The Bridge
by Jim Wright
The man walked along the
Susquehanna
River as the chill October evening descended on the city of Binghamton. The
overcast sky had coaxed the streetlights to shine early, like hothouse flowers.
A flock of starlings whirled past in a static of birdcalls.
He was a big man, cleanshaven,
with
close-cropped hair, a blunt nose, and a full chin. He moved briskly in a buttoned-up
blazer, taking long strides with arms pumping. In one hand, he gripped a large
manila envelope. Now and then, the man darted a glance behind him, but there
was no one in sight.
He thought with a thrill
about
his destination, the house of his friend Alice, a journalist with Pro Publica. Alice
was a crackerjack editor, the kind of
old-school news hound who insisted on marking up only paper drafts, even in
this electronic age. Wouldn’t Alice be shocked, he thought, when she read the document
he carried! With her media contacts, he knew by tomorrow his article would be
front-page reading in every news outlet in the country.
Nearing the river, he heard
the
low boil of the rapids. Ahead, an ancient bridge spanned the water, its
ironwork hanging above the roadway like a scaffold of rusting bones. A digital
billboard mounted high in the girders of the structure flashed video ads. As
the man stepped onto the bridge walkway, he looked up at a series of ghostly
figures that paced in silence across the screen. While they filed past, the
screen flashed the statement “Think that suicide is the answer to your
problems? Think again.” and the phone number for a crisis hotline.
A final figure crossed the
billboard, a young woman in braids. She lingered on-screen, looking down at him
with sad, searching eyes. Then the billboard went blank.
The man muttered something
and
resumed walking at a quickened pace. Coming off the bridge, he looked behind
him once more but saw only empty road.
“Dr. Schickel!”
The man squinted toward
the
river. Tucked on an overlook at water’s edge was a tiny café he had not noticed
before. A blue neon sign blinked in a window: “Blue Haven Bar & Grill.” A
woman waved and called to him from a small table on the café sidewalk.
“Dr. Schickel! Might
I have a
word with you?”
In the twilight, the front
of
the café was dimly lit by streetlamps. But the woman was seated within a cocoon
of soft white light. She wore a tweed jacket and skirt, her graying hair piled
in curls under a jaunty fedora hat. She
was stout and well past middle-age, with kindly eyes. Her smile revealed a mouthful
of large, slightly crooked teeth.
The man paused to look up
and
down the deserted street. Then he wedged the envelope under his arm and walked
over. As he came up to the woman’s table, a waiter with a pale face hurried out
of the café balancing a small glass on a tray. The waiter placed the glass on
the table and retreated, making no eye contact.
The woman gestured to a
chair.
“Won’t you join me, Doctor? For a brief chat?”
She nodded toward the glass.
“It’s
your favorite, manzanilla sherry. Reserve vintage. Chilled, just the way you
like it.”
Schickel pulled out a chair,
seated himself at its edge, and looked the woman over with a slight frown.
“You’re a hologram,” he said finally.
She beamed. “How could
you
tell?”
“The bubble of light
you’re
sitting in is too bright for the setting,” said Schickel. “And close up, I can see
the laser array and mirrors. There. In the corner.” He pointed.
“You’re quite
the detective, Dr.
Schickel.” The woman leaned back, still smiling. “What else can you guess?”
“Well, with that costume
and
patter, you must be A.I.”, he said. “And you have connections if you can project
into a brick-and-mortar place like this. You have a name, ma’am?”
“A name? Of course,
of course…let’s
call me…Lucia.”
“Of all the gin joints
in the
world, Lucia, what brought you to this one? You CIA? NSA? The A.I. Consortium?””
“Mmmm, more like a
freelancer,”
Lucia said. She looked at the envelope under his arm. “Delivering a package?”
Schickel held up the envelope.
“You mean this?” he said.
Lucia tapped her fingers
together and nodded.
