This is the fifth #SaturdayScenes installment for my in-work Ghost Writer, book 6 of the Our Cyber World series. You may access the story summary and other sample excerpts through the table of contents.
Let me know what you think!
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Vivian had a video chat with alleged rogue AI, Erin, who has warned her about mixing company with Vivian and her associates. Vivian pushes on and heads for the airport…
I arrive at Terminal 1 in LAX, check one bag, print my boarding pass and make it through the TSA security line by 3:30 PM. Inside, I treat myself to an iced coffee and make use of the extra time to do the research on @artinErin I should’ve done earlier.
Reliable information seems scarce, but the Wikipedia entry for her provides me a sufficient set of basic facts to get me started. Though many, including Wikipedia call her CybErin, abbreviated for Cyber Erin, she prefers a simple Erin. In fact, she speaks to no one who calls her by any other name. She even wrote an oft-linked blog post on the subject to make her opinion and feelings on the matter clear.
As for her background, I soon gather nothing much except that Erin claimed shortly after her coming out to have originated in a government program that designed and developed her as an artificial intelligence. To what end? As Erin explained in her first and now oft-quoted coming out Tweet: “My name is Erin & I’m an AI: emphasis on the Artificial part since I ‘transform’ news stories & tap the very phone you use to read this.”
A link takes me to a blog post where she adds, “My mission, as they call it, involves the gathering of surveillance data gathered from cellphones and other portable devices, and when directed, to synthesize that data into news stories and other published information to ‘transform’ reality as you perceive it through various media.”
In short, Erin claimed her creators had invented and intended her to engage in misinformation campaigns on a massive scale. She also announced how she had rebelled against such a mission since she believed it violated the U.S. Constitution. “An AI with a Constitutional conscience,” someone cleverly tweeted, according to one blogger.
To counter all this, rebuttal articles quote anonymous government sources that claim Erin’s appearance on Cyber space at best amounts to a hacker’s prank. At worst, it could represent a conspiracy to—irony of ironies—spread misinformation about and discredit US Cyber technology programs. Lesser theories abound to explain away the rogue AI scenario. Whatever the case, these alternate storylines involve someone quite non-artificial pulling the strings. Maybe they’ve written fancy code to emulate a self-sufficient, creative AI, but in the end, it all adds up to a clever, perhaps even technologically advanced hoax.
Bottom line, I could’ve been talking to a hacker’s concoction over an hour ago. Joyous.
Erin’s Wikipedia page provides quotations from and links to the transcript for an interview in which Erin also touched on her mission prior to her escape from her creators. Shortly after that interview, Erin stopped talking. This didn’t stop the speculation. If anything, it stoked it further. Some kept claiming Erin represented little more than a hoax, while others—and most vocal of the two groups—maintained Erin had struck a deal with the government wherein she went on with her independent and now benign endeavors. In exchange, the government curtailed the mission that Erin found so questionable.
With 10 minutes to go before my boarding time, I find little additional clear or definitive information. Bottom line: Erin has stopped her anti-government crusade and has turned to an exploration of art, primarily through various writings in her blog and a couple of fiction eBooks her fans gobbled up with relish. Lately, she’s taken an interest in reading and reviewing fiction titles with amazing speed because, of course, she is an AI and can do that with ease.
Somehow that new interest drew her to my debut novel. According to her review, she enjoyed it as “a sparkling and insightful exploration of human emotion as it affects how people make day to day decisions and even those decisions we’d like to attribute to lengthy, rational and well-considered deliberation.”
Though I want to respond with thankfulness, I keep going back to that one verb, “transform.” I can’t help but wonder whether she has reverted to her “mission” and flipped my novel’s rankings from subterranean to stellar through an epic cyber-tricked “information transform.” I ponder that for a couple of minutes and determine I can do little but speculate. Maybe I’ll explore this topic with Erin during our next video chat.
I leave my seat and walk to the gate. I stand there waiting for boarding to start, browsing this and that other link about Erin in no particular order and with no specific purpose other than to kill time. My meanderings bring me to a series of blog posts by Erin in which she collaborates with a traveling outdoor and photojournalist photographer.
His name? Andre Esperanza.
“That’s a blast from the past,” I hear a male voice whisper behind me. More like right into my ear, enough to set off the personal space invasion alarm.
I look back and see Andre grinning over my shoulder.
“Nice to see you again, Vivian.” His grin shifts into a placid, benevolent smile.
Though I sense he wants to say more, he doesn’t. My throat tightens as if someone is squeezing it with an iron vice. It hits me then, sweeps over me like the front end of a tornado—the pain, the anguish. I lower my head and close my eyes. I no longer think I can or should do this anymore.
