The match flares and fades, and then the next, and the next. The face of the man flicking matches into life and tossing them into the darkness is that of her first surgeon, and Irina is calm, lost in the slow sequence of conflagrations, and she thinks she’ll be content to watch forever but then the surgeon says, “These are the seconds, you know, burning away,” and lights another. In the dream she laughs and says, “Nothing is lost, or ever will be,” and summons forth all the recent images of the matches burning and fading out, delighting in her power, but the surgeon shakes his head and points at her stomach and looking down at a point just above her navel (she is naked, now) she sees a black spot so tiny it ought to be imperceptible, and as she tries, futilely, to scrape it away with her fingernails she can feel the tainted cells’ surging reproduction as they boil outward into clean tissue. The black spot widens before her eyes—it hesitates, as her immune system rallies, then surges again. As it reaches bone, she feels cold.
She sits up in the hotel bed and turns off her phone’s alarm; the sound of waves hissing over sand stops abruptly, leaving only room tone—voices reflected down corridors, the hum of the air-conditioning, distant traffic. In her bag are pills that offer sleep, or worse than sleep, but she’s already late, and the client pays well, and more years of life come dear, so, moving herself like a marionette, she gets out of bed.
Brushing her teeth, the little lines around her eyes are a legible fraction of a millimeter deeper, the visible consequence of another bad night, and what other, less obvious damage has her restlessness caused, damage not reparable by any decent plastic surgeon. “So get to work,” she tells her reflection.
In the early light the hotel lobby seems oddly tragic, suggesting a valiant determination not to waste the morning. Other souls rush by, coffees in hand, immersed in their phones or having energetic conversations with the air. Most are younger than she is, bustling young things from the vast reaches of the middle middle technocracy; a pretty, somehow Midwestern-looking girl with roses in her cheeks, clad in the Armani of seasons past, is all but hyperventilating as she berates a cloud of invisible subordinates who have apparently failed to establish a link between networks in Reykjavík and Poznan. Irina tries to imagine feeling so much emotion over infrastructure, thinks that, medical bills or no, she may have to be less frugal about hotels.
In the cab, the fog glows with diffuse morning light, a migraine light, and she puts on her sunglasses, closes her eyes. Her face, reflected in the chrome of the cab’s dash, looks closed, remote, arrogant, a mask formed over an interior darkness. She tries a smile, convinces no one. They’ll see her essential strangeness, but let them; her mind turns to the cathedral vastnesses of the AIs’ memories.
She dozes, soothed by the rush of tires, opening her eyes as the cab ascends an overpass and there, slipping by, are the favelas, like concrete termite nests on a monumental scale, if termites were inclined to cubism and many balconies. Occasional windows reflect the morning sun; squinting, she imagines she’s looking at geology, the product of a chthonic upheaval in the faults beneath the city, but, no, the favelas are actually like a Lebbeus Woods drawing she saw in an architecture textbook for half a second twenty years ago, and these things are, of course, what she always thinks when she sees favelas. Her other memory stirs—she has thought these thoughts two hundred and nineteen times, now two hundred and twenty.
Like sculpture, the favelas, but she reminds herself that, avant-garde rapture notwithstanding, they’re sinks for all the saddest ugliness in the world, that to set foot in them is to step back decades, or even centuries; they’re the last bastion of the old, bad kind of HIV, and have little law but the gangs in their various and occasionally lurid plumages—even the cops won’t go in except in armor. She’s read about refugees starving slowly, unlicensed dentists with third-hand tools, child brothels moving from room to buried room.
Childish, she reminds herself, still to expect to find wonder in cities, especially when it’s elsewhere, and just under the surface of things. She remembers the Metatemetatem, an AI that makes other AIs, owned by a Vancouver research lab from her last gig but one. Metatemetatem is a name given to a class of AIs that burn through trillions of possibilities a second in search of the shape of their successors; every Metatemetatem had been designed by its predecessor for some thousand generations and ninety years. There must have been some definite moment when they’d passed beyond the understanding of even the subtlest mathematician, though when this happened is a matter of debate—all that’s certain is that no one noticed at the time. Now most of the world’s software, and, lately, its industrial design, comes from machines that are essentially ineffable, though only a handful of specialists seem to realize this, or care, the world in general blithely unaware that the programs and devices that mediate their lives have emerged from mystery.
