First Chapter: Grok
 
By Tom Maremaa She was sitting by the edge of the pool in the sweltering heat of LA, her feet dan- gling happily in the water. It was noon: any minute now the band was due to show up. She needed a few moments to relax and collect her thoughts. Not that there was really that much to think about. The day, like most days in LA, looked to be a per- fect combination of white, shocking pink, and cobalt blue, as if, in a series of broad strokes, it had somehow been painted up by the English artist David Hockney. She was an old lady now, her face and hands badly wrinkled, her hair completely white. Age spots, blotches and blemishes of discolored skin covered her arms and neck and shoulders. Her lips were brittle, cracked at the corners. And she moved very slowly, but still managed to get around the splitlevel house on her own power, albeit with the help of a silver cane. She had outlived them all: her three brothers and even her younger sister. She was, as she fondly put it, if anyone was interested in asking, “around ninetysomething.” Suddenly the phone rang and she grabbed the cordless instrument, thinking it was the band apologizing for being late again; but it was her son Grok. “Zandie, my life is a mess! A complete mess!” “Sorry to hear that,” she said, without emotion. “You see, she’s got me wrapped around her little finger. I’m helpless in her presence. And I’m flirting all the time with––disaster!” “Well, Grok, do you love her?” “Yes, of course I do,” he said. “What else can I do? I just can’t believe this is really happening to me. . . .” “Do you love her even if it means the end of everything?” “Yes.” There was an awkward silence between them in which everything that had to be spoken without saying a word was. “Then you’re doing the right thing, Grok.” Out of the cobalt blue, she started to laugh. Grok’s affair with Maddy was, in her old mind, nothing if not highly amusing, a comic misadventure, life becoming the ludicrous stuff of soap opera. Aren’t we all vulnerable to the same thing? she thought. Don’t all our lives turn to soap at one point or another? “Why are you laughing? Zandie, listen . . . Do you hear me? Zandie, are you there?” Zandie could not contain herself; it was coming back, the infamous swell of laughter that had once saved her life from a rushing train in Paris. The laugh she had learned at the school of Stein and Joyce. It began rippling through the tissue of her old body, like a convulsion, an epileptic seizure, almost knocking her over into the swimming pool. “Zandie, are you there?” he repeated. “Hello, hello . . .” “Oh, my God! I nearly fell into the pool! Wait a minute,” she said, trying to regain her composure, juggling the cordless phone before it got away from her. “For a woman who’s ninetysomething, you still haven’t lost that laugh, have you?” “I hope I never will,” she said. “There’s something to be learned from that, isn’t there?” he said. “You bet!” “Thanks for the advice. Bye now.” About an hour later, the band showed up, all five musicians with a truckload of guitars, drums, and mega-amplifiers. They were getting ready to go on tour and Zandie was acting now as the group’s all-purpose den mother, coach, manager, music arranger, and wet-nurse. She managed some of their business affairs, too, though she would not travel with them on the road, despite their pleadings to come along. The group was very young, four men and one woman, all in their early to mid-twenties. They were musically talented but extremely limited in conversation and vocabulary. They had extended the mindless cult of the inarticulate, which had started in the sixties, and responded to every situation, every question with just one of three words: killer, cool, and lame. Charles, the leader of the group, came out to the pool and kissed Zandie lovingly on the cheeks, giving her a big hug. The Charles Raven Band, a technopunk, industrial rock group, already had two singles that were rapidly climbing the charts; a road tour would take them over the top. That’s what they were counting on, at any rate. The band liked to practice outside by the pool, with Zandie directing the rehearsals and adding a few chords on her Kurweil synthesizer. “Just don’t fall into the water when you’re hooked up to those amps, okay?” she had told them many times. “You’ll electrocute yourself!” “Cool,” said the drummer. “I’ll go out with style.” “No, man. A very lame thing to do,” said the bass guitarist. “I agree,” said Charles. “Killer,” said Zandie. The lead guitarist, James, said nothing. Charles, in leather and chains, had just shaved his scalp, leaving