The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Elephant on Table ^{BRUCE STERLING}

Tullio and Irma had found peace in the Shadow House. Then the Chief arrived from his clinic and hid in the panic-room.

Tullio and Irma heard shuddering moans from the HVAC system, the steely squeak of the hydraulic wheels, but not a human whisper. The Shadow House cat whined and yowled at the vault door.

Three tense days passed, and the Chief tottered from his airtight chamber into summer daylight. Head bobbing, knees shaking, he reeled like an antique Sicilian puppet.

Blank-eyed yet stoic, the elderly statesman wobbled up the perforated stairs to the Shadow House veranda. This expanse was adroitly sheltered from a too-knowing world.

The panic rooms below ground were sheathed in Faraday copper, cast-iron, and lead, but the mansion’s airy upper parts were a nested, multilayer labyrinth of sound baffles, absorbent membranes, metastructured foam, malleable ribbons, carbon filaments, vapor smoke, and mirror chaff. Snakelike vines wreathed the trellises. The gardens abounded in spiky cactus. Tullio took pains to maintain the establishment as it deserved.

The Chief staggered into a rattan throne. He set his hairy hands flat on the cold marble tabletop.

He roared for food.

Tullio and Irma hastened to comply. The Chief promptly devoured three hard-boiled eggs, a jar of pickled artichoke hearts, a sugar-soaked grapefruit, and a jumbo-sized mango, skin and all.

Some human color returned to his famous, surgically amended face. The Chief still looked bad, like a reckless, drug-addict roué of fifty. However, the Chief was actually one hundred and four years old. The Chief had paid millions for the zealous medical care of his elite Swiss clinic. He’d even paid hundreds of thousands for the veterinary care of his house cat.

While Irma tidied the sloppy ruins of breakfast, Tullio queried Shadow House screens for any threats in the vicinity.

The Chief had many enemies: thousands of them. His four ex-wives were by far his worst foes. He was also much resented by various Italian nationalists, fringe leftist groups, volatile feminist cults, and a large sprinkling of mentally disturbed stalkers who had fixated on him for decades.

However, few of these fierce, gritty, unhappy people were on the island of Sardinia in August 2073. None of them knew that the Chief had secretly arrived on Sardinia from Switzerland. The Shadow House algorithms ranked their worst threat as the local gossip journalist “Carlo Pizzi,” a notorious little busybody who was harassing supermodels.

Reassured by this security-check, Tullio carried the card-table out to the beach. Using a clanking capstan and crank, Tullio erected a big, party-colored sun umbrella. In its slanting shade he arranged four plastic chairs, a stack of plastic cups, plastic crypto-coins, shrink-wrapped card decks, paper pads, and stubby pencils. Every object was anonymous and disposable: devoid of trademarks, codes, or identities. No surface took fingerprints.

The Chief arrived to play, wearing wrap-around mirrorshades and a brown, hooded beach-robe. It was a Mediterranean August, hot, blue, and breezy. The murmuring surf was chased by a skittering horde of little shore-birds.

Irma poured the Chief a tall iced glass of his favorite vitamin sludge while Tullio shuffled and dealt.

The Chief disrobed and smeared his seamy, portly carcass with medicated suntan unguent. He gripped his waterproofed plastic cards.

“Anaconda,” he commanded, and belched.

The empty fourth chair at their card table was meant to attract the public. The Chief was safe from surveillance inside his sumptuous Shadow House—that was the purpose of the house, its design motif, its reason for being. However, safety had never satisfied the Chief. He was an Italian politician, so it was his nature to flirt with disaster.

Whenever left to themselves, Tullio and Irma passed their pleasant days inside the Shadow House, discreet, unseen, unbothered, and unbothering. But the two of them were still their Chief’s loyal retainers. The Chief was a man of scandal and turbulence—half-forgotten, half-ignored by a happier era. But the Chief still had his burning need to control the gaze of the little people.

The Chief’s raw hunger for glory, which had often shaken the roots of Europe, had never granted him a moment’s peace. During his long, rampaging life, he’d possessed wealth, fame, power, and the love of small armies of women. Serenity, though, still eluded him. Privacy was his obsession: fame was his compulsion.

Tullio played his cards badly, for it seemed to him that a violent host of invisible furies still circled the Chief’s troubled, sweating head. The notorious secrecy. The covert scandals. The blatant vulgarity, which was also a subtle opacity—for the Chief was an outsized statesman, a heroic figure of many perverse contradictions. His achievements and his crimes were like a herd of elephants: they could never stand still within a silent room.

