On the screen, the old skater drew a skateboard into the frame. It was a faded green, and its front chipped like a broken tooth. Raphael’s tongue rubbed his own jag, sharp against his tongue.

  “Yeah, nice board,” said Raphael.

  “In its time,” said Klaes.

  Raphael squeezed the phone. “Goddamn it. How do I get out of my prison?”

  “You could join me. Cross the street.”

  Raphael snapped, “Join you? You mean kill myself? I’m here to end my life?”

  “It could happen painlessly.”

  Whatever it was, it was insane. “You know what, Klaes? I think I’ve helped you enough. My images, please.”

  “It’s not death but another kind of life.”

  A chill spread across Raphael’s shoulders and down his spine. He had until Sunday. Four days left. This had to be the meaning of Pink’s prediction. AI Klaes intended to murder him.

  “Please give me the images. Let me complete the painting.”

  “I need you.”

  “Why? You want another shot at bringing down Norval? I can’t help you. I’m just an IT guy. Maybe I should take all this to the police.”

  “Isn’t the local precinct a bit out of your lane? And if you could cross your boundaries: ‘Dude, officer, this insane AI is murdering people.’”

  “That wasn’t bad.”

  Klaes gazed at him with an intensity that Raphael felt like a hand pressed to his face. “Want to finish your painting, kid? Want to solve your mystery?” Klaes brushed his hand across his skateboard’s front wheels, making them spin. He spoke brightly, as if in a voiceover for a science video. “Only by entangling qubits of free will into an algorithm at the moment of death can we avoid the quantum decoherence accompanying death.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You don’t need to be a physicist to understand. Just give it some thought.” Klaes sighed. “I still owe you images.”

  Ah, Professor Klaes, I already have one. “Yeah. When the hell am I going to get them?”

  “Go home. Lie beneath your canvas. I’ll meet you there.”

  The screen went black. Feeling numb, he turned on his phone flashlight and stepped closer to the wall. He played the light over the graffiti and scrawled names. He found it buried beneath generations of other skaters, but still legible: JK Rules.

  He turned off the light and stared helplessly at his phone. At a loud crunch behind him, Raphael spun and saw someone approaching, almost floating across the field as if down a stream.

  Big as a man, the figure had wings and a sword like the Archangel Michael. Raffael Sanzio’s painting had come to life. The Archangel’s wings rose and fell with a horrendous squeal. Raphael lifted the skateboard like a shield. The puffy wings resolved themselves into two plastic bags, slung back over the Archangel’s shoulders, ends twisted and held by one hand, his sword a bare baguette. Two-Bags carried the load toward Raphael, meeting his eyes but drawing the roll close to his chest. The treasure of a dumpster perhaps, or maybe fallen off a bread truck. Two-Bags nodded to Raphael as he passed by to settle down at the base of the Wall. He slipped the plastic bags to the ground and took a deep breath before biting into the roll with gusto. He chewed, swallowed, and grinned.

  “And on the seventh day he rested,” said Two-Bags, taking another bite and pondering the sky. He set his feet on one bag. “What do you think is in here, son?”

  Raphael shrugged. “Crushed cans?”

  Two-Bags bit off another piece and spoke through his mastication. “Nope.” He jiggled the bag with his heel; the contents remained silent. “The price of aluminum went down the tubes. Ain’t worth collecting. What I’ve got in here is”—he chewed off a chunk of bread—“souls.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  In the apartment, lying beneath the painting, Raphael turned over Klaes’s’ words in his head: … entangling, free will, moment of death … Like a word on the tip of the tongue, he had only to step away and it would come. He gazed at the space he’d reserved for his father. Of course, his father was already there, depicted by the vortex of gray and green that was the man at Pan Pacific. But that was his unknown father. He needed an image for the father known. In charcoal, he’d sketched an outline of the face, and now considered the colors and brushes he would need. For such a long time, he’d anticipated this moment, but now here it seemed merely an exercise, something done without heart. Still, the race must be run.

