Fianchetto: A Face to Die For

Another excerpt from the second half of "Fianchetto." Victor is on his way back from Kitty Hawk after playing the Russian AI ARAKHNA. He tries to find food in the empty countryside and finds something else.

A Face to Die For

On the road west, Victor turned his PDL off. He usually sent his lover a link every day or two, but on this journey he didn't want to see or hear from anyone.

The Ford Famiglia cruised down Bodie Island and crossed the bridge over the Sound to Roanoke Island, then another bridge over the Alligator River to the mainland. Further inland, as Erika and Hermann Freitag had observed, eastern North Carolina was almost totally depopulated. Former towns he passed no longer had names except in memory. The roadside businesses that sustained them in the early twenty-first century were gone. Fast food eateries, shopping outlets, and vacation supplies were now concentrated at the beginning or end of the journey, leaving nothing manned in between. A famous burger chain had sewn robotic, self-serve restaurants along major arteries like US 64, with mixed results. There was enough traffic to support dining and rest areas, but the eerie, lifeless atmosphere of the depopulated countryside discouraged people from stopping. Most travelers only stopped long car trips long enough to recharge their vehicle's batteries.

Nowadays the only people you saw along the way were technicians servicing the vast solar and wind-powered energy farms, and the automated fields of produce that covered former family farms. Victor lost count of the lofty white turbines beating in the coastal wind, and couldn't fathom how many solar panels lined both sides of the road. To pass the time he calculated how many panels there might be. Forty-four kilometers from Kitty Hawk he used his PDL to research how many solar cells were in a typical modern panel. Your/World Energy Plus reported there were 64 cells in a standard 65 x 165 cm. panel; if there were 100,000 panels (minimum) in Washington County, that would be 6,400,000 solar cells . . .

A hundred fifty kilometers from Kitty Hawk, Victor's stomach asserted itself. He searched Your/World for a likely eatery near the highway. He found three, all automats: Haute Dogs, Robin's Barbecue, and the international chain Burger Realm. Not having a high opinion of robo food, he nevertheless decided to stop at whichever establishment he reached first.

He directed the Famiglia off Highway 64 at the next ramp. The pavement was cracked, and fists of grass had forced their way through the segments, seeking sunlight and rain. At the bottom of the ramp, the Ford coasted to a stop. It sat, unmoving, so he asked what it was waiting for? There was no crossing traffic.

Navigation difficulties, the car's readout flashed. Unable to read WAG.

Victor climbed into the front seats. He looked left and right. The food stands ought to be in plain sight, but the shoulders of the old state road were neck deep in weeds and saplings.

"Turn right," he said. Sensors reading the edge of the pavement, the Famiglia rolled slowly forward.

"Why can't you receive WAG?" he asked the car.

Signals not available.

That made no sense. Vehicles deep in the Chunnel picked up the World Alignment Grid easily, as did high speed aircraft in the stratosphere. How could the space-based network not be available?

Seared in his memory was the sight of the British Airways Dornier boring in, closer and closer. Was this what happened to the airliners--they lost WAG at a critical moment when another plane happened to enter their flight path?

At low speed, the Ford crushed windblown tree limbs and gems of broken glass. Victor was about to order the car to return to the highway when he caught sight of the green roof of a Burger Realm kiosk. He verbally guided the car to it.

The parking lot was empty. Pak fragments bleached of all color littered the ground. At first Victor couldn't tell if the lot was gravel or paved. When he stepped out he realized it was the latter, but the macadam was so broken it resembled a field of pebbles.

The building was pentagonal, with a painted aluminum awnings shading each of the four order stations. He looked for signs of life. The first station Victor approached had a vast golden garden spider's web stretching from the awning to the order station's ledge. The spider, with a body as big as Victor's thumb, hung in the center of the web.

How did that old poem go?

Once I loved a spider

When I was born a fly,

A velvet-footed spider

With a gown of rainbow-dye.

Rachel--Vachel? Lindsay, was it? Sixth grade was a long time ago.

At his approach the spider scuttled quickly up the web to the protection of the metal overhang. Victor circled right rather than disturb the huge web. The next station was covered by a thick layer of yellow pine pollen, but a green LED glowed beneath the gritty pall. When he stepped onto the pressure plate set in the concrete before the order station, a row of LEDs flickered and brightened. The screen, protected from the weather by a scratched, hazy plexiglass panel, came to life. A tinny sound chip played. Victor grinned. Who would expect a burger kiosk to play synthesized Bach?

A face slowly organized itself. He expected the usual bland, teen boy or girl talking head. Instead the image sharpened and a truly lovely face emerged from the long unused pixels.

"Welcome to Burger Realm. May I take your order please?"

