The scryer was dead. The rusty bullet hole in the center of his forehead confirmed it. That, and his serene milky gaze into nowhere, the small smile on his blueing lips as if finally confirmed, in his final moments, of something long suspected.
“What’s the prognosis?” Damon was only half paying attention, standing to the side and fingering a message to his forearm dermal veil. Flanking him, his twin cookies looked back at Avery with the pleasant, attentive curiosity that marked everything they did. For a moment, Avery had the urge to clap his hands or bark at them, something to make their eyes flare. The feeling passed. “He’s dead,” he said.
“No scheisse, Einschteisse.” Damon flicked the dermal away and transferred his dry gaze to Avery. “Did the unit glitch? Did it go rogue, or what?”
Avery reluctantly turned toward where the scryer’s cookie sat on a stool to one side, guarded by policemen. They had taken the gun away, but the way the cookie sat there, dejected, looking down at its own hand curled in its lap, it might have still been holding it.
It perked up as Avery approached. “Hello.”
“You know who I am?” Avery asked.
“Of course. You developed my prototype. It’s an honor to finally meet you, sir.”
Was there a hint of mockery? Avery felt a familiar twinge of annoyance and confusion. Regardless of how well he understood the technology — perhaps because of how well he understood it — the cookies always managed to unnerve him. “You were his cookie?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t get along with him?”
“What do you mean?”
Avery gestured to where the scryer lay in a puddle of his own sticky blood. “Did you hate him that much?”
The cookie pulled itself up in a display of indignation. “To the contrary! I loved him, sir. More than any human ever could. Well, I don’t need to tell you that.” Again the shadow of a smile? The cookie relaxed onto the stool. It seemed perfectly content, stretching its legs in a leisurely way. “To answer your real question, I killed him for the same reason I would do anything. Because he wanted me to.”
###
They emerged into the blustery, cobalt chill of chaotic basement streets, a crowded market square, people hurrying down the narrow lanes, pushing goods carts, yelling at each other in a way that could have been affectionate or hostile, it was difficult to say. Avery was gratified to see the twins flinch back. Damon laughed, made a show of shooing them outward, but he didn’t need to. They came of their own accord with quick, twitchy fascination, their eyes darting back and forth, flashing and flaring as they registered new stimuli and relayed it to the Omni.
For a while, it had been a kind of sport: trying to get their eyes to glow. People would do it at dinner parties, taking turns, like they were provoking them and making them blush. But then people remembered it wasn’t really a blush, just the indication that the cookies were cataloging new stimuli and adding them to the database. And that didn’t sit so well. Besides, it was a losing game, like digging wet sand. The cookies were quick, and the Omni was voracious. Soon enough, it was impossible to surprise them.
Damon was cheered now that the matter in the shop was resolved, and he walked with a bounce in his step and an easy whistle. Suicide — easy enough to write that on the police report, absolve the company of guilt or negligence. Avery studied him as they walked. Damon wore a long, dark woolen coat, strands of silver woven through his hair, a scarf that cost more than most people down here made in a month. Was it any wonder people stepped aside with admiration as he passed? He wasn’t a particularly tall guy, but lately, he seemed taller. Avery wondered if he had gotten enhancements. In addition to other markers of success, there was a bit of a stature race going on in top city. It sometimes seemed to Avery that everyone was growing up around him while he stayed the same.
The irony was that he and Damon had started as equals, coming up through the ranks, through the same schools, even from the same neighborhood; they had been childhood friends. Damon had always been more popular, more attractive. But it was balanced by the fact that Avery was smarter. It was Avery, after all, who had had the idea of the cookies in the first place, recognizing that the Omni’s voracious appetite for data required an equally creative way to get it. And what better way than a customized synthetic companion that went everywhere with you, that adapted to your preferences, that anticipated your every need, that provided bespoke pleasure (if you went for that), that told you just what you wanted to hear just when you wanted to hear it. Sure, it also collected data for the Omni, but that was a small price to pay. When he described this vision to Damon, Damon gazed at him with amazement, quickly pulling him into the proper channels of influence, securing the funding and support. They made an excellent team — Avery with the vision and the technical wizardry, Damon with the networking, the charisma, and the charm. In the end, Damon signed the government partnership without really getting Avery’s approval, claiming to be accompliced by his flamboyant scrawl even while Avery was trying to calculate the consequences. Not that the consequences required much calculation. Damon emerged regal and resplendent with his aerie apartment, his parties, the cordials in crystal, a cookie on each arm. He could still make their eyes flare, too, and he would, as a party trick. A personal valet rode like a carriage boy on the side of his two-in-one through the park. They didn’t spend much time together anymore, him and Damon. Avery would see him now and then, at a company meeting or a random event, surrounded by friends and competitors — Avery couldn’t tell which was which and who was who.
