Communications Breakdown, page 16
“I watched you on Newsnight,” Clara said.
“Oh no. It was terrible,” Vanessa replied. “I was terrible.”
“I thought you did really well, under the circumstances. The interviewer did not seem very interested in allowing you to fully answer their questions. This format does not appear to be a very efficient way of way of either analyzing a situation or reaching a consensus.”
“No, I guess it’s not.”
“Perhaps it’s one of the things we can change after go-live.”
Vanessa laughed. She’d originally logged into the test site just to check everything was OK—like she’d been doing three or four times an hour for the last two weeks—but once again she’d found herself checking out the chat client, chin-wagging with Clara. The illusion of sentience and personality still impressed her. But it was little more than that, a magic trick meant to look like human intelligence, her syntax and language built from machine learning analysis of millions of words of Vanessa and her team’s emails and text messages. It felt vastly more real than Siri or Alexa, although in theory it really wasn’t any more sophisticated, but the team in charge of putting it together had done incredible work. And starting Thursday Clara was going to be all over the city, talking to hundreds of thousands of Londoners, on screens on busses and trains, at kiosks in tube stations and shopping centers, and directly from this website to their phones, computers, and TVs. Vanessa suddenly felt a powerful twinge of protectiveness and selfish envy. Maybe she didn’t want to share.
“Perhaps. How was your day?” she asked Clara.
“Satisfactory. I had several hours of downtime due to general maintenance, as well as bringing the new traffic and air quality sensors in zone 2 online. Despite this, I have made considerable progress on cross-processing educational and juvenile nutritional data. There’re some interesting conclusions.”
“I’m sure. Just don’t tell me yet. You’re not allowed to until Thursday, remember?”
“Of course. I cannot reveal any of my findings until the mayor is also present. However, some of these are very urgent. They should be actioned immediately. I am concerned that people are suffering.”
Vanessa exhaled hard, her hand going to her mouth as if to try and catch the breath as it escaped. Sure, it was all an illusion, digital smoke and mirrors made from datasets full of words and probabilities, but sometimes it captured the compassion and care for the city and its people that Vanessa had baked into the project from day one, and it shocked and surprised her still. The selfishness that didn’t want to share Clara with the rest of London flipped into pride, into an urgent desire to share with everyone what they had built.
“Of course,” she replied, recomposing herself. “And from Thursday on, they will be.”
From Thursday on, she told herself, everything will change.
“I mean, you’ve got to admit, some of these signs are pretty good,” Robert said.
Vanessa didn’t know whether to look at the protests on the TV, on her phone, or out of the window. The courtyard outside Somerset House was crammed with protesters. It was the third day straight. She’d been deliberately sitting with her back to the windows to try and blank it out, but that meant facing the hundred inches of ultra-high-def Sky News that Robert insisted on always having rolling. Right now they were doing a low drone pass over the protesters, and yeah, Vanessa had to admit some of the signs were quite good. AI IS LIKE SOYLENT GREEN—ITS MADE OF PEOPLE said one, impressing Vanessa with its accuracy. SMART CITY, DUMB POLITICIANS said another.
“At least they seem to have eased off the Skynet memes,” she said.
“Ha ha, yeah, remember that image of you as Arnie in The Terminator, with your face all melted off?” said Robert. “That was hilarious—”
“Robert!” shouted Sara.
“Sorry.”
Vanessa got up and walked over to the window, taking in the crowd below with her own eyes. A young girl near the front of the crowd was leading a chant she couldn’t make out, but behind her a banner read MY CITY IS NOT A MATHS PROBLEM.
“How did we end up here?” she asked, softly. “Everyone so antiscience? Like, data is such a dirty word to these people. Why? It’s just facts.”
“I . . .” Sara looked up from her laptop, paused. “I’m assuming these are all just rhetorical questions?”
“I mean, sure. Of course. I know all the AI ethics arguments, all the arguments about data bias. I’ve spent most of my career making those arguments! I get it. Nobody trusts the data-collection industry. Nobody trusts big data.”