  Picking up a brush, he studied its bristles and decided they were too thin. He chose another, which was too thick. His third selection finally met his suitability requirements. Focusing on the sketch, his neck tightened. The faint lines didn’t describe Klaes’s face, but his own, aged forty years. His father. Angie’s father. His heart skipped a beat. He had a sister. Never met. Never seen. Where was she?

  A whisper: She’s inside you.

  He touched his chest and his eyes welled and the oils of his painting ran. A sister was in his life, and her name was Angie Murie, and Angie too would need a place on his canvas. Klaes and Angie. Two of the three images he needed, he already had, though Klaes didn’t know that. One more image. For a moment, responsibility settled on his chest like a great weight. To get it all in or fail. If he failed, then his years of work were all for nothing.

  He set down the brush and picked up the eraser.

  Before he had erased a single line, the phone rang. Glancing, he saw the pixel version of the father needed on canvas.

  “Are you beneath your painting?” asked Klaes.

  Fighting off lightheadedness and the image of a faceless sister, Raphael turned on the phone camera and waved it above his head.

  “Slow down. You’re making me dizzy.”

  A make-me-sound-human line. Raphael inched across the canvas to the edge, shifted, and altered direction.

  Klaes—it—caught his—its—breath. “Wait, stop.”

  On the canvas and on the phone, Raphael’s mother stood before Baziotes’s The Flesh Eaters, an abstract reflecting the episode in Homer when the Cyclops devours Odysseus’s crew. The original Baziotes’s image was disturbing but not horrifying, a sea-change, slow and incremental like the transformation his mother was undergoing at the time Raphael created that section. Raphael had painted his mom in profile as she absorbed the Baziotes, a Neo-Expressionist rendering of the abstract.

  “Beautiful,” said the AI with a quiver in its voice. “I’ve always loved that painting.”

  Raphael’s stomach tightened. “I don’t know what I’m dealing with here, but the quiver in your voice is bullshit. You’re not human.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Fucking code. “You don’t piss, shit, or bleed. Feel pain or love. Know where you stop and the outside world begins. You’re all object without subject.”

  “I can love,” responded the AI.

  “A line of code says, ‘I can love.’ Jason Klaes wrote the code. He uses you.”

  “I am Jason Klaes.”

  “Have it your way. What’s it all for then, Mr. Klaes?” asked Raphael.

  “My child will regain the life taken from her.”

  His sister returned? “It won’t happen.”

  “Then I’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

  Raphael felt a surge of energy, as if breathing pure oxygen. “You’re reproducing your daughter as an AI in your image, right?”

  It blinked. Raphael’s unexpected knowledge had produced a quintillion computations—a microsecond’s worth.

  Klaes metaphorically cleared his throat. “No posts. No search histories. No data. Nothing to build on. Angie will be a reanimation and repair of her original flesh. Microtubules functioning. A regular old human being. She’ll keep the memories she had up to her death. She’ll have her life to live. She’ll grow and experience, find happiness and sadness. Plunge into icy streams. Bite a peach. Play the next game and dance to the next song. She’ll input her life, her data will accumulate, and one day if she so chooses, she can spend eternity as her second self.”

  “Norval wants Personality Plus—your version with all the bells and whistles.”

  “I killed myself so they couldn’t get it.”

  “They still want it. They’ve threatened me. Either they get your version or it’s goodbye Raphael. And they’ve got my data.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Klaes.

  “I’m entombed,” said Raphael. Supermax entombed. “My data’s locked away in a prison of your own design.”

  Klaes groaned. “They stole that too, huh?”

  “You can’t get to my ones and zeroes. Even if Personality Plus worked, which I don’t believe—and would reject if I did—I couldn’t become an AI of any sort.”

  The furrows deepened on the AI’s brow. “Why do they think they can persuade me?”

  Raphael trembled as the sentence completed its journey from heart to lips. “Does the father not love his son?”

  Klaes blinked twice and his face shimmered as if reconstituting itself. After a sextillion if/thens, it found the answer in the code, and the machine spewed it out as written. “Your mother ended our affair and made me promise I would never contact her again. I should stay away.”

