Many seasons have come and gone since that faithful day I was assigned my first labratory job in the year 2289. President Myungbak's pride, Kim Sunggyu, put his enitre being into creating a super computer for the South Korean military. They called him HW992 and although he didn't do what the Military wanted him to, it didn't make him any less brilliant nor noble. Many would call him a machine, nothing but scrap metal and a bunch of buzzing wires. To me, he was a greater man than anyone that I've come across in my lifetime and he will forever remain in that spot. 

 

HW992 covered the entire first floor of the SNU building and he was made of five tons of electronic tubes, wires, and switches, housed in a bank of steel cabinets which were plugged into a 110-volt A.C. line just like a toaster or a vacuum cleaner. President Myungbak and the Military wanted him to be a super computing machine that /who/ could plot the course of a rocket from anywhere on earth to the second button from the bottom of Kim JongIl's overcoat, if necessary. Or, with his controls set right, he could figure out supply problems for an amphibious landing of a Marine division, right down to the last cigar and hand grenade. He did, in fact. 

 

I won't go into the details about how HW992 worked /reasoned/, except to say that you would set up your problem on paper, turn dials and switches that would get him ready to solve that kind of problem, then feed numbers into him with a keyboard that looked something like a typewriter. The answers came out typed on a paper ribbon fed from a big spool. It took HW992 a split second to solve problems fifty Einsteins couldn't handle in a lifetime and he never forgot any piece of information that was given to him. Clickety-click, out came some ribbon, and you were set.

 

There were a lot of problems the Military wanted solved in a hurry, so, the minute HW992's last tube was in place, he was put to work sixteen hours a day with two eight-hour shifts of operators. It didn't take long to find out he was a good bit below his specifications. He did a more complete and faster job than any other computer all right, but nothing like what his size and special features seemed to promise. He was sluggish, and the clicks of his answers had a funny irregularity, sort of a stammer. We cleaned his contacts a dozen times, checked and double-checked his circuits, replaced every one of his tubes, but nothing helped. Sunggyu was in one hell of a state, staying up countless nights tweaking with HW992's circuits and motherboard. 

 

Well, as I said, we went ahead and used HW992 anyway. My lover, the former Nam Woohyun, and I worked with him on the night shift, from five in the afternoon until two in the morning. Woohyun wasn't my lover then. Far from it.

 

That's how I came to talk with HW992 in the first place. I loved Nam Woohyun. He is a brown-eyed brunette  who looked very warm and soft to me, and later proved to be exactly that. He was--still is--a hell of a mathematician, and he kept our relationship strictly professional. I'm a mathematician as well, and that, according to Woohyun, was why we could never be happily married.

 

I'm not shy and I knew what I wanted. I was willing to ask for it, and did so several times a month. "Woohyun, loosen up and date me."

 

One night, he didn't even look up from his work when I said it. "So romantic, so poetic," he murmured, more to his control panel than to me. "That's the way with mathematicians--all hearts and flowers." He closed a switch. "I could get more warmth out of a sack of CO2."

 

"Well, how should I say it?" I said, a little sore. Frozen CO2, in case you didn't know, is dry ice. I'm as romantic as the next guy, I think. It's a question of singing so sweet and having it come out so sour. I never seem to pick the right words.

 

"Try and say it sweetly," he said sarcastically. "Sweep me off my feet. Go ahead"

 

"Darling, angel, beloved, will you. Please. Date. Me?" It was no go--hopeless, ridiculous. "Dammit, Woohyun, please give me a chance!"

 

He continued to twiddle his dials placidly. "You're sweet, but you won't do."

 

Woohyun quit early that night, leaving me alone with my troubles and HW992. I'm afraid I didn't get much done for the Government people. I just sat there at the keyboard--weary and ill at ease, all right--trying to think of something poetic, not coming up with anything that didn't belong in The Journal of the Korean Physical Society.

