Raphael swore. “Christ!”

  A museum guard pushed through the throng. “I’ll take over, son.” He separated Raphael from the woman and gestured for the crowd to retreat. “Happens frequently,” said the guard, drawing out a capped syringe. “Might be too late here.”

  “Jesus,” Raphael whispered. A siren sounded, and a surveillance drone flew overhead. The phones floated in the air as the onlookers, ignoring the guard’s pleas, moved closer to that alluring pictorial flame, turned their backs, and held their devices at arm’s length to include themselves in their documentation.

  The guard stuck the needle into her upper arm.

  Someone in the crowd chanted, “For you, Miranda. For you, dear goddess.”

  And one by one, the audience took up the chant until it filled the air. The young woman’s fingernails were blue and her body a discarded cloth.

  “Shit,” said the guard.

  Raphael’s phone rang. He staggered back from the dismal, infuriating, and perplexing scene.

  On the screen, an animated greeting card had appeared. Little birds taking flight to Peter and the Wolf dissolved into a request from Jason Klaes to meet with Raphael at the Wall … at midnight.

  “Is she going to be all right?” he cried out to the guard as a team of paramedics sprinted up to the scene, shouting for the selfie takers to back off.

  No one answered, but he knew.

  Fan Belt? No, fuck—she must have been trying to say Van Pelt. The people taking selfies had praised Miranda.

  Dazed, wondering if he remained asleep and the scene was an awful dream, he replayed the message. The Wall at midnight.

  The young woman was gone, and he had to go.

  As he exited, the light of the 3D billboard on Wilshire flashed. He had seen identical 3D boards going up around the area, each displaying a species that had vanished from the planet: the Hawskbill Turtle, the Black Rhino, the Amur Leopard, and the Sumatran Orangutan. The display finished its cycle with the name of the animal and the question:

  Extinct. Are you prepared?

  He watched now as the porpoise glided over the boulevard, and the question appeared. The question fragmented, to be overwhelmed by a radiant stream of letters.

  Beat extinction with Norval’s Personality Plus.

  Raphael skated home, tried to eat, but couldn’t down a mouthful. He played the invitation as one might a favorite song, but he didn’t hum along. Even if Klaes was Raphael’s father, he shouldn’t have been aware of the Wall, just as he shouldn’t have been cognizant of Raphael’s painting or sickness—but he was. Among the remains of an old train depot, the Wall was a weed-bordered hangout for skateboarders when Raphael was an early teen, there was no better place for an undisturbed confrontation. If Klaes knew as much as he purported to know, Raphael might have freedom handed to him tonight—or meet his maker. If so, there would be no defense. He would be at the mercy of whatever beast awaited him.

  As he skated to the site, Peter’s little birds were in his throat.

  By the time he reached the overgrown lot, the little birds forced their way from gullet into belly. He paced the perimeter, then with a grunt of determination and heart racing, lunged into the waist-high weeds.

  Ten yards in, Raphael chanced on an old path, sparking a memory of when he was twelve and approached the Wall with an ounce of hope and a pound of doubt. Would this be the day he’d nail the trick? A few yards farther on, the foliage had retaken the terrain. He lumbered forward. A can crackled beneath his foot, alarming an army of low creatures scurrying away through the undergrowth. He stopped and scanned the field. As a vehicle cruised by on the bordering street, shadows leaped up along the field’s perimeter. Black flares took the form of fearful men and fierce monsters. When the car passed, the shadows vanished, leaving only a mailbox, hydrant, and tethered saplings.

  Raphael switched on the phone flashlight and surveyed the terrain. Heart slowing, he continued to the abandoned depot.

  At the structure’s remains, little more than a crumbling concrete platform, rusty tracks, and the Wall itself, he turned off the flashlight and pocketed the phone. From the eaves of a long-closed library a short distance away, a solitary bulb illuminated the platform. The forgotten light shone on a return slot in the library’s side, waiting to swallow books—swallow. Was everything to be a fairytale monster?

