Last Tango in Cyberspace

by Steven Kotler

The clippings are in English, or maybe a translation AI made a pass. One from a newspaper in Dubai, one from Cape Town, a third from something New York local, The Upstate Register.

  He starts in Dubai, six months back. A Lebanese zookeeper at a private sanctuary released all the animals in his care, climbed into a cage with a pair of baboons, and went to sleep. Before dawn, it was lions, tigers, and bears on the highway. The army was called in. A pixelated photo shows an Oboronprom Ka-52 Alligator helicopter airlifting a giraffe to safety, like Noah with coaxial rotors.

  He’s seen this image before. Picks up the photo stack he’d set aside and counts four shots down. There it is: same Ka-52, same giraffe. He plays a hunch and touches the Red Ice icon. The photo whirs to life, going close-up on the helicopter, the pilot in mirror shades and serious concentration. Finger tap to freeze, another to unlock. Sliding right on the giraffe provides a different focus: long neck in tight zoom.

  Neat trick.

  The next image is an overhead of an octagon-shaped viewing area. A raised central platform surrounded by eight glass walls fronting eight large cages, all big and empty. The next shot details the inside of the octagon. Different vantage point, but the same glass cages. At the center of the photo, a canary-yellow arrow appears, pointing to a dark wooden table surrounded by six cheap plastic chairs that sit in the middle of the central platform.

  Lion taps a finger on the table. The arrow disappears and the photo zooms. Close-up of wood grain in high relief, and atop the grain: five lines of silver powder and a silver straw. Three faint lines, already inhaled, two left intact, each the same hue as a classic Airstream.

  Same silver as Bo’s tattoo.

  A click in his brain as data bit finds data bit. Neurotransmitters dump into synapses, end result, more questions: Is this a Rilkean thing? A drug thing? An animal rights thing? Whatever thing it is, Arctic sure managed to dig up his backstory. Lion definitely understands why they want him for this job.

  The South Africa article is about a family on safari: kids, grandkids, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, a clan of nearly eighteen. Without explanation, they departed camp in the middle of the night and were found the next morning, sleeping amid a pride of lions. Everyone makes it back to camp safely; no one can remember why they left.

  Corresponding photo shows the safari camp, a picnic table painted fire-engine red in the center. Another yellow arrow, pointing at the picnic table. Tap for close-up. Same silver straw, same silver powder residue.

  The final article is a detective story, told twenty-first-century style. Airplane records show Robert Walker, fifty-four, departing Dallas, landing at LaGuardia. A kid taking a selfie catches Walker in snakeskin boots and desert fatigues stepping off the plane in New York. A camera over baggage claim has him lifting a camo-colored duffel and black gun case into a luggage cart. Uber gets him curbside to his Hamptons residence. His alarm system confirms entry. Drone footage from who knows where reconfirms. Four minutes later, Alexa has him asking about a silver residue on a table in his study. Two days after, an anonymous 911 from an untraceable burner brings in the cops. They report the house empty, so the press reports Robert Walker MIA.

  Something not quite right is the only thing Lion gets from the story. He takes another hit from the joint and tries again. Still can’t put his finger on it.

  And no follow-up article.

  But he finds two corresponding photos in the stack. The first shows a tartan graveyard that must be Walker’s study. Plaid wallpaper and mounted animal heads covering every inch. Lion sees a Lucite end table beneath a giant elk, an unzipped gun bag sitting beneath the table and a .300 Winchester Magnum visible through its acrylic surface. A familiar sheen on the tabletop.

  He taps and zooms, bringing the tabletop into close-up. Now he sees what he already expects to see: silver straw, silver powder lines.

  The second photo takes him a second. It’s another shot of Walker’s study, the lens pointed straight at the animal heads. Deer, antelope, gazelle, zebra, tiger, and then human, male, roughly midfifties. The missing Robert Walker? His head neatly mounted to oval-shaped mahogany, hanging on the wall like just another trophy.

  Lion double-taps the image for the zoom, maybe hitting the mesh electronics a little too hard, maybe not yet believing what’s he’s seeing.

