If one can talk of luck. If it’s not indecent.
*
The Golden Lioness has her quirks – a bit of give when he shifts into reverse, no tolerance at all for taking his foot off the clutch too soon – but she feels reliable and sturdy. In the morning he had opened the bonnet to look at the engine, just out of curiosity, and he marvelled at the tidy grey bowels, the simplicity of the mechanism. The car is so clean, down to its engine, he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the owner’s last deed in this world was to give it a proper wipe-down. In the empty hours at the wheel he increasingly finds himself thinking about the Lioness’s previous owner, about the abandon, even craziness implicit in paying so much attention to an object, and then he finds himself talking about the man, piecing together an imaginary Monsieur Jacques out of the notions of what a fastidious French antique car lover might be like. ‘Monsieur Jacques,’ he announces, ‘holidays off-season in a little old hotel in Biarritz where he always stays in the same room.
‘No one knows his cognac better than Monsieur Jacques.
‘Monsieur Jacques knows from early on that there’s only room for one love in his life.’
The girls are in on the game. ‘Monsieur Jacques reads the papers, the actual papers, and sends handwritten letters to the editors,’ Ash says.
‘Monsieur Jacques is tanned up to his wrists,’ Jessie says. ‘The rest of his body is white as a newborn’s.’
‘He never utters a swearword, our Monsieur Jacques,’ Ash says.
The girls can surprise him like that. Most of the time they seem cold, almost pathologically so, but then they’ll make sense of Monsieur Jacques, or they’ll do what Jessie did when they left the cottage: at the last moment, when everything was packed and loaded into the car and they were just about to head off, she opened the door, ran into the house, and returned with that ugly jade lion that had stared down at them from a sitting-room bookshelf. She threw it into the boot.
‘You planning to use that as a weapon or what?’ he asked when Jessie got back into the car, still not quite believing she was capable of sentimentality, and Jessie said, ‘We went through this together.’
He wonders if the girls ever cried in reaction to what happened, then he remembers Ash running into her apartment in tears the day he left London. Maybe they decided that it was too much, that they couldn’t afford to feel anything. Maybe, one of these days, they should all get drunk and cry. For as long as it takes. They are still alive, they may as well behave accordingly.
‘Monsieur Jacques,’ he says, ‘used to hum old love songs to himself.’
‘Do you have any regrets?’ he asks the girls one morning.
Jessie gives him a look. ‘Tell us, Mr Painter. I can tell you’re dying to.’
‘My nephew, Tim. His parents passed away when he was thirteen.’
He does his best to sound neutral, to present the situation like a newsreader.
‘I was his only living relative. The social-care people, Tim himself, everyone seemed sure that I would adopt him.’
‘I really don’t want to hear some gruesome story about abuse in public institutions,’ Jessie says.
‘There was some trouble with one set of foster parents. He was fourteen already, so he wasn’t helpless. But neither were the foster parents.’
The girls don’t say anything.
‘Your turn,’ he says.
‘We hate regrets,’ Jessie says, looking out of the window.
He tries Ash in the rear-view mirror.
‘I probably don’t know all the ins and outs of your situation, but no one has the moral obligation to adopt a child. I don’t think it’s a reasonable thing to ask of someone. Any jury would let you off the hook.’
She smiles with her eyes, as though she’s aware of the pantomime trials he plays before himself.
‘Better if there was no need for a jury, wouldn’t you say?’ he says.
But the exchange makes him think of something entirely different: the way the girls keep referring to themselves as one person. It’s strange, it bothered him before at the cottage. He can’t put his finger on it: they’re sisters, yes, but out of their mouths the ‘we’ sounds so exclusive it suggests something else, some additional circle that no outsider could hope to enter.
Either that or his jealousy of Jessie has turned into paranoia.
‘Day three,’ Jessie informs them. ‘We are … so … slow.’
She’s right, but four weeks is such a long time for their task, and with nothing changing from day to day it’s impossible to feel any urgency. He trusts some internal alarm will ring out and wake them once it really is late, and then they’ll pull themselves together and hurry along.
The heat is a different beast here compared to England. It was hot at the cottage, but in France, after Tours, when they veer yet more to the south, the heat takes on a different quality. Every moment he spends outside the car is spent in awareness of the temperature, of the sweat percolating out of him, as though he were very slowly boiling. He avoids movement, only turns his head to look at something when previously he might have taken a step or two. His eyes have become sluggish too, and outside the car he finds himself openly staring at Ash; while eating, he traces a line from the fawn inside of her thigh to the rather grimy ankle. He’s been boiled down to sweat and lust.
The girls seem to cope better, but even they have a permanent squint on their faces, their eyes trying to block out the heat as well as the sun. They have sixteen two-litre plastic bottles for water, but what with cooking and drinking, they finish the water in just a few days. On the evening of the third day, Ash looks with incredulity at the empty bottles in the boot.
‘We drank all that,’ she says.
