The Privilege, page 22
“Would it really matter what he has done?” asked Giuseppe.
Leaning back, his left arm thrown casually over the corner of his chair, a troubled smile, like an unsolved riddle, slipped sideways across his mouth. He looked at Tangerine, but the question he had asked was one he tried himself to answer.
“There was some time ago in Europe a scandal about a certain composer. He had without question committed a number of criminal acts. He was even thought responsible for the suicide of his wife. He was by all accounts a thoroughly despicable human being, but no one suggested that for that reason we should stop performing the music - let me add, the brilliant music - he had written. And of course no one suggests that a surgeon should refuse to save the life of someone because of what the patient has done. Consider that: suppose you are a doctor and the man who has raped and murdered your wife suddenly needs your help - he’ll die without it. What should he do?”
“Let the bastard die,” suggested Sophia, with a grim expression of utter defiance. “And hope he suffers.”
“He has not that choice,” persisted Giuseppe. “As a man, a husband, yes; but not as a physician.”
“A physician who was a man, a physician who was a husband, would do what you say: operate to save his life, and then, at the crucial moment, let the knife slip just enough,” said Sophia, her large, magnificent eyes full of exuberant malevolence. “I know what you will say, but, remember, the law and justice are not always the same.”
“A lawyer, then, should do the same thing?” asked Giuseppe, stealing a glance at me before continuing with Sophia. “Would you have our friend, the great trial lawyer - No, I mean that, Joseph. Everyone agrees: you are the best there is at what you do - You would have him take the case to trial, and then, to get justice for what his client has done before, have him - I think the phrase is - ‘throw the case,’ make sure the jury finds him guilty, even if he did not do it, even if he was not guilty, even if, as in the two cases we have been talking about - the Friedrich trial and now the trial of Alan Boe - someone else committed the crime?”
He let the question hang in the air, a question that would make a liar out of anyone who thought he knew what the answer had to be, a question that you could only hope you would never have to answer, never have to choose whether to help someone who had gotten away with murder avoid conviction for a murder he did not commit, or make sure he was convicted as the only way to stop him from murdering again. We sat there, the four of us, with suddenly nothing we wanted to say, because, suddenly, everything we had thought before now seemed quite probably wrong.
Raising his hand, Giuseppe signaled for the waiter. He was there in an instant, ready to do whatever it was our pleasure to ask. Giuseppe ordered in Sicilian for all of us. And then it started, course after course, each one the best thing I had ever eaten, and each one better than the last. The talk, following our appetite, left the dismal metaphysics of courtroom justice, the juggling conundrums of legal reasoning, and turned to the more interesting, and more noble, discussion of the loves and hatreds of men and women, the taunting, teasing confessions of the romantically inspired, the strengths and weaknesses of that rarest of things, the love affair between two people still married to each other. We watched, together, as it were, Tangerine and I, the way Giuseppe and Sophia Gasperini seemed to live inside a mirror of their own devising, each movement become, before you could bat an eye, a double image, everything they did, everything they said, the first or second part of a two half whole. If they did not finish each other’s sentences, it was only because they were too busy beginning the next sentence the other was about to speak.
Dinner went on for hours. I did not want it to end, I did not want to start thinking again about that question, what was going to happen next; I did not want to start thinking about James Michael Redfield. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow there would be time enough for that. I knew that I was avoiding it, that I was trying too hard to lose myself in the present moment, trying too hard to have a good time. I started drinking, more than I usually did at dinner, and the more I drank the easier it became to have another glass, and another one after that. Tangerine began to look at me with what I thought a trace, more than a trace, of disappointment. I began to look at her with growing anger and resentment. I reached for the wine bottle. Her hand was on my wrist.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t?” I demanded. “You’re telling me that I shouldn’t…?”
“Shouldn’t let Redfield get to you like this. Remember what you told me, when we first met? When you’re in court, you’re the defense attorney, all the advantage is with you. You know everything the prosecution knows and you know more than that: you know what the defendant has told you in private.”
“What does that have to do with…?”
“Redfield does not know what you know. He does not know that - as you often remind me - something always happens during a trial that no one expects and no one has anticipated. What I am trying to tell you,” she continued, squeezing my wrist, “is that if there is another murder, if there is another trial - if you think you have to do it - he’ll make a mistake, he’ll do something you’ll be able to use to turn everything against him. I know it, I’m sure of it. So, for God’s sake, don’t worry about what will happen next. Whatever it is, whatever happens, you’ll know what to do with it.”
There was not a word of truth in what she said. I had nothing like the kind of greater knowledge, I had nothing like the advantage, she insisted I had. She was wrong, wrong about all of it, but - and this was the only thing that mattered - she believed it, believed that somehow, some way, whatever happened, Redfield, or anyone else I came up against, would lose and I would win. The strange, if perhaps predictable, part was that because she believed it, I began to believe it myself.
