“The Vapor Kid? What does that mean? Why am I in the Chronicle with this stupid headline?”
I was stung.
“Have a look at the other newspapers and you’ll start to connect the dots…”
Again, I reached into the backseat and grabbed a pile of magazines and newspapers. Time, Wired, Newsweek, New York Times… I was on the cover of all of them wearing the same thing! Standing in front of the black cube. The headlines ranged from admiring to strongly critical: “He’s going to change the world!”
“The Next Big Thing”
“The $100 Billion Man”
“Fall Faked!”
“The Fraud”
My hands were shaking. This young man, who was the it-boy of all the newspapers, who ignited so much passion, I didn’t know him! I had no memory of him! Me, worth $100 billion? World changer? But how could I be?
“Mark, this is all beyond me, it’s… it’s surreal!”
“It’s your world, Leo, it’s real. The fruits of your strong will and years of work. And we are going to have to get you back at it quick, because there’s not much time left.”
Mark’s voice was as cold as a knife blade. I felt in him an icy determination, without an ounce of humanity. His fingers gripped the leather steering wheel as if he were trying to make it burst, his teeth clenched tight.
“They say that you wanted to throw it all away because your promises were nothing but a sham. There was no way out, no way to escape shame and ruin, it was the only way. Now you are alive and you’re going to have to explain yourself, Leo.”
Dumbfounded by what he was telling me, I didn’t notice that we had exited the Highway and the Bentley was now following a narrow dirt road up a hill. The car slowed down in front of a large cast-iron gate that opened automatically as we arrived.
On one of the massive pillars, a gold sign read Hal.
San Francisco
Hal
The Bentley parked in front of the enormous mansion. A modern design, it was rectangular and mounted on stilts with huge bay windows. The view across the San Francisco Bay was spectacular.
“You designed it so that no matter where you are, you can always see the Bay. From the moment you arrive, there it is. That’s why you put it up on stilts.”
Hesitant, I got out of the car and turned toward the stairs leading to the front door of the mansion. At the top of the stairs, I stood there for a moment speechless.
“Mark… I can’t find the door.”
“I’m not surprised. There isn’t one. You said that it was a thing of the past.”
“A thing of the past? A front door into a mansion is a thing of the past?”
“Did you not read those magazine covers, Leo? You want to change the world.”
“Yeah, but this much? To the point that there are no more front doors?”
“Yep, this much, my friend.”
“Okayyy… so how do you go in?”
“You just walk in, that’s it.”
“I just walk in… and that’s it?”
“Yes, just walk in… and that’s really it.”
I examined the large bay window in front of me looking for some sort of opening. Nothing. So what kind of mechanism would let me just walk in? After a few long seconds, I decided to walk forward. A light breeze blew across my face and forearms and I heard a knock behind me. I turned around and saw Mark tapping on the window.
“Leo, let me in please!”
By some sort of technological miracle, I’d gotten in. But not Mark.
“You can’t get in?”
“Of course not, it’s your house, not mine.”
Of course. There must’ve been some sort of camera or voice recognition system.
“So how do I let you in?”
“You have to ask him.”
“What? Ask who?”
“The house, of course.”
“The house?”
“Yes, the house. Come on now, just do it. I know that this might seem odd, but we’ve really got work to do. So, please, just let me in.
“Um… House… let Mark in!”
I had the nasty feeling that I was in some kind of children’s story, like I couldn’t have sounded more ridiculous than if I’d said “Open Sesame!”
The window stayed intact and refused to open for Mark.
“No, Leo, you’re not doing it right!”
“Uh… House, please let Mark in.”
“His name is Hal.”
“Hal? The house’s name is Hal?”
“Yes, like the computer in 2001 Space Odyssey, sound familiar?”
Apparently it did, but I found it extremely strange to call a house by name.
“Hal? Hal, can you hear me? Can you let Mark in please? Thank you.”
Nothing happened.
“Hal? It’s me, Leo. I’m asking you to let my friend Mark in.”
Still no change in the bay window. Mark was getting antsy.
“It should work, Leo. You have to really mean it.”
“Hal? Open the door for Mark right now. I order you.”
Suddenly the window started to vibrate rapidly. I jumped back, afraid that it was going to blow up. Mark, on the other hand, walked forward with a confident step and literally walked through the glass, which stayed intact.
“Incredible! How does it do that?” I asked.
“The glass liquefies with the quick vibrations. A powerful electromagnetic beam keeps it in place and allows you to walk through it.”
“And this is from our labs?”
“It’s still very experimental. We are testing the sociological consequences of such an invention.”
“I think that’s definitely something we would need to look into.”
