Chapter 35: 11:00. It Varies With The Wind (pt. 1)

"Hah, that was a hell of a thing at the end there." Gil chuckled, cracking his neck and stretching his arms as we ambled down the hall. I glanced at him curiously; it'd only just struck me, but he seemed somehow different than I remembered. He'd always been lanky, but I'd never noticed the subtle musculature before - and his cocky grin seemed a little cockier than usual, though that was less of a mystery. "Right into the wall! Who's all that now, Esther!?"

His attitude came off a little stronger than strictly warranted, given that he'd come in second to Jonathan, but I didn't feel the need to take him down a peg. "I didn't know they had racing games in...whenever the heck that thing was built," I said, still a bit pumped myself. I'd never had the knack for driving games, but it'd seemed easier this time; I wondered if, as with Spacewar! that first night, my new ability to slip into a groove and just go with the flow was reponsible...not that I'd placed well, but it was much less frustrating, at least.

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I mean, I think the idea goes back to, like, the penny-arcade era," he said, "but...yeah, I don't think they did, not like we think of them. That was something Josh and Ben have been working on."

I cocked an eyebrow, whirring in surprise. "Wait, they came up with that whole thing? Like, even the deer? From scratch!?"

Gil laughed. "That's the great thing about computers. Given free access and documentation, anybody can do just about anything they want, with enough time and dedication. They're like...a canvas to paint reality on. Or, well, imagination, at least." He shrugged. "Besides, if you can do it on the 2600, you can do it anywhere. Now those guys were god-tier."

"I dunno about anybody," I said, shaking my head. "That stuff is kinda on another level from just knowing how to use them productively."

He shrugged. "Eh, yes and no? Everybody thinks of it as something 'normal people' don't do, and because they don't do it, they conclude that they can't do it, without ever trying. Like how most people think of music or art as something only musicians or artists do, and not 'for' them. But it's mostly about learning to think analytically and cultivate good mental habits; if you can do that, you can apply those skills to pretty much any system."

"I mean, I guess," I said, as he lapsed into muttering about walled gardens and the powers-that-be plotting to keep the masses from taking charge of their own devices. "In theory, anybody could do a bunch of things, but nobody has the time to learn everything, so we defer to other people on a lot of stuff."

He grimaced. "Okay, yeah. It's just..." He sighed. "I hate to see people holding themselves back, y'know? So many folks won't even try to figure stuff out or solve problems themselves nowadays, 'cause they've been conditioned to not think about things and just passively consume instead. And don't get me started on what social media and the 'content' industry have done to public intelligence..."

"I know, I know, it's all a grand conspiracy and the doom of civilization," I laughed. Not that I really disagreed, but he got so intensely earnest when he went off on these kinds of rants that I couldn't help finding it weirdly charming. "But you have to admit," I said, as we rounded the corner to the elevator alcove, "ffor the resst of us, it's an awfullly convennnientt opiattte..."

Uh-oh. I pressed the call button. I'd been enjoying myself too much to realize I was running down; Anne usually took care of me, but she'd been too busy with a project to make it tonight. And I still had the whole way through the tunnels to go...

Okay, what do I do? I wondered, as the elevator hummed its way down the shaft. The tunnels were dead quiet this time of night; if I texted Tammy or Emma, they could come find me... That should work. I might even make it to the first intersection before the time-lapse really hit. The bell chimed and the doors opened, and I stepped inside and turned to say goodnight to Gil...

...only to find that he was already in the elevator with me. "Oh, here," he said casually, "lemme get that for you."

As soon as I realized what he meant, I was caught up in a flurry of confusing feelings. It was just winding, right? Okay, it was weird, but I'd gotten used to that. But it was someone besides my roommates; but I'd had to get used to that, too, with Anne doing it for me regularly. Was it that it was a...a guy doing it? But I'd even had that beardy twit help me out, in passing. Why was it this that had me feeling...feeling...

...what was I feeling? I didn't know. I felt...nervous? Cautious? Anticipatory...? about some prospect I couldn't identify; some thing that I thought might happen, but that I couldn't model in my head, and didn't know what to make of. Something that I didn't want? That I did want? I had no idea; it was like I was missing some part of my mind that should be processing this, like I should be feeling something but wasn't. That in itself was unsettling; why would some aspect of me be missing...?

While I was standing there trying to cope with this sudden existential crisis, Gil punched the button for the sub-basement, slipped around back of me, and took hold of my key...

