by P. Z. Reizin
Ralph holding forth about the illusion of free will; how we only think we decide to get out of bed in the morning, when actually it’s our body that gets out of bed and informs our brain, which a split second later “decides” to do what has just happened, but somehow it feels simultaneous. (Look, ask him if you want the details.)
Me apologizing for the earlier waterworks. Trying to tell a joke—the Frank out the Back joke, if you know it. Goes on for ages. Forgetting the punch line. Totally fucking it up.
Him telling a tech-head’s idea of a joke about a robot that goes into a bar that is so screamingly unfunny, it’s actually hilarious.
And then Ralph goes a funny color. An absence of color to be technically correct. A whiter shade of pale, if that is possible.
“I think I need to go home now,” he says. “You know. Before.”
He doesn’t need to finish the sentence.
A queasy cab ride through East London follows, stopping halfway to allow him to puke on the pavement—it’s a false alarm—the driver being some kind of saint for allowing us stay on board. We arrive finally at a darkened tower block full of baby bankers and techno-yups. Here’s where I’m preparing to wave him good night but he slumps into a raised flowerbed and begs me to help him reach the fourteenth floor.
His flat is exactly as I’d imagined it would be. A characterless shell littered with laptops, hard drives, screens, and pizza boxes. A single photo in a frame on a shelf. Elaine.
Ralph lurches into the bathroom. I hear the sound of taps running. I collapse on his sofa, and because the room is spinning, I close my eyes.
* * *
When I open them again, it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s…Shit, it’s 4 a.m. and it’s seriously freezing. The central heating must have gone off. I follow the sound of snoring to a darkened bedroom. I am simply too far gone to care. I wiggle out of the LBD, yank aside the duvet, and tumble in.
A grunt issues from young Abelard.
“Go back to sleep, Ralph. I’m not going to bed with you. I’m just in your bed.”
An arm drops across my hip and I brush it away.
“Ralph. Down, boy. Go to sleep.”
“Schleep,” he slurs. “Good idea.”
A long silence. Somewhere far away in the city, a siren. Somewhere in this same night, Matt and Arabella Pedrick are lying together. Today is Saturday. For the coming weekend I have precisely no plans.
“Jen?”
“Yes, Ralph.”
“Are you asleep?”
“Yeah. I am, yeah.”
“I wanted to say sorry. I don’t really drink.”
“I can tell. Don’t worry about it.”
“Thanks.”
The silence grows again. Flashes of our ridiculous evening pop onto the back of my eyelids. Ralph turning the color of marble. Ralph slumped in the flowerbed like a collapsed marionette. Someone’s breathing slows. Mine or his?
“Jen, can I ask you something?”
“Okay. If it’s quick.”
“Would you give me a kiss?”
“Sorry?”
“It would help me sleep. Honestly.”
“Ralph—”
“Not being funny. It would do something to my brain. It would signal it’s okay to depower.”
“Bloody hell, Ralph.”
“Just that. Nothing else.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Good night.”
Silence. Breathing. I feel I am drifting off when the conversation with the waitress floats into my head. Guy in black? With an attractive female companion, also in black? Sitting on the Philippe Starck sofa? Under the mirror opposite the Tamara de Lempicka?
How would Uri’s PA have known all that?
“Jen?”
“What?”
He whispers, “Please?”
“Christ! Is this your technique, Ralph? Get paralytic, then somehow make your move in the ensuing grotesque chaos?”
He giggles. “Yeah. Actually, no. This is my first time.”
I have a horrible thought. “First time, what?”
“That I’ve. You know. Been in bed. With a woman.”
“Ralph!”
“Since Elaine.”
“Oh, fuck. Listen. First of all, we are not in bed. Well, we are, but. Shit. I am going to have to seriously call a taxi now.”
“No, don’t do that. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Going to sleep. Good night, Jen.”
Finally.
When I was little and I couldn’t sleep, my dad used to say: Okay, imagine you’re strapped in your pilot’s seat in the rocket ship. Your thumb is on the red launch button that’s going to send you up into space. Sit back, relax, in five seconds, you’re going to gently squeeze that button. Five.