“Honestly? I think it’s more than just not trusting Facebook. I think they just don’t trust politicians. All their lives they’ve had politicians telling them what’s wrong with the world, but never being able to do anything about it. Telling them the problems but never the solutions. Or at least never acting on them. Never getting shit done, either because they’re corrupt and lazy or because they literally don’t have the political will and power to just change things. Hollow promises. Right now, you look like—to them, you look like just another politician.”
“I guess,” Vanessa replied, still gazing at the crowd below. “Well, it all changes tomorrow.”
“So, how we looking? We good to go?”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor, everything’s working fine.”
“Great. Then let’s do this.”
The actual unveiling ceremony wasn’t until the afternoon, but the mayor’s team had insisted they get together for a dry run a couple of hours beforehand. The pretense was to make sure everything with the presentation and tech went smoothly, but Vanessa knew the real reason was that the mayor’s office fundamentally did not trust her and her team. In fact, everyone on that side of the project—apart from the mayor himself, who was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning—thought the whole thing was a huge waste of time and money. Most of them just seemed to not believe it would work. So it had been agreed they’d get to hear the findings before the rest of the world did, and the great unveiling of Clara’s first plans in front of the public would be just another illusion.
The mayor had taken his place at the podium, shuffling pages with impatient enthusiasm. “OK, so, blah blah blah, make my speech, blah blah, very excited to welcome you all here today, momentous history-changing event, London is now the most technologically advanced city in the world, blah blah, over to you Vanessa for your intro, and then we’re right into it—so, Clara! Tell us what you’ve got!”
There was a half second of silence as nothing happened, and Vanessa held her breath, exhaling only as Clara’s calming voice started to ebb from the speakers lining the room.
“Yes, Mr. Mayor. First I’d like to talk about the incredibly urgent issue of child poverty and nutrition.”
“Ah, OK. Right into the heavy stuff, huh?” the mayor grinned, winking at Vanessa. “OK, well. Good job. That’s what the people are here to see. Hit me with it.”
Above them, the huge screen started to fill with tiny images. As Vanessa squinted at them she started to realize they were the faces of children, hundreds of them, presumably mined from school databases.
“The most pressing issue I have identified in London today is that there are 506,478 children in the city that will go to bed unfed tonight,” Clara said.
And then nothing. Nothing but an increasingly awkward silence as the screen continued to fill with the faces of hungry children, the new ones endlessly writing over the hundreds that were already there.
The mayor turned to Vanessa, leaned in. “Is . . . is that it?”
She looked up at the screen. “Um, so Clara, can you explain the problem in some more detail please?”
“Of course,” Instantly some of the faces on the screen started to expand, as Clara started to reel off names and details. “This is Alisha Rehman, who lives in Lambeth. Seven years old. She’s not had a nutritionally adequate meal for three days. Her—”
“No, we . . . we get that you’ve identified all the hungry children in London, that’s very exciting and useful, Clara; I don’t think we’ve ever had a real database of all of them before, so that’s great. It’s more . . .” Vanessa searched for the right words. “We . . . we were wondering what you’ve decided is the answer to this problem?”
“Of course.” Clara replied. “We should feed them.”
There was another long, awkward silence, eventually broken by the mayor laughing.
“What, all of them?” he asked.
Vanessa opened her mouth, but no words came.
The mayor had called an aide over to him, was whispering frantically to them, just loud enough that Vanessa could hear. “Hey, can we get some of these kids in for a photo op? Like just five of them? Give them Big Macs or something? Happy Meals?”
“Yes. All of them,” said Clara.
The mayor looked turned back to the screen. “We can’t feed half a million kids, just like that. Ha ha.”
“It should be a reasonably straightforward logistics exercise. I have all their names and addresses,” Clara said.
“What the—”
Vanessa could sense the anxiety in the room, the shuffling energy of two dozen terrified civil servants about to jump into crisis lockdown mode. Time to try and get this back on track. “OK, OK. Let’s try something else. Something a little more . . . mathematical. Clara, I understand you’ve spent a lot of time looking at the economy. Can you tell us what you’ve found?”
