by David Brin
“Tell us more about these elephants, they interest me,” the Chief urged, scratching his oiled belly. “Have a prosecco, have a brandy.” But the peddler was too streetwise: he had sensed that something was up. He gathered his tray and escaped them, hastening down the beach, toward the day’s gathering crowds.
Tullio, Irma and the Chief ran through more hands of Anaconda poker. The Chief, an expert player, was too restless to lose, so he was absent-mindedly piling up all their coinage.
“My God, if only I, too, had no name!” he burst out. “No identity, like that African boy—what I could do in this world now! Elephants, here in Sardinia! When I was young, did I have any elephants? Not one! I had less than nothing, I suffered from huge debts! These days are such happy times, and the young people now, they just have no idea!”
Tullio and Irma knew every aspect of their Chief’s hard-luck origin story, so they merely pretended attention.
The summer beach crowd was clustering down the coastline, a joyful human mass of tanned and salty arms and legs, ornamented with balloons and scraps of pop music.
A beachcombing group of Japanese tourists swanned by. Although they wore little, the Japanese were fantastically well-dressed. The Japanese had found their métier as the world’s most elegant people. Even the jealous Milanese were content to admire their style.
Lacking any new victim to interrogate at his card table, the Chief began to reminisce. The Chief would loudly bluster about any topic, except for his true sorrows, which he never confessed aloud.
The Swiss had lavished many dark attentions on the Chief’s crumbling brain. The Swiss had invaded his bony skull, that last refuge of humane privacy, like a horde of Swiss pikemen invading Renaissance Italy. They occupied it, but they couldn’t govern it.
The Chief’s upgraded brain, so closely surveilled by Swiss medical imaging, could no longer fully conceal his private chains of thought. The Chief had once been a political genius, but now his scorched neurons were like some huge database racked by a spy agency’s analytics.
Deftly shuffling a fresh card deck, the Chief suddenly lost his composure. He commenced to leak and babble. His unsought theme was “elephants.” Any memory, any anecdote that struck his mind, about elephants.
Hannibal had invaded Italy with elephants. The elephant had once been the symbol of an American political party. A houseplant named the elephant ear. The Chief recalled a pretty Swedish pop star with the unlikely name of Elliphant.
The Chief was still afraid of the surgically warped and sickening Elephant Man, a dark horror-movie figure from his remote childhood.
The Chief might not look terribly old—not to a surveillance camera—but he was senile. Those high-tech quacks in Switzerland took more and more of his wealth, but delivered less and less health. Life-extension technology was a rich man’s gamble. The odds were always with the house.
Irma gently removed the cards from the Chief’s erratic hands, and dealt them herself. The sea wind rose and loudly ruffled the beach umbrella. Windsurfers passed by, out to sea, with kites that might be aerial surveillance platforms. A group of black-clad divers on a big rubber boat looked scary, like spies, assassins or secret policemen.
The ever-swelling beach crowd, that gathering, multilimbed tide of relaxed and playful humanity, inspired a spiritual unease in Tullio. His years inside the Shadow House had made Tullio a retiring, modest man. He had never much enjoyed public oversight. Wherever there were people, there was also hardware and software. There was scanning and recording. Ubiquity and transparency.
That was progress, and the world was better for progress, but it was also a different world, and that hurt.
Some happy beachgoing children arrived, and improved the mood at the poker table. As a political leader, the Chief had always been an excellent performer around kids. He clowned with all his old practiced stagecraft, and the surprised little gang of five kids giggled like fifty.
But with the instinctive wisdom of the innocent, the kids didn’t care to spend much time with a strange, fat, extremely old man wearing sunglasses and a too-tight swimsuit.
The card play transitioned from anaconda poker to seven-card stud. Tullio and Irma shared a reassuring glance. Lunch was approaching, and lunch would take two hours. After his lunch, the Chief would nap. After the summer siesta, he would put on his rubber cap, foot-fins and water wings, and swim. With his ritual exercise performed, dinner would be looming. After the ritual of dinner, with its many small and varied pleasures, the day would close quietly.
