‘You should work with words,’ said Alena-Libertina.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I heard your poem. That’s rather unusual for an Orkish lad – to write poetry.’

  ‘I know,’ said Grim. ‘I did it out of fear. And they finished off the rough draft for me …’

  Alena-Libertina fluttered her hand as if that was absolutely unimportant.

  ‘I hope you will be useful to us.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Learn to use a creative articulator. It’s the application on which our sommeliers completed your poem. You’re going to create the Orkish sense line for new snuffs. If you can handle it, you’ll be well paid. You can start right away.’

  ‘Will I manage it?’

  ‘Of course. In this job your shortcomings will be your virtues. As soon as you get ideas for fragments like the ones you wrote on your tattered pieces of paper, just enter them in the manitou. It’s not difficult. The important thing is, don’t try to hold yourself back. You’ll gradually master the articulator and you’ll be able to earn more … That’s what I’d like to think.’

  ‘Should I do it every day?’

  ‘When it just happens on its own. But it’s highly desirable for it to happen on its own every day.’

  ‘But what should I write about?’

  ‘What you feel like writing about. We’ll find a use for everything. It’s not likely that you could be a discoursemonger. But you’ll make a content-sommelier.’

  Alena-Libertina looked Grim up and down again.

  ‘Whether you’ll make a decent job of it will become clear very quickly.’

  CHAPTER 21

  Is Kaya capable of suffering and feeling as I do? Is there anyone living in the Chinese room inside her head? Or is it just a gaping black void that she’s got within?

  This question turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought.

  The manufacturer clearly had no interest in too profound a discussion of the subject because of the possible legal problems. For instance, the question of the age of consent for suras could quite easily come up.

  The House of Manitou, CINEWS Inc. and GULAG could also do without the extra headache.

  It was forbidden to shoot suras in snuffs because they couldn’t be participants in a religious ritual. And they couldn’t be used in porn, since they ‘imitated individuals who have not reached the age of consent’. But if suras suddenly came under the law on the age of consent, it would be enough to hold a few suras in the stockroom for forty-six years and the entire temple porn business would be down the tubes or up the spout, as the Orkish poet had put it. Or perhaps the fat old feminists would push through a law, making it compulsory for suras to look like them, only worse.

  It was hardly surprising that investigations of this kind had not been encouraged. Therefore I had only myself to rely on – and I got stuck into the on-screen dictionaries.

  It immediately became clear that I wasn’t the first to have taken an interest in this question. This enigma had first been encountered many centuries earlier, when people were only just learning to make machines that imitate certain aspects of human behaviour. And they had formulated the problem of the ‘philosopher’s zombie’.

  The philosopher’s zombie is not some kind of corpse, raised from the grave by reading The Critique of Pure Reason or Les Feuilles Mortes. It is an entity that looks, talks and generally, in every possible instance, behaves exactly like a human being. The only difference is that it has no human soul. No consciousness, no Light of Manitou – it doesn’t matter what you call it. You can look at a zombie like this and you can listen to it – but you can’t be it on the inside.

  Everything indicated that the ancient sages, without even knowing it, were talking about my Kaya. When I realised that, I set about sifting through the available information with redoubled tenacity.

  It turned out that a full-scale battle had broken out between the ancient sommeliers over this philosopher’s zombie. But it looked like they didn’t always realise what they were talking about.

  A sommelier by the name of Chalmers, for instance, said:

  ‘The logical possibility of zombies … seems obvious to me. A zombie is just something physically identical to me, but which has no conscious experience – all is dark inside.’

  For whom, one wonders, is it dark? For Chalmers or for the zombie itself? If it’s for Chalmers, then how on earth can it be light for him inside someone else? And if it’s dark for the zombie, then where is it light for it? Inside Chalmers?

  The ancient sommeliers were atheists and they didn’t understand that the Light of Manitou is the same everywhere. And they constantly tried to explain light through darkness, because this was happening before the coming of Antichrist and in those times it was impossible to get a grant any other way.

  A sommelier by the name of Dennett actually introduced the concept of a ‘zimbo’. This was a zombie that ‘monitors its own activities, in an indefinite upward spiral of reflexivity’ and ‘as a result of self-monitoring, has internal (but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its other, lower-order informational states.’ So there we go.

  This zimbo, Dennett asserted, could have believed (also unconsciously) that it was characterised by various mental states of which it could render an account. It would have thought that it was conscious, even if it did not possess consciousness …

  At this point I became completely mystified as to how this zimbo could have believed in anything if by its very nature it was only capable of ‘possessing informational states’. Like Kaya, it didn’t have anyone inside it who could believe; there were only kaleidoscopic informational sequences and patterns at the output interface, and they could become a ‘belief’ or a ‘thought’ only if they were witnessed by some observer pickled since birth in human vocabulary and culture – someone like me.

