Magic, Machines and the Awakening of Danny Searle

by John McWilliams

  “How’d your interview go with Peter?”

  “Fine—I think. He told me he had two more candidates to interview.” She adjusted the purple, yellow-starred bag on her shoulder and brushed a few strands of hair out of her eyes.

  My father got to his feet, took out his cellphone and walked off toward the driveway.

  Danny turned to me. She looked puzzled.

  “You’ve got the job,” I told her. “Congratulations.”

  My father changed direction and headed toward the sundial, then stopped. He put his cellphone away and returned. “How about you start tomorrow?”

  “You’re going to work at our dad’s lab-ba-tory?” Jasmine asked. She and Tara looked up hopefully.

  “It seems that way.”

  “We can go over the details tomorrow,” my father suggested. “And, we’re planning a company dinner meeting here at the house this Saturday night. I’d like you to be there if you can. Bring a date if you like—it’s casual attire.”

  Danny turned and looked at the house. The Castle, with the sun now setting behind it, had gained a dark, foreboding appearance.

  “It’ll just be me,” she said.

  A moment later, having said our goodbyes, Danny walked off toward her car.

  “In your handbag?” my father called out to her.

  “My handbag?”

  “The kitten. You hid it in your handbag—right?”

  She laughed, opened her door and waved.

  “Now that’s one inspirational young lady,” my father said, turning to me. “What do you think? Oh, never mind, I know what you think: You’re in love.”

  In love. I shook my head. How ridiculous. Then it hit me: Holy crap, I think I am.

  And now he’s smiling at me.

  “You know what I think?” I said. “I think you hired her just so I’d work on that Prometheus project.”

  “Don’t be such an egomaniac.”

  “Me…?”

  “‘Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.’”

  “Nietzsche?” We watched as Danny pulled out onto Bayview Drive.

  “Spinoza.”

  “Dad, Danny didn’t hide Pillow anywhere,” Jasmine said. “It was magic.”

  “I know,” my father said. “And perhaps magic is the perfect metaphor for all our illusions.”

  “And what does that mean?” I asked.

  “Come to the dinner meeting on Saturday night and find out. You don’t have to be an employee to come. I’m inviting you. Of course, if you prefer, I’m sure Peter won’t mind entertaining Danny all night. He can tell her about his doctoral thesis—maybe over a glass of wine on the porch.” My father winked at the girls. “Should I call you if they start making out?”

  “I’ll go,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m developing that Prometheus program for you.”

  “And it doesn’t mean you aren’t.” He sat back down on the quilt between the girls. “You see, sometimes to motivate a potential employee all you need is the right fringe benefit.”

  “Dad, are we inspirational?” Tara asked.

  “Of course you are. What could be more inspirational than having two beautiful witches in the family?”

  The girls smiled broadly.

  “Just one thing, though: where do you suppose she hid that kitten?”

  3

  Saturday night I parked my Ford Econoline van, the old white beast, two cars behind Danny’s Camry in my father’s driveway. Cool air and exhaust filtered into the porous cabin as the engine grumbled to a halt. Through the smudged windshield, I could see two people smoking on the porch, plumes of gray rising into the yellowish light.

  Quickly, I checked my hair in the rearview mirror and wrestled my door open. As I approached the house, I could see that the two smokers were electrical engineering gurus Mohamed and Stewart.

  Stewart, blond and lanky, was wearing a brown cardigan sweater over a Harvard T-shirt. Mohamed, sporting a permanent five o’clock shadow, was dressed as my father typically dressed: simply. Khaki pants and a white button-down shirt. Both men were around thirty. Reaching the steps, I could see that Mohamed’s wife, Jamila, was also present. She was seated on the glider, wearing a traditional pale blue headscarf.

  I waved respectfully, opened one of the grand Italian doors and stepped into the swell of Indian incense and new-age guitar music.

