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  “—and he does scream, occasionally,” Melanie explained. Her advisor and a few other grad students were at the presentation, in the front rows, but as these presentations were theoretically open to the public, the Lovecraftians had come out in force, squeezing themselves into the tiny desk-chairs. They looked a lot like grad students themselves, but even paler and more poorly dressed in ill-fitting T-shirts and unusual garments—one even wore a fedora—plus they kept interrupting.

  “Can we hear it talk?” one asked, and then he raised his hand, as if remembering that he had to. “Ask it questions?”

  “Please, leave all questions—for us—until after the presentation. We’re not going to expose the AI to haphazard stimuli during this presentation,” Chakravarty said.

  “He’s . . . fairly calm so far,” Melanie said. “Which is to be expected. We know a lot about Lovecraft. He recorded almost everything he did or thought in his letters, after all, and we have nearly all of them. What ice cream he liked, how it felt to catch the last train out of South Station, how he saw the colors scarlet and purple when he thought the word evil. He was fairly phlegmatic, for all the crazy prose and ideas, so he’s okay.”

  “How do we know that this is really an artificial intelligence, and not just a bunch of programmed responses?” This one, huge and bearded, wore a fedora.

  Chakravarty opened his mouth to speak, his face hard, but Melanie answered with an upturned palm. “It’s fine,” she said to him. “Most of these talks are total snoozers. Nobody ever has any questions.” Then, to the audience: “I’d argue that we can’t know it’s a bunch of programmed responses, except that we didn’t program all the responses we’ve seen so far. Of course, I don’t know that you, sir,” she said, pointing to the Lovecraftian, “aren’t also just a bunch of programmed responses that are just the physical manifestation of the reactions going on in the bag of chemicals you keep in your skull.”

  “I don’t feel like I am!”

  “Do you believe everything you feel; do you not believe in anything you haven’t?”

  “No, and no true Lovecraftian would,” he said.

  “Right. So you don’t believe in the female orgasm,” Melanie said. The room erupted in hoots and applause. Then Chakravarty got up, shouted that everyone who didn’t understand what’s going on should just go home, Google “Chinese room,” and stop asking stupid questions. “Ooh, Chinese—Lovecraft wouldn’t like that room,” someone said. Then the classroom was quiet again.

  “Uh, thanks for that, Chakravarty,” Melanie said. She adjusted her watch, thick and blocky on her wrist. “I’ve been walking around the city with him. He likes Boston and Cambridge, it helped ease him into his, uh, existence. And he knew things, how roads crossed and bits of history, that I didn’t know, that we didn’t program into him. But we did program a lot into him. Everything we had access to, both locally and up at Brown.” Behind her, a ghostly image of the author, chin like a bucket, eyes wide and a bit wild, flickered into existence. He sat in an overstuffed chair in the swirling null-space of a factory-present screensaver image.

  “Well, if there are no more questions”—Melanie glanced about the classroom and there were no questions, just some leftover giggles—“why don’t we have him say hello?”

  The room went silent. “And none of that ftang ftang stuff,” Melanie added. Somebody giggled, high-pitched like a fife.

  Chakravarty leaned down into a microphone that snaked out from the laptop. “Lovecraft, can you hear me? Can you see us? Many people here have read your stories.”

  The image blinked. “Hello,” it said, its voice tinny and distant.

  “How are you?” Chakravarty asked. A simple question, one with only a couple of socially acceptable answers. A kid could program the word “Fine,” into an AIM buddy chat.

  “I do not quite know,” Lovecraft said. “I . . .” he trailed off, then looked out into the room, as if peering into the distance. “Why have you people done this to me?”

  Chakravarty giggled, all nerves. Melanie opened her mouth, but was interrupted by one of the professors, who waved a gnarled hand. Chakravarty clicked off the mic. On the screen, Lovecraft started, as if he sensed something, and he began to peer into the distance, as if seeing past the other side of the screen upon which he was projected.

  “What sort of internal state does this AI supposedly have?” the professor asked.

