Conception: Book One of Human Dilemma

by Scott Sibary

  “Seriously enough?”

  “We’re here, Solveig. And a country lacking a power advantage has to think in terms of cooperation. With other countries, that is.”

  Cooperation and sharing. Solveig recalled the warm food brought over by neighbors and placed on their kitchen table, and the aromas filling her nostrils. Her mother’s occasional illness would not leave them hungry. Solveig had seen the surreptitiously referred-to money transfer “from all our people” that came during hard times.

  That part, she thought, is a kind of cooperation Reidar doesn’t approve of. She’d heard him say to Lars, “We hand out too many freebies.” And Reidar knew her background.

  “Then there’s me,” she said with a hint of challenge, “not someone you’d expect to come up with a breakthrough.”

  “No, one wouldn’t expect you specifically. We just design and fund a lot of education so we can get the best our country can produce.”

  “I only invented part of what we’re installing, yet I was chosen to lead the mission. Could have been Rolv, or you. You’re both more than ten years older.”

  “Could have been. But you have connections.” He flicked a glance at her.

  “Oh, come on!” Her shoulders slumped and her pace slowed. “I wouldn’t call it a connection.”

  “Don’t you like our Royal Family?”

  “Did you grow up in Oslo?”

  “You can hear it in my accent.”

  “I’ll tell you a story. As a child on Osterøy, I loved all the fanfare on the Seventeenth of May: the music, costumes, uniforms. It made me feel part of a special, fun drama. When I was eight years old, my mother took me on a trip to Oslo to celebrate our national holiday. And I saw the same fanfare on a larger scale. It was like suddenly I was more important. I’d moved up to be part of a bigger world.

  “We went to see the palace. I stood staring through the wrought-iron fence, mesmerized by the colors in the flower beds and the banners waving in the breeze. The king was waving from the balcony.” She stopped pumping and raised her arm in a single wave to imitate him. “In that palace, I imagined, must take place the things we read in fairy tales.”

  Reidar chuckled. “Lively imagination.”

  “Yes! I really felt that way. And then, twenty-two years later, the engagement was announced. I wondered how it was that a cousin of mine, even one I’d only met a few times and hardly knew, could join that cast of characters.” She laughed and resumed her exercise.

  “Before I take my swim, I’ll tell you something.” He hopped off the cycle and stood close to her machine. “I read the dossiers, of course. I know your mother cleaned at the senior center for a living. That she insisted she never knew who your father was.” He held a hand to his mouth and cleared his throat. “That must have been something for you to overcome, to adjust to. Not easy, I imagine. Yet, you didn’t let that get you down. You’re quoted as saying, on several occasions, ‘Norway is my father.’ The folks in security were impressed by your patriotism.” He nodded to his own words and repeated, “Norway is my father.”

  “I always say that when people ask me about my father.”

  As Reidar left, she finished her private thought. Because I always picture a bar full of single men.

  As he often did, Deng AnDe found himself caught in the middle. On one side of his subway seat he rubbed shoulders with a stalwart of the party—if the red-star tie clasp was anything to go by. AnDe knew that membership no longer guaranteed values, and the plain suit said little about position or occupation. On his other side he was overlapped by an over-grown adolescent. The rumbling of the crowded train car was not loud enough to mask the irregular thumping of music coming from the young man’s headphones. AnDe might ask him to nudge over, to allow room enough for AnDe to reach into the side pocket of his sports jacket and draw out an electronic tablet. Just a little effort to cooperate with those around you: that’s a good skill for young people to learn.

  The younger people in government seemed to have that attitude: cooperate with the Norwegian delegation to the fullest extent of the understanding between the two countries. Enough older leaders agreed, and that had become the prevailing position of the government. AnDe, not a policy maker, went along even as he sensed pressure from the other side operating within the Ministry of Technology and the Foreign Ministry, from those who assumed that the best for China meant exacting concessions until no more would be given. Earlier that day, he’d missed a call from his boss: Director Liu, the man who liked to emphasize loyalty.

  Then there were his parents; it had been more than two weeks since he had seen them. He’d replied to their text, saying he might come, that he had spent the weekend preparing for a meeting he wanted to go perfectly. He knew more pressure might come from his parents.

  At the next station, he’d be about halfway there, physically. He considered the alternative: take the local bus to his apartment, and decompress. When he got off the metro he might plod or spring, depending on what he had decided.

  But it was only one o’clock, and he wasn’t physically tired. A third choice would be to go to the gym near the station and get a workout; the place shouldn’t be too crowded. He might practice Kung Fu with a few of the regulars. He could defer his decision about the evening. Yes, there was always a “third choice.”

  As he thought of his friends in martial arts, he imagined the grip he’d certainly feel if a certain friend were there that afternoon. Yet why was he feeling that grip now? He looked down to see his right hand clutching his left wrist. Had he not felt something like that grip earlier today? Ah yes, it had surprised him, that clamping on his right hand that forced him to grip back firmly, just to protect himself.

  He smiled as he thought of how far she might throw someone, even if she didn’t know any martial arts.