Irma offered Tullio a glance over their dwindling poker hands. They both pitied their Chief, because they understood him. Tullio had once been an Italian political party operative, and Irma, a deft Italian tax-avoidance expert. Nowadays they were reduced to the status of the house-repairman and the hostess, the butler and the cook. There was no more Italy. The Chief had outlived his nation.

Becoming ex-Italian meant a calmer life for Tullio and Irma, because the world was gentler without an Italy. It was their duty to keep this lonely, ill-starred old man out of any more trouble. The Chief would never behave decently—that was simply not in his character—but their discreet beach mansion could hush up his remaining excesses.

The first wandering stranger approached their open table. This fringe figure was one tiny fragment of the world’s public, a remote demographic outlier, a man among the lowest of the low. He was poor, black, and a beach peddler. Many such emigres haunted the edges of the huge Mediterranean summer beach crowds. These near-vagrants sold various forms of pretty rubbish.

The Chief was delighted to welcome this anonymous personage. He politely relieved the peddler of his miserable tray of fried fish, candy bars, and kid’s plastic pinwheels, and insisted on seating him at the green poker table.

“Hey, I can’t stay here, boss,” complained the peddler, in bad Italian. “I have to work.”

“We’ll look after you,” the Chief coaxed, surveilling the peddler, from head to foot, with covert glee. “My friend Tullio here will buy your fish. Tullio has a hungry cat over there, isn’t that right, Tullio?”

The Chief waved his thick arm at the Shadow House, but the peddler simply couldn’t see the place. The mansion’s structure was visually broken up by active dazzle lines. Its silhouette faded like a cryptic mist into the island’s calm palette of palms and citruses.

Tullio obediently played along. “Oh yes, that’s true, we do have a big tomcat, he’s always hungry.” He offered the peddler some plastic coinage from the poker table.

Irma gathered up the reeking roasted sardines. When Irma rounded a corner of the Shadow House, she vanished as if swallowed.

“It has been my experience,” the Chief said sagely, scooping up and squaring the poker cards, “that the migrants of the world—men like yourself—are risk-takers. So, my friend: how’d you like to double your money in a quick hand of Hi-Lo with us?”

“I’m not a player, boss,” said the peddler, though he was clearly tempted.

“So, saving up your capital, is that it? Do you want to live here in Italy—is that your plan?”

The peddler shrugged. “There is no Italy! In Europe, the people love elephants. So, I came here with the elephants. The people don’t see me. The machines don’t care.”

Irma reappeared as if by magic. Seeing the tense look on their faces, she said brightly, “So, do you tend those elephants, young man? People in town say they brought whales this year, too!”

“Oh no, no, signora!” cried the peddler. “See the elephants, but never look at the whales! You have to ride a boat out there, you get seasick, that’s no good!”

“Tell us more about these elephants, they interest me,” the Chief urged, scratching his oiled belly, “have a prosecco, have a brandy.” But the peddler was too street-wise: he had sensed that something was up. He gathered his tray and escaped them, hastening down the beach, toward the day’s gathering crowds.

Tullio, Irma, and the Chief ran through more hands of Anaconda poker. The Chief, an expert player, was too restless to lose, so he was absentmindedly piling up all their coinage.

“My God, if only I, too, had no name!” he burst out. “No identity, like that African boy—what I could do in this world now! Elephants, here in Sardinia! When I was young, did I have any elephants? Not one! I had less than nothing, I suffered from huge debts! These days are such happy times, and the young people now, they just have no idea!”

Tullio and Irma knew every aspect of their Chief’s hard-luck origin story, so they merely pretended attention.

The summer beach crowd was clustering down the coastline, a joyful human mass of tanned and salty arms and legs, ornamented with balloons and scraps of pop music.

A beach-combing group of Japanese tourists swanned by. Although they wore little, the Japanese were fantastically well-dressed. The Japanese had found their metier as the world’s most elegant people. Even the jealous Milanese were content to admire their style.

Lacking any new victim to interrogate at his card table, the Chief began to reminisce. The Chief would loudly bluster about any topic, except for his true sorrows, which he never confessed aloud.

