Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  He was charming, even if he couldn’t be trusted. She should say no—but what harm was there in a helicopter ride? She was sick of this room, sick of grief. She could handle this man—she had known men like him during three years working in industry, before the MS program, before America. Before.

  She was glad not to run into anyone else as they went up to the roof of the building.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just over the sea. Quick trip out to the nearest TRex and back. You’re here for such a short time, you should see a little of the Arctic.”

  On the rooftop the cold breeze took her breath away. She stumbled—Rick steadied her, his face unreadable behind the goggles. She climbed into the helicopter, a compact yellow-and-black giant bumble-bee of a machine, with “Arctic Energy” painted on the sides, and the circular insignia of GaiaCorp.

  “You know how to fly this thing?” she yelled over the engine’s roar.

  He grinned.

  “Want to inspect my license?”

  She shook her head.

  “Just get me back safe and sound,” she yelled as they rose into the air. “In time for lunch!”

  “Much as I’d like to spend more time with the most attractive woman in fifty square miles, I fully intend to get us back for lunch,” he said, laughing. “Although I could get you a better meal in Utqiagvik.”

  “Mr. Walters, you’re flirting,” she said. Below them the ice sheet was a great, white wing, fraying at the edges where it met the liquid sea. North Point station had vanished behind them.

  “Sorry,” he said. He sounded unrepentant. “Look, we’re over the ocean now. Those little white patches are part of the shore ice that separated, floated off.”

  The ocean was incomprehensibly vast, stretching away to the curve of the horizon. Above their heads the helicopter blades were a blur through the transparent walls of the cockpit.

  “Why are we going to see the TRex?”

  “We’ve had some trouble with a couple of them, we don’t know why. System failures, mechanical wear, hydrophones non-functional. I like to reconnoiter at least semi-regularly. Despite the Big Melt the Arctic is still a really inhospitable place—well, I don’t need to tell you that—”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Hang on, we’re here.”

  The craft fell like a stone. Varsha clutched the edge of her seat, but the helicopter slowed and hovered over the dark sea. The tops of the waves glittered in the low-angled sunlight. She gasped.

  Before them, rising out of the water like a creature from a mechanized Jurassic nightmare, stood the TRex. It was the one she had seen from the window of her aunt’s office. Its long snout swiveled toward them and its optical sensors glittered with iridescence like the compound eyes of an insect. Rick’s fingers flashed over the copter’s dashboard, and the TRex abruptly bent its head. Its neck collapsed inward until was several meters shorter.

  “It’s pulling its legs in—I’ve put it in search mode, so you can see how it works,” Rick said. “Look!”

  Floats inflated on either side of the machine. It began to move, through some invisible propeller mechanism, purposefully across the sea. The copter followed it.

  There was a deafening series of booms below them. A milky froth appeared in the water around the TRex.

  “That’s the airgun array—don’t worry, I’ve turned it off now. Sound waves penetrate the seabed and are reflected back. See the buoys around it? Hydrophones, receiving the sound, giving it a picture of the sea floor, hundreds of meters down.”

  “Pretty impressive,” Varsha said. “But damaging to whales, I hear.”

  “Yes, but the TRex has a 360-degree sensor that detects whale pods,” Rick said. “It’s not just the Iñupiaq who care about whales, you know. We spend a lot of R&D money making sure we don’t damage the environment.”

  His fingers moved over the dashboard controls again.

  “There, it’s back to doing sampling. Good, it passed the test, and you got to see it in action.”

  On the way back she asked him whether he’d looked at TRexes self-diagnostics.

  “You’re smart,” he said. “Like your aunt. The diagnostics don’t tell us anything, because the non-functionality comes without warning.”

  “It could be a kind of cascade failure,” she said. “I’ve worked with some sophisticated Augs programs—complexity can cause all kinds of sudden failures.”

  He looked at her.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said, “but I’ve seen some internal reports—problems with some of the Geoengineering projects that nobody understands. Warming spikes instead of cooling in the upper atmosphere. Plankton die-offs where you expect a bloom. Winds changing in unexpected ways. We could use people like you.”

