I glance over at Khalid. I remember the burning villages, screams. Much the same as anywhere, really. “And the villages?”
“Oh, there are some targets they always wanted to hit,” Turing says.
“Well,” I say. “Some things never change.”
“Only their methods of cover up,” Turing says, smiling that steel-skull smile, and raising his steel finger into the air.
“Yes,” Mathews says, still in love with the machine. He glances at me. “We can do so much... good of course.”
“Of course.” I know what he means. To be able to infiltrate the enemy’s thoughts like this seems like a power I wanted as a child. Maybe even as a man. “What do you know of why they sent a hit team at me?” I say. “Why not just pay some street rat to put a bullet in my head and steal my wallet?”
Turing screws his face up like he’s confused, but he listens and runs through the Internet, the screen a blur. “They were arguing about just that. But some of it was trying to solidify their marketing of their organization as America’s pit bull.”
Mathews excuses himself and heads to the toilet.
“So my wife is close?”
“Ex-wife,” Turing says. “Don’t get misogynistic now.”
I wonder where Turing is learning how to act more and more human and think that if it’s off the Internet then I will see an interesting piece of action coming out of him. “Okay. But she is?”
“Yes. But you look tired,” he says and places that heavy and cold metal hand on my shoulder.
“I am.”
“Let’s let him sleep.”
We walk to the hallway as Mathews comes out again from the bathroom.
I turn to see Turing place a blanket on Khalid and carefully place the top end under his chin. The Arab mumbles something.
“We sleep?” Mathews asks.
“Yes,” says Turing.
Mathews leads us to his bedroom. “Only place that isn’t a complete mess,” he says.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” I say.
I lay down, closing my eyes. Mathews switches off the light, and with the door open, I can see a little bit of ambient light leaking in from the overhead New York night. Turing stands above me, staring. Mathews is already snoring. I ignore the machine and and close my eyes. I’m terrifically tired, and as soon as I close my eyes, I’m screaming, running through my life, being chased, chasing, and at one point as I run up some stairs I slip. The slip is my foot reaching out for something solid, and it jerks me awake. The world is as it was, but I have no idea how much time has passed. Khalid and Mathews are in a snore off.
Turing leans over me. “Can I ask you something,” he whispers.
“Sure thing,” I say, though I want the machine to shut up and let me get some sleep.
“The flesh. It’s talking to me. I can tell the components of all the bomb’s victims. I can hear their screams.”
“Christ, Turing. Who programmed you? They must have wanted you to suffer.”
“I’m not sure about that,” he says, somewhat disconcerted. “Besides, I told you I’m a self-made man.”
“Yeah—“
“But the DNA. That I can read.”
“Get outta here,” I say. “You’d need a bigger lab than you can fit in that metal casing.”
That looks like it actually hurts him. Is he trembling?
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I say. Is an algorithm that hurts the same as a human that does?
“That’s fine, ape.”
I grin.
He grins back. “But perhaps some coder somewhere meant for me to learn from you. And that’s why I’m hearing these screams in my head,” he says and taps his fleshy head.
“Could be. What of it?”
“Why kill each other in ways you would never want to happen to yourselves?”
“That’s the million dollar question.”
Turing nods. “I’m trying to find out,” he says.
“Well, I hope you do.”
No answer. He sits there, rest in ton his haunches. I drift away, this time my sleep isn’t so hectic.
I awake to the stillest quiet that I’ve sensed in some time. I hold my breath, trying to think what could cause such quietness in the city. All I can hear is the beating of my heart, and the force of the blood pushing past my ears. I look for some idea of what time it is. I can’t see anything but the light leaking in from the hallway. I cock my head. Still nothing. It shouldn’t be this quiet here, should it? I realize that I have a blanket half on me. I throw it off and try to see if the lump that’s on Mathews’ bed is him. My heart beats faster. Isn’t this quiet something like the kind that comes before a storm? My mind races, positions men with small 9mm sub machine guns at the ready, right around the corner, hands on flash bangs and strips of explosives to break through the door, perhaps sniper rifles are overlooking the entire room, through slits in the window. Now I feel nauseous.
Then I hear something like a hammer chiseling through concrete. I smell dust, though I can’t place what type. I realize that Turing is no longer here. The dust now smells like metal. I hold my breath, thinking that inhaling all this can’t be good for the health. When the chiseling sound stops, the silence takes back over. There’s no way I can go back to sleep, I shift and feel all my joints slowly loosen. But until the moment that there’s more fluid running through them, they crack and sing with pain.
Something in my heart twitches. I look up and Turing stands only a few inches away. I hadn’t even sensed him come into the room.
“You were thinking,” he says.
“I’m allowed that, I believe,” I say. “I thought you left,” I say, I want to tell him all about my thoughts, the mistakes I made, my fears, but I want nothing to do with it now.
Turing whirrs as he looks me over. “What then about the future?”