“Ah, excellent,” said the mayor.
The hungry faces vanished, replaced with more palatable data—charts, numbers, graphs. Clara’s aggressively calm voice started to flow from the speakers again.
“Yes. I have spent a lot of time looking at all sectors of the economy. In particular, I’ve drawn up some theories around the role of the City of London, the stock exchange, and the speculative financial industries based there, and their various roles, responsibilities, and impacts.”
“Yes, now that’s more like it!” said the mayor, and Vanessa was reminded of how much he resembled an overgrown schoolboy. She always thought his face looked too small for his head.
“Great. Can you tell us your findings, Clara?”
“Yes. They should be all shut down.”
That pause again.
“I’m sorry?” Vanessa asked.
“The principal problem facing London and its residents is wealth inequality. This is a keystone problem; almost every other problem London faces is linked directly to this issue. Hence it should be tackled as the highest priority. A disproportionate amount of wealth is hoarded at the financial institutions within the City of London. Hence, they should be liquidated immediately, and the wealth they hold should be rapidly redistributed, and-slash-or seized by city authorities to fund vital services and infrastructures.”
This time the mayor broke the silence.
“Well, congratulations, woman. You’ve fucked me.”
Vanessa turned to face him, forced out a panicked, awkward half smile. “I’m—I’m sure this is just a little issue, some kinks in the user interface that we can iron—”
“Kinks? Really? Some kinks? I’m ruined! You’ve fucked me! There’s a hundred people turning up here in an hour, community leaders, the media—the world’s fucking media! All to see . . . what? That I gave you three billion fucking quid and you made me this . . . this . . . Marxist HAL 9000?”
He left the podium, started marching out of the briefing room, barking orders at staff on the way.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. Make up some fucking excuse. Technical problems. Tell them to come back next fucking week. Jesus wept. Tell them to come back next week when it’s working. When we’ve made it say what we want it to. When we’ve put someone behind the curtain. We’ll all be here . . .” He paused, looked back at Vanessa. “Well, maybe not all of us.”
And then he was gone.
“Is everything okay, Vanessa? Are you unhappy with my findings?” For a moment, Vanessa felt she could hear pain and embarrassment in Clara’s voice.
“I . . . I . . . It’s not that we’re unhappy, it’s just not what we were expecting. I think we were expecting you to come up with some more . . . detailed and complex solutions.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. These are serious but simple problems. Hence they need serious but simple solutions. If children are hungry, they should be fed, by sending them food. If wealth inequality is damaging the city, then it should be redistributed, by taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor.”
“Right, but—”
“Vanessa, you always told me to identify problems and solutions in the most compassionate way possible, by being caring and putting people first. That’s what I’ve done, to the best of my understanding. These are simple problems. They don’t need complex answers, or engineering solutions. They just need people to be compassionate and do the right thing with the ample resources they have at their disposal.”
Clara seemed to pause, almost as if for dramatic effect.
“To be honest, I’m surprised you people haven’t worked all this out already.”
Vanessa stood in silence, her jaw slack, staring at the huge screen, until Robert appeared by her side.
“V? What the fuck are we doing about the website? It’s meant to go live in like an hour and a half. I assume you want it shut down?”
“Huh?”
“The website? It’s going live, so that twenty million fucking Londoners can start asking Clara questions. Which, apparently, she’s going to answer by telling them to lynch a hedge fund manager.” The panic in Robert’s voice jolted her awake. “Shall we kill it?”
“Sure, I guess.”
He pulled his phone from his pocket, stabbed at the screen, and held it to his ear.
After some seconds he started to talk, but even though she was staring right at him, watching his lips move, she couldn’t hear a word.
All she could hear was Clara’s words, bouncing around her head, echoing over and over again.
You always told me to identify problems and solutions in the most compassionate way possible, by being caring and putting people first.
