Part 3: Last Ride
Chapter 38: Christmas Slumber Party
Rudy spent his twentieth Christmas in Russia like his first, snowbound but warm in Siberia. But this time, this twentieth Russian Christmas, he was in the city, surrounded by friends, waiting out a blizzard on the floor of Vitaly and Maria’s apartment.
Several hours ago, Rudy could still see the nearly full moon when he stepped out of his apartment with his ryukzak stuffed with chocolates and gifts for the children and his colleagues. He’d stayed in the city most of this week, helping Vitaly with campus network upgrades. But clouds blew in from the north and began throwing down cold rain. The sidewalk was slick by the time Rudy reached Vitaly and Maria’s apartment. The streets were coated with a centimeter of ice before the rain turned to snow. The wind hammered at the windows and blew curtains of snow that hid the world more than a block away. In their shared happy medium buzz, one part alcohol, one part Christmas, they were all struck by the holiday appropriateness of escaping to their youth and throwing an impromptu slumber party. Why crawl home in a blizzard when they could all sleep safe and warm, cheek by jowl, in Vitaly and Maria’s cozy apartment?
Maria threw herself into remaking her apartment into a bunkhouse for her Christmas party guests. Like snacks and vodka, Maria seemed to have an endless supply of blankets and pillows. Eight months pregnant, baby due the first week of February, she directed the pushing back of the furniture and the arrangement of blankets and pillows and four great downy sleeping bags into sleeping spaces for all nine of her unexpected overnight guests, three in the children’s room—the twins, little Ksenia and Rudolf, got to partake in the adventure, too, bedding down in their parents’ room—and six in the living room.
Ksenochka and Rudolf thought the whole affair a hoot: with grace undimmed by staying up past midnight, Ksenochka made a show of tucking each guest into blankets or sleeping bags, and Rudolf handed each guest a bedtime cookie. The children kissed each guest good night on both cheeks, even Galya, whom Rudy had never seen subjected to such personal tenderness. The great Galina Filipovna bore this affection well; she blushed a little and patted the children’s heads, drawing laughter and oohs and aahs from the others. When the children shushed them, they laughed all the more, drawing more shushing, which drew more laughter, but the adults placated the children by muffling their mirth. Satisfied at having done their duty, the little hosts raised their own ruckus, squealing and thundering as little feet do to their parents’ large bed before Vitaly and Maria could turn toward the hallway. Good nights all around, the grown-up hosts retired, the lights went out… and in under a minute, the voices died down and every Russian in the apartment was breathing slowly and sleepily.
Whatever magic the Russians shared to surrender to sleep so fast, Rudy didn’t have it tonight. Rudy lay by the window, staring up at the white curtain in the orange light from the city outside. He was as well equipped as any of his fellow refugees—Vitaly’s down sleeping bag, another blanket on top of that, and a firm feather pillow. It was warm and, more than that, wonderful here, safely surrounded by friends. But 20, 30, 40 minutes—he checked his watch, and sleep would not come.
At 01:12, he sat up, shimmied out of the sleeping bag, and picked his way through the human minefield toward the kitchen. No one stirred as he passed, but when he looked back from the hall, he saw Galya in the dim city light, beside the displaced coffee table, up on one elbow, looking straight at him.
Come then, he thought, let us raid the kitchen together. Incredibly, Galya seemed to hear. SHe softly folded her bedroll back, draped one thin blanket over her shoulders, and floated like a ghost over the limbs and quilts to Rudy’s side. She followed him to the kitchen. Rudy sat at the kitchen table. He opened the cookie box, one of five containers of snacks remaining from the party, and gobbled down one of Galya’s pryaniki. Galya paced slowly to the window over the sink, looked outside to the snow swirling through the back courtyard of Vitaly and Maria’s building, then carried herself on her silent feet back to the table, where she carefully scooted a chair from its usual place to sit right beside Rudy. Hip touching hip, shoulder touching shoulder. He thought she was reaching for a cookie, but instead she laid her hand on his and squeezed.
“Rudy,” Galya said, her voice as close to a whisper as possible while still maintaining tone, leaning close but looking toward their hands, not his eyes. “Why can’t you sleep?”