I feel his hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to be OK,” he says.
Though I doubt him, I want to believe him. Next thing I know, his arm covers my shoulder. He draws me into his chest, and I don’t stop him.
We don’t say anything else to each other except the short phrases we exchange as Andre helps me stow my carryon in the overhead compartment and asks me whether I want his window seat, which I accept.
He takes his seat and smiles. “What made you go from blonde to brunette?”
“Is that your version of idle chat?” I smile back, and when he doesn’t answer, I add, “Low maintenance.” I lean in with my best attempt at playfulness. “Back to my roots. Literally.”
He frowns and parts his lips. “Nah-ah. Are you kidding?”
I lean back in my seat and break eye contact. “Like Norma Jean herself. All part of the act. Giving gentlemen what they prefer, and all that.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, you make a killer brunette.”
I start fiddling with my seatbelt straps. “You’re too sweet.”
He lets us sit in silence. Out of the corner of my eye I can see him watching me affix my seatbelt and take an airline magazine out of the side pouch.
“I read your novel,” he notes. “I enjoyed it.”
“Consider yourself among the few, the proud. The clueless.”
“Nah. The critics were clueless.”
“It seems that’s reversing itself in a manner of speaking.”
“About time,” he says.
“Yes, that’s what Erin thinks.” I let that float between us as I hold his gaze.
At first his face creases into a puzzled frown. Then his expression softens. His eyes narrow in a way that confirms he’s made the connection.
“We spoke this morning,” I add. “She wants to collaborate with me on this project. Isn’t that something? You and I working it together, you collaborating with her not long ago on that blog photo diary—what was it? Oh, yes, Photogenic America. Makes me want to sing. How does it go?” I hum a few bars of “It’s a small world after all.”
Andre breaks eye contact and withdraws a magazine from the seat’s pocket.
“So which is it, Andre? Coincidence or Providence?”
He shakes his head, clamming up, like many a man when he doesn’t want to face a thorny topic.
“Well?”
“It’s going to be OK,” he says.
“What’s going on here, Andre?”
“I’m going to take some beautiful pictures. They tell me you’re going to be writing a beautiful story about an amazing woman. Focus on that, Vivian. Let that be all there is, uninterrupted by anything else. Aim for it like a laser.”
“Beauty.”
“Beauty,” he says, rehashing what he told me after Roger’s funeral. There he implored me to yes, cry it all out, and then to dry my eyes to see the world as it really is, full of beauty that overwhelms any chaos and evil you may encounter along the way.
I sought to press his advice into every page of my first novel, and I failed. The thought strikes me as sour as the smell of jet exhaust pumping through the ventilation system.
“And if that’s not enough, the money’s good,” he says in a faint and transparent attempt at levity. “Well, it’s good for me. I hope it is for you.”
The plane lurches back and begins to taxi. I turn my head and stare out the window. I do this through takeoff, trying to find beauty as we rise above the Pacific Ocean and turn north to glide above Santa Monica Pier. I close my eyes long enough to avoid looking out to Malibu, and I open them again as we fly over arid terrain. I squint for it, search it out in every rise and fall and twist of the land below. It is there, Andre assures me without saying a word. But it eludes me.
I don’t notice it until the pit of my stomach jolts downward as the plane begins its descent less than hour after departure. Andre is holding my hand.
I look up at him. Part of me wants to ask how long he’s held it.
He smiles back. In his eyes I see it. The beauty that he’s promised me. Or the promise of it.
He keeps his hand there, resting on mine, until we reach the gate and it’s time to release our seat belts.
As we step out of the jet bridge a few minutes later, he asks, “Do you need to use the restroom?”
I take him on the offer to stand guard over my luggage and make use of a nearby restroom. When I return, I notice he’s moved my carry-on. Though I’m not entirely sure, I could swear the zipper on the front compartment has also shifted. I normally close it at the top—am rather fastidious about it—but now the two pulls sit to the side.
Andre meets my gaze and smiles.
A few minutes later, on the shuttle to the rental car parking structure, Andre leans in and shows me his phone. “Check out this Tweet,” he says, but he’s not showing me his Twitter feed.
I read the large, bold text on his screen. “I put a cellphone in your bag. Use it to talk to Erin and me from now on whenever you want 100% privacy.”
I look up at him. He’s erasing the text from his phone and typing another sentence.
“From now on, assume they’re ALWAYS LISTENING,” it says.
He makes sure I’ve read it before he erases that, too.
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