The Labyrinth of Souls

by Nelson Lowhim

  “Did it go well?”

  I explain the ratlines to him.

  “Interesting. And he’ll be mainly giving us marijuana?”

  “Yeah. For the most part.”

  “Not addictive.”

  “Well, we don’t want to tear this city down, we just want to get some money, right?”

  “I can have some people design something more efficient.”

  “I...” I have no argument, and I’m tired. Energy draining from my muscles, from my bones even. Old age. Again it was creeping into my every fiber. I remember Dalcia’s place. The old man falling apart before our eyes. What was his name? Christ, that would be the least I could do. But would it? Why am I thinking like this?

  “You okay?” Turing asks.

  I nod. “Yeah... I saw the video with the swarms. What they were doing.”

  “Doing?” Turing shakes his head. “No. That video was something from the advertising video we made. None of it is operational yet.”

  Sounds like a general. “I also...” I’m getting things off my chest now, rather than think rationally. “Saw Behemoth at the press conference.”

  “Who?”

  Oh, right. “He’s...” I peer into Turing’s eyes, trying to see if there’s something there. But nothing, no tells. If what Dalcia said is right, then whomever Turing is working for, they would have the sense to design him to have no tells whatsoever. “You lie, Turing?”

  Turing draws back. “Not here. Not to you.”

  Again, he looks like he’s being honest. Hell, he sounds hurt. “Right.”

  Turing’s eyes are studying me, except they’re doing it at the right speed. “Something wrong? You don’t trust me?”

  “I saw... What’s going on in the art gallery? With the plays? Are you studying us?”

  “No.”

  Deadpan, holding my stare. Though I wouldn’t know if he’s taking in my whole face or not, would I? “That’s what it sounds like. Like you’re playing with us.” Who am I? I didn’t really think that, did I? Or is Dalcia playing on my thoughts?

  Turing shakes his head, now smiling.

  “You look condescending, don’t do it that way.”

  “Sorry.” He stops. “George... Thing is, I’m trying to make art. And what’s art?”

  “Somehow tying us humans to our own history? Seeing that need to create something... Who knows? Something somewhat useless but beautiful, I guess.”

  “Oh?”

  I want to correct him, put him in his place. “What have all your studies shown?”

  “You know I can read all histories, all art histories? I have.”

  “Doesn’t mean you can understand what you read. Or process it.”

  “Ooohh. Okay.”

  An anger, unlike any I felt before rises to the top. I want to tear off his perfect flesh—how is it still without a blemish?—and I want to interact with a metallic robot, so I know what I’m dealing with. Maybe Dalcia has a point.

  “You’re angry,” Turing says, the grin vanishing from his face. “Sorry.”

  “No. Tell me. What have you learned? What is art to you?”

  “Not to me. Remember, I am just... Turing. I’m here for you.”

  “So, what are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to create art. For you. What I understand art to be for you.”

  “And?”

  “It’s all about the reaction in people. What you can evoke out of them when they look at something. That’s why there are the whispers. They are there to help along.”

  “People leave your shows.”

  “I’m learning.”

  And like that, with that sad dog face he’s making on that unblemished face, a pang of regret for questioning him hits my guts. “All right. Christ. But make sure that the art gallery is having some human artists too, all right? Art is also about the conversation between people.”

  “Oh.” That hurt face again.

  “I—“

  “I was doing it because of the money. We can’t afford to host or to help human artist right now.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re even making some money selling that art... or I guess you wouldn’t call it art...” He looks away at the hills in the horizon. The hills seem balder than before, and now I can see individual trees on them, piercing the low-hanging clouds and from the bellies of these clouds spills forth an orange-red light all over the landscape. Dusk will be here soon.

  “Sorry. It’s art.” What do I know, besides? Is there a definition to art? What about all that post-modern stuff?

  The distant lapping of the waves takes over the silence between us. I try not to look at him. Inhaling, the sand-freshwater smell filling my nose, I remember how beautiful and mind-clearing everything about this place was.

  “Thanks.”

  Grief, relief. It’s all in his voice. “Of course. So we’re getting some money in?”

  “A little. Enough to keep operations going.”

  “Great. Once the ratlines are set—“

  “Did you find anything else out? Anything that could hep us?”

  Not really, did I? There wasn’t much out there. “Hard times out there.”

  “Here too.”

  “Right. But... I think people are growing tired.”

  Turing grins again. Pearly whites still dazzling in this low light. “The pastoral ethos is being stretched.”

  “I suppose. Hard to believe. But I guess that it’s never really going to change.”

  “How? You—“

  I raise my hand. “I mean, the ethos won’t. But they won’t keep helping the hand that doesn’t do much for them. So they’ll soon take that and turn it on the people in charge. They will soon...”

  “What’s needed to push them?”

  “Though you were studying that?”

  Turing just smiles.

  “They’re going to get tired of sending their sons to die. They will. What’s needed is a way to protest all that. So we can get more people on the streets, protesting the dead for what is essentially a money transfer to the rich.”

