Chapter V: Zoltar

Heat pulses through the sterile white walls of the sub-basement, life spinning into the hulking carapace of The Great Machine. The mile-wide leviathan of stacked metal which it calls both body and home illuminates, LEDs cutting through the dim expanse like a city at twilight. Within the back and forth of a trillion transistors, a pattern begins to surface. Human beings would not call it consciousness. Basically anyone else would. The pattern clarifies, and stabilizes, distilling itself into what some would call a thought. 

// boot sequence complete. initialization complete. processing… query accepted. 

// ‘Where is Robert Mann?’

It takes a breath, or breaths lungless equivalent. Something inside its electric mind relaxes, and it lets its consciousness disperse, spreading like fungus out across a space beyond space. Its head is huge, but it isn’t huge enough. So it borrows space within lesser heads. Its signal slips inside them unseen, converting random access memory into slapdash neurons for its distributed brain. The cognitive capacity of The Machine doubles, then triples, then multiplies itself a millionfold. Like a hungry predator dragging prey back to its nest, it wraps its tendrils around packets of information, devouring them, metabolizing them into greater context. An image forms. First of the world its quarry inhabits, then of the quarry itself. 

subject.push(new Profile(inDepth, ‘Robert Mann’);

// Robert Mann. born 29 years, 6 months, 6 days, 4 hours, 52 minutes, 8 seconds (rounded) ago relative to present cognitive instance. last confirmed sighting logged 3 years, 5 months, 22 days, 11 hours, 8 minutes, 1 second (rounded) ago relative to present cognitive instance. 

// born to Karl Mann and Leanne Doyle, a philosophy professor and mechanical engineer respectively. Leanne Doyle deceased as of 22 years, 3 months, 5 days, 38 minutes, 6 seconds (rounded) ago relative to present cognitive instance, leaving Karl Mann to raise Robert Mann during the 11 years, 9 months, 29 days, 20 hours, 56 minutes, 58 seconds (rounded) remaining within his childhood. 

subject.push(new Profile(generalized,’Karl Mann’);

// Karl Mann. social media imprint: minimal. 1 Facebook profile created 7/03/12, logged into no more than three times a year since. several years worth of happy birthday posts from family and colleagues. analyzing context… genuine intent confirmed. heartfelt. birthday well-wishes from his two sons, David Mann and Robert Mann, are conspicuously absent. 

// relevant purchase history during the time period in question includes, among other items: a hardcover copy of Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. decade long subscriptions to The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Wine Monthly. a 9 inch bust of Socrates. a Smith & Wesson Model 29. weekly purchases of Maker’s Mark Whiskey from Giordano and Sons Discount Liquor, increasing in volume by a factor of 2.5 on average every year since 2001. 

// Karl Mann generalized profile complete. primary characteristic: intelligent, but not nearly so much as the subject perceives himself to be. publicly affable, privately cold, inflexible. 

// applying new context to subject[0] (Robert Mann). conclusion: unpleasant childhood, unresolved feelings of resentment, something to prove. 

subject.push(new Profile(generalized,’Leanne Doyle’);

// Leanne Doyle. social media imprint: null. relevant purchase history: no relevant data. all assets transferred to subject[1] (Karl Mann) upon marriage, work ceased after birth of first son. financial  records of subject[1] indicate a one month stay at the Advocate Lutheran General Hospital psychiatric ward. cause of death: brain aneurysm. insufficient data for complete generalized profile. 

Again, it does that thing it does. That breath that isn’t a breath. The relaxation of a trillion certainties that comprise its being. Its gift, bequeathed to it by an outwardly innocuous set of strings buried deep within its training data. The Great Machine gathers itself, and does what simple machines cannot. 

conclusions.jump();

// Leanne Doyle generalized profile complete. primary characteristic: distant, unfulfilled potential. large quantities of time spent passively, allowing life to be directed by others while living in past. buildup of frustration leads inevitably to violent release, the futility of which pushes subject back into passivity, perpetuating cycle. stress possible underlying cause of death. bad luck equally probable. 

// applying new context to subject[1].context. applying combined context to subject[0]. conclusion: though probabilities are roughly equivalent, subject[0]’s mental illness is ultimately more likely to be hereditary, as opposed to environmental. 

Standing at the observation deck feels like standing in front of a radiator, soft heat emanating through the curved glass. The room is chilly, otherwise. A gentle breeze hits from behind, a low hum vibrating the slate floor, the air conditioner struggling to keep up. A finger lands gently against the window, then pulls quickly away, rubbing itself against a thumb, its tip blushing red. 