only a small patch of hair at the nape of his neck, which he had dyed magenta and lime-green. He sported a three-day growth of stubble and looked particularly menacing, except for the shocking pink lipstick that he had smeared on his face. Indeed, the day was just as David Hockney had painted it: her white hair, the cobalt blue sky, and now, his lipstick. The other musicians were, as to be expected with a near-toxic industrial waste band, appropriately hideous-looking. Their hairdos were ratted and freakish. They wore tattered clothes and their skinny bodies were covered with numerous (though not permanent) tattoos. And no ears, noses, lips, cheeks, eyebrows, navels, or nipples were left untouched by a string of gold and silver rings. “We have to practice!” shouted Zandie to the troops. “Now! Let’s get moving. No ands, buts, or maybes. This isn’t a grunge band, after all.” “Okay,” said Charles. “Let’s crank up the passion.” “Yeah. Cool. Crank it up, man!” “Yeah, passion.” “Save the passion for performance, not now!” she cried. “Okay,” Charles told the band. “Save the passion!” In her protective and grandmotherly way, Zandie loved this younger generation of musicians, even if they were all still children in her eyes. She wanted them to succeed but also to break new ground with their music. She had tried to teach them about passion; what she had learned from her early days in Paris. There can be no great art without passion! Yet it never answered to its name. “It’s not something you can turn on and off, guys,” she laughed. “It’s not like the switches on your guitars or amps.” “What is it then?” said Charles. “It’s simply what you’re made of––the fabric of your being, the tissue and bones,” she said. “Everything, in other words, that you’re feeling.” “Okay,” said Charles to the band, pointing a finger at the drummer. “Let’s hear everything you’re feeling!” They cranked it up slowly, playing badly for a while with everything they were feeling. Zandie stuck her fingers in both ears. The sounds were horrendous. Yet they were on the right track. After a couple hours of practice, they were getting a little better. And better. And with their music flowing, with everybody in the band working on a groove, the colors of the day were beginning to change. Now if only Grok’s life could change, too, she thought. The painter, who belonged to the school of post-postmodern deconstructionism, had wanted to do her portrait at the beach, her feet wet in the sand, sitting in a blue canvas chair, legs crossed, arms akimbo, wearing some stupid baseball cap and pearl- studded sunglasses, like a crazy American movie director shooting a B picture on location. But she had vehemently protested against striking such a pose; it wasn’t her, it was phony and cheaply theatrical, she’d said. “I shall take you apart and then let the eye of the beholder put you back together again––in his own image,” he’d said, hoping to convince her. “I’m not Humpty Dumpty,” said Marsa, wearing a straw hat and billowy white dress. “Paint me as I am.” “Very well,” said the artist, returning to his easel. “You realize, of course, this means I must start a brand new school of painting.” She yelled an obscenity in Malti at him, and he quickly snapped to attention. “Stop your moaning and begin!” she commanded. “Yes, yes!” said the painter. The blue waves of the Mediterranean were lapping gently against the white sand, a perfect day. She was not feeling particularly well; her health was poor, age by now having got the best of her. And Alzheimer’s was wreaking havoc with her nervous system. It was bloody awful. She could not literally remember anything she said from one moment to the next. A small crowd of onlookers had assembled on the beach, watching each stroke of the painter’s brush as it crisscrossed the wet canvas. “C’mon. Aren’t you finished yet? What’s taking so long?” she nagged impatiently. “Marsa, I’m working as fast as I can. You know, my love, this is, tragically, a completely different style for me!” “Excuses, excuses!” She was the worst subject, the most difficult woman he had ever painted. Yet he had been inexorably drawn to her as a moth to light the moment he had set eyes on her, hobbling along the back streets of Valletta with her silver cane. Her large, oval-shaped body, her snowy-white hair, her piercing eyes––these were only the surface, not her true essence. For she was, as he beheld her, the fat woman sitting in every train compartment, the mother of every child, the scrubber of every floor, the fixer of every torn garment, the mender of souls. Without doubt, she was the singer of every