“You were here before?”
“It’s a long story,” The Pillar changes the subject and turns to Xian. “We need a favor.”
“Shoot,” Xian says, and I can’t fathom his dialect or slang. Maybe he is some sort of a modern monk.
“We have a puzzle that led us to you.” The Pillar shows him the note we found in the chess piece.
“Sticky note!” Xian seems fascinated with it. He sticks it on his head. “Haven’t seen one of those in about… hmmm… forty years.”
“I’ll send you a tank full of sticky notes later,” The Pillar says. “As you can see, it has the word Deep Blue written on one side.”
“White Stones on the other,” Xian says.
“Let’s stick to the part you know about,” The Pillar says.
“You mean the machine?” Xian looks all serious and worried.
The Pillar nods.
“You remember what the machine looks like, right?”
“Of course,” The Pillar says. “A long monolith-like black box. Inside it are all the wires and microchips that makes it think.”
“Good memory, Cao Pao Wong.”
“I think the puzzle is a secret way to open it.”
“No one has been able to open the machine ever before. I hope you remember that.”
“I know, even the guys at IBM believed it was haunted when they couldn’t open it after the game with Kasparov. Just tell me where you keep it.”
Xian rubs his chin. “This is going to be a bit of a problem.”
“Why so?” I interfere.
“Like The Pillar said. It looks like a monolith, black, intimidating and huge. You look at it and feel strange and conflicting emotions.”
“So?” I ask.
“Let me put it this way,” Xian says. “It looks like the monolith in that Space Odyssey movie by Stanley Kubrick.”
I haven’t seen the movie so The Pillar explains it’s about space exploration, where a mysterious monolith is found by astronauts. The monolith is shown in the movie to have taught the first man, apes precisely, how to hunt and make a weapon. In brief, it showed man how to make things, from a hunting weapon to a thinking computer in our modern day.
“I get it,” I tell Xian. “So the IBM machine looks like that monolith in the movie. What does this have to do with us seeing Deep Blue now?”
Xian takes a moment and says. “Well, my monks are now worshiping the machine in the middle of the snow.”
Chapter 32
Xian walks us to where the Deep Blue machine sticks out of the snow. It’s about two meters high and slightly less than a meter wide. It also looks like it parts from the middle, only if you punch in a combination of secret numbers in the digital pad on top. A sixteen number combination.
“So the issue is to how to get the numbers?” The Pillar asks Xian.
“I’d call it your secondary issue,” Xian says. “The first would be them.” He points at the monks in orange praying while facing the monolith. A few of them are already suspicious about us.
“So they think Deep Blue is God?” I ask.
“Todd,” Xian says.
“Todd?” The Pillar asks.
“Yes, Todd.” Xian says.
“Who’s Todd?” I ask Xian.
“God.” Xian says.
“Todd is God?” The Pillar asks.
“Or God is Todd.” I remark, loving the insanity.
“How can God be Todd?” The Pillar asks.
“A misspelling.” Xian says.
“You Buddhist misspelled God’s name?” The Pillar says.
“Not at all,” Xian says. “One day, I took my monks to New York. They asked a man whom New Yorkers pray to. A drunk man on a Sunday morning told them ‘God’ in a slurry tongue. They thought he said Tod. And since Deep Blue is a computer, and my monks believe computers are western inventions, they called it Todd.”
“What about Deep Blue?” I ask.
“You can’t worship something called Deep Blue.” Xian noted.
“Why even worship a machine?” I ask. “Are you sure you guys are Buddhists?”
“First of all, not all of my monks worship Todd. Some of them don’t. Secondly, we’re not really Buddhists; we’re left out in the cold wearing those silly orange robes, and we don’t know why we do it. We were just born that way.”
“And third?”
“That part of my men worship Todd so they get an American visa.”
“What?” My voice pitches up.
“They were told if they worship a machine from California, and the machine likes them, they’d end up with an American visa.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“A green card maybe?” Xian scratches his head.
“You’re being outrageously offensive right now.” I tell him, about to tell those poor monks the truth.
“Work Permit?” Xian wonders. “They wouldn’t mind that. It’s really cold and lonely in here.”
“Stop it.” I hold my head from internally exploding. “Who the heck told those poor monks they can get a visa by worshiping a machine?”
Xian shrugs, looking sideways.
“Who?” I pull him in from his robe.
“Him.” He points at The Pillar.
I turn and find The Pillar is already praying with the monks, avoiding me. When I near him, he is talking a woman into marrying him and giving her British citizenship, which is way cooler than American.
Chapter 33
It’s hard to do something about The Pillar’s atrocious behavior right now. I don’t even know when he was here in the past or what he’s done. All I get from his wink is that he is distracting the monks so I can solve the machine’s puzzle.
“Come with me, Xian,” I tell the old man, walking back to Deep Blue.
“So you know how the numbers go to the machine?” He asks.
“Hardly,” I say, looking at the note again. “All I know is that the other side of the note should be the way to do it.”
“White stones?” Xian wonders.
“Do you have any idea what it means?”
“I am trying to think.”
“If Lewis, or Fabiola, or whoever designed this global puzzle, meant the ‘white stones’ to help us open the machine, then it should point at something nearby.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing nearby.”
He is right. My eyes dart back to the machine itself. I notice the back of the machine is divided into small squares, carved with a sharp tool. The squares are many from top to bottom, and they have circles inside. Not all squares but some.
“What is this, Xian?”
“We’ve never known exactly. It came with the machine.”
“Looks like a calendar to me. The squares.” I rub my hands on its surface. “Look, at the top of each set you can see those small writings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on.”
“One of our monks suggested that, but what use could it be?”
“I agree. It’s seems useless, but why write a calendar on the back of the machine?”
“You tell me, Alice of Wonderland. Maybe you can autograph my robe?”
“Autograph?” I roll my eyes. “What would you tell others? That the girl from the book autographed it? Stick with the puzzle, please.”
“As you say, Alice of Wonderland,” he says and pulls out two slippers from under his robe. They’re made to look like two rabbits. “Can’t think of a better occasion of wearing them. Brought them from…”
“New York, I know. You should stop being obsessed with American products.”
“But the slippers aren’t American,” he argued. “They’re made in Wonderland, the beautiful salesman told me.”
I roll my eyes again, in courtesy of all the foolish and stupid people in the world. Then I grab one of the slippers and check the sign on the back “It’s made in China, Xian,” I say. “So you technically let some sneaky salesman sell you an American product, claiming it was from Wonderland, when probably one of these monks manufactured it.”
Xian looks shocked. “You mean I could’ve already obtained the American Visa with those rabbit slippers?”