The Swiss had lavished many dark attentions on the Chief’s crumbling brain. The Swiss had invaded his bony skull, that last refuge of humane privacy, like a horde of Swiss pikemen invading Renaissance Italy. They occupied it, but they couldn’t govern it.

The Chief’s upgraded brain, so closely surveilled by Swiss medical imaging, could no longer fully conceal his private chains of thought. The Chief had once been a political genius, but now his scorched neurons were like some huge database racked by a spy agency’s analytics.

Deftly shuffling a fresh card-deck, the Chief suddenly lost his composure. He commenced to leak and babble. His unsought theme was “elephants.” Any memory, any anecdote that struck his mind, about elephants.

Hannibal had invaded Italy with elephants. The elephant had once been the symbol of an American political party. A houseplant named the “Elephant Ear.” The Chief recalled a pretty Swedish pop-star with the unlikely name of “Elliphant.”

The Chief was still afraid of the surgically warped and sickening “Elephant Man,” a dark horror-movie figure from his remote childhood.

The Chief might not look terribly old—not to a surveillance camera—but he was senile. Those high-tech quacks in Switzerland took more and more of his wealth, but delivered less and less health. Life-extension technology was a rich man’s gamble. The odds were always with the house.

Irma gently removed the cards from the Chief’s erratic hands, and dealt them herself. The sea-wind rose and loudly ruffled the beach umbrella. Wind-surfers passed by, out to sea, with kites that might be aerial surveillance platforms. A group of black-clad divers on a big rubber boat looked scary, like spies, assassins, or secret policemen.

The ever-swelling beach crowd, that gathering, multi-limbed tide of relaxed and playful humanity, inspired a spiritual unease in Tullio. His years inside the Shadow House had made Tullio a retiring, modest man. He had never much enjoyed public oversight. Wherever there were people, there was also hardware and software. There was scanning and recording. Ubiquity and transparency.

That was progress, and the world was better for progress, but it was also a different world, and that hurt.

Some happy beach-going children arrived and improved the mood at the poker table. As a political leader, the Chief had always been an excellent performer around kids. He clowned with all his old practiced stage-craft, and the surprised little gang of five kids giggled like fifty.

But with the instinctive wisdom of the innocent, the kids didn’t care to spend much time with a strange, fat, extremely old man wearing sunglasses and a too-tight swimsuit.

The card-play transitioned from Anaconda poker to seven-card stud. Tullio and Irma shared a reassuring glance. Lunch was approaching, and lunch would take two hours. After his lunch, the Chief would nap. After the summer siesta, he would put on his rubber cap, foot-fins and water-wings, and swim. With his ritual exercise performed, dinner would be looming. After the ritual of dinner, with its many small and varied pleasures, the day would close quietly.

Tullio and Irma had their two weeks of duty every August, and then the demands of the Chief’s wealth and health would call him elsewhere. Then Tullio and Irma could return to their customary peace and quiet. Just them and their eccentric house cat, in their fortress consecrated to solitude.

The Shadow House robot, a nameless flat plastic pancake, emerged from its hidden runway. The diligent machine fluffed the sand, trimmed the beach-herbage, and picked up and munched some driftwood bits of garbage electronics.

A beautiful woman arrived on the shore. Her extravagant curves were strapped into bright, clumsy American swimwear. Despite the gusting sea breeze, her salon updo was perfect.

The Chief noticed this beauty instantly. It was as if someone had ordered him a box of hot American donuts.

Tullio and Irma watched warily as the demimondaine strolled by. She tramped the wet edge of the foamy surf like a lingerie runway model. She clearly knew where the Shadow House was sited. She had deliberately wandered within range of its sensors.

The Chief threw on his beach robe and hurried over to chat her up.

The Chief returned with the air of synthetic triumph that he assumed around his synthetic girlfriends. “This is Monica,” he announced in English. “Monica wants to play with us.”

“What a pretty name,” said Irma in English, her eyes narrowing. “Such a glamorous lady as you, such beauty is hard to miss.”

“Oh, I visit Sardinia every August,” Monica lied sweetly. “But Herr Hentschel has gone back to Berlin. So it’s been a bit lonely.”

“Everyone knows your Herr Hentschel?” Irma probed.

Monica named a prominent European armaments firm with long-standing American national security ties.

The matter was simple. The Chief had been too visible, out on the beach, all morning. This was long enough for interested parties to notice him with scanners, scare up smart algorithms, and dispatch a working agent.

