Tranziltor Park: limbs (4/7)

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     He was enthralled by the quiet madness of computers, the noiseless functioning of metallic life, aesthetic and soulless in a struggle for an inevitably higher existence.  A whole room full of them; the mass produced prodigy children of man and his mind of calm, cool, collected horror.
     That he turned out to be a teacher, specifically a computer teacher, was no surprise at all.  What was surprising was that he taught high school, and not university, which all of us had first surmised he would do.  He had that particular brilliance and insight that led to innovation, that cried out for him to be known as Professor Jenkins, but he had had a break down at twenty-one, I remember the day well, in his big house, for at that time he had published his first, and very successful, book on the advancements of artificial intelligence.
     But it was here, in his classroom, that one could study and appreciate his unusual sort of genius.  His students had but two opinions of him:  either the weirdo had an un-surpassing intellect, or he was a lunatic.  For the computers were not lined up in rows as was the traditional classroom, but in a giant spiral, with his mainframe smack in the middle of the room, and all the desks winding outwards counterclockwise from that central point.  If your desk happened to be nearer to the center, you would have to walk around and around, sometimes thrice, in order to reach your destination.  All of the windows had been covered by black Bristol board, and the lights dimmed a yellowish-green by clear, plastic filters.  
     And he did not use a chalkboard.  He did not hand out any textbooks.  All of his students learned from their terminal exclusively -- they were not allowed to take anything home.  Or study for that matter.  And he never spoke with his voice.  Each terminal had a distinct personality, by his design of course, through which he communicated their daily lessons.  To give you a clear example of the oddity of this situation, one student came to class and was taught by Sir Wilfred Laurier, another by Bach, complete with historical mannerisms and colloquialisms.  
     And it worked! -- each student advanced well; Jenkins was known for his teaching prowess, and thus he had afforded himself the rights to conduct his classroom in any way that he saw fit.
     Oh, every once and a while a parent would question his methods, but the children would soon dissuade them from further queries, for Jenkins held a severe power over his pupils.  Indeed, his fame as a well-loved instructor had reached many circles of higher learning.  Because of his books he had been offered countless high-income positions at monumental computer firms, but in each case he refused to part from room 117 at Amsford High.
     It was on this day, the first Thursday of June, that he had asked me to stop by the school and accompany him on his walk home.  Five or six times of the year we practiced this conversational ritual, and I always looked forward to it the way one looks forward to seeing the opening scene of a bizarre circus act.  The way he talked in real life by no means concerted with the way he wrote.  His writing was smashingly concise and to the point, perfected mathematically, and not without a touch of human sentiment -- which was a feat in itself, considering the topic that his books covered.  But his manner of speech...ah!  Now there was a rare and entertaining jewel!  
     The school day had ended, the classroom void of habitation save Jenkins himself.  I had just walked in at the exact moment when each terminal blinked out in rapid succession, their shining faces dying in sequential spiral, until finally the massive mainframe in front of Jenkins himself beeped and shut down.
     His head shot up at my arrival, he smiled, and his eyes blinked quickly beneath his thick, spotless bifocals.  He picked up a briefcase from his desk, turned out the yellow-green lights, and walked briskly over to shake my hand.  I firmly obliged, and noted again how he never ever lost the half smile that curved his lips...it always appeared as though he was caught between a humorous thought and an annoying ache, for the smile could just the same have been a grimace.  He said not a word, and as was the practice, we exited the school and began the trek to his house on Clairmont Ave.
     “That-that-that’s just what I mean, just what I mean,” he began, and I braced myself excitedly for what I knew would be a fun time.  How I enjoyed him!
     “Yes, yes!” he continued, raising a finger in the air.