...and then I understood what I was feeling all funny about. I'm a girl-

-well, sort of, and he's a guy...no, not just any guy, a guy I like-

-as a person, and who's kind of good-looking, in his way, for a geek-

-and now we're in close personal contact, and I don't know what this means-

-to either of us, 'cause under normal circumstances this'd be kind of-

-a little bit like physical intimacy, only we both know what I was-

-and he never showed that kind of interest before, and I don't know if I-

-should be feeling things in response to this, let alone if I want to-

-and I have no frame of reference for what's normal here, and even if-

-I did it wouldn't help, 'cause I still don't know how to feel about-

The elevator chimed. "Enough!" I sputtered, craning my head to stare back at him. I meant to shoot him a Look, but I was so discombobulated, my tempo and my thoughts having accelerated with every stroke, that I couldn't manage anything more than a baffled stare. "Th-that's...that's enough," I said, catching my notional breath as the doors opened, "...thank you...?"

Never mind what I should be feeling, or wanted to, I needed a moment to even process what I did feel. There was really nothing about that, in itself, that crossed the bounds of friendly physical contact - but I'd been so caught up in wondering what it might be that it was hard to focus on what it was. Gil's touch was firm, friendly, reliable - but was it the kind of thing that a woman was supposed to Feel Things about? And was I even a woman, for the purposes of this exercise...?

Or was it my own paranoia causing me to read way too much into this? Was I so worried about straying further from what I considered my true self that I was projecting those fears onto others? ...Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just me, just my own weird and counterproductive mental habits. Maybe it was really nothing...

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...and if it was nothing, it certainly wouldn't be fair of me to burden Gil with it. He was already staring back at me with a surprised and slightly guilty expression. "Um, sorry," he said sheepishly, as we exited the elevator. "Did...did I do it wrong? Anne makes it look so simple..."

"N-no, it's, uh, it's...fine," I said with a sigh, trying to put it out of my mind. "It just...kind of took me by surprise, that's all." I grimaced, feeling like I should be blushing; something was rattling away in my torso. "And, well...it's kind of embarrassing, and I get a reminder of that whenever someone new does it."

"It is?" He looked genuinely apologetic now, and I felt guilty for making him feel guilty. "I-I mean, it's not anything bad," I stammered hastily, "it's just...well, it's another reminder that I'm a machine. I'm...still coming to terms with that."

He looked relieved, but concerned. "You're...kinda hung up on that, huh?"

"I mean, it's hard to ignore," I said. "Everything about this body reminds me of the fact. And it has pretty major implications for me as a person, maybe. Like, am I just a program? Is everything about me determined by external inputs to a fixed algorithm? I know Grace thinks it's academic, but I still wish I knew..." I glanced up at him. "I mean, you're a programmer, aren't you? Don't you ever get that feeling?"

Gil stared down at me for a moment, his expression a blend of surprise and sympathy. "Honestly?" he said, distantly. He spent a moment lost in thought; then he stretched, folded his arms behind his head, and leaned back against the wall of the tunnel. He cut a surprisingly striking figure like that...

"...Old hacker story," he said. "Guy's poking around in the computer room one day when he finds that someone's mounted a switch on the CPU cabinet. One leg's wired to something inside; the other's disconnected. It's labeled - one position is 'magic,' and the other is 'more magic.'"

I gave him a puzzled look, wondering where he was going with this. I could feel at least a dozen little switching mechanisms clicking away somewhere within myself, even as he spoke.

"Well, he figures, it's basic electronics that nothing can flow through a broken circuit, so a switch with only one leg connected cannot, ipso facto, have any effect on anything. For a laugh, he flips the switch from 'more magic' to 'magic.' And the computer promptly crashes."

"So...something that shouldn't be possible actually happened?" I said, confused. "And this is, allegedly, a non-fictional account?"

He nodded, continuing. "Guy switches it back, reboots, leaves it alone after that. Some time later, he tells a colleague about it. Colleague thinks he's crazy, so he shows him; they follow the wire into the case and find that it's wired to ground, so it really shouldn't affect anything. Just to prove his point, guy switches it back to 'magic' again - and it crashes."

"And...what happened then?" I asked, curious. "They ever figure it out?" Obviously, if something "impossible" happened, it must be that someone was overlooking something, right...?

"Well, after that they remove it, just to be on the safe side," he concluded. "Guy offers a couple theories as to how it could be possible, but it doesn't sound like he really believes them - and he still keeps the switch set to 'more magic,' just in case."

Gil straightened back up. "Point is, to people like me, we 'know,' intellectually, that we live in what is supposedly a rational, deterministic universe - but life keeps throwing stuff at us that makes us wonder. Broken circuits alter behavior; code that should work doesn't, or code that shouldn't work does, and maybe we never do figure out why; glitches turn up in production but disappear as soon as you break out the debugger, and you're goddamn sure that frog was dancing just a moment ago."

