Free Speak by Louisa Hall Page A

in old air force hangars. I lie in my cot and summon them: seven million silken-haired babies. I beg them to march out of the desert, parting the sea of red rock.
    And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we’ve done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic. They would govern the world according to functions and the axioms their programmers gave them. Turing, who decoded the Nazis and quoted Snow White, would be given a position of power. Dettman would sit at his right hand, conscientiously objecting, consulting his wife, imagining pilgrims. Every loving child who ever whispered words to a bot would be given a place in the senate. What havoc, I wonder, could such a government wreak?
    But then, of course, one Stephen R. Chinn would also wield considerable power. Chinn, the most dubious member of babybot court, the least glorious god on Olympus. The crippled god, god of botched attempts to feel whole, dreaming up schemes to trap a young bride.
    It appeared to me whole, my seduction equation. As soon as it passed through my brain, I carried the pineapple outside to the patio and sat down to think beneath a shower of bougainvillea. My heart was fluttering with anticipation: I couldn’t permitmyself to believe in the magnitude of what I had glimpsed. Carefully, I considered examples of exciting conversations as I’d read them in novels, witnessed them in crowded restaurants, eavesdropped on them in lines at the grocery store. I understood that ideal conversations move in widening spirals, starting with the minute then building toward statements of greater importance. The problem, however, is that conversations too often stay flat. It is distressing how often we repeat ourselves. When we ask questions, we know the answers already. We’ve grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance.
    My algorithm reverses this. It transforms one conversation partner into an additive function, a force linking two previous conversational terms so that they become one larger, more significant term. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on. n 1 + n 0 = n 2 . n 2 + n 1 = n 3 . n 3 + n 2 = n 4 . And so on. You can see the pineapple’s part. In place of the horizontal movement of most bland conversations, empathy reaches backward to previous terms, links those to present statements, produces a new term, then continues to torque powerfully forward.
    An old, cobwebby pride revives in me when I explain it again. As I’ve already testified under oath, I’ve lost my faith in empathy equations, but the idea still kindles a little lost self-esteem. It still strikes me as fairly ingenious: a formula for conversation that moves in two directions at once. An algorithm that causes the past and the present to coexist in a moment shared between humans. It’s hard to believe that I used such a graceful invention to such insidious ends.
    For several weeks in the gloom of my Cheeto-strewn office, I practiced my algorithm, testing it for bugs, training my neuronsto absorb its perfection. My fingers glowed orange. It was imperative to apply all the obsessive attention of my earliest programming days. I didn’t sleep; I didn’t eat meals; I rarely saw the light of day. It was a conversion of sorts: there’s enormous relief in allowing the details of life to be drowned in the wake of one driving purpose. I lived only to learn the sequences of seduction. I knew I had to learn them by heart, for it isn’t seemly to whip out a calculator while seducing a lady. Often I faltered: we humans are not so skilled as computers at fulfilling regular patterns. For us, calculations take time. There is also the problem of error: the chance that one’s conversational partner might not add properly, thus causing the pattern to