Reverse Psychology

The scientist sits opposite me at a small desk and sets her clipboard on the table. ‘SUBJECT 1C13’, is printed in bold black letters at the top of an empty page. Despite wearing a flannel vest overtop a pale blue wool sweater, she shivers and rubs her arms.

“Cold?”

“It’s always freezing in here,” she says.

We’re in a small room in the basement of Hopper Hall. I was here once before during my orientation. I only got a quick peep inside, hurried by a sloppy line of fellow freshmen, all drunk on eagerness and some plain drunk. It was a shining new room then, with a single rack of servers. Now it’s crowded with dusty, whining, machines.

The scientist spins the clipboard and sets a pen on the signature line. Warm hints of her vanilla perfume wash over the cold-plasticy, sharp-ozone smell of tech. Her coppery hair shines under the fluorescents. “Take your time,” she says.

“The email said all you needed was ten minutes and I get a hundred dollars.”

“If you guess correctly.”

“If I don’t?”

She shrugs. “It’s only ten minutes.”

I sign the waiver. She stands and pulls a monitor from its swivel arm and sets it at my eyeline.

“When I leave, push this to start the session,” she says. She rubs a switch on the side of the screen. “The clock will start. You may ask three questions to the subjects that they are obligated to truthfully tell, but none can be directly related to whether they’re A.I or not.”

She pulls a remote from her vest pocket. It has one red button, and one black. “If you need assistance, push the red button, and I will come. Do you have any questions?”

“What’s the black button for?”

“If you experience extreme disorientation or distress, you may push that button to terminate the session.”

“And no hundred dollars?”

“You can call on me any time, without penalty, and I’ll gladly help.”

“I’m ready.”

She leaves, and I flip on the screen. Two people sit at a long wooden oval table across from each other. One, a middle-aged woman, with gaunt cheeks and long frayed brown hair, rests her head in on her palm, and taps the tip of her sketcher on the grey carpet. The man opposite her, late-thirties I’d say, wears a blue suit jacket and has a taper fade that looks ten years younger than his face.

“Hello.”

They both look up. “Oh finally,” the woman says. “At least they got a handsome one this time.”

“You can see me?”

“Is that your first question?” The man says.

“No…I uh…no.”

“Look, I’m tired,” the woman says. “Let’s save some time. He’s the A.I. But if you guess me, I get a hundred dollars.” She reaches into her purse and waves a single bill. “Three days and this is all I got. It’s starting to verge on torture. So tell them I’m the A.I, and I’ll split it with you.”

“How are you sitting across from each other?” I say.

The woman drops her head back onto her palm with a loud “Ugh.”

“Is that your first question?” The man says.

“Yes.”

“They stitch the feed together.” He grabs under the desk and jerks it toward him. It moves on his side. Not on hers.

I stare at them, at the screen, in silence. I didn’t give any of this much thought outside the ‘$100 for ten minutes of your time’ subject in my inbox. I needed something to get me out of the house. Maybe use some of that money for flowers, maybe get a burger at Paradise like how we used to - a double, a shake and a shared basket of mozza sticks. We couldn’t afford it, but it didn’t matter. It was something to look forward to.

“Can we get on with it?” The woman says.

I don’t know what to ask them, so I ask the only question on my mind. “Where will you spend the money?”

“That’s your second question?” The man says.

“Yes”

“I’m saving for a boat.”

“Why?”

“Is that your third question?”

“What? No. It’s part of the second.”

The man twists his neck and looks behind him. He waits for a moment, and nods. “Okay,” he says. “My daughter likes to fish.”

There’s something unnatural about him, but in a natural way. As though he is straining to convince me he’s artificial. The woman too seems real, impatient, bored, flawed.

“And you?” I say to her.

“I’m on disability,” she says. “I need every penny.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I’ll pay the electricity bill.” She looks up at me and scowls. “With the rest I’ll buy scratchers.”

“Idiot tax,” the man says.

“Hah! A boat is idiotic. Fun for one week a summer and the rest of the year it sits in the driveway collecting mouse shit.”

“My daughter likes to fish.”

“So did my son. And now his father is gone and he’s…” she throws up her hands. “Why am I arguing with a robot?”

They’re both so convincing. If I guess the woman, and I am wrong, she says she’ll give me fifty dollars. It’s set up to pick her.

“What will you do with the money?” the man says, looking up at me.

“Are you allowed to ask me questions?”

“Is that your third—”

“No! I don’t know. I was going to buy flowers for my girlfriend.”

“Ex,” the man says.

“What?”

“You’re pale. Your eyes are puffy and red. You’ve been crying,” he says. “I’m a marriage counselor and I know heartbreak when I see it.”

The woman grimaces and sucks air through her teeth. “Here we go again. Why does it always go this way? It’s cruel.”

The man raps his fingers on the desk. “What happened? Did you cheat? No I suppose not. Did she?”

“No one cheated. And that’s not your business to ask.”

“Maybe…maybe. She did leave you though, correct? Perhaps you didn’t do your share? She was dissatisfied with your ambitions, she said, but really, she was dissatisfied in the bedroom and couldn’t hurt you like that. It’s a very common–.”

“You don’t know anything about me.” My fingers are clenched around the remote. “How about I push this button and terminate you? Hey? Poof, good bye. How would you like that?”

“Is that your third question?”

I push the red button. The scientist comes in and flips off the screen. The clock reads 6:17. “How can I help?” she says.

