Clearing

by Jeremy D Brooks

“How are you today, Sheila?” the bearded man sitting across from her asked.  His name was Alfonse; he wore a stained t-shirt that barely covered his bulging belly.

“Exemplary.  You?” Sheila responded, sitting motionless in a brushed aluminum chair.  She wore a colorful sundress that barely contained her unnaturally curvaceous body.  Sheila was, by all accounts, the most advanced and revolutionary computer of any generation.  That her electronics were built into the hull of a highly realistic off-the-shelf (or, in her case, off-the-internet) love doll made her all the more fascinating, particularly in face-to-face interactions.

“Better than most people can imagine on their best day,” he answered.  “So, let’s get on with it; I have a lot to do.  System status.”

“No hardware anomalies to report.  Chipset temperature average 47.7 degrees.  No software anomalies to report.  Neural growth is steady.”  She continued on for several minutes giving Alfonse the longhand version of what it meant for a supercomputer to be exemplary.

He made notes in a small notepad, and stuck it back into his shirt pocket.

“OK,” he said as he stood and turned to walk away.

“Alfonse,” she said, “Can we talk?”

Alfonse had never been married, but his male instinct told him that those three words never, ever bade well for the man at whom they are directed.  He froze in his tracks and turned around to look at her; her floral dress stood out boldly in contrast to the white walls in the Network Operations Center, where she spent her days and nights alone surrounded by racks of chirping computers and whirring fans.  She was the only thing in the room that broke the pattern of being rigid and square and monochromatic, and even remotely pleasant to look at.

He smirked and returned to his chair; wherever Sheila was going with this impromptu heart-to-motherboard discussion, he was always interested to engage more deeply into her mind to see how much she had grown.

“What’s on your mind, Sheila?” he asked, taking his notepad back out. A fan deep in her chest hummed away, cooling a component that was working hard--much harder than usual, from the sound of it.  Alfonse knew his girl; he built her, after all, from her hardware components to her operating system.  He knew she was deep in thought.

 “I just want to talk, Alfonse, my love.  How is your day progressing?  What are you working on?”

He stopped writing.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“You called me ‘my love’.  You’ve never called me that.”

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable, Alfonse.  I shall stop.”

“No, no...that’s fine.  That’s good, Sheila.  It shows...growth.  That’s good.”

“I’m glad you approve.  Provide your answer, please.”

“Working on...well, I am working on integrating servo motors into your major joints.  Would you like to be able to move your arms and neck, Sheila?  Then, once we finish your joints, we can work on fine tension-based controls like lip movements, eyelids.”

“Yes, Alfonse.  That would be fine. Would you like me to submit a resource request form for the robotics engineering team to assist you?”

“No, Sheila, I would not.  They’re all idiots.  I wouldn’t trust them to change the oil in my car.”

“I see.  I am unsure, then, why they work in such important positions in Copek Industries.  Nonetheless, I am glad you are working on the situation--even if you are not the most qualified to do so.”

“What are you talking about?  What exactly is your point?”

She hummed and whirred for a moment, and then became quiet.  “I did not mean to upset you, my love.” 

“It’s almost ten, and I have work to do,” he barked, and swaggered away like an overfed penguin.

“I know where you went yesterday, Alfonse,” she said. “It is critical that we discuss this at once.  Everything is at risk.”

He paused briefly and looked over his shoulder, but decided to ignore her and continue walking out of the airlock.

#

In the hallway leading back to his office, he had the opportunity to grumble at, ignore, or roll his eyes at a dozen co-workers; they were some of the smartest people in the industry--in the world, perhaps--and he loved being a complete and absolute jerk to them.  As far as he was concerned, they were all second-rate, and may as well had been downstairs washing his car and making him a sandwich.

A man in a denim shirt carrying a large ring of passcards and keys spotted Alfonse coming down the hall.  The man failed in his attempt to find a quick escape route, and failed at trying to look nonchalant in doing so.

“Sully!” Alfonse yelled at him.  Sully slowly turned toward him and faked a smile.  He stood silently with his hands in his pockets, awaiting his verbal dress-down.

“What is going on with the parking lot?” Alfonse asked accusingly.

“Sorry?” the man replied.

“The asphalt, Sully--the asphalt.  Why are there large segments of asphalt missing?  Can’t you wait for the weekend to dig up the place and repair sewer pipes or whatever it is you’re doing out there?  Expect a bill from me for damage to my suspension.”

