“You certainly must think very highly of yourself”, Ada said. “I’m not as fragile as all that, and you were never as important to me as that.”
Shit. Wint had stepped into it. After a better part of the day, drinking coffee and being ignored by everyone but Tom, he’d finally confronted Ada and asked her to explain to him what was going on. He wasn’t sure how the conversation had taken such a wrong turn so quickly, but a civil conversation about simple facts had turned into a heated barrage of personal accusations. Though Ada claimed she was not upset and that he had not meant much to her, the ferocity of her protestations said precisely the opposite.
“No no no I didn’t mean it like that”, Wint stammered.
“For a self-styled word smith, you sure aren’t very good with them.”
“No. I suppose not.”
A moment of quiet fell. They were sat on the single, neatly-made bed in Ada’s bedroom. Structurally, the room was identical to the one where he had slept the night, but its decoration gave it an air of… normalcy? The concrete walls had been painted yellow and, along with the orange-hued lamp on the night stand, it gave the room a warm feeling. The floor was covered by an IKEA rug that Wint recognised — he had the same one, as did every second household in the world. A small bookshelf made up of square slots was half full of cheap pocketbooks, most of them old and worn out, probably bought second hand. Sci-fi, fantasy, mystery. Not a single real book by Wint’s standards.
“So… do you want to try that again?” Ada offered him an olive branch.
“Yes, Ada. What I meant was, I hope we can put our past differences behind us and, for the time being at least, focus on the pressing matter at hand. Namely, who is trying to kill me, and how do we stop them?”
“No”, Ada, flatly.
“No?”
“No. We can not put our past differences behind us. Let’s talk about our past differences.”
“Uhh….”
“I think the only past difference between us is that when we decided that we would both leave our lives to try to make something out of our relationship, I actually went ahead and did my half, and you… didn’t. That’s one difference I think we should talk about.”
“Ada…”
“Yes?”
“You’re right.”
Ada looked at Wint skeptically, as if she’d won his admission too easily, and that without having to fight for it, the victory did not taste as sweet.
“I’ve regretted it since… the moment I hung up the phone.”
Ada’s face fell. She hadn’t enjoyed the reminder of the phone call he had made to tell her he would not be coming to meet her in Tallinn. He saw tears begin pooling in the corners of her eyes.
Wint knew he was treading on thin ice, but at this point, it was too late to attempt to bowdlerise the point. “I’m sorry Ada. I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t… mature enough? I wasn’t…”
“Don’t fucking dare say it.”
“…man enough.”
“FUUUUUCK! YOUUUUUU!”, Ada screamed into his face, with her voice cracking into a grotesque falsetto as it rose above her range, leaving behind an awkward quietude, quickly filled by her next salvo: “Fuck you and your fucking gender bullshit. Man enough? What the fuck does that even mean? You were man too much, if anything.”
“Yes.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake! Can you say something?”
“Say what?”
“I don’t know. Anything…”, she squeezed her hands into fists of fury, and her whole body shook.
Wint saw what was happening. She had war-gamed this situation. She had doubtlessly thought of all the things she would say to get the grief out of her chest. He saw it. He wasn’t sure how he could help her get to it. Unless… it was an idiotic thing to say.
“I would have called if you had left me a number.”
Her jaw dropped and hung there, her dark burgundy lips parted in an expression of disbelief.
“YOU ARE TRYING TO MAKE THIS BE MY FAULT!?”
The tactic had worked. Now all that remained to be seen was whether the gamble would pay off.
“YOU. You…. you…”, her eyes widened as she struggled for words. His audacity had scrambled her brain completely, and she fell to her basest instincts, the ones she had tried so hard to wean herself free from. She socked him, hard, onto his mouth. Not a slap, a fury-fisted punch.
Wint was knocked backwards on the bed. Arms flailing back for support to catch his fall, his right hand came out empty and he stumbled heavily, almost comically, onto the rug.
Shocked to find himself on the floor, he looked up at Ada. Equally shocked, Ada looked back at him. Neither of them could believe what she had just done.
Ada was the first to break the silence. She did so by cracking up into a hysteric laughter. Wint observed her reaction curiously, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there was no shoe. There was only Ada, giggling, which made him first smile, and then burst to uproarious howls of laughter. Ada reached her hand out to him and he grabbed it, pulling himself to an upright sitting position on the floor. Ada held onto his hand and shook it, business-like, still tittering: “That man enough for you?”
After their laughter had died down, Wint clambered back onto the bed, and leaning against the wall waited for Ada, who sat next to him staring in the same direction, to begin. For this conversation, neither wanted to look the other in the eye.
“After…”, she began. “Well, after… after. After everything, I stayed in Estonia for a while. I didn’t feel like there was anything for me in the UK. All the activity in the crypto community was happening in New York, among the Occupy crowd. And then it moved to Silicon Valley, and I suppose Japan. But by that time it was already too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late for the core to be fixed. The performance issues, the energy consumption, the constant threats of forks. But mostly the governance. It was all being taken over by white guys, and then by the day traders, speculators, bankers. Wave by wave the dudes poured in and diluted the idea. Since the stock of Bitcoin is not going to magically increase but the value is going up, it’s all owned by the same club that owned all the previous systems of wealth, with the exception that instead of industrial plutocrats, it’s now owned by technological plutocrats. We might as well light it all on fire and let it burn…”
She took a deep breath and continued: “So I just of bounced around for a while, keeping an eye on things, you know? Seeing what was coming from around the bend to see if there was something we could use to fix the world before it got co-opted and integrated into The Borg.”
“Borg?”, Wint asked.
“Ah, I forget you’re too cultured. It’s a trekkie thing. I meant, could we define a use case for a technology before someone could figure out how to turn a profit from it, and it would be ran into the ground, just like Bitcoin.”
“And…?”
“And… yes. Kind of. How much do you know about AI?”