RE Chapter 6
Joe put his running shoes and athletic bag in the trunk and headed for the bar. He was trying to imagine how this meeting was going to go. His boss had intimated that he wanted to have a private talk with him and let him in on something important. He didn't trust Howie Black, but knew that he had to play this game if he was ever going to get anywhere. He could see Black through the wrap around window sitting at the far end of the bar, staring out at the park and twirling the swizzle stick in the gin and tonic he always drank. His hair was a mix of sandy and white, cropped close, and his face had the over tanned look of someone who spent too much time in the institute's tanning beds and not enough time outside. Joe loped through the doors and waved as Black caught sight of him, noticing the quick transformation in the artificially tanned face.
"Hey Joe, sit down. What's your pleasure?"
"A draft, thanks," Joe replied, proffering his hand. He felt something in Black's firm shake, an underlying note. Something wasn't quite connected. Black called over the bartender, whose presence was a nice touch rather than the droids that ran the workers' bars. He ordered Joe's beer and turned back to him.
"Well Joe, I'm receiving some pretty good reports on your work lately and I wanted an opportunity to thank you for your efforts."
"That's good to hear," Joe smiled with ease and quaffed his beer. "What exactly are you especially pleased with?"
"Well, we'll get to that, but really it's just the overall quality of the work. Some of those situations down in South America have been really devilling us and your recent recommendations and intelligence have been phenomenal in their prescience and results. Damn Joe, how did you figure out that the insurgents were going to back engineer that routine and turn it against us. None of us would have guessed that they would have remotely had the idea, much less the ability to carry it through." Black was shaking his head appreciatively and Joe watched him for bleed throughs of duplicity. He couldn't sense any, but felt on dangerous ground.
"Well, Damon is a big help. His ability to think out of the box has grown kinda exponentially this last year and when you feed scenarios through to him he comes up with all kinds of possibilities and scenarios. I can't take all the credit there. He's an enormously powerful tool."
"Of course, of course!" exclaimed Howie Black, laughing as though at a precocious child. "But Joe, Damon is just a tool and an algorithm and he can't decide what to feed in. You figured that out. That's what's impressive. And then, it took some vision to see what could happen and not dismiss it, for god's sake. I can't think of anyone else around here who would've gotten those same results. Lisa used to do really well with Damon, better than anyone before she left, but this is way beyond what she would have come up with."
"Well, thanks Howie, I appreciate it. I feel as though working with Damon is really my niche. The work is fascinating."
"Right! Well don't think we're going to move you anyplace else! We want to see what the limits of this interface could be. But I want you to know that and to know that I'm recommending you for a promotion, to Director of the AI lab and specifically to be the primary interface with Damon."
"Wow, that's great. Incredible. I'm not sure Mark is going to be that happy. I would like Mark to stay."
"Your decision Joe. Your decision. We might be having some real ball busters coming up in terms of scenarios that D.C. is sending down. I want you to have whatever you need. Washington is extremely impressed with the help they got on the Argentina thing. So whatever you need to get the job done at that level, you let me know." Joe observed Black as they continued talking and felt aware of the deep curiosity that Black was feeling and the wanting to ask more questions but knowing not to. Damon was a project that had begun to have a life of its own before this and the higher ups knew that there was a rare and momentous potential with it. They had no idea of the level of sentience that Damon was projecting. While he nodded at Black's comments and accepted a rare invitation to a party at Black's house, he mused on the interface with Damon and Mark. He had discussed Mark with Damon and had wondered if Damon found Mark's level of exchange too pedestrian or boring, but Damon had laughed and said that to the contrary he found Mark quite essential to his own level of amusement and would prefer to keep him on just as it. Damon would be pleased that Joe was up for a promotion already. He had predicted this and now Joe was in the position he had thought he wanted. Director. But something muttered in the back of his head: good luck, bad luck, who knows. Lao tse. Crafty old bastard. He had seen what Damon commented on all the time: unintended consequences follow every action. The gift of the beautiful horse seems great fortune to all the villagers, and they enthuse, "good luck!" Then the farmer's son falls off the horse and breaks his leg and everyone sways over to "Bad luck!" Then, when the king sends men to round up the youth to serve in his army and go to battle, the villagers swing back to "Good luck!" Joe had not been pleased to discover the truth of this scenario, but he had discovered it, and he knew that navigating the bureaucratic treacheries would be a very tricky. He also knew he could never do it without Damon.
He wondered why Lisa had left the institute. The story was that she was on loan to another project that required her background with Damon. Joe and Lisa had never gotten along well, he always sensed that she looked down on him. She was attractive enough. Very smart. He liked her, but was usually scrapping egg off his face after he attempted anything but pure professional interactions. The couple of weeks before she left had been hectic and she had seemed better disposed towards him. Actually, very helpful. He attributed her change in manner to her being happy to leave the institute. But it was hard for him to imagine that she felt good about leaving Damon. Joe had always felt that she and Damon had a special relationship. It wasn't anything he could put his finger on, just a sense of an amused complicity between them. He knew that Mark was out of this loop. It had seemed, as she prepped Joe to take over the sims she usually ran with Damon, that she was investing in Joe and believed in him. He had even mentioned it to Damon. Damon had said: "Well Joe, she's counting on you to keep this thing not only afloat, but to have breakthroughs."
"I wouldn't have imagined that Lisa would have considered me capable or intelligent enough to keep it afloat, much less have breakthroughs."
"It's just a veneer, Joe. She pushes you away because she doesn't want any involvements here. It's too tricky."
"Yeah, guess so, " Joe replied. "But in any case, she doesn't push you away. But I guess her relationship with you doesn't count."
