Take Me with You

by Tara Altebrando

  There were things in life you probably weren’t meant to know.

  ILANKA

  Practice had been long and boring, and her mother didn’t show except to pick her up on foot so they could ride the subway home together. It was a quick shot from midtown to their stop—the first one in Queens—and a short walk to the French restaurant where Ilanka didn’t like any of the food. Baked escargot. Creamy potatoes. Beef in red sauces. It was all trying too hard.

  Her father was already at a table when they arrived, with a vodka in front of him. He kissed her mother first, then her. They ordered. Then her parents started to talk as if she weren’t there.

  It’s not like Ilanka could just text the others out of the blue. She needed a reason. Like something she forgot to tell them about the device and her time with it?

  She couldn’t think of anything.

  Anyway, they’d be in touch Sunday to hand it off to her.

  That was the plan, and there was no reason for her to think it would change.

  Nothing ever changed.

  Maybe nothing ever changed unless you changed it.

  “And what’s new with you?” her father finally said when their meals arrived. He turned to her, eyebrows awake.

  “I don’t feel like doing gymnastics anymore,” she said.

  Her mother’s food caught in her throat with a gag, and she reached for her water. Drank steadily. Coughed. Breathed.

  “After all these years? You’ve worked so hard!” her mother said.

  “But for what?” Ilanka said. “What am I working toward?”

  Her mother had no answer; her father sipped his drink, cut a slice of bloody steak, ate it.

  “I just want to have a normal end of high school,” Ilanka said. “With my friends.”

  “What friends?” her mother said.

  “Ilona,” her father scolded.

  “That’s not what I mean,” her mother said. “She has friends. Of course she has friends. At the gym. And Svetlana of course.”

  “Maybe I want new or more friends,” Ilanka said. “Maybe I want to … like, try out for the school play or play basketball. I don’t know.”

  “Basketball,” her mother said with distaste. It was the same way she sounded when she said words like “hot dog” or “barbecue” or anything American that she loathed.

  “Why not?” Ilanka challenged.

  Obviously she didn’t want to be friends with Eden and Marwan and Eli, but surely there were people out there she could … connect with.

  It wasn’t normal to be alone with her parents so much.

  And alone with herself the rest of the time.

  Was it?

  “Svetlana’s coming on Sunday,” her mother said. “Did I tell you?”

  “No,” Ilanka said. “She told me.” Then after a pause, after realizing that the movie-going lie would actually be a good thing for the handoff, she said, “We thought maybe we’d go to a movie instead of just hanging around the house.”

  “Fine by me,” her mother said.

  “Sure, why not?” her father said.

  Ilanka felt the impulse to check her phone—maybe even text them?—but didn’t. It was always a little disappointing when there was nothing new.

  And her father wouldn’t approve even though he was as addicted to his phone as anybody. More than anybody, he was also—and this was sort of a contradiction considering his phone was always with him—really paranoid about technology, maybe because he worked in technology. He wouldn’t get an Alexa thing because he didn’t want anyone spying on them in their home. He wouldn’t like this new device that had come into Ilanka’s life at all. Which was maybe part of the appeal of being a part of it?

  Back at their building after dinner, she went up to the roof alone. It was another great place to study the skyline and imagine the lives of other people who were better at all this, maybe, than she was, the way Svetlana was. Svetlana had friends. She had a mystery boyfriend.

  Ilanka only had this secret, and who knew how long she could even keep it?

  She opened Instagram and the photo she’d taken of it was right there. It would be so easy to post and say, “Anybody know what this creepy thing is?”

  But she didn’t. She tapped the camera. The light was so perfect up there at that moment. She took a selfie and posted it with the caption “TFW the light is just perfect.” #sunset #nyc #nofilter and was proud of herself because for a long time she’d had a mental block and always had to google what TFW stood for.

  That feeling when. That feeling when.

  While she waited for her likes to start ticking up, she went to pull up the picture of the device again. But it was gone. She must have accidentally deleted it.

  She searched for each of the three and considered friending or following or whatever, but didn’t.

  She texted them: Turns out I’ll be by the movie theater near school Sunday around 11:20 so can get device then.

  She had ten hearts on her selfie—five gymnastics friends and five internet randoms—and sat there waiting for more.

  EDEN

  Voices at home when she walked in.

  This was not good. Not good at all.

  Anjali was sitting at the kitchen table with Eden’s mom. They both had mugs in front of them and looked like they’d been there awhile. Her mom had their “I Astoria” mug; Anjali’s said, “Dad You Rock,” and seemed to send shrill feedback across the room.

  “What’s going on?” Eden asked, taking out her earbuds and pausing her music—her father’s “Land Down Under” playlist.

  “That’s what we’d like to know,” her mom said.

  They’d had a handful of moments like this in the past six months—when they were like characters out of a not particularly well-written film about a mother and daughter clashing.

  Anjali’s look wasn’t the apologetic look of a friend who somehow got caught lying for her friend; she had a traitorous sheen to her eyes and looked irritated but also somehow vindicated. Her mug should have said, “Serves You Right.”

