Solomon's Code

by Olaf Groth

  “Look, I gotta get going, man,” Connor said. “Believe it or not, I have to go get the mules and finish plowing a field.”

  Vladimir laughed, and Connor couldn’t help but join him, both getting a kick at just how absurdly life had changed for both of them over the past fifteen years. They embraced again, and Connor waved goodbye to Tony as Vladimir paid the bill. He hopped on his bike, turned northwest, and started back toward his new world.

  “Excuse me, Connor,” his PAL said, “but I have a few quick things to note. May I proceed?”

  Connor assented, and the PAL went on: “First, your vitals and biometric readings look great. The cleaner living and eating is improving your health. Second, you did not call your brother. I could try to reach him now, but it appears he’s in therapy. We’ll have to wait ninety minutes or try again another time.”

  “Shit,” Connor said. “Send him a note and let him know I’m good, and that I’ll try to reach him in a few days unless he needs me before then. Oh, and tell him I saw Vladimir. They always got along pretty well.”

  “Consider it done,” the bot replied. “Now, one other thing. It’s been three years since Leo died, and Ava is throwing a celebration to commemorate it.”

  Connor caught himself just before the front tire slipped out from under him. He’d noticed his PAL probing a bit more during their therapy conversations. It asked more about his past life, confronted him about looking at old pictures, and wondered why Connor might be thinking more about Ava—much like he had done the day before while plowing.

  He rode in silence for a couple minutes, marinating in the news of the invitation.

  “She sent you an invitation,” the PAL said. “I think you should hear it. Would you like me to proceed?”

  Connor rose out of the bicycle’s saddle and pushed up the steepening incline ahead of him.

  JULES AND GABRIEL (THE MOTHER AND FATHER)

  She caught a faint whiff of her daughter’s perfume—it must’ve rubbed off on her jacket when they hugged at lunch—and Jules chuckled again. It never failed to amuse her, the idea of Ava’s PAL recommending a rose scent she never would’ve worn otherwise, and has worn exclusively ever since. She ribbed Ava about it for a while, but her daughter was just as humored by the idea as she was, and they’d both end up laughing about it. “It suits her,” Jules said to a golden retriever tied outside. She leaned over, gave the dog a quick scratch behind the ears, and then turned to walk downtown.

  She checked her phone and saw a couple messages from her husband, Gabriel, and her other daughter, Willow. As seamless as communication technologies had become, she still preferred a good old-fashioned text message, and she still turned off her phone every time she sat down to talk with someone. She quickly flipped by Gabriel’s message; he just wanted to make sure she knew where they were meeting with their retirement planner. She stopped to read Willow’s message. Her younger daughter was struggling to figure out what to do next with her career, and despite the quick burst of terse messages—in fact, because of them—Jules knew she really needed to come by for one of their regular “whine and cheese” nights. She asked her old Siri assistant to suggest a couple nights the next week, and then asked Willow if she should invite Ava, too. Jules figured she’d have plenty to tell both of them.

  They’re not going to like this idea, she thought, and she felt her anxiety rise when she saw Gabriel waiting outside the office.

  “How was lunch?” he asked, leaning in to give her a quick kiss.

  “Great! Ava says hi. And she told me to tell you those shoes are a crime against humanity.”

  Gabriel erupted in laughter, then cut himself off with a look of faux outrage. He’d bought the shoes the week prior, out shopping with Ava, who tried in vain to dissuade him from blue suede shoes. He couldn’t help but revel in the Elvis lore of it all, and started singing “Love Me Tender” right there on the sidewalk, curled lip and all. He always knew how to raise Jules’s spirits. He’d carried her through her breast cancer diagnosis, the terrible experience with the first oncologist, and then through Ava’s improbable birth just months later. And now, worried about their long-term retirement and care plans, he eased her anxiety again. They both were nervous, but at least they could go in with a sense of optimism.

  Their planner pulled up the options they discussed on a panel embedded in the wall. He knew better than to use the hologram projections, which disturbed Jules the first time they met. Some of his clients liked the 3-D renderings and the ability to walk around and experience the care settings or interact with the simulated robotic caregivers. Jules was not one of those clients. So, he brought up the video of the HomeCare 3T bot, a common option for most of the septuagenarians these days. Gabriel loved the idea as soon as Willow suggested it—stay in their home longer, have a greater sense of security, and a little bit of companionship. “Sort of like having a grandchild in the house!” he’d joked after Thanksgiving dinner, laughing at the side-eyed glances that prompted from both daughters.

  Jules wouldn’t go for it, though, and all of them knew it. She craved human companionship and, despite the surprisingly natural interactions she’d had with the AIs and robots Willow’s entrepreneurial friends developed over the years, they could never be human enough for her to connect with. Now sixty-five, after a lifetime of doctors, checkups, and every iteration of health care technology you could imagine, she wanted a flesh-and-blood human to talk to and rely on. Besides, the HomeCare 3T never did live up to the hype. The trade wars over the previous decade limited investment in US robotics, and the care robots in China and especially Japan had far exceeded the capabilities of the HomeCare line.

