by David Brin
Tullio shuddered in pain.
“Be not afraid!” Father Simeon commanded. “This world has its wickedness—but if the saints and angels stand with us, what machine can stand against us?” Father Simeon carefully gloved his bony hands. He uncapped his reeking vial of holy oil.
“I’m so sorry about all this, Monsignor. It’s so embarrassing that we failed in this way. We always tried to protect him, here in the Shadow House.”
The priest deftly rubbed the eyes, ears and temples of the stricken Chief with the sacramental ointment. “All men are sinners. Go to confession, my boy. God is all-seeing, and yet He is forgiving; whenever we open our heart to God, He always sees and understands.”
Irma beckoned at Tullio from the doorway. Tullio excused himself and met her outside.
The emergency had provoked Irma’s best cleverness. She had quickly dressed Monica in some fine clothes, left behind in Shadow House by the Chief’s estranged daughter. These abandoned garments were out of style, of course, but they were of classic cut and fine fabric. The prostitute looked just like a Italian parliamentarian.
“I told you to run away,” said Tullio.
“Oh sure, I wanted to run,” Monica agreed, “but if I ran from the scene of a crime, then some algorithm might spot my guilty behavior. But now look at me! I look political, instead of like some lowlife. So I can be ten times as guilty, and nothing will happen to me.”
Tullio looked at Irma, who shrugged, because of course it was true.
“Let the priest finish his holy business,” Irma counseled. “Extreme Unction is a sacrament. We can’t push the Big Red Button during this holy moment.”
“Are you guys Catholics?” said Monica. At their surprised look, she raised both her hands. “Hey, I’m from Miami, we got lots!”
“Are you a believer?” said Irma.
“Well, I tried to believe,” said Monica, blinking. “I read some of the Bible in a hotel room once. That book’s pretty crazy. Full of begats.”
A horrid shriek came from the Chief’s bedroom.
The Chief was bolt upright in bed, moans and whispers bursting in anguish from his writhing lips. The anointment with sacred oil had aroused one last burst of his mortal vitality. His heart was pounding so powerfully that it was audible across the room.
This spectral deathbed fit dismayed Father Simeon not at all. With care, he performed his ministry.
A death rattle eclipsed the Chief’s last words. His head plummeted into a pillow. He was as dead as a stone, although his heart continued to beat for over a minute.
The priest removed the rosary from around his shrunken neck and folded it into the Chief’s hairy hands.
“He expressed his contrition,” the priest announced. “At his mortal end, he was lucid and transparent. God knows all, sees all and forgives all. So do not be frightened. He has not left us. He has simply gone home.”
“Wow,” Monica said in the sudden silence. “That was awesome. Who is this old guy?”
“This is our world-famous hermit, Father Simeon,” said Tullio.
“Our friend Father Simeon was the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications,” Irma said proudly. “He also wrote the canon law for the Evangelization of Artificial Intelligences.”
“That sounds pretty cool,” said Monica. “Listen, padre, Holy Father, whatever…”
“’Holy Father’ is a title reserved for our pope,” Father Simeon told her, in a crisp Oxford English. “My machines call me ‘Excellency’—but since you are human, please call me ‘Father.’”
“Okay, ‘Father,’ sure. You forgave him, right? He’s dead—but he’s going to heaven, because he has no guilty secrets. That’s how it works, right?”
“He confessed. He died in the arms of the Church.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s great—but how about me? Can I get forgiven, too? Because I’m a bad girl! I didn’t want him to die! That was terrible! I’m really sorry.”
Father Simeon was old and had been through a trial at the deathbed, but his faith sustained him. “Do not despair, my child. Yes, you may be weak and a sinner. Take courage: the power of the Church is great. You can break the chains of unrighteousness. Have faith that you can turn away from sin.”
“But how, Father? I’ve got police records on three continents, and about a thousand johns have rated my services on hooker e-commerce sites.”