“Maybe, we go inside the Shadow House now,” Tullio suggested in English. “For lunch.”

Monica agreed to join them. Tullio shut the rattling umbrella and stacked all the plastic chairs.

The microwave sensors of the Shadow House had a deep electromagnetic look at Monica, and objected loudly.

“A surveillance device,” said Tullio.

Monica shrugged her bare, tanned shoulders. She wore nothing but her gaudy floral bikini and her flat zori sandals.

Tullio spread his hands. “Lady, most times, no one knows, no one cares—but this is Shadow House.”

Monica plucked off her bikini top and shook it. Her swimwear unfolded with uncanny ease and became a writhing square of algorithmic fabric.

“So pretty,” Irma remarked. She carried off the writhing interface to stuff it in a copper-lined box.

The Chief stared at Monica’s bared torso as if she’d revealed two rocketships.

Tullio gave Monica a house robe. Women like Monica were common guests for the Shadow House. Sometimes, commonly, one girl. Sometimes five girls, sometimes ten, or, when the Chief’s need was truly unbearable, a popular mass of forty-five or fifty girls, girls of any class, color, creed, or condition, girls from anywhere, anything female and human.

On those taut, packed, manic occasions, the Chief threw colossal, fully catered parties, with blasting music and wild dancing and fitful orgies in private VIP nooks. The Shadow House would be ablaze in glimmering witch-lights, except for the pitch-black, bomb-proofed niche where the Chief retreated to spy on his guests.

Those events were legendary beach parties, for the less young people saw of the Chief, the happier everybody was.

Lunch was modest, by the Chief’s standards: fried zucchini, calamari with marinara sauce, flatbread drenched in molten cheese and olive-spread, tender meatballs of mutton, clams, scampi, and a finisher of mixed and salted nuts, which were good for the nervous system. The Chief fed choice table-scraps to the tomcat.

Monica spoke, with an unfeigned good cheer, about her vocation, which was leading less fortunate children in hikes on the dikes of Miami.

When lunch ended, the Chief and the demimondaine retired together for a “nap.”

After the necessary medical checks for any intimate encounter, the Chief’s efforts in this line generally took him ten minutes. Once his covert romp was over, he would return to daylight with a lighter heart. Generally, he would turn his attention to some favorite topic in public policy, such as hotel construction or the proper maintenance of world-heritage sites.

His charisma would revive, then, for the Chief was truly wise about some things. Whenever he was pleased and appeased, one could see why he’d once led a nation, and how his dynamism and his optimistic gusto had encouraged people.

Italian men had voted for the Chief, because they had imagined that they would live like him, if they too were rich, and bold, and famous, and swashbuckling. Some Italian women also voted for the Chief because, with a man like him in power, at least you understood what you were getting.

But the Chief did not emerge into daylight. After two hours of gathering silence, the house cat yowled in a mystical animal anguish. The cat had no technical understanding about the Shadow House. Being a cat, he had not one scrap of an inkling about Faraday cages or nanocarbon camouflage. However, being a house cat, he knew how to exist in a house. He knew life as a cat knew life, and he knew death, too.

After an anxious struggle, Tullio found the software override, and opened the locked bedroom door. The cat quickly bounded inside, between Tullio’s ankles.

The Chief was supine in bed, with a tender smile and an emptied, infinite stare. The pupils of his eyes were two pinpoints.

Tullio lifted the Chief’s beefy, naked arm, felt its fluttering pulse, and released it to flop limp on the mattress.

“We push the Big Red Button,” Tullio announced to Irma.

“Oh, Tullio, we said we never would do that! What a mess!”

“This is an emergency. We must push the Big Red Button. We owe it to him. It’s our duty to push the button.”

“But the whole world will find out everything! All his enemies! And his friends are even worse!”

A voice came from under the bed. “Please don’t push any button.”

Tullio bent and gazed under the bedframe. “So, now you understand Italian, miss?”

“A little.” Monica stuck her tousled head from under the rumpled satin bed-coverlet. Her frightened face was streaked with tears.

“What did you do to our Chief?”

“Nothing! Well, just normal stuff. He was having a pretty good time of it, for such an old guy. So, I kind of turned it up, and I got busy. Next thing I knew, he was all limp!”

“Men,” Irma sympathized.

“Can I have some clothes?” said Monica. “If you push that button, cops will show up for sure. I don’t want to be in a station-house naked.”