  The adviser saw the sour look on Jules’s face and called up the next video. The new scene opened on a lake in the mountains, a dirt road running beside it, and tall, vividly green bamboo swaying gently in the breeze. A gray-haired couple walked slowly, hand-in-hand along the road, smiling as they chatted. The video cut to a close-up, she leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder, and they both gazed contentedly into the distance. “It’s perfect! We’ll take it!” Gabriel said, bursting out in laughter.

  “Yeah, a lot of this video is pretty ridiculous,” the adviser laughed. “The hologram gives you a better sense of it, but let me get the tour of the facilities here on the screen.”

  This is what it had come to: They couldn’t afford the soaring cost of human care in the United States. That became an unaffordable luxury for most people after insurance companies started insisting on less expensive, rudimentary robotic companions and wouldn’t reimburse anything else. Most retirees had very few options after that. They could try to take care of themselves as long as possible, hoping to reach a point where they could afford a briefer stay with human care at the very end of their lives. They could settle for the mediocre HomeCare 3T and remain in their homes indefinitely. Or they could join the rising wave of “retirement tourism,” going to China, Germany, or the handful of other countries that managed to contain costs while remaining human-centric. These health-care havens had invested early in higher-quality robots that augmented the skills of their highly trained immigrant elder care workers.

  The adviser noted some of the amenities of the Chinese facility on the screen. He made a point to tell Jules and Gabriel that the staff didn’t look Chinese because, in fact, they weren’t. Despite its massive population, China’s firms couldn’t recruit a big enough domestic staff. So, the industry recruited and trained thousands of caretakers from the Belt and Road countries, much like German facilities did with the influx of Syrians and Iraqis a decade before. This facility, the adviser added, offers a semiretirement package, too, in which younger residents can help provide companionship and care to fill some of the gaps—and earn a little money to offset costs. “They have a great system that matches up companions,” the adviser said. “I have a handful of clients who really rave about it. I could put you in touch with one of them.”

  Jules liked the idea, and she knew Ava an
d Willow would appreciate that some algorithmic input would help smooth the transition. But she also knew the girls would rather they stayed home. Willow got over to China often enough, and Ava might consider moving to Europe. But would that be enough?

  Either way, Jules knew they didn’t have a ton of options, but as she and Gabriel walked back to the house that afternoon she felt grateful, knowing they could afford more choices than most people. Ava had sent them both a hologram, saying she felt a little better and thanking Jules for lunch, so they stopped at a café a few blocks from home to have a glass of wine, share a brownie, and decompress a little bit. Later that evening, they officially narrowed their decision down to the two choices they expected from the start: China or Germany.

  “So, ni hao or Guten Tag?” Gabriel asked.

  Jules chuckled. The certainty of only Option A or Option B had put her at ease. She knew which one she’d prefer, and she figured Gabriel probably leaned the same way. But she felt a the same dual twinge of excitement and doubt about both. And she could deal with that.

  WILLOW (THE SISTER)

  Willow was always the scientific wunderkind, winning her junior high science fair four years in a row, including the one when she was still in fifth grade and convinced her teacher to let her enter a machine-learning program that helped match her classmates with seventh-grade tutors. No one would’ve guessed that her eighth-grade project would eventually become the core of her groundbreaking environmental-preservation models, but they wouldn’t have been surprised.

  The problem with pure science, though, is that it doesn’t pay. Willow open-sourced the Muir Models, named after her favorite national park, posting both the code and a white paper explaining the inspiration and a few initial notes for new directions the system could take. And with that, she decided, it was time to stop scraping by on loans from mom and dad. She called in a few favors from the grad students with whom she consulted, and soon fell in with an investment fund that needed an AI platform to help it balance better returns with the volatile political and cultural sensibilities of a global investor base. “If I can help them increase value by investing in the right kinds of companies, who cares if I’m selling out a little bit,” she said as much to herself as to her sister and her boyfriend. Ava was skeptical, but she could see her sister had made her decision already.

  Less than two years later, even Willow had misgivings. The advanced platform proved more successful than even she expected, but as they pushed the boundaries it became clear that, for all the fund’s interest in sustainable investments, profit still came first. Twice, US regulators asked to review the code, and both times the company rejected their inquiries, citing the decade-old Algorithm Trade Secrets Act both times. The Chinese and Europeans demanded the code from top to bottom, so the fund never even bothered to register in either market. Willow wished they had, if for no other reason than to have someone confirm whether the platform went too far.

  “You just want everyone to know how awesome your code is,” her husband teased. Willow couldn’t entirely deny it. She was proud of just how cleverly the program could tease out insights from almost any combination of relevant data sets. She’d already started tinkering at home with ways to apply some of the same techniques to her Muir Models, but knew the hedge fund would march her straight into court as soon as she released even the first line. She had all the material wealth she could want, but now wished she could hop back to science as easily as she hopped into the commercial world. Before he proposed, her husband had moved from Shanghai to San Francisco to head up UC Berkeley’s computer science department—a prestigious enough post that even his company and the Chinese government helped smooth the transition. But standing in their Wyoming cabin, gazing past the gnarled ponderosa pine outside the picture window, Willow couldn’t see anything but barriers in her way.

