“You remember what the machine looks like, right?”
“Of course,” The Pillar says. “A long monolith-like black box. Inside it are all the wires and microchips that makes it think.”
“Good memory, Cao Pao Wong.”
“I think the puzzle is a secret way to open it.”
“No one has been able to open the machine ever before. I hope you remember that.”
“I know, even the guys at IBM believed it was haunted when they couldn’t open it after the game with Kasparov. Just tell me where you keep it.”
Xian rubs his chin. “This is going to be a bit of a problem.”
“Why so?” I interfere.
“Like The Pillar said. It looks like a monolith, black, intimidating and huge. You look at it and feel strange and conflicting emotions.”
“So?” I ask.
“Let me put it this way,” Xian says. “It looks like the monolith in that Space Odyssey movie by Stanley Kubrick.”
I haven’t seen the movie so The Pillar explains it’s about space exploration, where a mysterious monolith is found by astronauts. The monolith is shown in the movie to have taught the first man, apes precisely, how to hunt and make a weapon. In brief, it showed man how to make things, from a hunting weapon to a thinking computer in our modern day.
“I get it,” I tell Xian. “So the IBM machine looks like that monolith in the movie. What does this have to do with us seeing Deep Blue now?”
Xian takes a moment and says. “Well, my monks are now worshiping the machine in the middle of the snow.”
Chapter 32
Xian walks us to where the Deep Blue machine sticks out of the snow. It’s about two meters high and slightly less than a meter wide. It also looks like it parts from the middle, only if you punch in a combination of secret numbers in the digital pad on top. A sixteen number combination.
“So the issue is to how to get the numbers?” The Pillar asks Xian.
“I’d call it your secondary issue,” Xian says. “The first would be them.” He points at the monks in orange praying while facing the monolith. A few of them are already suspicious about us.
“So they think Deep Blue is God?” I ask.
“Todd,” Xian says.
“Todd?” The Pillar asks.
“Yes, Todd.” Xian says.
“Who’s Todd?” I ask Xian.
“God.” Xian says.
“Todd is God?” The Pillar asks.
“Or God is Todd.” I remark, loving the insanity.
“How can God be Todd?” The Pillar asks.
“A misspelling.” Xian says.
“You Buddhist misspelled God’s name?” The Pillar says.
“Not at all,” Xian says. “One day, I took my monks to New York. They asked a man whom New Yorkers pray to. A drunk man on a Sunday morning told them ‘God’ in a slurry tongue. They thought he said Tod. And since Deep Blue is a computer, and my monks believe computers are western inventions, they called it Todd.”
“What about Deep Blue?” I ask.
“You can’t worship something called Deep Blue.” Xian noted.
“Why even worship a machine?” I ask. “Are you sure you guys are Buddhists?”
“First of all, not all of my monks worship Todd. Some of them don’t. Secondly, we’re not really Buddhists; we’re left out in the cold wearing those silly orange robes, and we don’t know why we do it. We were just born that way.”
“And third?”
“That part of my men worship Todd so they get an American visa.”
“What?” My voice pitches up.
“They were told if they worship a machine from California, and the machine likes them, they’d end up with an American visa.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“A green card maybe?” Xian scratches his head.
“You’re being outrageously offensive right now.” I tell him, about to tell those poor monks the truth.
“Work Permit?” Xian wonders. “They wouldn’t mind that. It’s really cold and lonely in here.”
“Stop it.” I hold my head from internally exploding. “Who the heck told those poor monks they can get a visa by worshiping a machine?”
Xian shrugs, looking sideways.
“Who?” I pull him in from his robe.
“Him.” He points at The Pillar.
I turn and find The Pillar is already praying with the monks, avoiding me. When I near him, he is talking a woman into marrying him and giving her British citizenship, which is way cooler than American.
Chapter 33
It’s hard to do something about The Pillar’s atrocious behavior right now. I don’t even know when he was here in the past or what he’s done. All I get from his wink is that he is distracting the monks so I can solve the machine’s puzzle.
“Come with me, Xian,” I tell the old man, walking back to Deep Blue.
“So you know how the numbers go to the machine?” He asks.
“Hardly,” I say, looking at the note again. “All I know is that the other side of the note should be the way to do it.”
“White stones?” Xian wonders.
“Do you have any idea what it means?”