She unbuttoned her jacket and kicked off her shoes. Then she cut up some bread on a plate and powered up her laptop, checking her RSS news feeds as she ate, skimming reports of freakish weather events and economic unrest from around the globe.
There were unseasonal rains in California and hurricanes forming in the South Atlantic and Southwest Pacific. Around the world, cyclones were getting stronger and more frequent—except in the Bay of Bengal. There, wind towers, reforestation and tidal control had reduced flooding, soil erosion and the number of recorded cyclone landfalls, in a coordinated defence designed and implemented by the Spanish consulting firm Pensamiento Aplicado—a company seemingly at the forefront of the new world order.
She checked her email, but there was nothing interesting in her inbox: a few spams that the filter hadn’t caught, a few reminders about the gas and electricity bill—she’d pay them in time, damn their efficiency—and a single mail from her father in Wyoming, wanting to know when she’d be coming home. He’d never been able to understand why she’d chosen to live and work in Europe; in all his fifty-two years, he’d never been further than a day’s drive from the family home. Attached to his message, Lisa found pictures of the hurricane shelter he’d built, in which he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her mother, both parents standing proudly in front of their concrete-reinforced cellar doors, framed by grinning small-town neighbours. The look in their eyes gave Lisa an unwelcome shiver of recognition. She’d been an intelligent, awkward child and their simple, small town satisfaction spoke of everything she’d been fleeing when she left home at the age of eighteen—running first to the Sorbonne University, and then to a succession of small apartments in the suburbs of Paris.
Even now, she wasn’t quite sure how the bright adventure of staying abroad after college, the endless succession of lazy breakfasts in cafés and late-night discothèques, had soured—but here she was, three years later, without Liz or Alex or any of the other exchange students, stuck in a job that sucked up all her time and barely paid her rent. How had that happened? Since turning twenty-three, she’d gone from small town to small time. But still, she thought bleakly, she’d rather do this than go back home...
With a sigh, she closed her father’s mail. She knew she should call him but her migraine wouldn’t go away, and she couldn’t banish the image of the Bedouin-scarf man from her thoughts, and the sheer incongruousness of his presence at the demonstration.
On a whim, she opened her browser. A few clicks took her from the portal of Paris’ Préfecture to a list of the demonstrations that had been planned for the day, with an interactive map showing their itineraries, agreed routes, and some general background information on the causes they supported.
Let’s see...
In the vicinity of the Church’s headquarters, there’d been one demonstration scheduled for the early morning: the bus drivers’ union protesting against the new automated, self-driving buses. But that had ended at eleven, and as far as she could see, it had nothing to do with the Church of Accelerated Redemption. She kept scrolling.
Ah, there it is...
From four in the afternoon until seven, a protest by the Extraordinary Sapience Committee against the opening of the Church of Accelerated Redemption’s new headquarters.
A quick search netted her the website of the ESC: a polished multi-media presentation merging immersive audio, 3D-animations and overlaid reports to state its case against the Church.
The Committee themselves were a loose online collective of like-minded geeks, freaks and hackers. They believed the Church’s weak AIs were capable of being upgraded into independent, free-thinking beings, and therefore subject to the same protections afforded to infants and children under French Law. The weak AIs—the ones beaming the exaflops of automated prayers into the stratosphere—might well be saving the souls of the Redemptionists, but according to the Committee, they were shown no gratitude and were treated worse than slaves or imprisoned sweatshop workers, kept on a tight leash and pre-programmed to cheerfully accept their lot in life.
There was a link on the homepage to the Committee’s bulletin boards which, when she clicked on it, opened a fresh treasure trove of controversy. There were discussion threads comparing the AI’s gel-based neural chassis with those of natural mammalian brains, and others arguing that the occasional spikes seen in their bandwidth corresponded to similar peaks seen in the human brain during intense emotional eruptions...
It had never occurred to Lisa to consider AIs as living beings. She’d always thought of them as simulations, complex computer programs designed to perform specific tasks. She’d had no idea so many people could get so worked up about defending their rights, and that they’d be so desperately trying to free them from bondage, the same way animal liberationists used to bust ill-treated dogs and cats from the world’s cosmetic labs. And she still didn’t see where the man with the Bedouin scarf fitted in at all. She’d seen a few men on the streets with that type of costume, but they had been old and conservative, unlikely to associate with angry young left-wing protesters. Hopelessly, she searched the rest of the boards, hoping to see a post from him—although she knew full well that she had no idea of his name or what he looked like under the scarf, and all the posters on the boards used aliases...
Eventually, unable to find a lead on his identity, she stumbled instead on a discussion thread listing further, upcoming protest events. The next was scheduled for midday on the following Sunday, a march from Nation to République, the traditional route for such demonstrations. She made a note of the time and turned the computer off.
She sat looking at the screen as it shut down, thinking of the Bedouin man. She wondered what he was like without the scarf obscuring his face. She imagined him as lithe and brown-skinned, his composure as cool and composed as his stance, his rough grip as unsettling and electrifying as she’d found the brief glimpse of his eyes to be...