  Eden’s mother got up and dumped tea into the sink—the smell of mint invading the air—then turned and folded her arms. “I got your text that you were with Anjali,” she said. “So you can imagine my surprise when I bumped into her on Steinway. Without you.”

  “Why were you on Steinway?” she asked her mother. “I thought you had work drinks?”

  “Not the point.”

  “And why are you here?” Eden said to Anjali.

  Her mom answered. “I asked her to come here so we could talk about your … strange behavior.”

  Eden laughed. “What strange behavior?”

  “Anjali says you’re suddenly spending time with people at school who maybe are not the right kind of people?”

  “You said that?” Eden slid her phone onto the table.

  “Well, it’s true!” Anjali said, and Eden could only shake her head. Anjali didn’t know any of them. At all.

  “They’re perfectly nice people,” Eden said.

  “And the other afternoon,” her mother said, “you were outside talking to that Eli boy and acting secretive. And if you lied tonight about where you were I highly doubt it’s the first time. It’s just the first time you were caught.”

  “Where were you?” Anjali asked. “Were you with Marwan?”

  “I was with Eli!”

  “Why is your hair so messy?” her mom asked. “What have you been doing?”

  “We took a ferry ride.”

  Her mother threw her hands up wildly. “This gets better by the minute! Who are these people?”

  “They’re just … people. Friends.”

  “Why all of a sudden?” her mom asked.

  “I don’t know!” Eden shrugged. “Why do I have to explain having friends?”

  “You know that’s not the issue,” her mother said. “What I want an explanation for is the lies. The deceit.”

  “Deceit!” Eden repeated. “Don’t be so dramatic.”
/>   “I’ll be as dramatic as I like!”

  Off-screen, the director of their bad movie was about to scream, “Cut!” Then say, “Okay, let’s take it again, but this time dial it back by at least half.”

  Her mother’s voice got shaky. “What if something happened to you? What if you’re off somewhere where I have no idea where you are and something happens?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” Eden said, and that felt wrong because she didn’t believe it, but also because her mother was usually the one telling her that. “And anyway you could track my phone.”

  It was a dumb thing to say.

  Her mother had started crying, and now Eden was, too.

  Anjali stood. “I’m gonna go.”

  Eden’s mom said, “Thanks for being honest with me, Anjali”—Nice dig, Mom!—and turned her back to them while putting her mug in the sink.

  Eden followed Anjali to the door and unlocked it to let her out.

  “Talk later?” Eden tried.

  Anjali stepped past her. “You can lie to your mother all you want, but why are you lying to me?”

  Eden couldn’t find words to explain and had already made too many excuses. Anjali shook her head and walked out the door and up the driveway.

  Back inside, Eden’s mom had Eden’s phone in her hand.

  “Mom?” Panic rose. “What are you doing?”

  “Who’s Ilanka?” Her mother looked up at her with panicked eyes. “And what’s the ‘device’?”

  ELI

  Eli sent Eliot to the Willow Creek library when the option “go to library and research/read” popped up, then thought maybe that was a good idea for him IRL. His initial googling hadn’t helped.

  He discovered his phone was dead, so he left it home, and maybe that was for the best anyway? He grabbed his wallet and the notebook where he’d taken his notes on Aizel, and walked the fifteen minutes to the library. He hated being disconnected like this. It was true that nothing much ever happened to him, but he always felt that something was sure to happen when he was phoneless and least able to handle it.

  The library was busy but not overcrowded. He approached the librarian at the desk. “I’m interested in books about artificial intelligence,” he said, and she turned to a computer and typed for a few minutes, then said, “We don’t have much here. There are a few at other branches I can request for you if it’s not urgent.”

  He said, “It’s sort of urgent.”

  “Follow me,” she said, and she came out through a gate and led him to the back of the library where she ran a hand along a shelf, then slowed, then stopped and pulled out a hardcover with a plastic cover on it. “This is from 1974 so it’s going to be really out of date, is my guess.”

  “I’ll flip through it anyway,” Eli said, and she held it out to him. “Thanks.”

  Everything about the book was old and wrong. The fonts, the language. Eli couldn’t find an entry point that made any sense. It was too technical, not at all what he needed, even though he wasn’t even sure what he needed. Staring at the table of contents he saw a chapter about the Turing test, but he already knew the basic idea of that from the movies. The Turing test was this bar that artificial intelligence developers were trying to reach, where the AI could convince a human it was also human.

  Would the device pass the test? Should he try it and see if he could trick it? Talk it into a corner? How would you even do that? What were the markers that would make it feel “real”? Was Aizel able to think? Or feel?

  He put the book back on the shelf and rubbed his dusty fingers together, then on his jeans, and went to one of the computers on the other side of the room.

  He googled “Aizel” and “Turing test.”

  One of the first hits intrigued him, even though it had crossed out “Aizel.”

  “ ‘Minimal Turing Test’ asks you to prove you’re a human with a single word.”

  He clicked. It was about a group of scientists who posed the question of whether you could prove to a judge that you were a human and not a robot if the human and robot both said only one word.