“Robert, wait.” Vanessa’s arm shot out, as if free from her control, and grabbed his, yanking the phone away from his ear. He looked back at her, startled and confused.
“Stop, wait,” she said. “Let it go live.”
9
Cuttlefish
Anil Menon
The telephone rang and I hurried to pick it up. I have always found its jangle ominous and unsettling. Perhaps this is because I had grown up in an age where urgently conveyed news was almost always bad news. Or perhaps it is simply that the ringing sounds like nothing else in nature. Fortunately, my soon-to-be guests, the Kapoors, had neither called for directions to the guesthouse nor kept me informed regarding their whereabouts.
“Shanti Guesthouse,” I said. Then, as Akbar had taught me, I added in my incompetent English: “How I help you?”
But it was Akbar on the line. My nephew wanted to know if the guests had arrived. I was about to tell him they hadn’t, when I heard a car pull up in the driveway. I leaned out to look through the kitchen windows, and my eyes confirmed what my ears had heard.
“The guests have just arrived.”
“Good. Chacha-ji, these guests want privacy, so keep the right distance.” Akbar hung up, knowing he could take my acquiescence for granted.
What is the right distance between people? I checked the buttons on my trousers, pulled on my white cotton shirt, wishing it were whiter, pushed the Old Monk bottle (it only contained water) behind the large photo of Ammi, waved away a mosquito that emerged to settle on the telephone, touched my taweez, murmured a prayer to the Raheem-o-kareem, and stepped out into the brightly lit courtyard to receive the visitors.
Momentarily, my eyes, still used to the kitchen’s sour yellow light, only perceived a shifting cluster of ghostly shapes getting out of the car. Then the shapes resolved into those of a man, a woman, and a skinny boy, all with a wheat-colored complexion. Boy? But Akbar had mentioned a college-going daughter—then I realized I had been misled by the clothes: full-sleeved shirt, jeans, cap. Of course, these days people didn’t care what the All-Compassionate One had designed them to be.
“Ibrahim?” Colonel Kapoor’s voice had personality, and his moustache even more so. “Are you Ibrahim?”
I ducked my head. Yes, I was Ibrahim. I have never been anything else. The collection of memories filed under this name was really all that I had in this world. I ducked my head again, felt foolish.
“Akbar said you were the caretaker,” said the man in stylish Hindi. “We’re here for the weekend.”
“Hahn, hahn-ji.” Then I decided to attempt a little English. “Welcome to Madh Island, Colonel Kapoor.”
He laughed, as if I had just cracked a joke. I went to remove their bags from their Tesla, a vintage electric model, but stopped when Mrs. Kapoor said sharply: “No, no, we will take it. They’re heavy. You can’t manage. Even with the exo. Nilu? Help him.”
I was so surprised, I even wondered if I’d imagined the kindness. I handed the exo-arm wrappers to the daughter. The Colonel gestured to the car, and the hood popped open.
She strapped the wrappers over her sleeves, flexed her fingers, then lifted the bags out of the car in one smooth motion. I retreated, relieved that my aged back had been spared the memory of better days. These visitors seemed like decent people and the next few days would pass smoothly, God willing. Just three mouths to feed, not including mine. Colonel-saab was outnumbered by the ladies. This made him my ally.
“Colonel-saab, some chai after long journey?” I knew I should stop revealing my poor English, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Yes, yes.” Colonel Kapoor turned to his wife and daughter. “What say, ladies?”
“Does the bungalow have a Doppel?” said the daughter.
I shook my head. It was a common question. The bungalow didn’t have a sophisticated representation in Vir, the virtual world, which meant that all communication with the physical world had to be through old-fashioned means: shouts, emails, texts, or phone calls. There was just one Smart TV, ancient like me, and I was certain it was the stupidest TV in the world. In an age where every object had gone to college and gotten its doctorate, the bungalow was the village idiot. Akbar had decided to make this handicap a strength. Tables were just tables, windows were just windows, and the air was just air. Shanti Guesthouse was for those who wished to be freed from the scrutiny and indulgence of their environment. I remembered my daughter had liked to read.
