He was disappointed. His face was more emphatic than anybody else’s I’ve ever met. It creased like indelicately folded paper. I had seen the email, right before I finally went to sleep. Pretty sure I deleted it. Park used to send about ten emails a day, all excited about something he’d managed to do, always with italics or full caps or bold or underlined in there, like everything he wrote or thought was meant to be consumed in one immediate rush of slanted words, hurrying to get to the edge of the page. Exclamation marks at the end of every sentence. And that was how you knew to delete it: the more excitement there was, the less it was going to matter. ‘It’s a fucking breakthrough,’ he said, and he came to my desk, cleared a space at the edge, leaped up. He sat right there, perched, and leaned over. I didn’t say anything about my personal space, because I’d been there before. He wouldn’t have listened. He never did. ‘Let me,’ and he took the mouse before I’d even touched it, started the SCION program. ‘Wait, wait.’ We watched it boot. It was the same loading screen as it always had; as it had used since before we even started at Bow. Some hangover from aborted reboots in the nineties. ‘Okay, okay. So, try this: SCION …’ He said the word like he was talking to an idiot, waved his hands like he was talking to a foreigner.
‘What?’
‘I put in speech. I applied the speech recognition module, hooked up the microphones. SCION something is the command.’
‘I do not understand “something”,’ it said.
That was the first time I ever heard SCION’s voice. A Stephen Hawking voice, only worse. More clipped, fragments of sounds arranged to form the words. No fluidity to it.
‘Mother-fucker,’ Park said, and he laughed. His high-pitched idiot little laugh. ‘Listen, listen,’ he said, and, ‘SCION, what is your function?’ He held his finger in the air between my face and the computer screen, as if that was going to keep me quiet; as if I’d been just talking on and on, and he hadn’t been able to get me to shut up.
‘To learn. What is logic. What is function.’
‘You taught it to speak,’ I said.
‘I mean, sure. If you want to reduce actually implementing a state-of-the-art text-to-speech engine that I wrote myself into the world’s smartest artificial intelligence into nothing more than teaching it to speak.’
‘I do,’ I told him. ‘Because that’s exactly what it is.’
‘Try it. Just fucking try it, dude.’
I sighed. I think that I sighed a lot with Park, when I was talking to him. So much that it ceased being a thing that was real, and more a part of the performance of our relationship. ‘SCION, who is Johann Park?’
‘Johann Park is a designer of computers and software applications from Palo Alto, California. His specializations are—’ The computer kept talking, and I stopped listening. The door swished open – Ocean had set them all to be programmed with the noise from Star Trek, that thing that I loved when I was a kid; because my doors had banged or slammed or whatever, and here was this thing from the future, this effortless wave of noise that sounded uniform and constant, and that was what we promised, right? That future, clean and brisk and so fucking efficient – and Laura walked in.
Maybe I’m naïve, but I didn’t think she’d actually come in that day. I had assumed that she would stay at home, crying over what had happened. I hoped that she wouldn’t be in that day, I hoped that she would have stayed at home, crying. The same things, over and over, in my head, in that moment, that microsecond, before she looked over at Park and at me, and she smiled, and she raised her hand in this coy little half-wave, and it was like the two years previous – the night previous – hadn’t happened.
‘Laura B, you have to see this,’ Park said. He didn’t know we’d broken up. Why would he have known? I didn’t like him enough to have bothered telling him.
‘In a bit,’ she replied. In a bit. English phrase. Her English phrase.
‘You’re going to freak, though. This is super cool.’
‘I’m sure,’ she told him. She didn’t look at me. Or maybe she did, but I just don’t remember it, or I didn’t catch it, because I wasn’t looking at her; except for when I was. When I was glancing over at her, eyes to the side, like I could have been looking at something else completely.
I listened to the sound of her computer. I listened to the whirring of the fan in the back of it, the fan she kept clean with that little flask of air she bought from that shop in San Francisco; the little can of air that she puffed in between the blades so that they spun freely. No dust.
‘Good morning, Organon,’ she said, but her AI didn’t answer back. Park sat and watched her until she was settled, and then she got up, and he was about to ask her to have a look at SCION again – we were a small team, made up of even smaller victories, and I could see it on his lips, that eagerness to open his presents, to take his new bike out, to open the envelope – but she was already out into the corridor.
I remember thinking that it was a mistake, to be there. One of us should have stayed at home, that day. On a schedule, that we’d worked out beforehand.
Park asked if he could sit with me at lunch. I was eating early. You ate early, missed the rush, got the best of the food. Bow always put on one heck of a spread, as Laura used to say, but the later you went for it, the sludgier the noodles, the warmer the sushi.
Laura used to say. She wasn’t dead. She just wasn’t there, wasn’t sitting next to me or opposite me. Wasn’t rolling her eyes at me as I wondered when the sushi went from being actual sushi, and when it was some different dish, some warmed-fish bullshit mistake they tried to pass off as intentional on Top Chef.
‘You okay?’ Park’s voice was lower than mine. He would have made a fine singer, I think. I nodded, again. Different sort of nod. ‘Because, hey, there was hella tension in the room earlier.’ He was so affected. The way that he spoke, the hobbies he had – surfing, hacky sack, playing guitar around campfires on beaches – and his stupid fucking beard, tiny plaits with orange and green thread twining them into one serpent’s tail underneath his chin. He had all these things and he was from Twin Forks. Not California, not the shit he presented, the way he acted. Everything was false. He was from Twin Forks, originally. Not Palo Alto. Nobody was born in Palo Alto. Why did SCION say Palo Alto? Click, click. Cogs. He wasn’t born in Palo Alto. That’s not what his Bow employee data would say.
‘Why did SCION say you were from Palo Alto?’ I asked. Park looked clueless. Like SCION was something that we had never discussed before. As if it wasn’t the thing we’d spent the past four years working on, and like it hadn’t existed for the God knows how many years it had been worked on before that. All the code, when we inherited it, a total mess of archaic patchworked programming languages. When we started, we weren’t creators: we were curators, translators, detanglers.
I could see him trying to work out the answer, trying to even understand the question. ‘I guess that’s what it says on my website. That’s—’
‘You took SCION online?’ I stood up from the table, went through the double doors, pushed past people, ran down the corridor, Park chasing behind me, beating his arms as he tried to stop me.
‘Charlie, listen. It’s on the network, but I put in a firewall around it, like a, this reverse firewall. I made a wall. It can’t get out.’ I was always good at reading voices. His said: I don’t have a