He thought about saying he was just hungry—entirely appropriate and believable flattery—but the surprise he felt at her unusual touch, on top of his ceaseless respect for her perceptivity, prevented that evasion. He matched Galya’s low voice. “Everybody here, and here beside you, all of us together… it feels like Suzdal. That was summer, this is winter, it is entirely different… but it feels the same. Working together, drinking together, having this little adventure against a big dangerous world together, holding hands against whatever comes next.”
Rudy looked out at the snow swirling past icicles. “We don’t think about how much we matter to each other, but here we are, like children, all piled together, safe in each other’s company, blissfully unaware of how close danger is, how close we are to losing everything and each other.”
“Like children,” Galya said. With Galya sitting so close and beside him in the mostly-dark of the kitchen, Rudy could not see her facial expression. “Maybe I am keeping you up with my own resonant frequencies. I was listening to our lungs, trying to hear hearts… and brains, all the different waves, mingling, superimposing, like in the Ring…. Maybe I could find a formula, ideal ratios of frequencies in the shared organic hum that would predict friendship, collaboration… love.”
“Take readings on Vitaly and Maria,” Rudy said. “Their frequencies match better than anyone else’s.”
He felt Galya nod. “I worry for them,” she said. “I worry for all of us.” She squeezed his hand, leaned her head against his, and spoke to the mere centimeter around them. “Moscow is coming.”
Rudy wanted to look Galya in the eye, but he felt she had frozen him into this position, facing the window, aiming their soft whispers away from the hall and the slumber party. “When? What has happened?”
She nuzzled him a bit with her dark hair, a new auburn over her advancing gray in daylight, now black in the midnight, black like when he’d first seen her at the chalkboards. “Putin’s Intel-Tech chief sent a memo Thursday saying the state has deemed our AI research a critical security asset. They don’t know the full extent of how we are using it, but they know it is big and powerful, and they want it. Intel-Tech wants a complete report by March 1 on capabilities, uses so far, and planned applications. The agency also wants an audit of all Institute funds, state, private, domestic, foreign, used in development and deployment of the technology and spillovers to other research projects at the Institute.”
“But the state withdrew funding for the Ring years ago. We’re self-sustaining. The books are none of their business.”
“Everything is their business.” Galya squeezed Rudy’s hand a little tighter. “I think I can delay them until June, but this inquiry is a prelude to installing their own director and taking over our primary projects.”
“A new director? But you…?”
“Moscow perceives the need for talent less keenly than it perceives the need for control. We have been lucky to operate this long without drawing Putin’s deadly attention. Bigger fish to fry, perhaps, certainly many. Loose ends everywhere in an empire unraveled. Putin has been re-weaving the tapestry of control for as long as we have been working to build our Kremlin. He is strong enough now to reach further, to consolidate all the institutions he hasn’t subjugated.”
“Can we resist?”
“Can anyone?”
Rudy thought of the corporations, legal and illegal, where the state had installed its cronies. The Ring Group’s own operations involved constant effort not to resist but to hide.
“What will Putin do with our AI?”
“Surely the same as we do: enrich himself, analyze his enemies, anticipate their moves to insulate his apparatus from challenge. But only if his people can figure out how it works. And only if it keeps working amid… changing informational dynamics.” Galya was silent for a minute. The wind surged and rattled the kitchen window. Rudy felt a faint, chill draft. Galya flinched and started to turn, as if she were getting up from the table. Rudy relaxed his fingers, not wanting to restrain her, but Galya kept her grip on Rudy’s hand. She settled back into her chair. “Something is wrong with the prediction machine.”
Rudy resisted raising his voice. “Wrong…what? A malfunction?”
Galya shook her head. “I’ve looked closely at the reports you and Vitaly have submitted. Your machinery and his code are functioning exactly as designed.” Galya looked down at the table. “There’s a flaw in my theory.”
Rudy imagined chalk snapping, an eraser wiping away equations in a cloud of clingy dust. “If there is a flaw, wouldn’t we have seen it already?”