Tullio and Irma had their two weeks of duty every August, and then the demands of the Chief’s wealth and health would call him elsewhere. Then Tullio and Irma could return to their customary peace and quiet. Just them and their eccentric house cat, in their fortress consecrated to solitude.
The Shadow House robot, a nameless flat plastic pancake, emerged from its hidden runway. The diligent machine fluffed the sand, trimmed the beach-herbage, and picked up and munched some driftwood bits of garbage electronics.
A beautiful woman arrived on the shore. Her extravagant curves were strapped into bright, clumsy American swimwear. Despite the gusting sea breeze, her salon updo was perfect.
The Chief noticed this beauty instantly. It was as if someone had ordered him a box of hot American donuts.
Tullio and Irma watched warily as the demimondaine strolled by. She tramped the wet edge of the foamy surf like a lingerie runway model. She clearly knew where the Shadow House was sited. She had deliberately wandered within range of its sensors.
The Chief threw on his beach robe and hurried over to chat her up.
The Chief returned with the air of synthetic triumph that he assumed around his synthetic girlfriends. “This is Monica,” he announced in English. “Monica wants to play with us.”
“What a pretty name,” said Irma in English, her eyes narrowing. “Such glamorous lady as you, such beauty is hard to miss.”
“Oh, I visit Sardinia every August,” Monica lied sweetly. “But Herr Hentschel has gone back to Berlin. So it’s been a bit lonely.”
“Everyone knows your Herr Hentschel?” Irma probed.
Monica named a prominent European armaments firm with longstanding American national security ties.
The matter was simple. The Chief had been too visible, out on the beach, all morning. This was long enough for interested parties to notice him with scanners, scare up smart algorithms, and dispatch a working agent.
“Maybe we go inside the Shadow House now,” Tullio suggested in English. “For lunch.”
Monica agreed to join them. Tullio shut the rattling umbrella and stacked all the plastic chairs.
The microwave sensors of the Shadow House had a deep electromagnetic look at Monica, and objected loudly.
“A surveillance device,” said Tullio.
Monica shrugged her bare, tanned shoulders. She wore nothing but her gaudy floral bikini and her flat zori sandals.
Tullio spread his hands. “Lady, most times, no one knows, no one cares—but this is Shadow House.”
Monica plucked off her bikini top and shook it. Her swimwear unfolded with uncanny ease and became a writhing square of algorithmic fabric.
“So pretty,” Irma remarked. She carried off the writhing interface to stuff it in a copper-lined box.
The Chief stared at Monica’s bared torso as if she’d revealed two rocketships.
Tullio gave Monica a house robe. Women like Monica were common guests for Shadow House. Sometimes, commonly, one girl. Sometimes five girls, sometimes ten or, when the Chief’s need was truly unbearable, a popular mass of forty-five or fifty girls, girls of any class, color, creed or condition, girls from anywhere, anything female and human.
On those taut, packed, manic occasions, the Chief threw colossal, fully catered parties, with blasting music and wild dancing and fitful orgies in private VIP nooks. The Shadow House would be ablaze in glimmering witch lights, except for the pitch-black, bombproofed niche where the Chie
f retreated to spy on his guests.
Those events were legendary beach parties, for the less that young people saw of the Chief, the happier everybody was.
Lunch was modest, by the Chief’s standards: fried zucchini, calamari with marinara sauce, flatbread drenched in molten cheese-and-olive spread, tender meatballs of mutton, clams, scampi and a finisher of mixed and salted nuts, which were good for the nervous system. The Chief fed choice table scraps to the tomcat.
Monica spoke, with an unfeigned good cheer, about her vocation, which was leading less fortunate children in hikes on the dikes of Miami.
When lunch ended, the Chief and the demimondaine retired together for a “nap.”
After the necessary medical checks for any intimate encounter, the Chief’s efforts in this line generally took him ten minutes. Once his covert romp was over, he would return to daylight with a lighter heart. Generally, he would turn his attention to some favorite topic in public policy, such as hotel construction or the proper maintenance of world-heritage sites.
