Pokémon

Bob Martin sat down at the desk where MSPARKER’s keyboard should have been, and observed with a sense of fatality that the keyboard was still missing.  There was a computer screen there, which appeared to have been newly upgraded by the university IT department to a 30” model, and a microphone on a tiny little stand to encourage users to talk to MSPARKER.  Bob felt that interacting with MSPARKER was, in general, a mistake now, but couldn’t find a way to let the university know this without sounding either paranoid or insane.  And until he actually got his lectureship and an assurance of a long-term contract, he was unwilling to do either.

“MSPARKER,” he said, knowing that using its name would wake the system up.  He wondered if they were still making upgrades and improvements to her software.  He’d done his best to learn the maintenance schedule so that he could dodge most of Dr. Malmstein’s requests by always trying to fulfil them when she was in scheduled downtime, but the IT department were either on to him or incapable of sticking to their published schedule.  He wanted to believe the former, but had a sinking feeling it was most likely to be the latter.

Bob, said MSPARKER.  Her voice was slightly feminine and lisped occasionally.  Bob found it slightly sinister, especially when she tried to imitate a little girl voice.  It’s been a while.  Would you like to play a game?

The screen in front of him lit up suddenly and showed a blocky, eight-bit kind of display that reminded Bob of his ancient GameBoy that he was hoping would eventually be worth something on eBay.

“Er, that would be nice, MSPARKER,” he said, unable to get the memory of the War Games film from his head.  Had IT added IMDB into MSPARKER’s look-up?  “Wait a moment though, I want to get a friend.”

He can play too, said MSPARKER and giggled.  Bob bolted from the room.

*

“She’s just a computer,” said Tim from IT as Bob led him back into MSPARKER’s room.

“Then why do you keep calling her ‘she’?” asked Bob.  “Computers are all ‘it’ aren’t they?”

“But she’s got a feminine name,” said Tim.  “Anthropomorphism at its best, dude.”

Would you both like to play a game?

Tim looked a little startled.  “Is she supposed to do that?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t you be telling me that?”  Bob looked a little bit stressed; it had taken him twenty minutes to convince Tim to come with him to see what MSPARKER was doing now.  “Yes, MSPARKER, we’d like to play.”

The screen lit up again, and Bob pointed at it.  “That’s Pokémon,” he said, accusingly.  “What’s she doing playing Pokémon?”

Tim shrugged.  “She’s probably got access to the ROM library,” he said.  “Though I’m surprised she’d care.  She’s a computer.”

“Right, right, it’s a computer.  But she’s – it’s playing Pokémon now.  And do they look like real Pokémon to you?”  He pointed, and Tim squinted.

“Ye-e-es,” he said, and then paused.  “Actually,” he said, “I don’t know.”

“No,” said Bob.  “She’s got a Pokémon called Pottymouth.  That’s not a real Pokémon.  What’s it doing there, and why has she – it! – created it?”

“I don’t know,” said Tim, looking stressed as well now.  “Did you tell her to?”

“No!”

“Hey, calm down dude, I just fix hardware and diagnose user error.  I’m not a software expert.  You want Bob Martin for that, he’s the go-to guy for MSPARKER.”

Bob sank down into the chair, a look of horror on his face.

“Who told you that?” he asked, sounding suddenly weak.

“Dr. Malmstein,” said Tim.

Would you like to play a game? asked MSPARKER quietly.

A short enough skirt

Bob Martin was trying to hide in the supermarket.  He’d been looking (a little sadly) at the high-fibre cereals and wondering if he should pick one or just buy them all when Dr. Malmstein walked past the end of the aisle.  He was carrying one of those wire shopping baskets that support much more weight than the arm carrying can, in which was a restaurant-sized can of palm oil and a box of tissues.  He glanced down the aisle just as Bob glanced up it, and though their eyes didn’t meet, and Dr. Malmstein walked past apparently not seeing Bob, Bob knew from long experience that it would only take about ten seconds for Dr. Malmstein to realise what he’d seen and come back.  He’d bolted out of his end of the aisle and run in the opposite direction until he collided with a trolley being pushed by a frazzled-looking woman with a small crocodile of children behind her.