Galya released Rudy’s hand. Even at a whisper, she could not talk about her math without her hands. “No. Something new is happening. Not in the Ring: the AI continues to process data from our particle experiments flawlessly. But in the social realm…. When I translated the theory to social prediction, I conditioned the prediction algorithms to recognize the incompleteness in the inputs, all the things people say and do that aren’t captured online. It’s like a dark gravity that we don’t understand but can at least quantify: here’s how much we know about humanity, here’s how much we don’t know, so here’s how much the unknowns should ‘pull’ the knowns when we try to make predictions. But now there’s a new gravity, a new uncertainty that I did not account for because it was not there.” Galya brought her hands close to her chin and punched the air on those last words. “When I do the math, I find discrepancies that suggest some growing subset of the social inputs are inaccurate, artificial, not as representative of real individual and social behavior as we have assumed.”
“Misinformation?”
“There have been liars online from the start. We’ve trained our AI to recognize propaganda and properly filter bias and agenda.. Something else is pulling events away from our predictions, and I can’t find it yet.”
Some faint hope occurred to Rudy. “Won’t a new flaw work in our favor? As long as that problem persists, won’t Putin need you to puzzle it out and improve the system for his use?”
“I’m not so sure. This regime knows how to play the long game in politics, but in technology, it demands immediate results. When they finally take the AI out of our hands and find it’s not working, they will think we have tricked them or sabotaged or held back from them the critical security asset they expect. The state will not be happy, and when this state is not happy, people die.”
Rudy had sat leaning back in his chair with his hands folded in his lap. Galya had settled beside him again and taken hold of his arm, offering or seeking protection, Rudy could not tell which. He laid his hand gently on her thin wrist, at the edge of the cuff of her thick gray wool sweater. “How do we stop this?”
“The state? We can’t. The dying? That may still be within our power to avert. The surest way to protect ourselves is to figure out the anomaly. What is causing the prediction machine to drift? Which of our assumptions is leading the AI astray?”
Galya was asking herself that question, but Rudy gave it the most serious consideration he could. He did hardware, not software, and definitely not theory and higher mathematics. But in the dark, he reached for insight beyond his usual toolbox.
“Our artificial intelligence observes the world and participates in it, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve told me that, in physics, one of the basic complications is that the observer changes the outcomes. When you watch your particles collide, your watching changes the collision. It changes the particles that result and their trajectories. Does our AI change the world by observing it? Do those changes accumulate? Do they affect subsequent results?”
Galya looked intently at his face. “You have been listening… but the analogy is inapt. The complication you speak of is quantum effects, at the micro scale. That phenomenon should not explain deviations in interactions at the macro scale, in events affecting humans and society.”
“I remember how Kolya said people aren’t particles, and you said, ‘Aren’t they?’ You built this whole prediction theory on the idea that you could substitute people for particles in your formulas, and it worked. Maybe…” Rudy paused, embarrassed to propose such half-baked foolishness to Galina Filipovna. But he ought to have been embarrassed to presume that he could sit here with Galina Filipovna in a dark kitchen, speaking in hushed tones while all the children—their friends, their colleagues, a great dogpile of their shared community for whom they sat up worrying—slept through a snowstorm. Everything was unlikely, yet all of it was happening.
“What if,” he said slowly, stepping gently on unfamiliar stones across a murky stream, “that scale is relative? Quantum effects… affect small things, particles, that we observe. Our artificial intelligence observes much larger things… but our AI is much larger, too. It observes an entire world of data, but it, too, becomes a world of data, and it distills its world into particles of answers that we deploy to change the world.”
“You play word games… but you understand an important point. We change the system we observe. However, we know the changes we are making. We feed those changes back into our AI algorithms. Our actions do not explain the anomalies.”
“Could someone else be making observations, and acting on them, making changes we don’t know about?”
“There are seven billion people observing and acting on the world. The majority of them have no data in our system. They are many, like butterflies, but the flapping of their wings has not altered the reliability of the results we get from applying our algorithms to specific datasets from specific individuals and organizations. Their individual effects are too small.”
“What about a bigger observer, a bigger experimenter, one as big as ours, that we don’t know about?”