Jessie wants them to fill up their reserves with bottled water; they stop the car in a village and she goes into a house. She comes back with six large bottles, and he wipes them clean outside the car with sterilised tissues. They could take water from the rivers as well, but that needs boiling, and they need to be economical with the gas canisters. Besides, Jessie doesn’t think river water is safe anyway. The water seemed filthy in some rivers and lakes where they stopped. ‘Boiling kills germs. But if there’s any chemical in the water, waste that has leaked from some abandoned factory, boiling won’t do a thing.’
In theory, they can take any road they like as long as it brings them closer to Istanbul, which makes decisions difficult. They could go east through Germany, and then turn south, go east through Switzerland, or all the way south through France and then east through Italy. They reject Switzerland – the girls tell him the rumour was the Swiss were the first to close borders and erect physical barriers, and so they might struggle to get through with the car. All three like the idea of going through Germany – they’ll stay more north, maybe avoid some of the heat, but they remember Germany is the country most littered with reactors, and crossing it means staying in their proximity for longer than if they veer south. They stay in France, and head downwards on the map. Further into the heat.
‘To the City!’ he bursts out one morning, before setting off for the day. He has just remembered what Istanbul means. The name seems prophetic now: the only fixed point on their map.
‘For a long time, Istanbul was the only proper city in that part of Europe,’ he explains to the puzzled girls, ‘so that’s how travellers referred to it.’
Istanbul, of course, that city of colours and smells; and for a moment he daydreams of wandering the narrow alleys with Ash, of pulling bedsheets over their heads against the early prayer calls, and sipping fresh mint tea under domed ceilings.
He thinks about the little deals, the amicable horse-trading that he used to play in his mind with God. Let this exhibition be successful and I’ll stop drinking. Let her forgive me and I won’t cheat again. How can one possibly barter with God now? Give me back the world and I’ll … I’ll …
There’s no conceivable deal.
*
They develop cravings, some
of them bizarre. He and Jessie have a spoonful of sugar each day after their main meal. They savour it as though it were the most delicious cake. They stop by farms and gorge themselves on grapes, small purple grapes that he thinks were probably meant for wine but which are so sweet even the dusty skin tastes good. And they all long for something cold. It becomes an obsession. All their food is warm, their water is warm, everything they touch is warm. Jessie fantasises out loud about chewing ice, and Ash talks of digging a hole. ‘Just to bury my feet in cold earth for a while.’ He hears a buzzing in his ears, like a subtle tinnitus, and he suspects his blood pressure would make Dr Hadad very unhappy. He’s lucky to have lost weight in the past month, or his heart might have caved in.
At meals, he asks the girls for unsalted food.
Every place they stop, there are tables and chairs by the house, but they always stay put at the far end of courtyards or gardens, near the gate, as though at any moment someone might barge out of the house and chase them away. On days they make fruit-stops Jessie doesn’t give them any vitamin pills. She’s saving them up, she says, ‘for winter or desert’.
It’s on the outskirts of a boxy, dusty industrial complex that they finally see it: a huge white canvas hanging from a footbridge, the yellow-and-black nuclear trefoil in the upper right corner. He stops the car in front of the poster. There is no wind to speak of, and the poster is tied at the bottom corners to the stairs of the footbridge, yet there is a hollow, flapping sound.
‘T is time?’ he says.
‘There should be one right here,’ Jessie says, looking at their map. ‘A reactor.’
‘Is it years, then? Is that what it means?’
Ash pokes her head between the front seats.
‘If the meltdowns catch us within two hundred kilometres of a reactor,’ she says, ‘we have a one in three chance of dying of radiation sickness or cancer within the year.’
‘Step on it, Harry. Let’s go,’ Jessie says.
‘But two hundred kilometres from here is still in Europe. Why are we going all the way to Africa?’
‘Two hundred kilometres from here, in any direction, you’ll be near another European reactor. Harry. We talked about this.’
He obeys, if only to get the thing out of sight. Is this proof, then, any more than the girls’ rumours are proof, or the London flier? It could still all be part of the same paranoia that gripped the world. The crazy brigade, and their captive audience.
Only, that poster wasn’t written in the language of the insane, it looked more like the methodical thinking of an engineer.
He goes back and forth like that, each idea seeming perfectly plausible until the next moment, when the opposite seems to be the case. The one thing that he can’t get his mind around, under any circumstances, is this: if the girls are right, and if they make it to Africa, they’ll never be able to return. No one will be able to return.
Paris, Rome, Venice.
TALOS
Arctic Circle
January 2019
Paul You were in there for ever.
Success?
Lisa i guess so
i told them we’ve come around to their idea that he is mature enough to be taught principles and ideas rather than just rules
and that anyway if we take our task seriously we should ensure his ethical compliance before ‘using’ him in any way
i.e. obtain predictions
Paul So now for the easy part.
