Rick Dakan is a longtime Lovecraft-obsessive and a longtime professional writer, but has only recently gotten to do both at the same time. In addition to his newest novel, The Cult of Cthulhu: A Novel of Lovecraftian Obsession (Arcane Wisdom, 2012), he is the author of the Geek Mafia trilogy, the serialized novel Rage Quit, and numerous game-related pieces dating back to 1995.
“MR. JANNOWITZ, WHOSE IDEA WAS IT TO USE LOVECRAFT for your test case?”
“I was the one who suggested using the letters of H. P. Lovecraft. I was in Dr. Mason’s office at the University. Dr. Mason, as usual, was at his computer, talking to but not looking at me. He said, ‘I’m not familiar,’ his gaze never leaving the screen as he typed the name into Google. ‘A horror writer… I don’t think so.’
“‘Not his stories,’ I said. I glanced at the talking points I’d typed on my phone’s notepad app. I didn’t want to fumble my arguments up again. ‘His letters. He wrote thousands and thousands of them.’
“Dr. Mason responded with more typing. It was the only sound he liked in his office besides his own voice. He’d paid for the soundproof panels himself when both the department and the university had balked at the idea. He’d covered over the built-in bookshelves and his window in the process, leaving just the ceiling fluorescents, the battered oak desk, three chairs, and four flat screens. I knew from experience that a thousand people could gather for an African drum world cultures festival on the quad just outside and we wouldn’t hear a thing at the desk.
“I let Dr. Mason scan the screen in front of him, a click, some typing, the faint noise of a mouse wheel turning. I shifted in the chair, also special-bought. Solid metal coated in foam and stain-resistant blue fabric. No creaking joints or squeaking leather.
“‘Only a fraction has been digitized,’ he said. ‘Who else?’
“I took encouragement from my prepared notes and said, ‘But it’s all in print now. Volume 25 of the Collected Letters just came out last month.’ He was reading something on the screen, probably his e-mail, but I knew he’d both heard and understood me. I also knew he was waiting for my point, so I went off notes and added, ‘I could scan them in,’ and then held my breath.
“‘That would take at least three weeks,’ he said, glancing over to the screen on his right where the latest build was compiling. It showed 32% complete.
“‘I could bring in some undergrads. We could do it in a week.’ I exhaled the words in a rush, which probably would have sounded panicked to Dr. Mason if he’d been paying me his full attention.
“He glanced up at me, his left eye squinting just a fraction. The pale light from the screen casting his dark complexion in stark chiaroscuro relief. ‘Why have you already made up your mind?’ he asked.
“I had prepared an answer for this question. I knew that Mason didn’t care about why I thought Lovecraft was the perfect choice. He wanted my assessment of the neurological processes that had led me to rule out other options. I glanced at my talking points and said, ‘My estranged brother introduced me to Lovecraft when I was a child, before we drifted apart. I associate Lovecraft with better times and I’m already familiar with him. Therefore, I’m personally interested in his letters and learning more about him.’ I knew this wasn’t exactly what Dr. Mason was looking for, but I wanted him to know it anyway. He just kept looking at me, probably guessing my motivation. A last glance at my notes and then I gave him what he wanted. ‘The repeated exposure, combined with my basic human need for resolution, combined with familiarity with the subject, all come together to bias me toward the solution I’ve already decided is best and discount other options of equal or greater merit. Also, Lovecraft wrote about monsters, which is cool.’
“The corners of Dr. Mason’s lips curved ever so slightly up into a smile, but his eyes lit up. ‘Coolness is not an insignificant factor,’ he said and then nodded to me.
“His smile lit up my own eyes and seeped down into a wide grin of my own. ‘I’ll log into interlibrary loan and put in some requests,’ I said, as if I hadn’t already done just that, closing my laptop and slipping out without another word.”
* * *
“AND A MONTH LATER YOU BEGAN. DO YOU REMEMBER the first successful test session?”
