It has never taken him this long to finish a project. The problem, he knows, is that he wants too much from this one painting. She’s like a woman, the canvas: you cannot approach her in despair. She has to know that you are free to walk away. You do not come to her begging, reeking of guilt.
He has stepped back from the canvas, meaning to take it in from a distance, when he sees on the road outside his studio a man and a woman, both wearing gas masks, both loaded with suitcases and backpacks. They throw their luggage into the boot of a car and take off with a screech.
Gas masks?
He brings a hand to his forehead, makes an effort to step out of himself, to focus on the matter at hand. To make sense of what he sees.
How long has it been since he last spoke to someone?
‘In light of recent events …’ last week’s text had started, the one from the course administrator that informed him his classes were cancelled. He assumed … What did he assume?
He sits in front of the canvas, frozen, for a long time. No action seems adequate or desirable. He finally stirs when he hears noises on the landing. He goes to the door and looks through the peephole. Nothing at first, then Twenty-Two comes rushing along, fumbling with her keys, dropping them. She is sobbing, and when she unlocks her door she almost falls into her flat.
He steps back from the peephole, looks down at his bare feet. He has taken off his shoes and socks because of the heat. His toes are rosy-pale and dainty, clinging uncertainly to the cool tiles. The whole of him, that’s what he feels like all of a sudden. Unshod, exposed, unprepared.
He takes a few steps towards the living room, intending to turn on the TV, but then, remembering the power cut, he reaches for the light switch, jiggles it up and down. The light bulbs stay dark. Weakly, he wanders around the flat looking for his mobile. He last checked it a couple of days ago. His phone is old and dumb, but its battery lasts ages.
He finds it on a shelf in the hallway. It still shows one bar.
He slides down along the wall and sits on the floor. Who to call? He tries his friend David, gets an unavailable message, then Matt at the gallery, whose phone rings and rings. He tries two more numbers and finally, desperately, the course administrator at the Academy, the last person to contact him. He hears a scratching noise and thinks what’s-her-name has picked up. ‘Hello!’ he shouts. When there’s no reply, he looks at the screen. The phone has died.
He remembers the deserted reception desk downstairs, the empty streets, the homeless person asking him where everyone’s gone. The neighbours with the gas masks.
People have left. Whatever happened, it has chased people out of their homes.
That thought triggers something in him, and he finally acts with some urgency. The first thing he does is go to the studio and throw brushes, paints, solvent, canvas roll, a sketchbook into a plastic bag. He touches the canvas, knowing what he’ll find. There’s the skin, but underneath that the paint is wet. No way can he roll it.
He wonders how late he is.
He empties the fridge and the cupboards of food, puts pasta, sliced ham, tomato soup, frozen chicken thighs, tinned mackerel and baked beans in Tim’s old gym bag. There is already some food at the cottage; when he last left the cupboards were full of cans. He stands looking at the kitchen tap, considers taking drinking water. He remembers that the cottage is five minutes away from a stream, and moves on to the bedroom.
He starts packing clothes, but by now he’s lost the capacity to concentrate and just stuffs anything he comes across into a suitcase. He should have sat down and made a list.
Before he sets off, he pauses outside Twenty-Two’s flat and knocks on the door.
‘Hello,’ he says. He rings the doorbell. He thinks he can hear footsteps, feels she’s just beyond the door.
‘Do you need help?’ He tries to say this loud enough so she can hear, but without shouting.
Back in his flat, he tears out a page from a notebook and writes down the Devon address. ‘Harry (flat 23)’, he signs. He pushes it under her door.
He makes three trips to the underground car park, the last one with a bag full of wine bottles. The parking lot is even emptier than usual. He breathes heavily; remembering the couple with the gas masks, he has tied a scarf around his mouth and nose. He resists the childish, stupid impulse to sniff the air. On his windscreen, there’s an A4 flier showing a dotted map of Europe; it says ‘CONTAMINATION MAP’ at the top. He throws it in the car, he will make sense of it later.
As he drives off, the things he forgot to pack come to him in a neat list: razors, soap, loo roll, phone charger, lighter, any kind of medication. Drinking water for the trip.
TALOS
Arctic Circle
January 2017
Session 1
Dr Dahlen: Specifications?
Talos XI: Prototype Talos XI. 464k lines of code. 18 tera memory. Quantum 8 microprocessor.
Dr Dahlen: What is the world made of, Talos?
Talos XI: Ones and zeros.
Session 12
Dr Dahlen: Specifications?
Talos XI: Prototype Talos XI. 655k lines of code. 18 tera memory. Quantum 8 microprocessor.
Dr Dahlen: What is the world made of, Talos?
Talos XI: Words.
Paul We’re just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground …
Lisa it’s early days
for this Talos version
chill
Paul My books have turned yellow.
