by Hunt N. Peck
“Why on Earth did you say that?” said the Bosun, scraping the last of the chicken vindaloo from the aluminium-foil tray. “Is there any more naan bread?”
I found some under a newspaper on the kitchen table and passed it to him.
“I was disoriented. Jet planes, helicopters, beautiful women, thugs in uniforms. I thought he was going to be stroking a white cat with his artificial hand, or something.” I found another piece of flat bread. Coconut-flavoured peshwari naan, nice to dip in lemony tarka daal. I did so, and took a sip of cider to wash it down.
“It was for the best, anyway,” I said. “He noticed that my clothes were from India, put two and two together and made five, and assumed I’d been involved in some hush-hush United Nations stunt in Myanmar. All I had to do was look knowing and say I couldn’t possibly confirm or deny it, and there I was, the modest hero. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to have done there, mind you.”
“Expensive cider,” said the Bosun, examining a bottle before refilling his glass, “and an Indian take-away from the Rajah’s Palace in Grimthorpe, still hot, therefore a taxi. I deduce that you not only got the job, but that you also got a generous consultancy fee for the day.”
“Single-varietal cider. Hand-pressed,” I said. “Even the dead rat dropped into the fermenting-vat is special, not just any common old rattus norvegicus. The Argente Creme Monarch breed has won rosettes at fancy-rat shows, you know. Yes, you deduce correctly. Everyone’s going Sherlock Holmes on me today. Mr Fraxinus is a great Conan Doyle fan and he has a full set of first editions, which was lucky for me, as he mistakenly deduced that I am a lion-hearted adventurer who gets his suits eaten by beetles in the jungles of Burma whilst nobly serving humanity, and so I got the job, and then a very good lunch, as promised.”
“You jest! They do not put rats in cider! It is merely an old wives’ tale. What was the lunch?”
“Surely they do,” I said. “The decomposing rat provides essential minerals for the yeast, such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Cheap ciders use ground-up sheep bones, but that gives it a mutton-fat taste, haven’t you noticed? Rats give a gameyness, a mustiness that complements the bright acidic flavours of the fermented apple. The lunch was nursery food – Brown Windsor soup, steak-and-kidney pudding and veg, Spotted Dick for afters – but it was cooked by a chef from La Crapule, flown in from Paris, and it was very good indeed. Mr Fraxinus had another guest, too. Hugh Dunnett, the crime writer.”
The Bosun was eyeing his cider suspiciously, but he noticed me smiling and ostentatiously took a long draught.
“You mean Detective-Inspector Dunnett?” he said. “The police detective who writes thrillers about a police detective who writes thrillers about a police detective who writes thrillers about a police detective who writes thrillers about a police detective?”
“That’s the fellow,” I said, “the recursive detective.”
“Hmm, I once looked up ‘recursion’ in a dictionary,” said the Bosun, “and it said ‘see recursion’.” He took another swallow of cider. “What is the job? Did the mysterious Mr Fraxinus tell you?”
“He did.” I binned the foil containers, stacked the plates and opened another bottle of cider. “This one is pressed from the Old Maid’s Winter Apple, a russet with an unusually irregular, warty and knobbly surface. The rat is a albino laboratory rat of the Sprague Dawley breed, which are ideal for cider-making as they have no gall-bladder, the poor dears.” I said, peering at the label.
“Stop prevaricating, and stop trying to put me off the scumble. I don’t care if they put roadkill hedgehogs in it, it tastes just grand.”
“Hedgehogs? No, that’s the French stuff from Normandy. You’d think they’d use frogs, wouldn’t you? The Australians are rumoured to be experimenting with cane toads. The bufotenin in their skin gives the cider an hallucinogenic quality, they say, but also results in a rank smell, like wombat farts.”
“If you, Hunt, were to be drowned in a vat of cider I am sure that you would give it a rank smell, like bullshit,” said the Bosun, “and you might well be if you do not tell me what the crazy old megalomaniac wishes you to do.”
I frowned and took a pull of cider to compose my thoughts. The Bosun searched the pockets of his dungarees for his pipe.
“You have heard of Artificial Intelligence?” I asked him.
“I have. It is the attempt to construct computers which think like human beings. Not overly successful so far.”
“Artificial Intelligence did not produce the results that were so confidently predicted, it is true, and that resulted in the so-called ‘AI winter’, when all the funding dried up.” I said. The Bosun lit his pipe and nodded for me to continue. “Mr Fraxinus has a theory that the research was deliberately sabotaged by doctors. The first useful results from AI were expected to be in the field of ‘expert systems’ which would diagnose diseases from symptoms more accurately than a human could. That would have put a lot of quacks out of work, so a world-wide conspiracy of medicos crippled the project by diagnosing key workers as insane and consigning them to mental hospitals.”
“Surely you cannot give credence to such an outlandish theory?” said the Bosun, wreathed in smoke.
