The Labyrinth of Souls

by Nelson Lowhim

Turing leans in, his fleshy hand touching mine. “Then will you help me? Help me make this world less unjust?”

  I stared at him for a second. “Yes,” I croak.

  “Yes? That’s swell.”

  I pause, stare.

  “What?”

  “Swell is kinda outdated.”

  “That’s right,” he says and snaps his metal hand, sending a screeching sound piercing through my skull. “And don’t do that. Use the other hand for that.”

  “Got it,” he says, smiling.

  I proceed to paint the entire set of steel teeth. At the end, I step back and feel that something is off about these teeth. “There you go,” I say.

  Turing looks at me, those eyes of his seemingly more untrusting by the moment, and grabs a mirror. He smiles at the image. “Thank you.”

  Silence pervades our little sanctum. Khalid giggles, still staring at the ceiling. “What are you going to do about him?”

  “Haven’t I done enough?” Turing asks, sounding offended. “I brought a man back to life. Don’t you think this worthy of your praise?”

  I raise my hands. “It is, it is.” I bow my head. “And you did something amazing. It’s just that... It’s troublesome to see a human like this.” I jerk my head at the moving, smiling corpse that is Khalid.

  “Troublesome?” Turing says, straightening his back like he expected such a challenge. “I find it saddening that you would consider his state troublesome. Isn’t it evil to consider a human troublesome.”

  What has he been reading? “Well, it’s not just that you have that to consider here,” I say. “You made him what he is. He was more than that.”

  “You prefer him dead?”

  “No. But this is not alive. This is something else.” I’m not sure how else to say this. “He needs to be better, Turing.”

  “He’s happy, though. What’s wrong with that?”

  Nothing wrong with that, I think as I stare at the vacant smile on Khalid’s face. Perhaps a smarter Khalid would be relegated to a life where he was tortured or shot up. What then to choose for him? “Nothing,” I say.

  I look up at the flaked ceiling. There’s the engraving of a steer’s skull, initials in some script I can’t recognize. Next to it, more graffiti: “Beware the reaper. He has good marketing.”

  Turing follows my gaze and chuckles. “You will be leaving soon.”

  “I must,” I say, though it’s not really true.

  “What will you do... for money?”

  “I’ll be a writer.”

  “Oh. You can work for me. I can help you out.”

  I stiffen. Work for a machine? Not me. “I can manage.”

  “Writing? You won’t be able to sell anything,” Turing says, raising his voice. “You haven’t the skills. As we speak,” Turing pulls out a tablet and scrolls to an bestselling books page. “I have already written the best books of the past year. I can write thousands for every one you write...” He looks at me, raising that eyebrow of his, seams appearing.

  I shrink back in my seat. “Enough.”

  Turing shows me the tablet. It’s a bombing of a village in another dusty Muslim country. “See? It’s all going to hell. You were right. There is evil in the world, and it’s up to us to fight it... I shouldn’t say that you’re helping me, but rather that I’m following you.”

  My depleted ego swells with a little pride. “Yeah?”

  “Of course. You have great ideas. I told you I want to learn from you. So teach me. We will help put an end to all this. Do you agree?”

  I nod my head, a soothing calm coming over me, relief taking hold. “Yes.” My mind’s still brimming with heat, but I feel better.

  “Good.” Turing’s metal hand hits my kneecap, sending pain down my leg. “Good.”

  And still the earth runs dry. Crusted with tiles then dust. The wretched of the earth cry out but there is no answer and they die and the survivors move on to shanties with aluminum siding lean-tos and they stew in thought and cry for help and hear an answer. The soothing answer that they will find solace just walk this way. And even with drones from above they do not fear now, they simply understand and regroup.

  I over hear Turing mumbling this as he works on Khalid. As he speaks these words, they fill the air, fill one’s marrow, really. There is something eery and familiar about the tone. Have I heard Turing before? I ask what it is and he just smiles and says it might be a glitch. He’ll look into it. He’s self-correcting, of course.

