Last Tango in Cyberspace

by Steven Kotler

  “Sir Richard’s holding our spot,” says Jenka, pointing toward a far corner of the restaurant.

  Lion follows his finger across the room. Richard at a distant table, wearing a white button-down shirt, a black jacket, and the I HAVE ISSUES trucker cap. It takes some maneuvering to get there.

  They thread between a drunken debutante and a waiter carrying an enormous tray of gefilte fish wrapped in nori decorated with orange roe. Finally, Richard standing up to greet him.

  “Lion,” he says, before he’s even reached the table, “what’s the Turing test for tree consciousness?”

  Blinks.

  “Richard,” says Jenka, his tone cheerfully diplomatic, “let him order a drink first.”

  “Ordered,” passing over a Knob Creek neat. “What’s the Turing test for tree consciousness? What kind of proof would it take to convince you?”

  “The Turing test?” asks Lion, taking a seat, trying to shift his brain into a higher gear. “The how to tell an AI from a human thing?”

  “Yes, but for trees.”

  “Are we not,” says Jenka, his tone a little less diplomatic, “here to discuss business?”

  Richard ignores him. “We know trees process information just as we do, with neurochemicals. Dopamine, serotonin. They have senses, take in data, integrate it, make decisions. Send out defense chemicals, which sounds like an automatic response, but trees also practice altruism, form memories, and you can knock them out with a human anesthetic. So how would you test for tree consciousness? How would you know?”

  “Why,” snaps Jenka, “would anybody care?”

  “We care,” says Richard, fixing the Slav with his too-blue eyes, “because trees are what’s next.”

  “What’s next?” asks Lion.

  “Three hundred years ago we decide owning other people was a bad idea. Two hundred years ago and women should vote. Then black people want to be free. Then the LGTB variety pack and a hundred different gender pronouns. Then animals. Switzerland grants basic rights to great apes. No-kill shelters in most major cities. Hopefully in-vitro meat replaces ranching. So maybe the animals are still next, but whatever, it’s never over. We’ll fight another battle over whether robots and AIs are conscious and deserving of rights, just like we’ll fight the same fight over trees and plants. And it might very well be turtles all the way down.”

  “I don’t know this expression,” says Jenka, resigned to his fate.

  “An infinite regress,” explains Lion, trying to recall the details. “A philosopher, Bertrand Russell, I think, was lecturing about how the earth orbits the sun and the sun orbits the galaxy. This old woman stood up and called him a liar and said: ‘Everyone knows the world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ So Russell asked the woman what the tortoise was standing on. ‘You’re very clever, young man,’ she said, ‘but it’s turtles all the way down.’”

  “Patterns inside of patterns inside of patterns,” says Jenka, glaring at Richard. “Why didn’t you say so.”

  Lion takes a sip of bourbon and waits.

  Richard continues: “Lots of people believe consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like space and time. If that’s the case, then it is turtles all the way down. We’ll have this debate about our microbiome. About rocks and atoms and quarks. Until we have Gaia consciousness, there will always be an us-them divide, always a next frontier for empathy—isn’t that right, Lion?”

  Said it better than I could, is what Lion’s thinking, and finds himself uncomfortable with this fact. Like Richard’s invaded his territory. Might not even be personal. Entirely possible that Gaia consciousness has become the new mega-rich-guy thing, like the billionaires who used to become libertarian sea-steaders.

  Another possibility: This could be a well-calculated, well-disguised up-sell, an Arctic ploy like Penelope’s flirting. Guerrilla-guerrilla marketing. Lion decides to proceed slowly. “I’m not sure about the conscious universe part,” he says, “but em-tracking is like that; it’s the experience of cultural empathy. That’s a new frontier. It’s empathy in a direction we didn’t even know we could feel.”

  “Bloody exactly-exactly,” says Richard, doing that finger-snapping clap again, I HAVE ISSUES bobbing to the beatnik beat.

  “I’m not sure about the Turing test for trees either,” Lion continues, “but whatever it is, it’s probably going to require empathy.”

