Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  He feels profound relief as he steps into the dark room and the words comes pouring out as he says, “Something’s gone wrong. There was a stranger who I think followed me from the clinic and I think she has the implant dementia but she seemed to know who I was and she asked me what I remember but I remember almost nothing, and at the clinic they told me things were going badly, but it felt like a threat. I’m afraid I’m going to die. Mom?” As his eyes adjust he sees that the darkness isn’t absolute, that there’s a little light from a TV, dimmed by a blanket thrown over the screen, that that’s where the voices are coming from, though his mother hates television, won’t watch it even on long flights, and he wonders if she’s herself these days.

  He pulls the blanket off of the TV like a magician doing a trick and on the screen there’s a religious show, the sweating preacher apoplectic and pleading as websites and fragments of scripture scroll by. In the full glare of the television’s light he sees that the room has no bed, and no books, just an old couch covered in duvets, and gin bottles, mostly empty, scattered on the floor among half-burned votive candles adorned with beaming Jesuses and serene Virgins, though his mother despises religion, and there’s no good apparent explanation—has she for some reason given the room to a maid? There’s no sense of her presence at all; he knows she’s been drinking since they came to the Protectorates but he can’t believe she’s this far gone.

  Back outside the garden looks ancient, and threatening, a residual pocket of the Mesozoic just biding its time; he resists an urge to look behind the cycads. He listens to the wind moving the branches and it occurs to him that it’s late and he could go inside and to bed and assume everything will have resolved itself by morning but he still has the lucidity he’s felt since the clinic, which makes him feel like a kind of ethereal detective, and sleep seems less important than finding his mother, who’s probably in her house in the mountains, because he doesn’t know where else she’d go in Los Angeles.

  27

  Venice Replicated

  Rain sluicing down the windows, reflecting the restaurant’s dim light, distorting the strangers passing on the street. The interior is like a firelit cave, the waiters unobtrusive as attendant ghosts as they light the candles that accentuate the shadows. The acoustics are muffling, enveloping her in a hush of voices, the words blotted up.

  Alone at her table, she watches the door. Out on the sidewalk, water beads on the guards’ helmets, pours in rivulets from their blue plastic ponchos; their filtration masks give them the air of anonymous henchmen, though their postures speak only of the boredom of the shift. Is this security necessary, or just a kind of decor, meant to imply a clientele that’s posh enough to rob, and do the guards come to loathe their charges, warm and dry and eating tapas, or are all their thoughts of the monotony of the shift?

  Under the regular menu she finds the waiter has left a smaller, handwritten one, listing dishes made with the flesh of slaughtered animals rather than the usual cultured meat; it’s outlandishly expensive, the kind of thing favored only by hard-core gastronomes and rich old Republicans mourning a lost Augustan age. She wonders which he took her for, tries not to hold it against him.

  The downpour intensifies, the water switching channels on the glass, roaring and echoing in the narrow street, and suddenly she’s in Manhattan, as though the voice of the water had summoned that city. How Manhattan is like Venice, once a great commercial principality, now flooded, its roads become waterways, beautiful and useless and beloved. Finance is long gone but the arts hold on, tenuously, students and writers squatting in the unheated Park Avenue apartments where once magnates lived, working in the sound of the perpetual storms. The bridges between buildings, late additions, like the arcs of white wings. She once went to a fashion show in the undrowned levels of the public library, saw the lions of the steps, their dignity intact under the swirling tide, and in the cramped dressing rooms that were once archives slim young girls hurried by, their makeup thick and operatic, their shimmering green dresses like the plumage of birds, bejeweled and elusive, court attire of an empire unborn, and always, always the rain.

  Manhattan, like Venice before it, will presently be a stub, so many worn stones a few feet under water, a romantic ruin in an ocean replete with them. Her pleasure in the rain fades as she thinks of cities crumbling, the soul of Venice replicated endlessly, falling endlessly beneath the waves. The door opens, then, admitting the smell of rain and of wet concrete; a few patrons turn to look, then look away, except for her, because it’s Philip, come to see her.

