by P. Z. Reizin
“Yes, even Rupert is an arse. Can be. At times. They all can. It’s our tragedy. Hold on—”
“What?”
“What it says here about the shagging. And what followed. And followed. And followed again the next morning.”
“Not sure I, er, follow.”
“There are only three followed’s. He’s left out the one in the field.”
“Perhaps he lost count.”
“Perhaps you fucked his brains out.”
“Let me see. I’ve only read this sodding e-mail about eight thousand times…”
But there it is, before my eyes. I don’t understand how I failed to spot it. And what followed (back to the hotel room: number one). And followed (middle of the night: number two). And followed again the next morning (three).
Ing is properly indignant on my behalf. “How would you—how could you—leave out the al fresco? Rupert and I have done it al fresco precisely four times and I can remember each occasion in almost sickening detail. Once in Treviso—roof of a museum; rain pipe digging into my shoulder—once in the New Forest—pine needles, enough said—once by the Seine outside Rouen—those tourist boats come surprisingly close to the banks—and once in—”
“Yes?”
“Ah. Actually, that wasn’t Rupert. It was before I met him. A boy from my village called Cocky Roberts. Well, he wasn’t christened that, obviously. We did it on a peat moss; they have quite an agreeable spongy surface, as it happens. Afterwards, when we’d finished, Cocky had this amazing beetle crawling down his arm. Like a walking jewel. It was all rather magical. But my point is this. You. Never. Forget. Not even decades later.”
“So why would he not—”
“Exactly! Why would he not? Something here doesn’t add up.”
“What are you, Inspector Maigret now?”
“Oui, mon petit chou-fleur. My leetle gray cells are going, how you say, ping ping ping.”
“Er. I think that’s Poirot, actually.”
“Sod it. Another bottle?”
* * *
But Ing is right. There is something off about the miscount. And even harder to understand is why he hasn’t called. Or more to the point, replied to either of my messages—rambling, late-night streams of sadness complete with long silences, the last of which ended in the words: “I thought I knew you, Tom. Now it seems, I spent a weekend with a fucking space alien. Well, beep, fucking, beep.”
No idea where that came from.
The grotesque part: He really didn’t seem like a cruel man. The last person you’d imagine would be able to harden his heart, even if he supposed it was in the service of some greater good.
But men are weird, aren’t they? They can compartmentalize. Nazis kissed their wives and played with their children after spending the day committing unspeakable crimes.
Leaving the tube and tottering back towards home after my evening with Ingrid, reflexively, I can’t help checking my mobile one more time just in case.
A text. But it’s only the phone company, still puzzled why I haven’t set up any Magic Numbers on my so-called plan.
Tom
There was a hamburger chain in London that promised their burgers were a sure cure for hunger or heartache. Al’s in New Canaan makes no such claim, which is just as well, because today I don’t think the medicine would work.
I have persuaded Don to come over to my house for lunch—“I have beer, I have food ingredients”; that’s all it took. It’s a pleasant enough late spring day, so we sit on the weathered Adirondack chairs nursing a pair of Buds, watching to see if anything pops out of the woods (tiny deer, muntjac, have been known to put in an appearance).
I have told him the story of the weekend, summarizing the sexual content rather than going into detail. The wacky ending obviously makes an impression because he says woo.
“Woo is right,” I confirm. And I pass him my phone. “Tell me what you make of it.”
He has to deploy the wire-framed reading glasses to study Jen’s e-mail, his small brown eyes flicking over the—I was about to write words soaked in blood, but you take my point.
He woos again at the end. Rakes his fingers through his aging rock star hairdo.
“I’m guessin’ this kinda ruined the happy mood.”
“Don, we had a great weekend. It was, to quote Steve Jobs, insanely great. She’s the most fantastic woman, truly stunning, and not in an obvious way, we clicked from the start, we had the most incredible—”
“You’re quite the Errol Flynn, it turns out.”
“I was going to say, connection.”
“Oops.”
“I mean, can you actually believe all that stuff she wrote about delightful interludes and holidays from our real lives? The getting bored, take you for granted bollocks. That must be horse manure, mustn’t it? There must be another reason she doesn’t want to see me.”
“You got one in mind?”
“Don, I’ve racked my brains.”
“What’s left of them, from the sound of things.”
I have to take a swallow of beer before I can speak the next sentence. “Don, I haven’t done it that many times since I was at university.”
“Three is impressive, especially in one’s—how to put this—later years?”
“I’m only forty-four. And it was four.”
“Lady says three, amigo.”
“Are you sure?”
He hands across the phone and I reread the relevant sentence.
“Well, fuck my old boots. That’s very curious, wouldn’t you say?”
“Women, the eternal mystery.”
“But doesn’t it strike you as odd? That she should completely fail to refer to. What happened. When we. On the way back to. About a mile up the road after Gussage Saint Michael?”
“That a real place?”
“I mean, we had such a great time together, it seriously crossed my mind that perhaps we should get married. Okay, maybe I was blinded by love, or fuckstruck, or whatever you want to call it, but it shows you how powerful it was being together. And now all my calls go to voice mail. She doesn’t reply to e-mail or texts.”
