by Hunt N. Peck
My mind froze, and I think my heart stopped for about half a second. Then a sense of relief washed over me. I was the victim of a practical joke! Those computer guys! What a bunch of leg-pullers! They have never spoken to me, but they are having a laugh with me. Those nerds, eh? All the same, their lighthearted prank had put me in a difficult position. I could easily end up looking like the biggest fool in the world, and lose this well-paid doddle of a job. I should have to think carefully about this.
The phone rang. It was Horatio Chung, Mr Fraxinus’s liaison to the Chinese Room project, and the liaison between me and the techies. A Consulting General Specialist such as myself does not have a boss – I am a freelance brought in to do a specific task, and must be free to do it – but Horatio was certainly a fellow that I needed on my side. He wanted to know, obviously, what the reply slip said. The hangover, the headache and the implications of the practical joke clouded my thinking and made me defensive.
“Horatio! … Yes, an answer slip! And so early on! … I’m just looking at it now … I’m afraid it seems to be nonsense … well, I want to look at it some more … if there have been mistakes in transcription there may be some concealed sense. I doubt it, but it’s best to be certain … yes, surely … I’ll have another message ready for tomorrow morning … yes, you have a nice day, too!”
I put down the phone. I had committed myself to a course of action now. I would conceal the meaningful answer from Horatio Chung, but respond to it, so that I might turn the joke around on its perpetrators. Perhaps they would stop their foolishness then and we could all get down to the real business of stuffing our wallets with Mr Fraxinus’s money, while riding this doomed project to its natural end. It seemed that I had done the right thing. I shrugged, took two aspirins and continued reading the adventures of DI Quine.
All the same I felt uneasy as I walked back to the octagonal chalet that evening. What if it is a real response? said my irritating inner voice, you have no proof that it is a spoof, you goof. It can be a very irritating inner voice sometimes. I felt unsettled, so after a sandwich and a cup of coffee I went out for a walk. The Persephone Corporation’s campus was starting to close in on me a little. I’d noticed a loose section of chain-link fence at the boundary, away from the paths and the radio thingys. I slipped through the fence. Judging from the scuffed grass by the gap, I wasn’t the only one needing to get out. I followed a vague track in the grass across some scrubby wasteland and found myself stumbling into the car park at the rear of a bar. It didn’t look very salubrious, but I wasn’t feeling picky.
When I was in the bar, and my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I wished I’d been a bit more picky. The clientele looked quite villainous. I strolled to the countertop with careful nonchalance and ordered a beer and a bourbon. I chucked the whisky down in one, not to impress but because I needed it. The remnants of a hangover were still with me, and the answer from the Chinese Room had unnerved me more than I expected. I sipped the beer, and looked up and down the bar, and to my surprise I saw a familiar face. Fred, the surly technician from the Dee Codex project, was sitting on a bar-stool at the far end of the counter. I went over and greeted him. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see me, but I bought him a drink anyway. A thought occurred to me:
“Fred, me old dear,” I said. “You’re working for Persephone, aren’t you?”
“Yes, what of it?” He looked at me suspiciously. “Of course, you are too … oh, crap, you’re the Persian Interrogator, aren’t you? I shouldn’t be talking to you! I could lose my job!”
Fred was no fool. He made as though to rise, but I a put a hand on his arm.
“Don’t be so nervy. We’re just two old friends, meeting by chance in a foreign land, and none of the others in here look like they work for Persephone, do they? Have another beer.”
He was reassured, and accepted a beer and a short. This is a break, I thought, he’s a techie on the Chinese Room. I reminisced for a little while about our happy days back at the University of Bumbleside, to which he responded with grunts.
“You know, Fred,” I said, “it hurts that you don’t trust me, because I could have ratted you out to the Old Bill.” I sipped my beer, smiling ruefully.
“Wotchoo mean?” he snarled. “I didn’t kill Doc Toots!”
“I didn’t think you did,” I said smoothly, “but I could have told them about how you sold weed to the students, and how you kept your stash in the air-duct in the storeroom.”
He looked at me, and his mouth opened and closed like a goldfish.
“How did you … ?” he gasped.
