Zee stood in the hall with his chin resting between his thumb and forefinger. He didn’t know why he adopted this pose, it was something people just did in art galleries. It was Tuesday morning, and The National Gallery was nearly empty. Zee didn’t much care for London, and the frequent trips he had to make to the city had begun to wear on him, but if there was one category he did have to admit London beat San Francisco in, it was the art galleries.
The painting he was studying was one of a queer-looking man in an oversized hat, holding hands with a pregnant woman in a flowing green frock. The man, Zee thought, looked like a cartoon version of Vladimir Putin, and the woman he assumed was the man’s wife. Zee didn’t really understand art, he was loathe to admit to himself. It was beyond him why this particular painting, rather frumpy by even the standards set by the other paintings in the same room, was one of the most priced possessions of the gallery. The only thing that stood out to Zee, and the reason he was looking at this particular work, was its age. The Arnolfini Portrait was painted by a dutch paitner Jan van Eyck in 1434 — over five hundred and eighty years ago. Zee focused on the dimly lit background of the painting, where a gold chandelier hung against a brown wall. People weren’t that different then than they were now, Zee thought. All his friends in the Valley were decorating their houses with tacky, opulent ornaments whose purpose was to signify that their owner possessed the means and taste to choose them, even if they were chosen by their interior decorators.
Why had this painting survived for nearly six centuries? Why was it hung here among the prized works of human achiement? Was it simply survival bias — the fact that very few pieces actually managed to physically stand the test of time? The survival of the fittest. Things were so fragile, Zee thought. What he was creating was eternal. Or was there something about this painting that had motivated its owners, the dozens of generations of humans and institutions to take care of it, carefully store and meticulously restore it? When Zee was gone, who would look after his creation? If he was successful in his plans, he didn’t need humans to take care of his baby. His baby would take care of the humans.
Zee squinted and focused his eyes to the small, round mirror in the center of the painting behind the man and the woman. The mirror showed a fisheye rendering of the backsides of the couple, and in between them… a man in a blue frilly necktie and another figure… He leaned closed to the painting. Was that the painter itself? Van Eyck had painted himself into the picture and into history! What a clever bastard! Instead of signing the corner of the painting like most of the other works in the gallery, above the mirror, the painter had inscribed his own name: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic”, which Zee presumed meant “Jan Van Eyck was here”. It was a sort of proto-graffiti, a primordial scream of Kilroy five hundred years ahead of its time.
This was why Zee came to the gallery. Even if he didn’t understand what made them special, he liked to immerse himself in the work of the masters and imagine that one day people would look back to his creation with the same amount of respect and reverence as they did these paintings. His masterpiece would not be hung on the wall of a gallery; he couldn’t paint, nor could he write stories or play a musical instrument; his instrument was the keyboard of a computer, and his creation would be not have a physical manifestation: it would simply be everywhere. It would be something much bigger than himself, but it would immortalise his name: Chakra.
Chakra had begun from humble roots, just like Zee himself. All he had wanted to do initially was to be a founder, but it hadn’t been immediately evident what he was founding. His company had done a few pivots, a Valley term of figuring out nobody wanted to buy what you were selling, and taking a different direction. With each pivot, he had grown his ambition: what had started as a sophisticated way of selling ads on the internet was now going to change the world. Chakra would be the first company to crack the tough nut of general AI, Zee was sure. He didn’t really know how they would make the seemingly impossible leap from machines that put up a convincing simile of learning, into machines that could actually learn — and also think, but he was in a pole position in the race to get there. With the resources in his disposal, he had built a team of some of the brightest researchers, mathematicians, philosophers and programmers ever known. Zee imagined the Chakra headquarters were the AI research equivalent of the Dutch School of painters, studying the form of reality and replicating it with ever finer detail, until one day it would become as real as reality itself. Looking at Van Eyck’s six hundred year old painting, the precise detail of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini’s feature were lifelike, but you could still tell it from a photograph, and even further from a real, three dimensional human being. That was also the current state of AI research — convincing at a glance, but not the real deal. With the release of Chakra v7, the newest iteration his team was currently debugging in order to get it to alpha, this would all change. The initial tests showed that the algorithm was performing feats previously thought impossible, including lateral thinking and learning on data sets the algorithm wasn’t specifically told to look at: Chakra algorithm v7 was displaying curiosity. “Algorithm” was not precisely the right word for it, as the nature of a purely digital being wasn’t strictly speaking algorithmic, and nor was it statistical or heuristic; a word hadn’t yet been coined for it. Zee hoped the word would simply become known as chakra, therefore forever recording him into the history of humankind.
