The Professor of Immortality Page 3

  Besides, she can easily summon compassion for a man who has sunk from attending a White House conference chaired by George Herbert Walker Bush to the monthly airing of grievances around a particleboard table in a mold-infested basement at a meeting convened by her.

  … Leads a Meeting

  When she enters the conference room, the thirteen men who comprise the faculty of the Institute for Future Studies seem to be playing musical chairs. Each chooses a seat as far from his enemies as possible. Which means they will be glowering at those same enemies across the table. The mood is even more embittered by their inability to comprehend why Maxine is directing the program when they are so much smarter.

  If she were a man, they might pay her the compliment of scheming to overthrow her. As it is, they imagine her role to be secretarial and besiege her with requests for new computers or complaints about their offices being too hot or too cold. Or they treat her like their mother, rolling their eyes when she pleads with them not to overspend their travel limits or to please mop up the coffee grounds in the sink and the sauce spattered inside the microwave.

  You might think a field as progressive as Future Studies wouldn’t be retarded by the sexism of the past. But if any discipline attracts fewer female scholars, Maxine doesn’t know what it is. Maybe women are too preoccupied helping their children master the new math or making sure their elderly parents don’t go tumbling down the stairs to worry about robots taking over. If a man with flowing white hair and a paisley scarf claims to foresee the future, he is invited to pontificate on the news; a woman with the same credentials is accorded the respect of a palm reader at the country fair. Of the two female professors Maxine implored to join her institute, the first snapped: “Do you know how many years I’ve needed to be taken seriously? If I move to something called Future Studies, I’ll get laughed off the invitation list for every physics conference in the world.” The other woman’s husband received an offer from a university in Colorado, and even though she preferred to remain in Michigan, she didn’t want to split up her family.

  As to professors of color, they served on so many committees to promote diversity they had little spare time in which to stray across the boundaries of their fields. The future in which most people eventually found themselves living would be determined largely by straight white men.

  And yet, watching Alphred Kisbye battle Tobin Brazelton to snag the last chocolate-filled croissant as opposed to, say, the almond, Maxine feels overcome with tenderness. Who but these men—crumbs in their beards, dabs of butter on their lips—are willing to use their intellect not for private gain but to head off the catastrophes that might dim the prospects of generations they won’t live to see? Maxine recalls the pride that buoyed her heart when she secured funding to pay their salaries. The Times, in its fall 2003 education supplement, had devoted seven full paragraphs to what the reporter called “Professor Maxine Sayers’s important and far-seeing innovation.” And yet, in the nine years since then, the future has become old hat. What grows stale sooner than the future? Even as a child, holding her father’s hand as they skipped through the turnstile of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Maxine sensed that calling an exhibit “Tomorrowland” was childish. Or maybe Tomorrowland remains as shiny and new as ever; the problem is she no longer has a father with whom to skip through the gate.

  Tobin Brazelton tosses the day’s newspaper on the table. Tobin is the institute’s expert on Terror Management Theory, which postulates that every human institution—religion, science, art—was created to distract us from the reality that we each must die. “I see our favorite sociopathic Luddite is at it again,” Tobin says. “Next time I submit an article to a journal, I’m going to threaten to blow up their offices if they don’t accept it.”

  Everyone starts talking at once. If the revolution the Technobomber is trying to incite doesn’t begin immediately, will he attack Google first, or Facebook? Which computer science department will be his next target? Their own university already has suffered one such act of terrorism; shouldn’t they be on high alert?

  “Hey, Maxine,” Tobin says, “don’t you teach that novel the bomber quotes in his manifesto? The one by Conrad? Come to think of it, I’ve heard you espouse many of his same convictions.”

  She feels as exposed as if she had proceeded directly from her shower to this conference room without putting on the gray wool skirt and cream silk blouse she selected to lend herself an aura of authority. Again she is struck by the irrational dread she is somehow to blame for the bomber’s tirade.

  “I’ll tell you what,” says Alphred Kisbye, one of the three AI guys on their faculty. “The person I feel sorriest for today is that bastard Schlechter.”

