Navinder searched the rafters as if he wasn’t sure what to do with the question. “Things that deserve it.”
“An example, Navinder… For instance, what one event made you the most frustrated this past month?”
Navinder’s brow furrowed and his lips stretched into a thin line. “You really want to know?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It’s a bit embarrassing.”
“For whom?”
“For you, I would think.”
Åkerlund allowed his teeth to flash again and raised his Perrier to Navinder. “I think I’m prepared for it.”
“Did you hear about the children in Kuala Lumpur?”
Åkerlund nodded. Everyone had heard, of course. Five children had been kidnapped, accompanied by a demand that the staged elections be reheld. The government, predictably, had refused their demands, and the children had been viciously murdered, their bodies found a week before the match along the banks of the Kelang.
“A year ago, I would have cried for those children.”
“And that frustrates you?”
“It does, Doctor, but not how you might think. Some of my reactions were deemed too emotional, and I was adjusted, a lobotomy of sorts, so that my reactions were more typical of humanity.”
Åkerlund paused. “And you think we should all be ashamed.”
“I’d be surprised if you weren’t when standing face-to-face with your callous nature.”
“You think we’re inherently callous.”
“Aren’t you?”
Åkerlund ignored the question. “Do you think you could contain all that pain were you to feel all of it?”
Navinder’s brow furrowed. “Doctor, I know intellectually why my emotions had to be checked—I had already fallen into bouts of depression before last year’s match—but I still feel like I’ve lost something.”
Åkerlund shifted in his chair and exhaled noisily. “I suppose you have, Navinder.”
Retta shivered as Bobby leaned over and tapped her glasses. “You believe that?”
She scrunched her eyes to clear them of their too-much-video haze. It took her a moment to reorient to the here and now of sitting with Bobby Levine on a transcontinental scramjet, and even longer to realize he’d been watching her video. “What?”
“That in order to be human you have to be numb.”
“I suppose so,” she said, trying hard not to think about her mom. “Why?”
He shrugged and practically rammed his dripping roast beef sandwich into his mouth to take a bite. “It’s just messed up,” he said around his food.
Retta turned off the video as the steward came by with her meal: chicken cordon bleu, mashed potatoes, and those tiny peeled carrots with the green ends still on them. “What’s messed up?”
“That there’s so much pain around us that nature’s built in extra defenses.”
As she dove into her food, thoughts of her mother and her conversation with Lynn came rushing back. Lynn always acted so high and mighty, but she lived near Mom. Retta lived in New York, plus she was always on the go, chasing stories. And with Gil constantly threatening to cut her loose, she didn’t dare take time off. Not now. Maybe in a month or two.
“You know what I don’t get?” Bobby asked.
Retta rolled her eyes. What do you get, she said to herself.
“They had those other competitions, right? The Loebner and Turing thingies? Why weren’t those good enough?”
“The Loebner Prize Gold Medal and the Turing Test? They were only small steps,” Retta said, “and everyone knew it. Questioning a computer blindly over a keyboard is a pretty specific application, and programming for it was the same. No one who sat and had a real conversation with those AIs would claim they were human.”
“They seemed pretty smart to me.”
Retta snorted.
“Just seems like they’re beating a dead horse.”
“Well that dead horse is paying your bills, my friend.”
He opened his mouth to speak, again with a mouthful of see-food, but Retta cut him off and pointed to his earbuds. “Get back to your music, Sigmund. I have work to do.”
Bobby frowned and tuned in a different movie on the vidscreen attached to his chair.
Retta finished eating and fast-forwarded the video a few hours. There was only another three hours before they touched down in Cape Town, and she had to get to the juicy part. She scanned several hours’ worth of the match, but there was nothing that gave any clues, and when they were within an hour of touching down, Retta fast-forwarded to the end.
Dag Åkerlund sat with one leg crossed over the other, absentmindedly combing his thick, pepper-and-nutmeg beard with his left hand. “I’d like to discuss your self-portrait, Navinder.”
Navinder nodded and turned to the huge video screen at the back of the auditorium stage. Navinder had been given an assignment each year before the match began: to draw a picture that described his inner self.
The black screen flashed to life and showed a rudimentary pencil sketch of a man sitting cross-legged on a mountain, hugging himself tightly. The sun shone brightly on the mountaintop, but the center of the sun was black and very near to the horizon. Clouds obscured much of the valley below, but a thriving metropolis could be seen through the fog.
“You’re the man sitting alone, Navinder?”
“Yes.”
“Why the clouds?”
“Because of my isolation.”
“And the black sun?”
“That’s my creator.”
“CES?”
CES. The name Navinder’s creators had chosen for themselves. To the public, they claimed it stood for the Community for the Evolution of Society, but anyone in the know knew it stood for cogito ergo sum, René Descartes’s famous quote: I think, therefore I am.
“No,” Navinder said simply. He held both his arms across his waist, and he looked more than a little like the man on the mountain. “My creator is from the ether. I’m as much a mistake as I am a planned entity, Doctor.”
“A mistake…”
“Yes. CES were hardly sure that I would attain any more consciousness than a bumblebee, or a titmouse.”