opera, every musical, every national anthem at the start of every ballgame. She was the General of every army––and the elder stateswoman of every modern country, the preacher of every gospel that embraced freedom and democracy. She was past, present, and future all rolled into one. In failing health, ravished by Alzheimer’s, her memory shot, she still managed somehow to keep going. Her son Johnny, who had become very successful in America, sent her checks each month; all her needs in her old age were taken care of––for which she thanked God every day and counted her blessings. Now this silly portrait, this silly painter! What does he want from me? Every chance she got she needled the artist. At least I won’t be chopped up like meat, she thought. Her head slightly angled, her body in profile, she looked languidly out to sea. The afternoon light fell on the water, sparkling like specks of gold. She had forgotten completely now her impatience with the painter; her thoughts were elsewhere. Perhaps when the mail came there would be a letter from her son, or her grandchildren. She lived in a perpetual state of waiting; waiting to hear, waiting for them to visit. “Don’t move!” shouted the painter. “I’ll move if I want to you,” she shouted back. “You’re impossible, tres impossible!” “You wouldn’t want me to be any other way, would you?” The children of Malta gathered around her, tugging at her dress. She was mother of them all. When she picked up two little girls in bathing suits and sat them squarely on her lap the painter threw up his arms in frustration and walked away from his easel. “Artists are always so temperamental,” she scoffed. “He’ll be back again.” “What did he paint?” asked one of the girls. “C’mon,” she whispered to the children, “let’s take a peek and see. I am certain it won’t look anything at all like me.” On the contrary, the painting was a mirror image of her soul. Parts of her body and face were fleshed in, though much of the canvas was still rough. Yet she knew the artist had begun to capture all the shades of emotion that made her vulnerable––and human. The sadness, loss, and pain of old age. The compassion and caring for others. The hope she was still clinging to. “What’s that in your eye?” asked one of the little girls. “What’s what?” said Marsa. Sure enough, when she looked closely she saw in one eye an odd, almost puzzling figure. It was the reflection of a man, but with his head lopped off, enmeshed in a spider’s web. She recognized the face of the man: it was Grok. This is bad, she thought. Very bad. There is no body. Grok was in danger––she must warn him. Quickly, she grabbed her things on the beach and walked back to her house near the old colonial Phoenicia Hotel in Valletta. When she tried to call Zandie, she found all the phone lines to America were busy. She could not get through. Would she place her call later? She tried again later, again and again, before falling asleep from exhaustion. The next day when she woke up, she knew there was something she had to do. She just couldn’t remember what it was. Marshall Fleischkopf was lying in the bathtub, his fat, oblong-shaped head leaning back against the rim, his naked, blubbery body, rippling with layers of fat, hanging lazily over its sides. There was no water in the tub. The old Victorian with gold-plated legs and fixtures, which he had bought at auction from a member of the British royal family, was packed, instead, with ice. Large chunks of ice. It was a treatment prescribed to bring down fever (which he had once read about in an obscure French medical journal). But Fleischkopf had no fever. He was suffering from an affliction purely of his own invention: a feeling attack. Feelings would suddenly start to rise from his gut, feelings of love, compassion, tenderness. Feelings of anger, sadness, and grief. His nostrils would flare, his eyes water, his cheeks turn rosy. He would begin to choke up. Even his heart, which was probably made of glass, would skip a beat, fluttering like a schoolgirl in the flush of first romance. Whenever that happened––and it was occurring now with much greater frequency than ever before––he would leap into his tub. And sit there in ice until the feelings cooled off, until his body temperature dropped well-below the threshold that made him human. Feelings were much too dangerous, too unpredictable. He hated them, because they always got in the way of what he was thinking. They got in the way of his Machiavellian schemes, his diabolical plots. Hughes had taught him that. “Hey, I want some more ice!” he shouted. “Get it!” “Coming right up, boss,” replied