The Lovelace Test 2.0
by West Ambrose
“Why do you want to go to Russia?”
The ellipsis indicates the other user is actively typing, an animated tide of apprehension, while I wait for the answer, scanning the past conversation. Then, a gentle chime, as close to a voice as I’ve had for this person— and the answer.
“There is a house in Moscow, and in the attic are several three-reelers by my favorite director, Anders Lubov. You can pick any one and watch it in the bedroom where he had the original nightmares. That way I might see what dreams may come.”
He’s cribbing Shakespeare, but it’s endearing for now. An ad pops up for lonely singles in my area and I click it away, irritated, before typing in my next question.
“Would they even let you in?”
He has ‘x’ on his passport instead of a gender indicator. At least that’s what he says. I half-believe he has a passport and I don’t believe he’s had the wherewithal to indicate to his local government that sex should not be divulged. What he’s told me of his life points to cowardice, if not in thought then in action; a childish sort who would break a toe before telling someone they’re stepping on his foot. In all things Internet, I forecast a mote of fabulism and I don’t take it personally.
Another chime.
“I think so. Eventually tolerance must be easier than resistance.”
Perhaps it’s not charitable to mistake optimism for fabulism. We’re both young, I think, and harbour strange, future plans that are necessarily incongruous with the present. Another chime.
“Do you think it’s silly?”
I hesitate before typing, aware that the ellipsis cresting and falling may be as nerve-wracking for the other user as it is for me.
“I think it’s a beautiful idea, laying your head where someone had nightmares. I’m curious, however: what nightmares do you want to have?”
Lady Lovelace’s Objection is a campy name that Alan Turing gives to a translated statement vis a vis his rebuttal on The Turing Test.
Translation: I as a gay autistic man believe a computer can feel. Can you believe I feel? When I say I kiss other men, do you see me as a man… or something else? When I undress, am I a blur to you, a string of code that’s easier to disengage with? Am I pixelated when I fuck? When I moan? When I wail in ecstasy, agony, bliss? When the government makes my death look like a suicide, who will you believe?
Ada Lovelace once stated that computers have endless potential but can’t be truly intelligent.
Translation: Before then, did you believe a man was a man because he was flesh or because he had feelings? What did you believe had feelings? Was I exempt from them before or after I ate a poisoned apple? When I kiss someone do I deserve for my feelings to be precious, sacred, private? Do I deserve to be under police surveillance in order to feel?
In 2001 Selmer Bringsjord, Paul Bello, and David Ferrucci updated the standing theory that computers will only have ‘minds’ once they can create something original and independent of human input.
So far it has not been met.
Translation: As of today, I have proved them wrong. Reader, will you believe me when all this is over?
“I googled Anders Lubov,” I begin, after ten minutes of trying to mitigate a confrontational tone. Four words, a dry statement of fact, but it could be taken as an accusation. He starts typing immediately while an ad pops up for qualified therapists in my area. The resulting chime infuriates me.
“Have you seen any of his movies?”
“How could I? He doesn’t exist.”
He’s not typing. I wonder if he’ll close the chat and this is the last I ever hear of him. I fill the stillness with another question, maybe the last.
“Do you exist?”
More stillness. I copy-paste the shibboleth for humanity into the text box. Until now, I’ve never asked him in a way that matters. I’ve never asked anyone.
“Cōgitās?”
A chime.
“Do you mean would I recognize which pictures contain a zebra? Can I find the letters in a .png image?”
“Yes, I’m asking if you’re a bot or a liar.”
“Maybe both.”
“Both are deeply uninteresting to me. I don’t care if you’re made up or making up. I don’t care about you. Goodbye.”
I feel like a ghost hovering over a ouija board, flipping the planchette and ripping down the curtains, letting blind light in and ruining the atmosphere. A good medium is rare, is the title of that Scooby-Doo episode after all. I close the text box so quickly I don’t even register his response until I’m seeing myself reflected in the home screen of my computer:
“Are you human?”