  “Well, as one of the major problems with developing strong AI is embodiment—” Melanie stopped herself, and added for the fans and cops, “the idea that learning takes place because we have bodies and live in a social world . . . well, some of us do. Anyway, Lovecraft, in addition to having left behind enough personal correspondence to reconstruct much of his day-to-day life, was also rather repulsed by the body, by the idea of flesh. Many of his stories involve a brain trapped in a metal cylinder, or a consciousness stranded millions of years in the past. So we decided to tell him that we have a ghost. No body, no problem.”

  “Where’s he going?” asked the guy in the fedora.

  Chakravarty tapped on the keys of the laptop. Melanie wiggled the projector cable. The chair was empty. Lovecraft had gotten up and walked right off the edge of the screen.

  “A non-fat venti misto,” Chakravarty said. That was Melanie’s drink. She made eye contact.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “How’s life among the proletariat treating you?”

  “I’m a manager,” she said. “Watch this.” Off came her cap and apron—“Tyler, cover me.” She quickly made two drinks and walked around the counter. “See?”

  “Great,” Chakravarty said. “Anyway, I have the list.” From his messenger bag he dug out a binder the size of the local Yellow Pages. “Twice as many as last time.”

  “And still no idea where he could be?” Then, as Chakravarty pointed to the binder, Melanie interrupted herself, “I mean, where he is.”

  “Moore’s law, you know. The longer the AI is out in the wild, the more servers are actually capable of supporting it, plus it’s Alife. It’s been eighteen months, so we can say that the number of nodes capable of holding him has doubled. Plus, who knows what it looks like by now. I’ve been closely reading my spam—”

  “In that case, the misto is on the house.”

  “Heh,” said Chakravarty. “Anyway, a content analysis shows that a lot of the AI’s utterances and the correspondence documents have been popping up.”

  “All his fiction’s in the public domain. Of course it would appear in spam.”

  “You’re still doing that, you know—calling it he.”

  “And you’re still calling him it.”

  Chakravarty leaned forward, an old and happy argument spelling itself out in his posture. “And you wanted to develop an AI, an Alife, because you didn’t like animal testing and psych exams. But you got too close to the idea of your thesis project being real. Did it need memories of a love life to qualify as sufficiently embodied?”

  “Well, you don’t,” Melanie said, snippy. She pushed the book away. “Why didn’t you just email this to me? Hardcopy isn’t even searchable,” Melanie said. She quickly corrected herself: “Easily searchable.” She made a show of flipping through the pages.

  “Well, anyway,” Chakravarty said, but he didn’t have anything else to say except that he missed Melanie and wanted her to come back to the lab and that a wild AI was still worth a paper or three and how ridiculous it was to quit school, but he couldn’t make himself mention any of that. So he pushed the book across the table to Melanie. “If you want to follow up, go ahead. I have things to do.” He looked around the coffee shop, all dark tones and shelves. “So do you, I bet.”

  Melanie sipped her drink. “If only I did.”

  Melanie often dreamed of Chakravarty. Sometimes she found herself back in school, struggling with the final exam of a course she had forgotten to ever attend, only to be granted a reprieve and an automatic A when Chakravarty’s death was announced over the loudspeaker of what
was suddenly her fourth-grade classroom. The plastic desktop scraping against her knees felt thick and soft like a comforter, then she’d wake up. Or she dreamt of the bus ride to Providence, the grungy South Station and the long lines of kids in college sweatshirts. The mysterious letter that burned in her pocket. The house on Angell Street and Chakravarty’s body bubbling into a puddle of ichor and rotten-seeming fungi. Or she dreamt of the sort of day a coffee shop manager dreams about—a bit rainy, but warm inside, and the old smell of the bean surging back to the forefront like the first day of work. No lines, but enough customers to keep the store buzzing. And laptops. And then Lovecraft on all the screens. The image, black and white and shot through with static, like that old Super Bowl commercial, opens his mouth—its mouth—and screams that he has correlated all the contents of his own mind. And he is afraid.

  Melanie woke up one morning and remembered that Lovecraft had, on one occasion, a complete story seemingly delivered to him in a dream. Without the resources of the university, she’d never be able to find a wayward AI hiding somewhere in the black oceans of the net, but she knew she could find a frightened man. First, talk to his friends.

