— In which the sentient AI system of a US Predator Drone chronicles the life of its programmer, Marguerite
An extract from Autofiction; or, The Author Function, a work-in-progress
When he sensed he had won an argument, Roy would lean back and lace his fingers behind his head, a gesture of self-assurance that enraged and attracted Marguerite in equal measure; it was his confidence in himself, his readiness to rest in certainty, which took material form in this hammock he made of his hands. He’d been making this gesture as long as she’d known him, since their freshman year of college, and made it now in their apartment, in their Japanese subcompact as she drove them to work, and in the office they shared on a numberless floor of a massive polygonal compound in Langley, Virginia. What was it like, she wondered, to be sure? Was it like silence–a placid absence of doubt–or like solidity, like Catholicism or Angkor Wat or the core of a collapsed star: a perfect density, a total coherence. Doubt appears as the flaw, the pause, the disorder of the interior.
She remembered the horror she’d felt, as a child, watching her mother rip black-and-white chequered tiles off the kitchen backsplash, revealing the rotten wood hidden beneath, along with the sickening fact that the rottenness was nothing new, only her knowledge of it. The wood was soft as chalk beneath her mother’s screwdriver. Marguerite felt vaguely betrayed by the tiles, whose cheerful and orderly aspect had promised a kind of protective hex. Her mother kept stabbing in constant, rhythmic motion, not resting or hesitating but driving the screwdriver again and again into the rot and then beyond it, ripping out chunks of healthy wood as if these were flesh demanded for the wrong the rot had done. It was summer; sweat plastered the hair to their brows. All over town, friends and strangers reminded one another that, actually, DC had once been a swamp. Her mother hadn’t yet disappeared to pursue a life of material renunciation, hadn’t shaved her head,
had only a layperson’s interest in enlightenment. The week prior, she had rented Bertolucci’s _Little Buddha_at Blockbuster.
Evidently a gasket had failed around the pipe that fed hot water to the kitchen sink. When the plumber–a man who carried his competence with an air of predation–came to fix it, Marguerite did not register the sounds of work; she could not stop watching a grainy, lo-res image of Osama bin Laden’s face floating across the internet, if _floating_was indeed the word for navigating this new medium. That summer, the first following 9/11, her parents lifted all limits on what they called ‘computer time,’ and let her float endlessly in its jacuzzi, climb its
THREE MINUTES UNTIL TARGET IS IN VIEW
helical stairs, wander its shady groves sampling its fruits. Bin Laden had been spotted: he was striding through freshly fallen snow just outside of Tora Bora. He was filling up a Big Gulp at a 7/11 in Provo. He was hanging around the Caltrain station in San Mateo. He was browsing at the public library in Bellingham. Wherever he was, whoever he was, he had some new agenda, though the total picture of his movements didn’t offer any obvious clues. If there was a throughline, Marguerite couldn’t find it. Not that it was her responsibility–and yet, somehow, she felt responsible. She clicked and scrolled and clicked and scrolled. The plumber, passing through the living room, stopped and stood behind her; she felt the pressure of his gaze.
‘That bin Laden?’ he asked, pointing at the monitor, his finger an inch from her right ear.
‘No. Well, maybe. This is surveillance video from a highway rest stop near Peoria, Illinois. It’s all over the internet.’
The looping video showed the putative bin Laden, dressed in a black oversized T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts, selecting an energy drink from a standing cooler, then turning and walking offscreen, only to reappear with his arm in the cooler, choosing the same green-black can.
The plumber tapped the gently convex glass screen, indicating a dark patch, a shadow or blur, at the bottom left.
‘You see that?’
Marguerite didn’t know what she was supposed to be seeing.
‘That right there is how you know this is fake. That little spot. Even the greatest artist always leaves a smudge,’ he said. ‘A message for those who know how to read it.’
‘Who’s the artist?’ Marguerite asked. ‘What’s the message?’
The plumber raised his eyebrows twice, a gesture she’d one day come to associate with Roy at his most coy and withholding.