“Who knows? There were undoubtedly a large number of AI boffins who got put away – there are a couple up in the old asylum on the hill, I believe – but it could also be explained by the tendency of AI work to drive people doolally, in much the same way that all psychiatrists are as mad as hatters from studying the workings of the brain too closely. Anyway, it matters not. Mr Fraxinus believes it, and so he believes that a well-funded assault on AI might pay off, as the research was ended just when it was about to bear fruit.”
“So he has a plan, then. How do you fit into it?”
“Patience. Mr Fraxinus examined the AI research and noticed that a lot of the arguments centred around a gedankenexperiment called the ‘Chinese Room’, which was proposed by a Professor Searle. One wit said that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as ‘the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room argument to be false’. It attempts to undermine a critical assumption in the ‘computational theory of mind’ and so demonstrate the futility of AI research.”
The Bosun puffed his pipe and made a circular ‘get on with it’ gesture.
“The Chinese Room proposes that there is a man in a locked room. He has books of written instructions in English, and he does not speak Chinese. A slip of paper is slid under the door, it has Chinese characters written upon it. The man in the room follows the written instructions, which tell him how to process the message. This eventually results in him copying Chinese ideograms from a book onto a piece of paper, which he pushes back under the door. So he has answered the message, but without understanding either the message or the reply that he has written, since he does not understand Chinese. All he has done is follow instructions.”
The Bosun considered this in silence. I sipped cider while he cogitated.
“I see,” he said. “The assumption being that even if the answers do seem to make sense they are demonstrably not the result of intelligence, and so intelligence cannot be created merely by following a set of rules, and therefore a computer can never be intelligent because a program can be logically reduced to a set of rules.”
“Very good! Can you also see the flaw in this argument?”
“Hmm! It assumes that humans are themselves intelligent. Lightning Boy up at the pub behaves much like the Chinese Room. One can almost imagine the little man in his head desperately leafing through the books of rules as he tries to respond when someone speaks to him, sometimes giving answers that have little to do with the questions, especially when he’s had a few.”
“Again, very good! But we must not get bogged-down on philosophy, better men than we have wrangled over these knotty conundrums, and to but little avail. Mr Fraxinus intends to solve the riddle by experimental means. He intends to create an actual Chinese Room!”
“And you are to be the poor sucker in the room?” asked the Bosun.
“Certainly not!” I cried. “Am I some witless drone to perform dreary meaningless tasks, controlled by a book of rules? Not I! Anyway, the guy in the room is just an imaginary figment in the thought-experiment. In reality it would take far too long to get a reply. Mr Fraxinus is going to replace the man in the room with an office-block full of people and computers; a bureaucratic calculator, so to speak. He reckons this will speed the whole thing up. He is also not going to use Chinese, as it has no real ‘alphabetical order’ for the ideograms, so it is not ideal for a partially-computerised set-up.”
I raised an eyebrow and waited for the Bosun to see it.
“Aha! The Chinese Room is going to be a Persian Room! And you are to be the one who writes the questions!” He looked pleased with himself. “That’s why you are the only Farsi speaker allowed! To prevent any collusion! He is not so daft, your Mr Fraxinus, is he?”
“Indeed not. Persian is much better suited to the project. It has a phonetic alphabet and is quite logically structured,” I said. “The facility to construct nouns from root-words means it has a potential to have two hundred and sixty million nouns without inventing new roots. Ideal for story-tellers, poets and song-writers, but also ideal for digital analysis. I shall have nothing to do with that side of it, though, I shall be the Chinese Room’s interrogator. I am quite enthusiastic, actually. I do not for one moment think it is going to work, but it should be interesting. And well-paid.”
“Where will all this take place?” enquired the Bosun.
“At the headquarters of the Persephone Corporation, the heart of Mr Fraxinus’s Persephone Project to bring the future to the world today. In sunny Florida.” I smirked at the Bosun, and the rain rattled against the kitchen windows, as though in frustration at my escape from it.
Florida was a disappointment. On the flight over the Pond, snug in a first-class seat with a gin-and-tonic in my hand, I had imagined the Persephone Corporation’s headquarters to be a luxurious complex by the beach, with views over palm trees to the blue sea, but it was actually in the middle of a swamp, miles from the golden sands and far from any of the bikini-clad babes of my expectations. The buildings were all concrete, oddly shaped and painted in paler variations of the swirly light-show pattern, and they looked sadly old-fashioned, like a vision of the future from a ‘Fifties science-fiction movie. I was comfortable enough, though, with a psychedelically-coloured octagonal ‘chalet’ in the residential part of the ‘campus’ and a corner office in one of the admin blocks, both air-conned to near freezing. On the outside the heat was hot and and the humidity humid, and there were mosquitos the size of Jurassic dragon-flies which inflicted itchy red golf-ball-sized lumps, as I found when I went for an exploratory circumambulation.