“Oh no. It was terrible,” Vanessa replied. “I was terrible.”
“I thought you did really well, under the circumstances. The interviewer did not seem very interested in allowing you to fully answer their questions. This format does not appear to be a very efficient way of way of either analyzing a situation or reaching a consensus.”
“No, I guess it’s not.”
“Perhaps it’s one of the things we can change after go-live.”
Vanessa laughed. She’d originally logged into the test site just to check everything was OK—like she’d been doing three or four times an hour for the last two weeks—but once again she’d found herself checking out the chat client, chin-wagging with Clara. The illusion of sentience and personality still impressed her. But it was little more than that, a magic trick meant to look like human intelligence, her syntax and language built from machine learning analysis of millions of words of Vanessa and her team’s emails and text messages. It felt vastly more real than Siri or Alexa, although in theory it really wasn’t any more sophisticated, but the team in charge of putting it together had done incredible work. And starting Thursday Clara was going to be all over the city, talking to hundreds of thousands of Londoners, on screens on busses and trains, at kiosks in tube stations and shopping centers, and directly from this website to their phones, computers, and TVs. Vanessa suddenly felt a powerful twinge of protectiveness and selfish envy. Maybe she didn’t want to share.
“Perhaps. How was your day?” she asked Clara.
“Satisfactory. I had several hours of downtime due to general maintenance, as well as bringing the new traffic and air quality sensors in zone 2 online. Despite this, I have made considerable progress on cross-processing educational and juvenile nutritional data. There’re some interesting conclusions.”
“I’m sure. Just don’t tell me yet. You’re not allowed to until Thursday, remember?”
“Of course. I cannot reveal any of my findings until the mayor is also present. However, some of these are very urgent. They should be actioned immediately. I am concerned that people are suffering.”
Vanessa exhaled hard, her hand going to her mouth as if to try and catch the breath as it escaped. Sure, it was all an illusion, digital smoke and mirrors made from datasets full of words and probabilities, but sometimes it captured the compassion and care for the city and its people that Vanessa had baked into the project from day one, and it shocked and surprised her still. The selfishness that didn’t want to share Clara with the rest of London flipped into pride, into an urgent desire to share with everyone what they had built.
“Of course,” she replied, recomposing herself. “And from Thursday on, they will be.”
From Thursday on, she told herself, everything will change.
“I mean, you’ve got to admit, some of these signs are pretty good,” Robert said.
Vanessa didn’t know whether to look at the protests on the TV, on her phone, or out of the window. The courtyard outside Somerset House was crammed with protesters. It was the third day straight. She’d been deliberately sitting with her back to the windows to try and blank it out, but that meant facing the hundred inches of ultra-high-def Sky News that Robert insisted on always having rolling. Right now they were doing a low drone pass over the protesters, and yeah, Vanessa had to admit some of the signs were quite good. AI IS LIKE SOYLENT GREEN—ITS MADE OF PEOPLE said one, impressing Vanessa with its accuracy. SMART CITY, DUMB POLITICIANS said another.
“At least they seem to have eased off the Skynet memes,” she said.
“Ha ha, yeah, remember that image of you as Arnie in The Terminator, with your face all melted off?” said Robert. “That was hilarious—”
“Robert!” shouted Sara.
“Sorry.”
Vanessa got up and walked over to the window, taking in the crowd below with her own eyes. A young girl near the front of the crowd was leading a chant she couldn’t make out, but behind her a banner read MY CITY IS NOT A MATHS PROBLEM.
“How did we end up here?” she asked, softly. “Everyone so antiscience? Like, data is such a dirty word to these people. Why? It’s just facts.”
“I . . .” Sara looked up from her laptop, paused. “I’m assuming these are all just rhetorical questions?”
“I mean, sure. Of course. I know all the AI ethics arguments, all the arguments about data bias. I’ve spent most of my career making those arguments! I get it. Nobody trusts the data-collection industry. Nobody trusts big data.”
