Free The Emoticon Generation by Guy Hasson Page B

about herself, Glynis.” He raised his eyes and looked at her, “If I tell you, you’ll never be the same again. Never, Glynis. Do you understand that?”
    She paused for a few seconds, so it will look like she considered it. “I understand. Tell me.”
    Steve took a few deep and slow breaths, as if he was gathering strength for an impossibly hard task. Not looking directly at her, he said, “First thing, Glynis, no, Olivia is most definitely not your real mother. You’re her—... um... You’re a science experiment, Glynis.”
    “A science experiment? But she’s a psychologist!” Then her eyes narrowed. “She is a psychologist, isn’t she?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Then—Then—Then—”
    “Glynis, Glynis, please listen.” There was compassion in his voice. “I told you this would be hard to believe. And this is the easy part. What I’m going to say next is also the easy part, although it won’t sound like it. Glynis...” he sighed and looked aside. “...You’re not human.”
    Glynis stared at the screen. “I...That’s ridiculous,” she finally said.
    “It’s true,” he said in a calm voice.
    “But... I walk, I dream, I breathe, I smell, I feel —” She stopped, realizing that animals do all those things, too. “I think ! I talk ! I—” It was ridiculous, and yet she couldn’t prove that she was human, because maybe a new form of intelligent life would be able to do that, too. “I’m just like everyone else!” she shouted. “I—I—I—I’m human !”
    “I know you do all those things and more. And you would have been human, and you could have been human, and you most definitely have human DNA and just human DNA. But the fact is ... that...” He couldn’t go on.
    “That what?”
    And he looked straight into her eyes and said, “Glynis, you’re not real.”
    ~
    You have to let me tell you (Steve said) without interrupting me, okay?
    It all started – for Olivia, at least – during her first year in college. It bothered her that the science of psychology could never make any real progress because the researchers couldn’t make any real experiments. Not like physicists or biologists or chemists could. Because the experiments are on people you could never actually repeat most of the experiments you would like to have. You never worked in real lab conditions. It was always possible that things happened not because of what you did or didn’t do – but because of something else. It was all suppositions, guesswork.
    I met her during her third year in college. It was, uh, 1997. We met, we befriended, we... became involved. And it was then that she trusted me enough that she told me about an idea she had. She knew it was a bad idea and that it could never work, but, still, she couldn’t help being obsessed by it. It went roughly like this: The only way to make real progress in psychology is to somehow put the human mind in a petrii dish. Or maybe a computer was a better analogy. If you could do to a person what you could do to a program or a digitalized movie or a digitalized piece of music, it would be perfect. If you could copy them, save them, replay them, add or subtract information then rerun the situation – then you would have lab conditions. You could have the same kid grow with two different sets of parents, and how different the two of him are when he grows up. You could make sure that what you think makes the difference is what made the difference, by eliminating all the other options. If you could digitize the human mind you could perform experiments in lab conditions. You could repeat experiments. You could— You could do everything. You could finally get psychology to the level of a science.
    But the idea was obviously self-defeating. She wanted to put the human mind in a computer neural net so she could figure out how the human mind works. But to get it into a computer neural net in the first place, you already had to know how it works. It wasn’t even a paradox. It