A half-hour later, and the Director had joined her, and he’d brought tea. He was eager to report on his talk with Eva and discuss the girl’s response to the news that she would not be “alone” when she woke up alone. He also very much wanted to process his own experience of the conversation, which had left him feeling uncomfortable – he didn’t get the chance: he hadn’t considered that Brigid would also be hearing much of the same information for the first time. Normally, he would have been excited to share the story – how Medalion had been able to reproduce a limitless array of things from the “raw material” of the swarm, even to the point of creating fully habitable environments filled with dynamic community life. But there was nothing normal about these conversations anymore, and the audiences were less friendly now than they used to be. He could see that Brigid was no longer listening, and so he allowed a moment of silence, that she might gather her thoughts; it could be a lot to take in. She was holding a small cup of tea in her hands, and marveling at the warmth and weight of it. The psychologist was processing these final astounding revelations in the only way she knew how, by wrestling her attention onto something concrete, blocking out the global implications in favor of the safety of simple truths at hand. When her patients were overwhelmed or anxious they learned to use their physical senses to become grounded, to reach out for something soft or maybe abrasive, something cold or warm, felt, tasted, smelled, whatever. Each could be a touchpoint in an anxious person’s need to be safely anchored in reality. Brigid’s attempt to get grounded in this moment was unsuccessful, not merely because the threat of anxiety was greater than she was used to, but because the very thing she was touching in order to become grounded was not real. It occurred to her that the ground itself might not be real either. ... ‘Don’t be mad, Brigid, of course the ground is real,’ she told herself, turning again to the warmth of her un-tea in one more unsuccessful attempt to focus. She felt detached from her own body, but only by a few inches, as if she were stuck in a failed out-of-body experience, unable to get free, bound to a marionette version of her fleshly self that she had forgotten how to control. Then the Director was talking again, explaining how her entire environmental experience since arriving had been designed and built by a computer: everywhere she’d been, everything she’d seen, even eaten; and not only the occasional beer or breadstick – artificial meals were easy enough to accept, if only because science had been chasing the trope of food replicators for years. But, considering everything she’d witnessed since arriving, she was distressed to learn that his questionable vision for the future was happening, and that the core technology was even now represented at almost every level across the compound – the rooms and everything inside of them, the passageways, the networked technology itself ... were all machine-made and made-of-the-machine. Most astounding of all? Many of the staff were built from the same stuff as their surroundings. The latter fact made sense when she thought back over some of the weird interactions she’d had throughout the facility. Any doubt she had was driven from her mind when Albert showed her the live feed of a town being raised overnight a short distance away. Not long before, she had looked out over an empty gravel plot a mile to the east, all that remained after the demolition of the burned City Center. He explained that the open space under its now translucent dome was itself simply the top half of a massive sphere that would cradle the infrastructure of Medalion’s elaborate work of architectural stage-craft. He called it the world’s largest snow globe, half filled with the settled rubble of the passing present, sanitized and prepared as a foundation for what comes next. And what came next was apparently going to play out in an exact replica of an unremarkable suburban city center. Some part of her knew that she wasn’t going to ease her fear or frustration by confronting the totality of a world she barely understood, and her attention unconsciously redirected toward problems of a smaller scale. ‘... So, you ... also made the room they put me in when I first came here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Your Machine ... created the room from scratch? With unlimited resources?’ ‘Yes!’ Then, with the attitude of instruction, ‘But no, not unlimited resources. It’s really very ....’ She cut him off, ‘And you made that room? Essentially the inside of a trailer, with ... wait, the furniture too?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You can make anything and ... I mean, seriously Albert. Plastic furniture? I was in there, alone, for more than an hour! I thought I was going to lose my mind. Did you try to make it boring? ... Hold on!’ She’d suddenly remembered the blue-and-green ball; she pulled it out of her pocket and looked at it like she’d been carrying something of unexpected value; ‘Did you make this too?’ ‘Well, yes! I mean, no! But yes. See, that was really something. The room was boring, I’ll give you that. But I was working with ... well, I tried to tweak the settings for the room because I knew you were coming in. It was going to be basic to begin with – we classified it as a temporary meeting room for visitors. But I wanted to further define the room as a therapy room because, you’re ... well you know, but as of that morning, turns out the system didn’t have a library for the kind of place where you do what you do. So, in a bit of a rush-job, I told Abdul to enter a couple keywords at the last minute, “anxiety” and “mitigation,” etcetera, etcetera. The sad truth is we just ran out of time, so I made the call to freeze the code because I wouldn’t be able to review. But at the last moment, the Machine ...,’ here he looked weirdly pleased, ‘just popped out that little ball.’ Brigid shook her head, unsure of what to think. ‘Ok, huh. Well. Has anyone given any thought to these kids and what the architecture is going to do to their will to live? You took Eva from her home! And you have her locked up in a prison that takes design cues from an under-funded lab. I have more freedom than she does in this place, and I’m going nuts after a couple days. It’s bad enough buildings like this exist in the world, Albert, but, you had a choice! You couldn’t, maybe, allow for a little creativity?’ ‘Well, Brigid, now, you’re making a valid point, but these choices serve a very important purpose.’ She looked disappointed. ‘... In fact, it’s critical. It proves the Machine can make intelligent choices by itself!’ ‘Intelligent.’ ‘Hah, well. We don’t tell the Machine how to design the buildings. We tell it what they are for and who works there and let it do its own calculations. If we tried to get creative, or, worse, asked the code to be creative, we’d have nothing to measure success against, and no assurance of a viable, or sustainable pattern going forward. As it is, we have high confidence that a few key parameters are all the code needs to generate environments suitable for living or working in.’ Shaking her head with an expression of doubt: ‘I don’t know, Albert.’ She wasn’t ready to let him off the hook just yet. ‘See, Because we told a computer to make us a sensible, functional, temporary meeting room, and it designed one without our help, we know the computer is smart enough to figure out these things on its own. Because the Machine designed a safe, conventional, unremarkable, boring building with all the right features and nothing out of the ordinary ... we can rest easy knowing that it’s unlikely to do anything that would cause our subjects any confusion. Right now, Doctor Tobin, we are doing everything we can to reduce surprises in a future where there will be no version 2. Just the essentials; no time for anything more.’ ‘You and I might have different ideas about what’s essential. ... Personally, I don’t know if I can spend my last days under office lights. Where do I file a complaint?’ ‘Huh. Well, maybe you should take it up with City Hall.’ ‘I hope your new City Hall works better than the old one.’ Right then, he wanted nothing more than to tell her all the ways it was better than the old one. But he decided against it. She said, ‘I’m still not entirely sure what we’re talking about, here, Albert? I mean, if creativity is such a problem, why don’t you just tell the machine what to build, what to do, and be done with it?’ He stood up, suddenly, and turned to look up at the tilted window of an observation room perched above the entryway to The Garden. She saw it for the first time and felt her stomach sink. The Director signaled to the now-visible operator at a bank of controls behind the glass. By some trick of light or attention, she became suddenly aware of how large the space really was, and that it was filled with a more diverse ecosystem than had been apparent to her before. Her apple tree appeared to be growing on the edge of a miniature rain forest. ‘What do you think of this room?’ ‘I think it’s a little paradise, Albert, relatively speaking.’ ‘Heavenly?’ ‘Sure ...? You’re going to ruin it for me, aren’t you?’ The temperature was dropping, rapidly, as he spoke. ‘Well, what makes this room heavenly? It isn’t only that it’s pretty, or that it somehow contains all the good things, you know. What do we expect from heaven, Doctor Tobin?’ He was using her title in the way her mother used to use her full name. ‘Uhm, alright. I’ll play. You can’t be talking about harps and clouds. ... Like resurrection? The dead are raised up? Like that?’ ‘Sure, I guess, yes! That’s good, since we’re talking about heaven – hold