  To my right, inside the foyer, was the library, shelves of books interspersed with rare mechanical dinosaurs. My father’s collection included a scaled-down version of Charles Babbage’s difference engine—an early-nineteenth-century precursor to the computer that was a machining masterpiece of chrome, brass and steel; a non-functioning replica of Jacques de Vaucanson’s eighteenth-century robotic duck; a Tesla coil; a 1977 Apple II computer; and one of my father’s oldest experiments, a ten-foot-tall robot named BART. Just inside the library’s French doors was a sitting area, with a plush leather couch that was great for sleeping on—assuming you could ignore all the monsters.

  I followed the voices coming from down the hall.

  “Now don’t have a heart attack,” my father said as I entered the kitchen. He was at the stove, apron on, stirring a pot.

  “Your dad is only pretending to cook.” Ishana’s Indian accent made it sound more like a question. “Stirring the sauce was all we could find for him to do. But he’s really just a monkey in a suit.”

  My father swatted at her rear end with an oven mitt.

  Ishana adjusted her black-rimmed glasses and tossed a half-eaten carrot at him.

  “What’s wrong with you two?” I took a ginger ale from the refrigerator and, as I closed the door, caught my father returning fire with a fettuccine noodle.

  “It’s liable to end up in the pot,” he warned Ishana, who was poised to throw the noodle back. “Truce?” He showed her his empty hands.

  She feinted throwing it at him, then disposed of it in the sink.

  As a show of goodwill, my father offered her a drink of his Scarola Chardonnay. An open bottle of it was on the counter.

  “We’re having fettuccine Alfredo with shrimp and scallops, in case you were wondering.” My father returned to his task at the stove. “She’s in the dining room, by the way.”

  “Who?” I asked innocently.

  “Mary Poppins, who do you think? And look, speak of the—”

  “Hello,” I heard Danny’s voice from behind me. I turned.

  Danny was wearing a long black skirt, a sleeveless black blouse, and an Egyptian-style necklace. Her hair was elegantly pinned up, not a strand of it masking her delicate, bare neck. She moved gracefully over to the kitchen island and began slicing carrots.

  “The queen of magic here”—my father pointed with his ladle—“still won’t tell me where she hid that kitten.” Ishana guided the dripping ladle back into the pot. “And now, due to all the trauma, that thing seems twice as dumb as it ever was. I’m starting to think she sat on it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Apparently grumpy old scientists just aren’t capable of fathoming the depths of true magic.” Danny smiled.

  “I’m not grumpy. And if you didn’t sit on it, you must have hidden it inside your handbag.”

  “It’s a satchel—a wizard’s satchel.” Danny tossed the last piece of carrot into the salad bowl. “And, no, I didn’t hide it in my satchel.”

  “Where’d the softball come from?” I asked.

  “It was in her… satchel,” my father said.

  “I know that. But why? Why would she have a softball in there?”

  “Because that wizard’s satchel contains the most magically powerful things in the world,” she replied. “Pens, pencils, marbles, dice, matchsticks… a softball. The more common the object, the more magically powerful it is.”

  “The more common the object, the more magically powerful it is?” I said.

  “Sure. The easier it is for someone to recognize an object, the easier it is to blow thei
r mind when it behaves in some unexpected way. The object’s power comes from the person’s own head—what the person already believes about it. Those beliefs are a magician’s playground.”

  “Oh, so you’re willing to tell my son your secrets?” my father mock-complained.

  “He hasn’t been badgering me about it for the past couple of days.” Danny picked up her wine glass and drank.

  “And he’s cute,” Ishana said.

  “He’s a Cipriani,” my father said. “He can’t help that. Anyway, I’ve only been toying with you, Danny. I know exactly where you hid that kitten.”

  “Oh?” Danny creased her brow.

  “You didn’t.”

  “She sent Pillow off to magical magic land?” Ishana teased.

  “She didn’t send Pillow anywhere. And technically, she didn’t hide her either.” He refilled his glass and looked at me expectantly.

  “He means she hid Pillow in plain sight.”

  “See why I love this young man?” My father pulled me into a one-armed hug. “Danny didn’t need to hide Pillow. We, the audience, did that all by ourselves. We saw Danny put Pillow inside the scarf, and since we never saw her remove her, we never stopped believing Pillow was there. Pillow could have been sitting right in front of us for all we knew. We simply weren’t looking anywhere but the scarf.

