Chatterbox
Chatterbox
As the curator for the Baldwin House, a private library funded by the son of a local timber tycoon, I often have the opportunity to meet renowned writers passing through town. Last winter, soon after the release of his critically acclaimed novel Hyperreal, “a literary cyberpunk masterpiece” according to the New York Times, the author took a short break from his tour to spend a night in our guest wing. After dinner we gathered in the reading room to enjoy a dessert brandy amidst stacks of books and a fireplace I had lit to help the brandy chase off the damp chill of the season. The conversation soon turned to books, as it so often does, and our guest made a stunning confession. “I didn’t actually write Hyperreal.”
Not believing what we had just heard, my employer and I pressed for clarification. Our guest was quiet for a moment, staring into the fire, and then in a voice almost too low to hear he explained that when he wrote, he had no idea what he was doing. He started with a feeling, a vague idea, some image or even a sound, then a word would come to him and then another. He didn’t actually do anything to determine those words. His brain, like some weird AI, simply calculated the next word based on patterns gleaned from all of the other words in all the other books he had ever read. One word after another, and he just kept going, word after word, until his brain spat out “the end.” You see? he asked. I’m a machine, a simulacrum. Even my side of this conversation is just a product of computations generating words based on what’s already been said. I don’t think there’s any real meaning or intelligence behind it. After a brief pause, during which my employer and I exchanged glances, he chuckled and looked up. Know what I call it, my zombie brain that has everyone fooled? Chatterbox. Of course, it invented that too.
He then changed the topic, asking about our extensive collection of rare Philip K. Dick first editions, and the conversation stumbled uneasily into the night. When I returned the next morning, the author had already left for the next stop on his tour. I often think back to that night. Was it a jest? Or a metaphor for writing: the algorithm as muse? Or was it an episode of schizophrenic paranoia? Even now, as I catalog a recent acquisition of DeLillo works, I wonder about the author and what living with Chatterbox must be like. Then I realize it’s just about five and I’ve nearly finished writing the catalog. Some days just fly by.