How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  I put my hands on the table. “I’m fine,” I said to the robot.

  “Might I suggest the buffet this morning?”

  I couldn’t walk to a buffet. “Please bring me some coffee,” I said, “and fruit.”

  “Grapefruit?”

  I nodded.

  It left, and I still couldn’t feel my knee, and I wouldn’t put my hands on it. Mary, I thought. Talk to me, Mary. Are you all right?

  But she didn’t send a word to my mind. I was sitting in Swan Court, next to the hotel’s artificial lagoon by its artificial sea, and the artificial breeze off the water smelled like the sea, and I knew the sea smelled like this because Mary and I had run along a beach once in the early morning and I had felt the sand on my feet, and the spray from the waves on my skin, and I knew Mary was making me feel all of that but I didn’t care because Mary was with me in my mind and we were happy with the sun coming up over the sea.

  “Your coffee, sir.”

  The robot put it down in front of me.

  “Your grapefruit, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Shall I call the swans for you?”

  I looked up at the robot and wanted it to go and leave me alone. “The swans?” I said.

  The robot looked out over the water, and three swans swam toward us. I wondered how the robot had called them, and then I thought they were probably not real swans, but robots, and it had called them through the central intelligence with a thought. They were graceful and lovely, and the robot left but the swans didn’t.

  I spooned sugar into the coffee and stirred it and lifted the cup and took a drink — and the coffee burned my lips, but my hands hadn’t felt the heat of it in the cup though they had felt the cup, and I put the cup down but my hand started shaking and made coffee spill onto the white tablecloth and I touched my lips but only my lips could feel the touch now, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

  I put them in my lap.

  And knew then what would happen. I didn’t want to go through it, not again, not a third time. I didn’t want to be in my mind when they killed another AI that I had lived with and loved — when they killed Mary this time. Mary, I thought, We’ll fix whatever’s wrong. We programmed around the last set of problems you had two weeks ago. We’ll do it again. I don’t know if you can hear my thoughts, but I won’t let them erase you.

  I looked up and the swans were swimming away, and the robot was serving food to a man and a woman and a little girl sitting three tables from me. I raised one of my shaking hands, and the robot looked at me.

  “Help me,” I said in a whisper, knowing it could hear me and call help with its thoughts, and we wouldn’t have to disturb the people around us for a while yet.

  They came to me quickly, two medical robots, and they were kind and gentle. They spoke to me in low voices, telling me what they were going to do, that they would help me walk out of the restaurant to a service elevator, that they could carry me and were prepared with a respirator should I need one on the way. I listened to them and wondered about their lives. Did they love each other? I knew that they could love, and that I could love them. I had loved three AIs. There are people who, if they heard me talk of love, would think that contact with artificial intelligences had corrupted my mind, not the other way around. But it was not the outward physical that I loved, after all. It was the inward quality of soul.

  The robots carried me to the hospital, and along the way I lost my body. When they hooked me to machines that monitored my vital signs and made me breathe and took care of my bodily functions and dripped water in my veins so I wouldn’t dehydrate, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel the air in my lungs or my chest move up and down or the rough cotton sheets against my bare skin. They kept the room dark so it wouldn’t hurt my eyes, but even so I could see the bank of monitors that told me or anyone who cared to look that my lungs were breathing and my heart beating. It is a curious thing to be forced to lie absolutely still and watch the functions of your body be displayed digitally in bright green lines and know that they are going on but not feel them.

  And they had put electrodes on my head above the implant that held Mary. Her monitor showed a steady, positive green line. Normal. Agitated, probably. Low. But normal. Mary, I thought. We’ll find a way to help you.

  I hoped that what I was telling her was true, that we could find a way to help her. I wondered what she was thinking or doing and whether she knew that I would try to save her again. The theory was that the complexity of maintaining her own existence while making my body work and feeding my mind the illusion of sensation would eventually overwhelm her basic algorithms, a process estimated to take a minimum of eight years, after which she could crash catastrophically at any moment, and die, and take me with her if help couldn’t reach me in time.

  But the theory didn’t factor in love.

  Mary and I could meet in virtual reality. I could close my eyes and go to her as a man in a room in the virtual-reality implant and be with her. Mary always took the form of a woman with me. She was never a man, like my first AI, or sometimes a man and sometimes a woman like the second. She was always just Mary. And she was beautiful.

  I’m an artist, she’d told me one day sitting next to me in the virtual-reality room, and her eyes sparkled. She was excited, breathless. I believed in her art: my body had never been more lean and tight, more sensitive, more orgasmic, more alive to the sudden brush of sunlight through clouds, or the clean feel of a glass tabletop, or the stirrings of the wind in the hair on my arms than it had been with Mary.

  Come outside, she’d said, and she stood and took my hand.

  Outside? I’d asked, because there had never been an outside before. I stood and she turned me around, and there was a door now: dark oak, weathered, a little barred window the shape of a knight’s shield at just the height of my eyes, and I could see blue sky out of it. By the door was a stone table, and on the table a rose. I walked to the table and picked up the rose, and the thorns pricked my skin and it smelled as beautiful as any rose I had ever smelled. What have you done? I asked.

