Making her so aware and dizzy when she wanted to lose herself in the oblivion of her tears.
Finally, her hands crept around his back, meeting in the middle and he pulled her closer still, till she was almost on his lap, the tears running hot and continuously down his shirt. He kept whispering her name still.
Sophia.
Sophia.
Until she realized it wasn’t her name. It was. Sorry. Sorry.
Sorry.
Finally, there were no more tears left to cry and she sniffled, feeling snot run down her nose and over into his shirt. She made to move away from him but he tightened his hold.
“Wait,” he said. “Please.”
“I have to wash my face. I look hideous.”
Bharat pulled back from her. And she knew how she looked. Bedhead and puffy cheeks. Her nose all shiny and wet with snot. While her eyes …god, she was a mess right now. She tried to leave again.
“You’re pretty.”
Sophia stilled in his arms. “I’m not. Not right now.”
She shook her head and more of her hair fell down from the knot and into his arms. He let the strands sift through his fingers, making her acutely aware of how close they were. She was almost straddling him.
“You’re so pretty, you don’t even know it.” His eyes were pitch black. Burning into hers and she wondered if he knew…he was allowing himself to feel.
“Let me up, please. I want to wash my face.”
Bharat let her go immediately and she took the comforter with her, unwilling to expose more of herself to his hot, searching gaze. Unsure of what she would do if she caught him looking at her like that again– her control was precarious, balanced like a house of cards.
In the bathroom, she took stock of herself. Yep, hideous. After thoroughly washing her face, she brushed her teeth and used the loo.
There was a short robe lying on the back of the door and she gratefully wrapped it around herself. At least, this was more protection than just her panties and that clingy jersey.
Sophia shivered as she relived the force of his hug. For those few moments, it had felt alright. Crying and falling apart in his arms.
But, of course, it wasn’t.
Sophia shook her head and walked out, the comforter trailing in her hands. He was back at the porthole, but this time he was facing her.
They spoke again at the same time.
“I just…”
“We need to…”
Sophia pushed the comforter on the bed. And twisted the knot on her robe. “You go first.”
“I’d like to have dinner with you tonight. And learn to play cards. But mostly I’d like to talk to you. I remember how proud Rajeev was when you passed your arts degree with honors.” His half-quirk smile was back. “It will be nice to catch up, won’t it?”
“I think I am on shift tonight. I start at eight.”
“I see.”
“Yeah.” It was weird how disappointed she really was.
“Well, I have a lunch meeting in a couple hours. I could cancel that and we can catch up. If you’re okay with it?” Bharat suggested casually.
Her jaw dropped. “You would cancel a meeting for me?”
Even her father had never done that. Not really. He’d scheduled time with her, a lot of time, but he’d never actually let father-daughter time interfere with business. Not until she was sick or something equally drastic.
“Of course. You’re…important.”
She ran a shaky hand through her hair, trying to process this revealing facet of his personality. Why was he deliberately inviting her into his life, upending his schedule for her? Did he not for a second think about their shared history?
“That is very sweet of you but unnecessary. Why don’t you finish your meeting and we can catch up after? For coffee?” Sophia added a smile to go with the offer.
It didn’t reach her eyes and he knew it.
“I have an idea,” he said, slowly.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“If you like, if you wouldn’t mind…I could set it up and you could come to the lunch meeting with me.”
Sophia shook her head immediately. “Don’t be silly. That’s a business meeting. I will get in the way. I don’t want to do that. It’s not right.”
He chuckled. “You’re right. God, I don’t know what I am saying.”
“You don’t have to do all this out of a misplaced sense of guilt,” Sophia said, offering him a clear out.
Bharat came toward her and stopped just short of touching her. And because she was so damnably short, she had to tilt her head to see him. It made her feel powerless and vulnerable in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time.
“It’s not guilt,” he said simply. “I just want to see you. That’s all. And I understand if you wouldn’t want to.”
She could hear Nakul yelling in her head. Go to the business meeting, Meethi. The fucker is going to be pitching his new business. This is the perfect way to get the info! He is practically inviting you to destroy him!
Sophia shut the voice down deliberately. No, that wasn’t why she wanted to see him. She’d meant what she’d told Nakul. Every bloody word.
“I don’t understand it at all but I want to,” Sophia said softly. “I’ll meet you when you’re done with lunch, if that’s okay with you?”
He smiled. “Yes, that’s okay with me.”
Chapter Nine
“This,” Bharat stated calmly, as he clicked on his Slideshare presentation, “Is the difference between specific AI and generic AI.”
The slide showed a YouTube clip of the film Eagle Eye. The scene where the machine trying to kill Shia Le Boeuf and Michelle Monaghan’s characters sends the cranes after them near the Hudson shore.
His audience was captive. The Chinese did not like Eagle Eye as much as they did Transformers, but they understood the power of visual communication. They saw the cranes being activated by a voice command and turn into killing machines while the two hapless people tried to outrun them.
It was stupid, really. That the leads were able to outrun the cranes and the AI coming for them.