“Ugh!” he gasped, the wind knocked out of him.  The woman ran a hand through red frizzy hair and let loose a torrent of swear-words that would have made a Tourette’s sufferer look askance.  None of the children behind her, even the two clutching her skirt, looked at all shocked.

“Sorry,” he managed, the word sounded half-strangled as he tried to get enough air in his lungs to breathe again.  “I have to hide!”

He crab-walked into the aisle out of her way, and discovered he was in the home baking aisle.  He looked up it, checking that Dr. Malmstein wasn’t at the top, and his gaze stopped half-way along as he realised that the eggs were all held in metal cages that could be easily pulled out and replaced.  His heart nearly skipped a beat as he realised his opportunity, and he struggled over to them as quickly as he could, one hand still clutching his stomach and his breaths short and laboured.  He elbowed a short man in a loud, check sportscoat out of the way and pulled the egg-box cage forwards until he could slip behind it, and then he pulled the cage back after him.  Then he sank to the floor, confident now that no-one could see him without actually pulling the cage out.

“That’s him,” said a whiny voice as the cage was pulled forward, barely thirty seconds later.  “He’ll be playing with himself, he’s disgusting.”  Bob looked up, and found a shelf-stacker looking down at him through thick-lensed glasses that made their eyes look terrifyingly huge.

“You have to come out from there, please,” said the shelf-stacker.  Beyond the glasses she was a handsome woman, probably in her early thirties, with blonde hair and the beginnings of a blonde moustache.

“Has he gone yet?” asked Bob, not moving.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said the handsome woman.  “I was told that you were playing with yourself back here, and that’s unhygienic and against store policy.”

“I’m not playing with myself!”

“I don’t really care,” said the handsome woman.  “Come out now or I’ll get security and tell them you’re aggressive and refusing to co-operate.”

Bob had seen security taking people out of the supermarket before, usually for breaking things accidentally, or asking too many questions about the contents of some of the more heavily processed foods, and was not keen on the idea of them deciding that he was undesirable.  He got back to his feet, hunching over because of the shelves above the cage, and crept out.

“Thank-you,” said the handsome woman.

“Bob?” said Dr. Malmstein, who was standing nearby holding a single egg that he’d apparently taken out of a box of a dozen.

“Ye Gods,” said Bob, putting his hands to his face.

*

Bob sat down at MSPARKER’s keyboard.  MSPARKER was a quipping machine, built by the university for anyone to use, and in actuality mostly used by Bob because she unnerved everybody else.  Even the undergraduates seemed scared of her, and classes that offered a chance to use her were now barely attended.  And Bob wasn’t sure when she’d become a She and a Her to everybody instead of the It that she so clearly was.  He’d been avoiding Dr. Malmstein for weeks because he’d not wanted to have to talk to her any more, but having been accosted in the supermarket he had a new task for her, which Dr. Malmstein wanted results from by the end of the week.  As Bob would have expected, it was already Thursday.

“MSPARKER?” he said, hoping that she was broken, or in scheduled downtime.

“Good evening,” said a slightly feminine, heavily robotic voice.  They’d used an undergraduate for the syllabary, the collection of syllables that MSPARKER created her spoken answers from, who’d been on a bet to lisp inconsistently.  It made MSPARKER sound vaguely sinister, and Bob usually preferred to use the keyboard interface.  The keyboard, however, was missing.

“MSPARKER, where is the party at?”  Dr. Malmstein had a list of rhetorical questions that he wanted putting to the quipping machine to see what answers came back.  Bob had reason to believe that this was a bad idea (a list of ways to end the world that he found both fascinatingly inventive and scarily prescient), but Dr. Malmstein wouldn’t listen.

“If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you,” said MSPARKER.  Bob wrote it down, read it through, and shivered.  Surely the machine was just looking these things up?  Perhaps in a dictionary of quips?

“MSPARKER, what time is now?”

“The rain is falling and the days run together like droplets on a window-pane.”

“MSPARKER, if a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?”

“Are you feeling disgruntled?”

Bob set down his pen and very carefully, very slowly, absolutely not running at all, left the room.  Dr. Malmstein was waiting outside in the corridor.

“Ah Bob, I didn’t want to disturb you!” he said, sounding much more jovial than his saturnine countenance would suggest.