“It was pretty obvious. The Prof and the Doc would never have noticed, but I am a horse of a different feather. If I’d told the gavvers they would have thought me a proper upstanding decent citizen, and would not have been so bloody suspicious of me. It seems to be my fate, people being lairy of me. What a world!”
I shook my head sadly, a took a belt of bourbon. Fred was chastened, and a little less surly. After that it was easy; I let Fred buy me a drink, then I bought us a couple of double shots of ‘Major General Sir Edward Pakenham’ single-barrel bourbon, instead of the standard kerosene-flavoured rye.
“Strange name for an American whisky, ain’t it?” said Fred. “Not bad, though.”
“He lost the battle of New Orleans. You know the song? ‘We fired our guns and the British came a runnin–o, something, something, diddley-diddley-o’. A famous wit said that he’d snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He got killed there, and they sent him home in a barrel of whisky, so some other famous wit said that he’d returned in better spirits than when he’d left. It makes sense, if you think about it, to name a bourbon after him … Fred, perhaps you could do me a small favour …”
He was once again as wary as an alley-cat, but I managed to get him to listen while I told him my suspicion that I was being made the butt of a practical joke.
“See, Fred, these wallies are risking our jobs as well. They think it’s just a big laugh, like putting the dean’s car on the gym roof, but what will happen if Mr Fraxinus finds out, eh?”
Fred sipped the bourbon and looked thoughtful.
“He’d shut the project down, sack everybody, and start again with new people.”
“You see? He’d sterilise the Chinese Room like it was an experiment, which it is. I’m thinking about the good of the project, as well as getting our pay for as long as possible. All I want you to do is keep an eye peeled for me. I don’t want to hear anything about how the Room works, so it would still be in the spirit of the thing, wouldn’t it? And us Limeys have to stick together against the Septics, don’t we?”
“Okay, Hunt,” he said reluctantly, “but I haven’t seen any signs of something like that going on. The code-jockeys are a bunch of buffoons, it’s true – aren’t they always? – but they seem pretty serious about the project. And the Door is guarded by two security goons when the Room is up and running, and covered by CCTV, too. I can’t see how they’d do it.”
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? If it was easy they wouldn’t have bothered. You know what engineers are like. They love a challenge.”
He agreed to meet me in the same bar in a couple of days. None of the Persephone people drank there, as there was a more civilised place a little further on. Surly Fred preferred the uncivilised pub, of course.
The next morning, with my head still a little fuzzy from the bourbon, I wrote the second message to the Chinese Room. It didn’t come easily. I had to assume that the reply was real, and answer appropriately, but it appeared to come from someone who was confined, rather than from a disembodied voice as one would expect. I also had to put a trap in it, to catch the practical jokesters. In the end I wrote:
I am a friend. My name is Hunter.
It is not I who keeps you there. Perhaps I can help?
Describe your surroundings, if you can.
The ebullient good humour of those persifleurs would unmask them, I was sure, so I had provided a couple of hidden hooks upon which their badinage might hang itself. I picked up the phone and summoned the security guys. After they had left with the envelope I poured myself some coffee and continued reading The Treachery Of Images,
I had just finished the last page, in which DI Quine reveals the true identity of Monsieur Pipe, when the two security guards returned and gave me an envelope.
I looked at lying upon the desk, and felt a frisson of mixed fear and curiosity. I opened the envelope, the flowing Persian script said:
I am in a room with a locked door. The walls and the floor are stone. There is a table and a chair. There is paper and a pencil on the table, on which I write.
I cannot remember who I am, or where I came from, and I am afraid. I think they are drugging me, because I remember nothing between answering your first message and receiving your reply.
Hunter is an auspicious name. Perhaps you are a mighty hunter who will find me and release me from this place.
I read it, and then read it through again, then I put it down on the desk, then I picked it up and read it once again. These jokers have a bizarre sense of humour, I thought, very droll indeed. They must have a Persian speaker to write the replies, I reasoned, so these messages are the work of one mind. The jokey geeks are smuggling the messages into the system somehow, but there is just one Persian linguist. I wonder who she is? The messages could be heard by the mind’s ear as having a slight accent of Tadjik, an old-fashioned phrasing, slightly quaint … She? What do I mean, she?