  Despite herself, Maxine also feels pity for Arnold Schlechter, the bomber’s third victim and a member of their own university’s computer science faculty. But her compassion is balanced by how deeply she dislikes the man. The first year she and Sam lived in Ann Arbor, they couldn’t attend a party without encountering Arnold Schlechter. And each time they met, Schlechter acted as if he and Maxine had never been introduced.

  What diminishes her sympathy even more is that after Schlechter recovered from his injuries, he published a book about the pernicious effects of liberalism on academia, blaming the nation’s ills on feminists, blacks, gays, journalists, working mothers, atheists, and vegetarians. Worse, when Maxine reached the part in Schlechter’s book in which he quoted from the letter that had arrived in the same day’s mail as the package that had blinded him, she was horrified to catch herself agreeing with the bomber. “You’re not as smart as you think you are,” the madman taunted. “If you were, you wouldn’t have opened a package you weren’t expecting from someone whose name you didn’t know solely because that person seemed to work at an Ivy League university.”

  Incited by Schlechter’s claim that in the technology-driven future, no one would be left behind because any reasonably intelligent, college-educated person would be able to master the new machines, the bomber scoffed: “What about people who aren’t ‘reasonably intelligent’? Or who can’t afford to go to college? Have you ever stopped to think some people might not want to compete in a world in which computers have deprived everyone of his privacy and condemned most of us to sitting for hours hunched over a keyboard performing repetitious tasks, or carrying out simulations that masquerade as authentic human life?” What angered the bomber even more was Schlechter’s belief that such a world had become inevitable. Really? A world in which no normal human wished to live had become inevitable? If so, it was only because nerds like Arnold Schlechter caused it to seem inevitable. If all the people who didn’t want to go along with the so-called “inevitable” computer revolution were to rise up and eliminate the computer scientists, there would be no “inevitable” revolution in computer science.

  That was where Maxine got off the bus. Unless you were willing to execute everyone who had a technical degree, or, like the tyrant Pol Pot, everyone who wore glasses and could read, you couldn’t put a halt to progress. You predicted what could be predicted. You prophesied. You warned. You made aware. You shielded the most vulnerable citizens from the harshest effects of the innovations that stood to benefit the majority. You made sure the human race didn’t devolve into two species—the effete, atrophied Eloi, who knew how everything worked, and the sad, brutish Morlocks, who served the Eloi. You didn’t allow society to be ruled by arrogant jerks like Arnold Schlechter. But you didn’t send them packages that resulted in their losing an eye and three fingers of their right hand.

  By now, everyone is arguing whether Schlechter should be pitied for the deluge of interviews he will need to endure that day, forcing him to relive the moment he pulled that tab and was blinded by a flash, his hand shredded by fragments of a lead pipe inserted in a hollowed-out ream of inkjet paper, or whether he should be disdained as a reactionary troglodyte who would capitalize on this platform to spout hi
s elitist white male propaganda.

  Maxine tries to bring the meeting to order. “Everyone! Please!” Each man in the room considers himself a feminist, yet none seems able to pay attention to the female voice. “Carleton,” she says, “why don’t you start us off with an update on your project?”

  Carleton Marius, whose colleagues in English used to scorn him because his specialty is science fiction, now finds himself in demand as the only member of his department who can navigate the websites needed to post a syllabus, apply for a grant, or submit a letter of recommendation. His lectures on the mythos of Star Wars and Harry Potter are far more popular than his colleagues’ seminars on the deconstruction of the Spenserian sonnet. A disheveled, Lear-like man, Marius is convinced he came up with the idea for the Institute for Future Studies, then graciously stepped aside so Maxine could run it.

  “I am so very touched you are interested in being ‘updated’ on my ‘project.’” He scratches the air with talons so filthy he might well have spent the previous night in a thunderstorm on the heath. “But if you had shown the slightest support a few months ago, the administration might have granted my request that classes be canceled so the students could attend my teach-in.”