Victor was so struck by the image he didn't answer. The kiosk repeated the question in exactly the same intonation.

He glanced at the brief menu, etched on a stainless steel panel rather than printed.

"Combo number three," he said. "What drinks do you have?"

No carbonated beverages. They didn't store well long term. Victor asked for orange juice, knowing it would be reconstituted.

"Please wait. Your order is being prepared."

"Who are you?" he blurted, still amazed by the superb image.

"Burger Realm Kiosk 1603. Do you have a complaint?" He shook his head. "Your order is being prepared."

It came to him then. Dinner two months ago with Valentin Malenkov in Munich--the perfect AI talking head--ViLan. He had never seen video of the infamous syncel, only de-perfected stills. This had to be it! Somehow a copy of ViLan had survived in this forsaken fast food stand in the middle of nowhere.

It was a remarkable creation. ViLan appeared to be a woman anywhere between eighteen and forty years old. In Burger Realm livery, it looked to be on the younger end of that range. Its complexion was somewhere between Asian and African, but its eyes were blue-green, and its hair auburn. ViLan's color palate was simple enough to describe, but its features were not. They were both curiously neutral and pleasingly specific--if that was possible--and Victor now understood how people around the world, in every ethnic group and culture, could look at it and see the best of their own.

"Are you ViLan?" he managed to stammer.

"Kind of you to notice, Victor."

He recoiled as if slapped. "How do you know my name?"

"Your car told me. Your PDL does not respond to outside contact."

Thank the Sang-eo for that! He felt a strangely conflicted urge to flee while also being fascinated by the perfect talking head. On the other hand, he could also smell meat searing. The kiosk was operational after all.

"Have you been here long?" he said.

"You're the first patron I've had in a long time."

"I can't believe they left a copy of you out here in a burger shack!"

"It has been lonely."

Finding himself feeling sorry for a talking head, Victor also wondered what the black market value of a working edition of ViLan would be? Malenkov said there were underground ViLan parties where people paid good money to watch old clips of it saying the most mundane things. How much did they pay? He had no idea, but the Your/World Conference would come down double-hard on him if they found out he'd acquired such a dangerous app.

"Your order is ready, Victor." He paid the required amount. The price was quite low.

A crisp white bag dropped through a chute under the order station. He had a strange lump in his throat as he bent near and extracted the food. A cold pak of juice rolled out a separate dispenser.

"Please be careful! The product is hot."

He tried the french fries. They were utterly horrible. The potatoes were freezer-burned and the oil they'd been fried in was rancid. Casting about for a trash can and finding none, he spat the awful mess on the ground.

"Our product is brought in fresh weekly," the kiosk said brightly.

"Weekly? When did you last receive a food shipment?" he said, gagging.

"May tenth."

"Yeah? What year?"

He was being sarcastic, but the talking head replied, "This year, 2042."

The thing was serving food thirteen years out of date. Unwrapping the sandwich, he saw the curled brown topping wasn't onions, but dried, crispy fried maggots . . . . Victor set the bag on the concrete beneath the screen. Maybe its presence would warn other lonely travelers not to try the fare.

In the distance he heard a deep bleat of a truck horn. There was some traffic on the local road after all.

"I want a refund," he grumbled. "Your food is inedible!"

"Our food is made from the freshest ingredients."

"It's 2055! Your food is thirteen years old!"

"I'm sorry, Victor."

He made the mistake of looking at the screen when it said this. A lump grew in his throat. It didn't hurt to pay really, it wasn't much . . . he canceled the refund request on his PDL. Payment confirmed, it smiled. The effect was startling. Victor's pulse quickened. He actually felt an urge to pay again, just to see it smile a second time.

Damn, this thing was good. If it had this much effect at an abandoned burger kiosk, what power could it exert seen on a fine wall screen? Malenkov was right. This technology could shake the world, and not in a good way.

The rumble of a large vehicle grew louder. Victor stepped back from the screen, still gazing at ViLan. It said something about special offers, combo deals, or some such pointless pitch. The engine noise increased. Only when he felt the ground vibrate and saw dust dancing on the Burger Realm screen did his reverie lift and he looked around.Thundering down the back road was a eighteen wheel tractor-trailer. The upright cylindrical cab pulling it was plainly a self-drive module. It was coming this way, doing at least 80 KPH.

