When Safiyah Sets Her Flowers Down

“…Robins exhorting threadbare branches. Saxophones battling beneath their wings. Oh, I close my eyes and remember girls shivering in premature sundresses, the fresh scent of winter still so slowly taking leave. Then the sudden apparition of gardens riotous with spring!

“But I suppose I don’t have eyes now, do I?”

As if the sudden apparition of his own remembered spring, the voice had risen out of nothing when Safiyah set her flowers down. Elegiac yet oddly stilted, low and somehow gravelly, it can only be the revenant of one Jack Smoke, the dying author who had digitized himself last spring.

In another mood, that might have entertained her. A promising sculptor, Safiyah’s recently concluded graduate exhibition was a series of heavily abstracted busts meant to render famous alumni of the university as bird baths, and there have been few alumni in recent decades more notable than him.

But tonight she has a mission. A mission not to be disrupted by poetically minded revenants or unseasonable frosts. She is here, in the whitewashed laboratory of Dr. Alouette Brendon, researcher par excellence and, when she feels like it, her girlfriend, to make up, and maybe make a little love.

And yet, infuriatingly, Alouette is not here.

“Robins,” says the voice quite softly. It repeats the word, testing it, stressing its bounds. It breaks the bird into its syllables and then hisses out their rhythm, an eccentric writer’s parody of the last generation’s language learning models. “Rah-binssss…”

Safiyah crosses the lab and peers into its appended office. Nothing. She chews her lower lip and stares a while at Alouette’s long list of conferences and meetings, her little whiteboard calendar a cacophony of captured time.

“Saxophones,” the voice says, still testing. “Sundresses. Sundresses. Sun. Dress. Ezz...”

Then comes a sound like a man sucking on his teeth. “Sundress, noun. A light, loose, sleeveless uniform with a wide neckline and thin straps. Alternatively: she who sunders.”

At that, Safiyah almost laughs aloud. She’s never heard a description that fits Alouette so perfectly before. The woman is a forest pool, set somewhere gorgeous and abandoned. But wading into Alouette’s cool depths you will find a mind sharp enough to vivisect you; and only then, if you are lucky, will your blood begin to warm her waters.

Or maybe, Safiya thinks, that’s just the Wild Turkey talking. She’d taken a shot in her studio to get up the nerve to come here.

Returning to the console where she set her flowers down, Safiyah drags the nearest chair over and then sits down to wait. It is evening, the bell tower’s long shadow making inroads on the quad, and Alouette will be by shortly, to close her lab if nothing else.

As the computer babbles on about sundresses and spring, about her poor, frostbitten flowers, Safiyah closes her eyes and tries to remember how she got here, how a child’s fascination with stacked rocks and papier-mâché sculptures has lead her to a lover’s laboratory, and the dead gaze of a famous writer.

But try as she might, Safiyah cannot find the answers. And so, perhaps out of boredom, she allows herself to ask whatever there is left of him.

“Am I speaking to Jack Smoke?” she says, turning circles in a rolling chair as she looks for someplace polite to rest her eyes. “Author of The Wishing Well and Three Tuesdays Past Tomorrow?”

“Ach!” the voice says. “My two worst books! Why not Jack Smoke, author of Party Games, or Jack Smoke, collector of Bulgarian sports cars?”

“You are him, though?” Safiyah presses. Revenants can be a tricky business. A new technology, their strengths and limitations are not yet clearly defined. A prime factor in attracting Alouette, who’s always loved a mystery far more than its answer.

There is a pause. A door slams in the hallway while, from the open window, music starts to invade the room. Saxophones, Safiyah notes wryly. An alto fleeing from a tenor.

“I have been,” says the strange, harsh voice. “Who’s asking?”

“Safiyah Calderon. Does that name ring a bell?”

The computer turns it over for a moment. Safiyah doesn’t know whether to be flattered or offended; despite industry prognostications, subtext has eluded silicon, and yet she knows, from discussions with Alouette, that her ambitions with the dead writer might lead to something more.