His charisma would revive, then, for the Chief was truly wise about some things. Whenever he was pleased and appeased, one could see why he’d once led a nation, and how his dynamism and his optimistic gusto had encouraged people.
Italian men had voted for the Chief, because they had imagined that they would live like him, if they too were rich, and bold, and famous, and swashbuckling. Some Italian women also voted for the Chief because, with a man like him in power, at least you understood what you were getting.
But the Chief did not emerge into daylight. After two hours of gathering silence, the house cat yowled in a mystical animal anguish. The cat had no technical understanding about the Shadow House. Being a cat, he had not one scrap of an inkling about Faraday cages or nanocarbon camouflage. However, being a house cat, he knew how to exist in a house. He knew life as a cat knew life, and he knew death, too.
After an anxious struggle, Tullio found the software override, and opened the locked bedroom door. The cat quickly bounded inside, between Tullio’s ankles.
The Chief was supine in bed, with a tender smile and an emptied, infinite stare. The pupils of his eyes were two pinpoints.
Tullio lifted the Chief’s beefy, naked arm, felt its fluttering pulse, and released it to flop limp on the mattress.
“We push the Big Red Button,” Tullio announced to Irma.
“Oh, Tullio, we said we never would do that! What a mess!”
“This is an emergency. We must push the Big Red Button. We owe it to him. It’s our duty to push the button.”
“But the whole world will find out everything! All his enemies! And his friends are even worse!”
A voice came from under the bed. “Please don’t push any button.”
Tullio bent and gazed under the bedframe. “So, now you understand Italian, miss?”
“A little.” Monica stuck her tousled head from under the rumpled satin bed-coverlet. Her frightened face was streaked with tears.
“What did you do to our Chief?”
“Nothing! Well, just normal stuff. He was having a pretty good time of it, for such an old guy. So, I kind of turned it up, and I got busy. Next thing I knew, he was all limp!”
“Men,” Irma sympathized.
“Can I have some clothes?” said Monica. “If you push that button, cops will show up for sure. I don’t want to be in a station house naked.”
Irma hastened to a nearby wardrobe. “Inside, you girls do as you please, but no girl leaves my Shadow House naked!”
Tullio rubbed his chin. “So, you’ve been to the station house before, Monica?”
“The oldest profession is a hard life.” Monica crept out from under the Chief’s huge bed, and slipped into the yellow satin house robe that Irma offered. She belted it firmly. “I can’t believe I walked right in here in my second-best bikini. I just knew something bad would happen in this weird house.”
Tullio recited: “Shadow House is the state of the art in confidential living and reputation management.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ve done guys in worse dives,” Monica agreed, “but a million bomb shelters couldn’t hush up that guy’s reputation. Every working girl knows about him. He’s been buying our services for eighty years.”
Stabbed by this remark, Tullio gazed on the stricken Chief.
The old man’s body was breathing, and its heart was beating, because the Swiss had done much expensive work on the Chief’s lungs and heart. But Tullio knew, with a henchman’s instinctive certainty, that the Chief was, more or less, dead. The old rascal had simply blown his old brains out in a final erotic gallop. It was a massive, awful, fatal scandal. A tragedy.
When Tullio looked up, the two women were gone. Outside the catastrophic bedroom, Monica was wiping her tear-smudged mascara and confessing her all to Irma.
“So, I guess,” Monica said, “maybe, I kinda showed up at the end of his chain here. But for a little Miami girl, like me, to join such a great European tradition—well, it seemed like such an honor!”
Tullio and Irma exchanged glances. “I wish more of these girls had such a positive attitude,” said Irma.
Monica, sensing them weakening, looked eager. “Just let me take a hot shower. Okay? If I’m clean, no cop can prove anything! We played cards, that’s all. He told me bedtime stories.”
“Is there a money trail?” said Irma, who had worked in taxes.
“Oh, no, never! Cash for sex is so old-fashioned.” Monica absently picked up the yammering tomcat by the scruff of the neck. She gathered the beast in her sleek arms and massaged him. The surprised cat accepted this treatment, and even seemed grateful.
