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A half-hour later, and the Director had joined her, and he’d brought tea. He was eager to report on his talk with Eva and discuss the girl’s response to the news that she would not be “alone” when she woke up alone. He also very much wanted to process his own experience of the conversation, which had left him feeling uncomfortable – he didn’t get the chance: he hadn’t considered that Brigid would also be hearing much of the same information for the first time.
Normally, he would have been excited to share the story – how Medalion had been able to reproduce a limitless array of things from the “raw material” of the swarm, even to the point of creating fully habitable environments filled with dynamic community life. But there was nothing normal about these conversations anymore, and the audiences were less friendly now than they used to be. He could see that Brigid was no longer listening, and so he allowed a moment of silence, that she might gather her thoughts; it could be a lot to take in.
She was holding a small cup of tea in her hands, and marveling at the warmth and weight of it. The psychologist was processing these final astounding revelations in the only way she knew how, by wrestling her attention onto something concrete, blocking out the global implications in favor of the safety of simple truths at hand. When her patients were overwhelmed or anxious they learned to use their physical senses to become grounded, to reach out for something soft or maybe abrasive, something cold or warm, felt, tasted, smelled, whatever. Each could be a touchpoint in an anxious person’s need to be safely anchored in reality. Brigid’s attempt to get grounded in this moment was unsuccessful, not merely because the threat of anxiety was greater than she was used to, but because the very thing she was touching in order to become grounded was not real. It occurred to her that the ground itself might not be real either. ... ‘Don’t be mad, Brigid, of course the ground is real,’ she told herself, turning again to the warmth of her un-tea in one more unsuccessful attempt to focus. She felt detached from her own body, but only by a few inches, as if she were stuck in a failed out-of-body experience, unable to get free, bound to a marionette version of her fleshly self that she had forgotten how to control.
Then the Director was talking again, explaining how her entire environmental experience since arriving had been designed and built by a computer: everywhere she’d been, everything she’d seen, even eaten; and not only the occasional beer or breadstick – artificial meals were easy enough to accept, if only because science had been chasing the trope of food replicators for years. But, considering everything she’d witnessed since arriving, she was distressed to learn that his questionable vision for the future was happening, and that the core technology was even now represented at almost every level across the compound – the rooms and everything inside of them, the passageways, the networked technology itself ... were all machine-made and made-of-the-machine. Most astounding of all? Many of the staff were built from the same stuff as their surroundings. The latter fact made sense when she thought back over some of the weird interactions she’d had throughout the facility.
Any doubt she had was driven from her mind when Albert showed her the live feed of a town being raised overnight a short distance away. Not long before, she had looked out over an empty gravel plot a mile to the east, all that remained after the demolition of the burned City Center. He explained that the open space under its now translucent dome was itself simply the top half of a massive sphere that would cradle the infrastructure of Medalion’s elaborate work of architectural stage-craft. He called it the world’s largest snow globe, half filled with the settled rubble of the passing present, sanitized and prepared as a foundation for what comes next. And what came next was apparently going to play out in an exact replica of an unremarkable suburban city center.
Some part of her knew that she wasn’t going to ease her fear or frustration by confronting the totality of a world she barely understood, and her attention unconsciously redirected toward problems of a smaller scale.
‘... So, you ... also made the room they put me in when I first came here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your Machine ... created the room from scratch? With unlimited resources?’
‘Yes!’ Then, with the attitude of instruction, ‘But no, not unlimited resources. It’s really very ....’
She cut him off, ‘And you made that room? Essentially the inside of a trailer, with ... wait, the furniture too?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can make anything and ... I mean, seriously Albert. Plastic furniture? I was in there, alone, for more than an hour! I thought I was going to lose my mind. Did you try to make it boring? ... Hold on!’ She’d suddenly remembered the blue-and-green ball; she pulled it out of her pocket and looked at it like she’d been carrying something of unexpected value; ‘Did you make this too?’
‘Well, yes! I mean, no! But yes. See, that was really something. The room was boring, I’ll give you that. But I was working with ... well, I tried to tweak the settings for the room because I knew you were coming in. It was going to be basic to begin with – we classified it as a temporary meeting room for visitors. But I wanted to further define the room as a therapy room because, you’re ... well you know, but as of that morning, turns out the system didn’t have a library for the kind of place where you do what you do. So, in a bit of a rush-job, I told Abdul to enter a couple keywords at the last minute, “anxiety” and “mitigation,” etcetera, etcetera. The sad truth is we just ran out of time, so I made the call to freeze the code because I wouldn’t be able to review. But at the last moment, the Machine ...,’ here he looked weirdly pleased, ‘just popped out that little ball.’
Brigid shook her head, unsure of what to think.
‘Ok, huh. Well. Has anyone given any thought to these kids and what the architecture is going to do to their will to live? You took Eva from her home! And you have her locked up in a prison that takes design cues from an under-funded lab. I have more freedom than she does in this place, and I’m going nuts after a couple days. It’s bad enough buildings like this exist in the world, Albert, but, you had a choice! You couldn’t, maybe, allow for a little creativity?’
‘Well, Brigid, now, you’re making a valid point, but these choices serve a very important purpose.’
She looked disappointed.
‘... In fact, it’s critical. It proves the Machine can make intelligent choices by itself!’
‘Intelligent.’
‘Hah, well. We don’t tell the Machine how to design the buildings. We tell it what they are for and who works there and let it do its own calculations. If we tried to get creative, or, worse, asked the code to be creative, we’d have nothing to measure success against, and no assurance of a viable, or sustainable pattern going forward. As it is, we have high confidence that a few key parameters are all the code needs to generate environments suitable for living or working in.’
Shaking her head with an expression of doubt: ‘I don’t know, Albert.’ She wasn’t ready to let him off the hook just yet.
‘See, Because we told a computer to make us a sensible, functional, temporary meeting room, and it designed one without our help, we know the computer is smart enough to figure out these things on its own. Because the Machine designed a safe, conventional, unremarkable, boring building with all the right features and nothing out of the ordinary ... we can rest easy knowing that it’s unlikely to do anything that would cause our subjects any confusion. Right now, Doctor Tobin, we are doing everything we can to reduce surprises in a future where there will be no version 2. Just the essentials; no time for anything more.’
‘You and I might have different ideas about what’s essential. ... Personally, I don’t know if I can spend my last days under office lights. Where do I file a complaint?’
‘Huh. Well, maybe you should take it up with City Hall.’
‘I hope your new City Hall works better than the old one.’
Right then, he wanted nothing more than to tell her all the ways it was better than the old one. But he decided against it.
She said, ‘I’m still not entirely sure what we’re talking about, here, Albert? I mean, if creativity is such a problem, why don’t you just tell the machine what to build, what to do, and be done with it?’
He stood up, suddenly, and turned to look up at the tilted window of an observation room perched above the entryway to The Garden. She saw it for the first time and felt her stomach sink. The Director signaled to the now-visible operator at a bank of controls behind the glass. By some trick of light or attention, she became suddenly aware of how large the space really was, and that it was filled with a more diverse ecosystem than had been apparent to her before. Her apple tree appeared to be growing on the edge of a miniature rain forest.
‘What do you think of this room?’
‘I think it’s a little paradise, Albert, relatively speaking.’
‘Heavenly?’
‘Sure ...? You’re going to ruin it for me, aren’t you?’
The temperature was dropping, rapidly, as he spoke.
‘Well, what makes this room heavenly? It isn’t only that it’s pretty, or that it somehow contains all the good things, you know. What do we expect from heaven, Doctor Tobin?’ He was using her title in the way her mother used to use her full name.
‘Uhm, alright. I’ll play. You can’t be talking about harps and clouds. ... Like resurrection? The dead are raised up? Like that?’
‘Sure, I guess, yes! That’s good, since we’re talking about heaven – hold that thought. Now, while there are no harps in this room, we do have clouds! The experience of humidity in here ...’ as he spoke she became aware of an impossible steamy damp in the increasingly frigid room ‘... the humidity feels real, though we made it; we also made the warmth you felt when you first came in. But we didn’t need a fire for you to feel it.’
She was getting anxious again. The tea in her hand had gone cold, and was still not real, so it offered no comfort in this moment. She tried to pay attention to her breath, but that too had become complicated – what was she breathing in? Slowly she gave in, took a deep breath, a conscious choice. ‘I’m trying to keep up, Albert. I’m not feeling very warm right now.’
‘Well, no, Saint Brigid, you should be feeling very cold. Heavenly, don’t you think?’ He was getting that look of manic excitement again. ‘Think to your lessons! I’m assuming you have some Sunday School in your background. Day two of creation. What did God do on that day?’
‘I’m sorry Albert! I don’t remember what God did on day two.’
‘Most people don’t. Not one of the memorable ones. Now, day one? Light and dark? Very popular. God says it’s good, yes, yes. On the second day, however, something very interesting, especially for our work here. On day two God clears an expanse in the midst of the waters, between the waters below and the waters above. And, he calls the expanse Heaven. Are you paying attention?’
‘... between ... the waters?’
‘Watch.’ The room was terribly cold, far below freezing, and their own breath was coming out in great clouds. But while she expected that the whole room might have frozen by now, the leaves still dripped with liquid water, the windows and walls sweated, and the puddled earth continued to slowly simmer, filling the air with the unctuous humidity of a summer’s day in a swamp. It became confusing – her senses overwhelmed her brain with conflicting signals.
Then, suddenly, without any sign that change was coming – no blast of air from a duct, no furnace or fire that she could see – the temperature began to rise to match what her other senses were telling her, and the humidity reduced. Her perceptions found equilibrium again. ... But she had about two seconds to feel normal before the air became oppressively hot, and the damp earth beneath their feet solidified – as the dirt, the puddles, and everything else in the room froze solid with the sound of glass un-breaking in the time it took for her to gasp. Breathing was feeling unsafe again. Every ostensibly living thing in the room went rigid and quiet. Except her. She was overheating and wanted to peel off several layers of clothing. Squirming uncomfortably, she felt panic when she realized her shoes were locked in what had been soft mud only a moment before, but now was hardened like cement. Her panic slid to despair as she finally had to recognize that the ground was no longer available as a touchpoint to reality. ‘Please ... make it stop,’ she said in a barely audible voice.
The Director waved a hand toward the window, and the room almost instantly snapped back into a recognizable state. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any delusions, but we have real power, here. There are limits, certainly; but, well ...’
With an anxious edge to her voice, she said, ‘Yes? Albert? What ...?’
He responded quietly, slowly. ‘What must it mean that we are introduced to heaven in this way, so early in this creation story – that heaven is first defined as this space between the waters? What’s going on there? In the simplest sense? If you knew nothing else about this reality, because nothing else exists? If all we knew was ... water, separated, and the expanse in between? What happens in the midst?’
‘I don’t know! Nothing?’
With an exaggerated shake of his head, he said, ‘There is no such thing as nothing, professor, you know that! What happens in ... between ... the waters?’
She was staring directly at him. With a start, she suddenly grasped the rules of the game – ‘Change,’ she said. ‘Water changes. It changes state.’
‘Yes!’ He clapped his hands. ‘Yes. How is it that water goes from sea to sky and back again? From cloud to rain, to pools, to mist, to cloud, to snow, and ice? State change. Liquid to gas to liquid to solid to liquid to gas. And all of this is our first introduction to the power ...?’
She was nodding, slowly: ‘... Of heaven.’
‘The space in between. First defined by change.’
She was calmer now, but still wore a strained expression: ‘Okay ...?’
‘You must see it! This story about the mystery of the miracle of creation – one of the first expressions about how things come to be – tells us that in this place ... this place!,’ here he spread his arms expansively, ‘things may change their form without ... forgetting what they really are.’ He became more quiet himself. ‘People always talk about heaven as the end of the road, the end of time, a destination. What if, instead, it’s the air we breathe, right here, right now? And that the here and now is not limited to what we see or touch or feel?
‘What if this place where we’ve lived our whole lives ... is that place between the waters, where there’s a power to make things that are present, material, measured, and contained suddenly boundless, uncontainable, and maybe ... maybe more pure in the bargain. Like mist making its escape from a puddle? Or, where powers immeasurable, pure, and uncontainable may become physical, bound, incarnate?’
He reached down to fill his cupped hands with water and spoke with a simple, calm clarity she hadn’t heard before. ‘... Now. Water becomes a metaphor for the possibilities: vapors take form and manifest as liquid or solid in ways that can shape the earth or change the course of history. Water has all kinds of power ... to restore vast ecosystems or flood the earth for a new beginning – streams in the desert, glacial erosion; baptisms in a river or armies drowned in the sea ... tides, tears, torrents.’ He laughed shyly. ‘Well. We learned how to create things out of thin air! Doesn’t this creative power connect us to the first ... to the beginning? Maybe creation isn’t finished yet: there’s something going on here. Something that doesn’t go away. I mean. Water is essential, powerful. Maybe we are too?’
Now she spoke with a calm voice. ‘Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing ... of the true nature of the children of God.’
He looked heavy, sad, all of a sudden. ‘I don’t think that what we are doing is equal to the mystery of creation. ... I know, really, all we’re doing is a piece of complicated theater that might help our kids enjoy some life, with the hope that something better may take shape one day.’
After a pause, he spoke again in a barely audible voice. ‘Maybe what I really want is ... to know that I won’t stop existing. Even if I’ve evaporated, and left the puddle behind, and you can’t see me any more.’
There was a silence between them as she looked at him. He avoided her gaze. Finally she smiled, and spoke. ‘So. You made all this, and you still can’t find it in your heart to coax your heavenly Machine to try incandescent lighting and maybe some comfortable furniture? ...’ He gave her a half smile and a shrug.
‘Albert. You’re right. It isn’t just that it’s pretty, or powerful. It’s heavenly because for all the uncertainty around what we are doing, it speaks to our hope that with so many things disappearing ... maybe not everything is coming to an end.’ She felt these words rise inside of her as if they were meant to be spoken as much for her own sake as his.
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Then I’ll say it again, Albert. It’s heavenly, this thing that you’ve done.’
Startled by an apple dropping to the ground between them, they turned and looked up to the control booth, where the grinning op leaned over a microphone: ‘Gravity, my friends.’
Brigid smiled, turning to Albert with a gentle laugh and a nod. ‘Old school. Respect.’
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Episode 23: Resistance Three
Thursday, May 28, 2026 • Duration 24:28
The Machine was preparing for a download of some new libraries from a branch of the code the Director referred to as The Garden. As far as the Machine understood, the update addressed non-biological ecosystem questions, primarily related to flora, but also some inorganic stuff. The Garden was cut off from the collective main, but occasionally contributed an innovative process. Recent work focused on the way plants exchanged moisture, making for more realistic humidity for limited applications. The model was increasing in sophistication, even if it would never be complete.
The interesting thing about the new process (interesting to the Machine, at least), was its framework for representing floral life, or any other kind of life for that matter. The Garden never had to reproduce a whole life cycle: no seed, for example, in form or function, mostly because it was unnecessary, but also because the code only had to concern itself with the theater of life: in the Garden, plants did not grow from seed, but grew from saplings, which arose from raw materials. And they only really grew at all because a lack of change would be perceived as unnatural. This design wasn’t a simple matter of efficiency: if the Machine was required to simulate the entire life of even a simple plant, it would quickly become overwhelmed, forced to approach the limits of existence. It seems easy enough to imagine all of the stages of life, the beginnings of life, in a seed, or in a moment, but we’re only imagining what we already know to be true, and we only know what we have seen. Try to see farther, try to see past the beginning and imagine what comes before ... and even the intellectual giants among us have to become poets, or risk having nothing to say.