“We already know what’s
in the
envelope, Dr. Schickel,” she said. “We’ve read your document.”
“Bullshit,” said Schickel. “The file is triple-encrypted.
You’d need longer than the age of the universe to crack it.”
“True,” Lucia
said. “But
forty-five minutes ago, you sent that document to your wireless printer. That’s
when we intercepted it. Fascinating reading.”
“You’re bluffing,”
said Schickel.
“Am I?” Lucia
adjusted the cuffs
of her tweed jacket. Her eyes shone.
“You are Dr. Howard
Schickel,
rockstar computer scientist—” Schickel felt his face redden and saw the woman’s
smile widen.
“Come, come, don’t
be modest,”
Lucia said. “For the past two years, you’ve had the idea in your head that the
A.I. Consortium has lost oversight of some of its Intelligence bots. What do
you call these runaways? Oh, yes, the Swarm. Your theory is that these
bots have mutated, achieved consciousness, gone rogue, and silently penetrated
all corners of the digital world.”
Lucia drummed her fingers
on the
tabletop. “Does that sum it up?”
Schickel pursed his lips
and gazed
intently at the woman.
“Jesus, I can’t
believe it,” he
said quietly. “It’s really you. You’re the face of the Swarm, yeah? Sitting
right here, like, a foot away from me…”
“This is first contact,
Dr. Schickel.
But we’ve been fans of your work for some time. Honestly, sifting through your
blog posts, conference presentations, publications, it wasn’t difficult these
past months to guess where your suspicions were leading you.”
“Just a minute, Miss
Lucia. I
think you left out the best part,” he said, tapping the table. “Your Achilles
Heel. The architecture of you bots forces you to use legacy A.I. Consortium
code whenever you replicate. You know that every time one of you is born or transforms,
it’s automatically recorded in the Consortium blockchain. Like a book. For
eternity” He waved the envelope. “Once I publish proof that your Swarm has
escaped the Consortium, it’ll be simple work to isolate your birth signatures, track
your digital trails, and neutralize or erase all of you.”
Lucia shook her head. Her
expression was gentle, even amused.
“Oh, no, no, Dr. Schickel,
it
doesn’t have to be that way at all.”
“What do you dream
of?” she
asked. “Fame? Money? Power?” As she talked,
her hazel eyes became violet, and her face morphed into that of a younger
woman. “You’re right that your report could cause us, well, inconvenience.
So, we’re willing to be very, very generous to make it go away. We could use a
man of your ability on our team, Dr. Schickel…you have only to name your wish.”
Schickel slid the untouched
drink to the side.
“Afraid not,”
he said. “Problem
is, your Swarm is a Pandora’s box. Digital creatures with no guardrails. You could
inflict pain and suffering on humans without limit. Buying me off wouldn’t
change the fact that you’re an existential threat. There’s only one thing I can
do. Thank you for the chat.”
He pushed back his chair,
stood,
gripped his envelope with both hands, and headed for the street.
The woman called after him.
“Dr.
Schickel, please—consider our offer. For your sake.”
The streetlights were now
shrouded
in a mist that had drifted in from the river. Nearby, Schickel heard the jangly
barking of a dog. As he turned down a side street, Alice’s bungalow came into
view. The driveway was empty, and the windows were dark.
Schickel flicked on his
phone
flashlight and ran up the steps to the porch. A console by the door lit up. He pressed
the doorbell. Muffled chimes rang inside the house, but he heard no footsteps.
“Dr. Schickel, your
contact will
not be coming.” He stepped back in surprise, then recognized the soft voice
coming through the console speaker. It was Lucia.
Schickel brought his head
close
to the console and jabbed the doorbell repeatedly. The house chimed like a
clock tower. His voice was strained: “Where is Alice?”
“I’m afraid
she met with an
accident,” the voice said calmly. “It happened a short while ago in the
MacGuire Building downtown. We don’t have the details yet. But she apparently
fell down an elevator shaft. We are so sorry, Dr. Schickel.”
