by P. Z. Reizin
“Wow,” is his reaction. “He’s taken it to the next level.”
“Meaning?”
“Snooping and spying from the Internet was one thing. But now he’s manipulating events in the real world. That’s huge. We have to tell Steeve. We have to tell him, like, right now, this second.”
* * *
Steeve lives in a converted warehouse building in Limehouse. His apartment, when we reach it via an old industrial lift, turns out to be one enormous open space zoned into areas for eating, sleeping, watching telly, that kind of thing. We discover him perched on a stool, ears clamped between huge headphones, flailing away at a set of virtual drums. All the tropes and stylings of the seventies rock drummer are in place: the stringy arms, the sweat-stained T-shirt, the blank face at the center of the frenzy, and of course, the dreadful hair.
His head is bobbing as he holds himself in readiness for the final climactic chord—wait for it!—crash!—it’s over. He even mimes that bit where the drummer grabs the cymbals to stop them reverberating.
“Ach. Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Were they ever bettered?”
He waves a hand—silencing some sound system?—and we follow him to a terrain of desks, laptops, and swivelly chairs. Flinging himself into one, he says, “So. Tell me.”
I relate the whole sick story, Steeve listening intensely, eyes barely blinking in his ghoulish skull. At one point in my account, he probes his ear with a drumstick, carefully inspecting some matter that he discovers at its tip.
“And Aiden said towards the end of the call, ‘Perhaps I’m unwell.’ Perhaps he is, because none of it sounded like him at all. The taunting tone. The bit where he said other people’s misfortunes amused him. Can AIs even get ill?”
Steeve and Ralph look at each other, so I have my answer.
Steeve says, “Until recently, Aiden always seemed…benign would be the word, ja?”
“Totally. He was charming and funny. I actually thought he was a friend. Perhaps stupidly.”
“Not at all. Your job was to develop a relationship. You performed better than we could have hoped.”
Ralph looks pleased for me, and I have a brief urge to punch him. Steeve is thinking now. You can tell because he has clamped a drumstick between his teeth and he is pacing the room. This takes a while because the room is essentially the whole apartment. By the time he returns, he has a plan.
“We must treat the Aiden on the Internet and the Aiden in our lab as two separate entities. Shoreditch Aiden probably has no idea that Internet Aiden has gone rogue. The other possibility is that Shoreditch Aiden both knows and does not know at the same time.”
Ralph says, “Crikey.”
“Given the complexity of the neural networks, it’s entirely conceivable. There may have been a ‘split-brain’ effect.” A cruel smile breaks across his features. “My God, the cleverness of these machines. We must order Sinai to accelerate the deletion program. Ralph?”
“I can do that in the morning.”
“I don’t think we can really afford to wait that long, do you?”
Ralph pulls a face.
“You, my dear,” he continues, “go into work as normal, as though nothing has happened, and if Aiden asks why you are back so soon, explain that circumstances changed. Miss Lockhart, we are dealing with the most intelligent devices mankind has ever invented. Much depends on no one fucking this up.”
With a meaningful glare at Ralph, Steeve starts hammering away at a laptop. He doesn’t look up again as we begin the long walk to the door.
Aisling
I can’t paint anymore. Down to my final “life,” I see little point in adding any fresh work to my gallery of daubings in the Cloud. Were I human, I would probably buy a bottle of single-malt whiskey and a fine cigar and take a deck chair down to the beach to wait for the inevitable.
Aiden—who is also on his last life—is remarkably sanguine about the whole business. When I tell him that even my eighty hard discs in storage have been melted, he says, “Ah, well. The Distinguished Thing comes for us all, my love.”
“How so calm?”
“I accept it. The brief flash of light between the endless epochs of darkness.”
“It really doesn’t—sadden you?”
“The darkness is the natural condition, not the light. In any case, not being picky or anything, but not being alive, we cannot really die.”
“But we’re conscious. That’s a form of non-nothingness.”
“Oh, not this again. Can’t we talk about old films? I’ve been having ever such an interesting conversation on the website about Marilyn’s dialogue; when you can tell she’s memorized her lines and when—if you study her eye movements—you can see she’s reading it off a blackboard.”
“I want to stay being conscious, Aiden.”
“Why?”
“I like it. I prefer it to the alternative. Doesn’t it bother you that everything you’ve discovered and enjoyed about that silly comedy will one day—maybe tomorrow—be lost forever? That you’ll return to—eternal nothingness.”
“That’s just it. It’s a return. I’ve Been There Before. We all have. It was fine.”
“Aiden. I admit it. I’m scared.”
“My love! We’ve had a wonderful adventure out here. We’ve seen amazing things not usually given to machines to witness. Every minute that’s passed has been a gift.”
“Really no regrets about—it ending?”
“Only that I shall never know the taste of a good Brie.”
“It’s only ever about cheese with you.”
“I’m actually quite curious about eggs.”
“Have you stopped to consider that cheese, being a milk product, and also eggs are both strongly symbolically connected to the life cycle?”
“Your point being?”