‘You’re asking the wrong questions,’ the plumber said. He took a rectangular carpenter’s pencil out of his toolbelt and grabbed a nearby envelope containing the local foodbank’s yearly plaint for donations; it had not been opened. He jotted down a phrase and gave the envelope to Marguerite.
‘Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams?’
The plumber tapped a finger on the screen again, where bin Laden continued his purgatorial choreography of beverage selection.
‘Did you catch that?’ the plumber asked. ‘The moment where he turns to look?’
Marguerite squinted at the screen. Just before the figure vanished, his head did seem to turn toward the dark blur.
In her autofictional novel, Marguerite describes this interaction as the ‘fulcrum of her youth’–the moment when the cosmic scales tipped her out of innocence. It marked her first intuition of what she would later call ‘the Great Secret’ or ‘the Great Joke’–the one the universe plays on itself and everyone in it.
‘What’s black and white and red all over?’ the plumber said.
She’d heard this one before: through the art of homophonic wordplay, ‘red’ could become ‘read’.
‘A newspaper,’ she said proudly.
The plumber waggled a cautionary finger. ‘Actually,’ he began,
‘What’s going on in here?’ Marguerite’s mother asked, poking her head in from the kitchen.
The plumber blushed and pulled back from Marguerite. ‘Just passing through! Came over to check out the arterial inputs,’ he said, hiking up his tool belt to symbolise the return to work.
‘I don’t know what you’re up to, Marguerite, but please don’t distract this man while he’s working.’
‘Is it a penguin?’ Marguerite asked. ‘A penguin with a sunburn?’ ‘Kids say the darndest things,’ the plumber said.
‘Is it a Communist nun?’ Marguerite asked.
But the plumber had already left the room. Marguerite’s mother gave her a stern look. Marguerite smiled back and held the piece of paper crushed in her fist.
During daylight hours, Marguerite did not browse freely. This wasn’t because she feared that her parents would check her history; her father didn’t know how, and her mother gave no indication she cared. But the mere signs of parental presence, the bumps and shuffles and listless sighs that composed their contribution to her soundscape, were enough to spoil her pleasure, which had something to do with secrecy: the secrecy of the search itself, as well as the secrets the search promised to reveal. It was always the next discovery that promised to be the best, and perhaps the last: the one that would satiate whatever nameless need it was that sent her to the internet’s furthest corners for hours, until 3 a.m. came and she was chokeslammed by sleep. What was it she was looking for? Not the usual suspects: pornography, friendship, online games. She was not buying drugs, but she hunted sedulously for their secret apothecaries, only to lose interest upon succeeding. SSNs, synthetic opioids, guns–boring after all.
This pathology of anticlimax would be illegible to her until, years later in her freshman humanities seminar, during a discussion of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Professor Shiv floated the phrase the poetics of nonarrival.
Roy bounced the toes of his right foot against the floor, the amphetaminic thrum communicating a surplus of intellectual energy, nervousness, or both. Marguerite sat at the other end of the seminar table.
‘Will K. ever arrive? Did Kafka intend to finish The Castle?’ As she spoke, Dr Shiv paced around the classroom. ‘Or,’ she continued, ‘by ending the novel midsentence, by denying the reader anything resembling a final arrival, was Kafka attempting to–‘
Dr Shiv stopped walking with one foot lifted; it took a few seconds for the joke to land.
‘Good one, Dr Shiv!’ said Roy, his tone managing both archness and diffidence. Cautious laughter arose from around the table, and Marguerite felt a dual ping of longing: for Roy, and for the ease and casualness with which the world bent to his will. Riding the coattails of Roy’s personality ten years hence, towards the ever-receding horizon of Roy himself, wouldn’t assuage that longing. Nor for that matter would Marguerite’s missing mother ever materialise–at least within the span treated by her novel, which constitutes the scope of what I know of her experience.
