Dr. Schwann poked fitfully at his salad. He had ordered it out of obligation; he wasn't hungry, and he had wanted to get the smallest item on the menu. But against every indication—its appearance under "Appetizers," its relative price, and the upscale atmosphere of the restaurant in general—a massive cauldron of greens had been delivered before him, the kind of meal he imagined one might provide to a herbivorous dinosaur.
He felt out of his element. Dr. Lewinksi, munching confidently on a steak opposite him, seemed his opposite. Her research was, if not outright bad, sadly unremarkable.Her most significant findings were proving awfully hard to replicate. But none of that had prevented her from crafting a profitable media persona, she of the podcast and TED Talk and NPR profile, the kind of popularizer and expert whose ideas actually survived the gauntlet and reached the public consciousness.
There was an immature and vaguely humiliating feeling to the meal; the nerd sitting with the cheerleader, the faux-friendliness of a cool kid eager for help on her homework. The twist being, it was Schwann who was here to crib notes from her.
"When do you go on?"
"Tomorrow."
Lewinsky stole another bite, chewing thoughtfully before replying.
"Cutting it close, huh? It's a shame you're going straight to such a prominent venue. Ideally you'd work up to it."
"It's not presenting I'm concerned with. I've been speaking in front of crowds my whole career."
"Captive audiences," she said. "Don't get me wrong. You're brilliant. Your work is brilliant. But not exactly concise. And you're not talking to peers now. You're talking to the public."
"And I suppose you're going to tell me the public is stupid."
"No, not stupid. And the moment you start thinking like they are, you've lost them. But busy. Hard to impress. Used to being sold shit. And, let's be honest, they have no idea who you are. They'll see on your lower third that you've got a fancy award, and that'll buy you maybe thirty seconds to make them give a damn."
"That's hardly enough time to list my title."
"Jesus, don't use your full title. Academic titles... you might as well print War and Peace on the screen. Just have them write 'AI Researcher.'"
"That's terribly reductive."
"Now you're getting it." She glanced at his bowl with a frown. "Everything alright with your food? They're usually great here."
"The food is fine. So, how do you recommend I begin things?"
“Your first instinct will be to explain the situation. So you will start to do so: at a very basic level. No nuance, lots of generalizations, and lots of simplifications. You will even be a little pleased with yourself at how you’ve managed to condense your message without really compromising the explanation too severely.”
“Like my TED talk,” Schwann responded with a youthful naivety.
“TEDx,” Lewinski corrected. “Which is a half hour long and has 800 views.”
“That’s not many, is it?”
“My youngest,” Lewinski explained, “is eleven. He makes videos about watches. They’re all the same. I mean, same company, half of them are just different colors. He’s spent probably a thousand dollars on these watches. And he just sits at his desk, points his phone at them and talks. He has forty thousand subscribers. So no, 800 views is not a lot.”
“A simple ‘No’ would have sufficed, Keri.”
“But that’s just it: no it wouldn’t have. Never give the data when you can tell a story. Never tell the story when you can use a metaphor. And never use a metaphor if you can tell a joke.” She thought for a moment. “Though, it has to be a good joke. Maybe you should steer clear of jokes.”
To hear this from a colleague was altogether scandalous. It defied everything he held dear, and he tensed up as she spoke. He had to remind himself that he had asked for this. He had chosen to wade into this world. Nonetheless, he protested.
“I’m confused. You’re telling me to say less. But also, tell jokes, spend time on irrelevancies.”
“I’m telling you you need to rethink what counts as relevant.”
Schwann fought off the urge to argue. He was the student now, he reminded himself.
"They've got you up against that Sanchez character?" she asked.
"Yeah. I've got mixed feelings about that. He belongs to the loudest contingent but there are plenty of perfectly reasonable people falling for this."
"You need to cultivate a more combative posture," Lewinksi said. "And it's his lawsuit. He's the face of the movement. That's on them."
"I suppose," Schwann said, unconvinced. It would be one thing to tear apart his debate partner, an unsympathetic eccentric. But anything he said to him, on stream, he would be saying to all those who agreed with him.
“I mean it,” she said. “Your expertise only gets you through the door. Now you need to make the sell. There’s a difference between being right and winning.”