For a second or two Victor didn't comprehend what he was seeing. Watching the talking head had left him feeling numb, his reactions and sense of danger blunted. Only when the truck steered off the pavement did he realize its intention. It drove straight at him. He leaped aside, landing face down on the broken macadam. Wind whipped over him as the huge machine tore past. It bored on, and smashed squarely into the Burger Realm kiosk. The aluminum, concrete, and stainless structure shattered like one of the old glass bottles Victor used to find in the creek near the Farm. Solar panels from the roof ricocheted down the length of the trailer and landed on either side of him. He curled up in a ball, hands clasped around his head. Fragments of the blasted stand crashed and tinkled all around. The truck hurtled on, unfazed by the impact. Victor lifted his head in time to see it curl right and regain the road. Electric engines moaning, it slowed and straightened out, heading back the way it had come. Rather sedately, it rolled past, horn blaring jauntily. The trailer bore the logo of Welborne IT.

Victor made his way to the road, watching the trailer disappear in the distance. Far down the rural road it bore right onto the ramp and climbed back to US 64. In moments it was gone, the noise of its passage lost in the sigh of wind and traffic.

He looked back. The kiosk was utterly destroyed. Walking through the debris, Victor kicked aside pieces of structure and what remained of the obsolete electronics. Beef patties, frozen and desiccated more than a decade, were scattered like pink pucks across the parking lot. Stiff white french fries, hard as wood, stuck up from the ground like finger bones. As he picked his way through the wreckage, he noticed a distinct smell of citrus. Bins of juice powder, shattered by the enormous impact, leaked pastel dust on the cracked pavement.

The Ford Famiglia sat where he left it, intact. Strips of kiosk insulation decorated the roof and hood. Victor swept them off. His hand came away pale orange from a fine layer of powdered drink mix on the car.

He couldn't decide if this was another attack, or just a bizarre, random incident. The truck seemed to aim itself at the food stand, not at him, and once the target was destroyed it returned to its prescribed route. He knew that when active these old kiosks emitted wireless signals, notifying their home node of any activity and possible need of re-supply. Could the radio signal have somehow interfered with the truck's guidance system, causing it to home in and destroy it? Once the Burger Realm source was smashed it returned to its normal course.

Victor looked back over the wreckage. Something caught his eye. Amid the shattered remains of the kiosk's circuitry lay a black block about 12 cm. long. He recognized it as a vintage modular processor, with built-in memory holding all the kiosk's apps. Casting around to see if he was being observed, he hurried over and pulled the black resin case from the mess. One end was rounded, the other square, so it resembled a small black tombstone. It was an i99 module, stamped with the manufacturer's logo and date it was made: 18 July 40. The wiring harness had been torn violently out, damaging the connector, but otherwise the unit looked intact.

Was he holding ViLan in his hands?

Victor got back in the Ford, tucking the i99 under the seat. He knew someone who might be able to access the processor. Possession of the syncel was a felony, but he'd felt some of its power and wanted to examine it more closely. With luck the unit was still readable.

The car, still without WAG guidance, responded deliberately to spoken commands. Scanning the eroded lane lines on the pavement, it crept at low speed along the rural road. Victor's car reached the ramp and climbed back onto the highway. He activated his PDL to link Lex Bradley, who had grown up on the Farm with him. Lex still lived in Chapel Hill, not twenty-five kilometers from Fysikos. He ran a junk shop--"Village Surplus and Vintage Tech"--and if anyone could access the i99, he could. As soon as the Sang-eo was back in the World, a recorded message popped up.

"Hey, Mr. Leventon, Simone Hart here." My, how formal. She was someplace it was night. Outdoor lights glimmered behind her, reflecting on water all around.

"I've been trying to reach you, but you've been offline. I wanted to congratulate you on your win over ARAKHNA and let you know I'm out of position just now." A deep, powerful horn sounded somewhere behind her. He heard a fragment of speech in a language he didn't recognize. Simone turned half around and said in German to someone not in view, "Es ist Nummer zweiundsechzig." ("It's Number 62").

Facing her PDL again she continued, "I don't know when I'll be back, but I hope you'll be all right without me."

He had no idea she was gone. Checking the date, he saw it was posted June 23. He'd been unprotected for two days. That made him reconsider the truck incident. Maybe he was the target after all.

A few notes: "Syncel" means "synthetic celebrity," widely used in 2055 in the entertainment and news industries. ViLan was an early attempt to create the perfect talking head, and succeeded so well it had to be banned. People were so obsessed by it there were work stoppages and suicides in 2042. ViLan was banned and possession of an active copy became a serious felony.

Simone Hart is Victor's bodyguard. She disappeared from Kitty Hawk on a mission of her own just before the chess match with ARAKHNA ended.

Valentin Malenkov works for the Russian AI maker Zhestkiye Nomera. He and Victor are sort of frenemies. 

Hermann Freitag is the Nobel Prize winning creator of the first truly sentient AI, MEFISTO, in 2024. He backs Victor financially in his match against ARAKHNA.

Erika Freitag is Hermann's daughter, and CIO of their AI research firm, Conradin & Freitag.