Father Simeon winced at this bleak admission, but truth didn’t daunt him. “My child, those data records are only software and hardware. You have a human soul, you possess free will. The Magdalen was a fallen woman whose conscience was awakened. She was a chosen companion of Christ. So do not bow your head to this pagan system of surveillance that confines you to a category, and seeks to entrap you there!”
Monica burst into tears. “What must I do to be saved from surveillance?”
“Take the catechism! Learn the meaning of life! We are placed on Earth to know, to love, and to serve our God! We are not here to cater to the whims of German arms corporations that build spy towers in the Mediterranean!”
Monica blinked. “Hey, wait a minute, Father—how do you know all that—about my German arms corporation and all those towers in the sea?”
“God is not mocked! There are some big data systems in this world that are little more than corrupt incubi, and there are other, better-programmed, sanctified data systems that are like protective saints and angels.”
Monica looked to Tullio and Irma. “Is he kidding?”
Tullio and Irma silently shook their heads.
“Wow,” breathed Monica. “I would really, truly love to have an AI guardian angel.”
The lights began to strobe overhead.
“Something is happening outside,” said Tullio hastily. “When I come back, we’ll all press the Big Red Button together.”
* * *
Behind the Shadow House, a group of bored teenagers had discovered Father Simeon’s abandoned wheelchair. They had captured the vehicle and were giving one another joyrides.
Overwhelmed by the day’s events, Tullio chased them off the Shadow House property, shouting in rage. The teens were foreign tourists, and knew not one word of Italian, so they fled his angry scolding in a panic, and ran off headlong to scramble up into the howdah of a waiting elephant.
“Teenage kids should never have elephants!” Tullio complained, wheeling the recaptured wheelchair back to Irma. “Elephants are huge beasts! Look at this mess.”
“Elephants are better than cars,” said Irma. “You can’t even kiss a boy in a car, because the cars are tracked and they record everything. That’s what the girls say in town.”
“Delinquents. Hooligans! With elephants! What kind of world is this, outside our house?”
“Kissing boys has always been trouble.” Irma closely examined the wheelchair, which had been tumbled, scratched and splattered with sandy dirt. “Oh dear, we can’t possibly give it back to Father Simeon in this condition.”
“I’ll touch it up,” Tullio promised.
“Should I push the Big Red Button now?”
“Not yet,” Tullio said. “A time like this needs dignity. We should get the Chief’s lawyer to fly in from Milan. If we have the Church and the law on our side, then we can still protect him, Irma, even after death. No one will know what happened here. There’s still client-lawyer confidentiality. There’s still the sacred silence of the confessional. And this house is radarproof.”
“I’m sure the Chief would want to be buried in Rome. The city where he saw his best days.”
“Of course you’re right,” said Tullio. “There will be riots at his funeral … but our Chief will finally find peace in Rome. Nobody will care about his private secrets any more. There are historical records, but the machines never bother to look at them. History is one of the humanities.”
“Let’s get the Vatican to publicly announce his passing. With no Italian government, the Church is what we have left.”
�
�What a good idea.” Tullio looked at his wife admiringly. Irma had always been at her best in handling scandalous emergencies. It was a pity that a woman of such skill had retired to a quiet life.
“I’ll talk to Father Simeon about it. He’ll know who to contact, behind the scenes.” Irma left.
Tullio brushed sand from the wheelchair’s ascetic leather upholstery, and polished the indicator lights with his sleeve. Since electronics were no longer tender or delicate devices—electronics were the bedrock of the modern world, basically—the wheelchair was not much disturbed by its mishap.
It was Tullio himself who felt tumbled and upset. Why were machines so hard to kill, and people so frail? The Shadow House had been built around the needs of one great man. The structure could grant him a physical privacy, but it couldn’t stop his harsh compulsion to reveal himself.
The Shadow House functioned properly, but it was a Don Quixote windmill. The Chief was, finally, too mad in the head to care if his manias were noticed. What the Chief had liked best about his beach house was simply playing poker with two old friends. Relaxing informally, despite his colossal burdens of wealth and fame, sitting there in improbable poise, like an elephant perched on a card table.
