by Tom Caldwell
Natalie shrugged as she scrolled through her contact list. “I think you’d be promising her a job if she did that for you. A good one.”
“I was planning to,” said Roshan, taking umbrage at the implication. “If Ezra and Jacob were thinking of hiring her anyway, we can find something for her. Shruti’s young, we can sponsor her education, do the mentor thing.”
Natalie looked up at him, trying to gauge his sincerity. It was surprisingly high. “Really?”
“Yeah. I always wanted to be someone’s mentor.”
“It would be a crime if you didn’t,” Liz drawled. “You have so much to offer.”
Natalie intervened before they could get into an actual slap fight. “Then get her info and call her.” She took another drag, exhaling sharply as she hit her assistant’s number on her phone. “It’s a good angle, if she’s down for it. —Hi, Emily, change of plans for today. I’m on my way to Siddhartha Station, can you make arrangements to send a camera crew with us? Like documentary stuff, yeah. Small is fine...”
“Is Shruti even a good coder?” Liz asked Roshan.
“Probably good enough,” Roshan said, leaning back against the handrail of the walkway, his own phone in his hand. “There’s no way she could be worse than, like, Marty.”
“The bar is low, I see.”
Roshan didn’t argue, for once. “Yup. AI still creeps people out—not you, obviously, but normal people. Taking care of Taltos shows that we’re about human compassion and connectivity, not just machines. It’s the right thing to do, and coincidentally, it’s really useful.”
Murdoch raised an eyebrow. “Or the other way around?”
“Oh my God, you’re so funny,” Roshan said in leaden tones. “Speaking of Marty, where does he even work in Bijaspace? Not the Earth HQ, right? If he’s on Siddhartha, maybe he can help get us inside.”
“It’d solve a lot of security issues,” Murdoch admitted, unfolding her tablet to check up on Marty’s illustrious career. “If he has any kind of system access, I can use Ahriman to throttle them.”
“Even better.”
“Of course, that could implicate Marty. If Magnus gets upset and decides he wants somebody’s head on a platter.”
Roshan rolled his eyes. “Granted, but if we get in there and try this and fail at it, Marty’s going down anyway. He used to work with us. Magnus would accuse him of being a Taltos collaborator whether it’s true or not.”
“You’re right, that is an enormous flaw in your plan.”
“You haven’t pointed out a flaw.” Roshan had to lean in to whisper-yell at Liz, since Natalie was on her phone. They kept swearing off each other, but inevitably the distances began to close as time went by. “You didn’t even specify what you think will go wrong. You just made a dark prediction, and hoped we’d all think that cynicism is the same thing as intelligence. Well, it’s not. If you think there’s a problem, fucking spell it out. How would we fail? What would go wrong?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Murdoch. It was as close as she would come to saying she liked the plan, because she didn’t; it was also as close as she would come to saying she didn’t have a better idea.
At the hangar, Roshan found a quietish side corridor to talk to Shruti. Storage rooms, equipment lockers, weird pools of condensation wetting the concrete, wisps of M-fuel fumes in the air. “Hi, is this Shruti? Roshan Tehrani. CEO of Ahriman Technologies—”
“I know who you are,” she said. Video chat was off, and he could only hear her surroundings: she was sitting on something that creaked, maybe a staircase or an old guestroom bed, and there were voices nearby, like a family gathering that she was trying to escape. Except she doesn’t have a family anymore, moron. Distant relatives and well-wishers, at best. “Is this about Taltos?”
“Yeah—yeah, definitely,” said Roshan, gingerly lowering himself down to rest on his haunches, trying not to sit in or lean against any of the mysterious wet spots. “We’re having some trouble with—um, Ezra and Jacob have been incommunicado since Magnus rescued them. ‘Rescued’ in inverted commas, maybe, ha.” Instinctively trying to make a joke even though this situation wasn’t funny, not even to him. “Taltos’ VC firm wants them back, and legal wants to get the sale of the company data finalised. So we’re going to head for Bijaspace to pick them up.”
“Is Bija just gonna let you do that?”