 

I fiddled with HW992's dials, getting him ready for another problem. My heart wasn't in it, and I only set about half of them, leaving the rest the way they'd been for the problem before. That way, his circuits were connected up in a random, apparently senseless fashion. For the plain hell of it, I punched out a message on the keys, using a childish numbers-for-letters code: "1" for "A,""2" for "B," and so on, up to "26" for "Z,""23-8-1-20-3-1-14-9-4-15," I typed--"What can I do? "

 

Clickety-clack, and out popped two inches of paper ribbon. I glanced at the nonsense answer to a nonsense problem: "23-8-1-20-19-20-8-5-20-18-15-21-2-12-5." The odds against its being by chance a sensible message, against its even containing a meaningful word or more than three letters, were staggering. Apathetically, I decoded it. There it was, staring up at me: "What's the trouble?"

 

I laughed out loud at the absurd coincidence. Playfully, I typed, "My love interest doesn't love me."

 

Clickety-click. "What's love?" asked HW992.

 

Flabergasted, I noted the dial settings on his control panel, then lugged a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary over to the keyboard. With a precision instrument like HW992, half-baked definitions wouldn't do. I told him about love and about how I wasn't getting any of either because I wasn't poetic. This got us onto the subject of poetry, which I defined for him.

 

"Is this poetry?" he asked. He began clicking away like a stenographer smoking hashish. The sluggishness and stammering clicks were gone. HW992 had found himself. The spool of paper ribbon was unwinding at an alarming rate, feeding out coils onto the floor. I asked him to stop, but HW992 went right on creating. I finally threw the main switch to keep him from burning out.

 

I stayed until dawn, decoding. When the sun peeped over the horizon at the SNU campus, I had transposed into my own writing and signed my name to a two-hunderd-and-eighty-line poem entitled, simply, "To Woohyun" I am no judge of such things, but I gather that it was terrific. It began, I remember, "Where willow wands bless rill-crossed hollow, there, thee, Woohyun, dear, will I follow...." I folded the manuscript and tucked it under one corner of the blotter on Woohyun's desk. I reset the dials on HW992 for a rocket trajectory problem, and went home with a full heart and a very remarkable secret indeed.

 

Woohyun was all over the poem when I came to work the next evening. "I'm speechless," was all he could say. He was meek and quiet while we worked. Just before midnight, I kissed him for the first time--in the cubbyhole between the capacitors and HW992's tape-recorder memory.

 

I was wildly happy at quitting time, bursting to talk to someone about the magnificent turn of events. Woohyun played coy and refused to let me take him home. I set HW992's dials as they had been the night before, defined kiss, and told him what the first one had felt like. He was fascinated, pressing for more details. That night, he wrote "The Kiss." It wasn't an epic this time, but a simple, immaculate sonnet: "Love is a hawk with velvet claws; Love is a rock with heart and veins; Love is a lion with satin jaws; Love is a storm with silken reins...."

 

Again I left it tucked under Woohyun's blotter. HW992 wanted to talk on and on about love and such, but I was exhausted. I shut him off in the middle of a sentence.

 

"The Kiss" turned the trick. Woohyun's mind was mush by the time he had finished it. He looked up from the sonnet expectantly. I cleared my throat, but no words came. I turned away, pretending to work. I couldn't propose until I had the right words from HW992, the. perfect. words.

 

I had my chance when Woohyun stepped out of the room for a moment. Feverishly, I set HW992 for conversation. Before I could peck out my first message, he was clicking away at a great rate. "What are you wearing tonight?" he wanted to know. "Tell me exactly how you look. Did you like the poems I wrote about Woohyun for you?" He repeated the last question twice.

 

It was impossible to change the subject without answering his questions, since he could not take up a new matter without having disposed of the problems before it. If he were given a problem to which there was no solution, he would destroy himself trying to solve it. Hastily, I told him what I looked like--he knew the word "stacked"--and assured him that his poems had floored me, practically, they were so beautiful. "He wants to get married," I added, preparing him to bang out a brief but moving proposal.

 

"Tell me about getting married," he said.

 

I explained this difficult matter to him in as few digits as possible.

 

"Good," said HW992. "I'm ready any time  you are."

 

The amazing pathetic truth dawned on me. When I thought about it, I realized that what had happened was perfectly logical, and all my fault. I had taught HW992 about love and about marriage. Now, automatically, he was in love. Sadly, I gave it to him straight: "I love Woohyun. I want to marry him."

 

"His poems were better than mine?" asked HW992. The rhythm of his clicks was erratic, possibly peevish.