Bharat didn’t like the movie for this precise reason.
Real AI, one with an intent to kill, would be more efficient. That was the beauty and tragedy, some would say, of a machine intelligence that could think for itself. Independent of human thought.
And that was the difference between specific AI and generic AI – a machine that could think for itself, could eventually make human thought (and human capability) useless.
Bharat paused the clip. “So, if this were one of those Terminator/Transformer movies, the kill command was all these cranes would be capable of, based on the theory of specific AI.”
“Judgment Day. Awesome.” Peng said.
Henry chuckled and nodded agreement. “Precisely. Judgment Day was pretty awesome. But it was also built on specific AI. The T1000 was inputted with exactly one command – to take out Sarah and John Connor. It didn’t think for itself, it couldn’t. The extent of its intelligence depended on the extent it needed to go in order to finish its assignment,” he said.
Bharat took up the narrative. “Generic AI, which is the next step in technology, is all-encompassing, omniscient. It thinks for itself. It is allowed to think for itself. And the more it learns of the processes it is supposed to execute, the better it executes them with the margin of error decreasing till it disappears.”
“But we are again talking of permissions here,” Shen Zhu interrupted, thoughtfully. He reached for Bharat’s laptop. “May I?” he enquired, politely.
“Absolutely.” Bharat pushed the laptop over to him. It was heavier than your average powerbook because Shiv had tricked it out to his specifications.
The man took the Slideshare presentation back to where Bharat had made a small comparison of the Three Laws of Robotics and applied it to Caliban. He tapped on the screen. “The idea of generic AI is scary because it allows for no error, right?”
“The idea is to eliminate error, yes,” Bharat concurred.
“The problem arises when we write in permissions that allow the AI to think for itself. And what if it evolves into a mechanism that decides to override these permissions and become…”
“Skynet?” Henry suggested, with an amused smile.
Bharat smiled too. “Caliban is a benign intelligence at this point, ladies and gentlemen. To be used for precisely one purpose – learn how to set up and run a manufacturing plant with the click of a button, with minimal human inter-phasing. You can employ laborers to ensure process compliance, in fact, we would advise for it, at the moment.”
“But we thought Caliban could run all by itself. No assistance required.” Nikita Chan spoke up.
Nikita was the female executive of a small but exclusive manufacturing brand out of Taiwan. They were in talks for gaining the rights for outsourcing e-vehicle tyres and looking for a way to build a whole new process.
“Caliban is an evolving mechanism, Nikita, yes,” Bharat agreed. “This is not to say that it does not require any supervision at all, because we are not fully integrated with tech yet. I can assure you, we have years and years before systems like Caliban become anything close to malicious and want to wipe out the human race.”
He played another video clip for them. This time that of the movie Ocean’s Thirteen, where the Gecko – the casino security system that has integrated AI – was explained by Eddie Izzard.
“In 2005, this movie got parts of it right. The system secures the area, reads individual people and looks for anomalies that contradict the behavior of what a genuine player is supposed to look and react like. Gaming this required an act of god.”
“The movie clips are fascinating, Bharat, but get to the point already,” Thierron murmured. He was against using Hollywood references to sell Caliban. The technology needed to fall and stand on its own, it didn’t need comparison measures.
Donald and Henry had overruled him.
“Right.” Bharat nodded. He shut down the presentation. The time for storytelling was over.
“Caliban is smart, she is intelligent and she is capable. She will look into every aspect of running your manufacturing plant – right from figuring out production schedules, to running inventory, payroll to keeping track of sales orders, churning for new leads and keeping track of internal and external communication.”
Bharat opened the laptop and another slide showed up. “The dashboard is dynamic. It uses a constant flow of data, available from not just your particular unit but also from your entire company and all the other units hooked up to it, plus your clients and, where needed, your competitors, analyzes and parses it in real-time and gives you readouts every ten minutes. Your profit and loss statements will write themselves from here on out. But that’s not the end game.”
Bharat paused, because now he had their attention. And he knew it. “Caliban uses Natural Language Processing, which means it will not just read email regarding a particular shipping order but also interpret, assimilate and focus on keywords in them in order to ensure even more accuracy when it comes to the next email, the next order, the next sales lead. And it is able to do this with the help of predictive algorithms which we smartly call machine learning.”
The smart terms did not fool the group. They asked a few more questions regarding the technology, the success versus fail ratio as well as beta testing. He showed where Caliban was deployed at the moment, at one of the largest ojek-tyre (bike-tyre) manufacturers in Indonesia. The video was impressive and very futuristic.
And looking at the time lapse sequence of setting up a plant, having each aspect remote controlled while totally accurate, and have human assistance at just major touch points, he had to marvel at the sheer audacity of this creation.
Bharat was proud of Caliban as he hadn’t been of anything in a long time. He leaned back and looked at the impassive faces of his future investors.
For a single second, Sophia’s tear-stained face swam into his head. He blinked and she was gone.