I let out a sigh. Everything in my brain tells me that he’s a robot who’s merely acting in some specifically defined algorithm, and that this hurt look of his is merely an action in a chain of many, that he’s manipulating me in every way he can. But I am a human, aren’t I? I can see that there’s a connection, or I feel that way, and I cannot see anything but what’s tainted by what I feel, and there is the feeling that I cannot continue hitting him. And what, anyways is the reason I think my reactions as a human are so much better? Aren’t I going by some similar algorithm? Perhaps influenced a little too strongly by heuristics. And perhaps attached to emotion, but what are emotions anyhow?
“You’re thinking again,” he says.
“I am,” I say.
“Why?”
“I’m stressed. We tend to think out our position when we’re stressed. Especially if we’re being hunted.”
“But you didn’t think as much before, under the same situation.” He seems concerned, or at least eager to find out what’s on my mind.
For a second I focus on a piece of the quilted flesh that is his face. It looks dark red in this light. “True... I’m not sure. I think maybe the fact that it was extremely quiet, that you were gone, all made me wonder if men were going to come bursting through.”
“The quiet before the storm,” he says, smiling, amber light reflecting off his steel teeth.
“Yes,” I say, and can’t help but smile.
“You’re tired,” he says.
“You’re very perceptive, Turing.”
“My name.”
I’m not sure where he’s going with this. He knows his name. “What were you doing?” I ask.
“Tearing down that wall. Your friend,” Turing says and nods his head over to the lump that now snores and that should still be Mathews. “He lied. There is something beyond that wall.”
“The place beneath the city. Where we met.”
“That’s right. I remember now.”
I feel a little better that I’m not crazy, or at least one other entity remembers that time, but knowing that the place exists doesn’t help matters, does it? It doesn’t chang
e the fact that I am being hunted. That even in that place I was hunted. And yet I want to try and find that place again.
“Come,” says Turing. I step out of the room, walking past a thick plastic tarp. There’s a tarp hiding the living room as well. A strong light in the hallway shines on the wall, which has a hole about a foot in diameter.
“I used the tarps so that you wouldn’t awake,” Turing says.
“Thanks,” I say. Khalid’s snoring stutters into a snort, then resumes its rhythm.
“You were right then, about the maze underneath.”
“I wish it were somewhere to hide,” I say.
“Why hide? I thought you wanted to see your wife.”
I don’t answer, I can hear Mathews stirring. Even Khalid stops snoring. Something is making the air crackle.
“Can you hear all radio frequencies?” I ask.
Turing raises his hand and looks lost, but opens his mouth after a second and lets out static.
The air starts to vibrate and I hear footsteps running up to the front door.
I turn to grab Khalid, but the explosion knocks me on my feet and I black out. I come to and can only see a hole in front of me, a steel hand holding me down. I’m on the other side of the wall. I can see the entire apartment in front of me flooded with light. Men are running through, all black, guns out. The tarps are down. Khalid comes into view, falling, then getting up against the hails of freezes being yelled, and he reaches into his pocket. The shots ring out, and he pulls out a pen, collapsing to the floor, twitching.
“Mathews,” I yell, before my mouth is covered with a steel hand.
“Silence, George. The wall will not hold them back.”
I feel a fleshy hand on my shoulder. “I’m here, George.”
“Fuck,” I say. Turing pulls us away from the hole in the wall. As we go through a doorway and the door is closed shut, I see the end of a barrel being pushed through the hole, then the sparks of bullets flying our way. Turing shields me as bullets make a satisfying thunk sound on his metal sheeting.
Khalid. What was he to me? An annoyance? And yet when even an annoyance is taken from me I can sense the spirits of the world shifting, swallowing him, but also reminding me that I was not equal to him. That I was not better. That I might be next. The moments after Turing saved my life, again, linger on the edges of my lips. The image of Khalid being shot down sits in the middle of my thoughts, stifling anything from moving about freely. My heart, beats as if its next pump is its last. What does one do after something like this? I’m not weak-hearted, though I may be broken, but I’m pretty certain that there’s nothing left of me, nothing that will move forward for even the simple act of finding my wife. We are, of course, back in the labyrinth, and though that should bring me unheard of levels of joy, it doesn’t.
Mathews simply shrugs now that we’re here and says that he’s heard of places like this: abandoned halls of former subways or other fallout shelters, remnants of a time when this nation was slightly more frightened of its enemies. I’m not sure why, but that annoys me. I want this to be a special place, but when Mathews thinks otherwise, acts like he knows otherwise, it turns the entire dream I had of finding this place into nothing.
Or maybe I’m being sensitive. To be fair, this room itself isn’t the most inspiring. I’ve asked to leave, but Turing says it isn’t safe. The room has walls of porous concrete, the holes are the size of fists in some areas, and there are two arches for the ceiling, which is a peeled paint, half of it about to break off. And the floor is concrete, with wooden boards laid across at what seems to be the high points of the floor, for it has all dried water marks that indicate flooding is a possibility. Every now and then I hear a train and Mathews gives me an arched eyebrows look, but I try not to pay him any attention. Perhaps he’s right, but my ego needs to believe that this place is real, this labyrinth.
And what of Turing? He has left us, locked in for our safety, and gone to figure things out. At first I am fine, leaning back on a couch with lumps that seems made for me. But after a few minutes a sense of being trapped creeps into my mind and hinders my breathing. Getting up, I check the steel door Turing walked out of. It won’t budge.
