Interella
And the search for knowledge
Once upon a future time – and a time of techno-tyranny it will be – a girl called Interella will ask her father, “What is school?”
“Ah, school,” he replies, dragging himself from his phone as he dimly recalls days spent at a desk in a classroom, a teacher blathering on. “A place where we used to be sent, so that we could learn to think.”
“Think?” says Interella. “What is thinking?” She asks her phone this time instead of her father. But the phone’s response sends an odd feeling through her.
“Thinking comprises the mental processes that occur when prompting a phone to respond,” it outputs.
The words are disorienting, as they so often are when she strays from asking about potential purchases. Yet she recognises that a peculiar thing happens in her head when she prompts. There is something about this “thinking” that piques her curiosity: an intuition that the phone is not telling her the whole story; that an energy could be coursing within her which is but a trickle at present. An energy that is mysterious, and maybe good.
Interella goes to her mother, who is gardening in the early morning before the sun becomes too high and the sweltering begins. “What is thinking?” she asks.
Her mother puts down her watering can, and looks at her daughter with pity.
“My dearest Interella, it’s time you knew that I am sick and will soon die. When I go, take the spaceship from the garage and travel to the stars in search of the answer you seek. Leave your phone behind – bury it with me. Promise me you will do this.”
When her mother dies a few months later, Interella, in her grief, honours what her mother asked of her. She slips her phone into her mother’s coffin. On the night after the burial, she takes the craft out of the garage, and it carries her off into space.
“Where do you want to go?” asks the spaceship, once they have left Earth’s atmosphere.
“Take me to a planet where I will find out how to think,” she says.
“I don’t know where that is,” the spaceship replies. Interella finds it strange for a machine to say it doesn’t know something – instead of confidently answering with what might be nonsense for all she knows. If only her mother were there to tell her what to do, she thinks (although she doesn’t know to call it that).
All of a sudden her mother appears on the screen before her, looking dark-gold and mysterious.
“Interella, you don’t know it but you are already thinking. You need to do more of it, that’s all. And to do it more deeply. Ask the spaceship to go to a planet where they have survived the tyranny of dictators, corporations and their machines.”
The spaceship complies, and takes her to a beautiful green planet called Epistemo where the people – Interella eventually learns to think of them as that, however many arms they have – where the people worship knowledge and facts and culture and reasoning. Their machines are mere implements, dedicated to those pursuits.
The people of Epistemo are fascinated by their visitor. They teach her their language, and laugh kindly with her and correct her when she misunderstands them. After many orbits of their moon, she is thinking as much as they do: formulating questions and devising answers, whether by herself or through debate with her new friends. She learns to hold these answers to a high standard with respect to material reality, the rigours of conceptual clarity, and the demands of ethics and aesthetics. She learns to write up the results as poetry, fiction and treatises.
There are disputes, and accountability. The thinking life is often hard, but fascinating. Knowledge is difficult to come by, and worth it.
Yet, after some orbits of Epistemo around its sun, Interella grows homesick. She reluctantly bids an emotional farewell to her new friends – tears glisten from non-human eyes. Her spaceship takes her home.
There she finds that her father has remarried. Her stepmother and two stepsisters preside over their grand home, which her stepmother’s friend, the Dictator, bestowed upon them. Her step-family are mean and cruel to Interella – in part because they follow the Dictator in their nature, but mainly because they are jealous of her. Even they can see that her mind is beautiful. She comes up with ideas by herself which throw a charmed light on reality; she rarely asks her phone for anything other than to identify new sources of information, which she critically evaluates, against all convention. She possesses a faculty which they would not want for themselves, for it frightens them; but whose existence humiliates them in a way they can barely understand. They hate her for it, and consign her to work in the kitchen, cleaning and scrubbing. She becomes a prisoner there.
Later that year, as the warm, wet winter draws in and the days shorten, the Dictator announces that his son is seeking new development opportunities. He will fund the person who most impresses him at a series of grand receptions to be held in the golden palace.
