The White Oak (3 page)

The jittery ghosts are temporarily released from their routine when I pass by. My presence seems to liberate them from the compulsory tracing of their labyrinths, and this delights them. I avoid stepping in their chalk-lined spaces, but they seem eager for me to do so. I stop for a moment in front of a cell crammed with junk: two wrecked cars, a massive television, and eight broken computers. The ghost in this cell tends to the rubbish. I see him glowing under the hood of a car, zipping through the engine block and out the tailpipe.

“What are you doing?” I say to him, not expecting a response.

“My job doing,” he mumbles. It’s hard to make out his words because his voice is full of air. I watch him for a few minutes. He illuminates a computer screen with electric blue light when his ghostly body enters the machine to tinker with its dead circuits. He seems determined to bring the discarded stuff back to life.

“What is your job?” I ask, moving closer to watch him work and accidentally stepping into his cell. As soon as I’ve crossed the boundary, the flame’s whole life passes through me like a seamless memory. He was a repairman with a wife, five kids, and an all-consuming fear of losing his job. The objects in his parking space look different now; they glow with urgency. Everything needs to be fixed. The computer he is working on has a big crack in its eggshell-white casing. It should be replaced, but that’s impossible here. He can’t get new parts; he has to repair what he has, with what he has. I feel what he is feeling—anxiety over the conditions of his work, and the lack of resources, the impossibility of restoring these items without tools or parts, and the futility of it all. Once these things are fixed, there will be no one to use them.

My presence in the cell has freed the specter and entrapped me. He cautiously steps out of the cell, returns, and then leaves again, inching closer to a nearby cell that’s filled with tools. The farther he goes, the more imprisoned I become. When he returns triumphantly, with a plastic repair kit, I am released for a moment, but before I can escape, he flies off again, leaving me rooted to the floor.

I’m thirsty, hungry, wounded, and cold, still wet from the river and shivering in my summer dress. The flickering blue spirit looks so much like a flame that I get an idea. “Hello,” I call out loudly, hoping to get his attention. He is exercising his new freedom, zipping out of his cell, stealing a part from a neighbor, and flying back to his junk pile while the ghost he’s stolen from curses at the edge of his own territory. I try again. “My name is Cora Alexander,” I say. At the mention of my name, the shade stops moving and turns to look at me. For a moment, he has a human face brimming over with surprise and excitement, and something else. He looks like one of my mother’s relatives, but only for a second—the likeness passes across his face and dissolves into the mist. He scurries over to examine me, which is exactly what I’d hoped for; I need his heat. The ghosts in neighboring cells spread the news, and soon everyone is whispering about me, standing up tall to try to see me.

“Why are they so excited?” I ask. But the specter ignores the question, creeps up close to me, and pokes my arm as if to confirm my presence. His touch is not what I expected. It feels like a puff of cool breath. There is no warmth in him at all. Standing in his cell, I shiver as violently as I did when I was immersed in the river, but the heat of anger that kept me going has been drained out of me by the desperation of this place.

The specter speaks to me in a strange, jumbled syntax: “Is doing here what you? Want from us what you?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I answer. “And I don’t want anything from you.” I look out across the black-and-white grid at the congregation of cold flames. Each one worries over a different pile of objects, and in those piles I see things that might help me. “Wait,” I say, as the specter moves away. “I do need things: a warm coat, hot tea, something to eat.” Immediately, a dozen specters press against the edges of their spaces, holding up some of the items I’ve requested. They seem eager both to please me and to unburden themselves. My host collects the objects, laying them at my feet and hovering over them, wringing his transparent hands.

He’s brought things I don’t need, but I can see from the way the specters watch that they hope I’ll accept the gifts: a necklace missing all but one of its stones, a battered saucepan, sequin-encrusted ballet slippers, a tattered fur coat with a missing sleeve, an empty bottle of vodka, a dirty pot of tea, a half-eaten sandwich, a cake of Stilton cheese covered in moldy fuzz. It’s junk to me, but I can tell these things have significance to their owners, and some of the stuff could be useful. The coat will cover most of my body. I bend down to pick it up. My skin tingles in anticipation of its warmth, and the specter vibrates with excitement as I reach out for it.