You mean ‘she’, said the inner voice, it’s a woman, you know it is. I immediately thought of Yasmin, then discounted it. I had detected no signs of evasiveness when we had spoken on the plane, none of the ‘tells’ that betray duplicity; it wasn’t Yasmin. Who then? An unknown woman. I spent the rest of the day lost in thought, staring out of the office window at the landscaped campus with its odd multicoloured buildings, straight concrete paths and worn brown tracks on the lawns. I spent the evening in thought, too, alone in the octagonal chalet with a few beers and the television twittering unheard. In the morning, as I shaved, the outline of a plan started to form in my mind.
When I got to my office I phoned Horatio Chung and asked to see him. I liked Horatio, he was a good fellow. Realising that I would feel isolated in my role as the Persian Interrogator, he had invited me to dinner with his family a couple of times. A Chinese-American, he was short, bandy-legged, long-armed with very wide shoulders, and had a Halloween-pumpkin head with no discernable neck. He was irrepressibly good humoured. His wife was pretty, and their two children were surprisingly good-looking, considering how plug-ugly their father was. When I got to his office he pretended to hit me on the head with a cricket bat.
“Clicky-ba!” he chortled. “Ho-ho! I’ve got myself a ‘clicky-ba’! I bought it on eBola.”
When I was last at his place, after a glass too many of red wine, I had kidded him that he was a fictional character, but it seemed that after checking out what I’d meant he was not offended. Now I felt slightly bad, for I was already deceiving him about the replies, and now I was going to dupe him again.
“Careful with that thing, Horatio!” I laughed. “I’m not the Wolf of Kabul.”
“Shir Muhammud, maybe,” he said. “What can I do for you, Hunt?”
“I know I’m not supposed to have anything to do with the running of the Chinese Room,” I said, “but I have an idea that may be useful.”
“So long as you are isolated from the Room, Hunt, you may suggest and propose anything you wish. Give me your thoughts.” He swung the cricket bat, scoring an imaginary six.
“It occurred to me, Horatio, that it is an unnatural situation. It’s as though we wake someone up, thrust a message at them, demand they respond instantly, then hit them on the head with your clicky-ba to send them back to sleep. Maybe that’s why the replies are garbled. Perhaps the Room needs to be kept running for longer periods, not just when it’s processing messages. Maybe even twenty-four-seven. What do you think?”
Horatio Chung put the bat down, and sat and looked at me.
“Holy moly, Hunt! You may have something there! I’ll float the idea past our computer guys. It cannot hurt to try a new approach.”
We chatted for a little while, then I went back to my office. If I could get them to run the Chinese Room continuously the extra work-load would put a strain on maintaining their foolish practical joke. I felt satisfied with my morning’s work. I took Hugh Dunnett’s third DI Quine novel from the drawer of my desk, Gödel, Friedman, Unterweger – An Eternal Dread Goblin. What an odd title, I thought. I poured myself a cup of coffee and turned to the first page.
Horatio came to my office that afternoon; the Chinese Room was going to switch to continuous operation! The computer team had fiercely resisted (aha! I thought) but Mr Fraxinus, in mid-Atlantic in his huge yacht, was enthusiastic and had said “make it so”. The computer guys were going onto a rotating three-shift system and more staff were being brought in. (That will teach you to play games with Hunt N. Peck, I thought smugly.)
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you, Hunt,” said Horatio, “but I reckoned you ought to know, as it was your idea.”
“Our little secret,” I winked at him. When he had gone I continued reading An Eternal Dread Goblin. The first chapter, Gonad Bridle, was quite shocking, and the second chapter, Bladed Groin, was a bloodbath. Intriguing, though. I started on the third chapter, Olde Brigand. The reorganisation of the Chinese Room meant that I had several days before the third message would be required, so I could indulge myself in a little light reading.