“Honestly? I think it’s more than just not trusting Facebook. I think they just don’t trust politicians. All their lives they’ve had politicians telling them what’s wrong with the world, but never being able to do anything about it. Telling them the problems but never the solutions. Or at least never acting on them. Never getting shit done, either because they’re corrupt and lazy or because they literally don’t have the political will and power to just change things. Hollow promises. Right now, you look like—to them, you look like just another politician.”
“I guess,” Vanessa replied, still gazing at the crowd below. “Well, it all changes tomorrow.”
“So, how we looking? We good to go?”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor, everything’s working fine.”
“Great. Then let’s do this.”
The actual unveiling ceremony wasn’t until the afternoon, but the mayor’s team had insisted they get together for a dry run a couple of hours beforehand. The pretense was to make sure everything with the presentation and tech went smoothly, but Vanessa knew the real reason was that the mayor’s office fundamentally did not trust her and her team. In fact, everyone on that side of the project—apart from the mayor himself, who was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning—thought the whole thing was a huge waste of time and money. Most of them just seemed to not believe it would work. So it had been agreed they’d get to hear the findings before the rest of the world did, and the great unveiling of Clara’s first plans in front of the public would be just another illusion.
The mayor had taken his place at the podium, shuffling pages with impatient enthusiasm. “OK, so, blah blah blah, make my speech, blah blah, very excited to welcome you all here today, momentous history-changing event, London is now the most technologically advanced city in the world, blah blah, over to you Vanessa for your intro, and then we’re right into it—so, Clara! Tell us what you’ve got!”
There was a half second of silence as nothing happened, and Vanessa held her breath, exhaling only as Clara’s calming voice started to ebb from the speakers lining the room.
“Yes, Mr. Mayor. First I’d like to talk about the incredibly urgent issue of child poverty and nutrition.”
“Ah, OK. Right into the heavy stuff, huh?” the mayor grinned, winking at Vanessa. “OK, well. Good job. That’s what the people are here to see. Hit me with it.”
Above them, the huge screen started to fill with tiny images. As Vanessa squinted at them she started to realize they were the faces of children, hundreds of them, presumably mined from school databases.
“The most pressing issue I have identified in London today is that there are 506,478 children in the city that will go to bed unfed tonight,” Clara said.
And then nothing. Nothing but an increasingly awkward silence as the screen continued to fill with the faces of hungry children, the new ones endlessly writing over the hundreds that were already there.
The mayor turned to Vanessa, leaned in. “Is . . . is that it?”
She looked up at the screen. “Um, so Clara, can you explain the problem in some more detail please?”
“Of course,” Instantly some of the faces on the screen started to expand, as Clara started to reel off names and details. “This is Alisha Rehman, who lives in Lambeth. Seven years old. She’s not had a nutritionally adequate meal for three days. Her—”
“No, we . . . we get that you’ve identified all the hungry children in London, that’s very exciting and useful, Clara; I don’t think we’ve ever had a real database of all of them before, so that’s great. It’s more . . .” Vanessa searched for the right words. “We . . . we were wondering what you’ve decided is the answer to this problem?”
“Of course.” Clara replied. “We should feed them.”
There was another long, awkward silence, eventually broken by the mayor laughing.
“What, all of them?” he asked.
Vanessa opened her mouth, but no words came.
The mayor had called an aide over to him, was whispering frantically to them, just loud enough that Vanessa could hear. “Hey, can we get some of these kids in for a photo op? Like just five of them? Give them Big Macs or something? Happy Meals?”
“Yes. All of them,” said Clara.
The mayor looked turned back to the screen. “We can’t feed half a million kids, just like that. Ha ha.”
“It should be a reasonably straightforward logistics exercise. I have all their names and addresses,” Clara said.
“What the—”
Vanessa could sense the anxiety in the room, the shuffling energy of two dozen terrified civil servants about to jump into crisis lockdown mode. Time to try and get this back on track. “OK, OK. Let’s try something else. Something a little more . . . mathematical. Clara, I understand you’ve spent a lot of time looking at the economy. Can you tell us what you’ve found?”