  Long and lean, Philip, shoulders hunched, his face haughty in repose but she knows that only means he’s thinking. They’d met when they were students and he was skeletally thin and had really no money and once spent an entire semester reading in the library when his financial aid didn’t come through, and even when it did he never let her see where he lived—she suspected it was in the basement of an administration building, which he snuck into, at night, through a window, but it was clear she shouldn’t press him. When she’d hinted that the trust from her parents’ estate, though small, was more than she needed, he’d closed up like a slighted Spanish grandee. For years, even after his circumstances were less dire, he’d been utterly certain that owning more than one pair of shoes was a sign of unseriousness, and that one of the many virtues of books was that, in sufficient quantity, they were furniture. In the decades since he has made money, and discovered clothes, and with pleasure she sees him frown and sluice the beaded water from the moss-colored wool of an overcoat that can only be a Calatrava.

  Three years since she’s seen him, and her other memory gives her the black brick of what had been a customs house when Victoria reigned and had become a cafe by the river, the burnished silverware shining on the distressed oak tables, the arched panes of tall windows framing the glow of the Thames, the squalid clinker of its bank, the lights implying bridges in the dark. Almost deserted, the one remaining waiter busied at a distance, and the solitude eased Philip’s tension enough for him to tell her that he’d been floating too long, felt that it was time to compromise his purity of action enough to find some definite place in the world, and so he was leaving, going to San Francisco, there to start a company and put down the roots he’d found he lacked, even if it meant a life less wholly of the spirit. The scene disperses under the pressure of his hand on her wrist. Kindly, he says, “You’re in your memory.”

  He sits and they’re about to speak when the waiter arrives with the wine and pours a dram into a glass for his approval. A moment of stillness as this gesture recasts the scene, renders them symbolically a couple, and she remembers the first time they slept together, how she’d counted his ribs with her fingertips, how he’d trembled when he touched her, and the last time, just after graduation, her flight leaving in hours, for she was going to go and see the world and he pretended that this was unremarkable, no more than the next thing, but then, in a disgusted aside, Philip says, “This ritual means nothing to me but I’ll perform it,” touches the wine to his lips, nods curtly, and the waiter finally leaves.

  He looks down, starts putting his silverware just so.

  “So, tell me what your company’s doing,” she says brightly, knowing it relaxes him to hold forth on his work, and that later, his nerves settled, they can talk.

  “Engines,” he says. “Engines for cars. Exotic ones, designed-by-AI, for Pagani, Tetsujin and, now, Lotus. Their complexity is incredible—fractal, almost—the most intricate things I’ve seen outside biology. We get them fabbed in Milan, at this facility where they make parts for rockets and jets. The engines work, in fact they work wonderfully, but no one understands why, and that includes the best mechanical engineers I’ve been able to find. So we have a lot of work, and we’ve put a new thing into the world, and thereby been of service to some race-car drivers and a handful of rich guys. They’re beautiful, though, the engines. The problem,” he says, impaling carpaccio with a fork, “is the people.”

  She rem
embers the density of dark summer woods at the end of their freshman year, the white trunks pressed close around the pond, her flashlight skimming over the black water till the beam found his body among the ripples, and in the first moment of stark surprise she wondered if he’d drowned, and if it was deliberate, if his text had summoned her to bear witness to his death, but then he rose gasping in an eruption of foam; naked beside her on the muddy bank, he explained that he’d decided to stop speaking, for the semester, except, apparently, to her; he’d been sleeping all day, submitting homework online, seeking out lonely places, because it was too hard to be near other people; the quiet let his mind still. “Unbearable prima donnas, my employees,” he says. “The AI wranglers, I mean—the receptionist is lovely, and the girls down in marketing are like friendly little animals. But the technical people are at me all the time, demanding more money, more stock, or else they’ll leave and start their own shops. I don’t even really want to go to the office anymore.”