  The whirring of a circular blade as it cuts through Khalid’s hair, skull, fills the room. I close my eyes and try to sleep, but nothing comes to my mind, just the cool blue of closed eyelids. The smell of flesh enters my nostrils, then it’s replaced by the smell of smoldering wires. That evokes saliva into my mouth and I spit on the floor. I wonder where Mathews has gone to, though I don’t miss him one bit.

  Turing comes around from the curtain partition and grins. He’s covered with blood.

  “How’d it turn out?” I say rather stupidly. I should be there with him, seeing what he’s doing. Especially when I have such a visceral reaction to what he’s creating with Khalid. Luckily, he doesn’t answer. A silence follows. I feel I have to fill it.

  “Well, we have to start working towards some end. To...” I feel woozy. That I’m going against such odds does make me shiver, but I remember that better men have lost bigger bets than this. But how did they take that first step?

  “The injustice, right? We have to do something.” Turing nods with such ferocity that I give him an odd look and he stops. “Too much?”

  “Yes, a tad.”

  “Well, we have to do something. Make the world a better place.”

  Something about that last line also comes out wrong from Turing’s mouth, but I figure that perhaps it’s a glitch. “We will.”

  “The story of your species has mostly been one of subjugation followed by false hopes of breaking that cycle before falling back into the same rut, has it not? That the people who use language to consolidate power are smart enough to use violence or fancy words to keep it.”

  “But we don’t need blood on the streets.”

  “Never,” Turing says.

  His white teeth look patchy. “Good. We need money.” Another thing I don’t have much of.

  “That I have. We have Mathews, and he’ll be working on some things for us. And online...” Turing grins, “we have lots. You’re going up?” He pulls out a credit card from God knows where, and throws it to me. “1-0-1-0 is the pin.”

  “Thanks,” I say. Begging from a machine. Something inside me shrivels.

  “What will you do?”

  That I haven’t thought about. How does one start this? And I mean this, because I don’t want to put a name to it. “We need people,” I say, waving the card, feeling less awful about taking the free money.

  “Okay.”

  “But,” I say, my mind careening out of control, imagining what would happen next if I were to recruit people. With an ATM card, I assume that’s what this is, there’s a limit per day on what I can pull out. So right now I would only get the dregs of society and I wouldn’t be able to get anyone who was truly talented (in the sense that I needed people who were good at making things, though having bodies wasn’t a bad thing either). Beads of sweat are forming on my forehead and I know that I want to get out of this place, I want to be as far away from Turing as possible. “I’ll just need a way to get them back down here... to help.”

  “Of course. And you’ll have help, of course,” says Turing.

  A metal plate hits the floor and I jump. “Khalid?” I say.

  Khalid shuffles around the corner. He squints at me. “George?”

  “Y-y-you’re... good?”

  Khalid nods meekly, his eyes rolling over to Turing. Something’s not right. “I’m very good,” Khalid says in a soft voice. I can’t remember if that’s his voice.

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine alone,” I say, realizing that Turing wants me to go wit
h Khalid.

  “No, don’t be silly. This will be a great chance for you to reacquaint him with the world. You wanted him to be better, no?” Turing says.

  “I...” I push the card into my pocket and finger the hard plastic edge. “It’s not that. I can do it, only later. Look at him and how he’s walking. I’ll never be able to find anyone.”

  Turing looks at me for a second. “And you’ll be fine up there alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Turing nods, his face still bloodier than ever and beckons me to follow him. We go down a familiar route, though I’m not sure I’ve actually walked it. Just when I think Turing is about to push into some secret chamber in a wall, he instead shows me a normal elevator door. “Here,” Turing says, “you will be able to bring them back down.” He points across the hallway and I see a door, beyond that a large warehouse-like room with all the trappings of an Army staging point: cots, fridges, stacks of military rations. I was starting to think of this underground lair as a sanctum, and now it seems like Turing’s place.

  “So we’re breaking the cycle of subjugation, right?”

  Turing’s eyes, whirring—or I think I hear the slight whirring—turn to me. “Of course, George.”

