WINNER: The Thinking Machine

By Mary Heeran White, Co. Clare

At twenty-three minutes past nine on the last Wednesday of January, Jimmy Grogan pushed open the door of the Long Dock.

Rain came in with him, stippling the floorboards before the wind forced the door shut. He removed his cap and hung it on the peg underneath the counter.

Danny was already pulling his Guinness.

Jimmy took the stool he had occupied every Wednesday for years. The one beside it remained empty.

Beyond the quay, fishing boats pulled against their ropes. Carrigaholt Castle had disappeared into the dark.

Inside, turf reddened the hearth and threw amber light across the bottles ranked behind Danny’s shoulder, so that the whiskeys glowed from within like small lanterns. The same men stood in the same order they always did. A glass met the counter. A low word passed between two fishermen. The rain outside made the warmth feel earned.

Jimmy rested both hands on the counter as Danny set down the pint. The backs of his hands were mapped with small scars from fencing wire, calving ropes and winter mornings spent coaxing old engines back to life.

“Bad out?” “Worse coming.”

“You said that last week.” “I was right.”

Tom folded the Clare Champion and pushed it aside.

“You’ll never guess what the Pope was talking about this morning.” “The price of diesel?”

“AI.”

Mick Hanrahan looked over his whiskey. Red razor marks showed along his chin. “Artificial insemination?”

“The Pope?” Danny said. “That’s what Tom said.”

At the top of the bar, Seamus straightened. His corduroy trousers hung from his long legs like curtains and his pale eyes carried the fixed brightness of a man waiting to correct somebody.

“Not insemination, ye pair of eejits. Intelligence.” “What’s the difference?”

Tom held up his phone.

“That ChatGPT yoke. It can answer questions, write stories, translate books. They say it’ll take half our jobs.”

“Small enough for a prize bull’s contribution.” Laughter moved along the bar.

Danny wiped the overflow from Tom’s pint.

“The Pope had more to say than that. Compassion. Responsibility. An ethical compass.” “So it’s a thinking machine?” Jimmy said.

“That’s about the size of it.” “Can it milk cows?”

“No.”

“Then we’re grand.”

The talk moved on to Clare’s chances of winning the All Ireland Hurling that year, the price of meal and whether the Killimer ferry would make it through another winter.

Pat Brennan came in with the rain at his back. He had a hooked nose, a falling grey moustache and a face pinched as though Carrigaholt owed him an apology.

“Who died?” he asked. “No one yet,” Danny said.

The tables had been pushed aside for the Wednesday session. A fiddle case leaned against the wall. A bodhrán rested inside a supermarket bag on a chair.

Tom reopened the paper, though his attention remained on the phone. “They say the thing learns from us.”

“That’s its first mistake,” Jimmy replied. “They’re worried about what it might decide.”

“People have done enough damage with their own decisions.” “I’ve yet to meet a machine that started a war.”

“You’ve been giving this fierce thought.” “More than most men in Carrigaholt.”

“That wouldn’t take much.”

Tom slid the phone across the counter.

“You use the thinking machine yourself, don’t you?” “What makes you think that?”

“No man defends a thing that hard unless he’s at it.” “Every day.”

Tom lowered the paper. “You?”

“Me.”

“Jesus.” 

“I know.”

“What do you do with it?” “Ask it things.”

“What sort of things?” “Things I don’t know.” “That must keep it busy.”

“Just as well you don’t use it. You’d have the poor thing in therapy.”

The door opened again. A woman edged in with a fiddle case on her back and stamped the rain from her boots. She greeted Danny, drew a chair towards the fire and began loosening the clasps.

Jimmy watched the turf settle.

“It started after Mary died,” he said. The teasing left the bar.

Everyone in Carrigaholt knew about Mary. Forty-seven years married, and Jimmy had scarcely spent a night away from her until her last months in hospital. He drove to Limerick every morning, even when the roads flooded and the doctors warned she might not know he was there.

She always knew.

“The evenings were the worst,” he said. “You’d think silence would be quiet.” “I’m sure.”