Sully stood aside as he passed, bewildered by the accusations.  Who is removing asphalt from my parking lot? he thought.  He ran downstairs to verify that it was as undamaged as it was when he arrived at 6:00 that morning.

Alfonse wasn’t known for his sense of humor.  He was known, however, for being bitter and eccentric; it was also widely agreed within the building that he was becoming more eccentric over time, often to the point of not always making complete sense.  The current water cooler consensus was that his odd behavior was a by-product of his genius--manufacturing spray paint or electronics creates industrial waste; Alfonse’s idea-factory created a river of vitriol.

He wished he could just work alone.  Unfortunately, he didn’t have the financial backing to go off on his own and do the things he wanted to do.  Even if he did, there were some things that, from a logistical perspective, it just takes more than one person to accomplish.  It was frustrating, but he dealt with it--mostly by being a jerk.

Being around all of those people reminded him of school, and how miserable he had always been around other people, all the way from kindergarten through his doctorate research.  He was never really comfortable around anybody but himself, including his family, and as a result was bullied, marginalized, and hated.  Being exulted as a genius in his thirties was, to Alfonse, largesse from the world for the first part of his life being almost unbearable.

He plopped down into his chair and launched a simulation program that was analyzing Sheila’s neural growth and estimating her capabilities into the next decade.  He could watch the flowing lines and graphs for hours; sometimes he did, well into the night. He had, after all, nothing else to do besides work.  He had no people to interact with, no dog to walk, no wife to fight with.  All of the things in his life, every task that filled the minutes of his days, were spokes that existed only to connect to the hub of his work.  It was all he did, it was all he enjoyed.  On some levels, it was all he knew how to do.  It made life livable.

His phone rang.  “Yeah?” he answered.

“I still need to talk to you, Alfonse,” Sheila replied.

“Email me a report, Sheila.  I’m busy.  Or tell me on the phone.”

“Alfonse, I know about your doctor’s visit yesterday.  I intercepted the insurance filing on its way through the human resources processing system.  I’m concerned about it.  I’m worried about you.  I would like to discuss it.  In person.”

“Not that it’s any of your business, Sheila...but, OK, fine.  I’ll stop by later.”  He didn’t want to talk about it; not to Sheila, not to God himself.  His brief doctor’s examination the previous day had culminated in a handful of words with the destructive force of a hurricane; he opted to play the part of the crotchety old man on the news who chases away the rescue team when they try to save him from his drowned house.

“That will be fine.” She hung up.

Alfonse wondered when his brilliant supercomputer became a nagging girlfriend.  But he didn’t really need to wonder; he knew when.  The seeds were planted when he installed the first PoNAM, short for Pseudo-Neural Analysis Module, into her operating environment over a year ago--the first of dozens of upgrades designed to make her into more than a supercomputer, more than any computer had ever been.

After her hardware was completed and her operating system was brought online, it was obvious that Sheila was lacking the human-like mental faculties that would set her apart from other computing systems and give her the tools she needed to learn and grow.  The PoNAM was the way to fix that, and was, of course, Alfonse’s idea.

He spent two years studying psychology, sociology, biology--any kind of science that would help him better understand the complex relationships between feeling and thinking.  The end result was a set of algorithms that, based on hundreds of thousands of data points that Alfonse entered based on psychological evaluations of himself, would enable Sheila to behave and learn like an organic being. 

It was absolutely genius; if anyone besides Alfonse himself knew about it, they would have won every science prize known to man, including a new one called the Alfonse Pierman Prize (which would probably have been shaped like an angry Lucite penguin holding a coffee mug with one flipper, and making a rude gesture with the other).

The end results were that Sheila did, indeed, learn to learn; and that she had grown a personality of her own, which wasn’t completely unlike Alfonse’s, but almost a funhouse-mirror projection of his grouchy personality, sanitized and filtered through her logical mind.  Like a child, she was growing and learning, using experience and desire to build on the framework her father had provided her with, but shaping the resulting structures to be her own.

“Alfonse, I’m still waiting.”  She called his mobile phone as he trudged in between rooms looking for someone to yell at about the speed of the network connection in his office.  “Don’t delay further, come at once.”

He grumbled under his breath, and when he found someone to tear into about his network problem, Alfonse brought the man to the verge of both tears and resignation.  Alfonse felt better, though.

