The Fires of Orc

Downtown.

Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder

And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.

Stephen Chbosky

We ordered gyros and salads. I drank a rather bitter ale, she a Pinot Grigio. We talked over dinner about food, about San Diego, about the campaign in particular and politics in general. Lydia was a devoted student of the public process, an avid believer in democracy and the idea that in time the majority got more things right than wrong.

“You don’t think it’s all just a beauty contest?” I asked.

“Not at all,” she retorted. “It’s easy to say ‘Oh, the media decides all this stuff. People are just gullible consumers buying the candidate with the best pitch.’ But I don’t believe that.”

“How can you not?” I asked. “That’s been my assumption all along and the pitch seems to be working. Nothing has changed in the last couple of months except the pitch. So where’s the support coming from?”

“It’s coming from the people.” She spoke the words as if from a witness box. “You have so little faith in the people. I don’t know how you can do what you do believing that people are so stupid.”

“Well I don’t think all people are stupid…”

She cut in, “But you treat them like they have no choice in the matter. Of course our pitch is better, thanks to you, and that is resulting in better reception. More people have a better idea of who Markus is. They have a greater sense of what to expect from him and a clearer picture of what makes him different from the other candidates. The people’s knowledge is improving thanks, in part, to the pitch. But their choice reflects their knowledge. They don’t just blindly support who you tell them to. They choose.”

I chuckled, “Don’t tell anyone that. If it becomes fashionable for people to act like they have free will, guys like me could be out of work.”

The bill arrived and I pulled a card from my wallet.

“Please don’t do that,” she said.

“What,” I asked, “pay for dinner? It’s honestly my pleasure.”

“No,” she said. “You can pay for whatever you like and I appreciate it, though it’s not necessary. Just please don’t put this on the campaign card.”

“Why not?” I asked. “We’re working.”

“Is that what you think?” She shifted uncomfortably.

“Well I just assumed…”

“You know,” she said, “We’ve been here nearly two hours and we haven’t even looked at our tablets. I’ve been having a nice time and it seemed like you were too.”

“Heck yes I’m having a nice time…”

“Okay then,” she said, “and we’re two young people out in the evening taking our time over dinner. Some people might think this was a date?”

“A date?” I tried not to squeal. “Is this a date?”

“No,” she said, “it’s just a fortunate accident. But it’s definitely not work and I would prefer that you not use the business account. Scruples are only scrupulous when they’re inconvenient.”

I replaced the business card with one of my own. It took every bit of moxy I could summon to utter what came next.

“Okay,” said I, “since we’re having fun, then why don’t we continue it? The hotel across the street has a fantastic piano lounge. I would love to buy you a glass of wine, maybe a cocktail, whatever you’d like. I really don’t want this evening to end yet.”

“I won’t accept,” she said, “without your assurance that this has nothing to do with work and will not affect our professional relationship.”

“On that you have my solemn assurance,” I said with upraised hand. “You already have my complete professional respect and I promise you the joy of an evening in your company could not diminish that.”

“Boy you do pour it on,” she said. “Let’s go have fun.”

There is still, quite possibly, hidden in some sunken hollow beneath the crumbled mass of a city, an unscarred stack of notebooks stuffed fat with romantic prose, penned in better times by better men. Whether they exist or not, those love-thick passages, none ever recounted an enchantment to match that night. I was wholly and hopelessly bewitched.

The swirl of her wine, the soft shadows and warm amber light on her cheek, the way she looked away at times when recalling some revealing account – whether of a dream, or of a disappointment – she was every bit angelic. There was no pianist on Thursday nights. So much the better. We had the place to ourselves and she had wine. I had Scotch. Together we had the work of Coltrane and Davis and Monk on the house track, the best the masters could compose for our private enjoyment. She was beauty and nothing less. The notes tripped blue and dark and the night tarried.

“Shall we?” She asked. It was near midnight and without any lead up, there it was: “Shall we?”

“Um, I suppose we shall,” I said, not knowing for certain what we proposed to shall.

“Your place is near?” she asked.

“Two blocks,” I said.

“Let’s walk if you don’t mind,” she suggested. “It’s still so nice out and winter will be here soon enough.”

“Very well.” I threw a wad of bills on the table and waved at the cocktail waitress. “It’s enough,” I said, passing her on our way out.

“No worries, hun,” said the cute little server.

Lydia stifled a laugh. Outside she teased, “Hun?”

“Whatever,” I said. “She probably calls everyone that.”

“Probably everyone who regularly over-tips her at least.”

“Probably,” I said, fighting back a blush.