Zee wasn’t a religious man — he was far too logical to believe in gods any more than he believed in ghosts, but he couldn’t help but love the connotation of his company’s name. In the lexicon of Hinduism and Buddhism, “chakras” were the metaphysical points of the human body connecting the person to the higher realm of energy. In the branch of Hinduism practiced by his parents, there were seven chakras, and the seventh version of Chakra would be the one to finally complete the cycle between humans and machines. As much as he didn’t believe in ghosts, what he was creating was the literal “ghost in the machine”, the digital manifestation of the mind-body duality.
Zee’s reverie was broken by a form of a man appearing in the edge of his field of vision. Another spectator had joined him in admiring the Arnolfini portrait. Typical London, Zee thought. There was no place to be alone. Why did this shape, this person, have to look at this particular painting right this moment. There were floors and floors worth of masterpieces. Why couldn’t this one be his, if even just for a moment? He should just go an buy the damn painting…
“Mr. Chakramurthy”, the man beside him said.
Zee startled. He wasn’t used to being recognized. He might have been infamous in certain Valley circles, but despite his wish to be immortalised in history, he had never wanted it to be associated with his physical form, and he stayed out of the spotlight of the media. He snapped his head to the right, and was doubly startled.
“Whoa!” The man besides him was unmistakably William Webster, the editor of one of the small media outlets they’d bought in London to trial the previous version of Chakra. He’d last seen Webster just before the weekend, but in front of him stood a man transformed: his hair and his stupid little moustache shaved, he looked like a far more serious man; his jailhouse grooming and his heather grey hoodie made him look almost criminal. The sharp look in his eyes was something Zee hadn’t seen before. His surprise was multiplied hundredfold by the fact that he had been looking for the man for the past two days without a single lead. Now some divine serendipity had dropped him right under his nose.
“I’ve been looking for you”, Zee said, his voice rough. He hadn’t spoken to another living being that morning.
“I could say the same”, Wint said.
Zee took two steps back to create distance between them. Webster looked pissed off, and Zee wasn’t prepared for a scuffle. He scanned the room. They were completely alone in this room of the gallery. The silence between them reverberated in the empty hall, until Wint broke it.
“You can have this back”, Wint said and handed him a small brown paper envelope.
Puzzled, Zee opened the envelope and peered in. It was empty. No… there was something lodged in one corner. He shook the envelope and let a tiny microchip land on the palm of his hand. He studied it. It didn’t look like anything to him. “What the hell is this?”
“Come on, man. You already blew your story. You’ve been after me, but now I’m turning the tables. I”m on to you.”
Zee furrowed his brow. “What are you saying?”
Wint took his hand out from the pocket of his hoodie, holding a black device. It looked like a smartphone, but not quite. On the top end of the device there were two copper prongs, and Wint was holding his thumb on a green button on one edge. He pressed the button, and the machine buzzed ominously.
“I’m saying you better come with me.”
Wint motioned Zee towards the back of the room. He took few steps, and felt Wint press the device against the small of his back. They walked through one sparsely populated gallery after another, through the renaissance classics of Leonardo, Cranach, Michelangelo, Raphael, Holbein, Bruegel, Bronzino, Titian and Veronese; past 17th century Caravaggios, Velázquezes, Claudes, Rembrandts and Vermeers; at the cusp of modernism Zee suddenly felt a hard shove on his back. He nearly fell through the open door of a men’s room, stumbling on the tiled floor. Wint followed him to the bathroom and closed the door behind them.
Zee clambered on his hands and knees. The shock of the push dazed him, but for some reason all he could think was: how clean were these floors? His hygienic musings were cut short by a pair of hands grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and up from the floor. Zee was eye to eye with a wiry man with a good week’s stubble. Zee’s eyes focused on the black ring that pierced the septum of his nose.
“Good to finally meet you, Mr. Chakramurthy”, the man said in an English accent Zee couldn’t place.
“Good to meet — who the hell are you?” Zee’s shock was releasing itself into anger.
“I’m your confessor”, the man said. “It’s time to start talking.”
“We know that you know about the virus in Chakra’s servers”, Wint said. “And we are here to tell you that you’ll never get your hands on it, and you need to call off your dogs.”
