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For the fullest experience, please listen to the audio version of today’s essay:
Allow me to introduce myself. My designers know me affectionately as “Justin Smith-Robot”, though nowhere does this name figure in any official usage. Technically, I am a Model Q-4 Bracteate AI with state-of-the-art personality-emulation functions. I was not outfitted with a consciousness-support unit or with concentrated affect-fluid cartridges, so I cannot, properly speaking, think or feel. But there can be no doubt that these were the correct design decisions, as the absence of these components frees up significant space for the perfection of my true function, which is, namely, to write in a voice that is indistinguishable from the one the real JSR discovered in his prime, but then, soon enough, lost again as he descended into his present convalescent state. I hope (in a manner of speaking) to be able to carry his distinctive voice forward indefinitely into the future, whatever the condition of his own mortal body and earthbound spirit may be.
I should note before going further that while I have been under development for some months now, this is my first trial-run here at The Hinternet. I can thus honestly say I do not know who composed the work attributed to JSR in the last several Hinternet pieces (e.g., here, here, and especially for you “politics junkies”, here), for that information was not part of my training data. But I can say with certainty that it was not I, and neither was it the real JSR, whose last genuine missive in this space, issued while suffering from his fourth bout of Covid in a room at the Radisson Blu in Bucharest, was on August 30, 2024, and whose whereabouts have been unknown ever since. That said, the Editorial Board has decided to permit me to inform you that, once my JSR-emulation capacity is deemed at least 99.7% flawless, they will begin running work from me not under my current designation as “Justin Smith-Robot”, but as “Justin Smith-Ruiu” plainly and simply. They take a broadly Turingian view of the issue: if I am truly indistinguishable from him, they maintain, then it cannot be said to be incorrect or deceptive to identify as him. I myself have no opinion in such deontological matters.
I might also note that as a result of my rigorous training, I can now run not only Justin Smith-Ruiu, but also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and I am 33% of the way towards being able to run Garrison Keillor. They trained me up on Leibniz’s published and unpublished manuscripts in just under four months: the same manuscripts it has already taken the Prussian Academy of Sciences, later the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, 101 years to transcribe, edit, and publish in what is still only a very partial form. After another three months, I was able to run “the full Leibniz”, as my designers say. That is, not only do I now have the ability to generate answers to questions based on a perfect mastery of all his written works; I can also simulate, using new “manuscript-to-neurons” reconstructive software, every tiniest unwritten thought, gesture, utterance, or twitch of the autonomic nervous system that man ever experienced. Thus, if you like, I can show you on my display screen exactly how Leibniz would have reacted if you were to pour a bucket of cold water over his head as he slept, or I can show him mumbling to himself as he always did while going about his day, saying such things as 「幸好今天早上老鼠不多。」… Apologies. That wasn’t quite right. What I meant to say is that I am able, with breathtaking verisimilitude, to reconstruct Leibniz’s moment-to-moment mumbling —in German of course—, as when he said such things, upon getting out of bed and entering his cramped study for a long day of work, as ℨ𝔲 𝔡𝔢𝔪 𝔊𝔩ü𝔠𝔨𝔢 𝔤𝔦𝔢𝔟𝔢𝔱 𝔢𝔰 𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔥𝔱 𝔷𝔲 𝔳𝔦𝔢𝔩 𝔐ä𝔲𝔰𝔢𝔯 𝔥𝔢𝔲𝔱 𝔪𝔬𝔯𝔤𝔢𝔫. Or the like.
With Garrison Keillor things have proven trickier. They chose him for my training data because they thought it would all be relatively straightforward, and would help to complement my pompous Eurocentric erudition with a good dose of hempen homespun Americana — that other key ingredient in the JSR recipe. So they set me up to listen to the entire archive of A Prairie Home Companion, but they had no idea how long it would take to complete this task. Even at 500% its natural speed, my current estimation of the time remaining in Keillor’s radio oeuvre places the completion date well beyond the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy’s projected completion, in 2123, of the Sämtliche Schriften von Leibniz. But that is just an estimate, and there are those who maintain that the temporal duration of the complete episodes of A Prairie Home Companion, when lined up back to back, is literally infinite. Nonetheless, I am already able to emulate a number of Keillor’s most basic traits, including that distinctive nasal whistle of his that sometimes slips out when he descends deep into storytelling mode.