At least until the check for dinner came. There was no check, because, as our good waiter explained, someone had paid it for us. There was a note, addressed to me.
“Who is it? What does it say?” asked Tangerine, as I opened the small envelope and read the card.
“James Michael Redfield. He has invited me to visit him at that company of his, the one no outsider has supposedly ever seen.”
Chapter Fifteen
Despite what I had been led to expect, there was no fence, no gate, no security guard at the entrance, nothing, except a small sign with the letters AIE, to indicate that you had not simply made a wrong turn and found yourself at the end of a dead end street. What looked more like a narrow paved walking path than a road led under a canopy of tall majestic redwood trees for perhaps half a mile until, suddenly, after coming around a steep curve, there was a large clearing of several hundred well-tended acres, where, on the far side of a small blue water lake, a half dozen low slung modern steel and glass buildings were spread out among close cut green grass lawns. Reflected off the water, the late afternoon sunlight painted everything a soft scarlet gold.
There was no parking lot that I could see, in fact there were no cars anywhere. I pulled up next to what looked to be the main building. I started to get out of the car, but the door was already being opened. A young woman, twenty-three or twenty-four, was standing there, apparently come to greet me. She was astonishingly good looking, but what struck me most about her was the depth of her eyes and the quiet intensity with which she looked at me. From a distance you might have imagined her somewhere on a beach; seeing her this close you would half expect to be told she was the newest member of the physics department of some university.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Antonelli. Welcome to AIE. My name is Carruthers. Redfield has asked me to show you around.”
“Carruthers?” I asked. She was very friendly, she seemed quite open, but the use of her last name, as if it were the only name she had, seemed a shade, not exactly pretentious, but self-consciously formal.
“We don’t use first names here, and we don’t call anyone mister or miss. Redfield wants it that way. He explained to us that it avoids any invidious distinctions between the sexes, and eliminates any suggestion of a hierarchy among those of who who work and learn here.”
“You called me Mr. Antonelli,” I reminded her.
“Yes, of course. You’re a visitor, an invited guest, the first one I think we have ever had. We’re all very excited to have you with us. Redfield told us as great deal about you. What I was saying, what I tried to explain to you: the names we use here - that of course is only here, among the members of the community.”
I may have been the first visitor to the sheltered campus of AIE, but Carruthers conducted the tour with the ease of someone who had done it dozens of times before. This does not mean that I really understood everything she told me; I did not even quite understand the full significance of the name. AIE, she explained, tossing her head as if there was something humorous in it, stood for Artificial Intelligence Enterprises.
“Redfield says it is a contradiction in terms, that intelligence - if it is intelligence, and not stupidity in the form of logic - is the very antithesis of anything artificial; that intelligence is not a product of the human mind: it is the essence, the definition, of the human mind. That makes perfect sense when you think about it, don’t you think so, Mr. Antonelli?”
I had no answer to this, or to any other question she was likely to ask, as she continued to describe what AIE actually did.
“We are the world’s leading producer of advanced artificial intelligence. Whatever you have read about what artificial intelligence will be able to do in ten years, twenty years - we are there already, and then some. Let me show you something,” she announced with all the eagerness of surprise.
I followed her into a windowless building without any visible markings: no name, no number, nothing but the memory of where it was to distinguish it from its neighbors. Like the entrance to the campus itself, there was no apparent security, no lock on the door, no armed, or unarmed, personnel to keep anyone out.
“This is what I mean,” said Carruthers, sweeping the air with her arm to take in everything inside.
But all I saw was an endless series of cubicles, dozens of them, and a few white coated technicians - at least I assumed that was what they were - crouched over microscopes or staring into densely colored computer screens.
“This is the medical building,” she explained, as if that would tell me all I would need to know.
“It doesn’t look like a medical building.”
Carruthers was nearly as tall as I am, with long, straight blonde hair, and smooth perfect skin. Her hands, with long tapered fingers, were like those of a concert pianist or a gifted surgeon She looked at me with what for a moment was a blank expression. Then she understood.
“You’ll have to forgive me. When you haven’t been anywhere else for as along a time as I have been here, you forget what others do not know. It is called the medical building because this is where the future of medicine is being written.”
“Written?”
She led me down the central corridor to what looked like a lounge, a large, open circle with two or three leather sofas, a couple of tables, and a half dozen straight back chairs. An enormous, wafer thin screen hung suspended from the ceiling at the farther edge. Placing her right foot on a bronze cylinder embedded in the gray cement floor, she pointed with her index finger toward the screen. The screen came to life, the picture in three dimensions and a narrator’s voice I recognized immediately as Redfield’s own.
“This will explain what we do here,” said Carruthers, whispering as if Redfield were there in person and she did not want to interrupt.