The house cat curled around Tullio’s ankles. Since the cat had never before left the confines of the Shadow House, this alarmed Tullio.
Inside, Father Simeon, Irma and Monica were sharing tea on a rattan couch, while surrounded by screens.
“People are querying the Shadow House address,” Irma announced. “We’re getting map queries from Washington and Berlin.”
“I guess you can blame me for that, too,” Monica moaned. “My Artificial Intelligence boyfriend is worried about me, since I dropped out of connectivity in here.”
“I counsel against that arrangement,” Father Simeon stated. “Although an AI network is not a man, he can still exploit a vulnerable woman. A machine with no soul can sin. Our Vatican theology-bots are explicit about this.”
“I never thought of my sweet megacorporation as a pimp and an incubus—but you’re right, Father Simeon. I guess I’ve got a lot to learn.”
“Never fear to be righteous, my child. Mother Church knows how to welcome converts. Our convents and monasteries make this shadowy place look like a little boy’s toy.”
* * *
The priest and his new convert managed to escape discreetly. The wheelchair vanished into the orange groves. Moments later, Carlo Pizzi arrived at Shadow House on his motor scooter.
The short and rather pear-shaped Pizzi was wearing his customary, outsized, head-mounted display goggles, which connected him constantly to his cloudy network. The goggles made Pizzi look as awkward as a grounded aviator, but he enjoyed making entirely sure that other people knew all about his social-media capacities.
After some polite chitchat about the weather (which he deftly recited from a display inside his goggles), Pizzi got straight to the point. “I’m searching for a girl named Monica. Tall, pretty, red hair, American, height 175 centimeters, weight 54 kilograms.”
“We haven’t seen her in some time,” Irma offered.
“Monica has vanished from the network. That activity doesn’t fit her emotional profile. I’ve got an interested party that’s concerned about her safety.”
“You mean the German arms manufacturer?” said Irma.
Carlo Pizzi paused awkwardly as he read invisible cues from his goggles.
“In our modern transparent society,” Pizzi ventured at last, “the three of us can all do well for ourselves by doing some social good. For instance: if you can reconnect Monica to the network, then my friend can see to it that pleasant things are said about this area to the German trade press. Then you’ll see more German tourists on your nice beach here.”
“You can tell your creepy AI friend to recalibrate his correlations, because Shadow House is a private home,” said Tullio. His words were defiant, but Tullio’s voice shook with grief. That was a bad idea when an AI was deftly listening for the emotional cues in human speech patterns.
“So, is Father Simeon dead?” Carlo Pizzi said. “Good heavens! If that famous hermit is dead, that would be huge news in Sardinia.”
“No, Father Simeon is fine,” said Irma. “Please don’t disturb his seclusion. Publicity makes him angry.”
“Then it’s that old politician who has died. The last prime minister of Italy,” said Carlo Pizzi, suddenly convinced. “Thanks for cuing up his bio for me! A man who lives for a hundred years sure can get into trouble!”
Tullio and Irma sidled away as Pizzi was distractedly talking to the empty air, but he noticed them and followed them like a dog. “The German system has figured out your boss is dead,” Pizzi confided, “because the big-data correlations add up. Cloud AIs are superior at that sort of stuff. But can I get a physical confirmation on that?”
“What are you talking about?” said Tullio.
“I need the first post-mortem shot of the deceased. There were rumors before now that he had died. Because he had this strange habit of disappearing whenever things got hot for him. So, this could be another trick of his—but if I could see him with my goggles here, and zoom in on his exact proportions and scan his fingerprints and such, then our friend the German system would have a first-mover market advantage.”
“We don’t want to bargain with a big-data correlation system,” said Tullio. “That’s like trying to play chess with a computer. We can’t possibly win, so it’s not really fair.”
“But you’re the one being unfair! Think of the prosperity that big-data market capitalism has brought to the world! A corporation is just the legal and computational platform for its human stockholders, you know. My friend is a ‘corporate person’ with thousands of happy human stockholders. He has a fiduciary obligation to improve their situation. That’s what we’re doing right now.”
