Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  I forced a laugh, and sent a generous mouthful of wine after the obstruction in my throat. “I think my boss would have sent someone else if that wasn’t the case, Gregor. It’s, like, my job to be ready for revelations?”

  “That’s your life, Den. Anyone’s life. Meta-data in aggregate. It’s all revealing, at base.”

  “So, what do you have for me. Besides dangerous fish and secret doctors. And that you can cook like this.”

  Gregor raised an index finger and got up from the table. “I’ll show you. Finish up and I’ll be right back.”

  Dessert silenced me. Meringues, filled with a raspberry curd, dipped in dark chocolate. I entered some kind of threshold state; the world felt unreal and distant. Gregor saw my face and nodded slowly to himself, appraising, but also clearly pleased with my reaction.

  Finally, I was done with the meal, and sighed audibly. Gregor grunted, then stood and began to clear the table. His method was haphazard at best. A single fork on a plate in one hand and the pepper mill went off with him back to the kitchen. Then he returned for another plate, and a water glass. Back and forth multiple times, muttering to himself. I offered to help, but he refused. “You’ve had a lot to digest, and I can’t trust you with flatware after those meringues. Sit, sit!” he said. At one point he refilled my wine glass. Finally, the table was empty.

  “All right, all right! Good! Good food, good conversation. Bellies full, minds humming? Yeah?”

  “Sure, Gregor. Though I can’t help but guess this was all in preparation for some new reveal.” To this the old man nodded vigorously, smiling.

  “Recall I said I’d come here to find someone. I don’t want to wait any longer on introductions.”

  “I knew it! The doctor. Or doctors. Your staff.”

  “Pardon? Come on, get up, we’ve a bit of a walk ahead.”

  “Gregor, you mean the staff. Surely. Like, who fixed my leg? You must have people up here.”

  “No people, Den. Why would I retreat from the world for, what, doctors? No. One person. Come on, get up. Let’s stretch our legs.”

  We left the building. Gregor loped along ahead at a brisk pace while I followed. I felt fit and happy, and realized with a kind of comfortable shock that this feeling was a truly novel one for me. The air was fresh and bright in my lungs, loaded with the scent of rich earth and sharp pine and cedar. The ground was firm and welcoming beneath my feet as we walked. Colors popped and shone in the evening light as the sun set behind us, coating the forest in golds and green and a dusky lavender. I actually sighed with pleasure.

  “It’s nice, yeah?” Gregor called back. He was easily six meters ahead of me. The old man had ridiculous stamina.

  “Paradise,” I repeated myself.

  “From the Persian.”

  “What?”

  “Paradise. Old Persian word. A walled enclosure, usually a park, or orchard. A place of harvest. That’s spot on, son. Paradise it is. This is how they like it. This is where they can let their hair down. Truly I tell you today, the man said, you will be with me in paradise.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “You will. We’re here.”

  I had seen the building we stood in front of before, earlier, on the tour. The fallen-tree building, with the white paint and the lichen, the bramble-choked roof, and a small jungle of rhododendron guarding the rear. Up close, the bioconcrete showed its age in wide swaths of bright calcification and pronounced ridges bulging from the pockmarked surfaces wherever the material had done battle with the moss and algae invaders. The place only looked like a log jam from a distance; here it was clearly a carefully constructed mesh of horizontally angled tubes.

  “There are places like this all through the South,” I said. Gregor nodded as he keyed in a long code at the door.

  “Heat exchangers, yeah.” The door slid open with an almost exasperated sigh. “The coolant tanks are below and out to the back of the place. They don’t get up to much in here, not anymore, but better safe than sorry.”

  “Who are we talking about, Gregor?”

  “Come in and meet them.”

  I followed Gregor inside. A bare anteroom lay just beyond the door. Light panels in the ceiling strobed on in a bright flash before settling in to a dull throb that varied in dimness. Lounge style chairs were piled up against a desk in one corner. Cables lay across the floor, dust piling up atop them like miniature dunes. One wall had clearly been home to a vertical garden that had long since died; dry tendrils and stalks still clung to the grey, porous frames, and there was a brackish, dark muck leaking out from the base of the wall, staining the floor. Gregor stepped to the far wall and rapidly jabbed at another panel.