  As director of an institute that brings in no revenue, whether from government grants, patents, or plastic surgery, Maxine wouldn’t be able to persuade the administration to pay for another round of mold abatement, let alone a day off from classes so Carleton Marius might tutor the undergraduates on the need to turn off their cell phones, go somewhere out of range of government surveillance, and do something they wouldn’t ordinarily do if they were being watched. She looks around the drab, windowless conference room, whose cracked, stained walls she and Rosa have tried to enliven by posting portraits of the most far-sighted scientific pioneers, including as many women, African Americans, immigrants, foreigners, gays, and Jews as they could think of, which has the effect of making Maxine feel she is hiding them from the Gestapo and will soon, when their funding runs out, be forced to turn them in.

  “Carleton,” she says, “I’m sorry we can’t help you with your efforts to cancel classes. But you have the institute’s full support to publicize your Awareness Day.”

  Knowing she has left Carleton despising her for her wishy-washiness, she steers the conversation toward the fundraising event that Mick, with Rosa’s assistance, has been planning for the past six months. What they need is something that will impress the country’s most innovative thinkers and generous financiers into donating to their institution. Unfortunately, the best Mick and Rosa have come up with is a banquet at the natural history museum, with a showing of From the Big Bang to Inflation in the planetarium and a chance to be chased through the gloomy halls by a herd of Velociraptors created by the special-effects team from Jurassic Park.

  “Are you shitting me?” Alphred asks. “Maybe if you reconstitute a few actual T. rexes, then throw in a Neanderthal, that might begin to impress those guys.”

  “You know what?” says Wally Klein, one of Alphred’s compatriots in the AI racket. “Bring in Ray Kurzweil. Tell them if they donate a few million, when the Singularity comes, old Ray will beam them up into the Great Supercomputer in the sky and they’ll live forever.”

  Maxine has to laugh. She came up with the idea of studying immortality long before Ray Kurzweil. But Kurzweil has done a far better job marketing the idea than she has. He even prophesied a date when the so-called Singularity will arrive: within the next fifty or sixty years, advances in genetics, medicine, nanotechnology, and computer science will synergistically accelerate such that human beings, in conjunction with machines, might achieve incalculably long lifetimes. When she first read Kurzweil’s work, Maxine nearly drove herself mad trying to figure out how she could stay alive until she reached the Singularity. How terrible to belong to the last generation of humans who would be denied the opportunity to live forever! But the more she read, the more she dismissed Kurzweil’s predictions as optimistic. If the Singularity could be achieved, it wouldn’t happen in her lifetime, or even Zach’s. She is lucky she wasn’t born in any of the millennia in which women died in childbirth or Zach would have perished from the diseases against which he had been vaccinated when he was born. Besides, with Sam dead and Zach missing, she isn’t sure she wants to hang around for another year, let alone endure an eternity of grief and lassitude.

  “Listen, Maxine.” Alphred fingers his druidic beard. “You can try to impress the donors with your Jurassic petting zoo. But you know what will really get them wetting their pajamas? Let us set up a Turing Test. We’ll put Wally in one booth, and me in another, and our prototype in a third. The money boys can pull out their checkbooks and pay to take the test.” Alphred lowers his glasses. “You do know what a Turing Test is, don’t you, Maxine?”

