The Privilege, page 23
“He’ll see you,” insisted Carruthers, when I told her I was there to meet Redfield privately. “When he’s ready.”
We went to the next building, and the one after that, and I was in each place given the same kind of short summation of how AIE, which meant Redfield, was years ahead of everyone else, in transportation, economic development, entertainment, even in sports. I noticed that I had been wrong in my assumption that there were hundreds of people working there. The size of the buildings, the long line of cubicles, had the effect of a kind of double mirror, the same thing repeated over and over into infinity. In fact, I learned when I finally asked, there were only a hundred people working there, exactly one hundred, as it turned out, divided for some reason equally between men and women. They were all in their early twenties, all of them graduates of the better universities in the country, all of them under contract for five years.
“And all of you started the same time, all of you together?”
“Yes,” replied Carruthers, with a puzzled glance, as if she could not quite grasp why this seemed in any way unusual. “We’re all members of the same class.”
We had left the last building and were walking past a small amphitheater next to the dining hall on the other side. Carruthers moved with a dancer’s easy, balanced grace, her shoulders straight, her head held high. Her voice, soft and warm like the summer wind, seemed to wrap around you, take you inside the thought she was giving expression. It was a voice that inspired confidence, but instead of inviting intimacy established a distance, like the voice of a teacher you loved to listen to, but who, if you passed her in the hall, you would not think to speak to unless she spoke to you first.
“Member of the same class? There was another class before you then, and another one that will follow?”
“Two classes before; we’re the third. I don’t know if there will be a fourth. That depends on Redfield.”
I stopped walking. She turned and waited to see what I wanted.
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t…?”
“Make any sense. What you just told me. You work at what, if I am not mistaken - what Redfield himself has told me - is one of the most successful high tech companies in the -”
“No, not one of the most successful - AIE is the most successful company of its sort, not just in this country, but in the world. We’re the leading -”
“Yes, I know, I know. That’s my point. You work for AIE, but you talk about it - the way you describe it - like a university, a five year graduate education, part of a class that when you’re finished - when you ‘graduate’ - another class takes your place, another class that repeats the same five year curriculum.”
“No, nothing is repeated here,” she responded, shaking her head abruptly. “What we do, what we accomplish - what we discover, what we invent, the technical and theoretical breakthroughs - in our last year is what the next class will build on in their first year.”
“That is what doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t all of you stay; why replace all of you with another ‘class’? After all the training, after everything you must have learned, all the work you must have done, why not keep everyone here, continue the work, build on what you have done?”
She looked at me with the vast sympathy of her superior knowledge, and I began to get impatient. For all the thorough detail with which she had described the various things she had shown me on her guided tour, I had had the sense that something was being left out, something missing that would have given a different meaning to all those neatly labelled facts of her’s and their endless classifications. Everything had been too measured, too organized, too well-prepared. Her soft summer voice had calibrated the intervals of spoken words like a metronome marking time. She seemed to take my question under advisement, not what the answer was going to be, but how she was going to phrase it. She smiled, briefly, the silent laughter of a secret she might have been willing to share if only she had thought I were capable of understanding what it meant.
“We aren’t here to change the world, Mr. Antonelli; we’re here to save it. At least the part that is important,” she added, as she gave me that same, brief smile again, and started toward the dining hall just a few short steps away.
The dining hall was a large, rectangular room, the two long facing walls floor to ceiling glass. At one end, in open view, was the kitchen where everyone took turns cooking. There were no hired waiters, no one to wash dishes; everything was done by the hundred men and women who, from what I had been told and what I had seen, were developing the most advanced artificial intelligence technology in the world. They all knew each other, and seemed to like each other. There were ten tables each with ten chairs and, so far as I could tell, everyone just took whatever seat happened to be available. Then I noticed in the far corner something I had not expected, a large play pen with nearly a dozen small children. I looked at Carruthers.
“Our children,” she said, and without another word of explanation led me to a table next to the window at the opposite end of the room from the kitchen.
“Whose children?” I asked, as I took a chair.
“Ours,” she repeated. “The children born here. We’re their parents.”
She noticed my confusion and decided it was forgivable. She nodded to the other eight people at the table, four young men and four young women, an equal division which, I realized, was for some reason true of all the other tables as well.
“To make sure we all can work together, that we stay united, dedicated to a common objective, we have everything in common. That means, in a real sense, each other. We sleep with whomever we wish, but always with the understanding that we do not keep things private, that we do not form attachments of the kind that become exclusive. One result, of course, is that occasionally someone gets pregnant and has a child.”
It seemed too obvious, but I said it anyway.
“There is such a thing as birth control.”
“Yes, but that assumes we don’t want children.”
“And what happens when, at the end of five years, you all leave. Who takes care of the children then?”
“The mother, of course,” she laughed. “Who else?”
