"Night, Gillian,” Jason would reply, winking brightly while showing that big, joyful smile.
And then she wouldn't think about the man again. At least not until the next day, if she happened to be at work. And if she were elsewhere, then she probably wouldn't consider him at all.
His last name was Popper, and Gillian couldn't decide when she learned that critical detail. But later she would recall an afternoon when the store was especially busy and Gillian had to call out for help. That's when she realized Jason felt some kind of loyalty to her, or maybe even an ill-defined interest. Because when the adjacent lane opened up, he waved other customers over there just so he could stand in her line, waiting patiently with a gallon of skim milk in one hand and an over-stuffed basket in the other.
Jason Popper became very real after that.
His attentions didn't go unnoticed. The assistant manager—a mousy-haired woman in the midst of her second divorce—made the point of teasing Gillian about her boyfriend.
"He's not my boyfriend,” the cashier argued.
"Oh, I know he's not,” the older woman said with a smile. But then her eyes narrowed and an edge crept into her voice. “Of course you know your boyfriend's loaded, don't you?"
Gillian's boyfriend was a college freshman who had a pesky habit of making her pay for their dates.
"Popper inherited a ton of money,” the assistant manager explained. “From what I hear, he owns a couple hundred shares of Berkshire Hathaway."
"Is that a lot?” asked Gillian. Which was a reasonable question, since she happened to own sixty shares of automobile stock—a gift from her grandmother; and because of the ongoing bankruptcy, worth little more than two tickets at the cheap movie theatre.
"Just one share of Berkshire Hathaway is a fortune,” Gillian learned. “If he wanted, Jason could buy out this store every day for the rest of his life."
But weren't quite a few of their customers wealthy?
"But how many are interested in you?"
At that instant, Jason became embarrassingly real. Thinking of him standing in her lane, all those groceries clasped in his hands ... well, Gillian felt herself beginning to blush.
"I wish he'd give me a second look,” the assistant manager complained. Then with a bawdy wink, she added, “I'll tell you what. I'd do a hell of a lot more than just ‘wish’ him a good evening."
Maybe there was truth in the accusation. Gillian tried to count the times that Jason didn't use her lane, and after several months, the number was zero. And if she happened to be on break, he would turn and stroll the aisles for a while longer, waiting until she returned. And always, without exception, he found something nice to say. He never actually told Gillian that she was attractive, but when he spoke about the lovely evening, he would stare at her cheekbones and her short curly hair and those big shy eyes that couldn't help but blink and smile at the same time. He was sweet and charming, but not pushy. Never pushy. That was one reason why she felt so comfortable with the gentleman. And of course the difference in their ages insulated her: Jason Popper was probably in his late forties, or even past fifty, while the object of his polite affections was waiting to turn seventeen.
For a year and a half, Jason was a very regular Regular. In smooth, almost imperceptible steps, their relationship evolved to where Gillian began looking forward to their several-times-a-week meetings. With a phrase here and an anecdote there, little details about each other were revealed. Sometimes her real boyfriend visited the store, and at least once, Jason chatted amiably with the boy. But on a different day, he asked Gillian about the two of them—one harmless question leading to several more—and after she had finished answering, he nodded and smiled while pointing out, “You can do better."
Yet when she finally broke up with the boy, Jason did absolutely nothing to fill the gap in her social life.
Now and again, her friend mentioned a busy life. He was some kind of researcher working for far-flung interests. He sometimes vanished for a week or two, and on his return, she would mention his tan, and he would name a conference in some exotic tropical port-of-call. And there were occasions—usually when she was out on a date with some new boy—when she noticed Jason at a distance. Each time, a different woman was at his side. A few of his dates were barely older than Gillian, but most were closer to his age. If she felt jealous, she was careful not to admit it to herself. Yet each of Jason's dates was beautiful, and sometimes, when Gillian needed encouragement, she imagined herself belonging at the bottom of that select group.
One day, early in their relationship, Jason asked about her college plans. Gillian mentioned several possibilities before confessing that she wasn't sure about anything. Then his smile grew serious, and with his most fatherly tone, he mentioned that her future was being built by an army of engineers and programmers, all working in the growing field of artificial intelligence.
Gillian didn't have a technical mind and his advice meant nothing.
But after that, she took the trouble to Google and Wiki him. In short order, she learned that the man was astonishingly rich. But more than that, the name “Jason Popper” was famous in an odd little corner of mathematics. She had never realized that she knew a rare kind of genius, and his potent little algorithms were fueling research in half a dozen fields, including AIs and cybernetics.
In the end, they were good enough friends that Gillian felt obligated to warn him that she was quitting soon. After countless delays, she finally decided on a college, and it wasn't going to be a local school. She'd work another two weeks at the store, and then she would move a thousand miles to live with her maiden aunt, finding work there to help pay her way while attending a little university in the wild woods of Minnesota.
"Good for you,” Jason declared.
That was the first time she felt hurt by him. She was hoping to see disappointment in his face, and perhaps hear a little pain in his voice. Wasn't she walking out of his life? Yet after more than a year of using her checkout lane, proving his unflagging loyalty, all he could do was offer a grand smile while saying, “The best of luck to you!"