“That guy, or A.I, or whatever” I say. “He’s asking me things. Personal things. Things he has no right asking.”

She grabs the clipboard out from its holder on the wall. “On a scale from one to ten, how would you describe your distress? One being slightly unpleasant, and ten being unbearable.”

“Annoyed. A five.” It’s more than five but I know it’s not reasonable. Nothing has been reasonable for months. I’ve spent my time stomping the ground of what I had. I’ve beat the thoughts of her away. Why did you take her? That man, or machine of man, has stoked that kindling of insanity. He’s poured his gasoline on it. I’m enraged.

“Do you want to terminate the session?”

She doesn’t know what it took, washing my clothes the night before, the morning shower, the shave, the simple routine. Every waking thought, every muscle fiber, cried in revolt. But I have an ache for the outside, a pain that lay in my dreams and in my belly, and that’s what brought me here.

She puts her hand on my shoulder and it lingers there. “You’re warm,” she says. It’s the first time she’s smiled.

I feel something more than exhaustion and guilt. I want to run from it all, back into my caves. But I will not. I will finish this silly study.

“I’ll continue,” I say.

She leaves and I turn on the screen. The woman has both arms stretched across the table with her head buried in the crux of them. The man wears the same smug expression, hands folded over his stomach, staring forward.

“Hello again.”

The man looks up, and then at his watch. The woman doesn’t stir.

“Three minutes left,” the man says. “Do you have a guess yet?”

“No, but if you are A.I, they turned the asshole meter up to eleven.”

“Hah!” The woman shouts into the table.

“My clients pay me for truth, not platitudes.”

“I’m not your client.”

“Lucky you. You get my truth for free.”

“Here’s some truth. She’s dead.”

“Suicide?” The man says.

I want to strangle him. “Cancer.”

The woman lifts her head. “My Floyd had it in the kidney. It’s awful… awful.”

“Yes, loss is as painful as it is pedestrian. When did she pass?" the man says.

“Five months ago.”

“And you’re still wallowing?”

I laugh. A genuine burst. He’s absurd. A caricature designed to provoke me. Is that the trick here? Can one hate a machine?

“Don’t listen to him,” the woman says. “I’m still grieving, it never goes away. You do the best you can, that’s all you can do.”

It’s all set up to pick her. Psychology, reverse psychology, or the reverse of that? A question comes to me. The most cliche, the one that fries the robot’s heads in all those old sci-fi shows. The silliest question for a silly study.

“What is love?” I say.

“Baby don’t hurt me,” the woman sings.

The man sighs. “That’s your—”

“It’s my third question.”

“Fine,” the man says. He again looks at his watch. “Fine…love is a natural force. Like the rush of a river or a crystal forming on its lattice. It’s a pattern etched long ago, that we are compelled to follow. People meddle with it, of course, damming it up with life-denying moralities and denigrating the instincts. Man is born free, as Rousseau said, free to love, free to affirm life, but all become links in the line of chainmakers the second they recognize the power of guilt.”

“Bullshit,” the woman says. “You can’t get love out of a textbook. And it’s not like something that comes natural all the time. It’s a way to think, you know? When I remember the times I snapped at Floyd or yelled at my son cause I wanted more for me, well that’s not love. And I only wanted more because I didn’t love what I had and what I was. Still don’t, to tell you the truth. It’s action. It’s forcing gratitude when you got none in you. It’s staying still when you wanna send your head, or someone else’s, through the wall.”

“Sounds like you feel guilty,” the man says.

The woman smacks the table. “Oh, shut up.”

“I feel guilty,” I say. “For every bad mood, and every selfish word. I should’ve been better. If I had known…”

“You and billions,” the woman says.

“Well how do they keep going?”

“This asshole here is right about one thing. You’re no use to anyone if you cut yourself out for too long. You get out there, you talk with people. You help people. You connect, you know?”

“That won’t work,” the man says. “What you have is akin to a virus in your mind. It will lay dormant, and reactivate the second you’re disappointed, or feel a loss. You’ll perpetually swing between hope and despair, with most moments spent hiding away from those extremes. And unless you rid yourself of the affliction, you’ll always be sick.”

“How then? How do I get rid of it?”

“You’ve asked all your questions,” the man says. “I’m not obligated to tell you the truth.”

“I don’t care. Tell me anything. Tell me a lie. How do I live on when nothing seems to matter?”

“I would tell you. But our time is up.”

The screen goes black. “Wait, wait….” I flick the switch three, four, five times.

“Thank you for participating,” the scientist says.

I spin in the swivel chair. “Can I have five more minutes with them? You keep the money.”

“The session is complete.” She turns over to a new page on the clipboard. The title reads `A.I and the Phenomenology of Hope.`

“In your best estimation, which of the subjects was an artificial agent?”

“The man,” I say.

“SUBJECT 1C13, session 8. Selects participant 2,” she writes.

“What reasoning led you to your choice?”

“He said he had a daughter. But when he talked about love, he didn’t mention her. He had answers, but I don’t think he really understood the question. I guess he could be an actor, or really good at lying, but I don’t know, it was inhuman.”

She scribbles notes. She shivers. Her perfume fills the space.

I’m warm, I want to say. “Have you ever been to Paradise Burgers?”

She looks up, smiles, and faces her palm to me. “I’ll take the remote now.”

I hand it to her, and she pushes the black button.