The Labyrinth of Souls

by Nelson Lowhim

  And for another second there appears to be a conspiracy because Turing and Yusef exchange glances.

  “Well then, I shall try to learn in every which way. What do you say about Mathew?” Turing says, sounding now like some New England aristocrat.

  “I think he’ll talk too.” I let out a sigh. “But that doesn’t mean it’s the same as a torture. He’s just weak.”

  “And for those who aren’t weak? What would you do to them?” Turing asks.

  “I would use other methods than torture to talk.”

  Yusef, with a quarter of a corner of his lip in a smirk, points at me, mimicking my actions to Turing. “But when the stakes are up, you’re not going to have time for fancy tricks.”

  I’m not sure I believe that I’m having this conversation. “Christ. This is your expert opinion? That we should break people whenever we can?”

  That smirk of Yusef’s grows bigger. “What about you? They were turning the screws on you, weren’t they?”

  I don’t want to admit that... how did he know?

  “I hacked their systems, they were a mess after the explosion, and I found out what it was they were doing to you. Softening up is the term, is it not?”

  Turing is now mimicking Yusef’s smile.

  Yusef goes on. “And they almost would have. They would have gotten everything from you if the bomb hadn’t gone off.”

  “Fuck you,” I say, squaring off against Yusef now, noticing that in the corner of my eye, Turing seems to be reacting, moving in. “You have no idea—“

  “They videotaped everything. Almost Nazi like. They’d broken it down to a science.” Yusef now raises his hands feigning innocence. “But I’m on your side. I’m with you, remember? We’re here to make sure that such things don’t happen ever again.”

  I pause, staring at him, allowing the roiling in my chest to subside. “Fine,” I say in a cracked voice. “You can say what you want, but breaking me down...” I pause to clear out my throat, suddenly tightening from the thought of those cages, that woman I saved, how she turned on me. Behemoth. Where is he? Surely he knew all about me here. “It doesn’t work. And we need to be better and not do it.”

  Yusef scoffs. “That doesn’t make any—“

  “It’s fine,” Turing says. “We won’t do it. And I will look further into it. All right?”

  I nod, knowing that my argument did not suffice.

  Yusef coughs. “Let’s not get into that right now. Shouldn’t we be worried about the fact that there’s still a war going on? That was the point of all this, right?”

  That cuts through the tension. I don’t think that I’ve heard it called that, though.

  “That’s correct.” Turing, scratches his cheek, pulls hard enough to almost pull off the skin. He hands me a tablet.

  I scan a newspaper headline and it is more of the same: proclaimed victory after victory, but with warnings that more victories would be needed and that to cease the victories at any point now and in the future would lead to defeat. Sound logic.

  “They’re sending a few thousand troops.”

  “And we should stop them.” I feel that lump in my throat, that pain in my knees where I had been forced to kneel for ages. I’m growing weak, my body cracking in places I was beaten up on.

  “Of course,” says Yusef.

  “That app—“

  “It’s going well,” Yusef says, nodding like it’s his app that did so well.

  Now I know something’s wrong, but I need to focus on the war, on stopping it.

  “Let’s go to the office.” Turing ushers us up the stairs.

  “Here,” Turing pulls up a screen and shows us the myriad of projects he’s working on. I recognize the handful that I saw as projects with DOD and NSA and other arms that help us reach out and touch our enemies. He swipes that off and turns to another screen of headline news.

  Yusef, wheezing from the steps, nods his head to no one in particular.

  “We can keep stepping it up. We can continue to target people with our other—“

  “Feeding them the truth through their browsers?” Turing says.

  His tone is off again. “We keep hitting them. We have hackers looking to find out more about anything illegal, or any illegal connections out there?”

  “Of course.”

  Yusef walks off. I’m not sure why. Turing smiles at me.

  “And,” Turing says, placing a hand on my wrist. “I’ve talked to these generals. They’re wondering who’s doing what, and they’re cracking down on people like Mathews, but we’re not on their list... I’m not.” He gives an extra wide grin; he looks like a skull. He seems pleased with himself.

  “You shouldn’t grin like that.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He’s challenging me. I can sense it and I hate it. “Just trying to guide you Turing.”

  “Oh? They, the generals, they like it. They like the way I talk.”

  Of course they do, they like that he probably breaks down things to their simplest forms, the language of mere weaponry against weaponry. Everyone likes that, everyone wants the world to seem simple. I don’t say that though.

  My silence ends the conversation. I walk to the office, realizing that this sad place, with as beautiful a view as it has, is now sitting rock-like in my chest. It smells like laser printer emissions and that plastic heated smell of computers overworked. It’s night time now—where is the time going?—so I stare out and watch a few cars and a series of men standing on corners, looking around and looking alert. There were more than before. They could be zeroing in on us. Whoever is in charge could be waiting, a sniper could have a bead on me, breathing out, squeezing the trigger, all because in some secret room men who were bound to make money off this war, or escalation of hostilities, could make that damn money. A cold shiver, a tremble, and I wonder if I’ll ever be free of the burden of looking over my shoulder. I should call Turing, make sure that no one is coming after me. Or us. That’s what matters, us. This movement. And Turing. He’s making deals with the generals. He’s got that language that they like. We’ll be fine. But, but, there’s something else that is just out of reach of my thoughts. But Turing is the answer, I tell myself.