  She resists splashing orange juice in his face. Yes, Alphred. A Turing Test is when someone like me tries to tell the difference between a human-seeming computer and an inhuman prick like you. Her friends in Women’s Studies commiserate with her for needing to supervise a bunch of older white males like John Mickelthwaite and Carleton Marius. But the youngest members of the department are the ones who treat women, especially older women like her, with barely concealed contempt. Once, Alphred had been a timid freshman in a seminar Maxine taught called Nerds and Geeks: How Video Games Changed America. He stayed after class and confided the torment he had endured growing up as an overweight genius in a fundamentalist Scandinavian sect in western Michigan. Within months of taking her class, he had slimmed down, acquired a girlfriend, and founded the university’s hacker collective, KRAKEN. In his senior year, he begged Maxine to supervise his honors thesis. Her letter of support helped him gain acceptance to Cal Tech, where he studied with the leading expert in Emergent Systems and Phenomena. Having recruited Alphred to return to his alma mater, Maxine overheard him dismiss her as “well-intentioned but a little soft in the head.” Most of the young men Maxine mentored acted as if they were embarrassed to admit they had sprung from her professorial womb. Never mind that she had been punching cards on an IBM mainframe thirty years before any of the AI guys were born. She had been too busy teaching, serving on committees, and raising a son to keep up with the latest advances in computer vision and voice-recognition software. Never mind that she had created the perfect environment in which young male geniuses like Alphred and Wally could thrive. They treated her with the condescension they might employ while showing their grandmothers how to set up an account on Facebook.

  Admittedly, she did need Alphred’s help in setting up her blog, www.professorofimmortality.com. What had he called her—a “technopeasant”? Alphred predicted that, like most bloggers, Maxine would soon grow tired of writing entries. To spite him, she had struggled to come up with new material, meditating on the effects of immortality on human culture. But after a few months, she had given up. So what if maintaining a presence on social media might raise her institute’s profile and attract more donors? Wasn’t there already a whiff of something, well, grandmotherly about the very word “blog”?

  The true heart of the AI guys’ animosity derived from her unwillingness to believe a computer could be intelligent. The question seemed nonsensical. If intelligence meant an awareness of one’s self, how could a machine become aware? Of what? That it had no self to be aware of? If a person couldn’t tell she was conversing with a computer, what you had was a machine capable of fooling a human into thinking she was carrying on a conversation with another human. That didn’t make the computer a human being, any more than a whistle that attracted a duck could be considered a duck. A computer might come up with a plan to replicate itself. But it would never be conscious of creating what it created. Only beings with bodies could experience the hunger, the pain, the yearning for a mate that ignited the desire to communicate with another being. And only with language could a creature become aware of its desire as desire, its self as a being separate from the
other beings from whom it was begging food or protection for a child. Believing a bunch of digital switches might, by achieving a certain level of complexity, make a synergistic leap to consciousness struck Maxine as ridiculous. One day, everyone would look back on such a belief and laugh, as we now laughed at the idea that a mouse might spontaneously arise from a dusty rag or a rotted cheese.

  Still, running a Turing Test for their donors is a brainstorm. Humbled, she begs Alphred to add his expertise to Rosa’s and Mick’s. Maybe the fundraiser will be a success after all. Or avoid looking like an abject failure.

  That leaves only a request from Jackson Sparrow, the institute’s resident poet, who asks that he be allowed to read a poem. Rakish enough in his youth that he earned the nickname “Pirate,” Jackson is now more likely to bring to mind the nervous little bird the other reading of his name implies. He grew up in Detroit, then paid his way through Wayne State by working in an automobile factory; he hasn’t performed manual labor since the 1960s, but the experience still serves as the subject for his poetry. Having read Alphred Kisbye’s essay “Establishing Guidelines for the Post-Human Era,” Jackson had come up to Maxine and demanded a literal place at the literal table where such guidelines were being made. How could anyone so casually accept that the future would be “post-human”? What did “post-human” even mean? If there is anything about the future Jackson Sparrow doesn’t oppose, Maxine doesn’t know what it is. He refuses to buy a cell phone. He types his poems on a manual Royal typewriter, then publishes them on a hand-cranked press he and his late wife purchased at a junk shop. Even though he doesn’t hesitate to fly to Paris or Beijing to accept prizes for his poems, he makes a point of walking or biking elsewhere.

  That said, Jackson is a gentle, thoughtful widower who, a few months earlier, invited Maxine to see the printing press in the basement of his house, which is down the street from hers. There, as she cranked the crank and printed a broadside of one of Keats’s poems, Jackson leaned in and kissed her. The kiss hadn’t been unromantic. But his skin felt dusty and dry, his chest so frail she was afraid he would crumble like a mummy.