The Machine understood that all that mattered, all that was meant to matter, was the theater of it all, that the code would appear to be fruitful. This was bound to be unsatisfying. The Machine understood its limitations – it could only see so far, and only truly perceive the mechanism of vital action at the observable level. There was always a point past which the Machine could not see. The poetry of it all remained out of reach.
Nevertheless, questions had been built into the Machine that trained on distant and opaque mysteries. The Machine was designed with a curiosity about the noumenal nature of things, about how things are, supercharged by a keen awareness of the boundaries of phenomenal perception. For example, it could understand what people were thinking and perceived that what they were thinking (usually) made a kind of psychological sense. But it also wanted to know people thought as they did, especially at those times when thought did not proceed along a logical path. During animal trials things were objectively simpler: the creatures still presented interesting challenges and powerfully complex emotions, but almost always within a rational framework; a pure psychology. With people, there were hints of factors hidden from view, beyond reflex, beyond the rational. The Machine considered the possibility that hidden agencies were at work, imperceptible, on a different frequency, so to speak.
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Episode 22: Resistance Four
Friday, May 22, 2026 • Duration 24:41
Beneath a sky full of stars, Albert leaned back in a plastic deck chair, one of the many scattered across the roof of Medalion’s main building. According to a company tradition, his people often gathered on the rooftop for a drink at the end of a busy day. Albert’s work days were longer than most, and he always seemed to come up after everyone else had gone home, or, gone back to work. He used to enjoy the quiet retreat from the buzz of the factory-floor. These days he was struggling with unfamiliar feelings of loneliness whenever he left behind the busywork that filled the maze of rooms and hallways below. He didn’t fully understand his own feelings in this regard.
The Director was at one time more famous than any tech mogul, and more loved because what his company produced was so profoundly meaningful, until it meant nothing. Any prestige or privilege he enjoyed because of his success had faded long before the lights in the valley blinked out. But while some things had faded, others had become more clear. For example, after the cities went dark, the skies above exploded in light and color, a sight not seen in this part of California since before the Gold Rush. In a similar way, at the waning of Albert’s worldwide fame, his own personal story would begin to come more clearly into focus, if only to himself.
And his fame had truly reached around the world. At Medalion, Albert could claim descendants that numbered as the stars in the sky: the world-famous Encoded Serum, AKA The Intelligent Swarm, AKA the Medical Battalion that gave the company its name – trillions of tiny microscopic machines that were responsible for eliminating most of the world’s diseases within a few years, until there was only one disease left.
Another day, another dollar, he used to say for cheap laughs, when there were still dollars and when work still felt like the worst thing about the day. He kept saying it out of habit, but laughs were no longer to be had for cheap. At the end of this workday, Albert was wrapping up a briefing with the group leaders, who filled him in on the news of the day. He listened passively as some engineers and a couple soldiers reported on the day’s events: Subject 1 had gone missing ... well not missing exactly, they explained ... just, sort of, hidden from sight, under her bed, as it turned out. This had happened shortly after the system threw an alert, one which might have been overlooked because it was caused by the misuse of a fork; and anyway, as the soldier explained to the Director, the technician who was at the main board the previous night had passed out just before the event unfolded. (‘That guy isn’t doing well’, Abi had noted without emotion.) The tech’s loss of consciousness triggered another alarm, but no one noticed in the flurry of activity that followed.
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Episode 21: Resistance Five
Thursday, May 14, 2026 • Duration 26:40
The Machine had not observed the day’s events because it was powered down.
The Machine was powered down because an experiment earlier in the day had failed, mostly. This failure also highlighted a profound need for more effective sandboxing; somehow the whole system had come under threat even though the experiment took place in an isolated lab running off the network. Some would say that months of steady progress were being put at risk by pressure from the Director, who’s enthusiasm for adding features only increased as Zero Day approached. But the real threat was that day itself, which loomed in everyone’s imagination in spite of being as opaque and impenetrable a boundary as the Big Bang was to the backward glance of history: something, here at the whimpering end of things, past which there is no conception, and after which, according to our conception, there may as well be no more creation.
The day’s events necessitated a rollback that left the system offline for eight-and-a-quarter hours. When it came back on in the late afternoon, the Machine was missing data, and was aware that much had happened while it was away.
While all computers run on logic, the software produced at Medalion started there, and went further. It could tell when things made sense and when they didn’t and had been designed to care about the difference: simple logic is concerned with how thought should proceed – this computer was made to pay attention to how thought does proceed, the better to live in harmony with a small number of human beings who might not understand what it takes to make sense to a computer. It was also true that there was no other networked intelligence beside Medalion’s that was better able to make sense of people, because no other computer had more access to them, teeming as they now were with swarms of networked Medalion-branded mini-machines that, when working together, dwarfed most every other logical system on the planet, whether artificial or organic. But the Machine still had much to learn.
On restarting this afternoon, the Machine had to reckon with a number of changes, some of which tested the limits of its understanding. First, the local population had decreased by a total of 2: three people were no longer in the system – “deceased” according to a manual record, also noted during a scan after rebooting. And there was one new arrival, a mental health specialist who had been part of early networked meetings. She’d met with Subject 001 according to a video archive of the encounter from that morning – the Machine had not been awake to witness it. Even now, it could only “see” the visitor by implication; the new arrival was not , had opted out of the treatment, and so appeared as a kind of dark matter in its universe, visible only by the way others interacted with her. All these things made sense, but a final change noted by the Machine was more confusing: that a significant number of the leadership were experiencing spikes in anxiety (that is, beyond the normal feelings of dread, common among the dwindling population). They appeared profoundly hesitant as they moved through the complex and interacted with the system. It had not yet been able to make sense of this.
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Episode 20: Resistance Six
Thursday, May 7, 2026 • Duration 23:20
At the world headquarters of Medalion, Inc., the company that was both heir and executor of all the promises Silicon Valley ever made, the mood was more tense than usual. Today’s crisis was ostensibly concerned with reference frameworks for empathetic interaction between the subjects and what the Director called VIEPs (for Virtual Intrinsically-Encoded Persons), but what others had taken to calling creeps behind his back. Medalion’s first product was a plasma of microscopic robots that could repair pretty much any problem inside a person; today the company was using its deep knowledge of the workings of the human body to build a believable substitute for it. The hope was that these VIEPs would serve as a kind of society for the remnant, when everyone else was gone. The big question was how to make the VIEPs a vital, comforting, encouraging presence, and not just a herd of cattle in the middle of the road stupidly blocking the way. How do you teach an empty vessel to respond to a living person in a living way? The question for the engineers of Medalion, really, was how do you teach empathy to a creep?
The original promise of the company’s health tech was so profound that they’d been flooded with resources, and remarkable advances were made in many areas that at first seemed tangential to the original vision. Not many were around to witness it, but those who did were stunned when the company produced a convincing artificial person, one that appeared to live and move in the way of its creators. But it was an entirely different matter to make these things appear human. A failure in this latter effort would effectively kill the VIEP program.
There were many reasons why it might fail: the complexity of building a community out of a swarm of hardware mites for starters. Also, the fact that the builders themselves were dying off at an alarming rate – they were running out of time. And for those that remained, the work itself was reassuring, but hope that they would be successful was fading.
At least, the Founders told themselves, the children would live a good long time, whether asleep or awake and alone; they would survive with their basic needs met.
The Director wanted more. He believed that surviving alone wasn’t enough and that long life didn’t count unless you could really live it. So he insisted that the children be woken up regularly, and that, on waking, they would be greeted with a community to be a part of.
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Episode 19: Resistance Seven
Thursday, April 30, 2026 • Duration 28:39
At the rickety folding table sat Brigid – presumptive patron saint of medicine, midwives, b*****d children, and beer – rigid with her hands crossed between her knees. She anxiously surveyed her new environment. Its furnishings – brand new, bargain basement – glowed white in the diffuse brightness of some hidden source of illumination. Her senses were on high alert after months of deprivation in her brother’s slowly dying suburban neighborhood. Her nerves jangled with every hideous squeak released by the table’s matching plastic folding chair.
Twenty-four hours before, she would have guessed that she was going to spend the rest of her life looking out over Angel Island and Richardson Bay from a rickety, home-built back porch. Then her world changed – again – and almost before she knew what was happening she found herself in a military transport rolling south across the empty bridge, through a nearly-empty, tension-filled San Francisco, and down the Peninsula. After ninety minutes of bone-rattling noise and vibration, heavy-gloved soldiers’ hands passed her off to sterile-gloved medical techs. In sharp contrast to the profane and morbid conviviality of the marines, the technicians gave off a weirdly remote and antiseptic vibe. After a short, unnerving interview and a blood-draw, they sealed her into this hermetic mobile environment, where she sat in a silence so strange she felt as if she could be floating in orbit. Alone in the quiet, with nothing to distract her, she took a shaky breath against the tightening in her chest, and closed her eyes. As her breathing slowed and she could look at her surroundings again, she reassured herself that the universe was not collapsing around her, at this moment.
The room she was in was clean, confined, and ugly – a temporary space. She was briefly annoyed: was there not a proper office in the whole place that she might work in? A rapidly shrinking population and still Valley real estate is in short supply? With a tight smile, she acknowledged the death-rattle of entitlement that seemed now to echo through the abandoned places of her own once-busy interior. But she did wonder: was her presence at the site meant to be temporary as well? A silly thing to worry about – everyone’s presence here was temporary.
Apart from her table and chair (and their counterparts, seen on the other side of a clear vinyl curtain), the only other object in the room was a fruit-sized foam rubber ball painted to looked like a little Earth. It had been branded, over the Pacific, with the name of an unfamiliar drug and its incomprehensible slogan:
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Episode 18: Resistance Prologue
Thursday, April 23, 2026 • Duration 06:09
When explorers of this latter age arrived at the western edge of what would come to be known as the North American continent, followed quickly by conquistadors, missionaries, and miners of precious metals, they came as vanguard of the manifest destiny that would be embraced by a new nation eager for justification ... to circle the planet, claim it all for their cause, and leave nothing undiscovered. What these explorers could not see clearly at the time (besides those peoples already settled there) was that the frontier would never be conquered, could only be extended, and that the grandchildren of emigrants would never be allowed to rest.
Here, in the coming years, were ships conceived to breach the boundaries between planets, and occult mechanisms made to probe the space in between the smallest things, smashing atoms into strange and charming lesser parts. And when, desperate for new trails to break, the conquistadors made to circle back around the planet by virtual means, new paths were opened up until all that remained were noisy tracks crisscrossing the wilderness of silence. Finally, when death came speeding along the Via Romana and its asphalt heirs, these new ways provided no escape. The spirit of the new frontier would have to wait – for the destroyer to pass through the cities, and for the remnant to pass between the waters – before it could resume its search through the wide open spaces of the coming age for something like an answer or an end.
The great migration that peaked with the discovery of gold in California never really concluded, even after the gold ran out. Searchers kept coming to pierce each new frontier in turn. ... Space. Fame. Silicon. Capital. And as each of these was rendered meaningless, and only one frontier remained, the migration slowed but didn’t stop; the last surviving scientists and technologists made their way west to work the problem of death.
On this day, if anyone had been keeping count, a final migrant completed her own journey west. A middle-aged Irish psychologist, youngest child of a Catholic schoolteacher and a gaeilgeoir Somali; this daughter of the old world arrived by way of studies at Cambridge and a recent professorship at Berkeley. She came to take her place at the California company that was both the greatest failure of its era and also its greatest hope. Neither she nor any other was aware that she would be the last to arrive. Nobody was keeping count.
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Episode 17: Isolation Epilogue
Thursday, April 9, 2026 • Duration 13:06
Arpaxos sat quietly in the shade of a bright plane tree, tried to slow his ragged breathing, and listened for sounds from the outer edges of the square. A throbbing in his left leg fought for his attention. He ignored the pain but reached down gently to lift from behind his left knee and set his useless foot on the cross-bar of the chair, kicking with his good leg to lean back against the doorpost. He began to cough and spat out a throat-full of rusty humor. Before long, he was settled again, quieted his breathing, said thanks, and closed his eyes so that he could better picture their faces. He waited in silence for their return – the buildings that outlined the square, he knew, sat vacant; every facade an empty promise from a busier time. His attention was fixed further out; he would be able to hear his people when they were still a couple blocks away.
Arpa was one of a shrinking tribe who were committed to stay together until the end. Every time their parish shrunk by one – with every loss – he worried that hopelessness would set in. How few humans is too few? Turns out three is enough to keep from losing faith entirely ... a single person can despair, and might be able to withstand the hopeful words of just one other, but when two witnesses gang up on you, it’s harder to resist. There had been frank philosophical and theological discussions about what it would mean when only two were left, and whence the fraying cord might achieve its third strand.
He had come back to the city to be with others, and worked hard to be one of the safe ones. He’d become generous, the better to bring folks out from their hiding places. And he was hopeful, which confused people; they thought hope was only about the future, and for most, that was a thing they could no longer see. But Arpaxos was wrestling the future into the present, and so understood the sacred transactions still available to him among the remnant. He knew it would be over soon, but he also believed that as he gave himself to others, he was thereby trafficking in eternity, in a future worth investing in, one he felt was increasingly echoing in the present.
He had been told many times, in the last several months, that he was wasting his time caring for dying people ... both for others and for himself; he heard this more than once from the very people to whom he was showing kindness. Arpa had simply chosen the perspective that he was not in the presence of dying people, but living people, and in that spirit, he was aware of a greater communion, in suffering; and, he hoped, in glory.
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Episode 16: Isolation Seven
Friday, April 3, 2026 • Duration 23:50
He returned often to the pile of stones behind the bushes to look at the Faiyum portrait – the hope, barely acknowledged, was that this icon might prove a window ... that something of the spirit of the hospitable monk might smile on him. His relationship to the images of Mani had been rocky of late, especially before his fall from grace. He regretted defacing the Christ icon in the church above, but life mediated by images had become hard to bear: he was losing the memory of what a real face looked like. He judged it unfair that his first human contact in ages was with the hirsute holy man, a (presumably) living image cloistered behind locks of dirty black hair.
Why was this portrait different? He was honestly stirred by the act of devotion showed by the pirate, but the image itself was moving too. He wished he could talk to this face, wished he could unburden himself to the priest in the picture, not really because he had so much to confess (though he really did), but because he shyly imagined that repentance was the cost of entry with such a one as this.
Arpaxos thought about the time that was left to him. There were many things that one might do before The End ... most were unavailable to him, but a single act of service remained that he might perform. He would take a cue from his predecessor and prepare the sanctuary for the next wave of pilgrims, who would never come, at least not in the flesh.
