“Let’s get the Vatican to publicly announce his passing. With no Italian government, the Church is what we have left.”
“What a good idea.” Tullio looked at his wife admiringly. Irma had always been at her best in handling scandalous emergencies. It was a pity that a woman of such skill had retired to a quiet life.
“I’ll talk to Father Simeon about it. He’ll know who to contact, behind the scenes.” Irma left.
Tullio brushed sand from the wheelchair’s ascetic leather upholstery, and polished the indicator lights with his sleeve. Since electronics were no longer tender or delicate devices—electronics were the bedrock of the modern world, basically—the wheelchair was not much disturbed by its mishap.
It was Tullio himself who felt tumbled and upset. Why were machines so hard to kill, and people so frail? The Shadow House had been built around the needs of one great man. The structure could grant him a physical privacy, but it couldn’t stop his harsh compulsion to reveal himself.
The Shadow House functioned properly, but it was a Don Quixote windmill. The Chief was, finally, too mad in the head to care if his manias were noticed. What the Chief had liked best about his beach house was simply playing poker with two old friends. Relaxing informally, despite his colossal burdens of wealth and fame, sitting there in improbable poise, like an elephant perched on a card table.
The house cat curled around Tullio’s ankles. Since the cat had never before left the confines of the Shadow House, this alarmed Tullio.
Inside, Father Simeon, Irma, and Monica were sharing tea on a rattan couch, while surrounded by screens.
“People are querying the Shadow House address,” Irma announced. “We’re getting map queries from Washington and Berlin.”
“I guess you can blame me for that, too,” Monica moaned. “My Artificial Intelligence boyfriend is worried about me, since I dropped out of connectivity in here.”
“I counsel against that arrangement,” Father Simeon stated. “Although an AI network is not a man, he can still exploit a vulnerable woman. A machine with no soul can sin. Our Vatican theology-bots are explicit about this.”
“I never thought of my sweet mega-corporation as a pimp and an incubus—but you’re right, Father Simeon. I guess I’ve got a lot to learn.”
“Never fear to be righteous, my child. Mother Church knows how to welcome converts. Our convents and monasteries make this shadowy place look like a little boy’s toy.”
The priest and his new convert managed to escape discreetly. The wheelchair vanished into the orange groves. Moments later, Carlo Pizzi arrived at the Shadow House on his motor scooter.
The short and rather pear-shaped Pizzi was wearing his customary, outsize, head-mounted display goggles, which connected him constantly to his cloudy network. The goggles made Pizzi look as awkward as a grounded aviator, but he enjoyed making entirely sure that other people knew all about his social media capacities.
After some polite chit-chat about the weather (which he deftly recited from a display inside his goggles), Pizzi got straight to the point. “I’m searching for a girl named Monica. Tall, pretty, red hair, American, height one hundred seventy-five centimeters, weight fifty-four kilograms.”
“We haven’t seen her in some time,” Irma offered.
“Monica has vanished from the network. That activity doesn’t fit her emotional profile. I’ve got an interested party that’s concerned about her safety.”
“You mean the German arms manufacturer?” said Irma.
Carlo Pizzi paused awkwardly as he read invisible cues from his goggles.
“In our modern Transparent Society,” Pizzi ventured at last, “the three of us can all do well for ourselves by doing some social good. For instance: if you can re-connect Monica to the network, then my friend can see to it that pleasant things are said about this area to the German trade press. Then you’ll see more German tourists on your nice beach here.”
“You can tell your creepy AI friend to re-calibrate his correlations, because the Shadow House is a private home,” said Tullio. His words were defiant, but Tullio’s voice shook with grief. That was a bad idea when an AI was deftly listening for the emotional cues in human speech patterns.
“So, is Father Simeon dead?” Carlo Pizzi said. “Good heavens! If that famous hermit is dead, that would be huge news in Sardinia.”
“No, Father Simeon is fine,” said Irma. “Please don’t disturb his seclusion. Publicity makes him angry.”
“Then it’s that old politician who has died. The last Prime Minister of Italy,” said Carlo Pizzi, suddenly convinced. “Thanks for cuing up his bio for me! A man who lives for a hundred years sure can get into trouble!”
Tullio and Irma sidled away as Pizzi was distractedly talking to the empty air, but he noticed them and followed them like a dog. “The German system has figured out your boss is dead,” Pizzi confided, “because the big-data correlations add up. Cloud AIs are superior at that sort of stuff. But can I get a physical confirmation on that?”
“What are you talking about?” said Tullio.
“I need the first post-mortem shot of the deceased. There were rumors before now that he had died. Because he had this strange habit of disappearing whenever things got hot for him. So, this could be another trick of his—but if I could see him with my goggles here, and zoom in on his exact proportions and scan his fingerprints and such, then our friend the German system would have a first-mover market advantage.”
“We don’t want to bargain with a big-data correlation system,” said Tullio. “That’s like trying to play chess with a computer. We can’t possibly win, so it’s not really fair.”
“But you’re the one being unfair! Think of the prosperity that big-data market capitalism has brought to the world! A corporation is just the legal and computational platform for its human stockholders, you know. My friend is a ‘corporate person’ with thousands of happy human stockholders. He has a fiduciary obligation to improve their situation. That’s what we’re doing right now.”
“You own stock in this thing yourself?” said Irma.
“Well, sure, of course. Look, I know you think I want to leak this paparazzi photo to the public. But I don’t, because that’s obsolete! Our friend the German AI doesn’t want this scandal revealed, any more than you do. I just pass him some encrypted photo evidence, and he gets ahead of the market game. Then I can take the rest of this year off and finish my new novel!”
There was a ponderous silence. “His novels are pretty good beach reading,” Irma offered at last. “If you like roman-à-clef tell-all books.”
“Look here, Signor Pizzi,” said Tullio, “the wife and I are not against modern capitalism and big-data pattern recognition. But we can’t just let you barge in here and disturb the peace of our dead patron. He was always good to us—in his way.”
“Somebody has to find out he’s dead. That’s the way of the world,” Pizzi coaxed. “Isn’t it better that it’s just a big-data machine who knows? The guy has four surviving ex-wives, and every one of them is a hellion.”
“That’s all because of him,” said Irma. “All those First Ladies were very nice ladies once.”
Pizzi read data at length from the inside of his goggles; one could tell because his body language froze while his lips moved slightly. “Speaking of patronage,” he said, “your son has a nice job in Milan that was arranged by your late boss in there.”
“Luigi doesn’t know about that,” said Irma. “He thinks he got that job on merit.”
“How would it be if Luigi suddenly got that big promotion he’s been waiting for? Our AI friend can guarantee that. Your son deserves a boost. He works hard.”