Before I can touch it, a silvery light flashes between the coat and me. “Don’t take the gifts” it says, “or you will be stuck here forever!” It’s not the voice I heard in the caves, or in the river. I instantly distrust it and reach again for the garment. I am shivering uncontrollably. The flame picks it up and glides toward me to drape it over my shoulders. But before it can, lightning strikes it and incinerates the coat. The force of the blast pushes me backward, out of the cell. The silver light returns, but this time it has a shape. It looks like a man, like part of a man—the top part. The bottom is just haze. “Get away from her now!” it yells. The flame flattens against the ground and slides away.

“Who are you?” I say loudly and with too much anger in my voice. Fear activates a fight-or-flight response, and for me it’s usually fight. The silver ghost ignores my question. He’s preoccupied with making sure the objects are collected and taken away. When he realizes that the specter can’t leave his cell now that I’m out of it, he picks the objects up and throws them back toward their owners. He glows in midair like a movie projected in a dark theater. His image is jumpy, like an old film. And he doesn’t hold one shape for long. I recognize all the personas he takes on, because they come from the movies. First he’s the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz
. Bending stiffly to pick up the broken necklace, he becomes the silvery shape-changing robot from
The Terminator
. Then he dissolves again and comes back as an Arthurian knight, his armor shimmering in the underworld twilight. His face is blurry, but I can just make out the serious expression of a man on a mission. Through the haze of his constantly changing body, I see his determination. Even when he’s not looking at me, I can tell he is focused on me. He is rescuing me, which I don’t like. I prefer to take care of myself.

“Who are you and what do you want?” I say sharply. The silver knight looks into my eyes and slowly becomes more solid. Instead of a shifting, transparent image, I see a real man standing in front of me—or at least he seems real. I recognize him as an actor from a movie about knights and wizards. His costume is a hood of glittering chain mail and a tunic with a richly embroidered crest. He holds a shining sword.

“My name is Minotaur,” he says. His voice sounds exactly like that of the actor, but his speech is awkward and broken, as though he’s piecing together words from film clips. I immediately dislike him.

“What are you?” I ask, rudely. I don’t want him to see how scared I am. “You’re not human, obviously.” Minotaur gets a little blurry when I say that.

“You are correct—I am not fully human,” he replies, with sadness in his borrowed voice. “My father named me after the Minotaur, a legendary half man, prisoner of the labyrinth.” His armor-clad image fades and an approximation of the Greek Minotaur appears—a human body, dirty and naked, with the gigantic head of a horned beast. The image is ghastly. It should scare me more than the movie robots, but I like it better. I can almost smell the animal musk and the fleshy stink of the emaciated human frame.

“You’re not afraid of this?” he growls from his animal head.

“Not really,” I shrug, feeling compassion for the beast. I hope he doesn’t notice.

“Well, it doesn’t matter; this is not what I look like.” The image fades and white noise fills the air. “I don’t look like anything. I have no body.” There is a long silence as I wait for Minotaur to say something more. After a few minutes, I worry that he’s gone. I don’t trust him, but he is the only thing I can talk to in this strange world, and I have a lot of questions.

“Minotaur?” I call out, trying to sound casual, as if I’m just wondering where he went. I need him, but I don’t want him to know it. A partial head flickers in front of me. It’s only a forehead, eyes, and a smiling mouth. It buzzes in midair like an insect.

“I’m still here,” he answers.

“If you don’t have a body, then what are you?”

Minotaur’s sad, borrowed eyes look into mine. “Existence is possible without a body,” he says.

“Okay, then
who
are you?”

