Darker than expected, within, a narrow room walled with bookshelves. There are fossils on the shelves, ammonites and trilobites and a carnosaur’s fanged grin, and butterflies pinned in display cases. At first it all reads as a set designer’s take on a Victorian naturalist’s study, but then she sees the books’ spines are broken, mostly, that they run to novels, number theory, card magic, recent history. The only light is from the far wall’s high windows, the dusty glass panes framing nothing. Cromwell sits at his desk, backlit and obscured; as he closes his laptop, there’s a momentary glow on the lenses of his glasses. The suits who’ve been waiting on him—attorneys, most likely—turn to regard her with glazed hauteur, unable to place her in any hierarchy, but she takes no offense, for, however well-paid, they’re essentially servants, and in any case her eyes are drawn toward Cromwell’s desk by a flare of dream-blue like the wing of a morpho.
The iridescence is from a jagged shard of metal as long as her hand, its surface comprised of tissue-thin membranes whose tiny convolutions remind her of disinterred cities, and these in turn comprised of other cities still; the purity of the blue is remarkable, a blue to disappear in, and as its forms fill her other memory the fugue stirs, which she won’t permit, not in company, so she looks away as she sets down the shard, which she has, she finds, picked up. The attorneys must have excused themselves. Behind his desk, Cromwell smiles up at her.
He’s younger than she’d supposed, but no, that’s just the quality of the work. He presents as a man whose age is just starting to show, his temples greying, the crow’s feet around his eyes concessions to the expected presentation of an alpha male. No tie with a dark suit whose very simplicity suggests considerable expense, like a kimono reinterpreted through bespoke Italian tailoring, and she sees how intently he’s watching her, and has the sense that she interests him, which is rare, for his kind, and she wonders if she was right to preemptively dismiss him. “It’s a computer,” he says, nodding toward the shard. “We think. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. It seems to be an improperly assembled prototype. Certainly designed by AI. Beautiful, no?”
“Beautiful,” she says, the word hanging there as she tries to put the blue from her mind, clear her other memory. She’s seen AI-designed computer hardware, but nothing like this. “Why this blue?” she asks, still shaken, feeling a little like she’s asked a question about the reason for the sky.
“The physicists haven’t been able to figure it out, though they seem to find the problem a compelling one,” he says. “In fact, I was hoping you could tell me something about it. Bright as they are, my researchers, they’re not…” He makes a gesture perhaps meant to indicate that she’s something else entirely but he’s too discreet to mention it.
She looks back at the shard, like a window on another world and a lovelier one, then quickly looks away. “It’d be hard to say with a microscope, much less with the naked eye. The AIs’ designs tend to be impenetrable. Sometimes I think they’re just addicted to complexity.”
“I’ve often said as much,” says Cromwell, eyes shining, and he has a friendliness, even a latent giddiness, that she doesn’t expect in Big Money. “It sometimes seems to me that trying to talk to the AIs is like trying to read the future in the clouds, or flocks of birds. Do you think we’ll ever really be able to communicate?”
It’s the right question—usually CEOs ask her when AIs will be able to predict the stock market, or when they can get a robot nanny (or, god help them, mistress). The bright young university men seem always to be claiming that true communication is just ten years away, but it’s been ten years away since before she was born. Cromwell’s interest seems genuine, even acute, so she says, “No, because there’s no common ground, and there never will be. We’re primates, evolved to live on Earth and pass on our genes, and this has given our thoughts a certain shape, but the AIs have nothing to do with these things, and their thoughts are shaped differently. Terrestrial matters are as counterintuitive to them as tensor algebra is to us. For them, the physical world has a kind of ghostliness, if they’re aware of it at all. Some of them don’t even know about time.” It’s the set piece she’d give to strangers at parties, years ago, before she stopped talking about her work, but who knows, it might strike Cromwell as profound.
“But surely there’s some way to bridge the gap. Maybe if they had enough information about the world.”
“They’ve tried that,” she says, trying to conceal her boredom, and not to remember how many times she’s had this conversation. “In fact, someone rediscovers that idea about once a decade, and has for more than a century, but no matter how many encyclopedias or decades’ worth of newspapers you put in front of the AIs, they still see nothing but confusion.”
It’s a commonplace, known to every grad student, but Cromwell seems rapt and says, “But it is possible, to connect with them, at least to a degree. I mean, that’s what you do. From what I’ve read, it’s practically who you are.”
Exhaustion washes over her, and as her will to speak fades the room starts to seem remote and unimportant, and Cromwell must have felt a door close because he says, “Forgive me. I’m too personal. A bad habit—one of the disfigurements of influence—it makes one unfit for decent company. I’ll let you get to work, but first is there anything I can tell you about the job?”
In fact, she hasn’t read her contract, or the email that Maya forwarded with the project précis, and if she checks email now there will inevitably be a new message from Maya reminding her of where she’s supposed to be and what she’s supposed to do there, carefully worded to suggest a subtle compassion and entirely conceal any impatience or disgust, and though she won’t want to read it and be exposed to these unwelcome emotions she knows she’ll do so anyway so she says, “Why don’t you tell me about it, from the beginning? It’s always better to hear it in the principal’s own words.”
Cromwell appears to accept this—in fact, the gambit has yet to fail—and says, “I have a pool of in-house AIs, all custom-made. There’s one that does resource arbitrage. It’s one of my biggest earners, but lately it’s been noticeably off. I don’t want to prejudice your judgment, so I won’t tell you much more, but I’d like to know what you make of it.” He seems momentarily uncomfortable, apparently in the belief that she’s capable of caring about his company’s secrets and failings.
“So it’s not working as intended?”
“Not exactly.”
“Could it be a virus?”
Slight hesitation. “No. I think not.”
“If it’s some kind of exotic virus, you need to hire someone else. That’s not what I do, and I don’t want to waste your time or money,” she says, wearier than ever.