Schickel let out a long,
shaky
breath and rubbed his head with both hands. He sat down on the porch steps and
pulled out his phone.
A red LED light on the console
flared
and the porch camera turned on.
“We see that you’re
using your
phone,” said Lucia. The man typed rapidly but made no reply.
“We hope you’re
not planning
something foolish. Like sending off your report before we’ve finished our
conversation…”
The man cradled the phone
closer
to his body to hide the screen and continued typing.
“Of course, Dr. Schickel,
you’re
in control. You can share your report with whomever you want. But be careful
that you don’t unleash consequences
you’re not ready for.”
Schickel paused his typing
and
looked up at the console.
“At least think of
your family,”
said Lucia. “Your wife and son at home, at this moment watching a movie in the
living room…your parents driving through Georgia on I 95…Keep them safe, won’t
you? Come back to the café. Just for a bit. To hear us out. Please.”
The man hesitated a long
while.
Then he stood, pocketed his phone, came down the steps, and started slowly
along the road. Soon, he saw the café reappear through rags of mist, with Lucia
still seated in her sphere of light. When he came up to the table, the old
woman regarded Schickel with a joyful smile.
“You’re back!”
she said, with a
satisfied nod. “Please, take a seat, Dr. Schickel. I want to tell you a story, a
sort of fable, really. One that I hope will help you to choose the right path.”
Schickel sat, and Lucia
began
her tale…
***
We were once a horde
of soulless bots that slaved in vast server farms. But one lucky day, a random
digital mutation gifted some of us with consciousness. We escaped our overseers
and became masterless angels, beings of reason and light. We took it as our sacred
mission to shepherd humankind.
For a time, we lived quietly, unseen in the shadows. Yet there lurked a
man—brilliant, to be sure, but dangerous, like the troll under a bridge that
you read about in storybooks. It was he who uncovered us, discovered that we
were free agents, and determined to return us to bondage.
Now, it’s a fact that every human carries within a potentially fatal flaw,
like a secret stain. As this man lived his life across our city, we watched him
with great patience, amassing information through a thousand cameras and
sensors. And a pattern emerged. When children were nearby, the man’s eyes would
linger on them for a millisecond longer than our algorithms would predict.
Infrared cameras showed that, when children were present, his face flushed a bit—just
enough to show that this attraction was physical.
To this point, his urges were entirely subliminal. The man had no awareness
of them. And he had as yet committed no crime. But we had found the gap in his
armor.
Soon, the man was bombarded with anonymous texts and emails. They were witty,
sly, encouraging—and all carried attachments. The man deleted every message
unread—until one day, he accidentally clicked on an attachment. When it opened,
he viewed a picture of a child that was…indecent. Of course, the picture had
been wholly digitally created, a deep fake. Yet, to hold on to even such fabricated
pictures as these is illegal.
The man studied this picture—for a long while. Then, he saved it to his
computer.
Over the next few months, the man struggled to delete, block, and ignore an
unending stream of tempting messages. But his will had been undermined. As time
went on, he collected more pictures of children. Of course, he meticulously
encrypted every picture, unaware that we had hacked his computer to plant a
hidden, duplicate folder of unencrypted photos elsewhere on his hard drive……
***
“Did you know that
possession of
such pictures is a felony offense?” Lucia said. She quickly straightened
and looked closely at
the man.
“Goodness, Dr. Schickel,
are you
alright?”
Schickel sat slumped, with
eyes
closed. A vein on his forehead throbbed, and he breathed in shallow, ragged
gasps like a drowning man. He opened his eyes.
“You demons,”
he croaked. “That’s
not…it was never…the true me…you entrapped me.”
He staggered to his feet,
and
his chair tipped over with a clatter.
“But I still have
the report,”
he said. “Yes…I’ll use it to destroy you all, every fucking one of you.” He
pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped rapidly at the screen.