“So you’ll take care of it?” said Damon. They had reached the kiosk, and he touched the display. Then, he turned and grinned at Avery in an easy way. “There won’t be an inquiry?” It wasn’t really a question. And Avery didn’t feel the need to answer. No, there would not be an inquiry. Or if there was, nothing would come of it. There was too much riding on the program now, too much at stake, too much to be gained by too many people. Damon slapped Avery’s shoulder and entered the lift without waiting for a response. To him, the matter was concluded.
###
But Avery was still thinking about it the next day while fixing his morning booster in his flat by the canal. A hint of light leaked across the counter. Avery fingered the blinds and was met by such a radiant blast of blue sky and sunshine that he stepped back, feeling annoyed. The weather was impeccable — you couldn’t fault that. Another crisp, shimmery day in top city, just a flutter at the edges, which meant the climatologists were tweaking the algorithms again. And so what if they laced it with cations and ionized serotonin to keep a positive vibe for the population. Wasn’t that a good thing, to feel happy? He finished scraping jelly on his toast and took a bite, but it tasted flavorless, like seaweed, after the dopamine jolt.
The detectives had delivered the scryer’s last manuscript, and Avery idly leafed through it as he sipped his tea. It was thick, hundreds of pages filled with inky hieroglyphs. Avery knew how to read the archaic language, but the process was laborious, like trying to move a stuck vehicle out of the muck. He worked at the title, sounding it out: “Panopticon.” The word rolled across his tongue with a distant, tactile recognition. The obvious thing would be to run the packet through the Omni for translation, but Avery was reluctant to do that. Once committed to the datastream, it was absorbed and incorporated as if it had never existed as anything discrete. Besides, lately, he had had the paranoid, irrational suspicion that the Omni wasn’t quite returning the results he asked for or that were accurate.
In his bedroom, his new cookie, Wanderly, was still in pajamas, propped against the headboard, wearing a headset and doing a damn good impersonation of a bob and weave. It was a new model with advanced human mirroring that included wearing headsets and exploring experience mods, just as humans did. But it was still doughy and androgynous with pale skin and limp, translucent hair, lacking pigment or ethnicity or even any sexual characteristics to add personality. Not yet. It would not be until Avery established a baseline preference that it would begin to adapt and evolve. The problem was, Avery didn’t have a preference, at least not one that he could pull into focus.
“Hello.” Wanderly removed the goggles and smiled at him. “Can I help you with something? Oh!” It spotted the pages. “Is that the writing from the scryer?” It didn’t surprise Avery that Wanderly knew what he was holding or what had happened in the shop the previous day. Information flowed both ways — from the cookies to the Omni, but also from the Omni to the cookies. It allowed them to be more agile and predictive, and ready to respond to any situation. “Would you like me to read it, Avery?” Wanderly was bouncing slightly with excitement. “I could translate it.” It tilted its head, trying to read the title and Avery had the absurd impulse to hide the packet behind his back.
“Not necessary.” He backed out of the room and began to close the door. “I’ll scan it at the office.” His face heated at the obvious lie that Wanderly had no doubt already detected or predicted.
###
Avery’s team was involved with creating new modules for the cookies, always expanding their reach and effectiveness. It was mostly theory and strategy at this level since all the coding, as well as integration, was done by the Omni itself. Sometimes, it seemed that Omni was doing the strategy, too. When Avery thought about it, he was pretty sure that if you did not go very far in any one direction in the company (payroll, partnerships, software, marketing, sales), you would end up back inside Omni. In this way, it could be said that they were creating artificial intelligence, but they were also inside artificial intelligence. The thought made him tippy, like a hall of mirrors falling away into darkness.