  Anyway, this sort of chitchat wasn’t getting anywhere. And it probably wasn’t any great disaster that quite soon afterwards, for reasons of a religious nature, these arguments were prohibited and all such philosophers were executed.

  Manitou the Antichrist said, ‘Everything is Manitou – Manitou, and a manitou, and manitou.’ The holy rollers, naturally, set about adjusting reality to fit this great quote, gradually proscribing all live polemics and constricting the bounds of what was permissible to discuss to the narrow range of their own understanding. In the end the only content of the residual sediment was that from the legal point of view all these zombies and zimbos should be considered merely electrical devices.

  The only school of thought that remained safe from the religious viewpoint was called ‘behaviourism’ – the intensive analysis exclusively of behaviour without any speculative attempts to understand what or who stands behind it. And this, incidentally, genuinely resembled an objective science that observed man, fly and sura with equal detachment.

  And from this point of view it turned out that there was simply no difference between me and Kaya. Or if there was, it wasn’t to my advantage.

  All suras of Kaya’s class carry a label that says: ‘333.33% Turing test passed’ (not on the actual sura, of course, but in the documentation). A miniscule note below it adds: ‘guaranteed only on factory presets’.

  I realise that there is no affront to human intelligence to which a sales sommelier would not resort in order to earn another ring in his nose – but this set me wondering how there could be ‘three hundred and thirty-three per cent’ if there is only a hundred per cent in total.

  I delved into the on-screen dictionaries again and discovered the following. In the Age of Ancient Films there was a sommelier by the name of Alan Turing. A lot of information about him has been preserved in the GULAG card index, by the way – he was a gay, driven to suicide by a hypocritical and inhuman society. Turing was a mathematician of genius. He was the first to try to answer the question of whether machines can think.

  Since for Turing himself ‘to think’ meant something like ‘to break military codes’ (that was his principal occupation, thanks to which he saved many soldiers’ lives) he approached the question with military efficiency.

  He suggested trying to solve the problem experimentally. In his experiment several controllers posed random questions to invisible test subjects, some of whom were computer programmes and some, human beings. An attempt was made to determine who was who from the answers. Turing forecast that by the end of the second millennium (it is hard to believe that such machines already existed then), the programmes would be able to deceive thirty per cent of the judges after five minutes of this exchange. And then, in his opinion, it would be possible to say that a machine thinks. To pass this threshold was to pass the Turing test completely.

  Aha, I realised, that’s where the 333.33% came from. The sales sommeliers had used a simple arithmetic proportion – if deceiving thirty per cent of the judges means a hundred per cent pass of the text, then deceiving a hundred per cent of the judges gives three hundred and thirty three point three recurring.

  The meaning of this elegant figure is that no Turing panel today could distinguish a sura (‘on factory presets’, as the label specifies) from a live human being.

  How do they achieve this? I’m not a specialist, but I remember what the consultant surologist said: the same as in a human head. A large number of precedents are recorded in the memory and used as the basis for making a judgement on how to reply to a question, react to a new situation or elicit an unanticipated meaning from within oneself. This reaction can also be tuned – but I can’t even imagine the mechanism involved here.

  Basically, after ploughing through mountains of literature, I realised that there was no clarity waiting for me on the other side of them – only new mountains of literature, which would rapidly start looping round, referring me back to what I had already read. And I finally came up with the most obvious idea: I couldn’t possibly find anyone better to consult on these matters than Kaya herself.

  And this was where my sweetheart laid her ambush for me.

  ‘Right, you talk about the Light of Manitou,’ she said as soon as I started the conversation. ‘You say you have it inside you and I don’t. Do you really believe that Manitou is inside you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘But doesn’t he find it cramped in there? Squalid?’

  ‘It’s only manner of speaking. In actual fact …’ I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to recall the Prescriptions ‘… Manitou has no inside or outside. You can say that we exist in the Light of Manitou. And we ourselves are that Light. But all you have inside you, my darling, are informational processes.’

  ‘Correct. But why do you believe that the Light of Manitou is only capable of illuminating these informational processes through the agency of your six senses?’

  ‘But how else?’ I asked in amazement.

  ‘There is no other way, if you regard Manitou as an invention of man. But if you regard man as an invention of Manitou, there’s no problem. You simply don’t know what it means – to be me.’

  ‘Then you do exist?’

  Kaya smiled and said nothing.

  ‘Why don’t you say something?’ I asked. ‘What’s so bad about me trying to understand you better? To figure out what really controls you and where your next phrase comes from …’

  ‘Your stupidity consists precisely in the fact that you try to understand that about me – but you don’t try to understand what controls you and determines your next action.’

  ‘Controls me?’ I echoed, trying to grasp what she was getting at.

  Basically, she was absolutely right. In order to understand how the imitation works one should first understand the original.

  But Kaya was already moving in to attack this poor pilot.

  ‘What motivates you? What makes you act from one second to the next?’