“Man… Webster. I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
The wiry pierced man snorted. “Cut the shit, mate. This is dead serious. The only way you’re walking out of here is if we get into an agreement.”
“Wait, dude… do you have Laura? What have you done with her?”
Now it was Wint’s and Rob’s turn to be confused. “Who the feck is Laura?”, Rob asked.
“My chief of staff. I sent her to find you… to find Webster, yesterday morning. The last I heard from her is that she had a lead on you and she was together with your assistant, and then nothing. Have you… did you hurt her?”
“My assistant?”
“Yeah, that dark girl… from the paper.”
“Merida?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Rob looked at Wint. “What’s he talking about?”
“Merida works for me”, Wint replied. “But past that I have no idea.”
Zee was starting to catch up with what was happening. “How did you find me anyway?”
“It wasn’t exactly hard”, Rob said. “You tweeted about going to the gallery.”
“Oh…” Zee’s Twitter addiction finally bit him. “I swear, I don’t know anything about any virus…” His mind was in overdrive. A virus in Chakra’s system would have been a disaster on any day of the week, and he needed to contact his head of security immediately. If only he could figure out to escape… The two men were blocking the only exit out of the room, and one of them was holding a tazer. He didn’t like his chances.
“Oh, fuck this. Trying to get any sense out of this guy is pointless… let’s just see for ourselves”, Rob said, and pulled out a laptop from his backpack. Zee looked on as the man pulled out a weird-looking set of headphones and plugged them into the laptop.
“Hold him steady”, Rob said. Zee felt Wint’s arms squeeze around him from behind.
“Fook me”, Rob said. “Looks like he’s telling the truth.”
“Are you sure? Do you know how to read that?”, Wint asked.
“Look for yourself”, Rob said and turned the laptop around. “I put it in lie detector mode.”
Wint looked at table of data. He couldn’t really understand the leftmost columns, but the rightmost column showed a solid line of green, and the word “TRUE” in each cell. The table didn’t show the questions they had asked, but seems like Zee had answered all of their questions truthfully, including:
Did you have a microchip installed into my head?
Did you use me to try to find Ada Effram?
Do you know about the Struct?
Do you know about the virus inside Chakra’s systems?
Are you telling the truth?
Wint scratched his head with the tazer. “I was sure… it was the only thing that made sense.”
“Look man”, Zee pleaded. “I don’t know what is going on, but I’m telling you the truth. I have been looking for you, but only because there’s someone who wants to talk to you and I was doing them a favor. Bill, come on, this is ridiculous. Really man, just tell me, what did you do with Laura? Is she all right?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Stay here”, Rob said to Zee and grabbed Wint by the arm, escorting him out of the men’s room back into the main gallery. On the other side of the door, a young japanese man was just about to grab the door handle and pulled his hand away in surprise as Rob pushed Wint out through the door. “It’s busy mate. Find another loo, yeah”, Rob said to the tourist, who scurried away.
“What do you think?”, Rob said.
“I don’t know. If it’s not him, I have no idea who’s chasing us”, Wint replied.
“What do we do with him? Taze him and let the cleaners pick him up?”
“I don’t know, it sounds like he knows something we don’t. It sounds like Laura is in some kind of trouble, and if Merida is with her…” Wint felt his stomach sink. He had always felt protective of the girl, and even the idea of Merida in the hands of the commando team made him feel panicky. “I think we could use him.”
“Use him for what?”
“I don’t know… he’s a powerful man. He has connections. If he really is as innocent as the MemBrain says, maybe he can help us figure it out.”
“Fuck, Wint. I don’t trust that guy. At all.”
“I’m not a big fan either”, Wint admitted, “but it sounds we have a shared incentive. If someone gets access to the Struct, they can take down his company.”
Rob pursed his lips. “I don’t know.”
“You know the saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“Fine”, Rob said. “But we can’t take him to Ada. It’s too risky. She’s too valuable.”
Wint agreed.
“Ok, I’ll find us a new safe house”, Rob said.
Wint handed tazer to Rob. “Fine, you take him. I need to pop by my office. Just make sure you keep him from…”
Fuck.
“Keep him from…?”
They had overlooked one little detail.
“Keep him from contacting anyone on his cell phone.”
Rob kicked open the men’s room door. They peered in through the doorway, and saw Zee furiously typing on his iPhone.