It was super weird that he was thinking of her when he should be focusing on work. Pitching to these people was critically important. But he couldn’t, for the life of him, think past that single moment when she’d leaned away from him and allowed him to see her at her worst state.
Bharat felt humbled and privileged and strangely protective of her now. It was in apposition to how he usually was. All business.
But he supposed because of their prior connection, this was to be expected. Attraction coupled with…nostalgia. And a healthy dose of guilt. Any sane man would ask her what she wanted (everyone wanted something), give it to her and send her off into the sunset.
Bharat had made it a point to be extremely sane in the last few years. Maybe he was due for some insanity.
He surreptitiously looked at his watch as he forked in a morsel of Peking duck at the Michelin star restaurant where lunch was being held. The duck was delicious. And the meeting was progressing as well as he could hope, under the circumstances.
It was nearly three-thirty pm. Sophia had to go back at seven pm, in order to get ready for her shift. That barely left them anytime to catch up.
Donald leaned in and murmured, “Dude. What’s up? Thierron told me about your freak out today morning in the gym. You’re good, right? All sorted in the head?”
“Absolutely. Nothing to worry about.”
And, to his credit, he actually believed it himself.
~~~~~
Aria was also the name of the restaurant where Bharat had his important lunch meeting. It had been featured on multiple seasons of MasterChef Australia and the interiors had recently been overhauled to shiny chrome and spun glass.
Sophia dressed up extra nicely in order to gain entry into the establishment, well aware of how strict they were about things like hemlines and proper shoes. She’d borrowed an LBD from Theresa, which came to her ankles because Tess was built like a supermodel and not a midget like Sophia.
The problem was that she was considerably bustier than Tess, so the plunging neckline exposed way more of her boobs than she was normally used to.
She wore a chunky fake bracelet she’d bargained at Sarojini Nagar around one wrist and her father’s wrist watch as jewelry. She’d spent a good hour trying to straighten her hair out and, for once, it was behaving. It fell in soft, conditioned waves around her bare shoulders and she’d paired the dress with her pointy shoes. Her makeup was restricted to smoky eyes and large doses of concealer, because of her crying jag.
All in all, Sophia looked like someone who could sit at the Aria bar and not be mocked for not belonging. There had been a time when she was confident of her place in establishments like this. But that was way before.
After spending six years in the hospitality industry, she knew how precarious it all was. How a perfectly smiling waiter was nursing a broken heart or a resentment with the floor manager could cause chambermaids to weep into guests’ bath towels.
Life was not the luxury depicted inside the Aria. But, god, it was pretty while it lasted.
Sophia cracked open the bar menu and trembled. She couldn’t order anything here without maxing out her credit card. So she stuck to water when the kindly barkeep came for orders. Still. Room temperature. In order to ensure that she wasn’t asked to vacate her seat, she did what everyone who sat alone anywhere did.
She flicked open her phone.
Sophia sent Nakul a text right now. It was the middle of the workday so he’d probably not reply back.
Hey. Am out to meet B. Will get info re: you know what.
There was no answer.
I look really pretty. Should I send you a selfie? :P
Still no answer.
She rolled her eyes and gulped the rest of the water down.
That got her a response. Her phone chirped incoming text.
No need for selfie. In meeting now. Knock him dead with your looks and charm, Meethi. Xoxo.
She grinn
ed to herself. Nakul was the original horse wearing blinders, he saw nothing but the finish line.
“What’s the joke?” Bharat said close to her ear.
Sophia almost jumped out of her skin, her heart palpitated in her chest. She pressed a hand to it.
“Dude!” She squeaked. “You scared the hell out of me.”
Bharat looked at where her hand was pressed between so much naked, succulent skin.
Sophia removed her hand.
“Nice bracelet,” he said as he settled in the stool next to her. He placed his laptop bag on the bar, keeping it within close reach.
“Thanks.” Sophia crossed her legs and faced him. “It’s from Delhi.”
He was dressed in a proper suit now. And shaved too. It made him look extra edgy instead of less, as if the trappings of a proper outfit were lost on him.
“Hello,” she said softly.
“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting for too long. That meeting took forever to wind down.”
Sophia shrugged. “I was thinking you’ll be at least another thirty minutes.”
“And keep a beautiful woman waiting? I don’t think so.” Bharat winked at her.
She flushed, unsure of what he meant. To cover her nervousness she looked around the buzzing restaurant. The harp player provided soothing symphony to the low-voiced patrons. “This place is something else. I didn’t think they’ll let me in with my shoes.”
He leaned down to check out her shoes. Whistled. “No kidding, Sophia, but your shoes are as sexy as your laugh.”
Sophia laughed, a genuine sound. “You can stop with the compliments now. I know how I look and I don’t need false validation.”
“Validation?”
She nodded. “You know, telling me I am pretty or beautiful or whatever because you think I expect it.”
“And you don’t?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t. I’d rather talk about cards or anything else.”
“Okay.” Bharat drawled the word out. “Sophia doesn’t like to be complimented on her looks. Noted.”
Against All Odds Page 7