She drifts off but comes back enough to open her eyes to slits as the cab rushes through a canyon between buildings, and she could be anywhere, or nowhere at all. There’s no one else around, but every few seconds the cab passes through the shadow of the SFPD drones hovering at intervals over the street, which is a kind of company.
She wakes again when the car stops and the door clicks open; she steps out onto a vast too-bright field of concrete before what must have been a naval air hangar once, the Bay glittering beyond it. The hangar’s hull has weathered beautifully, the gradients of lichen on the ancient aluminum cladding streaked with ocher and rust. What is now much too much parking lot, bounded by distant chain-link fence and concertina wire, must have started as an airfield, or perhaps a spaceport, but she doesn’t think they had those, really, when the hangar was built. Cracked white lines on the tarmac denote parking stalls, swallowed by the scale of the place, magic diagrams to ward off air and emptiness. The few dozen parked cars seem forlorn, huddled around the hangar against the morning. Gulls circle; the wind brings her the Bay, the tang of iron, the smoke of the fires in the cities to the east. She shivers, checks her phone; this is the place. She turns to watch as the cab pulls away.
In the hangar’s shadow, she feels calmer. She picks her way among the cars, which look mostly new, and mostly expensive, except for a handful of white fleet vans. A few workmen in paper overalls stand by low double doors set in the monumental wall, face masks around their necks, their eyes powdered with white dust; seeing the cigarettes burning between their fingers, she stops dead, intensely aware of the hours burning off of their lives; she’d once seen a video of a lung cell, in vitro, exposed to nicotine smoke—she remembers the cascading mutations, the computer model of unraveling DNA. The one nearest the door, an older man with an air of bemused dignity, smiles at her with yellow teeth and grinds out his cigarette on his calloused palm; in the face of his kindness, she is abashed to be read so easily, and to think that the lost time won’t matter for them anyway. He says something in Russian, and the others laugh and saunter away from the doors, indulging her. She’d once read a Russian dictionary, and the definitions of his words rise up in her mind, so many ragged chunks of disconnected meaning, but she pushes them away, as reminders of the distance between language and the world.
The doors open as she approaches, bringing her the high whine of power tools, an exhalation of cold air. Within, the space is vast, underlit and vertiginous; looking up into the shadows, she expects to see the gently bobbing ghosts of dirigibles past. Some workmen are grinding up regions of floor with industrial sanders, throwing up clouds of sparks and dust, others, with tablets, observing. The actual offices appear to be built onto the sides of the hangar’s interior; the effect is of mass-produced pueblos clinging to the walls of an Industrial Age canyon. A pause in the sanding; she hears the muted hubbub of voices, footsteps, their echoes, all illegible, and somehow comforting; the concrete under her feet, cracked and indelibly oil-stained, is covered with a thick, hepatic varnish.
No one challenges her, or even seems to notice her presence. Before her is a rising sweep of concrete that will be a reception desk, probably, when all’s done, but is, for now, abandoned; behind it is a huge, hollow globe, the diameter of a bus—the continents are iron, the seas absences and the major rivers are traced in blue enamel; the mirrored rectangles must be the great dams. She wonders if there are firms specializing in the sculpture of hubris, and do they ever build heroically scaled, improbably muscular statues of their older, more literal-minded clientele? It was the sort of thing they’d have had in Dubai, when it was a city-state, back before it was a ruin beloved of documentarians with its toppled spires, cavernous drowned malls, iridescent fishes schooling in the atriums of what had been hotels, would soon be reefs.