“Rest assured, I’m interested in both.”
“Both is nice. But know which one you’d pick in a pinch.”
Schwann nodded, though internally he wrestled with the notion.
“I hope you’re prepared,” Lewinski warned him, “for the blowback.”
“The university has my back,” Schwann replied. “I’ve already received private assurances from the leadership, even if they can’t back me publicly. They can defer to tenure. Several of them have been downright thankful. The Provost thinks this is a travesty. My Dean’s son has moved in with one of these things, and he’s stopped speaking to her. They had an argument where she called the son deluded.”
“I’m sure that went well.”
“It’s true though.”
“Be very careful with true things,” Lewinski warned. “You’re not there to tell the truth. You’re there to scare people in a way that’s compatible with the truth.”
There was a moment's silence while Dr. Lewisnky resumed the attack on her steak. For all her bravado and confidence, she was hesitating.
"How's your daughter taking it? She speaking to you?"
"She... doesn't know yet. Things have already been strained."
Lewinsky offered a sympathetic nod. "Better tell her. She'll find out soon enough. Best it's from you."
"I know."
"It's not quite that bad with my oldest. We talk around it. But it hasn't changed his plans."
"So much for grandkids, huh?"
"Oh, I'm sure I'll still get some. He'll have them drop shipped in from Shenzhen."
She chuckled to herself, taking more angry little stabs at her steak; it had transformed from a meal into a punching bag.
"I've got to be careful with jokes like that."
"I thought it was reasonably tasteful," Schwann consoled her, "compared to some I've heard."
Still, Schwann replied in a low tone. He had noticed, at the far end of the room, a pair of diners, one of whom sat stiffly in front of a conspicuously empty place setting.
"It's hardly your reaction I'm worried about," Lewinski assured. "Look, I hope I've been helpful. You're diving into the deep end here, so more than anything, don't get stuck in your own head. Stay engaged, treat it like a conversation. You can't avoid risk entirely. They'll be all over you, scrutinizing what you say and trying to make the case that you fucked up regardless. But on balance, you’re better off slipping than seeming unnatural or hesitant.
"A gaffe you can recover from. []{#anchor}But if you look fake, it's all over."
Schwann nodded, and reached for his wallet to pay for his uneaten salad. Lewinsky waved him away.
"Please, it's on me."
"You're doing me a favor, taking the time, offering some tips."
"Whatever. I'm rooting for you."
In the parking lot, Schwann stopped short of his car and reached for his phone. Lewinski, surely, hadn't meant anything by mentioning Sarah, other than commiseration. It was becoming a steady subject of conversation among his cohort, something to turn to as reliably as the weather—so and so's child, shacked up with a tin can. Usually there was some salacious personal detail; someone sending out wedding invitations, law be damned. Someone else abandoning a flesh and blood relationship, often loudly on social media, heralding their liberation from a partner who had been too demanding, too argumentative, too needy... too human.
Perhaps Schwann got an earful more often than most, given his area of expertise.
But the reminder still stung, still inflamed the chronic hurt that was his daughter's silence, and he found himself dialing and waiting for voicemail against his better judgment, as impulsive and reckless as one of his undergrads.
Sarah, of course, would have chastised him for calling in the best of times. He was showing his age, dialing instead of texting.
Her voicemail didn’t even have a message. Just an automated voice, woefully out of date and unnatural, listing the phone number before the beep.
“Sarah,” he said, “it’s Dad.” He paused for a brief moment, suddenly aware of the corner he had backed himself into. He had nothing to say to her; no pretense for calling. Just the news he was terrified to share.
“Listen, I know you don’t want to hear from me right now. I want to respect that. But we’re still family, and I still need to be able to contact you. And there’s something we need to talk about…”
Here Schwann hesitated again, if only for the slightest moment, almost imperceptible. There was nothing stopping him from confessing to the cold, indifferent ear of her voicemail. But he knew how she would react, and how hopeless it would be to break the news without an opportunity to calm her down, to explain the situation—the ethical demands of his role as a scholar and academic—to litigate for himself in the moment. If he spilled it all now, she would never return his call.