“It isn’t. Not after you’ve lived with someone that long.”

After the funeral, his granddaughter Aoife brought him a tablet. “Ask it anything, Grandad,” she had said. “It’ll keep you company.” “And did it?” Tom asked.

“It told me it wasn’t a person.” “Honest enough.”

“It said it couldn’t replace human companionship.” Danny nodded towards the empty stool.

“Smarter than some people.”

Mary had sat there every Wednesday, her green shawl folded over the back and a mineral water in front of her because, as she told anyone who asked, somebody had to drive Jimmy home.

“The first night,” Jimmy said, “I asked about the weather.” “You needed a machine for that?”

“It told me it was raining. Thirteen degrees.” “Worth every penny.”

“It wasn’t the answer I needed.”

The catches on the fiddle case clicked open. “I suppose I needed to ask something.”

Danny replaced Jimmy’s pint without being asked.

“The next night, I asked who scored the winning point in the All-Ireland final of ’78. Then why starlings sit together on telephone wires. One evening, why the moon looks bigger when it’s low over the estuary.”

“Did it know?”

“It had an answer.”

“That’s not the same thing,” Tom replied, his interest piqued. “No.”

A second musician arrived with a bodhrán beneath his coat. He shook hands around the room and joined the woman by the fire. Fingers tapped softly against goatskin.

“One night, I found an old photograph in the press under the stairs. Mary was standing beside a bicycle. Nineteen, maybe. Black skirt, white blouse, her hair tied back with a scarf. Looking straight at the camera as if whoever held it had annoyed her.”

“That sounds like Mary.”

“It does indeed.” “What did you ask?”

“What kind of bicycle it was.” “Why?”

Jimmy traced a finger through the damp ring beneath his glass. “It was easier than asking why she was gone.”

The fiddler drew the bow across a string, stopped and tightened a peg.

“The machine said it was probably a Raleigh Sports. Late fifties. Three gears, rod brakes, the whole lot.”

“Was it right?”

“I haven’t a clue. But the name brought me back to the Hydro in Kilkee. First time I saw her.” “You never met Mary at the Hydro.”

“I did.”

“You always said Doonbeg.”

“That’s where I spoke to her. I saw her first at the Hydro.” “A technical distinction.”

“An important one.” Jimmy’s voice softened.

“She came in with two girls from Kilrush. Blue dress, white cardigan. She’d borrowed the bicycle from her sister and cycled half the road before getting a lift in a neighbour’s van. I thought she was the finest woman in County Clare.”

“You and every other young fella in the place.” “Maybe. But I was the one she married.” “What did you say to her?”

“Nothing.”

“Sounds about right.”

“I watched her dance with three other men and spent the night pretending I wasn’t watching.” “And when did you speak to her?”

“Two weeks later. In Doonbeg.” “What did you say?”

“I asked if the bicycle was hers.”

“Forty-seven years of marriage because you were interested in a bicycle.” “It was a good bicycle.”

The laughter rose, and for a moment Mary seemed near enough to interrupt and tell the story properly.

“So the machine gave you back the memory,” Tom said.

“No. The memory was mine. But it pointed me towards it, maybe.” The fiddler began a slow air. The first notes hung above the fire.

“You talk to it about Mary often?” Tom asked. “Not often.”

The answer came too quickly.

“One night, the eldest grandchild got her Leaving results. Mary would have rung half the county before teatime.”

“She would.”

“I asked what Mary might have said if she’d seen the grandchildren now.” “And?”

“It gave me three paragraphs.” “What did it say?”

“Something about being proud of the remarkable people they had become.” “Mary would never have called anyone remarkable.”

“She once called Father Moloney remarkable,” Tom said. “That was after he fell off the altar.”

Jimmy smiled, then turned his glass slowly on the counter.

“It used all the right words. Proud. Love. Legacy. Family. Not one of them sounded like her.”

