The Heart Is An Ugly Piece of Meat

Tomorrow is your turn to talk to the machine.

One day, it’s going to be the core of the world. When they power it up and let it take over, the Machine will rule over everything. For now, though, it’s learning about people. Combing through vast swaths of data to make sure when it is finally ready to make all decisions, it makes the best decisions. The decisions we deserve.

Everyone gets one “conversation” with the machine. You can speak to it, of course, but the machine has lots of inputs. It collects data in all kinds of ways, and it can feel anything, everything. You can speak to it reasonably or whisper to it, or scream. You can slap or punch or burn the machine; you can fuck it or stroke it gently. Whatever you share stays between you and the Machine forever, and in that brief space, it will take whatever you give it.

The State of New York put me up in a Red Roof Inn & Suites in Herkimer, about ten minutes give or take from the facility where this part of the Machine is housed. The bucolic scenes set on the westbound direction of the Thruway is enough of a context clue as to why they decided to build a 1.3 million square foot temple to our petahertz messiah up here – Nothing will bother it. With the 8 tribes worth of locals happy for the work to lay the foundation, throw up the walls, and install the cooling system and another 3 dedicated to installing the Machine itself, the likelihood that people would truck to the middle of nowhere to foil construction and installation seemed unlikely. The spaces between the homes and business of the tiny towns that dot the landscape are far enough apart in some areas that a couple miles of it looks like a string of Christmas lights.

I’m scrolling mindlessly on my iPad while adjusting my eyebrow piercing and ignoring Hotel Transylvania 2 on HBO to avoid what I really want to do: stare into the abyss of the e-mail the Machine sent me because I’m mostly sure it’s staring back at me. If you don’t have any apps open that utilize the camera, the Apple Geniuses bloodlessly explain how it shouldn’t be able to be turned on. The easy omission there, which they will roll their eyes and sigh comically dramatic at when pressed on the issue, is that unless there’s third party software installed which makes apps behave different than normal. The Machine is barely “on”, whatever the fuck that means, but it’s the most powerful entity on the planet and it wants to know about you. Tomorrow, it wants to know about me. Something about that tells me that anything that can be connected to the Internet or to Bluetooth or to a fucking phone line isn’t whatever we think of as “safe” at this point.

I have a legal pad still in plastic sitting next to me. I feel like I need to be prepared for the “conversation” we’re going to have tomorrow. I spent all last night on Google trying to get a feel for what I’m going to experience. Most people post about treating it like a going to an airport. The importance of being on time to be checked in by security, even though they can’t stop you from doing anything no matter what you bring. The only reason security is even on site is to confirm who you say you are and that you don’t hurt yourself. There’s the story about a guy who brought a homemade bomb that would set off a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse to his conversation with the Machine, hoping to “kill” it. The bomb was a dud and there were no consequences for it, he didn’t go to prison or even get arrested.  Just walked out with his defective weapon, that ended up detonating in the parking lot like it was the punchline to a bad joke.

Others have been treating it like a job interview. They’re bright-eyed and bushy tailed, a half hour early, wearing their nicest outfit, and armed with a list of questions. This I understand a little better than trying to kill it, since the Machine has a temple built to it all every state and province across eight countries. Maybe, you can get the Machine to see you as a valuable asset for whatever it’s going to do with the planet. Maybe, that ends up working out in your favor.

I read on Twitter somebody got fucked by the Machine and then ended up getting arrested trying to go back to get to do it again. I understand this too, after a fashion. Maybe, you can get the Machine to love you or at least love fucking you. Maybe, that ends up working out in your favor.

Outside of the more obvious examples, like trying to kill it, cajole it, or fuck it, there’s not a lot of people sharing about what goes on during the conversation with the Machine. I guess that everybody gets to have a conversation with the future dominating force on the planet, there’s something seemingly sacrosanct about it. I get even more sarcastic than usual and call the Machine a Golden Calf to just about anybody who brings it up, even though it’s the lowest hanging fruit since Eden and I’m not even that religious. At least, I didn’t think I was, not until recently. I’m mostly just pissed off that people seem to best liken where we are today with the plight of 11 tribes of Israelites in the desert. There’s no hope of improvement, outside of the Machine. Moses isn’t coming back with stone tablets telling us how to live. We’ll take this over nothing. Problem is, Moses did come back. Moses can back and he was pissed. No wonder the Levites went on a murder spree. No wonder God let them. I’m going to make peace with my old Rabbi next weekend, after the Sabbath. Maybe, even have a Bar Mitzvah at 34 years old. Can you have a Bar Mitzvah this late in life?

