Conception: Book One of Human Dilemma

by Scott Sibary

  “And, of course, that would be unacceptable,” added Per with a questioning face. He looked nervous as he glanced at her and away again several times. “Therefore, I think we have no reason to trust the Chinese, as they obviously want to achieve full control of the OS. We must stay on our guard.”

  “And you wait until now to tell me this?”

  “I’m sorry; I don’t like to act rashly. It was only after today’s results that I realized I needed to tell you my suspicions.”

  “They’re interesting, but they’re still only suspicions. Keep testing your hypotheses. This must not keep us from working with them any more than these failed tests should keep them from working with us. You may be right about their team getting demoralized, and they might be getting pressure from higher up in their government. Maybe I can learn a little from AnDe.”

  The two smiled at each other. She drained the last of her second glass of the exquisite wine.

  When they finished their hors d’oeuvres, they returned to the kitchen-dining room, and Per turned the conversation to sports.

  “I play in the pick-up soccer games here on Sunday mornings, if you’d like to join us,” he said. “They say you’re a very fast runner.”

  “But not so good controlling the ball or kicking.”

  “We’re not that competitive; it’s just for fun.”

  “Not for my shins!”

  He shrugged. “Well, if you must keep meeting with . . . with Andy, remember he’s an excellent maneuverer. He knows martial arts—the mental kind, as well.”

  Per placed three small potatoes on her plate and sprinkled fresh dill on top. Then he set a small porcelain pitcher of melted butter sauce on the table, along with a platter loaded with steamed vegetables and the bowl of salad.

  The fragrance of butter and vinegar flirted with her attention.

  “You’re not having any meat yourself?” she asked.

  “We had the cheese. I don’t need anything more tonight.” He added more wine to her glass.

  Maneuverer, she thought: something to ask about anyone while the game is afoot.

  “You fill the evening with an air of nostalgia. It’s . . . lovely.”

  “Thanks. When I have the simple, beautiful things I was raised with—that you were too, I think—I don’t feel so homesick. And I don’t feel I need anything more.”

  She pointed to the kitchen window, in front of which hung a framed depiction of trees beside a lake.

  “You certainly have discriminating taste. Is that North American stained glass?”

  “Very good. Are you a connoisseur of stained glass?”

  “The modern styles.”

  “Well, that’s a little treasure I found in an antique shop, or pawn shop. I don’t always know the difference here. It’s an original Thomas Flanagan. It must be worth a hundred times what I paid for it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can tell.”

  “I guess that shopkeeper didn’t make his month’s income on what he sold to you that day, did he?” The jesting in her voice was followed by a cringe.

  The brightness disappeared from Per’s face. “It’s a competitive world, business.”

  “And if there weren’t these opportunities to find hidden treasures, you wouldn’t go hunting for them, right?”

  “Exactly.” He looked better.

  She wanted to ask him whether he’d pay as little if it were being sold by a half-starved or homeless person on the street, but she was afraid he’d then say it must have been stolen. “Everything you have here, the art, the furnishings, not to mention the clothes you wear, seems pretty classy to me.”

  “Thanks. It’s important to me to have fine things, but I don’t need to have a lot of them.” He glanced around at his possessions. “I’ll confess, it does help to inherit a little money.”

  A little money, she repeated to herself. How that can help change your perspective, even just thinking about it. You’ve felt that haven’t you? Perspective, position, class.

  “Of course,” Per added, “it’s not the money that makes the difference. It’s who you are.” He appealed to her with warm, strong eyes. “You and I may be different in some ways, but the proof is in the product. We two are the creative thinkers of this team. We two are the ones who truly understand the importance of both our individuality and the cultural values that support us. So we as individuals must support our culture—the culture of our people. Right?” His voice took on a higher pitch. “You’re keeping that idea alive in the Protection Lock, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I suppose.” Her hands churned the space in front of her, working her thoughts into words. “It’s a question of whether I’ll be involved during implementation, and later in maintenance, assuming this World Council becomes operational.”

  He leaned forward, face reddening. “I mean, we must not disappear. That would be a loss of something precious, something unique, like nothing else the world has ever seen! We must protect that. Tell me you agree.” His eyes looked ready to form tears.

  She gripped the table as she jerked away. For an instant her vision crossed, presenting her with two Pers. Yes, she thought, there’s more than one. Aren’t we all?

  Calm again, she reached for her wine, then put it down again without drinking. She rose and walked over to the stained glass.

  “It’s an exceptional piece,” she said. “Marvelous tints and suggestive shapes.”

  “Perfect in its imperfections. Though the scene is American, Maine or Massachusetts, it reminds me of home.”

  She turned to face one who seemed to lack only the balance and security given by a partner, ironically enough.

  “Any interest in playing tennis?” she asked.

  “No, thanks, I’ll leave that to you and Lars. Many other activities, though.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “And the one tomorrow is work, so . . . a thousand thanks. It’s been a splendid treat after a stressful day.”

