There’s a sense of decreasing pressure as the machine turns back to its work. It’s sublimely complex, but somehow empty, and she feels certain it doesn’t know she exists. Could she have been wrong? No—there’s something else, barely there, and now, just like that, vanished. She adjusts the filters, eliminating the flows of energy and traffic, and now the city is gone, leaving her floating in an empty neutral space.
She looks out into the dark. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing without end. I know you’re there, she thinks, trying to persuade herself, and there, like she’s willed it into being, a distant phosphene shimmer. Gone already, but she pursues it, and yes, there it is, receding. (She’s aware of following it off of W&P’s servers and out into who-knows-where—she feels like an explorer in a lightless country.) Will it always be like this, she wonders, though it’s only been seconds, chasing this fleeting sense of presence, never giving up or getting closer. She stops abruptly, because there before her is another machine, like a turbulent ocean of pale light.
It’s fathomless, crystalline. Rapt, she drifts closer. It’s the biggest AI she’s seen by far, bigger than she’d thought was possible. Its surface is golden, seething, is already closer than she thought, and now she’s in it.
Sense of rushing over the sea at dawn, and then the paper-lantern glow of the glass and steel towers of a city rising from the waves, rising up without limit, its heights lost in cloud and the blue of distance, and there, up at the apex, something is hidden, and she can’t quite bring it into focus …
Hard transition to a road through the desert under a dust-cloud sky, empty except for a girl driving too fast in a car that isn’t hers, and the girl is leaving everything behind, and Irina pities her, for she’s lost, though the road lies straight, and doesn’t know where she’s going, and now the road is gone and there’s a screen shimmering with static in a steep room full of black seats where a woman sits alone holding her phone in both hands, looking old and tired in the half-light and staring at the screen as though it hid her salvation, and she thinks someone says, It’s you. In the voice she hears distance, and surprise, and maybe wonder, and she starts to speak, though she doesn’t know who will hear her, or what she’s going to say, but everything is collapsing, and as the fugue dissolves the houselights rise and she hears the projector’s whine as it powers down. She’s clutching her phone too tightly; deliberately, she unclenches her hands. The back of her shirt is damp with sweat but she shivers in the cold of the theater.
12
Clinic
The interior of the town car is dark as a cavern, cramped by the thickness of the armor of the hull. No sound, there, but for the muffled creak of leather as Thales shifts in his seat. The windows, set to black, don’t show him his reflection.
As the car accelerates, the crash seat folds itself around him with a ginger, almost maternal, precision. The map of Venice Beach on the dimmed seatback display shows him leaving the hotel’s garage, passing beyond the last of its defenses—there’s a faint vibration as the car’s weapons come online. There will be other cars, he knows, pulling out beside him, empty and identical, a fleet of sacrificial distractions, and in each, he imagines, there is a false, other Thales, bound for someplace else.
His father died in a car like this, Thales in the seat beside him. He tries to summon the memory, but of course there’s nothing, just an absence, and images from after the fact, which is probably a kindness. That car’s armament was the same as this one’s, but his mother says the risk is less, with his father gone, that now his uncles are the focus of the violence. (Even so he feels her constant tension, her new fear of strangers.)
In the weeks after the attack, she’d barely let him leave their suite, had spent all day reading to him and holding his hand; once, when he was having a clear day, she’d taken him to a tiny, beautiful house she’d built as a young woman in the mountains over LA, back when she still worked as an architect, but recently she’s been staying in her room—he suspects she’s been drinking—and once again he’s going to the clinic alone. He doesn’t have his math book, so he closes his eyes, sinks deeper into the seat, wonders what the odds are that he’ll reach the clinic whole.
*
He wakes with a start as the car turns and the mini-fridge clinks. Opening it, he finds two splits of champagne, one open and half-empty, its carbonation fading—his brothers must have been using the car. As he shuts the fridge the car stops, the door sighing open onto too much light, and as he covers his eyes he’s momentarily convinced that he’s denying himself the specifics of his death, but in fact there’s no ambush, just the clinic’s courtyard.
The car is parked in a garden of raked sand and a few irregular stones, placed with studied randomness, and low pines whose wind-bent forms suggest endurance in the face of extremity. The curved walls are high and sheer, defining a cylinder of air and light; he looks straight up into dust motes burning in the sun. Behind the car, the foot-thick steel gate closes soundlessly, sealing him in.
A girl in clinic livery approaches—young and pretty, he notes distantly—her posture conveying both welcome and submission. He wonders if the better clinics have always been modeled on elegant hotels, perhaps to conceal their underlying horror.
Within, the clinic is cool and dark and the girl says they’ve lowered the lights for him, to minimize the potential for—she frowns—disturbance; she looks him full in the eyes and her face, which might hold pity, is a landscape of uncertainty and of a significance into which he feels himself falling and though he looks immediately away the migraine flickers and he finds himself staring into a twisted blur of curvature and fangs but he exhales carefully and stills his mind and the blur ripples and resolves into a white porcelain vase with blue Chinese dragons on its stand by the reception desk.
The girl sends him down a corridor alone and he starts to feel steady, almost poised, probably capable of facing the morning, and this isn’t least because the tessellations of the floor’s tile are predictable without being intricate or even interesting and then, deep within the clinic, he opens a door onto an office as enshadowed as a tomb where the only color is the muted red of a Persian rug on the weathered hardwood floor. His surgeon is there, behind his desk, perfectly still, studying his phone, and Thales notes the clarity with which the little light picks out his features.
“Is it more physical therapy today?” Thales asks, feeling edgy, trying for a weary familiarity.