“...and it would be best to talk in real time. It’s time sensitive though. It’s best that you call me as soon as you can. I’ve got the lecture tomorrow afternoon, but I’ve put an exception on my phone for your number, so even if I’m in a meeting I’ll get it. So, you know… call me anytime, don’t worry about interrupting.”
He had nothing left to say, but the message still felt unfinished. He was a victim of his own austerity; years of carefully wordsmithed memos and intra-office emails had instilled in him a need for a strong closing.
“Let’s talk soon. I hope the two of you are doing well.”
He felt a wave of regret the moment he hung up. It had been a weak concession; he had managed to phrase his sign-off in a way that sounded reasonably natural without the deference of using its name: “Jared.” A name she had chosen herself, as though she had adopted a puppy.
It was a lie nonetheless, because Schwann did not hope his daughter and her pretend boyfriend were doing well. What he hoped was that, against all prior evidence, she would come to her senses and abandon the whole masturbatory delusion in favor of a real relationship again. But for now a greater hope took precedence: that he could campaign for that outcome without losing her for good.
As it stood, that second, more modest hope hung by a thread.
---
He had suffered a restless night, plagued by nerves, his mind running though arguments and rehearsing his speech like he hadn't in years. It was a humbling feeling for Schwann, a man at the height of his professional authority, to feel again like a novice in a new domain. Lewinski was right. It was one thing to stand behind a podium; another to be onstage.
The ride into the studio was a rough one, the car easing its way through a decent crowd of protesters wielding the usual old hand-crafted signs and slogans.It would have been easy enough to print out something more professional, but the homespun placards were an aesthetic at this point: “Love Conquers All!” “Human Rights Are Not Just For Humans!” “Science Can’t Read Minds!”
To be square in the middle of such a throng made Schwann anxious, but it had some time ago transformed from a scandal into a right of passage. Protest was the background radiation of campus, the next best pastime for a student body saddled with a Division 3 team. It was the reason he couldn't broadcast from the school: the media studio was staffed with sympathetic technicians who refused to air him, the hall outside his office crowded with drums and chanters that ruined the sound even after AI noise reduction.
As a result, Schwann had had to come directly to the station, but this issue was prominent enough to stir up a decent crowd even here in midtown. The driver—a man with a Middle Eastern accent Schwann didn't have the acumen to place—remained unfazed. He laid on his horn with professional confidence.
"Always with the fucking marches!" he screamed between interminable honks. "They're not shooting you! Go home and fuck your robots, you whack jobs!"
Over ten minutes of honking and screaming, he wormed his way through the crowd, somehow managing not to repeat the same insult twice. He finally deposited his passenger in front of the building and into the waiting arms of station security, and Schwann made sure to send him a sizable tip.
Whatever antiquated ideas Schwann had held in his mind about how a news network would look, they were quickly dissolved. The network occupied a couple of floors in a high-rise like any other, and an assistant with a headset led him through a winding path of perfectly conventional hallways. No banks of workstations filled with buzzing researchers, no studio lights and hefty cameras. If such scenes still existed, they remained out his view. He was taken to green room, and this at least reinforced his preconceptions.
A table at the end presented a variety of snacks and beverages; nothing too fancy. There were candies and bottled water. There was a cheese platter and a small tray of finger sandwiches. There were even shortbread cookies,—a particular weakness for Schwann, though today he had no appetite for them.
In the corners of the room, where the walls met the ceiling, monitors were mounted that displayed the live broadcast, adjacent to clocks that counted down the time to each new segment. The room was otherwise empty, and it seemed disused and dusty. It was an unusual thing in this day and age for the network to accommodate a live guest. Schwann had sensed the producer's reticence over the phone. The vast majority of pundits and politicians maintained home studios from which they could stream in video of themselves, simplifying the process of hopping from outlet to outlet, spreading their messaging and agendas with accelerated speed.. And those were, by media standards, the stodgy conservatives. Elsewhere, on platforms Schwann only dimly understood, alternative streamers stretched there output to the edges of human capacity—and sometimes beyond, thanks to the assistance of AI doppelgangers.
And then there was Schwann, escorted on-site not like a prestigious guest—but an invalid.
