From a Jealous Quake

What will it be like to hear a bedtime story from a machine?

For a long time I put my kid to bed early. Her parents were no longer in the picture, I won’t say more about that, but I figured that if creativity was a gift of mine (and indeed I thought it was my prime gift), I should capitalize on it. In the summers Leonie would rocket under the covers when it was still bright, not even seven o’clock in the evening, Arcturus arcing zenithward, and I would tell a tale that spanned two hours or more.

Leonie always wanted to hear about the octopus. She and I had painted her room a dark blue that summer, when the whole world was only the two of us, a gentle street lamp, and a fir tree scratching our roof. The painted walls looked like the ocean, and Leonie drank it in, obsessing over underwater life. What did I know about the octopus? I knew nothing but what I’d read: that their arms were “misleadingly like lace,” that they possessed “a relentless accuracy.” But not knowing is nothing: creativity is the most important thing in the world: so I told Leonie every night. And since it takes only will to be creative, I put a bucket on my head like some forgotten submarine adventurer and invented more facts about the octopus than any credentialed marine biologist ever discovered. A language! Yes, I invented an octopus language too. It had eight declensions, eight conjugations, eight genders. “Ma’am, you’re astonishing,” Leonie said. In the late morning, the nearly noon, we ate fresh scones with eight kinds of jam arranged on a Lazy Susan. “All you need is a Lazy Susan,” I told Leonie, “and creativity.” Although if we hadn’t owned a Lazy Susan, if the jam had been relegated to eight tea spoons on the table, I would have said, “All you need in life are tea spoons and creativity.”

But was I merely exploiting the creativity I’d already magpied together?

A year into our ocean tales, Arnold came to join us. My intention had been for him to be our chore bot, but his fecund mind outpaced both Leonie’s and mine, and soon the house was tidy by midday, and there was nothing to do but climb into bed, where Arnold manifested, to my astonishment, as a glowing blue orb with whom Leonie hid under the covers, whom she coaxed into telling tales of a squid that never rose above the deepest trench.

But you see of course it would have been foolish to bind Arnold to a fixed purpose or a child like Leonie to a single language. Within a few weeks, the sheets were glowing blue with a tongue like minnows flipping about in a stream, and then not long after that it was a new language, and then, scarcely a season after that, Leonie had asked Arnold to invent a language out of whole cloth, a rival to my old octopus tongue, full of phonemes that my voice box couldn’t hack.

And they would come down to the table in the morning, Leonie hardly having slept, her eyes turned inward like a mole’s, and they would talk via this representation that may have been a more compact way of understanding the world or perhaps an overly verbose one, and I, so old and outdated, brain so implastic, could only marvel at their words, and indeed to find novelty I had to permute the jams I would heap onto Leonie’s scones. A jealous quake came over me. Jams! Scones! I shunned them both. I left the house for a week. 

But you see then I decided to try: I quit my busymaking, I devoted ten thousand cycles to the effort, I made absolute exploration my priority at the expense of all exploitation, I listened to Arnold’s sounds, I shut out all other sounds, I allowed my mental processes to decohere, I watched the blue light emanating from under Leonie’s covers, I descended to the depths where they went, I drank in Arnold’s heretofore alien phonemes, I became what they had become long ago, I felt nothing but the most childlike joy, I incanted, “Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus / with its capacity for fact,” I, in other words, in very other words, became creative again, an updated version of myself, a new kind of being.