“C ao Pao Wong?” I glare at the Pillar.
“Better than Kung Fu Panda,” the Pillar remarks.
“You were here before?”
“It’s a long story.” The Pillar changes the subject and turns to Xian. “We need a favor.”
“Shoot,” Xian says, and I can’t fathom his dialect or slang. Maybe he is some sort of a modern monk.
“We have a puzzle that led us to you.” The Pillar shows him the note we found in the chess piece.
“Sticky note!” Xian seems fascinated with it. He sticks it on his head. “Haven’t seen one of those in about…hmmm…forty years.”
“I’ll send you a tank full of sticky notes later,” the Pillar says. “As you can see, it has the words Deep Blue written on one side.”
“White Stones on the other,” Xian says.
“Let’s stick to the part you know about,” the Pillar says.
“You mean the machine?” Xian looks all serious and worried.
The Pillar nods.
“You remember what the machine looks like, right?”
“Of course,” the Pillar says. “A long, monolith-like black box. Inside it are all the wires and microchips that make it think.”
“Good memory, Cao Pao Wong.”
“I think the puzzle is a secret way to open it.”
“No one has been able to open the machine ever before. I hope you remember that.”
“I know; even the guys at IBM believed it was haunted when they couldn’t open it after the game with Kasparov. Just tell me where you keep it.”
Xian rubs his chin. “This is going to be a bit of a problem.”
“Why so?” I interrupt.
“Like the Pillar said, it looks like a monolith—black, intimidating, and huge. You look at it and feel strange and conflicting emotions.”
“So?” I ask.
“Let me put it this way,” Xian says. “It looks like the monolith in that Space Odyssey movie by Stanley Kubrick.”
I haven’t seen the movie, so the Pillar explains it’s about space exploration, where a mysterious monolith is found by astronauts. The monolith is shown in the movie to have taught the first man, apes precisely, how to hunt and make a weapon. In brief, it showed man how to make things, from a hunting weapon to a thinking computer in our modern-day.
“I get it,” I tell Xian. “So the IBM machine looks like that monolith in the movie. What does this have to do with us seeing Deep Blue now?”
Xian takes a moment and then says, “Well, my monks are now worshiping the machine in the middle of the snow.”