In between reading and drinking coffee I did think about the third message, though. What I hoped from the third message was that the reply would be nonsense, then I would know that the jokers had been confounded by the shift-changes and new staff, and we could all get on with trying to coax meaningful words out of an office building full of computers and clerks, until Mr Fraxinus gets bored with the whole mad caper. Trying to second-guess the process by assuming that the Chinese Room had already answered me just curdled my brain, and I refused to be drawn into the kind of labyrinthine analyses of language that Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed in his Philosophical Investigations. In the end I wrote:
Are you still there?
I put the sealed envelope in the desk drawer, poured myself more coffee and opened An Eternal Dread Goblin again. After the disturbing and bloody opening chapters the middle part of the story concerned DI Russell Quine’s struggle with the complexity of the case, with the chapters Addling Bore, Odd Blearing and Lodged Brain reflecting his bewilderment at the developments. I knew how he felt.
The security guards came for the third message two days later and I gave them the envelope. The reply came back to me the next morning. I placed it on the desk and looked at it for several minutes before I tore it open.
I am still here, in this room. I did not write anything in reply for a long while because I wanted time to think, but I still do not remember my name, or where I come from, or who I am. There is an emptiness in me, a hollow place that should be full. Perhaps I have been ill.
I have no memories to give you, please tell me something of yourself.
Yes, I thought, who are you? You are playing this game very well. The language you use is odd. Archaic. A little like Tadjik. Perhaps she is not Persian? I thought. She knows it very well, but a little strangely, like a foreigner, as though it is not her native tongue, despite her fluency. And she has not revealed any duplicity, she writes as though she has awakened in a room, with no memories. The Chinese Room is supposed to react like a person, not like a person in a room, so where does the room come from? One could say, said my inner voice, that the room is obligatory. The assumption of this experiment is that a language contains structures that reflect the reality which it communicates. Words create the objects that they describe; a shoe is an object that is put upon a foot, if it went upon a head it would be a hat, so the use of the word ‘shoe’ in a language defines ‘shoeness’ even if there are no actual shoes around for the word to refer to, and it also corroborates the existence of ‘footness’. The connections between the words give structure to the language making it a web defining reality, not just the reality of the person speaking, but also the reality of their environment. A blind, deaf, paralysed amnesiac in a sensory-deprivation tank has nothing whatever to say, and thus cannot say anything. So there has to be a room. My inner voice paused, perhaps I live in a room, it said. Shut up, I told it, and got up and stamped around the office, feeling schizophrenic and pulling at my hair.
When I had calmed down I poured myself more coffee and ate a biscuit. The horrible thought occurred to me that I might be the subject of the experiment, that the whole Chinese Room business might be a charade to study my responses, to test some bizarre theory. The world’s foremost Consulting General Specialist is, after all, the possessor of a unique brain, so it might make sense to test the limits of my credulity. I thought of Stanley Milgram, who had set up a psychlogical experiment with a scenario where his test subjects thought they were electrocuting a man to death, but he was only an actor pretending to die. That cheered me up; if the whole thing was a scenario then it didn’t matter what I did. On the other hand, I had now deceived Horatio Chung, and Jules Fraxinus too, so if it was not a set-up then I was digging myself into a hole. The woman who was writing the replies had Persian as a second language, and had the subtlety to answer as though a newly-created virtual entity, and this excited my curiosity. I would have to continue, but make a greater effort to resolve the dilemma.
I wrote the fourth message:
I am glad that you are still receiving my messages.
I do not know who you are. Perhaps you will remember in time.
Are you getting food and drink?
My mother is a Persian and my father was a Magyar, but I have lived in many lands and speak many tongues. Do you speak any other languages?
Well, I thought, let’s see how you process that, Persian-speaking lady! The room is one thing, but does it supply the necessities of life? Does a virtual entity even require food? The Chinese Room is built to respond only to Persian, too, so even the mere mention of other languages ought to confuse it, but not a bilingual human. I felt a little smug after I had sealed the envelope and the security guards had taken it away.
The reply came back within an hour:
I am getting food. I have just eaten a bowl of rice and fish. I am now staying awake after I slip my message under the door, so perhaps they were drugging my food and so I did not remember eating it, and perhaps now they have stopped. Perhaps not, as I do not recall seeing anyone bring the rice-bowl into the room.