  “So get rid of them,” she says, surprised at her own coldness, a throwback to the days when it was really just the two of them.

  “But I need my bright young things, you see, for the cash to flow. It’s just that the media has discovered design-by-AI lately, and exaggerated their sense of their own importance. Have you seen these articles? There was one in the Times called ‘The New Mediums,’ which said anyone who can communicate at all with these opaque and somehow unknowable artifacts is more or less the peer of Newton, or in any case of Gauss, and should expect to be paid accordingly.”

  “One does what one must for the cash for the Mayo,” she says, intoning it, almost, as though it were a precept from antiquity, although she hadn’t meant to, her latest visit threatening to rise to the surface of her mind, and then she notices that Philip has pulled into himself, that he has something to say, but doesn’t want to, and she sees him stifle it and say, “So what brings you to the Valley?”

  “A last-minute gig with Water and Power. Have you heard about their new office? It’s meant to last at least a millennium. Either Cromwell is planning a thousand-year reich or he has his heart set on a legacy in architecture.”

  “How is the old sod? It’s virtually impossible to get a meeting with him these days. Did you meet Magda? It seems to be her job to protect him from the vulgarity of the world. She lets one through only if one has something elegant with which to engage the greatness of his mind.”

  “Mnemosyne” is on the tip of her tongue but she finds she isn’t ready to tell him about that, or what might have been a kidnap attempt, or how she gave a fraction of herself, in the most literal sense, to Constantin, right before he died, and how that sliver of self has found its own life in the world. (She wonders once again if Cromwell is her enemy, and the one who stole her memories—he certainly seems to be a locus of strangeness—but his true intentions remain opaque.) In any case, she can take care of her own problems, and in that moment Philip feels like a stranger with whom she is, for the course of dinner, inexplicably trapped. “He’s thriving,” she says, gamely making conversation. “As far as I can tell. And he’s a fan, or seems to be, god help him, a fact of which Magda is aware, which probably explains why she hates me, though we’ve barely spoken. It took me a while to figure it out, and by the time I did I couldn’t think of anything to do except pretending not to notice. Anyway, they called me because one of the house AIs was broken in some unspecified way.”

  “Did you find out why?”

  “I found something strange,” she says on impulse, feeling suddenly exposed but trying to keep it out of her voice, grateful for the echoes and the noise of the place. She decides to give him a measure of the truth. “It was doing energy arbitrage, nominally, but there was something else behind it.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the strange part,” she says, her voice quieter than she wants, afraid he’ll ask her to repeat herself. “It was another AI. A big one. And there was a city in the waves, very high, higher than seems possible. There was a secret there. And there was this girl,” she says, and suddenly doesn’t want to talk about it, but if she can’t talk to Philip then she really can’t talk to anyone at all, and she’s afraid it sounds like she’s babbling as she says, “and she was driving too fast through the desert by herself, and she didn’t know where she was going, or what she would do, and she was afraid of everything, all the time, and she was happy, because she was leaving the past irretrievably.”

  “The opposite of you, then.”

  She tries not to show that she’s wounded, reminding herself that, when he sees something clearly, he can’t hold his tongue. “Exactly. The opposite of me,” she says, and he looks away, and it’s always been a little like hanging out with a sibyl, the fit coming at odd moments, the truth boiling out uncontrollably.

  “It gets stranger,” she says, still vulnerable, not caring. “Someone saw me. Spoke to me. Knew I was there, and who I was.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. No one, I guess. Things get fuzzy, in the fugue—I’m not even sure if it really spoke or if it was just something I got from the glyphs. So maybe the AI? And then the machine kicked me out, which is also a first.”

  He swirls his wine, stares into space. “How did it feel? Your interlocutor. Was it … like anything, when whoever it was spoke to you?”

  “They were surprised. Like they hadn’t expected to find me, but knew who I was,” she says, only realizing this as she articulates it.

