Long and lean, Philip, shoulders hunched, his face haughty in repose but she knows that only means he’s thinking. They’d met when they were students and he was skeletally thin and had really no money and once spent an entire semester reading in the library when his financial aid didn’t come through, and even when it did he never let her see where he lived—she suspected it was in the basement of an administration building, which he snuck into, at night, through a window, but it was clear she shouldn’t press him. When she’d hinted that the trust from her parents’ estate, though small, was more than she needed, he’d closed up like a slighted Spanish grandee. For years, even after his circumstances were less dire, he’d been utterly certain that owning more than one pair of shoes was a sign of unseriousness, and that one of the many virtues of books was that, in sufficient quantity, they were furniture. In the decades since he has made money, and discovered clothes, and with pleasure she sees him frown and sluice the beaded water from the moss-colored wool of an overcoat that can only be a Calatrava.
Three years since she’s seen him, and her other memory gives her the black brick of what had been a customs house when Victoria reigned and had become a cafe by the river, the burnished silverware shining on the distressed oak tables, the arched panes of tall windows framing the glow of the Thames, the squalid clinker of its bank, the lights implying bridges in the dark. Almost deserted, the one remaining waiter busied at a distance, and the solitude eased Philip’s tension enough for him to tell her that he’d been floating too long, felt that it was time to compromise his purity of action enough to find some definite place in the world, and so he was leaving, going to San Francisco, there to start a company and put down the roots he’d found he lacked, even if it meant a life less wholly of the spirit. The scene disperses under the pressure of his hand on her wrist. Kindly, he says, “You’re in your memory.”
He sits and they’re about to speak when the waiter arrives with the wine and pours a dram into a glass for his approval. A moment of stillness as this gesture recasts the scene, renders them symbolically a couple, and she remembers the first time they slept together, how she’d counted his ribs with her fingertips, how he’d trembled when he touched her, and the last time, just after graduation, her flight leaving in hours, for she was going to go and see the world and he pretended that this was unremarkable, no more than the next thing, but then, in a disgusted aside, Philip says, “This ritual means nothing to me but I’ll perform it,” touches the wine to his lips, nods curtly, and the waiter finally leaves.
He looks down, starts putting his silverware just so.
“So, tell me what your company’s doing,” she says brightly, knowing it relaxes him to hold forth on his work, and that later, his nerves settled, they can talk.
“Engines,” he says. “Engines for cars. Exotic ones, designed-by-AI, for Pagani, Tetsujin and, now, Lotus. Their complexity is incredible—fractal, almost—the most intricate things I’ve seen outside biology. We get them fabbed in Milan, at this facility where they make parts for rockets and jets. The engines work, in fact they work wonderfully, but no one understands why, and that includes the best mechanical engineers I’ve been able to find. So we have a lot of work, and we’ve put a new thing into the world, and thereby been of service to some race-car drivers and a handful of rich guys. They’re beautiful, though, the engines. The problem,” he says, impaling carpaccio with a fork, “is the people.”
She remembers the density of dark summer woods at the end of their freshman year, the white trunks pressed close around the pond, her flashlight skimming over the black water till the beam found his body among the ripples, and in the first moment of stark surprise she wondered if he’d drowned, and if it was deliberate, if his text had summoned her to bear witness to his death, but then he rose gasping in an eruption of foam; naked beside her on the muddy bank, he explained that he’d decided to stop speaking, for the semester, except, apparently, to her; he’d been sleeping all day, submitting homework online, seeking out lonely places, because it was too hard to be near other people; the quiet let his mind still. “Unbearable prima donnas, my employees,” he says. “The AI wranglers, I mean—the receptionist is lovely, and the girls down in marketing are like friendly little animals. But the technical people are at me all the time, demanding more money, more stock, or else they’ll leave and start their own shops. I don’t even really want to go to the office anymore.”
“So get rid of them,” she says, surprised at her own coldness, a throwback to the days when it was really just the two of them.
“But I need my bright young things, you see, for the cash to flow. It’s just that the media has discovered design-by-AI lately, and exaggerated their sense of their own importance. Have you seen these articles? There was one in the Times called ‘The New Mediums,’ which said anyone who can communicate at all with these opaque and somehow unknowable artifacts is more or less the peer of Newton, or in any case of Gauss, and should expect to be paid accordingly.”
“One does what one must for the cash for the Mayo,” she says, intoning it, almost, as though it were a precept from antiquity, although she hadn’t meant to, her latest visit threatening to rise to the surface of her mind, and then she notices that Philip has pulled into himself, that he has something to say, but doesn’t want to, and she sees him stifle it and say, “So what brings you to the Valley?”
“A last-minute gig with Water and Power. Have you heard about their new office? It’s meant to last at least a millennium. Either Cromwell is planning a thousand-year reich or he has his heart set on a legacy in architecture.”
“How is the old sod? It’s virtually impossible to get a meeting with him these days. Did you meet Magda? It seems to be her job to protect him from the vulgarity of the world. She lets one through only if one has something elegant with which to engage the greatness of his mind.”
“Mnemosyne” is on the tip of her tongue but she finds she isn’t ready to tell him about that, or what might have been a kidnap attempt, or how she gave a fraction of herself, in the most literal sense, to Constantin, right before he died, and how that sliver of self has found its own life in the world. (She wonders once again if Cromwell is her enemy, and the one who stole her memories—he certainly seems to be a locus of strangeness—but his true intentions remain opaque.) In any case, she can take care of her own problems, and in that moment Philip feels like a stranger with whom she is, for the course of dinner, inexplicably trapped. “He’s thriving,” she says, gamely making conversation. “As far as I can tell. And he’s a fan, or seems to be, god help him, a fact of which Magda is aware, which probably explains why she hates me, though we’ve barely spoken. It took me a while to figure it out, and by the time I did I couldn’t think of anything to do except pretending not to notice. Anyway, they called me because one of the house AIs was broken in some unspecified way.”
“Did you find out why?”
“I found something strange,” she says on impulse, feeling suddenly exposed but trying to keep it out of her voice, grateful for the echoes and the noise of the place. She decides to give him a measure of the truth. “It was doing energy arbitrage, nominally, but there was something else behind it.”