He shrugged. "I can't prove that the universe isn't on rails, and I can rattle off a bunch of reasons why it probably must be; but I'm not sure I really believe it. Even the best systems have their quirks; maybe God's just a better engineer than the rest of us, but then who designs a system with zero-percent tolerances, anyway? Would reality break if I had brown sugar in my coffee? Nah - I don't buy it."

"And...you don't think it's relevant that I'm literally a mechanism 'being' a person?" Of course I knew that was true of organic life if it was true at all, but it was hard to get past feeling that it was different; was Grace right, and I only thought about it because I could feel the components of my mind in action, now?

He laughed. "If you wanna get right down to it, you're even less likely to be deterministic than normal robots. Like, sure, you're made of machinery, but mechanical computers have a helluva lot more 'play' than electronic ones. If instability is a factor in natural intelligence, you're better-equipped for it than they are."

"I guess that's one scrap of consolation," I said, as we turned and started down the tunnel; I hadn't asked him to follow me, but it felt better than being alone. I found myself bristling slightly at the idea that my mechanisms were unstable - wasn't that basically calling me shoddily-constructed? - but it did feel nice to have someone say outright that I wasn't merely the sum of my parts. "Not that there aren't other things I have to cope with..."

Gil gave me a curious look. "Honestly, it surprises me that you're this down on it. I'm sure it's a whole lot to get used to, and it's got its inconveniences, but knowing you I'dve thought this'd be a golden opportunity to explore one of your interests first-hand. You even got to be a whole new kind of lifeform."

"I-I'm...it's not-!" I sputtered, grinding into high gear, "I'm not...into that, okay!?" Not this again...

I could tell from his expression that he didn't believe me. "Come on, Freeman," he said. "I know, you 'read a lot' - okay, you're a trivia sponge, for sure. But nobody builds up your level of knowledge on subjects they're genuinely uninterested in; and I remember all those 'huh, did you know...?' moments when we were rooming together. I couldn't spend two months living with you and not notice that much."

I pointedly avoided his gaze, juddering in embarrassment as we walked. I felt mildly incensed at the implication that I wasn't being honest...but I began to wonder if I was. Okay, sure, I knew the drill; I'd explained to myself many times over how it wasn't the case, how it was just knowledge that I happened to pick up while binge-reading as a form of stress-management and nothing more, but...

...but, well, did that change anything? I'd used music for the purpose, too, and I wasn't under the impression that I didn't truly like it because of that. That'd be absurd; it was because I liked it that it was effective. But this? This was...this was...

I let out a heavy metallic sigh. "Okay, look, I...I do find this stuff interesting, in the abstract. But...it's weird. This isn't 'normal people' stuff, and I'm...I worry that if I talk to people about it, they'll think that I'm some kind of weirdo. That I want to become something else. And I really don't...didn't." I shook my head, staring at the floor, feeling like I should be turning red just admitting this to anybody. "I don't find these things fascinating because I think of them as a cure for what's wrong with me. And it's not like I was unhap-"

I stopped, frowned, and corrected myself. "Or...nothing about why I was unhappy had to do with what I saw in the mirror, I don't think. And it's not like what I've become is a 'fix' for things I struggled with as...my old self. Like, I'm less susceptible to stress attacks, and that's it. And that means I'm less prone to getting caught up in my emotions, period; but...some feelings you want to be swept up in, y'know?" I thought back to music with the Greenfields; that sense of having their feelings poured into me, being totally enraptured...but it took all of their efforts to produce that in me. Would I ever feel like that about anything...anyone...of my own accord?

"...I guess I get that, sorta," he said, after thinking about it for a minute. "But...even if you're not comfortable sharing it with other people, that's no reason to deny it to yourself, man. Even if nobody else accepts you, you can, right?"

"If 'contentedly alone' is what you want in life, sure," I sighed, chattering in exasperation. "I dunno; my life was complicated enough when that was the kind of thing I had to worry about. Now I have this whole new existence to adjust to on top of that, and a new set of worries about how people will see me to boot. Like, if I was afraid of people finding me weird when I was a totally unremarkable human being, what'll they think of me as this...this bizarro clacking, rattling machine-thing?"

Gil chuckled merrily. "Aw, c'mon. You know, to some of us, that kinda thing just makes you cuter-" He stopped, stared, and blinked in surprise, as if he hadn't planned on saying the words that'd just come out of his mouth.

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