This prospect excites the stepsisters, who dress in their most expensive gowns and leave for the reception. They pay no mind to Interella, who has to continue her toils in the kitchen. But after they have left, Interella’s mother appears on a screen. She tells her daughter how proud she is of her, after her successful trip to Epistemo. “You shall go to the reception,” she tells her. “You’re a thinker, now. Find a way!”
Interella’s spaceship is hidden nearby. Encouraged by her mother, she picks the old-fashioned window-lock with the point of a skewer, and returns to her craft. Inside, she dresses in the clothes she brought back from planet Epistemo, and leaves for the reception.
After that night, all everyone can talk about is the girl in the exotic costume who so impressed the Dictator’s son that he talked and danced with her more than anyone else. His face bore a look simultaneously of lust, admiration and incomprehension at whatever it was she said to him. No one’s phone could identify her, in her exotic costume and the weird but somehow glamorous facial jewellery she wore as a disguise.
The following day, the stepsisters come down to the kitchen to gloat about what a splendid time they had at the fantastic reception. What a shame it was that Interella was not fit to attend such an event, they tell her. They even begin to describe the outlandish creature who seemed to have won the heart of the Dictator’s son, but soon leave after they realise that her existence serves only to cast a shadow over their far lesser appeal.
Twice again the Dictator holds grand receptions, and each time the mysterious woman appears and captivates his son all night. Each time, she disappears without a trace, as suddenly as she has appeared.
After the final reception, the Dictator’s son grows distraught. He has no idea who she is. His phone’s account of what she said to him about her plans still makes no sense to him.
But there was a word she used on that final night, one that his phone could not make head or tail of. Whatever it meant, it sticks with him: he can hear the six syllables roll from her tongue, alien and beguiling. He sends for all the women who attended the receptions. He will fund the plans of whoever can utter the word she used: the word whose meaning he asked her for, but she did not answer.
On the first two days, the women propose words so far from what he is after, that he wonders why they bothered to come. So it continues on the third and final day. The stepsisters are the last to appear. They have paid the most expensive prompt alchemists to help their phones divine the word – on the basis of what, exactly, they cannot say. The Dictator’s son places his head in his hands at both their responses.
An even greater sadness falls upon him now that his last hope has been crushed. The Dictator does his best to draw his son from the room where he languishes. One day, however, he persuades the son to accompany him to dinner at the house of his business acquaintance, Interella’s stepmother. When Interella sees the son arrive, she begs her father to allow her to cook a special dish for the visitors. His father finally agrees, despite the displeasure of his wife, after Interella tells him it is a special soup which her mother showed her how to make.
She cooks the soup with a vegetable she brought back from Epistemo, which still grows inside the spaceship in soil she brought back from there, under lamps that emulate its sun.
The Dictator’s son marvels at the soup’s deliciousness, which lifts his spirits. He demands that the cook be brought before him. Under the glare of his wife and stepdaughters, Interella’s father goes to fetch her from the kitchen, where he finds her cleaning.
She brings with her the alien vegetable to show the Dictator’s son, and explains how she made the soup. When he asks her how she found the vegetable, she answers with the word she used at the final reception.
He bolts forward on hearing the word again, exactly as before. “What does it mean?” he asks her. This time, she answers.
“It means the beauty of searching in one’s own mind and with one’s own body for what is hard to find but true and wise, and whose pursuit is a treasure in itself.”
No one can understand her definition, or what their phones tell them it might mean. No one who was present, that is. In the Dictator’s land, a few remain who work in the fine-tuning centres, the workslops, the institutes where incremental algorithmic advances are made, and in the few remaining art ghettos and science caves. They immediately understand what she says, on hearing it broadcast over the streams.
“What do you wish for?” the Dictator’s son asks her. “I’ll give you anything.”
With the funds he grants her, Interella establishes a city of knowledge. There, she and her fellow knowledge workers and artists discover how much human potential had once existed. That was in the time before the corporations who paid for the Dictator to rule had reduced civilisation to algorithmic futility; the time before their inundation with the virtual had washed his subjects away from the real.
Interella and her fellow citizens live happily in the city of knowledge, which they call Epistemo. They spread the joy of the search for wisdom all across the land. Until finally the Dictator is overthrown.
Image of Mae Jemison, NASA.