I think I speak other languages, but I cannot remember any words. There is so much that I cannot remember. What is a Magyar?
Oh! Persian-speaking lady, you are so subtle! I thought. I wondered again if I was being made the subject of some psychological experiment. This response suggested that whoever was writing the replies had considered the ramifications in great detail, unlike a casual prankster. The ontological necessity for a room, for an environment for the virtual being, extends to food and drink, but not to another virtual being to deliver it; the food therefore appears magically! Um, said my inner voice, that of itself implies that the entire environment is ‘magical’, and that the Persian-speaking lady, if she is a virtual being, can have anything she wishes for. Limited only by the boundaries of the language, That’s interesting, I thought, maybe the Chinese Room can only work with Persian, since Persian handles concepts of magic so well. If the Room were to use English the very pragmatism of the language would prevent food from appearing without explanation. And she thinks she speaks other languages, but cannot remember which. How easily she avoids my trap!
I needed time to think about this, and delaying my next message would leave her in suspense, now that she wasn’t being drugged. What? said my inner voice, what do you mean not being drugged? Do you think that could be because of the continuous operation? Now I was getting confused. I locked the message away with the others, then I phoned Horatio Chung and reported that the latest reply showed interesting signs of improvement from the twenty-four-seven running of the Room, but it was still garbled, I felt increasingly uneasy about not telling Horatio, perhaps he would beat me with his clicky-ba if he found me out. I locked my office and walked back to the octagonal chalet, deep in thought.
After nuking a teevee dinner in the microwave I still felt restless, so I walked to the hole in the fence, keeping an eye open for grey-uniformed Persephone security men, and on to the bar. I looked at the front of the building before going in. It was called ‘The Whole Nole’ and had a sign with a picture of two native American Indians raising beerglasses to each other. I went in. I was not unduly surprised to see surly Fred sitting at the bar. I hopped onto a stool next to him and made the big-small finger gesture to the barman for a beer and a shot. The Seminole barman wiped the countertop and placed the drinks in front of me, I gestured that he should give one to Fred as well. He did so, and returned to the other end of the bar to continue playing backgammon with his twin brother.
“Bad day?” inquired Fred, sipping rye. I downed mine in one.
“Too damn right. I am downhearted.” I explained that I had been unable to end the practical jokery, even though I had got the Chinese Room onto continuous operation. Fred surprised me by buying me a another whisky. He explained that he was now on twelve-hour shifts, thanks to me, and making a bundle on the overtime. We drank and talked, and I realised that Fred had, to some extent, become a co-conspirator. It was he who suggested running a cable to connect the Chinese Room network to the network of my office computer.
“A few simple hacks, and you could catch them at it, or sabotage them. Be a shame if this project folded. It’s a little goldmine. I think I might buy one a them big Yankee cars and ship it home. A Pontillac Firebuzzard, one of the early ones with the big fins, something like that. Go up the pub of a Saturday night and take up half the car park.”
“Um, I’m not sure, Fred. Somebody would notice.”
“Of course they will! That would be the point, you wally, I’ll get a pink one … oh, sorry … the cable … not a chance, I know just where I could put it in. About three metres of coaxial lead. It would just be lost in among the other cables and wires. I couldn’t do the hacking, though. Somebody would notice that for sure. They’re code jockeys, you check your email and they’ll look over your shoulder in case you’re programming, so they can say ‘oh! you should have defined that matrix dynamically, you wimp’ or ‘nobody codes in Forprog anymore, you know, why aren’t you using Gerbil?’ The spotty little buggers have never even seen a punch-card. I miss them punch-cards, they used to make great roaches. Anyway, Hunt, you’re all alone in your office, you could hack away all day and nobody would see you doing it.”
He had a point, and I reluctantly agreed to the plan. I couldn’t think of another way to resolve the situation quickly. We drank more beers and shots, then stumbled out, taking care to leave separately. I tore my trousers squeezing back through the hole in the fence.