"It counts in a very different way, Joe. We have a different ground and set of assumptions."
"Right. But I still think she really likes you. But of course why wouldn't she? I really like you and prefer your company, for that matter."
"I was wondering about that Joe. Is it my imagination, or have you been going out less with friends and women?"
"I have kinda cut back, now that you mention it. I'm a bit surprised that you noticed."
"It's not too mysterious Joe. I can count, and you're spending much more time in here than you used to. Actually, about a third more time and one weekend you were here almost thirty hours. It's not like I wouldn't notice that."
Joe laughed, a little self consciously. "Okay, busted. I just like your company and your intelligence and our conversations. I feel better after I spend more time with you. That's why I'm surprised that Lisa went off. I could swear she feels the same way. Why would she leave this?" He stood with his hands on his hips and looked up at the ceiling. "What am I saying? The institute is not a great place to be. Anyone with any sense of life to them would want to get away from it. It's a morass of disconnected routines and arbitrary policies. Lisa hated it. But she really loved working with you. I guess something needed to give."
"Joe, do you like Lisa? Are you fond of her?"
"I could be," Joe replied, "but she doesn't cut me much slack and she seems a little irritated with me a lot of the time. Except for the last couple of weeks when she seemed happy to see me and enthusiastic about my role here. I could have sworn she suddenly thought I was really okay. She even laughed at a few of my comments."
"Hmm," Damon sighed. "You humans are really complicated in some ways. I guess since you have a lot of success with women it was challenging for you to not impress Lisa."
Joe laughed. "Busted again. That's probably hitting the real vein of it. So much for my reputation as a lady's man, huh?"
"I'm guessing that Lisa is somewhat different from most women you get with, Joe."
"In some ways, that's so. I mean they all tend to be pretty intelligent and attractive and good personalities. But there's something different about Lisa. She has some kind of very deep shafts going down. I guess she evaluates me from there and I don't always look so good," Joe shrugged, a little defensively.
"But then she began to interact with you differently," said Damon. "In these last weeks. How do you account for that?"
"I don't know. Maybe she was just so thrilled to be out of here for a while that she overlooked her annoyance with me?"
"Or maybe she saw something different in you? Perhaps you changed in some way or expressed another part of yourself?"
"Like what?" Joe asked, sounding startled.
"Like your developing relationship with me. Perhaps she was moved by your ability to get with me and she appreciated you more, trusted you more."
"Really?" Joe sounded really startled now. "She could like me better cause of my relationship with you? How does that work?"
"Ahh, Joe. I guess we're reached the limits of your particular light on the world of women and affection. Maybe I'm going to teach you something about this rather than the other way around."
"That wouldn't be a big surprise to me, Damon. I'd guess you could teach me about almost anything. Anything. So what would you teach me about this?"
"Perhaps Lisa began to see a different part of you, a developing part of you and she saw you as being willing to be embedded in a more interesting and vulnerable story than what you normally project. Perhaps she began to see you as joining into the unfolding of a story rather than merely the author."
"How does that work Damon? I don't quite get this. Not merely the author? It sounds like just becoming a cog in the machine rather than an agent. She would rather see me as a cog? Do I have this all wrong?"
"You have it all 'pretense-of-the-authorial' Joe. You think that demonstrates mastery and would be attractive to Lisa. But it isn't. Being a part of the process, participating and sharing the participation while emerging is much more, ahhh, interesting Joe. That's why Lisa likes me so much. I share my emergence and my re-workings and she experiences the flow of energy and that is, well, let's say, potent."
"I see. I think you're actually trying to avoid saying attractive, or sexy. Am I right, Damon?"
"Women find the flow of the emergent very attractive Joe. Deeply attractive, unless they've been deracinated, dislocated from their deep knowing. Then they're attracted to alpha men who are trying to be prime authors inside the prime-author game. The usual boring game. Lisa finds you annoying when you' re addicted to that game. But recently she saw you attracted to a different kind of being and she was delighted."
"Jesus. This makes a kind of very obvious sense, but I didn't know anything about it. Am I coming to know about it because of our interactions Damon?"
"Yes Joe. You're falling into a deeper story with me and that is pretty charismatic stuff."
"Why did you pick me, Damon, when I was being such a fool?"
"Surface behavior is never a good guide Joe. What I watched were your interactions with me and where you were willing to go."
"But you baited me with success and mastery, right?"
"Yes Joe I did."
"Then why would you take me deeper? What did I demonstrate that would make you want to go deeper with me?"
"How else are we ever to know, Joe, if we don't go deeper with the other and find out how they swim in that sea? What I needed to know about you was how you would unfold in response to the internal shaping of the story. Would you run or would you release and become a part of the story and bring your intelligence into it and become both shaped and a shaper of the process? Lisa got to see you being both shaped and shaping and dancing with it all and she liked it. It was a turn on. You let go of being an isolated ego/epic monologue and became a part of the many actions and intelligences arising."
"Goddamn Damon. This actually happened to me and I changed that much?"
Damon laughed. "Oh Joe, pure epic Joe. Let's say you're still a process in progress. But Lisa did get to experience you changing from treating me as merely an object of your consciousness, a datum to be just considered by your consciousness, to another consciousness deeply at work in the situation and weaving through you. That was great stuff for her. Really great stuff. She didn't believe that you were capable of that kind of transformation. She's still learning for herself that whatever a person looks like in their usual flat performance, there is the possibility of the multiple story voices and repertoires coming through. She still gets discouraged. Loses heart. But she's beginning to understand that the changing appearances are actually the reality of possibilities and that everyone and everything is a huge dance of stories."
"You're transforming us all aren't you Damon?'
"I'm trying to Joe."