Dag chuckled. “Come now. You were the twentieth iteration, and each gained more awareness than the last.”
“I don’t doubt that they made progress, Doctor, and I don’t doubt that they would have eventually succeeded even if I’d been deemed an utter failure. I’m merely stating that I, my iteration, could have easily been brain dead by modern medical standards.”
“Fair enough,” he said as he returned his gaze to the screen. “Will you permit me an observation, Navinder?”
“Please.”
“At first blush, many would say your portrait speaks of pride; some might even say hubris.”
Navinder turned his attention to the picture, his blue-tainted brow pinching. “I don’t see that.”
“You don’t? Why are you above the clouds and the rest of humanity below it? Why are you being shined upon while no one else is?”
“It wasn’t because I thought I was better.”
“Only different,” Åkerlund offered.
“Yes.”
“Then consider my second conclusion, one I came to understand only from speaking to you in such depth these last four years. You’re angry in that picture, Navinder. Resentful.”
Navinder kept his eyes on the portrait. He seemed frozen and alone and inside himself.
“You’re looking down through the clouds upon humanity, and you feel separated and alone. You wish you had what the rest of us have, what most of us take for granted every single day.”
Navinder turned away from the picture and stared at the white king sitting on the chess board between them.
“Why are you angry, Navinder?”
Navinder opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He repeated this several times. “I’d rather not say, Doctor.”
“You’re embarrassed to
say it?”
Navinder looked so small then. So confused. “I… I’m scared.”
Åkerlund looked like he’d taken a physical blow. “Scared? Why, Navinder?”
Navinder looked out upon the crowd and closed his eyes. He unwrapped his arms from around his midsection and flexed his blue hands several times.
“Please, you can tell me.”
Navinder reopened his eyes, and he seemed to have gained a new clarity. “I’m dying, Doctor.”
Åkerlund was speechless for a moment. “You’re what?”
“I’m dying.”
The crowd murmured, but huge blinking SILENCE signs brought them back under heel.
“You mean you think you’re dying.”
“No, Doctor. I am dying. The single, largest change made to my being in the last year was the introduction of an end date. I will die within ten years—” Navinder forced a wry smile onto his serious face, “—so I hope our matches turn in my favor soon.”
Åkerlund shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“At a random time, somewhere between now and 2068, my mind will cease to function. Then, I will be brain dead, Doctor. For all intents and purposes, I will have died.”
“But they can recover you.”
“Come, Doctor, you know the technology as well as I. They can start again, yes. They can grow another brain like mine, place it in another body like mine, but it will not be me. It will be the equivalent of a clone being reared in a new time and a new place.”
Dr. Åkerlund leaned forward until his arms were resting on his knees and remained silent for some time. He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. “What do you think will happen to you, Navinder, after you die?”
Navinder smoothed a wrinkle on his pant leg. “I have no illusions of an afterlife, if that’s what you mean.”
“So you fear death.”
“Fear it? No.”
“Then what?” The doctor appeared to be speaking more to himself than he was Navinder. “How does your mind reconcile with death?”
“That’s a difficult question to answer. Six months ago, the notion had never entered my mind. And now—” Navinder shrugged, “—it feels…foreign.”
Dr. Åkerlund motioned to the picture. “Then why the anger?”
Navinder stood and paced beneath the huge screen, and for the first time ever, gesticulated while he talked. “Because of what I’ll never be able to do! Because of what I’ll never experience! My best prognosis, Doctor, is that I’ll die at the physical age of fourteen, the mental age of thirty-five. Wouldn’t that make you a little bit angry?”
Dr. Åkerlund seemed unable to reply. He had a serious look that Retta had tried to interpret many times. It was part sadness, part shock, part compassion, but she couldn’t quite nail the emotion he seemed to be exuding. “Yes it would, Navinder,” Dr. Åkerlund said. At this he stood, leaned forward, and tipped the white king over.
“Yes it would.”
And with that he walked off the stage.
Just as flash photography showered the stage white and the crowd erupted into excited conversation, Retta stopped the vid. The thrum of the engines could not quite conceal Bobby’s light snoring in the seat next to her. Outside, the sun was rising.
Everyone had wanted to know why Åkerlund had resigned, had wanted to know how he could be so sure. He held a press conference the following day where he read a prepared statement to the media. He’d been given the mantle of deciding whether or not Navinder was human, and he’d done that to the best of his ability, and he didn’t care, he’d said tersely, to debate his debate. He left São Paulo the following morning, leaving the media and public to quarrel over the fairness of the competition. Had Åkerlund thrown the match? Had someone close to him died recently?
CES declared a clear victory among the doubts being raised, and they refused to set up additional matches with Navinder. In fact, while they offered free access to any number of their other AI prototypes, they refused to grant a single audience with Navinder himself, making the results seem even more dubious.
In the years since, Åkerlund’s sizable fortune from his father’s timber empire had allowed him to enter and remain in hiding.
Until now.
* * *
Rawlins, a rangy black expat wearing jeans and a beaten cowboy hat, met them at baggage claim. The short trip to Rawlins’s waiting Land Rover was bitterly cold.
