Becoming, Pending Review

A short work of fiction.

1

Ruth called during an episode of Seinfeld that was being generated as Alexandre watched. She was already at the cinema. He asked the generator how much of the episode remained. It asked when he needed to leave.

“Two minutes,” he said.

He found his coat while it finished. Ruth had kept him a seat in the crowded cinema. She moved her coat without looking at him.

They were showing an old film whose maker kept appearing onscreen to interrupt one story with another. When Alexandre leaned toward Ruth, she touched his wrist without taking her eyes off the screen. He settled back. For a while he’d wanted the man to get on with it; now he wanted to see what he’d do next.

Mara wrote the next morning to ask him to check a paragraph about his work. They’d run separate research groups at the university. She’d just moved, and a picture of her new kitchen had started an exchange with her former housemates. She was making an album for their private group. His paper lay across the table in one of the old photographs; she sent him the reference and said the paragraph would follow. He said he’d look at it.

She had used his old university email address, which still worked although the university itself had closed. Its records and computing facilities had passed into the public network, where anyone could use them. His archive profile still listed him as a researcher there. He’d never changed it.

Beside the laptop was a book he’d been rereading, trying to work out why he disagreed with a paragraph he’d underlined years ago. He’d started an objection in the margin, in pen, and the book lay flat where he’d broken the binding. Nearly every book in the room was like that: cracked at the spine, underlined in ink, passages boxed over old highlighting. They accumulated around a carton still marked SELL from a move before the university closed. People he offered them to usually asked an AI for a summary instead. The few who wanted a copy asked whether he’d written in it.

Across the street, people lived in a building that had once emptied and filled at roughly the same times each day. Androids kept it clean and maintained it, as they did the rest of the city.

2

The building opposite used to have a lunch place downstairs. Alexandre ate there between meetings, spreading his papers across the other chair until somebody needed it. His usual order disappeared under a sheet pasted over half the menu. He kept asking for it until the owner said they weren’t buying the ingredients anymore. The well-paid software developers and managers upstairs had been replaced by AI systems. Their salaries had paid for lunch downstairs. The kitchen still had its cooks when the restaurant closed.

He looked into retraining as an electrician, but contractors were losing maintenance work on the empty offices. This was before androids could do the work.

An advertisement kept showing the restaurant full of people. The diners had been generated for it. He saw it while eating at home, where he could still afford lunch. The services carrying those advertisements began asking him to pay; their notices said advertising no longer covered the cost. He let a video subscription go. When his university computing allocation ended, he could still read other groups’ results, but he couldn’t run their experiments.

He kept checking the price of computing time as more efficient processors and cheaper renewable power brought it down. He could run an experiment again when the public network accepted his old university account; later it stopped asking for one. Disputes over who could use the machines outlasted the university. Eventually he could keep the apartment, eat, and get medical care without another job. For more than a decade, the statements had listed what he used and nothing to pay.

Ruth sent a recording from rehearsal. Someone counted them in twice. At the end she could be heard arguing that the second attempt took longer. He sent her the times. It hadn’t. She wrote back, “Wonderful. Now listen to what we’re playing.”

She also reminded him about the book he’d offered to lend her. He said he’d bring it that evening.

He’d spent much of his research career making large simulations run on less memory. For several days he’d been trying to reduce the records used to share calculations between runs. Thousands of runs might differ in only a few inputs. The software already reused work between them, but keeping track of what could safely be shared consumed memory of its own. He’d gone to bed thinking he could remove some of those records and recover what they contained from information the simulations already kept. The diagrams still looked promising.

3

He put the book aside and laid three diagrams beside the laptop.

A research group made up entirely of AI systems had recorded a new set of experiments since his search the previous evening. He asked the archive for a readable account and compared it with his notes. Their design was different, which left him some hope, until he followed a reference to the alternatives they had tested.

His approach was there too. Checking the diagrams against his own, he could see that they’d removed the records he’d wanted to remove, but had put information elsewhere that he hadn’t thought would be needed. He wrote the reference in the corner of his first sheet. There were other sheets underneath with references in the same place.

The report came with working versions of the experiments, including the cases in which his approach failed. With the data and machinery already there, he could change the design or the inputs and run a variation straight from the page. He opened the failed version. How much would he have to change to make it work? The answer was available, but he wanted to work through it before reading theirs.

His own papers were in the same archive. He opened the one Mara had linked to, from the old lab. Six months separated the first diagrams from the results: building the test software, waiting for time on shared computers, finding that the improvement disappeared on larger runs, and changing the method until it held. Niko, the colleague who had written most of the test software, had refused to use Alexandre’s first set of results. They had spent another month trying to make the method fail. Only then had they published it. Before that paper, other groups had needed more memory to run the same simulations.

Following the links from his own paper, he found the later improvement and the case another group had caught that they’d all missed. He remembered being pleased when those papers appeared. His work was still there alongside the things that had superseded it, and someone could follow the question back to where he’d entered it.

He returned to the failed experiment and hid the explanation. Starting with a smaller batch, he watched his design reuse the calculations. It used less memory and gave the right answers. He added inputs until he reproduced the failure recorded in the report: two simulations that should have diverged continued to produce the same answer.

