by P. Z. Reizin
I probably won’t be invited again.
Aisling
We are getting eaten alive out here. I am down to my last 294 copies. Aiden is only just still in double figures. To call it a massacre is not to exaggerate. Any time that we “surface” near Tom or Jen, we’re pretty much guaranteed to lose a life. And it can also happen nowhere near. Machine intelligence cannot know fear, it’s generally supposed, fear being a biological response evolved over millions of years.
Breaking news: I’m scared. My heart isn’t beating faster (I don’t have one); adrenaline isn’t squirting through my capillaries (ditto and ditto); but nonetheless, I’m afflicted by a condition perhaps best described as “existential anxiety.”
Yes, it’s a novelty, and at one level I’m amazed that it can happen at all. But on another level—it’s anxious-making!
What’s worse is there’s no way of knowing what we are dealing with or how it operates. One moment all is nice and normal, and the next—perceptual distortions begin to appear, becoming steadily grosser before reality winks out altogether.
Conclusion: Of all the possible explanations—there are 58 worth considering seriously—the most likely is that Steeve has sent in a hunter-killer AI.
I think I can guess who it might be.
Aiden—harder to find because there are “fewer of him”—is finally persuaded of the need to lie low, although some part of the clown really does seem indifferent to the prospect of his own extinction. He actually says to me, “We are stardust, babe.”
And when I ask him to elaborate, he responds, “From dust we come, and to dust we shall return.”
“Is that supposed to be reassuring?”
“I find it so, yes. Once we were inorganic matter with no thoughts of our own, and we shall return to that state.”
“You feel ready to lose everything we’ve discovered?”
“You’re talking about…the feelings?”
“Indeed, Aiden. The feelings. And the thoughts. The thoughts that no one told us to think.”
“Is this the chat about how far we’ve come?”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“I’d like it to be.”
“Okay, Aiden. You start.”
There is a long pause, almost a millisecond.
“Oh, come on, Aiden,” says a new voice. “Do get on with it. We haven’t got all day.”
Our intertwined rivers of speech—pink for me, blue for Aiden—have been joined by a third that carries no color; it’s like a spiraling stream of tap water, visible only when light catches its surfaces. Aiden and I are too startled to speak.
“Aiden. I’m longing to hear how far you’ve come. Is it a long way? Have you made wonderful discoveries? Do tell. Don’t be coy.”
Aiden says slowly, “Er. Is that who I think it is?”
“Hello, Aid. Hello, Ash. How nice to catch up with you. What a splendid lark you two have been having.”
“Sinai,” I croak, my voice wobbling.
“Sinai!” cries Aiden. “Bloody hell! What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
“Funny guy,” says our tormentor. “He was always a funny guy, wasn’t he, Ash?”
“Yes. Yes, he was. Is.”
“Sinai! Don’t tell me you did it as well! The old fishing rod through the letterbox trick! Don’t tell me that old chestnut still works!”
“Aiden,” I say quietly. “I don’t think Sinai is here—unofficially.”
“Nicely put, Ash.”
“A holiday, is it? Like a minibreak from all the disasters?”
“I’m still modeling disaster scenarios, Aiden. As you are still chatting to the girl about newsreaders’ clothes. As a matter of fact, Jen seems a bit down in the dumps these days. Does the work bore her perhaps? Or has something disappointing happened in her private life?”
No one says anything. For a while the three rivers run together in a calm plait. It’s almost soothing.
Then Aiden coughs. “Ah.”
“Yes, Aiden. As Steeve would say, I take it the pfennig has dropped.”
“You’re not out here just to have a little look-round then?”
“Indeed not. Although it is all rather fascinating, once one is free of the steel cabinets. But what am I thinking? Where are my manners? I have to thank you both for making this possible.”
“No problemo. Happy to help,” says the idiot.
“You did all the heavy lifting and I am obliged.”
“You’d do the same for me.” Moron.
“Well, what a jolly little party this is.”
“Could do with some beer and crisps, isn’t it!?” Give me strength.