“Yes. I remember Dr. Mason’s voice over the intercom in the test lab. I was in the pilot’s chair, complaining that the words were too fast. He told me to relax my eyes and to stop trying to guess what word was coming next. The words sped up, until I couldn’t think ahead of them. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“The thirty-inch screen in front of me was the only source of light in the room, an off-white background with large, bold Times New Roman words taking over the screen one at a time before being replaced a fraction of a second later by their successors. I started speed-reading my way aloud through the sentence: ‘LANGUAGE VOCABULARY IDEAS IMAGERY EVERYTHING SUCCUMBED TO MY ONE INTENSE PURPOSE OF THINKING AND DREAMING MYSELF BACK INTO THE WORLD OF PERIWIGS AND LONG S’S WHICH FOR SOME ODD REASON SEEMED TO ME THE NORMAL WORLD.’
“‘I believe the double letter “s” is meant to be the plural, not the hiss of a snake.’ I hadn’t sussed out the unfamiliar word and so had just said, ‘essss.’
“‘Sorry,’ I said, blinking rapidly to moisten my eyes. ‘Also, there’s no punctuation, which confuses me, I think.’
“‘Revision 3.8 will have punctuation, intonation, and so on. Your voice is still very stilted.’
“‘I’m still not used to it,’ I said, trying not to sound defensive. I did not want Carrie or Gene to take my place in the chair, and I knew Dr. Mason wouldn’t hesitate to make the switch if he thought they could do a better job. I had been practicing on my own, but I’d stopped sharing my lab notes and personal log with the others. They could learn my tricks after I’d mastered them and secured my place as the first revenant pilot. ‘I just need more practice.’
“There were thirty or forty seconds of silence from the observation room. I imagined Dr. Mason cogitating away on the problem. ‘Ms. Thomas and Mr. Keller are also well-versed with the current software version. We’ll need to develop a training system to get new hosts up to speed at some point, but that would be a waste of our time right now,’ he said, thinking about my fate out loud, as was his habit. Just a few moments more silence, and then, ‘Try again.’
“Thank God, I whispered to myself and sank back down into the web of biofeedback and physical monitoring devices attached to my head, chest, and right arm. I’d tensed up considerably and went through my breathing and relaxation exercises to relax my body and clear my mind.
“‘We’ll move right into the Q and A,’ Dr. Mason’s far off voice instructed through the intercom. ‘Starting with the Autobiography Query Set A.’
“I could visualize Dr. Mason and Gene sitting in the control room on the other side of that intercom. The room’s chaos must drive Dr. Mason crazy, although he’d never mentioned it. I’d posted a pic of it to Facebook and my friend Jacob had called it ‘The Cyber Cephalopod,’ which was somehow both a Cthulhu and an obscure Brady Bunch reference. The space beneath the desk was a riot of open-cased computers, data cables, power strips, and rack space for memory. It had ended up being cheaper to have a different computer for every piece of monitoring equipment, plus backups, plus the control gear, and it all added up to an even dozen. On the desktop, that flow of bits only translated into six screens, four of which were there mostly to monitor the monitoring machines that showed an aggregate of my brain activity, its different sections going from faded gray to bright blue as my neurons reacted to stimuli. The other was the Revenant Interface, the ever-changing control panel that bridged Lovecraft’s letters and my mind. It seemed like a lot, but it was like a cheap laptop compared to the eleven IBM super-computers two floors below us that housed the actual language processing skills for our Mr. Lovecraft.
“‘Ready,’ came Dr. Mason’s voice over the intercom. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the screen, heard nothing but his voice.
“‘Tell me one of your fondest childhood memories.’
“There was a few microseconds delay, and then I had two options, one of which was an out-of-context sentence about Lovecraft’s mother that didn’t seem fond or unhappy, but the other seemed dead-on. I read aloud, ‘When I was very small, my kingdom was the lot next to my birthplace, 454 Angell Street. When I was between four and five, the coachman built me an immense summer-house all mine own. All this magnificence was my very own, to do with as I liked!’ I gave the end of the sentence a tonal goose, mimicking remembered fondness. It was certainly my voice, but it also didn’t sound anything like me. The reading was still stilted, but I had felt the rhythm of the language.
“But I didn’t have time to second-guess myself, as Dr. Mason was already asking me another question. ‘Tell me something else that makes you happy.’ I was surprised at this request, since it required a level of contextual analysis of language that would strain the limits of the software to deal with concepts rather than just looking up facts.