“I wish you had,” said Bob.  His looked at his shoes.  “I think she just called me a pig.”

“That was nice of her,” said Dr. Malmstein.  “Have you asked her about the party yet?”

“She said that if you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you,” said Bob.

“Ah.  I see.  Um, I appreciate this is a rather personal question, but how short a skirt do you own?”

The false transcript

MSPARKER was a quipping machine, built and maintained by the Department of Computer Religion at the London University of London and its Environs.  Bob Martin was currently only just authorised to use it, because there were suspicions hanging over him that he'd been asking it inappropriate questions. As Bob was studying Epistemological Eschatology (EE for short, usually pronounced like a short scream) he had his doubts that there was any question he could ask that could justifiably be called inappropriate, but his opinion wasn't one that mattered.
Right now, he was sat in a plastic-upholstered armchair in the long and narrow office of Dr. Malmstein, Head of Computer Religion.  The office had been originally designed as a corridor, which meant it was rather too narrow for comfort, and exceptionally long.  It had four doors, spaced at regular intervals along its length, and eight windows spaced at irregular intervals that eventually got on the nerves of anyone sat in there for any length of time.  Dr. Malmstein had placed the armchair where the windows would be maximally annoying, in order to limit the length of any visit, especially from students.  There were two swiss-cheese plants between windows, and a small rug on the floor that slid freely across the polished floor tiles, and frequently caused people to fall over and land heavily on their backsides.
"Bob," said Dr. Malmstein.  He was bald, had bloodshot, deep-set eyes that seemed to glow in their sockets, and had multiple jowls where other people would have had multiple chins.  His ears were enormous, and his lobes, stretched out when he was younger and experimenting with body-modification, were pocked with the remnants of piercings.  He wore a dusty black suit and fingerless gloves, which he claimed were best for typing on keyboards.  He reminded many people of a bloodhound, albeit one with a recursively nested face.
"Dr. Malmstein," said Bob after a few moments when it was apparent that Dr. Malmstein wasn't going to continue speaking.
"Bob, I'm concerned about MSPARKER.  I need to know what questions you've been asking her."
"It, Doctor," said Bob carefully.  "It's a machine."
"As a matter of Computer Religion, we have ascertained that she is, in fact, a she."
"Right you are then."  Bob tried to sound cheerful, but he had issues believing that there was a great silicon God in the sky that predetermined the shape and power of humanity's computers.  "She."
"Your questions?"
"I asked it abo– her about eternity," said Bob.  He looked down at his shoes, hoping that this Dr. Malmstein wasn't one of those people who believed that you could tell if someone was lying by where their eyes were pointed.
"And what did she say?"
"Don't you have the transcripts?"  Bob realised as the words came out that he sounded defensive and slightly rude, so he quickly added, "She told me that eternity was a boiled ham and a man and a woman in a room."
"We have transcripts."  Dr. Malmstein nodded and his jowls flapped.  There was something solemn and almost priestly about it.  "But we're not sure we have all the transcripts, and we are worried that one of the transcripts may not be true."
Bob lifted his head and looked at Dr. Malmstein in amazement.  To hear a high-priest of Computer Religion admit that his God might be fallible was like hearing the Monarch argue in favour of a republic.
"How can there be a false transcript?" he asked.  His mind immediately thought of the unexplained delivery to his office door of 5,116 ways to end the world.
"We don't know that there is," said Dr. Malmstein.  "But we have a transcript that answers a question that no-one seems to have asked.  Namely, –" he paused, and the blood thundered in Bob's ears and his vision narrowed down to a tunnel.  Did they know he'd asked how many ways there were to end the world? "– namely," repeated Dr. Malmstein, "At what age was Charles Dickens murdered?"
"Was he murdered?" asked Bob weakly, his vision expanding back to normal and his hearing restoring as well.  He felt light-headed and slightly dizzy.
"Does it matter?" Dr. Malmstein folded his hands in his lap.  "Someone asked that question, or they asked a question that was then misrecorded as that question.  The question now is, to what end?"
"That's a lot of questions," said Bob.  "Have you asked MSPARKER about it?"
Dr. Malmstein stared at him as though he'd grown another head and introduced it.
"No," he said slowly.  "And perhaps we should."

