“Khalid?” I say. This time there’s some recognition in the man’s eyes.
“He’ll learn,” says Turing.
“And he’ll learn fine without a chain,” I say.
Turing smiles at me like I’m being a child.
I hear Mathews scoff.
“Too much freedom can be a bad thing.”
I stay silent, my anger churns out heat from hearing these sort of views. Not that I can claim to be totally free of them at all times, either.
“George doesn’t agree.” Turing smiles that steely smile. “But you can’t explain it, can you?”
“I can,” I lie.
“Tell you what,” Mathews says. “I’ve loved staying down here with you guys, but I think I’m going to have to leave soon. It’s Monday tomorrow, isn’t it?”
Turing returns his gaze to the financial district worker. “You can go any time you like, Mathews. But remember it’s your house they tore into.”
“Damn,” Mathews says in an accusing manner, staring at Khalid. “But they got who they wanted, didn’t they? Shot—“
Khalid moans and flinches.
We all look at each other.
“You remember being shot, Khalid?” I ask.
Turing takes a step towards him. “Khalid?”
Khalid shakes, trembles. Urine runs down his leg.
“Get him some clothes,” I say.
Mathews grunts in accession.
“In time,” says Turing. “He needs to be house trained first.”
Khalid rolls into a fetal position, rolls over his own shit, and moans. A stench fills the room. Again, I try not to gag.
None of us, not even I who feels sorry, go over to him. After a few minutes of moaning, Khalid goes silent. Snores fill up the room.
“And what are you going to do next?” Turing asks me.
“Yeah,” Mathews says. “You’re kinda fucked, aren’t you?”
“I... Maybe.”
“Your wife didn’t want you, did she?” Mathews says.
Turing, whose face seems sad nods. “She is being watched and followed at all times. There’s no chance.”
My throat tightens as I think on my wife. Of her kisses. “She needs to live a normal life. One where she doesn’t need to look over her back. That would tear her apart.”
Mathews appears to be saddened by that. “Christ. Well, if I get a place to stay, you’re more than welcome to stay with me.”
“Thanks.”
“But what will you do?” Turing says.
“I don’t know.”
“You need a job. You can’t write any more.”
“That’s what you say,” I say without thinking, angry at the thought that I’ve thrown thousands of hours of toil away.
Mathews looks at us. “I... I can find you work...”
“Can you?” I say, not really wanting to work with the likes of Mathews or his friends.
“And what will you do in the meantime?” asks Turing.
I look up. Missing the muse, everything, has turned my thought process into jumbled thoughts. I’m not sure why it hurts so badly, but it must be my wife. “I’m not sure.”
“Read that book I gave you.” Turing points at the corner, and again I recognize the bag. How many times have I lost it?
“Fine,” I say, not wanting to read the refutation of my own profession.
Turing takes Mathews aside, talking to him while Khalid wanders in the background. Mathews’ face lights up and he leaves. The tension in my chest and in the room dissipates enough to allow me to close my eyes instead of doing anything, instead of thinking—or trying to think.
When I open my eyes, Khalid sits where Mathews once did, except that he has a suit on now and sits, perfectly still. All the marks and scars seem to have been concealed or covered with makeup of some sort. He doesn’t smell so fleshy. He actually smells a little like a dropped bottle of cologne in a hospital.
“Hello,” he says in a voice that now sounds vaguely familiar.
“Hi. Khalid.”
“George,” he says with a smile. “How are you?” He stares at me for a second before glancing off to the ceiling. He looks back down at the table, now it’s obvious that he’s avoiding eye contact.
“Much better, right?”
I turn. Across the room, Turing has been observing us.
“What did you do?”
“Some tweaks...” He stands up and walks over to me. “I gave him a little more of...”
“Some independence?”
Turing chuckles. “I made him look better. Look more like what you’re used to. Independence doesn’t matter as much.”
He sounds authoritative and thoughtful, Turing does.
“Where did you learn that?” I ask, rubbing out some crust from the corner of my eyes.
“From your lot. I made sure that he had quantitatively less independence. Appearances,” he says and raises that metal hand in the air. It has a slightly yellowish hue, rusty, something like blood.
“Is that a fact?”
“Look at your reaction. You’re considerably better behaved towards him—“
“You wanted him in chains!”
“Okay. But you weren’t being nice to him then, were you? Admit it.”
Feeling a little peeved with myself, I raise my hands, indicating that I want a detente. In the end if Turing learned his lesson about the chains, then so be it. “But you did improve him.”
“His looks.” Turing holds out a brush and a bottle of paint. “And I need you to do the same. To paint me pretty.” That grin catches light.
“Your teeth?”
Turing nods and sits next to me, jumping really, and places his feet on the table. “And I can read the book to you.”
“I’ll do that later,” I say.
Turing nods with his eyes. “I suppose I am allowing you to stay here.”
With that my heart drops. I squeeze out some paint and swipe the top with the brush. Turing unhinges his mouth, or opens it further wide than is humanly possible. Some of the flesh rips.
