All That We See or Seem, page 9
“I’m really not very good with them—”
She didn’t let him finish. “You have to learn a lot of new things on the run.”
She emptied his suitcase onto the garage floor and helped him repack what was necessary into the duffel.
“What did you pack?” Piers asked.
She unzipped her backpack and showed Piers: toiletries, a change of clothes, rolled-up plastic sheets, a thin blanket (folded tightly), some energy bars, two bottles of water, various other gear and electronics that he didn’t know the names for—except for what looked to be a dozen phones.
“What are those?” He pointed at the phones.
“I buy used phones from thrift stores and online. Handy for moments like this.”
“Handy how?”
“It’ll be clear soon. Give me the burner that you used when you came to my place.”
He handed her the burner. She turned it off and put it in her backpack.
“We’ll hold on to this for a bit because we can use it to throw them off our trail. Your real phone, on the other hand, can’t be used again. We might as well destroy it.” She held out her hand.
Piers clutched his real phone tightly. “But practically all my life is on there. Can’t I just keep it in airplane mode the whole time?”
“I already had Talos image it, so your data is safe.” She patted the backpack. “There’s no way to make that thing totally safe if you ever turn it on, and if we left it unpowered, it would just be deadweight.”
Reluctantly, he unlocked his phone and handed it to her. After tapping in a series of commands, she handed it back. “You need to confirm the secure wipe and then crush it.”
Once the phone was done erasing itself, Piers opened the driver’s-side door and dropped it under the front wheel. He let out a long exhale. A part of himself was literally being left behind.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Follow my directions and drive carefully. Never more than five miles above the speed limit.”
He backed up over the phone and out of the garage.
ELEVEN
“Tell me how you know that he doesn’t have Elli.”
Julia bit her bottom lip—she didn’t want to hurt him, but there was no choice.
*
There were gaps in Elli’s egolet, Julia explained.
It was not uncommon for there to be holes—absence of training data for certain periods or places—in a personal AI. While many in Silicon Valley advocated “total monitoring for total improvement,” few ordinary individuals were willing to have their personal AIs monitor and record literally every moment of their lives—bathroom, bedroom, deceit, embarrassment, pride, guilt. Many were the reasons why someone, anyone, might wish to exclude some moments from their second brain.
As much as the cloud AI subscription companies disliked leaving aspects of their customers’ lives unmonitored, they also understood that some form of control over their own surveillance by the subscriber was essential to the technology’s adoption.
But many of the lacunae in Elli’s egolet didn’t fit that kind of user choice. There were no records of Elli shutting off her personal AI during these times; there was just no data. This seemed to suggest a systematic “unlearning” rather than “absence of learning.” That is, it didn’t seem so much a deliberate choice to prevent the AI from learning during certain times or in certain places, as a deliberate choice to, after learning had already occurred, erase such memories.
Piers focused on the road and listened.
Out of curiosity, Julia had correlated the timestamps on these holes with other data to see if they followed a pattern. One immediately revealed itself: each absence of training data was associated with a time when Elli’s dream deck was in operation; moreover, all such instances had taken place when Elli was traveling away from home.
The best explanation of the evidence, Julia went on, was that Elli had, for years, been conducting vivid dream sessions in secret away from home. As her personal AI was necessary for vivid dreaming, she couldn’t just turn it off. Instead, she had, after each such session, carefully made her AI forget that it had just woven a dream.
Piers’s face grew pale, but he continued to listen without interrupting.
Such secret dream gatherings must have been small—Elli couldn’t possibly have hidden a large crowd. In fact, Julia believed that these were one-on-one dreams. This was confirmed when she checked the power usage history of Elli’s dream deck. The more cephaloscripts a dream deck had to process simultaneously, the more power the deck needed. The amount of power used by the dream deck during the last three such sessions—that was as far back as the deck’s logs went—was consistent with processing a single cephaloscript.
This was why Elli’s egolet had been so prepared to guide Julia through a solo dream—its neuromesh had been trained on one-on-one sessions, even if it had no memory of weaving such dreams.
The egolet’s choice of a dream based on the idea of the dreamer as the hero of their own story was likely also influenced by Elli’s real-life one-on-one dream partner. Julia’s choice of the singular partner here was deliberate.
A partner who didn’t otherwise exist in Elli’s AI’s memory at all.
Piers didn’t even flinch at this. He had intuited what Julia was going to say.
The inexorable logic of Julia’s deductions led to one conclusion: Elli had been meeting with the Prince in secret to dream with him.
She has . . . me.
Finally, Julia explained, she had run an analysis of the Prince’s video of Elli against Elli’s egolet and found a mismatch. The two were, to put it simply, maximally divergent.
“What does that mean?” Piers asked.