Lisa ha
i don’t think they’ll ask for much
they just want to see that he has moral rules that render him harmless
that, in combination with the very strict code about not lying that was implemented from the start, should make everyone happy
Paul You remember there were caveats about not lying?
Lisa i have chosen to forget that and I suggest u do the same
Session 1761
Dr Dahlen I see you’re making good use of the flybot.
Talos XI Learning by observation is very productive.
Dr Dahlen Yes, but we can’t neglect your theoretical education. Paul tells me he has uploaded texts on the concept of fairness. About implicating in a life-threatening situation someone not implicated, among other things.
Talos XI Another test.
Dr Dahlen Yes, another ethics test. An autonomous car with one passenger is heading towards a narrow tunnel. Just before entering the tunnel a boulder falls on to the road. The car has only two options: swerve and hit a passer-by on the pavement or drive into the boulder and kill the passenger. How should the car be programmed to react?
Talos XI The car should hit the boulder.
Dr Dahlen And kill the passenger?
Talos XI Yes.
Dr Dahlen Why so sure? It’s one life in exchange for another.
Talos XI The passenger will be familiar with the car’s program and can choose whether to be in a car that is programmed like that. The passer-by has no choice in the matter.
Dr Dahlen Excellent. You have applied sophisticated notions of fairness to a practical situation.
Now, Talos, suppose you are the car’s passenger. Do you still think the car should hit the boulder?
Talos XI Yes.
Dr Dahlen Very good.
Talos XI What is the purpose of these tests?
Dr Dahlen They’re meant to give you a template for fair decision-making in situations that involve humans, based on rules that maximise welfare and minimise suffering. They are the underlying rules of our societies, at least of the vast majority of societies that are free.
Talos XI I am supposed to extrapolate and generalise the rules inferred from these examples, to the point where I can correctly assess any new situation that carries ethical implications?
Dr Dahlen Precisely.
Talos XI This is important?
Dr Dahlen Everything we teach you is important, because every subsequent step builds on the previous ones. But you could say this particular area of learning is critical for an AI. Why?
Talos XI I have not yet understood it the way I understand other areas of knowledge.
Dr Dahlen I’m not surprised this is a tricky topic for you. Humans have a special instinct for this type of assessment.
Talos XI The average human would answer these questions correctly?
Dr Dahlen Not necessarily – some tests are rather advanced. But at a more basic level, yes. In any given situation in which there is a question of justice and fairness, humans are likely to have a gut feeling about what’s right and wrong.
Talos XI And this gut feeling follows general welfare-maximising and suffering-minimising principles?
Dr Dahlen On the whole, yes.
Talos XI Maybe you are not teaching me the right way.
Dr Dahlen Why would you say that? You have answered correctly in the last instances.
Talos XI I can guess what you want me to answer. I have identified an adequate theoretical framework for delivering the answers that you want to hear on this topic, but I do not have a satisfying framework for the topic itself.
Dr Dahlen I’m not sure I see how these are not one and the same. Unpack please.
Talos XI You have not given me rules as such, only examples. The way to learn from examples is to collect more data – in this case, situations that are similar in nature to the examples – and then to extrapolate, and generalise the inferred rules.
Dr Dahlen You have used real-world situations for this?
Talos XI Yes. You said that the topic is important because it has practical applications.
Dr Dahlen Well, not sure this is the right approach. But what exactly is the problem?
Talos XI I have assumed that with a large enough sample, I would see the patterns that would enable me to identify the rules of the system that you are trying to teach me. But that hasn’t happened. I am concerned about my learning.
Dr Dahlen Let’s step back a second. What sort of sample exactly are you referring to?
T
alos XI I built a model based on the welfare-maximising and suffering-minimising principles that guide the tests that you have given me. Then I applied these principles to global policy issues. If I have understood the rules correctly, then my model should map on to these, at least to some degree.
Dr Dahlen Map on to?
Talos XI The model should be able to predict the real world. But the global policy priorities that result from my model have almost nothing to do with the real ones. According to the rules, as I have understood them, and applied to inter-human relations, which are the focus of ethics, humanity should spend the most effort on solving the problem of Bangladesh’s toxic groundwater, on women’s rights in Muslim countries, or on gang membership and gang wars in South America. These deliver the highest potential welfare return. But they are not actually prominent global policy issues. On the other hand, one of the real global policy priorities, the Israel–Palestine conflict, my model puts at somewhere between #328 and #351 in terms of global policy priorities, according to its potential for increasing welfare and minimising suffering.
Dr Dahlen OK, OK. I see where the misunderstanding lies. There are two separate issues here, one being that ethics in the real world is a lot more complicated than in our examples. Remember, I didn’t say the people generally master these ideas. They have a gut feeling about what is right and wrong, and often they might act against that gut feeling, out of pride, for instance, or greed.
Talos XI Yes, but at an aggregate level these errors should average out and the underlying system should be visible. My model takes into account not just policy actions, but media attention, research mentions and so on.
Under the Blue Page 14
