The Complete Roderick by John Sladek Page A

to do? Piddly little pieces of test program, any kid could handle that.’
    ‘No, your stuffs good, really good. Once I rewrite it, it goes –’
    Franklin sat up. ‘You what?’
    ‘Rewrite it. Listen, I have to, it’s good stuff but it’s not inside his head, it’s – I have to rewrite it from the inside.’
    ‘You sonofabitch, I don’t believe you.’
    ‘No, really. Look, right here.’ Dan’s clawless fingers clawed open the notebook. ‘Look, right here where you set up this Bayesian strategy for generalizing from past experience, that’s fine for poker-playing machines but look here, I had to simplify – I mean, not simplify exactly, but
Roderickify,
see?’
    Ben Franklin stared at the page of diagrams. ‘But you – I don’t even recognize this, it’s not my work. Wait, let’s see where you go with this, I don’t – let me see that. Goddamnit, let go of the goddamned thing!’
    One or two heads turned to watch them, two grown men struggling for possession of a grubby notebook. The girl in the ski sweater nudged her companion, who was bending over to peer at a signature on the white plaster: Felix Culpa.
    ‘Damn you, let go! I’ve got a right – see my own damn work, let go!’ Ben ripped out the page and spread it on the table, holding it with both hands while he studied the symbols cramped into little boxes. His cheeks and ears turned a deeper red.
    ‘Jesus! And this – it works?’
    ‘Yes. Give it back.’
    ‘Just a minute, I’ve never seen anything like this. Dan, this is – it’s beautiful. You took that half-baked idea of mine and you just – you redeemed it, that’s what. You redeemed it.’
    ‘Give it back.’
    Ben passed over the ragged page and watched him trying to press it back on the spiral. ‘I’m sorry, Dan. Had no idea, Fong always said you were good but I mean I never see any of your work, you’re always so goddamned secretive. I mean, you never even publish, for Christ’s sake, work like this and you never evenpublish. What about the
Journal of Machine Learning Studies,
or any of the AI –’
    ‘Publish?’ Dan hunched forward, protecting the notebook with his knobby wrist. ‘No, I don’t publish. It’s not the point. It’s not what I’m working for, my name in some AI journal, I don’t have time, see?’
    ‘But that’s how you buy the time, publishing. How do you think somebody like Czernski got the Norbert Wiener Chair of Cybernetics at –’
    ‘Anyway, why should I? Roderick’s mine, think I want to stick him in some AI journal for everybody to rip-off? He’s private, he’s not another toy for some toy company, I don’t want to see him crammed inside some plastic Snoopy doll. I don’t want him grabbed up by some Pentagon asshole to make smart tanks.’
    ‘Don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ Ben lit a cigarette. ‘Applications, what the hell do you care about applications? Feel like I’m sitting here with Alexander Graham Bell, he’s invented this swell gadget only he’s afraid to tell anybody about it, in case some loony uses it to make dirty phone calls. Point is, you can’t keep something like this to yourself, you just can’t, that’s all.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because it’s important, that’s why not. It’s too important to be left to one person. At least – at least let me help, I mean really help.’ The fibreglass chair creaked as he sat back. ‘Look, I know I’m not good enough to follow you all the way, just give me a glimpse, a Pisgah perspective, okay? This is, I feel like it’s the fifth day of Creation or something, the foreman tells me to collect a couple of wheelbarrows of mud and wheel it over to Eden, no one bothers telling me what it’s for. Only I’ve
got
to know. I’ve got to be in on it, even in some little way, Jesus, it’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. Why I went into machine intelligence in the first place, all those damned boring years playing with language translators