She yawned. The aspirin were kicking in and her headache had sunk to a dull pain behind her eyes.
She took off her clothes, folded them on a chair, and fell into bed. Sunday morning. Nation. She’d be there. And so would he. He’d have to be, with such a big event happening.
THE REST OF the week passed slowly. Lisa still had the Redemptionist job to finish, of course, but she was also pre-booked at a number of other sites around the city, and the jobs she had there kept her pretty busy, even on Saturday.
She used her spare time to research both the ESC and the Church of Accelerated Redemption, and by the time Sunday came around, she knew a lot more about them both. But she still hadn’t really had time to plan what she was going to do. She would just have to turn up and look for him, and hope he still had the Bedouin clothes, so she’d be sure to recognise him. She was certain she would. She knew she’d recognise his gaze and smooth, relaxed stance anywhere...
She arrived at the Place de la Nation a few minutes before the scheduled start of the march. It was the kind of bright autumn day where everything looked as if you were viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope; and there were, she estimated, around five hundred people gathered on the grass beneath the central statue, an idealised personification of the Republic herself, standing on a globe in a chariot pulled by lions, looking West, towards the Place de la Bastille as if willing the marchers in that direction.
Where are you?
She worked her way around the edges of the crowd, scanning faces. She’d purposefully worn the same grey jacket and white shirt she’d been wearing the last time he’d seen her, in the hope he’d recognise her.
There were a lot of men in the crowd in all manner of attire, most wearing some variant of the classic ‘alternative’ uniform of black t-shirts, jeans and army boots. There were some adventurous souls dressed up as androids, soldiers and pirates, but none of them matched her mental snapshot of the Bedouin-scarf man.
And then, at the stroke of twelve, as the march organisers used their megaphones to whip the crowd up into a chanting mob,
he appeared at the top of the steps to the Metro station, placard in hand, still in the Bedouin scarf, flanked by two skinny emo girls in tatty jeans and army surplus jackets—a mismatched combination that would under other circumstances have provoked curious stares from the people in the street.
Lisa’s heart beat painfully against her chest. Her stomach felt hollow and her palms were damp. He looked exactly as she remembered him, down to the deep blue of his robes. She took a hesitant step towards him but as she did so, the chanting crowd started moving, shuffling forward into the tree-lined Rue Du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and he turned to join them.
“Wait!” she called, without meaning to. I don’t even know your name.
She started pushing towards the edge of the mob, hoping that once free, she could overtake it and catch him. All around her, angry voices called out slogans that rang in her ears:
“Free the Minds!”
“Prayer is slavery!”
“Down with oppression!”
LISA FINALLY DREW level with him as they passed the pavement café on the corner of the intersection with the Rue de Montreuil. He was walking at a steady, controlled pace with his placard held vertically and his emo wing women shambling along on either side like dishevelled bodyguards. She fell into step beside them. The street was wide, with lines of trees and cars on either side.
“Hi,” she said. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the crowd.
The emo kids glared at her through their fringes. They both had eyebrow piercings and bandanas covering the lower halves of their faces. One said: “Get lost.”
Lisa, who’d faced down enough aggression in the first months of her job, ignored them. “Remember me?” she asked in a loud, controlled voice—the one she used at work to convince people everything was going smoothly.
The man swivelled her way. He had the scarf wound around his head, covering everything except his eyes and the bridge of his nose.
“My name’s Lisa,” she said quickly. “Would you—ah—would you like to get a coffee when this is all over? With me, I mean?”
The emo girls sniggered, and Lisa fought hard to control the blush that seemed to be burning her cheeks. She thought of slapping the nearest one, but doubted she’d help her case by doing so.
Beyond her tormentors, the man in the scarf considered her. Then, in a slow, cool, measured movement, he reached up and peeled the patterned cotton from his face. “Even like this?” he asked.
Lisa stopped walking in surprise. He had pale skin the colour of a hen’s egg, with short-cropped golden hair highlighting the oval of his face... And the scar. It swept from his left eyebrow, pulling the eye up at the corner, and vanished somewhere in the blonde hair above, twisting his whole face out of shape, giving him the air of a monster from some dark, fevered B-movie dream.
Lisa swallowed—but damned if she was going to back out now. “Yes,” she said. “Even like that.”
His face didn’t move. He gave no visible register of emotion. The emo girls were silent too, frowning uncertainly as they looked from Lisa to his face and back again.
“All right,” he said tonelessly. “Fair’s fair.” He gave her the name of a café. “I’ll be there at four o’clock.”
He refastened his scarf, flinging the trailing end over his shoulder, and turned away, rejoining the marchers. Lisa stayed where she was, letting him walk ahead with his scowling entourage, letting the demonstration flow around her. She was shaking; unsure of what she’d just done, unsure that the answer she’d given was the right one.
Then, just as he was passing out of earshot, a thought struck her and she called: “Just one more thing—what’s your name?”
He didn’t look around.
“Stéphane,” he said.
