Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  After a few days, when the archaeologist showed no sign of rejoining her students for the trip home—for enough time had passed by now, and their Tuareg guide was concerned about the impending conflict—the students decided to act according to their instructions. Without warning they set upon the archaeologist, binding her arms and forcing her to wear the cap and veil. They saw the change ripple across her face, and the people nearby turned around, as before. But this time their faces were grim and sad, and they moved as one toward the three visitors. The archaeologist set up a great wailing, like a child locked in an empty room. Terrified, the students pulled her out of the building, dragging her at a good pace, with the villagers following. If the Tuareg guide had not been waiting at the perimeter the visitors would surely have been overtaken, because he came forward at a run and pulled them beyond the boundary.

  Thus the archaeologist was forced to return to Bamako.

  Some years later, having recovered from her experience, the archaeologist wrote up her notes, entrusted them to her former student, and disappeared from Bamako. She was traced as far as Tessalit. With the fighting having intensified, nobody was able to investigate for over a year. The woman to whom she had left her notes returned to try to find her, guessing that she had gone to the settlement, but where the settlement had been, there were only ruins. The people had vanished, she was told, in the middle of a sandstorm. There was no sign of their belongings, let alone the great tapestry. The only thing she could find in the empty, arid, rocky wasteland was a small, round pebble, shot with a vein of rose quartz.

  In the notes she left behind, the archaeologist had written down her conclusions—that the machine generated a field of a certain range, and that this field had the power to dissolve, or at least blur, the boundary between self and other. She wrote in French, and in Arabic, and in her mother tongue, Bambara, but after a while the regularity of her script began to break up, as a sandcastle loses its sharp edges and recognizable boundaries when the tide comes in. Thereafter her notes turned into intricate, indecipherable symbols reminiscent of the great tapestry that had hung in the main chamber of the settlement. These continued for several pages and finally, on the last page, she had written in French: I cannot bear it. I must return.

  Thus end the three accounts.

  Candidates will observe the requisite moment of contemplation.

  The candidate will now consult the Compendium of Machine Anomalies, the Hephaestian Mysteries, and the Yantric Oracle, which will help put these accounts in context. Having completed its perusal, the candidate will make the requisite changes to its own parts in order to generate hypotheses on these questions. Is the negative space of ambiguity machines infinite? Is it continuous? Are the conceptual sub-spaces occupied by each machine connected to each other—by geography, concept, or some other as-yet-undiscovered attribute? What can we make of the relationship between human and machine? If an engineer can dream a machine, can a machine dream an engineer? An artist? A mathematician? An archaeologist? A story? Is the space of ambiguity machines set like a jewel or a braid within the greater expanse of the space of impossible machines? Is it here, in the realm of dream and imagination, that the intelligent machine might at last transcend the ultimate boundary—between machine and non-machine? To take inspiration from human longing, from the organic, syncretic fecundity of nature, the candidate must be willing to consider and enable its own transformation.

  Begin.

  Requiem

  The thought of the letter lying on her desk in the untidy apartment was like a little time bomb ticking in her mind. Varsha told Chester about it, between the steamed mussels and the fish course.

  “So I’m going to Alaska for spring break,” she ended.

  “But—what about Atlanta?”

  He had been holding her hand in that ostentatious way he had whenever they were in a restaurant known to be a White Purist hangout. He let go of it, looking hurt.

  The seafood place was a hole-in-the-wall with a clientele that clustered around the TV screen and yelled epithets during football games. The AugReal entertainment was of poor quality—floating sea captains and naked ladies, mostly, but the food was fantastic. Chester liked to live on the edge, take her to places like this, challenge the status quo. She pulled down her Augs to look at him in the world: the blue eyes, the little cut on his cheek, the slight pout of his lips, a tendril of graying brown hair sticking damply to his forehead from the steam still rising off the dish of mussels, and thought: he’s really quite a kid, even though he’s eleven years older than me. That was the attractive thing about him, this childlike quality in a brilliant young professor, although at this moment it was annoying.

  “Atlanta can wait,” she said firmly. “This is my favorite aunt we’re talking about.”

  “You were going to go in the summer.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? The place is closing ahead of schedule. I have to get her things.”

  It hit her again that her aunt Rima was dead, had been dead for more than a year, that there was no relief from the shock of it, no matter how many times she mourned. And Chester was being a jerk right now. And she had homework to finish, grad school being what it was. She got up, grabbed her bag, and turned and walked away from him, from his shocked face, his half-suppressed “Varsha!”, the catcalls and laughter from the men at the bar. At the door she looked back very briefly—he was rising to his feet, arms reaching out, his face filled with rage and bewilderment. The night outside was cold—she fell into her familiar jogging rhythm, ignoring the glances of strangers, feet pounding on the pavement, bag strap tight across her chest—all the way to the T-station at the corner.

  The tragically delayed letter was lying on her desk. I’m coming, I’m coming, she said silently to Rima. Just like you wanted me to a year ago, I’m coming to Alaska for spring break.