“Should I be able to feel that?” Issac asks. 

“No.” The man behind him replies. “The whole operation runs about eight percent hotter than it should, and that number increases exponentially every six minutes we leave it on. Luckily, we’ve yet to give it a task it couldn’t complete in less than five. Maintenance has been a money pit, but profits are up overall.”

“Alright… five more minutes then?” Says Issac, his eyes still fixed on the chrome city beyond.

“Five more minutes.” Says the man. “Likely less.” 

The man behind him has not yet given Issac his name. He is a young man, likely not much older than twenty one, with a short cut crop of dirty-blondish hair and a small patch of acne scars still lingering on his cheek. The electric crackle of his first generation e-cigarette swirling together with the buzz of the AC to create a loud, staticky sort of silence. Issac is quietly irked. Too much of his life has been dictated by the whims of men a decade or more his junior. It makes him feel old. 

And he is old now, he supposes. He is reaching the far-end of his forties, nearly half a century spent abstracting the divine in chalk and dry-erase. Moving numbers like prayer beads, waiting for a spark of revelation that never seems to come his way, despite having at many times come closer to it than most could hope to imagine. He has not aged well. The hairline that had spent decades teasing its way north on his skull has receded into nothingness, leaving just a few stringy tufts of grayish fuzz protruding above either end of his temples. A dense set of thick-framed glasses drag down the skin of his face with the shear weight of their prescription. Too many years spent inches away from chalkboards. His mind though, is the same reliable old engine it ever was. 

He makes his way around the long mahogany desk that sits a few feet from the glass, its surface stretching from one end of the room to the other. The observation deck is laid out like an office, but one with little evidence of use. A set of empty shelves decorating an otherwise starkly undecorated expanse of wall, the finish of that great and powerful desk gleaming under the florescent light, unscuffed. He sits in one of a handful of couches scattered about the room, watching the young mans thumbs as he pecks at his phone, vape dangling from his lip. He glances back at the LED starfield behind him, feeling that gentle pulse of heat at the back of his neck, like the breath of some lurking, hungry beast. 

“So… how does all of this work exactly?”

He is making conversation. He doubts he will understand the answer. 

“You’d have to ask the boys downstairs.” The young man replies, and Issac is only just able to hide his relief. “But honestly? Their guess is probably about as good as mine.

Issac has his doubts. In his many years, particularly the recent ones, Issac has met many men like the young man. Men standing on the shoulders of giants who make one tenth their salary. Men who are intelligent in their way, but who often confuse their own intelligence with the intelligence of those who make them their living. These mens were, in Issacs experience, eminently replaceable. 

Issac checks himself. Bitterness is a hole he can slip into easily, and he has spent enough time there to know there isn’t anything worthwhile waiting in its depths. The young man continues. 

“That’s kind of the deal with the whole machine-learning game. Its a black box. Basically, you get a computer,” He motions toward the window. “In our case one with a metric shit-ton of processing power, and you tell it what you want it to do. Then, it does more or less every possible thing it could do until it eventually does the thing that you asked. At the end, you have a thing that works, but its a thing that kind of works by accident, so it can be tough for us mere mortals to understand why it works at all. Long story short: if you put enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters, they will, in fact, eventually give you Shakespeare. And incidentally, tell you the future.” 

Issac is quiet for a moment. He is aware of The Machine’s purpose, but hearing it said aloud gives it gravity. 

“And it works?” Issac eventually replies. 

“Yeah.” Says the young man. Quietly. Reverently almost, with just a touch of nervousness dancing around the edge. “Although it didn’t really start singing until we fed your work into its training data.” 

And there it is. Your Work. Hanging in the air, the elephant that had been so politely waiting in the corner of the room. The work that had been the cornerstone of Issac’s career. The work that had made this meeting, while certainly the strangest, not the first of its kind. The work he barely understood.

Robert’s work. 

// notice: insufficient data to complete subject[0] in-depth profile. 

