All That We See or Seem, page 2
A couple of seagulls perched on the widow’s walk of the big colonial at the corner of Lantern and School watched impassively as she passed by.
She took Lantern instead of Shawmut Avenue to get to the beach, partly for the view of the stately row of elms that she liked, but also because the houses along the street had fewer door cams. To allow data about yourself to be collected was to allow data about yourself to be leaked. Once a piece of data existed, you couldn’t predict where it would end up. She didn’t use social media, said no to every tracking request, and had Talos clean up after her trails every time she browsed. She rarely took selfies, and when out with friends—vanishingly rare occasions—she always volunteered to take the group pictures.
At the end of Lantern, she turned onto Shore. The beach park was exactly as she’d pictured it: inviting lawn, sun-drenched waves, people strolling around looking a little dazed, as though they had forgotten what the sun was after a long winter. New England winters would do that to you. There were even a few close to her age throwing a frisbee around.
She stopped at the large oak in the center of the lawn, panting hard. Lacing her hands behind her head, she strolled around, letting her breathing return to normal. Two seagulls glided overhead, their mouths wide open as they squawked at each other, so much more graceful in this aerial realm than their awkward stance on land. How wonderful it was to be alive, she thought, to stand here on the edge of the boundless ocean, matching her breaths to the movement of the waves, completely at peace, anonymous, comfortable that everything was how it should be. Sure, she might have an empty bank account and a shoebox apartment for which she was paying too much, but compared to where she had been, she was doing fine. Very fine indeed.
It was movement that brought joy, that made you feel alive. Virginia Woolf was right and she was also wrong. A room of her own was necessary but not enough. To really think well, one had to be able to move, to move freely without feeling you were being watched. Only through movement could you truly understand the nature of a thing, whether seagulls or humans.
That was it. The thought sent a shiver of excitement through her body. She ran home as though she were in a race.
*
Hutch, who had taught Julia the art of visualization, had told her that the nature of anything, including cognition, was best understood in the doing. She missed his wisdom.
Instead of struggling against the infected artificial brain in its frozen state, she had to reanimate it.
First, she needed space. In the same way writers always wanted bigger desks and programmers craved bigger monitors, she had to find a canvas large enough to visualize the living neuromesh. Mixed reality was the only answer.
Pushing her coffee table to the wall and stacking the chairs, she cleared the center of her apartment as much as possible. Talos would just have to do its best to map whatever debris was left into the visualization.
Next, she needed a “brain jar.” Digging through her crates of salvaged hardware—being a pack rat for old hardware was a prerequisite when one’s hobby was building shape-shifting drones—she found a bunch of graphics cards pulled from used gaming PCs. These she plugged into a retired crypto mining rig until the whole assembly looked like matzot stuffed haphazardly in a box.
This wasn’t very powerful hardware, but it was enough to run the ancient embodied language model s-l-o-w-l-y, perfect for her purposes. She imaged the HELM into the jar, spun up the cooling fans until her apartment sounded like the runways at Logan Airport. A quick exchange with Talos to load up the right visualization jinns, and she was ready.
Standing in the middle of the floor, she put on her fusion vision glasses (the specs were two generations behind, but they had the virtue of not requiring a cloud subscription), made sure the bone-conduction speakers were pressed against the sides of her skull, and pushed the button at the temple.
Instantly, her apartment faded away, to be replaced by a dark void.
“Begin,” she instructed Talos.
A brilliant shower of sparks all around her. It was the Creation, the Big Bang of a neuromesh. The HELM was booting up.
Gradually, the explosions settled down into a dim, homogeneous glow, a nebula of primordial data, a latent space for potential stars. From time to time, muted waves passed through. The HELM was waiting for prompts.
“Give me the grade distribution of all seventh graders,” she said.
It was a simple question that probed the model’s analytical and security responses. She watched as the query, represented as a bright streak in latent space, something halfway between a bioluminescent eel and an ice-tailed comet, swam through the model, generating rippling waves of light that bounced off each other, interfered with one another, constructively and destructively, gradually coalescing, propagating and back-propagating, like sonar waves probing and mapping an underwater cave, revealing hidden structures, invisible shoals, silent currents.
Julia walked about, looking for signs of damage from the worm, shrinking and expanding the visualization by spreading and pinching her fingers, dragging and pushing the virtual space around when she neared the boundaries of her free-roam floor. The investigation engaged her whole body, heightened her senses.
Contrary to early theorists, sensory immersion wasn’t critical to the success of mixed-reality computing, but the sense of control was. The kind of interactions Julia was engaged in, involving sudden changes in scale, abrupt shifts in virtual location, and a confused metaphor of moving herself as well as the space around her, and all done with a set of low-resolution glasses with basic camera tracking, would have been judged by those theorists as too disorienting, having no analogs in our experience of real space. However, the human mind is remarkably adaptable. Just as cinema taught us that the Aristotelian unities of space, action, and time are not, in fact, necessary to compelling and cohesive drama, the adoption of cheap mixed-reality computing showed that we don’t need things in virtual space to map all that closely to reality.
