Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  Her hands clenched on her lap. It was cold despite the heater—the tips of her fingers felt like ice.

  “We didn’t used to have much of a coast guard presence when I was growing up,” Vincent was saying. “But even with a coast guard station right here, they couldn’t do anything with that storm. Had to wait two days before they could risk sending out the helicopters and the search vessels. That was the only bad storm we had that winter. This winter the cold and snow and ice are much more steady—this was normal once.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “Jimmy was my cousin.”

  “Oh—God, I’m so sorry,” she said. She glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead, his face set.

  She looked out of the window. There were children out on bicycles—bicycles!—with thick treads in the front of a small grocery store. Their parka hoods were lined with fur. An Eskimo couple went by on a four-wheeled open vehicle, their faces ringed with fur-lined hoods. A man was digging out a car from several feet of snow in front of a house. The buildings had the same utilitarian steel-shed look of the airport, except for an extraordinary structure some six floors high that looked like a wedding cake.

  “Castle of Light Hotel,” declared the ornate sign.

  “Tourist trap,” Vincent said, a short, amused laugh. “Good for the economy, or so I hope. Used to be we’d make money off oil leases, before the oilfields gave up the last of the oil.”

  They turned east, leaving behind the houses. Now they were driving into the tundra—ahead and to their right was an expanse of snowy whiteness, flat and featureless. After a while they passed a large sign on their left with a cut-out image of a larger-than-life snowy owl. “Pagliavsi,” declared the sign, standing alone in the snowy emptiness. “Ukpeagvik, site of ancient Eskimo Village,” Vincent said. Behind the sign the ground rose gently and then fell away into an enormous plain, its smoothness broken only by untidy chunks of ice, like broken piecrust.

  “You should know,” Vincent said after a while. “Your aunt. She loved what she did. Like Jimmy—they were a pair. We’ll stop in a bit so you can see the sea ice.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get to know him,” Varsha said. “She talked about him to us.” She thought of Rima’s full-on zest for life. It was possible to be a fifteen-year-old and feel older and duller than her then-thirty-year-old aunt. Those days, Rima’s enthusiasms and adventures had led her from a short stint as an adventure and travel writer to a degree in mechanical engineering and the design and customization of wind generators in the high Himalayas. In the lush back garden of the old house in Patna, under the mango tree as old as her great-grandfather, Varsha had sat on the swing with Rima and heard all about the great expanse of the Tibetan desert, the lakes of meltwater from the vanished glaciers, oases in the arid heights. The wind that blew hard and cold, the measuring instruments that recorded wind speed and direction over an entire year, so that Rima and her team could design the best wind-energy-capture system for that particular locale. She saw the pictures and felt the possibilities of the world open up, a familiar side-effect of being with Rima.

  And now there was a lump in her throat, but Vincent was already pulling over by the side of the road and motioning her to get down. Here she was, Varsha of the tropics, on the Alaskan North Shore. There was the endless white expanse before her, with only the shiny ice road winding away before them. The sun had emerged from the clouds, and lay low on the horizon—the light on the snow hurt her eyes. She pulled up her Augs in world mode. You are 1280 miles from the North Pole, scrolled the message to the right of her field of view. Vincent led her to the top of the rise on the left. Her boots crunched on the snow. At the top they paused. Before them was the great, white plain broken by small piles of cracked ice. It extended all the way to the horizon, as far as she could tell.

  “That’s the Arctic Ocean,” Vincent said. “Sea ice. Frozen sea water. You can tell there’s water under there from the way the currents make the ice break up.”

  “Can you walk on it?”

  “In places. Used to be parts of the sea ice attached to the shore stayed all year round, built up a little every season. As much as three, four meters thick sometimes. We used to camp on the ice when we cut whaling trails in the Spring. Your aunt ever tell you about that?”

  “A little,” Varsha said. “She said the whaling hadn’t been very good for a while.”