During her last week at the grocery, Gillian didn't see the man once.
Was he traveling? But he hadn't mentioned going anywhere, and lately he had made a point of telling her if he was. She even took time to study the store records, discovering that her friend had shopped here only yesterday, half an hour before she arrived, signing for greens and oil and walnuts and a plastic box of cherry tomatoes—the makings for a salad big enough for two.
On her last day, Gillian worked until closing time.
It was night when she walked out to the old Corolla that her father bought her last year. Sitting in another corner of the parking lot was a sports car. She didn't notice it until it came to life, headlights opening as it crept closer to her. The car was a hybrid running on its muscular batteries, and it silently pulled up alongside her. The driver's window dropped and a familiar voice said, “Gillian,” with a suddenness that startled her.
She turned.
Jason was smiling, but something about the expression was different. Wrong. He looked serious and grave and suspicious, but just when she felt a touch of worry, the smile was replaced with a serious shake of the head and the handing over of an envelope, pink and square and bulging from whatever was stuffed inside.
"Good luck to you,” the man told her.
"Thank you,” she squeaked weakly.
Then he drove away, leaving her alone in the parking lot. Troubled and not certain why, she climbed into her own car and locked the doors and turned on the old-fashioned engine. For a few moments, she stared at the envelope, wondering if the right thing to do was to leave it at the desk, refusing whatever this was because something about the moment and these circumstances felt wrong.
But she had to look. How could she resist? With a long nail, she tore open the envelope, pulling out a greeting card that showed a calico kitten hiding behind a daisy, no words on the outside and nothing ins
ide but a man's careful scribblings, plus a tidy stack of one hundred dollar bills.
She counted fifteen bills before stopping.
This was exceptionally wrong, she thought. But she couldn't decide what made it wrong. She had done nothing and expected nothing from a man who had plenty of money to spend however he wished.
After a few moments of reflection, she finally read what Jason Popper had written:
"Gillian—
"You're a lovely girl, and have a wonderful youth. I'll come for you after the machines take over.
"Jason."
Beneath his signature was the name of a corporation that only recently went public, and beside it her suitor had jotted down the words, “If you want, use my gift to buy a few shares. They'll make you happy."
And as it happened, they did.
* * * *
The new world was smart and flashy-bright and prone to rapid, imaginative transformations—just as Gillian guessed it would be. The poorest human was richer than any emperor of old, and civilization was suddenly wielding an array of fabulous, muscular tools, giving it power over all but the farthest reaches of the solar system. But the Thinkers weren't quite what she'd guessed they would be. In her speculative moments, first at the college in Minnesota and then at graduate school in Boston, she envisioned computers that were a little larger than the machines she worked with, and fancier, and much colder. She knew practically nothing about the engineering of computers or AIs—a limitation she admitted to friends and lovers. But quite a few people knew she was a stockholder in Popper's thriving company, and if she wasn't competent in the tech stuff, then where did she get the good sense to invest at the beginning?
How she told that particular story depended on her audience.
Girlfriends heard a frank, somewhat amusing tale about a flirtatious old man and Gillian's extraordinary good luck. But boyfriends needed to be handled delicately, and experience taught her to pick between two basic avenues: Jason was a kind, harmless gentleman—basically just a fatherly figure. Or if she wanted to lift her value in the young male's eyes, she would play up the aspects of desire. She would imply that the great man had been interested in her, and perhaps she had encouraged him. On one or two occasions, when she thought she was in love and feared that her young man's attentions were wavering, Gillian would tell certain stories that were not even a little bit true.
It was amazing to see how a lover's mind could be intrigued by the idea of sharing a cramped bed with a billionaire's ex-girlfriend.
Gillian didn't particularly like that game, and when she was older, she consciously decided to tell nothing but the truth.
Yet what was the truth?
A decade had passed and she couldn't feel absolutely certain about the details involving her cashiering job or the customers. And another ten years brought her to an unnerving point where the past was vague and cluttered, but what she remembered with absolute clarity was the precise, much-practiced way she always told her story.
By then, the new world had begun.
Twenty years after the kitten and daisy and money, the Thinkers finally took over civilization—if only along proscribed, carefully regulated lines.
Jason Popper didn't build any of the hyperintelligent machines. But where a dozen other companies took that job, he owned the miraculous algorithms that were working furiously at the core of each newborn machine. And the machines were tinier than any contraption a young cashier would have imagined. One dime would have dwarfed the typical Thinker, and during that first pivotal year, the world's population of AIs could have fit comfortably on any shelf in a tiny neighborhood grocery store.
The results were sudden and world shaking, and for less prepared minds, they were terrifying.
But Gillian found the revolution bracing and quite fun.
The stock she had purchased two decades ago had already split repeatedly, and that following year, when its value was soaring, she sold half of her wealth in order to diversify in ten new industries, using the rest of her cash to buy a Thinker of her own.