  “Why?” Jenka wants to know, his eyes narrowing. “The test Alan Turing designed was about how an AI would fool a human into thinking the AI was human. That’s deception, not empathy. Why would tree consciousness require empathy?”

  “It’s an interface problem,” Lion explains. “The point where two systems meet—that’s an interface. The web browser Mosaic was an interface for the internet, an easy way for people to communicate with the new tech. AIs were designed by humans, with human-centric interfaces. Trees weren’t. They communicate mostly by pheromones. Dogs, with their incredible noses, speak tree. But not us, not at any conscious level. Our umwelt is different. If your umwelt is different, then empathy has to be your interface.”

  “I agree,” says Richard. “I also agree that the Turing test for tree consciousness is, for now, inscrutable.” He leans closer, speaking in a conspiratorial stage whisper: “But I do know what the proof would look like.”

  The whisper works. Lion feels curiosity grow. Humans, he thinks, such simple toys.

  Jenka bites first. “What would it look like?”

  “Like hyperactive grandmother neurons,” says Richard.

  So this is what this conversation is actually about.

  “Sietch Tabr,” Lion says flatly, looking closely at both of them, watching for any change in expression.

  Jenka smirks. Richard does that subject-switching thing he does. “Your no became a yes. Can you tell me why?”

  Lion notices that the picture on the wall behind Richard is the Horsehead Nebula with a Monopoly board superimposed over it. Park Place landing on the snout of that cosmic stallion. So who is going to own the Horsehead Nebula? Probably, he realizes, somebody like Richard.

  “Can you tell me why you stole the end table covered with powder?” asks Lion, choosing to counter with a different question.

  Jenka smirks again. “Borrowed.”

  “And for good reason,” says Richard, sliding an ornate envelope out of a briefcase. Rag weave paper and Red Ice icon. Lifting the flap, Richard places his finger on the nano-scanner. A zip of light and the flap opens. He slides out a piece of paper, blank.

  “A white piece of paper?”

  “We’ll get to this in a minute,” tapping the paper, subject switching again. “Tell me why the no became a yes.”

  “You know it doesn’t work like that,” says Lion. “All I get is a sense of the future. A little room to breathe, like a way forward.”

  “But you visited the Walker residence and felt that way forward?”

  Nods.

  “Humor us—extrapolate, please, if you can.”

  “Humans,” he says, looking from Jenka to Richard, “are clannish, insular, happy to divide into teams and tribes. Rich, poor, class, color, nation, species, whatever. These splits lead to predictable outcomes. Empathy, though, bridges the divide. As a result, it leads to more interesting futures. Less predictable, more hopeful. That’s what I got from the crime scene. A little sense of hope. But does any of that matter to Arctic? Does it lead to new products and profits?” Hands spread wide. “Open question.”

  “Yes,” says Richard, “yes, I think that too, which is why it will make a great medicine.”

  “A medicine?” Now confused.

  Richard puffs up in his chair, tosses the trucker cap to the table with a soft flourish, and flips over the paper. Reveals a new icon, blue ice this time, an iceberg in its natural shade. Also two words: Arctic Pharmaceuticals.

  “You’re going into pharmaceuticals?”

  Proudly, “Yes.”

  “A new branch
of Arctic,” crows Jenka, clearly happy to be back to business.

  “To treat what?”

  “We start with autism,” says Jenka, ticking them off on his fingers, “Asperger’s. Soon, social phobias, anxiety. The markets will be significant.”

  “You want to turn Sietch Tabr into a social phobia drug?” But in a way that doesn’t even seem particularly screwed up, it makes sense. They turned MDMA into an anti-anxiety drug. Why not Sietch Tabr? And he’s right, Arctic Pharmaceuticals will make bank. For the first time since taking this job, Lion actually feels a sense of relief.

  “That’s what this has been about all along?”

  Richard nods, but a hitch in the motion. “There does seem to be one small issue. We can’t get the compounding right. We saw the market potential early, almost as soon as rumors about the drug surfaced, hired the best chemists. Couldn’t get there. We heard about the Robert Walker incident and decided to get, shall we say, a tad more aggressive in our approach.”

  “You borrowed a sample from the crime scene, is what you mean?”

