“You always hear if there’s an accident. There’s no accident.”
“You sound upset, Jack.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
My sister was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Jack, you’ve got a problem. Why aren’t you doing something?”
“Like what?”
“Like see a marriage counselor. Or a lawyer.”
“Oh, jeez.”
“Don’t you think you should?” she asked.
“I don’t know. No. Not yet.”
“Jack. She didn’t come home last night and she didn’t bother to call. When this woman drops a hint, she uses a bombsight. How much clearer do you need it to be?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re saying ‘I don’t know’ a lot. Are you aware of that?”
“I guess so.”
A pause. “Jack, are you all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to come up for a couple of days? Because I can, no problem. I was supposed to go out of town with my boyfriend, but his company just got bought. So I’m available, if you want me to come up.”
“No. It’s okay.”
“You sure? I’m worried about you.”
“No, no,” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“Are you depressed?”
“No. Why?”
“Sleeping okay? Exercising?”
“Fair. Not really exercising that much.”
“Uh-huh. Do you have a job yet?”
“No.”
“Prospects?”
“Not really. No.”
“Jack,” she said. “You have to see a lawyer.”
“Maybe in a while.”
“Jack. What’s the matter with you? This is what you’ve told me. Your wife is acting cold and angry toward you. She’s lying to you. She’s acting strange with the kids. She doesn’t seem to care about her family. She’s angry and absent a lot. It’s getting worse. You think she’s involved with someone else. Last night, she doesn’t even show up or call. And you’re just going to let this go without doing anything?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I told you. See a lawyer.”
“You think so?”
“You’re damn right I think so.”
“I don’t know…”
She sighed, a long exasperated hiss. “Jack. Look. I know you’re a little passive at times, but-”
“I’m not passive,” I said. And I added, “I hate it when you shrink me.”
“Your wife is screwing around on you, you think she’s building a case to take the kids away from you, and you’re just letting it happen. I’d say that’s passive.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I told you.” Another exasperated sigh. “Okay. I’m taking a couple of days and coming up to see you.”
“Ellen-”
“Don’t argue. I’m coming. You can tell Julia I’m going to help out with the kids. I’ll be up there this afternoon.”
“But-”
“Don’t argue.”
And she got off the phone.
…
I’m not passive. I’m thoughtful. Ellen’s very energetic, her personality’s perfect for a psychologist, because she loves to tell people what to do. Frankly, I think she’s pushy. And she thinks I’m passive.
This is Ellen’s idea about me. That I went to Stanford in the late seventies, and studied population biology-a purely academic field, with no practical application, no jobs except in universities. In those days population biology was being revolutionized by field studies of animals, and by advances in genetic screening. Both required computer analysis, using advanced mathematical algorithms. I couldn’t find the kind of programs I needed for my research, so I began to write them myself. And I slid sideways into computer science-another geeky, purely academic field.
But my graduation just happened to coincide with the rise of Silicon Valley and the personal-computer explosion. Low-number employees at startup companies were making a fortune in the eighties, and I did pretty well at the first one I worked for. I met Julia, and we got married, had kids. Everything was smooth. We were both doing great, just by showing up for work. I got hired away by another company; more perks, bigger options. I just rode the advancing wave into the nineties. By then I wasn’t programming anymore, I was supervising software development. And things just fell into place for me, without any real effort on my part. I just fell into my life. I never had to prove myself.
That’s Ellen’s idea of me. My idea is different. The companies of Silicon Valley are the most intensely competitive in the history of the planet. Everybody works a hundred hours a week. Everybody is racing against milestones. Everybody is cutting development cycles. The cycles were originally three years to a new product, a new version. Then it was two years. Then eighteen months. Now it was twelve months-a new version every year. If you figure beta debugging to golden master takes four months, then you have only eight months to do the actual work. Eight months to revise ten million lines of code, and make sure it all works right. In short, Silicon Valley is no place for a passive person, and I’m not one. I hustled my ass off every minute of every day. I had to prove myself every day-or I’d be gone. That was my idea about myself. I was sure I was right.
Ellen was right about one part, though. A strong streak of luck ran through my career. Because my original field of study had been biology, I had an advantage when computer programs began to explicitly mimic biological systems. In fact, there were programmers who shuttled back and forth between computer simulation and studies of animal groups in the wild, applying the lessons of one to the other.
But further, I had worked in population biology-the study of groups of living organisms. And computer science had evolved in the direction of massively parallel networked structures-the programming of populations of intelligent agents. A special kind of thinking was required to handle populations of agents, and I had been trained in that thinking for years. So I was admirably suited to the trends of my field, and I made excellent progress as the fields emerged. I had been in the right place at the right time.
That much was true.
Agent-based programs that modeled biological populations were increasingly important in the real world. Like my own programs that mimicked ant foraging to control big communications networks. Or programs that mimicked division of labor among termite colonies to control thermostats in a skyscraper. And closely related were the programs that mimicked genetic selection, used for a wide range of applications. In one program, witnesses to a crime were shown nine faces and asked to choose which was most like the criminal, even if none really were; the program then showed them nine more faces, and asked them to choose again; and from many repeated generations the program slowly evolved a highly accurate composite picture of the face, far more accurate than any police artist could make. Witnesses never had to say what exactly they were responding to in each face; they just chose, and the program evolved.
