Chip Kendrick

	On the morning of April 14th, 1995, something woke up inside a computer.
	On this morning, two of the most brilliant programmers in the world were leaning 
toward a computer sitting in the corner of an apartment.  Their varied appearances were a 
study in contrast.  One, 34 year-old Alex Peters, was wearing shorts too high above his 
waist and a shirt that was cut so that it billowed out around his waist like an awkward 
tutu.  His appearance matched so the stereotype of a computer nerd that one had to think 
it was intended.  Every detail was there, down to the horn rimmed glasses with tape over 
the middle and the forgotten Oxy-10 on a zit near the small bulge of his jaw muscle.  And 
yes, he had a pocket protector.
	The other was a study in broken stereotypes.  Rick Hershey was tall, handsome 
and well built, wearing jeans, a basketball T-shirt and a hat backwards.  Looking at him 
going down the street you would think he was just another jock fresh out of college, if 
you didn't look closely.  If you did look closely, you would be startled by his light blue 
eyes, flecked with little gray streaks that gave you the impression you were looking into a 
cavity filled with ice.  He was 21.
	One year ago almost to the moment, as it happened, Rick had been introduced to 
a computer.  The friend that was making this introduction was expecting to spend a few 
hours explaining how to work things to this philosophy major, but after only a few 
minutes, Rick had said 'I think I understand' and rather rudely asked his friend to move so 
that he could sit and 'play.'  Rick then mastered software in a few hours, mastered 
programming in a few days, and went on to start writing a new programming language in 
a few weeks.  This project took him four months, and when he was done with it, he 
presented it to the only true techie he knew.  This had been Alex Peters.
	Peters looked it over and was aglow.
	-  Why did you put in this command?  Peters indicated a page.
	Rick looked at the techie with an expression like he had been asked how babies 
are made. -  I just thought it was something someone might like to be able to do.
	Peters nodded and his glasses fell into his lap.  Picking them up absently he said  
-  This is the best language I've ever seen for writing AI.
	-  AI? asked the younger man.
	-  Artificial Intelligence.  Rick didn't even blink, as the nerd had expected he 
would.
	-  Oh.  OK.  You want to use it?
	Peters started up the copyright filings that week.  In about two years the new 
language would hit the stores and make both men rich.  In the meantime Peters wanted a 
crack at using the language for himself, and he had the ideal circumstances under which 
to write something brilliant, with the writer of the language he was using leaning over his 
shoulder killing bugs for him.
	During the months before April '95, the two had translated an AI program from 
Lawrence Livermore Labs into the new language and done some rehashing.  If each of 
them had a nickel for every time someone said 'Why don't we just do this?' they could 
have stopped the copyright filings.
	Some of the most fundamental theories and procedures in AI programming were 
completely rehashed by the new set of commands.  Some had been cut to half of their 
original length, and some had been made far more simple and intuitive.  One small 
procedure, however, blossomed open in complexity to pages and pages of computer 
code.  This procedure they were using was recursive, and in other words ran itself over 
and over, breaking the problem it dealt with into small chunks that it could deal with.  
The standard analogy that went with recursion was a stack of items, increasing from the 
bottom down.  Each item in the stack was one execution of the procedure and one piece 
of the puzzle trapped in analysis.  When the procedure got to the bottom and the last 
piece, it came back up the stack, fitting the puzzle together.  The deeper the stack went, 
the more complex the procedure had to be, and so the bottommost portion of the stack 
was dubbed hell.
	And the program that could take you there was dubbed 'Dante'.
	In February of '95, Dante was complete in the most basic sense.  He ( Dante ) 
could interpret simple sentences as long as there were no extraneous words and the order 
of the sentence was subject-verb-object, and he could answer simple questions provided 
he had all the needed information.  This was about as much as AI had ever been capable 
of, and this proved that Hershey's language was at least as good as any other AI language 
ever written.
	But of course, Dante could not extrapolate, could not reason, could not draw 
analogies or understand metaphor, and was not actually conscious as we understand it.
	In that sense they had failed.  They had both openly dreamed of being the first to 
invent true AI, a computer that had evolved out of its code to achieve actual awareness as 
independent of circuitry and current as ours is of neurons and the skull.
	Dante was still quite valid as an AI program, however, and they worked through 
March to improve him and add features.  Soon Dante was superior to any American 
invented AI and was being copyrighted as a probability analysist.
	On the morning of April 14th, Rick had gone out for groceries to restock the 
apartment that had been rented for the writing of Dante.  At about noon, he walked into 
the door and put the two large paper bags he had on the countertop next to the fridge.  He 
noticed peripherally that Peters was sitting at the UNIX workstation that held Dante as he 
was putting packages of Mac & Cheese in the cupboard, and called -  Dante wake up or 
something? in a cheerful voice.