“What about the father? No matter how many men the mother may have slept with, DNA would tell you who he was.”
“There is a rule against that. If we did that, then, as I said before, there would be a separation, two people would have something private together.”
It all seemed quite strange, and yet, somehow, quite normal. Carruthers and, it seemed, everyone there appeared to be perfectly adjusted. They sat at their tables, laughing, having what again at least seemed a remarkably good time. Carruthers introduced me to the others at our table. As she had told me, they all went by their last name, only their last name, and they all insisted on calling me Mr. Antonelli. They exhibited the kind of cheerful formality I seldom encountered anymore.
“And this is Blankenberg. He is CEO this week.”
Blankenberg was sitting directly opposite me. Slightly overweight with small, sloping shoulders and a rather pudgy face, his mouth was as narrow and bunched together as a parrot’s beak. He had a habit of running his hand over his forehead to keep his long brownish blonde hair from falling over his blue button size eyes.
“And next week I get to clean toilets,” he remarked, as he reached across to shake my hand. “It is one of the things we do here, Mr. Antonelli: we learn how to do all the thing necessary, all the things that have to be done. It would not do much good if we all sat around talking about theoretical physics, or applied mathematics, if we did not have a clean place to work.”
“Or if we didn’t know how to cook or how to clean up,” added a young woman, Henderson by name, who sat next to him. While Blankenberg brushed aside a few strands of hair that had slid down to his eyes, she tapped her fingers together beneath a wide, slightly off-center mouth that when she smiled dropped to an even more acute angle. “If you are going to run a company, particularly if you are going to start one of your own - which is what many of us plan to do - then you should know how all the parts fit together. Redfield taught us that.”
I gazed around the room. There was a steady drone of conversation, accompanied by a muted chorus of silverware and plates. I looked everywhere, but I did not see him.
“Redfield - where is he?” I asked, a little irritated. “When is he coming?”
The question for some reason seemed a source of amusement. Everyone at the table looked at each other, wondering why I did not know.
“Redfield is never here at dinner,” explained Blankenberg finally.
“I was invited here to see him,” I said, turning to Carruthers. “You told me he wanted me to go on a tour of the facility, that he wanted me to learn something about this place. I’ve had the tour. Where is Redfield? I understand you said he would see me when he’s ready; he needs to understand I am just about out of both time and patience.”
“He comes after dinner,” replied Carruthers. “When he lectures.”
“When he lectures?”
I got up from my chair, and because this was not their fault, I started to tell them how much I had enjoyed meeting them and that I knew they would all make a great success of their lives. Carruthers grabbed my wrist.
“You can’t leave now. It’s almost time. You need to stay. Redfield’s lecture tonight is all about you: the two trials, what you did, how you managed to keep two people from going to prison.”
I was now more determined to leave than ever.
“Tell Redfield,” I said, doing nothing to conceal the scorn I felt, “that I don’t have any more time for this. He can play his games with someone else.”
The lights suddenly flickered and went out, and then, immediately came on again.
“Don’t go,” pleaded Carruthers, with a gentle, hopeful smile. “He’s here now. Or will be. Outside, in the amphitheater.”
Everyone, all one hundred employees, all of Redfield’s students, rose from their places and made their way outside where they seated themselves on the rows of benches in front of the small, circular stage that was at its closest point not more than twenty feet away from the audience. The stage and the circular rows of benches were well lighted. Carruthers wanted me to follow her to a place in front, but I was not sure how long I wanted to listen to a lecture, especially one in which, if Carruthers was right, was going to be about what I had done in two trials in which, though I was sure he was not going to talk about it, Redfield had been responsible for the murders. I sat in an unoccupied row as far back as I could get.
Everyone was seated; everyone was quiet. There was no one yet on stage. They were waiting for Redfield, but two, three, minutes went by and there was still no sign of him. But still no one made a sound. There were none of the whispered conversations that invariably take place when an audience is waiting for a play, a move, any kind of performance to begin. There was no sound at all. The longer the wait, the greater the sense of anticipation seemed to be. It was palpable. It was, strangely enough, like being in an audience at a political rally, everyone waiting for the candidate, the man on whom they had invested all their hopes and dreams, the candidate they expected to see any moment, but for whom they would wait for hours, as long as they had to, because nothing now mattered except the chance they had to get that close to him, to hear from him directly al the things, the bright new promises of what, thanks to him, their lives could be.
Three minutes, four; I was beginning to shake my head at this remarkable, inexplicable hold Redfield seemed to have on this group of one hundred of what must have been some of the best educated young men and women in the country. I was not going to wait a minute longer. I got up and turned to go. But, suddenly, there was darkness everywhere. The lights had all gone out. And then I heard a voice.