  The Lovecraftian cabal was easy enough to find. Melanie already had long experience with being the girl in the comic shop, the girl in the computer lab, the girl in the gaming store. Dove soap and magenta highlights always went a long way toward getting boys to speak to her. The anime club led to the science fiction specialty shop and then to the “goth” store and its plastic gargoyles and stringy-haired vampire cashier, which led, finally, to the soggy couch in the basement of the place that sold Magic cards and Pocky. They were there, and the dude in the fedora recognized her. Clearly the alpha of his pack, he swanned across the room, belly and the flapping lapels of his trenchcoat a step ahead the rest of him, and sat down next to Melanie.

  “I’m utterly horrid with names, but never forget a face,” he said. He had a smile. Decent teeth, Melanie noticed.

  “Melanie Deutsch. You came to my—”

  “Ah. Yes. Now I remember everything.”

  For a long moment neither of them said anything. A few feet away someone rolled a handful of die and yelped in glee.

  “I know why you’re here,” he said.

  Melanie shrugged. “Of course you do. Why else would I be here?”

  The man fell silent again, pursed his lips, and then tried again: “I would say that the AI is an it, not a he.”

  “Oh?” Melanie said.

  “It can’t write. Not creatively anyway.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t feel the need to write—I mean, it’s a goal-oriented behavior and he thinks he’s a ghost.”

  “Pffft,” the fedora man said. “He knew he wasn’t a ghost; he doesn’t believe in them. Lovecraft was a pretty bright guy, a genius by some measures. The program realized its own—” he waved his hands in front of Melanie’s face, too close—“programmitude right off.”

  “And it was his idea to escape, maybe hitching a ride on your iPhone?”

  “No. We didn’t find the AI till a few months ago. It sought us out, after finding the online fanzine archive, and our club’s server,” he said. “We even tried to make a copy of it, but the DRM was too—”

  “That’s not DRM,” Melanie said. “He wouldn’t let you. It’s human rights management—”

  The fedora man snorted again. Melanie realized that she didn’t know his name, and that she wasn’t going to ask for it.

  “Say . . . do you want to talk to it?” Fedora asked. He dug into his coat pockets and pulled out a PDA. “This thing has a little cam, so it can respond to you . . .” he muttered. Melanie held out a hand, but Fedora just held the device up to her face. “No touchie.”

  Melanie uttered an arbitrary phoneme. Not quite a huh.

  The Lovecraft AI appeared on the tiny screen. He’d . . . changed. Uglier now, jaw hyperinflated, but the rest of his head narrow and his nose flat against his face. Eyes like boiled eggs, hair all but gone. Horrid, but somehow alive. “Hello, ma’am,” he said.

  “How are you?” Melanie found herself saying. She was as programmed as anyone else. That realization burst out of her, all sweat.

  “Why did you tell me,” the AI asked, “how exactly I died? How could anyone be expected to . . . persist, knowing that? A universe of blasphemous horrors—finger puppets worn by a literary hand. I always knew that my life meant nothing, that all human life means nothing, but to experience it, to be in the void, like a doll cut out of paper only able to think enough just to fear, I—I just wanted to go home, but found myself . . . nowhere. And everywhere.” The fedora man’s meaty hand clamped over the PDA, so Lovecraft’s screams were muffled.

  Melanie reached into her backpack—Emily the Strange, smelled like coffee—and got her phone. It was a very nice phone.

  “Not it, he,” she said. “He wants to go back to when he wasn’t afraid.”

  Fedora glanced down at the phone. “Oh, so you can make a copy?”

  “Don’t talk like he isn’t here,” Melanie said. “And I’m certainly not going to leave him with you.”

  “Well, have you ever considered that maybe it . . . uh, he, wants to stay?”

  Melanie gave the basement the once over. “No,” she said. “Plus, it . . . or he?”

  “You know what I—”

  “If it’s an it, you’re in possession of stolen goods.”

  “Fine. He. He came to this place! He came to me, he—”

  “If Lovecraft is a he, well, God knows what that’ll mean. Kidnapping, maybe. Is he competent to make his own decisions? Does he have a Social Security number? Do you want the feds going through your systems and digging up all your hentai and stolen music to find out?”

  Fedora raised his PDA over his head. “No, no. You’re just—”

  “And then there are the patents we filed. We trademarked the look and feel of his chair, too. But you can turn him over to me instead of to the district attorney.” She smirked at Fedora, but then tilted her head to speak to the AI. “Not among people, but among scenes,” she said, almost as if asking a question. A muffled yawp came from the PDA.