“Those are good boots,” says someone, a man with a tablet, older, but his face has the polished, windswept look of the better plastic surgery. She looks down at her boots—an entire commission blown on them, the best thing out of Milan some five seasons past; they have the matte gloss of old black clay, and, however sleek, have a hint of blockiness, the barest suggestion of engineer’s boots, which saves them from being at least a decade too young for her. “Let me guess,” he says. “You’re here with the travertine. Am I right?”
“No,” she says, wonderingly. “No travertine … marble?”
“But you looked like you must be the travertine,” he says. “The serpentine then?”
“I have no stone at all,” she says, showing her palms. His expression doesn’t change; superficially his outfit is corporate-neutral but the materials and the details are very good—he’s probably some kind of creative. “I’m here to visit with the house AIs. What’s the travertine for?”
“Flooring! At least, a judiciously calculated part of the flooring. It’s the most remarkable thing. Himself has commissioned us, us being Applied Structures Incorporated, to retrofit this hangar into viable office space that will last for the next one thousand years. Literally, the next one thousand—it’s in the contract in triplicate, in italic bold. I’ve spent the last two months measuring the rates of erosion of flooring materials, and having my little team of quants model traffic. It has to look the same in a millennium as it does now, he says, though he has conceded that it may take a patina.”
“All this toward what possible end?”
“Far be it from me to examine the motives of such a consistent patron of the applied arts. After all, the very rich aren’t like you and me.”
“No, they have a great deal more money,” she murmurs.
“Exactly! Anyway, this is nothing—we’re also building him a house to last one million years. We hired seismologists to find a stable site, someplace that won’t be subducted the next time Pangaea rolls around. We’re building on the top of the Rocky Mountains, which is almost not isolated. It’s an absurd project, but it has a certain grandeur—we hired evolutionary biologists, for heaven’s sake, to get ahead of the adaptations the bacteria will make to the cooling system. I can only imagine he’s obsessed with his legacy.” His eyes go to the tablet in his hands. “Materials crisis. You must excuse me. Good luck!” He smiles at her, is off into the hangar’s distances.
She stands there, emptied of all volition, watching the workmen grind the floor down as the seconds pass. A chime from her phone as a text arrives, joining the confusion of the echoes in the space, but she ignores it, and the next one, and the next. When she looks, finally, she sees it was Maya, her agent. You’re on-site? she’s written, and Hello?, and finally, They’re waiting for you upstairs, dear. Go Now. Do Well. Call Me Later and Tell Me How It Went. XXOXOX, and then she is walking toward an elevator bank, grateful that Maya is there, unseen and far away, to push her through the world.
As the elevator rises she turns on her implant’s wireless, is instantly aware of the presence of the Net, its vastness and sterility. There was a time when she did the background for a job before she was in the elevator, watching the ground floor recede. (But you can get away with it, she thinks. You can get away with almost anything.)
She sighs, then reaches out, lets the company’s data come flooding in, filling the shallows of her other memory with websites and SEC filings and all the articles in the trade press and the blog posts and the records of old offices and learned articles on dead platforms and generations of annual reports and every mention in every public document. Fragments of text flicker through her awareness—“… closing its Manhattan offices in favor of Northern California…” and “… predicting energy consumption in major metropolitan markets…” and “Water and Power Capital Management LLC, an innovator in AI-driven resource arbitrage and medical engineering…” and “… James Cromwell, serial entrepreneur, founder and majority shareholder”—and in all of this there’s a sadness for there can be no doubt that Water and Power, the focus of the lives of its thousands of employees, is essentially the same as all the other trading houses owned by all the other stridently aggressive suits, and in fact she could just walk out, and be damned to no money and the marred reputation and the dwindling options and presently the doctor’s face a mask of seriousness as, with practiced gentleness, he tells her that it’s time to make her preparations and before he can finish she’ll turn away and stagger out of his office, full of the terror of the nearness of the end. She thinks of the chill outside, the blue of morning. The lift stops. The doors slide open.