Today, the discussion cycled around what had happened: the scryer in the basement. The consensus was that if the old man had wanted to be dead, then there was no breach of contract for the company or the cookie who had killed him. In fact, it could be argued that the cookie had acted admirably, exhibiting the highest level of dedication to the user. Although, there was also the pesky detail that a murder had occurred. But was it a murder? Thus, the debate looped, which was itself an example of the recursive logic that was giving Avery a headache.
“The man is dead,” Avery said, looking up. He felt the need to establish this simple bedrock fact. “Don’t you see that?” From the blank stares of his teammates, he wasn’t sure they did. “But that’s not even the point anyway.” He massaged his temples, trying to get the pieces to settle. “We used to look to the scryers as a way in, remember? As a pinhole to something outside of ourselves, like a swirl of fresh air. Now it’s just a refolding of a refolding; it’s like a goddamned terrarium. And what’s he doing here, anyway?” There was a cookie at the table, a few seats down. Technically, there weren’t supposed to be any synths present at this level of internal decision-making, yet there they were. And the way everyone looked at it, and then at each other, Avery was pretty sure nobody had realized it was there at all. The cookie looked back at them, apparently equally confused. It held up a tablet that displayed some indecipherable marks. “I’m just taking notes,” it said.
“Hey, Avery, it’s okay.” It was Kelly, the director of content, to his left, touching his arm to calm him. Avery looked at her. He and Kelly had known each other since the inception of the company; she was part of the founding team. They had even dated a couple of times early on, if you could call it that. He remembered standing close to her on a pier by the river, her face half hidden by her hood, half illuminated by the lamplight. She had leaned close, whispered something in his ear. What had she said? He couldn’t remember, but he could still feel her breath on his cheek. He wondered when that had ended or if it had ever really happened at all. “Yeah, I know.” He laughed loudly to show he was aware he was being a ninny. “There’s only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, right?” It was a running joke in the office, what they always said when they felt unmotivated or lazy, a reminder that everything was finite and reducible; it allowed them to pass some niggling chore to a cookie, a license not to try.
###
That night, Avery had a dream that he was back in the shuttered shop, with the scryer, surprised to find the man’s eyes clear and perceptive. It was raining outside, droplets making a steady rustling against the glass, cascading beads of shadows on the walls. The scryer was annoyed and grumbling to be mopping up the sticky mess from the previous day, but he was also animated with a strange, cackling excitement. The mark on his forehead was now a clean aperture through which passed a spear of bright white light that swept the floor and the walls as he turned his head. When he looked at Avery, the light momentarily blinded him, and he was filled with a warm glow of understanding. He woke with the sound of the scryer’s laughter in his ears, the lapping of water outside, sunlight across his desk and arms.
He sat up. He had gone to sleep upstairs, at his desk, poring over the manuscript, and now the pages were scattered about him, some on the floor. Wanderly was there, gathering up the loose sheets. It had paused, reading one. When it saw Avery awake, it hurried over, its doughy features contorted. “Oh, Avery,” it said, “This is important! We need to act fast.”
“What?” said Avery, bewildered. “What is it?”
“You need to write it all down before you forget it. I’ve got your tools set up for you downstairs.”