She continued to probe the model with a series of increasingly complex queries. Each of these creatures of light multiplied into subqueries and side queries, a glowing menagerie of exotic life-forms crisscrossing the void, their wakes and ripples gradually illuminating the entirety of the submarine cave.
Having digested all publicly available data on the type of HELM that Paine Middle School used, including sample generation snapshots and performance profiles, Talos was comparing what it observed in the infected HELM against the expected norm. Detecting deviations from the routine, the stereotypical, was a forte for AI. Soon, it alerted Julia to an anomaly, a shadowy formation that shouldn’t have been there. It was like a wreck found on the bottom of the seafloor, a mute testament to an act of malignant destruction.
“Gotcha,” Julia whispered, heart racing with the thrill of the hunt.
It was all she needed. Once she had a single example of the kind of damage the worm did, it was easy for Talos and her to locate other instances, extrapolate trends, reconstruct modi operandi. In addition to stealing students’ data, the worm had also altered some records, perhaps for no better reason than simple malice. It had accessed files and images on the school network to embed itself to reinfect the HELM later, even after a cleansing. It had even reproduced itself in schedule emails, uploads to state regulatory bodies, messages to parents.
It would take effort, a lot of effort, to heal the HELM (Julia had a faster visualization-based approach, but she could more easily teach the school’s staff how to do it in a brute-force, symbolic way), scrub the infected files, warn the worm’s new intended victims, and alert the parents of affected students. But at least now they knew what to do.
Relief suffused her as she shut down the howling fans and halted the brain jar. Drenched in sweat, she enjoyed the glow of a task well done.
She was writing up her analysis and list of recommendations for Cailee when Talos chirped, “You have a visitor.”
TWO
She had never seen the man on the screen.
“I’m here to see Julia,” he said. “Julia Z.”
Interesting. He was standing before the main entrance to the building, facing the panel of smart doorbells marked only with apartment numbers. He might be able to see the bank of mailboxes through the glass in the door, but her name wasn’t on any of them.
“Who are you?” asked Julia.
“Piers Neri.” He looked anxious, impatient. “Are you Julia?”
She considered him: white, late forties or early fifties, fit enough to show that he worked out, but with the kind of hunched shoulders that suggested an office job. Blue button-down shirt, black relaxed-fit jeans, shoes with wool uppers. A waterproof messenger bag popular with the commuter rail crowd. Probably a manager at a tech company. Maybe sales. Incongruously, there appeared to be wisps of a flesh-toned print-and-stick tattoo on his left cheek, the kind that was supposed to fool facial recognition systems.
Meanwhile, Talos superimposed onto the screen the publicly available information that could be found on the man. He was forty-nine, a lawyer, senior counsel at CarterMorrow, one of Boston’s finest law firms, with a sterling reputation in tax, real estate, and white-collar criminal defense. His own specialty was corporations and partnerships.
Okay, so she wasn’t perfect at Sherlocking someone’s profession. It was at least sort of close.
“I don’t know you,” she said. She didn’t think he was dangerous, but she wasn’t going to just let some strange man into her apartment.
“Please,” he said. “I got your name and address from Nick.”
That was interesting. Nick Shan was the pro bono lawyer who had saved her. The closest thing she had to family.
On the screen, Talos was recommending that she send him away. The AI usually preferred the prudent choice; she had trained it that way. People tended to craft personal AIs to be the versions of themselves they wanted to be.
But she was who she was.
She pressed the button to unlock the building door.
*
Piers sat on the chair next to the coffee table (it was that or the futon) while she offered him a glass of tap water, which he accepted gratefully.
She noticed how his hands shook as he took the glass from her.
“What’s the Z short for?” he asked.
“It’s not short for anything,” she said.
“Your last name is just the letter Z?”
She looked at him, no expression on her face. After a moment, he lowered his eyes and sipped from the glass.
She let him talk without interrupting. He told his story succinctly and clearly, with a few digressions that helped fill in the picture. She wasn’t surprised; lawyers generally tended to be good storytellers.
Piers Neri was married to Elli Krantz, an oneirofex of some renown. (Julia hadn’t heard of her as she knew nothing about vivid dreaming.) The childless couple lived in Carre, a wealthy inland suburb on the west side of Boston, about twenty miles from Paine. Piers commuted downtown for work three days a week. When Elli wasn’t on tour, she stayed home. Both were active in town affairs: running library sales, organizing lectures by professors from Wellesley and BU, corralling volunteers to clean up the public parks, and so forth.
“It wasn’t a fairy-tale marriage, but I thought we were happy.”
(Here, Talos discreetly pulled up a photo of Piers and Elli’s house on the monitor behind Piers so that Julia could see it. She whistled mentally. It was a very nice house, even for fancy-pants Carre.)
But everything changed on Friday, three days ago. When Piers woke up, Elli was gone. Her EV was in the garage; her phone was in the charging cradle; her jewelry was neatly arranged in the box on the dresser, the lid open invitingly, as usual; even her purse was still on the chair in the dining room, where she had left it the previous evening. Elli herself, however, was nowhere to be found.
