07. Elysians

Kafka stopped short of the commuter bar to fish for his lighter and cigarettes. Succeeding, he turned his lanky body away from the wind and lit his last Gauloise. He took a deep draw and looked around, arms crossed, rocking slightly from one leg to the other. The bar lay tucked under the brick arches of Berlin’s central tram bridge. The sunlit brickwork looked darker than it should, still covered in a century of exhaust from passing trains and cars. Both were mostly electric now, but their soot remained, smeared on the walls of his city.

He ambled a few steps along the empty sidewalk as he smoked, then stopped to assess his reflection in the archway windows. With close-cropped gray hair and a well-lined face mounted atop a tall, athletic frame, he looked both older and fitter than his fifty-seven years.

He shrugged and checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until the government workers would start arriving to numb the train ride home. Good, he thought. That will keep this short. Taking a final drag of the cigarette, he stubbed it out in the wall-mounted ashtray, then pulled on the door handle and ducked to enter. He nodded his head toward the barkeep. They’d seen each other countless times, yet neither had ever asked the other’s name. Perfectly German.

“Drinks?” the man asked.

“Ja, red wine,” Kafka said, proceeding through the bar’s main vault before turning into an intersecting archway that ran parallel to the tracks overhead. The small area was mostly dedicated to storage but for one small table, at which a slim man was seated. He tracked Kafka’s arrival with a dark brooding stare, turning a bottle of pilsner between his fingertips.

“Guten Tag, Tensor,” Kafka said, pulling back the metal chair and feeling the legs snag on the uneven floor. He bent awkwardly to slide his long frame under the low curving ceiling of the side vault.

Tensor nodded in reply. His dark brown hair was tucked behind his ears, accentuating his sharp features. He was nearing his thirtieth birthday, and his leathery olive skin had begun to show a few wrinkles, none of them the result of too much smiling. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped as the barkeep arrived with a small carafe of red wine and a cheap glass to go with it.

“Danke,” Kafka said. He filled his goblet and then raised it to his companion. “So, to what should we drink?”

“To you pulling a datacenter and seven petabytes of training data out of your ass,” Tensor replied, raising his bottle.

“Ja, ja, we have a plan. You worry too much,” Kafka replied.

“You have a plan for the data, but you haven’t told me how you’ll get me a datacenter with hundreds of pods for months. Will you steal that too?” Tensor’s face betrayed equal parts suspicion and despair.

“You don’t want to know.”

The younger man’s stare grew more intense. “Don’t I?”

“No, you don’t,” Kafka said, leaning in, his lips pulled tight across his teeth. “This was always our bloody deal. You do the hacking, I get you what you need. We don’t even share our real names. It’s safer for both of us.”

His anger passed as quickly as it had come. Tensor was a special breed; he’d turned down offers to work at all of the American tech giants, choosing instead to toil away in open-source AI research. He was the best. He was also a pain in the ass.

“What made you stay here?” Kafka asked after a pause. “You don’t have a family. You would have been as famous as any of those Americans if you’d gone over.”

Tensor frowned. “Why should I leave? This isn’t Timbuktu, this is Berlin, in the heart of Europe. I love this place.” He shook his head. “Are we going to be the end of the line? Everything will be American or Chinese now? Bullshit!”

Kafka smiled. A true believer.

Tensor took a drink. “Anyway, I can’t go to America now—they’ll connect the dots sooner or later.”

Kafka nodded in agreement. He had approached Tensor three years ago with an offer of resources. Slowly, they’d built trust, and using whatever equipment Kafka could get him, their Elysian Collective had managed to produce AI models rivaling Silicon Valley’s best. The capabilities had never fallen more than a year off the cutting edge—usually less—and all of it was released as open source.

Tensor lowered his eyes back to the bottle perspiring between his fingers. “It’s different now. They won’t be our little helpers anymore; they’ll be smarter than us.” He took a deep breath and then looked up at Kafka. “What happens when they get tired of making your friends richer?”

Kafka rolled his head back and let out a short, barking laugh. “That’s dramatic.”

Tensor shrugged. “Only governments and big companies have compute resources like this, and those assholes aren’t big on charity.” He glared out from under his dark eyebrows. “Who is it?”

Kafka sighed. “Of course there are big boys involved. The deal I offer them is a chance to break the American monopoly before it happens. If Freedom and Coda own all the AGIs on earth, then Europe will be a backwater. It’s only a matter of time.”

Tensor frowned. “Your friends will still try to grab it for themselves.”

“The deal was clear: they fund, and we open source. They’re paying to have a chance in the new world.” Kafka stopped to drain the rest of his glass. “It’s simple, Tensor. We’re thieves. We’re brilliant thieves. We’ve done the impossible, but now we need something that can’t be stolen. This time, we can’t do a little here, a little there, and catch up a year later. We’ve fought for years to keep up with the Americans, but now it’s the end game. We do this, or we give up.” Kafka refilled his glass, and they sat in silence as a train rumbled overhead.

“It’s taking too long. Our spies tell us that they both started training already,” Tensor continued, switching lines of attack.

“Relax. They’ll test forever. They can’t afford to release a dangerous AGI. We’ll catch them then.”

“And the Circus?”

Kafka shook his head. The Circus was Tensor’s pet project, where he let the latest AIs run together in a small cluster of dedicated pods. “That was part of the deal to get the big datacenters. Sorry.”

Tensor lowered his head in resignation. “How long until I need to shut them down?”

Finally, I’m getting him there. “A few days. All of the pieces are in place. The compute pods are ready when we need them. As for the data, we’ll have it this weekend. We just need to arrange a little party.”

Tensor finished his beer in silence.

“Good. Decided,” Kafka said, ending the meeting. “Now smile. You’re about to build an AGI and set it free!” He raised a hand in triumph. “We’re changing history.”

Tensor cracked a smile and shook his head as he stood. “You’re too optimistic for a German. You should have been an American.”

Kafka rubbed his chin as the younger man left. He’d gotten used to Tensor’s nerves. It was their fourth major training run. Hopefully, the next one would be managed by the AGI itself.

As the bar began filling up, he put ten euros on the table and left into the rapidly cooling evening. He patted his pockets for a cigarette and remembered he was out. “Shit,” he muttered, then slipped back into the shadows of an archway. Looking around to make sure he was alone, he pulled out a burner phone, texted “Go,” then dropped it down a sewer grate.