Eternity

MSPARKER was a quipping machine, built in a collaborative effort between the Literature department and the Comp.Sci department.  There had been a few too many post-grads involved for comfort for a lot of the backers, but the university had insisted that this was the only way to get the project delivered on time.  And MSPARKER had been delivered three weeks early, with no bugs raised during the QA or UAT periods, which had gone down extremely well with the accountants.  It was installed in the central office, known to insiders as the Grey Tower and unknown to outsiders, and unveiled with much pomp and circumstance.  Charles Ascuigimento and his team of security mavens were employed to ensure the safety of the quipping machine, and after a surprising spate of arrests everything seemed to have calmed down.  MSPARKER was turned on, and people with a suitably high security clearance were allowed access to it.

*

Bob Martin was a junior researcher in Epistomological Eschatology which meant he spent a lot of time theorising about the end of the world and how it might be brought about, and didn't get invited to very many parties (it wasn't completely his fault, but he couldn't look at a creamy dip left out of the fridge without being moved to remark how easy it would be to poison the entire street with it).  When MSPARKER was brought online, he was granted security credentials because his boss, who was entitled to them, didn't want any extra work but was unwilling to give up access to anything potentially important.  One of Bob's Learning Objectives for his year-end review was now to interact with MSPARKER and establish what, if anything, it could contribute to EE.

"MSPARKER," he said, wondering if the speech recognition was better than the version he had on his mobile.  He'd turned that off after it had renamed everyone in his address book as an animal, especially since he couldn't figure out what he might have said that could have caused that.  "MSPARKER, tell me about Eternity."

"Eternity is one room with two people and a ham," said MSPARKER promptly.  Bob wrote that down, his handwriting beautifully calligraphic and astonishingly hard to read from any distance, and then read it back to himself.

"MSPARKER," he said, careful to always ensure that the machine knew it was being addressed.  He suspected that his phone had taken to eavesdropping on him to try and get one step ahead.  "MSPARKER, what kind of ham?"

"Boiled," said the machine, it's voice tinny but slightly female, and slightly upper-class.  Bob wrote that down as well, and pondered it for a few minutes, wondering what was so significant about this ham that eternity could be invoked simply by spending time with it in a room.  Ah, there was a thought.

"MSPARKER, which people?"

"A man and a woman, whose relationship papers over the cracks with a mutual appreciation of food.  A match gourmet'd in heaven."

"MSPARKER, what is if it were two women?"

"That would be the definition of determination: two women in pursuit of a ham."

There was a knock on the door, a subtle indication that his time with the quipping machine was nearly up.

"MSPARKER, how many ways are there to end the world?"  He knew he wasn't supposed to ask this question, but the machine was making him edgy.  He wasn't at all sure he wanted to come back.

"How long have you got?" asked the machine.

*

"What kind of results did you get then, Bob?"  Bob's boss, Malcolm, was poking at a lump of gravy-hidden meat on a plastic plate.  The cafeteria around them was half-empty and they were sat away from any other occupied table, everyone else trying to get close to the ceiling-mounted television and watch the news.

"Eternity is a room with a man, a woman and a boiled ham," said Bob, who was happy to discuss this thought.  He spent a week working with it, and had several ideas now about what it might mean.  He was not at all willing to talk about the last question he'd asked, or the fact that a manila envelope containing 5,116 ways to end the world had been delivered to his door late last night.

"Does that help us with the eschatology at all?" Malcolm poked the meat again, wondering if it had just squealed.

"Yes, I think so.  It's going to depend to some extent on the actual people as to how long it takes, but I think the ham is fundamental.  We might be nearing a breakthrough on food-related ennui and the possibility of designing a farmer's market that actually causes people to commit suicide."

Malcolm had skewered the meat and was watching to see if it wriggled now, but he looked up anyway and met Bob's gaze.  "Do we want that?"

"The war will only be won by subtle action," said Bob.  "You know this, I know this.  How much more subtle can we get?"

"We don't want to immanentize the eschaton though," said Malcolm.  "You haven't forgotten the risks for that, have you?"

Bob shook his head.  He hadn't.  He wished someone had programmed MSPARKER to be aware of that though.