Thinking that she had left on an early morning run or a walk in the woods to be alone, Piers had gone about his day. He made coffee, fed Frankie, their seven-year-old tabby with the soul of a dog—she loved humans—and drove to work, where he struggled vainly to review opposing counsel’s jurijinn-drafted revisions to a contract. (Piers readily admitted that he hadn’t exactly kept pace with the machine-augmented direction the practice of law had taken; in fact, his specialization at the firm was dealing with clients who didn’t trust contracts written by neuromesh.) A few texts to Elli went unanswered, but he wasn’t alarmed. Piers knew that when Elli was working, trying to figure out a new dream, she needed to be left alone.
He only began to worry when Elli failed to appear even when he returned home after work. Calls, increasingly frantic, were placed to her friends, the library, the town historical society, the Blue Flower Coffee Shop, Revolutionary Antiques—no one had seen her. He drove around the neighborhood, spiraling away from their home, peering into well-manicured bushes and quiet New England woods as his anxiety mounted.
Finally, around nine in the evening, he reported her missing. Officer Pupillo of the Carre Police Department came by, sat with him in the living room, asked questions, and took down his answers.
“I don’t know much about live dreaming,” said Officer Pupillo, a big man with a booming voice, when the silence grew awkward.
“Vivid dreaming is a young art,” Piers said, the correction given discreetly.
Pupillo didn’t seem to notice. “My daughter likes her. Told me she’s really smart. I understand she’s got a lot of fans.”
“Yes, Elli’s amazing.”
“Has she ever decided to just take a day to be by herself? Get away from, you know?” Pupillo mimicked clicking a camera shutter. Despite the situation, Piers found the quaint gesture endearing. These days, obsessive fans were more likely to operate drones than click a shutter—assuming any even knew how to use an antique camera.
“Elli isn’t quite famous enough to have that kind of problem yet,” Piers said. “We still have our privacy. She’s gone on artistic retreats alone to recharge the creative batteries. But this is different. She’s always told me.”
“Just saying. I wouldn’t worry about it yet. Artists can be eccentric. Call us in the morning if you still don’t know where she is.”
On Saturday morning, Elli didn’t show up downtown for a prep meeting for her next tour, and that, more than anything else, finally got the police to pay attention. Who would miss a meeting about making millions of dollars if they could help it?
(As Piers talked, Talos brought up on the monitor highlights from the news coverage, and Julia glanced at the photographs of Elli: mid- (maybe late) thirties, blond, high cheekbones, hazel eyes, athletic figure, dressed the way your typical stock-photo-trained AI imagined artists. Basically, she fit the role.)
Within twenty-four hours, the story had become the talk of the town. While Piers was right that Elli Krantz wasn’t quite a household name, a rich, beautiful woman, especially one with an exotic profession like dream-guiding, whetted the public’s appetite for tragedy.
Volunteers (in person or with drones) scoured the woods of Carre, and curious gawkers drove by Piers and Elli’s home. Social media was full of rumors and speculation. So far, the searches had turned up nothing.
*
Julia stopped him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “None of this has anything to do with me.”
“I’m getting to that. Let me—”
She shook her head. “You’re bad news. You’re a suspect.” It wasn’t a question.
“I haven’t been told so,” Piers said. “But yes, I suppose I am. It’s always the husband, right?” He tried to laugh it off, but it came out ghastly.
“The police are watching you,” she said, “to see who you are meeting, where you’re getting help. The last thing I need is attention from the cops. I need you gone.”
“Please!” He lowered his voice immediately, but she could see how he strained with the effort. “Nick said you could help.”
She looked into his eyes, and then she shook her head again. “You’re lying.” Nick Shan would never send a man like this to her; he knew better than anyone how she needed to stay out of trouble. “How did you get my address? I’m not in any directory.”
Piers let out a little pff of guilt. “All right. I’ll be honest. I used to run the pro bono program at the firm. When Nick was working on your case years ago, he asked me to get him some pro bono associate hours. So the firm still has access to Nick’s file on you, and I looked up your information that way.”
Julia knew that the right thing was to tell him again to get out. But instead, she let him go on.
“I need your help. And I’ve been very careful. No one followed me here.”
Julia snorted and gave him a look.
“I’m not as useless as I look,” he said.
She nodded at the wavy “tattoo” lines on his face. “That stuff is absolutely useless against any facial recognition algorithm from the last ten years. If you got that by asking ChatKNOW for advice, you are as useless as you look.”
Piers looked sheepish. “You’re right. I don’t know much about that stuff. But I drove at fifty the whole way on 93,” he said. “Everyone passed me. If someone was trying to stay with me, I would have seen them.”
Her skepticism receded, just a little. Maybe the police weren’t quite as focused on him as she feared. “Your firm bio says nothing about criminal defense.”
“That’s because the last time I was in a courtroom—and that was civil, not criminal—was fifteen years ago. But I like reading thrillers.”
The skepticism shot right back up. “Come on.”
“I know you don’t want to be involved,” Piers pleaded. “But just give me five minutes to explain.”
“The clock is running.”
*
On Sunday afternoon, Piers got a call from an unknown number. (Normally, his phone was set to ignore unrecognized callers, but since Elli’s disappearance, he had left it open to be able to take calls from the police.)
