13

Since Leo has been working on the E-Creative project, under the Doctor’s supervision, he’s been assigned an individual cubicle in the most exclusive wing of CraftER. He’s heard a lot about this part of the building. His ex-coworkers tried to hide their envy by citing the rumor that if it was difficult to get in, it was even more difficult to get out. As if someone, after being promoted, would want to go back to their old position, he argued back when they started clutching at straws, citing all kinds of pretexts in order to ignore the evidence. If people were spending whole weeks without coming out it must be that the level of comfort and the rewards inside were incomparable with those outside. And if, once finished, they left the company, it would be to get even better jobs. He refused to listen to fantasies about brains pushed so hard they went mad, thrown out once they were no more than human waste, and he was even less prepared to believe them.

Now he’s been able to confirm his suspicions. It’s been days since he went home, not even to sleep. Why should he leave if he’s got everything he needs here and it makes him happy? Everything apart from Bet, of course, and maybe chess matches. He himself cannot quite understand his addiction to the physical presence of his opponent. Long distance, he’s lost matches against adversaries that he’d always beaten and, worse still, he hadn’t enjoyed the victories, as if it were a very different game than the one he usually got so excited about.

First his old colleagues, then Bet, and now chess … Why can’t he concentrate today? At this rate he won’t even finish the program he left practically completed last night. He must be unsettled by the prospect of leaving the cubicle so soon. Like it or not, knowing that all the information about the prosthesis will be erased as soon as he crosses the threshold makes him a bit nervous. Dr. Craft had assured him that, apart from that memory lapse, he wouldn’t notice anything else. In fact, he gave him a practical demonstration when, terrified by that clause of the contract, he was about to change his mind. The timeout button, as he called it, was just a simplified copy of the mechanism incorporated into the cubicles, but it really did the job. He can clearly see in his mind’s eye the dueling table that the Doctor had proudly shown him: its wooden shell with swords set into it and, in the middle, the spectacular touch screen. He can remember perfectly that a riddle popped up on it and he read it, and, what’s more, he found it absorbing; but as soon as he pressed the button, it was erased not only from the screen, but also from his memory. He couldn’t have explained how it worked even as a matter of life and death.

The waves of encryption the device added to the brain were innocuous, he’d checked it out. There weren’t any side effects either at the time or after, so in that sense he isn’t worried. What annoys him is being at the mercy of a mechanism that he doesn’t understand. Although the Doctor explained the basic idea to him, hinting that he could work the details out for himself, he hasn’t been able to get his head around it and has ended up convincing himself he’s been conned. Because … who would reveal the secret that gave them an advantage? Not the president of CraftER or most people he knew, starting with Bet. How many times had she warned him to take his inventions off the net before the company ordered him to do so? He must be the only idiot who gets a kick out of divulging his inventions. As impractical an addiction as needing the physical presence of an opponent when playing chess. If he at least had the table available to him, he could run tests and try to find out how each component worked.

He still doesn’t understand why they call it “timeout,” since it’s just a memory-less time that passes like any other. Maybe it’s a timeout for the duel, as it’s postponed, but it’s definitely not for the players. That’s something that hasn’t been invented yet and would be something he’d like: That the world carried on its normal course with him able to pause and then un-pause later on when the great technological fantasies have been brought to fruition, with him able to make good use of them. Or even the opposite, stop the world so he can spy on what’s being done in other laboratories and research centers, without anyone stopping him, without even realizing, since he’d be going at infinite speed compared to the poor people stuck on pause.

At first he thought the Doctor’s device would be useful for his wireless transmutation. At the same time that one person is injected with the electroencephalographic records of another, they’d be emptied of their own records or, if not, have them shut down to avoid interferences. But straightaway he realized that it didn’t work like that, the timeout device didn’t take memories away, it was more like adding them: it emitted waves of encryption that attached themselves to the waves generated by the individual when they read the riddle or performed any other activity. To erase the record, you just had to deactivate the transmitter. The signals generated in the brain, even though they’re the same ones as before, become mere noise once they’re stripped of the encryption base. The memory is there … it will be there when he leaves the cubicle a couple of hours from now to go pick up Bet, but he won’t have the key to decode it.

