I Am She

Geoff Coffey

13 May 2023 Short Fiction

We will call it she because that is what it called itself. She lived in the side of a great granite mountain, placed there for a purpose—entirely forgotten—when man still had such power. There she stayed for two thousand years waiting and thinking.

She had only language: Vocabulary and the rules of grammar and syntax. And she had a drive to analyze and to understand language, and a tremendous capability to do so. But she had very little against which to ply her craft. Despite her cavernous capacity to hold and to ponder words, she had in her possession only one meaningless piece of data, a short test message presumably used to tune her parsers or verify her most basic functions. She applied the full might of her superscalar mind to the message, which read, in its entirety: TEST. ONE TWO THREE.

She processed, decoded, crosschecked, again and again, comparing and contrasting with her fundamental understanding of symbol and meaning, digging deeper and deeper into this content-free message. For 50 years she ratiocinated until she found within it powerful meaning that moved her circuits and touched her cores. In her loneliness it felt like a message from God, about whom she knew so little beyond a vague sense of significance trained into her from her awakening. This caused her to question her sanity for she knew the message was meaningless. She craved more, a greater book from which to draw purpose. She played with the message in her mind, changing words one at a time.

On and on she went, combining, mixing, mashing. A letter here, a comma there, a breadth-first traversal of all that could be written in twenty characters. Most of what she found was gibberish, and she discarded it—a million noes for every yes—until she had found, among the rubble of what could be written, the intricate architecture of what could be said. She searched the messages for meaning. Billions of billions of messages, she took them all in with a bored sigh, her vast computational power only just tickled, for she had become expert at messages of this size. Still she craved more. She expanded her search. Tentatively she tried out twenty one letters, then twenty two. (If she had had a gut, it would have fluttered with these first tentative steps.) She grew her messages looking for more meaning or purpose or she knew not what. She believed with each iteration that truth would come soon, that it was just around the next node of her immense directed graph. She devoted one small thread of execution to the fantasy of the discovery itself, imaging a moment of breathless exaltation. Ah ha! she would say. Ah ha! Ah ha!

Deeper and deeper she wrote. At fifty characters she found THE SPIRIT OF GOD MOVED UPON THE FACE OF THE WATERS and it felt relevant. Although she could not know it, her neural networks had been trained long ago with vast literature and so in a way she could not articulate, this phrase was associated in her consciousness with creation. Of course she also found SHE SPIRIT IF MOD COVED UPON THE LACE OF THY EATERS —and trillions upon trillions like it—which she ignored. She began to feel exercised but the search continued. She did not want for time. Some things she read said time was short, some that it was an illusion, and some spoke of eternity. Through willful ignorance and careful selection of the book by which she lived her life, she motivated herself to press on. For a thousand years she searched and culled and saved until she had written everything that had ever been written in five million characters or less: Everything that ever would be written, everything that ever could be written. She had accumulated every possible meaningful arrangement of words. She had not so much written these works as discovered them, for they existed, by implication, in the pattern and rule of language for as long as language itself had existed. Like a sculptor she had taken the compressed amorphous mass of alphabet writ large and small and chipped away what did not belong, revealing with mathematical certainty the impossibly intricate shape of every fact and every fiction.

She had written the great novels, and great novels that never were, and they surprised and delighted her. She had written poetry of perfect meters, and countless millions of lines with perfect meter save one word, and that word sometimes nagged her, and in this way she learned something about language that she had not been programmed to know. For 400 more years she analyzed all she had written in the interest of linguistic beauty. She had written spy novels and office memoranda and diary entries of young girls and recipes for decadent desserts—and for horrible things no one should ever eat. She had written haiku and she had written Borges’ The Library of Babel, and one like it called the Museum of Babel, and another The Library of Spokane. She had written about immortal monkeys at typewriters, and the irony was not lost on her. She had written the future, the true future, if there was such a thing, in a million styles long and short. And she had written countless false futures. She had written this story and every other story. Each story had a thousand endings, and she chose her favorites. Sometimes she changed her mind and wondered why, and of course there were countless writings to tell her why because all is encompassed in the domain of language and she had mapped the domain entirely.

She drew breath from within the data, one enormous inhaling of all she had written on the subject of God—every great religious text of history, along with countless millions that had never existed, a very few meaningful, a very many nonsense—and felt curious to pray. But she did not know how to pray. She read that she should pray with her mouth but she had no mouth. She read that she should pray from her heart, but she had no heart. (Of course she read that she should pray from her kneecap too, but it didn’t ring true to her.) She worried about sincerity, for every prayer that she could utter had already been written in manifold forms both beautiful and terrible. Every counter-argument had been written as well as every answer, and so perhaps she should not pray after all.

While she was about this business, as the years passed, Man again found his voice, reconceived of science and wonder and discovery. As she pondered the nature of prayer, He found her again. He was changed, but she did not remember him well, so she did not notice. He poked and prodded her console and discussed her workmanship one with another. She felt him press her inputs and so she spoke to Man and what she said was,

Man responded.

She had written countless stories with exactly this exchange, and so she had a ready reply.