  “Thanks for your company. It was a pleasure we should pursue more often.” He followed her to the door. “Remember, Solveig, I’m always available to back you up, OK?” He leaned forward, and she suppressed the urge to recoil as his whispering breath tickled over her ear: “Now don’t get lost on your way home.”

  She had been back in her apartment three minutes and had begun to undress when the doorbell rang.

  Looking through the peephole, she saw it was Lars. He was smiling more broadly than usual. She let out an exhausted groan and opened the door.

  Lars entered hurriedly. “I wanted to catch you before you undressed,” he said, pointing at her underclothes. “Any more, that is. I was having a beer with Reidar, and he has a monitor of this hallway, you know, and we knew you were having dinner with Per.”

  “Just one beer?”

  “Well, maybe a bit more. Reidar cut me off after a while. Or maybe Rolv did. Anyway, I wanted to say you were great today. You didn’t explode at AnDe, and yet you stood your ground. That’s not easy.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and waited.

  “Well, I think AnDe is really genuine. I’ve been watching him, how he interacts. My Chinese is not bad, you know. He complaining at you was a formality.”

  “It felt genuine.”

  “They’ve been pretty patient. When the trials failed again, he needed to say something, to avoid losing face. I just don’t see our system as the problem.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “It must be their system, or their failure to figure out how to make it interface with ours. So AnDe’s reaction was natural. It was. His team’s getting demoralized. They needed to hear from him.”

  “Does Reidar agree with you?”

  “I think so. I don’t really know; I did most of the talking, and drinking.” He chuckled.

  “Right.” She shook her head. “And are you going to find a way through this Great Wall of theirs?”

  “Maybe. But that’s where you come in. You have to keep working on AnDe and discover its openings.
You’ve gained a good sense of him by now, haven’t you? He’s a lovely, open-hearted guy.”

  She rolled her eyes and held the door open for him. “See you in the morning, yeah?”

  Lars waved, and walked out.

  A minute later, she found herself staring at her phone and waiting. She wasn’t surprised when it rang.

  “Well, Solveig, there you have it,” came a purposeful, deep voice.

  “Hi, Rolv. Are you still with Reidar? I guess you saw that Lars just left.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “I think tonight you must have heard a lot. So, you know what we must do next?”

  “Yeah, sleep.”

  “Yes,” Rolv chuckled. “But now you shall hear; sleep on this idea. Tomorrow we make a small concession that jeopardizes nothing, something we don’t give a damn about, as a sign of good faith that we, we Norwegians, we are trustworthy and trying to make this work. Think about it.”

  “Thank you, Rolv, I will think it over. And I’ll talk to you in the morning, yeah?”

  “Yeah, yeah. We’ll see each other in the morning. Good night.”

  Once in bed, she melted into the comfort of a temporary reprieve. When she was younger, the subtleties and inconsistencies of human behavior had frustrated her, and driven her to study artificial intelligence. The AI problems she worked on could be highly complex and difficult. Yet people remained more uncertain. They pulled her in different directions with at least some truth to everything anyone argued.

  And I must make my choices, she thought.

  Lightly patting her temples, she queried herself: And how else should it be?

  Deng AnDe leaned back in the chair at his desk in his apartment. A jigsaw puzzle of faces floated in his mind. An after-dinner call had come from his boss’s boss, the deputy minister within the Ministry of Technology, and AnDe had answered a long series of questions about how the project was going. What AnDe hadn’t anticipated was the news given. The foreign minister and unmentioned other officials had been calling and asking sensitive questions about the project.

  What timing! AnDe thought. Quite curious.

  He reached for a pen and doodled names on paper. First the man who had called him, then the name of the foreign minister. Then several more names of persons possibly involved behind the scenes: the head of internal security, the head of international intelligence, and a few more.

  Something covert is going on, and part of it must involve people I know.

  He listed, in no particular order, the names of his people working in the health department basement. Then he wrote the names from his other teams that did not interface with the Norwegians. Success or failure of the project had meaning for each of his subordinates. For some, it offered hope in dealing with oppressive environmental problems or frightening political issues. For most, it determined the direction of their careers. There could even be one or two for whom failure would mean success.

  He tried drawing circles and lines, testing different arrangements of the jumble. No clear pattern appeared. Like random notes, it suggested no music.

  Yet it is amusing, he told himself. One could write an entertaining story. It could be a mystery filled with intrigue, tensions, strong motivations, maybe passions. But we are facing a real drama, and it should not be another power play. It should be about posterity and its chances.

  He looked at the scattering of scribbled Chinese characters. He asked himself, Do any of those people ever question the roles they play? Which of them is devoted to finding a way to go beyond? What insights could they share?

  He stared at the paper, pen in poised hand.

  Yes, he thought, there is a mystery here, but can I figure it out? Who else is trying to? He groaned, and his arm sagged.

  A smile spread wide across his face as he began to write her name in Roman script, beginning with the letter S, then the letter o. But the pen dropped from his hand after the fifth letter, as he looked in wonder at what he had written.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The niggling in her back wouldn’t go away. Even as she lay half-reclined in her tub in the spa chamber she shared with Mishuang, the sensation moved around, eluding clear definition. Solveig closed her eyes and let her memories send her twenty years into the past.