“Probably…nooot,” said Roshan, drawing the syllable out while he tried to think of a better plan than the one they had. It wasn’t working. “Ezra’s not exactly reliable, but Jacob would’ve called us right away if he was allowed to place a longsat call. He just would. The fact that he hasn’t suggests that Bija’s in a hostile mood. The radio silence worries me.”
“Huh.” Shruti sounded worried too. “What’re you guys planning to do?”
“Natalie Cope, our investor from Ennead—she’s gonna get a camera crew to follow us, as if we’re making a documentary. Magnus can get away with a lot on his own turf, but he’ll try to behave if he’s on camera, she thinks. We thought it might really help to have you there as a—”
“As a prop, yeah.”
“I did not say prop. You didn’t let me finish.”
“Fine, so finish. You want me there as a what?”
Roshan was now throwing darts with his eyes closed. “As—as a symbol of Taltos’ past. And future. As well as…I mean, we’re very interested in, um, investing in your career. Your education. Ahriman would pick up the tab for university, free ride if you want it.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh—assuming you still want to be a coder, absolutely. We’d have a harder time justifying it if you want to leave the tech world forever and study Russian literature or something. You don’t, right?”
“I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it, but if I’m going to be a symbol of the past and future…”
“Oh no.”
“I’m just saying I might need a few years to find myself in college,” Shruti said. “Ivy League, right?”
“You know, some of the best places for STEM aren’t traditional ivies—”
“I’m just really feeling the aesthetic, you know? Quads, cricket fields, sweaters, oak panelling, club ties, racism—”
Roshan caved. “Okay, fine, study wherever you want. Oxford, the Sorbonne, Wittenberg, who cares, it’s on the house.” He could afford it, if he got Ezra’s data. “Just help us get Jacob and Ezra back, before Magnus breaks them psychologically and they end up with Bija Stockholm Syndrome.”
“I’m taking the piss, man, it’s okay. You could’ve just asked me to help them, you know,” said Shruti, more quietly. “Ezra and Jacob put their asses on the line to get us off Perdigon. I’ll return the favour—bribes appreciated but not necessary.”
“It wasn’t a bribe. Just…your whole world was demolished, just when you were getting ready to leave it,” said Roshan. He knew what it was like, building model rockets in his backyard as a kid, launching them at the moon on summer evenings, wishing he could make something big enough for escape velocity. Afraid he might never do it, afraid the little rockets would go further than he ever would. “It wasn’t your fault. You deserve a clean shot.”
“Everyone does, I guess. Thanks.” Shruti sniffed sharply, once, and said, “I’m in Toronto right now with my chaachi and her kids, but I can take the train out to the spaceport in Hamilton tonight. Is that too soon?”
“It’s perfect.” Roshan felt about four different muscles loosen up in his neck. “Perfect. Hey. I like your hustle.”
Alone in his anonymous room on Siddhartha, held as an unofficial hostage, Jacob was watching the ships docking around the station’s pylons. He’d been sitting by the viewport for a couple of hours, lost in thought and entranced by the blinking lights on the ships as they came and went. Starboard was green and port was red. He hadn’t yet worked out what the blue lights were for.
He remembered the first real conversation he’d ever had with Ezra. After that elevato
r encounter, Jacob had seen him one evening at a self-serve bar near the Bija campus. The place was just a glorified vending machine, a narrow shopfront tucked between a dry-cleaner’s and a convenience store, bathed in apple-green light from the neon sign out front.
Jacob had been on his way to Lot G in the rain—banished from Magnus’ sight. Waiting at a crosswalk, he’d happened to look up and see the coder from the elevator sitting at the little bar’s front counter by the window, like one of the figures in Hopper’s Nighthawks. That profile. The coder had made eye contact with Jacob once, then looked abruptly away as if he hadn’t meant to get caught staring.
Curious, Jacob crossed the street and let himself into the bar, which was empty and humid, a cheap fan struggling to disperse the warm air.
The coder gave him a tiny smile. “Hi Jacob.”