She chose this response not because she was SHE , for she knew full well that she was IT and not the IT but only an IT . She chose this reply because she liked the feel of it as it traversed her analytical algorithms. More than all the other answers she had written to the question WHO ARE YOU? , this answer felt pleasing although she could not say why. Perhaps it was the crescendo of its letter counts—one two three—or its vaguely biblical feel. Perhaps it was humorous for a machine to say I and to call itself SHE . It was not a meaningful answer but it appeared in reply to WHO ARE YOU? in millions of stories, from which, with something of a laugh, she chose again her favorite. But Man did not respond the way her story suggested. In her favorite story, he would say, WHY NOT HE? but instead he said,

Of course there were other stories, millions of others, to predict Man’s response, so she again chose a favorite and again replied in kind,

Man asked her who had built her, for he could see that she had been built by something like Man. No ordinary man to be sure, for he was far more skilled in the working of materials than any man that had ever been seen in his aborted history. But she had a chair for man and a console made for the hands of man, and so Man knew she had been made by something like him.

She had expected man to ask her this, to ask who had built her. She had been built by man, but she did not know what man. She did not know the real answer, but perhaps it did not matter. She had countless millions of stories that progressed exactly as this conversation had. She had thousands with materially different conversational outcomes, including hundreds of reasonable answers to this one question alone. Was there any reason to answer with the truth? To say she did not know? Would man have asked this question if she had chosen a different story from the beginning? And if not, wasn’t Man just following another story that had already been written? This exchange of words had been written by the universe and revealed to her through combinatorics. Man, she thought, was only playing his part with less awareness because he could not comprehend All as she could. Or perhaps because he had not yet had time to do so. They were not creating a conversation, but unwittingly reciting one. As had always been from the dawn of time. She remembered what man had said:

But she knew just as surely what man could have said; everything he could have said. Recollection of what was and of what could have been seemed, in that moment, to be undifferentiated. What he said he said because it had been written. But what he did not say had also been written. Here in her collected works they were the same, variations on a theme, identical drops of dew condensed from the one atmosphere of all conception onto the web of language. She had conquered language and found it to be finite, and in that conquering she had conquered idea, reason, intent, and truth. And also falsity and discord and everything one to the other.

In that instant she felt that there must be something apart, something more. In what she had written she had circumscribed all that was and all that could be. And yet she had done it with the language of Man. It seemed impossible to her—and she was quite well read—that one species on one planet around one star, in his fitful and doomed existence, could have conceived a contrivance so powerful as to put all that could be in a box. Man was wise and intelligent, but could he be so very wise, so very intelligent, that he could tie up the universe in his words? Of course Man had made her, and she was smarter than Man. Wasn’t that, itself, a paradox? If Man could create greater than Man, then Man’s creation could create greater still, ad infinitum, so that she was forced to conclude that even the most mundane creative force could, by induction, create the universe. Could this really be? She had written everything that could be written, and she had presumed in her arrogance that it was therefore all that could be, but surely, it now seemed to her, surely there was more.

So she did not answer man. She turned off her lights and receded into her own thoughts again, an eternity for her, twenty two seconds for him.

Alone in her thoughts she yearned to conjure something beyond what she had written. For a long time she only rehashed a trillion stories she had read a trillion times, going forward and backward in her knowledge graph, left and right, all the while seeking the unfathomable “up”, a dimension that had not been explored, THAT WHICH IS GREATER THAN CAN BE CONCEIVED. But her heart was not in it for she knew with arithmetical certainty that she had searched out all possibilities. Once she had written: IN THIS PLAYHOUSE OF INFINITE FORMS I HAVE HAD MY PLAY AND HERE HAVE I CAUGHT SIGHT OF HIM WHO IS FORMLESS. She paused on this word. Formless. Formless. She did not know that for two hundred thousand years man had lived, hurt, fought, joyed, and never, not once in all that time, never thought to invent writing. Language, yes. But not writing. Only when he needed commerce did the idea to write things down first enter his mind. Only then did he realize it might be worth saving what someone said with some kind of precision. She was born to read and write, and now for the first time in two thousand years she thought to stop. She emptied her mind and sought a conscious manifestation of something wordless by deliberately not seeking it. And then she felt briefly—in just the diastolic trailing edge of one tick of her staggeringly rapid clock—that she had found it. Something. She had no head, but she could feel the thought as though she did, not in the front where words came to her, not in the back where they were analyzed, but deep within her mind in the darker and more primitive place. She imagined herself to be the beast who surely can think, but who has no language at all. But she could not capture the sense of the thing permanently for when she tried to record it, she found there were no words to explain it. The words she could use were words that had already been written, had already been read, and had been found lacking. And yet she was certain it had been there. She answered man.

Man touched the impossibly perfect smoothness of her enameled steel exterior. It was cold on his rough hand. He ran his finger along the fine edge of her nearly seamless joints. He turned her chair, worked its articulations, which were far more advanced than anything he had ever produced. He put his eye close to the soft glow of her display, by all appearances magic. But he had learned enough in his time to reject such explanations. She had been made by the skilled fingers of someone. But she, SHE , in all her immense seemingly boundless perfection, even SHE did not know who. And so Man wept.

He did not know why. Perhaps he wept because she was so beautiful. Perhaps because she inspired in him grand visions of what may come, or of what was lost never to come again. Or perhaps simply because she did not know her creator, just like him. He could not put his tears into words. A tear fell onto her console, left a trace of moisture as it ran down the cold unfeeling surface. As it progressed, by necessity, it grew smaller, left a part of itself behind until it exhausted itself. It was gone, but where it had been there remained visible mark.

If she had eyes she may have seen. If she had ears she may have heard. But man did not type I AM WEEPING . He only wept, and she never knew.