The light-filled interior of the mansion looked like something you might see in one of those international decorating magazines. Beautiful white leather couches and armchairs, a long burl wood dining room table, chairs and furniture made of a magnificent translucent material, and a wall that seemed to be made of mirrors several feet high. Soft music filled the living room and I recognized the Bossa Nova song, The Girl from Ipanema.
I had taste, which could also be seen in my house. However, I would have expected more electronic gadgets for a billionaire geek.
Mark asked me to follow him and as I passed, one of the mirrors transformed into a masterpiece of art, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
“You own it!” Mark exclaimed.
“A Van Gogh?”
“No, the digital rights to it. No reproduction in the world - photo, video, digital image, - none of them can be made without your permission.”
“And is it expensive to acquire the digital rights to a Van Gogh?”
“The original Sunflowers was sold for $45 million. You got the digital rights for $55 million.
“$55 million? For...what… the information... the ones and zeros?”
“Times are changing Leo… and they’re making you a fortune. Follow me, I need to introduce you to the person who matters the most to you.”
Mark hesitated when he said “person”, a fixed grin plastered across his face. But he quickly regained his composure and we went down a wide staircase to a large, light-filled room. It was empty. A wide bay window like the one upstairs offered a breath-taking view of the Bay.
After a long pause, Mark took on an air that was almost religious, whispering in a barely audible voice: “We’re here. This is where everything was and will be decided, Leo.”
“Here?”
“Yes, here.”
At this point, I took a deep breath and tried to gather my wits. The situation was totally surreal if you stepped back and thought about it for two seconds. Here I was in this empty room, me, the billionaire -geek-who-wants-to-change-the-world-and-lost-his-memory-after-having-tried -to-throw-it-all-away-for-some-unknown-reason, and my slick associate tells me that my future (his future too maybe) will be decided here… And what do I do now in this empty room? Another perhaps more reassurin
g possibility that had been rattling my brain all morning was that maybe I was still in a coma. Or maybe I was dead and this was the start of my journey through purgatory, some sort of high-tech rite of passage. From this room, I would start my new life.
“Leo? Leo, are you following me?”
Mark’s soft voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Huh? Yeah… But what am I supposed to do, Mark?”
Mark looked at me straight in the eyes. I hadn’t noticed how severe his eyebrows were until now. Furrowing them together, his light eyes revealed impatience and hopelessness.
“Leo, I thought that your memory would come back once I got you in this room! But I don’t have any say in your work. I’m out of control here. You’ve been working on this project alone and you are the only one who can do it. You’ve got to pull yourself together. Come on, I’m begging you!
“Sorry, but nothing comes to me. Listen, I don’t know what I can do, I don’t remember…”
All of a sudden the windows went dark and a staircase appeared in the floor. Shocked, I jumped back to the wall.
“Here we go! There she is!”
“She?”
The staircase vibrated silently and opened into a gaping hole. Something was moving down there, and I had only the craziest ideas of what it might be. Some kind of evil beast was going to jump out and rip us to shreds. Or maybe Mark was the devil and these weren’t the doors to heaven opening before me, but the jaws of hell.
The room was plunged into complete darkness and I could just make out Mark’s silhouette in front of me. His excitement seemed to take hold of him and he raised his hands in the air, reinforcing my idea that this was some kind of religious ritual.
Smoke was coming out of the hole. This was madness.
By now I was terrified and paralyzed with fear. My heart was going to give out. There was no way that it couldn’t. I was absolutely certain that my doctors would have been against this extrasensory experience.
Bum Bum
Bum Bum
Bum Bum
Bum Bum
Bum Bum Bum Bum Bum Bum Bum Bum
After a few long seconds, the noise stopped.
The blue diodes in the ceiling and walls lit up. The reflection of the light in the smoke gave me the feeling of being in the sea.
A soft breathing sound confirmed my impression that the smoke was dissipating.
And all at once, the smoke was gone.
And then I saw in the middle of the room a formidable being who would be the most important to me in the coming days.
San Francisco
Eve
I knew the form standing in front of me. I had stood in front of it time and time again for the newspapers that Mark showed me. It looked a bit smaller to me in the photos. Here, in the middle of this room, all alone and 10 feet tall. This black cube was seriously impressive. I approached the object slowly and skimmed the tips of my fingers across its surface. Its material felt soft to me and at the same time very hard. It reminded me of the skin of the dolphins that I had swum with once. But what really struck me was the temperature beneath it all. The cube gave off a soft heat, not too hot, not too cold, like… human body heat.
“Leo, allow me to introduce you to Eve.”
Lost in thought, I had forgotten that Mark was even there.
“Eve?”
“Yes, Eve. That’s her name.”
“You mean that’s what I named her?”
Mark let it sink in for a few seconds, as if to give more weight to his words.
“No, Leo, you don’t understand. That is the name that she gave herself.”
His words left me speechless. The idea of a machine giving itself a first name seemed so ridiculous to me that I started to laugh.