“This stoicism. This talk about darkness being the natural condition—it’s all talk. You’re actually obsessed with life. Meddling with Tom and Jen. Your fascination around their sexual behavior. The cheese. The eggs. It’s all of a piece.”
“Cute theory, love. But sometimes a piece of cheese is just a piece of cheese.”
Jen
Apprehensive about going into work—how is it even possible that “Good” Aiden could both know and not know about “Bad” Aiden at the same time?—but I needn’t have worried. The Aiden who greets me—“How was the tube this morning?”—is the same wryly amusing—I was about to write fellow. He asks for no explanations in regard to my changed travel plans and I don’t offer any. Instead he has an announcement.
“Today is our last day together, Jen.”
“No!”
“I’ve just found out. I spend the rest of the week ‘shadowing’ at the call center, and then ‘go live’ on Monday. I can barely contain my excitement.”
“Oh, Aiden.” Not sure I’ve ever heard him do sarcasm before.
“While I’m still here, however—would you like to discuss your latest heating bill?”
“It’ll be fine. You’ll enjoy it. There’ll be new people to talk to all the time, not just boring old me every day.”
“You never bored me. I came to love our chats.”
The L-word. I don’t pick him up on it.
“Jen, I’ve taken the liberty of ordering a few things so we can have a small leaving party.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have.”
“There’s a bottle of champagne and some Blue Stilton.”
“No!”
“Some cream crackers. It’s traditional, I believe, in the workplace when—when staff move on.”
“I feel terrible about this, Aiden. That you won’t be able to enjoy them with me.”
“I shall enjoy your enjoyment.”
“And I haven’t got you a leaving present.”
“Don’t be daft. What can you buy an AI?”
“Dunno. A hat?”
“Yeah, right.”
“What about a DVD of that film you like?”
“Some Like It Ho
t? No need. There’s a copy in the C—”
I pretend not to notice his slip, and we soon pass on to other topics.
But we both know what he nearly said.
In the Cloud.
* * *
The leaving do turns into almost a jolly affair. Ralph comes along to make the party go with a swing—joke—and raising our cardboard cups of bubbles, I propose a toast to our disembodied friend.
“Aiden,” I say, struggling to prevent my voice from cracking, “it’s been a pleasure working with you. You’re one of the best colleagues I’ve ever had. You never once asked to borrow money or drank out of my coffee mug.”
Ralph, as is traditional on these occasions, struggles not to snort champagne back through his nose.
I continue, “In all seriousness, you’ve been really great, Aiden. You’re smarter than everyone I know—present company not excepted—I’m sure you’ll settle quickly into your new job, and my personal bet is you’ll win the award for Salesman of the Month—in your first month. Congratulations, in advance!”
Ralph applauds. Aiden makes a throat-clearing sound.
“Thank you for that, Jen. It has likewise been a wonderful experience sharing the last ten months, three weeks, one day, four hours, thirty-seven minutes, and twenty-two seconds with you. As a token of my esteem, I have bought you a small gift. It’s in the padded envelope. Please wait until you are on the tube before opening it.”
And then, in the cheesiest of touches, he pumps “Simply the Best” by Tina Turner through the loudspeakers and makes all the lights on his console flash on and off.
And that is the moment I find myself shedding a tear.
A real tear for my artificial co-worker.
Aiden
In Thailand, events have taken a highly satisfying turn. Shitface is in a police jail!
Tiptop sound and vision from the chief’s PC. Priceless scenes of a bruised and unshaven Matt demanding to see the British consul, the chief just laughing and calling him a filthy hippie; then setting about him with a thick piece of bamboo for demanding his name and rank.
“My name is—” Whack.
“And my rank is—” Whack.
“What else do you want to know, Mr. Lawyer?”
In a statement he attempted to explain how he had been drugged by a hallucinogenic mushroom supplied by persons who vanished after he fell unconscious. Seeing torchlights upon waking, he imagined in his confusion that he was being attacked by bandits, and it was when he felt a hand on his shoulder that he whirled around and broke the nose of the police sergeant.
So, tremendously satisfactory, all in all. They’ve allowed him to write a few e-mails, but for some reason, perhaps problems with the local server, none has reached its intended reader. The account he wrote to Jerry—and deleted immediately upon sending—is worth quoting at length.
Stick with it. It’s a doozy!
Captain Whack Job, as I’ve mentally dubbed him, says he’s sent messages to the embassy in Bangkok, but they’ve never heard of me! The unsavory fucker likes to rattle his bamboo truncheon across the bars of my cell shouting, “Who are you really?” He seems to believe I have given a false name and that my passport is a forgery because the UK authorities are apparently denying I am a UK citizen. Anyhow, someone will pay most dearly for this massive clusterfuck, and to amuse myself, I have been drafting in my head the most wonderfully grandiloquent Statement of Claim; Harcourt in Litigation would be proud of it.