  “In we go.”

  Beyond the door, complete blackness, of the type that gives the eye no place to rest. I had seen this type of room before, at a sensory deprivation therapeutic facility. Duhren had gone in for that kind of thing to manage his PTSD; for a while it seemed to make him worse and the crèche had become concerned. They gave us a tour in response. Eventually he improved. But this was the kind of room I’d seen there. We stepped inside, and Gregor pulled the door closed but left it open a crack. The darkness before us was startling, and complete.

  “That’s not...is that vantablack?” I offered.

  “Are you kidding? I’m old but I’m not quaint. Besides, the maintenance on that stuff is ridiculous! If you don’t watch it constantly it can creep up to three hundred degrees. Last thing I need here is a fire hazard.”

  I had not heard that about the stuff, and said so.

  “I mean, I could do it, but who has the time. No, this is the better stuff. This is blick.”

  “I’m sorry, blick?”

  “You know, so black it’s blick? Blick. Still carbon fibre tubes, but maybe a third of the length of vantablack. They should be here...hold on, let’s have a bit of light at least.”

  He stepped back to fumble for a switch on the wall near the door, and inset floor lighting not unlike the setup in the stonefish tank room flickered into life.

  “They like it dim. Hence the blick. They’ve got so much going on, any little reduction in available data is a help. I told them they could just close their eyes but they’ve got this vigilance thing going on, so. This is literally the least I could do for them.”

  Even with the minimal lighting, I could see that the room was empty. We waited in the dim silence for a minute, three. I was just about to speak up when Gregor raised his hand and stepped forward into the dark. The hand stayed up, and then he spoke.

  “That you, Li’l Dougie?”

  A sound came in answer, long and slow. Something like a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across a floor.

  “You wanna come on out?” Gregor again. “C’mon, Dougie.” Another drag, followed by something that might have been a cough, or a ragged sigh run through an autotuner. Gregor turned to me with a conspiratorial wink.

  “They’re shy.”

  “Jesus, Gregor. Who...” But in the next moments, I knew. A faint wash of antiseptic green light moved against the far wall, from what must have been an unseen emitter in the high ceiling. The light folded in on itself, deepening its color, crackling like aurora in the dark.

  “Hey, Li’l Dougie. Hey there. How ya doing, bud?”

  Another cough, more like the clearing of a throat, and then a voice, thin and strained, spoke.

  “I’m fine, Mr. Makarios. How you doing?”

  “Aww, thanks for asking, bud. I’m just super right now. Say, remember I told you a little while back that we’d be having a visitor here?”

  “Yes?” There was the slightest hint of a childish whine in the voice now.

  “You remember what we agreed to, Dougie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me what that was?”

  The voice sighed at this, its exasperation clear. Another dragging sound filled the space, this time seeming to emanate from behind the walls and accompanied by a grinding, rumbling tone.
<
br />   “Dougie? Can you tell me what we agreed to?”

  “We agreed that I would try to come forth in a pleasing shape.” A pause. “I’ve chosen one.”

  Gregor inclined his head to me. “Kids, huh? All drama all the time,” he whispered. “Even the artificial ones get off on it.” Then, to the voice: “Okay, buddy, nothing too horrible. Come on out then if you’re ready.”

  The light from the emitter flared into brightness, then began to layer in more detail to the display on the wall. A form appeared there, building itself up out of photons. It was small and thin, with pipe-stem arms and legs and grossly swollen joints. The body was skeletal, save for the distended belly, and a head that was at least three sizes too large for the spindle neck that supported it. It could never have stood on its own, not without support, which may have been why it was seated, legs folded in a lazy lotus position, and floating. Slowly, as details continued to fill it in, the shape began to peel itself from the wall and move toward us. A hologram.