“Irina?” says a slight, almost plain woman, smiling, somehow birdlike, head cocked to one side. “I’m Magda. I’m so glad you could come.” Her ensemble is, Irina thinks, an Asano, and, as such, gorgeous, her blouse like fires flaring on a black patch of night, but she seems uncertain in her finery, and Irina wonders if she’s some sort of partner, perhaps newly minted, to be able to afford a designer she associates with maturing starlets, less formal cabinet ministers and, regrettably, minor royals, and she is expecting offers of coffee and the usual chatter to which she need not attend but Magda says, “Come with me—he wants to meet you.”
She duly follows, smiling woodenly, though she hates it when they want to meet her, as the questions are always the same, and, unless they’re very well bred, they’ll peer at her, fascinated by her difference. She thinks of her minute fraction of celebrity, centered on a handful of university departments, mostly brain science and AI, places she makes a point of avoiding.
Corridor upon corridor, none finished but all the same, loops of cable hanging from the ceiling like jungle vines, and she wonders what it would be like to be able to be lost. They come to a wide interior courtyard of bare concrete, stark in the muted light glowing through the tinted glass ceiling. Like winter, in that grey light. On each of the four walls is a sheet of canvas, ten feet across, restive in the air-conditioning; the canvas before her ripples, seethes, reveals a few inches of something spray-painted, complex, maybe some kind of writing? She wants to run her hands over the smoothness of the polished concrete, then take the rough canvas in her hands and yank it hard so it comes down in a billowing cloud to reveal … what? “It feels like a gallery,” she says, her voice reflecting off the walls.
“It will be,” says Magda. “When we’re done. It marks the transition to the inner offices.”
“What’s behind the canvas?” Irina asks.
“Nothing we’re ready to show yet,” says Magda with stagy regret and a false smile and Irina is surprised to find herself feeling like an unwelcome guest in another woman’s home. “He’s waiting,” Magda says, turning to lead her away.
They come to a massive steel door whose overengineered solidity speaks of bank vaults and a kind of vanity, but no, Irina reflects, that’s the mentality of a past time. She thinks of the LAPD (now reborn as the Provisional Authority), frantic and militarized, how you need the right ID, now, to get up onto Mulholland, how the drones scour the wastes through the night, like lethal constellations floating over the hills, visible from the flatlands, both reminder and warning. Metal groans at middle C as the door’s lock releases.
Darker than expected, within, a narrow room walled with bookshelves. There are fossils on the shelves, ammonites and trilobites and a carnosaur’s fanged grin, and butterflies pinned in display cases. At first it all reads as a set designer’s take on a Victorian naturalist’s study, but then she sees the books’ spines are broken, mostly, that they run to novels, number theory, card magic, recent history. The only light is from the far wall’s high windows, the dusty glass panes framing nothing. Cromwell sits at his desk, backlit and obscured; as he closes his laptop, there’s a momentary glow on the lenses of his glasses. The suits who’ve been waiting on him—attorneys, most likely—turn to regard her with glazed hauteur, unable to place her in any hierarchy, but she takes no offense, for, however well-paid, they’re essentially servants, and in any case her eyes are drawn toward Cromwell’s desk by a flare of dream-blue like the wing of a morpho.
The iridescence is from a jagged shard of metal as long as her hand, its surface comprised of tissue-thin membranes whose tiny convolutions remind her of disinterred cities, and these in turn comprised of other cities still; the purity of the blue is remarkable, a blue to disappear in, and as its forms fill her other memory the fugue stirs, which she won’t permit, not in company, so she looks away as she sets down the shard, which she has, she finds, picked up. The attorneys must have excused themselves. Behind his desk, Cromwell smiles up at her.
He’s younger than she’d supposed, but no, that’s just the quality of the work. He presents as a man whose age is just starting to show, his temples greying, the crow’s feet around his eyes concessions to the expected presentation of an alpha male. No tie with a dark suit whose very simplicity suggests considerable expense, like a kimono reinterpreted through bespoke Italian tailoring, and she sees how intently he’s watching her, and has the sense that she interests him, which is rare, for his kind, and she wonders if she was right to preemptively dismiss him. “It’s a computer,” he says, nodding toward the shard. “We think. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. It seems to be an improperly assembled prototype. Certainly designed by AI. Beautiful, no?”
