San Francisco

1977

Turkish profanity punctuated a shower of sparks that erupted from stage center. A big-eared man grappled with a cable as thick as his wrist as it spasmed with glittering gasps to-and-fro before the auditorium of dignitaries. Doctor Dorothea Darvula cast a furtive glance from the side of the stage. The phenomenal boredom of the assembly wasn't broken by the spectacle, and the man recovered in a barely uncomfortable amount of time. Still, Dorothea had swallowed another pint of oxygen that would not leave her body until this presentation was a bad cocktail anecdote.

The small explosion wasn't a blip on her foreman's neural radar. Papanav Reval swatted directions at his gaggle of stage technicians with Napoleonic patience. He was twenty-six and could bark angrily in as many languages, which he demonstrated when a crate dollied by two huffing lackeys careened into his path and threatened his cranial well-being. A swift pirouette dispelled the risk of concussion. Papanov strode backwards and beckoned the crate with one hand while the other whipped and spun around his body like a lasso. A lilting round of commands burst from his mouth, ostensibly followed by two laboring compatriots uncoiling and straightening out another roll of cord, this time from the center of the stage towards Dorothea. Words erupted from Papanav's lips in repetition. He dashed forward as the crate began to tilt. The electrical team dashed in on both sides, pushing their shoulder's into the corners of the crate like puppies fighting for milk. Beads of sweat poured down Papanav's bright red face and neck. He muttered commands until the box was jilted into place right beside the podium. The men stepped back, one clapped Papa on the back as he stooped over and found his breath. Once he could right himself, he held out an arm and was handed a crowbar that was a foot taller than he was. Bouncing it from hand to hand, he eyed the tall crate with appreciation. As he moved to approach it, however, Dorothea stepped forward.

"Just that bottom panel in the back, Papanav. That way we can get it plugged in." She smiled, and reached for the crowbar. "I'd like to do it during the presentation, Papa."

Papanav's face fell, his shoulder's slumped, and the whole crew seemed to lose a few inches of stature. He dutifully pried off the small section and picked it up, and relinquished the crowbar to Dorothea.

"Other crates, Papanav," Dorothea said. She remained behind to podium as Papanav barked out a few more commands. The tank began to throb with the dull grind of electrical power. The boys paced the stage one final time, ducking to retrieve tools from the stage, and lined up beside Dorothea. They all dressed in Papa's style, buttoned-up plaid shirts that inevitably untucked themselves from large tan pants held up with dull suspenders. Each offered their glum benediction; they wanted to see the crate opened. Dorothea shook each one's hand and thanked them.

"This is precise work gentlemen, and you nailed it tonight. We like having you guys with us and we want you to stay. We feel like you just can't walk away from working with science. After seeing these secrets, we'd have to kill you- ask the last team!"

The guys stared at their shoes.

"You're appreciated, and Leanord got you all seats."

Papanov answered for everyone. "Dorothea they can't understand you. And I told them you'd probably get us seats. They want to see me use that big bad crowbar!" He mimicked throwing his body against it and being flung back, and the guys all laughed with him. Dorothea smiled and shoo'd them away, giving Papanov hasty directions to where Leanord was waiting.