The Persephone headquarters were sprawling, the buildings set apart from each other in landscaped grounds. The swampy water-table was organised into lakes, ponds and fake canals among lawns, bushes and small stands of trees. In the residential areas of chalets and apartment blocks the concrete paths meandered about in curves, in the work areas of offices and labs the paths were all ruler-straight in a grid. This was supposed to make the living areas seem restful and the work areas purposeful, but all it actually did was ensure that no paved path had a course which anybody wanted to follow, so bare tracks were worn in the grass along the lines that people did want to walk. I found this oddly representative of the whole place. Jules Fraxinus obviously meant well and wished to make the world a better place for everybody with his Persephone Project, but wayward humanity would not be sensible and keep to the nice paths that he had designed and built for them. The irony was reinforced by occasional patches of grass fenced off for re-seeding and signs asking piteously to ‘Please Keep To The Footpaths’. The security reflected this, too. Access to anywhere on campus was by a radio-tagged ID badge that one must carry at all times, so that in theory I could not enter the residential area where the technical crew of the Chinese Room lived, I was quarantined from them. There was no actual gate, but if I tried to enter the area a security guard would be alerted and I would be escorted back. This relied on a radio thingy by the path, but if I walked off the path and went into the forbidden area via a small wood I did not go within range of a radio thingy so no alarm was sounded. I had no intention then to break the quarantine imposed upon the interrogator of the Chinese Room, I just found it amusing to test the weaknesses of the system under the cover of feigned absent-mindedness.
The first weeks were quite boring. I had little to do, except order a couple of big Persian dictionaries to sit on the shelf behind my head when I talked to people. To satisfy my curiosity, I was given a chaperoned tour of the office block full of computers and clerks that was the Chinese Room, but not allowed to talk to anybody. It was not very illuminating, as all offices full of computers look much the same. The slips of paper that would have been slid under the door of the virtual Chinese Room were actually put into a sealed envelope and pushed into a slot, whereupon a machine would strip off the envelope and feed the slip to an optical reader. If the Chinese Room answered then a slip would be printed, sealed in an envelope automatically and slid out of the same slot. The sealed envelopes would come from me and be returned to me unopened, to preserve the separation between the two sides of the experiment. A little wooden door labelled ‘Chinese Room – Do Not Disturb!’ had been glued to the machine’s front panel above the slot, They are such jokesters, those computer guys.
I gave some thought to what the first message ought to say. ‘Hello’ in Persian is salaam, which actually means ‘peace’, so that was perhaps ambiguous, not of itself a question requiring a reply. Eventually I settled upon ‘is anybody there?’ and so I wrote upon a slip of paper, right to left, of course:
هرکسی آنجا؟است
I sealed it in an envelope, put it in the drawer of my desk, and spent the rest of the day reading The Nth Policeman by Hugh Dunnett. The hero, Detective-Inspector Russell Quine, puts the ‘Met’ into metafiction, just as the blurb on the back cover said.
A couple of days later there was a knock at the door of my office, I shouted “enter!” and two security guards came in, dressed in grey uniforms with the Persephone green-heart-in-a-yellow-circle on the shoulders. The company brochure said that the logo symbolised the green heart of Planet Earth safe within the Sun’s benign influence, or some such load of old cobblers. The security guards asked me if I had a message prepared. I unlocked the desk drawer and gave them the envelope, noted the date and time in a log-book and got them to sign it. They got me to sign a pad and gave me a receipt. I felt that we should have saluted each other after such an elaborate hand-over, but I just wished them a nice day and they left and closed the door behind them. I poured myself a cup of coffee from a vacuum-jug and continued reading Hugh Dunnett’s The Treachery Of Images, the second of the DI Quine novels. As the blurb said; “This is not a detective thriller!”
I did not expect a reply at all, and I certainly did not expect a reply to the very first message. The computer software and office procedures they were using in the Chinese Room building had been kept secret from me, but I know how these things work so it seemed reasonable to assume that there would be a protracted period of tinkering and messing about before there was even an unintelligible response from the Room. It looked like it might be a long project, with good money and a minimum of actual work, so I celebrated a little by phoning for a pizza and a couple of bottles of chianti from the campus commissary, which were delivered by a man in a grey uniform in a little electric van. I stayed in and watched teevee, it was oppressively hot and damp outside, anyway. The pizza was good, and the wine was passable, but the next morning I had a thumping hangover and a headache. I sat sweating behind my desk, wincing at the clatter and howl of the air-conditioner (which I knew to be a soft click and a low hum under normal conditions), poured a cup of coffee from the flask and readied myself for another busy day with DI Quine. There was a tap at the door. I groaned, and the two security guards came in. For an instant I panicked, I had not yet written a second message, but before I could say anything one of them gave me an envelope. It took me a moment to realise that this was a reply.
“A reply,” I said, idiotically, “and so soon.”
“Yes, sir. Sign here, sir,” said the security guard, offering me a pen. I signed, and got him to sign my log.
“How many hours between the envelope going in and one coming out?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. We have been instructed not to answer any questions about the other building, sir,” he said.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I was just curious,” I said. He nodded and they left.
I sat at the desk, the envelope on the blotter in front of me. I felt a strange aversion to opening it. What the hell, I thought, it will just be gibberish, most likely. I tore open the envelope, unfolded the slip of paper inside and read the words in Persian:
Who are you?
Why are you keeping me here?