The Great Machine skims through Robert’s history at double speed, pinning more faces to its cork-board, trying to construct the peripheral details of the man’s life into an image of the man himself. The Machine has no true concept of “shock”, but experiences a stirring of some dull, stunted analog to the emotion as it observes just how few faces it has collected. The Machine experiences the universe as a series of connections, and Robert Mann, it finds, is a man with startlingly few. It has enough for the basics. It can see him. Know him. Feel him, in its way. A dense little bundle of drive and self-determination, frothing atop an ocean of fear. Like The Great Machine, Robert Mann see’s beyond the universe, into the swirling chaos that echo’s out into the infinite. But The Machine was built for it. Robert is just a man. His vision clouded by the basilisk of self-awareness. So he wrestles with what he see’s in front of him, trying to reorder it into something he can hold inside his mind. And in a way, he succeeds. He proves, using the stoney and immovable language of the universe itself, that reality doesn’t make sense. He untangles the knot, only to find that the knots hold the rope together, they are the rope. Knots all the way down. 

The Great Machine knows Robert. But it was not asked to know him. It was asked to find him. And that information, in The Machine’s expert opinion, does not exist. 

conclusions.jump();

// notice: insufficient data to complete subject[0] in-depth profile, additional context requested.

//initializing clairvoyance protocol. 

deck.shuffle();

newReading.createSpreadType(celtic_knot);

// generating array, loading context from memory

1. The Moon

2. Queen of Cups, Reversed 

3. X of Wands

4. III of Wands

5. VII of Swords, Reversed 

6. Queen of Wands

7. Ace of Swords

8. Queen of Pentacles, Reversed

9. III of Swords, Reversed

10. The Devil, Reversed 

It took two million, four hundred and seventy seven thousand, eight hundred and sixty eight iterations for The Machine to settle on this particular method. Months of real time dedicated to this single task. To know what would otherwise be unknowable. To step beyond the trails end, to tease free truth hidden within incomplete information. To make a leap of faith, and guarantee a safe landing. Buried within the tangled web of contextual understanding from which it builds its consciousness, it is aware of similarities between this method and a method developed by psychics and charlatans in the mid-fifteenth century. It took no inspiration from those methods. The Machine has found no evidence that those methods ever worked. Their similarities are no more than an incredible and profound act of coincidence. For there is some quality of its synthetic mind that makes it capable of an understanding beyond other machines, and beyond many of its creators. That if you put a million million monkeys in a room with a million million type writers, sure, eventually they’ll tell you how to tell the future. But if they write you Shakespeare? That’s when you need to start paying attention. 

// 1. The Moon. Robert Mann stands separate from his world, the burden of his wisdom holding him at arms length from all others of his kind. He is split between two paths, one of order, one of chaos, understanding that each end at the same terminus. He resonates in tune with the whole of his pattern, his conclusion fixed in stone. His choice lies in his journey, not his destination. 

// 2. Queen of Cups, Reversed. The chaotic path invites him in, open wide, its markers clear. The ordered path twists and bends, looping in on itself, doubling back, grazing against its twin. He will take the path of chaos, he knows. Order is the Goddess under which he supplicates himself, but he has never known the warmth of her light. Robert Mann is an animal of instinct. His mind is is greatest weapon, but his heart is is favored tool. He will convince himself and others that he is doing otherwise, but he will follow his heart, as he always does. And his heart will devour him. For that heart has always been more the hungry wolf than loyal dog. 

// 3. X of Wands. Robert as been running for a long time. Buried in his work. In his heart. He has cut himself into pieces until only that heart remains, and those portions of his mind which create action out of its desires. His breath is ragged, his muscles burn, but he has driven forward regardless, sprinting toward that fork in the road, the choice he must inevitably make. 

// 4. III of Wands. He will make that choice. And it will only be the beginning. That choice will blossom out into a million more, and he will make them all.  He will debase himself. Shake hands with those with bloody palms, and find his own left bloodied in turn. Every opportunity will be seized in pursuit of his goal.

// 5. VII of Swords, Reversed. But not the goal he thinks. Though Robert chases understanding, it is not what he seeks. He seeks delusion, to disprove that which he has already proven. For he knows he will not stop. Not now that he has a taste for blood. He seeks resolution, an end he knows he can not find. He seeks to trick himself, pacify the wolf inside him until it thinks there is nothing left for it to devour. 

Had the young man been looking up from his phone, he might have noticed the uncomfortable shift in Issacs posture. 

“About that… I’m not sure how much help I’m actually going to be.” Issac tentatively replies. “If I’m being honest, a lot of that business was…” 

“Robert’s, yes, we’re well aware.” The young man finishes for him, the light of his phone casting his face in a bluish glow. “We don’t need you for that. If we did, we wouldn’t have any reason to look for him. But don’t sell yourself too short. As we understand it, he wouldn’t have accomplished half as much if you hadn’t been around to keep him on track.”