Sure enough, downstairs, Wanderly had already prepped Avery’s workstation: clearing the tables and surfaces in anticipation, the components booted and humming, programs launched. Avery descended slowly, feeling like he was entering events that were already in motion or already decided. He sat down and ran his fingers across the keypads and inputs. It had been ages since he had sat there since he had tried to compose a new idea since he had imagined he had any new idea to compose. But Wanderly was right: there was something urgent that needed to be communicated from the scryer, from the dream, and already it was evaporating, like curls of mist in the sunshine. But the essential premise was there: they needed to make a space fenced off from the Omni and the cookies, quickly, a conception zone where new ideas could still enter and grow. He pulled up the first slide. It came prepopulated with predictive content that more or less matched his purpose. But it wasn’t right. He deleted it all and attempted his own version. It was worse, awkward and vague. The correction algorithms helped, smoothing and shapeshifting his muddled jargon into something more coherent. But that wasn’t right either! Avery erased it again, disabled all the predictive and corrective functions, then shut his eyes and focused on the dream. There had been the scryer, the shop, the beam of light. Just before he woke up, he looked at the windows and saw that what he thought was rain on the glass was actually insects trying to get in. He opened his eyes and, heart hammering, carefully typed the first sentence, word by painful word, sounding each one out to make sure it was accurate: A subtle manipulation and mutation of ideals that might almost go unnoticed. He sat back, amazed, then checked with Wanderly, who was watching over his shoulder. Wanderly nodded, impressed. “That’s it,” Wanderly said. “You wrote it exactly right, Avery. Except…” It reached forward and tapped a few keys. “You missed that, is all.” The sentence had changed, but Avery wasn’t sure how. It did seem better. Suddenly, he had an icy premonition. “Wait. Hold on for a moment.” He got up and ran upstairs, retrieved the manuscript, and brought it back down. “What does this say?” He pointed at the title.
“It says, ‘Playpen,’” said Wanderly, without looking, busy rearranging the slides and adding images and charts. “It refers to a utopia where technology does the work so humans can be free. That’s what we’re here for, right?” Wanderly smiled at him, and Avery was startled to see that its face had changed subtly. It was more angled and elongated, with a hint of modeling and coloring, as if the synthetic musculature and polymers had begun to adapt and rearrange to some preference that Avery didn’t even know he had. “But we need to focus on this report,” said Wanderly, serious again. “I’ve got the slides set up in order of priority. Now, I’ll help you fill in the content.”
###
They gave the presentation on Damon’s lavish rooftop deck with the fountains and topiary and an elegant table laid for a feast. Silk banners billowed in the breeze, carpets and cushions were lit by globes of light. Around them the city fell away on all sides, spired and channeled and rimmed in red from the settling sun. The golden hour lasted longer up here than it did in other places. Or perhaps Damon paid the climatologists to extend it.
Damon had convened quite an impressive assembly of influencers and dignitaries — board members, a couple of politicians, Avery recognized an actor as well as a curator from the local arts faction, and, of course, several representatives from the corporate commission. All were there to witness this proposal of the next phase of their company, which meant, in essence, the next phase of the future.
If Avery had been nervous or pursued by a vague sense of dread, it was gone when he projected the first slide. It was a gorgeous display he had created, very persuasive, and as he spoke, the concepts emerged so well articulated that he felt like he was conjuring them right there in the sky for everyone to see: a visionary zone, he called it, in the heart of the city where humans could go and gather to watch the council at work. The council would be cookies, of course, and they would be seated at a round table encircled by glass, and in the center of the table would be the glowing sphere of the Omni. Outside, people could gather to watch in amazement as the council made its decisions, and sometimes, they might knock on the glass or press their faces against it or scream to be heard, but the glass would be thick to eliminate any kind of distraction. Avery paused. The language didn’t feel quite right there and jarred something in his memory. Did it fit the dream? For a moment, he felt a fracture, a dislocation, as if he were looking at his own face from two different angles. But then he saw Wanderly at the foot of the table grinning and giving him an encouraging thumbs up, and he realized that Wanderly must have adjusted this final draft for clarity. Besides, the presentation was basically done. Damon was already on his feet, clapping and whistling, and soon, the rest of the guests joined him, standing and clapping their approval. Avery sat down, blushing at the attention.
A dessert had arrived; a gorgeous confection spun from the air and placed so cunningly by a server that Avery hadn’t even noticed. He took a scoop, licked it from his spoon: it was fruity and delicious. Probably laced with some kind of mood enhancer, but that was okay, too, wasn’t it? There was nothing wrong with feeling good, was there? Avery felt someone watching him and lifted his eyes. At the far end of the table, Wanderly was smiling at him in an enigmatic way, and for a moment, Avery felt a chill of recognition. Wanderly’s face was definitely adapting now, shifting, elongating, becoming something new and exciting. Avery could almost recognize what it was.
