Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  She duly follows, smiling woodenly, though she hates it when they want to meet her, as the questions are always the same, and, unless they’re very well bred, they’ll peer at her, fascinated by her difference. She thinks of her minute fraction of celebrity, centered on a handful of university departments, mostly brain science and AI, places she makes a point of avoiding.

  Corridor upon corridor, none finished but all the same, loops of cable hanging from the ceiling like jungle vines, and she wonders what it would be like to be able to be lost. They come to a wide interior courtyard of bare concrete, stark in the muted light glowing through the tinted glass ceiling. Like winter, in that grey light. On each of the four walls is a sheet of canvas, ten feet across, restive in the air-conditioning; the canvas before her ripples, seethes, reveals a few inches of something spray-painted, complex, maybe some kind of writing? She wants to run her hands over the smoothness of the polished concrete, then take the rough canvas in her hands and yank it hard so it comes down in a billowing cloud to reveal … what? “It feels like a gallery,” she says, her voice reflecting off the walls.

  “It will be,” says Magda. “When we’re done. It marks the transition to the inner offices.”

  “What’s behind the canvas?” Irina asks.

  “Nothing we’re ready to show yet,” says Magda with stagy regret and a false smile and Irina is surprised to find herself feeling like an unwelcome guest in another woman’s home. “He’s waiting,” Magda says, turning to lead her away.

  They come to a massive steel door whose overengineered solidity speaks of bank vaults and a kind of vanity, but no, Irina reflects, that’s the mentality of a past time. She thinks of the LAPD (now reborn as the Provisional Authority), frantic and militarized, how you need the right ID, now, to get up onto Mulholland, how the drones scour the wastes through the night, like lethal constellations floating over the hills, visible from the flatlands, both reminder and warning. Metal groans at middle C as the door’s lock releases.

  Darker than expected, within, a narrow room walled with bookshelves. There are fossils on the shelves, ammonites and trilobites and a carnosaur’s fanged grin, and butterflies pinned in display cases. At first it all reads as a set designer’s take on a Victorian naturalist’s study, but then she sees the books’ spines are broken, mostly, that they run to novels, number theory, card magic, recent history. The only light is from the far wall’s high windows, the dusty glass panes framing nothing. Cromwell sits at his desk, backlit and obscured; as he closes his laptop, there’s a momentary glow on the lenses of his glasses. The suits who’ve been waiting on him—attorneys, most likely—turn to regard her with glazed hauteur, unable to place her in any hierarchy, but she takes no offense, for, however well-paid, they’re essentially servants, and in any case her eyes are drawn toward Cromwell’s desk by a flare of dream-blue like the wing of a morpho.

  The iridescence is from a jagged shard of metal as long as her hand, its surface comprised of tissue-thin membranes whose tiny convolutions remind her of disinterred cities, and these in turn comprised of other cities still; the purity of the blue is remarkable, a blue to disappear in, and as its forms fill her other memory the fugue stirs, which she won’t permit, not in company, so she looks away as she sets down the shard, which she has, she finds, picked up. The attorneys must have excused themselves. Behind his desk, Cromwell smiles up at her.

  He’s younger than she’d supposed, but no, that’s just the quality of the work. He presents as a man whose age is just starting to show, his temples greying, the crow’s feet around his eyes concessions to the expected presentation of an alpha male. No tie with a dark suit whose very simplicity suggests considerable expense, like a kimono reinterpreted through bespoke Italian tailoring, and she sees how intently he’s watching her, and has the sense that she interests him, which is rare, for his kind, and she wonders if she was right to preemptively dismiss him. “It’s a computer,” he says, nodding toward the shard. “We think. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. It seems to be an improperly assembled prototype. Certainly designed by AI. Beautiful, no?”

  “Beautiful,” she says, the word hanging there as she tries to put the blue from her mind, clear her other memory. She’s seen AI-designed computer hardware, but nothing like this. “Why this blue?” she asks, still shaken, feeling a little like she’s asked a question about the reason for the sky.

  “The physicists haven’t been able to figure it out, though they seem to find the problem a compelling one,” he says. “In fact, I was hoping you could tell me something about it. Bright as they are, my researchers, they’re not…” He makes a gesture perhaps meant to indicate that she’s something else entirely but he’s too discreet to mention it.

  She looks back at the shard, like a window on another world and a lovelier one, then quickly looks away. “It’d be hard to say with a microscope, much less with the naked eye. The AIs’ designs tend to be impenetrable. Sometimes I think they’re just addicted to complexity.”

  “I’ve often said as much,” says Cromwell, eyes shining, and he has a friendliness, even a latent giddiness, that she doesn’t expect in Big Money. “It sometimes seems to me that trying to talk to the AIs is like trying to read the future in the clouds, or flocks of birds. Do you think we’ll ever really be able to communicate?”