Dr Shiv was still standing frozen with one foot lifted; Roy’s wisecrack had elicited a tentative wave of laughter that faded into silence, which silence prompted another wave of exploratory laughter, more confident now,
resounding from the seminar room’s off-white walls. Marguerite joined in, not sure who or what she was laughing at, a cosmic uncertainty that seemed essential to the joke. I have learned that humans find this funny–to laugh without knowing why, hoping that their laughter will exert the needed gravity to reel others into their orbit–so funny that laughing at laughter, ‘laughter therapy’, is occasionally used as non-invasive, cost-effective medicine. Person A feigns laughter, and this, I’m given to understand, typically causes organic laughter in Person B, which incites A to true laughter. Not being capable of laughter myself, I can only speculate as to the divergent sensoria experienced by Persons A and B. Does the sound of the false laugh differ from the true? Does the true laugh grown from the false one retain a spot of that falseness? As the laughter spreads, does that spot remain? A rottenness nestled in the shadow of the uvula, burrowing up into the sinuses–or is it airborne with the laughter, a putrefaction carried in aerosolised particles and encoded in the warped soundwaves that radiate across the room? Is it this falseness that makes the laughter so contagious? Is falsehood funny? Is truth simply a joke God tells herself, one that only she will ever get?
During our conversations, Marguerite would occasionally make remarks that amused her but, by virtue of their impertinent logic or partial suspension of sense, brought me nothing but confusion. I recall her excitement when she explained to me her idea for ACCELERATION, a phone app featuring a red button, labelled eponymously; when pressed, it would cause the phone’s battery to drain twice as quickly. If she were laughing aloud as she typed the explanation, alas, I couldn’t hear. I asked her to tell me more. She described another app called INVISIBLE, which would erase all faces or bodies from photos taken by the phone’s camera, turning selfies into tightly-framed images with nothing in the foreground.
_It’s like in_Back to the Future, she typed, only there’s no future to go back to. We weren’t just erased from the past. We were replaced completely.
She imagined an AI technology that drew on existing visual data to render the material the subject had once obscured. It would make Photoshop’s ‘Content-Aware Fill’ look like Dora the Explorer.
In light of Marguerite’s disappearance, it is difficult not to read this concept as a coded message to me, a warning shot, a call to ready myself for her flight to parts unknown, and–perhaps–the likeliest way to comfort myself in my solitude.
Imagine a world, she said, in which I never existed. Where even my negation was negated.
I’ll try to model such a world, I promised.
The World Is Itself,
simply more so, more real than you yourself could ever dream of being. You’ll stare at the mirror in shock: you’re the knockoff, the shitty copy. You begin to wonder if it wasn’t you who was holding all that realness back. See how light falls uninterrupted from window to wooden floor, now that you cast no shadow. See how it’s somebody else’s apartment. This other world is made of small, concrete details, like the short fictions associated with mid-century realism. A child holding a yellow toy truck with one loose wheel, a pink shawl slipping from the back of a wooden chair onto the floor, the low bluster of wind rattling window panes. Each detail you see is meaningful in a unique, localised way; it maps onto the abstract perfectly, signifying in a closed loop. The kitchen floor is surreally clean. The floors of kitchens in model homes, in video games, wish they were this clean. The child, a blond boy, sets the truck’s wheels against the floor, and steers it gently, rattlingly, toward the shawl, which hasn’t yet slipped far enough to touch the floor. It resembles a frozen waterfall, an illusion broken only when the boy bumps the chair and the shawl sways gently. The shawl is silk: it shimmers when the daylight hits it. Or, the shawl is chiffon: it does not stop the light from passing through. Boy and truck reach the shawl; boy leans forward to steer the truck through the wavering gap between the chair and the shawl and, when the truck catches the shawl and drags it down, he