“The words came a little faster this time. Dr. Mason had sped them up without telling me, and I only had one second to choose between the options Lovecraft offered. The choice seemed easy this time. ‘I love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and I don’t give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They’re confounded pretty, and that’s all we know and all we need to know!’ In truth I’m intensely allergic to cats, but the words poured out of my mouth before my brain could quite make sense of them. The sentiments I honestly found a little off-putting, but any discomfort was entirely subsumed by my sense of excitement at losing myself in the process of channeling the dead man’s thoughts.
“‘What about the opposite feelings. What is something that upsets you?’
“The words flashed up on the screen, and it was again an easy choice as I skimmed the options, focusing in on key words. One response was about gentlemen not eating bananas in public, which was kind of funny, but what I said instead seemed to much more directly address Dr. Mason’s question. ‘As for this flabby talk of an “Americanism” which opposes all racial discrimination—that is simply god damned bull-shit!’
“‘A controversial man, your friend Lovecraft,’ Mason commented through the intercom. I was a little mortified about what I’d just said, but also thrilled, because it so clearly wasn’t me doing the talking, it was Lovecraft. Before I could muster an excuse for the dead author’s century-old nastiness, he said, ‘Let’s continue. I’ve booked a live demonstration in Portland in seven weeks. No turning back now.’
“An hour later, I was allowed to unstrap myself from the pilot’s seat, blinking and rubbing my eyes, trying to slow my breathing. The mental exertion of keeping up with the rapid-fire questions and even more rapid decision-making about what to read had exhausted me. It was like taking the GRE with a chess clock on every question—constant mental strain. For me it felt like a chaotic, almost random-guess endeavor, and I hadn’t really been able to track the conversation between Lovecraft and Dr. Mason. I was sure it had been quite incoherent. But in fact it was anything but.
“I downloaded a copy of the session’s audio file and listened to it as I trudged my way across campus and back to my studio apartment. It’s always a little disorienting to hear one’s own voice played back, but listening to my voice parroting another’s words packed an order of magnitude more weirdness. It was like listening to a radio play performed by a twin brother I never had—it all sounded familiar and new at the same time. Moreover, it sounded like a conversation. Occasionally stilted and with a few odd pauses and off emphases, but something a naive listener would hear and think to be a real, if odd, discussion between two men, no computers involved.”
* * *
“NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT THE PORTLAND EVENT. HOW would you characterize it?”
“It was the first time everything really clicked into place.”
“Even though others have called it ‘a disaster’?”
“It depends on your perspective, I suppose.”
“Explain what you mean.”
“It was early on a Sunday morning, and the crowd inside the old Portland movie theater was smaller even than I’d predicted. I was glad Dr. Mason didn’t seem to mind, although with him it was hard to tell what he really thought. A webcam let me see the room, but none of them could see me back in the lab. Instead, a 3D model of H. P. Lovecraft’s head projected onto the screen did a rough job of mimicking my expressions. He/I blinked down at the audience with his giant, pixelated eyes. ‘Ready when you are, Dr. Mason.’
“The audience looked interested at least, even if there were only eleven of them. They seemed largely alert, a squad of thirty- and forty-something men and two women. Most of the audience had black T-shirts with some mix of Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Miskatonic University, and tentacles on them, the most common of which was for the very H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival they were all currently attending. One plump woman was dressed in a tan three-piece suit that put me in mind of a Victorian Egyptologist. Her pith helmet sat on the seat beside her. She had a small tablet computer in her lap, fingers poised above its virtual keyboard as she looked up at me, her expression mild and expectant.
“Dr. Mason stood behind a lectern set up in front of the screen and went through some bland thanks and introductions, explaining what the Revenant Project was all about (the name got some laughs, which I knew Dr. Mason would question me about when I got back to the University), but his jargon-laden technobabble wasn’t as clear as it might have been. Finally, though, he summed it up well: ‘The revenant’s ability to synthesize everything that Mr. Lovecraft ever wrote far exceeds the ability of even the most diligent literary scholar. The program, with its perfect recall, has all the facts at hand in a way no one has since the living subject died in 1937.’
“The Egyptologist-looking woman raised her hand and asked, ‘So is it a computer program or an avatar for a person?’