     “What do you mean?” I prodded, for it was like him to introduce a subject by pretending the both of you had already been talking about it for hours.
     “I mean what I mean!” his face lit up, and he looked at me, pausing in his steps.  Seeing that I had not grasped his elusive joke, he laughed anyway, a sharp, snorting sound.
     “Be more specific,” I urged, for I wanted to know what he was referring to.
     “I don’t teach!  I don’t teach!” He cackled.
     “Well, what were you doing today?”
     “I played crosswords!  I read the paper!”
     “In the classroom, I mean.”
     “Exactly!  Then I slept for forty-five minutes...!”
     “In the classroom?”
     “Exactly!  Exactly!  E-e-e-exactly!”
     “All day today you did not teach....” I was warming to what he wanted to get at, for his cheeks flushed, the way they always flushed when you followed the trail to the place he had laid out for you.  
     “Three months I haven’t taught one lesson!”
     That puzzled me, but I left it for the moment while we crossed Fairbanks -- the traffic was always hell here.  Many pedestrians had been injured or killed by impatient drivers on this corner, especially at rush hour, which so happened to be at that precise time.  We crossed in silence, and boy, was he festering on the inside!  Squirming and itching to get to his main point, whatever it was.
     “Not one lesson in three months,” I reiterated his last clue once we had crossed.
     “Not one!  Stravinsky is teaching now!  Armstrong too!  And Bell, and the Wright’s, and...and all of them!”  He was clutching his briefcase to his chest as a child does a favored doll, and he bit his lower lip in anticipation of my reaction.
     “You mean...the computers?  The AI?”
     “AI!  AI!  AI!”  And this he yelled so exuberantly that he startled not a few passerby’s.  I placed a calming hand on his shoulder.
     “The computers teach the class?  How is that possible?”
     He flew off then, explaining all the intricacies and complexities of his creations, rhyming off technical words that I had to keep interrupting him to define.  All said and done, it seemed that he had succeeded in modeling new AI software that could progressively teach a student.  Each terminal had its own stand-alone program, (as noted previously, like George Washington and Pierre Trudeau), but all networked into the mainframe so he could keep an eye on the proceedings.
     “The leader of them all is Stravinsky!  He is the master AI!  The lord of intelligence!”
     “Why Stravinsky?” I asked.
     “Greatness!  Greatness!”
     And I took that to mean that he considered Stravinsky’s work to be genius, for he began waving his left arm like a conductor, humming some fanciful melody extremely off-key.
     “More!” he blurted finally.
     “Yes?”
     “More!”
     “What more could there possibly be?” I took his intended bait.
     We approached Tranziltor Park, but we skirted its great iron-wrought gate.  Jenkins hated the place; he said the squirrels were devils and the unkempt grass the lair of snakes.  We never went there together, although I took to a walk inside every once in a while on my own.  
     “More!  They are creating their own AI!”
     It took me a moment to wrap my brain around that sentence.  “What?”
     “Stravinsky added a thirty-second program...called Arkdi-eight, as backup to teach in case we exceed thirty-one students for summer school!”
     “Arkdi-eight...what-”
     “I don’t know!  No one knows!”  But by his face I could tell this was thrilling news.
     “And it functions?”
     “Just as well as Stravinsky himself!” he held his breath, then added, “Maybe better!”
     “And so...” I trailed, for there was something else exciting he wanted to say.
     “That’s just what I mean!” he shouted wildly, harkening back to the first thing he had said to me upon our meeting.  “I’m obsolete!  Obsolete!”  He laughed and danced on the pavement.  Again I put a calming hand on his shoulder and guided him to Clairmont Ave.
     “You’ve made yourself obsolete...” I repeated.
     “They upgrade themselves!  They get faster!  They get more effective at teaching each specific student!  They tailor themselves to the learning patterns of the kids!  Ha!  My next book will shake the world!”
     We reached his home and, inviting me in, I joined him for a cup of coffee and croissant.  We chatted about the AI for a lengthy time until, realizing the hour, I stooped to tie my shoe and head on home.  He told me to say “hi” to the family, but it was an automatic gesture, and just as quickly he asked me not to tell anyone about his breakthrough.  I promised on his grave that I wouldn’t.  But that’s just it.  For it’s on his grave that I am telling this story.