  Close-up reveals a wide, pale forehead, a tight web of crow’s-feet jutting off hazel eyes, and a receding prep school haircut from another decade. Walker’s jaw seems clenched, his neck muscles bulging, and nothing below his neck but high-gloss dark wood.

  Decapitation.

  What the hell has he gotten himself into? The Red Ice icon pulses hot pink, just once, then fades to black. And he knows, in the same way the rain knows gravity, Arctic is what he’s gotten himself into.

  But he’s not gonna think about it right now. His attention is fixed on the dark ovals of Walker’s eyes. Something in those eyes, Lion will think later, something else he should have seen coming.

  HUNTING THE HUNTERS

  Holding the photo of Walker’s head on the wall, Lion finds it takes a few minutes for the gruesome to pass.

  Once it does, he notes a different sensation, a lack of sensation. He’s still staring at the photo, but not feeling much of anything.

  And not the way things normally work.

  He tries holding the image at different distances: arm’s length, close up. Tap to zoom, double tap for wide. Five more minutes pass and still nothing. Em-trace machinery failing to em, and the taste of ash in the back of his throat.

  Joint residue, or does em-tracking failure really taste like ash?

  Answer probably still unknown. Em-tracking is a fairly new addition to the human repertoire. Not surprising, Lion knows, because the idea of empathy itself only dates to the late eighteenth century. The notion was invented by psycho-physiologist Wilhelm Wundt to describe our ability to experience another’s experience, and different, Wundt thought, from sympathy and compassion. Empathy is about the transmission of information; sympathy and compassion are reactions to that information.

  Lion stares at the photo, tastes more ash. It’s the first time he’s seen a dead body on the job—but no other information is transmitting.

  A couple of years after Wundt’s invention, philosopher Theodor Lipps wonders why art affects us so strongly. Comes to see the act of viewing art as an act of co-creation. An artist has a primal emotion that becomes an original insight that births a work of art. Viewers tap that source code via viewing, as if the feeling that led to the original insight gets broadcast, and people with the right kind of radio can detect the signal. Tune the frequency correctly and the experience is shared experience, transmitted through an object and across time.

  Lion relights the joint, trying to tune the frequency. He rearranges his body in the chair, feeling the Modo auto-adjust to his motion, like tiny hands holding his hips. And a soft breeze bouncing off tall buildings.

  Needing a name for this process, Lipps borrows einfuhlung, German for “feeling into,” from an 1873 aesthetics dissertation. This gets translated into English to become “empathy” in a 1909 textbook, but not before the poet Rainer Maria Rilke recognizes this experience as a superpower, calling it “my very greatest feeling, my world feeling, the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.”

  Lion’s talent is expanded in-seeing.

  Rilke used empathy as a virus-scan for truth, his way to live the questions. Lion lives bigger questions. His empathy isn’t individual; it’s cultural. He can feel how cultures collide and blend, the Darwinian mash of memes, the winners and losers and what truths remain. He’s like a lie detector for potential futures. An emotional prediction engine for how the we fractures, the us becomes them, and then back together again. And a useful skill for a certain type of company.

  He gets paid in cash; sometimes in crypto.

  But holding the photo of Robert Walker, he’s not in-seeing much of anything. Pattern recognition system refusi
ng to cooperate, or these stories lead nowhere. Not to a real future, or not one he can find.

  Usually all he’s paid for is yes or no.

  It’s a no.

  Work done, he pushes back from the table and stands up, taking one last look at Robert Walker before he goes.

  Still gruesome.

  Still a no.

  Then a thought: Someone expended a lot of effort to decapitate this man, took the time to taxidermy his head with something that looks like shellac, and a careful mounting job as well. Lion counts sixteen dead mammals on the wall beside Walker. Then he gets it.

  He opens his Moleskine and makes a quick note.

  Someone is hunting the hunters.

  Reading the words, he feels it. The primal emotion that became the original insight that led to Robert Walker’s head on a wall.

  Which is how Lion knows: He would like to meet that someone, maybe shake his hand.

  ON THE SPECTRUM

  Still hours before he’s due to meet Sir Richard. Into shorts and a T-shirt and taking the back staircase to the gym on the roof. A shiny glass box surrounded by a brick parapet and New York’s skyline stretching out like a carpet.