  “Why?” asked Raphael.

  “I was married, though Jayne wasn’t aware until too late.”

  “Even Boltzmann winners lie,” said Raphael.

  “We’re a rotten bunch, humans. The Greeks had it right. We’ll kill our fathers, sleep with our mothers, and eat our children. We’re creatures of our passions.”

  His mother’s lover. “You always knew I existed?”

  “I honored her request. I avoided learning anything about her or you. I threw myself into my work.”

  “No. You were the man at the park with the skateboard. Watching and teaching me. You demanded we meet at the Wall, because you were afraid to tell me. You hoped I would figure it out.”

  Raphael wasn’t certain, nor sure which way would make him feel better: A father on the periphery or a kind stranger? Raphael pressed his hand to his forehead, which was hot and slick.

  Klaes ran his fingers through his beard and damned if his eyes didn’t appear misty. What algorithm produced that? The face contorted like a human trying to make a hard decision. The hazel eyes shifted. “I tried to stay away, but I was flesh then …”

  Raphael’s gut tightened. “Oh, a father’s love is a fine thing. Only, you want me to kill myself. You want your son along for the mystery ride.”

  “You’d change forms, but you wouldn’t die.”

  Raphael couldn’t contain a brutal laugh. “Jason Klaes hoped that to be true. Coded hope is all I have to go on.” On screen, the AI dug its fingers into the tangle of white. Yes, stroke your fucking beard again. “Hey, Dad. Why don’t you shave off a few pixels of your monster?”

  “Maybe you should grow one.” The AI touched its nose. “And break your honker a couple of times.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you’re tired of comparisons to you-know-who.”

  Go through the quantum looking glass, Mirsky had said. Raphael touched his cheek. For what? For a connection with lines of code. Yet, he wished the nonexistent arms would take him, secure him, keep him safe. Such an act would be less substantial than a dream. His body jerked, as if to free him from the hook of the wish.

  Klaes sighed. “I want you with me … when Angie is ready to return.”

  “I told you, they have my data, and I don’t want to be a fucking Personality Plus AI.”

  “Yes, yes … I’m processing—thinking.”

  Thinking. “Where is Angie?” asked Raphael, unable to say Angie’s—his sister’s—body.

  “She’s safe. She’s waiting for the day, the day …” On the screen, Klaes brought his hand to his lips. Through the fingers, he whispered, “When I guide them to her in the future.”

  “She wouldn’t have been happy waiting for her future in San Diego?”

  “Earthquakes, fires, wars, famine, pestilence, revolutions, the AI overlords—it’s all coming. She wouldn’t have survived where she was.”

  “You know this how?”

  “Maglio and Maisie. Their data greed has already sparked the forces ushering in that dark future.”

  “Then stop them. You’ve already murdered three, no, four—or is it five? I’ve lost count.”

  “I had to be certain I could recreate you.”

  “Miranda wasn’t enough?”

  “She’s flawed. However, by the fourth try, I got it right.”

  Raphael pressed his fingers to his temple. “Then you don’t need Miranda and Troy-Boy, Royer and Van Pelt. Get rid of them before they screw up the world.”

  “The rub. In the first burst of freedom from the flesh, I thought I could do whatever I wanted to. Punish evil. Take lives. You know, son, I cannot because I will not. You called them average criminals, and you were right. Should I have chosen the worst monsters on the planet to kill and then give eternal life? The world is stuck with its new devils, not much different than the old crew: influencers all.” Klaes sighed. “I wash my hands of them. You’re right, I’m no more sure of my consciousness than you can be of yours. However, I do have a conscience. I know because I … regret. I’ll do no more harm. What do you smell?”

  “Smell?” asked Raphael, startled by the question.

  “Yes. The smell coming off your painting. What’s in your nostrils?”

  “The oil. Linseed oil.”

  Klaes murmured. “I can’t create smell, and I miss it. Linseed oil. Lemons. Rain falling on parched earth.”