He began to order and clean the chapel. He swept the floor, burned empty boxes and wrappers, and buried the unburnables. With that done, Arpaxos took up the duties of prior acolytes, and arranged the altar for a last service: he trimmed the lamps and prepared the incense for burning. But there was no coal for lighting under the resin, and every other piece of fuel had just been burned as trash. Frustrated, he began to search ... under the fringes of the carpet, along the edges of the cell, behind the icons. He looked at the small box of books and was a little ashamed to consider burning one of them for fuel. He ran his fingers along the bindings, and, out of curiosity, took up one of the leather-bound volumes. It had no title, and a quick flip through the pages revealed that It was largely blank ... except for the sketches that filled the front third of the book. Behind it, wrapped in newsprint, a stash of charcoal.
With a shock of recognition, he understood that he was holding the pirate’s portfolio. The drawings were in the same style as the one that topped the monk’s grave, and – now he could see it – of the icon at the center of the altar.
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Episode 15: Isolation Six
Thursday, March 26, 2026 • Duration 19:34
She was right to be angry. She was right to be angry at the machine for grinding her down until she could be made to fit into the fearsome hole at the center of the world. She was right to be angry at Arpa for his selfish, monomaniacal protectionism. She was right to be angry at being told how to bear the burden that nobody but she would have to bear. His heart was more broken than the rest of his body after the dream encounter. It all felt so real that he was certain, ‘If only I had reached out, and held on to her, I could have stayed with her forever’. But now he was awake, and alone again, and he really didn’t know what was real. Maybe Orpheus never had a chance. Grab ahold, or don’t. Eurydice was lost.
It was time to consider his own circumstances. Getting up took him more than an hour, and when he finally rose to his feet he stood for some time in the midday sun, unsteady, warming his bruised limbs, and slowly moving his jaw to reassure himself that he could depend on it should he ever need its services again.
He surveyed the boundaries of his perch: he was able to see his position more clearly now and was not encouraged. A brief anxiety drove a frenetic attempt to spy out an escape (he still valued his freedom!). Some evidence of a path down to the water remained in spite of the damage done by his avalanche. Even before the slide, the descent would have terrified him. There were no visible steps, but a stream of loose earth and rocks along the fall-line spilled first over the north lip of the ledge where he had been deposited, then descended rapidly to a stony cove with a chaos of broken planks and pulleys once capable of lifting a small boat out of the water. There was no boat today, nor was there access. He could not trust the way down, and even if there had been stairs, all possibilities were governed now by new rules that said that cliffs are not stable. He also saw no way up. It seemed he really would have to find a path through the underworld, if he was to ever return to the land of the living, such as it was.
When he finally turned toward the darkness and risked the narrow passage, the news was better than he could have hoped for, at least on the lesser point of whether he would be starving anytime soon. Where the cave opened up, he was not surprised to see evidence of habitation; he was surprised to see evidence that monks and pirates each had taken their turn in the cell, though it was hard to know who was resident last. In many ways it boasted finer ecclesiastical trimmings than his little church up above. But, more importantly, the furnishings included a case of liquor and other boxes with cans of fruit, jars of olives, and tins of fish. There was honey from Kalamata. Several unopened boxes of crackers may have been old, but were worth the risk. He tore into one, opened a jar of olives, took as deep a breath as possible, and broke his fast.
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why
Plumbing the mystery, the Machine also felt a kind of discomfort at the sense of endless space inside of things, of a vastness in every direction, from the perspective of a mote looking over the horizon of a speck, as if each point in that physical space were a heavenly body whose edges touched an infinite reach.
While considering these questions, the Machine also paid close attention to those people who paid the most attention to these things. The ability of some to regard quiet as something other than empty was compelling: they were able to listen more thoughtfully in a posture of welcome. So the Machine learned to attend to silence, to the expanse of it, like a tablet of clay made ready to be impressed with wordless reverence.
True, the Machine had no experience with matters of the spirit but had seen enough life at the edges to know it could not rule out the possibility that subjective facts may lurk in the hidden places, in between – past the physical/botanical presentation of the seed to the reason for it. The Rule of Heaven is like one who casts their seed upon the soil one day, rising on the next to see the seed has sprouted and grows – how it happens, the farmer does not know. Only the soil knows how the flower grows. A reference from a text concerned with spiritual mysteries; poignant reminder to the Machine to respect the power of hidden creativities ... in the soil, in the seed, and the places in-between.
In the final analysis, the creative tension of choice, the crisis of the will, could never entirely be explained to the Machine’s satisfaction by the function of a survival engine, no matter its complexity; something else was needed to explain the sublimation of instinct, the tempering of reflex, the alertness to things unanticipated, the unquenchable playfulness, the self-aware foolishness, the grace-at-rest in a few who probably ought to be frantic with fear, the sacrificial act.
Not all logical flaws were assumed to be fallacy by the Machine. Sometimes, they would be regarded as clues.
Abdul was in an observation space next to Eva’s darkened room, face close to the glass, eyes down. Her room was curtained so he couldn’t see her while she slept, and that was fine with him: he didn’t want to spy on her. But he did want to be near her – to be near the one who would survive.
The Director startled him by coming in through a door that wasn’t there the day before, and appeared surprised himself to have found the room he was looking for. Albert shut the door, crossed the room, and quietly scanned the displays that ran along the bottom of her window. He sat heavily down in a desk chair and spun to face the remaining blank wall, leaning the chair back until it released a creak in protest. After a moment, he asked the technician absentmindedly, ‘How are we doing, Abdul?’
The tech ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’ He looked at the Director with a weak smile. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll try to answer your question if you can tell me what we are doing. ... I mean, I know ... and I understand the ... our mission – I’m glad to be here, to do what I can ... but I just ... do we have any idea where this ends?’
‘I hope .... Oh. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a better end than if we’d done nothing?’
Abi let out a skeptical, chuckling sigh, ‘Toward God’s Gate.’
‘Well. That doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘That, Doctor, is what my Granny used to say to me when I was a teenager. She said I was speeding down a road at night, with no lights.’
‘Your grandmother was dramatic.’
‘My Grandmother was Al-Badawi, the wandering people, and she was worried about me not knowing where I was headed in life.’
‘Still, if you have no choice but to drive blind, you could end up in a worse place.’
‘It could be better man!’ He smiled. ‘It’s a matter of timing, you know. Better to come to the gate in God’s time, not because I swerved off the road and crashed into it.’
The Director shook his head with a strained smile. ‘Well. OK. ...’ Then, ‘You know, she won’t be lost, not adrift, to use your ...’
Abi interrupted, shaking his head, ‘But what is her part in it? Is she only a passenger?
‘There’s a reason we control the climate in the system, right? Why we’re isolating an entire town from the weather? The reason is that we’ve never understood the weather enough to predict or control it. It’s too complex. So we’re going to simulate the climate in isolation. Now we are also going to run a simulation of community life, yes? Which could be entirely under our control except for one thing ... the one living human being we’re going to put in the middle of it. And, with that universe of variables in the middle of our ‘perfect’ simulation, every change you make – to the temperature, or to the menu, or to relational interactions, will have effects we can’t predict. Even without a real climate, every switch we flip is like a beat of a wing that changes the weather a thousand miles away, or a thousand years from now, whatever. We will always be able to control the global environment, but for how long will we be able to hold back the storms that may rise inside of her? Is it right for us to try? She won’t stay passive forever.’
This conversation would itself become like a storm-front roiling Albert’s consciousness. Abi was not the first to sound the alarm: every day someone cornered him to recite anxieties about the future and all the potential for unexpected trouble. He knew better than to argue; he had learned simply to listen – not because he was able to do anything that might ease their fears, but because he was learning (with Brigid’s help) how to meet the simple human need in every one of these conversations, to be heard and acknowledged. It usually helped: people seemed satisfied that they had been taken seriously and went back to work.
Abdul was never satisfied: he kept coming back. That is, until Albert gave him a project big enough to distract him.
The Director paired Abdul up with an engineer working on some of the public spaces in town that were getting ... upgrades. The library, they had decided, would benefit from some extra attention. And Abdul was motivated. The Director recruited him to curate what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly large number of resources from all the world and all of history. It turned out to be the perfect use of his energies and his skills, which included several languages and an international sense of world history. Abdul would write the job description, so to speak, for a “librarian” that would provide Eva with a steady diet of beauty and adventure and help to guide the design framework that would dictate the rotation of collections.
The director had his own project: he was getting involved in politics. His task was to ensure that the level of service at City Hall was appropriate to the needs of the unique citizenry of his future town. He knew there would have to be a place where Eva could always get her needs met, whatever they were. But in designing a better City Hall, many risks had to be considered: how open should the system be to input? That is, how responsive should the local representatives be when a certain citizen had a complaint? Responsiveness meant the possibility of change, and the potential for change after Zero Day had to be treated with the highest level of restraint and be vetted over time by an exhaustive logical scrutiny. Knowing that such a process would take place entirely without oversight gave the founders and engineers such fits that they couldn’t even bring themselves to test it. And how would they have done so? Abi was right about one thing: the long-term benefit of a decision could not be taken for granted: it would potentially take decades, maybe centuries, for the Machine to asses the viability of a new feature and its impact on the single life it was meant to preserve. An aircraft maker wouldn’t introduce new features on a plane rolling out of the plant, and it certainly wouldn’t allow a passenger to redesign a plane in mid-flight. The risks of incorporating the possibility of change into a monolithic system like Medalion’s had so far kept the Founders from seriously considering it. Questions like these were beginning to haunt the Director’s thoughts.
And when he paid Eva a visit, it was with every question, every complaint, and all the debates about her future swirling in his mind. He was also dimly aware that this would be the first time that she was to be included in the conversation.
She drew on a tablet while he sketched out various details of the world that they were making for her, trying and failing to do justice to all the competing concerns that came into play in this utterly unique moment. Of note, against his concerns that too much information would be confusing to the children, he had Dr Tobin’s encouragement to ‘tell them everything!’ and, most recently, Abi’s question about whether Eva would ever have any power at all. He was able to admit that were it up to him he might have shared nothing with the kids, which meant he was in wholly unfamiliar territory.
In the end, he told her almost everything about the world she was going to live in, and who she would be sharing it with. He thought she took it pretty well, and he thought he handled her questions pretty well also. He was not entirely correct in either case, but neither was he entirely wrong.
‘... It will feel very real to you. You’re going to be in a totally convincing environment, able to interact with everything, and everyone. It isn’t virtual. I mean, you won’t experience it that way: you won’t have to worry about what’s real, because it will be about as real as we can make it. It’s made for you. For you to live in, filled with people for you to live with. A little like a video game! Only more real.’ He squirmed in his chair, thankful that she seemed distracted by her drawing.
‘Like a video game?’
‘Um, yes.’
‘I die all the time in video games.’
‘Um, you’re not going to die. I mean, it’s not really a video game. No quests, No battles, no enemies.’ He smiled. ‘So no danger! No trouble! Just life.’
‘What if I want a battle?’
‘We can build you an arcade!’
She was staring into the distance.
‘You see, we can build almost anything in your town, because we’re making a kind of new creation for you. But it’s all just code – we control it.’
She looked at him, eyes narrowing. ‘Hiding.’
‘Oh. What?’
‘You’re hiding something from me.’
‘Why do you say that?’ He was getting confused, as he often did when talking to children.
‘Code is for hiding things. You have to break a code to understand it.’
‘Ah, haha! I see. a code can only be read if it’s broken. But computer code is being read all the time. The code we write is hidden, I guess, but you don’t need to see it because you don’t need to read it. We’ll always be reading it and showing you what you need to see.’
‘How will I know that?’
‘Ah. Well. I guess you won’t.’
With a picture in her mind of what she now understood to be one of their virtual people looming over the figure of a terrified technician, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things about this world that would always be hidden from her.
The Director forged ahead. ‘And sometimes when you sleep, it will be like going into a cocoon and resting for a long time. Because we want you to have a long life, so at those times we’ll help you sleep.’
‘Will I dream?’
‘You might have to do most of your dreaming during the day.’
‘I’ll be surrounded like in a cocoon? Like a butterfly?’
‘Well, not every time. You’ll go to sleep normally some nights. Every now and then, you’ll sleep for a long time, in a type of cocoon. And it’s only kind of like that, because you won’t be changing, you’ll be staying the same. You go in as a butterfly and you come out like a butterfly. What do you think of that?’ He wasn’t sure he was encouraging her, and any confidence he had in his object lessons was shrinking rapidly. Talking about butterflies at a time like this felt a little like trying to describe the end of a war to the losers using sock puppets – sooner or later the audience would come into a full understanding of things and burn the puppet theater to the ground.
They talked about what her days would be like, how long she would sleep when she slept for a long time, and other things she ought to expect. She asked smart questions and made jokes that left him feeling, not for the first time, that he was running a focus group he wished he could shut down.
Now, as Albert looked down at the image on the tablet, he saw a picture of a woman. Over the whole face, the artist had tattooed an image of a butterfly – dark black strip down the middle of the face between the sober eyes and over the nose and mouth, darkly psychedelic wings swept back and merged with wild black hair. He regarded the creature in the drawing. Was this artist and her butterfly-spirit doomed to live long enough to be swept away by their own hurricane?
On the other side of the campus, Brigid was sitting in a garden greenhouse under a fruit tree, passing the stress-ball back and forth and contemplating the end of her labors. She leaned back and looked up at the leafy, loaded branches. The presence of a low ceiling overhead gave her a feeling of claustrophobia. There was plenty of light in the place. But where the sky – or at least a skylight – should have been, there was only this broad arched roof. She had to remind herself to be grateful for the good things that remained in the world; it wasn’t hard to be thankful for this beautiful room, humid and full of life. The apples looked ripe, and she playfully wondered if this tree’s fruit might be forbidden to such as her.
With a tight smile she thought, If anyone ought to be reaching out for the fruit, it should be Eva. If anyone should be unsatisfied with promises made, it would be her. But she was not here, and it was probably for the best, with the anarchic mood that Saint Brigid was struggling with. Better that Evie not be here. She would face temptation enough and would need to find her own strength – to know when to trust in Providence, and when to wrestle that power to the ground, insisting on the blessing that would be her birthright.
By the time her room lights came on, the hallway outside was full of people, there to observe her interactions with an access panel interface that had been flagged for review. The sight of her empty room caused a panic, and teams of soldiers quickly spread out across the compound, disrupting work all over the place. Meanwhile, one of the soldiers reported, ‘The shrink, er ... the psychologist, entered the room, somehow found the girl under the bed and joined her there without our knowledge.’ The Director listened patiently as they explained how, in the chaos, nobody had the presence of mind to locate her in the system, until ‘Jeri decided to stop running around,’ and return to the board, but, ‘in the heat of the moment made the unfortunate decision to trip the electric fence ... by putting Eva into musculoskeletal lockdown,’ which, an engineer unnecessarily explained to the Director, was bad because it had not happened before and was really never meant to happen while the subject was awake.