“Be careful,” I say. He closes his mouth some.
He can still talk; this close up I can hear that the voice comes directly from his throat. But he also has some stubble growing in slight patches on his jawline. It’s true that corpses’ nails and hair grow even after death, but this seems like it’s long after that timeframe. Still, without knowledge of the pathway by which the corpse grows hair, I cannot say if its flesh being slapped onto a machine would in someway affect it. I paint one tooth. Turing still smells like oil, but at least there’s none of the rotting flesh smell from before. When I’m done painting, I hear Khalid laughing. Looking over, Khalid still has his eyes on the ceiling.
“You’ll need more than looks to get him through.”
“Don’t worry,” says Turing, all open mouthed. “It will come. First we get him a simple job as a barista. After that, we can figure out what next.”
I stare at Khalid. He seems surprisingly dapper. “Perhaps he can be a doorman. Or some other non-thinking job.”
“I’ll see.”
“Since when have you become the job man?”
“I rule the internet.”
“Brilliant.”
“And I can find you something to do... Should you want it.”
“I thought I was teaching you how to be human.”
A pause as I dabble more paint on his front teeth, trying to smooth out the facture.
“No job? Do you want to be useless?”
I stare at Turing, holding down anger, reminding myself that he’s a machine running through algorithms. “I don’t know.”
“But you’re going to have to move on.”
“They won’t let me,” I say.
“Hmmm. Let’s say for a second that they called the hunt off. What would you do then?”
Well done, machine, is what I want to say, but instead I look over to Khalid who appears to be drooling and smiling at the ceiling. What would I d
o if I wasn’t being hunted?
“It’s your ex-wife, isn’t it?”
That’s really all he had to say. My throat tightens and I think on those lips. That kiss of hers. That body, those curves. But those aren’t the things that sink from my head into my heart, sending something like shockwaves of pain throughout my body. No, what does that are the memories of lying with her head on my chest, me moving a few strands of her long hair away from my face and us staring at the ceiling—together—and talking about our future and about the world and seeing that all of that lines up, that we saw most everything in exactly the same way, that we saw the ways of the future, the wrongs in the world in exactly the same way; and all of that is now gone. Being able to share the world and the window to the world with someone, with a lover, is the strongest force there ever exists.
“Tell me. She said she wanted nothing to do with you, and yet...”
“Let’s drop it,” I say. My throat is almost too tight to breathe. Tears wetting my eyes.
“You said you were here to teach me about you. Humanity,” he says the last part like he’s trying to be eloquent.
“I can,” I say, fighting back the tears, the tears to my muscles. Turing’s look of concern is all I really want. “It’s called love, Turing.”
“I’ve heard of it. Read of it. What of it?”
“Well...”
“Not all of you believe in it. Some even think that it’s a fool’s errand.”
I wave my hand.
“And someone like you, a non-believer. Why would you believe in such a thing?”
I pounded my chest, the same one that felt rotten all the way through. “It exists.”
“In stories...”
“Thanks,” I say, my voice cracking.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
And I know all the reasons why something like love doesn’t exist, that it’s faith. That any coupling is really a matter of efficient resource allocation. And as it was so shall it be. And any views of lust, is a biological imperative coming to the fore.
Turing snaps his metal fingers in front of me. “You still here?”
“It’s more than that. Love exists. What else would you call this?” I point to myself.
“Oh, the broken heart metaphor...”
I shake my head, looking to Khalid for a second, after all some of the best love poems have been in Arabic, but he’s still drooling and staring at the ceiling.
“Christ,” I say, my heart beating weakly, dangerously close to falling apart. Hard to think in these conditions. I feel the ground underneath me give away. I close my eyes, a sick feeling making its way to my gut.
“It’s okay,” Turing whispers. “It’s okay, you love her. I believe that.”
But however he’s saying it, it’s with distaste, so he or his algorithm must know that I can hear that tone. Is it on purpose, or perhaps a ploy? And I wonder if I’m really here to teach Turing.
I tumble into sleep again. I awake with no dreams remembered, but I feel a little better. Then I see Khalid on the couch, drooling. He may be looking at the same part of the ceiling. I pick up the book. The one made of human skin. Perhaps this does have the answers. I read the first page.
It sounds vaguely familiar, in the tone of Borges. It’s about a little boy born and stuck in a labyrinth. Except that this isn’t a physical labyrinth but one in his head. To have anything of a fruitful life, he must walk out of this labyrinth or else suffer the consequences of a life of the damned. I read on, the pacing seems perfect, the language crisp. If Turing or the cloud from whence he came wrote this, it’s a surprise that Turing doesn’t seem able to talk better. Maybe this is a solely different function to solve from the speech-interaction one. Suppose I can’t say that I as a writer have wholly solved the latter one. Wasn’t good enough to convince my wife, after all.
The prose and the character are really well created and I lose any trepidation I had from the separation with my wife. I read on, and as I get to an anecdotal story of the young boy, growing up in some distant land where dust and monsoons rule, he violates the first tenants of human evolutionary behavior, he goes against the very things that helped his ape species for so long and...