  He told himself he’d been practicing enough martial and diplomatic arts. He’d worked hard to prepare for her and her team. But she’d approached him as though she’d prepared even better. With half a day free, he could take time for a walk. He could track down that feeling moving from the wilds of the unconscious to a tightness in his gut.

  For a few more minutes, he remained squished between a hard shoulder and self-assuredness. He thought he’d better get used to it. It was his new job.

  He neither plod nor sprang as he ascended the exit stairs in a cluster of commuters. The street above greeted them with its whirring of electric vehicles in two-way traffic. Above, the breaking clouds offered a promising strip of sunlight. He was jostled by a pedestrian on one side, then bumped into someone on the other. Taking the overcrossing, he found himself getting on the bus to his parents’ neighborhood. As it moved quickly in the lane reserved for buses, taxis, and limousines, he looked down at the slower traffic being passed, and reflected. Once a decision had been made, moving fast could make a difference.

  AnDe caught his breath after bounding up three flights of stairs in his parents’ middle-class apartment building. He pressed the buzzer and noted with pleasure the varnished oak placard attached to the door. It had been a souvenir from a trip to California. It read in English, “Home Sweet Home.”

  “Hello, Mom!” He embraced his aproned mother, and her strong arms squeezed him back. “Is Dad here?”

  “Right here!” His father appeared in the entry foyer, removing his reading glasses to examine his son. “We weren’t sure you were coming.”

  “You like surprises.”

  “Sometimes,” his mother said. “We made a late lunch and planned to eat with or without you.”

  “Thanks. I’m hungry.”

  “You’ll be here for dinner too?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I have calls to make.”

  “Let’s go into the living room. The food is nearly ready.” His father led him away.

  His mother went into the kitchen while he and his father sat in two plush, comfortably worn-in armchairs opposite the dining area. “We’ve seen so little of you recently. You don’t liv
e that far away.”

  “I apologize. This new project is very important—the most important I’ve worked on. I’ve spent extra time preparing for it. We begin the work tomorrow.”

  “Extra time means seven days a week? Tell me, what makes it so special?”

  “My team is hosting a group of six computer scientists. I need to study the files I’ve been given on them, as I do for every new member of my teams in Beijing. The problem is we have a variety of hypotheses for more powerful artificial intelligence in competition with each other. Bright people get attached to their own ideas and inventions. Decisions have to be made favoring one over others. The debate can be divisive. And I want to create the sense of one unified team. You know the stratagem . . .”

  “. . . that cooperation is gotten by giving. Yes, you’ve learned that well, my son.”

  “So I need to study them, what they have accomplished, and their goals. Today, my teams on the operating system and immune systems met them for the first time.”

  “Sounds like these six are special.”

  “Especially their leader. She invented a key part that we hope will integrate into our system.”

  “Their leader is a woman?”

  “It works, you know!” the voice of AnDe’s mother projected from the kitchen. “Now, come get these platters for the table.”

  AnDe set the table as his parents brought out a larger spread of food than usual.

  “Well, this is very interesting,” his mother said. “Tell us about this invention.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it. Maybe someday, but not during development.”

  “Like a budding romance one doesn’t want to reveal, until one knows the relationship will click.” His mother stretched her lips into a smile and cocked her head at him.

  “More like, we can’t say much specific until the project is completed.”

  “Then what is interesting about her?” his mother asked. “Anything you can tell us?”

  “Well . . .” He sighed, then perked up. “In some ways, she’s like you, Mom. The file says she follows a plant-based diet and that she’s into yoga.”

  “Yoga, not Tai Chi, like me?”

  “She picked up yoga while doing her post-doctoral research in India.”

  “How unusual. Where did she do her doctoral work?”

  “At the University of Bergen, in Norway.”

  “Where is her team visiting from?” his father asked.

  “Norway.”

  His mother asked, “Is she of Chinese ancestry?”

  “No, nor any of the others on her team. Since I play a role in hosting them, it’s taken extra time to prepare.”

  “You’ll need patience with the foreigners,” his father said. “They have such blunt manners and attitudes. Different from your Chinese subordinates.”

  “My Chinese team members may be polite and reserved on the surface, but most are overconfident from earlier achievements. Now that they’ve been crowned with the honor of being appointed to this project, China must have full confidence in them, and so should I—or so they think. Yet I know from my superiors that no such dangerous assumptions are made by those above.”

  AnDe’s mother was shaking her head, as if not listening to him, as she extended him a just-filled bowl of rice.

  “Don’t tell me she’s another Tara!”

  “No, this is a professional relationship.”

  “You were taken in by her. You were excited by her. Why can’t you stick to your own kind?” She focused her eyes, as if to stare into her son’s mind. “She was beautiful, and she dominated you. She would have taken you away to another world, another kind of life. What would your opportunities have been in South Africa? What would we have seen of you then?”

  “Will you listen to me, Mother? I am talking about a computer scientist who is my counterpart in a very, very important project. We are not going to mess around.”

  “You were smart to let her go.” She asserted the words as a conclusion.

  The three ate in silence for several minutes.

