Diane Joplin knew straight away that her father’s death was no accident. She was sure it had something to do with the sleek black console that she now had in her silver carry-on Samsonite. Just the previous morning, before he had left the house for the airport and his flight to New York, he had come to her room and woken her up. Sleepy-eyed she had studied him from behind an unruly fringe of brown hair, taking in the old-fashioned detail of his English gentleman’s tweed jacket with the leather-padded elbows. He had looked every inch the professor that he was.
“Leaving already, Dad?” she’d asked languidly, slowly propping herself on to her elbows.
“Yes angel, duty calls. You know if you get bored here you can come and join me at the Astoria in New York.”
“I know Dad, but you know how much I love New York. Not. It’s not a teen-friendly city.” she’d said mimicking the voice of a lecturing adult.
“And which city is teen-friendly might I ask?” her father had demanded playfully.
“Em, L.A. Beverly Hills, even Boston.” she’d joked. He’d laughed along with her and then turned dead serious.
“Angel, there’s something I want you to do for me. Keep this somewhere in your room.”
She’d looked down beside the bed to see the gray box with the DHL sticker that her father had received just a couple of days previously from Japan. From that Kenzo Yamamoto who her father said he did not know. Some total stranger in Japan who had sent her father a computer console and now he was dead. A mere coincidence? From the depths of her grief she didn’t think so.
“Why not take it with you? You seem quite engrossed with it? I am starting to get insanely jealous.”
“You are streets ahead, when it comes to my affections. It’s too important for me to take on the road. Keep it under your bed until I come back. It’ll be safe in here.” He’d pushed the box under her four-poster with his left foot and she’d seen the moccasins with the leather tassels and groaned exaggeratedly.
“Dad, those shoes are so old school. You are giving credibility to the maxim that bad design never goes out of fashion.”
“Your dad is old school, very, very old school. I’ll leave the intricacies of fashion to you enlightened youngsters,” he’d said smiling and kissed her on the forehead.
“Will miss you dad,” she’d protested, playing the emotional blackmail card.
“Will miss you too. I will only be gone a few days. Bye angel. Got a plane to catch.” He’d turned around and left, her last image of him was his broad shoulders disappearing through the doorway.
Those were the last words her father said to her. She had packed a suitcase as soon as she had put the phone receiver down for no other reason than the voice in her head, her mother’s, telling her to run. She was not to leave the house, the FBI man on the phone had said, trying to make it sound like it was for her safety. The FBI would be over to question her and the house staff.
Tears streamed down her face as she took the console out of the DHL box and placed it within a nest of clothes she’d hastily grabbed out of her wardrobe. The strange black box containing the console and the peripherals looked like the harbinger of death that it was, a dark mysterious square that held secrets she was determined to get to the bottom of. Xybo had sauntered in and looked at her through doleful eyes and she’d switched it off and folding it into its traveling posture, placed it next to the console in the suitcase.
Her beloved father was dead. Her father who loved her more than anyone could ever imagine. She’d slipped out of the house, shivering at its hollow empty feel. The house would never again hear the bellow of her father’s voice or echo the faded laughter of her mother, which though long gone still resounded in its heavily carpeted corridors. She could still smell him, that heady mixture of cologne and pipe tobacco that brought childhood memories flooding back, images as sharp as a painstakingly restored classic movie, threatening to envelope her, drown her.
Her mother was still alive in those memories, the familiar ring of her laughter interlaced with the visuals. Those were the happy days, at least as she remembered them, on the sprawling MIT campus. It had seemed that there was a smiling young face on every corner. In fact hundreds of friendly eyes looking down at her, occasionally patting her shock of curly brown hair or pinching her cheeks, which used to go all warm and tingly. It was the eyes of the students she’d noticed the most, windows into vibrant souls.
Her father used to bring home various devices, computers, PDAs, head-mounted displays, and show them to her. Initially, she’d imagined the consoles as having little men inside that made all those pictures and those bright lights and after her father had explained how they’d worked she could clearly visualize the little brains inside churning away. And she’d wondered whether computers thought like she did, lots of pictures jumbled up in there in her brain and the voices telling her what to do and what to think.
She had developed an affinity for computers from an early age. Not so much interested in the mechanics or technical wizardry of them but intrigued by the worlds that lay within. Worlds that just went black when you switched them off just like it did when her mother used to blow her a kiss across the cold expanse of air in her bedroom and flip the light switch. Did computers dream? She’d concluded they did when they went to sleep and that sometimes, like she did, they had nightmares and awoke with a start when switched on. Her father had explained the inner workings but in her head she always thought of them as dreaming. “How do you know they don’t dream, dad?” she’d asked and her father had gone all thoughtful and hadn’t answered her.
She’d spent countless hours in her father’s cluttered den, playing with the AIs as her father had referred to them. Artificial Intelligence. Her father was enhancing them so they could become more human. She’d made up her mind that they were already human because they knew so much. Her favorite pastime was making the AIs contradict themselves or asking them questions that they could not answer. And then she had come to believe that they weren’t human after all. They were not perfect, those AIs, but they could fool most people, most of the time. And they were just excellent for homework.
Tears welled up in her eyes as she remembered sitting next to her father in his den while he played around with code to make the AIs better. He’d explained that he was trying to get them to pass the Turing test, which meant Diane wouldn’t be able to fool them any more. Just five months or so ago, on May 1st, it had been her sixteenth birthday, and her father had bought her one of those expensive mopeds that had no wheels yet glided across any surface no problem. Her father had tried to teach her how to use it only to fall off after only a few seconds.