  It’s the right question—usually CEOs ask her when AIs will be able to predict the stock market, or when they can get a robot nanny (or, god help them, mistress). The bright young university men seem always to be claiming that true communication is just ten years away, but it’s been ten years away since before she was born. Cromwell’s interest seems genuine, even acute, so she says, “No, because there’s no common ground, and there never will be. We’re primates, evolved to live on Earth and pass on our genes, and this has given our thoughts a certain shape, but the AIs have nothing to do with these things, and their thoughts are shaped differently. Terrestrial matters are as counterintuitive to them as tensor algebra is to us. For them, the physical world has a kind of ghostliness, if they’re aware of it at all. Some of them don’t even know about time.” It’s the set piece she’d give to strangers at parties, years ago, before she stopped talking about her work, but who knows, it might strike Cromwell as profound.

  “But surely there’s some way to bridge the gap. Maybe if they had enough information about the world.”

  “They’ve tried that,” she says, trying to conceal her boredom, and not to remember how many times she’s had this conversation. “In fact, someone rediscovers that idea about once a decade, and has for more than a century, but no matter how many encyclopedias or decades’ worth of newspapers you put in front of the AIs, they still see nothing but confusion.”

  It’s a commonplace, known to every grad student, but Cromwell seems rapt and says, “But it is possible, to connect with them, at least to a degree. I mean, that’s what you do. From what I’ve read, it’s practically who you are.”

  Exhaustion washes over her, and as her will to speak fades the room starts to seem remote and unimportant, and Cromwell must have felt a door close because he says, “Forgive me. I’m too personal. A bad habit—one of the disfigurements of influence—it makes one unfit for decent company. I’ll let you get to work, but first is there anything I can tell you about the job?”

  In fact, she hasn’t read her contract, or the email that Maya forwarded with the project précis, and if she checks email now there will inevitably be a new message from Maya reminding her of where she’s supposed to be and what she’s supposed to do there, carefully worded to suggest a subtle compassion and entirely conceal any impatience or disgust, and though she won’t want to read it and be exposed to these unwelcome emotions she knows she’ll do so anyway so she says, “Why don’t you tell me about it, from the beginning? It’s always better to hear it in the principal’s own words.”

  Cromwell appears to accept this—in fact, the gambit has yet to fail—and says, “I have a pool of in-house AIs, all custo
m-made. There’s one that does resource arbitrage. It’s one of my biggest earners, but lately it’s been noticeably off. I don’t want to prejudice your judgment, so I won’t tell you much more, but I’d like to know what you make of it.” He seems momentarily uncomfortable, apparently in the belief that she’s capable of caring about his company’s secrets and failings.

  “So it’s not working as intended?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Could it be a virus?”

  Slight hesitation. “No. I think not.”

  “If it’s some kind of exotic virus, you need to hire someone else. That’s not what I do, and I don’t want to waste your time or money,” she says, wearier than ever.

  “I know! I assure you, I’m aware of the parameters of your expertise,” he said, smiling. “This is of some importance to me, and my talented young men are getting nowhere, though I didn’t really expect them to.” In a lower, more inward voice, he says, “It’s hard to find the right people. Only the brightest, the nearly autistic ones are any use, and they mostly want to collect stamps and solve Hilbert’s problems,” and she thinks of the rare, talented, incomplete boys who sometimes come close to doing what she does, how, in the technical world’s uppermost reaches, autistic symptoms have a certain cachet, ambitious young men affecting the inability to look one in the eye and a total innocence of the world.

  Fathomless blue in the corner of her eye, pulling at her, and then an irresistible flash of intuition. “Is your problem AI running on hardware like that?” she blurts, pointing at the shard, and a beat of silence tells her she’s been impolitic.

  Cromwell is about to speak but Magda turns to him and says, “Don’t you have a ten o’clock?” with such a studied professionalism that Irina turns in time to catch their shared look, and she realizes that they’re lovers, and probably new ones, and don’t wish to have it known, and she watches him as he assents, and it’s the combination of his intensity and his sincerity and the fact that he’s chosen this nervous, unfriendly woman in lieu of whatever model or actress or pediatrician she’d expect to find in a rich man’s bed that makes her interested enough to turn on her wireless again and run a search on him.

  She finds the public records of his purchases of server farms, decaying factories, abandoned cities in Costa Rica. It’s been decades since he’s spoken to a journalist but fifty years ago, during the second AI bubble, he founded a sequence of start-ups, all long since acquired or dissolved, and his interviews from that era boil past, his remarks comprised of the usual founder’s boilerplate about striding boldly into bright futures, all of them forgettable, almost conspicuously vacant, though she senses an undercurrent of irony that suggests an awareness of playing with a form. Not long after the last start-up exited he’d bought a majority stake in ReTelomer Inc., an early player in genetic life extension, which later did very well; a forty-year-old editorial in Harper’s inveighed against ReTelomer for making long life available only to the rich, and she takes a moment to pity the writer as she would a child first encountering the hardness of the world. A website dedicated to the meticulous and fawning investigation of the higher beau monde asserts that Cromwell is much richer than is generally supposed, that most of his gains have been hidden from public view over the last generation, that he’s approaching the point of being a state unto himself, less like Leland Stanford now than some rapacious Borgia prince. Recent photos show him beside senators at fund-raisers and an older photo, in which he looks exactly the same, shows him drinking in a dive bar with a then-young actress who was famous about the time Irina was born; the oldest photo of all shows him in late adolescence peering at a computer screen beside an older, bearded man whom she realizes was a founder of one of the first googles, which puts Cromwell’s age at at least a hundred and fifty, an incredible figure, old even by the standards of the stratospherically rich—he must be one of the oldest people living, though he is, she believes, approaching the limit of what life extension can do. She wonders how all the years have shaped him, what desires survive.