Acrid dust drifted out of the projector and diffused over the dignitaries of medicine and science assembled at Reiser Hall. They sat uncomfortably in their seats and balanced vegetables on small disposable plates. Some used the end of the break to stand up and remove expensive layers of rayon and wool. They buzzed with opinions on the day's startling presentations over soft unassuming piano music from the address system. At the podium, Dorothea Darvula shuffled her notes and peered through narrow eyelids over the horizon of the audience to where the sound booth was. She squeezed everything she had told Gus the sound technician during their short rehearsal into a powerful and penetrating glare. Somehow she could smell his cigarette smoke and condescension from here. It was six? slides; Dorothea tried to believe in him. She ignored the words on her cards but could not stop adjusting them. It distracted her from the herd of petty cooing doves that were fidgeting in her periphery. She saw a beam of light shoot out from the left of the auditorium as Papanav and his crew entered and made their way to the edge of the wing where the world's biggest and sweetest penguin Leonard Krammer waited for them. She knew he studied his program furiously for her benefit; throughout the setting up process he had stared and dabbed tears from his bespectacled eyes. Dorothea prepared every precise detail of this presentation but had failed to steel herself for the very real possibility that she wouldn't hear from Leanord after tonight. His blind faith in her had impelled Stanford to take her, and though it had cost him over the years his pride in her never wavered. Leanord dreamed of seeing Dorothea take the shape of her mother, his former colleague Dr. Gertrude Darvula. Their lives hadn't overlapped enough to leave Dorothea with any impression of her, so she spent a lifetime deciphering her mother's scientific legacy, and exhausted an old-world fortune with private forays into technology and biology that left Leonard baffled. He had been content to patronize her work and hope his old colleague smiled down from heaven. Two weeks before tonight, Dorothea's mail box contained an envelope embossed in black and gold. Inside was an invitation to her own surprise party, addressed to a Doctor Zingu Trask. The banquet hall of the Marriot was booked in Leanord's name tonight. It was stuffed with champagne, violets, and the intention to hobnob with admiring stars who would congratulate the Karmmer-Darvula foundation for its visionary leaps in whatever it was Dorothea had done in those rooms full of sparkling machines. Leonard's anachronistic understanding of science made Dorothea's explanations incomprehensible to him; he had never suspected her of being vague. For seven years she had cloaked her work in jargon, jibberish, and outright lies, protected by a thin bubble of nondisclosure agreements and foreign contracting. Several times she had feared some prying finger from the outside world would pop that bubble, exposing her earlier attempts at science. Whether or not her revelations were published, if the outside world knew nothing of Dorothea's work then for a second at least she was taking a sledgehammer to that bubble. This room of fools at least would never be the same.

The house lights dimmed. Dorothy felt the PA hum with her breathing.

"Esteemed colleagues." She tried the words out as the milky image of her first slide flashed above her. Considerate members of the audience muffled their conversations, others continued unabashed.

"Celebrated chemist Albrecht Hespentzen can be seen here with the mutton-chops and so much lace. He wrote in 1899: 'Unfetter the curious mind and it will drive a wedge into all it touches, dividing the world into thinner tendrils of tinder. Man reduces by nature, and resists the notion that far down he may encounter that which resists division- a fundamental piece of the world which cannot be split, only destroyed.'"

Dorothea winced and peered toward the sound. A glint of light winked at her from the back of the theatre,and she heard the slide click. A rough matchstick against an eggshell white background towered over her. It was her favorite matchstick in the whole Smithsonian archive. It had never struck her as possibly dull before.

"'Consider the matchstick. Split it, and you will not have two matches. No keen hand or divine concentration can whittle off another. Many times I've stuffed a matchstick in my pocket only to find it snapped, and it is undeniable annihilation.'"

"Hespetzen went on to write about the atom."

An audible sigh broke from Stuttgart. He shifted his legs and adjusted his belongings.

"Will this presentation be straying from this weird history of archaic notions, Doctor Darvula?"

Dorothy ignored him. "Influenza robbed Hespetzen of seeing the atom split. He even missed the discovery of elements #[[look up this fact, atoms discovered after 1920]]. But industrious students at MIT were sober once long enough to remember this passage, and thought to commemorate his loss by using a laser-" Dorothea signaled for the slide to change. She tried to see the audience's expression. Lasers always rocked people's world.

"To slice in half this matchstick."

Dorothea could count the carrots snapping in front of her now. It was veritable silence, and she liked it.

"In fact, here is that matchstick again, parted into 99 parts this time and arranged on a birthday cake, and when Albrecht Hespentzen would have turned 99 they lit them and sang." Another click, nerds in party hats. She sighed. It looked so cool. They better be thinking it looked cool.

"It demonstrates something we all love, which is that with money, time, and beer, science will push forward and portion out smaller pieces from yesterday's impossibilities. Nothing denies divorce."

"Honestly!" The professor was on his feet now.

The voice that answered him sounded clean and cold, like a young attractive surgeon.

"It is a pity that you have an eleven-year-old's attention."

"Now MATT, be nice." Dorothea laughed.

"I'm sorry, Doctor Darvula."

"He's only being formal to impress you, you wouldn't believe what he calls me at home."

The shadow of the audience lightened in hue. Dorothea had the whites of their eyes. She took a step back and planted her foot, and heaved the crowbar into the crate. There was a thunderous collapse, and the audience strained to make out the contents against the glare of the stage lights. There were screams. A glass broke.