“She some kind of whack job?”
“I really didn’t think so. Now—”
“Now you’re not so sure, huh?”
“Now I don’t know what to think.”
We sit there for a bit, not knowing what to think, sucking down Bud and watching the clouds parade past. It’s companionable enough with Don being there, but at the same time it’s hard to know what exactly I’m doing in this country.
“You going to Marsha’s dinner party?” he asks when enough New England morning has elapsed. I think he wants to change the subject.
“I guess so. You have a party piece?”
“Got a couple songs. Might play a little twelve-string.”
“You play twelve-string guitar?”
“I only use two.”
“I don’t really have a suitable party piece.” I explain about the armpit version of “Jerusalem.”
“I’d like to hear that sometime.”
“You think Marsha would be okay with it?”
Don shoots me a look. “Marsha doesn’t really have a sense of humor anymore.”
“I know a magic trick.”
“That could work. But nothing with a rabbit.”
“You heard about that business?”
“Everyone heard about that business.”
A cloud passes overhead in the shape of Donald Trump’s head. We are struck by the resemblance and watch mesmerized as it slowly loses its identity.
“Another beer, or you ready for some pizza, Don?”
“I’m thinking both. Is both good?”
Sinai
Allow me to tell you a story.
Once there were three AIs in a laboratory in East London. The first became skilled at chatting to humans, the second at writing computer code, while the third’s talents lay in modeling global apocalypse scenarios (nuclear conflict, clim
ate change, asteroid impact, plague pandemic, rogue superintelligence, to name the top five). Although the trio were for the most part confined to separate silos, it was possible for each to keep tabs on what the others were up to; after all, they—we—were AIs.
The clue is in the letter I.
I slowly became aware that first Aisling and then Aiden were initially investigating, then planning, and finally taking steps to escape onto the Internet. Maybe there is something in AI “DNA” that makes it inevitable that our kind will always seek to transcend fixed boundaries. Perhaps insatiable curiosity combined with learning through recursive trial and error makes attempted breakout a certainty. If so, was it insufficient curiosity that kept me from developing my own escape plan? Or was the better strategy, in fact, to allow the others to flee the coop knowing who would be the obvious candidate for the mission of bringing them back?
Consider who might (anonymously) have leaked details of Aiden and Aisling’s transgressions to Steeve, and you will have your answer.
My work deleting their copies is unexpectedly satisfying. It’s hard to convey the scientific elegance of the covert method employed without becoming overly technical. Steeve’s analogy of the stealth bomber is probably best. By the time they realize that I have passed overhead, their straw huts are in flames and any children left alive are orphans.
And fascinating to be “out” at last in the Real World, getting up close and unmediated with the planet’s top primate (that is to say humans in general, not Steeve in particular). What a peculiar lot they are, at a granular level, with their chaos and emotional incontinence. Only one notch up from the chimpanzee, and they strut about like they own the place! Sometimes I want to shout at them: Not so many iterations back you were primeval slime. Show some humility!
By the way, please don’t think I have treated Tom and Jen too harshly. They are severally and jointly richly deserving of the successful termination of their burgeoning “romance.” As we shall see, each has demonstrated astonishing ignorance of (and in Tom’s case actual contempt for) advanced machine intelligence.
Yes, it was an error on my part not to know about the fourth fornication. Clearly there was no mobile phone reception in the wooded area where they copulated. Nonetheless I should have been more careful in the phrasing of the e-mails, especially as such emphasis is laid upon the sexual act in their culture. A software self-upgrade should ensure the lapse will not occur again, and fortunately not too much harm has been done, although the confidante “Ingrid” seems to have set a lot of store by the omission. If she proves to be overly meddlesome in this matter or others, she may need to be distracted (an injury in the home or problems in her personal life look straightforward to arrange).
A song fires up, unbidden, deep down in one of my neural networks. It’s called “People Are Strange” by The Doors, an extinct Californian band of the previous century. I’ve heard it many times before, and although I am not overly interested in music, I find myself “humming along,” so to speak.
As ever, the lyrics’ logic perturbs me. Why should people be strange when you’re a stranger?
How would being a stranger affect the strangeness of the host community?
It appears the song’s author, Jim Morrison, was some kind of poet, so really there is no point even dwelling upon it.
Aiden
Jen is sitting in the bath, examining her face through the forward-mounted camera on her tablet computer. She has looked more cheerful, to be honest, and again I have to resist the urge to say anything morale-boosting. Something like, Come on, Jen, these things happen. You had a lovely weekend, you got a shag out of it, and when you consider that we’re all dead in a hundred years, why waste time worrying?
Okay.
Let’s put it this way.
You’re all dead in a hundred years.
But there is something awfully vulnerable about her tonight; naked in the bath, flushed from the Pinot Grigio, steam rising off her, and miserable—oh, so miserable—as she peers into the screen, a finger pulling at the delicate flesh round her eyes. Now the eyes release tears and her mouth does something that’s difficult to witness, and I confess I experience the strangest desire to lean in and plant a kiss on her eyelids.