his bodyguard, as if he were serving the Man a cocktail. Lately, with the rash of feelings getting worse, it was taking larger and larger chucks of ice to cool him off. Anger, guilt, compassion––whatever made him human––would surface from the deep, like a shark smelling blood, savagely ready to attack. Particularly anger. Which affected his “rational” thinking as well as his intri- cate criminal plottings. He had to keep his anger in check, or it would get the best of him, he feared. Fleischkopf had seen how his father, Morris Fleischkopf, the mad psychiatrist, having deflected, absorbed, or provoked feelings in his patients, somehow ended up having no feelings at all for him, his only son. Young Fleischkopf had grown up completely cut off from anything he was feeling, and now wanted to keep it that way. Next to the tub was his Altair laptop, which instantly connected him to the world-wide E.N.I.G.M.A. network, the organization of fanatical followers and cult worshippers of the cryonically frozen Hughes. The Altair laptop, in Fleischkopf’s twisted mind, was a mega-cool machine, the thing that made it all possible. He was thankful to Grok and his Altair crew for having invented it. With it, crime had become more user-friendly. He reached over now and grabbed the laptop, quickly typing a message to Oskar. DO YOUR STUFF. GO TO WORLD BANK IN D.C., TAP INTO CAIRO’S ACCOUNT, SIPHON OFF FUNDS. YOU KNOW THE REST. YES, SIR. Oskar would reply. Oskar, the mutated computer virus, did most of the dirty work for the organization. Oskar had been ingeniously programmed by Fleischkopf and his crew of criminal hackers, becoming a true marvel of electronic thievery. Oskar could break through any electronic security system, do his siphoning or “rearranging” of bank accounts, and get out before anyone could detect “his” presence. This was almost as the Krel had envisioned: the transfer of matter––in this case, millions of dollars––by means of pure thought, or as it happened, a simple set of commands that Fleischkopf punched in on his Altair keyboard. Suddenly Upjohn burst into the room. “Hey, we got trouble, man. I mean, trouble!” “What is it now? Can’t you see? I’m trying to cool out.” Dan Upjohn had joined the ranks of the organization after giving up completely on the radical politics of the sixties. He was now a front man for E.N.I.G.M.A., a cool manipulator of people and ideas, especially good at buying politicians. He was going to “work for change” by means of violence and crime and lobbying in Washington. The problem was that, from Fleischkopf’s point of view, Upjohn had never specialized: all he knew was projection. Which contributed to the internal strife and bickering that was now going on between E.N.I.G.M.A.’s two major factions: the Specialists and the Projectors. This bothered Fleischkopf because he saw the Projectors putting the blame for their own inadequacies on everybody else. This was dumb. The Projectors could be petty and vindictive, a dangerous combination. “That damn, creepy congressman’s the problem!” said Upjohn. “He won’t leave us alone. He’s the one who’s causing all the trouble, trying to stop us from bringing about change.” “Don’t worry, Dan. It’ll be alright,” he tried to comfort the ageing Projector. “We’ll take care of him. Change is inevitable.” He took a piece of ice and crushed it in his bare hand, leaving a splat of water on the floor. “That’s what I say. But how?” “I’ve got Oskar working on it right now, this minute, tapping into his bank account, checking his appointments, monitoring him electronically,” smiled Fleischkopf, getting out of the tub and drying himself off with a white beach towel. There was a fiendish look in his eye. “Just to be on the safe side, though,” he added, “why don’t you have the Congressman tailed? Let’s keep track of him in real as well as virtual space.” “Yes, sir!” Upjohn saluted and left. He had his orders to follow. Barefoot, dripping with bits of ice, a towel wrapped around his huge waist, Fleischkopf lumbered slowly into the next room and sat down in his big executive chair, propping up his fat feet on his hand-carved teakwood desk. Behind him were trophies of his past conquests: a gold-plated copy of the first cracked version of Lotus 1-2-3, which had been given to him by his fellow crackers; a collage of newspaper articles with stories about various electronic break-ins and security breaches of banks, government offices, and brokerage houses, all attributa- ble (but not traceable) to the daring work of the E.N.I.G.M.A. team; a set of disks, encased in glass, with all the proprietary source code for