  “I thought you were just the transition liaison,” she said, mocking him. “I didn’t realize you were the CEO of GaiaCorp!”

  He threw his head back and laughed. The sky above them was a deep azure. Below and ahead lay the ice, swathed with the sun’s gold light.

  “I like you, Varsha,” he said, looking at her. “I think we’re going to be friends.”

  Rick stayed for lunch. It was an uncomfortable lunch, since the scientists didn’t seem to want to talk very much. Only Carl—Julie’s husband—held up the conversation. Vince was very quiet. Varsha thought uncomfortably that perhaps he felt betrayed by her excursion with Rick. She wanted very badly to reassure him. After Rick left, she gave herself time to collect her wits, and went to talk to Vincent.

  He was in his office. Packing boxes sat on the floor and on chairs. Vincent had his back to her, looking at a large map on the wall. But when she came into the office, he turned, although she hadn’t made any sound.

  “About my copter ride with Rick Walters,” she said. “I wanted to let you know. He was all charm, but I didn’t tell him anything. He showed off his TRex and brought us back, that’s all. I wouldn’t let Rima down in a million years.”

  Slowly he smiled.

  “It’s been very tough,” he said. “The last year and a half it’s been one thing after another. It’s not for me to tell you what to do. But thanks for being smart about Rick Walters.”

  “What is it that he wants to know, anyway? What are we hiding from him?”

  “Rick’s an information gatherer,” he said. “He collects all kinds of details indiscriminately, in the hope that they will come in useful someday. That’s kind of how he swung the deal for North Point. In short, he’s nosey.” He pointed at the map. “I unrolled it and put it back on the wall after he left. Just to look at again before I pack it away. It’s Rima and Jimmy’s work. They called it the Map of Anomalies. Rick would love to get his hands on it.”

  It was a map of the coastline, rich with markings and symbols in a rainbow of colors. Lines traced the migration pathways of the Bowheads—different shades of blue indicating how the paths were shifting every year. Rima and Jimmy would follow the bowheads in a boat, or track them with drones and underwater robots, explained Vince. Little red triangles indicated sites of killer whale attacks—red squares were ship injuries, and red lines were TRex trajectories across the shallow seas.

  Event markers were in mysterious purple symbols.

  “This one—this was the most recent one, after Rima and Jimmy were lost. I put it in. Just this past October, at the time of the Fall whaling. These are places where Jimmy’s drones picked up bowhead whales in formations that have never been seen before, sounding together. Those symbols over there are TRexes that malfunctioned without warning. Rick’s not the only one interested in the TRexes.”

  Another symbol off the shore of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic indicated a crossing point, where migration routes of belugas, the small white whales of the North, intersected the new bowhead pathways. There were similar intersections with humpback routes in the North Pacific.

  “It’s a pattern-recognition exercise,” Varsha said, remembering games from childhood. “I wis
h I could see a little of what they saw.”

  On her third day at North Point, Varsha made a discovery. She had left the bookshelf for last. She started to make two piles on the bed—books to give to Vincent, if he wanted them, and books she would take back with her. On the bottom shelf she found something she had given to her aunt the summer before last—a fat tome that was not a book: Adventures in the Real and the Unreal. With shaking hands she opened it. There was her handwriting on the first page—“with love from Varsha—may you have musst adventures!” The first few pages were real—but in the middle of the book was a hollow compartment. Inside was a small book with a red-brown cover—a diary. There were also some thin, parchment-like pieces of paper, carefully folded.

  She opened the diary first. Her grandparents had given it to Rima when she had visited them, the summer before her disappearance. The last time I saw her, Varsha thought, and I didn’t even know it. She remembered Nanu handing his daughter the book. “I know you are too busy to keep a diary,” he had said, “but at least write something in it from time to time. When you think of us, write something for us. No engineering diagrams, but just what you are thinking and doing. Fill it up until your next trip home. Then bring it so we can all read it.”