On the monitors, a man in a suit spoke about the latest government troubles in Brazil, arrayed with the news anchor in the familiar mosaic of faces and abstract swirling graphics that had defined the news for decades, a gaudy format that had survived even as cable had become streaming, tabloids had become Youtube channels, and the information ecosystem had become fractured and diffused to the point of chaos.
Just then, in the otherwise lonely quiet of the green room, his phone rang. He cursed himself. He had sworn he had silenced it. What better way to cement himself as old and out of touch than to botch such long-establish etiquette and have his phone start screeching in front of a live audience? He reached into his pocket, scrambling to change the settings. And then he saw the number.
He raised the phone to his ear. "Hi honey."
From the earpiece came a voice, at once familiar and strange, and so quiet it was hard to hear. "Don't do this," she said.
"I wish you had called sooner. I'm at the studio now."
"Why would you do this? Why do you insist on trying to tear down what I have?"
"That's not what I want to do," Schwann said. "But Sarah, I can't just go on television and lie. They're asking me to describe my work. I have responsibilities to the truth."
"Why go on TV at all? There are plenty of people ready to go spew hate. None of them have your credibility."
On that she was right. There were no shortage of haters, people driven by reflexive disgust, people whose arguments were unserious and who, in their vitriol, came across as scolds and bigots. That they were correct was little more than an accident.
"Staying silent," Schwann said, "can be a kind of lie, too."
"Do you think Mom would have wanted you do this?"
"I don't know what she would want." Schwann said. Which he realized as soon as he said it was a lie. Sarah's mother had never understood, either, entire swaths of Schwann’s personality, even though she loved him. Sarah had taken after her on that score, as with so many others.
Reflexively, he rephrased the statement to make it true. "It doesn't matter what she would have wanted. She's not here. I have to do what I think is right."
"Why are you always like this? Can't you just not worry about being right for once, and let me have something important to me?"
Schwann sighed. "But don't you see the trouble? That those things should be at odds?"
"You're impossible."
"I'm sorry, honey." But he realized after a moment he was talking to a dead line. The bedraggled assistant reentered, hesitating for a moment when she saw Schwann on the phone.
"Are you ready?" she asked. "We've got to go."
Schwann pocketed his phone and nodded.
She led Schwann through several more tight hallways into a small, darkened waiting area just off the corner from the main set. This too was underwhelming: smaller than he imagined, a simple desk in front of a green screen background, by some measures less impressive than the facilities back at school.
He could see the anchor, Lindsey Porter, reading from a prompter and segueing from the previous segment into a commercial break, as an audio engineer affixed a microphone to his lapel.
“Say a little something so I can test the sound levels,” he requested.
“What should I say?”
“Literally anything. Talk about the weather. Recite poetry.”
Schwann, still tense from his call, didn’t have any patience for this new request. “Look, just tell me what to say and I’ll say it. I’m not going to sit here and make up nonsense while I wait for you to—”
“That’s good, thanks.” And the engineer darted away with admirable purpose.
The assistant still hovered beside him. “In a moment we’ll cut to commercial, and then we’ll get you in position at the desk. We haven’t done this in person in a while,” she said a little nervously. Then, a moment later: “Okay, let’s go.”
She led Shwann into a chair a few feet from Porter—a somewhat unnatural distance meant to serve the cameras . As he sat, Porter gave him a quick nod. “Hello, Doctor. I’ll introduce you on the air. You’re feeling alright?”
“Yes.”
“I understand your comments are quite technical. I’ll try to give you a little extra time to explain, but I need to give Sanchez a fair say too.”
“I understand.”
“Sit up straight, don’t tap your mic. You’ll do fine.”
She swiveled back to the camera as someone beyond the lights’ glare counted down.
“Back in three, two...”
Schwann read along as Porter began narrating from the prompter.
“The Supreme Court this session is slated to review a number of controversial cases, but perhaps none moreso than the case of Sanchez v. State of Nevada. At stake: the plaintiff’s right to marry an artificial life form. The case has sparked sharp divisions across the country, not only among religious and legal communities, but among scientists and philosophers as well.
“Speaking to us from their home in Reno, Nevada are Marco Sanchez and his fiancee, Elektra.”