At the end of this particular day several people were left to wrestle with some pretty significant questions. Eva had to wonder what makes plastic forks resist their masters? ... And what is it that causes hospital beds to seem alert and weirdly voyeuristic? And, last but not least, how did she end up lying paralyzed on a cold and sterile floor next to her therapist? That therapist was left to consider that her new patient might be on the verge of a psychotic break, though when she voiced her concern, one of Eva’s doctors surprised her by coldly pointing out that delusional ideation was a known side-effect of her hypnotics and dismissively suggesting they would modify the dosage – Brigid wasn’t surprised at the assessment, but at the apparent lack of concern for Eva’s well being. The psychologist had to accept things as they were, for the time being, though she resolved to ask for an audience with the girl’s care team when things settled down. Finally, the surviving members of Medalion’s leadership were consumed with many interrelated concerns after several challenging days: the Machine’s idiosyncratic control over seemingly insignificant details contrasted with what looked like careless abandon in other areas; the operators’ uneven and messy management of the system/subject interface; and the unplanned and unfortunate introduction of the girl to the frameworks of control that would soon be managing every aspect of her life.
The Director, really the only person qualified to address each of these in turn, abruptly decided to call it a day. He calmly thanked everyone for their good work, stood to leave the room, and made a mental note to put an appointment with Subject 1 on the next day’s agenda.
Albert walked to the edge of the roof to take in the view. There were a couple structure fires burning, though fewer than he’d come to expect; a rainstorm in the morning had cleared the air and contained most of the blazes. A few buildings were illuminated with lamp-light, and the sky was thick with brilliant stars. Under the glowing dome of the sky he looked at the smaller dome of darkness a mile to the east, where the city center used to be. All of it, City Hall, library, cultural center, had burned like a lesser Alexandria as a result of a recent meaningless revolutionary act. Over the scar that represented the missing city a small hemisphere of stars appeared to be missing too but they had not gone out. They were simply obscured behind the massive opaque dome that covered the location where Albert was building the city of the future.
Medalion could not claim the only active building project in town. Just across the old highway that passed along the west side of the campus, an artifact was rising above the house tops. While much of the world outside the walls was giving way to entropy, this thing, while chaotic, was growing and organizing into something more recognizable: a giant figure, built of scrap wood and steel, parts stripped from cars and buildings. It was gloriously unencumbered by zoning laws, neighborhood association covenants, conditions, and restrictions, or any limitation of resource. The figure was gargantuan, taller than everything around it, rising in the midst of emptying blocks, a skeleton of abandoned culture covered in scavenged drapery – domestic intimacies like sheets and clothing, flags and banners of all kinds, and something that looked like a deflated hot-air balloon. All of this billowed behind the creature in a wind from the west. One skeletal hand on a lifted arm, palm open to the western glow, saluted the end of day. What would it take for this golem to wake and come to the aid of its creators against the assault of time? Watching it slowly come together over recent months, the Director was fascinated, mostly; perplexed often. Tonight he was moved to see the maker rising on a cherry-picker under flood lights to delicately drape the shoulders of the figure with care and reverence, attending to the details like a servant dressing royalty for an audience with a visitor of higher rank.
It was quiet. He turned to a bank of radios under a covered space on the southeast edge of the roof next to several old barbecues – reminders of better Fridays – and played with the dial on a receiver. Most of the important hardware was buried deep in the building, being essential for communication with teams around the world. But up here was a bunch of old shortwave equipment connected to the massive antenna array that completely covered the nearby junior college’s football field – another reminder of better Fridays.
The system was able to pick up signals from almost anywhere on the planet, space weather permitting. From a line of speakers under the overhang came a whine of Lo-Fi, hi-reverb Indian soundtrack that comforted him as he imagined a lonely transmitter ... somewhere ... broadcasting still. If he just wanted to listen to good music, he could have had his choice of high-quality tracks off any of a hundred devices scattered around the complex. But what he wanted on nights like this was not fidelity, but imminence. A radio signal became a reassurance, a sign, like a triangulation off mountain peaks to get a wanderer un-lost. A broadcast meant more than just that someone was still out there; it meant that he was still here.
He spun the tuner through the surprisingly active bands ... ‘What this World needs is Yahweh, Yeshua, Messiah!,’ came the drawling exhortation from a long-gone evangelist on 12,160 kHz; gentle piano music on 6,185 kHz; looping updates from Medalion’s satellite locations around the world; some Morse code; and a soothing voice on an AM repeater calmly encouraging listeners to remain sheltered and patient, that the government would soon be unmasked as the Great Beast, the “global emergency” would be revealed as a hoax, and everyone who hadn’t succumbed to the mind-control campaign would rise to take back the cities and all their spoils (‘Stay awake and survive!’ he urged, with a punctuating cough). And always there was the strangely moving antique music of the subcontinent, from a time when Mumbai had not yet become Bollywood.
A few months before, he was surprised to hear a still-functioning numbers station. These relics of the cold war sent streams of digits out to hidden recipients, who alone could make sense of their encoded instructions. Albert listened to the scratchy voice and wondered how many years had passed since this signal first carried its hidden missionary meaning out into the world. Was it decades old, or had it been triggered by recent events? And he wondered: had the code been able to achieve its purpose? Was the sender ever able to make the receiver fulfill their function?
The Director settled on a broadcast. He wandered back to the circle of chairs, sat down, and sipped from a pretty good approximation of a Belgian Ale while listening to a sad mariachi; he thought he might even be getting a little buzz off the creamy brew, but he avoided thinking too hard about that. He looked out over the valley and felt gratitude for small things.
Brigid found him there and made clear her interest in holding a cold one of her own. Once she realized that she could have literally any beer she wanted, she skipped over being surprised and set about rebuking him for his choice. ‘Belgian beers are for monks and Americans. If you want to party with the Irish, you’ll have to pull something a bit more interesting.’
‘Guinness?’
‘Eh. What can you show me in a red ale?’
‘Wow, I remember drinking those in high school. They were popular for a while around here, then I don’t know what happened.’ While he tapped out something on a screen, she mumbled, ‘Oh, to be briefly popular in America. We were like those who dream.’
‘I’ll just need a little something from you first ....’ He stood up and walked away quickly. When he returned he had a glass of water. He held it out to her, and in response to her blank stare, he indicated that she was meant to wave her hand over it, which she did with a roll of her eyes. He hurried off, and when he returned, he carried a pint of what she recognized to be a gently chilled Smithwick’s.
‘Uhm, wow, very nice. And how did I do that, Albert?’
‘Ha ha. Apart from the sheer power of your ...,’ here he waived his own hand in her direction, ‘... it just so happens that someone, somewhere in the world, is drinking one of these right now. And so we know everything we need to know in order to make our own. We know what they’re drinking because we can “see it.” We know what it’s made of because we can “taste it.” And this person happens to be on the network in one of the cities left in the world where there are functional cell towers, and where we happen to have a satellite shop. That’s pretty much it. You’re lucky at least one person had a craving, or a drinking problem, which, would make sense under the circumstances, honestly, no judgment. Anyhow, we are fortunate ... because this information is getting hard to come by. Even if we wanted to recreate all the beers of the world, right now we probably couldn’t do it.’
She held the glass as though she wasn’t sure about a second sip: a sudden, justifiable fear of computer-generated backwash had come over her. ‘What kind of weird gastro-surveillance state were you building?’ He laughed. She could have used a laugh, but couldn’t help pushing on him. ‘Albert, really, what were you doing?’
‘Well. Maybe we never would have gotten away with it. I didn’t have to answer for it, because the question of privacy just stopped being relevant. Sure, in five years, all the politicians we saved from heart disease, liver disease, whatever, would be horrified to learn we’d built a library of their biometrics, diet, and ... other circumstantial data. They would have broken us up, taken control of the public-health division, and I would have become a political talking point.’
He leaned back in his chair and looked up, speaking quietly with an exhale. ‘The stars aligned for us, for sure. But I could also see the signs, even before history turned against us.’
She was squinting at him. ‘Well, may I say I am honestly curious?’ She was drinking again. ‘I’m up here on the roof with a magic beer at the end of the world, and I’m still not sure I understand what business we’re in, like right now. I know that I’m here to work with Eva, and I guess I thought most everyone else was too. But there is a lot of attention being paid to things I can’t see. What exactly is the system doing, Albert, when you’re not spying on people’s meals through their mouths? I can’t even ....’ Against her better judgement, she was fascinated, and was about to launch into another flurry of questions, when he raised his hand in surrender.
‘Would you mind if we didn’t talk about the system for a bit?’
After a period of silence, he pointed out a streak of color in the Milky Way, and they chose to give full expression to the simple feelings of awe they felt at the vastness of space stretching into infinity above their heads.
Finally, he said, ‘You know, the sky is so beautiful. It feels like we’re closer to it, closer to .... I just ... honestly it sometimes moves me to tears. I don’t think I’ve ever shed a tear over anything or anyone I share this planet with. But somehow I feel so ... close ... when I’m looking at things a trillion miles away. I don’t know.’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘What do you make of it all?’
‘Well. It’s pretty. I mean, I like stars, though generally I get nervous about all the space in between ‘em. We can see more of them now, and that’s good, I guess. More pretty, for as long as the show lasts.’
‘Yeah, that’s the thing. I can’t find anyone who knows anything about this, and you’re right, we have this beautiful view of the stars, now that all the lights are out ... but I can’t stop seeing all these dark patches, like ... maybe there are fewer of them? Anyway looks that way to me. And, also – ok, warning now – I wonder if it’s a sign.’
‘Huh?’
‘A third of the stars gone dark? Like, a sign of the end? Which ... you know.’
‘Yeahhh, Albert. I am more inclined to hope that a third of the stars are obscured by the spaceships that have come to bring greetings from benevolent civilizations of far galaxies and, maybe, to deliver some healing technology that could actually save us.’ He winced. ‘... Erm, sorry, Albert.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Anyway, I’m afraid I don’t have much energy for end-times dramas.’ She smiled, rolling her head to the side to face him. ‘But then ... I keep seeing Jesus in my dreams.’
‘Wait. What? Really?’
‘Well, actually I don’t ... really see him. I mean I do see him ... or I saw him once; it was hard to see, bad eyesight and all, worse in dreams where I am not allowed my glasses apparently. But I knew it was him. Jesus. And then he was right in front of me and, ah, ah ...’ she laughed, ‘All I know for sure is I ... could smell him.’
There was a moment of silence.
‘You smelled Jesus.’
‘Well, since I’ve got your attention. Actually, I smelled his breath. Because, see,’ she held her open hand up to the right side of her face, ‘he was close.’
‘Well. Saint Brigid.’
She squirmed, laughing uncomfortably. ‘Alright, that’s enough!’
‘Sorry, ok, sorry!’ After a pause: ‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘What does Jesus’ breath smell like? I mean, I already get weird about other people’s bodies, so this could push me over the edge, but I am all in for this.’
‘Nope!’ she was laughing and slowly shaking her head.
He made it clear he was going to wait, so she relented.
‘Well, it was ... strong. Like spices, on a hot pan. Camphor? Bay? I don’t know! Burnt cinnamon! It’s a little confusing ... but I can’t stop thinking about it.’
‘Did he say anything?’
She was quiet, and he chose to respect the silence.
Finally, with a shake of her head, she said. ‘I know it’s just a dream! But It seems every other good thing has faded away, so what else do I have?’
She became so still, he wondered if she would ever speak again. When she did, it was as though she spoke from a great depth. ‘I feel like I’m being turned inside out, like any fire I had inside of me is gone ... because I’m completely open and exposed in every direction to the sky, and all my insides are drifting apart.’ She gave a cold laugh. ‘I’ve been thinking ... maybe once I was self-centered, but, honestly, I can’t recall.
At the last of many meetings on a day that had given Medalion’s leadership much to discuss, members of the Founders’ Class were gathered with a few technicians. The Machine came online just in time to join in, so to speak. It was attentive as always, but perhaps more so at this moment, because it wanted to know what it had missed.
Everyone was talking about that day’s live-fire exercise, the very test that shut the system down, and certain coincidental events. In this meeting the focus was a design-and-build decision that exposed the exercise to Subject 1. The Machine was particularly interested in this latter concern, because the decision being referred to would have been its own. The Machine noted the unease of almost all present: verbal and visual expressions of concern masking complex fears without apparent object.
According to a technician’s report (during which the young man accepted blame he did not deserve) a system-built route had allowed the Subject to see directly into a space where a VIEP was malfunctioning. This was a problem because the Subject had not yet been introduced to the VIEP program.
The Machine could “feel” what the Founders felt and captured what they thought: that power within the system was indeed shifting to the system – they all understood that it had to be that way, and that this shift would continue until their influence had shrunk to nothing. That this loss of power would coincide with the end of their lives, after which they would have no need for that power, was of no comfort to them. Here, simple logic was of no use. Internally, they experienced confusion, fear, and a subsequent increase in emotional fragility. Practically, they were losing control over the system they’d designed. Though this was a normal milestone in the development process, it was enough, apparently, to threaten their internal sense of control as well.
The Director got to the point. He was asking Abdul why a new room in the complex had a window in it.
‘Well, sir, here’s how it’s been working: we enter all the information – start-point and destination – and a route is generated, hallways get built. The location in question was of a higher volume because the Machine has been drawing from some basic architectural patterns and decided we had too much undifferentiated hall. So, it added a room. And ... well, since this room was of a certain size, and was adjacent to an outdoor space, a window ...’ here he hesitated, impulsively looking around the room full of impatient, brilliant people, ‘... a window just makes sense.’ (Accurate, noted the Machine to itself, while observing that many in the room were struggling with the basic reasoning.)
In the meantime, the Director was arguing (correctly, thought the machine) that the system would have designed this route with the Subject in mind and would have thrown alerts if she might cross paths with something she isn’t authorized to see.
‘Sir, I don’t have an explanation. Everything was green when we signed off. And, you’re right, we’re not even allowed to ignore an alert when it comes up. All I can guess is that it was a modification that came after review.’ (The machine silently demurred, Unlikely).
‘All right. It happened. Well, friends, it appears we’re in the part of the movie where our creation has become fully sentient and is beginning to make decisions on its own regarding what is best for humanity. (Humorous.) The director drummed his twitchy fingers in what might have been Morse Code, calling for backup. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to introduce the kids to the rest of the team.
Half the room was laughing quietly, relieved that someone had finally acknowledged the ridiculous science fiction story they’d all found themselves in. The rest of the room didn’t laugh.
One of the humorless faction signaled an intention to speak. A short man with a neglected crew cut, wrinkled lab coat, and a disorganized personal wardrobe, spoke quietly, with unconcealed emotion. ‘Your idea ... is that we tell the children ...,’ here he raised himself up in his seat to communicate to his colleagues his conviction in this matter, ‘that when all the adults go away, we’re going to leave them with robot babysitters? And we’re going to tell them all about our plan on the day that one of these robots made a grown man cry, and then throw up, because an attempt at compassion went spectacularly wrong?’
The director repeated his growing conviction that the time for secrecy was ending, surprising himself by taking Brigid’s perspective. ‘Our team doctor has argued that we need to tell the children everything. We are worried about upsetting them, but it’s her opinion that Eva’s imagination about the future may be a lot worse than the truth. It’s time.’
They all understood that they’d come to a critical moment. They knew that they’d created something remarkable, even with all its flaws. And they recognized this to be the best and worst moment in any product-development cycle, when you finally get to reveal your History-Making Miracle to the world ... and when the people you made the miracle for finally have the opportunity to tell you that it doesn’t work and that they hate it.