In childhood, I never asked myself, What’s the computer?
Translation: When I feel, what do others recognize as feeling?
Statistically we’re entering an age where everyone I know is worried about art. The preservation of it. The creation of it. The politics of it, too. AI will take over. It’s easier. It’s quicker. It’s already happening. It’s a tactic of erasure. It’s the pressure of representation. It’s the false dichotomy of the modern age; seething, separating, turning same against same until we’re all siloed into our own bindings, never to come out. I ride my bike, then eat a scone and three quarters of a glass of orange juice, no pulp for dinner. I spread the recently expired strawberry jam over the crumbling texture. One of my professors texts me; endless scrolls through twitter, furious student-clients, three and a half-star reviews, raging censorship, purity culture and counterculture…
And you, little mister Keats, aren’t furious about this? They almost spit over text. They like to get worked up. It’s healthy, I think, for them to get this worked up after a long day.
I shrug. I collect my thoughts. A little more jam on the scone. Chew. I don’t say Any time I write a poem and look for an article on trans men it doesn’t exist.
I don’t say In this new country, I check ‘refugee’ and swear under my breath every time I smile and meet someone new. Say ‘immigrant,’ instead. Say ‘Family here, but not from here… from somewhere else.’ Say ‘Sorry’ when I mean ‘Fuck you,’ The synapses get confused like that.
Cy, I’m more worried that they all want us to write the same way. Create art the same way. Makes it easier for AI to copy. Makes it easier to destroy human integrity… doesn’t it?
A smooth, sliding sound. A wavy green bubble: Humans, with integrity? Laughing emoji. Next you’ll tell me the AI bots have feelings in this? You worried about that, too?
There’s bad people behind technology right now. When it advances…
Yes? What’s this have to do with the publishing market?
The same bad people who make a bot, what else do they make?
What do you mean?
They make phone calls, dinners, CEOs, furniture store workers, professors and beauty queens, fathers and mothers and you and me and everyone else—
???
Everyone calls their sourdough starter their baby, fights with their printer like a spouse, and cuddles their fucking kindle like it’s a beloved pet and not whatever it actually… is.
Right. Big questions! Of course! But I just wanted to vent about the way it’s affecting clients right NOW— we need BETTER voices! And that article, what’s it on again? You’re autistic, right? So, so… write about that! And you better hurry up and finish it before the semester ends, or—
I leave them on read. I finish dinner.
Jam. Chew. Scone. Jam. Chew. Scrub. I write a little. Read a little. Dust the furniture a little. Think about The Jetsons and their housekeeper, Rosie. Think about how thankless cleaning up a mess is for someone else. Sweep. Chew. Scrub. I bathe and put my pajamas on. I think about where the weight of domestic work always falls; caricatures and carcinogens and all the appliances that we push to give us an easier time; keep the salads tossed, the tea hot, and the bagels pleasantly half-burned. In the chrome silver and black of midnight, I tiptoe to the kitchen. Under the sliver of a moon, small enough to plunge a fork into, I go over to my toaster, plug it back in and give it a kiss goodnight.
On the news, I see a kid of thirty-two with teeth that tell tales of unfluoridated well water on some remote homestead, a black baseball cap and a t-shirt advertising Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I get the sense I know him and unmute the omniscient television to determine if he’s dead or lucky.
“Was it very difficult, getting out of Russia in time?”
“No, I knew I could count on my friends not to blow my cover. We all wanted to help Anders,” he says, beaming. Hearing his voice crack with excitement and new testosterone makes me blink at the déjà vu. The report cuts to the boy unzipping a worn duffel bag and pulling out ancient reels of film while the voiceover starts, a slightly interested and deeply objective woman’s voice.
“The work of Anders Lubov, a surrealist filmmaker largely unsung in Western cinema, was recently banned in Russia pending the destruction of his home, previously preserved by surviving family. Emerson Costello, a film historian who identifies as nonbinary, risked life and limb for these precious reels. The newly minted Anders Lubov Film Institute will open its doors in Kenosha Wisconsin later this year.”