A fiddle note hung in the air a moment before the bow found the tune. The bodhrán player set down his pint and reached for the drum. Someone near the fire said something low, and the concertina answered with the opening phrase, and then the whole thing lifted at once—boots shifting, a stool dragged half an inch, the talk at the far end of the bar dropping away without anyone deciding to stop.

“It knew plenty,” Jimmy said. “It knew English. It just didn’t know Mary.” “I asked for Mary’s brown-bread recipe.”

Danny put down the cloth. “Why would you do that?”

“I couldn’t find the copy she wrote out.” “It was in the blue notebook.”

“I know that now.”

“What did the machine tell you?” “Quinoa.”

Tom stared. “Quinoa?”

“And maple syrup.”

“Mary would have barred the thing,” Danny said. “She’d have barred me for asking.”

“Did you make it?”

“I have some dignity.” “What did you do?”

“I asked Aoife to find the notebook.” “And?”

“It was behind the flour tin.” “Where Mary always kept it.”

“The thinking machine knew how to bake bread,” Jimmy said. “It didn’t know where Mary kept the recipe.”

“That’s because it never opened one of her cupboards. You took your life in your hands doing that.”

“There were systems.” “There were traps.”

A fisherman near the hearth looked over, realised he had missed the joke and returned to his whiskey.

“So it gets things wrong.” “All the time.”

“Give me another.”

“I asked who built the old stone bridge over the Moyarta.” “It knew?” Seamus asked.

“It gave me three pages on Norman engineering. Mortar composition. Medieval roads. The Augustinians.”

“You’d have to respect the research,” Tom said.

“Ah sure, the Normans built half the bridges in Ireland,” Mick said. “Mick told me the truth in thirty seconds.”

“What did I say?”

“You said Paddy Kelleher built it because his donkey kept drowning.” “That’s right.”

Danny leaned on the taps. “That’s not why he built it.” “It is.”

“The donkey didn’t drown. It sat down in the river and wouldn’t get up.” “It drowned twice.”

“A donkey can’t drown twice.” “This one could.”

“So which version am I meant to believe?” Jimmy, Danny and Mick answered together. “Mine.”

The slow air ended. A concertina player settled beside the fiddler and tested a button. Chairs scraped across the floorboards. Pat Brennan moved his whiskey out of reach of passing boots and complained that musicians were taking over the place.

“I still don’t trust it.” “Neither do I.”

“You use it every day.”

“How do you decide what to believe?” Tom asked.

“The same way I always did.” “Which is?”

“Ask someone who knows more than I do.” “And what if the machine sounds as if it knows?” “That’s when you have to be most careful.”

“The Pope would approve.” “I’ll sleep easier.”

The first reel began.

The fiddle entered alone, bright and thin. The concertina joined, then the bodhrán, and the room altered around them. Boots kept time on the floorboards. Danny abandoned the cloth and leaned both elbows on the counter.

Mary had loved the Wednesday session. She complained that Jimmy talked through the slow airs and clapped in the wrong places, but she never missed one unless the road flooded.

Her green shawl had often been forgotten on the stool beside him. Jimmy had returned for it so many times that Danny eventually began hanging it behind the bar.

“You’ll keep using the thinking machine, then?” Tom asked. “Aye.”

“Even though it gets the important things wrong?” “It gets some things wrong.”

“It didn’t know Mary.”

“No.”

 “Or her bread.” “Definitely not her bread.” “Or the bridge.”

“Nobody knows the bridge.”

 Mick opened his mouth, but Danny raised a hand. “So why keep asking it questions?”

Between the pints, the phone had gone dark. The hanging lamps shone in the black glass. Behind them, the musicians moved in blurred reflection.

 “Sure,” Jimmy said, “it passes the evening.”

Danny set down two fresh pints.

Then, without thinking, he placed a mineral water on the empty stool beside Jimmy.

 The reel gathered speed. A fisherman began beating time with his heel. Pat Brennan forgot to complain. Another gust struck the door, but no one came in.

Beyond the harbour wall, the estuary moved through the darkness, patient and unseen.

Tonight, he had company.