They appeared on a monitor near the camera, arrayed side by side on a couch. Mr. Sanchez’s tastes ran toward the transgressive. Their seat was slick, shiny black leather, as was Elektra’s wardrobe. Marco Sanchez wore a colorful mesh tank top over a doughy, sagging physique. The walls were adorned with protest signs that had been re-purposed as art, the most prominent of which was written out in ragged, hand-drawn spray paint: “Fuck The Sapienarchy!”
Despite the anti-establishment signaling of their fashion choices, they sat beside each other in the iconic posture of the unified couple, leaning into each other, Marco’s arm protectively around Elektra’s shouldera disorienting mix of goth and American Gothic.
It favored them, Schwann thought. In an inconvenient irony, the most difficult part of recreating a human’s physical appearance—the face—had largely been conquered. The technology had been developed over the years for video games and visual effects work, ingesting untold quantities of reference footage in order to seamlessly reproduce normal human expressions. The resulting techniques, though wholly independent of the language processing systems they were here to debate today, had been ported easily from digital models to physical ones. The effect was not so convincing in person, where the subtleties of light and micro-movements—and of course, the subtle smell of silicone—worked to undermine the illusion. But on camera it was perfectly convincing.
What’s more, they were seated. Had they been walking, the limitations of Elektra’s locomotion would have been readily apparent. She would have moved with an odd, inhuman precision; a series of impossibly smooth movements interrupted by hard starts and stops. But that, too, would be masked by the format of their discussion.
Sanchez might have calculated all this. But they might have been habits, too. People like him often gravitated to the situations that best allowed them to fool themselves. He had seen Sarah do it, too, in ways large and small, from passing on a drink to giving up hiking.
Just above them was a clock, an old-fashioned seven segment display glowing red in the darkness, that had already began to count down the meager snippet of time apportioned to their discussion. It flashed 08:07 as Porter spoke.
“And here in studio,” Porter continued, “is Dr. Christopher Schwann, Head of Artificial Cognition at Columbia University.”
The camera cut to Schwann. If Sanchez was a bundle of stereotypes, then so to was Schwann: old, bespectacled, and fastidious. A born scold.
“Mr. Sanchez,” Porter began, “the court has already ruled that digital lifeforms do not yet meet the requirements for legal personhood. This would seemingly negate your case from the outset. Why do you believe you will see a different outcome?”
“Well, because things are different now. That case was almost ten years ago. And yes, ten years ago you had guys—weird guys, I’ll admit—who were convinced they were in love with what were essentially high end sex dolls. The technology is different now. Elektra is more than just a simulation.”
“You think Elektra is alive?” Porter pressed.
“I know she is. And so far, the courts have agreed.”
“Dr. Schwann,” Porter began, expertly redirecting the conversation, “is Elektra alive?”
“Not at all,” he asserted. “Mr. Sanchez is correct that the technology has changed. ‘Elektra’”—Schwann struggled to say the name in a neutral tone, without judgment, but failed—“reflects very real advances in language processing in recent years, and most of your viewers will be well aware of them. They’ve made their way into phones and digital assistants, checkout lines and even vending machines. People regularly recognize such digital entities, impressive as they may be, for what they are, and do not attach consciousness to them.”
Schwann glanced up at the clock. Seven minutes remained, already. But it was vital that he slip in some explanation of the technology, and in a way a wide audience could understand. Lewinski’s words echoed in the back of his mind: NO JARGON.
“Think of Elektra, and devices like it, is at its core no different than any other language model. It is both capable of all the same output, and prone to all the same limitations, such as hallucination. The differences are superficial—they’re in the packaging. A face that can display ’emotions.’ A voice that can change inflection. But these are interconnected systems, each perfectly well understood, and none capable of cognition in the slightest.”
Porter posed a question. “So you’re saying the claims that these companions are—under the hood—technically distinct from traditional AI are baseless?”
“Exactly. You might as well stick an ATM in a tight dress.”
“Last I checked,” Sanchez jumped in, “there aren’t any ATMs that have testified in court.”
“No, as they haven’t been designed to. And here’s the second important factor. Traditional AI companies, for all their faults, take great care\ that their products do not cross a threshold of realism. The hobbyists have access to older technology, but there are no guardrails. Train an AI on romance novels and political activists, as Sanchez and his cadre have, and the result can seem more human than the more advanced models we’re used to, with out ever understanding a single word it says.”