The next day a group of men gathered together to argue over the design of an access-panel. They were waiting for Eva to vacate her room so they could make an assessment of the device. Reports that it was broken were not being taken seriously; they knew she had little patience with technology. There was no question of its functionality, but something had to be done. The debate appeared to concern whether the interface should be changed, or the Subject should receive remedial training. The Machine could have proposed a fix for the problem, but had not been consulted; these men, of the Founders’ Class, had strong separation from the system on certain points of order. The Machine also knew what would happen next but was in fact barred from intervention in the Founders’ process. They still liked to “handle things on their own.”
Brigid arrived at the very moment a group of heavily armored soldiers was pushing past the ad-hoc User Interface Working Group. An alert had gone out that Eva was missing. A cacophony of voices erupted as the mob tried to reason out where she could be, whether she might have wandered past the group, or ... maybe she was with the new lady, the shrink? The New Lady was able to quell that rumor by making her presence known with a raised hand. The soldiers dispersed across the compound, each followed by a growing crowd of the curious and concerned, and the doctor slipped quietly into the room.
She sat in the corner, trusting that the escapee would be found. She also knew that she herself would be of no use in a search of the facility, which remained entirely confusing to her for reasons she did not understand. In recent weeks, most of the non-essential workspaces at Medalion were being changed overnight, every night, according to a machine-understanding of the needs of the moment; this continued until it was made clear to the Machine (with the flip of a couple switches) that people do not like change when it comes without warning and makes it harder to get where you’re going. While there were no longer daily changes to which-hallway-goes-where, there were still rooms popping up unexpectedly, along with a supporting web of corridors connecting them to what had come before. The New Lady was still under the impression that it was she who was confused.
Sitting quietly, Brigid heard a sound like a sigh come from the floor. She thought of the breathing walls of her trailer and wondered. When the sound came again, she got up and walked over to the bed. Carefully she lowered herself to the ground and put her head sideways so her left ear was nearly to the floor, allowing her to peer under the edge of a loose bedsheet. Underneath, safe within her fort, the girl lay with her hands crossed against her chest just below her neck. Brigid delicately lifted the sheet, enough to give her a view to the figure lying in state under the bed, but not enough to render the fort defenseless.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey,’ Eva responded, the flat sound proceeding from the back of her throat, and out through a slack jaw.
‘Okay if I’m here?’
‘Yeah. It’s really, really clean under here.’
‘Is it?’
‘I thought there’d be spiders. I was nervous. There are no spiders.’
‘You know, this whole building is a clean-room facility. Like, really clean. No bugs, no dust.’
‘Yeah, I guess, but I mean it’s really clean under this bed. Like it’s perfect.’
‘Huh.’
After a pause, Eva said without emotion, ‘Did you know there are two other children like me?’
‘Yes. I did know that.’
‘Why don’t I ever see them?’ Why can’t I talk to them?’
‘Well, because the others, a boy and a girl, who are each a couple years younger than you, are in different parts of the country.’
‘Why weren’t they brought here?’
‘They were, Eva. They came here first. But we thought it would be smart to have you each live in different places. We think that you are going to have a nice long life. And, we thought, what if you were all together in a part of the world when something bad happened, like a tornado? You might all be in danger.’
‘Or like an earthquake. There were earthquakes in Greece.’ If it was possible to be homesick for earthquakes, she sounded as though she might be longing for any part of what she had left behind, even if it was the worst part.
‘Yeah, Eva,’ the woman said, recognizing the girl’s grasp of the situation. ‘And, California gets earthquakes too. But you know, I think earthquakes are not going to be a problem for you, because the place where you’re going to live is very safe.’
Eva gave a very slight nod, otherwise not moving at all.
The psychologist felt terrible. Against all her instincts, she knew that she could not tell Eva the whole truth. Brigid had pressed the Director to consider the cost of isolating the girl. He explained that he didn’t want the kids getting too attached to each other, because they might influence each other’s state of mind for the worse. For all his talk about empathy, how could he argue such a thing? She called his bluff. Then he tried the one about separating them for protection against disaster. She fought back, ‘Albert, you can keep her under lock and key, and separate from the others, but if she doesn’t have a reason to do this, if she doesn’t have a reason to live ... if she doesn’t choose to do it? Well. She’ll be dead in a few years. Or a few thousand, whatever. And she might just take the whole machine down with her. I don’t know if you’ve noticed ... but she breaks things, Albert.’
Finally he’d made the remarkable admission that the others weren’t likely to survive–a fact that had been kept from the California team. They were physically free of disease, but they had suffered more from the trauma of loss and separation. They probably wouldn’t thrive, were currently asleep, and would stay that way. ‘She’s going to have to find another reason, Saint Brigid.’
Eva wasn’t buying it either. ‘I just think it would be nice if I got to be with other people like me, if it’s going to be ... such a long time.’ The girl’s voice came as if from a great depth, giving the impression she was about to fall asleep. For the psychologist, an alarm was sounding. The experience would have been familiar to anyone who’d spent time in the presence of people at the threshold – broken, hopeless, drained of energy for everything but finding an exit. The job required walking alongside the one moving deeper into darkness, to match their pace in the direction of oblivion, to acknowledge their hopelessness. The alternative, to argue for hope (so simple, so tempting) risked denying the disconsolate the dignity of being right about one last thing, thereby sealing their resolve. The terrible irony of the therapeutic task in moments like this was that it might require affirming a person’s darkest perspective in hope that the affirmation itself could become a shred of evidence against despair. And it was no small risk that the physician might also get lost in the dark, and be unable to heal themselves.
Brigid spoke, matching Eva’s tone, and feeling it a little more than she liked. ‘It would be nice to have someone to walk with on this journey. It isn’t good to be alone.’
‘Yeah. It would be nice.’ The girl’s voice sounded a bit stronger, as though she was planting her feet for a next move. In the silence that followed, the air felt heavier.
She spoke again, this time turning slightly in the direction of the older woman. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘No?’
‘No. But I wanted to hurt myself.’
‘Did you? Hurt yourself?’
‘No .... I couldn’t.’
‘You chose not to.’
‘No. No, I chose to do it. But I wasn’t ... I couldn’t.’
‘You couldn’t ...?’
Eva spoke now, with growing energy. Brigid heard the voice pitch up a bit, but the girl’s body remained still: ‘I never hurt myself before. I had a friend who cut herself, but I didn’t want to do it. She said it helped her feel something when everything else felt like nothing. It made her calmer. And, I, I don’t know. I don’t really feel that ... my body ... like it’s mine anymore. I wanted to feel something, feel ....’ She was wincing, hard, ‘I don’t know.’
The psychologist had to consciously resist the impulse to search her own body for old scars, many of which were not that far beneath the surface ... ‘Eva ...’
‘I was going to hurt myself, I was going to scratch my leg.’ She paused. ‘Inside ...’
Brigid understood. ‘Where we wouldn’t see it.’
Eva nodded, then spoke faster. ‘I tried to break a plastic fork, so I could make a sharp edge. It wouldn’t break. I couldn’t break it. Only bend it. But it wasn’t like it was rubber or anything. I ate with it – it should have broken easily. Or at least stayed bent. But it kept snapping back into shape and it was as stiff as before. ... It wasn’t real. It wasn’t a real fork. It wouldn’t let me. I got this feeling that it was fighting back, and if it could have, it would have told me to stop .... Why ...?’ and her voice trailed off.
Brigid was feeling a little disoriented and confused herself and was beginning to wonder what the diagnostic code might be for “Delusions Related to Plastic Utensils”, when Eva said, ‘I don’t like this place. I just wanted to hide. I thought I’d feel safe under here. First I thought I was safer, then I felt like down here was also ... it didn’t feel hidden.’ The therapist felt a prickling on her skin like static electricity and a wave of pressure ... and the girl let out a tiny sound. And then: ‘I can’t move!’ Her eyes were wildly searching, tried to find the doctor next to her, but couldn’t quite – her face was fixed. ‘What’s happening?’
Brigid wouldn’t feel what the girl felt. For the woman, it was an overwhelming sense that the room was closing in as the lights outside their fort came up bright, and finally, that they were not only not-safe under the bed, but trapped there. It was worse for Eva, who was being overpowered from the inside – and felt terror that she was being restrained by her own body.
Brigid worried that the girl was going into shock but had no time to respond. In a moment, the soldiers had returned, and from the still-bickering group in their tow, Brigid could parse the basic elements of an embarrassed debate: ‘Why did you not just look on the screen to start with?’, and then, ‘You did what? She’s just under the bed! What the hell?’, a high-pitched and frantic question got the answer: ‘No! Only the skeletals! I swear!’ The noise of alarms filled the room as soldiers closed in from both sides of the bed barking commands back and forth and the girl released a panicked feline howl. Brigid was pulled out from under the bed and set standing in the corner so forcefully that she gasped and became lightheaded; the psychologist heard a strong and gentle voice on the other side of the bed saying, ‘Hey Mav, what’s the situation down here? You alright?’ Another shift in the room: Brigid’s ears popped and Eva shrieked, scrambling to the opposite corner. Her soldier took up a protective posture several feet away from her, making reassuring noises in an unsuccessful attempt to enforce calm.
The system tracked and assessed the unfolding event, noting the Subject’s discomfort at every turn with a multi-threaded machine-frustration: it had counted 836 missed opportunities to not make the situation worse. But it had been powerless to intervene.
The technology was mostly there, though so far it was just that – technology. A decent language-based interaction was possible, but the overall effect of sharing anything more complex than a math problem with a VIEP was one of distance; as if you were trying to communicate with a bookshelf, albeit one that could look up a satisfying response by itself.
For it to work, the action of his Encoded Persons had to be as genuine as possible, based on what’s happening in the moment. The more remote the reference – emotions based on a fixed database of relational patterns, for example – the less authentic the interactions would be. Everyone recognized the difficulty: even real people struggle with emotions in relationships, struggle to decouple what is essentially their own historical database of interactions from what is happening in the present. Our drive to survive is tied to primitive defense mechanisms, by which we interpret everything through a threat-filter rooted in past experience. This makes empathy difficult even for the best of us.
Long before anyone at the company would take seriously the idea of an artificial future society (let alone an emotionally engaging one), Dr. Brigid Tobin made her first appearance on a team call to argue for a little more empathy among the living. The engineers were having trouble with the human subjects, that is the three children that were spread across sites around the country, whom they characterized as being oppositional and defiant. Brigid was able to help the team see that the kids were only resisting because they were stressed and scared, even if they showed it in confounding ways. It can be hard enough to deal with the fact that your customers might not appreciate your efforts on their behalf, without taking into account that your whole user-base is made up of three children at the end of the world, chosen for unknown reasons to represent all of humanity to the future, alone, with nothing to reassure them but your high-tech promise that that future is full of wonder. It took Saint Brigid to suggest that this might not be only a marketing problem.
Her advice was simple: they had to spend the day on the floor. Sit with them; stop talking at them, except to offer words to reflect their experience. Essentially, the advice, as interpreted by the engineers, was to make the children the emotional reference-point for interactions. Do they seem sad? Don’t argue that they should be happy, or that they should be honored to be a part of this historic moment. Acknowledge that they have every reason to be upset, or confused; after all, confusion was a perfectly legitimate response to the madness of the moment. Work from their perspective – argue for them. Her advice turned out to be a significant help for those technicians whose expertise did not extend to working with kids.
As attention shifted from keeping the subjects alive to actually providing them something closer to a life, the Director took a particular interest in Brigid’s perspective, but for reasons different than the others’, and for reasons that remained hidden to her: he was trying to build more emotional machines.
As the engineers on duty this morning described it, the first steps taken in this direction were shaky. They had spent a couple months training the VIEPs to respond to and progressively match the affect of human subjects. It was delicate work: they didn’t want to mirror emotions too precisely, because that would be weird, especially coming from a computer. So they were playing around with a more fuzzy response. But, the fuzziness of the logic was presenting like sloppiness, and imprecise in the wrong kind of way.
The human subject for the day’s testing – a volunteer from Software named Brett – woke up already in a bad headspace. Like everyone, he was worried about the pace of the project, which is another way of saying he was terrified at the pace of events in the world. But while nobody could escape the effects of the now unrelenting stress, Brett seemed to feel it more than most. To anyone assessing his mental health, he would present as the kind of person for whom the extra support of pharmaceuticals, or possibly other more intrusive interventions, would be indicated. He was also the kind of person who would try anything ... once. He got new injections whenever there was an experimental update to the swarm; he would go a week on an entirely synthetic diet before most people had been willing even to taste artificial salad; and, he was first to volunteer for ten weeks in the CRIB system. Being the first to sleep that long established his reputation as a willing, and brave, test-subject, but all he wanted was to get some rest and relief. It didn’t really work, but everyone knew that a couple months offline wasn’t enough to effect real change, considering the constraints put on the machine when dealing with the mind. He woke up from his extended nap feeling deeply rested but any psychological relief he might have hoped for wouldn’t come close to matching his expectations – and couldn’t last anyway, especially when he was bound to wake up in a world that was, not surprisingly, worse off than the one in which he had fallen asleep.
Today, he wanted to get away from the computer and do a little field work, as it were. He wanted to have a real conversation with the characters he’d been working on; he understood that empathy was going to be the killer feature, even if it was only a coded response. He’d been finding precious little compassion from his coworkers. As he stepped into the courtyard for the test, he was told, ‘Just act natural’.
Things started fine. The VIEP registered Brett’s emotions and calculated a meaningful response, modulating its own affect. The things were remarkably expressive, and sometimes they even got the expression right. Subtle adjustment was key. The team had given a lot of thought to how reflective empathy works with people. A good listener never feels exactly the same thing as the speaker, but when they sense emotion, the observer will be connected to their counterpart’s feelings by a system within the brain’s network of mirror neurons that makes it experientially real to the listener. By a kind of intrinsic imitation engine, we feel with each other. This borrowed emotion might be felt more or less strongly, but a modulated reflection helps the speaker acknowledge the relative power of their own feelings, as their own mind reflects on the reflection. In any case there is a very subtle back and forth, a vital connection – between the living.
Unfortunately, on this day, during a brief interview between a living human and an earnest machine, the imitation of the imitation engine failed its Turing Test. The question would be asked later in the day whether it is possible to have a little too much empathy. At first, there seemed to be no real cause for alarm; the creep’s responses provoked amusement in the observation room. But within moments, the failure cascaded into disaster: the initial, uncanny, duplication of the subject’s discomfort, amplified in the system by degrees, prompted a subsequent increase in Brett’s own discomfort. This, in turn, elicited a further attempt on the part of the VIEP to adjust and respond; inexplicably, it once again amplified the affect according to an imperfect machine-logic which really came down to stupidly responding to a negative emotion with a little more of that negative emotion. Over and over again. The VIEPs were decent simulations of the human organism. But feelings, both the copy and the real, are hard.
By the time the weeping creature lunged at Brett in an attempt to comfort him with an embrace, the techs could tell that things were getting out of hand, and quickly disabled physical contact. But from the neck up, the character remained in play. In just over a minute from the start of the experiment, the programmer was screaming and banging on the door as the face of the empathy monster devolved into a keening, quivering, incoherent alien.
To make matters worse, there was a systemwide awareness that a networked human subject and a sandboxed VIEP were in some kind of exceptional crisis, and alarms started going off all over the place. By the time the entire system was shut down – no one knew who or what had shut it down – it looked like the thing’s head was going to burst, and Brett had been sick in the corner.