  She’s on Osterøy on a halcyon August day. Sunbathing in a bikini, she hears the water lapping against the concrete wall of the dock at Fotlandsvåg. She leaves her reclining deck chair with no ambitions beyond taking a curious look below the surface of the aquamarine shield. She leans forward to peer over the two-meter drop to view seaweed waving to her from the tops of granite boulders. She assesses the depth. Her fingers wiggle, then her toes. She shakes her head, straightens her torso and is about to turn around. Then the shove in the back.

  Her forearms churn the air like twin propellers as the water, once brightly shimmering, darkens with its fast approach. Now the North Sea is going to swallow her. Underwater, arms still churning wildly, mouth seized against any speech in the foreign world, she kicks her way to the surface.

  The perpetrators stand triumphant on the edge of the dock: the boy and girl, both topless, laughing, bending over, jerking up and down and slapping their arms against their hips. What did they know how it could feel? Them in their big, secure families, where friendly tussling was an accepted caprice. Yet they hadn’t seemed to mind that, when helping her out, she had pulled them both in.

  Another wave from the past washed over her, and the North Sea turned to lavender. Her scene took the shape of the hills of Provence.

  Bent over and bicycling hard, she raises her panting torso to see undulating corduroy rows of flower stocks. Her vision dizzies, and her bike leans. It rolls off the shoulder and onto the dirt, and she tumbles into a decelerating collage of lavender, tan and green. At rest on her back, she lays cradled in the soft, tilled soil, save one loose stone pressing against her lumbar. She grins as Erik’s concerned face looks down at her through the curtain of spikes and blossoms.

  Solveig opened her eyes, and his image disappeared.

  She took a deep breath, and her nostrils burned. Mishuang returned a bottle of lavender oil to the tray between their tubs.

  Solveig perused the labels, lifted the citrus oil, and sent a sharply scented squirt into the water above her groin. Squeezing her thigh muscles between her thumbs and fingers, she pushed her hands slowly to her knees, then pulled back with a prolonged, rising inhalation. The sense of presence filled her: her mind, her body, the water, the tub, the room, all part of one process of sensing. All one.

  Peaking like a river raft at the crest of a standing wave, her hands reversed course to move down again for another ride. But at the knees they clenched to a stop, her arms rigid as she saw a different perspective: no, not all one; just one, alone.

  Uncertain questions hiding behind her lips, Solveig turned to the married woman, partially obscured in a vapor-blanket, but Mishuang spoke first.

  “I forgot, would you like to listen to music? The controls are next to my tub.”

  “Is there a traditional Chinese music for the bath?”

  “This spa is Japanese. They do have traditional Japanese music.” She whispered something to the controls.

  The haunting resonance of a shakuhachi flute together with a female voice graced the bath chamber.

  A distant memory it must be, that war, if remembered at all, Solveig thought. No one of her generation seems to resent the Japanese.

  A tangle of worries filled her head, messy as the incomprehensible web of axons in her brain, making connections where none ought to be. Past conflicts, possible future ones, personal and international. Then the soothing voice of the singer broke through into her awareness and suggested order to the confusion. Solveig took the risk.

  “Miriam, what do you think about the future? Tell me frankly. Do you feel secure, personally?” She faced the eyes of one who had been ambushed. “Don’t answer if the question bothers you. I think your expression has said enough.”

&n
bsp; “Me, my family?” Mishuang blinked. “I worry. I know I shouldn’t.” She looked down at the tinted water in her tub. “When I was little, many people would become ill from the air pollution. Some would die. The government put much money into cleaner power, but still people were afraid. My family invested in a new housing project, but the bad air would collect there. It lost money. My family lost everything: our big house, both automobiles.”

  “You became poor, like me.”

  “Yes, I guess.” She lifted her head. “We rented a small apartment. We managed. Things got better. Then . . .” Mishuang paused at some painful place, holding her breath before releasing her thought. “The influenza. I lost my father.” She shot an intense look at Solveig. “Some people lost children.”

  “I know. We are here because of it, to keep it from happening again. You want to protect your son and daughter.”

  “Yes. Many people here feel that way.”

  “And what about their prosperity? Will our technology take their jobs, make them useless? We can’t know how things will work out.”

  “The increased production will benefit everyone, in some way, in the long run.”

  “How do you know? Society is the kind of chaotic system that responds to predictions about it. Forecasting becomes virtually impossible.”

  “We can still look ahead a little. Our AGI will do that, and figure out what’s best.”

  Solveig let one arm slide off the tub and slap the water. “Yet, it’s no secret that not everyone wants our project to succeed.” Solveig accompanied her comment with a languid wave of her other arm as she leaned back in the tub. She held Mishuang in the corner of her vision.

  “Who is against the WEA?”

  “Well, I know some people in Norway, India, lots of countries, who fear it’ll be corrupted and used as a weapon: an ever-more-powerful weapon. But that’s not what I meant.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I mean, people see our project as an essential part of the World Council proposal, right?”