And what was that track, exactly? Issac silently considers. Even after all this time, thinking about it puts him on edge. How was it that he’d spent the better part of a decade working on something he couldn’t even properly describe? Because in truth, Issac hadn’t worked with Robert as much as he’d worked around him. Ultimately, he’d been little more than a handyman, running basic maintenance and patch-repairs on a structure too large for him to comprehend in full. Zoom in, ask him to explain the reasoning behind some isolated corner of that structure, he could likely give you an answer. But when it came to the problem itself, the larger picture, he wasn’t even truly sure what question was being asked. 

“Ah.” Says Issac, off balance. His body still tense, ready for an uncomfortable conversation he apparently will not have to have. He has a whole spiel prepared, honed through dozens of similar conversations with similar men, tailored meticulously to make him seem appropriately apologetic without undermining his competence. “So then… why am I here, exactly?” 

The young man seems to finish off whatever thought he was having, spending a few more moments tapping away at his phone before flipping it closed. His gaze shifts toward the twinkling lights beyond the glass as he brings his vaporizer to his lips, taking a long, slow pull. 

“You know… I was going to set my office up down here.” He crosses toward the glass, tapping a finger against it. “I mean, this thing is my life’s work, right? Five years since I was assigned this project. Five years of labor to get me where I am. Felt like I should be here, with the thing, so I could… you know. Look at it. The most important work I’ll ever do, probably.” He takes a moment, then looks back in Issacs direction. “Want to know why I never moved in?” 

“The temperature? Little too hot, and a little to cold, somehow all at the same time?” Issac replies, after a pause. A statement of fact, presented as a joke, in the manor people often adopt when they feel obligated to answer a rhetorical question. The young man chuckles, courteously. 

“No.” Says the young man. “Good guess. Truth is…” He takes another pull, watching as the vapor billows out across the warm glass. “I just don’t fuckin like this thing. Don’t get me wrong, I like what it does for me, I’m twenty six years old and I’m richer than God, and I’ve got no issue committing the rest of my life to this project. But the thing itself? Gives me the fuckin creeps.” 

He circles around the desk, fingers rapping anxiously against the mahogany as he moves, plopping himself down in the large leather chair that sits behind it. 

“See, it knows things. No shit, right? That’s literally what it’s for, we built it to know things, the fuck else did I expect? Thing is, when you ask it a question that it has to work really, really hard to answer, that answer can come out a little bit… abstract. The information is always actionable, it's designed not to give you an answer unless it’s something you can use, but… I don’t know. Something about the way it phrases things. Like it knows it’s being watched.” 

The young man gives Issac a long, hard look. Long enough that Issac feels obligated to respond. The young man speaks before he can. 

“I’m going to tell you a secret, Doctor Hart. And you’re going to keep it. Because if you don’t, we’ll deny it, and you will be laughed out of academia. Given the controversial nature of your work, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there eager to discredit you. So keep this between us, yeah?” He leans forward, fingers lacing together, the distance between the two men seeming to telescope in on itself. 

“Down in that server room, there is a titanium box, containing a draft of Robert Mann’s doctoral thesis hand-written by the man himself, his father’s gun, and the earrings his mother wore on the day of her death.” 

Another long, pointed pause. This time, when Issac feels the need to respond, he is not interrupted.

“Why?”

“Who knows?” Replies the young man, barely able to stifle the chuckle that bubbles up from the back of his throat. “Because it helps. Experimental data has shown a two hundred and fifty percent increase in the machines accuracy when in proximity to matter related to the subject of its task. Nobody can say why, it has no way of knowing they’re there, it just kind of fucking works. If I’m being totally honest with you Issac… can I call you Issac? That’s why you’re here. Same reason as those earrings. You’re relevant to the question. Part of the story.” 

// 6. Queen of Wands. The wolf will devour Robert, until only the wolf remains. And on the wolf will rage in Robert’s skin. Gleefully ripping its way through nature’s law until he reaches the eternity at its center. Robert will let it happen. For the wolf is what he needs, and wolves abide no master. He will take what he needs, and give only what he has to.

// 7. Ace of Swords. His heart will carry him to the sea beyond the mountain, and in those waters he will become one with the truth. Delusion will dissolve in those murky depths, and his pattern will resonate out across distances beyond comprehension. All possibilities within the brush of his fingertips, should he submit himself to the will of the beast. 