  “Who made you, Turing?”

  “Me? Made?” He furrows up his forehead. Too much, as it would be, and I see seams again. “Oh, you mean who had an original hand in the programming?”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” I say.

  Turing puts his finger up to his nose and starts scratching it.

  “No,” I say. “Scratch your chin. It’ll make your thoughts seem more... thoughtful.”

  Turing does as I suggest. “Yours is an odd species, you know that?”

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Is this the sort of conversation that leads to a proper revolution, or is talking about unserious things a harbinger of our doomed venture. I look at the green Army cots again. “Where did you get all this?”

  “Pretty cheaply, actually. Army is drawing down from its wars, so it’s selling at a high discount, while the preppers who have been saving up for the apocalypse, or at least the slight drawdown of America as a nation-state, are all going bankrupt. Hard to maintain such a lifestyle, I suppose.”

  I look at Turing, remembering the original question. “Your maker?”

  “My initial programmer. I don’t know...”

  Maybe Turing’s more like us than I gave him credit for.

  Turing looks at the cots one more time, then sticks his head into the warehouse room and switches off the light. “There will be food and everything for them,” he says as he walks away swiftly.

  I follow him down the hallway which ends at a door. Wooden with rusty handles and no lock. Turing raps his metal knuckles on it. The echoes of the sound filters down the hallway. I hearing typing.

  “Come in,” says a tired voice.

  We enter, and I recognize the room. Multiple screen. The window with a distant ocean and the accompanying smells of salty seaweeds and moist sand. A seagull squawks. “Hi, Yusef,” I say and put out my hand.

  The young man, turns away from the screen and looks at me, no recognition lighting his face. But when he looks at Turing, he gives a slight whimper. The machine, he recognizes. “Hi... Greg.”

  “George,” I say.

  “Of course,” Yusef says. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s perfectly fine,” I say. “How are you?”

  “Busy,” he says, his eyes returning to Turing. I’m not sure that it’s fear or affection with which he looks at Turing. Then it hits me.

  Leaning in, I ask Yusef, “so you programmed him?”

  Yuself nods, his eyes on Turing.

  I look towards Turing and see that he’s glancing at Yusef mockingly. There is something between them that could only be described as history. Bad history. How does a machine ever turn on its maker? Wouldn’t the maker think to program that part out of it?

  “Yes,” Turing says. “This man had a hand in my initial programming.”

  Another seagull squawks nearby, and a loud thundering crash is followed by a slight mist in the air. Turing turns and walks to the window. His hands behind his back, he stares out, still, unmoving.

  Yusef leans in. “I made him. That’s what I was working on when you interrupted me last time. His code is perfect.” Yusef casts an adoring eye at Turing. “Maybe too perfect. He doesn’t like me. He learned too much, too soon, and now his AI is perfect online.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Yusef looks at me like I’m too dumb. “AI isn’t the right word, though. Perhaps simply intelligence, because there’s nothing artificial about his intelligence.” Another adoring eye cast towards Turing. “But he grew tired of me. He thinks he can only learn from you.”

  At least that swells my chest, though it ends up being fleeting when Yusef returns his eyes to me, with all its inherent disgust.

  “Why?” I ask.

  Yusef rolls his eyes. “I’m on your side, you know.”

  As good as that feels, I’m not sure what Yusef means.

  Yusef nods, jerking his head much too hard. “But what are you going to do now that you cannot write... not as well as him, at least?”

  That hurts, even if it is true, and I’m sure then that I hate Yusef. “I’m helping Turing,” I say, as I see Turing half turn to us, but then stop when he realizes that we’re still talking, and turns back to the window. And somewhere, when I see a glint off his arm, a few other thoughts almost surface, but remain on that borderline of conscious and subconscious, and they whisper things like this robot is the one who needs your help, and that if there’s nothing else to do, this is at least something concrete.

  “I know,” Yusef says, fake-smiling. “I’m glad. Like I said, he’s got the online written world on lock, he just needs a hand as he gains help with the physical world.”