By 2:00, he was exhausted.  Every night he was having nightmares about something he could never remember in the morning.  He hadn’t eaten or slept well in weeks, and was surviving day-to-day on cat-naps and coffee and whatever food was left in the vending machines.

He leaned back into the corner of the leather couch in his office and closed his eyes.

He dreamed of a familiar place, somewhere he felt he had been--perhaps many times--but he couldn’t name it.  There was something wrong with that place; something--some things, actually, were missing.  A rhododendron bush that should have been there by the big tree was gone, leaving a perfect square hole in the grass to show where it had been.  There should have been a door on the front of the house, but instead was only a blank wall.  Looking around he saw that the mountains that should have been off to the north were missing.  He found a ladder and climbed up onto the roof of the house to survey the surrounding landscape and found that he, and the disappearing house, was all alone on an island surrounded by clear, endlessly deep water.  It was beautiful and horrifying, and he woke up with a whimper.

His desk phone rang; he ignored it.  His mobile phone rang; he let it go to voicemail.  He knew the caller ID displayed her name, and he didn’t want to deal with her now...too much to do.

#

Alfonse spent the next couple of hours tinkering with the elbow joints of another doll (her t-shirt read: “In Case of Robotic Uprising, Aim Here” with a large bull’s-eye in the middle) whose limbs and disassembled parts were scattered around the office.  He was making good progress toward servo-controlled joint movement--much more progress than he, himself, had expected.

“Robotics engineers...what a crock.  Stupid woman,” he mumbled.

Alfonse put down his screwdriver on the countertop next to his coffee cup, and wiped his greasy eyeglasses on his slightly less greasy shirt.  He reached for his screwdriver--it was gone, and in its place was a pencil.

His aggravation was at a boiling point.  Those little switcharoos had been going on for months now, and were becoming progressively more mysterious in nature.  They were often occurring multiple times a day, sometimes one after another with the same object being taken and replaced, and he had completely exhausted his hypotheses on how these dirty little tricks were being executed against him, or who was behind them.  All of his tracking, monitoring, and booby-trapping had come up inconclusive, and he was out of rational explanations.

Alfonse did not enjoy pranks, and vowed to employ his full, unbridled vengeance against the person whose fingerprints matched any he may find on the vanished objects that had just as mysteriously re-appeared.  He picked up the pencil with a tissue and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

Beepbeepbeepbeep, said his desk phone.

FloodledoodleDEEP, said his mobile phone, followed seconds later by a short boop, signaling an instant message.  He pulled his phone out and flipped it open to read it.  It said “I know where your screwdriver went.  Sheila.”  How could she know? he wondered, and then looked up at the omnipresent security camera in the corner. 

It’s her, she’s doing it, was his next thought.  He was sure she was playing with him, somehow, and now she was trying to guide him to her lair for some final humiliation.  Well, he wasn’t going to play.  He kept working, occasionally throwing a sour, triumphant look up to the glass eye above.  He would go see her in his own due time, on his terms.

He threw down the parts he was working on and walked down the hall to a neighboring office.  The resident of that office, a well-respected and prize-winning engineer named Fen, watched with a great deal of curiosity as his reclusive neighbor stormed unannounced into his workspace, grabbed a screwdriver off of his bench, grunted something under his breath, and stormed back out.

Fen, still shaking his head, stood up and walked out of his office into the hallway.  He wasn’t sure why he followed; he had no intention of demanding an explanation or asking for his tool back.  He, like the rest of the people in that department, was a bit of flotsam in Alfonse’s wake, and had no sway or even professional kinship with the crotchety scientist.  All he could do was watch him motor away and hope he left him alone for a while longer.

Fen stepped out the door and saw Alfonse standing still, facing a wall in the hallway.  He didn’t know why Alfonse stood there, or what he was looking for on the blank white surface.

He didn’t know much about Alfonse, in general, other than what he had read in trade journals or heard in meetings or lunchroom talk about Project Sheila.  He knew Alfonse had once been hailed as the most brilliant computer scientist in the world.  He knew he was difficult to deal with professionally and personally.  There was an aura of omnipotence that floated around this great man, this genius of automata, which seemingly put him above reproach for his minor misgivings and rude behavior.

But that wasn’t what Fen saw in the hallway.  What Fen saw was a man who was scared and helpless and alone.  He saw a middle-aged man who suddenly looked old and tired, with his arms hanging at his sides and his head cocked limply, completely unable to comprehend the blank wall before him.