  “We’ve actually been training for this illusion since early childhood. Cover a one-year-old’s rattle with a blanket and the toddler has no idea where the rattle has gone. Her three-year-old sister, however, does. The older sister has learned to see the rattle under the blanket in her mind’s eye—just as we, in our mind’s eye, can see and know the food in the refrigerator is still there. This ability really is our sixth sense. And we trust it in the same way we trust our other senses.

  “Can you believe the end of this ladle is not under the sauce?” He stirred the pot. “You can’t. And Danny, as a magician, counted on this. Which got me to thinking—hang on.” He opened a drawer next to the sink and took out a Rubik’s Cube. “Danny, did you bring your black scarf as I asked?”

  Danny made the scarf appear with a flourish of her hands.

  “Show-off,” my father said.

  Ishana clapped.

  “Now, Danny, if you wouldn’t mind blindfolding Tyler.” He tossed the Rubik’s Cube to me. “I’m pretty sure he won’t mind.”

  I quickly memorized the cube’s colorful pattern, but as Danny covered my eyes and her delicious perfume wafted through my brain, I nearly forgot it.

  “There,” Danny said, finishing the knot. I couldn’t see a thing.

  “Solving a Rubik’s Cube,” my father explained, “is not what we would typically call magic, but—Tyler, are you all set?”

  I gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Sixty seconds.”

  “You’re timing me?”

  “Fifty-eight.”

  A three-by-three Rubik’s Cube isn’t exactly a challenge. I could solve puzzles much more complicated than that by the time I was three—or at least that’s what two papers co-written by my father on developmental neuroplasticity claim. Most people depend on algorithms to solve these things; I simply untwist the patterns.

  “Ten… nine… eight…”

  I continued to twist the cube, though it was already solved. I thought my father might appreciate the added drama.

  “Six,” Ishana and Danny joined in, “five, four, three, two—”

  I tossed the cube in my father’s direction and removed the blindfold. He spun the cube around, displaying its sides before handing it to Danny. She studied it.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Braille or something.”

  “All I did was memorize the pattern before you blindfolded me. Any of a thousand five-year-olds could do the same thing.”

  “No, no, Tyler, don’t ruin the magic,” my father said.

  “What magic?”

  “The magic you just performed—which, by the way, makes you a magician.”

  “How was what I did magic?”

  “You did what Danny did with Pillow—only in reverse. Danny fooled us by taking advantage of our internal model of the world—by creating a false location for Pillow within our brains. You fooled us by masking your own internal model—using the scarf to make us believe you couldn’t see the cube. In both cases, we, the audience, were fooled because we believed the scarf hid nothing from us.” He stirred the sauce. “Anyway, this got me to thinking about another kind of magic act, nature’s magic act.

  “We’re all so certain that the brain—the stuff we see when we crack open the skull—is what creates consciousness. And yet we know this can’t be the entire story either, because consciousness seems to be so much more. But what if this conundrum is merely due to a kind of naturally occurring magic act? What if this naturally occurring magic act is exactly how we are conscious?”

  “You don’t think the brain creates consciousness?” Ishana asked.

  “I don’t think we can see our brains.” He peered into the sauce pot. “Ish, whatever this stuff is, I think it’s done.”

  ****

  In the dining room, minutes later, my father took his usual seat—at the head of the table, nearest the kitchen—and Ishana took hers, at the opposite end, nearest the front window. Unfortunately (and perhaps because I wasn’t aggressive enough), I found myself diagonally opposite from Danny, with Ishana to my right and Mohamed and Jamila to my left.

  On the wall behind Danny, Captain Ahab in a sea-swept rowboat prepared to harpoon a whale; behind me, Don Quixote—eyes intense, hands gnarled—prepared to slay a windmill.

  “Tyler,” my father said, “maybe you should have sat next to Danny. You both seem to have a penchant for black.”