  Turing nods. “Good.”

  There are many ways to describe Turing, and one of them includes calling him a heartless robot—hard not to see how Dalcia feels that—but it’s also true that Turing listens more than any other human I know. “I guess. But going down this route will mean that recruiting everything will be harder. They certainly son’t sit back and let us take money from their pockets.”

  “I know that. We know that. They hit us hard with that digital counter attack.”

  “Yeah... Too bad we can’t get them back. It was a good recruitment machine.”

  Turing snaps his fingers, the sound is a little too loose to be a human snap of the fingers.

  I smile. “Yeah, don’t do that.”

  “No. I mean, we have been setback a lot, but we can still reach out to individuals and slowly turn them.”

  “But not enmass.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, let’s begin it. And make sure we have a way to retreat when they hit us hard.”

  I sleep at the lakeside. I sleep in until the noon sun pierces through my eye lids, and bakes my skin. I rub my eyes, shake out my joints, waiting for them to loosen up some. Turing stands at the lake edge where he was when I went to sleep. Walking up to him, I shake out my legs.

  “Thought you’d be gone.”

  Turing doesn’t budge, his eyes on the horizon.

  “What do you see?” I squint at the horizon. Boats? I’m not certain.

  Turing turns back to me. “Nothing. We should get started.” He hands me a tablet with the news.

  The war has picked up. More troops are being sent to scrub out the latest scourge: evil faceless people who are nothing more than a handful of barbarians and deserve nothing more than death. I stare at the number of troops. Back in the thousands. More money is being spent. I stare on, the reality of now seems to overwhelm me, and I think on the past, on how things keep repea
ting themselves, that perhaps life plays out so that your own story seems so linear and yet the story of everyone else, of the world, of the masses seems so cyclic. And stupid. The headlines are a mixture between technology-worship and how to kill as many people at the lowest cost. It would make sense that those in charge think in such ways, but it’s still abhorrent. No one talks about the reasons.

  “It angers you, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” I say, forcing a smile to alleviate the tightness in my head. “Aching, nobly, to wade through savages’ blood.”

  “Baldwin,” Turing says with a smile.

  “We need to work, and work hard.”

  “We can do it. We have the tools to make flash mobs. Except these will stay. We have thousands lined up.”

  “Let’s start it then.”

  We walk all the way to the elevator. I notice, in the distant darker corners of the hallway a metallic figure walking, holding a leash and something at the other end, limping, though on all fours—a person? It couldn’t be a person, could it?—but when I blink it’s gone.

  “What is it?” Turing asks.

  “Nothing...” I look back at his unblemished face, he’s beaming about something. My head, meanwhile, is whirring. We’re taking that first step and soon, as in battle, everything is a slow-motion blur where time doesn’t seem to matter and my focus is infinite.

  We spend hours discussing how exactly the protests will go. At first, I claim that what’s needed is a completely non-violent protest. We’ll get the attention of a handful of congressmen and from there we can enact something to help end this war, the money bleeding out in this country. Turing, that smile of his barely stretching the teenage flesh shaped to be a grown man face of his, grins, then starts to point out that what we were facing required more than a handful of peaceful protesters. He pointed out near history, how Occupy and a handful of other actions achieved nothing. Not true, I claim. We will just need numbers, make sure we can act everywhere, and they can’t so easily tear us down. Turing, nodding dolefully like a father, ceased to smile and said that previous such actions never really worked, and that, furthermore, we couldn’t be hundred percent that the people who joined our protests weren’t police or government agents, looking to do a little harm, trash a few stores so that all the protesters would look bad and our entire attempt would fail. I point out Martin Luther King. Ghandi, even. Turing smiles even wider than before.

  Not true, he says. See, he pulls out the tablet and starts to sift through a powerpoint presentation and with a series of diplomatic cables and other such, presents his case that the non-violence only works when there’s an even more powerful violent movement that threatens the power structure. When that happens, then the non-violent looks like a better choice and it wins out. The evidence, though I don’t want to believe it, is overwhelming. A few minutes later I decide to go with Turing’s plan. Whatever reservations I had from before, whatever I hated him for, sitting here and discussing this with him is not only interesting (he backs all assertions with pertinent facts, which means he probably knows how to read and understand what he’s reading; that alone—that he has access to all information in the world, all history—is enough to fill me with chills, as well as a brotherly love I cannot explain: it’s much like the one I felt in the pitch of battle) but it reminds me of the times in college when, inspired by youth and discovery, I was pulled into hours of discussions about this or that in the world and had found the ability to think one could solve the world’s problem with intellect alone, and here I was able to completely forgive him and chastise myself for any and all doubts I had about him. Except here we were doing exactly what we failed to do in college: change the world. And Turing, he talked just like he had to, and I knew then we were brothers in arms.