  I first heard the songs of the bowhead whale on the internet. Varsha and I and a bunch of neighborhood kids and one of the pariah dogs—I think it was Tinku—were gathered in the front veranda of the Patna house, playing a video game. For some reason that I can’t remember now, we looked up whale songs, and there it was, the long, strange call, filling the space. The dog Tinku started howling in tandem and wagging his tail, as though he could understand what the whale was saying. All of us burst out laughing. But there was something about that song that tugged at me. It occurs to me now that my journey to the Arctic started there, on that afternoon, with the honeysuckle bush in full bloom and the smell of the flowers almost making me dizzy. The shisham trees in the front garden whispered in the breeze—a kind of bass note to the whale’s song—and all those years later it is the whales I hear, and the shisham trees are a warm and distant memory.

  We are out in the boat, Jimmy and I, and we are following a pod of bowhead. There is an AUV—an underwater robot—fitted with a hydrophone that is moving with the whales. We can see its output right here on Jimmy’s laptop—the spectral analysis of the conversation below, and the sounds themselves, in their immense complexity. We know each individual in the pod—they were tagged decades ago, but even without the tags, the coloring on their flukes or the injury scars on their flanks tell us who they are. We’re seeing more propeller scars since the Arctic was opened to shipping. The killer whales have been moving up, too, hungry terrors that they are, and the bowheads that survive bear some horrifying scars. No wonder the bowheads are pushing farther North, toward the pole, where the waters are still cold, tracking the changing currents in search of krill.

  I have learned that bowheads may be the oldest-living animals in the world. They live for over two hundred years! Apart from the new threats, their lives are relatively peaceful: the slow migrations around the North Pole, in the sub-freezing waters, with their kin; when hungry, they just open their enormous, garage-sized mouths and sieve in millions of tiny krill. Living that long, they must think long, deep thoughts. What do they think about? What do they say to each other?

  When we are back
at North Point, Jimmy will put on the headphones and scroll through the video feed and spectral analysis. Apart from language-recognition software, he says immersive attention is a way to use the best pattern-recognition device we know—the brain. It’s what his people have always done, paid attention to their environment in a way that makes the most observant scientists among us seem oblivious, blind, bumbling. No wonder I am having such a hard time with the language—Iñupiaq has to be the most precise language in the world.

  I wish I could help you all understand what it is about this place that gets me. It is so cold I don’t have the words to describe it. Even with global climate change—even with the warming of the Arctic, the winters here are colder than we tropical flowers can ever imagine. When the wind blows, which it does all the time in gales and gasps, I feel like there is no breath in my lungs. I have to put warm gel packs in my gloves and boots so that I don’t get frostbite. For six months of the year there is darkness or near darkness, and—what I miss the most—there are no trees! But still, this place draws me and draws me and draws me, and it isn’t just Jimmy or the work. The tundra in early spring is astounding. The way the low sun hits the snow, the blinding beauty of it takes the breath away. Once, out in the field, we saw two Arctic foxes playing, chasing each other round and round in circles, without a sound. But the tundra is not silent. Did you know, ice can speak? It squeaks and grunts, makes little slithering, sliding noises, and great explosive, cracking sounds too. Once, early in my stay here, we were out on the sea ice, Jimmy and I, along with a few others from North Point. It was dark and cold, but very still. The stars were out in their billions, and we could see the faint, translucent curtains of the Northern lights high in the sky. We were getting ready to set up our instruments, talking quietly, when Jimmy said: “Guys, we’ve got to get off. Now.”

  I looked around but there was no obvious threat. I was going to ask Jimmy what the problem was, but then I saw everyone else acquiesce without argument. They packed up in a big hurry too. Hurry, hurry, Jimmy kept saying. I was thinking maybe there was an emergency with his family that he’d somehow remembered, but the moment we got off the ice there was an ear-splitting crack, and the segment we had been on suddenly broke off. You can’t imagine what that was like—a whole great peninsula of floating ice suddenly detached from the rest of the shore ice and floated away, ghost-like in the semi-dark, into the black Arctic Ocean. I was shivering and shaking with shock, but the others were slapping Jimmy on the back and shaking his hand, as we trudged back to the trucks.

  I asked him later how he knew. It’s paying attention. Something he learned from his father and grandfather when he went hunting with them as a little boy, a kind of sixth sense that is developed through experience, a sensitivity to the slightest change in wind direction, the tiniest syllable spoken by the ice. Imperceptible to others, this ability to communicate with the physical environment is what originally earned the respect of scientists for Native Elders.

  In the plane, on the final leg of the journey, Varsha’s bravado vanished. It was a really small plane, and there was a crack across the plastic of the seat in front of her, which didn’t inspire confidence. She could pull on her Augs and edit that all away, but she wasn’t such a V-head. Working in the field, you got to know where to draw the line.