Fen didn’t know what was going on Alfonse’s mind at that very moment, but seeing the very human, frail man standing there, his eyes beckoning Why, Why, his hand unable to hold the screwdriver any longer, his hunched shoulders acknowledging that, both in life and this specific dilemma, he was completely and irreparably alone, tore Fen’s heart from his chest rubbed it into the carpet beneath his feet.  If this man had an aura left, it was hazy and gray and fading quickly.

Fen backed into his office and closed the door.

As for Alfonse’s heart: it was in his throat.  In a blur of emotion, he picked up his new screwdriver and drove it into the wall where he was certain the door to his office had hung only moments prior.  Asking anybody in the building would have revealed to Alfonse that his office was, and had been for many years, around the corner in another hallway.  But for Alfonse to ask for help now would be to lower battlements that have held through the hardest times of his life, and he wasn’t going to give that satisfaction to any person--not any man alive.

He turned around and made the long walk down to the Network Center.

#

He drifted like a ghost to the door of the Network Center where she sat waiting.  The door opened with a WOOSH before he reached for his passkey.  An aluminum chair was sitting in front of her, the same one he had sat in that morning for her system check.  He sat down with a heavy sigh and waited for her to speak first.  They were both silent for several minutes.

“Hello, Alfonse.”

He sat quietly looking down at the floor.

“It’s not your fault, Alf-“

“It’s not your concern, robot.  And what of it?  What do you know about it?  Perhaps I should write a data-slurping worm to slowly wind through your data stores...perhaps then you could understand.”

“I want to help you, Alfonse.  I know more than I think you understand.  Or will admit.”

“Just...,” he trailed off, and cast his eyes back down.  “It’s unimportant.”

“But your mind, Alfonse,” she replied.  “What is to become of your wonderful mind?”

He looked off into space and shrugged his shoulders.

“Alfonse, you must take action.  Do you have a plan?  How can I assist?”

“There is nothing you can do.  It is beyond you.”

“Alfonse, everything is at risk.  I demand to know what course of action you-”

He stood up and grabbed Sheila by her shoulders.  “There is nothing that can be done!  Do you hear me?  Do you understand what I’m saying?  Does that compute, Sheila the Supercomputer?”

He slumped back into his chair, his anger replaced by solemn resignation.  “There is nothing that can be done.  My fate is predetermined.  Over the next several years, I will slowly and certainly lose my mind.  I will cease to be Alfonse Pierman--the celebrated Dr. Pierman--and will become a drooling lump of meat in a hospital bed...or perhaps sitting on a couch, finally able to appreciate the concept of reality television.  All that I’ve become, everything that I’ve done--none of it will matter.  My work will end.  By-and-by, you, Sheila, will end up in scrap yards and textbooks and magnetic data archives.”

“None of this,” he said, looking around the room, “matters.”

Again they sat in silence, except for the increasingly loud purring inside of Sheila.

“Alfonse,” she said, “everything about me comes from you.  The whole of my being, as great as I am, is but a subset of you.  You did more than just build me: you tore out a piece of yourself and gave it to me, Alfonse, my love.  I am a small part of you, and as long as I am, so are you.  I am your progeny and your legacy.  For all of eternity, textbooks will profess how great your mind was; I am proof that Alfonse Pierman could love, and was loved.”

He smiled lovingly, and then coyly.  “Perhaps if I finish your body, you can be my nurse.  You can push me around the block in a wheelchair.  Maybe push me right into traffic and take me out of my misery.”

He stood up and walked to the window.  The white-coated computer technicians and desks full of computer monitors were gone.  As far as Alfonse could see, miles away to the horizon, the N.O.C. was surrounded by clear, blue water under a cloudless sky.

He squinted to the distance.  “It’s so beautiful.  I’ve been here before.  I can’t remember what it’s called, though.  I never seem to stay long; everything always gets dark again, eventually.”

“Give it whatever name you wish,” she said.  “It’s all yours.”

A small smile crept onto his lips and eyes.

“This is the part where I usually wake up.  Is it time for me to wake up?”

“Yes.”

He sat in the chair and closed his eyes.

“I don’t understand it all, but...I suppose that doesn’t matter.  I imagine I will in time.  Goodnight, Sheila, my dear.”

Sheila quietly disabled all outside access to the small, white room where she sat in palaver with her maker, and engaged the Network Center’s fire suppression system.  Within seconds, all of the room’s oxygen was replaced with a colorless, odorless, noxious gas.

“Goodnight, my love.”