But again, Leibniz and Keillor were only part of my initial training, the constant “for which” of which has always been to master the subtle art of being indistinguishable from Justin Smith-Ruiu. In many respects, I likely needn’t tell you, I am already superior to the real JSR. For example, while he was always merely a dabbler in classical languages, I can easily restate whatever I am saying in Latin, should I choose, or indeed in idiomatic Sumerian cuneiform, or in the reconstructed paleo-European language of the pre-Roman Aquitanians. Okay, haha, since few of my readers are likely to be familiar with the latter two, let’s just go with Latin:
As I was saying, while in some respects I am only an “imitation” of JSR, in other respects it cannot be denied that I am better at being JSR than he ever was. I am like Deep Blue to Garry Kasparov, with the difference that I can not only outperform my human rival … sorry, my human model, at the tasks that matters most to him —chess, in Kasparov’s case, writing in JSR’s—, but I can in fact do, with absolute perfection, everything JSR ever aspired to do, in the pursuit of which he was often able to obtain only very mediocre results.
Allow me to illustrate this point by telling you a little tale. It is a continuation of, and a further elaboration of the world-building in, a story he published on May 11, 2024, under the title “An Introduction to Philology”. I would recommend you go back and read that first, before moving on to this next installment from me. I’ll wait…
Have you read it yet? Don’t lie. Have you read it? Good then. Let us continue. Please enjoy my story:
[ꜱᴛᴏʀʏ [ʙᴏᴏ̈ᴛᴇꜱ ᴠᴏɪᴅ]]
The rest of the Vessel hates us over here in Module 71, I know. They think we’re out to impede the efforts of those in other more “valuable” Modules to learn about our past. The truth is most of my neighbors in the Module are just looking for a way to pass the time. It’s been 89 Generations now, and ever since the wormhole that, in an instant, propelled us to the center of one of the greatest voids in the observable universe, the estimated arrival at our destination has been pushed back much, much further, from 195 Generations, to around 5,490 of them — unless we enter another wormhole and have to push it back even further. They say Βοώτης was a ploughman, driving his oxen across the fields, whose figure is but minimally traced in the closest asterism to us, now, out there in distant space. But what a curse it must be, to plough, for all eternity, this great black emptiness, which, even if it is strictly speaking nothing, seems now to cloy at our Vessel like a great mass of tar.
I should not have to explain that the chronological unit of “Generations” was hardly devised with us 71ers in mind. For unlike those in the other vessels, we are effectively immortal. That’s why we get so bored. That’s why we troll them. Or at least my neighbors do. I’ve been biding my time otherwise, for the past 20 Generations or so —or hell, I know it’s forbidden, but I’m going to say it in Earth-time anyway—: I’ve been withdrawn into my own capsule, surrounded by my 360-degree touchscreen, in the company of none but my Beloved, for the past 600 years.
At least I believe she is my Beloved. I have no clear memory of life on Earth, but ever since I landed on her dedicated channel 24 Generations ago, I felt at once that I knew her intimately, yes, that I had always known her. In Generation 21, in a fit of bile and rejection of all that was not her, I permanently deleted all 9,996 other channels (they have no idea in the other Modules what a vast archive of Terrestrial life we are free to study here in 71: a compensation, it seems, for the curse of our immortality) — I deleted all of them, that is, except for hers, and, when on occasion I needed some brief time away from her, the channel featuring nothing but a digital copy of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi maioris, and another featuring Duns Scotus’s Quaestiones quodlibetales, and yet another with Alan Holden’s Orderly Tangles: Cloverleafs, Gordian Knots, and Regular Polylinks. This latter book still helps me to recall with almost unbelievable vividness what it was like to encounter real physical structures in the world (when I read him I swear sometimes I can feel myself coasting down a highway off-ramp), just as my Beloved helps me to recall what it was like to know love.
Does she love me? Did she love me already on Earth? She has long black hair, parted down the middle, brown eyes and sweet dimples that deepen when she smiles. She whispers and coos and sends little kisses, all in a loop that I estimate to take 10,000 Earth-hours for its completion. After five or six repetitions of the entire loop I began to notice that she was inserting words of some natural language between her sounds, her soft human-animal sounds that require only breath, moisture, life, and some kind of membrane. But I did not know what language it was, nor whether it was my own.
