Zooming in, the storm’s surface becomes glyphs flowing in waves over the screen. The glyphs are intricate, radiant with significance that she can’t quite articulate. Like rain, she thinks, on a clear day, seen over miles of ocean. Like ideograms distended in a black hole’s gravity. Like thick filaments of DNA, fraying before her eyes. This is what she always thinks, on seeing the glyphs, and then, as always, she remembers that language won’t suffice here. She remembers rain blatting on the bay windows of a high room in a good hotel rising over the surf of the South China Sea; her lover, a mathematician, whom she never saw again after that night, had asked her to explain a glyph, just one, the simplest, fully, and she had tried, as the hotel swayed, just perceptibly, in the wind, offering analogies, at first, and then, when that failed, reciting the glyph’s structure in a child’s singsong, her voice rising and falling, and as she wound on and on she lost track of where she was, seeing blurred shadows of glyphs in the rain channels on the glass, and then of time, until, finally, he stopped her with a finger to her lips, and moved her hair aside to kiss tenderly her forehead’s faded scar. She cranks the resolution, then, and the glyphs seethe, splitting and fusing, burning off into nothing, her face flickering in the violence of the light. Her perception vibrates as her other memory churns, searching for pattern, vainly, and the moments pass, and still she can make nothing of the glyphs rushing by.
She knows, then, with an absolute and dismal certainty, that her gift is lost, that the machines’ luminous otherness is closed to her for good, but then the fugue hits, and her breath catches. The theater is gone, and she’s somewhere else, bodiless, lost in the light and motion of the transit of Los Angeles.
She knows the temperature, the wear and slickness of every meter of every highway in the Inland Traffic Authority. She hears all the chatter of all the surveillance drones hovering high in the amber smog, and sees, through their cameras, tens of thousands of taillights receding. She sees all the cars’ positions and their velocities and the spectral probabilities of accident and delay overlaid on the interchanges, the overpasses, the long desert straightaways, and the patterns implied by these trajectories, beyond number, without meaning, rising up endlessly, like thermals shimmering over the freeways, pulling at her attention as they form and disperse, and there on the coastal highway where the ocean roars under raw cliffs a new BMW’s steering fails catastrophically, and three lives and the car’s computer blink out for good, and in that moment seventeen more cars merge onto the freeway, and she is grateful, almost, for the accident that marred her life but brought her this vision.
Time falls away, and she would linger there, in transit’s endless present, but she reminds herself that she is not the sum of all velocities, that she is, in fact, alone, somewhere, in a theater, staring at its screen, her neck aching and her eyes dry, that she has work to do, a question to answer, that the AI isn’t doing what it should.
The filters change—somewhere, she is changing them—and in rapid succession she knows the mass of the water behind the high desert dams, the number of solar cells turned like silver flowers to the sun, the blue Chartres glow of Cerenkov radiation in the coolant tank of a desert fission plant, the kilojoules of power humming through the high-tension lines strung over the desiccated mountains, through the exurbs, pouring current into the Los Angeles sprawl. A sense of pressure, then, and heat lightning flaring at the edges of her vision, and the machine is with her, vast and slow, less persona than weather.
She’d been diligent, once, in trying to know them, but that was long ago, and now it’s enough to look, as others look at the stars. The machine lacks all human feeling, and all human meaning, but somehow feels close. Its thoughts pour over her—it’s like trying to read letters written on turbulent water—and it’s beyond even what her other memory can hold, so each moment, as it passes, is lost for good; she is acutely aware of leaving a strand of old selves behind, like brilliant pebbles on the timeline, of falling, headlong, into the future. This, she knows, is how other people always experience time, and she wonders if they notice.
She wills herself to passivity, letting the torrent of its thoughts roar around her, like an infinite flock of birds always exploding into motion, and is drawn up with them, through layers of abstraction, and at first there are glimpses of meaning—transient correlations between delays in coastal traffic and the dry mountain wind, strange spikes in power usage repeated at intervals of years—but then there’s just form, beyond words, and her mind is a cloud dissolving in the wind.