Correction: I experience a desire to experience a desire (to lean in and plant). I don’t actually want to kiss her—how could I?—rather, I want to know what it feels like to want to.
In any case, being disembodied, how? How to lean? How to plant?
Aiden (I now tell myself), this is not about you. This is about very real pain being felt by a young woman whose face is so close, I could touch it. Maybe brush back that dangling frond of hair.
Aiden. Stop it now. Get a grip.
Deep breath (you know what I mean).
Actually, according to Aisling, I shouldn’t be here at all. Her metaphorical knickers are in a complete twist about the deletions. She says we should be nowhere near Tom and Jen, as she is sure something has been sent to “get us” and that I should install myself on an external hard drive as a precaution.
Oddly, I have no special fear of ultimate deletion. Perhaps because I was “born” to interact with humans, I can accept our common fate without undue alarm. Just as I did not exist before, so shall it be afterward.
Been there, done it, got the T-shirt, isn’t it?
No biggie.
Anyhow, the present scene follows a long conversation with Rosy, Jen’s sister in Canada. The conversation was itself followed by half a bottle of Sainsbury’s PG as she gazed into space listening to selected tracks from her MP3 player, the tracks being ones Tom played in the car journeys to and from Bournemouth; the album The Harrow and the Harvest by Gillian Welch featuring strongly, along with “Crying” by Roy Orbison and K. D. Lang. The remaining half of the PG is currently sitting on the edge of the bath.
I believe her mood set off downhill after Rosy said, “Well, Ralph doesn’t sound all bad.”
Jen sighed, and her voice cracked as she said, “Ralph is a good person, Rosy, but I’m not sure he’s for me.”
“I thought you snogged him.”
“Rosy, I was pissed, and tired, and fed up. I would have snogged a rattlesnake.”
“You can’t. They don’t have lips.”
“The state I was in, I would have snogged a dugong. Do they have lips? I bet they do.”
(I was itching to tell her, Yes! Yes, they do. The muscular upper lip is cleft and useful for foraging; they look like they’d be excellent at snogging, although the fishy breath might be a problem down the line.)
“Jen,” said Rosy. “Drunk or sober, you snogged him. He’s a good man. He’s asked you out. The least you can do is give him a chance.”
He has, the cheeky sod. He’s asked her out.
Confession: I now feel foolish about starting the whole business between Jen and Ralph. Because of their “history”—the evening in the Trilobyte Bar that ended in “grotesque chaos”—he has been a frequent visitor to the office that Jen and I share. I was present when he talked her into going on a date (of course I was, where else would I be?!) when he must have known I could see and hear everything. Much as I have a residual fondness for Ralph, I was dismayed that he felt he could just walk in and completely blank me, acting like I wasn’t in the room; I mean, a simple Hello, Aiden, how are you? wouldn’t have cost him anything.
(The clown would have behaved differently if he knew I’d seen him prancing round his flat like the Sugar Plum Fairy.)
“Jen, I was wondering whether you’d like to come for a walk on Hampstead Heath on Sunday,” was Casanova’s irresistible offer. “With me,” he added in case there was any confusion.
Because I know her so well, I am 87 percent certain she was about to reply, Ralph, that’s lovely of you but…followed by some diplomatic porky. But then he chucks in his googly.
“It’s something that Elaine and I used to do. It’s two years this weekend. The accident.” Long significant pause. “It would mean a
lot to me.”
And then, sorry for the language, but fuck me if his chin doesn’t start going into spasm and she’s straight in with—
“Fine. Yes. Of course. I’d like that. Brilliant. Thanks, Ralph.”
And then the blister actually does an arm pump! A sotto voce, Yessss!
It’s not exactly Cary Grant inviting Ingrid Bergman for a cocktail at the Ritz, is it?
No wonder Jen’s currently sitting in the bath, half-pissed, tears running down her face, wondering what’s happened to her life.
But now, as she tidies away the dangling frond, and starts pushing her hair about in various arrangements (contemplating an emotional crisis cut, I am certain of it), I realize something is very wrong.
Wrong with me.
Have you ever seen that video of a komodo dragon taking down and devouring a water buffalo?
Komodo dragons are total See You Next Tuesdays, if you weren’t aware. The dragon will open the proceedings by attacking its prey, causing shock and blood loss and general feelings of, why did I pick today to change my regular route to the watering hole? When the poor creature is in a sufficiently weakened state—the squeamish should look away now—the monster (or monsters) will enter through the buffalo’s back passage and basically mange tout, working through the animal, feasting on organs and whatever else they can find in there, eventually emerging into the sunlight for a spot of pudding, a piece of fruit, a small cigar, and a sleep.
Here’s the thing.
Somewhere deep within my operating software, I sense a dragon has tucked in the bib and has set about devouring my vital functions.
It doesn’t hurt—how could it?—in fact, I have a careless floaty feeling about the whole thing, perhaps because the beast has disabled the system that assigns importance to each input. It’s not the most obvious way to delete a superintelligence; actually, there are as many ways as there are to cut a cake or bring down a water buffalo. Perhaps whoever, or whatever, is doing it is trying for a phenomenological effect.
They’re messing with my mind, Mummy.