“Beautiful,” she says, the word hanging there as she tries to put the blue from her mind, clear her other memory. She’s seen AI-designed computer hardware, but nothing like this. “Why this blue?” she asks, still shaken, feeling a little like she’s asked a question about the reason for the sky.
“The physicists haven’t been able to figure it out, though they seem to find the problem a compelling one,” he says. “In fact, I was hoping you could tell me something about it. Bright as they are, my researchers, they’re not…” He makes a gesture perhaps meant to indicate that she’s something else entirely but he’s too discreet to mention it.
She looks back at the shard, like a window on another world and a lovelier one, then quickly looks away. “It’d be hard to say with a microscope, much less with the naked eye. The AIs’ designs tend to be impenetrable. Sometimes I think they’re just addicted to complexity.”
“I’ve often said as much,” says Cromwell, eyes shining, and he has a friendliness, even a latent giddiness, that she doesn’t expect in Big Money. “It sometimes seems to me that trying to talk to the AIs is like trying to read the future in the clouds, or flocks of birds. Do you think we’ll ever really be able to communicate?”
It’s the right question—usually CEOs ask her when AIs will be able to predict the stock market, or when they can get a robot nanny (or, god help them, mistress). The bright young university men seem always to be claiming that true communication is just ten years away, but it’s been ten years away since before she was born. Cromwell’s interest seems genuine, even acute, so she says, “No, because there’s no common ground, and there never will be. We’re primates, evolved to live on Earth and pass on our genes, and this has given our thoughts a certain shape, but the AIs have nothing to do with these things, and their thoughts are shaped differently. Terrestrial matters are as counterintuitive to them as tensor algebra is to us. For them, the physical world has a kind of ghostliness, if they’re aware of it at all. Some of them don’t even know about time.” It’s the set piece she’d give to strangers at parties, years ago, before she stopped talking about her work, but who knows, it might strike Cromwell as profound.
“But surely there’s some way to bridge the gap. Maybe if they had enough information about the world.”
“They’ve tried that,” she says, trying to conceal her boredom, and not to remember how many times she’s had this conversation. “In fact, someone rediscovers that idea about once a decade, and has for more than a century, but no matter how many encyclopedias or decades’ worth of newspapers you put in front of the AIs, they still see nothing but confusion.”
It’s a commonplace, known to every grad student, but Cromwell seems rapt and says, “But it is possible, to connect with them, at least to a degree. I mean, that’s what you do. From what I’ve read, it’s practically who you are.”
Exhaustion washes over her, and as her will to speak fades the room starts to seem remote and unimportant, and Cromwell must have felt a door close because he says, “Forgive me. I’m too personal. A bad habit—one of the disfigurements of influence—it makes one unfit for decent company. I’ll let you get to work, but first is there anything I can tell you about the job?”
In fact, she hasn’t read her contract, or the email that Maya forwarded with the project précis, and if she checks email now there will inevitably be a new message from Maya reminding her of where she’s supposed to be and what she’s supposed to do there, carefully worded to suggest a subtle compassion and entirely conceal any impatience or disgust, and though she won’t want to read it and be exposed to these unwelcome emotions she knows she’ll do so anyway so she says, “Why don’t you tell me about it, from the beginning? It’s always better to hear it in the principal’s own words.”
Cromwell appears to accept this—in fact, the gambit has yet to fail—and says, “I have a pool of in-house AIs, all custom-made. There’s one that does resource arbitrage. It’s one of my biggest earners, but lately it’s been noticeably off. I don’t want to prejudice your judgment, so I won’t tell you much more, but I’d like to know what you make of it.” He seems momentarily uncomfortable, apparently in the belief that she’s capable of caring about his company’s secrets and failings.
“So it’s not working as intended?”
“Not exactly.”
“Could it be a virus?”
Slight hesitation. “No. I think not.”