d

     The following week I received a message from my secretary that Matthew Jenkins had called and wished me to his home as soon as I could manage.  I had been away from the office all day with the boss’s son, introducing him to his new, undeserved position as Executive Director, a seat I had been laboring tirelessly to obtain for over three years.  Needless to say, my mood was not the lightest when I landed at his door on Clairmont Ave.  I rung the doorbell.  Again.  And then again, frustrated and ready to leave.
     A bell sounded, faintly and from within, and the door swiveled open before me.  I entered, placed my hat and coat on the banister and, turning to his library, caught my breath.  The library, covered in dust as was usual, was laden with wires and diodes and optic fiber.  A large mass of wires had been pushed into the middle of the floor, and what lay beneath was what had caught my breath.  A hand.  I rushed over at once, pushed the wires from his still-breathing torso, and looked down into his little eyes.  His glasses had fallen off, so I placed them back on his face and said his name.
     “Leslie!” he shouted, once my voice had penetrated his ears.
     “Yes, yes.  What happened?”
     He sat up groggily, I noticed gold filings covering his black sweater, and aided him to a leather sofa, repeating my question.
“Nothing, in absolute!” he answered.
     “Why were you unconscious on the floor with that mess all over you?”
     “Sleeping, sleeping,” he mumbled, rubbing at his eyes,
     “You wanted me to come?”
     “Come, yes!  I m-m-m-must show you...th-this!” He pulled out a chip from his pants pocket.  
     “What is it?”
     “Arkdi-twelve.”
     “Wh-”
     “Arkdi-twelve!  Fifth version of AI’s AI!  Look how small it is!”
     I marveled, truly, I did.  I as much told Jenkins that this was quite extraordinary.  The chip was golden and glittered in his sweating palm.
     “Not all!  Not all!” He beamed.
     “Okay...what else?”
     He reached into his other pocket and showed me something on the edge of his fingertip.  A small, golden dot, with tiny, almost imperceptible tracings over it.
     “Arkdi-twenty-nine!” He whispered giddily.
     My jaw dropped.  “Twenty-nine!?”
     “Twenty-nine!” he affirmed.  He leapt from the sofa and plunged his hand into a satchel beside his desk.  Within his hand sparkled hundreds of golden dots.  “Thousands of them!  Look how fast they’ve replicated!”
     “How does software create hardware?” I asked.  It was a question that I should have thought about minutes ago, such an obvious question, and I kicked myself for the stupidity.
     “Recycling themselves!  Each terminal has the capacity to become...a million of these!  They reuse their own materials!”
     “All from the computer lab at Amsford High?”
     “Yes!  Canceled class!”
     At that I rushed him out of his house and took him to one of those old, Irish pubs.  We drank a mite of Guinness and talked ecstatically about the capabilities of such technology; about the millions that he could make, and about how the company I worked for would pay astronomical amounts for such a breakthrough.  Our meeting ended late into the night and, once escorting him safely back to Clairmont Ave, I sped home and fell into my own bed.  I had no idea it would be the second-last time I ever saw him alive.

d
     
     The funeral was brief.  He had no known relatives, and only his close friends attended, which were few.  We had the usual sordid lunch of quarter sandwiches and black coffee, and milled about together in the church basement.  Talk proved idle, we were all stunned; he had been a young man still, only in his late thirties.  They said it was some sort of complication with the lungs...seems as though he had inhaled something none too healthy, but they were as yet determining what the substance was.  Suicide -- the word was whispered under the breath, but I refused to believe it.  
     Gregory handed me a package addressed to myself when I arrived home.  I as much suspected it to be there, I think.  He said it had been left between the doors and that the kids had found it when they got home from school.  I pretended it were nothing, although all through dinner I could not direct my mind away from the contents.  A letter?  Some sort of documentation?  I knew it was from Jenkins, I knew it.  
     I waited until Gregory had fallen asleep, his breathing slow and his eyes moving rapidly beneath the lids.  Then I secreted down to the den with the package and tore it open.  Within was a DVD.  I searched for a note, but not finding any, pushed the disc into the player and turned the volume on low.  Jenkins scrawny face blinked onto the screen, and he backed away from the camera which he had just succeeded in steadying.
     “Got to see this, Leslie, got to see this!” he squealed.  He was, unmistakably, in his library, for the sofa and desk I recognized instantly, and the bookshelves too, covered in dust.
     “Remember this?” he said, and moving close to the camera again, I beheld a tiny golden dot on his finger.
     “Arkdi-twenty-nine,” I whispered.
     “Arkdi-twenty-nine!” he confirmed.  “Well, there’s more!”  And he scuttled over to the bookshelves and placed his hand palm-down on a ledge.  Wiping carefully across the wooden surface, he returned to the camera and held up a dirty, gray-filmed hand.
     “The dust!” he exclaimed.  His hand took up the whole screen, it shook nervously, and remained there for minutes.
     “What about the dust?” I wondered aloud, impatient.
     He laughed, as though he had anticipated the delayed response.  “Look around you, Leslie, where you sit right now watching me in video-land!  Floating right beside your head, and throughout the entire room, are the self-same particles as smeared on my hand!”
     “Okay,” I acceded slowly.
     He removed his hand from the camera lens and peered at me with his beady eyes, enlarged as they were behind his bifocals.
     “Ready?” he asked.
     “Yes!  Yes!”
     “Arkdi-four hundred.”
     “What?”
     “The dust!  Each one is an Arkdi!  Version four hundred, to be exact!”
     “All of them are...computers?”
     “Yes!  All over the school, all over my house...all over the city by now!  Stravinsky made them before he made any other versions!  In essence, this dust is Arkdi-one.  But, so far advanced that I’ve dubbed it Arkdi-four hundred.”
     “Why would the AI make this version before the other ones?”
     Jenkins nodded in approval.  “He foresaw my study of his advancements.  He tricked me, Leslie, he tricked me!”
     Suddenly it hit.  
     “Get out of there!  Don’t inhale--” I whispered violently at the screen.
     But just then sparks erupted from the DVD player, the power flashed on and off, and on the morrow I took a leave of work to dust the entire house.


copyright (c) JMD, 2006