“When do you think he’ll come back?” I ask.
Mathews shrugs. He’s sitting on a lazy boy, leaning back. There’s a refrigerator next to him and he’s helped himself to a beer. I realize that for all his inquiries into the definition of words that matter to me, he appears to be a prep school poster child. He sips his beer in small slurps, and sighs in satisfaction after each one. I’m close to wanting to ask him his age, but decide not to.
“Seems like we’re trapped,” I say. But he doesn’t hear me because a train rumbles by, drowning out my voice. I kick on the door. It doesn’t budge and pain shoots up my leg. I sit back on the couch, looking around, trying to figure out what I can use to break out of here, or what I can use to find out about the world.
“I could use some weed. Got any?”
“None,” I say, annoyed that he wants to drift into a high spell. I look at the couch. There’s a stain. Yellow-red. I let my forefinger hover over it, but decide that perhaps it’s wise not to. Yellow and red, what could it be but blood? And if so, what’s blood doing here in this basement room of my labyrinth? Maybe it’s not my place, but rather a place that was meant for Turing. My heart trips into fast beats. I take deep breaths. This will be fine. Why would Turing save me just to see me die?
“You okay?” Mathews asks. He’s studying me.
“I’m fine.”
“Was Khalid a terrorist?” he asks.
I think for a second, staring at the stain, yellow and red. I remember, or think I remember, that the carpet had turned red as Khalid was being shot. Why had he pretended to be armed? He must have known that death was coming if he did so. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to be captured again. That is what happens when someone’s tortured or has their soul torn to pieces, or has it separated from their flesh. They realize that the world that they live in is too separate from them and that living is not quite worth it. And so it goes. But it does drive people to reach out for extremes. To lash out. Perhaps Khalid reaching in for a weapon that didn’t exist was the same as strapping a bomb on and driving towards the heart of the enemy.
Don’t scoff. I, for one, know that suicide bombing isn’t that far from being a soldier willing to sacrifice his life for his country. The first thing one learns in basic training is to learn how to die, then how to kill. With suicide bombing all we have is a train of thought that isn’t that new to armies. Perhaps there will be some social stigma to overcome. But just sprinkle some desperation into the mix and you’ll get the recipe about right.
Mathews snaps his fingers. “Georgie...” he says, or maybe hisses.
“Yeah?” I say, looking up, annoyed as all hell.
“Well, was he?”
“I’m not sure. I blame him for the bombing. But once we got out he seemed more hapless than anything.”
“Why hapless? He fought against us before, right? He should have been ecstatic for another chance to hit us.”
“Could be. But it could also be that without that organization to help him focus on the simple tasks he needs, he was lost. Perhaps he fell in love with the people...”
Another train rumbles by. I notice pipes above us and this time the shaking forces drips from the pipe. One splashes on the couch. Maybe that’s what the stain is, rusty water.
“Were you two friends?”
“I barely knew him a few days.”
Mathews swirls his beer then takes another drink. “That really don’t answer my question.”
“I don’t know.” And I don’t. Khalid had been more than willing to watch me take the blame for the bombing. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything worthwhile about the man. “I do know we need to get out,” I say.
“Concrete walls, steel door. I say the robot has us.”
“Why?”
“Who knows.�
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“You like him, don’t you?”
Mathews smiles. “He’s the future, isn’t he?”
“His flesh was made—“
“Was created by his imagination. That’s what you have to see,” Mathews says, pointing the beer bottle at me. “That’s what you have to see.” He finishes his drink and stands up. He seems to consider the bottle for a few seconds and teeters. Then without warning he arches his back, and chucks the bottle at a wall. The bottle breaks with a satisfying pop and glass goes flying as the main part of the bottle collapses on the floor, further breaking into more pieces. I realize that it’s a brown bottle without a label. “We are his prisoners,” Mathews says, sitting back down. “He knows a lot and will probably learn at an exponential rate forever.”
“That doesn’t mean shit, even if it’s true.”
“I was in finance,” Mathews says. “Algorithms were taking over. Traders were really useless and it was a matter of time before they were replaced. There was an out cry from these normally wolfish capitalists. But you know what? Just like I’m sure that someone complained when the first spear with a stone that was chipped to make it sharper was probably seen as cheating, or helping the weak, it doesn’t matter what people think. You have to move on or else someone else will come up with the idea and kill you.”
“So, I’m guessing you’re no democracy lover?” I say, trying to hide my disappointment that the one possible ally of mine, or at least intellectual friend, subscribes to some sort of Social Darwinism.
Mathews raises his hands. “Hey. I love the Constitution. But I’m of the thought that the founders only got the capitalistic part right.”
“And the terrorists?”
“They’re part of it. They’re a reaction to what’s done. But they will probably all end up like Khalid. Camel herders. I mean, what do you expect? What do they bring to the table? Did they create anything like Turing? I think not. We did some bad things there, but it’s not like they aren’t helping us. Like I said. We can talk about what’s moral, but it all ends up not mattering.”
“Brilliant,” I mutter. “So everything is fine so long as we progress.”
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 19