“Artificial intelligence that betrays who we are and how we live and think.”
“Lights back on, heat back on, our collective mind back where it was, more or less, in a day or two.”
“The artificial future. The neural interface.”
They seemed determined not to look at each other.
Martin, speaking to no one in particular, raised the subject of his students. Global origins, assorted accents, all smart, specially selected for his course, ready for anything he might say, whatever assignment, whatever proposal he might advance concerning areas of study beyond physics. He’d recited names to them. Thaumatology, ontology, eschatology, epistemology. He could not stop himself. Metaphysics, phenomenology, transcendentalism. He paused and thought and kept going. Teleology, etiology, ontogeny, phylogeny. They looked, they listened, they sniffed the stale air. This is why they were there, all of them, students and teacher.
“And one of the students recited a dream he’d had. It was a dream of words, not images. Two words. He woke up with those words and just stared into space. Umbrella’d ambuscade. Umbrella with an apostrophe d. And ambuscade. He had to look up the latter word. How could he dream of a word he’d never encountered? Ambuscade. Ambush. But it was umbrella with an apostrophe d that seemed a true mystery. And the two words joined. Umbrella’d ambuscade.”
He waited for a time.
“All this in the Bronx,” he said finally, making Diane smile. “There I stood listening to the young men and women discuss the matter, the students, my students, and I wondered, myself, what to make of the term. Ten men with umbrellas? Preparing an attack? And the student whose dream it was, he was looking at me as if I were responsible for what happened in his sleep. All my fault. Apostrophe d.”
There was a knock on the door. It sounded weary, elevators not working, people having to climb eight flights. Diane was standing right there but paused before reaching for the doorknob.
“I was hoping it was you.”
“It’s us, barely,” Jim Kripps said.
They took off their coats and tossed them on the sofa and Diane gestured to Martin and spoke his name and there were handshakes and half embraces and Max standing with one clenched fist raised in a gesture of greeting. He saw the bandage on Jim’s forehead and threw a few counterfeit punches.
When everyone was seated, here, there, the newcomers spoke of the flight and the events that followed and the spectacle of the midtown streets, the grid system, all emptied out.
“In darkness.”
“No street lights, store lights, high-rise buildings, skyscrapers, all windows everywhere.”
“Dark.”
“Quarter-moon up there somewhere.”
“And you’re back from Rome.”
“We’re back from Paris,” Tessa said.
Diane thought she was beautiful, mixed parentage, her poetry obscure, intimate, impressive.
The couple lived on the Upper West Side, which would have meant a walk through Central Park in total darkness and then a longer walk uptown.
The conversation became labored after a while, shadowed in disquiet. Jim spoke looking down between his feet and Diane waved her arms indicating events taking place somewhere beyond their shallow grasp.
“Food. Time to eat something,” she said. “But first I’m curious about the food they served on your flight. I know I’m babbling. But I ask people this question and they never remember. Ask about the last restaurant meal even if it was a week ago and they can tell me. No problem. Name of restaurant, name of main course, type of wine, country of origin. But food on planes. First class, business class, economy, none of it matters. People do not remember what they ate.”
“Spinach-and-cheese tortellini,” Tessa said.
No one spoke for a moment.
Then Diane said, “Our food. Here and now. Football food.”
Martin went with her to the kitchen. The others waited quietly in candlelight. Soon Tessa started counting down slowly by sevens from two hundred and three to zero, deadpan, changing languages along the way, and eventually the food arrived, prepared earlier by Max, and all five individuals sat and ate. The kitchen chair, the rocking chair, the armchair, a side chair, a folding chair. None of the guests offered to go home after the meal even when Jim and Tessa got their coats off the sofa and put them back on, simply needing to get warmer. Martin closed his eyes as he chewed his food.
Was each a mystery to the others, however close their involvement, each individual so naturally encased that he or she escaped a final determination, a fixed appraisal by the others in the room?
Max looked at the screen as he ate and when he was finished eating he put the plate down and kept on looking. He took the bottle of bourbon off the floor and the glass with it and poured himself a drink. He put the bottle down and held the glass in both hands.
Then he stared into the blank screen.
PART TWO
It is clear by now that the launch codes are being manipulated remotely by unknown groups or agencies. All nuclear weapons, worldwide, have become dysfunctional. Missiles are not soaring over oceans, bombs are not being dropped from supersonic aircraft.
But the war rolls on and the terms accumulate.
Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions. Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and disabled. Starvation, plague and what else?
Power grids collapsing. Our personal perceptions sinking into quantum dominance.
Are the oceans rising rapidly? Is the air getting warmer, hour by hour, minute by minute?
Do people experience memories of earlier conflicts, the spread of terrorism, the shaky video of someone approaching an embassy, a bomb vest strapped to his chest? Pray and die. War that we can see and feel.
Is there a shred of nostalgia in these recollections?
People begin to appear in the streets, warily at first and then in a spirit of release, walking, looking, wondering, women and men, an incidental cluster of adolescents, all escorting each other through the mass insomnia of this inconceivable time.
And isn’t it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout? Is this something that they’ve always longed for, subliminally, subatomically? Some people, always some, a minuscule number among the human inhabitants of planet Earth, third planet from the sun, the realm of mortal existence.
* * *
“Nobody wants to call it World War III but this is what it is,” Martin says.
* * *
Seemingly all screens have emptied out, everywhere. What remains for us to see, hear, feel? Do a select number of people have a form of phone implanted in their bodies? A serious question, the young man says. Is this a protection against the global silence that marks our hours, minutes and seconds? Who are such people? How do they access the subcutaneous calls? Is there a body-code, a sort of second heartbeat that conveys a local warning?
It is well past midnight and he is still talking and Diane is still listening and the friends are still here, Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, with Max crunched in his chair.
Dark energy, phantom waves, hack and counterhack.
Mass surveillance software that makes its own decisions, overruling itself at times.
Satellite tracking data.
Targets in space that remain in space.