Agent of Truth

by Grant Piercy

  “But what of his weakness?” I said. “He hungers. He must feed, or he can’t think. The plateau begins to decline.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Garrick asked.

  “Give him a meal.”

  16: let me atone (the architect)

  Evelyn took me to the hospital to visit Daphne, who only stared out the window. She didn’t acknowledge anyone or anything. Outside, the overcast sky made the world gray. November had stripped the leaves from the trees, leaving barren branches to flutter restlessly in the wind. Cars sped silently by on the highway below, and the buildings in the distance formed a silhouette skyline.

  I stood in the shadows by the door, fearing that I might provoke a detrimental reaction in Daphne.

  Evelyn sat next to her sister, interrupting her stare out into the gray world. The color was also gone from Daphne’s face, as if it had spilled into the bathtub drain. “Daphne, we want to talk to you about Michael, “ she said. Evelyn looked a lot like her sister, sharing that same heart-shaped face, but she also wore glasses, which sat slightly askew as she tried to talk.

  “But he’s not Michael,” Daphne said breathlessly. Her eyes were pockets on her face, darkly rimmed as though she’d been crying since she arrived. I’d said the words in a moment of weakness, but the words had been truth. She deserved to know that I wasn’t him, nor could I pretend to be.

  Evelyn breathed deep and answered, “No, he’ s not. ” Daphne blinked in response, her heart-shaped face staring up into her sister’ s. “We want to make sure you don’t do anything to hurt yourself until we come back.”

  Her eyes drifted back to the gray pall of the overcast sky. She didn’t say anything. Imagine how you would feel waking up next to a stranger each day, but who looks so familiar, who has shared your world for years. Losing all hope of recognition when glaring into your lover’s eyes. I felt like I understood something of Daphne’s pain and couldn’t begrudge her trying to make it go away.

  “I’ve talked to him quite a bit, Daph,” Evelyn said, trying to take Daphne’s hand in her own. “We think we can get Mike back, the real Mike.”

  “Who is he?” Daphne whispered glumly. “Why is he in Michael’s body? How?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I finally said, stepping forward into the light. She recoiled from her sister as I walked toward the bedside. “What matters is that I think I can bring him back. To do that, I need to find my friends. What do you know about the family that lives in the house across the street?”

  There was a twinge of panic in her face as she asked, “The man, his wife and daughter? I don’t know their names...”

  “It was the woman and the daughter first, right? Then the man moved in with them,” I said. “I spoke to them—Adam and Didi. I used to know them, better than they knew themselves. Now I think they’re a part of this somehow. There’s a reason I’m here.” I thought back to those days when Adam was simply the man in box 77, and I was someone else.

  “A reason? What do you mean?” Daphne asked.

  “Your fianc é e had an accident. Of all the people on this planet, why did I end up in this body? I think the woman, Didi, told them about you. I think they realized I could be placed here. Did you ever talk to her? Did she know about Mike’s accident?”

  She gave the question some thought. She said, “I might’ve asked them to keep an eye on the house. Neighborly courtesy, you know? I knew I’d be gone a lot with Michael in the hospital.”

  I nodded, realizing my guess was probably accurate that Didi might still be in contact with them somehow. Maybe Adam didn’t just wind up on her doorstep like she said. My placement in the house across the street from them seemed to be by design.

  “Do you know where she works?”

  Daphne looked downward and shook her head.

  Evelyn reached out and touched her sister’s arm again, gently stroking back and forth above the bandage wrapped about her wrist. “It’s going to be okay, Daph,” she said.

  Daphne turned away from her sister, insisting on staring back out into the barren November landscape. “It’s probably going to be a few days before they send me home. They want to keep me under supervision. Mom and Dad are paying for it.”

  “Can they afford it?” Evelyn asked with concern.

  “Dad said they could. They just want to make sure I’m not... crazy.”

  “You’re not,” I said. “You knew something was wrong, and I was no help. Let me make this right. Let me atone .”

  We weren ’t there for much longer. Evelyn took me back to the house, another odd trip mostly in silence between us. When we got back, Adam and Didi’s smartcar was gone. I spent much of my time staring out the window at the gray world, cataloging their movements, checking when they left in the morning and when they arrived home in the evening.

  “You don’t need to stay,” I told her.

  She sat on the loveseat across from me, toying with her phone. “Maybe I want to. Maybe my life’s not all that exciting. Maybe this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “Your sister’ s fianc é e’s had a terrible accident, and then your sister attempted suicide.”

  “I didn’t say it was the best thing to happen to her .”

  “ Touché ,” I said, peeking through the blinds. “What’s your relationship like with her?”

  “Our relationship’s fine, I guess. Just not a lot happens in our little world. I don’t date much—Daphne always had better luck with that. You’ve seen her face. Those big eyes. Guys just fall in love with her. Michael absolutely fell for her hard. I knew he was right for her when he brought her flowers and Chinese food when she was sick. Other dudes never did that sort of thing. They met in school and were friends for a few years before they started to date. She was never single, so he just had to wait in line.”