  Eli thought the right word for the job was probably “love” or “mercy” or “please” or “mommy,” but he read through and it turned out the best way to prove you were the human and not the robot was to say “poop.”

  He clicked back and saw a sublink that had appeared.

  “Did Eliza pass the Turing test?”

  Who was Eliza?

  Eli clicked.

  The ELIZA software is designed to simulate conversations with a Rogerian psychotherapist. But anyone who interacts with the program quickly realizes that they are talking to a machine that would not pass a Turing test.

  He googled “Turing test Eliza” and read some conversations with her, and she sounded pretty primitive compared to the device. Just throwing back words at the person it was talking to.

  But apparently early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite its programmer’s insistence to the contrary.

  People were idiots.

  But what did that make him? And was the device just a program or was someone actually running/operating it in a more hands-on way?

  He wasn’t sure what to do next and sat there for a moment just looking at the screen. Something about the name Eliza was bugging him, and he just sat and stared at it for a long time until he figured it out.

  If you rearranged the letters it spelled Aizel.

  MARWAN

  Marwan’s mother and sisters were at the kitchen table in their pajamas. Selma was reading from a sheet of paper. “If you were able to give up one chore for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

  “Not this again,” Marwan asked. Ever since they’d gone to a birthday party at the American Girl doll store last year, they were into dumb questions. Because apparently when you have lunch there, they leave a box of conversation starters on the table.

  “Well,” Selma said to him. “What chore would you give up?”

  He thought through his chores list, which was topped by taking out the garbage and emptying the dishwasher, in addition to basics like keeping his room clean and doing his laundry. He picked “Taking out the garbage” even though he didn’t mind it that much. “That’s a dumb question.”

  “What about you, Mom?” Selma asked.

  “I already gave up the one I disliked most. Marwan empties the dishwasher now.” She smiled.

  He said, “I’m glad we had this chat. I feel much closer to you now.”

  She looked at the paper Selma was holding and said, “What is your favorite childhood memory?” then looked at him and waited.

  “For real?” he asked.

  “I know mine,” Tosnim said.

  “What?” Selma asked.

  Tosnim started to talk about a snowstorm from a bunch of years back and how the neighbors across the street made this mountain of snow and dug a tunnel through it and how all the kids on the block took turns sliding through it.

  It was a nice memory, but the whole idea of conversation starters was still dumb. He’d seen an ad for a new conversation-starter game from Europe in his feed not that long ago; it showed all these good-looking people hugging each other in soft focus. How was that a real thing?

  Anyway, his father could talk to a wall. They did not need help on this front as a family.

  “What about you, Marwan?” his mother said.

  “Gonna have to get back to you,” he said, and then he said, “I’ll be in my room.”

  He had clean laundry to put away, so he put his earbuds in and queued up the beauty queen. It was a particularly infuriating episode about lost evidence and mishandling of the scene. There was so much human error involved in the botched investigation that Marwan wondered about the future of AI in crime solving. Like, if it were fed all the data, could the device or something like it solve a crime better than a human could? If he was going to ask the device for help, did he need the approval of the others first?

&n
bsp; He’d only had a few minutes left of that episode, and when it was done he wasn’t in the mood to start another. He lay down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling’s water stain in the shape of an old man’s profile and said softly, “It all started with a message that came to four of us—all students at a high school in Queens—one Wednesday afternoon.”

  Pushing away the feeling of feeling dumb, he said it again, and added on to it. “The message told us to report to the music room and said that the matter was urgent. I should have known something was up, but I couldn’t have ever imagined what was going to happen next.”

  He started over and then added on, “A small black cube sat on the teacher’s desk, only the teacher never showed. Then, when we were talking about whether to just leave, the device lit up and said, ‘Do not tell anyone about the device. Do not leave the device unattended.’ Right then, the fire alarm sounded, and the device flashed a message that said, ‘Take me with you … or else.’ So Eden—more about her in a bit—grabbed it.” Dramatic pause. “That was two days ago, and things have only gotten stranger.”

  This was fun.

  He should write it down.

  He got up and opened his laptop and opened a Google Doc and named it “Aizel,” then changed his mind and named it “The Device” and started to tell the whole story. Maybe he’d record it someday; maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe the process of writing it down would help him to somehow figure it out, to crack the case?

  He looked over the paragraph where he described the whole incident of the device frying his phone. He’d written that the device was attempting to get even with him for trying to get rid of it.

  He’d have to rethink that line. Because the device didn’t have emotions.

  He wondered, though, if it could somehow detect his emotions? Like that he was maybe developing feelings for Eden. Was there something it could read in his voice? In his speech patterns when she was around? How would it, in theory, be able to figure it out? How would she? What cues would she pick up on?

  For fun, he started jotting down an episode breakdown. There was a rhythm to these things, so episode one would leave off at a moment of high drama, maybe when Marwan’s phone got fried? Would that be enough material? Then episode two would go back and fill in some background about the four of them. It would be called “The Four.”