As the houselights fade Irina’s heart rises. Her other memory is full of the last day’s imagery—sun glare on asphalt, her hotel’s existentially sterile lobby, the sudden chill of conditioned air as she stepped from the Santa Monica heat into the defense contractor’s office—which she now deletes, and those hours, briefly reprieved from oblivion, vanish for good, leaving an ache like a word just forgotten. (But even now new images accumulate: the flash of her phone as it acquires the local network, the smooth leather under her hand, her declining tension.) Like a sun slowly rising, the screen begins to glow.
Static, then, bright and churning. She watches intently, sifting the white noise for structure, but finds no more than the faintest ghost traces, always dissolved before she can give them a name. Her thumbs move in the air over her phone’s screen, changing the filters, upping the resolution and intensity, and for some reason she sees herself as if from a distance, a woman sitting alone, staring wide-eyed at the screen’s entropy, this most abstract of all possible cinemas. And then, without warning, the static is gone, and the AI’s thoughts are there before her, manifest as a dully glowing nebula, riddled with storms, roiling sluggishly. Her other memory floods with its geometry and shadows.
Zooming in, the storm’s surface becomes glyphs flowing in waves over the screen. The glyphs are intricate, radiant with significance that she can’t quite articulate. Like rain, she thinks, on a clear day, seen over miles of ocean. Like ideograms distended in a black hole’s gravity. Like thick filaments of DNA, fraying before her eyes. This is what she always thinks, on seeing the glyphs, and then, as always, she remembers that language won’t suffice here. She remembers rain blatting on the bay windows of a high room in a good hotel rising over the surf of the South China Sea; her lover, a mathematician, whom she never saw again after that night, had asked her to explain a glyph, just one, the simplest, fully, and she had tried, as the hotel swayed, just perceptibly, in the wind, offering analogies, at first, and then, when that failed, reciting the glyph’s structure in a child’s singsong, her voice rising and falling, and as she wound on and on she lost track of where she was, seeing blurred shadows of glyphs in the rain channels on the glass, and then of time, until, finally, he stopped her with a finger to her lips, and moved her hair aside to kiss tenderly her forehead’s faded scar. She cranks the resolution, then, and the glyphs seethe, splitting and fusing, burning off into nothing, her face flickering in the violence of the light. Her perception vibrates as her other memory churns, searching for pattern, vainly, and the moments pass, and still she can make nothing of the glyphs rushing by.
She knows, then, with an absolute and dismal certainty, that her gift is lost, that the machines’ luminous otherness is closed to her for good, but then the fugue hits, and her breath catches. The theater is gone, and she’s somewhere else, bodiless, lost in the light and motion of the transit of Los Angeles.
She knows the temperature, the wear and slickness of every meter of every highway in the Inland Traffic Authority. She hears all the chatter of all the surveillance drones hovering high in the amber smog, and sees, through their cameras, tens of thousands of taillights receding. She sees all the cars’ positions and their velocities and the spectral probabilities of accident and delay overlaid on the interchanges, the overpasses, the long desert straightaways, and the patterns implied by these trajectories, beyond number, without meaning, rising up endlessly, like thermals shimmering over the freeways, pulling at her attention as they form and disperse, and there on the coastal highway where the ocean roars under raw cliffs a new BMW’s steering fails catastrophically, and three lives and the car’s computer blink out for good, and in that moment seventeen more cars merge onto the freeway, and she is grateful, almost, for the accident that marred her life but brought her this vision.
Time falls away, and she would linger there, in transit’s endless present, but she reminds herself that she is not the sum of all velocities, that she is, in fact, alone, somewhere, in a theater, staring at its screen, her neck aching and her eyes dry, that she has work to do, a question to answer, that the AI isn’t doing what it should.
The filters change—somewhere, she is changing them—and in rapid succession she knows the mass of the water behind the high desert dams, the number of solar cells turned like silver flowers to the sun, the blue Chartres glow of Cerenkov radiation in the coolant tank of a desert fission plant, the kilojoules of power humming through the high-tension lines strung over the desiccated mountains, through the exurbs, pouring current into the Los Angeles sprawl. A sense of pressure, then, and heat lightning flaring at the edges of her vision, and the machine is with her, vast and slow, less persona than weather.
She’d been diligent, once, in trying to know them, but that was long ago, and now it’s enough to look, as others look at the stars. The machine lacks all human feeling, and all human meaning, but somehow feels close. Its thoughts pour over her—it’s like trying to read letters written on turbulent water—and it’s beyond even what her other memory can hold, so each moment, as it passes, is lost for good; she is acutely aware of leaving a strand of old selves behind, like brilliant pebbles on the timeline, of falling, headlong, into the future. This, she knows, is how other people always experience time, and she wonders if they notice.
She wills herself to passivity, letting the torrent of its thoughts roar around her, like an infinite flock of birds always exploding into motion, and is drawn up with them, through layers of abstraction, and at first there are glimpses of meaning—transient correlations between delays in coastal traffic and the dry mountain wind, strange spikes in power usage repeated at intervals of years—but then there’s just form, beyond words, and her mind is a cloud dissolving in the wind.
Abruptly, the maelstrom crystallizes as the machine’s focus narrows onto the Santa Monica coast, the fortress enclaves of the rich behind the high walls glittering with jagged broken glass. Its thoughts slow as it runs over and over the long chain of causes whose sole conclusion is the shadow of a probability that they’ll burn the lights a little longer, tonight, in those high rooms over the sea, and Irina sees that, for all its intricacy, it seems to be performing exactly as intended.
The machine starts buying up futures contracts, wringing all the value from its sliver of prescience. What now? she thinks, as its millions of micro-trades pour out into the markets, and she’s tired, and ill at ease, though she’s just been sitting still—the fugue flickers as her focus wanes. She wonders if it’s lack of sleep, then realizes she feels watched.