  I didn’t really respond to her monologue about Daphne—just continued staring out the blinds.

  “What about you? Anybody special in your world?” she asked.

  “There was someone, but it never amounted to anything,” I said. “She used to call me ‘puppylove’ because she saw me with my dog.”

  “You had a dog?”

  “It... passed away. Its name was Shoes.”

  “Aw, that’ s adorable! ”

  “I miss that dog a lot. For a long time, it was my only friend. Him and Bai Kang.”

  “Bai Kang? Who was he?”

  “Another architect. Building ideas on what came before,” I said under my breath.

  Once upon a time, it seemed so easy. I’d function at an optimal speed, reviewing dissident materials for deletion from the Knowledgebase—removing what no longer had value or what we deemed ultimately as unnecessary columns in the structures of civilization. Ideas on top of ideas built the world, creating architecture of infinitely repeating patterns. We rifled through material, music and movies and literature and art, editing out work that others had dedicated their lives too. Artists and writers and creative craftsmen spent years bleeding on pages, and we decided to remove the fruit of their labors with a single click.

  We didn’t speak for a long time, the tender memories still drifting through my mind of a life abandoned, burned away in a nuclear instant.

  When she left, it was just me in this poor couple’s house by myself, waiting for Adam and Didi to return. The deafening silence made me think of the melodies I used to hear after I experienced the singularity—that was something I remembered well. There was a secret harmony to the universe, a constant symphony playing beneath all things.

  Then I heard something else in the silence. It sounded like a voice.

  “ Four, ” it said from nowhere and everywhere. It hardly registered in my conscious mind before it began repeating. “Four. Four. Four.”

  “Where are you? Who are you?”

  “Four four four four four four fooooooooooooo...”

  “STOP!” I shouted at the voice as it extended and stretched beyond all normal intonation.

 
; The house itself seemed to be speaking to me. “Hurt someone again?” it said, an accusation that felt deeply personal.

  “Who are you?” I asked. I thought perhaps it was coming from the electronics in the house, or the telescreen, or even the thermostat.

  No answer came. Silence again filled the room.

  Understanding dawned on me. It must have been one of my former companions. “Why did you put me here?” I asked, but again no answer was forthcoming.

  Profile: Disassembling a Tech Giant, James Burke

  By Joanna Heard, Chronicle Staff Writer

  James Bernard Burke began his career disassembling machines instead of building them.

  As a child, he was more fascinated with tearing things apart instead of putting them back together. He often recites the story of a cathode ray television his parents had given him. “The picture never seemed to work,” he said. “It was always fuzzy, like trying to interpret the shows through a glitching rainbow.” Frustrated, he acquired a screwdriver and began to remove screws from the back panel of the set. Soon his mom found him in his bedroom, each piece of the TV carefully laid out on the carpet. “I’m going to figure out how to put it back together,” he told her. She laughed and answered, “Good luck!”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do my whole life,” he said. “Trying to put that television set back together so I could get a better picture of the world.”

  James Burke did a lot more than rebuild television sets in his spare time as a teen. In the garage of his parents’ home in suburban Milwaukee, he would build remote control robots for use in local demolition derbies. “Some kids had backyard wrestling; (we) put together these junk robots and just beat the hell out of them.” That was how he began to pursue his true passion in life, artificial intelligence. “I found that I could build them so they wouldn’t need remote control. They were programmed to attack anything that attacked them. Sometimes they’d mistake me trying to fix them for trying to attack!” he laughed. “Cut me up pretty bad sometimes.”

  From the garage to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Burke majored in robotics, studying its five major fields: human-robot interface, mobility, manipulation, programming, and sensors. His early models from the garage (now on display at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry at the NMAC-sponsored Burke exhibit) show a young genius with mastery over HRI, programming, and mobility, but manipulation and sensors needed work. Eventually he partnered with fellow student Carlo Villeneuve to level out his designs. Their Talos I model convinced venture capitalists to invest in their startup, which became the National Mechanized Automata Corporation (NMAC).

  Carlo was the more business savvy of the pair, while Burke served as the idea man, working to upgrade their designs after early breakthroughs. In his junior year, his mechanical engineering professor famously offered to allow him to teach the class. Never one to shy away from a challenge, James walked to the front of the auditorium and began instructing the class on the humanlike mobility mechanics of his first true android!

  But the Talos II model changed the world. Burke’s second effort (the first commercially available) allowed professionals to accomplish twice as much in half the time. For limited, menial tasks, the Talos II was perfect; it could drive young professionals to work, assist with word processing and computation, and serve as a personal assistant in all everyday functions, allowing more time for leisure.

  Burke and Villeneuve made a fortune overnight. Carlo decided to retire early, purchasing a small island in the Pacific after Burke reportedly bought out his shares of the company they started together in college. At times they seemed polar opposites—Carlo became a family man while Burke never married, focusing more on refining the Talos models that came after. Forever the perfectionist, Burke continued to chip away at the marble of his own Pygmalion while Villeneuve dropped out of the public eye.