“You own stock in this thing yourself?” said Irma.
“Well, sure, of course. Look, I know you think I want to leak this paparazzi photo to the public. But I don’t, because that’s obsolete! Our friend the German AI doesn’t want this scandal revealed, any more than you do. I just pass him some encrypted photo evidence, and he gets ahead of the market game. Then I can take the rest of this year off and finish my new novel!”
There was a ponderous silence. “His novels are pretty good beach reading,” Irma offered at last. “If you like roman-a-clef tell-all books.”
“Look here, Signor Pizzi,” said Tullio, “the wife and I are not against modern capitalism and big-data pattern recognition. But we can’t just let you barge in here and disturb the peace of our dead patron. He was always good to us—in his way.”
“Somebody has to find out he’s dead. That’s the way of the world,” Pizzi coaxed. “Isn’t it a better that it’s just a big-data machine who knows? The guy has four surviving ex-wives, and every one of them is a hellion.”
“That’s all because of him,” said Irma. “All those first ladies were very nice ladies once.”
Pizzi read data at length from the inside of his goggles; one could tell because his body language froze while his lips moved slightly. “Speaking of patronage,” he said, “your son has a nice job in Milan that was arranged by your late boss in there.”
“Luigi doesn’t know about that,” said Irma. “He thinks he got that job on merit.”
“How would it be if Luigi suddenly got that big promotion he’s been waiting for? Our AI friend can guarantee that. Your son deserves a boost. He works hard.”
Irma gave Tullio a hopeful, beseeching glance.
“My God, no wonder national governments broke down,” said Tullio, scowling. “With these sly big-data engines running the world, political backroom deals don’t stand a chance! Our poor old dead boss, he really is a relic of the past now. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Can’t we just go inside?” urged the paparazzo. “It won’t take five minutes.”
It took longer, because the Sha
dow House would not allow the gossip’s head-mounted device inside the premises. They had to unscrew the goggles from his head—Pizzi, with his merely human eyes exposed to fresh air, looked utterly bewildered—and they smuggled the device to the deathbed inside a Faraday bag.
Carlo Pizzi swept the camera’s gaze over the dead man from head to foot, as if sprinkling the corpse with holy water. They then hurried out of the radio silence, so that Carlo Pizzi could upload his captured images to the waiting AI.
“Our friend the German machine has another proposal for you now,” said Carlo Pizzi. “There’s nothing much in it for me, but I’d be happy to tell you about it, just to be neighborly.”
“What is the proposal?” said Irma.
“Well, this Shadow House poses a problem.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s an opaque structure in a transparent world. Human beings shouldn’t be concealing themselves from ubiquitous machine awareness. That’s pessimistic and backward-looking. This failure to turn a clean face to the future does harm to our society.”
“Go on.”
“Also, the dead man stored some secrets in here. Something to do with his previous political dealings, as Italian head of state, with German arms suppliers.”
“Maybe he stored secrets, and maybe he didn’t,” said Tullio stoutly. “It’s none of your business.
“It would be good news for business if the house burned down,” said Carlo Pizzi. “I know that sounds shocking to humans, but good advice from wise machines often does. Listen. There are other places like this house, but much better and bigger. They’re a series of naval surveillance towers, built at great state expense, to protect the Mediterranean coasts of Italy from migrants and terrorists. Instead of being Shadow Houses, they’re tall and powerful Light Houses, with radar, sonar, lidar, and drone landing strips. Real military castles, with all the trimmings.”
“I always adored lighthouses,” said Irma wonderingly. “They’re so remote and romantic.”
“If this Shadow House should happen to catch fire,” said Carlo Pizzi, “our friend could have you both appointed caretakers of one of those Italian sea castles. The world is so peaceful and progressive now, that those castles don’t meet any threats. However, there’s a lot of profit involved in keeping them open and running. Your new job would be just like your old job here—just with a different patron.”