“What?”
“That’s the strange part,” she says, her voice quieter than she wants, afraid he’ll ask her to repeat herself. “It was another AI. A big one. And there was a city in the waves, very high, higher than seems possible. There was a secret there. And there was this girl,” she says, and suddenly doesn’t want to talk about it, but if she can’t talk to Philip then she really can’t talk to anyone at all, and she’s afraid it sounds like she’s babbling as she says, “and she was driving too fast through the desert by herself, and she didn’t know where she was going, or what she would do, and she was afraid of everything, all the time, and she was happy, because she was leaving the past irretrievably.”
“The opposite of you, then.”
She tries not to show that she’s wounded, reminding herself that, when he sees something clearly, he can’t hold his tongue. “Exactly. The opposite of me,” she says, and he looks away, and it’s always been a little like hanging out with a sibyl, the fit coming at odd moments, the truth boiling out uncontrollably.
“It gets stranger,” she says, still vulnerable, not caring. “Someone saw me. Spoke to me. Knew I was there, and who I was.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. No one, I guess. Things get fuzzy, in the fugue—I’m not even sure if it really spoke or if it was just something I got from the glyphs. So maybe the AI? And then the machine kicked me out, which is also a first.”
He swirls his wine, stares into space. “How did it feel? Your interlocutor. Was it … like anything, when whoever it was spoke to you?”
“They were surprised. Like they hadn’t expected to find me, but knew who I was,” she says, only realizing this as she articulates it.
He regards her gravely, his face deliberately blank, and she remembers frost flowers dense on the warehouse windows, that last year it snowed in London (they said it wouldn’t snow again till the next ice age came), the tiny, inadequate islands of warmth around the space heaters, how they lay companionably in his bed under what must have been thirty pounds of blankets, though they hadn’t been lovers in years, and drank hot wine from cracked cups, and in the small hours she’d finally told him about the trickle of registered letters from the makers of her implant, advising her of her risks, as they became apparent, of seizure, delusion, dementia, stroke. “It isn’t that,” she says. “I’m still all here. I’d know. I would. I, of all people.” He’s embarrassed to be read so easily, and she wonders if he’s forgotten how it is with them, what’s gotten in the way.
The candles flicker as the opening door admits a blast of cold air and in the movement of the shadows his face becomes an ancient mask, an ancestor spirit from a sacred grove on some remote archipelago, an image exhumed from deep within the mind, one that speaks to her of wisdom, loss, resignation. “It’s strange,” he says.
*
By the time the waiter brings the third bottle they’re holding hands across the table, which, she feels, is a ship, and the restaurant a sea, and that the world without is primal darkness, full of nothing but night and rain, the world on the evening of creation’s first day. “And what about everyone else?” she says, not sure who she means, or if she just means she cares for nothing beyond their circle of light.
“They’re disappointing,” he said. “We were ambitious, when we were young. We reached for the stars. We were to be Bloomsbury, in our way, but with more math and fewer middling talents. Historians of science were to marvel that we’d known each other at all, much less been friends, or shared the squat. I used to be angry, and excoriate them behind their backs, but now I barely have the heart to list their failures. Sasha is a math don at Oxford, that college where Oscar Wilde went, but mostly he teaches. Colin, who was going to make nanoscale replicators a reality rather than a running scientific joke, is a manager at a game company. Amanda, god help me, is a housewife, and often emails me about her twins’ prodigious aptitudes. From there it gets worse.”
“And what about you?” she asks. “What happened to your ambition? As I recall, you were going to make real AIs, ones that think like we do and actually know the world.” The question could be a mortal affront but their intimacy is such that she thinks his pride will allow it.
“I tried,” he says. “Easy to say, but entirely true. I read everything about AI. Not literally everything, not the student work or the tenure grist, of which there is a great deal, but everything good. At first I could only concentrate for five or so hours a day, but I was hard with myself, and by the end I could focus for sixteen. After a few years I was getting fat, and there were migraines all the time, so I started making myself exercise for an hour a day, and eating things besides curry and black coffee.”
“And what did you find?”
“Nothing. I found nothing. I failed. There were islands of order, and sometimes I had an intuition of a larger shape, but it was nothing I could ever quite name. It was maddening. Very nearly literally. Sometimes, in dreams, I understood them, the AIs, or thought I did, but when I woke up it always amounted to nothing. Becoming desperate, I resorted to mortifications of the flesh. I’ve never told this to anyone before, but I’d set myself a problem, and a time in which to solve it, and if I failed I had to drive a sterilized surgical needle through the palm of my hand. The pain was … clarifying. I realize this makes me sound like an emotionally disturbed teenager, but I had to try everything, to go farther than anyone ever had. I’d be Alexander or die.”
“And now?”
“I guess I died. There came a point when there was nothing more to try. Maybe if I had more lifetimes. So now I’m nothing, a mere entrepreneur, a tedious rich old fuck to be. The best I can say of myself is that I’m honest.”
*
“Even now we’re in your memory,” Philip says. “There behind your elegantly marred forehead.” The daylight is gone, now, the guards on the street invisible, no sign of the outside but the drumming of the rain. The other tables have emptied and filled and in the candlelight everyone looks happy, like their lives are replete, and there’s a woman, blond and ripe, who will run to fat soon but is, for now, beautiful, standing in the doorway, smiling radiantly at someone inside, looking like she’s just thought of something to say.