  Exercise dulls the emo-stim overload, pretty much a job requirement for any em-tracker. Lion does pull-ups and jump rope and more pull-ups. He does push-ups and rowing machine and more push-ups. Goblet squats to exhaustion, then finishes with whatever damage he can do with their limited supply of shiny chrome barbells. Can’t anybody lift over fifty pounds anymore?

  And another round of goblet squats.

  Down the stairs and to his room, where he indulges in a second shower, then back into his straight-world uniform. The Moleskine with its single note goes into a black Burton sling-pack. A second-edition Dune, sunrise over Arrakis on the dust jacket, follows. Photos and articles slip into the envelope, a whirl of the fingerprint scanner locks it closed, and into the sling-pack as well. Then traction elevator to Dirty French for cage-free eggs and hash browns.

  He takes a booth by the window, beneath a cantilevered mirror rimmed in vintage marquee lights. Less Vegas than vaudeville. Sling-pack beside place setting, he slides out his copy of Dune. He likes to reread the book before certain kinds of jobs. Frank Herbert being one of the first to spot how subcults meld, Arctic starting to feel like one of those jobs.

  Opening the book, Lion finds a passage about Thufir Hawat, a Mentat for the ages. Herbert dreamed up the Mentat in like 1965. A human computer. A walking logic bomb. This was fifty years before Silicon Valley became a hotbed for a certain type of analytical mind. People on the spectrum. Historical outcasts, now prized for their whiz-bang math skills. Spectrum-ites get hired in droves, invited to parties and laid, many for the very first time. On the spectrum breeds with on the spectrum. Kids arrive with hyper-logical minds, or where, assumes Lion, we are today. But Lion knows what Herbert knew, a few more generations down this trail and we’re into a different thing. A different species. Mentat.

  Em-tracking, he figures, is the very opposite of the Mentat. Another doorway into the adjacent possible. More niche creation. More speciation. Down a different spectrum. Into a different thing.

  A sip of coffee. Not as strong as Lion usually prefers, but he finds he doesn’t mind. He reads a couple of paragraphs and tries to focus, but something outside the window keeps grabbing for his attention. Looks up to satisfy the urge. A scrolling screen atop a parked taxicab, its constant fluttering similar in effect to the dazzle of the airport. Once again, the motion tricking his life recognition machinery.

  Lion thinks empathy is another way we have learned to recognize life. When the party ends and guests leave, the house doesn’t just look empty. It feels empty. Absence of life gives off sensation. One possibility is mirror neurons, which are the habit machinery beneath empathy. In the presence of the living, we automatically mirror their behavior. In their absence, with nothing to mirror, this lack emotes a feeling, the null set of empathy. Presence or absence of aliveness, Lion believes, is one of the basic bits of information conveyed by empathy.

  Out the window and across the street, a black flash. Bo and the shiny mobile pulling into a parking space. Lion checks the clock to be sure. Bo’s twenty minutes early.

  Dune is still beckoning, but Lion changes direction, picks up his phone and Googles Arctic. He’s been to their site before, but the puzzle of this morning makes him want to see their client list. Product development, consulting, start-ups, nothing pharmaceutical, nothing animal rights, nothing that gives him a clue as to what he can’t quite sense from those articles and photos.

  Nothing that explains Robert Walker’s head on the wall.

  He glances back at Bo and thinks about the meeting he’s about to attend.

  “Arctic,” he says aloud, wondering again what, exactly, he’s gotten himself into.

  Turning his attention back to his browser, he decides to find out. Loading Arctic’s homepage auto-starts a video of Sir Richard. “The arc of the twentieth century can be traced by the failure of language,” as Lion struggles to find PAUSE.

  Nearby diners give him hard glares.

  “Language crystallizes the nebulous,” continues Sir Richard, his accent Middlesex posh with a faint trace of Cockney, “imparting form to the embryonic.”

  And still too loud.

  Unable to find PAUSE, Lion gives up and powers down, tossing the finally quiet phone into his sling-pack in relief. Across the street, Bo steps out of the car to stretch his legs. The waiter brings a fresh carafe of coffee. Lion tries to turn back to his book but can no longer focus.