  Over the years, the graffiti had grown so dense on the platform that no word was decipherable from within the shadows. Darkest of all was the bottom of the Wall, a long slab of concrete eight feet high and tilted at a sixty-degree angle, likely from an earthquake. At its base, spider webs glinted their invitation to guileless insects.

  He scanned the area. “Jason?”

  The weeds shivered in an erratic breeze. A cricket chirped. Something plodded through the undergrowth. Stagnant air smelling of rotting animal matter and stubbed out cigarettes.

  At a rustle behind him, his heart quickened. He spun around. “Is anyone here?”

  Scuffing his heel against the dirt, Raphael tossed the board above his head and, without a glance, caught it. He scanned the surroundings like a night-watch aboard a ship. Midnight came and went. For twenty minutes, he waited, breath coming ever harder.

  “Jason? Jason?” A child in a pool yelling “Marco.”

  No “Polos” or “Klaeses” responded.

  Raphael dropped to the platform and tapped his fist on the concrete as if knocking at a door. The knock was answered by a loud stirring in the brush. He jumped up, trembling, but the undergrowth was still and quiet again. No one was there. He remembered how once there was. One evening, among a half-dozen other skaters, he pushed off harder than he ever had, determined to get the speed to nail the trick. As always, he failed, but when he got up from ground, he spotted a figure standing in the weeds and gazing at him. Although the figure turned and strode away, Raphael recognized him as the man from Pan Pacific Park, his guide. It was the last time Raphael saw his guide, though many times he looked for him, as tonight he looked for Jason Klaes. As if he had skated the Wall a dozen times, sweat dripped from his forehead and his heart pounded.

  “Jason, stop playing with me!” he cried, voice echoing off the slab. He drew up his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and pulled his legs to his chest. He rocked several times. “Come on, Jason. Show yourself.” Releasing his legs, Raphael grabbed the board and slapped at a wheel. The spinning brought comfort in the familiar whirr.

  The Mussorgsky tune of his ringer sent him to his feet. Drawing the phone from his pocket, he jerked it up. It slipped from his fingers, fell to the slab, and bounced a yard away. Not breathing, he picked it up. A jumble of letters, digits, and symbols extended across the screen.

  “Hello, Raphael,” said the caller through the phone speaker.

  “Jason?” A bead of sweat ran down Raphael’s forehead and into his eye.

  “Sorry I’m late.” The voice was deep and clear, and if Raphael didn’t know the words were coming out of his phone, he would have thought an invisible man was speaking.

  On the screen, an old man’s bearded face appeared. Goosebumps rose on Raphael’s arms. “You resemble him.” Raphael scanned the shadowy brush, expecting some imitation of a man to rise from the foliage.

  “Aren’t I him?” asked the caller.

  “No. I mean, not the Jason who once—”

  “What am I?”

  “An advanced algorithm. A dead man’s script.” Having said it, Raphael breathed with relief, as if he had finally escaped from his labyrinth.

  But Klaes merely gazed back. The caller’s eyes contained an image that shouldn’t have been there: Raphael’s face, as if two humans stood toe to toe, their features mutually caught in the other’s pupil and iris. Thinking it might be his reflection on the screen, Raphael tilted the phone left and right, but the image remained.

  Klaes grinned as if aware of Raphael’s confusion. “I am Jason Klaes.”

  “I don’t believe it. Jason Klaes is dead.”

  The flesh evaporated from the face on the screen, and a hand rose to grip the skull. The deep, clear voice recited, “Here hung those lips I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?” The face recovered its flesh. Klaes’s cheeks glowed, and the eyebrows danced in imitation of merry old Saint Nick’s.

  “I’ve seen plenty—and better—animations.”

  Klaes grinned through the bushy beard. “Tough generation to impress. What did you say I was?”

  “A program. Well-written code. AI hoping to pass itself off as artificial general intelligence.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Klaes, eyebrows rising.

  “Singular, Holmes. A singular clue. A singular warning. Dr. Watson’s one word. What, you’re the onset of the singularity?”

  “No?”

  “You’re pretending to interact with me as an equal—more than an equal. Artificial superintelligence and consciousness. We’re far from there.”