  He regards her gravely, his face deliberately blank, and she remembers frost flowers dense on the warehouse windows, that last year it snowed in London (they said it wouldn’t snow again till the next ice age came), the tiny, inadequate islands of warmth around the space heaters, how they lay companionably in his bed under what must have been thirty pounds of blankets, though they hadn’t been lovers in years, and drank hot wine from cracked cups, and in the small hours she’d finally told him about the trickle of registered letters from the makers of her implant, advising her of her risks, as they became apparent, of seizure, delusion, dementia, stroke. “It isn’t that,” she says. “I’m still all here. I’d know. I would. I, of all people.” He’s embarrassed to be read so easily, and she wonders if he’s forgotten how it is with them, what’s gotten in the way.

  The candles flicker as the opening door admits a blast of cold air and in the movement of the shadows his face becomes an ancient mask, an ancestor spirit from a sacred grove on some remote archipelago, an image exhumed from deep within the mind, one that speaks to her of wisdom, loss, resignation. “It’s strange,” he says.

  * * *

  By the time the waiter brings the third bottle they’re holding hands across the table, which, she feels, is a ship, and the restaurant a sea, and that the world without is primal darkness, full of nothing but night and rain, the world on the evening of creation’s first day. “And what about everyone else?” she says, not sure who she means, or if she just means she cares for nothing beyond their circle of light.

  “They’re disappointing,” he said. “We were ambitious, when we were young. We reached for the stars. We were to be Bloomsbury, in our way, but with more math and fewer middling talents. Historians of science were to marvel that we’d known each other at all, much less been friends, or shared the squat. I used to be angry, and excoriate them behind their backs, but now I barely have the heart to list their failures. Sasha is a math don at Oxford, that college where Oscar Wilde went, but mostly he teaches. Colin, who was going to make nanoscale replicators a reality rather than a running scientific joke, is a manager at a game company. Amanda, god help me, is a housewife, and often emails me about her twins’ prodigious aptitudes. From there it gets worse.”

  “And what about you?” she asks. “What happened to your ambition? As I recall, you were going to make real AIs, ones that think like we do and actually know the world.” The question could be a mortal affront but their intimacy is such that she thinks his pride will allow it.

 
; “I tried,” he says. “Easy to say, but entirely true. I read everything about AI. Not literally everything, not the student work or the tenure grist, of which there is a great deal, but everything good. At first I could only concentrate for five or so hours a day, but I was hard with myself, and by the end I could focus for sixteen. After a few years I was getting fat, and there were migraines all the time, so I started making myself exercise for an hour a day, and eating things besides curry and black coffee.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Nothing. I found nothing. I failed. There were islands of order, and sometimes I had an intuition of a larger shape, but it was nothing I could ever quite name. It was maddening. Very nearly literally. Sometimes, in dreams, I understood them, the AIs, or thought I did, but when I woke up it always amounted to nothing. Becoming desperate, I resorted to mortifications of the flesh. I’ve never told this to anyone before, but I’d set myself a problem, and a time in which to solve it, and if I failed I had to drive a sterilized surgical needle through the palm of my hand. The pain was … clarifying. I realize this makes me sound like an emotionally disturbed teenager, but I had to try everything, to go farther than anyone ever had. I’d be Alexander or die.”

  “And now?”

  “I guess I died. There came a point when there was nothing more to try. Maybe if I had more lifetimes. So now I’m nothing, a mere entrepreneur, a tedious rich old fuck to be. The best I can say of myself is that I’m honest.”

  * * *

  “Even now we’re in your memory,” Philip says. “There behind your elegantly marred forehead.” The daylight is gone, now, the guards on the street invisible, no sign of the outside but the drumming of the rain. The other tables have emptied and filled and in the candlelight everyone looks happy, like their lives are replete, and there’s a woman, blond and ripe, who will run to fat soon but is, for now, beautiful, standing in the doorway, smiling radiantly at someone inside, looking like she’s just thought of something to say.