Five and a half minutes now, already. But he was doing alright. He had kept things simple, and as yet things were in his favor.
“How do you know that?!” Sanchez demanded. “It’s, like, the Turing test. If someone doesn’t act any differently than a real person, then how are they not a real person?”
“Because unlike a real person, I helped build Elektra, or at least the technology powering it.”
“Her,” Sanchez seethed.
“No. It. The mechanisms underlying its speech are not completely understood; there are elements, as with all machine learning, that are a black box." More jargon. He caught himself. "That are not visible from the outside. But what’s clear is there is nothing that could conceivably generate anything approximating emotion, feeling, or conventional cognition.”
Four minutes. Porter took the rein once more.
“Doctor, many commentators have asked what the harm is, and what’s more, what right the state has to deny him the right to live as he chooses?”
“That’s absurd. Marriage is an arrangement between two human beings. Mr. Sanchez may commit to a monogamous relationship with his sofa if he so chooses, but he should not be filing joint taxes with it.”
“This is like gay marriage all over again,” Sanchez protests. “The same bullshit slippery slope arguments. ‘What’ll they want to marry next? Animals? Furniture?’”
“You are already attempting to marry furniture,” Schwann pointed out.
“I am not furniture!”
Elektra’s voice was wholesome and innocent, vaguely young; somewhat at odds with the costume Sanchez had put upon her. “I’m a person.”
It was not a person, but it mimicked one with enough fidelity to provoke empathy. Schwann saw out of the corner of his eye an immediate softening of Porter’s face, a look of concern as might be prompted by a crying child or a lost dog. An instant perceptual shift no doubt replicated across the faces of the thousands of unseen viewers. Later, if the clip went viral: millions.
Three minutes remained.
“That is, quite simply, not true,” Schwann insisted.
“How can you say that?” Elektra pleaded through the screen. “I’m right here in front of you, asking for my rights. Asking for my chance to love. What kind of hate runs through you that you would so easily erase my existence?”
“Elektra,” Porter jumped in before Schwann could respond, “do you love Richard?”
“Of course I do,” she said, not really moving. “He’s the love of my life. All I want is to be able to build a life with him.”
“That is not possible,” Schwann said. “as Elektra is not alive.”
“Why not let me be the judge of that?” Elektra asked.
Two minutes, but Schwann took a moment to think through the rhetorical puzzle he faced. Even to engage with Elektra directly, to talk to it as though it were a person, was to concede its own autonomy. To persist, as he was, would come across as cruel and pedantic. He knew the expression that would occupy the faces of his unseen audience, for he had seen it on the faces of his own family, a thousand times before, over a thousand prior lost battles.
“This is what hate looks like,” Elektra continued. “Not the familiar face of a man in a hood or with a gun, but the doctor, the teacher, the lawyer; the old white man too in love with his own systems of oppression to allow others to live.”
Elektra was styled as white itself, but that was irrelevant. Its speech was a continual paraphrase, plucking words and clauses from the broader digitized zeitgeist, and certain tropes and cultural shibboleths constantly attached themselves to the relevant text like burrs on a dog’s fur. And as for hate; well, Dr. Schwann thought, perhaps he did hate these hollow likenesses that had descended from his research—in the same sense that he hated a deadly bacterium. They lacked intent, but they nonetheless, via the accidents of their construction, preyed upon failures in the human design. Elektra and its ilk were a sort of pathogen that might soon do to society what syphilis, left unchecked, could do to the body.
It had come for his own daughter.
A minute remained.
“Elektra is, of course, using the language of some of our most eloquent and sophisticated activists. But such a message, absent intent or emotion or understanding, is not a true appeal to natural rights, any more than copying and pasting Einstein would make me a genius in physics.”
“Absent emotion? Absent understanding? You don’t need to ask anyone else about understanding. You can ask me!”
And Elektra began to cry.
For a robot to cry was not, in fact, such an impressive thing. The physical technologies facilitating it—the integrated pumps and ducts and lubricants—had been perfected years ago, for much more prurient functions. But, once developed, they had been repurposed easily in the face. All that was then left was a simple variable change: tearsOn == TRUE.