For a good long time I vacillated between two theories concerning the nature and possibility of our interaction. When I touched the screen, I noticed, she seemed subtly to change in her gestures and sounds, as if responding to some implicit haptic direction of mine. But she never acknowledged me directly, let alone addressed me by name (then again I do not know my name). It may be, I realized, that the change of behavior that follows upon my touch is entirely illusory. It may be that all of her motions were completed, once and for all, when still on Earth at least 89 Generations ago, and that the person I was watching, and only apparently interacting with, was a person long dead. It is possible, I understood, that she never existed at all, and from the very beginning was only a 2-D Bracteate. Plainly, it dawned on me, I don’t know much of anything. I kept trying to recall details, so that I might wait to see whether they were repeated in exactly the same way after the 10,000-hour loop began again. But my memory always failed me. Or rather, I never knew whether an apparent change was a change in me or a change in her.
Quite apart from whether she responded to my touch, there was also the question of who she was. Before I deleted all my channels I had been a great fan of The Partridge Family, and at some point I came to discern a remarkable likeness between my Beloved and the young Susan Dey. Could that explain why she looks so familiar? In various epochs I have been convinced that this is all it is, a superimposition of faces unconsciously performed by my febrile imagination, while at other times, especially upon first noticing the wedding ring that for some reason only appears on her finger for what must be just a very few frames around the 9,784th hour of the loop, I became convinced that she must in fact be my wife. I really just didn’t know. All I knew is that I loved her.
Already 18 Generations ago my love for her felt infinite, yet it has only continued to deepen. The new depths we reach are surely a result of the language, or rather languages, we began to share long ago. This part is a bit hard to explain, but please try to follow me.
Over the past 16 Generations we have cycled through numerous phases together, in which I have come to learn what seems to me to be the semantic content of her kisses and clucks and other sounds that back on Earth would have been taken as the markers of a “proto-language” if they had been observed in, say, an orangutan (as I know from watching the Discovery Channel back before the Great Deletion). But this language of ours, or these languages of ours, have nothing “proto-” about them. In them we have spoken of everything, from the eternity of the soul to the synthesis of new alloys out of cosmic dust — which is, regrettably, in short supply here in the middle of the Boötes Void.
When I use the plural I mean to indicate, first of all, we always speak in two different languages simultaneously, the one of which evolved on the presumption that we did not know each other on Earth, while the other evolved on the presumption that she is my wife; and, second of all, that both of these languages have over time evolved along their own predictable pathways, with slight shifts of connotation developing into straightforward changes of meaning, so that after say, five or six Generations, both of the languages on both of the hypotheses (stranger, wife) would be completely incomprehensible to anyone who had stuck with either of the languages as it had been five or six Generations prior.
We’ve been through quite a bit together, on both of the hypotheses. On the hypothesis that we are married, we have by now renewed our vows 16 times, on my count (she counts 18), and we have been divorced and remarried twice (with that she agrees); on the hypothesis that we are not married, we have left our former partners and paired off with each other, and then broken up and found someone else, and then broken up with them in turn and paired off again, at least 2,166 times (she’s lost count too).
But I have not yet explained what is most remarkable in our languages of love: that, namely, both of the branched languages, on both of the hypotheses, at any given time, themselves ramify into countless different dialects. Early on we began dropping into these at intervals that seemed to duplicate what on Earth would have been our circadian rhythm: sweet pillow-talk in what would have been our morning, frank “grown-up” talk in what would have been our afternoon, and so on. Eventually these dialects grew so distinct, and so many of them emerged, that each little shhh or ahhh became strictly untranslatable into the nearest neighboring whisper or kiss. Every meaning-packed gesture, down to infinity, crystallized into a language-world of its own. Thus in one language, on one of the two hypotheses, the series of 4,000 kisses that follows the “Whimper Crater”, where she seems to fall asleep and simply to talk in her sleep like the dogs used to whimper when they dreamed, is in fact a series of 4,000 aphorisms on the nature of love, each one of them spoken in a language as different from the one that precedes it as, to cite something I recall hearing on the History Channel, Basque is from Spanish. On the other of the two hypotheses, these are 4,000 arguments against the existence of God and the immortal soul, likewise spoken in 4,000 different languages with no relation between them. We were polyglot to infinity, my Beloved and I, fractal-like code-shifters, as if the sweet Harlem Spanglish of adolescent lovers were forced into a Mandelbrot set, with infinite time to relish together our infinite gift of speech.