  “You’re cold—let’s get back in the car. Yes, the bowheads changed their migration patterns after the Big Melt. We, the Iñupiaq—my people—had always lived with the whales, and when they started to change, our old knowledge wasn’t as much help. The killer whales started coming up into the warming waters, hunting the bowheads. And the TRexes became active at the time.”

  In the car the heater was running on high. She put her hands in front of the vents.

  “We’ll get you proper gear for this place,” he said. “Your aunt’s stuff. She loved this place but never liked the cold.”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me about the TRexes,” she said. There was an Augree Experience involving intelligent monster machines that she’d helped debug when it was still in production. She’d been surprised to learn that TRexes were for real, in the world.

  “There are about twenty of them working these waters,” he said. “Still got oil and methane down on the sea floor. TRexes found two large deposits last year. But they’re having trouble with some of them, I hear. Shut-downs and failures. Keep your eyes peeled, we may see one on the way. There’s one operating a few miles from us at North Point.”

  They didn’t see any TRexes but after about an hour the North Point Research facility loomed suddenly out of the landscape—a building capped by four tall steel lattice towers, and three rows of small windows on the visible sides of a cubical structure in between. The windows shone in the sun’s low light. The place was larger than she expected. It jutted out into the plain of sea ice on concrete pillars.

  “We’re down to a handful of people,” Vincent said, leading her in past a heavy steel door. “Most of the researchers have left. The rest are packing up, finishing up. You’ll meet them at meals. I’m the Native liaison here.”

  Inside, there were white walls and long corridors, gray-painted metal doors, some with windows.

  “Who’s bought the station?”

  “GaiaCorp’s Arctic Energy unit,” he said. “They run the TRexes.”

  The dorms were at the back of the facility. Their footsteps echoed emptily in the silence. Lights came on as they walked. Vincent led her to a small room with a white bed and a desk and chair. “Bathroom’s down the hall,” he said. “Sorry, we live kind of plain here. Why don’t you get settled and I’ll ping you when it’s time for dinner. The door next to yours—that’s the suite Rima and Jimmy had. It has an attached bathroom if you want. Here’s their keycard, and here’s yours. Thought it would be easier to have you right next door.”

  After she had washed up and unpacked, she saw that it was only four-thirty. She took a deep breath. Might as well start now. She went into the suite her aunt had shared with Jimmy Young. It consisted of a tiny outer room and a bedroom and bathroom. When she turned on the light she was startled at how bare it looked. It had clearly been used very little, mostly for sleeping, she imagined. There was a stereo in the small living room, a carving of a polar bear on the coffee table that looked like it had been made from bone, and a picture of two people on the prow of a boat. She picked up the photograph—it was Rima, her face rimmed by a fur hood, and almost-uncle Jimmy, snow goggles pushed back over his head, his dark hair windswept. They were both grinning as though they were having the time of their lives. She set it down again, congratulating herself for keeping her composure so far. She had a job to do, and she simply had to keep herself together until it was done. Pretend she was on an errand for a strict taskmaster like—her aunt. Yes. Sure. In the bedroom she willed herself to open the closet. Vincent had taken care of Jimmy’s things—only her aunt’s clo
thes were here. She could donate some to the local town swap, Vincent had said. She breathed the still air inside the closet. Was there something of Rima left here, still, after all these months? A faint whiff of something indefinable—a lotion—yes, the sandalwood lotion from home that everyone in the family used. There was a long, beaded kurta in green, and a pink chikanwork outfit among the flannel shirts and turtlenecks—she buried her face in the kurta and swallowed a lump in her throat—she would keep those. She began to pull things onto the bed, making two piles.

  Once she had begun it was easy enough to continue with the suitcases in the closet—mostly empty—and the shoes at the bottom. Then the side table. This was going fast. If she went through the office stuff as quickly she would be done in a day. Whatever had possessed her to plan a four-day stay?