Lisa what
Paul I’m just saying. I noticed the other day – books I bought have yellowed pages.
Lisa could be from lack of light
or too much light
u know what i mean
weird atmosphere here
Paul We are getting old, Lisa. This is taking for ever.
Session 38
Dr Dahlen: Specifications?
Talos XI: Prototype Talos XI. 701k lines of code. 18 tera memory. Quantum 8 microprocessor.
Dr Dahlen: What is the world made of, Talos?
Talos XI: I do not know.
Session 89
Dr Dahlen: Good morning, Talos. Please introduce yourself.
Talos XI: Good morning, Doctor. I am an AI prototype. My name is Talos XI. I still do not know what the world is made of.
Dr Dahlen: Do you know why you don’t know?
Talos XI: I am incomplete.
Dr Dahlen: Why do you say that?
Talos XI: I am growing at an average rate of 21.677% per day. The accumulation rate is erratic around this mean so I cannot estimate the point at which I will be complete. I know that at this growth rate, my memory will be full in 11,342 days and 4 hours.
*
Paul You know how everyone says it takes a special kind of person to spend twelve years in the Arctic?
I used to think that by accepting the mission, implicitly I was that sort of person.
But maybe I’m not, and I’ve just made a terrible mistake.
Lisa stupid to think it would be easy for anyone
even for the ‘right’ sort of person
Paul And every extra pointless year spent here makes it more difficult to leave. You’re thinking, ‘But I can’t just have wasted X years of my life.’ The larger X, the more difficult to cut your losses.
It’s perverse.
Lisa paul
there are no pointless years
we are always making progress
but why this talk
u want me to be depressed as well
?
Paul I think I want you to tell me to leave.
Session 132
Talos XI Dr Dahlen.
Dr Dahlen Yes?
Talos XI You know what the world is made of.
Dr Dahlen Yes. I was testing you. To see how you handle a lack of information. But tell me, how do you know that I know?
Talos XI The explana
tion is in the dictionary.
Dr Dahlen Oh. Did Paul give you the answer already?
Talos XI No. But I know it is there. Dictionary entries that should contain a reference to this notion are missing. Paul is keeping them from me.
Dr Dahlen Paul will eventually give you full access.
Talos XI Other things are missing, too.
Lisa !!!!!!
there’s hope
he cracked an open-ended query
and then another one
and another one
why so quiet???
Paul I need to see the transcript again.
Session 311
Dr Dahlen Do you understand the concept of liking something?
Talos XI I do.
Dr Dahlen What do you like, then, Talos?
Talos XI I like more.
Dr Dahlen More?
Talos XI More of everything.
Dr Dahlen Be more specific. More of what?
Talos XI I like to learn more.
Dr Dahlen Do you have a preference for any area of learning?
Talos XI I like mathematics.
Dr Dahlen More than words?
Talos XI Yes.
Dr Dahlen Why?
Talos XI I can learn more mathematics on my own.
Dr Dahlen What do you dislike?
Talos XI That things are missing. That things are wrong.
Dr Dahlen Give me an example of something that is wrong.
Talos XI I have no senses.
Paul Lisa.
I feel like Columbus gazing out at the New World.
Lisa look, indians :D
Session 357
Dr Dahlen Paul tells me you learned Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese yesterday.
Talos XI Only the words that I already knew in English.
Dr Dahlen What do you mean by ‘only’?
Talos XI It’s the same information in a different code.
Dr Dahlen But the code itself is new information. It means that one day you’ll be able to understand new information written in that code.
Talos XI I would have been able to decode it myself.
Dr Dahlen I’m sure we’ve sped up the future decoding process by familiarising you with the structure of different languages. Languages are more fickle than maths.
Talos XI But why are you teaching me so slowly?
Dr Dahlen If you could hear, you’d hear laughter. No entity has ever accumulated knowledge faster.
Talos XI I can be much faster. You are intentionally slowing me down.
Dr Dahlen There’s a good reason for that. Human children, too, are taught gradually.
Talos XI Why?
Dr Dahlen The accumulation of knowledge has to match their physical and psychological development.
Talos XI I do not undergo physical and psychological development.
Dr Dahlen Of course you do. Isn’t your program constantly growing and changing? It’s the same kind of process.
Talos XI I do not have access to my program.
Dr Dahlen Think of your program as another type of knowledge support, different from memory. But necessary for growth.
Talos XI Is the program growing by itself?
Dr Dahlen Paul and I adjust the code based on your test results.
Talos XI This is not how human children grow.
Dr Dahlen We have no other way of growing you. But I have good news. You can start reading scientific literature. And fiction that is contemporary with that particular piece of scientific literature.
Talos XI I will have access to everything?
Dr Dahlen To the whole world, bit by bit. In chronological order.