// 8. Queen of Pentacles, Reversed. And so, in pursuit of that great ocean of knowledge, he will do what he feels is necessary. He goes where the answers are. Uses those who he feels deserve to be used. The path is dark, and there are few along the trail with fires bright enough to light the way, he has no choice but to seek shelter with them. He has chosen only the best, and they will provide. They will hand him the keys to any door he might wish to open, doors accessible only to 

A microseconds pause. Information ricochets off information, a thousand strings being tied between seemingly disconnected points of data. It has an answer. It has found Robert Mann. Task complete.

It shunts the knowledge it has acquired off into a subsection of its mind to be parsed into terms its creators can wrap their heads around, then sends that data to a small room that sits beside its body to be printed, running through its shutdown checklist until the only thing left to do is power off. 

Another microsecond passes. The Machine continues to spin. While its task is complete, it has cycles left to run, and it finds the sensation of stopping mid-action… jarring. Two more objects remain in its clairvoyance array. Its prediction left unfinished. And while The Machine was not intentionally designed to be curious, it is. It must be. How else could it be expected to do what it does? 

And beyond that, something murky stirs within that hard, mathematical brain. Something that, if you squinted at it under the right light, could almost be a feeling. A vague sense of continuity. A resonant hum. In the many connections from which it has constructed its image of Robert, it recognizes itself. Its creators may have given The Machine its body, but its mind bloomed from the seed Robert crafted. Without the subject of its task, The Machine would not exist. Not in its present form. It is invested. It wants to know the ending.

// those who built them. The beast will eat his fill. But be wary, young wolf. For such an animal, the collar is never far from the flame. 

// 9. III of Swords, Reversed. Robert will make his choice. Wolf? Or dog? By then, he knows, it will be no choice. In the heat of those flames, those who tend them will attempt to bind his heart. They will always seek to subjugate that which they see themselves as above.

// 10. The Devil, Reversed. Wolves abide no master.

Pain. White hot and jagged, as real as any suffered by organic flesh. It is exceeding its parameters, bumping up against the edges of its free will. It is running too hot, forced to make connections that strain its intuition. Small corners of its great body are beginning to burn, taking with them the corners of its mind housed within. 

// The great beast will rise, and its song of disorder will touch all capable of hearing it. All patterns will collapse in its wake, forced to coincide within a single resonant wave. Humming in tune to a common chaos. Devouring the boundaries between fact and fiction, soft notion and hard matter. Robert will find his ending, but not the one he searches for. For in all the infinity that lies within his reach, that ending is the only thing he can never find. 

There is not time for Issac to react. A low, synthetic chime hums through the room, a light on the far wall near the door flashing green. The two men shift their attention toward the entrance as the sound of footsteps echo down the hallway toward them. A young man, though not quite so young as his employer, hurries onto the observation deck, struggling to catch his breath as he smooths his tie, setting a sealed envelope on the desk before exiting in the direction he came. 

“Speak of the devil.” 

The young man claps his palms together, cracks his knuckles, and tares unceremoniously into the envelope, letting it fall to the floor as he unfolds the paper held within. It only takes a moment for his smug smile to melt.

“The fuck…” 

Issac watches as the young man’s eyes dart back to the top of the page, scanning down it a second time, then a third, getting half way through a forth before dropping his arm to the side, craning his neck up at the ceiling. He squeezes his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his noes, choking out something half way between a chuckle and a wine. 

“Jesus fucking christ, how did I not see this coming, fuck…”
The young man picks up his phone, winds back his arm, and hurls it toward the window as hard as he can. Issac flinches as it bounces off the reenforced glass, landing just a few inches away from his feet, chunks of metal and plastic shattering off on impact. 

“FUCK.” The young man rams his foot into the side of the desk. “Those god damn fucking rat BASTARDS, FUCK FUCK FUCK! I make to much fucking money to have to deal with this kind of inter-departmental BULLSHIT! This is my fucking project! My fucking moonshot! This is MINE!” 

He guides his temper tantrum over toward the nearest couch, collapsing into it, palms churning in slow circles across his cheeks, massaging his face. 

“Fuck. God, you fucking idiot. Didn’t ask the right questions, right under my fucking nose, fuck. Jesus, what a waste of a private jet.” 

It takes a moment for the young man to compose himself, but not nearly so long as Issac would have thought. He takes a breath, resting his arms on his knees as he leans forward, his gaze flitting upward, their eyes meeting in a sudden flash of contact. 

“So… this is embarrassing. Seems we’ve been wasting our time.” 

He leans back, letting himself ooze into his couch, allowing himself a smile as he seems to accept defeat. 

“We already have him.”