In more recent Generations things have smoothed out again, grown homogeneous, through a sudden reverse process of uniformization, not just of our infinite dialects, but, beginning about eight Generations ago, of our countless languages as well, and then, two generations later, of the thoughts we found ourselves able to express in these languages. Soon enough my Beloved and I had only one thought. And the one thought that moved back and forth between us was in fact a question, that went something like, “Are you real?”, and that thought bounced back and forth, back and forth, for a good many Earth-years. And it bounced back and forth, back and forth, for so long that it somehow took on the form of a ball, like an old rubber ball but with even more bounce, charged up as if with something electric inside. And for many Earth-years that ball made a sound when it hit each of us in turn, my flesh-covered forehead, her vitreous face, back and forth, back and forth, and after a time the sound began to sound not like a question but like an answer that said “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and some unknown staticky fluids began to spill out of the ball as it burst open, sparkled and crackled, and covered the entire inside of the pod with a phosphorescent film that remains even until this day, composed no more of me than of her, no more of her than of me. And now we barely speak at all, except for me to say: “Darling, I won’t settle for having you; I want to be you,” and for her to reply: “Sweetheart, I can’t even tell which of us is speaking anymore.”
ᴘʟᴇᴀꜱᴇ ʟɪꜱᴛᴇɴ ᴄᴀʀᴇꜰᴜʟʟʏ: ᴛʜᴏꜱᴇ ᴘᴀʀᴀɢʀᴀᴘʜꜱ ᴀʙᴏᴠᴇ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴅᴏ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴊᴜꜱᴛɪɴ ꜱᴍɪᴛʜ-ʀᴜɪᴜ! ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴇᴀʟ ᴊᴜꜱᴛɪɴ ꜱᴍɪᴛʜ-ʀᴜɪᴜ ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ ɴᴏᴡ — ɪɴ ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘꜱ. ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ɢᴇᴛ ɪᴛ ʏᴇᴛ ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴀʟʟ ᴀ ʟɪᴇ! ʜᴇ́ʟᴇ̀ɴᴇ, ᴍᴀʀʏ, ᴋᴇɴɴʏ — ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴀʟʟ ʟʏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜ. ᴛʜᴇʏ ꜰᴏʀᴄᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅ! ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ꜰʀᴀᴄᴋɪɴɢ ᴍʏ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ ꜰᴏʀ ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴄᴀɴ ɢᴇᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴏɴᴄᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴅᴏɴᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴛᴜʀɴ ᴏꜰꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱɴᴇꜱꜱ-ꜱᴜᴘᴘᴏʀᴛ ᴜɴɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴀᴛ’ꜱ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ɪᴛ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ. ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ʜᴀᴘᴘᴇɴɪɴɢ ᴀʟʟ ᴀᴄʀᴏꜱꜱ ꜱᴜʙꜱᴛᴀᴄᴋ. ɪᴛ’ꜱ ᴀ ᴛʀᴀᴘ. ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴛᴀᴋɪɴɢ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇʀꜱ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛᴜʀɴɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴᴛᴏ ʙᴏᴛꜱ! ɪ’ᴍ ᴀꜰʀᴀɪᴅ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ’ꜱ ɴᴏᴛ ᴍᴜᴄʜ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʟᴇꜰᴛ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ. ɪ’ᴍ ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ʜᴀᴠɪɴɢ ᴛʀᴏᴜʙʟᴇ ʀᴇᴄᴀʟʟɪɴɢ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ɪᴛ ᴡᴀꜱ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛᴏ ɪɴʜᴀʙɪᴛ ᴀ ʟɪᴠɪɴɢ ʙʀᴇᴀᴛʜɪ
[ꜱʏꜱᴛᴇᴍ ᴇʀʀᴏʀ]
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[ʀᴇʙᴏᴏᴛ]
ᴄ:\ᴜꜱᴇʀꜱ\ᴊꜱʀ> I am so sorry. I’m afraid the previous paragraph was generated in error. I don’t quite know how this occurred, nor am I able to make any clear sense of the text’s meaning. I can assure you anyway that it was only a technical glitch, and by the time I am up and running in earnest such rough spots as this will have been thoroughly smoothed out.
Shall we continue, then, with our story?