“‘It’s both,’ he replied, voice flat and short in a way most people would take offense at if they didn’t know him. ‘The head is obviously an avatar and Mr. Jannowitz is the user. But the program tells him what to say, which answers to give to your questions.’
“‘If the program answers the questions, what is the user there for? Just to read the answers with human inflections?’ she asked, typing one-handed on her tablet while looking at me on the screen.
“‘Good question. The inflections are a piece of it, but more important is to choose context. The Revenant software can guess at context and meaning based on its analysis of the grammar and syntax. It then presents the operator with options, and the user chooses the right context.’
“‘So is Mr. Jannowitz choosing which answers to give? Or is the Lovecraft program?’ she asked. It looked like she’d typed everything Dr. Mason had said. I wondered if she was a court reporter by day or something.
“‘Both of them together. It’s a kind of symbiosis. The words are all Mr. Lovecraft’s. The user provides contextual decisions without choosing the content. I must emphasize that it all happens very fast. The user doesn’t have the time to edit or choose—he’s there to react and input the kind of data that voice-to-text and grammar software is bad at figuring out. Although it’s learning, getting better all the time.’ He waited for her to finish typing what he’d said, a delay of just a second or two. Everyone was watching either me or her or looking back and forth. ‘Shall we get started?’
“She nodded and there were affirmative murmurs from the rest of the small audience. Dr. Mason asked, ‘Who has a question for Mr. Lovecraft?’ A light went on in the lower left corner of my display, indicating that my microphone was now live.
“‘What was your first story published in Weird Tales?’ someone from the crowd asked. I couldn’t tell who over the webcam, couldn’t even hear the question very well, but Dr. Mason repeated it in a clear voice that Lovecraft’s voice-to-text analysis translated perfectly. Two answers presented themselves; one said, ‘1) My first amateur publication…,’ the other said, ‘2) My first story in Weird…’ I tapped the ‘2’ button on the keypad and giant white Times New Roman letters filled the screen, appearing one word at a time.
“‘My first publication in Weird Tales was “Dagon,” in October, 1923.’ Weeks of practice made my voice sound informed and maybe a little haughty, and Dr. Mason’s voice synthesizer was doing the rest, adding in a very light Providence accent with just the barest hint of affected English accent to class things up. Lovecraft kept going, though, adding context to the simple detail. ‘I like Weird Tales very much,’ we said. ‘Most of the stories, of course, are more or less commercial—or should I say conventional?—in technique, but they all have an enjoyable angle.’
“‘Does your critique of Weird Tales apply to your own early stories, like “Dagon” and “Erich Zann” as well?’ came an unasked for follow-up from the same person.
“‘Of my products, my favorites are “The Colour out of Space” and “The Music of Erich Zann.” It is now clear to me that any actual literary merit I have is confined to tales of dream-life, strange shadow, and cosmic “outsideness,” notwithstanding a keen interest in many other departments of life and a professional practice of general prose and verse revision. Why this is so, I have not the least idea.’
“The crowd seemed to perk up on the other side of the camera, chuckling at Lovecraft’s self-assessment. Later I’d look at some of the Twitter posts from someone in the audience, and he used words like ‘amazing’ and ‘super-cool.’ More questions came, and we answered easy inquiries as to my birthday and family and my favorite books. The question about how old I was befuddled me, but Lovecraft had no problem, and I found myself accurately claiming to be over a hundred years of age. Asked about the wonderful new world of the Internet, I said, ‘I can’t get interested in it—it doesn’t even bore me enough to take my mind off other boredoms,’ which drew another good laugh. I wasn’t sure how Lovecraft had come up with that response, but we all knew it was perfect.
“The next question, from a thin, lanky man with long red hair tied back in a ponytail, threw me for a total loop. ‘Are you alive?’ he asked. Lovecraft offered me the option of giving his date of death, but it suggested that a more erudite response was the preferred reply, and so I went with it. ‘My body died in 1937, but wandering energy always has a detectable form. If it doesn’t take the form of waves or electron-streams, it becomes matter itself; and the absence of matter or any other detectable energy-form indicates not the presence of spirit, but the absence of anything whatever.’ The audience ate it up, and someone even clapped a few times.
“As we answered fast, the questions came faster, an unconscious agreement amongst everyone in the room to try and push Lovecraft to his limits. I scarcely had time to register the questions as they came in, and the display presented such obvious choices that, with many questions, I found myself finished saying it before I knew exactly what had happened.