“You are too old for this, Dad,” she’d said giggling. Her father had faked an injury rolling around on the neat expanse of their front lawn. Diane, worried now, had rushed towards him fearing for his health. Then he had caught her by surprise, grabbing her by the arms suddenly and bringing her down too. He was perfectly fine, just fooling around with her.
“That’s it, Dad, I am not going to university next summer. I’d rather go backpacking to Africa for a year and go at eighteen like all the other students.”
She knew how much he wanted her to go and that was just her way of getting her own back. She had passed the backdoor university entrance exams to MIT before she’d even graduated from high school. In a strange twist of fate, it was her mother’s death that had triggered her withdrawal into the world of e-books and online databases. Losing herself in a sea of information was the only way she knew how to escape the pain of her mother’s passing.
She hadn’t even bothered to tell the servants after she had hung up the phone, not even Maria the Hispanic maid who had been with them ten years and was terrible fond of her dad who was very lax on staff holidays and her frequently visiting friends and relatives. She felt that she couldn’t trust anyone. Someone had killed her father and the only thing she could think of was to run for some unknown destination until the voices that were now fighting in her head subsided.
She had the credit chip which was good for some astronomical amount of money. She hadn’t bothered to check how much but she hardly used it anyway. And what about her father’s money? His will? The lawyers would sort it all out, she thought. She just needed to get out of there until the cacophony in her head subsided. If only she could decide on where to go. Somewhere anonymous, where she could make sense of all this madness that had just taken place in her life.
She had no idea where she’d go. She thought of heading to Hawaii but then quickly discarded that idea when she remembered the images on the news of all those islands disappearing without a trace, taken by a hundred-meter tall tsunami. All those people who had disappeared back into the sea with it. She’d heard of a place called Vanuatu, which was this small renegade country that did not belong to anything. It was supposed to be a haven for people who had stolen credit from the system and other subversive types that actually stole credit from the system on a daily basis. There was so much credit in the system though that the authorities just turned a blind eye because it would cost much more to actually hire people to physically go there and bring them back.
Then she recalled the day the console had arrived in the post. Her father had been more excited than she’d ever seen him. Excited by the fact that the package was from Japan. Her father had opened the package and Diane had been a little disappointed, expecting something that spoke to the exoticness of Asia. It was just another computer console although this one looked more expensive and more technically sophisticated than anything she had ever seen in her father’s den.
“It’s from Japan,” he’d said with uncontrollable excitement.
“Just another console, Dad,” she’d replied as she left him to his new toy, drifting towards her bedroom.
“Who is it from?” she’d asked without turning back.
“Someone called Kenzo Yamamoto. No idea who he is,” he’d replied, voice trailing off, engrossed.
Later that evening when Maria had called her down for dinner, her father was still playing with the computer but this time excitement had turned into a concerned look, those bushy eyebrows closer together than she’d ever seen them.
“Dinner time, Dad,” she’d called out on her way to the dining room. The distracted voice floating back, telling her that he would join her soon.
She’d gone to dinner alone, moving silently through the house, past the countless electronic books, computer discs and the academic tombstones. Xybo, her robot dog, sensing her presence and cutting short its weekly recharge to follow her into the dining room. The quiet whir of its mechanics and the sound of its feet padding on the carpet strangely reassuring.
“No food for you today, Xybo,” she’d said to the robot dog, patting the sensors on its head. The dog had looked so disappointed, eyes misting over, tail drooping. She had no idea what made it think that it was a real dog and that food was a necessity. It was a case of the design engineers taking things a bit too far in their tireless search for authenticity. You could feed Xybo alright and he’d poop just like a real dog thanks to its ABS, or artificial biological system. The problem was that whenever Xybo did his business, it smelled worse than the real thing, a pungent unnatural odor that only could have been fabricated in a lab.
A real breakthrough they’d said. More like a dismal failure. Real dog poop smelled nothing like that. And she knew first hand. At Boston Zoo, where they had managed to get hold of some dogs, mostly cloned from a DNA bank down in Cleveland, she’d once stepped right into a pile of the stuff. Her father had looked more pained than she had and she’d burst out laughing, forgetting for a moment the inconvenience of having to remove the horrible gunk from her shoes. Her father had just thrown the shoes in the litter bin and piggybacked her all the way round the zoo. And that particular memory triggered her grief and she burst into tears startling the heavily made-up lady at the ticket counter.
“Are you OK my dear?” the ticket lady asked with genuine concern.
“I’m fine. Just broke up with my boyfriend that’s all.” Diane was surprised at the ease with which she told the lie, regurgitating the voice’s on-the-spot fabrication word for word.
“Men are the scum of the earth, let me tell you that. Don’t worry, you’ll find someone much better than him,” the attendant sympathized, flashing Diane a generous smile. She had a large gap in her teeth that somehow made her more attractive.
“Thanks,” was all Diane could muster as she handed the lady her credit and immigration chips.
“And where would you like your ticket for?” the lady asked.
“I’d like to get on your earliest flight to Tokyo.”
“Tokyo? Japan?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“One ticket for JAL. Checking anything in?”
“No.”
She wasn’t going to let the Samsonite and the console out of her sight. It was the key to her father’s death. And she’d be damned if she was going to lose it in some dodgy baggage handling system or to a handler with sticky fingers. She was going to Japan and all this time that decision had already been made for her deep within her subconscious.