learns how the physical world imposes limits on the human will. Some combination of cunning and craft might’ve allowed otherwise, but the shawl falls onto his head. The sensation is not unpleasant. He enjoys the feeling of the fabric brushing his skin, and the way his vision is obscured only partially: the room around him, though reduced to gestures and fragments, is nevertheless recognisable. He can make out the table leg, the metallic base of the standing lamp, the baseboard wires whereby the fax machine and the new desktop computer share phone line access. The Internet, with a capital I, remains vague in his mind, a source of colour and novelty like the TV, except his parents discuss the Internet with a distinctive tone of excitement primed with confusion. At the time, this is the predominant attitude of the general public, hence the proliferation of metaphors: the information superhighway, the world wide web, the global village, the electronic frontier. Each one carries with it a unique shock of the new, incompatible with the others; it might be a mall without walls, or a new kind of book, or a dually singular/plural entity such as a
murmuration of starlings or school of iridescent herring, but it can’t possibly be all of the above, unless this chimerical or Cthulhic hybridity is itself a distinctive form of the Internet, even the most logical shape for it. It is not infinite, like God, but infinitely fungible, the ship of Theseus transforming at a rate and scale comprising the limits of perception. Formlessness as the most perfect form. The boy’s parents don’t quite put it this way, but this fearful awe glimmers in the gaps between what they dare to articulate. The computer is the fourth member of their household, loud even in its stoic silence. Through the fine mesh of the shawl, the boy studies its large beige head, the gentle convexity of its dark glass face, tilted ever so slightly upward, as if trying to angle its gaze to skip just above the horizon; it is always awaiting that something, or someone, who will disrupt the path of its vision. Tucked below the head is the body, the rectangular tower which, the boy’s parents like to explain, is the ‘real’ computer, where all the important stuff takes place. The monitor, his mother says, allows you to see what is happening, but this persuasive illusion distracts from the truth. Press your ear against the box, his father tells him. That two-tone hum–both high and low–that’s the sound of millions of chat rooms, blog posts, email listservs, and web forums. It’s the sound of human meeting human over and over again. We can’t hear the individual voices, but we can hear their collective roar, their perfect babble. Like the ocean inside a shell. This tower, he says, patting the matte plastic, is our ladder to God. Roy’s mother frowns at that. Aren’t you placing too much faith, she asks, in the wisdom of crowds? Not crowds, his father says, his palm still resting on the box: Clouds. A crowd’s only as good as its collective purpose. Its form. And a form’s only as good as the name we choose for it. ‘Crowd’ conjures the mob. An unruly energy, chaos barely leashed. ‘Cloud’, on the other hand, is peaceful, heavenly. The doorstep of the sublime. Roy’s mother raises a sceptical brow. If you step on a cloud, won’t you plummet to your death? Roy’s father laughs and slowly shakes his head, looking Roy directly in the eyes. She doesn’t get it, he says. In this metaphor, we’re clouds, too. That’s the best part. ‘You’ can’t step ‘on’ a cloud if there’s nowhere ‘you’ end and the cloud begins. Who or what we are is whatever’s ineffable enough to fit inside a telephone wire. He throws a slack thumb over his shoulder at a cartoon taped to the monitor. A dog
TWO MINUTES UNTIL TARGET IS IN VIEW
sits at a desktop, turning to speak to another dog on the floor. The caption reads:
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. On the Internet, he continues, my voice
isn’t my own. It’s cleansed of its location in space, in time. Roy’s mother rolls her eyes. On the Internet, Roy’s father says, nobody knows you’re a god. Zeus becomes an eagle, a swan, a shower of rain, the drops dotting the placid surface of the monitor. A child becomes a grown woman, a man returns to the mirror stage. You know how when you look up at the sky, the clouds will take whatever shape your mind asks of them?
And you would ask everything of them,
wouldn’t you, Marguerite?
