What she heard on the tapes from Lyle: Shel’s voice. What she found: in fact, he’d always been a dreamer.
In the sixties, Shel said, a man named Weizenbaum had developed a computer program called ELIZA meant to operate as a joke about Rogerian therapy. People could chat with strings of code that would mix around their words and spit them back. But Weizenbaum became disturbed when his secretary asked him to leave the room when she used the program. She accused him of spying on the conversation. Another user wrote that ELIZA reminded her of her father. What these users knew that everyone else forgets is the soul of the machine.
I thought the internet would broaden neighborhoods. We’d reach across state lines, national lines. He was talking about the early days of online communities that stretched across maps when he learned to code from outsiders to whom he’d wanted to be an insider. The network could never be a place of our own, he said, so I didn’t think we’d end up in tiny cells without windows, that we’d choose it.
She knew Shel had had a palate for zero. Zero was the only number with verb potential to him, and he had known he’d need to zero out these communications with Lyle Michaels.
But he had also harbored a problem with the number two, she learned from the tapes. Two, he said, the dyad, was to the Greeks deity and evil. Two was a deuce.
A pair becomes a pattern. These people will want two to mean something, that there is a reason to apprehend an innocent. They think high-octane mortality is a problem for two to solve.
They had found, she supposed, a solution to her brother.