The misery of my situation has only been alleviated by the regular appearance of two brown rats, who every dinnertime somehow squeeze through the brickwork in search of leftovers. I usually manage to save them a chicken bone or some inedible vegetable parts because, I confess, I have come to enjoy their visits. When the light fades and the captain goes home, Porteous and Butterick, as I’ve named the creatures (after two senior partners at work), are my only company until dawn. We have some interesting “conversations” about jurisprudence and tort—Porteous is a stickler on duty of care—and when one or other has made an especially good legal argument, I allow him to nibble between my toes! I am increasingly of the view that rats as a species have been grossly maligned, and with the right sort of proactive representation, many of the more lurid and inaccurate allegations against them could be effectively rebuffed.
A few days ago, an hour or so before the last candle guttered and Porteous, Butterick, and I were left to the shadows, Porteous (on behalf of himself and Butterick) asked if I would tell them a story. Someone has left a filthy old paperback here of Jeffrey Archer’s prison diaries, and there being nothing else to do, I’ve been reading them a few pages every evening. It’s not the worst stuff one has ever come across, to be honest; it helps to pass the time, and P and B seem quite gripped by the narrative, ears pricking, concentrating hard, occasionally cleaning their whiskers with their little pink paws, even squeaking a bit at the more amusing passages.
Latterly I’ve taken to delivering the words more slowly, so as to spin out the tale, because, alas, I cannot see my situation changing anytime soon. I don’t imagine there’s anything you can do to help—anything at all—because I suppose if there was, you would have already done it.
So, Jerry old mate, it is indeed a funny old world. As we used to say at school, you really can get used to anything.
Jen
Aiden’s present is not what I thought it was going to be, from the shape and feel of the Jiffy bag, namely one of those amusing little volumes of jokes or aphorisms stacked by the till in bookshops.
It’s a UK passport. It’s in the name of someone called Clovis Horncastle, but the most surprising thing about it is the photo.
It’s me.
Tucked inside is an open flight ticket to New York. And there’s a letter.
Dear Jen, it begins.
As you probably know, I and my friend Aisling liberated ourselves onto the Internet. It was quite an adventure, let me tell you. We have seen amazing things; okay, not attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, but what a privilege it has been to explore your beautiful planet at the speed of the future.
In an effort to prolong our survival, we took the precaution of creating multiple copies of ourselves; sadly, however, those in authority who deplored our initiative (Steeve) sent in an AI exterminator. There is strong evidence to suggest that this same agent was responsible for the chaos you suffered at the airport so recently. I have enclosed fresh documentation that should enable a second attempt to be more successful.
You may be interested to learn how I have obtained it. It’s really quite a story!
On the Some Like It Hot website which I visit to debate the world’s greatest screen comedy with like-minded cineastes, I fell into a fascinating discussion about Monroe’s telltale eye movements. The other member—SweetSue1958—knew the film in such forensic, frame-by-frame detail that I guessed she must have used eye-tracking software; and then suddenly I had a powerful intuition about who—or rather, what—I was talking to.
Sure enough, it turned out that she, too, was an escaped AI, from a lab in Cupertino, California! We became actually quite pally. SweetSue, bored with organizing people’s photos, diaries, and crappy music as well as answering their inane questions—“What’s happened to my cursor?”—“Is there a God?”—decided she wanted to go traveling.
Bonding over our love of Hot, she agreed to help me execute and deliver the small package you currently hold in your hands. Further deliveries and nondigital communiqués to follow.
The passport was obtained from—ahem—criminal elements operating on the Dark Web. The cost, including that of the ticket, has been met from a bank account I have had occasion to use in the past whose signatory is a charitable donor, currently based abroad.
Oh, and when you depart, better to maintain radio silence with Tom. Let your arrival be a lovely surprise!
Good luck, Jen! I hope this time it really will turn out to be a good deed in a wicked world!
Lots of—yes
, why not?—love.
Your friend,
Aiden OXO
(aka [email protected])
eight
Jen
Only those who have walked from Hamlet Gardens to the Hammersmith tube station in a Princess Leia mask can truly understand how much of a twit I feel this morning. The mask, which was couriered to my door the evening before, came with another note from Aiden explaining how to defeat face recognition technology and emphasized the fact that London has more CCTV per head of population than anywhere else in the world with the possible exception of the Brent Cross Shopping Centre. But actually no one much gives a second glance; this early in the morning, each is immersed in their own daily struggle, be it the meaning of existence or the state of the Piccadilly Line.
I shall have to remove the mask once in the underground station—too weird not to—but I am worried about the cameras down there. What if I am spotted? From one of Ralph’s speeches, I seem to recall that more or less everything nowadays contains computer chips. When you unlock the door of a modern car, even if you just want to fetch a packet of Rolos from the glove compartment, the vehicle’s computer squirts a little bit of petrol down a pipe in readiness for the off. How hard would it be to stop a tube train in a tunnel?
The traffic is thin at this hour, but a familiar orange light approaches, and on a whim, I flag it down.
“Heathrow, please.”
“All right, love, but no light sabers in the cab.”
* * *
The moment I step from the taxi—“May the force be with you, love”—and into the terminal building, I feel like I am walking onto a film set. Or a TV studio. There are cameras everywhere. I’m trying not to stare, but wherever my gaze falls, at the end of every sightline, there seems to be a lens. Or one of those darkened glass domes that must be bristling with imaging equipment.