  She stared past the tree and at the mountains for a while before sending the VR video to her mother. She always loved the home as a retreat, and began spending more time there lately, trying to figure out what to do. She’d expanded on her investment programs, privately tinkering around with ways to use AI to go beyond existing sensor systems and learn from different natural processes themselves. How does the forest solve pollution? How does the ocean convert oil spills? It wasn’t that far off from the question the investment firm had asked—what, exactly, makes humans and machines decide they like a stock enough to buy it in a volatile marketplace? The profit-seeking motive followed the old reductionist tendencies of artificial intelligence, boiling complexity down to small sets of key variables. And it worked remarkably well. But Willow, always the curious one, didn’t want simply good. She wanted to use AI to help embrace and revel in the greater complexities of the world—to absorb and process and enhance more of the messiness of life.

  Her mother made no effort to disguise her displeasure when Willow went to work for the fund. So now, sitting at her desk in Wyoming, Willow still hoped a return to her environmental passions would soothe her mom. Willow’s PAL chimed, and she nodded in return. “Ava is going to meet your mother for lunch. Her appointment with her doctor has concluded and she appears to be a little distressed. Would you like me to connect you?”

  “No, I’ll call later,” Willow replied. “But cue Ava’s PAL to play some Dave Brubeck at some point after lunch. She’ll appreciate that.” She waved her arm to dismiss any follow-up inquiries from the system and went downstairs. She needed a hike to clear her head.

  It was nearly dark by the time she returned, and the house had transitioned itself to the evening. From the outside, with the chill descending off the mountain, their home looked warm and welcoming. She walked into the kitchen and started putting the leftover stew on the stove when her PAL chimed and patched Ava through. The immediacy jolted Willow after her quiet hike, but she could hear the urgency in Ava’s voice: “I talked to Dad. I think they’re going to move to Germany.” Willow went numb. She knew Mom and Dad were thinking about moving overseas, but she always assumed they would figure out a way to stay home—even if it meant swallowing their pride and letting their daughters pitch in.

  “They can’t go to Germany, Ava,” she said. “We’ll hardly ever see them.”

  Ava gave a tired sigh. They’d gone over this before, and nothing had changed in their minds. Mom and Dad absolutely should stay at home. And if they didn’t, well, Willow and Ava had different ideas about where they should go. But that they could deal with that. “Ava, tell me something,” Willow said. “Do you think they’d change their minds if I told them I’m leaving my job to work on this natural complexity theory? I might take some of my code along, even if I get sued for it.”

  A short pause later: “Really? You’re really going to do it? They might . . .”

  EMILY (THE GIRLFRIEND) AND

  AVA (THE PROTAGONIST)

  She steeled herself to hear it again, trying her hardest to make sure she didn’t show that the message phased her. “Thick skin; goddamned dinosaur hide,” she told herself. And then she told her PAL to play it.

  “I know a lot about you, Emily,” the voice on the PAL said. “I know you don’t believe a word you say on your show. I know you’re dating another woman. And I know what you did to her ex-boyfriend. I also know that you have no idea what I’m going to do about it next.”

  “That’s all there is. No number, nothing,” Emily said, as confidently as she could muster.

  She’d reported threatening callers before. Sometimes her managers offered support, sometimes they just mumbled something about “hanging tough” and criticism being “just part of the territory.” She usually let them slide off her shoulders, venting to Ava when she got home. They both might fret about it for a day or two and then, together, let it all go. This one was different, far more personal and directly related to Ava. How would anyone in her audience know about Ava? Her bosses didn’t even know about Ava.

  A quick run of the metadata and voice through NewsHive’s security platform flagged the message imm
ediately, informing the local police and federal authorities. Emily saw the surprise on her manager’s face when he saw the security system’s note about the FBI. She’d resigned herself to the fact that this day would come, eventually, but not like this. She just assumed it would leak out, or some controversy would convince the company or a hacker to dig a little deeper into her data and start making the connections. An investigation into the caller would lead straight to Ava. A hard-right, conservative, Bible-thumping pundit who’s actually a middle-left lesbian living in San Francisco? Yeah, that wouldn’t go over very well with anyone.

  The chaotic months that followed almost broke Emily. At work, her managers insisted they didn’t care and wanted her to continue, at least through the end of her contract. They could begin building a new virtual character in case of emergency, but they wanted Emily to personally hand off the reins to a successor. She tipped ever more toward conspiracy theories, finding ways to support her arguments with data long debunked but still considered credible by her followers.

  At home, Ava felt Emily swing further right and started to worry whether she was starting to believe the crap she spewed on her show. Ava confronted her almost every day now. Their relationship app—the one that used to just coordinate calendars, but now managed so much more of their personal interactions—kept nudging them into arguments, urging Ava to get things out in the open and prompting Emily to compartmentalize her work and home life. It all blew up seven months into the investigation, when Ava floated the idea of a party to remember Leo and said she wanted to send an invitation to Connor.