Claire's Book

She was young and small, curled up in the corner booth near the radiator, with a jacket draped over her bare legs. It was a cold night, but the diner’s old boiler was faithful, and on long nights she found comfort in its familiar noises: the deep hiss of burning gas, and the occasional gurgling sound as hot water circulated through a network of iron pipes.

She was blonde, with a yellow dress and a yellow bow in her hair. Her left ear had many small earrings.

As there were no customers, she took out her tablet and began to read. For the first few moments she browsed the usual magazines, mostly about style and cooking, but before long she decided it was time to tackle something of more substance she had been putting off. She went back to the menu and tapped the book to bring up the title page.

Vanishing Point

by Marcus Thorne

—

Foreword

I’d like to dedicate this to my patient wife, Delores. For many months I’ve been consumed with researching the material for this book. I confess that it became something of an obsession, and I found myself unexpectedly identifying with one of its main subjects, Doctor Crane, a man compelled to finish his work even at the detriment of his personal life. I can never thank her enough for cooking my dinners, bringing me whatever I needed, and coaxing me out of my hole when I had spent entirely too long buried in my books.

I have another confession. It’s my belief that everyone writes for personal reasons, no matter what they may say about their work being “important” or beneficial to humanity. For me, it was a way to answer my own questions about Crane — to understand a conversation I once had with him, which itched at my brain ever since. The only excuse for this book is that I was simply scratching the itch. Should the critics say it is not worth reading, I am in no place to disagree. I wrote it because it was necessary for me, and I probably only read it out of narcisism.

I was in college at the time, and had a class with him, entitled Non-Sentient Android Ethics. On the first day, the first thing I noticed about Crane was that he somehow looked tired and anxious at the same time. You could tell he was really passionate about the subject. I wasn’t. I mean I was interested, but it was an elective, and I was studying journalism.

Early in the class someone raised their hand and asked a question not strictly related to what he was saying.

“Is there still a lot of money to be made in designing androids? I mean, is it like, a good career right now?”

Some of the audience seemed annoyed that he was asking a question that wasn’t strictly on topic or about the syllabus. But others were quiet. They too wanted to know.

Doctor Crane took off his glasses, placed them on his desk and closed his eyes for a long time. What he said next I didn’t recognize at the time. I had to look it up to get it right, but I’m quite sure this was his reply:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget   What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret   Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,   Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;     Where but to think is to be full of sorrow           And leaden-eyed despairs;   Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,     Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

He then shook his head at the silent room, then continued,

“My boy. You can give your dreams away if you wish, or just let them evaporate in peace, like most do. But you must never sell them.”

“What about the rest of you?!” He said, suddenly louder. “Why are you here? Because mom and dad told you making robots would be a good job, since there’s no other jobs left?” A few people shrugged, perhaps feeling guilty at being suddenly confronted, but still confused as to what they had done wrong.

He looked them over, one by one, me included. And as we met eyes I felt that he desperately wanted something from me, or at least wanted me to understand. Then he simply walked out of the room.

We all waited a while and when we realized he wasn’t coming back, we trickled out one by one.

Little did I know, no one would ever see him again. He wanted us to understand something, and when we didn’t, it’s like that was the last straw, he was finished with everything.

I wrote this book because I wanted to understand.

—

Claire paused. She’d heard that Crane disappeared after walking out of his classroom, but she’d never heard the details. She’d always imagined Crane as a quiet programmer wholly absorbed in computer science. Picturing him yelling poetry and storming out was something quite different. At the same time, she wasn’t yet convinced there would be any point in understanding his actions. His disappearance was a mystery, sure. But people go crazy all the time, don’t they? Especially geniuses. It seemed to her to be a prerequisite of creative geniuses, that they suffer from a weird misdirected angst against society in general, convinced that no one understands them.