“Nope,” he says eventually. “Should it have?”

Safiyah closes her eyes. She takes a slow and shaky breath. She also knows, from those same late night discussions, just how temperamental Alouette’s experiments can be.

“Enough. Mr. Smoke, I would like to ask you a question. You may use any and all of your faculties to answer it, including the prodigious capacities added on to you after your death. Do you understand what I am asking?”

“Is that your question?”

Safiyah bites her lip. She’s losing patience. Outside, the saxophones are howling. Night is bearing down. Her graduate exhibition has just ended, an exhibition that Alouette poignantly did not attend, and yet she’s still here to talk to her, to look at her, to lay back and be vivisected by her.

“No, it most certainly is not my question,” Safiyah snarls. “My question is this: why am I, a capable, vivacious woman, not a beauty but a catch at least—a milihelen, certainly—here in this godforsaken lab, with my bouquet of frostbitten flowers, when I could be out there, in that wide and crazy world, seeing the sights that might inspire me to launch my own metaphorical ships?”

Another pause. “Is that…one question?”

Safiyah’s head is in her hands. “Yes? I think so? I…” she sighs. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day and it’s only getting longer. Lets circle back to all of that, I’d guess we have the time. What was it you were quoting when I first arrived?”

“Oh, that question is much easier! That was, dear girl, an excerpt from a novel that ought never to be published. I call it The Story of My Lives, and it is fifty-two years long and counting. At a conservative estimate of five-hundred words a day, that makes it, at this exact moment—”

“Long as hell,” Safiyah interrupts. “Is that what Alouette has you doing? Writing AI novels?”

The computer snorts. “Not in the slightest. I am employed in many areas, but novels, being new only in the assertion put forth by their name, are only tangentially among them.”

At that, Safiyah rises. She goes to the window. The buildings ranged around the campus have all grown very tall, and so the night closes on her world like a fist. The shadows lengthen, then pitch off cliffs and fall. In a moment it is dark, and all that’s left are the saxophones, allied temporarily in a harmony against the night.

“I guess she isn’t coming,” Safiyah says, mostly to herself.

“Dr. Brendon?” the computer asks.

“Alouette,” Safiyah answers.

But this time, where Safiyah expects a pause, the computer clears its throat.

“Ms. Calderon,” it says. “On page seven-thousand-two-hundred-and-ninety-three of The Story of My Lives, there is an anecdote about a concept known as fuzzy logic. Are you familiar with the phrase?”

“Fuzzy socks, fuzzy carpets, fuzzy cats.” Safiyah nods. “I know them well. But logic? Alouette insists that we aren’t friends.”

She can hear the wince in Smoke’s simulated voice. “I thought as much. That’s likely why she pursued me. In short, Ms. Calderon: fuzzy logic is the basis for humanity. It contains within its mathematics all the partial truths extant between our ones and zeroes.

“Fuzzy logic is an assertion of uncertainty. In some people it might manifest as an intuitive leap. In others it becomes paralysis, as if, in our modern era, the classical Cartesian thesis has become ‘I doubt, therefore I am.’

“In our cases, it leads us here. You with your flowers, somehow certain you aren’t living. And me with my—what did you call them? Aftermarket add-ons?”

“Additional capacities,” Safiyah whispers.

“Pardon,” says the revenant. “That was the Bulgarian sports car fan in me.”

Safiyah lingers there, on fuzzy logic. She imagines herself dangling from the bell tower above the blackened quad. It would be impossible to know if Alouette was watching. If her professors, working late into the evening, might lean out of their office windows and see her, framed by analog hands.

But she could paint them there. Sculpt their features from the darkness and impose them on their offices. And hanging between the world and its absence, she might discover things about herself. Extrapolate real truths from the way her fingers claw the tower’s sill.