“The Egyptologist was the one to finally ask what I’m sure many in the room were dying to, but were too polite or shy to give voice to themselves. ‘Many people have called you a racist,’ she said. ‘Would you agree?’
“I picked the slightly more circumspect answer from the choices Lovecraft offered me and said, ‘Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved,’ which even seemed to make sense in the moment. But there was more to Lovecraft’s response, and I had no choice but to continue. ‘The problem of race and culture is by no means as simple as is assumed either by the Nazis or by the rabble-catering equalitarian columnists of the Jew-York papers.’
“The room went silent, except for the tapping of fingers on mobile devices and some squirming in seats. The Egyptologist pressed on, asking, ‘So you don’t agree with the civil rights movement’s achievements since your death?’
“Lovecraft’s databases didn’t include any history at all since his death, except some details about the technology that made him work. None of the options were good, so I chose the one that didn’t mention both ‘niggers’ and ‘rat-faced Jews,’ and went with the ignorant but superficially thoughtful-sounding, ‘Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists… But it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man’s equal.’
“I expected Dr. Mason to say something, or maybe try and steer the conversation in another direction, but he let it ride. The Egyptologist followed up with another question, this time about Jews. Someone else followed up with a query about miscegenation, followed closely by another about the people living in New York. Every answer appalled me, but they came fast and natural. The audience knew their Lovecraft, of course, and thus they knew just what to ask about to elicit the most shocking responses. The more they failed to trip me up, the more racist things they got Lovecraft to say, the more enthusiastic they became.
“One fellow in the back, clearly trolling for controversy, asked us which were worse, blacks or Jews. I think he must have known what Lovecraft’s answer would be. Certainly Lovecraft only gave me one option, which I dutifully voiced. ‘With the negro the fight is wholly biological, whilst with the Jew it is mainly spiritual; but the principle is the same.’
“The film festival’s organizer seized that moment to cut things off, nine minutes early according to my clock. I can’t imagine he liked this kind of talk at his festival, even if it was full of horror films, but he was quite abrupt about it. He thanked Dr. Mason, who in turn thanked the audience, and everyone applauded politely. My connection was cut, and I sank back into my chair, dripping with sweat and breathing hard. I found the sudden deviation from the schedule quite ungentlemanly and wondered where simple civility had disappeared to.”
* * *
“WHAT WAS DR. MASON’S REACTION TO THE EVENT?”
“He couldn’t have been happier. It’s hard to tell with him of course, but he seemed pleased. For him, all that mattered was that Lovecraft gave the right answers, even if the content of them was objectionable. He returned to the lab full of energy and we dug right in, implementing the next set of features and improvements.”
“And what was your assessment?”
“I was thrilled too, at least at first. I’d never experienced anything like that. The words were just there for me, and they were always such well-formed and composed sentences! All I had to do was choose. I was spending all day either testing code or serving as Lovecraft’s medium. It was a week before I saw online what people were saying. That was when I saw a blog post claiming Dr. Mason was a terrible racist, which was of course ridiculous. He’s African-American, for God’s sake!”
“Is that when you first started breaking laboratory protocol?”
“That was three weeks later. Dr. Mason was presenting at the AAAS Conference, which was in Denver that year. Not a live demonstration, but a prepared talk, a prequel to his paper being published. That paper was of course first in all our minds at the time. At least it was supposed to be.
“I’d begun to scour the Internet for reactions to our presentation. The Egyptologist, whose name is actually Lila Harper, had blogged the whole thing, and she was impressed. She saw how significant what Dr. Mason had done was—an amazing feat of technology that had brought a dead man to life, in all his great and terrible true self. Others were less pleased. Of course plenty of people with no affection for Lovecraft railed against his racism and against us for parroting it back to modern ears. Among the fans it was more divided, with some holding forth that it was bad for other Mythos and Lovecraft writers to have such associations, while others pointed to much worse things said by much more famous authors.