Irma hastened to a nearby wardrobe. “Inside, you girls do as you please, but no girl leaves my Shadow House naked!”

Tullio rubbed his chin. “So, you’ve been to the station-house before, Monica?”

“The oldest profession is a hard life.” Monica crept out from under the Chief’s huge bed, and slipped into the yellow satin house robe that Irma offered. She belted it firmly. “I can’t believe I walked right in here in my second-best bikini. I just knew something bad would happen in this weird house.”

Tullio recited: “Shadow House is the state-of-the-art in confidential living and reputation management.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ve done guys in worse dives,” Monica agreed, “but a million bomb-shelters couldn’t hush up that guy’s reputation. Every working-girl knows about him. He’s been buying our services for eighty years.”

Stabbed by this remark, Tullio gazed on the stricken Chief.

The old man’s body was breathing, and its heart was beating, because the Swiss had done much expensive work on the Chief’s lungs and heart. But Tullio knew, with a henchman’s instinctive certainty, that the Chief was, more or less, dead. The old rascal had simply blown his old brains out in a final erotic gallop. It was a massive, awful, fatal scandal. A tragedy.

When Tullio looked up, the two women were gone. Outside the catastrophic bedroom, Monica was wiping her tear-smudged mascara and confessing her all to Irma.

“So, I guess,” Monica said, “maybe, I kinda showed up at the end of his chain here. But for a little Miami girl, like me, to join such a great European tradition—well, it seemed like such an honor!”

Tullio and Irma exchanged glances. “I wish more of these girls had such a positive attitude,” said Irma.

Monica, sensing them weakening, looked eager. “Just let me take a hot shower. Okay? If I’m clean, no cop can prove anything! We played cards, that’s all. He told me bed-time stories.”

“Is there a money trail?” said Irma, who had worked in taxes.

“Oh, no, never! Cash for sex is so old-fashioned.” Monica absently picked up the yammering tom-cat by the scruff of the neck. She gathered the beast in her sleek arms and massaged him. The surprised cat accepted this treatment, and even seemed grateful.

“See, I have a personal relationship with a big German arms firm,” Monica explained, as the cat purred like a small engine. “My sugar-daddy is a big defense corporation. It’s an Artificial Intelligence, because it tracks me. It knows all my personal habits, and it takes real good care of me… So, sometimes I do a favor—I mean, just a small personal favor for my big AI boyfriend, the big corporation. Then the stockholders’ return on investment feels much better.”

Baffled by this English-language business jargon, Tullio scratched his head.

Monica lifted her chin. “That’s how the vice racket beats a transparent surveillance society. Spies are the world’s second oldest profession. Us working girls are still the first.”

“We must take a chance,” Tullio decided. “You, girl, quick, get clean. Irma, help her. Leave Shadow House, and forget you ever saw us.”

“Oh, thank you, sir, thank you! I’ll be grateful the rest of my life, if I live to be a hundred and fifty!” cried Monica. She tossed the purring tomcat to the floor.

Irma hustled her away. The Shadow House had decontamination showers. Its sewers had membraneous firewalls. The cover-up had a good chance to work. The house had been built for just such reasons.

Tullio removed the tell-tale bedsheets. He did what he could to put the comatose Chief into better order. Tullio had put the Chief to bed, dead drunk, on more than one occasion. This experience was like those comic old times, except not funny, because the Chief was not drunk: just dead.

The lights of Shadow House were strobing. An intruder had arrived.

The hermit priest had rolled to the House perimeter within his smart mobile wheelchair. Father Simeon was a particularly old man—even older than the Chief. Father Simeon was the Chief’s long-time spiritual guide and personal confessor.

“Did you push that Big Red Button?” said the super-centenarian cleric.

“No, Monsignor!”

“Good. I have arrived now, have I not? Where is my poor boy? Take me to him.”

“The Chief is sick, Monsignor.” Tullio suddenly burst into tears. “He had a fit. He collapsed, he’s not conscious. What can we do?”

“The status of death is not a matter for a layman to decide,” said the priest.

The Shadow House did not allow the cleric’s wheelchair to enter its premises. The Vatican wheelchair was a rolling mass of embedded electronics. The Shadow House rejected this Catholic computational platform as if it were a car-bomb.