  But when Vincent knocked on the door to call her to dinner, there was still the pile on the bed to be arranged, and the books in the bookshelf—she had let herself become distracted by them—well-thumbed volumes about Iñupiaq culture and history, one on biomimicry, a number of technical-looking books on alternative energy and acoustical engineering. There was a book she had gifted to her aunt when Rima had left for the US: The Best Travel Writing of the 21st Century—it had “Love, Varsha” on the inside cover. There were books on economics and history, cetacean biology, and interspecies communication.

  She was relieved to go down to the dining hall, where a buffet meal was served—rolls and fried chicken and some kind of vegetable greens she couldn’t identify. She sat with Vincent and four other people to whom she was introduced, all white except for Vincent and an African-American called Kenny, who was a sea-ice expert. It was strange to be around people who weren’t wearing Augs or any other kind of goggles, who were so much in the world. Usually she liked talking to people but suddenly she was almost too exhausted to eat. Fortunately the others seemed preoccupied with the impending shutting down of the institute. Incomprehensible discussions about local politics and who was going where and what Arctic Energy would do with the facility allowed her to concentrate on her food and sit with her thoughts, until the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair sitting next to her said in a low voice:

  “Sorry about your aunt. It must be awful—but you don’t want to talk about that. How was your trip?”

  She would have liked to talk about Rima. It might have helped her feel grounded, she thought tiredly, but she had noticed how most Americans tended to assume that dead people were off-topic. She tried to smile.

  “Long. And cold, at least the drive here. I’m still warming up.”

  The woman laughed. Her name was—yes, Julie. She had very pale skin, and a fine dusting of freckles.

  “I’ve been here for two years and I’m not really used to being here either. For one thing, the Arctic is going through some really rapid changes. Kind of like being married to whatsyourname here.” She elbowed the man next to her, who smiled. “But mostly what gets me is the absence of light for six months of the year. If you’d come in December it would have been darker and colder.”

  “Boston will feel tropical after this.”

  “Hey,” Vincent said. “This is the best place in the world. Even with climate change. No need to enhance reality when you have—this!” He swept his arm around the room. The Arctic night was dark blue outside the small, square windows.

  “It would be hard to edit out the cold, or your ass freezing doing fieldwork on the ice,” said one of the young men, whose name she had forgotten already. He nodded pleasantly at her. “Vince said you’re in VReality, is that right?”

  “Not at the moment,” she said. The greens tasted bitter and sad, as though they had never known the sun. Even her Augs couldn’t fix that. She explained about her Master’s program.

  “Bet you can’t wait to get out of here,” said the young man. “The US of A isn’t what it used to be. Unbelievable how quickly things have changed in just a few years.”

  “It wasn’t that great before, Matt,” said the black man. Varsha remembered his name was Kenny or something. Yes, Kendrick. He looked in disgust at the pile of chicken bones on his plate, and stabbed at the soggy greens with his fork. “Yes,” he said. “Try being black in America in any era. It’s worse now, of course. And there’s North Point. There was a time we couldn’t have imagined oil coming back, after the ban. Now we have GaiaCorp promising to protect us through geoengineering. Project Terra! Why study climate change when we can fix it from space? We can burn fossil fuels again! Get the last of the oil and gas out of the Arctic. Five, six years ago, if you’d told me that there would be TRexes in the ocean and North Point bought out by GaiaCorp, I would have said you were crazy. I’ll never say ‘It can’t happen’ again!”

  “Started with the Space Act in 2015,” said Matt. “You start mining the moon and then suddenly you have the corporate wars, then Earth Corp, and the agreements with nations, and—”

  “Spare me the history lesson,” said the fourth person, the one next to Julie. He put down his fork and dragged his fingers though long, straggly brown hair. “I agree with you in broad terms but you are connecting the wrong dots, Matt—”

  Vincent pushed back his chair.

  “Got to go finish up some things. Varsha, you got everything you need? Breakfast is from six to nine a.m. After breakfast, if you want, Julie can show you around. Julie—?”