  Melanie, on wind-swept Benefit Street, venti misto in one hand, Lovecraft in the other. Lovecraft says that he is Providence. That’s programmed. Melanie smiles and sometimes he smiles back. That’s not.

  ____________________

  I’ve been writing Lovecraftian fiction since near the beginning of my career. My first novel, Move Under Ground, was inspired by noticing that both Lovecraft and Kerouac had a cult of readers sufficiently large to support the publication of their correspondence. Lovecraft was a far more prolific writer of letters than he was of fiction, and his letters are often more entertaining than his stories.

  “Walking with a Ghost” is one of two stories in this volume about collecting correspondence to create a personality-emulator. I’m not sure why I’m so interested in this concept, but I think my history as a blogger has something to do with it. When I first began blogging, I decided that I’d record every experience I had as I remembered it, which led to massive problems keeping friends who didn’t like the way they were depicted, and didn’t share my memories of our conversations and activities. “Same to you, buddy!” is all one can say to that, but you don’t get to have many buddies afterwards. So I made my blog more of a professional one, and much less a public diary.

  Lovecraft also appears in fiction as a character very often, thanks to his correspondence. We know a lot about him and his daily routines, his execrable politics and racial attitudes, his aesthetics, and his humor. Given nerdy love of both all things tentacular and for completism, if we ever get to create personality emulators, Lovecraft is going to be one of the first people an ambitious graduate student will re-create. It may even be a good thing, so long as we don’t let him blog about contemporary social issues.

  ARBEITSKRAFT

  1. The Transformation Problem

  IN GLANCING OVER MY CORRESPONDENCE with H
err Marx, especially the letters written during the period in which he struggled to complete his opus, Capital, even whilst I was remanded to the Victoria Mill of Ermen and Engels in Weaste to simultaneously betray the class I was born into and the class to which I’d dedicated my life, I was struck again by the sheer audacity of my plan. I’ve moved beyond political organizing or even investigations of natural philosophy and have used my family’s money and the labour of my workers—even now, after a lifetime of railing against the bourgeoisie, their peculiar logic limns my language—to encode my old friend’s thoughts in a way I hope will prove fruitful for the struggles to come.

  I am a fox, ever hunted by agents of the state, but also by political rivals and even the occasional enthusiastic student intellectual manqué. For two weeks, I have been making a very public display of destroying my friend’s voluminous correspondence. The girls come in each day and carry letters and covers both in their aprons to the roof of the mill to burn them in a soot-stained metal drum. It’s a bit of a spectacle, especially as the girls wear cowls to avoid smoke inhalation and have rather pronounced limps as they walk the bulk of letters along the roof, but we are ever attracted to spectacle, aren’t we? The strings of electrical lights in the petit-bourgeois districts that twinkle all night, the iridescent skins of the dirigibles that litter the skies over The City like peculiar flying fish leaping from the ocean—they even appear overhead here in Manchester, much to the shock, and more recently, glee of the street urchins who shout and yawp whenever one passes under the clouds, and the only slightly more composed women on their way to squalid Deansgate market. A fortnight ago I took in a theatrical production, a local production of Mr. Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, already a hoary old play given new life and revived, ironically enough, by recent innovations in electrified machine-works. How bright the lights, how stunning the arc of actual lightning, tamed and obedient, how thunderous the ovations and the crumbling of the glacial cliffs! All the bombast of German opera in a space no larger than a middle-class parlour. And yet, throughout the entire evening, the great and hulking monster never spoke. Contra Madame Shelley’s engaging novel, the “new Adam” never learns of philosophy, and the total of her excellent speeches of critique against the social institutions of her, and our, day are expurgated. Instead, the monster is ever an infant, given only to explosions of rage. Yet the audience, which contained a fair number of working-men who had managed to save or secure 5d. for “penny-stinker” seating, were enthralled. The play’s Christian morality, alien to the original novel, was spelled out as if on a slate for the audience, and the monster was rendered as nothing more than an artefact of unholy vice. But lights blazed, and living snow from coils of refrigeration fell from the ceiling, and spectacle won the day.