Abruptly, the maelstrom crystallizes as the machine’s focus narrows onto the Santa Monica coast, the fortress enclaves of the rich behind the high walls glittering with jagged broken glass. Its thoughts slow as it runs over and over the long chain of causes whose sole conclusion is the shadow of a probability that they’ll burn the lights a little longer, tonight, in those high rooms over the sea, and Irina sees that, for all its intricacy, it seems to be performing exactly as intended.
The machine starts buying up futures contracts, wringing all the value from its sliver of prescience. What now? she thinks, as its millions of micro-trades pour out into the markets, and she’s tired, and ill at ease, though she’s just been sitting still—the fugue flickers as her focus wanes. She wonders if it’s lack of sleep, then realizes she feels watched.
There’s a sense of decreasing pressure as the machine turns back to its work. It’s sublimely complex, but somehow empty, and she feels certain it doesn’t know she exists. Could she have been wrong? No—there’s something else, barely there, and now, just like that, vanished. She adjusts the filters, eliminating the flows of energy and traffic, and now the city is gone, leaving her floating in an empty neutral space.
She looks out into the dark. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing without end. I know you’re there, she thinks, trying to persuade herself, and there, like she’s willed it into being, a distant phosphene shimmer. Gone already, but she pursues it, and yes, there it is, receding. (She’s aware of following it off of W&P’s servers and out into who-knows-where—she feels like an explorer in a lightless country.) Will it always be like this, she wonders, though it’s only been seconds, chasing this fleeting sense of presence, never giving up or getting closer. She stops abruptly, because there before her is another machine, like a turbulent ocean of pale light.
It’s fathomless, crystalline. Rapt, she drifts closer. It’s the biggest AI she’s seen by far, bigger than she’d thought was possible. Its surface is golden, seething, is already closer than she thought, and now she’s in it.
Sense of rushing over the sea at dawn, and then the paper-lantern glow of the glass and steel towers of a city rising from the waves, rising up without limit, its heights lost in cloud and the blue of distance, and there, up at the apex, something is hidden, and she can’t quite bring it into focus …
Hard transition to a road through the desert under a dust-cloud sky, empty except for a girl driving too fast in a car that isn’t hers, and the girl is leaving everything behind, and Irina pities her, for she’s lost, though the road lies straight, and doesn’t know where she’s going, and now the road is gone and there’s a screen shimmering with static in a steep room full of black seats where a woman sits alone holding her phone in both hands, looking old and tired in the half-light and staring at the screen as though it hid her salvation, and she thinks someone says, It’s you. In the voice she hears distance, and surprise, and maybe wonder, and she starts to speak, though she doesn’t know who will hear her, or what she’s going to say, but everything is collapsing, and as the fugue dissolves the houselights rise and she hears the projector’s whine as it powers down. She’s clutching her phone too tightly; deliberately, she unclenches her hands. The back of her shirt is damp with sweat but she shivers in the cold of the theater.
12
Clinic
The interior of the town car is dark as a cavern, cramped by the thickness of the armor of the hull. No sound, there, but for the muffled creak of lea
ther as Thales shifts in his seat. The windows, set to black, don’t show him his reflection.
As the car accelerates, the crash seat folds itself around him with a ginger, almost maternal, precision. The map of Venice Beach on the dimmed seatback display shows him leaving the hotel’s garage, passing beyond the last of its defenses—there’s a faint vibration as the car’s weapons come online. There will be other cars, he knows, pulling out beside him, empty and identical, a fleet of sacrificial distractions, and in each, he imagines, there is a false, other Thales, bound for someplace else.