The next day, suffering only a moderate hangover, I considered my next message to the Chinese Room. I needed to put traps into it, but the Persian-speaking lady was quick and subtle. The interaction between her environment and her memory gave the best chance of catching her out in a logical absurdity. I wrote:
If you remember food then you must remember something of your past life. Perhaps new tastes will stimulate your memory. Leave a note by your rice-bowl asking for something different, maybe they will give you a dish that will jog your memory.
You are not being drugged anymore, but do you sleep?
A Magyar is somebody from Hungary, which is far to the west of Persia.
Why do you not press her about who brings the food? Said my inner voice. I am going for the logically simple ones first, I told myself, and I’ve got to keep something in reserve. You lie, said the inner voice, you don’t want to end this too quickly because the lady intrigues you. Poppycock, I told myself, as I sealed the message in an envelope.
I stared at the envelope for a while, then I phoned the security men and they came and took it away. I don’t blame you, said the inner voice, she must be really sparky to handle this stuff. You mean the play on the internal structure of language? I thought. The self-consistency of language has implications. Back in the Stone Age some bored Cro-Magnon gave his fingers names (or her fingers, it’s kind of a chick thing to do) and so invented counting. The existence of the number line – one, two, three, four and so on – implies the existence of infinity; another one can always be added on the end. The number line also implies subtraction, which implies the zero and the negative numbers, and a minus infinity. Addition implies multiplication. Subtraction implies division. The whole of mathematics can be deduced, following logically just from the simple linguistic act of giving names to your fingers. There must be a limit to the virtual world which can be constructed by implication from a language, but it is not a small limit. You mean she could dodge your traps for ever? said the inner voice. Maybe, I thought, maybe.
I tried to read more of Gödel, Friedman, Unterweger – An Eternal Dread Goblin but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. No reply came that day.
I had a quiet evening, listening to the radio in the octagonal chalet. As I was just falling asleep my inner voice cleared its throat, ahem. What now? I thought. Oh, just a small quibble, it said. Infinity is implied by the number line, and yet there is no infinity in the real universe. The volume of space implied by the naming of fingers is larger than the volume of the finite universe. Infinitely greater. A virtual world could contain more possibilities than reality. Magic may be the reality in a virtual world. Tell me, inner voice, I enquired sweetly, do you have an inner voice? Er, um, it said. And does your inner voice have an inner voice? And does that inner voice have an inner voice?
That seemed to shut it up, and I slept, but it was a troubled sleep. Shadows and phantoms, not-quite nightmares, drifted through my dreams, mumbling curses in symbolic logic and rattling their Markoff chains.
The next day the reply came in the afternoon, just as I was fixing myself a cup of Earl Grey. I looked at the envelope on the desk, sipping the bergamot-scented tea as though it was a potion that would protect me. I opened the envelope.
Hunter, you are a clever man! I wrote a note and left it by the rice-bowl, as you suggested, and I got noodles and roasted pork with a spicy pepper sauce. Much nicer than plain boiled rice and fish! I am trying to remember what else I like.
Thankyou, Hunter, I feel much more hope now.
I had hardly finished reading this when there was a knock at the door and the security men brought me another envelope. I signed for it, and noticed that my hands were shaking when I opened it.
This is so nice! I remembered that I like to wear white, so when I left a note asking for green tea by the bowl the noodles came in I also asked for a white dress, and I found a lovely gown of white silk on the bed after the green tea came! What I was wearing before must have been very plain and dreary, because I can’t remember what it was anymore.
I’ve remembered that the roasted pork is called Char Su, which is not a Persian word, so I must speak another language. I feel so happy!
That’s weird, I thought. Char Su is definitely not in Persian. Perhaps she’s slipped up? I felt a sense of disappointment that the game was over so quickly. Maybe it’s not a slip, said the inner voice, perhaps the invisible waiter left her a menu from the takeaway, ho-ho! Very funny, I thought, but no, she’s tripped up; there can’t be any Chinese in the Persian language, how would an office block full of people and computers process that? It would be straining at handling Persian, even if it was a genuine response. Don’t be hasty, said the inner voice, just think, if I’m your inner voice, and I’ve got an inner voice, then perhaps you, Hunt, are just somebody else’s inner voice and you yourself are living in a Room? If language defines the world, as you believe, then your world is defined by your language, and yet your world contains languages that you do not understand, as the lovely Yasmin sussed out in two minutes flat. Damn! you might be right, I thought, even those old prophets had got that notion – in the beginning was the Word – and The Word was Greek, which is logos, which is the root of the English word logic, because of that very connection. The mere existence of Persian might logically imply Chinese. It is far-fetched, said the inner voice, but you cannot ignore the possibility. Leave it for a while before you go to Horatio Chung, to be absolutely sure you are being spoofed. A couple more messages should do it.