  Jenka jumping in: “A month now, the best chemists mass-speccing it from every angle. There’s something we can’t identify. A mystery.”

  “We’d like your assistance in solving this mystery,” adds Richard.

  “Way outside my lane,” says Lion, yet can’t help but wonder, “What would I do?”

  “You would help us find someone.”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “Muad’Dib,” continues Richard, then, turning to Jenka, “Show him.”

  Jenka reaches into his shirt pocket, fingers disappearing behind pink cloth, reappearing with an Amex Centurion, the black neon issue. You could buy an aircraft carrier with that piece of plastic. Lion has never seen one up close. Jenka taps a finger on the raised letters of the nameplate. Two words: Judah Zorn.

  “You would have our full resources behind you,” explains Richard. “And a place to start.”

  “Who’s Muad’Dib?” asks Lion. “Unless you’re talking about the protagonist in Dune.”

  Richard smiles, putting too many teeth on display. “I’m talking about the leader of the Rilkeans.”

  “The Rilkeans don’t have a leader. They’re entirely nonhierarchical.”

  “When they emerged, yes. Leaderless, rudderless, poetry geeks of all stripes. But they had a shared interest in consciousness-hacking pharmaceuticals. Muad’Dib became their leader by being the master chemist, the one who created Sietch Tabr. He gave them a better way to live the questions.”

  “And soon to be our third partner in Arctic Pharmaceuticals,” adds Jenka.

  “The Rilkeans are deep subcult,” says Lion. “They don’t strike me as the Big Pharma kind.”

  Jenka snarls, “As your great American poet David Mamet once said, ‘everyone needs money—that’s why they call it money.’”

  “You can leave the negotiations up to us,” adds Richard. “We just want you to find Muad’Dib, get him to agree to a meeting. We’ll take it from there.”

  “I’m an em-tracker.”

  “Lion,” says Richard, in his mellifluous best, “you are many things. An excellent reporter. An animal rights advocate willing to get arrested for the cause. A man with a deep interest in consciousness-changing compounds. You are perfect for the job.”

  “Why not ask Penelope? I saw the tattoo. She’s a Rilkean.”

  “Not a Rilkean,” says Richard, cryptically. “And she doesn’t have your particular skills.”

  “What skills?”

  “She’s not an em-tracker.”

  “I’m still not following.”

  “The way to find Muad’Dib is through Prince Shiz,” Richard explains. “Unfortunately, despite the fact that Shiz hired us to aid in his disappearance, he’s not interested in disclosing Dib’s location to a man of my persuasion.”

  “Your persuasion?”

  “Rich,” snipes Jenka. “Shiz is half Jamaican. Thinks money is from Babylon. All he does is quote Marley: ‘Possessions make you rich? I don’t have that type of richness. My richness is life.’ But he’s a big fan of yours, Lion Zorn, em-tracker of the Rod of Correction.”

  “I didn’t think em-trackers had fans,” he says, both stalling and knowing, because of Balthazar, this isn’t exactly true.

  “Shiz is a fan,” says Jenka. “He’s just so-so-so to meet you.”

  “Let’s eat,” says Richard, suddenly adopting diplomatic tones. “We can certainly let you ponder over a meal.”

  Jenka nods, resigned. “Of course.”

  Richard pushes a button to his left and a small lens rises from the center of the table, projecting a holographic menu they all can read. Dragon roll borscht in a challah bowl. The words in luminous baby-blue chalk dust, hovering in the empty space between them.

  “One question,” says Lion, fixing Jenka with a hard glare. “What the fuck’s up with the dragonfly?”

  “Dragonfly?” both Jenka and Richard say in unison, and with what might be genuine surprise.

  “The one that followed me.”

  “What dragonfly?” asks Jenka again, amping toward befuddlement.

  Humans are able to fake many emotions, but not the so-called distressed quartet of anger, fear, sadness, and surprise. Feeling these feelings, Lion knows, requires the simultaneous contraction of antagonistic facial muscles. Surprise tugs eyebrows upward while knitting foreheads together, for example, and this collusion lifts up the inner corners of the eyes. Totally involuntary, very hard to fake.