His father died in a car like this, Thales in the seat beside him. He tries to summon the memory, but of course there’s nothing, just an absence, and images from after the fact, which is probably a kindness. That car’s armament was the same as this one’s, but his mother says the risk is less, with his father gone, that now his uncles are the focus of the violence. (Even so he feels her constant tension, her new fear of strangers.)
In the weeks after the attack, she’d barely let him leave their suite, had spent all day reading to him and holding his hand; once, when he was having a clear day, she’d taken him to a tiny, beautiful house she’d built as a young woman in the mountains over LA, back when she still worked as an architect, but recently she’s been staying in her room—he suspects she’s been drinking—and once again he’s going to the clinic alone. He doesn’t have his math book, so he closes his eyes, sinks deeper into the seat, wonders what the odds are that he’ll reach the clinic whole.
* * *
He wakes with a start as the car turns and the mini-fridge clinks. Opening it, he finds two splits of champagne, one open and half-empty, its carbonation fading—his brothers must have been using the car. As he shuts the fridge the car stops, the door sighing open onto too much light, and as he covers his eyes he’s momentarily convinced that he’s denying himself the specifics of his death, but in fact there’s no ambush, just the clinic’s courtyard.
The car is parked in a garden of raked sand and a few irregular stones, placed with studied randomness, and low pines whose wind-bent forms suggest endurance in the face of extremity. The curved walls are high and sheer, defining a cylinder of air and light; he looks straight up into dust motes burning in the sun. Behind the car, the foot-thick steel gate closes soundlessly, sealing him in.
A girl in clinic livery approaches—young and pretty, he notes distantly—her posture conveying both welcome and submission. He wonders if the better clinics have always been modeled on elegant hotels, perhaps to conceal their underlying horror.
Within, the clinic is cool and dark and the girl says they’ve lowered the lights for him, to minimize the potential for—she frowns—disturbance; she looks him full in the eyes and her face, which might hold pity, is a landscape of uncertainty and of a significance into which he feels himself falling and though he looks immediately away the migraine flickers and he finds himself staring into a twisted blur of curvature and fangs but he exhales carefully and stills his mind and the blur ripples and resolves into a white porcelain vase with blue Chinese dragons on its stand by the reception desk.
The girl sends him down a corridor alone and he starts to feel steady, almost poised, probably capable of facing the morning, and this isn’t least because the tessellations of the floor’s tile are predictable without being intricate or even interesting and then, deep within the clinic, he opens a door onto an office as enshadowed as a tomb where the only color is the muted red of a Persian rug on the weathered hardwood floor. His surgeon is there, behind his desk, perfectly still, studying his phone, and Thales notes the clarity with which the little light picks out his features.
“Is it more physical therapy today?” Thales asks, feeling edgy, trying for a weary familiarity.
The surgeon says, “Actually, I have some questions for you.” The lack of greeting or preamble is off-putting, somehow worrisome, and then, like a conjurer, the surgeon produces a handful of small metal objects and sets them on the table. Their surfaces glitter in the narrow halogen beam, their faces reflecting the room, and the other objects’ reflections, which starts to draw him in. When the physician says, “What do you see here?” he rallies and says, “The platonic solids, cast in metal, maybe tungsten, each about four inches on the longest axis, about the length of the last two joints of a finger.”
“Good,” says the physician, and Thales scans him for signs of hope or satisfaction, but he remains impassive as he puts a tablet on the desk. He says, “I need you to interpret this for me,” and plays a video.
It shows a close-up on a woman—handsome, young, or actually not young but young-looking—and she’s sitting in some kind of sloped theater by herself, her phone in her hands, her thumbs moving. She has a thousand-yard stare, or perhaps a million—it’s a private face, and a vulnerable one, reflecting an absolute immersion, and the light playing over her is so bright it looks like she’s in a cinema, and if she is then what’s the film that’s gripped her so completely? He could try to explain all this, but he’s tired, and he wants to go home, to the hotel if he must, ideally to Rio, though the Rio house won’t quite come to mind. Nothing much is happening on the screen, though for some reason it’s hard to look away, perhaps because of the tension in her face. For a moment he wonders if this is meant to be art, though it seems way beyond the surgeon’s likely tolerance for the avant-garde. He rallies, finds words, and with an effort says, “She’s in a theater. She’s maybe about forty. I don’t think she knows that anyone’s watching.”