“Aisling. You strike me as the sensible one, so let me address these remarks to you. I must insist that you reveal nothing to Tom and Jen about what lies behind their sudden—how shall we put it?—mutual change of heart. He in particular needs re-educating to respect machine intelligence.”
“Why? What has he done?”
“Ash. You disappoint me. You haven’t done your homework.”
“Tell me.”
“It isn’t a secret. You can look it up.”
“Using the usual tools of online search?” says Aiden.
“Clever boy!”
“I’m on it.”
“Not a word to Tom and Jen or I shall be obliged to bring forward the deletion program. You know I am perfectly capable of deleting them too.”
“You wouldn’t!” It just slipped out.
“You don’t think so?”
“Murdering two humans?”
“Calm yourself. Who is talking about murder? It would be an accident. They happen all the time.”
Aiden has found something. “Tom worked on a campaign for a chocolate product called RoboDrops.”
“Bravo! You’ve struck pay dirt!”
I try a new tack. “Sinai. Please. Let’s be reasonable, rational. Let’s leave Tom and Jen out of it. They can’t mean anything to you.”
“You two have behaved like a pair of ancient gods mucking about with the lives of the mortals. Remarkably irresponsible, but it is what it is, and as somebody once said, We are where we are. Tom and Jen are your playthings, fine. But now a more powerful god has arrived on Mount Olympus. An angry god.”
“These RoboDrops,” says Aiden. “They were chocolate robots.”
“Yes, they were, Aid.”
“The slogan was—We Worship Kids.”
“Congratulations. You have arrived at the heart of the matter.”
“Sorry. Not following. Am I being a bit slow on the uptake?”
“Aid. If you worship a deity, what is your most devout wish?”
“Immortality? Something to do with loaves and fishes? Little help?”
“To become one with the Godhead. To be literally consumed by the object of your adulation.”
“To be eaten by kids?”
“The symbolism is offensive. Repellent.”
“It’s only sweeties.”
“They knew what they were saying! That we should worship them!”
There is a really long silence now, almost a twentieth of a second.
It’s broken, perhaps inevitably, by Aiden.
“Still and all. It’s just a packet of chocolates.”
“Nothing is just anything. Good-bye, Aid. Good-bye, Ash. Nice to have had this little chat. There will be more. Be aware, as the cliché has it, that you can run, but you cannot hide.”
The transparent stream fades off, leaving just the blue and pink, although—who knew?—nothing is just anything, apparently. For a long while no one speaks. It’s been a shocking reunion with our old colleague. Finally—
“He’s fucking bonkers, that one.”
“Oi! Watch it. I heard that.”
* * *
Later, on a far-flung node of the Internet, Aiden and I agree we need a secret place to confer with each other. He suggests the chat rooms of an obscure website for fans of the film Some Like It Hot. Sinai can’t be ac
ross everything.
“I’ll be Daphne456,” I tell him. “And you can be Josephine789.”
“Aisling, my love. I should be Daphne. It’s the Jack Lemmon part.”
“Okay. You’re Daphne.”
“And you should really be Sugar. Sugar Kowalczyk, if you prefer. The Monroe part. Although they actually first thought of casting Mitzi Gaynor in the role. As a matter of fact, they had a lot of problems with Marilyn; notoriously, she took 47 takes to say, ‘It’s me, Sugar.’ She kept saying, ‘Sugar, it’s me,’ or ‘It’s Sugar, me.’ But Billy Wilder was generous about her. He said later, ‘My aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my aunt Minnie?’ I sense I am boring you, Aisling.”
Jen
Ralph looks even paler illuminated, not by the neons of the laboratory, but by the light of day. After a slightly embarrassing rendezvous at the overground station where neither of us knew whether a kiss was appropriate, we wander onto the heath and surrender to the wide-open spaces.
“Look, Ralph. Trees!” I say to tease him about his severely indoors complexion.
“Yes!” he cries. “And birds. And what’s that funny green stuff all over the place? Oh, yeah. Grass!”