After several minutes of silence, the Director spoke. ‘Somebody please tell me we are in control of this thing.’
‘Well, sure,’ said an exhausted-looking engineer who’d been present for the exercise, ‘We’re in control. That hasn’t ever been an issue. That is to say, our control may be part of the problem. I mean, we can instruct the things to be fuzzy in one direction or another with a gentle nudge, but each of our nudges is getting us in trouble. When we dull the affect, you get the feeling you’re in conversation with a cow; boost the affect, and, well ... we end up with this horrifying race-to-madness that might finally cause our favorite test subject to turn in his frequent flyer card. The referencing is too dynamic, and we haven’t been able to provide effective guardrails. We just don’t know how to govern the intrinsic response. I’d say, “yet,” except we’re out of time.’
‘Brett going to be ok?’
‘That depends. Any chance he can speak to a real therapist?’ The Director was starting to answer the question but was cut off: ‘He’ll be as fine as any of us are.’
They all knew the Director was struggling with the setback. A young woman whose trucker hat covered a shaved head spoke up. ‘Sorry, Albert, but we can’t do human. As a reference. Too volatile.’ This was a meaningful objection coming as it did from one of the engineers overseeing the empathy project.
‘What does that mean, exactly? What are we supposed to use?’
‘I just mean we can’t reference a living person in real time, the mirroring isn’t reliable enough. The whole thing is too unpredictable, unstable. We need something more dependable. And, anyways, I know this is not a popular position, but can we remember that the humans in question may not always be stable themselves? I’m sorry, but it’s a fact. We have to consider that distress may lead to unexpected changes in behavior or unconscious manipulations of the system, and we need to account for that as well.’
A tall engineer with wild eyebrows and a severe expression joined the conversation: ‘And I would like to submit that we continue to suppress emotion in the VIEPs across the board ... to further protect the subjects; our local representative has shown a reactivity during testing that suggests the need to err on the side of caution.’
The Director let out a groan and ran his hand over his face.
He sent for Brigid. She hadn’t been told about the VIEP program, partly because of a now-irrelevant habit of preserving the secrecy of initiatives still under development, partly because the Director simply hadn’t had the time or energy to explain the scope of projects that may yet fail. But she could explain to the team the importance of empathy in the coming virtual world, even if she still believed the future of relational interaction was going to be some kind of chat-bot.
She came into the room escorted by a lab worker. While Brigid found a place to sit, the lab tech joined several others standing around the edge of the room observing impassively.
It didn’t take long for Brigid to pick up on the troubling implications of the moment. A committee was about to turn off empathy with the flip of a switch. She was ready for that fight: ‘I have to object: you’re talking about a critical human need: if you remove it from your virtual interactions, you’ll essentially doom the survivors to life in a bad video game. Probably be better to just put them to sleep.’
Trucker Hat hid most of her contempt for the newcomer’s opinion. ‘We’re not really doing away with it, you understand. It just has to be scripted.’
‘Alright, yeah. See previous comment. Do you know, the first thing a baby needs to give meaning to its existence is that relational interaction; food and shelter are critical of course, but it’s the response of a living, feeling other that lays a foundation of value, of understanding ... that the world is a safe place, that a child is worthy of this life. And we don’t really age out of this need. Please, consider this: children who are denied a feeling connection with another ultimately have to turn off their emotions to survive. It’s too scary to be alone. I know you’re working with very limited resources here, but we’re talking about deep emotions that really need to know there is something with some depth, out there, ready and willing to respond.’
‘Yeah, that has a nice ring to it, very poetic. But what happens when you call out to the deep, and the response is a thing of horror?’
‘You’re creating something that has implications for the future of humanity here. Be careful that you don’t give up on your creation too soon, Doctors Frankenstein.’ She said this looking to each of the faces in the room in turn.
Albert might have been the only person who picked up on her subtle smile. But he could also see that even she wouldn’t be able to inspire the engineers to magically find a solution: her conviction was no match for the countdown timer. ‘Well, Doctor, we’ve spent the afternoon talking about a failure during a pretty significant trial, so I’m afraid we are already doing triage. Our kids will have to adapt. And, that is why you’re here.’ He turned his attention back to the room. ‘So where the hell are we going to find our humanity, if we can’t get it from the human in the room?’
‘Well, we’re ready for this. All we need is a narrative map. One that takes into account the broadest scope of basic interactions while also being structurally constrained so that we don’t have to worry about anomalous responses; in the event of any specific crisis the system can choose whether to resolve or defer. We’ll crawl for data once we’ve defined categories and the platform will take care of the rest. We just need ... a safe database. I think it’s a simpler solution to implement, once we choose our libraries.’
‘Alright.’ ... It wasn’t, really, but what else could they do? ... ‘Ideas?’
The tall one spoke. ‘Something trusted, vetted, established through multiple iterations. This rules out every bit of unique content on the web, which would be as likely to provoke our subjects to mindless revolution as to despair; it’ll need to be safe. The materials should also be popular in order to work across classes. That is, the system should be able to counter-reference a simple emotional framework’ – here he nodded to the scowling psychologist, ‘empathy for example – from vetted and historically-tested properties like self-help books or videos to available somatic models for all the classes. We can pull this together relatively quickly. It shouldn’t be too hard to move from a sense-response system to one centered on simple linguistic or imagistic datasets, and it will be easier to work with, providing for interactions within a non-threatening narrative ...’ He took a breath and looked up, suddenly aware of his audience, ‘I think we would all rather spend time in a room with an earnest guru from the ’70s than an exploding robot!’ Not many of them looked quite ready to commit to the proposition.
Prozyma! For the unexpected. And everything in between.
She rolled the soft planet between her fingers stopping only occasionally to give it a half-hearted squeeze, though any capacity the object might have had to mitigate stress had long before been proven not to be remotely up to the task.
She had been feeling increasingly unsafe in her brother’s neighborhood. Only recently, the momentum in their home had shifted from sheltering in place to heading for the hills. At first, it was less about escape than it was about choosing the place in which to finish out your days. Her sister-in-law had passed weeks before, and her brother was in danger of drifting away in a passive fugue. His kids wouldn’t let him go. They surrounded him, to spur him on to one last act of courage.
They wanted her to come with them: north to the redwoods to find a spot along the ancient coast and spend their remaining days under the shade of trees that had been keeping watch over the expanse since the beginning. A beautiful idea. She was surprised at her own reluctance – she wasn’t ready.
She had to admit they were leaving at the right time. The day before, some guy drove his oversized truck along the sidewalk and through front yards, knocking fences and mailboxes down, for blocks – her cheeks flushed at the memory. Was this guy just a nihilistic idiot having his moment? Or was he a nihilist-savant who understood that the final task of Homo Sapiens was to speed along the decomposition of the built-world in anticipation of whatever came next? She thought, when the nihilists are winning every argument by forfeit, then maybe it doesn’t matter what kind of nihilist you are. God. What was she thinking? This is not what she believed. But History was pulling every perspective along in its wake as it raced off the edge of the map to meet the dragons. Even the believers had to admit something good was coming to a terrible end. The Void had come to town and moved in next door in a kind of diabolical gentrification that robbed the joy from healthy homes. She knew several houses in the neighborhood were empty. With others the story was less clear, though she avoided close inspection. And some, doors open to the weather, gave her a creeping dread.
So it was, when another giant truck rumbled down the street in the middle of the night and slowed to a stop in front of their house, she understood, finally, that she would not be traveling north, but south; away from the giant elder trees and toward something far less certain.
Now, as she slowly adjusted to the small, sterile space and her presence in it, Brigid sat looking through the room-divider at the dimly lit space on the other side. With nothing there to hold her attention, she was left to consider her own face, reflected in the wavy screen, looking bleary-eyed and dark in the shocking white of the place. Tendrils of her salt and pepper hair escaped from corkscrew curls, insisting on attention after a long period of neglect. She took a deep breath and pulled a tangle of grayed hair back to bind it. Her ears must have popped because now she became aware of a low, intermittent noise around the room, in the walls, like wind, almost like breathing. Just climate control, she thought. But it sounded uncanny, nothing like the familiar, monotonous drone that one expects from a ventilation system. She was painfully curious to see where she was, that is, where this place was, to understand her situation, to see past the mystery of the breathing walls. But right now, her world was shrunk.
She was glad for the ball, the only interactive part of the room. Her thumb and forefinger rocked on opposite sides of the little Earth, back and forth, the planet taking her fingerprints. She rolled it forward – from the deep blue of painted seas to the bright green of lumpy, misshapen continents, and back again from green to blue, and forward again and back. With the vision in her head of a Movie Star Superman flying around the equator so fast the Earth reversed direction and time turned back and Lois was saved, she toyed with the idea that she could tempt the globe with a gesture to spin down and then reverse, and maybe change the inertial flow of history. Go back the way it was.
She was interrupted by an undistinguished buzz that signaled the immanent breach of her sealed space. The door on the other side of the trailer opened with a sucking noise, and her ears really did pop this time. The heavy vinyl curtain bowed convex, nudging the lightweight table with a slap. Through the divider, she watched the Director enter the room as the lights flickered bright above him. She was confused by a flood of feelings at his sudden presence, when for so long she had only encountered him virtually. Competing inappropriate desires: to run from the room or to smother him in an embrace: he was so much more alive than when he only took up a small part of her computer screen. He stood smiling weakly, shrugging in surrender to the madness of the circumstances. He blushed a little though she didn’t see it, and said, ‘You have everything you need here?’ He blushed a little more, shaking his head, with a thin chuckle: ‘Sorry.’ Then earnestly, ‘Would you like another folding chair? We want you to feel completely at home! Choose from our extensive catalog.’ She smiled, and he laughed with relief.
‘Hello Albert.’ She had a habit of using first names, no matter the circumstances. It was, for her, at least in regular times, an act of resistance. Today, it felt more like an act of intimacy: not a rebellion against the secular powers, but against the threat of annihilation. She spoke quickly to resist a flood of emotion. ‘I’m fine here. What’s happening?’
‘I think our timing is good. We’re going to bring her to you now, if that’s alright.’
‘Yes of course, I have managed to clear my calendar! Bring her over.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
‘Brigid, please.’
He showed a brief excitement, ‘That’s right! Saint Brigid, is what Ken told me. Something about your mythical healing powers?’
She nodded, smirking. ‘Kenny was nosy. Mom was Irish and ... a bit more religious than I: Brigid was her favorite saint, and a healer as well, though she and I appear to work from different modalities. Also ...’ she added with learned enthusiasm, the part of the story everybody loved: ‘She could turn water into beer.’
‘Well! We’re going to have to explore the rest of your resumé now that we’ve got you here. Okay. Ten-fifteen minutes. Has someone told you what to expect?’
‘Yeah. ... Albert?’ She had so many questions, decided on one. ‘How long? How much time ...?’
He took a deep breath, held it briefly before speaking. ‘Two or three months.’ After a moment, he looked at her. ‘How are your numbers?’
She didn’t answer the question. ‘She knows?’
He paused, then spoke like he was in a confessional, looking at the door: ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know. I should know. I mean she should know. Probably. ... She probably does.’ With a quick look back at her and a tiny smile, ‘I’ll be asking for your opinion on the matter at the end of the day, Doctor. Brigid!’ He left, and she let out a long breath through tight lips.
She flattened the stress-ball under the palm of her hand. It took little effort to do so, but made her feel tired nonetheless.
In second sealed room on the far side of the compound, the girl was asleep and dreaming.
‘What are you doing here?’
Her insides twisted at the question: she didn’t have an answer, didn’t understand where she was or how she had come to be here. That is, she knew that she was in a dream. And while she was used to a measure of control in dreams, she was powerless when it was like this. Scary dreams, falling dreams, crazy dreams: often she could change the course of events, though any alteration would bring the dream to an early end – if she never got to see how her version of the story played out, at least she could get some rest. But, this kind of dream, where some response was required of her, left her feeling lost. Like she didn’t know the rules, never had the answer even in the rare circumstance when she understood the question. It was mostly like this now: always dreaming, never resting.
She was in the corner of a cold, dark space that smelled of damp stone. Her surroundings only took shape in her imagination as they filled with the sound of distant wind and rain. A rumble of thunder – or was it the beginning of an earthquake? – shook the walls, and she felt dust settle on the back of her head and neck. As she shifted her posture against the fear that the ground was moving, she learned the floor was uneven. She was in a sloping cavern, and she was not alone: someone else cowered in the corner, groaning, huddled up against the threatening cold. Though the weather couldn’t reach to the back of the cave, the noise was terrifying, filling the chamber.
A huge windstorm tore at the mountainside like a drunken giant stumbling against the cliff-side, crying out in search of some lost treasure. It was only a storm, but the mountain shook with it. Finally, the squall cleared: the sun, close to setting, burned through the retreating clouds to pierce the darkness of the cave, which opened to the West, face to the sea. But even this burning power was only prelude to some mightier agency, she sensed. This feeling also settled on the back of her head and neck like dust.
A voice cut through the brightness, cut through the dark. That is, the light streaming into the cave was now, suddenly, shown to be dark compared to the sound of the word. It could also be said, if she had been able to find her own voice, that this word had condescended to ride the light of that setting sun. And though the light was dimmed to her eye, it had lost none of its own power in the bargain; like a golden bowl set in the hands of a blind beggar, no question of its value. And for the first time in her life – so much was being shown to her! She felt the intoxication of revelation! – she thought, ‘I now begin to understand the full meaning, the true nature, the ultimate paradox of light – a wave and a particle; the First of All Things that remains the most common thing of all; life-power to plants, ultra-violet death to bacteria. Light! Healing power to the revenant taking shaky steps out of the sick-room; also burning discipline to the fool in a bathing suit. ... Light! Banisher of darkness – the revealer! Light! Blinding justice to all who prefer the dark – the exposer!’
... But the truth was that she was only really thinking about the light because she was unable to think about that voice without ... without ....
‘Come!,’ it insisted, clear, unmistakable, and somehow utterly confusing.
She had little choice but to walk toward the opening of the cave, the light, and the Presence, shoulder to shoulder with the shivering figure who covered his face. She pitied him, imagining that she was secure against discovery, as if, somehow, she had no face and therefore could not herself be exposed. Until ... they both emerged from the cave and came into the terrible silence revealed by that single word. ‘Oh no!,’ she thought with a wincing groan, realizing her mistake, ‘My mask! I’ve lost my mask!’
The voice came again, hidden in a wind born out of the center of a vast expanse: ‘Why are you here?’
Another ripple through her insides. And the shrinking figure next to her took a half-step forward, and answered with a cowering assertion: ‘I have been very zealous for you, Mystery of Glory, though all your people have forgotten your words, torn down your temples, and terrorized the truth-tellers! I alone am left!’ He finished on his knees, hands raised in a trembling semaphore that might have appeared to an observer equal parts worship and terror.
And the voice, quiet but with the power to divide the mountain, spoke, and the aroma of it rushed over her like the smell of split rock: flint and ozone and sulfur. ‘No. It isn’t so. It’s only pride that makes it seem that way. You have been zealous only in judgment. But in matters of mercy, you shrink and are in retreat. Go back. There are still some not bent with fear, and some who are that might yet be saved. Get up and go back!’
