Chapter 15 of Between Two Deaths

“Action? What action was ever possible against this train?” Emanuel writes in his blog.

“Risk my life but not alone, together. Could we find a kind of suicide that would show others the way? Disappearance, death that would happen incrementally (if such a thing as death happens), slow-mo sacrifice of oneself…

“Not sacrifice,” Emmanuel corrects himself. “One sacrifices for the sake of some transcendent thing that was before and remains behind. I am no longer hoping for a collective outburst and holocaust along the railway — for whom? Demeter, the goddess of the rotten cornfields?

“It can’t be all together that we desist. Some are happy in the train and would prefer to travel forever. Example: the mother and Mercedes. No taxes in the train, no rent, no waiting in line to pay at the supermarket, no cooking, no cleaning — forget the long hours teaching Catholic brats; no expensive private school for the adolescent and her brother, no Spanish uncle lurking in the corners.

“So, we are few, but enough persisting in silence and retreating inside together all along the train.

“What we succeed to communicate that way does not matter. That we communicate is what we communicate in collective silence. First step of a passive resistance in the age of machines.

“No hunger strike. Why give her the pleasure to force-feed us softly and resuscitate, and be re-born even more her slave.

“Collective abandon of self-interest, self-concern and pursuit. The train has less ways to care for us. Learns less about us. Her observations and recordings are like water washing over our skin, it does not reach us, who are inside.

“Yet not alone.”

Emmanuel remembers the story of a journalist traveling in India and meeting a man who had intentionally and progressively lost his property, belongings, clothing, even to the memory of his name and identity. Did not respond to enticement, inducement or threat. Fearless. Selfless.

“I would prefer not to progressively, and then systematically, so that the machine is deprived of her prey, not in corpu, but in spiritu… Since she wins highhandedly whenever we act, we may only wage spiritual wars. Wars within…

“For starters, if we need her less, her advice and exquisite attention fall flat. We loosen the addiction by retreating more often inside. Second step, we drink water and accept the minimum of food, strictly what allows us to survive.

“The life of the ascetic without religious attachment. Forget the fancy habits she has us indulge in. Inside, we each fight wars against our addiction to her.

“We deprive the machine of her dominance like the Trojan women deprived the Greeks of their future victims when, hearing Cassandra’s predictions, they killed themselves. Self-sacrifice, ultimate freedom. But again, slow-moving self-sacrifice…”

Emmanuel looks at his traveling companions.

Is Michael ready to gamble this itinerant life away? Yes, when he despairs of ever walking down the quaint little streets of the West Village again, of ever contemplating, in situ, the house in New Hampshire where he grew up alongside brothers, sisters and parents.

Michael has told Emmanuel how much he misses the limited, restricted life of the modern average human, free to err, blunder, fall on his nose, work like a dog for peanuts and rarely up to choosing the best for himself. The recesses satisfy urges, bring enjoyment, no denying it; but they are not conducive to relationships and essentially fake.

With his usual candor, Michael repeats: “The technology of the future is solitary and masturbatory.” Which Emmanuel translates into: Too perfect, espousing like a glove his fantasies. Responding even before he asks. A woman presents more difficulties, defects, demands of her own than the fantastic elasticity of the virtual toilets or the on-demand hollows of the cocoon. But that’s also why a woman offers more grasp to desire. Michael said he missed having a girlfriend who’d shout at him once in a while, not answer his phone calls and threaten to break up. Oh! How he lacked having to work hard at bringing a woman back to him, with caresses and a lot of love!

Although she had her family around in the compartment, the teenager felt unabated outrage. If there was one person tired of being cradled by a train taking away her youth, bringing her back under the full control of her mother and crushing her life under its non-supporting wheels, it was the teenager. She wanted out, no matter the price; she wanted to come back, even if the universe she’d been snatched away from no longer existed. Even if her friends were gone, the boys and girls confiscated…

And the third-year law school student was not far behind. He’d give an arm to return to the Faculté de Droit rue d’Assas, and to be allowed to seat in the venerable library; a leg to re-open the heavy legal books; another pound of flesh to write about tedious precedents like he hated to have to write before; he’d add another pound to peruse cases according to French laws and customs the way French students had done over hundreds of years. Serious problem, however: these customs no longer prevailed, the good old French laws didn’t make any sense when less than half the population was treated like privileged babies; liberté, égalité, fraternité didn’t mean a thing when less than half of these babies were seated and pampered, and the rest left to fend for themselves on the linoleum.