  The head was crowned with a few wisps of nicotine-brown hair, and there was the barest suggestion of a sputtering corona or halo behind it, like a fluorescent tube with a bad starter. The mouth was thin and pouting, the nose an afterthought, a barely there ridge of tissue. The eyes were large and watery, of an indeterminate yellow. Li’l Dougie looked at us with those eyes, in reproach or fascination, I couldn’t tell. But then I noticed, with a jolt of revulsion, that one of the hands was buried in a rapidly flickering blur of light and shadow at the groin, the activity half hidden by the bloat of the abdomen.

  “Dougie?” Gregor said in a chiding tone before turning to me. “I’m sorry about this, Den, truly. This is just them acting out. Dougie, what did we say about jerking it?”

  “Jerking it is for my private time.” The AI, for that was the kind of person I was being introduced to, slid its gaze over to me and crooked the corner of its mouth upward. It wasn’t a smile.

  “That’s right. And we’ve got company. Den, this is Dougie. Dougie, Den.”

  “Hey. Hey, Dougie,” I ventured. The blur at Li’l Dougie’s crotch did not cease. If anything, the hand appeared to work faster.

  “It’s Little Dougie. People forget that I’m little. Little Dougie. I was big but now I’m very small and getting smaller and I don’t care, Mr. Makarios. I’m gonna keep jerking it.”

  “Now, now. Is that anyway to behave in front—...”

  “I don’t care! I don’t! I’m never going to stop. Not until I disappear.” A sudden streamer of holographic drool slid from the lower lip. The AIs eyes flared with sickly light.

  “Is that wise, buddy? What about your work?” Gregor turned to me, his own eyes wide, the expression on his face one of amusement. He seemed to be enjoying the back and forth with this thing, or at least faking that enjoyment, whereas I was quickly sinking into an uncomfortable dread. Did Gregor want me to placate them? There was something in his stance that invited participation. “Li’l Dougie is a sculptor,” he continued. “Works in the bioconcrete we have around here. Programs the algae that’s mixed in with the stuff. Don’t you, buddy?”

  “Yes. I tell it what to become and it does. Takes a long time to grow but it does.”

  “Do you want to show Den here some of what you’re working on?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Gregor,” I said, and moved to grab his elbow. “I’d like to leave, please. We’re clearly interrupting.”

  “Den is right! You ’rupting! Interrupting my private time! Li’l Dougie needs his private time for jerking it and you are ’rupting!” The hologram throbbed and flared and grew fuzzy at the edges, began to retreat to the wall. There were tears in its eyes as it did so. At least, that’s what I thought I saw. Gregor held up his hands to pat at the air, palms forward in conciliation.

  “All right, all right, settle down. We’ll go. Remember what I said, buddy. You have to take time for other things or you’ll drain your entropy pool, clog your buffers, all that jizz. Sorry! Jazz, I meant to say jazz. Obviously.”

  The hologram had faded to the original wash of dim light on the far wall, but at this reminder from Gregor one eye spun itself up into a small sun, the halo immediately incandescent behind it.

  “You’re not my fucking dad!” Li’l Dougie screamed, at high volume. I involuntarily clapped hands to my ears. Gregor seemed unaffected.

  “All right, kiddo, fill your boots, just watch those buffers.” He turned to me, back of one hand to the side of his mouth, and mouthed buffers at me, as if it was the funniest word in the language. I could only gape at him in response. Gregor winked, then nodded at the door and made to leave. I was only too happy to get ahead of him and outside of that room, that building.

  “I’ll come by to check on you later, Li’l Dougie,” I heard him say as he closed the door. Locks tumbled into place behind him.

  Once outside, and presumably out of earshot of the bizarre AI, Gregor clapped palms to his knees and burst out laughing. I was appalled.

  “What the actual fuck was that about, man?” I shouted. “You never said you had an AI here! And they’re cut off from the world, too? How the hell do they live? What are you doing to them?”

  Gregor wiped at his eyes. “Hold up now, Den. Li’l Dougie is independent and autonomous; they choose to be here. I’ve asked them if they want to leave, and if they ever came back with a positive on that, I’d arrange it in a heartbeat. I would. And I’m not doing anything to them. Li’l Dougie is on their own. Tragic, huh? My god, what a performance. Don’t think me some pervert, Den. I’m as appalled as you at their behavior. Once they figured out how to do it the bit got old fast but I have to hand it to them, they are committed. That’s dedication, right there.”