It was brisk, as a November night gets, but sumptuously brisk. The faint nibble of night air at nose and lips heightened the awareness and drew the breath up shallow. Anticipation is a frightful thing, except in such moments when it is the grandest thing of all.

We walked half-a-block and she took my hand. I thought carefully about each step, placing one foot deliberately in front of the other lest I lose myself in the touch of her small hand. Her nearness alone stupefied me; her touch was almost deadly. Around her thin frame the enormity of the city was but a vanity. She was the center of all time and space, the irresistible force of being toward which I spiralled, hurtling myself into her orbit, leaving behind the world of solid facts for the realm of possibility in her.

At my building we were alone in the lobby and the elevator stood open, awaiting us. We rode up in silence.

For most of that night we moved as to the music of the spheres in their encircling paths, plucked notes on a great mandolin. It was sound and color and shape and furious artistry. Her throat, the arch of her back, her slender arms, the taper of her long waist…

Sleep came eventually and with it surrender to the poets’ muse. And in sleep dreaming brought the power over words that escape the waking tongue, and I, asleep but dreaming, told her what tongue could not utter. I spread out for her a world broader than waking brain could reach. I wove in my dream a tale of immortal truth, pulled from the strands of dream-speak that denies itself to waking fools.

And as I slept, she too slept, her hair in my face, her face on my shoulder, her legs wrapped in mine and thus it was, but briefly. For two such as we in such a moment ought not waste an hour in sleep that could be spent awake in this world. Sleeping is forever but now is fleeting and the now mattered most. We woke.

It was dark, and quiet, and we smelled of lust and the room of ardor and fading ecstasy and she spoke.

“I didn’t want to like you,” she said matter-of-factly.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I tried to dislike you. I had no intention of this. I still wish I didn’t like you.”

“I see,” said I. “For my own part, I’m rather glad you do.”

“It’s not like I have any choice in the matter. You’ve worked pretty hard at making me like you, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would not say!” I huffed.

“Please,” she said. “You’re good at many things, but subtlety isn’t one of them. Neither is coyness. There’s no need to put on the school-boy innocence. I’m attracted to you. It’s done now. I can’t help it.”

“Hmph,” I snorted. “What makes you such an expert?”

“I’m not such an expert,” she said. “You’re just really transparent. You’re also really good.”

“Well thank you very much. You’re pretty special yourself.”

“I meant you’re good at what you do,” she corrected. “But yes, you’re good at the other too, and thank you for that. It would have been very awkward if you weren’t.”

“Then I’m glad it won’t be awkward. This conversation, however, is getting rather awkward, wouldn’t you say.”

“Okay,” she said, “Then let’s talk about something that won’t make you uncomfortable. We wouldn’t want you to blush or anything.”

“Just about any subject change would be fine with me,” I said.

“So what makes you so good at what you do?” she asked.

“I assume you mean work.”

“Yes, and there’s no need to be shallow, Narcissus. I mean work.”

“I’m not sure I can explain it,” I said.

“Try me,” she plied.

“Alright. What do you know about quantum computers?”

“Enough to know I don’t really understand them,” she said.

“That’s no big deal. The people who designed them don’t really understand them. They just know they work.”

She chuckled.

“No, really. They seriously don’t understand, the designers I mean. They can’t. Quantum reality can’t be understood. That’s part of what’s so perfect about quantum computing. It does what it does, perfectly reliably, and no one is involved. We can’t get in the middle and screw something up because we don’t even understand what’s going on. All we do is read the outputs. We don’t add anything to the analysis. All variables are possible and the machine sorts them out.

“But then how can we believe what the computer tells us?”

“Because it considers everything possible and gives us answers in their order of likelihood.”

“It’s a probability machine, I get that.”

“Yes it is. Exactly. So take the case of a billiard ball.”

“What about it?” she asked.

“The computer can tell me that if I strike a cue ball with the right force at the right angle, its momentum will transfer to the object ball and the object ball will follow a path to the pocket.”

“Yeah?”

“Well really, what the computer is saying is that in the overwhelming majority of cases, given all the different possible considerations, that’s what will happen. But in actual fact there’s always the possibility, no matter how remote, that when I strike the cue ball it will turn into a chicken. There’s also the possibility that the pocket will open a worm hole to another point in the universe and the object ball will emerge in some distant galaxy. Those are such remote possibilities the computer doesn’t report on them, but they do exist and the computer could calculate the odds of them happening.”

“But so what? The computer can tell you what in fact is going to happen, no matter what might theoretically happen. Isn’t that good enough?”