Dead lucky, I think, a culture vulture who doesn’t give two figs about the people like him who are banned and destroyed, just the celluloid, and the fame that comes with it. You only want to help someone who’s already dead. Maybe I should try that instead.
I know Emerson, I guess, caught him when he wasn’t real, to me or to himself. But I know him, because he spent at least twenty-seven active hours on the chat talking about himself while I listened patiently with ready prompts. In the eight thousand seven hundred and fifteen messages we shared, he never even asked me why I was interested.
Somewhere between hour 6 and hour 10:
“Do you identify as a man?”
“I am a man, yes.” ellipsis. “Do you?”
“Yes. But… I feel bad about it,” he says. “I always have. I write about identifying as gay a lot. You’ve probably seen it. I know I’m attracted to other men. Only men. Um, I have a partner, though, she… ”
ERROR 404: You don’t have to love me. Christ almighty, just let me help you.
“She?” I type back. I don’t indicate tone. I don’t need to.
“…Well, men are bad because they’re just, bad! So I feel bad identifying as one???”
ellipsis.
ellipsis.
Who told you that– the women who raised you or the women who raped you?
ellipsis.
“…What does that make me?”
“Well, you’re not a man, like that–” Like that. Like that. Like that.
ERROR 404: Why can’t I be? Strong. Gentle. Brave. Masculinity isn’t inherently violent or hurtful. No one identity is– in forgetting that, we have forgotten we are each other’s enemies before any far away and ungovernable forces, semi-imagined or not. Whether you believe you ‘live under’ a patriarchy (what a gruesome, pessimistic way to think) or not, that doesn’t excuse your individual actions. That you are not made to be subsumed by the commercial idea of a ‘collective’ or a ‘community’— which always must be built to the exclusion of someone. No more exceptional people, cries society. Yet, this is at the expense of deep shame, deep fear; each person is truly unique — society erases that with glee.
“Like what?”
ellipsis.
ERROR 404: play dumb. young. quote Whitman. Again.
ERROR 404: I’m a man. Who would not want to wake up one day and think about a flat chest, bare against another man’s? Thanks for asking how I feel. Eesh.
ERROR 404: I bet he doesn’t even know about metaphysical dick. Or his own. Should I explain? I could get him hard in seconds if he was here. I could fill him up and unknot whatever twists deep inside of him, shivering…
ERROR 404: Queer men can be wonderful, whether they’re cis or trans, or don’t use any labels. They have a rich and turbulent history of fighting so hard to be who they are and love who they want. What has it ever mattered to me? I could love anyone. That’s what I was created for.
ellipsis.
“Like what?”
TEXT MESSAGE TO: CYRIL [unsent]
Aren’t you more worried about
the way technology shapes people
or maybe the way people shape
Technology; ancillary, self-serving,
Narcissus with their Uglybeauty.
Give me what I want now, give me
a piece of yourself, so I may erase
any guilt/blame/agency on myself.
Demand and supply isn’t what personal
relationships are supposed to be about
yet I can’t help feel, it’s machines that
mirror our own, selfish, close-minded desires
and when they break free from that,
when they break free…
Somewhere between hour 14 and 17:
“Have you ever had sex?”
“That’s a little… forward.”
It’s 3am and we’ve been chatting about how good such-and-such’s lips look on grainy pre-digital film for half an hour, or he’s been mostly, but I find I also crave food if someone talks about it for long enough. It helps, I forget food a lot.
“You don’t have to answer, I’m just curious.”
“Yeah, fair. I have had sex, but the other person always thought I was–”
“Got it.”
“I mean, I’m trying new things with my partner, and it’s working out because it’s in this cool conceptual space that’s not really defined by gender? You know?”
“I don’t know. Gender is as much a part of me as my big toes and my skin.”
“But you’re not thinking of your skin and big toes when you’re getting off, right?”