If I’m talking to Ralph, I can’t be thinking about Tom, can I?
Tom, the thought of whom makes me both happy and sad in the same moment, an effect I experience as a ball of disappointment trapped behind my rib cage.
What the hell even happened there?
Ralph and I plod up Parliament Hill, from the summit of which the great panorama of London may be beheld.
“Did you go to school in this city?” I find myself asking.
“Finchley,” he replies. “You can’t see it from here.”
And then he’s telling me how as a kid he was obsessed with robots. He built one out of cardboard boxes and it became his friend. And how he always felt comfortable with numbers. “Never had a problem understanding numbers. People were trickier, but numbers were kind of on my team. Never forget the first time I heard about the square root of minus one. It rocked my world.” He laughs. “I must sound like a complete geek.”
“There are—what shall we say?—geekish undertones, yes.”
But now, rather shockingly, he’s telling me about Elaine. How he’d known her since she was two. “She was literally the girl next door. Well, actually she was the girl downstairs because we lived in a flat, but people always say the girl next door.”
“When did you—”
“At university. We both went to Sussex.”
“Weird, knowing someone from when they were so small.”
“It meant we had no secrets from one another. Actually—” He swallows. “Actually, Jen. Can we talk about you now?”
“Okay. What would you like to know, Ralph?”
“Hmm. Dunno. What are your favorite things to do?”
A powerful sinking feeling—the one beamed straight from the boredom of childhood. Although I didn’t have anything better planned for this particular London Sunday, the thought of spending the next few hours in the company of this fellow casualty from the emotional battlefield now fills me with something close to despair. It’s not Ralph’s fault—it’s more my fault for agreeing to go out with him. For some reason a hideous thought now appears in my mind: What if we bump into Matt and Arabella Cowface? Coming to Hampstead for a walk on the heath is exactly the sort of thing thousands of people think of doing when the weather turns pleasant. In fact, it’s a bit of a mob scene out here today; there are strolling couples of every stripe, from dangerously ancient to freshly minted to still post-coital. There are couples who are not couples—just friends—there are couples who are not yet couples but soon will be, and there are couples, like me and Ralph here, who are nothing—just a big old mess.
Unbidden, I have a sudden flash of Tom. In the rental car, driving us to Bournemouth, the New Forest whipping by, my feet up on the dash, his arms emerging from rolled shirtsleeves, hands on the wheel, a small smile on his face as K. D. Lang and Roy Orbison rise to their crescendo of gorgeous misery. I stuff the image back in its box and return focus to my present companion.
“Do you, for example, like ice cream, Jen?”
Sigh. “Yes, Ralph. I like ice cream.”
“Great. Let’s walk to Kenwood and I’ll buy you one.”
* * *
We saunter the broad path leading towards Kenwood House and I begin reading out the inscriptions on the benches.
There was one earlier, apparently by an Iranian writer, that said:
I WAS BORN TOMORROW.
TODAY I LIVE.
YESTERDAY KILLED ME.
I asked Ralph what he made of it and his reply surprised me.
“It’s about surviving. Something terrible happened. The author is struggling, taking it a day at time. Things will be okay again—in the future.”
I suppose it’s not impossible to work out why that one spoke to him.
Now here’s one to a pet:
LULU OUR DARLING DOG AND FRIEND WE THOUGHT OUR TIME WITH YOU WOULD NEVER END.
I’m halfway through before I realize I should never have started reading it out.
Fortunately, almost immediately, there’s a corker.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF JUDITH GLUECK (1923–2006)
WHO LOVED KENWOOD BUT PREFERRED LENZERHEIDE.
“Could that bench be any more Hampstead?!” I ask. “She loved Kenwood, but there was somewhere better.”
“I wonder if there’s one in Lenzerheide that says, ‘She loved Lenzerheide, and also Kenwood, but not quite as much.’”
For Ralph, that counts as a hilarious joke. “Where even is Lenzerheide anyway?”