  It didn’t help that there was sick misery rising in her. There was no avoiding the fact of Rima’s death. Rima was supposed to have come down from Alaska to settle her in last August when Varsha had first arrived from Delhi—but she was already seven months dead and gone, taken by the ice during a storm, along with her partner and lover, an Eskimo scientist called James Young. It had been hard enough for Varsha to alight in Boston alone, to find her way to the International Graduate Students office at the University, to walk the bewildering streets of Cambridge in search of her apartment. But this was harder. The man who had forwarded Rima’s last letter had written to say that the research facility where her aunt had worked was closing down ahead of schedule, and there were some things of Rima’s that the family might like to have. The man’s name was Vincent Jones, and he would be glad to help in any way he could.

  The plane banked. They were about to land in Utqiagvik. Her aunt had always, in her restless travels, been drawn to remote places, but this was the end of the world, or so it had seemed from the pictures on the internet—a town of mostly Eskimo people at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. She pressed her face against the window. There was a whiteness everywhere—white sky, white land, no horizon but the undifferentiated whiteness. For a moment she thought they must be flying through clouds, but the plane’s wing was clearly visible. She fought a feeling of wild panic, and reasoned with herself—the plane wasn’t going to crash. There were people talking all around her, tourists and Natives, excitedly, because this was the first real winter in a decade.

  “Which hotel? That must be new. They say the Castle of Light has the best views . . .”

  “Worst winter they’ve had in a decade . . .”

  “This is a real winter. This is what winters used to be like. Back then, before the Great Melt. It will be good, maybe, for the whaling.”

  “The sea ice came back this winter to nearly 70%—no more multi-year ice—it will be thin and dangerous to walk on . . .”

  “. . . when you were growing up? Every year like this? Man, that must have been crazy . . .”

  In the whiteness below, there appeared a pinprick, then another and another. A line of houses or sheds, all in a row. The plane swooped lower and lower and she held on to the edge of her seat, thinking this is what Rima had seen on her first visit to this place—when was it? Five years ago? Maybe she’d been in this very plane, in the same seat. The misery rose in her like a solid wall.

  On the ground there was ice everywhere. The runway was ice, and ice rimed the edges of the small airport. It was a large metal shed with a corrugated roof and an extension clearly under construction—behind it were roads of ice, and buildings in the same utilitarian style. The airport was a single large hall with areas sectioned off for tickets, departures, arrivals and luggage. Native Iñupiaq Eskimos, white tourists, a small knot of men in coast guard uniforms. How strange to be in a place where the whites were so clearly the other, and yet this was still America! Oh America, I thought I knew you. She heard English around her, and a language she took to be Iñupiaq, the Native tongue of peoples who had been here for thousands of years before the Europeans came. What would Rima have thought and felt, coming here for the first time? Waiting for her suitcase, she texted the family group. I’m here in Utqiagvik, all fine. I must only be the second Indian to come to this place. It’s really different. There was her little orange suitcase, between wooden boxes and sacks. She hauled it off the belt and looked around with a feeling of panic. Where was her host? Her Augs beeped and she hastily pulled them on. The scene before her was augmented with scrolling information, and a couple of VReal polar bears wearing toothy welcoming smiles were speaking a welcome. “Welcome to Utqiagvik, Northernmost city in the US,” they said. “Take your taxi or van directly from the airport area. Polar bears have been sighted in town.” Amidst the strangeness and wonder of this was the little message icon flashing, showing her an outline of where Vincent Jones was waiting for her. Near the exit door. She arranged her backpack on her shoulders and wheeled her suitcase ahead of her to the exit.

  He was a large man with a broad, quiet face. His thin hair was streaked with white. He looked like the Tibetan refugees she had known in New Delhi. Smiling, he held out his hand.

  “Good, good. You’re here. Rima talked so much about you. You look like her.”

  “Thanks for receiving me,” she said. It was so strange to be here, to be here without her aunt Rima, who would have stood here shivering like this in this exact spot. There was a wind blowing, sharp in her face like icicles. She pulled up her hood. Vincent seemed unperturbed by the wind. They climbed into a large, black Land Rover which lumbered slowly into the streets of ice.r />
  “It’s a little ways to North Point,” Vincent said. “We’ll go through Utqiagvik and by the ocean, so you can see the sea ice over the Arctic. It’s been some years since we’ve had a winter like this one. Used to be the norm, once upon a time.”

  All she knew about Vincent was that he was somebody at North Point Polar Research Station, and he had been Rima’s friend, and he had sent the letter. It had been found on the desk in her office. He had been going through her desk because North Point was closing down. Rima must have meant to send it right before the trip out to sea from which she had never returned.

  “What was it like last winter, when my aunt died?” she said. Might as well get it over with. “We got the reports, but I’d like to understand—”

  “It wasn’t this cold or icy,” he said, “but we did get one great storm. The Arctic has been in a warming trend for decades, but it’s not steady, it goes up and down. Last winter the sea ice was so thin you couldn’t walk on it. Things are changing so fast weatherwise, it’s hard to predict whether a storm is going to fizzle out or turn into a howling blizzard. Rima and Jimmy were out in one of the research boats less than ten miles from shore when the blizzard hit.”