“June Cassidy. I’m with Public Investigations.” She released his arm and put out her hand. He ignored it. “I worked with Katelyn Thorsen. She was my friend.”
He ran the outside edge of an index finger across the lenses of his glasses like a windshield wiper, then studied her face. After a moment, he spun on a heel to regard his frozen security detail.
“Stop fucking around back there.” He pointed across the street at a small building with dark wood siding. “We’re getting coffee. Try to keep up.”
Then he set off into traffic, his long legs propelling him through the line of fast-moving cars as if they didn’t exist.
—
The Stone Way Café was bright and clean, with large windows and only two other customers, an older woman with a book and a young man with a laptop.
Wilkinson led June to a large corner table by the front window. There was aReservedsign on it. He didn’t seem to notice. She pointed to the sign. “Should we sit somewhere else?”
He looked at her as if at a particularly dim specimen of a much stupider species. “It’s reserved for me. I own the restaurant.”
Of course he did, June thought. Wilkinson’s net worth was somewhere north of a hundred billion dollars. He really should have had a larger security detail.
He shed his coat, scattering droplets everywhere. “You two.” He pointed at a table near the door with another reserved sign. “Sit.”
His security men’s disapproval showed in their faces, but they did as directed, dividing their attention between Lewis and the street outside. Lewis returned their gazes with a small tilted smile, leaning indifferently against the long marble service counter. The Beretta had vanished.
June opened her mouth to speak but Wilkinson put up a hand. A server approached unasked with six different coffee drinks on a tray, as if she’d somehow known he was coming. She set the tray on a lazy Susan in the middle of the table, the only one in the entire restaurant, then left without a word.
Wilkinson leaned forward and spun the lazy Susan twice, examining the options and finally selecting something in a tiny white porcelain cup. He gestured irritably at the remaining beverages. “Take one and tell me about Sanjay.”
June ignored the drinks. “He’s almost certainly dead and I think you know why.”
Wilkinson looked out the rain-beaded window. “Why do you believe he’s dead?”
“He’s been missing for five days. His wife traced his phone to his car in a parking lot south of town. On it, I found a Telegram message sent six days ago from someone calling himself Circuit Rider, asking for a meeting. He told his wife and his office manager he’d be gone for the day. I think he went to the meeting. It was clear from the text thathe was leaving the group. I believe he also gave one of the Messenger’s tapes to Katelyn Thorsen shortly before she was killed.”
“I cannot fault your logic,” he said, still staring out at the rain. “There is a high probability that Sanjay is dead.”
“I saw your texts to him. Tell me about your involvement with the Messenger. Have you heard the recordings?”
“I have a large collection,” he said. “I was the one who invited Sanjay into the Movement.” He turned to look at her again. His face was taut but otherwise betrayed no emotion. “If he is dead, it is my fault.”
June said, “Tell me everything you know about the Messenger’s group.”
Wilkinson glanced disapprovingly at his watch. “That will take longer than five minutes.”
June remembered KT telling her that Wilkinson was probably somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum. Very good at technical ideas, very good at numbers, not very good at people. But still human.
So she waited, knowing he wanted to talk.
43
Finally Wilkinson sighed. “Very well. What do you know about the so-called technological singularity?”
June felt like she was back in school. As a journalist whose job was to talk with very smart people who understood things she did not, this happened with regularity.
“The singularity,” she said, “is the idea that multiple technologies—artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nanotechnology—will advance in a mutually reinforcing explosion of innovation that will become uncontrollable and irreversible. The result would be that humanity either makes a great leap forward or destroys itself.”
“Very good,” Wilkinson said, his face indicating that perhaps she was not as dim as he’d previously thought. “It is not a crackpot theory. NASA has a conference on this subject every year. The current best thinking is that this explosion of innovation will arrive some time in the next five to twenty years. In my opinion, the possibility of a negativeoutcome is significant. Perhaps as high as fifty percent in the next hundred years.”
She held up her hands like a traffic cop. “Hold on. Your P(doom) is fifty percent?”
The risk arising from uncontrolled technological development was a popular topic in the tech world. AI researchers had coined the notoriously under-defined pseudo-mathematical term P(doom) to express the probability of a civilization-ending outcome. Fifty percent was much higher than the average.