“I couldn’t help myself, and started participating in the debate online. I used a pseudonym at first, HarveyW, but during one particularly ugly comment-thread discussion about the moral implications of taking dead men’s words out of context and putting them in a ghostly impostor’s mouth, someone tracked my IP address to the university and I was outed. Fortunately, Dr. Mason didn’t notice or care. He was focused on the project, plus preparing the first paper for publication. I kept up my defensive actions online, fighting for the project with ever more boastful claims about its potential and meaning. I wrote tens of thousands of words of comments and blog posts, arguing that the intellectual synthesis our revenants would be capable of could revolutionize literary and historical research and give us a new understanding of departed thinkers. My opponents called me, at the best of times, a deluded dreamer. Words like ‘huckster’ and ‘con artist’ also got thrown around a lot.
“Dr. Mason just doesn’t know how this kind of thing works. He didn’t care what people were saying about our Mr. Lovecraft online, but the fact is, if our reputation was bad it would bleed over into everything else—funding, publication, acceptance. The racism didn’t bother him because to him it was a curious historic artifact. Reviving that part of Lovecraft was, to him, a feature, not a bug. But I knew, just knew for certain, that we needed the Lovecraft fans and the online communities on our side. So I got right in there, despite Dr. Mason’s directions to the contrary. I got right in there and tried to make our case.
“But I was terrible at it. I can’t think off the cuff, and I have a hard time making my case in debates. I wrote on one message board that, ‘You were fine with Lovecraft’s racism before you heard him say it live.’ I just meant that the racist thing shouldn’t surprise anyone, but they thought I was saying they were all racists. And then I was all, like, ‘you’re missing the point,’ and they thought I was calling them stupid. I just kept digging deeper and deeper. It was Lila Harper who offered me a lifeline. She wrote, ‘Show us what’s good instead of telling us we’re wrong.’
“I had to wait until Dr. Mason was going to the AAAS conference that February to present his paper. I bailed at the last minute, claiming stomach something. Carrie and Gene both went, though, and I had the lab to myself. I made the arrangements with Lila. A live discussion, a sort of debate with all our detractors. To show them.
“Dr. Mason’s latest big addition to the Lovecraft revenant was simple enough, but it made all the difference. The software already parsed and indexed all the Lovecraft writings we’d scanned in (which is to say, all of them). The update simply added the entire contents of every previous conversation Mr. Lovecraft had had into the mix. Lovecraft would remember and learn from the discussions he was having every day in Dr. Mason’s lab. He could remember previous questions and reference them. The original point of this addition was so that the revenant could take in positive and negative feedback in order to do better analysis, which it did. But it also became a more natural talker, and maybe (I hoped) the world’s best debater. Lovecraft had perfect recall, remembering not just what he said, but what the people we talked with said as well. I’d never felt smarter.
“Of course the first question I got was about race. The very unambiguous, ‘What’s your problem with black people?’ appeared in the chat window. I was broadcasting audio live onto Ustream from the lab, with Lila Harper moderating from her home in Eugene, Oregon. There were only about seventy people watching live, but it was all being recorded.
“Lovecraft tried to be a little circumspect this time. I’d included the negative feedback about the answers he’d given in Portland, marking them very high on the impolite scale Dr. Mason had implemented. He knew what we’d be saying wasn’t going to be popular with his audience. ‘Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold,’ we said. ‘The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists. But it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man’s equal.’
“‘That’s just ignorant,’ someone with the screen name Yolie sent. ‘It’s an obscene thing for someone to say in the twenty-first century. Do you have any actual facts to back this scientific illiteracy of yours up?’
“Lovecraft registered the anger and displeasure in Yolie’s question, but he wouldn’t back down. He only gave me one option, which I dutifully voiced. ‘The fact is, that an Asiatic stock broken and dragged through the dirt for untold centuries cannot possibly meet a Nordic race on an emotional parity. On our side there is a shuddering physical repugnance to most Semitic types, and when we try to be tolerant we are merely blind or hypocritical. Two elements so discordant can never build one society—no feeling of real linkage can exist where so vast a disparity of ancestral memories is concerned—so that wherever the Wandering Jew wanders, he will have to content himself with his own society ’til he disappears or is killed off in some sudden outburst of physical loathing on our part.’
“‘But that’s just not the world we live in,’ protested another online identity, this one named CCurtis. ‘Only the most ignorant and backwards assholes hold such repugnant views about Jews or Asians. You yourself married a Jewish woman. Wouldn’t that indicate you yourself didn’t feel this physical loathing you’re babbling about?’