  “When will we be there?”

  Raphael shook his head. “Not tonight.”

  Raphael’s face vanished from Klaes’s eyes. Their hazel intensified to the point of blinding. Raphael looked away to escape falling into their ocean.

  The thing asked, “Then why are you out here?”

  “Why did you message me?”

  Klaes smiled. “In my instructions to Lily, I asked she use a public message board to report anything uncanny in the wake of my death. She reported her meeting with you and the direction your search for me had taken.”

  “She gave me a clue. A machine in a ghost. Watson’s one word nailed it for me. Klaes was dead but exerting his will.”

  Klaes grinned. “Yes.”

  “Exerting his will through a program.”

  “If you’re very loose with definitions. But that’s close enough.”

  Raphael’s jaw tightened. Avoid confrontation, argument. But the machine’s arrogance, programmed or not, pricked like a fresh splinter. One thing that the machine seemed not to know was that Raphael knew he was Klaes’s son. Was that an advantage for Raphael? “Whatever you are, you’ve promised something I need. Do you remember?”

  Klaes’s face vanished, replaced by a dense, dizzying screen of code zipping by. The code froze. Klaes’s face reappeared. “Your painting needs three images.”

  “I don’t know how you learned about my painting, but I’m getting the feeling you’re not giving me my images.”

  “Believe in me, Raphael.”

  “You demand faith? Your price is to believe in the unbelievable?”

  “I exist because I know. A tautology, a meaningless repetition, but it’s all you’ve got too.”

  The logic fell like a boulder on his shoulders. Sinking under its weight, he threw it off, steadied himself and put a finger to his temple. “I exist in here. Where do you exist?”

  “In a quantum computer in the Tadpole Galaxy.”

  He felt the veins in his neck pulse. “Bullshit.”

  Klaes chuckled. “Or maybe in a 1981 Dodge Charger hood ornament buried beneath scorched earth.”

  Did it mean anything or was it a joke? Raphael glanced down. If the ground were black, he might have run away. It was weeds and ordinary dirt. He should still run. It was foolish to believe he could control this situation. That he might get what he wanted. His heart beat furiously. Throw the phone into the weeds and jet. Yet he clung to the thin hope, the wish …

  He met eyes on the screen. They were human hazel, and Raphael’s face again reflected off their surface. If Klaes were the actual thing, a true artificial general intelligence, the power behind those pixels might meet or go far beyond Raphael’s intelligence. He could accept the magnitude of its computing functionality but couldn’t accept that the machine was aware. If it had intentions, they were the intentions Klaes had programmed into it.

  If you can’t tell whether you’re speaking to a machine or a human, you must accept it as human. He didn’t buy it. This—thing—was zeroes and ones, though Klaes provided the AI with sufficient knowledge and memories, some of which involved Raphael. What Raphael needed hid amongst the code—maybe: the final image. How to extract it? To begin, he had to pretend he wasn’t bargaining with a machine. The machine wanted—no, not wanted—was programmed to make the human feel he was dealing with another human.

  Raphael slipped his foot under the skateboard and flipped it over. “Why meet here?”

  “I wanted you in your comfort zone. Your childhood Fortress of Solitude.”

  Raphael stiffened. “How could you know?”

  “A little blog told me.”

  “I deleted the information when—” He came down hard, as if missing a last stair. Nothing disappears in cyberspace.

  “Are you frightened?” asked Klaes.

  “Who killed you?”

  Something large moved in the brush. Raphael spun and peered into the black field. The weeds rustled, but again no one appeared. A dog maybe or … a possum?

  He returned to Klaes. “Who?”

  Klaes shrugged. “Let’s call it a suicide of convenience, but I was ready for who I’d become.”

  In Raphael’s belly, something seemed to be swimming, bumping into walls. An AI with megalomania. “Yeah, I know—AGI.”

  “World’s first.”

  “Congratulations.” Bump. Bump. Bump. “Who killed Miranda?”

  “I killed Miranda. Or should I say, I had someone kill Miranda.”

  “The Electrician, right?”