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” said Jacob, apologetic, as he sat down at the counter. The touchpad menu’s glass was spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, repaired with a few pieces of clear packing tape—he could still feel the paths of the cracks under his fingertip as he ordered a bottle of water. The mechanism behind the back wall made a series of kachunk noises, then dispensed the bottle on a frayed old conveyor belt that ran along the bar. “You’ll have to forgive me if we’ve met before—unfortunately, years of trauma have given me a memory like Swiss cheese—”
“Um, we haven’t. Met yet. Sorry,” said the coder, who was carefully peeling the label off his bottle of Sapporo in a long strip. “Or we’re meeting now, I guess. It was fifty-fifty between this place and the Bija cafeteria. This is quieter, it’s better. I’m Ezra Barany and you’re Jacob Roth.”
“Pleasure to meet you—Ezra, have you been following me?” Jacob asked, keeping his tone as neutral as he could, although he checked over his shoulder to make sure the route to the exit was still clear.
“No—I mean, not the way you’re probably thinking. I guess you could think of it as—no, it’s not following or stalking or anything, I just know things,” said Ezra. They both looked sallow in the green light, but the backs of his ears were red. “Sorry. I can go, if you want.”
“Well, wait. What do you mean, you know things?”
“Have you done any reading on Serfaty’s area 39v?”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the brain,” Ezra said, gesturing vaguely towards his right ear. “It’s a newer classification system, based on Serfaty’s work in the ‘70s—he identified this part of the entorhinal cortex, in the medial temporal lobe. The ventral part of area 39 is normally associated with memory, perception of time, navigation. Discerning the familiar from the unfamiliar. Serfaty also found that it was strongly implicated in cases of—well, alleged psychic ability, I guess.”
Jacob wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “I…no, I haven’t done any reading about that. I’m sorry if I’m not understanding you properly—are you saying you’re psychic?”
“Sort of. Yes. I don’t like that word.” Ezra wiped his clammy hands on a bar napkin that was already half-shredded. “This isn’t like…’fear death by water’ or something. It’s science, I mean. I’m not just bullshitting you. We can already stimulate area 39v in rats—at the right frequency, they’re able to navigate unfamiliar mazes without errors. More complicated in humans, the process works with some people and not with others. There might be unique cells that fire in correlation with—I’m getting into the weeds here, I’m sorry.”
“No, not at all,” Jacob said reflexively, not because he understood yet but because he wanted to keep listening. Even if it was nonsense. He liked the racing rhythms of Ezra’s voice, dropping sentences in the middle, switching tracks, doubling back and jumping forward. “This is new material to me, that’s all. What kind of stimulation are you talking about?”
“Deep brain stimulation with targeted electrical impulses, administered by an implant. It’d be like a pacemaker in your head, almost. Or that’s an idea I’m looking at, anyway.” Ezra made a gesture like a spasm with one hand, as if demonstrating an electric shock, then went back to fidgeting with the Sapporo bottle. “When I was a kid, the doctors suggested that something like that might help, uh, regulate my brain, sort of. They thought it’d stop me seeing things. Knowing things.”
“Did it work? Did they try it?”
“Yeah. Broad-spectrum ECT, which was back in vogue when I was young. It’s an old treatment that goes in and out of fashion, because when it works the results can be dramatic, but when it fucks up it fucks up bad. For me, it made everything…louder, I guess?” said Ezra, rubbing his thumb over the beads of condensation on the glass, tracing curves and lines. “Louder. Yeah. Anyway. I recognised you in the elevator.”
“From the future?”
“Right.”
“What did you see?” Jacob asked, then tried to take it back. “Never mind, that’s probably a question I shouldn’t ask…”
“It’s okay,” said Ezra, with another private little smile directed down at the top of the bar. “You don’t really believe me, but that’s okay too. Just watch. Next car is red.”
In the rainy street outside the bar’s front window, a red car passed by, cutting a grey wake as it sheared through a puddle.
Before Jacob could say anything, Ezra said, “Next one’s blue. Then two black, then one white, then blue again.”
Blue. Black. Black. White. Blue.
