Page 86 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“But you said they’re not in South America.”

“Exactly.”

She holds her expression of puzzlement for a moment, while they sit in silence, and then pretends slow-dawning enlightenment. “Oh.”

“Two associates of your brothers, Galen Vector and Frank Trott, have also gone to South America,” the attorney says. “It’s a chore having to relocate all these people. Please don’t burden us with the need to move you into a new life.”

“I won’t,” she says. “I like it here.”

“You have two beauty shops, a lovely home, a nice life.”

“I don’t want to evaporate.”

Satisfied, the two men get up from the table. The golem opens the back door.

As he’s about to depart, the attorney turns to Wendy. “One more thing.”

“I know,” she says. “You were never here.”

“How could we have been? We don’t even exist.”

Smirking, he closes the door softly behind him.

Wendy opens a cabinet drawer near the cooktop and removes a colorful apron and uses it to blot the tears from her eyes before tying it on.

She wishes she might have had one more chance to convert her brothers, but she can no longer deny that she would have failed again because, frankly, they were psychopaths.

She prides herself on her fierce determination, which arises from having a meaningful purpose and bottomless energy, two of many qualities in which her slatternly mother was deficient.Wendy had failed to save her mother from a long fall toward early death, and now she had failed her brothers. After waiting eighteen years for Regis, the fulfillment of the seer’s prediction, she must not fail him. In the pursuit of his reformation, she will be decided, firm, inflexible, resolute. There are things about him worth loving, not least of all his inability to lie to her. She is putting it all on the line this time, and if she fails, she will be devastated. If she fails him, she does not know what she will do, does not know how she will cope, how she will find a reason to go on—except perhaps by opening a third beauty shop.

69

COME NIGHTFALL

Shortly before dusk fades to starlight, when the drones retreat and quiet settles across the mountains, Vida and Sam make camp on a gentle slope in open woods where spectral moonlight spares them from a blinding dark to which their eyes could never have adapted. They provide food and water for the dogs, and then sit with their backs to trees, eating PowerBars.

With the descent of darkness, the night insects remain silent. The great horned owls do not call to one another to establish their exclusive territories for the hunt ahead. The eerie, ululant cries of coyotes are not to be heard. If raccoons and opossums are foraging, they make less sound than mimes.

Vida knows—and surely Sam knows as well—that a mere human presence doesn’t inspire such a profound hush as this among the creatures of the wilderness. It’s as though the departure of the drones was followed by the arrival of some stalking ground-bound technology, robotic but stealthy, so alien that wild animals, though grown tolerant of humans, are reduced to alert stillness by this new and menacing intruder.

Strangely—or perhaps not—Vida and Sam are drawn to the same subject. Without suggesting the wisdom of whispering, they conduct their short and weary conversationsotto voce.

She says, “Do you sometimes wonder if our time is running out? Not just yours and mine. Everyone’s.”

“At some point,” Sam says, “the machines won’t need us, want us, or tolerate us.”

“There is a poem about AI, by Richard Brautigan—”

“I know it. ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.’”

She’s surprised and pleased that he’s familiar with the poem, but more important is what he thinks of it.

“The premise is bad science fiction,” he says. “Machines might be graceful if by ‘grace’ we mean elegance and beauty in manner or motion. But they can never be loving.”

Although she agrees, Vida says, “Some believe they can be.”

“Even an ultimate artificial general intelligence, possessing all the knowledge of humanity, won’t have a conscience or a soul. Apersonwithout a conscience is a sociopath. Sociopaths are incapable of love.”

“A cure for cancer, solutions to intractable problems—an AGI might solve them all.”

---