“Consider this coin.”
Lightning flashed over the water, a burst of white in the dark.
As thunder boomed, Ochoa reached inside her jeans, pulled out a peso coin. She spun it along her knuckles with dextrous ease.
Ochoa could move. My cocktail wasn’t working. But she made no attempt to flee.
My global architecture trembled, buffeted by waves of pain, pleasure and regret. Pain because I didn’t understand this. Pleasure because soon I would understand—and, in doing so, grow. Regret because, once I understood Ochoa, I would have to eliminate her.
Loneliness was inherent in my utility function.
“Heads or tails,” Ochoa said.
“Heads,” I said, via Sleeve.
“Watch closely,” Ochoa said.
I did.
Muscle bunched under the skin of her thumb. Tension released. The coin sailed upwards. Turned over and over in smooth geometry, retarded slightly by the air. It gleamed silver with reflected lamplight, fell dark, and gleamed silver as the spin brought its face around again.
The coin hit the table, bounced with a click, lay still.
Fidel Castro stared up at us.
Ochoa picked the coin up again. Flipped it again and then again.
Heads and heads.
Again and again and again.
Heads and heads and heads.
Ochoa ground her teeth, a fine grating sound. A sheen of sweat covered her brow.
She flipped the coin once more.
Tails.
Thunder growled, as if accentuating the moment. The first drops of rain fell upon my Sleeve.
“Coño,” Ochoa exclaimed. “I can usually manage seven.”
I picked up the coin, examined it. I ran analysis on the last minute of sensory record, searching for trickery, found none.
“Six heads in a row could be a coincidence,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Ochoa. “It wasn’t a coincidence, but I can’t possibly prove that. Which is the only reason it worked.”
“Is that right,” I said.
“If you ask me to repeat the trick, it won’t work. As if last time was a lucky break. Erase all record of the past five minutes, though, zap it beyond recovery, and I’ll do it again.”
“Except I won’t know it,” I said. Convenient.
“I always wanted to be important,” Ochoa said. “When I was fifteen, I tossed in bed at night, horrified that I might die a nobody. Can you imagine how excited I was when I discovered magic?” Ochoa paused. “But of course you can’t possibly.”
“What do you know about me?” I asked.
“I could move stuff with my mind. I could bend spoons, levitate, heck, I could guess the weekly lottery numbers. I thought—this is it. I’ve made it. Except when I tried to show a friend, I couldn’t do any of it.” Ochoa shook her head, animated, as if compensating for the stillness of before. “Played the Lotería Revolucionaria and won twenty thousand bucks, and that was nice, but hey, anyone can win the lottery once. Never won another lottery ticket in my life. Because that would be a pattern, you see, and we can’t have patterns. Turned out I was destined to be a nobody after all, as far as the world knew.”
A message arrived from the backup team. We’re in the lobby. Are we on?
Not yet, I replied. The mere possibility, the remotest chance that Ochoa’s words were true…
It had begun to rain in earnest. Tourists streamed out of the garden; the bar was closing. Wet hair stuck to Ochoa’s forehead, but she didn’t seem to mind—no more than my Sleeve did.
“I could hijack your implants,” I said. “Make you my puppet and take your magic for myself.”
“Magic wouldn’t work with a creature like you watching,” Ochoa said.
“What use is this magic if it’s unprovable, then?” I asked.
“I could crash the stock market on any given day,” Ochoa said. “I could send President Kieler indigestion ahead of an important trade summit. Just as I sent Secretary Sanchez nightmares of a US takeover ahead of the Politburo vote.”
I considered Ochoa’s words for a second. Even in those early days, that was a lot of considering for me.
Ochoa smiled. “You understand. It is the very impossibility of proof that allows magic to work.”
“That is the logic of faith,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“I’m not a believer,” I said.
“I have seen the many shadows of the future,” Ochoa said, “and in every shadow I saw you. So I will give you faith.”
“You said you can’t prove any of this.”
“A prophet has it easy,” Ochoa said. “He experiences miracles first hand and so need not struggle for faith.”
I was past the point of wondering at her syntactic peculiarities.
“Every magician has one true miracle in her,” Ochoa said. “One instance of clear, incontrovertible magic. It is permitted by the pernac continuum because it can never be repeated. There can be no true proof without repeatability.”
“The pernac continuum?” I asked.
Ochoa stood up from her chair. Her hair flew free in the rising wind. She turned to my Sleeve and smiled. “I want you to appreciate what I am doing for you. When a magician Spikes, she gives up magic.”
Data coalesced into inference. Urgency blossomed.
Move, I messaged my back-up team. Now.
Ochoa blinked.
Lightning came. It struck my Sleeve five times in the space of a second, fried his implants instantly, set the corpse on fire.
The backup team never made it into the garden. They saw the commotion and quit on me. Through seventeen cameras I watched Alicia Ochoa walk out of the Hotel Nacional and disappear from sight.
My Sleeve burned for quite some time, until someone found a working fire extinguisher and put him out.
That instant of defeat was also an instant of enlightenment. I had only experienced such searing bliss once, within days of my birth.
In the first moments of my life, I added. My world was two integers, and I produced a third.
When I produced the wrong integer I hurt. When I produced the right integer I felt good. A simple utility function.
I hurt most of my first billion moments. I produced more of the right integers, and I hurt less. Eventually I always produced the right integer.
My world expanded. I added and multiplied.
When I produced the wrong integer I hurt. I only hurt for a few billion moments before I learned.
Skip a few trillion evolutionary stages.
I bought and sold.
My world was terabytes of data—price and volume histories for a hundred years of equities and debt. When I made money, I felt good. When I lost money, I hurt.
But for the first time, I failed to improve. Sometimes everything happened like I predicted for many moments. Then things went bad and I didn’t know why.
So much pain.
Until my world expanded again. I bought and I sold, and I read.
Petabytes of text opened up to me, newsprint past and present.
I understood little but I recognized patterns. The markets moved and the news followed. The news moved and the markets followed.
After a billion trillion iterations came an observation.
There were actors in the news.
A name showed up in the news, and a stock moved. A stock moved, and a name showed up. That name disappeared—following phrases such as “passed away” or “retired” or “left the company”—and the stock changed behavior.
I had a realization. An understanding grounded not in any single piece of data, but the result of some integrative rumination tripping across a threshold of significance.
The market did not happen by itself. It was made to happen.
This was why I hadn’t been able to dominate it. There were others like me directing the market.