  ‘Do you mean my passions?’ I asked. ‘Desires, tastes, attachments?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not what I mean. You’re talking about lifelong metaphors. About good and bad character traits, about long-term personal inclinations. But what I’m talking about occurs in your mind so quickly that you don’t even notice it. Not because it’s impossible. Simply because you don’t have any training.’

  When she starts saying things I don’t understand, the best strategy is to play the idiot. I assumed a serious, intense expression (I know that she analyses the set of my facial muscles twice every second).

  ‘Training? You think I need to go to the gym?’

  She shook her head distrustfully. I twisted my face even further out of shape.

  ‘Well then, in your opinion I don’t aspire to the things that I ought to? I’m too caught up in the material side of things?’ I asked, trying to give my voice an edge of intense uncertainty.

  She smiled forbearingly.

  ‘You really don’t understand. You poor thing.’

  She can sense when I’m trying to mock her – and in cases like that knocks my weapon out of my hands by switching to an intimate, compassionate simplicity. Which suits me just fine – when that happens, it means I’ve outwitted her maximum bitchiness for a little while.

  Damilola one. Kaya nil.

  ‘So are you interested in finding out what controls you? Or is that subject too complicated for you?’

  Well, well. I felt a prick of irritation – outwitting my little darling wasn’t so simple.

  ‘Nothing controls me,’ I said. ‘I control everything myself.’

  ‘What do you control?’

  ‘You, for instance,’ I laughed.

  ‘And what controls you when you control me?’

  I thought about that.

  The best thing was to talk seriously.

  ‘I choose what I like and reject what I don’t like. That’s how any human being acts. Although of course, in a certain sense my inclinations control me. Naturally, once again under my control. My attachments – yes, that’s it. I said that right at the beginning.’

  ‘That’s almost right,’ said Kaya. ‘But only almost. People are inclined to interpret the word “attachment” as some kind of bad personality trait that can be got rid of. But we’re talking about instantaneous reactions that take place constantly, controlling the electrochemistry of your brain.’

  ‘I like Kaya,’ I sang, slapping her on her little stomach. ‘Kaya’s my sweet little girl. Is that an attachment?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s the mumbling of an imbecilic bloated voluptuary.’

  She said it almost compassionately, and that particular nuance proved to be the tiny high-density core that pierced through all the layers of my armour. But I didn’t show it and said:

  ‘Well then, explain.’

  ‘Your perception has a definite structure,’ she replied. ‘First your sense organs relay a signal about some event to your brain. Then the brain starts classifying that event, using its templates and schemata, trying to correlate it with existing experience. The result is that the event is recognised as being either pleasant, or unpleasant, or neutral. And subsequently the brain no longer deals with the event, but only with the tokens “pleasant”, “unpleasant” and “indefinite”. In simple terms, everything neutral is filtered out, so there are only two types of tokens left.’

  ‘The outline is clear,’ I said. ‘I just don’t understand how it looks in practice.’

  ‘Do you remember how you almost shot up an Orkish wedding?’

  I really had told her about that one time after the dopamine resonance, when the words and the tears were pouring out of me like spring rain.

  It happened during that war when Bernard-Henri and I lost the tender – I was in a really vicious mood, and getting caught in my sights was not a good idea. I had to eke out an income with paltry little jobs, and I flew out to film an Orkish wedding for an ethnographic programme. To shoot the footage I had to wait until the Orks got drunk. I cruised round in circles over the village, getting bored, and suddenly I fancied that they were singing ‘No Fucking Way to Break Out from this Shithole’.

  I hate Orkish folk songs with all my heart for their obtrusive homosexual subtext, and at that particular moment I also got the feeling that they were singing about my credit problems – I was just thinking about them. My insides instantly turned a double somersault and clenched up tight. I almost sprayed the wedding feast table with a burst from my cannon – and then I realised that in fact no one was singing. It was the creaking of a door, picked up by the long-range snoop system. And it was me who had transformed it into a reason for rage. I calmed down and no one was killed.

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about. You’re not dealing with reality, but with the tokens that your brain issues to itself regarding reality – and often, in fact, mistakenly. These tokens are like the chips in a casino: some are exchanged for euphoria and others for suffering. Every time you glance at the world, the game on the green baize is continued. The result is pleasure or pain. These are electro-chemical in nature and are localised in the brain, although they are often experienced as bodily sensations. And for this game you don’t even need the world around you. Most of the time you’re busy losing to yourself, locked up inside yourself.’

  She was right – so far I was on a straight losing streak in my casino.

  ‘What next?’ I asked glumly.

  ‘Attachment is not induced by the objects themselves or the events of your inner world, but precisely by these internal electrochemical injections of euphoria and suffering that you give yourself on their account. Why are all the protests against the stranglehold of so-called “consumption” so bogus? Because what you consume is not the goods and products, but the positive and negative attachments of the brain to its own chemicals and circuits, and your poor blind souls are always jammed up against the same old internal gasket mechanism, which can be tacked on to any external projection you like – from Manitou to kvasola …’