I throw down the book, shaking. That was me. I know it. I’m certain of it. I pick up the book again and continue to read. It goes on, something like my life, and how I went against those around me, with trepidation, but still going ahead and defying. I put down the book. Then pick it up and forward to the part where there’s me, sitting in a real labyrinth and not having a way out, nor a way out of the mental labyrinth.
Palms sweating, heart stuttering, I flick on to the next page. The character has found purpose, is looking to work and make other people’s lives better. But he’s doing it by violence. He’s cleansing the world like a rain, like a fire. I tremble. People always like to say that good comes of destruction, or that there is no growth without it. The easiest thing to think on is a forest fire that razes the beautiful growth to nothing. It’s also accepted in other versions: such as fate, that which God/Allah allows for a greater good that we may not be able to see, or evolution, in that the old has to make way for something newer, better, ostensibly.
Note the arc. Not that it’s wrong, but rather the cockiness that is required to live a good life comes with views such as any of one’s own evil must be for a greater good. That the historical arc points up. That’s why this man in the book—the one who could damn well be me—is taking this as his creed.
Turing jumps on the couch beside me.
“Hi George,” he says smiling. “I’m sorry about my questions from yesterday. I didn’t want to push a sore subject.”
“That’s fine.”
“I have another question.”
I put down the book, not really wanting to answer anymore of Turing’s questions. “Yes?”
“What is justice. Or injustice?”
“Christ, Turing,” I say and laugh. Khalid laughs too, though he still stares at the ceiling, drool dripping down the side of his mouth. I decide that perhaps I need to feel out Turing more. After all, he the one who wanted me to read the book—I’m still trembling from that. “Haven’t you read our entire canon? Everything every human has decided to put to paper or screen?”
Turing shrugs.
“Well then, what have you learned?”
“It’s complicated,” he says, looking down. “But I want you to tell me.” He’s looking me straight in the eyes. “You’re the one who knows... I trust your opinion more than the canon.”
My chest swells. I have lived a lot. But can I answer this question? “It’s hard. I think that mainly it’s hard wired in. That we want some sort of set of laws for our species, we require some level of social equality and at the same time require people to be higher than us—though only to a certain level. Anything that violates that seems to be a sort of injustice.”
Turing raises his fleshy hand. “What about what happened to Khalid?”
I look over. A tear rolls down Khalid’s cheek.
“That was injustice.”
“Why?”
Damn the machine. It’s this kind of thinking that got me into trouble. The horrid feeling from reading the books changes into something else. I’m now feeling something like a branch in my throat. “Christ. There are rules.”
“Rules make the injustice?”
“No,” I say. “Christ, Turing, do we have to go through with this now?”
His eyes downcast, he mumbles to himself. “I just want to know more. How you think... That’s important to me.”
He’s certainly pulling at my heart strings. “All right,” I say. “It’s more than the rules. Rules can be made to be bad. But amongst those who I would consider decent people, most of them should feel something bad when they’re doing something bad to someone, or having it done to them. And having that something bad done is what injustice is, no matter the reasoning... or rules...” I fumble with my thumbs. That wasn’t a great d
efinition. Horrid in fact. Are there holes in it? I’m too tired to even explain that well.
“What if the person has done something wrong? Isn’t it justice to seek out revenge?”
“Yeah,” I say. Angry that a stupid algorithm has so easily found a hole in what I say. What of the basic desire for revenge? The main way to right a wrong. The main arbiter for human events. Most of them at least... “We’ve moved forward from that. Just because it’s a human instinct doesn’t make it right.”
Turing nods as he stares at his metal hand, opening and closing it. It emits a whirring sound and the slight clank of metal snapping tight upon itself. Calming and disconcerting at the same time. I shift my feet. I’d rather not be here, answering these questions, but that’s a pessimistic view of things. I’m in a position where I can influence Turing, before he looks elsewhere for these answers. And after all, aren’t there some horrendous views on these matters?
“Then what counts? Pure power? Might makes right?”
“No,” I say as I rub my temples, thinking this hard about the world. I massage my temples even harder. “You see, our evolution isn’t one of the survival of the fittest, but rather of helping one another and becoming a stronger species because there’s a level of wanting to help those in the tribe... It just so happens that with the way the world is connected today, it’s best to treat everyone as the tribe... I mean with the consequences of too much war... nuclear weapons.” I stare at Turing who’s still opening and closing his hand.
The machine finally looks at me, its hand in a fist. “That’s it then, right?”
“Right,” I say, for in the end my impetus is wanting to basically not to have an injustice carried out upon myself...
“So, if I am to have one mission in life, it should be to eliminate injustice?”
“That would definitely be a great mission,” I say, feeling better about myself.
Turing stops playing with his hand and looks at me. “One must fight outside the unjust political system to attain anything lasting.”
It might be a question, it might not be, but I nod, happier still that he’s on my side. That dripping acid that was burning me up from inside is replaced by a warm lifting feeling. I’ll be all right.
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 24