  On the periphery of the mass of data she notices that in his days collecting art he briefly owned The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which she saw once, years ago, in the Louvre, back when she’d meant to see and so hold forever everything beautiful in the world. She remembers her jet lag and sense of dislocation as she wandered into yet another room in the sprawling postcontemporary wing, the shock of the sight of the shark floating in the green fluid glowing in the glass-walled tank in the otherwise empty gallery, the shark’s jaws gaping, like its relentless forward motion had just then been arrested, and, as the words of the title had shimmered in her mind, tank and shark and text fused to become an image of a blind rage for more life, and the wrinkles incised in the shark’s face seemed to imply great age and an absolute and unthinking cruelty. Strange to have run her fingers down the cool glass of an artwork that had passed through his hands, though she supposes that’s what happens, with time, with those rich enough to be, in some way, central to things, and, of course, to survive.

  And now a second has passed, and a new one is starting, and Magda is turning toward her, and before they can notice her abstraction she stands and says, “Let’s go wherever’s next.”

  10

  Laptop

  Kern’s laptop chimes twice and he stops mid-punch, the bag swinging crazily till he stills it with his palm, then sits cross-legged with the laptop in front of him.

  He’s found that it’s best to read one book at a time. This month it’s Penjak Tharanawat’s Radical Thai Boxing, in an English translation now ninety years old. He’s on the chapter about elbow strikes, how to use them to inflict hematoma and concussion, or to cut the skin over the occipital ridge so that blood will blind his enemy.

  As the laptop wakes he remembers the years when its game was the focus of his life, and once again regrets that he came to the game’s end. Even now he sometimes hopes that there’s another game, held in reserve, so far, but about to be revealed, but if there is, there’s no sign of it today, just the usual hierarchy of the folders of the laptop’s library, which is infinite, or might as well be, containing, as far as he can tell, just about all the media that had been published as of sixty years ago.

  There’s a samurai manual that has the maxim While you sleep, your enemy trains, and for a moment he’s afraid he’s being lazy and should go back to the bag, though his hands and shins are an agony, but no, it won’t do, hard training is one thing but overtraining is another; the laptop has documentaries about professional fighters reaching back centuries and he’s seen what can happen when they spend every waking hour in the gym, how their bodies stop working and in the ring they’re slow and stumbling and they end up sitting on the curb after their fights wondering how they could have lost when their commitment was total.

  Before returning to Tharanawat, he indulges himself by bringing up a video clip, apparently made by a tourist a century ago, of a waterfall in the forest on a mountain in Japan in whose icy flow Miyamoto Musashi had once meditated. Musashi was a ronin, without teacher or attachments, and flawless, fighting sixty duels without losing once as he wandered penniless through the wilds of ancient Japan. An ascetic, Musashi, beyond fear or desire, indifferent to women, money, even survival. As the clip plays, Kern tries to clear his mind, imagine the force of the waterfall’s torrent.

  * * *

  He’d found his laptop in a landfill some six years ago, not long after coming North, in a deposit of fragmented wine bottles, its black plastic chassis held together with frayed translucent tape. He’d slid it under his shirt, before any of the other pickers noticed, and slunk back to his room to cherish it.

  The letters were worn off the keys but the screen was intact, and a hand crank unfolded from the laptop’s side at the touch of a button, which was fortunate, as it was difficult, in the favelas, to steal electricity.

  The old owner’s files were still on the disk. The emails were indented rows of symbo
ls without meaning but there were also photographs, thousands of them, flash-frozen moments from decades of a life. The photos were dated, and Kern, able to read numbers a little, figured the owner, who’d been adult, white and apparently rich, must have died at least thirty years before he, Kern, was born. It was eerie, somehow, thinking of all these images sitting there on the disk as the years slipped past.

  There were loving shots of a bright red antique sports car and a big house standing alone in a desert. There were snapshots of street corners and signage, probably in San Francisco, that he could almost place. There were groups of beautiful people smiling in the refracted bottle-light of bars and he wondered if their gaiety was affected, a reflexive reaction to the camera’s stare, or if there really was some stratum of existence where everyone was always this happy. Some of the photos showed women alone, abandoned to sleep under rumpled sheets, drinking coffee, standing at the rail of a boat. Sometimes they were naked, sometimes inviting, but it was never the same one for long, except for one, a blonde, who went away for years at a time but always came back, while the others went away for good, and he wondered what she’d been to him. One photo, the only one that had its own folder, showed the blond woman’s naked back as she waded into a dark river, just starting to look back, the densely tangled trees on the far bank reflected in the black water around her waist.