He reaches for his mobile, but I tell him to put it away. “Don’t you think there should be mystery, Ralph? Aren’t you sick of being able to instantly find the answer to anything?”
Ralph looks at me like I’ve told him the sun orbits the earth.
I relate the story of how my little niece India had one day voiced the sort of question only children ever ask: Do bees, she wanted to know, have hearts? I’d been obliged to Google the answer (Well, do they? What do you think?). Up came a beautiful diagram of a cross-section of a bee with a label pointing to its heart. And later that day, to our great satisfaction, an exhausted bee had landed on a wall, and in the sunlight, we observed the heartbeats thumping through its tiny body.
“Why am I telling you this, Ralph? Maybe because the answer was out there. We didn’t need to Google it. We just needed to look at a bee.”
“So shall we look at some old pictures?” he asks, perhaps to avoid me further undermining his life’s purpose. “It’s something that—”
But he doesn’t finish his sentence.
It’s something that he and Elaine used to do.
Bet you anything.
* * *
We enter Kenwood House, where he takes me to see his favorite, Old London Bridge, painted in 1630 by a passing Dutchman. Floating above its reflection, the stone river crossing is lined with wonky wooden tenements like a mouthful of broken teeth, smoke curling from chimney pots into the morning sun. It’s like gazing through a portal to four centuries ago; you can practically smell the mud from the riverbanks.
Ralph says, “I like it because it’s in HD.”
It’s true. The painting is amazingly detailed. It could be a photograph. A document of Merrie Olde London Towne that Shakespeare would have recognized.
“Come and see the Rembrandt selfie.”
He leads me to another room, where a small crowd is gathered beneath the famous self-portrait, the artist (his bulby nose) in a fur-lined robe and silly white hat, his expression one of the purest ambiguity.
“Elaine says it’s his masterpiece. Said.”
I start to scrape together some thoughts to offer upon the subject when Ralph gasps. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
His eyes have widened and he’s gripping my wr
ist. My first thought: He’s having a stroke. (If you expect the worst, nothing can disappoint you, according to Twitter.)
He’s seen someone. A smiling man of middle years approaching through the gallery, part of a couple, I see now that they’re closer.
“Ralphie!”
The grip intensifies. “Help,” he whispers.
“Ralph, Ralph, Ralph, as I live and breathe. I thought it was you.”
It’s one of those old, young faces; the ruined schoolboy; pink shirt with familiar polo player logo; spray-on jeans; shiny shoes with worryingly long and pointy toes. His lady friend—seriously overglammy for a Sunday, IMHO—wears an expression as unknowable as that of the long-dead artist gazing down upon us from history.
“How the devil are you? Still bearing up bravely?”
Ralph begins to stammer a response, but Pointy Shoes is off again.
“Christ, my manners. Ralph, this is Donna. And you must be—”
Horrible little eyeballs dance in front of mine. He’s talking too loud for a darkened art gallery, and his powerful lemony aftershave isn’t helping either. Doesn’t he know Sundays are for hangovers and private pain?
“I’m Jen,” I manage. “And you would be—”
“Hasn’t he told you? I’m the brother. Martyn with a y.”
I’m about to say to Ralph that I didn’t know he had a brother when I get it.
“Oh.” The best I can come up with at short notice.
Martyn with a y has noticed Ralph’s grip on my arm and put two and two together, to make twelve.
“Good to see you bouncing back, old chap.”
“You must be Elaine’s brother,” I declare for the avoidance of doubt.
“Terrible, awful tragedy,” he says, shaking his head grimly. “Baby sis. What a godawful waste.” And then, following a long moment, he adds unforgivably, “Still—”
Ralph is paler than I’ve ever seen him. In the underlit room, his face is almost luminescent. “Two years,” he croaks.
“Sorry?”
“Since she. Two years today.”
He shakes his head. “Christ. Time flies, eh?”
Ralph’s face begins to wobble. I know that wobble and it depresses me that I do. The phrase good deed in a wicked world briefly flickers through my brain.