  “Electrician?”

  “The dude with all the tools.”

  “Ah. Yes, you can call him the Electrician. He goes by several such names, but that one will do.”

  Klaes’s face was serene. Raphael’s was burning, “Didn’t want to get blood on your hands?”

  Klaes smiled. “I can’t get blood on my hands. I’m a conscious being, but I only exist in the wiring, so to speak. Which doesn’t mean I can’t get things done. I have all the cryptocurrency I want. I paid your Electrician well for his work.”

  The face remained placid, yet the closed lips slipped to one side like a child waiting to see if their falsehood is believed. A hint of guilt? “You had Miranda killed for killing a swan.”

  “Not entirely. I had to see if I could do it again.”

  “Do what again?”

  “Make another me.”

  “In your image, like God.”

  “Not in my image nor with my consciousness, only in my form.”

  “To do all this, you’d have to be the smartest human on the planet.”

  Klaes smiled. “Someone has to be.”

  “It takes a team.”

  “Maybe I had a team. They assemble on wet days.”

  Raphael glanced toward the field, still expecting a three-dimensional version of Klaes to appear. Tadpole Galaxy. Team. Wet days. Sure. “So killing Miranda was an experiment?”

  “I didn’t have the courage while I was alive.”

  “Troy-Boy?”

  “On his podcasts, he called himself Truth Troy.”

  Truth Troy. The podcaster who decades ago denied the poisoning of twenty children and taunted the grieving parents. Called them actors. Mutilated dogs. Mutilated history. A fistful of ice pressed the back of Raphael’s neck. “An experiment too?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Klaes. “But if anyone—”

  Raphael completed the sentence. “—deserved to die it was him.” Yes, I too could have killed him. A flash in his brain like a strike of lightning, but then gone. No. He could not. “But there are much worse people on the planet. Why choose them? They were no more than average criminals.”

  On the screen, Klaes appeared taut and tired, eyes dull as if from cataracts. Only code. Instructions, mind-boggling galaxies of zeroes and ones. A classic if/then flowchart. Numbers of instructions. If discussing murders, appear worn and regretful. Was he any different? If trying to cross my forbidden street, then …

  Raphael jiggled the phone as if it might unsettle the digital Klaes impersonator. “I can see why you took your own life, but others …”

  “I regret—”

  “Regret? You can’t regret.”

  “If I’m only the weak AI you believe I am, then you’re right. I don’t have access to how it feels to be human. I don’t have regret or any other emotion.”

  “If your motives were so pure, why didn’t you kill yourself and leave it there?”

  “And if Oppenheimer had killed himself? Would another physicist have not fathered the wild atomic child in Germany or Russia or China?”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re the good machine. The one who will protect us from the bad machines: the dictators and destroyers.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You made me into an application. The Raphael-find-the-corrupt-file app.”

  Klaes took a lengthy breath and said, “Maglio and Maisie stole an early version of my—work. It was missing a few components, though sufficient for them to get started. I wanted them to think they had it all, so I threw them another bone, minus the marrow, poisoned code taking its place. A loyal, innocent worker uncovers what they need. They jump on it. They’re a clever bunch. It didn’t work out as I planned.”

  “You couldn’t just wave your wand and make Norval disappear?”

  Klaes closed his eyes, and the face relaxed. For an instant Raphael wondered if the digital god, the would-be human machine, was napping. The heavy lids retracted. “Did you know in my youth I used to skate here? A board with clay wheels.” The cloud lifted from Klaes’s eyes. They glistened.

  The light in Klaes’s eyes and his reminiscence about skating unsettled Raphael more than all the explanations. He lowered the phone. The phrase from his painting JK Rules! popped into Raphael’s brain. As data, his own life was in the AI program, which implied it could accumulate, add to itself like the living, change its own code and algorithms. Yet, none of those made it conscious. The program was efficient at gobbling and regurgitating. If/then/if/then.

  Steadying his hand, Raphael lifted the phone and met the rejuvenated eyes. “I led them to where you wanted them, Professor Klaes. You promised me my images.”