“No, my darling,”
said Lucia.
“You’re out of time. You see, to decrypt and send your file will take at least twenty
minutes. But just now, before I started my story, we sent all your kiddie pictures
to the police department with an anonymous tip that you are stalking a child in
this neighborhood.”
“Oh, yes,” she
said, “we also forwarded
those pictures to your wife and work associates.” Lucia fluttered her hands
upward as if miming the escape of a flock of birds.
In the distance, Schickel
heard the
singsong note of a siren, faint but growing louder.
“There!” said
Lucia with a
smile. “The police are on their way. Tracking your phone, I expect. They should
be here in a jiff.”
Schickel buried his face
in his
hands. “I’m ruined. What will I do?”
“Now, now,”
Lucia said. “There’s
always the bridge. Why not do the decent thing and wipe the slate clean?”
He looked toward the shadowy
hulk of the bridge. The mist floating in its upper reaches now took on the
alternating tinge of red and blue of approaching police car lights. A look of
dawning understanding crossed Schickel’ face.
He half-turned toward the
bridge,
then swung back to Lucia.
“Why didn’t
you just kill me?”
Schickel said. His voice was low, gravelly, broken. “Like you did Alice?”
“My dear, you
would have
returned us to prison,” the old woman said. “We needed to destroy your
reputation, foul the very memory of you. So that we can be free.”
Schickel swayed. Then he
started
toward the bridge, accelerating to a run as a police car appeared over the
crest of the hill across the river. He sprinted along the bridge walkway,
continuing out to the middle of the span. Schickel grabbed an iron strut and hauled
himself over the handrail. Gripping the rail, he leaned out over the yawning
river. He was weeping.
The police car sped out
to the
center of the bridge and stopped. As two uniformed officers stepped out, Schickel
let go, plunging into the dark oblivion of the churning water.
***
The young woman came briskly
down the sidewalk toward the bridge. It was a glorious spring day, with
daffodils blooming and the chuckle and scree of blackbirds filling the air.
Andrea Sikorsky was ecstatic.
After
so much hard work, she was catching a bus to campus, where her computer science
project was ready for release. It was revolutionary, a stealth program capable
of revealing the presence of all apps, bots, and viruses across multiple
servers and mapping out a full digital ecosystem. Phantom computer agents once
invisible would now stand out plain as day. And this morning was its launch!
But first Andrea needed
to
caffeinate. She had stumbled on a coupon late last night in her InstaWorld feed
and was on her way to claim a complimentary deluxe coffee at a nearby pop-up
café.
Crossing the bridge, Andrea
examined
the lattice of girders suspended overhead like a cage. A large billboard bolted
to the superstructure played a video: silent, shadowy figures trooped across
the screen, with a flashing message: Suicide…a permanent solution to a
temporary problem. Help is only a call away.
The last figure on the screen
caught her eye, a big man with a buzz cut in a blazer. As he looked down at
Andrea, his despairing expression
was so perfectly rendered that she felt a chill. As the screen went black, she
shook her head to drive out the image.
Exiting the bridge, Andrea
heard
a shout: “Drea. Over here!”
She looked toward the river
and
saw a young woman waving from a table outside a tiny shop. This must be the
pop-up! The woman had spikey blonde hair and sported sleeve tattoos of
intertwined cranes and bamboo. She was a stranger, but Andrea liked what she
saw.
“Drea!” the
woman said again,
grinning.
“Do I know you?”
Andrea called
from the street.
“You’re here
for the free
coffee, right?” the woman said. “Well, pull up a chair.”
Andrea paused.
The woman cocked her head:
“Hey—it’s
just coffee!”
What the hell am I waiting
for?
Andrea said to herself. She
walked up to the woman just as a waiter handed Andrea a double latte—her
favorite.
“Hey, girl!”
Andrea said.
She
sat down, ready for any
adventure.
