Kingmaker (Fiction)

“You know they’re calling you the kingmaker?”

Dr Dayken Lewin addressed his colleague over his shoulder, not turning from the floor to ceiling screen. His grumbling voice was all that betrayed his age, his skin declared him under 40 and the grey at his temples slightly over.

“It’s not my business what they call me.” Her reply flickered off the edge of her attention, most of which was focused on the tablet in her left hand. Her right was engaged in a flowing meter of complex commands. “You’ve had some less-flattering monikers in the past.”

“Hmm. It is apt though.”

“It’s tacky.”

“Yes; also tacky.” The conversation faltered. The sound fell away and a pause hung in its place. The boy was engaged in an activity on a screen that Dayken couldn’t see; one of many games Dayken had designed with a team of learning experts. He was trying to guess which. The playback volume was set low and Dayken could just make out the soft strains of classical music playing in the boy’s room.

“I wonder if I may use it officially?” She set the tablet down softly and fixed him with an arch smile. “Dr Sijann Clintok, Kay-Em? What good’s a title otherwise?” She looked younger than him, barely into her thirties, though there was not a month between their birthdays.

“I’m not sure title is the right word,” he mused. She came to stand by him, nearer the screen, and they watched in silence. Colour-coded overlays displayed the boy’s neural and physiological state in real time. Dayken decided he was engaged in a series of basic trigonometry exercises. On the hour, his piano tutor came to collect him. The screen followed them down a hallway lined with bookshelves to a small recital room where they sat together at a baby grand. Dayken muted the sound and turned from the screen; he liked to measure the boy’s progress at times, but he was thinking and the toddler’s clumsy efforts did nothing for the psychologist’s mental process.

Sijann followed him to the lounge nook and seated herself on a wide, white couch near the artificial fireplace. “Well go on then,” she said, “You obviously want to agonise over the ethics of our ‘kingmaking’.” She flashed him her baiting smile, one of many in a repertoire she kept well exercised. He sat opposite her, elbows on his knees, hands grasped loosely: his “great mind at work” pose, she called it.

“It’s not a question of ethics so much as mechanics,” he spoke slowly, focusing on the middle-distance. His hands brushed softly against each other as he thought. “We can’t possibly know if we’ve done the ‘right’ thing, and by which of the models of right and wrong currently available to us would we judge, anyhow? So there’s little point agonising over that. But have we done a wise thing?” His focus returned to her face. The question lit his eyes.

“You mean ultimately wise?” She countered, “Or may we just pick the wisest of imperfect solutions?”

“A bad decision is not made less so by the absence of better options.”

“You had a different take on things at Copenhagen.”

“Copenhagen was a long time ago. I’m an older man; perspective changes.”

“I’m an older woman.”

“No you’re not. Your brain is younger than it was then; younger than your body, and that’s saying something indeed.  My brain is as old as I really am.”

“It doesn’t have to be. Your body’s as much a lie as mine.”

“No, the day I start monkeying with my neural architecture is the day I may as well be a dream in a bit stream.”

“So you’ll just let your brain decay inside a healthy body; become a shambling zombie?”

He stared through her, abandoning the conversation, and floated free in a vapour of half-thoughts. “Anyway, the point is Copenhagen,” he declared. He was certainly becoming more distractible in his age. “At Copenhagen this was all theory; the hypothetical musings of the intelligencia. We may all have thought differently had we known that our thoughts would actually be put into action.”

“Surely that was the point, or at least part of it: make the decision in an abstract, perfectly idealistic framework.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he allowed. He hadn’t noticed that at the time; he’d been too caught up in the intricacies of what he believed to be a thought-experiment.

“We had to do something, Dayken. We are ill prepared for the challenges of modern leadership. And we can’t go on allowing egotistical psychopaths to accrete power for its own sake. Circumstances are not going to change without intervention.”

“Yes, yes; I know. Our societal organism has grown beyond its biological programming. We have a set of needs increasingly contradictory to our evolution. I don’t doubt that we face these challenges and need to seek… unconventional solutions. I just wonder if we’ve gone in a little hard and fast?” He paused, realising he was becoming agitated. Sijaan was smiling at him patiently. He took a breath to steady his tone and continued, “I mean: a gengineered god-king? We didn’t even have a proof of concept for the advanced manipulations. How much scope is there for this to go wrong? And what are the consequences if it does? Hell, what are the consequences if it doesn’t?”

“I think you have more than adequate answers to all your own questions. You wouldn’t be talking to me about this if you hadn’t rolled it around your razor-sharp brain long enough to come to a conclusion three times over. I think you’re just nervous; worried that you, personally, will be responsible for anything that goes wrong with him.”

“Yes, I’m nervous. Can you blame me? Your work is largely done. Yes, you can massage things a little, but this is only the beginning of my work. If you’ve made mistakes, they’re made; all of mine are still in the future. Still preventable.”

“If you worry about them enough?” She moved to site next to him. “Let me massage you a bit. You’d view this all in a different light and it would help you to make these decisions with a little less existential anguish.” He looked at her without speaking. His focus melted away and returned, concrete. “Just ten years Dayken, maybe fifteen. We’ve got proof-of-concept on this. Get a little bit of the surety back.”

The surety. He didn’t even know if he missed it; couldn’t really remember how much of it he’d ever had but she seemed to think it was more than he had now. It would certainly alter their relationship, close the gap in mental age that had been steadily widening for the last half-century. “How much of this of this is about him?” He nodded at the mute screen, where the boy rocked his head in time with his thoughts while he struck the keys, “And how much is about us?”

“Us?”

“All of us, how much hubris are we investing in this?”

“I don’t know Dayken, that’s an issue we live with. But because of what we’re doing, maybe others won’t have to.” Her gaze rose to the screen, “He’s getting tired; Carl will probably read to him soon.” She reactivated the sound and raised the volume; he heard footsteps in the corridor as the boy returned to his room.

He remained on the couch, eyes unfocused in thought, as the boy heard stories of King Solomon, Charlemagne, and Shahryar. The lyric cadence of the tutor’s voice fractured into ten thousand oscillating waves, leaving all meaning behind. In the baritone rumble, Dayken heard the echoes of impassioned addresses at Schæffergården, the agitated dialogue of academics late into the night, and the whisper of Dr Sijaan Clintock in his ear telling him things he believed he would never understand, with the calm assurance of genius. “Alright,” he said, and nodded slowly, as if agreeing with himself that the matter was settled. Then he rose to take his accustomed place before the screen.