  It was less than half full. Rima’s small, neat handwriting, interspersed with little cartoons. The first entry:

  “My greetings to the guava tree, the Bossy Pack, and the Human Horde of Chandragupta Park. No engineering diagrams, only deep thoughts in these pages. As promised! Right now I am on a plane back to Alaska, but I will write more when there is something worth sharing with you all . . .”

  She couldn’t read any further. She set the journal down and fell to her knees and wept, with her face against the bed, hard, angry sobs. She grabbed the pillow and held it to her. Her chest hurt. I could die with grief, she thought, and close on that came the thought of her grandparents. They had survived the terrible news—how? She thought of her Nanu’s face when they got the news, how it seemed to have shrunk. She thought of what he’d kept repeating, over and over, the first week or so—they didn’t find the body, they haven’t found the body— And then the discovery of the black box, the relaying of the last words, and the solidity, the incomprehensibility of grief. Her grandmother, who had seemed so fragile, suddenly appeared stronger, weeping her sorrow with a fierceness that kept them from going under. She had taken up knitting with a vengeance. The shawl she was knitting for Rima, that was half complete—she took it up again. Last Varsha heard, she was still at it—the shawl was the size of a blanket by now, and growing larger, as though it was possible for her grandmother to knit her way across the abyss that had opened in their lives. Even the pariah-dog pack that lived in the neighborhood, the Bossys, had howled for three nights. Her parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, the neighbors with whom the children had grown up, all shared the burden of grief. And someone or other would keep saying—look, Rima wouldn’t want us to fall apart, we’ve got to go on for her—and again—how could it be? She was the most alive person I knew—

  But there’s nobody I can share this with, she thought angrily. She was far away from everyone.

  At lunch she asked Vincent—

  “Is there a gym? A track or someplace I can run?”

  “There’s a treadmill on the upper floor. I think it’s still there. You can use it. The only gym’s going to be in Utqiagvik.”

  “You okay?” Julie, sitting next to her, gave her a quick, worried look.

  “I’m fine—well, as fine as I can be anyway. I just need—I have this habit, see, of running every day. They might bring the Boston Marathon back this year, so I’ve been training. I get a little crazy if I can’t run.”

  Later Vincent said: “You only have a couple more days here. I’m going home tomorrow evening. Come have dinner with my wife and me then.”

  She felt much better after the exercise. Back in her aunt’s room, she read some more pages of the diary. She carefully unfolded the sheets of paper—they were thin but tough, like cloth. They were blueprints of some kind, but hand-drawn. There was a delicate and precise sketch of a boat—but what a strange boat! It had flippers, and some kind of sail. A series of drawings showed the boat closing up from the top, like a convertible. There were other fine pages of notes, in a different handwriting, presumably Jimmy’s, because she couldn’t understand the words. Iñupiaq? There were sketches of whales of various types, and waveforms of sound waves. There was a list in her aunt’s writing—people and research institutions around the world—a Kartik Sahay at Marine Research Labs Chennai, a Skip Johnson at a facility in California, others in places as far away as Finland, Siberia, South Africa. Her aunt had thought all this was important enough to hide from prying eyes. Varsha remembered Rick Walters’ offer of help. Fuck off, she told him silently. On the other hand, what did she know about Vincent? He was not a scientist; he was the Coordinator for the Native Science Collaboration—they matched Native Elders with scientists. Whatever for? There was so much she didn’t understand about this place, these people. She was almost sure Rima had mentioned Vincent during her last trip home. She had talked about Jimmy, showed them pictures, and Vincent had been mentioned, and Julie. That was as close to an endorsement she was going to get, unless the diary provided any clues.

  She would probably have to trust someone eventually, but for now she would keep the existence of the diary and the papers a secret.

  In the afternoon there was some excitement. Matt reported that bowheads had been seen in the waters off Utqiagvik. The whaling camps were still being set up; it was a little early for the whales to have left their wintering grounds in the Bering Sea. A couple of whales were heading east along the coast now. There was a general rush to the observation bubble on the seabed.