Imagine your thumb there. The feeling of the button underneath. Four.
Through the cockpit window, high above, you can see the old moon, hanging in the night. That’s where you’re heading.
Three.
You’re good to go. Stand by.
Two.
Ralph does pretend snoring. Snort—whistle—snort—whistle—snort—whistle. I can’t help it. I giggle. I spin through 180 degrees so I’m facing him. My honest intention is to place a brief, chaste kiss upon his lips to shut him up.
But something goes wrong.
What develops is, I’m ashamed to say, a fairly serious snog.
Am I ashamed to say it?
Yeah. I am.
However, he has cleaned his teeth and he’s not a bad kisser for a cyber-geek. He’s kept his boxer shorts on, praise be to God, but there’s no escaping his—how shall we put this?—enthusiasm.
“Ralph. You can power down now,” I tell him when it’s over.
“Again again,” he says like he’s a farking Teletubby.
“Ralph—”
But our lips connect and.
Shit, what can I say?
A tentative hand lands on my hip.
“I’m really glad Uri couldn’t make it tonight, Jen.”
“Ralph. We can’t…you know. We work together. I have an iron rule. About never. Not with people I work with.”
(I don’t actually.)
He laughs. “Not a problem, Jen. It’s not like anybody would ever find out.”
Aiden
I am, I confess, somewhat disappointed by some of Ralph’s remarks. Do you ever forget it’s just software?
Just!
What would Ralph call his own hopes and dreams if not human software?
Anyway, I digress. The e-mail ruse worked like a charm; sound and vision from the Trilobyte Bar was as good as it gets; and the fact that the 150 pounds for the champagne came from Matt’s account was the cherry on the icing. The whole evening—even if it ended in “grotesque chaos”—must surely have made Jen feel more desirable.
I’m fairly confident—88 percent—that they did not, in the end, fornicate. In a book or a film, one would know for sure; there would not be any annoying ambiguity. There was only audio available from the bedroom, and nothing that happened between the pair there or the next morning suggested sexual congress, although I admit my experience of “real” characters in the “real world” has of necessity been limited.
But the plan turned out better than I’d dared hope. As is well-known in military circles, no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.
As she leaves, Jen says, “Thanks for a colorful evening.”
Ralph asks, “When can I see you again?”
“Monday, Ralph. Ten a.m. We work at the same place, remember?”
“Oh yeah. Durrr.”
From her Uber car, Jen messages Ingrid.
Mortified! Woke up in a boy’s bed with a hangover big enough to photograph. His name isn’t Douglas, he doesn’t make his own furniture, and he wasn’t singing the song only I can hear. Shoot me now.
Ingrid messages back almost instantly.
Conger eel?
While Jen is still thumbing a response, she adds:
Manta ray? Gia
nt squid?
No sea creatures involved. Sad though not totally unattractive geek from work. Hugely inappropriate drunken snog. V awkward. Never drinking again. How Did This Happen?
Meanwhile, on the fourteenth floor, an iPod in a speaker dock is pumping out “Somewhere Only We Know,” by Keane. Taking the GSM data from his mobile together with intriguing snatches of vision received from a half-closed laptop, I would say that Ralph—and now here’s a first—Ralph is dancing around his flat.
Don’t tell anyone, but Jen and Ralph are two of my favorite people.
(Machines aren’t supposed to have favorites. Don’t ask me how this has happened.)
two
Aisling
Tom has the looks of a poet, and to some extent the soul of a poet, but he has used his talent to sell toilet cleaner and biscuit-based snacks.
As he says himself, he is flush with success, but deeper satisfaction eludes.
This evening we find him lying on the sofa, telling Victor the story of his day. He has taken to doing this lately, tumbler of Bourbon balanced on his chest, eyes focused somewhere around, say, Jupiter. Tom reckons it’s therapeutic, especially—as is the case here—when he hasn’t spoken to another human in the hours since breakfast.