Up until then, Jacob had been listening to Ezra with a certain amount of benign condescension—trying to be open-minded, trying to listen kindly to someone who was probably sick. Empathising, validating, but reserving judgement. By the time the last blue car passed, though, he was shaken. “How—you could be using accomplices…”
“I couldn’t, I don’t have that many friends,” Ezra admitted. “Four, max. Traffic’s easy to predict, anyhow. Even simple AIs can do it already. What I’m interested in is predicting more complicated social patterns—I’ve got this fascinating coding project that I’ve been working on since college, it’s a music app that predicts the Billboard charts.”
“That’s what you’re using this for?” Jacob said, unable to disguise the incredulity in his voice. “Really?”
Ezra shrugged. “Proof of concept.”
“Of course. Sorry, I’m just…” This could be something that would get Jacob back into Magnus’ good graces. Not that he wanted to go back to that executive bathroom, but getting out of Lot G would be nice. Jacob had always been eager to please, even when he should have been keeping his head down. “Can I see it?”
“Yeah.” Ezra got his phone out to send him the prototype app. He didn’t ask for Jacob’s address, just thumbed it in from memory.
Months later, Jacob had asked him why he’d waited for that moment. Why hadn’t he said anything in the elevator? Or before that, even?
Ezra had merely shrugged. “Wrong time.”
“But I would’ve been just as happy to talk to you then.”
“Uh, no. You wouldn’t. Elevator had to happen first.”
“Why?”
“That’s just the way it is,” Ezra had said. “People don’t care about things unless…it has to seem like their idea. People need context, preparation, insight—lots of stuff. Without that, a prediction doesn’t mean anything.”
“Really?” said Jacob. “I’m not disagreeing, necessarily, sorry. I just didn’t know that you were…aware of that. Most of the time you seem to drop your bombshells and walk away.”
“Okay, well, I’m aware. I’m just not good at it. But most people aren’t—look at all those scientists who tried to warn everyone about climate change. They were right, but the people they were trying to reach weren’t ready to think in those terms. They couldn’t imagine a different world, and so to them, the predictions just sounded crazy.”
“Was it really a failure of imagination that made them ignore the warnings, though?” said Jacob. “Wasn’t it greed, in the end?”
“Greed was in the mix, sure, but they didn’t und
erstand how to be greedy in a different kind of economy, because they couldn’t imagine how it would work. If people aren’t ready to hear, they won’t. They need to be shown, they need to be taught. Predictions without context don’t change anything, just like—like a punchline doesn’t get a laugh without the setup. There’s a structure to this stuff. And being too early is the same thing as being wrong.”
Defeatist, maybe. But in the elevator, Ezra couldn’t have said, In the future, you throw it all away to come work with me, I’m the man you marry. Even though it was true. It would have felt invasive and creepy. Saying it out loud would have prevented the very future it was describing.
Instead, Ezra had held back, and Jacob had been the one to make the decision to sit down with him in the green bar. Wanting to understand. Ready for that future to unfold. Ready to be taught.
Jacob fell asleep with his cheek mashed against the cold glass of the viewport, and it was almost midnight on the station when he woke to the sound of the door chime. Stumbling to the door to check the screen by the security panel, it took him a blurry second to recognise Roshan.
Jacob barely waited for the doors to finish sliding open before he threw his arms around Roshan, who was looking rumpled, as if he had dressed in the dark in a hurry.
It took a second to register the camera crew in the hall behind Roshan—they were filming on equipment barely bigger than their phones, but the lights were still big and cumbersome. “Roshan—what is all this, how did you find us?”
“Come on, you think there’s anything Ahriman can’t find?” said Roshan jovially, gripping Jacob by the forearms, but then drew him down to whisper in his ear. “This was Natalie’s idea to get us inside, and so far it’s working, so play along.”
At regular volume for the cameras, he added, “We’re just shooting some material for the big Taltos re-launch before we head back to Ahriman’s Earth campus.”
“It’s time you boys came home,” Liz intoned, with such aggressive emptiness that it had to be a scripted line. She was lurking between the two camera techs like a lost stage hand, her arms folded. “Perdigon was a shitty idea anyway. A fetid swamp full of bottom-dwelling garbage fish and Catholics. You guys’ll have to cut that, huh?”
