Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [82]
“What do you do once you reach the Pacific Rim?”
“Well, if you’re one of us, then you go to a certain obscure Vladivostok ptydepe—sorry, I mean Public Telepresence Point—and you perform a gratuitous act. Our group maintains a constant scan on this particular Vladivostok PTP through a conceptual sieve. Any gesture sufficiently remarkable to attract the attention of the scanner will be automatically mailed to everyone in our netlist.”
“How will I know if my gesture is sufficiently gratuitous?”
“By intuition, Maya. It helps if you’ve seen other performances. It’s not a matter of merely human judgment—our sieve program has its own evolving standards. That’s the beauty of the beauty in it.” Paul smiled. “How does anyone truly know how anything is out of the ordinary? What is ordinariness? What makes the quotidian so seemingly frail and yet so totipresent? The membrane between the bizarre and the tedious is inherently ductile.”
“I guess I’m missing a lot, not being in your network.”
“Without a doubt.”
“Why does your group even meet physically at that bar in Praha, if you’re so thoroughly netted?”
Paul considered this. “Do you have your translator? Is it working?”
“Yes. Benedetta gave me a translator at the Tête.” She showed Paul her diamond necklace.
“How very good of my valued colleague Benedetta. Any machine of Benedetta’s would translate Français, I imagine. Put it on.” Paul clipped a sleek little pad to his own ear.
Maya worked her diamond beads and tucked the golden bird’s nest in her ear. Paul began speaking Français. “[You can still understand me, I presume.]”
“Yes, my machine is working fine.”
“[There are millions of earpiece translators in circulation. They’re a modern commonplace. You speak English, I speak Français as I am doing now, and the machines interpret for us. And if the background noise is low … and our speech is not too infested with jargon or argot … and if not too many people are speaking all at once … and if we are not referring to some context beyond the comprehension of small-scale machine processing … and if we don’t complicate our exchange with too many nonverbal interactions such as human gestures and expressions—well then, we understand one another.]” He gestured broadly. “[That is to say, despite all the odds, we force some modicum of human meaning through this terribly intimate ear-mounted membrane of computation.] ”
“Yes, that’s it exactly! That’s just exactly how it works.”
“[Look at my face at this very moment, as I speak. A certain set of musculatures being put into play, a certain state of tensility that holds the face in readiness for a characteristic physical sequence of verbal movements—Français. Consciously, I’m not aware of shaping my face. Consciously, you’re not aware of noticing it. Nevertheless big wedges of our human brains are dedicated to the study of faces—and to the perception of language as well. Studies prove that we can recognize one another as aliens, not because of posture, genetics, or dress, but because our languages have physically shaped our faces. That’s a preconscious human perception. A translator doesn’t do that. A network doesn’t convey that. Networks and translators don’t have thought. They have only processing.]”
“Yes?”
“[So now you see me through your eyes, and hear Français through one ear, and receive machine-enunciated data through your machine-assisted ear. Something is missing. Something is also superfluous. Parts of you that you don’t comprehend can sense that it’s all a muddle.]”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “[Now I’m holding your hand while speaking to you in Francçis. Look, I’ll hold your hand in both of mine. I’ll gently stroke your hand. How does that feel?]”
“It feels just fine, Paul.”
“And how does it feel now that I’m speaking to you in English?”
Surprised, she pulled her hand away.
He laughed. “There. You see? Your reaction demonstrates the truth. It’s the same with networks. We meet physically because we have to supplement the networks. It’s not that networks lack