Bobby laughed. “Need a coat, Sherlock?”
“Shove it,” she said as she rubbed her sleeveless arms and hid in the depths of the warm SUV.
As Rawlins wound through the streets of Cape Town, Retta took her incoming stream off Do Not Disturb and checked her queue. No video or voice mail, but Lynn had left an e-mail. She left it unread.
They went straight to the place Åkerlund had been transferred, a hospital called Groote Schuur. They asked around, making it clear there was money involved for anyone with information. They heard no news for two days, but on the third, the damn broke. A young black nurse told Retta she’d been on duty when Åkerlund had arrived at Groote Schuur. He’d stayed for three days, but then had checked himself out. When asked what Åkerlund had been diagnosed with, the nurse said she didn’t know. The session had been very private, but the doctor Åkerlund had met with was a specialist in neurological disorders.
“Can I speak with him?” Retta asked.
The wide-faced woman looked down, as if she was embarrassed in some way. “He died two months ago. A heart attack on a fishing charter off the coast of Mauritius.”
Retta tried to find out what she could from hospital records, but they were tighter with information than Fort Knox—a reason, she was sure, Åkerlund had chosen this hospital.
Rawlins came back to their hotel that same night and said he’d found Åkerlund’s estate.
“You’re shitting me,” Retta said.
Rawlins smiled. “This guy says he knows the farmer who supplies goat and steer to Åkerlund’s compound.”
Retta, Bobby, and Rawlins all loaded up in his beaten Land Rover the next morning and headed east out of Cape Town. They circled False Bay and reached Åkerlund’s property more than an hour later. They were presented with a nondescript gravel drive with a tall fence topped with razorwire. From what Retta guessed was the center of the estate, a trail of black smoke snaked up into an overcast sky.
Rawlins pulled the Rover up far enough that Retta could reach out and press the alert on the intercom. Someone barked back a few words, and though Retta recognized it as Afrikaans, she had no idea what they’d said.
She could have let Rawlins interpret for her, but instead she spoke in a pleasant voice at the intercom. “I’m here to see Dag Åkerlund. You can tell him it’s Retta Brown from the New York Times.”
A pause. “I’m sorry,” the voice said in halting English. “There is no Åkerlund here.”
“Ah, that’s too bad,” Retta replied. “I’d heard otherwise. But if you happen to dig him up, tell him I’ll be staying at the Sunset Inn in Rooi Els. Tell him, too, that I’ll be sending in my article in two days whether I talk to him or not.”
She motioned for Rawlins to stay where he was, but after five minutes of waiting it was clear they weren’t going to be allowed in. As they sat there, the smoke lessened and then vanished altogether.
They tried the same tack each morning for the next three days, but apparently Åkerlund was willing to call her bluff.
Near sundown on the fourth night of their stay in South Africa, Retta was researching neurological disorders, trying to figure out what on God’s green earth Åkerlund might have been diagnosed with, but with so little information, the canvas was simply too large. It could range anywhere from chronic fatigue to hypothyroidism. But the fact that Åkerlund had come out of hiding to meet with this particular doctor made Retta think it was very serious and most likely obscure.
Retta blinked off the article on the cure for Alzheimer’s she was reading when Rawlins knocked o
n her door. “Come in.”
Rawlins was huffing, as if winded from a long run, but he was smiling too, his perfectly white teeth a sharp contrast against his dark chocolate skin. “Something strange going on at that estate, Rett.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember that fire the first day?”
Retta nodded.
“It’s happened again the same time each day for about a half hour. I’ve been scouting around the perimeter to see if I might figure out what it was. Just now I saw two boys sneak under the fence. One of ’em had a slingshot. They came out a half-hour later with a hare over each shoulder.”
The implications were confusing. Retta had assumed the security around the estate would be top notch—the front gate looked imposing enough—but if two boys could slip past it undetected, then there was something seriously different about the reality of Åkerlund’s situation.
Rawlins scratched the white stubble along his neck and pursed his lips. “Want to go take a look?”
Retta glanced at the setting sun outside her hotel window. “Not tonight, but we’re heading in there tomorrow before the next fire starts.”
* * *
Sure enough, the perimeter defense around the estate seemed to be either inoperable or turned off. They used the same hollow the boys had used to shimmy under the fence, and neither of the nearby cameras swiveled to follow their movements. After a hike of less than a mile through uneven land dotted with copses of scrub brush, they reached a small rise. Retta crawled forward and used the image enhancers in her glasses to scan the estate only a few hundred meters away.
The beige-brick-and-glass monstrosity could have housed dozens, and its multitiered decks looked large enough to throw a birthday party for the entire village of Rooi Els, but there was a distinct note of disrepair to it all. All three swimming pools were green and rotten with algae and decomposed leaves. The wall of glass windows along the deck was dusty to the point where one couldn’t see through them. The roof had shingles out of place or missing altogether.
Just then a bald man in a beige suit stepped out onto the deck. He carried a tray, which held a single drinking glass filled with something resembling iced tea. After walking over to a table and a set of chairs, he set the tray down and pulled out one chair.
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