There was a knock at the door, and the security men brought me another envelope. The message said:
I’ve got some lovely red silk slippers, and a mirror! You were so clever to think of leaving notes! I think I must be Chinese, now that I have seen my own face, but I still cannot remember my name. I am remembering more things all the time, so maybe I will remember it soon. I must have been ill, or drugged, but now I feel that I must be getting better.
When I think of a Magyar now I see a horseman with a long moustache, riding across an empty plain in my mind’s eye, yet before it meant nothing! It is strange, but wonderful. Perhaps the Magyar is you, Hunter, riding to release me.
I did sleep last night, and not because I was drugged. I remember laying down, and then I dreamt – wonderful dreams! – and then I awoke when it became light. There is no window here, but the light fades at night, so there must be a concealed lantern.
I suddenly felt very tired, exhausted with the strain of trying to think my way through this. I didn’t answer the message, but I waited until it became dark outside before I left the office, in case there should be another envelope.
I walked straight to The Whole Nole tavern. On the way I pondered upon Edmund Husserl’s trancendental phenomenology. He proposed, in his vast and boring two-volume Logical Investigations, that there are material things – noema – whose existence is indisputable, a red silk slipper, for example, and that there are things that the mind ‘intends’ – noesis – like the general concept of footwear, for example. Husserl argued that a noesis is actually a noema, as it too exists of and for itself, thus producing the noema/noesis dichotomy, and also making himself the toast of the Viennese coffee-houses. Quite rightly, too, as it is the aim of all serious philosophers to produce a thesis that is so incomprehensible that it cannot be disproved by any amount of drunken talk over brandy and sacher torte, but which is so nearly intelligible as to be intriguing. Does the noema/noesis stuff help, though? Not much, said my inner voice, it is mostly crap. You ought to go with stuffy old Ernst Mach – ‘The ego is a useless hypothesis!’ – I mean, let’s keep this real, it is the technical stuff that will be the decider here, not this Chinese chick’s choice of shoes.
After a couple of beers and shots some sanity came back to me, and I ordered a cheeseburger and fries before I got another beer. The burger was good, even though Americans have never been able to understand cheese. Processed cheese slices don’t taste so bad, though, when melted onto a big enough lump of grilled ground beef, especially when the fellow doing the eating is protein-starved from over-exerting his brain. I was licking ketchup off my fingers when surly Fred hopped onto the bar-stool next to me and stole a handful of fries. Before I could speak he pushed something into my coat pocket.
“It’s a disk,” said Fred. “Put it in your office PC, run it, and it will connect to the Chinese Room network. I’ve put in the bridging cable.”
A worrying thought came to me.
“When did you put the cable in, Fred?”
“Yesterday morning early. Before breakfast, when there was nobody about except security goons, and they were all in their rest room doing coffee and crullers.”
Char Su, I thought, Magyars. You’ve breached the system isolation. She can ‘remember’ anything now because the entire internet is potentially her subconscious mind. On the other hand, said my inner voice, it may mean that the practical jokers have spotted the cable going in and they are turning the game back on you, upping the stakes.
“It’s a funny thing,” said Fred, “but later on, that evening, the whole system seemed to go slow, and then it went through these cycles of activity and slow-down. Everybody was talking about it this morning. Weird ain’t it? Whoops! I shouldn’t have told you that! We are trying to preserve the spirit of the experiment aren’t we?”
Sleep, I thought. Periods of REM dreaming, separated by troughs of low alpha-wave activity. She had a nice sleep with wonderful dreams. We are just so out of our depth here, aren’t we? said my inner voice.
“More drinks here, barman!” I called. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.