MET AND EMET
All art is born of science, just as all science has its origins in magic. Though it is hard to say exactly when AI design made the leap from science to art, two names are inextricably linked to the event: Hyacinthe Cohen and Gavi Shehadeh. Whatever you think of Gavi’s golem, its status as a watershed moment in the history of AI—and the history of Israel—is incontestable.
Gavi Shehadeh was so universally hated by the time he lost his leg that at first no one on either side of the Line could bring themselves to believe it wasn’t a richly deserved assassination attempt. The facts—the Shabbasvisit to the one faction of his Jewish family that was still speaking to him, the impromptu soccer game, the lost ball, and the bloody carnage in the weeds—came out with such excruciating slowness that Gavi was up and walking before most of his old friends and new enemies could bring themselves to admit that he’d been crippled by a perfectly ordinary land mine.
He was on administrative leave over the Absalom affair when it happened, and within a few months he found himself with a new ceramic compound leg courtesy of Hadassah Hospital’s special amputees unit and a growing realization that his career had died in Tel Aviv.
Yad Vashem had seemed like an escape when Didi first suggested it. Only when he reported to IDF headquarters for the mandatory sperm and blood samples did he realize he’d accepted what amounted, in most people’s minds, to a slow death sentence. No matter, he’d told himself. His exile would be over in a few months, a year at most.
But by now it had lasted almost four years.
He wasn’t sure just when Gavi the traitor had begun to feel more real to him than the man he’d always thought he was. But there were external signs by which he could measure the rate at which his new identity cannibalized his old one. Before his second summer in Yad Vashem he’d stopped writing letters and calling on his former colleagues in hope of a new position. Then his visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, always sporadic, had stopped entirely. And sometime in the third year of his live burial he’d admitted to himself that if his former enemies knew how he felt every time he had to leave the thickness of the Line, they would spirit him straight back to the eighth floor out of sheer spite.
GOLEM had grown out of the routine work of file maintenance that took up so much of Gavi’s time in the first years at Yad Vashem. The number of survivors’ testimonies—the sheer mass of information—contained in the Yad Vashem archives was inconceivable. Those testimonies were the heart of Yad Vashem, the true Monument of the Eternal Name, and one like no other humankind had ever constructed. But monuments of silicon were just as vulnerable to the forces of time and gravity as monuments of marble.
Time passed. Spins decayed. Disks and data cubes crumbled. Files that weren’t recopied and saved on a regular basis lost the one-way battle against entropy. And just as in Europe’s ancient shuls and monasteries, the only files that were recopied were the files people actually used. The Warsaw Ghetto files. The files concerning famous Zionists or writers or artists. But the rest—the men and women and children who had done nothing that History cared about, and had appeared in the testimonies only because they had been someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s lost brother or sister or cousin—those people were slowly being wiped from human memory, just as their killers had meant them to be.
To Gavi the answer had seemed obvious. What was needed was a person. A person who would hold the obscure dead just as beloved as the famous dead. A person who would remember them because he would bethem; just as Cohen, or at least some buried part of him, wasHyacinthe; just as Rabbi Loew’s golem had beenin some mystical sense the lives and history and souls of the people of the Prague ghetto brought to life.
But there would be nothing mystical about this golem, unless you counted the mystery of how sentience emerged from the swarming maelstrom of data inside an Emergent’s networks. Gavi knew the name of the magic that could bring his golem to life; he had poured over the specs and wiring diagrams and bug reports. It was not the cold clay of Prague he needed, but the cold spin lattices of Cohen’s neural networks.
Of course there were other AIs who had the processing power to handle the job. But none of them was as peculiarly human as Cohen was. None of their personality architectures had been so stable for so long. And none of them was as intimately tied to Israel and to Gavi himself.
Cohen could do it. He could breathe a soul into the archives, and turn dead testimony back into living memory…though with what violence to his own identity no human could begin to guess.
And he would do it, whatever the risk, if Gavi asked him to.
It was precisely that certainty that had kept Gavi from asking.
Gavi caught sight of the tail just as he turned onto King David Street to begin the final approach to Cohen’s hotel. The kid was clearly trying to avoid looking at him: the classic amateur’s gaffe.
Gavi loitered in front of the window of a spintronics store, inspecting the merchandise with minute attention, feeling the rhythm of the crowd as it flowed behind him, listening to the monotonous drone of the crosswalk signals. Then he dashed across the street at the last minute before the light changed, only to loiter again on the far corner waiting for the next light, scanning the crowd all the while for the telltale signs of averted eyes or sudden changes of direction. Then he apparently changed his mind, walked back to the store, went inside, and spent nearly ten minutes haggling over the price of a mobile uplink and left without buying anything. He sauntered down the street for several more blocks, assiduously window-shopping, and repeated the performance at a second store.
In the end he decided that there was only a single team of watchers: a couple, boy and girl, playing well out in front of him, and to the rear a clean-cut young man who looked like his great-great-great-grandparents might have arrived in the Ethiopian airlift. They were kids, diligent but raw.
He thought wistfully of Osnat, who wouldn’t have made such basic mistakes on her first day of training. Then he told himself he couldn’t afford to think of Osnat when he was about to put himself under Cohen’s sharp eyes.
Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the team worked their plodding way through every classic amateur mistake, and threw in a few new variations for good measure. The teacher in him wanted to walk over, grab them by the collars, and make them do it again, right. But he wasn’t a teacher now. He was a target. A target without backup or a safe house or any of the usual safety nets. And it didn’t take a professional to put a bullet through your skull. He’d learned that in Tel Aviv, even if he hadn’t learned anything else of any earthly use to anyone.
He worked his way up King David Street and over to City Tower, where he browsed at the jewelry counters, circled back to the entrance, then turned back at the last moment as if he’d suddenly remembered something he needed. Finally he backtracked to men’s clothing, where he tried on a series of unforgivably loud shirts.
The tail was still there the third time he came out of the dressing room, looking implausibly interested in the new sock selection.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” Gavi said.
The poor kid looked like he’d gotten caught passing notes in class.
“What do you think of the shirt? That bad, huh? How’s Didi, by the way?”
“I, uh…think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”
Gavi stared into the blue eyes until they dropped away from his. “No. You’re mistaking me for someone else. An idiot. Now why don’t you take your two little friends and trot back to the Office and tell Didi that if he wants to know where I’m going, he can damn well ask me.”