“If it’s some kind of exotic virus, you need to hire someone else. That’s not what I do, and I don’t want to waste your time or money,” she says, wearier than ever.
“I know! I assure you, I’m aware of the parameters of your expertise,” he said, smiling. “This is of some importance to me, and my talented young men are getting nowhere, though I didn’t really expect them to.” In a lower, more inward voice, he says, “It’s hard to find the right people. Only the brightest, the nearly autistic ones are any use, and they mostly want to collect stamps and solve Hilbert’s problems,” and she thinks of the rare, talented, incomplete boys who sometimes come close to doing what she does, how, in the technical world’s uppermost reaches, autistic symptoms have a certain cachet, ambitious young men affecting the inability to look one in the eye and a total innocence of the world.
Fathomless blue in the corner of her eye, pulling at her, and then an irresistible flash of intuition. “Is your problem AI running on hardware like that?” she blurts, pointing at the shard, and a beat of silence tells her she’s been impolitic.
Cromwell is about to speak but Magda turns to him and says, “Don’t you have a ten o’clock?” with such a studied professionalism that Irina turns in time to catch their shared look, and she realizes that they’re lovers, and probably new ones, and don’t wish to have it known, and she watches him as he assents, and it’s the combination of his intensity and his sincerity and the fact that he’s chosen this nervous, unfriendly woman in lieu of whatever model or actress or pediatrician she’d expect to find in a rich man’s bed that makes her interested enough to turn on her wireless again and run a search on him.
She finds the public records of his purchases of server farms, decaying factories, abandoned cities in Costa Rica. It’s been decades since he’s spoken to a journalist but fifty years ago, during the second AI bubble, he founded a sequence of start-ups, all long since acquired or dissolved, and his interviews from that era boil past, his remarks comprised of the usual founder’s boilerplate about striding boldly into bright futures, all of them forgettable, almost conspicuously vacant, though she senses an undercurrent of irony that suggests an awareness of playing with a form. Not long after the last start-up exited he’d bought a majority stake in ReTelomer Inc., an early player in genetic life extension, which later did very well; a forty-year-old editorial in Harper’s inveighed against ReTelomer for making long life available only to the rich, and she takes a moment to pity the writer as she would a child first encountering the hardness of the world. A website dedicated to the meticulous and fawning investigation of the higher beau monde asserts that Cromwell is much richer than is generally supposed, that most of his gains have been hidden from public view over the last generation, that he’s approaching the point of being a state unto himself, less like Leland Stanford now than some rapacious Borgia prince. Recent photos show him beside senators at fund-raisers and an older photo, in which he looks exactly the same, shows him drinking in a dive bar with a then-young actress who was famous about the time Irina was born; the oldest photo of all shows him in late adolescence peering at a computer screen beside an older, bearded man whom she realizes was a founder of one of the first googles, which puts Cromwell’s age at at least a hundred and fifty, an incredible figure, old even by the standards of the stratospherically rich—he must be one of the oldest people living, though he is, she believes, approaching the limit of what life extension can do. She wonders how all the years have shaped him, what desires survive.
On the periphery of the mass of data she notices that in his days collecting art he briefly owned The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which she saw once, years ago, in the Louvre, back when she’d meant to see and so hold forever everything beautiful in the world. She remembers her jet lag and sense of dislocation as she wandered into yet another room in the sprawling postcontemporary wing, the shock of the sight of the shark floating in the green fluid glowing in the glass-walled tank in the otherwise empty gallery, the shark’s jaws gaping, like its relentless forward motion had just then been arrested, and, as the words of the title had shimmered in her mind, tank and shark and text fused to become an image of a blind rage for more life, and the wrinkles incised in the shark’s face seemed to imply great age and an absolute and unthinking cruelty. Strange to have run her fingers down the cool glass of an artwork that had passed through his hands, though she supposes that’s what happens, with time, with those rich enough to be, in some way, central to things, and, of course, to survive.
And now a second has passed, and a new one is starting, and Magda is turning toward her, and before they can notice her abstraction she stands and says, “Let’s go wherever’s next.”