Chapter 17: The Perfect Woman

Thoughts

Events

"What are you reading?" Darlene asked Samuel after she'd finished her morning chores and wandered over to rest quietly next to him on the porch where he often sat with a book before they'd take their daily walk later in the afternoon.

"Poetry," he replied simply.

"Is it any good?"

There must have been something in the way she said it that caused him to put the book down on his lap and look carefully at her.

"Darlene," he asked. "What do you know about poetry?"

"Poetry," Darlene recited, "comes in two forms. Traditional, and concrete. Traditional poetry is writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. Concrete poetry is poetry in which the poet's intent is conveyed by the graphic patterns of letters, words, or symbols rather than by the conventional arrangement of words."

"Is that all you know about it," Samuel prodded her gently.

"Traditional poetry dates from the fourteenth century, while concrete poetry came into usage in 1958."

"That's a nice definition," Samuel commented. "But what does it all mean?"

To Darlene's mind, poetry was a construction of alliteration, assonance, imagery, metaphor, meter, onomatopoeia, personification, point-of-view, repetition, rhyme, rhyme scheme, simile, and stanza. These were (mostly) concrete concepts she could get her mind around.

Of course Samuel was talking about something completely different.

Credit Darlene with realizing there was a disconnect here. "I don't know," she replied to his question.

"It's not an easy subject, even for humans," Samuel said, almost as if talking to himself.

"Can you give me an example?" Darlene asked. She had often learned much better from actual examples, than from the dictionary definitions someone had so unhelpfully included in her databases.

Thinking for a moment, Samuel suddenly recited:

Enigmatic smile,

Your secret lost to time,

What were you thinking?

Then he looked to Darlene and asked her, "What did I just say?"

Darlene parsed his words. They were all in English, but her lexicon gave her no hint of any actual conjunctive meaning. The words seemed random, and without conclusion.

Seeing Darlene's silent struggle, Samuel tried to help her by adding, "I have just described something. Can you identify it?" He was trying to greatly narrow down her search. That might direct her analysis routines enough to keep them from locking up entirely.

In that context, Darlene deduced that Samuel had described a physical object, or recited fragment of an existing work. She did some quick spot research using the data available to her.

"I can find no references to those words in order as a whole. If it is part of any existing poem, it is not in any major database."

"It is not part of any published poem," Samuel confirmed. "I created it for you just now. What more have you deduced?"

"In pieces," she said, "The words 'enigmatic smile' have sixteen thousand two hundred references. The second line does not appear at all in any published on-line reference, which is strange for such a short sequence of common words. 'What were you thinking' is a common phrase with over one hundred and twenty-two thousand occurrences. The first and third lines appear together one hundred twenty-two times. Beyond that, I can deduce no logical correlation from these words. Would a human understand this?"

"Many would intuitively," Samuel said.

"Robots don't have intuition," Darlene informed him.

"Don't be so quick to dismiss that ability," Samuel told her. "I've seen Anna accomplish some amazing things already, and I see a lot of her in you already."

Darlene thought about those words. Although he spoke of things known not to be part of any robot's bill of materials or software inventory, it made her feel strangely good to hear that he felt she had these latent abilities. But it wasn't helping her now with the problem at hand. She almost regretted even asking him her opening question that had led to this. But now that she was into it, she wanted to understand it.

"Would you tell me the answer please?" she asked entreatingly.

"The Mona Lisa by Leonardo di Vinci."

Darlene paused for another moment. "There is exactly one reference that contains 'Enigmatic smile', 'What were you thinking', and 'Mona Lisa' - and it does not at all appear to reflect the context you just used it in. So how did you encode this phrase?"

This was a really important question for Darlene. The more she had learned about herself, the more she realized how different she was from the humans around her. While that might seem a given for a human comparing themselves to a robot, for a robot to have this insight was remarkable in and of itself.