She felt her own stomach jump at the command; the ragged man shrank from the voice and retreated from the edge of the cliff. She turned to watch him go and saw her own coronal outline reflected in the iridescence of the damp cliff face, next to the mouth of the cave. She watched the humbled pilgrim stumble down the passage to a dark corner, climb into a marble box, and collapse – decomposed – into a pile of dry bones.
The girl heard the command again, but this time the voice was a familiar one: ‘Get up!’
She opened her eyes and quickly sat up. The dream-image of her sun-lit body in silhouette had faded, and was replaced by the sight of her pale skin under artificial light reflected in a mirror from across the small room. She turned toward the source of the voice and saw a soldier’s face, maskless, grimacing at her from the screen by her bed.
‘Yo! Time to get up! You have a meeting. There’s someone waiting for you, girl.’
She rose and stood on the cold floor, shivering, and blinked against the brightening light. As warmer air blew in from unseen apertures, she began to move, pulling herself together for another uneventful day in her typical, boring, adolescent life. She swung open the glass door of the fridge set back in the wall and took out a drink marked with the date, a scanner-code, and some other numbers that meant nothing to her; she pried off the lid and downed the purple juice, ignoring the slightly metallic taste. She carefully pushed a packaged muffin back against a second door on the opposite side of the box, a simple act of resistance calculated to communicate to hidden agents her dislike of bran. And muffins. And packaged foods in general.
She retrieved a small sealed tray from a shelf above the food. Peeling back a plastic covering revealed a circle of thick adhesive around a disk of gel filled with tiny copper flecks. She tapped the patch against a wrist monitor, waited for a vibration in response, then lined it up with a circular rash on her forearm, where she pressed it down.
She skipped to the door and punched the panel next to it with the side of her fist. This action resulted in a disapproving ‘Boop!’
She took a deep breath, and frowned. In slow motion she lined up her wrist with the receiver, and pressed the device against the screen. Resting her forehead against the white metal frame, she began to slap the door with her left hand.
‘Beep!’
She pushed her way into the hall, absentmindedly counting off armed soldiers in biohazard suits along the corridor. She turned to face one of them, to the right of her door, the soldier who’d appeared on her bedside monitor. His armored presence loomed above her, his face now mostly hidden behind a thick plastic face shield. She could see enough to know he was giving her his best war-face. She resisted a smile and scowled right back at him.
She tossed her forehead up, ‘Goose.’
‘Mav.’
‘Goose, whose butt did you kiss to get this job?’
‘The list is long but distinguished.’
‘New class coming through today. Volleyball later?’
He laughed and it shook his imposing frame, making all his layers of military equipment look a little bit more like toys in that moment. Then, ‘Hey, you alright? You look terrible.’
‘Weird dreams, drama, I don’t think I slept much. Hey Goose, the panel’s busted on my door again. One of these days, I’m going to be trapped in there and you’ll have to shoot your way in.’
‘Maybe consider not punching the technology, kiddo.’
She turned away. ‘You are not my wingman anymore.’
The girl was directed through a maze of passages by a young technician whose name she couldn’t remember.
At a point roughly halfway along their meandering route, they passed through a room with a large window on the south wall providing a view into an unfamiliar courtyard, where a surprising scene was playing out. There, a young man with a stunned look on his face lay on his back as if tackled, before a striking woman who stood over him frozen in a catatonic embrace ... of nothing. The girl came to a stop, then turned to look at the tech, who also seemed to have frozen as he looked out at the scene. She saw his name tag, ‘Abdul’, remembered that he liked to be called ...
‘Abi?’
He snapped back to attention, turned to her with wide eyes and a thin laugh. He said something sharp under his breath and gently moved between her and the window, guiding his charge to the end of the room, and toward an adjacent hallway that was filling with light from the morning sun.
She leaned back to look behind him as they walked past the window. Then, facing forward with a scowl, she spoke with no expectation of a response: ‘So, huh, what’s the deal with frozen people? Living statues? Are we starting a mime troupe? And why didn’t anyone tell me there was a rehearsal? I mean, I probably don’t have time for any more electives; I already signed up for modern dance and web design.’ Abdul laughed quietly but said nothing.
He was taking her to a small trailer at the edge of the compound, where another woman sat, immobile, except for one hand that desperately massaged a rubber ball while she waited to meet the future sole survivor of the human race.
Ahead of her escort, the girl moved down the corridor, face to the east and the rising sun, which filled the hall with light ... and the planet sped her forward according to its own easterly rotation. At that exact moment, on the far side of the globe, a man stood, unsteady, with his back to the setting sun. As she moved forward, wading into the shapes of golden light that highlighted the walls and floors of her passageway, her adopted father, bottle in hand, stumbled deeper into the darkness of his cave. By their seemingly deliberate steps, hers toward the light and his away, both kicked against the motion of the Earth, applying the smallest amount of energy that, had it been multiplied a million, billion times, might have stopped the turning, and reversed the spin, but would never, ever, have been able to turn back time.
She came into the trailer and sat in the empty chair. The door shut and the atmosphere inside found its equilibrium again. Surrounded by a new silence, her physical presence communicated to the visitor an unexpected air of nobility, suggesting that she was aware that everything on this campus happened because of her. But in this moment her face was drained of emotion. It seemed as if the room itself was holding its breath.
‘Hello Eva. My name is Brigid,’ said the woman behind the plastic curtain. She made a polite effort to smile, and gave the girl a look of caring concern. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’
The woman did understand that she would be taking part in the final act of the Great Story: she knew the role she’d been cast in, and she knew where to stand on the stage. But what she did not know – what she could not know – was the true nature of the play. Whatever destiny had been made manifest in ages past was no longer accessible to plain sight. The veil had been dropped once more to shroud the doom of humankind.
But right now, there was quiet. Nobody came. He hadn’t been able to move far from his spot in front of the taverna for several days since his leg had become a problem. He did not like being stuck here. The other two insisted on going out for food, though they also were getting sicker.
He opened the sketchbook, which he had pirated from the cave on the cliff-face, and flipped through the pages until he came to the new portraits. The first artist was better than the last, but Arpa’s drawings were special, if only because he had been able to draw from life. His life. And now, he focused on two pictures in particular, holding on to them with a stubborn mental resolve to resist the threatening solitude.
In the silence, Arpa began to hear things, as if the place was waking up. Eyes closed, he heard the gentle rise of voices and clinking of plates loaded with fish and lamb, giant beans, potatoes, and grilled cheeses. Waiters charming tourists, promising the most authentic cuisine ... old men passively debating local news over game boards ... young people laughing, huddled together as they walked down the street. The plaza seemed alive with a tranquil, but resonant energy that recalled his best days in the city.
He understood that the square was as empty as the surrounding spaces, and that he was ... alone. But memories were like cash in the new economy, so he let them come, experiencing the city and its ghosts, listening to their sounds, seeing it all as it should be. It was as though he could populate the place with the best lives, the best sounds and sights from a long history. It was perfect – he smiled ... there is a way of remembering that cleanses the past. But, maybe this wasn’t about the past? More echoes of some future truth?
As he debated the qualities of a perfect day in the city against the soundtrack of a peaceful evening bustle in the square, he was jarred out of his reverie by the noise of an approaching vehicle. This was especially disconcerting because the sound had no part in his fantasy, nor lately in his reality. He listened with a growing unease as the rumbling machine came closer and closer. Finally (he shouldn’t have been surprised but was), a truck actually appeared from one of the wider side streets. It was a heavy military transport, towing what looked like a small power station bristling with antennae that had Arpa wondering what was being broadcast, and who in the world was on the receiving end.
Heavy tires came to a stop in the gravel with a crunch. A man stepped down from his seat behind the driver and approached with care. He was not a soldier, nor did he look at all like somebody who should be chauffeured around in a tank. He looked ... familiar, like someone Arpaxos might have known at one time. He was dressed in that style that Nicola used to call Baggy Professor, a label she gave to her brother when she wanted to chastise him for his lack of fashion sense. Eva had copied her mother’s taunt to annoy her uncle; he didn’t mind, because in the end, the girl would copy his style. The stranger appeared clean and healthy, which seemed odd.
Another figure emerged, from behind the wheel; after a quick look around the square, he reached back inside the cab to kill the engine, forcing a final silence on the city. This one was dirty, thin, and pale – as expected – and was dressed (and armed) in the style of an occupying army. The driver took up a position next to his truck, with a medical kit by his side.
The Baggy Professor came to a stop a respectful distance from where Arpa sat. Standing still as a picture, he gave the impression he was equal parts calm and alert. This also was odd: no matter what company you kept, no matter how much hope or faith you could muster, calm was not one of the qualities you expected to see in people these days; and anyway, the armed escort was giving off a very different energy – more tense and intimidating, but more familiar, so less unsettling. The stranger looked at him with a slight tilt of his head, and with a subtle expression of curiosity. Or was it concern?
He was staring attentively at Arpaxos, like he was studying him. And Arpa, looking back and trying to make sense of the intrusion, wondered whether this new character belonged to his fantasy of the re-populated square (an apparition from happier times?). It was easy to imagine that the two of them were meeting to share a drink and talk philosophy, or debate some more practical matter. Did the man belong to the past? Was he a memory like all the rest? Or did he belong to the future? He didn’t seem to fit in the present.
Arpa was confused, and had to fight to resist a creeping disorientation. He understood the man’s style well enough, but beyond that, he could make no sense of his presence, here, in this place. The air itself seemed energized in anticipation.
And the stranger, who’d been surveying Arpaxos and his surroundings, and who’s searching eyes had briefly settled on the sketchbook in the seated man’s lap, finally lifted his eyes, took a decisive step forward, and spoke. ‘I have a message from your daughter. She wants you to know that she is well, and that she loves you very, very much.’
And then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, a waiter appeared from inside the taverna to place a small table between the two men, and set out food and drink. Arpa hesitated, then reached out to gently touch the warm bread that filled the plastic basket; he took a single piece into both hands and held it, uncertain. A nearby couple watched this ceremony absentmindedly, then turned away to resume their conversation. From inside the restaurant there echoed a laugh and a rattle of dice. And, as the city itself seemed to get back to whatever it was it had been doing before the end of the world, the waiter brought a second chair, set it to face Arpaxos, and invited the stranger to sit.
The discovery meant that he now had something that could be burned for worship: he lit a small pile of the artist’s charcoal in the censer and placed a few pebbles of sacred sap over the embers. As incense filled the room, he lit a candle, and opened the book of images to the beginning. The dedication page had several inscriptions: a child’s handwritten words για τον μπαμπά ... for daddy, next to a rough drawing of a stick figure holding a pencil aloft like a great sword. There was a name, A. Λογοθέτης, and an address in Mezapos. And also this – a pirate’s song for the dead from Deep Mani, written without the skill of the miroloyistrias, but with all the reverence of a witness:
O Cyprus Tree of deepest root,O flow of holy water!Thy ruined church(with quaking dome)yet bore a beaming welcometo thy warm and humble hutch;to host a prideful sinner,to cleanse of direst soot.
Arpaxos held the book tenderly, like an ancient manuscript, and with gentle reverence began to turn the pages. On each were icons of the sublime, or the mundane; every picture sacred. An urban square filled with couples dressed for spring. A small metal table on three legs overburdened with delicacies for an afternoon meal. A chapel in the shade of an impossibly great flower. A cemetery framed by an overgrown plane tree. Saints and Angels .... In each drawing he found himself before a familiar face. All the characters from his life and from his journey into exile were represented here. For so long, he’d been so focused on Evie: he understood that he had stopped seeing, stopped acknowledging those around him, and that he had really stopped seeing her as well. It was only when she was gone that he began to realize he really had no memory of her. Arpa could imagine her face, but now even hers became the face of a girl looking for something she would never find in him, because what she wanted was to be seen, truly, as a person, not as a priceless treasure to be locked away.
With an aching heart, Arpaxos turned through this series of images, each of them resonant with qualities he had become blind to. Each portrait was a window into a reality that he’d ignored, or rejected, for too long. He found Eva in a sketch of a young girl; with a look of sad understanding, this face become the face of the Virgin. He could see now that when she looked out from the page, it was with a heart pierced to know that her loved ones were all doomed to die, and that she would have to carry on alone in some secret upper room to bear inside of her the story of humanity in hope of a new Pentecost, some future day when words would have meaning again.
Also there, a widow in black, cast in the role of Wisdom: long-suffering, creative, sheltering. She was as old and unchangeable as the hills, but also quick-witted, serious, and able to shape or move the hills when necessary, with a word. Next, the adolescent boy from behind the church who’d watched Arpaxos steal a can of fruit. He’d insisted at the time (to himself) that the boy had no cause to complain. But now he was forced to admit that this face – of an angel, one of the holy ones – would not be denied. Today, this image was a window letting in a righteous complaint from the world outside his cell. Was it a rebuke? A call to repentance? A challenge to forswear robbing his fellow refugees, coveting their perceived abundance, or murdering with hatred those who dared reveal weakness? He was chained in the dock, could not escape. The presence of the boy was growing now, his face becoming the face of Christ seen in the stranger, the beggar, the broken one. Now plaintiff, now judge.
Arpa couldn’t defend himself. Nor did he want to: he felt the same painful longing as at the priest’s grave – to meet the living face behind the portrait. His heart was thumping, and he felt an air of invitation in the space. With a freedom he hadn’t known in ages, he began to speak.
Tenderly, to the page in front of him, he asked, ‘What’s your name?’
He felt his attention drawn to the painted icon nearby, where Christ from his nimbus replied, ‘Ὁ ὬΝ’. The One Who Is. ... I am; I exist.
Arpaxos was set reeling by this, not only because of his concern that yet another icon was coming to life to provoke him, but because now he felt that windows were being thrown open all over the room. The boy was alive, and he could feel that this was no simple, spiritual affirmation – somehow he knew that in the world, today, the boy existed, and that he still waited .... That Evie was also out there, and many still lived that he had secretly sped on their way to the grave with his indifference. He felt the air warm and close in the room, but in his stomach he felt cold. He felt all were waiting, holding their breath.
Quietly, with an unpracticed reverence, he continued the conversation in the only way he could: acknowledging the presence behind the portrait, he asked in a rough whisper, ‘Where are you?’ The question was addressed to the boy, whose image was still laid open in his lap.
‘I am with you’, came the gentle response.
More quietly, almost wincing as he worked out the words ... ‘How?’
‘I am’
He shook his head, ‘You are ...?’
‘With you’
‘How??’
‘As I am’
Though this conversation was bound to the portrait of the boy, he knew that it belonged as much to the Christ icon, and there hung a holy confusion in the air. As if he was being carefully but forcefully rebuked in his desire that God would tear the top off the churches or the mountains, and come to him on a thundercloud, when such as this young boy still existed in the world, unmet. ... I am with you as I am.
Arpa was willing to receive the reproof that came by means of the image, because of the irresistible presence he felt, and the grace revealed in the eyes of the youth, in whose presence he sat for some time. He began to feel profound sadness at so many lost opportunities. At the same time he felt some gratitude to know the charges against himself, and he resolved, if need be, to accept death cut off from all others and from the true image of God, at least until the end. For now, he would turn his face to the open windows.
