What If AI Never Happened

The clearance is not a badge. It is a way of living. In our world, intelligence agencies are the largest users of the polygraph; about seventy thousand federal applicants are tested each year, one agency announced in 2008 that it would test every one of its five thousand seven hundred employees at least once a year, and cleared staff are reinvestigated on a cycle. In Irene's world the cycle is annual, the questions are fixed, and the last one is always the same: has anyone asked you what you do.

This is the week that question stopped being routine.

On the Monday, Irene was halfway up a ladder at her mother's fourplex, changing a wet cooler pad, when her mother leaned out of the bathroom window and asked whether there was a machine in the desert that knew what was eating her hands.

Bettina is sixty eight. Her hands have been closing up for two years. The infusion clinic slows it and does not stop it, and a woman at the clinic had told her that out past the range there is a machine that has read every medical paper ever written.

Irene gave her mother the part that is in the newspapers: that there had never been a public one, that the company had been folded into a defence group before it opened a door, that the Board handles the hardware the way it handles centrifuge parts. She did not say it was a rumour, because it is not, and her mother noticed the gap. Bettina said she was not asking anyone to steal anything. A person can stand not being given a thing. What a person cannot stand is not knowing whether the thing is there.

Then her mother asked whether Tomas knew what Irene did, and Irene said that Tomas knew she left at six and came home at seven and had never once in ten years asked her a question she could not answer. Her mother said that a man like that is either not curious or already knows.

Irene changed the pads and drove home to Albuquerque.

Tomas Castellano teaches marching band at a high school. He owns a whistle. Their daughter Wren is nine and asks for the engagement story twice a month, and he tells it the same way every time: that Irene came back from three days of interviews she would not describe, sat in his band room at nine at night, told him she had signed something, and that he asked her about it three weeks later, because some things take three weeks.

That Monday night Wren also asked about Guadalajara. Her friend's family goes at Christmas, and nobody in that family has to file a travel request. Irene's request had come back refused, unsigned, with no reason given, the way they always come back. Tomas said he had told her not to file in August, because August is when they clear out the ones they had already decided on. Irene had never heard that. She wrote it down later, in her head, in the place where she keeps things she has never heard.

That night the machine on the nightstand made its rain sound, the way it has every night for years, and Tomas asked her, for the third time that year, where she had first heard rain that was not rain. She told him she could not say. He said he knew.

On the Thursday she saw the decompression therapist the Board provides in Rio Rancho, fifty minutes a fortnight, the one room in her life that is supposed to be off the record. She told the therapist about the ladder and the hands. The therapist asked what Irene had told her mother, and Irene said the newspaper part. The therapist asked about the other part, and Irene said it in plain English, as she is permitted to in that room: eleven of them, cleared, the answers read out to people who cannot hear the machine, her mother's hands not being a cleared question because there is no form in the world with her name on it.

Then the therapist said, in the flat voice of someone reading a line, that in eleven months Irene had said she was frightened nine or ten times and had never once named who was in the room. And then she asked whether anyone had asked Irene what she does.

It is the polygraph's question. Word for word. Irene said so. The therapist did not deny it. She said she was the fifty minutes in which Irene was permitted to say she was frightened, and that she had never claimed to be the fifty minutes in which nobody was collecting.

On the Friday, at the north turnstile, which moves four people a minute in January because cold hands fail the palm reader, a colleague named Devrani Paul mentioned that her brother in law had moved into the casita in October. Devrani has been on the medical compartment two years longer than Irene. She said it was not generosity, it was the arrangement: the Board wanted a resident, and she would rather it was somebody whose cooking she could eat. Then she asked who Irene's was.

Irene said she did not have one. Devrani said everyone at their level has one. Irene said Tomas had never been read into anything in his life. Devrani waited for her on the far side of the turnstile, which she had not done in three years, and said, quietly, that nobody's is nobody.

Irene drove home the long way, past her mother's building, and did not stop.

In the kitchen, with the tap running, she asked Tomas to say the date of his polygraph. He reached past her and turned the tap off himself, and then he said it: the second Thursday of February, every year, in Los Lunas, not the south lot, because household reporters are not tested at the same site as the people they report on.

He said the rest plainly, because there was no longer any point in the other way. He files a monthly report on her. Contacts, travel, spending, mood. Whether she is drinking more this quarter than last. Whether her mother's illness is costing more than they can carry. He has done it for ten years. They cleared him on a Thursday, and he asked her about her interviews on the Friday, and he did not pretend now that the order had been the other way round.

He had not been placed on her. That would have been easier to hear. He had been told that there would be a resident reporter in the household and that the only open question was who, and he had asked whether it could be him, so that it would not be a stranger eating dinner with her and learning which nights she cries. The man across the table had been surprised enough to write it down.

Everything he had ever filed was true. He had never invented so much as a mood. He said that was not a defence, because it is the accurate reports that get used. He had filed that Wren has a pen friend in Szeged, that she is nine, that she asks about Guadalajara.

If Irene reported this, it would go on a form with his name on it and someone would drive out from Los Lunas, and they would not be surprised, because they had put him there. Wren would have a new one in the house inside a year, and neither of them would be told which one he was. He asked her to sit with that before she signed anything.

There had never been a night he was not working. There had also never been a night he was only working. She could have both of those or neither. She could not have one.

And who could she tell. Nobody. Her mother is not cleared. Devrani is a disclosure. The woman in Rio Rancho files on the fifteenth. The only person on this earth Irene could say it to was Tomas, and he already knew. The only person on this earth who could end him was Irene, and he had handed her that on the Friday, ten years ago, and slept beside it every night since.

The one room she had kept outside the fence had never been outside it.

She sat in the car in her own driveway with the engine off until her hands were cold enough that the reader would have failed them.

Later, in the dark, she asked him where he had first heard the rain. He was quiet for so long she thought he had gone under. Then he said it was in a room with no windows, while a man explained to him what the job was, and that he had stopped at a store on the way home and bought one that afternoon. Four years before she ever brought one into the house.