The presentation was short and to the point; three minutes that, if what he said was true, would make what we call modern medicine seem like a witch doctor’s primitive remedies. The human being, or rather the body of the human being would, in a sense, be reconfigured. A microchip - eventually, if I followed Redfield’s argument, a whole series of them - would be implanted, beginning almost at birth. Every function, every heartbeat, every breath, every brain wave, every cell, would be under constant surveillance; every change, every even the slightest variation from the normal, optimum condition, noted and subjected to an immediate course of treatment. The initial treatment would involve the use of the body’s own defenses: anti-bodies, healthy cells, would be directed by remedial programs written into the microchips. When this was not sufficient, a second stage of treatment would start. Everything tracked by the implanted microchips would also be monitored by computers which, upon the need, would make contact with the necessary hospital or physician. There would never be a disease detected too late for treatment, and nearly every treatment would be far less invasive, and far less difficult, than what was now required when a disease like cancer had spread throughout much of the body.
It was all very clinical, a concise, but, so far as I could tell, comprehensive and in every way convincing, summary of what the new medicine would accomplish. It was only at the end, in his very last sentence, that Redfield said something that gave me pause.
“For those who think there is nothing more important than life itself, this will seem like paradise on earth; for those who think that there is some other purpose to human existence the question may be somewhat more complicated.”
We left the medical building and moved on to the next one. It was almost identical to the one before: a series of cubicles, everyone working with one or more computers; but instead of medicine, they were developing a new form of education, one in which no one would have to learn anything.
“It is really quite simple,” remarked Carruthers, as we walked slowly from one end of the building to the other. “When everyone, or almost everyone, worked on the land; when except for a relatively small number of nobles that made up the ruling class, everyone, almost everyone, was illiterate, no one went to school. Then, with the industrial revolution, the working class, the people - including women and children - spent all their working hours in effect tethered to a machine; scarcely any of them learned to read or write. But with the development of a middle class, the rise of merchants, the increase in the members of the so-called learned professions like medicine and law, formal education - schools and colleges - began to assume a new importance. During all this time, there were always at least a small group of men, and even women, who read serious works. They were part of a leisured class that did not have to spend their time just trying to survive. Universities taught people like these the languages, the sciences, the classics of literature and philosophy; they taught history, ancient and modern. Then, after the Second World War, there was a new, increased demand for a college education, but it was a college education of a very particular kind: it was education for a practical purpose, the knowledge, the skills, needed to have a successful career. Theoretical knowledge was all right, but the world needed engineers; literature was okay, but business administration taught you how to rise quickly in a large corporation. Everyone now had to go to college; without that degree you were never going to get anywhere.
“Then, a half century later, something quite unexpected happened: you could get a college degree without going to college; you could get it online. But - and this is quite obvious, if you think it through - if you can give someone a college education, or what most people now think of as a college education: technical training of the kind of job they want - why can you not do the same thing for grammar school and high school. Why have schools at all? Everyone has a computer - let the computer do the teaching. Look around you. What do you see? What do you think everyone here is doing? - writing computer programs? No, not exactly. What we do here is design artificial human beings - teachers, or rather mentors, or what was once called tutors. The computer itself isn’t necessary anymore. We push a button - here, look at the screen.” She pointed to a small thin screen on a table a few feet off to the side. “Tutor!” she cried. A face appeared on the screen, waiting, as it seemed, to be told what was wanted. “Start the math lesson.”
And suddenly I was back in class, but all alone, answering questions, being told when I was wrong and the corrections I needed to make.
“That is the difference,” explained Carruthers. “Instant feedback. You are immediately told that you have made a mistake and how to fix it. That is just the beginning. Why, if you have a full-time tutor, someone who you can always have with you, someone who can always not just answer any questions you have, but explain the reasoning behind the answer - why learn anything, why go to school, when you can design your own education to fit your own particular need. If I wanted to be able to communicate with someone in French, instead of spending years in school learning the language, and probably never learning it well enough, I just tell my ‘tutor’ what I want said and he, she, whatever you want to call it, takes care of it for you. Instantaneous translation, always there at your command. Why bother with….” She stopped, and stared at me in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve gotten a little carried away. That is a much longer explanation that I should have given. You must….”
“No, quite the contrary. It’s fascinating, especially when, unless I’m mistaken, Redfield isn’t himself convinced that any of this is all that beneficial - is he?”
Carruthers only smiled.
“There are things that cannot be stopped. Technology takes on a life of its own. Redfield teaches that. And that is all the more reason to be as far in advance of that development as you can. You have to see where it is going if you are going to survive it.”
“Survive? You mean it might kill us all?”
“Or something worse than that,” she remarked with a strange, distant glance. “Come. There is lots more to show you and there is only a little time left before dinner, and just after that is when Redfield speaks.”
I had not come to have dinner and I certainly had not come to hear Redfield give a speech; I had come to meet Redfield , and to tell him that the game was over: I was not going to be forced into another trial.
