“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.
“A front for what, exactly?” he asks. She freeze-frames his expression—false smile on the lips, eyes narrowed in fear, hostility.
She remembers the high city and the girl—eurasian, probably a teenager, how her car’s windshield was webbed with cracks and looked like it was last washed a thousand miles ago. She’s on the verge of explaining, or trying to, as in duty bound, but she doesn’t like him, and in the absence of sympathy it’s hard to communicate subtle things, and she thinks he’d relish the chance to play interrogator. “It’s hard to say just what it was hiding,” she says, as neutrally as she can.
“And why is that?”
“Well, I suppose it’s because the AI was hiding it,” she says. She remembers the AI’s vastness, and shivers as its echoes press at her.
“That’s a very strong claim,” Martin says, looking up, fingers poised over his tablet. “I assume you can support it with evidence?” He’s in his late twenties, and has that slightly fussy programmer diction—his sense of his manhood will be tied up with his technical skills, and this must be his first job, so he’ll be more invested than he needs to be. She urges herself to meet his hostility with compassion. Fails utterly.
“It’s too complicated for me to try to convey the details,” she says. “My job is to provide an outline of what’s the case, not to convince you of anything.”
He half-sneers, half-laughs, but before he can speak she says, “I have another appointment,” and rises. She hasn’t read her contract with W&P, but knows that in it, as in all of her contracts, there will be a clause capping the debrief at half an hour—she reserves the right to answer further questions over email—it’s something she usually uses to fend off clients who become fascinated, and want to linger.
She’s already turned away when she hears his phone get a text and he says, “Wait. Please don’t go.” His tone is different, supplicating. She turns back, finds him looking alarmed. “We’d really like you to stay. I’m authorized to offer new and favorable terms.”
She wonders what could have changed so suddenly. Not that it matters, as in her heart she’s already gone.
She says, “You’ve got my agent’s number.”
* * *
Afterwards she always needs to be alone.
She squats by the wall outside the hangar, pulling her jacket close against the cold wind from the Bay, wishing she still smoked, letting herself attend to the echoes of the machines.
Her mind is aglow with power grids, the ley lines of the freeways, water in free fall in the dark. She reminds herself that these are the machine’s thoughts, not her own, and that she must let them go, but still they whirl in her memory. She inhales the sharp salt reek of the wetlands, watches the planes’ choreography in the airspace over SFO; the fugue stirs, not far from the surface, and she has a sense that planes and bay are shadows and symbols whose true significance is hidden but that revelation is close. Her hand finds a stone on the asphalt, grips it—she grinds her fingers into its surface, savoring its texture, reminding herself that she is here, in this morning, in the world, not lost in the pages of some vast and secret book. She thinks of coffee, its heat and bitterness. Breathe, she reminds herself, staring blankly at the Bay’s glitter.