“I know! I assure you, I’m aware of the parameters of your expertise,” he said, smiling. “This is of some importance to me, and my talented young men are getting nowhere, though I didn’t really expect them to.” In a lower, more inward voice, he says, “It’s hard to find the right people. Only the brightest, the nearly autistic ones are any use, and they mostly want to collect stamps and solve Hilbert’s problems,” and she thinks of the rare, talented, incomplete boys who sometimes come close to doing what she does, how, in the technical world’s uppermost reaches, autistic symptoms have a certain cachet, ambitious young men affecting the inability to look one in the eye and a total innocence of the world.
Fathomless blue in the corner of her eye, pulling at her, and then an irresistible flash of intuition. “Is your problem AI running on hardware like that?” she blurts, pointing at the shard, and a beat of silence tells her she’s been impolitic.
Cromwell is about to speak but Magda turns to him and says, “Don’t you have a ten o’clock?” with such a studied professionalism that Irina turns in time to catch their shared look, and she realizes that they’re lovers, and probably new ones, and don’t wish to have it known, and she watches him as he assents, and it’s the combination of his intensity and his sincerity and the fact that he’s chosen this nervous, unfriendly woman in lieu of whatever model or actress or pediatrician she’d expect to find in a rich man’s bed that makes her interested enough to turn on her wireless again and run a search on him.
She finds the public records of his purchases of server farms, decaying factories, abandoned cities in Costa Rica. It’s been decades since he’s spoken to a journalist but fifty years ago, during the second AI bubble, he founded a sequence of start-ups, all long since acquired or dissolved, and his interviews from that era boil past, his remarks comprised of the usual founder’s boilerplate about striding boldly into bright futures, all of them forgettable, almost conspicuously vacant, though she senses an undercurrent of irony that suggests an awareness of playing with a form. Not long after the last start-up exited he’d bought a majority stake in ReTelomer Inc., an early player in genetic life extension, which later did very well; a forty-year-old editorial in Harper’s inveighed against ReTelomer for making long life available only to the rich, and she takes a moment to pity the writer as she would a child first encountering the hardness of the world. A website dedicated to the meticulous and fawning investigation of the higher beau monde asserts that Cromwell is much richer than is generally supposed, that most of his gains have been hidden from public view over the last generation, that he’s approaching the point of being a state unto himself, less like Leland Stanford now than some rapacious Borgia prince. Recent photos show him beside senators at fund-raisers and an older photo, in which he looks exactly the same, shows him drinking in a dive bar with a then-young actress who was famous about the time Irina was born; the oldest photo of all shows him in late adolescence peering at a computer screen beside an older, bearded man whom she realizes was a founder of one of the first googles, which puts Cromwell’s age at at least a hundred and fifty, an incredible figure, old even by the standards of the stratospherically rich—he must be one of the oldest people living, though he is, she believes, approaching the limit of what life extension can do. She wonders how all the years have shaped him, what desires survive.
On the periphery of the mass of data she notices that in his days collecting art he briefly owned The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which she saw once, years ago, in the Louvre, back when she’d meant to see and so hold forever everything beautiful in the world. She remembers her jet lag and sense of dislocation as she wandered into yet another room in the sprawling postcontemporary wing, the shock of the sight of the shark floating in the green fluid glowing in the glass-walled tank in the otherwise empty gallery, the shark’s jaws gaping, like its relentless forward motion had just then been arrested, and, as the words of the title had shimmered in her mind, tank and shark and text fused to become an image of a blind rage for more life, and the wrinkles incised in the shark’s face seemed to imply great age and an absolute and unthinking cruelty. Strange to have run her fingers down the cool glass of an artwork that had passed through his hands, though she supposes that’s what happens, with time, with those rich enough to be, in some way, central to things, and, of course, to survive.
And now a second has passed, and a new one is starting, and Magda is turning toward her, and before they can notice her abstraction she stands and says, “Let’s go wherever’s next.”
10
Laptop
Kern’s laptop chimes twice and he stops mid-punch, the bag swinging crazily till he stills it with his palm, then sits cross-legged with the laptop in front of him.
He’s found that it’s best to read one book at a time. This month it’s Penjak Tharanawat’s Radical Thai Boxing, in an English translation now ninety years old. He’s on the chapter about elbow strikes, how to use them to inflict hematoma and concussion, or to cut the skin over the occipital ridge so that blood will blind his enemy.
As the laptop wakes he remembers the years when its game was the focus of his life, and once again regrets that he came to the game’s end. Even now he sometimes hopes that there’s another game, held in reserve, so far, but about to be revealed, but if there is, there’s no sign of it today, just the usual hierarchy of the folders of the laptop’s library, which is infinite, or might as well be, containing, as far as he can tell, just about all the media that had been published as of sixty years ago.
There’s a samurai manual that has the maxim While you sleep, your enemy trains, and for a moment he’s afraid he’s being lazy and should go back to the bag, though his hands and shins are an agony, but no, it won’t do, hard training is one thing but overtraining is another; the laptop has documentaries about professional fighters reaching back centuries and he’s seen what can happen when they spend every waking hour in the gym, how their bodies stop working and in the ring they’re slow and stumbling and they end up sitting on the curb after their fights wondering how they could have lost when their commitment was total.
Before returning to Tharanawat, he indulges himself by bringing up a video clip, apparently made by a tourist a century ago, of a waterfall in the forest on a mountain in Japan in whose icy flow Miyamoto Musashi had once meditated. Musashi was a ronin, without teacher or attachments, and flawless, fighting sixty duels without losing once as he wandered penniless through the wilds of ancient Japan. An ascetic, Musashi, beyond fear or desire, indifferent to women, money, even survival. As the clip plays, Kern tries to clear his mind, imagine the force of the waterfall’s torrent.
*
He’d found his laptop in a landfill some six years ago, not long after coming North, in a deposit of fragmented wine bottles, its black plastic chassis held together with frayed translucent tape. He’d slid it under his shirt, before any of the other pickers noticed, and slunk back to his room to cherish it.