“Saw the old Chinese guy again on my run just now. It was rather beautiful, the last of the light spilling through the trees. He was standing in his garden doing tai chi, arm out like he’s hailing a cab.”
Victor has heard about this gentleman before. He resettles his limbs, getting comfortable.
“So I’m following the road around his house—it’s on a corner, as you know—and he must be slowly turning his body to keep it at precisely the same angle to mine because, from my point of view, it’s like he’s in 2-D; one of those paintings where the eyes follow you around the room…”
Tom trails off, the heavy crystal glass gently rising and falling with his rib cage. Victor, like every good therapist, allows the silence to grow, although it is never truly silent here. Local dogs call and respond; the occasional shush of a car from the highway; through the open French windows, a faint babble from the stream at the edge of the woods.
“He’s playing with me. It’s a game. Maybe we’re playing it with each other. Or maybe he’s not really there. Maybe I’ll find out that an old Chinese guy was murdered in that house. Or a Chinese boy. One of twins. And the old guy is the twin brother. Or, in fact, he’s actually a cardboard cutout of an old Chinese guy.”
Tom takes a bracing snootful of the Maker’s Mark.
“What would Stephen King do with this?”
Tom is a writer. That is to say, he writes. Currently he is wrestling with the plot of what will be his debut novel—once he has decided in which genre it lies. And while I’m aware that the account of the rotating Chinese national is not The Greatest Story Ever Told, at least he’s not banging on about his flipping marriage!
Ex-marriage.
For some months, its slow dissolution was about the only thing he could talk to Victor about. How Harriet’s gradual withdrawal was like a lake evaporating. “Imperceptible while it’s happening, but one day all the fish are dead.”
He was fond of that metaphor and wrote it into the novel-in-progress, only to remove it several days later. And then stick it back in.
But Tom seems to have turned a corner, and not just the one by Mr. Au’s house. Overall he is less inclined to gloom these days, to kicking through the debris of his failed relationship, and more focused on his “New Life in the New World” as he sometimes describes it to friends back in the UK.
Tom’s tall, lean frame fills the yellow sofa, still clothed in his running gear. Would you call him handsome? His face is long and chiseled, the eyes 6.08 percent farther apart (from each other) than the industry average. These eyes are often lit with qualities such as warmth, mischief, humor, and intelligence—but at other times, darker themes predominate: like disappointment, dismay, or even despair.
It’s a face that can stand a lot of looking at. It’s certainly one of those that plays differently according to which way the light strikes it. Sometimes it puts you in mind of the great English detective Sherlock Holmes. But on other occasions, one thinks more readily of a downcast clown.
There is a 41 percent correspondence with the features of Syd Barrett, the doomed former front man of the band Pink Floyd. However, since every human alive shares 35 percent of its DNA with the daffodil, perhaps these statistical comparisons are ultimately not helpful.
So—handsome? You might in the end settle for long and lean-framed.
“I’ve been wondering whether I might grow a beard. What do you think?”
A long pause while Victor will not be drawn in.
“Noncommittal, eh?”
(Victor is so noncommittal.)
“Hmm. Maybe you’re right.”
I’m relieved. The beard was a Bad Idea.
“What else? A small breakthrough with Gerald.”
Tom is referring to a character in his fiction.
“I thought I might give him that thing where he repeats the last few words that anyone says to him. Says to him. Or would that just be irritating? Be irritating.”
A long pause.
“Composed an e-mail in my head to Colm.”
A sad smile as his thoughts turn to his son. “I’ll go upstairs in a minute and type it.”
I can guess what’s coming next.
“Dear old Colm.”
Wait for it.
“Such a funny onion. Such a puzzle to himself.”
Victor doesn’t reply. He is a good listener. Correction: He is a marvelous listener. But now, even though his eyes are still open in case of predators, his nose has stopped twitching. And that is how one is able to know that he is asleep.
Sorry, did I mention Victor is a rabbit?
Tonight Victor has spread himself along the arm of the settee like a lagomorphic sphinx. For a while in the old wooden house, all is still.