“See, I have a personal relationship with a big German arms firm,” Monica explained, as the cat purred like a small engine. “My sugar daddy is a big defense corporation. It’s an artificial intelligence, because it tracks me. It knows all my personal habits, and it takes real good care of me.… So, sometimes I do a favor—I mean, just a small personal favor for my big AI boyfriend, the big corporation. Then the stockholders’ return on investment feels much better.”
Baffled by this English-language business jargon, Tullio scratched his head.
Monica lifted her chin. “That’s how the vice racket beats a transparent surveillance society. Spies are the world’s second oldest profession. Us working girls are still the first.”
“We must take a chance,” Tullio decided. “You, girl, quick, get clean. Irma, help her. Leave Shadow House, and forget you ever saw us.”
“Oh, thank you, sir, thank you! I’ll be grateful the rest of my life, if I live to be 150!” cried Monica. She tossed the purring tomcat to the floor.
Irma hustled her away. The Shadow House had decontamination showers. Its sewers had membranous firewalls. The cover-up had a good chance to work. The house had been built for just such reasons.
Tullio removed the telltale bedsheets. He did what he could to put the comatose Chief into better order. Tullio had put the Chief to bed, dead drunk, on more than one occasion. This experience was like those comic old times, except not funny, because the Chief was not drunk: just dead.
The lights of Shadow House were strobing. An intruder had arrived.
* * *
The hermit priest had rolled to the House perimeter within his smart mobile wheelchair. Father Simeon was a particularly old man—even older than the Chief. Father Simeon was the Chief’s longtime spiritual guide and personal confessor.
“Did you push that Big Red Button?” said the supercentenarian cleric.
“No, Monsignor!”
“Good. I have arrived now, have I not? Where is my poor boy? Take me to him.”
“The Chief is sick, Monsignor.” Tullio suddenly burst into tears. “He had a fit. He collapsed, he’s not conscious. What can we do?”
“The status of death is not a matter for a layman to decide,” said the priest.
The Shadow House did not allow the cleric’s wheelchair to enter its premises. The Vatican
wheelchair was a rolling mass of embedded electronics. The Shadow House rejected this Catholic computational platform as if it were a car bomb.
Father Simeon—once a prominent Vatican figure—had retired to the island to end his days in a hermetic solitude. Paradoxically, his pursuit of holy seclusion made Father Simeon colossally popular. Since he didn’t want to meet or talk to anybody, the whole world adored him. Archbishops and cardinals constantly pestered the hermit for counsel, and his wizened face featured on countless tourist coffee cups.
“I must rise and walk,” said Father Simeon. “The soul of a sufferer needs me. Give me your arm, my son!”
Tullio placed his arm around the aged theologian, who clutched a heavy Bible and a precious vial of holy oil. Under his long, black, scarlet-buttoned cassock, the ancient hermit was a living skeleton. His bony legs rattled as his sandalled, blue-veined feet grazed the floor.
Tullio tripped over the housecat as they entered the Chief’s bedroom. They reeled together and almost fell headlong onto the stricken Chief, but the devoted priest gave no thought to his own safety. Father Simeon checked the Chief’s eyelids with his thumbs, then muttered a Latin prayer.
“I’m so glad for your help, Father,” said Tullio. “How did you know that we needed you here?”
The old man shot him a dark look from under his spiky gray brows. “My son,” he said, lifting his hand, “do you imagine that your mere technology—all these filters and window shades—can blind the divine awareness of the Living God? The Lord knows every sparrow that falls! God knows every hair of every human head! The good God has no need for any corporate AI’s or cheap singularities!”
Tullio considered this. “Well, can I do anything to help? Shall I call a doctor?”
“What use are the doctors now, after their wretched excesses? Pray for him!” said the priest. “His body persists while his soul is in Limbo. The Church rules supreme in bioethics. We will defend our faithful from these secular intrusions. If this had happened to him in Switzerland, they would have plugged him into the wall like a cash machine!”