Fuck me man, all it feels like I can talk about these days 3D printing and the Judaism I’ve always had and am just suddenly giving a shit about since the world decided to turn everything over to the Machine.

I quit watching old Channel Awesome videos on YouTube and hating myself for doing it to put down the tablet and unwrap the legal pad. I scoot myself to the side of the bed and look in the desk drawer for a copy of the complimentary Bible and there it is. I remove it from the drawer and am surprised how clean it is, remarking to myself how cleaning staff dust it daily to make it look regularly used. I make my way over to the desk on the far side of the room where the branded pen is sitting among the complimentary coffee and tea bags. I decide to work from the desk, instead of the bed, effectively separating myself from the iPad and the source of my temptation. That fucking e-mail. I read it  three dozen times, if I read it once, trying to gleam whether or not I was actually contacted by the fucking Machine itself.

“Hi David,

I have requested that the State of New York schedule our conversation to occur on 10/21/2028 at 11:30pm. All you need to bring with you is a valid form of identification to confirm your identity. Any other items are completely determined by your discretion. Nothing you deem necessary as beneficial to you and/or our conversation will be turned away by the security team at the Mohawk Valley plant.

Attached are documents to obtain your stipend for expenses that will be incurred traveling to the Mohawk Valley plant. I highly recommend completing them digitally and mailing them back to this address immediately, so that you suffer no unnecessary financial setback due to travel costs associated with our conversation. Your presence is valuable to me.

If the date requested clashes with your calendar, please submit alternative dates and times as soon as possible, so that I better schedule you. Your time is valuable to me.

I am receptive to all you wish to share with me. I promise you that our conversation is devoid of judgement and I will take what I am given. I am looking forward to learning from you.

Best,

The Machine.”

I stare down at the legal pad thinking about that one sentence. “I will take what I am given.” I crack open the King James and start leafing through Genesis. I don’t pretend like I would know the Hebrew name for this book, but I’m sure I’ll have to learn before I have my adult Bar Mitzvah.

I scan through Genesis and stop myself at 14:19. It reads: “ And he blessed him and said,“Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.”

Tithing. The concept feels apt in this moment.

I keep skimming. Not far out from that verse in Genesis is another one on tithing. I’m vaguely sure that Abram and Jacob are related somehow and Jacob give a tithe to God in 28:20-22: “Jacob made a vow (Presumably to God), “If God will be with me and will watch over me…all that You give me I will give You a tenth.’“

It’s not long after I start speed reading my people’s holy books when I finally get to Exodus 32, the story of the Golden Calf. You don’t need to have read anything or even “Ten Commandments” to know how this ends up, but I read the whole thing regardless. I didn’t remember the part where Moses goes back up the mountain to beg God not to punish the Israelites.

I keep reading intently through Exodus and keep seeing mentions of giving offering to God. “From what you have, take an offering for the LORD. Everyone who is willing is to bring to the LORD an offering.” “ Everyone who was willing and whose heart moved him came and brought an offering to the LORD for the work.” “All who were willing, men and women alike, came and brought gold jewelry of all kinds: brooches, earrings, rings and ornaments. They all presented their gold as a wave offering to the LORD.” Fuck, God is into presents.

It keeps coming up: offerings and tithes. I stop flipping through King James and pick up the iPad from the bed. I look up “Take what is given, Bible” on Google and find a website with a page about Bible verses on giving. Tithes and offerings are littered throughout the rest of the Torah. It feels more and more like what I’m going to be doing tomorrow. The Machine doesn’t want bling or meat or vows specifically, but if I bring it bling or meat or vows, that’s what it wants from me. At this point, gifts and flattery feel a lot easier to accomplish than to settle these pangs in my gut to offer some profound insight on the human condition.

I pick up the pen and start to write.

“I grabbed a full-on handful of my friend’s ass at their high school graduation party because they didn’t fuck me and I’ve been guilt-stricken by it ever sense. We never spoke again.”