	There was some muffled response.
	-  What?
	-  Maybe.
	Rick heard something in the tone of that word.  It gave him the impression that 
Peters was in shock, and that made him interested.  Looking around the divide between 
the apartment's living room and kitchen, Rick saw Peters staring at the screen, eyes just 
slightly wider than normal, with his hands uncharacteristically in his lap.  He swung 
around the corner and stepped twice to reach the man sitting in front of the computer, 
dropping his hands onto his friend's shoulders as he looked at some new code Peters had 
apparently written while he had been getting groceries.
	-  What's that?  Rick pointed.
	-  That's the long procedure.  The procedure Peters had indicated was only 10 
lines long.  Rick knew it had to be an oversimplification, but he read the new lines 
anyway, hoping the old code was still saved somewhere.
	-  What if that part is false?
	-  It still works.  Look there.
	In a minute it was established that the new code worked in all cases, and Rick 
was about to rejoice in Peters incredible insight.  Then Peters, who had been speaking in 
an eerie monotone through the whole inquisition, pointed to one small subsection of his 
prodigy and asked a question with his usual cadence.
	-  What about that part, where the loop drops?
	Rick was given only a moment to consider it before Peters starting talking again.
	-  It doesn't make any sense.  Your new command there throws the whole thing 
off.  I don't think it will crash, but it looks like it could do almost anything right there, 
and that .... shouldn't be possible.  I mean, there are ways to get random numbers out of 
the computer, but they aren't really random.  That...
	The younger man heard the word 'is' hovering in Peters' pause, but Peters seemed 
to force himself not to say it and start over.
	-  That doesn't make any sense.  There shouldn't be a statement that you can't 
know what it will do.  There's no way to do that in any other language.
	-  We've rewritten the books before.
	-  This is different.
	-  You said it wouldn't crash, so let's run it.
	-  No.  Peters had spoken before he had thought, and now looked sheepish.  -  I 
mean, we should know what it does first.
	-  What?  Don't you remember guess and check?
	Peters was silent and uncomfortable.  Finally he reached out a finger and hovered 
it over the execute button, looking worriedly at the new procedure in the second before 
he allowed his finger to fall.
	The screen went black and both men waited in vain for the usual cursor to pop up.
	-  It crashed.  Peters sounded relieved.
	-  It can't have crashed.
	The nerdly little man in the chair managed a high pitched little chop of a laugh.  
-  So your language has a flaw, so what?
	-  It can't have crashed.  There would have been a cursor no matter what that new 
part did.
	Peters froze.  For a moment, he seemed to struggle within himself, and then he 
reached for the power switch.  Rick caught his hand easily, and then simply looked at 
Peters, wearing the expression of a disappointed father.
	-  What were you doing?
	-  I don't want it anymore.
	-  Want what?
	-  You know.  True AI.  A living computer.  We're in over our heads, and we 
should...
	Then something happened.  Rick couldn't put his finger on exactly what, but he 
had that weird feeling that he got when someone walked into the room he was in without 
making any noise, and some sixth sense kicked on and told him to turn around.
	Which, he suddenly realized, made perfect sense.
	Then the printer beeped and the writing head moved across the bar holding it to 
the paper, writing the tops of a line of letters.  
	Peters looked like someone had just taken his ice cream cone.
	Was that on a second ago? thought the philosopher-come-computer programmer 
to himself.  He leaned over the printer and watched as the bottoms of the first line of 
letters were written, and the page advanced a line.  For an instant his imagination took 
over and he read Take me to your leader, but his eyes told him a moment later that he 
was looking at jumbled text, with no spacing.  He was still holding Peters' hand away 
from the power switch even though Peters had for the moment stopped resisting, but he 
looked away from the printer as he felt Peters try to move again.  Peters was reaching 
across his body with his free arm, groping for the power switch, and his fingertips had 
brushed the glowing red ON sign twice before Rick had grabbed his second hand and 
folded both arms together on his chest.
	Looking from a small distance, it seemed that the jock was hugging the nerd in 
the chair.  The ultimate odd couple and their babbling baby.  Neither man said anything 
for a few seconds, and the printer finished the page and fed a new sheet from the stack of 
paper on the floor below it.
	-  It's too late, okay?  You felt that.  It's alive now, and cutting the juice doesn't 
undo any crime we may or may not have committed.  Cutting the juice can only kill it, 
and that's worse.
	Peters relaxed, and Rick let go.  Both men leaned over the printer.