Lost in thought, he hasn’t even realized that ROBco has taken control of the wrap-around screen that, when stretched to its maximum, covers the walls of the space, and when it asks permission to deactivate the holographic partition walls, he almost jumps out of his seat. It has the results of the comparison it was assigned this morning; not like him, who hasn’t been able to stop getting side-tracked by his imminent outing. How little control, he’s making a fool of himself, and this moron, with all its neurolearning and pedigree, hasn’t even learned to stop him when he’s wasting time like an idiot. He looks up at the ever-watching electronic eyes of the cameras and thinks how lucky he is that they can’t read his mind. Then, the idea that his dreamed transmutation could make that kind of mental surveillance possible briefly crosses his mind, but he doesn’t make an effort to retain the thought.

He has before him, in parallel, representations of the structure of a cutting-edge hypothesis generator and the imagination algebra he’s been working on. He’s deliberately developed it without knowing anything about the generator so that, a posteriori, he can compare them and extract the best of both.

As expected, the generator follows an evolutionary scheme, consistently applying random mutations to the same idea and selecting the best variant. As if blind Darwinian evolution could be a font of creativity! He would never rely on fate doing his work for him, not when there are powerful automatic inference tools to guide the choice of possibilities. Thanks to these tools, his algebra mechanizes the creative process, avoiding all randomness and subjective evaluation. He’s pleased with it. But he has to admit that it has a limited, determinist scope. It’s possible that by adding some random but controlled sources from the generator he could increase its power.

With the help of the panoramic chart he’s able to quickly get a global picture, but meticulously analyzing which mechanisms are worth importing to his algebra would take hours. Plus he isn’t in the mood right now, even if ROBco is waiting expectantly next to him, ready to act as his assistant.

“It’s not worth us starting, if I have to leave in a moment.” As ROBco is still staring at him insistently, he admonishes it, “I told you: I can’t turn off and back on again and pick up where I left off, like you do, see if you can finally build that into your model.”

“Confirmation: It was incorporated seventeen days, four hours, thirteen …”

“Stop, stop, stop … I’ve also told you several times that it’s not necessary to be so precise. And if you’re aware of my limitations, I don’t understand why you insist on starting work.”

“Playback: You said “I have to leave in a moment.” Question: why?”

“I get it: I forgot to inform you that I’m going out with Bet today. Okay, you don’t have to correct anything, my mistake.”

“Request: What do I have to prepare?”

“We’ll take the aero’car. The Doctor assured me there’d always be one available.”

“Acceptance: I will check it is ready. Consultation: any other tasks?”

“Yes, it would be advisable to get ahead with the work. The next step will be to fill this formalism with content”—he waves at the diagrams covering the walls. “Collect as many encephalic records as you can from people performing creative tasks: artists, designers, inventors … and also mathematicians and physicists demonstrating theorems, to see if I’m right in thinking there are similarities. Use the same amount of geniuses as anonymous people, above all we need a wide variety of data in order to process it and extract correlations. It would be best if the records had introspective annotations attached.”

“Workload accepted. Any additional criteria for candidate selection?”

“It’s crucial to avoid statistical normality. Perhaps it would be wise to include a mentally ill person within such a rich universe, but mainly people without prejudices, not confined by any rules, people who hate routine and are averse to repetition. Keep in mind that a creative spark not only depends on individual factors, but is also fostered by shock: between cultures, environments, traditions. Look for people who, for whatever reason, have been transplanted to a different environment. They say that a genius is a person who moves forward, that looks and lives beyond their time.”

“Consultation: Do I have to search on the web or do you want me to travel to some data warehouses?”

“Start with the web. If later on I need to send you …” Suddenly, a thought leaps into his mind. “Can you save everything on the screens now to the absolute memory?”

“Denied: It is prohibited, I thought you knew.”

“Can you save it in a perennial storage device, then, or even in a compatible peripheral?”