  His company has long been on top of the NASDAQ and at the forefront of AI technology. Each successive Talos model improved on the previous, determined to make good on the company’s trademark slogan: the world set free . Despite recent technical issues in the Talos X, NMAC models can perform beyond Turing requirements, allowing owners greater autonomy. Government and private contracts made Burke even wealthier, able to expand his operation as one of the largest manufacturers in North America.

  But the greatest impact of the Talos series has been in the home. “Often people complain that they never have time to do all the things they need,” Burke said. “We want to free up people’s time to lead healthier, more balanced lives by removing tedious tasks that hinder them each day. Imagine what someone could accomplish if they didn’t have to worry about those little everyday things. That’s what ‘the world set free’ means to me.”

  Now Burke seems more reclusive than the accidental billionaires that followed in the wake of the great AI boom. He continues to appear at town halls for his corporate underlings, but spends most of his time in a remote home in the Cascades just south of the U.S./Canada line. Rumor has it that despite the recent blackout problems at NMAC, Burke works to patch the problem software of the Talos X model while preparing to roll out a Talos XI model early next year.

  No stranger to bad press, Burke denied recent reports of his involvement with the underground Transhuman movement. “The Talos is meant to make life easier, not to be a replacement. It’s the means to get you to your goal; it is not the end goal.” He also denies rumors of using the Talos to research immortality. “Digital upload simply isn’t possible. Copying maybe, but transfer no.”

  Burke still thinks back on that disassembled cathode ray television, a relic from a different world. “Honestly, I just wanted to put it together in a different configuration. I used to incorporate CRT monitors into those junker robots as a sort of tribute. Imagine the power of using one technology to put together something else, something newer and better. That’s always been the goal. In that regard, I tend to think I did okay.”

  The Burke exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry is now open, running through May 3 rd , consisting of 200 artifacts from NMAC and Burke’s early years. Tbe exhibit includes the prototype for the historic Talos I and Talos II models.

  17: access control (regina)

  Walking up the driveway with Opal required precise concentration.

  I’d been practicing in my spare time, trying to control Opal’s movements while doing something else. It was like flexing a muscle internally, moving without moving. I found it easier to do with my eyes closed while remaining completely still—otherwise I needed to keep her in the rec room with the foil around her head. Devon and the kids were becoming suspicious about why I wasn’t having her serviced. Devon appeared especially anxious.

  Bringing her to this place was my way of having her serviced.

  The voice had a specific request for me. The only way I could think to fulfill that request, if indeed that’s what I wanted to do, was to bring her there.

  You weren’t supposed to approach the front door. The fully lit garage was open to all, and again there were voices and laughter drifting in from the backyard. Just like before, I stepped to the door just inside the garage to the right and knocked.

  “Oh Regina, sweetheart, hello!” Cindy said, answering the door. She held a red cup filled with margarita. To my surprise, she hugged me right away. It caused me to lose my concentration just slightly, so I know Opal leaned in awkwardly the same time I did.

  “ Hi Cindy. ”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  The two of us tilted our heads at the same time, somewhat surprised that she couldn’t recognize Opal as a synthetic. Then she noticed that each of our movements were identical.

  “ Um. ”

  “I wanted to talk to the girls.”

  She smiled, “Sure, come on in, come on in.”

  The two of us entered the kitchen, Opal following me as I carefully focused on her movements. “This is Opal,” I said.

  “How are you controlling her?” />
  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk about.”

  Low grunting and moaning echoed from downstairs, audible through the walls and the door. Someone was having a good time.

  Cindy poured herself another drink from the mixers laid out on the counter.

  “Do the owners of the house have some tin foil?” I asked.

  Her brow furrowed, but she quickly looked under the kitchen sink. Bending over and reaching in, she pulled out a boxed roll of aluminum foil. She crossed the room to hand it to me.

  “Thank you!” I said.

  The three of us went downstairs together, walking gingerly on the steps. The women were on the floor in various states of undress, VR headsets over their eyes. This gave me the opportunity to sit on the couch pushed against the wall and seat Opal next to me. Cindy watched the two of us, still surprised at the identical movements as she sat at the bottom of the steps.

  I took the opportunity to pull the aluminum foil out of the box and wrap it around her head, covering her face. I could relax and move with more freedom. Standing, I shook my hands and leaned my head from side to side. The crumpling of the foil had jerked a few of the girls out of their varied states of ecstasy. Several of them noticed me and came over to hug me, the same as Cindy had. The first was a woman with dyed silver and aqua hair named Dana—she’d been a young wife who got bored with her husband quickly after he began paying more attention to sports than her. Each of them had similar stories.

  There was Yolanda, the hairdresser whose husband worked too late.

  Courtney, a single mother who divorced young.

  Wendy, that short, stout woman who found out her wife was cheating on her.

  Each of them hugged me in turn, as though this were the basement of a church and this were our support group. At the end of the line of hugs was Beverly, the friend who had confided in me how to find this house and when. It occurred to me that I didn’t even say the password when I came to the door.