People behaved differently in different contexts, Julia explained. Elli, in the video from the Prince, had behaved so differently from Elli’s egolet that Talos found it unusual. There were two possible explanations: one, Elli deliberately acted in the kidnapping video in a way that it would be picked up by AI analysis as maximally divergent from her AI’s memories of her; two, the Prince’s video of Elli was a fake that had been generated from data specifically removed from Elli’s AI.
“The missing times,” Piers said, understanding.
Explanation one required Elli to anticipate that someone would perform such an analysis so as to calibrate her own behavior in the video. Not impossible, but quite implausible. Explanation two, on the other hand, only required that the Prince generate the kidnapping video using his private footage of Elli, which happened to correspond to the parts of her life she’d deleted, parts spent in his company.
“Thank you,” said Piers, his voice unsteady.
Julia could only imagine his anguish.
*
Piers had learned over the years that it was not easy to be in love with a great artist.
Elli was a good spouse. She was affectionate and supportive, shouldering half of the burdens of marriage. The managing partners of his law firm liked her, as did his friends. She made sure he knew how important he was to her.
But Piers knew that he wasn’t Elli’s greatest love.
A child of divorce, Piers had grown up mistrusting romance. His parents, a nurse and a musician, had been head over heels in love. It was a whirlwind romance worthy of poetry and song. They wanted to consume each other, to possess and be possessed, to merge into one, until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
The fire lasted eight months before burning out. Desperate, they had gotten married in the hopes of rekindling that flame. When that failed, they turned to the magic of making babies. Three children, two lawyers, and countless bitter fights later, they finally admitted that yes, they were clichés, and accepted defeat.
With that model in mind, Piers had not believed himself capable of falling in love. He had gone into the law not because of a passion for justice, but a craving for stability and dependability—his father, who vanished from their lives after the divorce, had provided none. He pictured himself as one of those flat characters in a Dickens novel, a law clerk or a tutor, earning a respectable living at a boring job, putting a little away every month for retirement, a bundle of nervous tics and quirky habits, living by himself with perhaps a cat or two for company, the supporting cast for other people’s stories.
But then, on a whim, he went to a dream gathering by Elli.
Elli was unlike anyone else in his life. She simply glowed. Like all great performers, she channeled the energy of the crowd and reflected it back at them, transporting them to an otherworldly realm. But more than that, she made them feel that they, each of them individually, mattered.
Piers could not get her out of his mind. He went to another gathering, and then a third. He flew to other cities to follow her on tour. She had awakened something in him, a dream he had not known he craved.
No longer feeling like a supporting character, he wrote to her. And to his surprise, she wrote back. Even more improbably, the messages eventually led to an actual date.
She got him to tell his own story.
From the very start, he understood that their relationship would be unbalanced. Her art was what made him fall in love with her, but her art would also keep her from ever becoming his. To do what she did, Elli had to put her soul into her performances. Her grandest passion would always be outside their marriage—she was in love with Dream, that excavation of the reality beyond reality, where Truth lived, casting a mere shadow into our sublunary realm.
Yes, he was okay with that, he told her. He did not want to consume her, to possess her, to merge with her. He would love her steadily, dependably, see her off as she explored the stormy seas of the collective unconscious, and wait patiently for her return. He would be her Ithaca.
This, he realized, was the mythical prototype for the kind of lawyer he wanted to be: a safe harbor of order against the vicissitudes of random life. For his clients, his family, the woman he loved, he would be exactly that. Ithaca was not flat; it was heroic.
And so, he dared to ask her.
Yes, I will, yes, she had said. And his joy at hearing those words had been indescribable.
It had not been easy to keep his promise. Jealousies, insecurities, disappointments—these were the dark shadows of love, the real villains in a romance, who could never be wholly defeated but only held at bay. But he had worked at it, persisted, strived to be the story he wanted to tell. For her and also for himself.
His greatest love was Elli, but Elli’s greatest love was her art. Neither of them would betray their loves, not for anyone.
Faith, patience, love.
He would not stop now.
*
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the way Julia looked at him.
“I don’t know why she dreamed with him,” he said. “But I won’t let that come between us right now. If he doesn’t have her, then we have to find her before he does. The answers can wait.”
Julia marveled at the lawyer. For someone trained to follow the rules, to obey authority (and to benefit, for the most part, when it was exercised), the idea of being a fugitive, an outlaw, must be terrifying. Yet, here he was, plunging headlong into the unknown, all for the love of a woman who had lived another life in secret.
*
Julia directed Piers to Carre Crossing Station and had him park in a spot out of the sight line of the security cameras.
“You should probably say goodbye to your car now,” she told him while wiping down every surface that might hold her prints. “I don’t think we’ll be seeing it for a while.”
She bought their tickets on the train with cash. They rode all the way into the city and then back out to Paine. By the time they got off the second train, it was getting dark.
Julia connected her tensor bank to the public Wi-Fi at the station and checked the news. “They haven’t raided your house yet.” It was long after when the Prince had claimed things would blow up.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” Piers said. “Let’s hold off on going to your place.”