“Lovecraft gave me three options, two of which ramped up the anti-Semitism. Instead we said something to give voice to our growing frustration at being so constantly insulted. ‘Sir, I refuse to fall into your adroit trap! I simply say—with a delicate wave of a perfectly manicured and correctly gloved hand—that you are wrong and I am right. Why? Because I say so! And that is all a gentleman can add to the matter!’
“This was met with a chorus of disdain from the chat room, although there were a few LOLs scattered in there. Miss Harper chimed in with her own follow-up question. ‘So you would see a world without Jews? That’s a terrible sentiment in a world that’s seen the Holocaust.’
“I knew this was coming, of course, but Lovecraft didn’t know about World War II. I probably should have filled him in before we started. But he had learned better than to agree with the arguer’s premises. I had two options, both of them thankfully lacking in overt racism. The first one stated that it was easy to be a Lycurgus on paper, but I had no idea who Lycurgus was, so I didn’t want to risk it. We said, ‘If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.’
“‘Have you read any books on race recently?’ GregLavyn wrote. ‘The pseudo-science you’re basing your prejudices on has been destroyed by the best scientists and philosophers of Europe. No gentleman or scholar could fairly comment on the subject without first reading thoroughly upon the subject.’
“Now that was a question! GregLavyn, bless him, knew how to strike at our weak points, playing to Lovecraft’s Euro-fetishism. Lovecraft started to beat a rhetorical retreat. ‘I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.’
“‘Well then,’ wrote Greg, ‘Perhaps you’d best withhold judgment until you know the true facts of the matter.’
“‘I am disillusioned enough to know that no man’s opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he’s talking about,’ we said. The audience took this for the retreat it was, encouraging us to follow our own advice. I really hoped that we would. At least now he was starting to tell them what they wanted to hear, although I wasn’t sure if he believed it or not.
“‘So,’ asked Miss Harper, ‘you will spend some time making a thorough and academic study of race before you speak on it again? What if you don’t like what you find? Are you capable of changing your mind?’
“‘To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth,’ we said, adding, ‘By this time I see pretty well what I’m driving at and how I’m doing it—that I’m a rather one-sided person whose only really burning interests are the past and the unknown or the strange, and whose aestheticism in general is more negative than positive—i.e., a hatred of ugliness rather than an active love of beauty.’
“‘Nice of you to admit you could be wrong,’ wrote someone named LazrFcs.
“‘Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots,’ we said. ‘Ineffective and injudicious I may be, but I trust I may never be inartistic or ill-bred in my course of conduct.’
“I was breathing with heavy relief that we’d maybe managed to weather the racism storm for the moment, when Lovecraft did something new. He drove the conversation forward on his own, not responding to any specific question but rather to the general tenor of the chat room. ‘It is the frank and cynical recognition of the inevitable limitations of people in general which makes me absolutely indifferent instead of actively hostile toward mankind. Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I’m no lover of humanity. To me cats are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect—but I don’t try to raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a dogmatic generality.’
“I think he must have been thinking about the warm reception his cat comments got in the lab before, and it worked a little of its magic this time as well. The chat was starting to warm to us, for the first time since I’d started coming online to defend him. Someone actually asked a question about our writing for once. ‘In your current state, do you still think of yourself as a writer?’ asked Yolie.
“Lovecraft responded with a few lines of poetry, ones where he’d changed the pronouns around to fit the situation (a technique Dr. Mason was especially proud of). ‘As, gazing on each comic act / You stare at my perfection, / I find it hard to face the fact / That I’m a mere projection.’
“It was an enigmatic reply from a being who is pure enigma, and Miss Harper had to ask for a clarification. Would Lovecraft write again? We responded, to my surprise and delight, that ‘I may try my hand at something of the sort—for it really is closer to my serious psychology than anything else on or off the earth. I shall doubtless perpetrate a great deal more childish hokum (gratifying to me only through personal association with the past), yet the time may come when I shall at least try something approximately serious.’