“Another—” Galya sat up so fast her chair legs screeched on the floor. Rudy sat frozen, listening intently outside the room, hoping the noise hadn’t awakened anyone, but also listening intently there in the kitchen, in the centimeters between him and his director, waiting for Galya to catch her breath and finish her sentence.
“Damn you, Rudy,” she said, moving nothing but her lips to speak and her eyes to chase details of a new problem that flitted in the air between her and the window. She kept the rest of her body still, as if afraid her slightest movement might scare those details away. “Now I won’t sleep at all. Will you bring me my purse, by my pillow? I need my notebook.”
He felt a sudden disappointment: he liked having Galya leaning close to him, speaking confidentially to him, sharing the quiet dark and the swirl of snow in the midnight glow of the city, feeling her warm breath. But such indulgence embarrassed him and betrayed his duty Galina Filipovna was thinking. She was solving a problem. Nothing must get in her way.
After an instant’s delay, which he hoped Galya was too absorbed in the thought that seized her to notice, Rudy stood up and slipped between his chair and the wall, trying not to make any noise or jostle Galina Filipovna. He tiptoed among the sleepers in the living room and returned with the brown leather purse. He set it on the kitchen table. From the side pocket, Galina Filipovna pulled a pen and her black notebook, the curious square booklet the size of her hand with engineer’s gridded pages. She got up and walked to the counter by the window, where she could write notes in the faint parallelogram of orange light from outside. Rudy took up the blanket she had left on the chair and walked over to drape it over her shoulders.
Before he could turn away, a tiny whisper came from behind. “Are you two sneaking snacks?” Rudy turned. He thought the sound was too soft to interrupt Galya’s new train of thought, but she started and turned as well. They found little Rudolf standing by the kitchen table in his pajamas, printed in flowers.
Rudy watched the ice melt from Galya’s eyes. She crouched to bring her face down all the way level with the face of Vitaly’s little boy. With one hand, she held the blanket around herself. With the other, she held her notebook. “No, tiny man,” she said. “We were talking.” She waved her notebook before the boy’s big eyes. “Now I’m thinking.”
Rudolf came up very close, keenly conscious of the need for quiet. “It’s too late for talking and thinking,” he whispered, touching his forehead to Galya’s notebook. “It’s time for sneaking snacks.” He went to the counter reached up to Galya’s pryaniki plate. “One for Ksenochka,” the little boy chirped, “one for me.”
A cookie in each hand, Rudolf came back and hugged their legs, Galya first, then Rudy. He left crumbprints on Galya’s wool dress. “Merry Christmas. Don’t tell!” Then Rudolf tiptoed away with exaggerated care, silent as a ghost.
Galya herself picked up one of her pryaniki, then turned back to her notebook in the slanting patch of light. “Never too late for thinking, or pryaniki,” she whispered. “Little Rudolf is counting on us. Merry Christmas, Rudy.”
“Merry Christmas, Galina Filipovna.”
Rudy slipped silently back to the living room. Their long chat, Galya’s chair, Rudolf’s cookie raid, and now a tiny giggle from hungry bandits in Vitaly and Maria’s room—none of it had awakened Rudy’s friends. Rudy returned to his corner of the carpet, pulled Vitaly’s sleeping bag and blanket around himself and curled up tight, trying to squeeze away every worry and every threat to the Ring Group, to the people around him.
Putin’s just another gangster, Rudy thought, or wanted to think, as he opened himself to sleep.
But he’s worse, said the ever wakeful part of his soul. Putin is all the gangsters and the Chechens plus his secret police, all wrapped into one deadly machine. He will come for us, and we won’t be able to fight. We will only be able to submit and survive.
Just a gangster, he thought back against himself. Just a gangster. Go to sleep. Galya will think of something. We will think of something. We will fight this gangster and beat him, too, and Galya will always have her Kremlin and her Ring. Galya. Galya. Galina Filipovna. Midnight-dark hair, voice on my cheek, square notebook, cookie crumbs, Christmas, thinking, solving, all that writing but still delicate wrist. Galya, Galya, Christmas, Galya….