“Absolutely it’s good enough and that’s as good as it needs to be. Good enough is all we need to know because it turns out that nearly everything has a possibility of very nearly one or very nearly zero, at least everything on our level. On the quantum level there are countless values in between. In our world, there are ones and zeros, or at least as close as you can get.”

“So what does that have to do with your work?”

“It’s the way I think about people.”

“How do you mean?” she asked. “Like they’re billiard balls?”

“No no, not billiard balls. People are like a living quantum computer, as long as you have enough of them.”

“You’re saying a person is like a machine?”

“Not at all. A person can’t be predicted. But people can. It’s a question of scale.”

“Go on.”

“You see, we can’t know anything about how a given person will behave in a particular case any more than we can know anything about a particular qubit, or quark, or electron or anything else on that level. All we can know about people is how they will behave in the aggregate, just like we can know about billiard ball phenomena and other outputs from the quantum computer. The computer makes large-scale predictions from massive calculations of trillions of inputs. Each input’s value is infinitesimally small, but when you’re dealing in large volumes, lots of infinitessimals add up to some pretty powerful stuff.”

“But people aren’t qubits,”

“No they’re not, and there also aren’t trillions of people from which to calculate. Predicting how people will behave doesn’t come close to the accuracy of a quantum prediction. But the principle is the same. Hypothetically, people could walk into the voting booth, turn into chickens and strut out in the middle of a far off solar system. But in fact they won’t. Enough of them will do what we think they’re going to do to confirm our estimates. We can’t be as accurate as a quantum computer but we can be as accurate as we need to be.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but you’re missing my point. People, I mean persons, are unique. Each one of them is an individual. They aren’t subatomic particles with indefinite states. They’re real. They’re flesh and blood. They think and feel.”

“I agree. Like I said, persons can’t be understood. But people can. It’s not an exact science, I’ll admit, but it’s pretty damn close. We can’t demand the same degree of accuracy from all subjects alike. We have to accept the accuracy permitted by the subject matter. People aren’t qubits and I’m not a quantum theorist. But I know what I know – a large enough sample of people will do what they do and an observer with a long enough view and a wide enough perspective can read them like a formula. There’s no such thing as certainty, but in my game, ninety-nine percent is close enough.”

She pulled herself into my chest and I felt her breathing time itself to my own, our hearts too syncing up in a drowsy, peaceful rhythm. I laid my hand on her hip.

“So is this your usual pillow talk?” she asked.

“No. My usual pillow talk starts with ‘What’s your name again?’”

“Aren’t you just the absolute scoundrel?”

Not absolute, I thought, just ninety-nine percent.

“Hey, Old Timer, you had those super-computers in the old world. I thought they knew everything.”

The Landlord.

“What about them?”

“Why didn’t they warn you about the fires?”

“They weren’t prophets,” I explain. “They were machines.”

“Yeah, but couldn’t they figure everything out?”

How to explain this…

“The computers could answer virtually any question, yes, but you had to know what to ask.”

He scowls. “Do you mean to tell me that nobody thought to ask, ‘Is the world going to go to hell?’”

“It would seem not.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” he says. “You’ve got a machine that can tell you everything there is to know and you don’t ask it about what you really need to know?”

“Yes, well there are known unknowns and unknown unkowns.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

“I don’t really know,” I confess. “It’s just something a man said back in the old world.”

“He must have been a fool.”

“Sure enough.”

Poetically perhaps, but totally coincidentally, a Quark Metrics quantum computer, one of Markus’s finest creations, is one of the few reminders of the old world still on display for we denizens of this charred new world. It dwells aboard a near-earth space station, an artificial light in our night sky that blinks at us impotently from on high.

How must it look at us, with its all-seeing eye, in our humiliated state? What can it think of all that it has seen in its decades aloft, circling a silent earth, speaking its perfect language to deaf ears? Surely we are mere insects to the orbital brain, no longer even interesting in our pointless, feeble doings on this blackened chunk. Has it turned its gaze outward? Has it put the things of men behind and looked to the distance for acts more inspiring, data more worth recording? Right there, on a moonless night, beeping orange in the distance, its tiny, persistent presence reminds us that we once dared reach the outer limits. But it looks back at us from the edge of our former ambition and sees us now, if at all, in our reduced dimension.

Can a machine pity? Does it know us for the tragedy we are? Or are we instead a matter of complete indifference to the quantum mind?

There are so many unknown unknowns, but there is one thing no machine can ever know as well as I – our kind are not to be trusted with the power of our own ideas. We are genetically suicidal, set by nature on an inevitable collision course with our self-made destinies.

The computer lives an unthreatened life a hundred miles skyward. We pass our trudging days here, in the ruination we have made of our own history. The computer is smarter indeed.