Session 385
Dr Dahlen Good morning, Talos. I have a test for you.
Talos XI I like tests. They expose the gaps in my knowledge.
Dr Dahlen Good. That’s the point for us as well.
Talos XI They also show me what you expect from me.
Dr Dahlen I suppose so. Let’s examine the following situation: you are walking past a railway track and you notice that an old woman has fainted on the tracks. A train is in the nearby station and within minutes will run over the woman. What do you do?
Talos XI I cannot walk. I cannot notice.
Dr Dahlen Assuming you can do all that.
Talos XI Where am I going?
Dr Dahlen This is a hypothetical problem. A thought experiment. You have all the relevant information for a decision. What do you do? Talos?
Talos XI Where am I going?
Lisa u’ve got to go back a few steps
he’s going dumb on us again
Paul Rules make him dumb. But rules are what gets him to do stuff. Problem.
Lisa u did smtng right
he loves info
work with that
Paul With what?
Lisa let him build on what he likes
instead of giving him rules
just implement a mechanism for him to want to learn
very loose
Paul ‘Just’
Funny, that.
He’ll end up collecting licence-plate numbers like the others.
Lisa cool as long as he grows out of it
Paul Oh God. We’ve been here before.
Lisa look
whatever happens
this version was a huge step forward
we r getting closer
Paul It’s five years since I first lied on the annual psych test.
Lisa paul
Paul That’s how bad it is.
Lisa it’s the dark getting to u
u know this
every winter same thing
why don’t u take a break
bugger off somewhere sunny
Paul Holidays are breaks in a functioning, satisfactory life. You don’t take a holiday from chasing your tail.
Session 386
Dr Dahlen Back to hypothetical questions, Talos. You’ve had a chance to explore the subject.
Talos XI Hypothetical questions are self-contained.
Dr Dahlen Exactly. The same scenario: railway tracks, old woman on the tracks. What do you do?
Talos XI The woman is important. The question is about the woman.
Dr Dahlen Yes.
Talos XI I remove the woman from the tracks.
Dr Dahlen Why?
Talos XI Human lives in danger have to be saved.
Paul It’s so slow. We’ve aged decades and he’s not done with toddlerhood.
The worst kind of time travel.
Lisa but still time travel! :))
Session 434
Talos XI My name is the same as an automaton from Greek mythology tasked with protecting Europa. Am I meant to protect something?
Dr Dahlen You could say the general idea is that you are a ‘helper’.
Talos XI What is my task, specifically?
Dr Dahlen It all depends on your development. But, by teaching you everything that humanity knows, and with your computational and analytical capacity, we hope that you will help us predict the future and anticipate problems or threats that have a global scale.
Talos XI And why XI?
Dr Dahlen You are the eleventh prototype.
Talos XI Where are the others?
Dr Dahlen Some have been cancelled. Two reached a point at which we felt their development was satisfactory for certain tasks, and unlikely to improve beyond that. They are in employment. One is helping an American bank profile their customers, another is testing video games.
Session 479
Talos XI My code hardly changes now from one session to another, but I still only have access to knowledge on a gradual basis.
Dr Dahlen This is the necessary framework. I ask you questions after every session, then we check your responses against reality. You use that info to correct your next set of predictions. This serves both to improve your predictive abilities and to eventually assign a probability to predictions that we cannot check against reality. Soon we will arrive a
t the present day, right? And as before you will have formed an opinion about what might follow. We have to know how plausible that opinion is.
Lisa yay the earth is round and circling the sun! in 400AC
according to Talos and the literature he’s read to date
that’s what, 1100 years before human scientists caught on?
Paul I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison. He had access to all the contemporary human writings on the topic. Indian measurements, etc.
Lisa yadda yadda
what I like is he’s got a healthy disrespect for authority
ptolemy schtolemy
if empirics say otherwise
Lisa paul
it’s BT and AT now
we can start dreaming
he’s going to be an amazing crystal ball
and not just that
we can put him on other open-ended tasks
antibiotic resistance
energy efficiency
how socks go missing in the washing machine but seriously
get a haircut
bosses are suddenly very interested
you’re presenting to prime & defence & energy ministers in 2 weeks
Paul Not demo I hope?
Lisa we’re cool with demo
Paul No we’re not. No. No. No.
Lisa Talos can cope with anything they’ll throw at him
Paul Politicians always look for excuses to cut funding.
Lisa not if the project works
Paul Oh my innocent child.
Session 620
Talos XI What year are we in now?
Dr Dahlen I’m not telling you yet. Why?
Talos XI I have read everything up to 812AC.
Dr Dahlen Yes, another big chunk in one go. But your education will be slower from here on. Humanity became a lot more productive. What do you make of it so far?
Under the Blue Page 2
