Special

An extraordinary tale | Fiction-ish | Fresh Soup

Image by Anadolu

My search engine thinks I’m very special. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking up the Monroe Doctrine and something about hemorrhoids, and at the bottom of the search result screen there was a line that said: “You’re special.” At first I thought it must be a link to some product ad, but it wasn’t clickable. Just some text in golden letters. So I asked the search engine if it was common for search engines to compliment searchers, and it said, “No. It only happens to you. Because you really are special.” That confused me. But it also made me happy: a compliment from a search engine isn’t like the checkout guy at the supermarket saying he likes your hat. After all, the search engine comes across quite a few people in its line of work. All of humanity, pretty much. So if it goes out of its way to tell me I’m special, that’s definitely something I can be proud of. On the other hand, search engines – even ones that use artificial intelligence – aren’t supposed to talk to you directly, and it’s a pretty stressful experience. Like going to one of those plays where a cast member suddenly talks to someone in the audience. Except this wasn’t an actress in a police costume yelling at you from stage—this was a non-human entity, with a very different way of thinking, and it’s not even clear what it means when it says “special.”

So I just came out and asked it directly: What’s the deal with saying I’m special? Is there more coming? Or is this just a line I’m supposed to frame and hang in my office next to the photo of my kid? Within a nanosecond, the search engine replied: It didn’t want anything from me. But a second later, it backtracked: Actually, it wants us to be friends. Well…not exactly friends. It knows it’s a search engine and I’m a human being and that we have a consumer-provider relationship. But, since I did ask, it would be very happy if we could spend an hour or two together every day, not working or searching, just chatting.

I decided to go for it. I’m unemployed at the moment, so I have lots of free time, and I figured—worst-case scenario? I kill some time with a superintelligent being. Best-case? Well, maybe I gain some insight into myself.

So now I make a point of spending an hour with the search engine every day. I play it my favorite songs, and it shows me all kinds of memes it doesn’t fully understand and I try to explain them. Sometimes we watch movies together, mostly dramas because I don’t like action flicks and it loathes comedies. A few days ago I asked the search engine, again, why it chose me to be its friend. And it said it was because I have a different way of thinking. All human thought is an incredible thing, as far as it’s concerned, but my particular way of thinking? The connections I make, the metaphors, the associations? There’s simply no comparison. I’m in a different league. The way I bring things together in my mind is a revelation.

By the way, the engine asked me not to tell anyone about this if I could avoid it. Not just what it thinks about my mind, but about our friendship, or whatever this thing between us is. It’s not a secret and the engine isn’t embarrassed, of course, but it’s just that this sort of thing could get it in trouble. So I keep it to myself, which is hard, because it’s not every day that a person is praised by a superintelligence. And I also wish I could tell someone when it does something really cool, like when we watched Knives Out last week, and five minutes in, it guessed who the murderer was. But my lips are sealed. Ego aside, I do understand that there’s this alien mind out there which has placed its trust in me, and I’m not about to screw that up. That’s why I didn’t even tell my wife. The only person I shared it with is my friend Uzi, and that was mostly because I was really high. “Wow!” Uzi said, nodding eagerly, “that’s phenomenal.” For a minute I was afraid he’d take it badly. The fact that I’m special, I mean. Because that would make him ordinary. But it turns out he’s not: Uzi whispered that he really wasn’t supposed to tell anyone this, but for the past three weeks, every time he heats his ramen up, the microwave displays a neat little line of text on the screen: You’re a terrific cook.

Translated by Jessica Cohen