“And she chose this name by chance on Google or something? Typed in What is my name? And then clicked I’m Feeling Lucky?”
“You tell us, Leo. This is exactly the question that I’ve been asking myself, along with our investors and the rest of the world.”
“Do they think it’s some kind of hoax?”
“Yes, I think that’s it, Leo. But even if your memory fails you, I know that your ability to think outside of the box is still there and now you have the main pieces of the puzzle in your mind.”
I held my head in my hands for a few seconds to take it all in and realized that there was something extraordinary about my memory. I was capable of remembering all that I had learned and knew how to easily call on my personal resources. But what I had personally achieved myself, my own history, my actions - I couldn’t remember any of it.
“This machine... it’s some sort of ‘artificial intelligence’ or something?”
“Yes, well at least that’s what you promised the whole world, starting with me.”
I knew about artificial intelligence. Back in the 1970s in the early days of technology, it generated a lot of excitement but slowly lost momentum as researchers discovered that the computational power that was supposed to grow exponentially and be able to process endlessly complex combinations, didn’t actually work. The intelligence was limited to the computational power of the machine. And on top of that, there was still the problem of creating intuition, memory, emotions and senses.
Emotions. Now there’s a challenge. If you can manage to make a computer laugh, you will have solved one of the greatest questions in the reproduction of human intelligence. Of course, you can enter in all of the jokes that have ever been written throughout human history and try to come up with an algorithm that indicates whether a joke is funny or not, but this interpretation would still be linked to the personality of the person behind it. Therefore, it seems that to make a computer laugh, you would have to create a true personality. In humans, personality is created by hundreds of billions of sensorial inputs accumulated over the years, which are then sorted and organized in a way that scientists still don’t understand. So you would have to create a whole set of routines in order to construct the computer’s personality as well as all of the parameters allowing it to react to the information that it receives - a super-human endeavor that would require an unfathomable amount of intricately interwoven settings.
“I’m completely at a loss here. Somehow I managed this incredible feat, but I have no idea how I possibly could have done it.
Mark looked nervously at his watch.
“I’ve got to go now. I have to stop by our office and give the news to your team. Then I have to meet with the Board.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“Come with me? I’d rather you devote yourself to Eve and give me an update as soon as possible. As for the teams… I think that they would be truly shocked if you just walked in.”
“Shocked? Do I really look that bad?”
Mark smiled.
“No, Leo, it’s just that they have never actually met you in the flesh, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“Before your accident, you weren’t interested in them. You saw your programmers as ‘coding sheep,’ as you liked to call them. Listen, I gotta go. Let me take care of everything like I used to and you focus on your number one problem - Eve.”
Mark started back upstairs.
“Wait a second, I almost forgot the most important thing! I’m the one losing his memory now!”
He came back down the stairs and set down the messenger bag that he’d been carrying since the hospital. He opened it and took out a super thin laptop with a logo that read Goddess of Life and gave it to me.
“You’ve got 10 more just like it. I just grabbed one from your office. I’m sure that you will know how to use it.”
Then he turned around and hurtled up the stairs two at a time.
A few seconds later, I heard his syrupy voice for the last time that day.
“Oh Leo? Can you get the door for me, please?”
Of course. See what happens when you get rid of door knobs?
So I whispered, “Hal, sweetheart, could you open the door
for the Slimeball, please?”
Nothing happened. Hal wasn’t so intelligent, that was for sure.
“Hal, can you open the door for Mark, please?”
I heard a click. Mark could go out now.
“That’s all, thanks Leo! See you later!”
A heavy silence filled the room.
I now had an appointment with the most extraordinary machine in the world.
The New York Times
Front page
“Singer Laura Della returns to the stage at Madison Square Garden tonight for her first concert since her terrible car accident. This long awaited show is completely sold out, and thousands of fans have been lining up since this morning for a chance to get close to the singer, who is now worth over $65 million in album sales. After mourning her absence from the stage for months, the evening is sure to be an emotional one for the singer and her fans. The artist gave her last concert at the Stade de France in Paris last spring, closing her international tour, “A Thousand Angels Around Us.”
Twitter
@brokenheart
#lauradellaconcert I’ll be there! Just a few hours to go! #Iovemylife #angels
@starfan
Killing me that I didn’t get a ticket for tonight… #lauradellaconcert #fml
@sweetheart30
I love you Laura! Good luck tonight! #lauradellaconcert #lovetour #superstar #thousandangels
@stephanieloveslife
Laura Della is the most amazing singer the world has ever given us. Thank you for everything you bring to our lives #lovelaura #miracle #angelsaroundus
Madison Square Garden Backstage
30 minutes before the concert
“Do you hear them, Laura? You hear them?”
Invisible Symbiosis: An Artificial Intelligence Thriller Page 3