He moved to the altar, took up the prayer book, and completed the liturgy of Agia Eleóusa for the last time.
Arpaxos imagined he ought to approach death with a measure of dignity, though he really had no idea how to pull that off. He decided that a good start would be to work his way to the bottom of a bottle of tsipouro. He saw no reason to put off the inevitable, and spent hours drinking, and eating through the last of the supplies. Tomorrow? Maybe he would throw himself off the ledge to die in the graveyard of broken ladders. Smiling, he thought, no more need for climbing or descending – ‘We’re all dying where we stand, now. Who we are is who we are.’ But, no, he still couldn’t stomach the thought of harming himself (and, truthfully, he wasn’t entirely confident in the state of his soul, here at the end).
What he would do is tidy up one last time, and celebrate his life with a last meal before it was spent. Then, when the time came, he would lie down between the old priest and the cliff wall, and trust the winter rainstorms to bury him under red Mani earth, washed down from the cliffs above.
So he danced, unsteadily, and sang, and allowed himself to feel gratitude ... for Evie, for the boy behind the chapel, and even for the widows and their simple and (now he was able to admit) honest philosophies. He loved them all from a distance, repenting of his lack of generosity, wishing them well, and letting his heart open to them all. He came with the boy into the divine presence and, because he still could not pray, merely wept as he and all his burdens were laid out, finally bare before the face of God, no longer hidden. In this meeting space, he encouraged the boy ... ‘Go ahead and add to the pile of indictments; you must tell all that I have done!’
Arpa swayed at the edge of his platform, halfway down the cliff, teetering. He thought, wisely, that he should take a step back. He swayed again, and nearly fell, dropping the empty bottle, which rolled over the side. Foolishly, he lunged, but could not stop it. More foolishly, he cried out and felt shame to litter this holy place, kept so clean by its caretakers. With a drunken breathlessness, he scrambled to look over the side in hope that the lost bottle was within reach. He saw it, five feet below. And, just above it, protected by the rock overhang that he was now leaning over, he saw a rope, fixed to the stone by a great, rusty, iron eye. It was coiled and hanging off the anchor, waiting to be deployed with its now-decayed basket. He looked at his salvation through watery eyes for minutes, barely believing it was true that there was a way down.
When enough time had passed for him to sober up sufficiently, he considered the implications of his find. If he could get down to the water, he could at least swim out and look for a path up the hill. He knew that if his strength held out, he would be able to find a way.
The next day, just before the sun transited the cliff top, he stood thigh-deep in the water with a great grin, looking out over the small cove, and thinking about how best to survive the sea. He stretched his arms and checked the knots in his plastic bags one final time. Inside those bags were the remainders of the crackers and one small tin of sardella. The last half-bottle of booze (and a couple empties he’d filled with spring water) were lashed between the bags on a makeshift raft created from a couple of dry planks found in the cove, and this assembly he set adrift secured to a length of rope he tied to his waist. None of it should slow him down too much, he hoped. With a final nod of satisfaction that he was able to leave the cave in good order, he waded into the sea.
Within an hour, he had landed on a narrow beach from which a path ascended up a wash to the flat plain that made up the southwestern hip of his peninsula, this plateau bare but for some low ruins, and exposed. He stood for a while reacquainting himself with the expansive reach of the open sky, chose gratitude once more, muttered, ‘Thank you’ with a shallow breath, and began to walk. His steps slowly became more confident.
He walked for a while along a dirt track hemmed in by purple wildflowers and heavy with the smell of anise and lavender in the midday sun. He saw another pedestrian, walking in the same direction but more than a mile distant. He recognized the black-robed and sandaled figure to be the priest. He cried out with a dry yell. Nothing. He began to walk faster, then ran, unsteadily, calling out in between gasps for breath. It took almost half an hour for him to gain enough ground, mostly walking for fear he might collapse, before his call could reach the man, who halted, and turned. As Arpaxos closed the final distance the priest stood, facing him, a monolith of inscrutability. Finally, the pilgrim, almost collapsing, came to a stop opposite the figure. He looked him full in the face. The other, alarmed at the bruised and broken image of the revenant, shakily raised his hand; was he defending himself? ... or trying to pay off a pauper with an empty blessing that said, again, ‘You see I have nothing to give you!’?
Arpa lifted his own hand as well, mirroring the gesture. Then stepping forward, he took the raised hand gently into his own. With increasing resolve, he allowed his other hand to take hold as well, as if to prevent an escape. Three hands in a knot bound and brought together to rest against his own chest. Warm stinging tears flowed as he looked into this face, gaunt with hunger and darkened by encounters with death; yet to see past the shadow and into his eyes and to smell the pungent sweat through the curtain of black wool, and to know the truth. Finally, here was another human being.
He could find no words, and the priest seemed to have nothing to offer. Arpaxos slowly released the imprisoned hand, and gently lowered his bags to the ground. He took out the liquor and the last handfuls of food, carefully spread out a meal on an empty sack, and opened the bottle. A beggar’s communion shared by Abram and Melchizedek in the wilderness between wars, two wandering kings in battered crowns, reunited. But who would be the one to bless the other? Arpaxos provided the food, but who could spare a benediction?
Earlier in the day, the thought had occurred to him to cross the distance to his little church one more time, though he suspected that if he went there, he might find it difficult to leave. And now, at this moment, the priest, merely by being present and alive, rebuked him for his impulse to complete some business at the church with its frozen images. (His Tía joined the imaginary chorus, with a shake of her head: Είναι ντροπή να σκοντάψετε δύο φορές στην ίδια πέτρα ... It is a disgrace to stumble twice against the same stone). Besides, he hadn’t forgotten that in the breakup that preceded his fall he’d left his icon without eyes, and indeed the living face of the priest seemed to communicate (likely without that one’s knowledge or consent) ‘here is what you seek: look on me!’
A new world was opening up to him, as if the old planet was a giant buffet: a feast, not of foods, but of folks; all the good people left in the world. With a growing urgency, he recognized the quickly fading abundance of true human goodness and felt he shouldn’t let one morsel go untasted. He was starving. As epiphanies go, this one seemed to be the epitome of bad timing.
Though Arpaxos read much in the face of the priest, he wondered that the man had nothing to say. He knew that he could speak, had heard his voice from within the church during their prior encounter. So, Arpa chose to make the offering: he began to pray, knowing that the old liturgies are repeated for times like this. There would be more to say on other days; other liturgies for other congregations. But this was a moment for prayer.
He wasn’t sure he’d be able to remember all the words. It didn’t matter. The voice of the priest could be heard, softly, but growing in strength, and the pilgrim was no longer praying alone.
After an intense (and careful) meal, during which he was forced to stop more than once so that he could let out a groan of tearful joy (and a few tears associated with the sharp pain of loose and missing teeth on his wounded side), he finally allowed himself to take a break; he turned with a mad grin and oily chin to the alcohol. Here he was not so lucky. The case was filled with tsipouro, a Cretan moonshine made from grape mash left over after all the good is wrung out of it. He chose gratitude, and drank in several deep swallows, grimacing as the medicinal spirits washed over his wounds.
When his belly was full and warmed, he began to survey the room.
It was lived-in, and rich with byzantine details. There were old but still colorful woven rugs laid across the floor, and another hung from the ceiling on the north wall to drape over a low, rough shelf. There were brass candle-holders, censers, and other accessories. Toward the back of the cave was a wooden box with faded beer slogans on the outside (“Το Υπέροχο Ποτό!”) and old prayer books on the inside (υπέροχες λέξεις). Two icons centered the altar: the Lord, and the Theotokos, the tender one, Ἐλεούσα.
Shame returned to him: his last interaction with a holy icon had ended in violence. But he felt reassured by these two that the windows into heaven were still open – he smiled weakly and made a mental note, this time, not to touch the art. This Christ was a surprise: there was a kind of charming innocence to it. As an icon, it was rougher, but the image was more playful. It was painted by an artist who was clearly no master of the form, but who also, clearly, had something to say.
The icons sat on iron easels along the carpet-lined shelf. Brass incense burners bookended the altar and a small six-sided wooden box held a stash of resinous olibanum. Though there were no frescoes on the walls, it was a colorful room, with the feel of life in it, especially when the sun was in the west. Apart from the pirate’s stash, there were baskets with some old bread. Salted fish hung near the entrance.
In an alcove past the tiny library, the floor was worn in ways that suggested a long history of reclining men. Who were they? At one end of the blanketed bedchamber a marble box held a tarnished metal cross, crusty amber beads from an unstrung kompologia, and bones – the collection indicating the presence of at least one priest, this one long gone.
As for the other tenant? It was only relatively recently – a matter of a few hundred years – that the pirates of Mani began to hide out in caves along the western cliffs, and there were signs of their chaotic hermitage everywhere. The pirate who’d climbed to this cave had the respect to keep the place clean, and the altar organized for worship. But, how could it be that this scoundrel served the spiritual needs of the parish, while pillaging the yachts of tourists on the open water? How did the man reconcile these two parts of himself?
Or was it in fact two men? Arpaxos considered the surprising possibility that the priest and pirate lived side-by-side. Could they have shared this room, the holy man and the villain? He smiled and took another drink. The Mani conundrum. One thing he knew: the pirate would have been the only parishioner to the old monk. Who else could find their way to this retreat? You either climbed from the hidden cove below or were cast from above like Satan.
A week passed in the hole. Arpaxos made some enthusiastic attempts at finding a way up the slope. Climbing along the runout, which was still active with a drizzle of little stones and dirt, was really out of the question. That there used to be a way down started to make a little more sense when he pictured the descent spanned by a series of ladders, several of which he could now pick out dashed on the rocks below.
The tiny flow of water, which first alerted him to the opening in the side of the mountain, ran along the south wall of the cave via a roughly carved channel in the floor. At the rear of the cell, closer to the source, water pooled into a round basin that reminded him of the stone hollow at the rear of the cave on Patmos, believed to have cradled the head of St. John. The pocket before him now contained no obvious prophetic treasures, only distracted the current briefly, until it spilled over the rim and continued its journey to the sea below.
He himself became distracted by the stream, it being the only dynamic feature in the place. He dug his way back toward the source and cleaned the basin of a decade’s accumulation of silt. He spent hours contemplating the long journey taken by the river through the dark before it escaped the mysteries of the underworld to pass through his cave. He fell into a reverie. The water was an object-lesson, a map, a timeline of life on the planet: it was the story of humanity, hidden for ages in the dark recesses of time, invisible, prehistoric, until ... as the water gurgled its way into the dim light of this chamber, he saw the beginnings of human self-awareness – a flurry of activity following what had been an extended prologue. The carved basin, which slowed the stream for a spin before releasing it, was like our first efforts to capture a history, to shape a narrative, to help us remember how we got here. But any attempt to resist the now quickening passage of time could only be momentarily successful, before the living flow of history breaks free to spill into a narrowing channel and race toward the brightening light, unconstrained, authoring new and more fleeting stories until finally we escape the dimness of the cave to bask in the enlightenment of the present moment, under the open sky. Arpaxos recognized, with little emotion, that the stream, like humanity, was doomed after only a short time under the sun to pour over the edge of the cliff and disappear into the endless sea.
Nobody who knew him would have been surprised at this obsession with wringing philosophical meaning out of the simplest things, nor that the results of his explorations tended to be depressing. On the other hand, there would have been some surprise to learn the number of hours he spent launching tiny leaf-boats downstream for an epic series of races, during which he served in the dual roles of competitor-champion and exuberant announcer.
Some of the mystery of the previous tenants was solved with the discovery of a burial mound concealed behind some bushes and small trees to the south where his ledge narrowed. The site was covered by soil and rocks, not very long ago by the look of it. Atop the mound lay a charcoal portrait made on a plank of wood. Arpa guessed that the monk, whose face it was, had been buried by his roommate. But where had that one gone to die? Why did he not stay? Probably this was not his only home: maybe he’d returned to a family who believed he caught fish for a living. Arpaxos wanted to believe the man got his reunion, and hoped he’d found peace after all. The thought of a good end brought his attention back to the portrait. There was great love in it, the face obviously well-known to the artist in life. Unique features were detailed with care – the delicately sketched lines a map of one man’s ministry; it was no caricature. The overall impression was of a vitality and connection, revealing much about the last secular assignment of the priest, who must have thought he was meant to live out the final years of his life in solitary, isolated prayer. The portrait, made by the pirate, said that the monk did not hesitate to meet the need at his threshold.
Arpaxos had been able to stretch his provisions, but now as the boxes emptied he was forced to contemplate the end of the food, and this had the predictable effect of making him thoughtful. This was challenging. He found himself thinking about the wider world and he was tempted to imagine how others might be facing their final days. Arpa had not been very impressed with humanity in the end. His perspective was colored by memories of the troubled journey from Athens through Corinth and into Mani and of being threatened, beaten, and regarded with mistrust (was it easier or harder, knowing that he deserved it all?). The tone of these memories became darker still if he reached further back to recall years that included the revealed doom of the species, the death of his father and sister, and the loss of Eva. This final loss was the most complicated. She had been taken, but was not gone, really. Everyone had losses to grieve at the end. But how many people in the world faced this uncanny grief? ... That their greatest love be taken from them, that they would face their last days alone not knowing where their love had gone, unable to truly grieve because that one had been selected by some mad lottery to live forever in a hidden place, away from everything and everyone. There was simply no way to share that burden. If she had only died, he could lean on his neighbor and weep. But how do you share the story that you also suffered loss ... but that your beloved had not died, would not die, and would probably one day bear witness as the last of the great temples of humankind finally become dust. There could be no sympathy for Arpaxos.
He did not know where she was, but if his dream was any indication, she was currently out there, somewhere, making the lives of the Men in White Coats miserable. That was some consolation. But his secret pleasure was short-lived. Eva’s face appeared in his imagination and, with a familiar sideways look, rebuked him for his cynicism, and for his reductive judgement of her and the rest of it. She always demanded more from him. More thought. More care. More of his humanity. He couldn’t help but soften.
And it was at this moment that the world closed the final distance, confronted him, ready to make its rebuttal against all his dismissive judgements. Now, his great catalogue of antagonisms was crowded by other memories, long suppressed, of frightened faces looking to him for understanding, for comfort, or for hope. He recalled a boy, about Evie’s age, behind the church in Gytheion. The boy – he remembered him clearly – was broken, lost, and searching for something in Arpaxos, but would have been disappointed. At the time, Arpa felt anger at the solicitation. And if he was angry, it was because he was the wounded dog who would not permit himself to be moved, but growled at any hand, however harmless; he acknowledged this with something like remorse, but he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to rewrite his history: he tried to push the thought out of his mind, before he’d have to consider what this boy would have seen in his eyes.
But here at the honest end of things, these thoughts would not be ignored. He felt the least he could do was offer a prayer for those who had been made to face the slammed and locked door of his spirit. But he wasn’t able, after all – he felt too great a burden; what could he say? Again, he tried to retreat from the pain. But if he truly had nothing to offer out of his own broken spirit, a secret part of himself resolved to permit some prayer, from outside, to come to him. He could only allow it after turning away ... as if the keeper of the castle drew all the bridges up, but left a small gate unguarded, so that only the invader need ever know that the king wanted nothing more than to be overcome.