  We agree on that, then. To create, completely separate, two groups: one peaceful with simple demands, and another being violent with demands that will never be met. I head the violent group. Turing, through that human analysis of his gave me the names of several people who were at the end of their wits. Ones who’d been through enough that they didn’t want to quit. Hard looks. Eyes that didn’t dart, and if they did, it was with a wolfish quality that made me wary. Five cells with three-five people in them, completely working separately. I give them their orders, their demands. Turing claims he’s trained them. All they want is the go ahead to start the chaos.

  I see each cell: they’re focused on different things, on acts that will truly hurt the leaders where it counts. One cell focuses on the digital end of things. Hacking electrical grids and traffic lights as well as encrypted communications of Homeland agents, all of whom will surely be around. Another says they’re doing snatches. Going around, they’d infiltrated the limo services which were used by most of the richest on the island. They were going to take as many people hostage as possible. These will be publicized as much as possible (given the targets, it’s not unlikely that they will be anything but the most publicized. The other three groups will help with distracting public violence and damage, always done in places where the peaceful protestors couldn’t be associated with it (to help, we labeled the violent groups with a C and a skull. Simple, but if they used this as a signature, and the protestors used the symbol as something they didn’t like, it would help to minimize correlating each group with the other.

  That day the violence starts. News reports are minimal. Someone even blames environmental groups. But their presence is known by midnight when, in the midst of smoke, someone snatches a handful of billionaire kids during the emptying out of a famous club in Soho. A fire alarm was pulled and out littered hundreds of people having fun. The cell was mingling and just outside, they popped smoke. In the chaos, shedding those handlers, they took the children into vans and are gone.

  I’m impressed that the kids in that cell did this. The next snatch is done during a power outage—thanks to us—that takes out the entire eastern seaboard. The cell moves in on a penthouse. The backup generator already taken out, they sneak up and take out the two ex-Seals, but still overweight and out of touch, bodyguards and bundle up the son and finance of a Russian oligarch. The demands are simple and are posted up everywhere on the internet. Soon, the news channels are all over it.

  I walk the streets the next day. The air is heavier than normal. At a newsstand I hear an Arabic man—the kiosk owner, from Egypt, I believe—speaking about how it is that these hoodlums are now taking over the entire world and that if he were king he would not be so kind. You cannot give rights to those who don’t want them he says to a white red-faced man in a business suit. The listener is nodding vigorously. If there was any regret in my body, it dissipates then.

  The cell meant to start problems, simply starts with simple defacing of property that ends up being political in nature. Banksy times a million. I see a couple of them. Dummies of black and brown children lynched on a traffic light with a big sign that says don’t kill me for oil. The C-skull displayed prominently. The dummies are booby trapped. It takes a day for them to be removed. A website starts, fans of the self-proclaimed artist(s), start it. I scroll through the pictures at a public library, amused. Amazed. Our violent group might be gaining disciples.

  That night, after more outages, and some airports going out due to hacking the control towers, I head down the elevator. Turing is waiting for me. Again, there are more doors than I remember, and suddenly, as I walk by a door, I hear muffled screams. Turing, tugs me forward to the lake door. There’s something he wants to talk about. I smell something familiar, though just barely, so barely it’s more like it’s tickling a single cell in my nose, enticing up an old memory I can’t quite reach but nonetheless sends a shiver up my body. That smell, what is it? Organic, with the sense that bleach has been used to cover it all up. What is it?

  “Come on,” says Turing.

  My brother in arms. At the lake, the sun is shining, it’s perfect, and in the distance I see sails. “It’s going well. Everyone’s talking about it.”


  “I told you the cells were well trained.”

  “They were. I heard what they did. How the hell?”

  “Trained them all together. All of them.”

  I run warm sand through my toes. “They did good.”

  Turing nods, standing still, staring out to the horizon. “What comes after this?”

  “This? The peaceful protests start. Then we’re going to see how they react...” For some reason I can still hear screams. “What are they doing with the hostages, Turing?”

  Turing turns. Fresh-faced, even though I know that he hasn’t taken a sleep ever. “Only what’s needed.” I wonder if there’s a biochemical he’s using to look like that. Perhaps we should market it to humans? Wave splash one, overhead a plane drones out any silence, and any soft sounds.

  “You like the political art?”

  Turing turns, walks over and sits with a heavy thud on the ground. “Art?”

  “The cell’s. It’s pretty good.”

  Turing smiles. “You think that’s art?”

  “It’s making a statement.”

  Turing grins, like a teen catching an adult in something the adult told the teen was wrong. “It was my idea.”

  I look at turing to see if he’s fooling around. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, George.”

  I pantomime tipping my hat.

  Again the plane drones overhead. I crane my neck to see: it’s pulling a banner that says, I have to strain to see it, never quit.

  “Well, we should be able to up the ante and things will be easy for the peaceful protesters. They should actively condemn the violence acts.”

  I chuckle. “Christ, Turing, you are good.... Yes, we will do that. Make sure they distance themselves in all manners.”

  “I like that name.”

  Cocking my head at Turing, I try to see if he’s kidding.

  He grins. “I’m joking, human.”