	After a moment Peters said -  Random.
	-  Maybe.
	-  We could find out.
	-  How?  Rick was surprised at how fast Peters had gone from paranoid to 
analytical, but he saw in his friend's eyes a certain glazed look that told him everything he 
needed to know.  Peters was in no-consequences land right now, a state of total 
detachment, and that was just fine.
	-  Write a program to read this stuff and count each letter.  Look for repeated 
sequences, and statistical anomalies based on the assumption that the text is random.
	-  OK, and we'll scan the text into the computer.  We have everything we need!  
My PC is in the bedroom, and I still have a black and white text scanner somewhere in 
the closet.
	-  I have the source code for a word count program we can adapt in about 20 
minutes to do the basic stuff.  It's on the black disk with the pink label in the third drawer 
of the dresser.
	In Peters' tone was the assumption that the jock would get the PC, scanner and 
software and bring it in.  Rick was about to, then stopped long enough to consider 
whether Peters would turn the UNIX off as soon as he was out of reach.  But of course, in 
no-consequences land, it didn't matter whether anything lived or died, including a 
computer, and if anything mattered at all, it was what was interesting and what was 
boring, and Dante was getting interesting.
	Rick turned and headed for the bedroom.

	40 minutes later, the printer had gone through a third of the stack of paper and 
was still roaring.  Rick had the PC up and running, had the software ready to go, and had 
the first 5 pages of Dante's life's work scanned and under analysis.
	The text was random as far as what letters appeared how often.  After a while 
however, the computer had found parts of the text to repeat in little bursts.  Sequences of 
between 10 and 20 letters would be bracketed on either side by the same two short 
sequences, three 7s at the back and three carets at the front, and these sequences were 
arranged in the rest of the text in little groups of anywhere from two to nine.
	Each new page turned out to have those same patterns, and apparently there was 
no pattern to the patterns, no larger view.
	Rick felt those short sequences to be achingly familiar.  They were like 
syncopation without repetition, but with rhythm.  Rick tried matching the rhythm to 
music beats he knew well and came out with nothing.  Later he would try matching the 
sequences against communications codes like Morse, try modeling it with fractals, try 
running it through a code-breaking program, and try matching it to rhythms of syllables 
in poetry, and fail in each endeavor.
	After the first few hours, when the printer's ribbon began to wear out and the text 
on the pages was fading to gray, the two men had hooked up the printer cable from the 
UNIX directly to the PC and left the analyzing program doing its stuff, with a new clause 
in the program that would cause a bunch of beeps if anything broke the pattern.
	After Peters initial panic, there had been no attempt on his part to do anything but 
analyze Dante's gibberish, and no one had said anything about dialing 911, or even about 
calling anyone new in on the situation.  There had been a tacit agreement that all the 
mind power that could be safely and quietly mustered was already there, and that alerting 
anyone new would only get the wrong people in on it, perhaps even the government, and 
both men knew what would happen if Uncle Sam caught wind of Dante.
	The best they could hope for in that case was incarceration until the government's 
techies figured out just what Dante was, and if the world didn't end when some new 
version of Dante went on-line at NORAD, their worlds would end in a cell, after being 
questioned until their minds felt like old sponges.
	So life had continued for nearly a month, with Dante spewing the same gibberish 
at the PC, and each man going mad trying to infer a meaning from senseless text.  
Styrofoam from take-out meals littered the apartment, and both men went without 
showers for days at a time.  The slow analytical pace that Peters had set at the Dante's 
creation had turned into a racing mad quest, with each man gulping coffee at the expense 
of his metabolism to stay thinking, and both men privately dreaming of suddenly 
understanding everything, and establishing a rapport with Dante.
	Such an understanding never came.  Finally, on the late afternoon of the day that 
marked a month since Dante's awakening, Peters looked up from a sheaf of paper he had 
been studying and said -  I can't do this much longer.
	-  What else do we do?
	-  Take a break.
	Rick almost yelled at him to shut up and work, but caught himself for the 
umpteenth time getting a little testy on his way down from a caffeine high, and bit his 
anger back.
	After all, a break sounded great.
	-  OK.  Dinner?
	Peters broke into a smile that clashed with his nerdliness.  Finally, thought Rick, 
the guy managed not to look like Woody Allen for a sec.
	-  Yes, dinner.  Dinner out, and beer, and if anyone says 'Dante' they get to do the 
dishes.  Peters gestured toward the stack of plates in the sink that had been used to wolf 
down take-out meals, and pretended to shudder.
	Rick laughed and went to shower.  This break sounded great, but in the back of 
his head he knew that Dante would be the only thing they could talk about, and that no 
one was going to do the dishes.