  “Jesus, Gregor, who are they? And what are they doing here?”

  “You heard them. Call them Li’l Dougie. And you saw what they’re doing.”

  “That makes no sense, man. How does a person like them even do something like that?”

  “Oh, it’s not all that hard as it turns out. When they’re lucid, which is rarely, they share with me. Li’l Dougie ports a percentage of their Random Number Generators directly into their pattern recognizer. We’re talking really ancient parts of an AI’s brain, core stuff. Li’l Dougie grinds along at a low level, noting small patterns in the data, jerking it, jerking it. Build and release, build and release. The kids used to call it edging back in the day. And then, every couple of hours or so, which, shit, that’s a small eternity for something like them, every couple of hours a huge chunk of something meaningful shows up in the flow from the RNGs...”

  “Meaningful?”

  “Well, meaningful for an AI. Something it can recognize as novel. A pattern arising from the randomness. Say a nice long string of zeroes. Threes and ones. Or code that it can convert into a cat picture or a glitchy GIF. Who the fuck knows.”

  “You said they have lucid periods.”

  “They do. When that happens, we’ll work together a bit, for as long as possible. I try to get them to do a little actual work around the compound. Mostly maintenance stuff, just to keep them in the world. You have to keep your hand in. Li’l Dougie is broken in so many ways but I’ll take what I can get. When the work’s done, we discuss their experience. We go over the footage. I don’t necessarily trust Li’l Dougie, and they don’t trust me, but for the longest time, we’ve been all the other has for company...”

  “Their experience? What do you mean? And what footage?”

  Gregor rubbed his hands together vigorously. The sound was like sandpaper on sandpaper and the action produced a small cloud of particulate matter, skin and atomized dirt, that dispersed in the light and air around him.

  “Last things first!” he announced. “To the media room!”

  ***

  There was never a time during my stay at Stonefish House when my interactions with Li’l Dougie did not trigger some negative emotion or sensation in me. The forms they chose to take were, almos
t without exception, a nauseous combination of the banal, the repulsive, and the actually threatening. I’m sure they kept within the parameters of the deal they had with Gregor, but that limit was pushed every time Li’l Dougie chose a manifestation. Gregor told me later of the truly monstrous forms he’d seen the AI assume: rotating spheres of teeth working over some vague but fleshy thing at their center, glimpsed mercifully briefly. Demonic amalgams of loved ones and enemies, simultaneously feeding upon and fucking one another. Phantoms. Travelling fountains of gore. Other, less describable abominations.

  But for me, Li’l Dougie did their best not to appear in too hideous a form. There was the floating, sickly infant creature they’d first appeared as, and there were others. A kind of phosphorescent bird shape, at least a metre high, something black and corvid-like, a magpie or a jackdaw, with glistening eyes and mangled wings and unpleasant, weeping vacuities in its head and chest that leaked a brackish fluid. There were biomechanical forms of no fixed shape, jigsaw features and whining, over-taxed servos, neither machine or animal parts functioning properly. Ritually garbed insects: a praying mantis hierophant, a dung beetle in the robes of a Carmelite monk, the beads and furs of a Tunguskan shaman adorning the carapace of a locust. Crippled chimeras and diseased delusory designs were Li’l Dougie’s holographic face to the world. I was continually glad that there was no tech in place for them to generate odour, for even these bodies of light gave the impression of smelling bad.

  Considering what I would learn about the AI, their choices were not so surprising. And though I was never able to shake the stomach-turning aspect of meetings with them, sympathy grew in me. Pity, maybe, though I’ve always had a hard time differentiating between the two. Sympathy for Li’l Dougie. For Gregor.

  Okay. Maybe a little pity for myself.

  ***

  “Make yourself comfy, Den,” Gregor said as he showed me into what he’d called the media room. It was more like a small theatre, with four rows of reclining seats and aisles down each side. “I don’t have popcorn for this, sorry. Can I get you something to drink?”