every version of the DOS, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems ever devised, including graphics compression routines that were only known to a select few. On his desk was also a tiny ROM chip, in the shape of an ashtray, with a list of one million accessible––and easily billable––credit card numbers. Marshall Fleischkopf was a proud man indeed. For he had started out as an ordinary software pirate, before working his way up to cracker stardom, before the heady days of fame and fortune as geek leader of the E.N.I.G.M.A. organization. Early on, as a young boy of fourteen, he was a instant hit at his father’s cocktail parties, where he “served” the guests, mostly other shrinks, with large trays of pirated software, dozens and dozens of computer programs on disk, every known spreadsheet, graphics, and word-processing application, whose copy- protection schemes he had wantonly broken. He would walk from guest to guest, serving up the goods. The guests had lapped it up like crazy: Marshall was their hero, he was at last “appreciated,” and later, when he began selling the broken software to Hong Kong sweatshops and other international pirates, handsomely rewarded for his efforts. He was certainly a “success,” having fulfilled the dark side of the American dream. “Hey, success is success, isn’t it?” he would say gibly to his distractors. In time, he had “grown” his company, adding new hackers and crackers to the team. But Oskar had been the real prize. When he discovered Oskar on the nets, he had no idea that Oskar was self-mutating, a programmable virus, the first virus with real “intelligence.” If John von Neumann Sr, who had created Oskar, had known to what ends his little invention had been put, he would have been shocked and outraged. Now this lousy congressman was trying to shake things up! Fleischkopf snarled. His stomach was growling, a surge of rage shooting up from his groin, overwhelm- ing his fat torso. He would not let this congressman meddle in the affairs of his world-wide criminal operation for long. That was certain. He would squash the inquisitive congressman as if he were a simple programming bug, a minor glitch in the system. “Nobody messes with E.N.I.G.M.A.!” he cried at the top of his lungs, pounding his fist on the desk. “Nobody!” “Nobody!” echoed his bodyguard. “Hey,” said Fleischkopf, backing off, his voice suddenly calm. “That’s a pretty good advertising slogan, isn’t it? Madison Avenue would be proud.” “Yes, boss. Whatever you say.” Suddenly, in his underground cavern below the Desert Inn, Fleischkopf felt the building above shake––then roll. There was a tremor in the desert somewhere, or perhaps they were testing nuclear bombs again. The Congressman was behind this! He began to panic, for he was terrified of earthquakes. It lasted only a few seconds before it was calm again, but Fleischkopf ran as fast as he could into the other room and jumped headfirst into the old Victorian tub. The ice was melting but still cold enough to suppress all feelings. Hiro Nakazawa was taking a communal bath with his friends and fellow programmers when he was hastily summoned to the phone. It was steamy inside the bathhouse, his body now dripping profusely with raw sweat. Something had gone wrong at the robot plant, he figured; but nothing too serious. Still, I must take care of the problem, whatever the hour, wherever I am. He grabbed a towel and wrapped himself up, feeling at first apprehensive, then worried, but not showing any outward signs of emotion. Despite his daunting powers of intellect and imagination, Hiro was a man who lived entirely by his feelings. He knew feelings instinctively, as if they were a roadmap that he followed in every crisis. Feelings would begin with a churning sensation deep inside, a vague sense of uneasiness, followed by the stream of emotion pushing its way up his spinal column, then tightening the muscles on his face, particularly his jaw. Feelings were a conduit of information for him; each emotion corresponding to a set of events in the world. Even when they were “bad,” when they caused him much grief and anger and despair, he would not let the feelings frighten or disturb him. “This is Hiro,” he said on the phone. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing, boss.” “Why are you calling me?” “There is a pretty American girl who wants to see you,” said his associate. “She is right here at the front office.” “Her name?” “Lucy. She says she is a friend of Grok’s.” “A friend of Grok’s?” “Hai.” “Tell her, I’m on my way.” This was, indeed, a pleasant surprise. He and Grok had chatted many times on the nets, sent electronic mail back and forth, and attended the same computer conferences, but up to now, Grok had never sent anyone to visit him. All the frustration, pain and disappointment that he felt in his heroic struggle to complete work on the Tenth Generation Artificial Life Project momentarily evaporated, as the prospect of meeting this pretty American girl, Grok’s emissary, loomed on the horizon. Who was she, anyway? He dried himself off and put on his three-piece business suit, which he’d had custom-made by a friendly Singapore tailor. From his years of work at the computer, he had developed a permanent programmer’s slouch, his shoulders forever hunched over. So business suits straight off the rack from one of Tokyo’s department stores would not fit. He wetted down his dark hair, now heavily streaked with gray, and combed it straight back. And slapped some cologne on his cheeks. He wanted to look good for the American girl. He had a weakness when it came to American girls, especially blondes; there was something about them that he could not resist. Many Japanese men of his generation shared the same vulnerability. These days, the burden of the Tenth Generation Artificial Life project, its success or failure, rested firmly on his hunched shoulders. It was a unforgiving, almost impossible task, leaving him little time to see his wife Yoshiko or their three young sons. The sheer complexity and degree of difficulty in solving the Turing Test was at times more than any man could handle, let alone a prodigious computer mind such as Hiro. But in the process of driving to achieve this near-impossible goal, he had advanced the state of the art in Japanese programming. His team was unmatched anywhere else in the world, a model of discipline, training, and hard work. They had gone from programming industrial robots, which were now used in all of Japan’s manufacturing plants, to modeling, in three dimensions, the precise movements of the human body. Soon they would begin to model the neurological processes of human thought as well. His best programmer Kogr joined him in the car, driving back to the plant. Kogr, which, as everyone knew, was a simple anagram for Grok, joked with his boss: “Maybe this girl has come to see you because of your sexual prowess. Which, as we all know, is legendary.” “Are you out of your mind?” “Word does travel,” said Kogr. Indeed, word had traveled of Hiro’s sexual as well as mental prowess. “I’m bored with American men,” said Lucy, later sitting in Hiro’s office. “What brings you to Tokyo?” “I’m here with my band––and I’m here to meet some interesting Japanese men,” she said, “starting with you.” Hiro laughed. He was not used to this kind of forwardness; everything in his culture was so indirect. Lucy’s candor threw him a little off balance. “Perhaps you can show me the town,” she added. “Tokyo is a big town. There is much to show. How much time do you have?” “Oh, a couple of days.” “Time enough,” smiled Hiro. “Mondai nai, no problem.” Hiro wondered what his old friend and rival, Grok, was doing. “Oh, he’s losing it,” said Lucy. “What do you mean?” “He’s involved with this blonde bimbo, a girl named Maddy, and because of her, he’s losing his competitive edge. Badly.” “This is not good,” said Hiro. “For sure. But there’s nothing anybody can say or do about it. Altair is hurting. A disaster. Nobody seems motivated anymore.” “We need competition,” said Hiro. “Competition is healthy. It drives our two great countries on to even greater heights. I must talk to Grok about this.” “Go ahead, but I think it’s a lost cause.” “Nothing is lost,” said Hiro in a philosophical mood. “First law of computer science––all data is recoverable. First law of human experience––nothing is ever lost.” © copyright 2006 Tom Maremaa
A huge, sprawling novel about the quest to solve the elusive Turing Test (708 pp)
Notes: Grok is a huge sprawling epic novel about the comic misadventures of an eccentric family and its young son's quest to solve the elusive Turing Test. The story spans the contours of the 20th century, from the literary salons of Paris in the twenties to the seamy side of LA in the thirties from the counterculture wars of the sixties and beyond to the software inspired nineties. Along the way we are wildly entertained by a huge cast of colorful characters, scenes and happenings as Grok, the book's hero fights off the beguiling demons of the past and changes the world around him. There is never a dull moment in this wonderful mind bending story which holds the mirror of ourselves up to Nature and shows us that we can have the last laugh.