  The sun’s light percolated dimly through the ice above their heads. The water was dark, washed with blue where the ice was thin enough to let in some light. Matt turned on the external lights, but very dim, so that the golden radiance allowed them to see about ten meters further into the water. Fish swam by on the other side of the wall, their pale bellies agleam in the light.

  “There!” Vincent said. “Agviq!”

  And a dark, mountainous shape loomed just beyond their field of vision, and swam with cloud-like grace toward them. It came deliberately, straight to them, a huge, thirty-foot bulk with its flipper brushing the wall, its great eye looking in. In all her life Varsha would never forget that moment when she looked into the eye of the whale. Near her the others were talking quietly, exultantly.

  “She’s looking well—look at that healed propeller scar—”

  There was another whale behind this one. The two whales took turns looking into the lighted room. There was a low, long, booming sound, like a distant cello. Varsha could feel the walls vibrate. The whales were calling. They must have circled the observation dome for a good fifteen minutes before moving away into the dark.

  “Wow,” said Varsha, finding her breath. “I’ve never—I’ve never seen anything like this. How do you know one whale from another?”

  “Marks on the fluke—the tail,” Vincent said.

  “Are they all so curious?”

  “Whales are individuals,” said Matt. “Most of them keep away from here, but these two, and there are three others—they stop and say hello whenever they are passing by.”

  “We have hydrophones set up all along the coast,” Julie said. “Here—I’ll play the recording.”

  She pressed a button on the computer keyboard. A waveform scrolled across the screen, and the sound filled the air. It was the strangest call Varsha had ever heard. It filled the room, filled her being.

  “It feels as though I ought to understand it, but I don’t,” she said, shaking her head.

  She thought of her aunt standing here, watching the whales, hearing them sing.

  One of my former engineering professors, who looked like the crazy prof in the movie 3 Idiots, had this huge construct in his lab made from odds
and ends—a Rube-Goldberg machine on steroids. If you dropped a certain ball onto a ramp, the machine would light up and there would be wheels turning, pulleys spinning, weights flying into the air to hit specific targets and so on. The grand finale was that a dart would fly out and bury itself in a large picture of Isaac Newton on a Styrofoam board. The damn thing made a great racket. Isaac’s face was so perforated with dart strikes that his visage had mostly disappeared. We loved the machine, and part of our spare time was always spent tinkering with it. The crazy prof called it “Newton’s Engine.”

  I realized when I was quite young that there were two classes of problems, broadly speaking, simple ones and complex ones. Machines are good at solving simple problems. But throw in enough complexity and all bets are off. I went into biomimicry-based engineering because I wanted to challenge this realization. It’s only when I got to the Arctic that I realized my first instinct had been right. You can’t solve complex problems with machines, without breeding more problems of increasing intractability. Complexity is the spanner in the works of Newton’s Engine. But it goes beyond that. You might think a sufficiently advanced AI would think its way through some of the failures (I happen to know they are not just rumors) that are plaguing GaiaCorp’s Project Terra. GaiaCorp has invested so much in its intelligent geoengineering systems, but I think it is inconceivable for autocrats to realize that their slaves might not march to their orders. AIs are a fundamentally different kind of intelligence than humans. We have more in common with the whales than with our household robots.

  I think our main problem may be that we think of the Earth itself like a Newton’s Engine, something we can tinker with and fix. Jimmy says that even biologists fall into this trap—of putting living creatures into rigid categories of structure and behavior, motivated by simplistic evolutionary imperatives. To him, to understand the whale would mean not just the kind of work he did for his PhD at San Diego, but also traveling with the whale through its great migrations around the North Pole, being part of its way of being, without any preconceived notions. “You see things differently when you are part of them,” he says. “Explain,” I say, and he laughs and says he can express these ideas better in Iñupiaq. It is so much more precise a language. Jimmy is not a talker—not in English anyway—I think because he dislikes sloppiness. He likes to say things right. You should hear him chattering with his nieces and nephews whenever there is a big family gathering. As I take the first baby steps learning Iñupiaq, I remember what you always used to say, Papa: that every language is a different way of seeing the world.