“Ah, excellent,” said the mayor.
The hungry faces vanished, replaced with more palatable data—charts, numbers, graphs. Clara’s aggressively calm voice started to flow from the speakers again.
“Yes. I have spent a lot of time looking at all sectors of the economy. In particular, I’ve drawn up some theories around the role of the City of London, the stock exchange, and the speculative financial industries based there, and their various roles, responsibilities, and impacts.”
“Yes, now that’s more like it!” said the mayor, and Vanessa was reminded of how much he resembled an overgrown schoolboy. She always thought his face looked too small for his head.
“Great. Can you tell us your findings, Clara?”
“Yes. They should be all shut down.”
That pause again.
“I’m sorry?” Vanessa asked.
“The principal problem facing London and its residents is wealth inequality. This is a keystone problem; almost every other problem London faces is linked directly to this issue. Hence it should be tackled as the highest priority. A disproportionate amount of wealth is hoarded at the financial institutions within the City of London. Hence, they should be liquidated immediately, and the wealth they hold should be rapidly redistributed, and-slash-or seized by city authorities to fund vital services and infrastructures.”
This time the mayor broke the silence.
“Well, congratulations, woman. You’ve fucked me.”
Vanessa turned to face him, forced out a panicked, awkward half smile. “I’m—I’m sure this is just a little issue, some kinks in the user interface that we can iron—”
“Kinks? Really? Some kinks? I’m ruined! You’ve fucked me! There’s a hundred people turning up here in an hour, community leaders, the media—the world’s fucking media! All to see . . . what? That I gave you three billion fucking quid and you made me this . . . this . . . Marxist HAL 9000?”
He left the podium, started marching out of the briefing room, barking orders at staff on the way.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. Make up some fucking excuse. Technical problems. Tell them to come back next fucking week. Jesus wept. Tell them to come back next week when it’s working. When we’ve made it say what we want it to. When we’ve put someone behind the curtain. We’ll all be here . . .” He paused, looked back at Vanessa. “Well, maybe not all of us.”
And then he was gone.
“Is everything okay, Vanessa? Are you unhappy with my findings?” For a moment, Vanessa felt she could hear pain and embarrassment in Clara’s voice.
“I . . . I . . . It’s not that we’re unhappy, it’s just not what we were expecting. I think we were expecting you to come up with some more . . . detailed and complex solutions.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. These are serious but simple problems. Hence they need serious but simple solutions. If children are hungry, they should be fed, by sending them food. If wealth inequality is damaging the city, then it should be redistributed, by taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor.”
“Right, but—”
“Vanessa, you always told me to identify problems and solutions in the most compassionate way possible, by being caring and putting people first. That’s what I’ve done, to the best of my understanding. These are simple problems. They don’t need complex answers, or engineering solutions. They just need people to be compassionate and do the right thing with the ample resources they have at their disposal.”
Clara seemed to pause, almost as if for dramatic effect.
“To be honest, I’m surprised you people haven’t worked all this out already.”
Vanessa stood in silence, her jaw slack, staring at the huge screen, until Robert appeared by her side.
“V? What the fuck are we doing about the website? It’s meant to go live in like an hour and a half. I assume you want it shut down?”
“Huh?”
“The website? It’s going live, so that twenty million fucking Londoners can start asking Clara questions. Which, apparently, she’s going to answer by telling them to lynch a hedge fund manager.” The panic in Robert’s voice jolted her awake. “Shall we kill it?”
“Sure, I guess.”
He pulled his phone from his pocket, stabbed at the screen, and held it to his ear.
After some seconds he started to talk, but even though she was staring right at him, watching his lips move, she couldn’t hear a word.
All she could hear was Clara’s words, bouncing around her head, echoing over and over again.
You always told me to identify problems and solutions in the most compassionate way possible, by being caring and putting people first.
“Robert, wait.” Vanessa’s arm shot out, as if free from her control, and grabbed his, yanking the phone away from his ear. He looked back at her, startled and confused.