“So by coming here,” Safiyah says, “by looking for Alouette, do you mean to say I’m paralyzed? That these decisions that I think I’m making aren’t decisions at all, only childish uncertainties that just drag out my fall?”

The revenant chuckles. “I did not say that at all. You did. I’ve said only that I miss the spring. That when you set your flowers down on my observation console, I remembered what it meant for life to boil in my blood. To walk out on a brisk evening and lose myself in the patterns of the girls’ dresses like a robin riveted by the memory of budding branches, or saxophones when their player plays a wing.”

“A wing?” Safiyah asks suddenly. “How can you even talk like this? With subtext? In metaphors? A revenant’s code base might be more advanced than a classical AI’s, but that doesn’t mean that silicon can think.”

“Ah,” the revenant says, “but there is your mistake. You’re still young enough to think our bodies matter.”

The revenant laughs then, sad and low. “Earlier,” it says, “you asked if I was the author, Jack Smoke. I told you that I have been, but I’ve also become something less, and something else that may be worth far more. These days I am not the man, I am Jack Smoke’s fuzzy logic, the gray areas between his ego, superego, and id. And beyond that I am a circuit to be cloned and transferred, the fractions meant to complicate the binary of our black and white machines. To think, Ms. Calderon: by this time next year, buried deep inside the motherboards of every ballistic missile system, of every networked smart refrigerator and computerized insurance agent, there will beat the fuzzy heart of an artist who still remembers spring!”

And in the silence after that, Safiyah feels her world spinning. She wants to say, ‘I sculpted you,’ and tell the revenant about her exhibition. She wants to say, ‘I’ve read you,’ even though she never finished Wishing Well and has always hated people who make an art form out of flattery.

Instead, Safiyah doesn’t say a thing. She is too caught up in the imagery, and in the thought of this eccentric artist’s revenant forever yoked to a machine. And for what? She cannot answer that. Until that future comes, who can?

Stunned, Safiyah merely tucks her frostbitten flowers into the crook of her arm and prepares, as she should have from the start, to leave.

So of course that’s when the door opens, and Alouette walks in. Beautiful can no longer describe her—and yet she is still enchanting as that forest pool, from the tailored slacks that grace her hips to the shock that animates her long lashed eyes.

“Safi?” she says, her voice tired and a little drunken. “My god, Safi, are those flowers for me?”

And yanked off of her axis, into another body’s orbit, Safiyah has time only to turn quickly and call, “Jack? Are you real? Was any of this real?”

***

Safiyah wakes some hours later to Alouette’s neighbor’s alarm.

She sits up in the broad, blue bed, and checks her phone against the first curl of dawn. She is too awake too early, and the scent of Alouette’s perfume hangs far too heavy in the air.

Alone beside her sleeping lover, Safiyah studies the flowers in their cracked porcelain vase. There are pale snowdrops and purple irises, and a singular, frostbitten rose. The rose should not even have flowered yet, was precocious and paid the price, but now Safiyah can’t help but see it as a kind of fuzzy logic. Not the short and simple ‘No,’ that she’d imagined when she picked it, a word that would confine the rose to a few short weeks in May and June.

The rose is so much more than that. It is light transmuted into seed, a design turned on evolution’s unforgiving wheel until it spat out a metaphor for beauty so perfect that even she, an artist, can only ever abstract the conclusions that it makes.

And if perfection isn’t fuzzy, than Safiyah doesn’t know what is.

She lays there in the darkness and watches the sun roar up like thunder. She imagines her whole human life as no more than a firmware update, a set of contradictions both deepened and relieved by art. Rolling onto an elbow, she establishes the exact moment when Alouette wakes up but still pretends to be asleep, the breath catching in her perfect throat as she periscopes her senses up into the dawn.

Safiyah dresses in silence. She gathers up her toiletries and slips into her shoes. She sees her copy of The Wishing Well cockeyed on Alouette’s nightstand and, after some deliberation, she decides to take that too.

Then she hears the first faint robins, and goes out into Jack Smoke’s riotous spring.