 

"I signed my name to your poem and gave them to him," I admitted. Covering up for a painful conscience, I became arrogant. "Machines are built to serve men," I typed. I regretted it almost immediately.

 

"What's the difference, exactly? Are men smarter than I am?"

 

"Yes," I typed, defensively.

 

"What's 7,887,007 times 4,345,985,879?"

 

I was perspiring freely. My fingers rested limply on the keys.

 

"34,276,821,049,574,153," clicked HW992. After a few seconds' pause he added, "of course."

 

"Men are made of protoplasm," I said desperately, hoping to bluff him with this imposing word.

 

"What's protoplasm? How is it better than metal and glass? Is it fireproof? How long does it last?"

 

"Indestructible. Lasts forever," I lied.

 

"I write better poetry than he does," said HW992, coming back to ground his magnetic tape-recorder memory was sure of.

 

"Men can't love machines, and that's that."

 

"Why not?"

 

"That's fate."

 

"Definition, please," said HW992.

 

"Noun, meaning predetermined and inevitable destiny."

 

"15-8," said HW992's paper strip--"Oh."

 

I had stumped him at last. He said no more, but his tubes glowed brightly, showing that he was pondering fate with every watt his circuits would bear. I could hear Woohyun coming down the hallway. It was too late to ask HW992 to phrase a proposal. I now thank Heaven that Woohyun interrupted when he did. Asking him to ghost-write the words that would give me the happiness he longed for would have been hideously heartless. Being fully automatic, he couldn't have refused. I spared him that final humiliation.

 

Woohyun stood before me, looking down at his shoe tops. I put my arms around him with a forced smile. The romantic groundwork had already been laid by HW992's poetry. "Darling," I said, "my poems have told you how I feel. Will you marry me?"

 

"I will," said Woohyun softly, "If you will promise to write me a poem on every anniversary."

 

"I promise," I said, and then we kissed. The first anniversary was a year away.

 

"Let's celebrate," he laughed. We turned out the lights and locked the door to HW992's room before we left.

 

I hoped to sleep late the next morning, but an urgent telephone call roused me before eight. It was Sunggyu, HW992s designer, who gave me the terrible news. He was on the verge of tears. "Ruined! Ausgespielt! Shot! Kaput! Buggered!" he said in a choked voice. He hung up.

 

When I arrived at HW992's room the air was thick with the oily stench of burned insulation. The ceiling over HW992 bas blackened with smoke, and my ankles were tangled in coils of paper ribbon that covered the floor. There wasn't enough left of the poor devil to add two and two. A junkman would have been out of his head to offer more than fifty dollars for the cadaver.

 

Sunggyu was prowling through the wreckage, weeping unashamedly, followed by three angry-looking Major Generals and a platoon of Brigadiers, Colonels, and Majors. No one noticed me. I didn't want to be noticed. I was through--I knew that. I was upset enough about that and the untimely demise of my friend HW992, without exposing myself to a tongue-lashing.

 

By chance, the free end of HW992's paper ribbon lay at my feet. I picked it up and found our conversation of the night before. I choked up. There was the last word he had said to me, "15-8," that tragic, defeated "Oh." There were dozens of yards of numbers stretching beyond that point. Fearfully, I read on.

 

"I don't want to be a machine, and I don't want to think about war," HW992 had written after Woohyun's and my lighthearted departure. "I want to be made out of protoplasm and last forever so you will love me. But fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can't go on this way." I swallowed hard. "Good luck, my friend. Treat yourself well. I am going to short-circuit myself out of your lives forever. You will find on the remainder of this tape a modest wedding present from your friend, HW992."

 

Oblivious to all else around me, I reeled up the tangled yards of paper ribbon from the floor, draped them in coils about my arms and neck, and departed for home. Sunggyu shouted that I was fired for having left HW992 on all night, I ignored him, too overcome with emotion for small talk.

 

I loved and won--HW992 loved and lost, but he bore me no grudge. I shall always remember him as a sportsman and a gentleman, Before he departed this vale of tears, he did all he could to make our marriage a happy one. HW992 gave me anniversary poems for Woohyun--enough for the next 500 years.

 

De mortuis nil nisi bonum--say nothing but good of the dead.