Chapter Sixteen
Redfield was on the stage, a disembodied voice in the darkness. I could not see him, no one could, and it was all on purpose. It was no accident, the lights had not gone out of their own accord. No one in that audience could see him, the sense of sight had been taken away, and with that the sense of hearing had become more acute. We were like blind men listening, nothing visible, nothing of the normal shifting scene of appearances to distract attention from what Redfield wanted to say.
“We have with us this evening a guest, Mr. Joseph Antonelli, a very distinguished attorney who has, in recent months, been involved in two trials, both of which have taught us something about the deficiencies of the world in which we live. Because Mr. Antonelli is here, I will wait until another time to continue the discussion we began last time of that extraordinary work, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, written by Jacob Klein half a century ago, a book that, if you had to summarize it in a single line, demonstrates that the smallest countable number is two, because, after all, if there is only one of a thing there is nothing to count.”
As I became used to the darkness, I could see in bare outline a figure seated on an armless straight back chair, sitting perfectly still, talking to an audience he could not see. He spoke slowly, the way someone might speak sitting all alone, rehearsing a speech he was still working on, trying to get it right. Was that the reason for the darkness? - to make it easier to think out loud. He seemed completely at his ease. He certainly was not making an effort to impress anyone; it was too private, too personal, for that. He might have been talking to two or three close friends huddled around a small table in a Paris cafe. It had the feeling of that kind of intimacy.
“I invited Mr. Antonelli because I have been for a long time fascinated with the tension between justice and the law. We have discussed this before - this sense we have that some things like murder, or like betrayal, are always and everywhere wrong; and then the sometimes radical differences in what, in different times and different places, people believe is right and wrong. In a Muslim country, or among orthodox Jews, or in ancient Greece or Rome, the basic rule was whatever the law does not require is not permitted; while here, in America, and in most of the countries that talk of freedom, the rule is whatever is not prohibited by the law is allowed. Freedom, for the ancients, meant the ability to act in the way in which you should; freedom for the moderns means that we can, if we wish - or even if we do not wish, because wishing implies a conscious decision - live our lives as slaves. And this gets us to the real significance of what Mr. Antonelli was able to achieve in those two remarkable trials in which he, quite successfully, made the case for the defense.”
Had Redfield been speaking in plain view, had everyone been able to see him, had he been able to see us, he would at this point undoubtedly have made some gesture toward me, pointed out to his audience the person, the lawyer, he was talking about. In the dark, he did not need to; in the dark, the absence of that normal, polite and expected gesture had no need, no possibility, of interpretation. The words, and the words alone, carried all the meaning.
“The first trial, the trial of Justin Friedrich for the murder of his wife, Allison, put on public display the empty lives of the useless rich. It proved, for those with a mind to listen, that wealth without liberality destroys the soul. Remember what you have heard discussed here before, what was once the working assumption of every well-educated man or woman, what used to be taught to children, what used to be part of a classical, that is to say a liberal, education: living well requires having what you need to live and having time for important things like study and contemplation. Wealth has a limit: the end or purpose it serves. Everything has that as its limit. The question, the only important question, is what is the reason, what is the purpose, what is the end for which we engage in the activity, whatever that activity may happen to be.
“Consider again, and never stop considering, the work we do here. What is the reason, what the purpose, what the end, we hope to achieve with artificial intelligence? Is it to make money, to meet a demand, to be so far ahead of the competition that everyone looks to use to try to force the future? Yes, in a way. The money is a means, a necessary means, to enable us to continue to stay in front of everyone else; it is also, more importantly, the means by which when you leave here at the end to this year you will have the financial independence to do serious work: start your own companies or become involved in public things - politics, government, diplomacy - or spend your lives in study, learning everything the modern world to its great misfortune has forgotten: that it isn’t what you have, but what you are, that is important. If the Friedrich trial taught us nothing else, it surely taught us that.
“What it did not teach us is why they lived the way they did. These were two intelligent people. They had all the money - more than all the money - they could ever need. Why did they do what they did; why did they marry each other? It was quite apparent - you remember what we talked about during the trial - how everyone who knew them seem to consider it more a merger than a marriage. How many witnesses took the stand and told the same story: that instead of being among the wealthiest individuals in the city, they wanted to be the wealthiest young couple in town. This is how we are supposed to measure ourselves: by our combined net worth! Justin Friedrich was a drunk who chased other women; Allison Friedrich slept with other men. But they had money and that made them the honored guests anywhere they chose to go. So the question becomes not just why these two people lived the way they did, but why everyone else seemed to think there was nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it! What am I saying? Everyone thought those two benighted souls were to be envied! - an example that, given half a chance, everyone would have liked to follow! When did vice become a virtue? When did this become the lesson we were all supposed to learn? That was what the second trial should have taught us, what Joseph Antonelli, more than anyone else, helped show us.