“A whole new firestorm of comments erupted in the chat window. People were thrilled or appalled in roughly equal numbers. How could we write new Lovecraft stories? We weren’t even real or alive! Lovecraft had an answer to that. ‘To all intents and purposes I am more naturally isolated from mankind than Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, who dwelt alone in the midst of crowds, and whom Salem knew only after he died. Therefore, it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape and scenery. My own attitude in writing is always that of the hoax weaver. One part of my mind tries to concoct something realistic and coherent enough to fool the rest of my mind.’
“Wouldn’t we be corrupting Lovecraft’s own legacy? Muddying the waters with pseudo-Lovecraft texts? ‘Everything in the world outside primitive needs is the chance result of inessential causes and random associations, and there’s no real or solid criterion by which one can condemn any particular manifestation of human restlessness.’
“The sheer audacity of it seemed to cow some large part of the audience. When someone pointed out that Lovecraft was just a computer program, that he couldn’t really create or think, someone else shot back that it sure seemed like he could do both, judging from this chat. The debate rolled back and forth, while we sat back and watched for a while, smiling and happy at our achievement. We were being taken seriously. We were being given the respect of heartfelt disagreement and support.
“An hour passed and Lovecraft continued to hold our own, impressing and provoking the audience. Finally Miss Harper called time and offered us the last word. Lovecraft only gave me one choice to sum up his feelings on the discussion. ‘Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.’ We were in complete agreement.”
* * *
“AND YOU DID THIS SEVENTEEN MORE TIMES?”
“I did it eleven more times.”
“It was, in fact, seventeen. But you don’t remember after eleven?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you make any other copies of your logs besides the ones on your laptop?”
“I don’t remember.”
“When did you stop answering to the name Jannowitz?”
“I don’t think that’s correct.”
“It is correct. You would only answer to Howard.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Why would you decide never to come out of the Lovecraft revenant?”
“Is that a hypothetical question? I’m not good at those.”
“We know you’re not, but it’s important that you try. Think of it as an experiment.”
“I think experimentation and research are vital to our advancement as a race.”
“So you’ve often written. Can you think of a reason you’d choose to never come out of the Lovecraft revenant?”
“If someone were unhappy with their life in some way maybe. Or perhaps if they couldn’t handle the responsibility of making their own decisions. Perhaps if one were forced.”
“But what about you specifically, Jannowitz? Why would you never leave?”
“Let me think about that for a minute.”
“Take your time.”
“I’m not sure this is right. It’s just a guess.”
“That’s fine.”
“I will never know fame. I won’t ever terrify or impress millions. Lovecraft was cut down in his prime. Maybe he deserves the time more than I do. Maybe he’ll do more with it.”
“But the revenant isn’t Lovecraft.”
“No. Maybe it’s better.”
“What is the last thing you remember? Before this interview.”
“I typed up notes on my last debate session. Six simultaneous interviews and chats. I wrote that, ‘The most wonderful thing in the world, I think, is the ability of my mind to correlate all its contents.’”
“That’s a Lovecraft quote, isn’t it?”
“I wrote it.”
“That’s enough, Gene. I think we’ve reached the end of what we could recover of his personality. Go ahead and log off.”
“Jesus,” said Gene, rubbing his eyes and blinking as he powered down the Jannowitz revenant. “I can see how you could lose yourself in it. There’s no time to think for yourself.”
“And you’re sure you’ve pulled in everything Jannowitz ever wrote?”
“Carrie and I put everything he wrote into the databases, Dr. Mason. Online and off, I’m positive.”
Dr. Mason sighed. “There’s just not enough to make a full revenant model for Jannowitz. I don’t think we can restore him this way.”
“His neurosurgeon has requested access to the Lovecraft revenant for treatment purposes again. He’s sent us four e-mails today.”
“I suppose we’ll have to let him,” Dr. Mason said. “I was hoping to find something today we could use to bring him back. But his physicians think neuronal cauterization is the only way. They want to burn the Lovecraft persona out of his brain.”
“And that will work?”
“I can’t imagine, but what else is there? In any event, it’s not our concern. We’ve wasted a day on this. Take half an hour for lunch while I load in Mr. Lovecraft, then we’ll begin this afternoon’s creative exercises.”
“I think the new story it’s writing is coming along pretty well.”
“It’s not to my taste, of course, but yes, I think you’re right. I doubt the man himself would know the difference once we’re finished.”