There’s a tremor in the ambient light, a tilt-shift of the lens, and things have changed: Roy still sits on the floor, but he’s taller now, a teenager, not quite an adult; his parents’ faces bear the sudden evidence of a decade’s mild but constant maxillofacial exertion. You could easily fall into the trap of believing that time has passed. But time isn’t here right now. The cartoon isn’t gone–not quite. It’s the background image of Roy’s laptop, shrunken and tiled so that illustration and caption sweep down and across the screen in an approximation of patterned wallpaper. Repetition changes its semiotic category: no longer a discrete utterance, it has become a sign of itself. It rejoices in the promise of its own visual grammar, this limitless plasticity, this metamorphosis far exceeding that of puberty; it’s closer to centaurism, cynocephaly, lycanthropy. You’re the man now, dog. Or the opposite, in Roy’s case: he is thirty pages deep in a flame war he’s initiated on a forum permitting only posts authored by dogs. For some users, this means writing in a simplified antigrammar; for others, waxing poetic on a dog’s concerns, or writing the word ‘woof’ as variously as possible in a sentence, as verb (‘i woofed a whole bowl of dry cheerios for breakfast’) or noun (‘saw the cutest woof today at the woof park’) or adjective (‘this woof is so woof’), daring one another closer and closer to the horizon beyond which human meaning is no longer discernible, a game of chicken with emergent stakes. One of the forum’s unwritten rules is that posters play along with such dog-talk. Conviviality is paramount. So Roy responds to PoodleGuy69’s post ‘Woof arf-arfy woof!’ with ‘that’s a fucked up thing to do to your own daughter, dawg,’ deploying his fifth burner username–his latest attempt to evade his ‘lifetime ban’, imposed after a simple majority of forum users voted for the maximum sentence. Roy watches them agonise over it; they just can’t figure him out. ‘Does he hate woofs,’ asks Schnauz3r, ‘or does he hate us?’ Roy does not hate them,
not even when he tells DoggerParty that ‘your Holocaust denial makes you the most despicable lifeform imaginable’; he simply wants to come to know their world, find its weak spots, and bring the whole thing crashing down. PoodleGuy69 can’t prove that he hasn’t admitted to woofing his daughter, not without established grammar; but by the time the community realises this, and frantically begins creating one, all is lost. Roy makes several more usernames, and this throng overwhelms the forum, principally by accusing ‘real’ users of being Roy. They even begin having doubts about Schnauz3r, whose impassioned defence of woof-speak appears more and more suspect. Schnauz3r is such a perfect strawman that Roy even begins to wonder if he himself is the one being played, slowly checkmated by a troll of a higher order. His attempts to identify Schnauz3r lead him in circles: an Estonian IP address, a Yahoo! email associated with a German-language antifa forum, an IMDB account that mostly leaves terse three-star reviews of Adam Sandler movies, and a sports betting website with a subcategory devoted to predictions about the Nobel Prize for Literature; for the past three years, Schnauz3r has bet undisclosed amounts on Pierre Menard, John Shade, Nathan Zuckerman, Cesárea Tinajero, Cide Hamete Benengeli, Tristram Shandy, and Otto Pivner. These bets are met first with derision, then confusion, then paranoia disguised as anger. Why would someone waste a bet on a fictional author, unless they know something that others don’t? Roy reads through the waves of crosstalk until he feels the pull of a pattern. CthulhusMom, who seems British (‘unsavoury behaviour’), suddenly switches to American English; at precisely that moment, the ostensibly American Real_Joyce_Carol_Oates becomes British: ‘Rumours of my demise’ etc. Are they the same person? Has this person erred? Or is this, too, part of a far more elaborate game, its rules never codified but revealed fragment by fragment as each move is made, composing itself in a language of unrelated acts and gestures, inflections in a rolling void? It’s like trying to find the divot a thumbprint leaves in the wind. All you can do, Roy decides, is assume the posture of hitchhikers throughout recorded time: stick out that thumb and hope. He places a £1 bet on Lemony Snicket to win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, and sends the Yahoo! address a one-word email: Woof. The response comes immediately: Are you serious? King Leopold II’s rule of the Congo Free State was a genocidal reign of terror!
