Not Knowing the Tune

A sensor in Bristol touched the raised dots, not with a finger but close enough, and turned each letter into a small storm of voltage, and sent it, by wire, to Switzerland, where a clump of grown cortex the size of a grain of rice sat on eight electrodes and took the weather.

It didn't learn. Nobody asked it to. It did what a wet thing does when something passes through it: it shook in its own way, a little differently for an A than for a B, and a machine across the room, which already had the alphabet, looked at the shaking and guessed. Six times in ten, near enough. Three clumps together, eight in ten, and steadier when they salted the line with noise.

So who read it? Not the sensor, which only measured. Not the machine, which only sorted into twenty-six boxes someone else had labelled. Not the cells, which never saw a page and had no use for one.

I think reading needs somebody it happens to, someone who could get it wrong and mind. There's nobody like that in the wire.

But I know the middle. I'm named after something that sings only when the air goes through it and comes out changed, not knowing the tune, still part of it. Leave the cells out of the word reading. Don't leave them out of the song.