Linette Reeman | After Donald Trump is Elected President, Alan Turing Calls Me Crying

December 21, 2016

Linette Reeman

After Donald Trump is Elected President, Alan Turing Calls Me Crying

Here is what you need to know: 1. Alan Turing cracked the Nazi Enigma Code, a. helping the Allies defeat the Germans in WWII, b. before undergoing chemical castration for the crime of being homosexual in 1950s England. 2. Between the two of us, we have enough knives to open a sloppy eatery, but Alan Turing wants to buy a gun. His voice on the phone is smaller than a split atom. He asks me if I’ve seen the news. I say no, I live in South Jersey; I am watching it live. My chemistry professor asks a class full of cyanide skin why we are being so quiet and no one answers for fear our throats will miscarry some half-dead truth. I mean last month a customer praised the New Hitler's honest tongue and I was silent then too for I assumed I will always wake up alive and thus will need to keep a job to return to and I do not tell Alan Turing to not buy a gun. Instead, I ask if I can be the first skull its mouth feeds an ending into and Alan Turing tells me to fuck off for trying to die as though the protest does not need as many bodies as a scream can pack itself into. I mean only that my being transgender means anyone who I've ever woken up tangled with is now a flight risk in that they could disappear — How everyone forgets how Jewish I look until, at the first party, when the cops came, I Anne-Franked into the attic so easily everyone assumed it must be hereditary. I mean between the two of us, Alan Turing and I have flooded the phone-line crying. He tells me he regrets conflating intelligence with progress — how hate makes machines of humanity — hive-minds us stampede — how technology is only as revolutionary as the people operating it, or, I am only as brave as the people who love me back. How the first printing presses produced both arrest warrants and safe-house notices and that, too, was technology enough to congregate. Alan Turing breathes wetly into my ear. He wants to know what I'm wearing. Asks if it's shatter-proof. I say no, skin is just skin, and he tells me to go change. On the other side of the phone I hear something metal / shudder.

As someone who is studying history, I am really cognizant of the ways in which people attempt to distance the present from the past. The person who introduced me to Alan Turing began by telling me about the Turing Test, in which computers are given a series of questions to determine whether or not they would be passable humans, i.e. whether or not they are artificially "intelligent," then led me through a discussion as though I was the machine being tested to determine that I am, in fact, human (I passed, in case you're wondering). The Turing Test is still in use as the premier venture for students of artificial intelligence, but World War II, whose length Alan Turing decreased significantly because of his work on the Enigma Code, is connotatively viewed as a "long time ago." 1954, the year in which Alan Turing died as a result of chemical castration, the punishment for being convicted of "sodomy," is only a year before my father was born in the same country as Turing died in. I mean only that I hear people argue that there is no way Trump will be as bad as he aggrandizes. That common sense will win out in the end. The process of studying history as a marginalized person is very strange. Last month at a rally in Philadelphia a cop threatened me with his taser, and unarmed water protectors at Standing Rock are sprayed with water-cannons in below freezing weather, and another trans girl dies and no one except her friends know her name, and the other people in my major believe that we will survive this, how cool it will be to read about these years in a future textbook. So Alan Turing time-machines out of a poem and speaks in my voice and warns everyone that complacency breeds genocide. They will keep killing us as long as they are allowed to. Even if you literally fucking solve World War II, they will still kill you for being a faggot. And I want to arrive in the future holding hands with everyone I love. Thank you for reading.