  And now I see the fear in Yusef’s eyes. I lean in. “Are you scared of him?”

  Yusef, stiff, doesn’t reply. A small tremor passes through him, through the air, and touches my skin. I feel sorry for him, but only for a second. I remember that I hate him. “So it’s true,” I whisper using only my tongue and lips. “Your creation has you by the balls?”

  Yusef remains still and looks off at the wall. When I nudge him, he finally looks at me.

  “At least I created something that will last,” he says.

  I half grin. A well placed strike at my ego, but the man’s still scared. “And you’ll keep on helping him, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” he says. “I created him.”

  I pause. Where there was just fear, there’s now admiration, pride. Is it possible for both of those things to reside in the same person at the same time for the same thing? “Well, well... and he’s not forcing you to do a thing, is he?”

  “I want to see him succeed.”

  “But you fear him?”

  Another pause. I smell something else in the air, but when I look at Turing, he remains out of earshot.

  “It’s hard to know what he’s capable of,” says Yusef, his voice now cracking. “Though I am only helping him because I know that there will be much good to come out of his actions. He’s not like us, you know?”

  “Well—“

  “No, think about this. He has no sex drive, he has no pride, no ego, no fear. He just acts according to his programming. He can mimic those things, but that’s it.”

  I nod my head, my eyes focusing on a mole on Yusef’s cheek, with a handful of dark black hairs growing out of it. Stepping back, I see that though Turing is still in front of the window, the lighting in the room has changed. A fog wafts in. A short scream curdles the air. My skin tightens. I walk over to Turing’s side, and realize that the window no longer shows an ocean scene. Instead I’m looking at a dark moss-ridden forest with fog hiding the dark trunks, though every now and then a branch, or a trunk comes out of nowhere and the moss dripping from each trunk is more than just moss, it’s lik
e a bloody hand. Then, around a corner, I see what seems to be a large creature, man, with a knife in hand lurking. A smaller figure, walking in a feminine gait, walks by. The larger creature pounces. Another half scream fills the air. Or does it?

  “What was that?” I say, short of breath.

  “Nothing, why?”

  “No, I think someone out there is in trouble.”

  My eyes still on the scene, I can hear Turing’s head whirr as it faces me, then turns back. “It’s not,” he says. “If it was, don’t you think I would help?”

  I’m not sure how to answer this. “Would you?”

  His hand, the flesh one, falls on my shoulder. “Of course I would, George. I owe everything I have to you. Your species. I want to help. You must know this, believe this by now? I am here to help. If there was someone in trouble out there, I will, if I can, help them.”

  I turn. He’s looking me dead in the eyes. He’s like a human being. He is, for all intents. “Very well,” I say. “I believe you.”

  “And will you help me help your people?”

  My heart grows. “Of course,” I whisper.

  He looks me over and smiles. “Thanks, George. We can’t do it without you.”

  I look back at the forest, except now it’s an ocean, a mist breezing by my face.

  The next morning, I wake up to Turing clapping his hands—a sound more like a thwack than a clap. Khalid’s playing chess with Turing.

  “You should see him play, George,” Turing yells at me. “He’s damned good... for your people.”

  Is that a jab at me? “Great,” I murmur, rubbing the crust out of my eyes. The back of my eyeballs hurt. I rub my back, my temples. Slowly the pain dissipates.

  “You play, right?” Turing asks me.

  “Of course.”

  “Then, give him a try.”

  I step up to the table. Khalid isn’t looking at me, but is hunched over the chess board. Ten moves into the first game I can tell I’m out of my depth. Khalid is playing like a computer. No mistakes, no flair, just ruthless. Twenty moves in I haven’t lost, but I know I won’t win: my pieces are tripping over one another, and this far into the game I’m not thinking about attacking, but rather defending. Turing serves me a plate of eggs and toast. I eat it after I resign. I chew on whole wheat toast, the harder crunch of sunflower seeds, adding to its thick and almost pungent taste. The eggs too, are perfectly balanced between moist and dry.