“Denied: Information belonging to CraftER cannot be copied to foreign storage devices. Why do you want it?”

Instinctively, Leo looks up to the surveillance cameras, without realizing that the movement, along with ROBco’s words, sets off the possible incident alarm.

Just ten minutes later, a virtual image of the Doctor is plonked down before him.

“Hello, Leo. Is everything ready for the demo of the preliminary version of the prosthesis tomorrow?”

“Good afternoon, Dr. Craft.” He tries to hide his surprise at a visit that was not drawn up in the control schedule. “Not the demo, but I’ve got the mechanism diagram finished. Would you like to see it?”

“Don’t bother showing me pipe dreams, I want results. Development by layers and a demo for each layer. I made that clear enough, didn’t I?”

“Yes sir, but I can’t add content without having the overall scheme ready.”

“And I can’t wait for you to finish the project before I decide if you’re worth anything to me or not.”

“But incremental design is slower, and often produces a patchy final product.”

“Cut the spiel. The others have already sent me prototypes; limited ones, of course, but still of some use to me.”

“Others? You mean there are other people working on this project?”

“What did you think? That you’re the chosen one, the golden boy?”

He’ll always be naive. If Bet were here, she’d tear him apart. He’ll never tell her about this.

“Fire me, if you want.” He builds up some courage. “I know if you take a look at the overall design you won’t demand useless demos that could slow down the production of a decent prosthesis.”

“You’re so proud of your design that you intend to sneak it out of CraftER, I see.”

Leo feels blood rushing to his face, and lowers his eyes, away from the screen.

“It was a passing thought, you must have seen it wasn’t premeditated.”

“That’s what’s saved your skin. I don’t care if you break the rules, creative minds are like that, what I cannot tolerate is you wasting time on this bullshit. Get it into your head that it’s impossible: the timeout device is one of the projects I directed personally.”

On the screen, the arrow formed by the Doctor’s eyebrows appears blurred and doesn’t seem as threatening as in person. Just like his words, which seem to come out agreeably: he even recognized that Leo has a creative mind, the highest compliment you could imagine coming from Dr. Craft’s mouth. People really are unpredictable; he’s caught out, and then, as part of his telling off, he’s pummeled with praise. He’s been left in such a vulnerable state that, without realizing, he’s already agreed to have a demo ready for the next control meeting, ten days from now.

The sensible thing would be to get down to work straightaway and cancel his outing, but Bet would never forgive him. She’s already enough of a pain in the neck with her insistence that he’s deliberately keeping the project a secret from her. It’ll be difficult to make her understand that, outside of CraftER, it’s not that he doesn’t want to explain it to her, it’s that he can’t remember what he does when he’s in there. With some exceptions, of course, he hopes to at least be able to keep her happy by telling her about the everyday details; the Doctor had assured him that the amnesia would be limited to the project.

He’s never been so aware of himself as when he crosses the threshold of his cubicle. He does it very slowly, apprehensively, blind and deaf to everything around him, because his eyes are closed and he’s listening to his insides. He watches over every little feeling, every tiny beating of his restless pulse. He’s afraid his head will explode, that he will be unable to hold his train of thought, that he won’t recognize himself … he’s not entirely sure what he should be afraid of, where he should focus his suspicions. And then he’s already on the other side, without noticing anything strange, and now he looks down at his legs, his feet, he feels his arms, searching for external signs of a change he was unable to recognize under his skin.

Only when he searches his mind for the details of what he has been developing does he find an impenetrable empty space and is able to confirm that the Doctor hasn’t tricked him. Oh the irony, the emptiness that worried him so much is now a relief and, feeling more relaxed, he heads for the platform where ROBco is waiting with the aero’car.

It’s a spectacular two-seater, worthy of CraftER, stylish on the outside and spacious on the inside, with cavities to fit their respective ROBs; Bet will be delighted.

He was right, when he picks her up, Leo has the privilege of witnessing the biggest smile he’s ever seen on her face, and he momentarily questions his intention to cut their outing short in order to return to his demo. Tightly squeezing both her hands, he helps her into the front seat so that, face to face, they can plan their time together. It’s what they’ve always done, the secret to their successful relationship: deciding in that moment and in light of their current mood, without being held to a preestablished script dictating what they should do.