  “Sure,” Julie said. Varsha felt guilty. These people were winding down what seemed to be their life’s work. She didn’t need showing around. She had all the sorting and packing to do—

  But she wanted to know Rima the polar scientist. She wanted to know her almost-uncle Jimmy. She nodded.

  “Thanks, I’d love that. If it isn’t too much trouble.“

  There was a TRex at work far on the horizon. She was looking out of the window of the office her aunt Rima had shared with Jimmy Young. Jimmy’s space had been cleared and someone called Terra Longfield now occupied it, her absence bounded by pictures of a smiling blond child and drawings in crayon. But Rima’s desk was stacked with boxes of her things—papers, books, knickknacks that had used to be on her desk, including a picture of Varsha, and another picture of the family at the Patna house, the colors faded but the faces still poignant in their familiarity. Varsha was the kid tugging at Rima’s arm in the picture, pointing off-camera to something in the garden, and Rima was bent slightly forward, laughing, about to follow her niece’s glance. They were the only two not looking at the camera.

  It was cold in the empty office. She looked up to the window and saw the skyscape, the morning sun still low in the sky, the impossible immensity of the expanse of snow, the pale gray smudge of the horizon— and against it, a TRex somewhere far ahead where the sea ice gave way to open sea. Its skeletal frame, with the long head turning slowly this way and that, looked so alive and purposeful that she shuddered involuntarily. They were smart machines, she knew, but this one, far away as it was, seemed positively sentient. Its long labrum sipped hydrocarbons off the ocean floor, and the proboscis sniffed for methane bubbling up off the ocean floor. When exploring, she had heard, it would become buoyant in the water, its array of airguns firing boom-boom into the sea, looking for oil and gas under the seafloor. It was an amazing piece of engineering. Despite the remoteness of this one it felt more real than the ones she had seen in VR games.

  A knock at the door made her jump. Without waiting for her response a man came in. He was wearing a suit, which seemed incongruous after the casual clothing of the others. He was tall, with a pleasant, open face, and wavy dark brown hair. He wore a pair of Augs—state-of-the-art—in world mode—she could see his eyes through them, green. He smiled and held out his hand.

  “Rick Walters. So pleased to meet you, though in such sad circumstances. I knew your aunt well.”

  There was something compelling about him, she noticed, as she returned the pressure of his hand. An air of complete assurance and good nature.

  “I just wanted to let you know—if you n
eed help, or want to talk, I’ll be in and out,” he said.

  “Thanks. Are you a scientist here?”

  He laughed. “Me? Alas, I haven’t the temperament. I’m the Transition Liaison. Making sure the handover goes smoothly. Much as I’d prefer an Augs Enhancement, I have to have results in the world. Sorry to say.”

  She laughed. “I’m glad you’re not a V-head. It gives us a bad name.”

  “I just got my nephew his first real Augs,” Rick said, lightly. “He’ll be totally thrilled to know I met someone who works with them.” He passed his hand over the edge of her aunt’s desk, picked up the family photo, and set it down. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be interrupting.”

  Later, after he’d left, she thought how normal he seemed. He was from her world, the world of busy metropolises and high tech. But there was an older world than that, and she missed it now. Standing in the cold room, she pulled on her Augs and brought up her favorite program for when she was homesick. The walls of the room turned a sunlight yellow and the view from the window was of her grandparents’ courtyard. There was the old guava tree that she had grown up with. There were potted plants on the bench beside the window and she could hear the faint strains of the tanpura from her music lesson in the next room. The program was creative—it took the boxes of her aunt’s stuff on the desk and rendered them into piles of multi-colored knitting wool. Her grandmother was a knitter. Someone came into the room—it was her uncle. She waved to him, smiling. But when he spoke, his voice was distorted. “We apologize for the Cognitive Dissonance . . .” The words scrolled across her field of view. “Initiating patch—”

  But she had already pulled the Augs down. It wasn’t her uncle speaking Hindi, it was Vincent speaking English. His thin gray hair was disheveled, as though he had just pulled off his hat, coming in from the cold.