“But you are, and in about ten years,” the old man says, making an effort to say this matter-of-factly.
“Ten years is a lifetime,” she says.
“Ten years is an eye-blink. It will pass, and then comes the next thing.”
“For you, there will always be a next thing,” she says. “It’s what you wanted.”
The old man stares into space, then says, “When I was a young man I went to Iceland. I had no real reason—I just wanted to go—I liked their poetry and I wanted to see the world. It was the end of the season, the summer fading, and I rented a car and left Reykjavík, the city, their only city, then, behind. Now to think of Iceland is to think of software but back then there was nothing, just the empty island and the glaciers, remote and menacing, the waste at the heart of a place no one went. It was already evening and I didn’t know where I was going, didn’t even know where I’d sleep, and I was afraid, hurtling along the ring road, as I lost the light. I hadn’t even remembered to bring a coat. It was painterly, the graded shadows of the mountains, the color of distance, the ghosts of shape.”
“Now you can go back.”
“That Iceland is gone. It’s arable now. Cultivated. All tourist traps and code factories. But that’s not the point. It’s how I feel. This future I’m approaching.”
“I’ve stood between you and the world for a while now,” she says, “and I’d do it forever, if I could, but soon enough you’ll have to get along without me.”
“The world doesn’t suit me.”
“Then you’ll reshape it.”
“And if I can’t, then that other door is open.”
“Other door?”
“Pills. Heights. I don’t much like guns. These are the doors that lead out of eternity.”
“I don’t like to hear these things,” she says.
“I didn’t tell you, did I,” the old man says, recollecting himself. “They’ve changed the terms. Akemi no longer suffices—now they want Ms. Sunden too. Not what I had expected to come of her visit, and I can’t imagine she told us much of the truth, but it doesn’t matter. There’s just the one game in town, so I’ll touch my cap and hop to it.”
“Your good friend Irina,” the woman says bitterly.
“She’s interesting. Unique. An intermediate kind of thing. You can’t begrudge me my interesting friends—I’ve been collecting them since before you were born.”
“Wonderful. She can keep you company through the ages.” Her voice sounds toxic and artificial.
“We’ll see. She’s essentially mercenary, and her price is within my means. Hiro keeps encouraging me to take more direct action, but I’m not yet prepared to accept his standard of ethics. I haven’t told you about Hiro, have I? He handles my disavowables. His résumé is a demon’s. You’ll never meet him. In any case, most likely that will work out, one way or another, and most likely Hiro will get the phone, last night’s debacle notwithstanding, and soon after that I’ll have no real limits. I’ll hold more power than any one man since, oh, Genghis Khan. I’ll be able to make things whole, and I’ll have everything I’ve ever wanted, except for one thing.”
As the old man grips her hand the scene and in fact the clinic seem to be floating away and Thales realizes how tired he is, more tired than he’s ever been before, and the migraine is coming, and though he knows he should keep fighting to try to make an impression on the surgeon it’s no longer in him to act and he slumps in his chair feeling that the clinic and the surgeon are remote and insubstantial and have nothing to do with him.
Somewhere, the surgeon is saying, “I need to make changes but I’m not sure where.”
Thales is distantly aware of the surgeon doing something on his tablet and then, spontaneously, Thales vividly recalls the evening light on the brick wall of an empty storefront on the Westside. The surgeon does something else, and Thales recalls the shifting weight of a glass of water in his hand.
“What did you experience?” asks the surgeon.
“A wall. A glass of water,” Thales says, surprised out of his torpor. “What are you doing?”
“So that was episodic and sensory memory. Let’s try again.”
The physician does something else to his phone, and Thales curls up in his chair, wholly spent.
“What was that like?” asks the surgeon, but Thales has pulled his knees to his chest and now sees nothing but black and grey moiré patterns and in fact feels nothing but a flicker of interest in the logic of his dissolution.
“There,” says the surgeon. “Maybe that’s it. Let’s see if it works.”
Thales is suddenly wide awake. “What did you do?” he asks, though in the moment of asking he knows, in fact it’s obvious that the surgeon is accessing his thoughts through his implant, and in his clarity he realizes that his clarity is new, and presumably artificial, and he wonders how long he’ll get to keep it.
“Good,” says the surgeon. “I’ve locked it at high activation. Now we can work.” Thales nods and forces himself to smile, the better to conceal his burgeoning anger at this casual manipulation of the structures of his innermost being, though perhaps this is mere petulance and he should tolerate what’s necessary for his recovery, but now in his acuity it’s like his thoughts are tumbling forward and he sees that the surgeon’s story doesn’t hold together—the protocols amount less to treatment than to a veiled threat and if the videos with the strangers were part of a clinical test they’d probably feel anodyne and as though they’d been scripted for some particular purpose instead of essentially opaque and highly specific—and Thales feels like he’s become a detective sifting the evidence of the world as he searches for a plausible motive behind the surgeon’s actions; it seems like the surgeon wants him to be biddable and inclined to answer questions but the only things that are certain are that information is still missing and that the surgeon has lied.
13
Secret Book
“It’s a front,” Irina says. “Your arbitrage AI. There’s something else going on underneath.”
They’re in a conference room of perfect neutrality. Neither Cromwell nor Magda appeared for the debrief; her interlocutor, Martin, some flavor of quant, is scowling at his tablet while scribbling notes. According to his class ring, he’s a newly minted Ph.D. from Toronto; he looks like he learned how to knot his necktie on the web. It’s clear he finds it necessary for her to know she doesn’t impress him.