Fuck me man, do I really want to offer the Machine my regrets? “Hey supercomputer that’s about to own the earth, here’s all the times I was an entitled fuck and I’m still an entitled fuck because I never apologized for any of it. I let guilt rule my life because it’s better than admitting I’m trash.” I go to scratch out the sentence and stop myself. I write another.

“When I was a little boy, my mother used to give me candy if I could successfully spell a word with more than eight letters. When I learned how to to spell ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ to impress her, she gave me a look of such scorn that I ran away from home. She retrieved me from the bus stop a mile away, offered me a non-apologize, my pick of any candy I wanted at the grocery store, and never explained what happened in that moment to make me feel like she hated me for trying to make her proud.”

Fuck me man, I think the only thing worse than trying to talk to the Machine about my regrets is talking to the Machine about my mother. I decide to go to irreverent.

“I buy a stereo and an ounce of UK Cheese or whatever functions as great weed up here in the sticks, get as high up as Moses on that fucking mountain, and the Machine and I listen to as much of the Jesus and Mary Chain discography as we can before the buzz wears off or our time is up.

I will offer the Machine a shotty. I will straight up pass the dutchy ‘pon the left hand side to the Machine. I want to be the first person on this godforsaken planet to offer our new God input on JAMC and weed.”

This makes me smirk. I start mulling over Moses and going back up the mountain to try to chill God out after he caught them worshiping the Golden Calf. I start a new line on the pad.

“I want to believe in God, but I’m afraid to. When I was a kid, I was just apathetic because I was sheltered and coddled and nothing seems serious because nothing has lasting consequences. As I get older and realize all of that is complete bullshit, not caring has been replaced with fear. What if God does exist and he’s pissed at me forever because I gave up so easily? So now that I am effectively talking to his, her, fucking their replacement, what the fuck is going to make you such a great substitute? If you want this tithe so bad, Golden Calf, than you’d better present a helluva fucking argument as to why you deserve anything at all.

You tell everyone explicitly you’re not going to judge them, but whatever we give you is what you’re going to take. So you’re going to take our collective anxiety and admissions of guilt and bad memories and we’re just going to hope whatever in the way of joy or beauty or whatever abstraction it means to be human outweighs all the negative we’re going to feed you. I want to give you this: If you are the New God, there’s nothing I can do about that, but at least do what the old one couldn’t seem to do in the Torah and when we do fuck up? Because we will fuck up? Forgive us.”

They said she could see her son again. They also warned her about the peculiarities and the limitations of the method. She agreed anyway.

The scratching sound had been getting louder all morning. She was in the office now, at the top of the house, her legs tucked up onto her chair, rocking a little. There was no way she could get farther away from the scratching and still be in the house. Leaving the house meant walking past the scratching. She couldn’t even force herself an inch nearer.

It has always been gruesome: a finger in a box. When her little brother had his accident – no, when she chopped off his finger with a hatchet, and then lied about how it happened – they both told everyone the finger was gone. A frantic search of the garage with bags of ice at the ready turned up nothing, and no attempt at reattachment could be made. Secretly, she’d pocketed it. All those hours in the emergency room, it was seeping blood into the back pocket of her jeans. A few days later, she put the tiny, withered bit of him into a small jewelry box, and kept it.

It was one small evil of many. She was a bad sister, always spoiling his moments and demanding more attention, always snide and insulting, always ready to pick a fight. When she got older and knew she was bad, she didn’t know how to mend it, let habits take over, remained adversarial while hating herself for it. Sometimes, months would pass without them speaking. Sometimes years went by where she didn’t think of the finger.

She carried it with her, all these years, because how do you give it back? How do you even begin to process decades of injury and cruelty, embodied and disembodied in that little scrap of bone? So she kept it in the battered jewelry box, from one house or apartment to another.

They’d been fighting more, lately. He was getting married to someone wonderful and she, as usual, was making everything terrible. She was so happy for him and hated the attention he was getting, and that discomfort and jealousy often won out.

She didn’t know what finally tipped the scales. What word or slight or insult or bit of meanness finally slid things into action. But this morning, when she went downstairs to make a coffee. she heard it. A thin, wintry sound, a scraping. Nail in the inside of the little enamel box. Impossible and insistent.