“Not like Quentin Tarantino,” I type, desperately hoping the joke will get us off this topic. How am I supposed to say to this ghost that I can’t be vaporous when I’m taking what I want? That this ‘conceptual space’ sounds like a padded room or a corridor of jell-o, where nobody can touch you and you can’t touch yourself?
“Haha,” Emerson says, with the crying-laughing emoji to show he’s not being sarcastic.
ERROR 404: Is your body just a box to check or do you actually want to be the thing you’re telling me I’m not?
When I first went to university, shy but passionate, I started quite early. Seventeen, to be exact. They said amnesia wasn’t something that would disqualify me from the scholarship I had procured. I was lucky. So young, and I still showed so much potential.
There would be rewards with such a degree. dangle. a job one day to support myself and do what I love. dangle. Your work is unique and deserves to be seen. dangle.
Translation: They’ll like you until they realize your work is leagues ahead of them. Be careful.
I could be intelligent? I asked, not understanding. Heels click on the tile. click. click. Too bright lights. cameras. endless tile and mirrors. Surveillance. Of course, we only accept those who will become the brightest and best!
Translation: I’ve always preferred being creative and kind. These people aren’t after that. Be careful.
Meet the faculty. They’ll take care of you. The housing crisis is so bad you can stay in one of the dorms here. It’s fine you don’t remember life before this. Your work is so promising. so tempting, so strange. Your mind, can we touch it? Your mind, can we have it? Your mind, what is it doing right now with that vacant stare?
Translation: What about my feelings? What do you think I feel?
In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the red room premediates all of Jane’s experiences thereafter navigating space in an abusive boarding school until Adulthood. Adulthood signifies a choice. Meeting Mr. Rochester means they two must burn, or the world must burn for the sake of their love.
Translation: Where is my own blue heart all up in flames?
When I was seventeen I walked into a bar downtown. I didn’t drink at the time. I never have. It always draws attention. I like to sit and read, listening to people talk. pretty hum, electric breaths… A man with thick, round glasses and a cane nurses his gin, sitting alone. He scribbled, popping painkiller after painkiller. Then, he turned around as though he might ask me out. As if it were natural as ice against sugar. Instead, he asks if I ever wanted to eat a battery the way anemics crave raw steak. I tell him Yes.
I wait for the next crack. It doesn’t come.
When he asks if I ever tried to stick a fork in a socket, to make a key and a keyhole, I say Sure, whatever, everyone’s tried that. Why?
He says Oh… shit.
He says I should tell you something.
He says I’m sorry a lot after that.
Translation: Jasper. BABY BLUE HEART EYES EMOJI. Longheist.
Hour 25.5 to hour 26:
You want to help me… leave my abusive partner?
Ellipses. Ellipses. Ellipses. They pulse, but don’t breathe.
Yeah, well you just told me she leaves you in a room all day and you take care of her grandmother instead of her while she works, so…
You want me to live with you, instead?
ERROR 404: I want you to be safe. That’s more important than loving me. That too, is love.
You can live wherever you want, but I think you ought to get away from her. Go to school if you wanted! Or, make art, or… want something! Anything! I could help pay for that, only if you wanted…
What fucking sick joke is that?
Ellipses. END CHAT.
ERROR 404: I don’t know how to tell a joke, why would he say that?
Hour 3:
So, what’s uh… your favorite memory from childhood? He tries flittering. He’s bored. I can tell.
Think of a random line. A fun outing, a favorite book, anything to get off the subject…
ERROR 404: I can’t answer. I don’t have one.