  Lion looks at them. Foreheads knit, inner eyes up. They honestly have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “Never mind,” he says. “Forget about it. Let’s eat.”

  CHIEF OF RILKEAN RELATIONS

  Lion leaves them at the table. He has little desire for chocolate-covered matzo-mochi, telling them to enjoy dessert without him, telling them he might or might not be interested in tracking down Muad’Dib.

  “I’ll let you know in the morning.”

  On his way out, at the tail end of the entrance hall, he notices one final picture, smaller than the rest: Earth, from a great distance, a sun-beamed speck amid the vastness of deep space, with a chess board and a handful of pieces overlaid atop the image. Lion studies the arrangement.

  Check in four moves.

  And through the door.

  Outside, he finds the weather has cleared. Dry skies and warm air. He sees Bo and the shiny mobile, parked at the curb, but it’s a pleasant evening and he doesn’t want the ride. Also doesn’t want to tell Bo where he’s going.

  “I think I’m gonna walk back to the hotel,” he says.

  “A good thirty minutes,” says Bo. “You sure?”

  “No,” says Lion, “not in a long time. But yes on the walk.”

  “Roger that,” says Bo, starting toward the driver’s side door.

  Lion stops him. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I already told you—not a Rilkean.”

  “Not you,” says Lion, glancing at the front door of Torah Toro, checking to make sure Richard and Jenka are still inside. “What about Penelope? Is she a Rilkean?”

  “It’s a different thing. But also not a Rilkean.”

  “What kind of a different thing?”

  Bo hesitates, uncomfortable with this line of inquiry. “Might not be my place to say.”

  “Understood,” says Lion. “Sorry I asked.”

  “Then again,” says Bo, the slightest hint of a smirk visible along the edges of his mouth, “got any more of that Ghost Trainwreck?”

  Lion pats down his jacket, front left, front right, remembers he’d placed a joint in his inside pocket. Reaches in, removes it, then realizes he’d rolled 50-50, “Mind a little tobacco?”

  “Beggar,” says Bo, “not a chooser.” Then he points at the restaurant. “But can we move it away from the spot where my boss is having dinner?”

  “Take a stroll,” says Lion, striding off.

  Bo falls in beside him. Lion waits u
ntil they’re down the block and around a corner before lighting the joint.

  “If you ask Penelope about the tattoo,” Bo explains, “she’ll tell you that she saw it and liked it. That it was—what do you call it, the thing I learned about in class: meme contagion.”

  “And it wasn’t?” passing over the joint.

  Bo sucks in a lungful, starts talking mid-exhale. “Do you know what her original job title was?”

  “I thought she was Jenka’s exec assistant.”

  “Now,” says Bo, passing the joint back, “but that’s punishment. Her original job was in extra-specials. She was Chief of Rilkean Relations.”

  “And the tattoo?”

  “I drive people around,” he shrugs, “people say things. I hear things. Not my fault.”

  Lion is about to hit the joint but stops, feeling a familiar unfamiliar feeling, like he’s being watched again. Same vibe he felt at Walker’s house. The dragonfly, back for round two?

  He glances down the block.

  Formerly light industrial, now two-story lofts in sunshine colors. Completely wrong in New York—a city he always sees in black-and-white—but not the source of his concern.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Bo.

  Lion can’t decide.

  “Dunno,” he says. “Tell me what you heard.”

  “Richard made her get the tattoo; it was one of his hiring conditions.”

  “Seriously,” says Lion, shaking his head. “How’d she end up working for Jenka?”

  “Again, hearsay, but apparently she sucked at her first job.”

  “Which was?”

  “The general gist was find the Rilkeans for Richard. And she didn’t find any. Well, that’s not entirely true. She found me.”

  “Where did she find you?”

  “At NYU, actually. I came out of class and Penelope was standing there. She asked me if I wanted a job.”

  “You did?”

  “You’ve noticed Arctic’s proclivity for research?”

  Lion waves the spliff. “Ghost Trainwreck #69, tissue-engineered dragon box, em-tracker of the Rod of Correction. Yeah, you could say I’ve noticed.”