They found a coffee shop. As soon as they entered, Julia nudged Piers toward the couch by the corridor leading to the restrooms so that his face would never show up on the security cameras. She went to the counter and brought back coffee and pastries.
She logged onto the Wi-Fi with her tensor bank, tethered one of the old phones to it, and handed it to Piers.
“I’ve imaged your phone onto this. So long as you get online only through Talos, you should be untrackable.”
They browsed and waited.
*
It took two more hours before Talos alerted Julia to a local newsjinn report:
RAGING FIRE DESTROYS
MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR HOME IN CARRE
CARRE, MA—A fierce blaze has destroyed a multimillion-dollar home on Carmichael Lane this evening.
Emergency services received an anonymous call reporting the fire at approximately 6:00 PM. By the time firefighters arrived on the scene, the house was “already beyond saving,” according to fire officials. Fortunately, no injuries or fatalities have been reported.
The Carre Police Department confirmed that the house belonged to Elli Krantz, a prominent oneirofex, or “dream weaver,” and her husband, Piers Neri, a lawyer. Elli Krantz has been missing since last Wednesday. Neither Krantz nor Neri were at home during the fire.
Authorities are investigating the cause of the fire.
Julia slid next to Piers. He turned to her and was about to speak when she looked him in the eye and held a finger against her lips. Then she slipped him the computing stick with the article on the screen.
Piers’s eyes widened; Julia leaned in and whispered into his ear, “Don’t react. As calmly as possible, pack up your things.”
However, instead of complying, Piers turned his new phone to her, showing her his messaging account. There was a single message from the Prince: “Now you see what I’m capable of. Find Elli for me, or else.”
“We can’t talk in here,” Julia said.
Once on the sidewalk, Julia pulled Piers close to her so that they strolled along like a couple, faces turned toward each other. She made sure that she was on the outside so that Piers’s face would be hidden from any cameras in the shops they passed.
“The fire—” “How did the Prince—”
“You go first,” whispered Piers.
“He obviously has some very dangerous people working for him,” said Julia, as an involuntary shudder ran down her spine. After a pause, she added, “I guess we already knew that, given what happened to Frankie.”
Piers was surprisingly calm, considering he had just lost his house and everything in it. “The good news is that he doesn’t want to kill me, at least not right now. He needs me to find Elli for him.”
“He might not kill you, but that doesn’t mean he won’t kill me.”
“He doesn’t know you’re with me,” said Piers. “And we’ll have to keep it that way. We can’t go to your place, in case they’re watching the building, expecting me to go there for help like I did on Monday.”
“We don’t know if they ever figured out who you went to see.” Julia bit her bottom lip as she thought. “It’s too late to do anything about that now, so we’ll just have to do our best to keep him from figuring out I’m with you.” A new thought struck her. “I still don’t understand why he burned down your house.”
“To scare me. Show me that he’s capable of violence.”
“I don’t think that’s it.” Julia tried to recall the sequence of events. “He already tried to scare you . . . called you again . . . had you upload all of Elli’s data . . . The data. That must be it. Once we had given him all of Elli’s data, he wanted to destroy the originals so he has the only copy.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure.” Julia frowned, concentrating. “I can think of a few possibilities. One is that he believes what Elli supposedly took from him is in the data, but hidden. So he doesn’t want anyone else to have access to it.”
“I can see that. What else?”
“Maybe he thinks the data contains clues as to where Elli went, and he wants to find Elli before you do by keeping you from them.”
Piers looked horrified.
“Don’t worry. I have a copy of everything we uploaded.” Julia patted her backpack. “What did you think I was doing while we were packing? I’m a digital pack rat.”
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
As they continued to shuffle down the sidewalk, away from the busier town center, the Prince’s plan gradually came into focus.
“He’s trying to have it both ways,” said Piers. “One, he wants to see if he can find Elli on his own, from the data. Two, in case that fails, he wants to have me find Elli for him. That means he must be tracking me. His message to me—”
“Don’t worry. As long as you access the account only through Talos, he can’t locate you just because you read one of his messages. But do be careful. If you start writing back, you risk revealing your location inadvertently. I wouldn’t make correspondence with him a habit.”
“I have no intention of answering him.” Piers gave a bitter laugh. “He’s also made it impossible for me to go to the police. Think about it: while the police were watching, my house burned down, destroying all possible evidence related to Elli’s disappearance. Conveniently, I vanished at the same time. Even if I hadn’t been the primary suspect before, I certainly am now.”
Julia nodded. That certainly did appear to be one of the Prince’s goals.
“He’s got me backed into a corner. There’s nothing for me to do other than try to find Elli before he does.”
“Agreed,” said Julia. “But we shouldn’t try to leave town tonight—it’s actually harder to hide from the surveillance cameras when there are fewer cars. Better wait until the morning and hide in rush-hour traffic.”
“But where are we going to spend the night? The last commuter rail train is done. We’re stuck in Paine.”