Implantations were not routine yet. But the complications proved minor, the training period frustrating but endurable, and before her forty-first birthday, Gillian found herself in possession of an intelligence that was entirely her own—and she had the medical bills to prove it.
Soon the ancient limits to growth and social change had vanished.
Those first-generation Thinkers dreamed up new power sources and efficient rockets, plus the means not only to fix the Earth's teetering environment, but the tools to reconfigure the worlds and moons of a solar system that was suddenly lying within easy reach.
Before she was fifty, Gillian had her physical self made young again.
Soon after that, she emigrated to Mars, and later, out of love, jumped to a pioneer city floating in the clouds of Titan.
Now and again, she would mention that she knew Jason Popper back in those “before” days. But since everyone had an augmented mind, she had to be careful. Memories were huge, and vast data pools were available even to the average citizen. Her audiences were informed. She learned the hard way not to vary the details of her story, even when it was a new decade and a different world. People still talked to people. That would never change. Inevitably her new friends would ask to see the note that the famous man had written inside the kitten-and-daisy card, and Gillian would have to shake her head, admitting that she hadn't kept it. That pivotal treasure had been lost somewhere between college and graduate school. Then she noticed that people she didn't know were familiar with her non-adventure, and whenever a new face asked to see the treasured gift card, she could be sure that the keen mind behind the face already knew that it was gone.
There was more gossip than ever in the universe, and like gossip in any age, it was both subtle and cruel.
Gillian was lying, some assumed. Not about the cashier job or having some thin connection with the famous Popper. But they felt that the note was a bit of fantasy on her part, or more than a bit. And the money was surely a fiction too. Maybe Popper had suggested that she buy some of his stock, or maybe she had done it on her own. But a lot of people had bankrolled Popper's speculative business; the solar system had enough success stories, it was said, to populate a large asteroid.
Several centuries had passed, nearly a trillion people and near-people and synthetic people scattered across several thousand inhabited worlds. Everyone in Gillian's circle was younger than she, sometimes by ten or twenty decades, and they didn't care to even imagine an existence without Thinkers or their powerful gifts. These were the people most likely to tsk-tsk her salad-for-two stories. One young man—a lover who proved unworthy after just a few painful weeks—was cruel enough to point out what other people only thought:
"Maybe your story's true, Gillian. Sure, I'll give you that. But the machines took over long ago. And where's your savior? Tell me that."
Gillian knew almost exactly where Jason Popper was. A tiny expert inside her insatiable mind was devoted to tracking his motions and activities, at least as far as public laws and her personal tastes allowed. At the present moment, the great old man was living in seclusion on Earth, splitting his days between three heavily protected mansions.
Of course the “Where is he?” question had occurred to her. Many times.
"But what Jason imagined happening hasn't happened,” she offered. “Because people are still in charge, obviously."
"Who's talking now?” he snapped. “A human female, or the Thinker rooted in the female's helpless cortex?"
That sour man soon vanished from her life.
Then later, while attending a huge party celebrating another successful stage in the ongoing terraforming of Titan, Gillian found herself sharing air with a young-looking woman whom she didn't recognize and who didn't offer any name.
Gillian didn't even mention Jason Popper.
Yet the woman knew her story. She brought it up, and showing a smug grin, she told the tale in full, right down to
the “salad-for-two” line.
"Who are you?” Gillian asked.
"You should ask how I know this."
"I don't care how,” Gillian lied.
But the woman was proud, explaining in rigorous detail all the convoluted pathways that taught her what wasn't really important at all.
Again, Gillian asked, “Who are you?"
The woman looked young, but with an old-style human body, not unlike hers. And she was pretty in the same basic ways. Except of course everyone was beautiful, and it didn't have to mean anything at all.
But an intuition took hold of Gillian.
"How old are you?” she asked.
"My name is Sally Novak, and I'm five and a half years older than you.” Then the woman laughed, soaking up all the pleasure from this long-anticipated moment. “I used to work at a health club down the block from your old grocery. Mr. Popper was one of our members, and he always made a point of chatting with me. You know how. In that flirty, didn't-mean-much way of his."
Gillian checked that sketch against a thousand data pools, discovering that the woman might well be telling the truth.
"On my last day at work,” Sally said, “Jason handed me a card and gift."
The punch line was obvious.
"Like he did with you, he promised to rescue me when the machines took over."
Gillian's intellect easily absorbed this epiphany, but her emotions took a few moments longer.
"And do you know what else, darling?"
"What?” Gillian managed.
"Over the years, I've met nearly fifty women like you and me. That seedy old boyfriend of ours was having his fun with us. That's what I think. Which begs the question: How many other girls were there that we still don't know about?"
The moment was embarrassing and difficult. But more than anything, it brought to Gillian a distinct, infectious pleasure.
Her life had been long and unexpected—a comfortable, well-to-do existence—and she had grown accustomed to wielding several kinds of genius inside her rebuilt head. But that one moment taught her that it was still possible, not to mention wondrous and delicious, to be so surprised that the body could swoon in the weak gravity, begging permission to fall down.
FSF, September 2008 Page 16