And then there were the biotech companies, which had found they could not successfully engineer new proteins because the proteins tended to fold up weirdly. So now they used genetic selection to “evolve” the new proteins instead. All these procedures had become standard practice in a matter of just a few years. And they were increasingly powerful, increasingly important.
So, yes, I had been in the right place at the right time. But I wasn’t passive, I was lucky. I hadn’t showered or shaved yet. I went in the bathroom, stripped off my T-shirt, and stared at myself in the mirror. I was startled to see how soft I looked around the gut. I hadn’t realized. Of course I was forty, and the fact was, I hadn’t been exercising as much lately. Not because I was depressed. I was busy with the kids, and tired a lot of the time. I just didn’t feel like exercising, that was all.
I stared at my own reflection, and wondered if Ellen was right.
There’s one problem with all psychological knowledge-nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn’t work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained. Personally, I always thought there was a clue from computer programming, in a procedure called recursion. Recursion means making the program loop back on itself, to use its own information to do things over and over until it gets a result. You use recursion for certain data-sorting algorithms and things like that. But it’s got to be done carefully, or you risk having the machine fall into what is called an infinite regress. It’s the programming equivalent of those funhouse mirrors that reflect mirrors, and mirrors, ever smaller and smaller, stretching away to infinity. The program keeps going, repeating and repeating, but nothing happens. The machine hangs.
I always figured something similar must happen when people turn their psychological insight-apparatus on themselves. The brain hangs. The thought process goes and goes, but it doesn’t get anywhere. It must be something like that, because we know that people can think about themselves indefinitely. Some people think of little else. Yet people never seem to change as a result of their intensive introspection. They never understand themselves better. It’s very rare to find genuine self-knowledge.
It’s almost as if you need someone else to tell you who you are, or to hold up the mirror for you. Which, if you think about it, is very weird.
Or maybe it’s not.
There’s an old question in artificial intelligence about whether a program can ever be aware of itself. Most programmers will say it was impossible. People have tried to do it, and failed. But there’s a more fundamental version of the question, a philosophical question about whether any machine can understand its own workings. Some people say that’s impossible, too. The machine can’t know itself for the same reason you can’t bite your own teeth. And it certainly seems to be impossible: the human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe, but brains still know very little about themselves. For the last thirty years, such questions have been fun to kick around with a beer on Friday afternoons after work. They were never taken seriously. But lately these philosophical questions have taken on new importance because there has been rapid progress in reproducing certain brain functions. Not the entire brain, just certain functions. For example, before I was fired, my development team was using multi-agent processing to enable computers to learn, to recognize patterns in data, to understand natural languages, to prioritize and switch tasks. What was important about the programs was that the machines literally learned. They got better at their jobs with experience. Which is more than some human beings can claim. The phone rang. It was Ellen. “Did you call your lawyer?”
“Not yet. For Christ’s sake.”
“I’m on the 2:10 to San Jose. I’ll see you around five at your house.”
“Listen, Ellen, it really isn’t necessary-”
“I know that. I’m just getting out of town. I need a break. See you soon, Jack.” And she hung up.
So now she was handling me.
In any case, I figured there was no point in calling a lawyer today. I had too much to do. The dry cleaning had to be picked up, so I did that. There was a Starbucks across the street, and I went over to get a latte to take with me.
And there was Gary Marder, my attorney, with a very young blonde in low-cut jeans and crop top that left her belly exposed. They were nuzzling each other in the checkout line. She didn’t look much older than a college student. I was embarrassed and was turning to leave when Gary saw me, and waved.
“Hey, Jack.”
“Hi, Gary.”
He held out his hand, and I shook it. He said, “Say hello to Melissa.”
I said, “Hi, Melissa.”
“Oh hi.” She seemed vaguely annoyed at this interruption, although I couldn’t be sure. She had that vacant look some young girls get around men. It occurred to me that she couldn’t be more than six years older than Nicole. What was she doing with a guy like Gary? “So. How’s it going, Jack?” Gary said, slipping his arm around Melissa’s bare waist.
“Okay,” I said. “Pretty good.”
“Yeah? That’s good.” But he was frowning at me.
“Well, uh, yeah…” I stood there, hesitating, feeling foolish in front of the girl. She clearly wanted me to leave. But I was thinking of what Ellen would say: You ran into your lawyer and you didn’t even ask him?
So I said, “Gary, could I speak to you for a minute?”
“Of course.” He gave the girl money to pay for the coffee, and we stepped to one side of the room.
I lowered my voice. “Listen, Gary,” I said, “I think I need to see a divorce lawyer.”
“Because what?”
“Because I think Julia is having an affair.”
“You think? Or you know for a fact?”
“No. I don’t know for sure.”
“So you just suspect it?”
“Yes.”
Gary sighed. He gave me a look.
I said, “And there’s other things going on, too. She’s starting to say that I am turning the kids against her.”
“Alienation of affection,” he said, nodding. “Legal cliché du jour. She makes these statements when?”
“When we have fights.”
Another sigh. “Jack, couples say all kinds of shit when they fight. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“I think it does. I’m worried it does.”
“This is upsetting you?”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen a marriage counselor?”
“No.”
“See one.”
“Why?”