“Why is she there?” asks the surgeon, with an irritating serenity that reminds Thales of the Provisional Authority immigration police. “What does she want?”
“I have no idea,” he says, as politely as he can, and he’s ashamed of his evident petulance as he says, “Maybe you could explain to me why you’re asking me these questions?”
“I’m evaluating your prospects.”
“Prospects?” Thinking how his father had wanted him to study law instead of math and physics, which he’d said were respectable but essentially middle class.
“I need to assess the severity of your impairment. Your implant saved your life, but created new problems, and we’ve come to a crossroads in your treatment.”
Thales tries to interrupt but the surgeon talks over him. “There are two protocols. In one, we wind down treatment and transition you back to a fully independent life. Unfortunately, this option is available only to the rarest, highest-performing patients. The other option, the one for most patients, is, in essence, to keep you as comfortable as possible through the course of your decline, so please do your best in the testing today.”
It’s absurd, and so sudden—he wants to call his mother, get a second opinion, maybe even call the family counsel, who must have offices in the U.S., though in the stress of the moment the firm’s name eludes him, and why in god’s name haven’t they told him this before? He immediately sees that the answer is that they didn’t want to worry him in vain, and so, in the space of this brief and quiet chat, his life has been transformed, and to resist already seems as futile as throwing punches at the wind. The surgeon says, “Here’s the next one.”
The tablet plays a clip showing an old man sitting at a wide desk. It’s shot from above, backlit, low-res, maybe from a security camera. The old man reminds Thales of his father’s political friends with their immaculately cultivated health, his age less in his face than in his stillness.
A woman enters the frame, very slight, her hair long and dark.
“It looks like you’re going to make it,” she says, sitting on his lap, but he says nothing.
“It looks like you’re going to make it,” she says again, coaxingly, as though trying to persuade a child to accept good news. “Are you happy?”
The old man says, “Once upon a time there was a king who owned everything but was afraid to die. But there was an angel, who lived far away in the northern aurora, and one night it spoke to him from the dark, saying it could grant eter
nal life, but its speech was all but unintelligible, less like speech than the Arctic wind. The king found a seeress who, having passed through the kingdom of death, spoke the tongues of both angels and men, for he didn’t know if the angel was from the hosts of the righteous or the fallen, and he knew he would need her when it came time to enslave them. The king and the angel bargained, and it finally gave him what he wanted, taking, in its avarice, half his treasure, for the angels spun palaces of molecular gold in the high empyrean. The king thought, Now, finally, I alone of all the men who have ever lived need not fear time. Replete in this knowledge, he closed his eyes and slept, unworried, for the first time since he’d been a boy. Waking, he found that everyone he knew had died. Looking out the window of his tower he saw that his kingdom was buried in ice.”
Thales draws breath to start to try to unpack the parable but his eyes are full of golden filaments hanging in the sky and the seeress hovering at the doorway of the kingdom of death, and that, he thinks, is the gate I have passed through, but, far from speaking the tongues of angels, I can barely speak the tongues of men, and he imagines himself turning and going back through the doorway while the seeress watches with jaded curiosity, and all the while the angel is trying to ask him if the king can be trusted but can’t find the words.
The surgeon is watching him so he tries to find something to say but now the tablet glows with migraine light, as though revealed in its insubstantiality, and the couple’s faces have become membranes without meaning. He’s going to plead for more time or another chance or try to invoke his family’s power but the surgeon says, “No,” shaking his head, and Thales can already see that his resistance is futile, and then the surgeon says, “But you’re not alone.”
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