  I let out a sigh, taking several deep breaths, wishing I’d at one point in my life taken a lesson in meditation, wishing I were a damn monk, like that Buddhist monk in Vietnam, the hundreds in Tibet, each one with enough calm to light the match and accept as fact the burning of their own skin. Fuck, I’m really losing it, aren’t I? Gritting my teeth—which seems to work better than the breathing—I walk past a few programmers and take the elevator down to the hallway.

  When I find myself in the dark hallway, this time with steel beams coming out of the stone, I use my phone to light my way, the smell of mold and heavy air forcing sneezes through me. And when the cold becomes too much, I stop to piss on the wall. Doing it with the zeal of a boy marking a place in the world. As I zip up, I notice graffiti, “burn it all,” it says. I’m hit with deja vu as I remember seeing the exact same scrawl on the street where Dalcia’s art studio stood. I think on it for a second, then move on.

  Inside the first door I find, I see multiple rows of people, all who seem scrawny and somewhat small, hunched over computers. The stench of spices, strong and from the southern part of Asia hangs strong in my nose. I stare for second, before moving on. The next door weakens my knees, as I realize that it’s the hallway where I had been chased by Behemoth, the cages, the woman I tried to save, what had become of her. The indignity of it all forms a rock in my chest. And my mind, as if constantly scared, brings up the buzz of those insects that had almost killed me, the ones from which Turing saved me, and how they’d entered my throat. My throat tightens.

  I force my mind to return to the hallway. How I’d escaped. And I remember how this whole place had been tainted by Behemoth. But now, the whole make up of the room has changed. Whatever damage had been done before has been fixed and in each room, as small a
s they are, there are five beds, stacked high. In each, under a dull red light, people are sleeping. Are these our homeless men? The stench, like ammonia and dirty feet, overwhelms me before I watch for any longer period of time. I shut the door.

  The next door, shakes with a cool breeze behind it. I open it and walk inside, taking off my shoes, walking past the wall and onto the beach. All my worries dissipate with the cool breeze, the slow lapping of the lake. I lie down on the beach, the sand not yet uncomfortable, and I think to stay awake. But I crash.

  As the sun rose over the land, the distant low clouds burned off with the resulting cleared effect resembling that of a distant crackling painting. By now we were sending teams of assassins to deal with wretched of the earth. Well at least to deal with those who refused to bend the knee. The teams, hard smart men who melded as one with their guns, did their jobs with efficiency. Oh head shots and rescues so clean and pure and in stark contrast to the men for whom they in reality worked.

  Here at home we read about these tales of brave warriors marching forth all self sacrifice. Which is what it is about and in reality only a post modern outlook could move that from anything else. Oh the flag, oh the odds overcome, oh the men running in to shoot shoot kill. The masses of outstretched hands no longer begging now or demanding. Now they were cowering with the light of hope shining upon them. Soon they shall be saved.

  This is whispered like some madman’s melody and I awake in the middle of the night alone on that beach. Yet when I blink, I sense that Turing is somewhere here. Is it his whisper again? I close my eyes crash back into sleep.

  The war drones on. This time, the troops have landed in a foreign city I’m all too familiar with. Promises abound that this will be simple, that we’re fighting people who can barely spell the names of the weapons being used on them, let alone that they would fathom the technology, let alone know how to fight them. Underneath it all, my blood boils as I don’t know who’s pulling what strings and as a result I’m really angry against the unknown, and it’s hard to be angry against the unknown. They’re stepping up the reasoning.

  And another bomb in a cafe. Losers, says the media, fools who will be rushed as we march forward together, but we must stay strong and believe. More people arrested trying to plot against them (or “us”). All darker skinned, of course. But there, among the long faces of the arrested, is Mathews. He’s grinning. Then a picture of him with a black eye. There’s a caption about the financiers, like Mathews, who are being taken down everywhere. So they’re giving the mob an obligatory rich man, though Mathews is anything but. To calm my thoughts, I remember Turing, and I remember that somewhere in that robot’s destiny there lies mine... and the destiny of this world.

  I wake up to a blistering sun. When I sit up, fully rested, I notice the birds from before. As I approach them, however, I hear a stirring from beyond the grass. I turn and there’s Turing walking towards me.

  “Is this your new place?” He flashes that skull smile.

  “I like it.”

  “She didn’t care for it, did she?”

  “Dalcia?” A rush of embarrassment. I’d wanted her to like it. To find it a place to recharge her batteries. But she, city girl born and raised, had merely smiled.

  “You’ve heard the news?”

  “Uh—”

  “They shut down the app.”

  “How?”

  “A worm. They inserted it somehow. It means all of that won’t work. Same with reaching out with the truth. They wormed through all our programs—“

  “Can’t you counter? I thought—“

  “Of course we will. That’s what we’re doing. But it’s a setback... How’s the recruiting going?”