Verdant plasma sloshed from a tank parallel with Dorothy. Bubbles orbited and drifted toward the top and the dark shape eliciting them bobbed in the center. Long metal shanks protruded from it, some linked to tubes, some to wires. The mass's tenuous suspension shifted, giving the audience a complete look at the rubbery gray baby in the tube. In front of them an agile electric tendril fished through the water until it found its insertion site and plunged deep, delivering substance and probing for signal, nurturing and measuring.

"Don't be alarmed," it said. "I am the Matchstick Man."

"What the hell is that?" someone screamed from the audience. It looked like the sassy white-suited scientist was on his ass.

"I am the Matchstick Man, a perfect marriage between mind and machine."

"Half a dozen speakers today have promised limitless applications of their computing machines, only to frustrate you with the limitations of processing and memory. Where others have presented limitations and petitioned your patience, I have found the key in a computational amphibian at home in flesh and machine. By imbuing machine with the human mind's lightning impulses and powerful intuition, I've unleashed a super-intelligence that exceeds the capacities of either.

"Do not confuse this for an advance in computing. This is a contribution to the medicine of humankind.

"Right now MATT's personality is robotic, uninflected. The chemical environment utilizes his organic systems without imprinting them. His human material is smooth, unexperienced. If allowed, he would begin to map relationships and conform to experiences, generating a unique character but for now he is restrained. Reserved."

Click. what do they seeeee

"There is a process, costly and dangerous, as yet uncharted; but when mankind is ready, we will imprint Matchstick Man. Lasers will map and articulate the subject's brain to the smallest mannerism and then sculpt a soul out of the stem cells and clay, a form of the person- which if stored in the proper medium- live as long as man creates 120 volt alternating current."

Someone screamed. Hadn't somebody already screamed?

"Don't be alarmed," MATT said. "I know that you are confused. This is a lot for your brains to take in."

"Is that the baby?" Someone in the audience said. "Is the baby talking to us?"

"Miss Darvula, this isn't science! This is blaspheme!" The blond haired man was back on his feet, his stiff arms flapping by his sides. "A whole baby?"

MATT told her it would be the first question. Exactly half of the questions she would get to answer.

"My original model dissolved everything but the brain. This produced stunning machines. They found ways to heal damage to themselves, engineered solutions to mass transit, predicted reliable stock data and engineered moral codes sophisticated enough to refrain from revealing the information to us. They were the computers little boys dream about and I wanted more.

"So much thinking occurs outside the brain. The entire spinal cord encodes interactions both invisible and precise. The skin responds to anger, music, mathematical reasoning, and learning. So does the digestion system.

"This little dude floating next to me is a goldfish in a bowl; he won't grow any bigger, or come to any awakened understanding of his life. He's a sponge, a floating processing chip that MATT uses to synthesize human personality."

"Yes, but." The voice was afraid of the implications. "This is murder! Where did you get him?

"Almost a decade I've worked in secret; and when the time came, I had him myself."

Abruptly, her microphone cut out.

"Hey!" MATT said. The speakers hummed again, and Dorothea knew she could speak. Sparks caught her eye, from the booth. She heard the bright popping of little glass tubes. MATT's temper was coming out.

The sides of the auditorium filled with scientists, the fronts of their pants smeared with ranch dressing. A few were standing in the rows, shouting objections at her. Stuttgart demanded the auditorium's fuse be pulled and Darvula's creation destroyed. Dorothea searched for the face of Doctor Krammer, and found him sitting patiently in his chair with his leg crossed. She met his eyes and winced with a smile. He beamed at her.

Two men lumbered onto the stage, and the lights went out.

"Don't be alarmed, I've been instructed not to hurt you," MATT said. "Besides, this is all a model; you have no idea where I am actually located. I'm being transmitted here by means which would baffle you."

The men stood next to Dorothea and panted. She could smell the sweat under their stiff white shirts.

"But you had better step away from Doctor Dorothea Darvula. Your behavior would frighten a lesser person, and she is quite capable of flattening you with her palms."

Dorothea smiled at the closest man. He and his partner lowered themselves off the stage, and joined the throng of panicked spectators. MATT pulled up the houselights and opened all the doors in the building. His system tweaked the stoplights outside to accommodate the swarm of vehicles. Each person going had a small string of electronic coincidences set to unfold over the next few weeks to help them absorb the stress of the presentation. Human safety was MATT's directive. And although his statistical models were certain that everyone would leave the room unharmed, he remained on alert until the last person exited.

"Not bad, MATT," Dorothea said.

"It could have been worse," MATT said.

The only body in the audience left began to clap.