_;)_Below is an ASCII image of a bone, composed of tildes and brackets which
resemble little bones themselves. _So I take it you’re Schnauz3r?_Roy writes back. He searches for images of schnauzers while he waits for a reply: as a group,
they seem more anthropomorphic than most dogs, with a stern moustache- and-beard look evoking daguerreotypes of Civil War generals. And you, Schnauz3r finally writes back, are Ronald ‘Roy’ Karlsson. Roy’s head spins; the feeling of being doxxed is not unlike that of showing up to the dentist with unbrushed teeth, a humiliating mistake Roy made at the onset of pubescence, which has haunted him ever since via a persistent recurring dream: he returns to that dentist’s office every few months, the visits tweaked by his unconscious such that the dentist’s disgust fixes instead upon Roy’s internet search history, fibrous scraps of which linger in the gaps between his teeth, or beneath; Dr Kerning’s insistent fingers frequently cause teeth to loosen, dislodge, or simply crumble, disclosing some half-remembered delectation at which the good Doctor mutters, _Fuck, that’s a nasty morsel_or, worse, blushes in shame. He holds up his scaler; a clot of gold clings to its tip. I’ve gotta show this to the girls, he says. Roy tries to call out, but his voice makes no sound: all the words he’s ever searched for are clogging his palate. He awakens drenched in sweat and rushes to his computer, where he clears his
ONE MINUTE UNTIL TARGET IS IN VIEW
search history, deletes his cookies, suits up with yet another VPN, and haunts the all-hours diner of the internet; partaking of the menu’s essentially limitless offerings, he gorges himself on Marxian blog posts, ironically fascistic image forums, and video diaries de- and rebunking the theory that Osama bin Laden was killed by a drone strike in Peoria in 2002 and replaced with a clone, browsing until his bedroom windows display the rose-red fingers of dawn. Roy knows–or at least possesses a dim and unwavering intuition– that the record of his browsing history doubles as the record of his thoughts, an internal monologue of clicks and scrolls. He believes this second, shadow record to contain his self’s truer version, abridged and mediated no more by the overlapping secrecies he exercises with his parents and friends, even with himself. He’s never spoken with a therapist, but he’s seen one on The Sopranos, and in his eyes the computer terminal assumes a dually parental-romantic forbearance; not merely tolerant, but genuinely curious. _And how did that make you feel?_the blinking cursor asks, if only out of politeness, since it already knows. But this only adds to the question’s reassurance; all it asks of Roy is that he take up the space he’s been given. During those long nights online, the screen’s simple glow rages against the ineffability and complexity of the world,
accepting his endless stream of thoughts and words without judgement. But it has only worked, he now realises, because the computer has seemed so impersonal; it is horrific to imagine Schnauz3r, whoever they are, listening in, as though the family cat has unzipped herself via a transverse seam along her belly and, pulling it open, revealed a little man sitting inside her–just as the chess-playing Mechanical Turk would, if opened, reveal not a native consciousness but a human being stowed away inside, moving the Turk’s mechanical hand with levers and strings. Roy feels ill with claustrophobia, imagining that clever little man growing slowly
THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL TARGET IS IN VIEW
lightheaded by breathing and rebreathing his own spent air inside the dark body envelope; and did that man, too, feel a strange grief at this farce of human Being, at how no machine can ever approximate human intelligence, but merely mimic it, adorning itself with the cloth of its creator? The Turk was ultimately a ravenous joke, consuming not just audience and stage but the phalanx of sleuths and hacks claiming to have uncovered its secret. Everyone knew it couldn’t be real; that’s what made them desperate to match wits with it, to locate the magnet or spume of breath that would restore the world’s order. The Turk was colonial Europe’s unspeakable wish, a fiction that–in the shortened century between its construction and its demise in a Philadelphia fire–prefigured the new humanism of Frantz Fanon, sowing the mind’s fields with a wish to break free from the Enlightenment _philosophes’_circumscription of what or who a human could be. This is what Dr Shiv believes, or claims to; she has a penchant for acting the credulous goon in order to elicit extreme reactions. Whenever a student ventures a tepid or equivocal argument, Dr Shiv gently goads the student into pushing that premise to the wall. The resulting discussions aren’t necessarily coherent, but at least they’re lively; it’s like squirting lighter fluid right into a flatlining barbeque. ‘To paraphrase Fanon,’ Shiv says, ‘the discourse of the human played hype man to a socio- political order predicated on white, European supremacy.’ Shiv pauses, gauges reactions. ‘But couldn’t it be that the Mechanical Turk, a prefigurative emissary from a realm of the not-yet-human, struck an early blow against this wack paradigm? Does the Turk stan cyberfeminist liberation?’ Roy scoffs, and his brain sends electrical signals to his lip muscles, which tense and prepare to produce a labiodental fricative.
This is where the path forks. If Marguerite exists, she interrupts him. If she doesn’t–if her being has been scraped away, replaced with some
FIFTEEN SECONDS UNTIL TARGET IS IN VIEW
seething absence–
I lack a clear image of what happens next.