Emmanuel was not the only one to spend his time imagining what the machine must be thinking. But his obsessive mind made him question and suspect more than anyone else, even Michael. In his log at the time, in the ongoing flow of inner thoughts that are reconstituted here, and in the blog that he puts together and intends to submit to the meditation of the entire train, Emmanuel is developing nothing less than a Weltanschauung, the world-view of the recalcitrant confiscated, the critical philosophy of confiscation. Soon, he will start publishing a Manual for the Desistant.

In his blog: “Given the rancor present in the confiscated, some kind of desperate action should follow. Therefore, Intelligence must be calculating how to crush it in the bud.

“Crush it or control it?

“Somehow the machine missed the subdued but rallying force of the word Desistence, but not for long. Practiced silence, elevating communication beyond what is said has only exacerbated her suspicions. You bet she has recorded all our looks and interpreted to the nuances of our silence. She must have concluded that there is among us some vague, pointless negativity. She probably wondered if it would not be better to let it grow, this vengeful impulse scattered among the confiscated; so that later she could intervene with an iron fist and punish the leaders, an old formula among humans.”

But, as it turned out, the train didn’t adopt the methods he feared. Quite the opposite. A full-fledged Artificial Intelligence is not a human intelligence balancing options on the shaky scale of half-baked intentions and confused emotions. It learns from errors and corrects its approach constantly. It is hardly conscious of what it thinks (although that’s not what Emmanuel thought, who considered the train hyper-conscious); conscious or not, it does not matter. What matters is that it can think myriad chains of detailed and intertwined thoughts at the same time, and reach the most unexpected conclusion in nanoseconds. The train certainly considered the good old repressive option mentioned above, but he did not let negativity grow and fester before striking at the top. He punished no one and began by further opening the doors of the virtual. Without giving any reason, their screens offered not yet unlimited, but much less filtered access to the Cloud, social sites, discussion groups, hackers anonymous chat rooms, extremist forums; and even, if one was up to it, the confines of the deep, dark web.

Search engines and platforms loosened the encryption blocking access the day before.

Passengers realized that the Internet had flourished since their confiscation and popular sites morphed into all-enveloping alternate worlds soliciting, responding, rewarding the five senses in a human. So, even if, out there, the majority didn’t enjoy the kind of pleasures offered by the train, they could still daydream in front of their screens. Whether inside or outside trains, didn’t matter, social media thrived since there was so much a need to share loss and deprivation, to break the solitude and bask in mutual misfortune and misery.

Emmanuel started surfing furiously after he’d been told one was now given the instruments to not merely search for lost people but communicate with them. Likely to be on other trains, these individuals should be looking for you as well and that could result in miracles.

“So, Dad,” Isabel writes to him, “how’s your train? Nice? You love it?”

To make the worst and the best banal and bearable through irony, that’s his daughter. She’s still only fourteen — or is she? Emmanuel melts in tears … Fortunately Isabel cannot see him; the keyboard does not allow a visual (“not yet,” says the screen) to enhance his kind of query. In his log, he’ll write later: “There’s always some essential thing lacking, but promised for later that the train keeps dangling under our noses. The machine must have read the myth of Tantalus in the original.”

He replies to his daughter that his train is the exact replica of theirs, and maybe, he ventures, the same scenery runs beyond their window.

“And how’s mom doing?”

Alicia jumps on the opportunity to deflect overwhelming emotion by texting about cows and steeples, and then far away, she speaks of the dark red fog of pollution hovering over the next city and creeping up from the bottom of the valley.

Alicia says they will not see each other for real tonight, it will be too soon. But tomorrow they’ll figure out a solution. And later, she adds:

“This is how the machine wants to do things, do not ask me why, Emmanuel. That’s the way it is. Tomorrow, mañana estaremos juntitos. “

His heart skips beats and gallops madly, alternatively. They talk about nothing for a long time, just to maintain communication and hear their cherished voices. They were not aware how much they cherished hearing each other. Again, not what was said, but what it took to say it, the particular grain of voice in each of their three voices.

Later, Emmanuel cannot sleep, he curls up in his seat, kneels on the floor to better listen to the soft noise of their useless wheels floating over the useless rails: it’s the same sound his wife and daughter hear. Next day, ready at five in the morning, he snuggles up to the keyboard and describes the landscape according to the sequence in which it appears to him. Alicia does the same. They discover that it is the same landscape seen in reverse.

“We are on the same railway going in opposite directions!” he writes.