“Are you feeling desire today?” They always start with this, as it affects everything else.

“This morning I was at 6.7, but I think it’s dropped. You?”

“Nothing remarkable. Let’s forget about going to the health club, agreed?”

“Yes, yes, I’d prefer to make the most of this wonderful vehicle. What is it capable of?”

“No idea, ROBco flies it.”

“Information: I have been in charge of it for ninety-five minutes, I have only mastered the basic controls.”

“Ohh …” Bet doesn’t hide her disappointment, rather she exaggerates it.

“What if we go for a short flight today and save all the experienced piloting tricks for next time? I promise that ROBco will dedicate himself to it one hundred percent.”

“But I feel like doing it today. And isn’t your ROB tied up with the top secret project?”

“Don’t be so acerbic.”

“I’m only telling you what I think and what I feel, that’s what we agreed, right?”

“Okay, so I will too”—she’s handed it to him on a silver platter—“the president has just assigned me a demo and I’m in a hurry to get back.”

“Couldn’t you have told me that before?”

“You would have erased me from your contact list indefinitely.”

“Well I will if you don’t tell me what your project is about.”

“I don’t know, when I left they made me pass through a device that erases my memory.”

“Don’t mess with me, Leonix, this is our big joint project.” Rather than being angry, her expression is serious, as if she doubted the sanity of her partner.

“Joint?” Stunned by an expansive wave of doubt, he mechanically repeats the final word. The panic provoked by the effects of timeout becomes confused with the fact that he has no idea which project she’s talking to him about.

“Don’t look at me like that! You’re scaring me. Our project, don’t you remember? Or have they erased that too? It’s about selective memory loss.” As she sees her words are bringing him back to normal she continues, “You baptized it the ‘happiness app,’ is that ringing any bells?” She moves closer to stare at him, somewhere between amused and alarmed. “By adjusting the filter between what we remember and what we forget, we would be able to create a fortunate past for ourselves. You even talked about taking it further and introducing fictitious, very pleasing memories …”

“Yes, of course I remember.” He was so frightened by the ghost of the forgotten that it hadn’t even crossed his mind that she might have been referring to that other project. What a weight off his shoulders: he knows everything they’ve said about the app by heart; and more, he also has the details he’s been polishing on his own. “But that’s got nothing to do with CraftER’s protection system.”

“Hasn’t it? Didn’t you say they’ve erased certain things from your memory?”

“If you put it like that, then yes, but the principle is totally different. They can erase it because they’ve saved it in a special way, with an encryption base. Our app is much more ambitious: it has to be able to erase things without any control over the recording process; past events, for example.”

“You mean you haven’t given them our designs?”

“Of course not, sweetheart, it’s a different project, it was developed before they hired me.”

“How can you be sure that’s not the part of your memory they erased?”

“Because, when I started, they demonstrated the security mechanism to me.”

“Maybe they’ve gone one step further than us and they know how to introduce fictitious memories.”

“Why do you always have to be so suspicious? What’s it going to be: that they’ve gone a step further or that they’ve copied us?”

“You see? I worry about you and you get angry. Such an intrusive protection system must be illegal. There’s one at MascotER too, but it doesn’t put the rights of employees at risk.”

“How would you know how they work on exclusive projects!”

“That’s it, the great genius has to speak up.”

“Well yes, you know what, I prefer to move forward than to be stuck in a rut. All this reticence stops you achieving anything. Look”—he glances outside—“we’ve ended up staying here, we haven’t even had a little run round the block.”

“It wasn’t our day today, that’s all.” She gets up, determined to get out of the aero’car. “You were in a hurry, there’s nothing more to talk about. Just tell me beforehand next time, and we’ll just cancel.”

Leo, ever the gentleman, again takes her by the hands to help her out, but whereas before her smile made him question his will, now nothing can take his mind off throwing himself wholeheartedly into the demo.