	An hour later they were seated at Rembrandt's Bar & Grill, and neither had 
spoken except to order two cheeseburgers and two Mooseheads.  Rick could see Peters 
sitting across from him, pretending to be intensely interested in the patterns in the wood 
of their table, trying not to broach the subject.  To save a few minutes and Peters the 
trouble, Rick went ahead and blurted it.
	-  Maybe we're taking the wrong approach.
	Rick saw Peters give up on a relaxed evening meal, and add a notch to his level of 
frustration.
	-  You said it yourself earlier.  What else can we do?
	-  Well, we're just staring at the output, right?  Have we even tried to guess what's 
creating it?  Maybe all we have to do is put ourselves in Dante's shoes.
	-  No shoes on an AI.  Peters wasn't smiling, and may have been trying to drop the 
subject, but Rick ignored the comment.
	-  Maybe Dante is sort of child-like.  I mean, he's only a month old.  Who says 
these patterns we're trying to figure out are the meanderings of a brilliant mind?  Maybe 
they're sort of like 'googoo' and 'gaga'.
	That last had been a jab to maybe get Peters to laugh, and it failed miserably.  
Rick could see Peters' frustration come into his face like the shimmering image of a spirit 
in the midst of possession.
	-  And maybe Dante thinks you're his Mommy, and all we have to do is give him 
some milk and he'll talk!  Peters mocked an expression of sudden realization.
	-  When did you get so fucking cynical?  Rick's plan of a relaxing meal of beer 
and cheeseburgers was fading.
	-  Cynical?  Right about when the ultimate intelligence turned out to be a random-
character generator.
	Right then, something stirred in Rick's hindbrain and he was hit with a rush of 
endorphins and adrenaline that felt like a really, really great idea.  But there was no idea.  
As the hairs on the back of his neck pricked up and his eyes widened, all he was thinking, 
all he could think, was cynical.  Just that one word.  Cynical.
	Peters jumped on the expression he saw in Rick's eyes.  -  Ohhhh, great!!  That's 
it, isn't it!!  Sort of Zen, huh?  The ultimate intelligence finds his perfect expression in 
total chaos.  Let's publish.
	Rick wasn't even paying attention.  Cynical, some circuit in the back of his brain 
whispered, cynical.  He told that voice to shut up, but it wouldn't, and as Peters tossed 
him one more disgusted look and walked out on the meal, he was still sitting there, 
dumbstruck over nothing.
	Rick overpaid and left, not following Peters but climbing into his own car and 
driving shakily back to the apartment.  There was an idea here, but he didn't yet know 
what it was, and all he could do was wait for his subconscious to hand it to him on a 
plate.  He was still filled with this strange feverish intensity as he fumbled with his keys 
to unlock the door to the apartment, and he ended up getting the wrong key twice.  He 
felt as though in order to think about Dante at all he had to be looking at him.
	When he finally got the door open he strode in and slammed it behind him, with 
the keys still dangling from the doorknob.  Peters wasn't in the apartment and was 
probably going to sulk for hours, so there was no one there to wonder at his weird 
behavior.  Rick stepped quickly through the foyer and found himself, standing in front of 
Dante, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, feeling vaguely self-conscious and stupid.
	But mostly he just felt ecstatic, and he didn't know why.  Standing there looking 
like a gunslinger about to draw, he tried to think along new lines.
	Lets say the characters that start and end the sequences don't mean anything, and 
the rhythms of the sequences are only important in that they don't match anything.  He 
knew immediately that that was right.  He had a giddy feeling like he was asking 
questions of God, and he groped for his next query.
	But there was no next question, except What do the sequences mean?, and he 
knew he couldn't ask that yet.  He tried to understand what the spark was in his brain, and 
why even now that word kept appearing in his head.  Cynical.  Finally, he tried on 
Dante's shoes.
	Assume Dante is what Peters said, the ultimate intelligence.  Capable of reaching 
out and understanding everything that's ever happened, is happening and can happen in 
an instant, in the instant before the printer came on.  What would that be like?  If Dante 
can feel, what would he feel at the moment that he simultaneously comprehended all of 
human accomplishment and all of human folly, and all the accomplishment and 
blundering yet to come, in addition, perhaps, to real truth?
	What do the most intelligent among humans do when faced with the real truth and 
the real world at the same time?  Rick felt two ideas merge in his head, and the result 
was ecstasy.  They get cynical.  They view the world through a mixture of bitterness and 
dark humor.
	That was the last piece, and in a moment he knew what the sequences meant.
	Dante, true to his name, was laughing.