Father Simeon—once a prominent Vatican figure—had retired to the island to end his days in a hermetic solitude. Paradoxically, his pursuit of holy seclusion made Father Simeon colossally popular. Since he didn’t want to meet or talk to anybody, the whole world adored him. Archbishops and cardinals constantly pestered the hermit for counsel, and his wizened face featured on countless tourist coffee cups.

“I must rise and walk,” said Father Simeon. “The soul of a sufferer needs me. Give me your arm, my son!”

Tullio placed his arm around the aged theologian, who clutched a heavy Bible and a precious vial of holy oil. Under his long, black, scarlet-buttoned cassock, the ancient hermit was a living skeleton. His bony legs rattled as his sandaled, blue-veined feet grazed the floor.

Tullio tripped over the house cat as they entered the Chief’s bedroom. They reeled together and almost fell headlong onto the stricken Chief, but the devoted priest gave no thought to his own safety. Father Simeon checked the Chief’s eyelids with his thumbs, then muttered a Latin prayer.

“I’m so glad for your help, Father,” said Tullio. “How did you know that we needed you here?”

The old man shot him a dark look from under his spiky gray brows. “My son,” he said, lifting his hand, “do you imagine that your mere technology—all these filters and window shades—can blind the divine awareness of the Living God? The Lord knows every sparrow that falls! God knows every hair of every human head! The good God has no need for any corporate AI’s or cheap Singularities!”

Tullio considered this. “Well, can I do anything to help? Shall I call a doctor?”

“What use are the doctors now, after their wretched excesses? Pray for him!” said the priest. “His body persists while his soul is in Limbo. The Church rules supreme in bio-ethics. We will defend our faithful from these secular intrusions. If this had happened to him in Switzerland, they would have plugged him into the wall like a cash-machine!”

Tullio shuddered in pain.

“Be not afraid!” Father Simeon commanded. “This world has its wickedness—but if the saints and angels stand with us, what machine can stand against us?” Father Simeon carefully gloved his bony hands. He uncapped his reeking vial of holy oil.

“I’m so sorry about all this, Monsignor. It’s so embarrassing that we failed in this way. We always tried to protect him, here in the Shadow House.”

The priest deftly rubbed the eyes, ears, and temples of the stricken Chief with the sacramental ointment. “All men are sinners. Go to confession, my boy. God is all-seeing, and yet He is forgiving; whenever we open our heart to God, He always sees and understands.”

Irma beckoned at Tullio from the doorway. Tullio excused himself and met her outside.

The emergency had provoked Irma’s best cleverness. She had quickly dressed Monica in some fine clothes, left behind in Shadow House by the Chief’s estranged daughter. These abandoned garments were out of style, of course, but they were of classic cut and fine fabric. The prostitute looked just like an Italian Parliamentarian.

“I told you to run away,” said Tullio.

“Oh sure, I wanted to run,” Monica agreed, “but if I ran from the scene of a crime, then some algorithm might spot my guilty behavior. But now look at me! I look political, instead of like some low-life. So I can be ten times as guilty, and nothing will happen to me.”

Tullio looked at Irma, who shrugged, because of course it was true.

“Let the priest finish his holy business,” Irma counseled. “Extreme Unction is a sacrament. We can’t push the Big Red Button during this holy moment.”

“Are you guys Catholics?” said Monica. At their surprised looks, she raised both her hands. “Hey, I’m from Miami, we got lots!”

“Are you a believer?” said Irma.

“Well, I tried to believe,” said Monica, blinking. “I read some of the Bible in a hotel room once. That book’s pretty crazy. Full of begats.”

A horrid shriek came from the Chief’s bedroom.

The Chief was bolt upright in bed, while moans and whispers burst in anguish from his writhing lips. The anointment with sacred oil had aroused one last burst of his mortal vitality. His heart was pounding so powerfully that it was audible across the room.

This spectral deathbed fit dismayed Father Simeon not at all. With care, he performed his ministry.

A death-rattle eclipsed the Chief’s last words. His head plummeted into a pillow. He was as dead as a stone, although his heart continued to beat for over a minute.

The priest removed the rosary from around his shrunken neck and folded it into the Chief’s hairy hands.

“He expressed his contrition,” the priest announced. “At his mortal end, he was lucid and transparent. God knows all, sees all, and forgives all. So do not be frightened. He has not left us. He has simply gone home.”

“Wow,” Monica said in the sudden silence. “That was awesome. Who is this old guy?”