Minotaur seems to brighten at my acknowledgment of his humanity. He answers quickly this time: “I am everyone, but I am no one.” Then he pauses as though waiting for my reaction. Seeing my lack of understanding, he tries a different strategy. “I’ll show you what I mean,” he says.

There’s silence for a while, and when Minotaur speaks again, his voice is female. His image shifts from a three-dimensional hologram to a flat animation with text only—like a computer screen projected in midair.
“Welcome to Minotaur 3.0 animated tutorial,”
the voice says. The words
Minotaur 3.0
appear on the screen.
“Please select query stage,”
it says, and the screen displays a long list of possibilities for me to choose from. I have no idea what to do.
“Please select query stage,”
it repeats. When I don’t answer, it defaults to
Stage One Query,
and all the other options fade. Underneath
Stage One Query
, a loading bar gradually fills. When it finishes, the voice begins speaking again, and an old-fashioned drawing of a man standing inside a squared circle with his arms outstretched appears on the screen. It’s Leonardo da Vinci’s study of human proportion. I remember it from art history class.

“Minotaur 3.0 is the most advanced persona-building software available on the market today,”
the voice informs me
. “Its anti-encryption technology allows for seamless interface with almost any surveillance mechanism. Stealth encryption keeps your projects undetectable. Wireless technology and global positioning help the program locate subjects anywhere in the world. Minotaur 3.0 is able to penetrate any firewall it encounters to collect data from secure servers. Advanced AI systems build complete personas from even the thinnest data streams. Virtual versions of yourself, or someone else, can be generated and put to work in less than three seconds. Their fidelity is several grades higher than those offered by Minotaur 2.0. Think of Minotaur 3.0 as your shadow.”

A flowchart appears, explaining how a persona is built, beginning with the acquisition of data from surveillance cameras, cell phones, credit cards, medical records, and computer hard drives, web browsers, and social network sites. Data are compiled to allow a three-dimensional intelligent replica to be generated.

“Would you like a demonstration?” Minotaur asks, still speaking in his female voice. Curious, I say yes. A persona—an avatar—begins to build. It’s a young woman, wearing my dress. She has long dark hair and dark eyes. As the details fill in, I realize it’s me he’s drawing. When he finishes, the three-dimensional portrait is mirror perfect. It seems so real that I reach out to touch it. When my hand passes through her, the interface is activated. “My name is Cora Alexander,” she says in a choppy, robotic way—as though she’s still trying to figure out my voice. Columns of statistics appear to the right and left of my avatar: age, height, weight, blood pressure, my grades, library books I’ve checked out, all the phone calls I’ve made, every item I’ve purchased, comments I’ve made on web sites, a montage of footage from surveillance cameras, all the videos Lucas and I made, every photo I’ve ever taken, and more. I couldn’t believe what Minotaur had on me.

“These data are nothing,” Minotaur brags, using his male voice. “Any hacker could harvest this. It’s the way I synthesize the data that makes me different,” he says. “The persona is an art form that I have perfected. Talk to her and you will see.”

I stare at my double as she reads through my personal stats: hair and eye color, shoe size, Social Security number. Her mechanical voice becomes smooth and natural as the program quickly learns my speech patterns, analyzing recorded snippets of conversation, working to capture the precise pitch and music of my voice. After a few seconds she sounds exactly like me.

“Hello,” I say cautiously.

The persona stops talking and turns to look at me. “Hello,” she replies. “You look familiar—have we met?” She smiles at her own joke, which gives me a shiver because it’s something I would never do. Minotaur has me exactly right except for my personality. He seems to have inserted his own character into my avatar. “What would you like to know about us?” she says, holding her arms out as though offering an invisible gift. Her hair is clean and brushed; her dress is crisp and bright white. Orchids are woven into her hair, and when she extends her manicured fingers, I notice a large ruby ring on her left hand. We look exactly alike, but nothing alike. It’s as though we are identical twins who were separated at birth—one raised by peasants, the other by kings.