  I assumed he was being rhetorical. It would have been pretty idiotic at that point to start playing musical chairs. On the other hand, I noted that Peter’s red tie and robin’s-egg blue shirt did clash spectacularly with Danny’s black and gold elegance.

  “Before we begin…” My father raised his glass. “I’d like to formally welcome Danny to the Quantum Bay Labs team. Welcome, Danny.” We toasted. “Also, we now have a rough date for the A.I. XPRIZE presentation: early March. That gives us only sixteen months. And I know you all know what that means.”

  “Maximum effort?” Stewart said.

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s an inside joke,” Stewart informed Danny, passing her a plate of biscuits. “Maximum effort is a term used by this general in this old World War II movie, Twelve O’Clock High. Gregory Peck plays the part of the general. Anyway, when he’s asked to take over an American bomber squadron in England—”

  “He ends up pushing his men to the limits of their sanity,” Peter interjected.

  “And that’s when he knows he’s achieved maximum effort,” Stewart explained.

  “But then he, himself, ends up succumbing to the pressure,” Peter said.

  Stewart and Peter went on to tell Danny how, about a month ago, the Quantum Bay Labs team, and several others from Cobalt, had gathered in the upstairs theater room to watch Twelve O’Clock High. They had ordered Chinese food and, at about halfway through the movie, everyone started running off to the various bathrooms. Everyone, that is, except for my father and Mohamed, who, as legend would have it, kept right on eating.

  “That food was perfectly fine,” my father muttered, stuffing a forkful of pasta into his mouth.

  “I was never so sick,” Peter said.

  “And with those B-17 bombers just droning and droning over those big bass speakers,” Stewart added.

  “Can we please just enjoy this food?” Ishana complained.

  “That lo mein was a little gamey,” Mohamed said. “But in a good way.”

  My father roared with laughter, and Mohamed broke into a rare smile.

  “By the way, Tyler.” My father put down his fork. “I need you to fly up with me next week to meet Vincent Schneider.”

  “Who?”


  “Vincent—Dr. Schneider. The guy doing the layout design for the Prometheus Control Chip—the Warwick Chip. That’s where we’re meeting him: Warwick, Massachusetts.”

  “Shouldn’t Mohamed and Stewart be the ones going?”

  “Vincent has a CPL program he wants to talk to you about.” My father wiped his mouth and stared at me. “You remember Vincent—big mustache, round as a beach ball—he worked on Holstein’s STAR project…?”

  “Funny as hell, too,” Stewart added, looking around the table for agreement.

  I shrugged. Of course I knew who Vincent was. I just hated the fact that my father had, yet again, volunteered me for another project. He knew perfectly well that the moment I started helping Vincent, I’d be doing all the work. Complexity programming in CPL is a lot like solving a Rubik’s Cube (the way I solve them, anyway): you either see the patterns or you don’t. There are no algorithms to carry you through.

  “Well, he’s a fan of yours,” my father said. “Plan on coming.”

  “Yes,” Mohamed said, “enjoy your flight.”

  I gave him a crooked smile.

  “We have room for you too, Mohamed,” my father said, then turned to Danny. “Mohamed’s a little afraid of flying.”

  “I’m not afraid of flying. I’m just afraid of whatever it is that you do.”

  “Remember that landing at Oakville?” Stewart asked.

  “I still wake up in cold sweats,” Mohamed said.

  “I remember that.” Peter looked at Danny. “Dr. Cipriani kept asking me, ‘Do you see the runway?’”

  “And we were only like a hundred feet off the ground!” Stewart said. “I saw a man dive under his car.”

  “This story gets more and more ridiculous every time I hear it. Don’t listen to them, Danny.” My father looked at Stewart. “We landed, didn’t we?”

  “Sure, after a ninety-degree bank between those power lines.”

  “A ninety-degree bank? I think I need to take you up in my Citabria and show you what a ninety-degree bank feels like. Okay, I admit things did get a little hairy that day—mainly because of those power lines—but we landed safely, and that’s really all that matters. Tyler, we’ll fly up Monday—and I know, I know, you’re not officially working here, but one afternoon won’t kill you.”