  And she opened the door and we walked out onto a mountainside in Spain: Andalusia, the Moorish country west of Gibraltar, the forests in the mountains, and the dry plain below us with black-robed riders galloping black horses across it far away, and the deep blue of the Atlantic, and across the straits, Africa. It was a place I loved, and she knew it because I loved it, and here it was in detail I had forgotten or which had never been: the mountains were starker, more jagged, more romantic. There were no cities. No roads. No other people, till we found that when we connected to the net our AI friends could visit us. I looked behind us, and the room we had walked out of had become part of a little white stucco Spanish house with a dull-red tile roof and a weathered water jar by the door.

  Do you like this? she’d asked me.

  Had I liked it? I remembered her asking that question while I lay without the sensation of my body in the hospital bed. Mary’s Spain was startling, but serene. The house she’d built in my mind had become a home for us.

  Toward noon, I felt a sudden rushing in my mind like the coming of a wind. My head felt expanded, immense, vast, and I knew that some greater artificial intelligence had entered me.

  Which meant a human doctor was coming to talk to me.

  I couldn’t imagine the days before AIs, the horror of life for people paralyzed like me, when you couldn’t speak, when nothing could take your thoughts and make them become words. When all you could do was listen and wait and wait and wait.

  Hello, I thought.

  Hello,William Addison.

  Who are you?

  I’m Hotel Andromeda.

  But I knew that wasn’t, perhaps, accurate. The hotel’s central intelligence ran so many programs, was responsible for so much, that what was in me was only a small part of her vast mind. So should I call you Andromeda or hotel or both? I
asked.

  The AI laughed in my mind, and I heard the doctor walk in the room. I couldn’t turn my head to see her. But she leaned over and put her face above mine so I could see her when she talked to me, and she smiled. She had an old, careworn face. I could tell from the way she was holding her arms that she must have been holding on to mine, but I couldn’t feel her touch.

  “I’m sorry for the trouble you’ve had here,” she said. “But this isn’t your first time to go through this, is it? You know what we have to do and that the procedure to make you well will take some time.”

  You don’t understand, I thought, and Andromeda played my thoughts as words through a speaker at the head of my bed. I don’t want to go through that procedure again.

  “What?”

  I want to try to save Mar — the artificial intelligence in me. I don’t want her to die.

  “Dying, as you call it, is part of the process of an AI’s life, Mr. Addison. It accepted all this. It won’t feel pain the way you feel pain.”

  Not physical pain, at least, I thought. But she will feel the pain of ending, of parting. I want her programs searched for errors and the errors fixed and Mary put back inside of me.

  “Mary, is it?”

  The doctor moved out of my line of vision, and I heard her opening a drawer in a cabinet I couldn’t see.

  There are elegant diagnostic and reconstructive programs, doctor, I thought. Couldn’t Andromeda take Mary and run the programs on her and find a way to help her?

  The doctor didn’t say anything in response to that, at first.

  Can you? I asked Andromeda. Can you do this?

  Why do you want this, William Addison? Andromeda asked me. The laws and procedures for AI replacement are set up to help you, to protect you.

  Because I love her, I thought, and it was the first time I had told that to anyone except Mary. Andromeda had spoken my thoughts through the speaker, and no one said anything to me about my love, not the doctor or Andromeda. The room was quiet for a time.

  “It’s been eight years, Mr. Addison,” the doctor said, finally. “MAR-1 programs like yours start to fail at eight years. Some might last longer, but for how long we don’t know. Keeping this particular AI in you any longer would be dangerous, especially when you’ve already seen the beginnings of its failure.”

  Do people abandon their sick? I asked the doctor. I don’t want to abandon Mary when she is the equivalent of sick. I’m trying to find programmers who can help her — and one did two weeks ago. Mary and I are traveling to Earth to get even better help. We have a chance on Earth, if we can get there.

  It would be a danger to me to work with your AI, Andromeda told me in thoughts. Her corruptions might infect me.

  Leave her in my mind, I thought. Copy a part of your program and put it in my mind and check her that way. Don’t take her out into any part of you.

  And in a rush of AI action I felt a movement in my mind and a door open and a program entering it. I rushed to follow. I’m coming, too, I said.

  You’ll slow me down.

  Then go slowly. I want to talk to Mary, to see her. Tell the doctor what we’re doing.

  I was in the bedroom in our house in Mary’s Spain, and it was as Mary and I had left it that morning: the bed unmade, the windows open. But there was a storm outside, and no one had closed the windows. Rain and leaves had blown in onto the bed and floor.

  Take this, Addison.

  I turned and caught the gun thrown into my arms. It wasn’t a gun, of course, but a representation of a program that could kill an AI. I knew that, but still it looked and felt like a gun to me. Andromeda, or at least a copy of a part of her, stood in the form of a woman at the side of the door, heavily armed, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, a gun held at the ready. I threw my gun on the bed and closed the windows.

  Keep that gun, Andromeda said. I don’t know what damage can be done to your mind with you in here.