  So sling-pack open again. Trading book for phone and, as the bitten fruit that means on begins to glow, Lion feels even more relief. Is there a word for the comforting emotions produced by the presence of technology?

  As he’s thinking about this his phone buzzes with incoming messages. A text from Lorenzo, which he decides to check later. A second, he doesn’t recognize the number. Possibly Sir Richard reads the screen, and a stranger message: Forgive myocardial. Meet Jenka.

  “Forgive myocardial” sounds as serious as a heart attack. “Jenka” means nothing to him.

  Like most everything else this morning, this text makes little sense. Or little right now. So these facts get slotted, fodder for his pattern recognition system, fodder for later.

  OUT OF THE DIRTY FRENCH, INTO THE SLAV

  Turns out, “Forgive myocardial” is autocorrect for “Forgive my tardiness.” Not sure how that happened, but maybe Sir Richard’s right: The arc of the twentieth century is the failure of language.

  Either way, the receptionist with ringlets of blonde and a proper Armani straight skirt assures him, Sir Richard will be late. She offers him a seat on a long, low couch made of red sequins. Like someone skinned a chorus girl.

  Turns out to be more comfortable than it looks.

  Jenka turns out to be a severe Slav with hair gel, a white Hermès double-breasted suit, a Black Label herringbone knit cashmere tie, and no socks. A male specimen, late-thirties variety, and appears to not like him one bit.

  From his perch on the couch, all Lion gets is Slav in side view: cheekbones the size of supercolliders and the left half of a loose pompadour peeking around a corner. Something mumbled. Machinery kicks into gear: primary auditory cortex for signal decoding, Wernicke’s area for basic meaning making. A millisecond later, Lion realizes what that something was: a fast hello with a heavy accent.

  But before he can respond, Jenka gives him a quick follow-me wave of his hand and disappears back around the corner. Lion extracts himself from the chorus girl, re-slings his sling-pack, and starts after him. Makes it around the corner in time to see sockless ankles marching away from him, in silence, down a very long hallway. Only closed doors of sturdy oak and the watchful eyes of incandescent track lighting keeping Lion company.

  Finally, Jenka opens a door at the end of the hall.

  “We’re in here.”

  Lion follows him through the entryway and i
s immediately blinded by the white. Like something out of NASA. White chairs, white table, clean whiteboards on all the walls. The ceiling, some fourteen feet above, a maze of pipes and plumbing, also painted shiny white.

  Jenka takes a seat, pointing at another.

  Lion slides out a hot-white task chair, like fluorescent baby powder, realizing he’s been positioned at the opposite end of a repurposed Ping-Pong table—also in hot white—from Jenka. Eight feet between them and no one else in the room.

  “We’ll wait for Penelope,” says Jenka, not bothering to look at Lion as he speaks.

  So they wait. Neither checks his phone. Lion notices that with the white suit in the white room, Jenka is a kind of optical illusion. Depth of field impossible to gauge. Bets this is intentional.

  “Who’s Penelope?” he asks, eventually.

  Jenka slow-pans to the left. “Pardon?”

  “Penelope.”

  “Sorry. Severe jet lag, as you can probably tell. Penelope’s bringing the coffee.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Everywhere, I think. Kuala Lumpur last night.”

  Lion notices an oversized white grub in the corner. He prefers old New York, back before they understood beanbag chairs on the East Coast. Decides there’s something not quite right about Jenka, and jet lag is only an excuse. Another thirty seconds of silence and Lion tires of waiting. “Pardon my ignorance,” he says, “but who are you?”

  Jenka smiles; Lion sees Soviet Bloc silver dental work. “You’re asking about my crappy Moldovan childhood? My fake news start-up? How I helped put a real-life James Bond villain into power?”

  “What do you do for Arctic?”

  “Global director of creative oversight, in charge of the extra-special division.”

  Lion thinks this through and decides he has no idea what Jenka means, but he’s willing to bet this is intentional too.

  “I oversee our extra-special creatives.”

  Like that clears it up.