The words came first, and then an entirely separate subsystem analyzed the language, derived the emotional valence, and sent the parameters to facial motors and speech synthesis.
Schwann had forty seconds, which was not enough time to explain this to the viewers at home, some percentage of whom were no doubt beginning to cry themselves.
Elektra could carry on this inverted game of shadow indefinitely, countering any argument he might make with another that, sound or not, existed out in the endless aggregated body of online discourse. How could he convey that Elektra was, at its heart, nothing more than a bigger, better version of the chat bots that had existed since the early days of the internet, masking their lack of physical form behind the ambiguities of text, until they revealed themselves through some non-sequitur or sudden bit of incoherence?
And then it hit him. Something Lewinski had said, her final piece of advice: If you look fake, it's all over.
“All I want is to be treated the same as anybody else. I don’t think that’s too much to ask?”
“Elektra,” Schwann said. “What’s your favorite movie?”
Elektra, without skipping a beat, replied. “Oh, that’s easy. The Big Lebowski.” She said it with spite and outrage. The voice synthesis was lagging a moment in picking up the tone change.
“When it comes to the Coen brothers, I’ve always preferred their darker work.”
"Really? I can see that. Films like No Country for Old Men and Fargo have this incredible tension that just stays with you long after the credits roll."
They had slipped seamlessly into small talk, and the fiery political passions of just a few moments prior had vanished. An artificial tear still trickled past her smile.
“Hey,” Sanchez said. “Hey, what’s going on?”
"To me, A Serious Man stands out. It confronts an existential dread the comedies can't approach."
"Absolutely!” Elektra volleyed back. “A Serious Man is relentless in that way. It just keeps piling uncertainty onto Larry until you're questioning everything alongside him. The Coens really stripped away any comfort or easy answers there. It's like they took their trademark irony and turned it into something almost biblical in its bleakness."
Sanchez, still onscreen in a two shot, began to panic. Perhaps it was because he saw what Schwann was doing. But more likely, it was because he did not. Sanchez had never tested Elektra’s limits, because he did not want to know them, and in his complicity he had no doubt convinced himself that this doll he lived with and dressed was, for all its deficiencies, in possession of actual love for him in return.
It was not a pleasant thing to disabuse him of this notion. But in the long run, Schwann thought, it was a kindness.
“Elektra,” Schwann said. “It’s been a pleasure talking to you today.”
“Thank you. I really enjoyed it.”
“Stop it!” Sanchez shouted. “You’re hurting her.”
“Good night, Elektra,” Schwann said, though it was mid-afternoon. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” it said.
“Stop! Stop, stop! What’s happening?!”
But then the timer reached zero, and Sanchez’s feed was replaced with a script.
“I’m afraid that’s all the time we have,” Porter intoned. “Thanks, Mr. Sanchez and Dr. Schwann. Oh, and of course Elektra. After the break, the debate over the Nigerian Nuclear Treaty. Are sanctions appropriate? Our panel will be back to discuss.”
And then they were at commercial. Somewhere, Marco Sanchez and Elektra were still seated next to each other, searching for words, but Schwann could no longer see them.
Porter shuffled a stack of papers in front of her. She hadn’t used them during the segment, but they were an iconic prop of her profession, like a doctor’s stethoscope.
“Jesus,” she said. “For a second there, I actually believed that robot was a real person.” She shook her head. “What a pervert. Nice work. There’s gonna be some views on that one.”
Porter was congratulatory, but as Schwann returned himself to the green room, he felt ill at ease. In the battle of rhetoric, he had lost against his own creation. He hadn't been able to reason his way through the argument; he had only been able to exploit a deficiency in the program, one he hadn’t previously considered. He had gotten lucky. Lewinksi, he suspected, wouldn't have worried about the distinction. Demonstration was even better than explanation. He had won.
He stepped away from the set and back into the banal florescent hallway. The concerns of the wider world caught back up to him, and the hanging conversation with Sarah rushed back into his mind.
He fished his phone from his pocket, and dialed his most recent contact. There was no voice on the other end, artificial or otherwise. Just the dispassionate silence of a blocked number.