“This is our world-famous hermit, Father Simeon,” said Tullio.

“Our friend Father Simeon was the President for the Pontifical Council for Social Communications,” Irma said proudly. “He also wrote the canon law for the Evangelization of Artificial Intelligences.”

“That sounds pretty cool,” said Monica. “Listen, Padre, Holy Father, whatever…”

“‘Holy Father’ is a title reserved for our Pope,” Father Simeon told her, in crisp Oxford English. “My machines call me ‘Excellency’—but since you are human, please call me ‘Father.’”

“Okay, ‘Father,’ sure. You forgave him, right? He’s dead—but he’s going to heaven, because he has no guilty secrets. That’s how it works, right?”

“He confessed. He died in the arms of the Church.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s great—but how about me? Can I get forgiven, too? Because I’m a bad girl! I didn’t want him to die! That was terrible! I’m really sorry.”

Father Simeon was old and had been through a trial at the deathbed, but his faith sustained him. “Do not despair, my child. Yes, you may be weak and a sinner. Take courage: the power of the Church is great. You can break the chains of unrighteousness. Have faith that you can turn away from sin.”

“But how, Father? I’ve got police records on three continents, and about a thousand Johns have rated my services on hooker e-commerce sites.”

Father Simeon winced at this bleak admission, but truth didn’t daunt him. “My child, those data records are only software and hardware. You have a human soul, you possess free will. The Magdalen was a fallen woman whose conscience was awakened. She was a chosen companion of Christ. So do not bow your head to this pagan system of surveillance that confines you to a category, and seeks to entrap you there!”

Monica burst into tears. “What must I do to be saved from surveillance?”

“Take the catechism! Learn the meaning of life! We are placed on Earth to know, to love, and to serve our God! We are not here to cater to the whims of German arms corporations that build spy towers in the Mediterranean!”

Monica blinked. “Hey, wait a minute, Father—how do you know all that—about my German arms corporation and all those towers in the sea?”

“God is not mocked! There are some big data-systems in this world that are little more than corrupt incubi, and there are other, better-programmed, sanctified data systems that are like protective saints and angels.”

Monica looked to Tullio and Irma. “Is he kidding?”

Tullio and Irma silently shook their heads.

“Wow,” breathed Monica. “I would really, truly love to have an AI guardian angel.”

The lights began to strobe overhead.

“Something is happening outside,” said Tullio hastily. “When I come back, we’ll all press the Big Red Button together.”

Behind the Shadow House, a group of bored teenagers had discovered Father Simeon’s abandoned wheelchair. They had captured the vehicle and were giving one another joyrides.

Overwhelmed by the day’s events, Tullio chased them off the Shadow House property, shouting in rage. The teens were foreign tourists, and knew not one word of Italian, so they fled his angry scolding in a panic, and ran off headlong to scramble up into the howdah of a waiting elephant.

“Teenage kids should never have elephants!” Tullio complained, wheeling the recaptured wheelchair back to Irma. “Elephants are huge beasts! Look at this mess.”

“Elephants are better than cars,” said Irma. “You can’t even kiss a boy in a car, because the cars are tracked and they record everything. That’s what the girls say in town.”

“Delinquents. Hooligans! With elephants! What kind of world is this, outside our house?”

“Kissing boys has always been trouble.” Irma closely examined the wheelchair, which had been tumbled, scratched, and splattered with sandy dirt. “Oh dear, we can’t possibly give it back to Father Simeon in this condition.”

“I’ll touch it up,” Tullio promised.

“Should I push the Big Red Button now?”

“Not yet,” Tullio said. “A time like this needs dignity. We should get the Chief’s lawyer to fly in from Milan. If we have the Church and the Law on our side, then we can still protect him, Irma, even after death. No one will know what happened here. There’s still client-lawyer confidentiality. There’s still the sacred silence of the confessional. And this house is radar-proof.”

“I’m sure the Chief would want to be buried in Rome. The city where he saw his best days.”

“Of course you’re right,” said Tullio. “There will be riots at his funeral… but our Chief will finally find peace in Rome. Nobody will care about his private secrets any more. There are historical records, but the machines never bother to look at them. History is one of the Humanities.”

“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.”

Irma gave Tullio a hopeful, beseeching glance.

“My God, no wonder national governments broke down,” said Tullio, scowling. “With these sly big-data engines running the world, political backroom deals don’t stand a chance! Our poor old dead boss, he really is a relic of the past now. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“Can’t we just go inside?” urged the paparazzo. “It won’t take five minutes.”

