Curt Christian

Slava Ukraini!🇺🇦

About the Author

A chronic underachiever in the early years of high school, Curtis Wray Christian Jr. eventually discovered, for himself, the truth of the theme of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. That theme, presented in Mother Night, tells us that we are what we pretend to be.

He had always lacked confidence in himself... and it showed. But in his senior year, he enrolled in a Speech and Drama class. And he began to apply what he was learning for the stage to real life. He was about to begin his greatest role in the longest running play of his life.

He pretended to be, and outwardly became, the most self-confident person he had ever known. He pretended to be unafraid of things that actually terrified him... and he no longer trembled. But, deep inside where no one could see, he was a painting by Edvard Munch. The carefully muffled screams were audible only to himself.

For good or ill, after years of rewriting, editing and continually running the lines of the script, he had become the character he was pretending to be. Eventually, he no longer had to actively pretend.

The charade was running itself. And he could no longer hear the screams within.

While he had selected an acceptable social lifestyle with which to surround himself, he often had a tendency to retreat into his books… or immerse himself into his work, the mainframe systems with which he felt more secure and comfortable. Eventually, dealing with numbers for long periods of time would bring on painful migraine headaches. But during this particular stage in his life, the languages of his computers, the regrouped binary of octal and hexadecimal symphonies, provided the order he craved.

As he witnessed the infancy of artificial intelligence slowly maturing into adolescence, he began to grow uneasy with helping it progress any further, even though his contributions could be considered nearly negligible. It was beginning subtly enough, but a wary eye could easily see its goal. One of the first things he had to do to preserve his conscience was to remove himself from complicity. He dropped from the “Big Iron” scene. He would always be a practical engineer in the general field of electronics. But he could no longer be involved in any of the machinations that may lead to advancing these devices to the threshold of genuine intelligence… and, ultimately, self-awareness. Whatever they would eventually become, they would have to do it with no further assistance from him.