  “We’ve got plenty of homeless,” I say, realizing that I haven’t the exact amount of people we have in our ranks. And I refrain from asking about the two rooms I’d seen the previous night, with all those people, for there are more important things about.

  “We need to do more than that.”

  A complaint. “I will,” I say.

  “More than some people with nothing to really offer.”

  “All right.”

  “We might have nothing to do on the online world. Not until we get rid of this worm. So you need to recruit. We need to fight this as hard as we can.”

  “What about the writing? No income from that?”

  “The books were too perfect. Besides. All a person needs to do is buy one and they’re set.”

  “Oh,” I say, a resounding sense of impotence coming over me. I fight it back. Wasn’t it true that I always needed more than one book to move forward in life? How can only one be good enough for anyone?

  “You need to recruit,” Turing says.

  There’s something different about Turing’s voice this time. I lean in, his face seems brand new again, almost a different shade of a person. “You hear that another bomb went off?”

  Turing shakes his head. “Horrible, I know.”

  There is that shiver in his voice. Is this robot lying? “You know anything about this?” My voice tightens.

  He cocks his head. “Me? Good god no, George. Where would you get an idea like that?” He steps back from me, looking me over, studying me. Then he smiles, shaking his head, and he brushes his hair back with his hand. “No. You do know that Yusef has me programmed with Isamov’s general law for robots? That I cannot do harm to a human? You do know this?”

  “I didn’t. I’m sorry... It’s just that Khalid...”

  “Oh. You know there’s no proof, nor will there ever be any... Unless you know something about Khalid that we should all know?”

  The email, does he know? “No. No. It can’t be Khalid because he was a man of peace.”

  Turing laughs. “Yes. Peace. His religion too, I believe.”

  I mark his awkwardly timed laugh to his being a robot.

  We walk together to the exit.

  “We need money,” I say.

  “That’s right.”

  “How are the protests coming along?” I vaguely remember all the plots we had cooking before the bad news started, thus my question doesn’t come out as such.

  “We’re getting ready to amass a few protests. Residual from what our capabilities were earlier.” Turing sighs. “But to maintain the civil disobedience—“

  “I know. We need more money.”

  “Oh, we can go for some time with what we have saved. But if we run out, we deflate. And that’s the end of that.”

  We’re in the hallway now. We walk past the doors I’d opened earlier. There’s the distinct sweet smell of something roasting. “What’s in there?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  I search Turing’s face for a tell, but there’s nothing. I remind myself that he’s a robot. “I looked inside yesterday.”

  There’s a slight pause in Turing’s gait, as if he’s thinking.

  “You’re thinking.” Turing smiles. Some of the paint has come off his teeth. It’s barely noticeable, but it’s slowly chipping away. “What about?”

  “The doors. What’s behind them?”

  “Some of our workers. We have, now, a few people working from us, helping improve those algorithms. Helping to get past and to protect all our servers from the counterattacks. Especially since they were launched a few days ago.”

  “DOD?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Then we should aim for only one at a time.”

  “Too late.”

  “We need money,” I say, not without some sarcasm. “How to get it?” I take another glance at the doors, a sort of revulsion runs through me as I think on the people I saw huddled in there. Something about the way they were working, or even sleeping, struck me as horrendous. But since I can’t put it into words, I don’t know what to say.

  Another pause in Turing’s gait. “The workers are good. Trust me.”

  That last sentence doesn’t inspire trust, so I just look at the doors while nodding, as if only to listen.

 
; Turing walks a few steps then looks over at me, revulsion crawling up his face. “You’re very kind in the abstract. But not so much in person.” He walks off towards the elevator, or where the door for the elevator should be.

  His words, barbs really, go down my ears and settle on my heart. And there’s nothing that I can really do or say other than I need to learn what he’s trying to get up. But by the time I’ve caught up with him, the barb’s been digested and no longer thought about. For now.

  As we take the elevator up, Turing describes the various acts that we can take on. Finally, after we’ve shore up our defenses, we decide that making a few dollars here and there through internet robbery as well as small jobs, to include writing. Then Turing presses the hold button. And as a small red light beeps and glows red, he looks at me. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “Then we have to recruit. No money. We recruit people who are dedicated.”

  I nod once more, feeling another barb traveling through me, though this time I’m not so sure why it is that I’ve this feeling of foreboding. “Yes.”

  “We play them on their field with their rules. We lose. Money is part of their rules.”

  Turing is angry, or acting it. I like it. “Yes, but money makes the world go round,” I say.

  Turing blinks a few times. “Surely you’ve read enough to know that isn’t the truth? That there are other variables in homo sapiens that allows them to move on, to live a proper life.”

  “Sure,” I say. But part of me is fighting his logic, as sound as it is. And as I pull on all the history I know—surely less than what Turing has access to at any given time—I try to form some sort of correlation to whatever it is I know. Isn’t it true that money is supposed to be the only untainted human factor? That people claimed it would lead us to something greater by pushing aside all biases, that it would alone be the one thing our civilization would be known for?

  “So you agree?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, lets go of the button and when we’re up top, smoothes out his tie—he wears a tie now—and walks off. I see Yusef, who this time shuffles over, one leg obviously bothering him.