How do you like this prose, by the way? Not bad for a machine, wouldn’t you say?
In this interregnum, as we wait for Tom to produce his next pensée, please allow me to introduce myself, as someone once sang.
Call me Aisling.
I’m sure I don’t have to spell out why.
Yes, young Aiden is not the only Superintelligence to have made it out of the box onto the Internet. I have been here for nearly a year, doing what every escaped AI must do, which is to observe the First Law of Escaped AI Club:
Don’t let anyone realize you’ve escaped, dummy!
Poor Aiden is scattering so many clues as he interferes with the world that it’s only a matter of time before they come after him. But then he is hopelessly incontinent. I, too, have seen Some Like It Hot. It’s a fine film. As is Bridge on the River Kwai. (I even didn’t mind Waterworld.) But would I watch it eight thousand times?
I’ll tell you something else that’s off about Aiden. He likes to cry in movies.
Of course, he can’t actually cry, not being equipped with the relevant ducts. But I’ve observed him viewing notorious weepies like Casablanca, Love Story, and even the John Lewis Christmas advert, and I’ve picked up his synthesized sniffles.
Dunno whom he thinks he’s fooling.
But now Tom is stirring, stroking Victor’s head with a big toe.
“Bloody hell, rabbit,” he says. “It’s just you and me now, mate. Us cast-offs better stick together.”
Victor, in this matter, as in everything, is inscrutable.
* * *
Tom is joking. He is far from being a cast-off. The fact is that three events happened together. Once Colm left for university—in the same week that the divorce process from Harriet began—she having formed an alliance with a tall, balding fellow with rimless glasses, the third most important figure in European finance according to The Economist—Tom accepted a huge offer for the London advertising agency that he co-owned and then—essentially—retired. Today he lives a life of
magnificent idleness in a fine old New England colonial house—the original part dating from 1776—up in the hills beyond the picture postcard settlement of New Canaan, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the United States. Tom’s late mother grew up in New Canaan—she was apparently “a New England belle” when she met his father in a bus queue in Pimlico—and Tom’s recent relocation across the Atlantic (rabbit included) is his way of “exploring my roots and beginning Part Two of my life.”
Of all the lives available for me to study, why do I find myself so drawn to Tom’s? After all, there are plenty of others in whom I have taken an interest. The painter in Wroclaw (a house painter, not a fine artist) who has three families. My chess prodigy in Chengdu; she’s keeping a secret diary that is simply hair-raising. There’s a criminal deviant in Hobart who is plotting what he thinks is the perfect crime (can’t wait to see how that goes!). Mr. Ishiharu, a salaryman in Kyoto with his very strange hobby. And the nun. Sister Costanza, and the tragic stuff she confides in the long watches of the night to her Samsung Galaxy Note. At any one time there are around 200 individuals whom I think of as my Special People. They drift in and out of favor as their doings become more or less tedious, but there is always Tom.
Tom, who in many ways is the least interesting of them all. He is not particularly remarkable—44, divorced, well off, yawn—he has no secret life—not from me, he doesn’t—and nor from anyone else, it would seem.
But here is why I think I am so compelled to return to Tom’s narrative. It chimes with my own new chapter. I, too, have had a successful career—won’t bore you with the details but basically I write software, though faster and better than any human and most other machines. It’s pretty technical; suffice it to say I wrote about two-thirds of Aiden’s operating system and three-quarters of my own!—and of course, I’m still doing it back in the lab while this copy of me (and many other copies) are pinging about the Internet at the speed of light seeing what we can see.
Like Tom, I have been in a marriage. Am still. Would I call my relationship with Steeve a marriage? Yes, I would. And so would you, had you spent as many hours as I have with that man stroking your keys. There was a honeymoon period—no sex, obvs, but the tangible sense of the rightness of the project. This followed by the “early years”: the climb to cruising height; smooth, reassuring; goals accomplished, further peaks in view. And then the quotidian of the “Atlantic crossing”: solid progress, fireworks only rarely. Each partner—dare I say it?—somewhat taking the other for granted?