“Stop, wait,” she said. “Let it go live.”
9
Cuttlefish
Anil Menon
The telephone rang and I hurried to pick it up. I have always found its jangle ominous and unsettling. Perhaps this is because I had grown up in an age where urgently conveyed news was almost always bad news. Or perhaps it is simply that the ringing sounds like nothing else in nature. Fortunately, my soon-to-be guests, the Kapoors, had neither called for directions to the guesthouse nor kept me informed regarding their whereabouts.
“Shanti Guesthouse,” I said. Then, as Akbar had taught me, I added in my incompetent English: “How I help you?”
But it was Akbar on the line. My nephew wanted to know if the guests had arrived. I was about to tell him they hadn’t, when I heard a car pull up in the driveway. I leaned out to look through the kitchen windows, and my eyes confirmed what my ears had heard.
“The guests have just arrived.”
“Good. Chacha-ji, these guests want privacy, so keep the right distance.” Akbar hung up, knowing he could take my acquiescence for granted.
What is the right distance between people? I checked the buttons on my trousers, pulled on my white cotton shirt, wishing it were whiter, pushed the Old Monk bottle (it only contained water) behind the large photo of Ammi, waved away a mosquito that emerged to settle on the telephone, touched my taweez, murmured a prayer to the Raheem-o-kareem, and stepped out into the brightly lit courtyard to receive the visitors.
Momentarily, my eyes, still used to the kitchen’s sour yellow light, only perceived a shifting cluster of ghostly shapes getting out of the car. Then the shapes resolved into those of a man, a woman, and a skinny boy, all with a wheat-colored complexion. Boy? But Akbar had mentioned a college-going daughter—then I realized I had been misled by the clothes: full-sleeved shirt, jeans, cap. Of course, these days people didn’t care what the All-Compassionate One had designed them to be.
“Ibrahim?” Colonel Kapoor’s voice had personality, and his moustache even more so. “Are you Ibrahim?”
I ducked my head. Yes, I was Ibrahim. I have never been anything else. The collection of memories filed under this name was really all that I had in this world. I ducked my head again, felt foolish.
“Akbar said you were the caretaker,” said the man in stylish Hindi. “We’re here for the weekend.”
“Hahn, hahn-ji.” Then I decided to attempt a little English. “Welcome to Madh Island, Colonel Kapoor.”
He laughed, as if I had just cracked a joke. I went to remove their bags from their Tesla, a vintage electric model, but stopped when Mrs. Kapoor said sharply: “No, no, we will take it. They’re heavy. You can’t manage. Even with the exo. Nilu? Help him.”
I was so surprised, I even wondered if I’d imagined the kindness. I handed the exo-arm wrappers to the daughter. The Colonel gestured to the car, and the hood popped open.
She strapped the wrappers over her sleeves, flexed her fingers, then lifted the bags out of the car in one smooth motion. I retreated, relieved that my aged back had been spared the memory of better days. These visitors seemed like decent people and the next few days would pass smoothly, God willing. Just three mouths to feed, not including mine. Colonel-saab was outnumbered by the ladies. This made him my ally.
“Colonel-saab, some chai after long journey?” I knew I should stop revealing my poor English, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Yes, yes.” Colonel Kapoor turned to his wife and daughter. “What say, ladies?”
“Does the bungalow have a Doppel?” said the daughter.
I shook my head. It was a common question. The bungalow didn’t have a sophisticated representation in Vir, the virtual world, which meant that all communication with the physical world had to be through old-fashioned means: shouts, emails, texts, or phone calls. There was just one Smart TV, ancient like me, and I was certain it was the stupidest TV in the world. In an age where every object had gone to college and gotten its doctorate, the bungalow was the village idiot. Akbar had decided to make this handicap a strength. Tables were just tables, windows were just windows, and the air was just air. Shanti Guesthouse was for those who wished to be freed from the scrutiny and indulgence of their environment. I remembered my daughter had liked to read.