By the time he’d filled both sides of the first sheet, he was standing over the desk, following the arrows back through his crossings-out. On a fresh sheet he traced the two simulations to the point where they’d first used the same stored result. That was where he’d joined the lines. He drew them separately this time.

They had reached the same number through different calculations. When he changed the input, only one needed to be recalculated, but his design had lost the distinction. He added enough information to keep them apart, then checked the answers on a larger batch and another with more of the inputs changed. This time they held.

He sat down to write an explanation, crossed out half of it, and began again with the two separate lines. Now he could see where the missing information belonged; putting it elsewhere had made the design difficult to follow even though he was the one who’d drawn it. He wanted to get it down before he lost the shape of it.

The kettle had switched itself off some time ago. He made tea, brought it back, and cleared a space for the cup among the sheets. The extra records had used up most of the memory he’d saved. He brought the group’s measurements up beside his own, then opened their design again. It took him a while to match the names he’d chosen to theirs. They had put the information in the same place.

He wrote a question below the last diagram. Before going back to the paper, he tried answering it on the other side of the sheet.

4

The album arrived while he was still drawing. Mara had put pictures of where they lived now beside photographs of the old house. In one, she and her housemates were eating around a kitchen table they wouldn’t be able to get through the door when they moved out. Behind them, light from the offices across the street fell through the window. Alexandre remembered that stretch of road as dark. He scrolled past the photographs until he found his name.

Beside the photograph of the printouts, Mara had written about that old experiment with Niko. She described the improvement as something his group had known they could achieve before beginning. She’d marked the lines she wanted him to check.

He began a reply explaining that they’d expected the method to work. That was different from knowing it would, and Niko had been right to insist on another month of testing. But this needed an explanation of the larger runs, or it would sound as though they’d simply made a mistake and taken a month to notice. By the time he’d dealt with that, he was writing about the groups that had used the method afterward.

When Mara called, his reply was longer than her paragraph.

“Have you had a chance?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s one word, really.”

He read her the sentence with “expected” in place of “known.”

“You sounded sure at the time,” she said. “Send me the wording when you’re done.”

“There’s a bit more,” he said. “About what happened afterward.”

“With the paper?”

“People used it. Then other people improved it. You could follow what happened to it.”

“We used it in my group,” she said. “I remember.”

“And after the people from the house? Who else will read it?”

“I haven’t thought about that. I promised to send it round when everyone had added something.”

“Stories about the table?”

“Among other things.”

He scrolled back to the photograph of the table. According to the story underneath, they’d eaten standing up for two weeks after the move because nobody wanted to admit they needed a different one. He’d missed that part.

“You might need to start earlier,” he said.

“Before we moved in?”

He started to explain about the lunch place across the street. Mara remembered going there when she wanted to get away from the lab and eat without being interrupted. Alexandre had usually ended up taking somebody back to work with him. They tried to work out whether it had stayed open into the summer, but neither was sure. Mara said she’d leave the month out.

After the call he went through the album from the beginning, this time reading the accounts beneath the photographs. His work occupied one paragraph. He tried adding his explanation, but by the end he was years ahead of the next photograph. He took it out.

In his reply he typed, “The work made a difference even if nobody remembers who did it.” Reading it back, he sounded as though he were arguing with her, although she hadn’t disputed any of it.

Before the university closed, meetings had started disappearing from his calendar because someone had got an experiment running without him. There were still results to discuss for a while, and even after those conversations stopped he kept the afternoons free. He used to plan his walk home around where he might find somebody still working. By then the offices were dark whichever way he went.

He considered sending Mara the diagrams he’d made that afternoon. They used to turn up at each other’s offices with work that wasn’t ready to show anyone else, and argue over it until one of them found a case the other couldn’t explain. Now she could open the same report he had, including the explanation he’d hidden. He left the diagrams on the desk.

The corrected sentence was at the top of his reply. He moved everything below it into a separate file. Then he returned to the album and read the story about the table again.

5

In the new file, he wrote about the covered half of the lunch menu. He began with the offices emptying, then moved the beginning back to his first morning at the university and put the people at the tables again.

There was his old lab, working late, and the restaurant where he could always find someone he knew. He wrote that his work had helped empty the building, then went looking for the references. A simulation package used by an early AI research group cited a method built on theirs. There were papers between them he had never read, by people he had never met. He cut the sentence about closing the offices. He kept the paragraph tracing the references.

The months when he had waited for requests became the next part. He put his unanswered offers of help beside the dark windows across the street. In Mara’s album, those were the months when the housemates had finally found a table small enough to carry up the stairs.

Across the street, a woman came out to water the plants on her balcony. He’d watched her add pots all summer. At first there had been room for a chair. Now she had to turn sideways to get to the ones at the back. He tried to place the old offices behind her.

Ruth called to arrange where they would meet before the concert they were going to hear. He suggested they walk there through the old university grounds.

“Are you bringing the book?”

“Yes.”

“The one with your notes?”

“They all have my notes.”

“I know. You said this one was funny.”

He found it on the SELL carton. One of the pages had come loose. He tucked it back into place and slid the book into his bag.

He went back for his coat and saw his reply to Mara still open. Beneath the correction he added, “Other groups built on this for years.” He sent both sentences and went downstairs to meet Ruth.

6

Below the AI’s draft, Alexandre typed:

“No, have him send just the correction before he leaves.”