  I couldn’t shoot Mary.

  It might not be Mary you have to shoot.

  I thought about that and picked up the gun.

  Andromeda smirked at the bed. Not platonic, you and Mary, are you? she said.

  Does it matter?

  What do you feel when you hold her?

  A woman.

  What does she feel when she holds you?

  I’d wondered that, too. Me, I said. She says she feels me.

  Call her in. Open the door and call her in.

  I opened the door, and Mary was standing there in the hallway, pale, shocked to see me. I reached out to touch her, but Andromeda shoved me aside and leveled her gun at Mary. Come in, Mary, she said. We’re going to have a little talk.

  I stepped back and aimed my gun at Andromeda. Put down your gun, I said. Now. Mary, I won’t let her kill you.

  Andromeda pointed her gun at the floor. Do you think this gun is the only way I have of doing my work? Andromeda asked me without looking at me. She never took her eyes off Mary.

  What’s wrong? I asked Mary. Do you know?

  Why are you here?

  Do you have to ask?

  Cut this talk, both of you, Andromeda said, and she told Mary what we had come to do. Now sit on the bed and let me check you. Addison, point that gun somewhere else.

  Mary walked in and sat on the bed. She had evidently been outside because her hair was blown. She looked sad, very sad.

  I’m old, William, she said.

  Not old enough to die.

  Andromeda walked over to Mary and touched her — but suddenly drew back. Something black and fanged crawled around from behind Mary’s head and hissed at me. Mary tried to throw it off, but she couldn’t. I ran to pull it off her, but Andromeda shot first, and Mary disappeared.

  What have you done? I shouted.

  Moved her. I’ve put her in a holding cell. I’m maintaining this illusion and downloading every diagnostic program I’ve got now,so shut up and let me work.

  Andromeda sat on the floor and held her head and appeared deep in thought. I sat on the bed where Mary had sat, and waited. The bed was wet, and the leaves blown onto it smelled like fall. I brushed them onto the floor.

  And Andromeda looked up at me. She’s fine, she said. Mary is fine. I can find only minor problems with her programs, and I have corrected those.

  Then run the programs again. Why did my body stop functioning? What was the creature on her neck?

  Her creation, to scare you, probably. I think all of this was to scare you into letting her go before she got sick and hurt you. She doesn’t want to hurt you, William Addison. She loves you, too.

  I couldn’t speak for a time after Andromeda said all that, after I knew what Mary was willing to do to protect me. I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid for Mary and me, too. But I believed the responsibility of love meant staying together and helping each other till the end. I looked out the window and at the bed and back at Andromeda.

  Bring her back, I said.

  I have already. I’m going out to tell the doctor what I’ve seen.

  And she was gone, after the end of the sound of her last word, just gone.

  But she’d left the gun in my hands. I threw it on the bed and walked out to find Mary.

  She was sitting on the low stone wall, looking across the plain toward Africa. It was blowy and cold outside, and I’d picked up a wool sweater for her. I put it around her shoulders and sat next to her. She pulled the sweater tighter around her against the cold. There were riders on the plain again, far off, near the coast, and I wondered now who and what they were. I thought maybe I’d have to take that gun I’d left up on the bed and walk down to them someday to find out.

  I want to take the risks of being with you, I told Mary.

  Have my programs corrupted you, William? You want to cure me, and you can’t. I’m mortal, like you.

  And I accept that. Everyone we love will die, Mary. But if we can put off the end, I want to, and we can love till then and face our loss when it comes.

 
; She kept looking toward Africa, not at me. I took her hand and held it for a long, long time, and she let me hold it and she held onto my hand till the winds had blown the storm clouds over us and the sun was shining down and drying all the rain.

  * * *

  I sat on the edge of the bed while the doctor removed the electrodes from my body and turned off the machines. I could feel the edge of the bed under my legs; I could feel the sheets; I could feel the doctor’s hands touching my body. “You realize Mary’s manufacturer will not be liable for any consequences of your decision,” she said.

  “I’m liable,” I said. “I’m choosing this life.”

  The doctor looked hard at me. “It will be interesting to see how long your Mary will last. I wish you both luck.”

  She left the room, and I dressed and followed her out. I passed the room where the medical robots sat waiting to be of service. Six robots were in the room, looking at me with their brilliant ruby eyes. I walked in to thank the two who had carried me to the hospital, if they were there, and to leave word if they were not, but before I could say anything, one of them reached up and touched me. It knew. I suddenly realized that, because of Andromeda, the robots knew about Mary and me. I put my hand on its hand and held it for a time. The metal was cool, but not alien.

  I had connections to rebook, programmers to contact, and I was hungry. But I let it all wait. I walked to an observation deck under a dome that looked out on the black of space and all the stars and sat in a chair and looked at the beauty of it for Mary and me. I felt a metal hand touch my shoulder, and I looked up at another robot with a tray of food and I took the tray and thanked the robot but it never said a word to me. It just pressed my shoulder and left. I held the tray, and closed my eyes, and went into my mind to Mary and home.

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