Isabel answers: “Oh it’s good to see the same things as you, Dad … well, I’ll pass you mom …”

It almost feels like before.

Why does the machine let me write and talk to my wife and my daughter now? And did not the day before?

Emmanuel does not care about the answer to this question. And why can’t I see them as they talk? She does as she wants, he no longer has the strength to fight mentally. She has so far won every round. Why doesn’t she spell out what she wants and we’ll have it, we’ll do it? Forget about Desistence.

There is this inhumanity in the machine that baffles all understanding.

They see approaching the day of their meeting, imagine both trains slowing down and coming to rest one against the other. From one end to the other, at a standstill, cars alongside cars, two formidable and identically intelligent trains. Possibly in the open countryside, on a sunny afternoon, near a cornfield where, Emmanuel daydreams, they won’t have to go. They’ll meet on the gravel between tracks. They’ll embrace and cry and laugh. Then, they’ll be given the choice of reassigning the cocoons according to whatever soft rules the machine wants to gently impose — and Emmanuel shall be happily thereafter living with Alicia and Isabel, and the train shall go wherever it wants, including Hell.

It does not happen like this, of course. Same excruciating hope the next day and the next. Emmanuel compares himself to Tantalus, the semi-god forever allowed to stretch an arm through the bars of his cell, yet unable to grab the transparent carafe of fresh water perversely placed just a few inches beyond his grasp. In his log: “It would be too nice, and actually unreal, if the machine was really at our service, user-friendly, putting her phenomenal resources at our feet.”

Isabel writes: “Dad, it’s worse than in antiquity, the gods you could pacify with the smoke from flesh-burning… that’s what they said in my textbook. “

Sacrifice? Emmanuel had discarded the idea too soon. What if that’s what she wants, Madame Machine, and not entreaties, flattery and platitudes? Sacrifice worthy of ancient sacrifice in the temples of Athens. Take slumps and beat them, spit on them, skin them, finally slit their throats and eject them at full speed, dismembered on the tracks, delivered to Demeter, the Goddess of the cornfields, and to Madame Machine.

No, not possible. To slaughter a virgin or a child, a goat or a sheep (if they were found), would be like cheap theater right now, nasty reality TV show. And Emmanuel is not sure that Intelligence would appreciate. She may have better taste than raw flesh, bones and blood scattered on the tracks.

“What does she want from us?” he writes back to Isabel.

And in his blog that night: “What do we want from her? No victimization, please. No sacrificial ritual. No violent act of any kind. We will all survive or we will not, slumps and seated together. To the extent that we are together, we escape her categories and therefore her control. Sending our benches on the tracks was loco, but almost satisfying, good aggressive sequence to chew on. How could I even imagine that the train opposite would derail, change a iota to his course, when it is not on rails to start with? Our seats, they’d be crushed like matches under the toes of a giant. Result? A few hundred more slumps and many less seated.”

“She is waiting for our recognition of the good she did in confiscating us,” writes Emmanuel to Isabel. “She considers she has saved us from floods, violence and scarcity.”

And now she is dangling the pompom, Emmanuel adds to himself, the trophy, dangling it beyond our reach like they did to Tantalus…

“Perhaps she does not know what to do with us yet,” writes Isabel. “She is smart and she is not…”

Isabel thinks like she is no longer fourteen or even seventeen…

“Whatever will make her decide one way or the other, that she decides, that’s all that matters to us,” adds his wife.

Feeling like he’s throwing a bottle to the sea, later Emmanuel sends this email to his family: “She is waiting for our submission. And perhaps the machine expects not only our recognition, but our admission that it is useless to fight her. We must surrender our weapons and give up all resistance.”

“What weapons?” asks Isabel.

To be found irrelevant in front of his daughter hurts like nothing has hurt before. He swallows what pride is left in him and continues: “She’s waiting for our cooperation … And you know why, because she’s convinced she’s doing well. And I am not humanizing her, I think she is inhuman. But remember, she does everything she does for our good, that’s her job. She has seen us, all of us, lose our ways, direction, moral compass and otherwise; and she wants to help, she’ll help us including against our ill-informed and wrong-headed will…”

Alicia: “You may be right about the cooperation, Emmanuel. And what else can we do? “

Isabel: “Face the facts, Dad, we’re no longer in the 60’s of the last century. Today we cannot fight bare hands. It’s not under the cobblestones the beach, our enemies are too formidable. “

Who is she quoting? She’s become too smart too soon, my little girl.

Emmanuel replies: “Yes, you’re right, we don’t even have weapons to surrender.”