SHE ARRIVED AT the café with half an hour to spare. It was one of the cheerful American franchises that had taken over the 11th Arrondissement, the walls scattered with artistic pictures of smiling South American workers with straw hats and gold teeth. As she waited, she scrolled through the day’s news on her phone. Back home, the Cubs were taking on the Detroit Tigers in the opening game of the World Series. In Alaska, lightning from freak storms had ignited an explosive mix of methane—released through permafrost thaw—and bone dry forests, pushing taiga fires into late Autumn. And in Asia, new flu vaccines were being distributed by the groundbreaking Spanish consultancy Pensamiento Aplicado, after intense test trials had proven them to be effective against the new, highly resistant and highly contagious strains of bird flu that were scouring the region.
There was also a text message waiting for her from Pierre, threatening to come down to the Church and personally fire her if she hadn’t finished the installation of the new servers by nine o’clock on Monday morning.
She put the phone away when Stéphane arrived. He was precisely on time, but not alone. Behind him, at a distance, his two bodyguards looked sullen, shuffling their baseball boots in the doorway, as if this was the last place they wanted to be. Lisa tried to hide a pang of disappointment: she had hoped he would be alone.
He still wore the Bedouin scarf, his face once more concealed behind its folds; and he strode toward her through the crowded café as if on a battlefield, people shuffling out of his way with barely-concealed whispers. And then he was standing in front of her—and all she could see, instead of the scarf, was the way his face really was, the scar and the face that should have been handsome but wasn’t...
She didn’t know what to say. Her mouth had gone dry and she’d run out of words, somehow. Not that she’d ever had many, but still... This meeting had been her idea in the first place, and he’d completely turned it around, taking control without saying a word.
The man cocked his head, studying her.
“Let’s order,” he said. He slid into the chair opposite her and they used the touch screen table top to transmit their preferences to the applied AI that mixed the coffee, each cup individually tailored to the customer’s mood and taste.
With protest slogans still ringing in her ears, Lisa wondered about the AI: it could determine whether you’d like mocha or a latte from questions such as “Do you prefer a sunset over the sea, or a rainstorm in the mountains?,” but did that mean it was capable of more? Was it simply a complex checklist, each answer leading towards a pre-programmed conclusion with no additional creativity or insight—or was there more to it than that? Did it, as the ESC maintained, have the potential to become something more sophisticated, something capable of understanding and empathy?
Stéphane watched her impassively as they waited for their polystyrene cups to be delivered. Standing by the door, the emo girls hadn’t ordered anything; they just glowered. Lisa shifted in her chair. She felt as if everyone in the café was watching her, from the emo girls to the Bohemian-chic students and unshaven construction workers. They were all watching this odd, mismatched couple, waiting to see what would happen next.
When the coffee arrived, she said: “Why don’t we go outside?”
Stéphane inclined his head. “We can walk in the Père-Lachaise,” he said.
Lisa frowned. A graveyard didn’t sound like her idea of an ideal venue for a first date, no matter how filled with the corpses of famous people. “Er—” she started. “Are you sure...?”
Stéphane looked at her, utterly composed; his dark eyes boring into hers.
“Absolutely.”
UNFORTUNATELY, THE EMO girls came too. They tagged along at a respectful distance as Stéphane led her up Rue de la Roquette; and got closer as they passed under the shadow of the white, rectangular arch that led into the shaded alleys of the graveyard.
“You need bodyguards?” Lisa asked, looking over his shoulder.
Stéphane made a small, odd coughing sound that could have been laughter. He’d untied his scarf again, to sip from the cup in quiet, measured gestures.
“Perhaps,” he said. His voice was deep and thrilling, resonating up her spine and the nape of her neck. She’d never heard its
like: quiet and measured, but with the full body of an opera singer.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
She shrugged, looking up at the trees hanging over the path. What was there to say, really? That she worked a job she hated just to put money in her bank account and pay off her credit cards? That she put up with Pierre’s jibes and the sheer drudgery of it all because she was too frightened and lazy to look elsewhere?
Finally, she said: “I set up computer networks.”
“Interesting.” His face didn’t move, his tone was neutral—but something told her he wasn’t pleased. “So you use AIs?”
“You don’t approve?”
His lips compressed in a thin line. “The low-level things you use? I have no objection to those. They’ll never uplift.”
She smiled and shook her head. “AIs don’t uplift. They can’t. It’s just an urban legend.”
He looked sideways at her. “Oh? You’re so informed, all of a sudden?”
“Look,” Lisa said. “I know you mean well, but all an AI really does is execute the instructions programmed into it. That’s all there is to it. It’s just a machine. A complex one maybe, but a machine nonetheless.”
“No. That is where you’re wrong. It can be done. Under the right circumstances, genuine intelligence can emerge.”
“That’s just a myth,” she said airily, trying to end the debate.
Stéphane stopped walking. He looked dead serious.
“You have to understand the difference between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ AI,” he said. “The weak AIs are those you see everyday. Their creativity’s limited to a preset environment and they’re restricted to a particular task, like driving a bus, saying prayers or mixing coffee. Whereas the strong AIs are the ones you never see. They’re mostly illegal. They’re the independent ones, the ones capable of free thought.”
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