  “Since you seem interested,” AnDe said, “I can tell you that I do plan to start dating again as soon as this project is over, in a few months probably.”

  His parents were listening, but their faces had not brightened.

  “The speed dating clubs are fun, and very efficient. Almost like getting flowers at a florist.”

  “I don’t think your mother and I are too impressed by that analogy. You never let your relationships succeed. You always find a mismatch, some fatal flaw. As when you sense she’s highly motivated by status and material possessions, you extol the virtues of a humble, ascetic life in the style of your grandfather. That goes over like a lead balloon. Or if she says she’s eager to start a family, you explain why you are not.”

  “I’ll admit it; my candor isn’t much appreciated,” AnDe said. “One woman even exploded at me, demanding what was wrong with me, why I didn’t show more interest. I said there was nothing wrong with either of us, alone. That ended it. But I’ll keep trying.”

  After nodding in sympathy, his father said, “Maybe you should try to show more interest—keep it going.”

  “That can be worse. Once, I had to interrupt my date in the middle of her long postulation of our happy future together to ask what she’d do in my position, having the values and interests I’d already explained to her. Can you guess what happened? Her eyes watered. She looked at the platter in front of her like it was a heap of lacerated dreams. Then she stood up quietly, put some money on the table, and walked out.”

  “You’ve summed up your failures,” his mother said. “How about a success?”

  “I do see beauty in every blossom. But I seek something else, not something more: that unarticulated ingredient. I think it’s foolish to pursue a relationship that lacks it—foolish for both people.”

  “Sounds like you’re still pursuing that elusive concept of wisdom,” his father said. “Ever since you were sixteen and your mother’s father suggested it.”

  AnDe’s mother cleared her throat and stared at her husband. He returned her look.

  “What was foolish,” his mother said, raising a finger at AnDe, “was letting Yingna go. After more than a year with you! You should have had everything worked out. And she Mongolian, even from the tribes of Qinghai, just like my mother. A perfect match.”

  “Oh, Mom!” AnDe shook his head between his hands. He looked up again and swallowed as he forced an expression of joyful appreciation. “Hey, thank you for the great lunch; it’s always like a celebration.” He waited for his parents to nod or smile, then added, “I will need to figure out this evening’s plans—obligations, that is. But first I’d like to get outside and stretch my legs. I’ll walk up to Badachu Park.”

  “You do that, son,” his father said.

  “And don’t forget to take your phone with you this time. And answer it if I call.”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Sunday afternoon . . . Badachu Park might be filled with pretty women.”

  Chapter Four

  As Solveig prepared for a final sprint on the elliptical trainer, Reidar returned from the pool and paused again beside her machine, his towel wrapped around his waist and his wet hair clinging to his head. She paused in mid-stride.

  “I nearly forgot to mention,” he said. “A message came in just before I came down. You know that hallway we’re going to have to ourselves in the international residential compound? It seems the construction crew brought in to touch it up left some vulnerabilities unaddressed. The rooms and hallway didn’t pass inspection by our security, so another crew is going in. I’m afraid it’ll take some time to ensure we have secure communications from our lodgings.”

  “That’s uncomfortable news. How long?”

  “A week, maybe more.”

  “I hate delays.” She let her arms drop. “I guess we’d better get used to this hotel.”

  “We are the ‘guests.’ Well, I’m heading for the shower
. Care to join my wife and me for dinner? I think Stig, Rolv, and Eva might join us as well.”

  “Thanks, but I know I’m going to need to sleep.”

  “Fine,” he said. “See you in the morning.”

  His feet moved silently on the carpeted floor as he left her.

  The faces around Solveig all looked absorbed. Absorption, she thought, a common remedy. How many of them have plague nightmares? Most, probably. It’s the price you pay at night for being absorbed in routines during the day.

  She’d let herself venture onto a slippery slope, and she began sliding into the recollections.

  Some nightmares replayed the first month of the epidemic, April 2029, before she was hit with it herself: She arrives at work early one morning in April to prepare for another day of trying to lead a team of researchers, but she finds notices on all the building doors advising that the university has been closed for the epidemic. She walks through her building, looking at the empty desks in every office, each with a funerary bouquet on top, trying to remember the names of the missing occupants. Or so it happened in her nightmare.

  She had, in fact, received the message and stayed home, sitting for over an hour on the grass beside the irregular patch of planted flowers, watching and finding metaphors in the slowly waving blooms. She’d put a tag at the base of a flower for each friend, relative, or acquaintance who had already died. She left untagged the large, late-blooming tulip as her own.

  There were weeks when every night she got to revisit the sickbeds of people she knew. Some lay dying with the terrifying knowledge that the game—the war game—was on them. How could she honestly reassure them when she herself had experienced that terror? Some nightmares were filled with the same frustration and righteous anger she’d felt when unable to do anything to keep her grandfather alive: his large frame, hot and uncovered except for a thin robe, his lungs filled with fluid and heaving slowly, and his knowing eyes saying goodbye from his paralyzed body. There was no way to avenge his death. The memory of her outrage would yank her from her sleep.