It took longer, because the Shadow House would not allow the gossip’s head-mounted device inside the premises. They had to unscrew the goggles from his head—Pizzi, with his merely human eyes exposed to fresh air, looked utterly bewildered—and they smuggled the device to the deathbed inside a Faraday bag.

Carlo Pizzi swept the camera’s gaze over the dead man from head to foot, as if sprinkling the corpse with holy water. They then hurried out of the radio-silence, so that Carlo Pizzi could upload his captured images to the waiting AI.

“Our friend the German machine has another proposal for you now,” said Carlo Pizzi. “There’s nothing much in it for me, but I’d be happy to tell you about it, just to be neighborly.”

“What is the proposal?” said Irma.

“Well, this Shadow House poses a problem.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s an opaque structure in a transparent world. Human beings shouldn’t be concealing themselves from ubiquitous machine awareness. That’s pessimistic and backward-looking. This failure to turn a clean face to the future does harm to our society.”

“Go on.”

“Also, the dead man stored some secrets in here. Something to do with his previous political dealings, as Italian head of state, with German arms suppliers.”

“Maybe he stored secrets, and maybe he didn’t,” said Tullio stoutly. “It’s none of your business.”

“It would be good news for business if the house burned down,” said Carlo Pizzi. “I know that sounds shocking to humans, but good advice from wise machines often does. Listen. There are other places like this house, but much better and bigger. They’re a series of naval surveillance towers, built at great state expense, to protect the Mediterranean coasts of Italy from migrants and terrorists. Instead of being Shadow Houses, they’re tall and powerful Light Houses, with radar, sonar, lidar, and drone landing strips. Real military castles, with all the trimmings.”

“I always adored lighthouses,” said Irma wonderingly. “They’re so remote and romantic.”

“If this Shadow House should happen to catch fire,” said Carlo Pizzi, “our friend could have you both appointed caretakers of one of those Italian sea-castles. The world is so peaceful and progressive now, that those castles don’t meet any threats. However, there’s a lot of profit involved in keeping them open and running. Your new job would be just like your old job here—just with a different patron.”

“Yes, but that’s arson.”

“The dead man has no heirs for his Shadow House,” said Carlo Pizzi. “Our friend has just checked thoroughly, and that old man was so egotistical, and so confident that he would live forever, that he died intestate. So, if you burn the house down, no one will miss it.”

“There’s the cat,” said Tullio. “The cat would miss the house.”

“What?”

“A cat lives in this house,” said Tullio. “Why don’t you get your friend the AI to negotiate with our house cat? See if it can make the cat a convincing offer.”

Carlo Pizzi mulled this over behind his face-mounted screens. “The German AI was entirely unaware of the existence of the house cat.”

“That’s because a house cat is a living being and your friend is just a bunch of code. It’s morally wrong to burn down houses. Arson is illegal. What would the Church say? Obviously it’s a sin.”

“You’re just emotionally upset now, because you can’t think as quickly and efficiently as an Artificial Intelligence,” said Carlo Pizzi. “However, think it over at your own slow speed. The offer stands. I’ll be going now, because if I stand too long around here, some algorithm might notice me, and draw unwelcome conclusions.”

“Good luck with your new novel,” said Irma. “I hope it’s as funny as your early, good ones.”

Carlo Pizzi left hastily on his small and silent electric scooter. Tullio and Irma retreated within the Shadow House.

“The brazen nerve of that smart machine, to carry on so ‘deus ex machina,’ “said Tullio. “We can’t burn down this beautiful place! Shadow House is a monument to privacy—to a vanishing, but noble way of life! Besides, you’d need thermite grenades to take out those steel panic rooms.”

Irma looked dreamy. “I remember when the government of Italy went broke building all those security lighthouses. There must be dozens of them, far out to sea. Maybe we could have our pick.”

“But those paranoid towers will never be refined and airy and beautiful, like this beach house! It would be like living in a nuclear missile silo.”

“All of those are empty now, too,” said Irma.

“Those nuclear silos had Big Red Buttons, too, now that you mention it. We’re never going to push that button, are we, Irma? I always wondered what kind of noise it would make.”

“We never make big elephant noises,” said Irma, with an eloquent shrug. “You and me, that’s not how we live.”