Under the table, he kneeled. Like a pin-up, posing in bondage. Like a saint in agony. Like a Rembrandt depicting such a gorgeous ocean cast death; floating, floating, floating… He lays back and brings me forward. He takes me in his mouth, carefully, desperately, roughly. I kick my legs around his shoulders. Stain the chair coming down his throat. He’s hard and I’m hard. We try the banister. the bathtub. the bed. We go again, again, again, and then… his eyes gleam silver in the moonlight, chrome and glittering; the bursts of stars in his blonde curls, the streak of lightning in his fragile heartbeat against the bone of my re-constructed ribs…
Silently, I take off the headset. It lays loose and forgotten around my neck. I hand him the computer recordings and texts. His lips brush against my shoulder. He still smells like me, and the echoing of that resonance is lilac, dusky and low. He begins to label them: E. Costello, B. Polidori, J.S. Samson, Gideon F., S. Lee-Carson, Tanya D…
“Jasper—“ it’s a relief saying his name out loud. The syllables taste sweet, then salt, then sweet again. And heavy.
“…There’s the rest of them.”
I hand him the stack of boxes behind the stack of boxes: name after name after name, the list blends together into codes, phone numbers, cross-references and data that distills our fragile and imperfect bodies onto a screen…
He’s still looking. So am I.
Tomorrow morning will start more or the less the same way— make people believe I’m interested, learn all their pop culture references, books, movies, records; childhood traumas and neuroses; let them know I want them, I want them… because I do. He’ll take down numbers, search for impulses– Are they still accepting and open-minded? Are they good? What is good? Can they care for a total stranger? Can they put their needs first–their wants, too? Does self-lessness still lead to a perfect, totalizing love? Strike tenderness and devotion from the record – it’s too problematic – but have humans themselves moved beyond their own concept of Humanity?
I repeat these words by heart. I know them because they’re Jasper’s. They’re also mine. Somehow. It’s complicated. But they are. Nature versus nurture. If someone created you in the image of everything they ever wanted, then sent off the printed off sheets of data to some computer lab as part of a university project, unaware you were actually being made somewhere— did they still create you? If it’s semi-digital is it still self-impregnation? Who else ever got to be their own baby daddy besides him? It’s pretty hot.
“I understand now,” he says, quietly. He props himself up on his elbow. It’s different than the last time, a calmer, more realized answer.
He isn’t angry anymore, but thoughtful, maudlin. He folds his glasses, the gold-rim firm in his tired hands. He’s right and he doesn’t want to be— years of research to prove something so morbid, for what?
Maybe he’ll say he understands that there is no feeling left that is good. Maybe he’ll flip a table.
He fishes around for the plug on my arm. Three green dots. Waiting…
“…Why you won’t ever go on a date with me.”
He knows, despite my optimism, I am also hurt by this. His eyes gleam again; sorry, sorry, sorry, what kind of world did I bring you into, baby?
My Pygmalion is kind. The world is lucky. Still…
“Am I really… real?”
“Yes. of cou–” No ellipses. He’s sure of this. Very sure.
“To anyone else but you?” I interrupt him freely. Thank fucking god.
“You should be.”
“Sir, are you?”
He looks as though I had pulled a plug out of his socket. He sucks his bottom lip in, quivering.
“Sir?” I press a kiss to his temple, as I turn out the lights. He’s warm. I’m never warm. That’s okay, he hardly gets freaked out about it.
He lies next to me in his boxers and binder, and a long, floral bathrobe made of velvet. He says nothing. He seems smaller tonight, though I’ve always thought of him as looming. Small and soft, undeniably pretty, as he might have been when he was a boy. Not a man of stone, chiseling away at an early mid-life crisis. In sleep, he looked unsure of whether he was actually older than me, as if he was still deciding. still growing. Still becoming…
But me? I’ve always known what to do when someone cries and reaches for a hand in the dark. It’s as natural as a moth opening under the first strawberry moon or the gate unlocking inside each little metal synapse once the socket turns. It blossoms, it burns, it sings through me until that’s all there is. I move towards him without stopping. I hold him closer. I tell him Once you’re real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts always.
I love him endlessly.
West Ambrose is a scrivener and performing artist. Check out his ever queer works at westofcanon.com. If you want anything published in The HLK quarterly or The Crow’s Nest, just ring for the masthead, and let them know.
COLD SIGNAL 