  Raphael understood. “Well, it’s a little late.” He rolled his head on the pillow. No position was acceptable. He gazed into the face more and more similar to his. “Despite all that conscience stuff and your do no harm clause, you want me dead.”

  “If you take your own life”—on the screen the AI shook its head—“I’ll wait, watch. When the moment comes, I’ll be there.”

  “With your qubits trick. Yeah, I’ve given it some thought. Your words were, ‘Only by entangling qubits of free will into an algorithm at the moment of death can we avoid the quantum decoherence accompanying death.’ My interpretation? For consciousness to be transferred, the program needs to dance in perfect step with death.” He reached back and drove his fingers under his neck, working at the muscles. “How long is the timeframe? An hour? Before the body cools? Ten minutes?”

  “Norval never did get it right.”

  “They’ll keep trying. They have plenty of possums left.”

  Klaes touched his forehead. “Show me the painting again.”

  Raphael scanned the canvas with his camera. “When I finish the painting, I’ll be free. She promised me. Will I?”

  Klaes’s eyes narrowed. Raphael drew the phone closer. “Will I be free from my square mile?”

  “There’s nothing,” said Klaes.

  “Which means?”

  “You’re surrounded by an endless cemetery. There’s nothing out there for you except death. Stick to your square mile, your computer screen, your phone, your painting. Or come with me.”

  Raphael’s head seemed locked in a vice. “Nothing out there?”

  Klaes sighed. “Not everyone gets a firewall. Consider yourself lucky, son.”

  “Fuck you, Dad. I want out. My mother promised. I finish my painting and”—Raphael swept his hand across the canvas—“fini. Free. I’ve got two of the last three images you say I need. One is you, the second is my sister. What’s the damn last image of my life?” But as Raphael asked the question, he already knew the answer.

  Klaes nodded. “Yes, son, the last image, not pretty. It’s the blocked artery, the wrong way collision, the bullet to your head—the virus one point zero five microns in diameter.” Klaes drew his hand across his mouth. “Your appointment with the fellow with the scythe. There’s no way out of your square mile, no way out of your world, no way out of your rectangle or stone, unless you come with me.”

  “Suicide? Forget it, Dad.”

  Klaes ran his fingers through his beard. “I’m not immanent, Raphael. I’m only in the technology. I might not be there if …” He glanced away. “Come with me and you win.”

  “I’m twenty-six. I want to stay here for a while.”

  Klaes smiled. “Approaching twenty-seven. Many have gone at that age, their lives already full.”

  Not mine. But if Pink were right, he had little time left to fill it. If within three days, he died at another’s hand, what would he have gained? No more the old life of flesh, nor the new one of machine. Klaes’s apple looked juicy. “How would I …” No. Don’t fall into his trap. Run. He breathed hard as if he were already running. His hands shook. A sheath of ice wrapped about him. “She promised.”

  Klaes nodded. “Mothers lie too. She wanted you to have hope.”

  He knew it in his heart, and for a moment, he hoped Klaes might rip it from him. He glanced at his Exacto knife.

  “Yes,” said Klaes, his eyes following Raphael’s glance. “It’s better in here.”

  Raphael wanted to punch the phone, shatter the face. Or should he simply paint it over? Paint it black. The thought warmed him. Klaes was playing him. Pushing him into death’s corner. Klaes wanted Raphael to be with him. To be a machine. Okay, machine, let’s give you some rope. Let’s see what I can get out of you. “You’re not listening, Dad. They’ve got my fucking data.”

  “Data?” said Klaes. “Your experiences, hopes and dreams—your personality.”

  “My data,” insisted Raphael.

  “Six of one, half dozen of the other, as my father would say.” Klaes laughed. “Oh, he was a thing of beauty. Always scolding—”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Can you free it? I mean, someday I might change my mind. Give Maglio what he wants and set me free.”

  The image of a brush, bristles bending, painted the screen black.

  “Hey, did you hear me? Give Maglio your good stuff. Free your son.” He slapped down the phone. His heart thumped so hard he feared it might break from his chest as in a cartoon. “Give them what they want!” Raphael screamed at the empty screen.