Ariadna arrived on Monday, three days before I left.
Physically, she took up less space than the regional Ministry of Culture had led us to expect. Two grey cabinets with ventilation grilles, a crate of cables, a terminal, four acoustic panels and a box of documents that Vera immediately called the main component of the system. It all came in through the stage door before ten in the morning, while the foyer floor was being washed and there was no telling the dawn of a technological age from a delivery of new fire extinguishers.
I arrived at half past nine. Not for any ceremonial welcome: the operator's email simply said "installation from 9.00 to 18.00", and leaving the first encounter between a human being and an artificial consciousness to Stas would have been irresponsible. Stas can connect any cable to any other if you give him insulating tape and ask no questions about the warranty. That is not enough for the birth of a new theatrical intelligence.
The operator's chief engineer turned out to be a young man in a grey hoodie. He introduced himself as Misha, asked to see the radio room and did not look at the stage once. At first I took this for professional narrow-mindedness, but I later discovered that he had seen the stage on the plans and already knew more about it than we did.
"This is the server room," I said, opening the radio room.
"The documents say former radio room."
"Documents record the past."
Misha looked inside, felt the wall beside the socket and asked whether the extractor fan worked.
"If you switch it on."
"Why isn't it on?"
"It's noisy."
He wrote something on his tablet. Vera stood beside him with a folder in her hands; she gave me the look with which she usually heralded an expense, then went to find Stas.
The grey cabinets were placed along the far wall. They immediately took the place of an old table holding a reel-to-reel tape recorder, two broken microphones and a folder marked `RADIO STATION 1986`, which Stas refused to let anyone throw away for reasons unrelated to memory. The table was carried into the corridor. Stas took the folder with him.
The terminal was to be installed in the prompter's box. Misha positioned it in the centre, with the screen facing the backstage passage, and was already laying the cable when I asked him to turn the equipment rack.
"Why?"
"The spotlight is reflected in the screen from here."
The spotlight was off, and its reflection was barely visible. Misha looked at the screen, then at me, loosened the mounting and turned the equipment rack twenty degrees.
Now, viewed from the fifth row, the screen and my profile were aligned. I had no intention of giving interviews from the prompter's box. But if the need arose, it would be too late to correct the angle in the middle of the conversation.
"Anything else?"
"That's good."
Misha wrote something else on his tablet. By evening I had begun to suspect that some of his notes concerned me, but I could not check: he kept the screen turned towards himself.
Vera sat in the front row reading the contract. The contract's thickness had nothing to do with Ariadna's complexity. The contract for the touring bus was half the length, though the bus could break down, have an accident or get stranded in Voronezh. According to the operator, Ariadna could not even send someone a message without separate consent, yet every form of consent required its own table.
"There are four appendices on access and not one on authorship of her work," Vera said.
Misha did not look up from the cable.
"Authorship of outputs is governed by the main contract."
"It says ‘system outputs’. If she writes a play, who grants permission for the production?"
"The theatre, under the pilot scheme."
"I'm not asking who stages it. I'm asking who grants permission."
Misha finally looked up.
"You'd be better off checking that with the lawyer."
Vera folded down the corner of the page.
"We'll check before we sign."
I went down into the auditorium and sat beside her. On stage, Stas and two installers were running a cable to an acoustic panel, which was more interesting to watch than the appendices.
"If she writes a play, we'll come to an agreement," I said quietly.
"With whom?"
"With her."
"She isn't a party to the contract."
"Vera, you're trying to settle a human question through the grammar of a document."
"I'm trying to establish who will sign the authorisation."
"Not everything real begins with a signature."
She turned the page.
"A salary does."
This was fair, though not entirely relevant to our conversation.
By two o'clock the power was connected. The cabinets began to hum, the extractor fan hummed more loudly, Stas said it was impossible to work like this, Misha said it was impossible to work any other way, and they spent the next forty minutes in rare agreement on the substance and complete disagreement over how to put it. In the end, Stas removed the grille and found a clump of old dust and a concert ticket from 1992 inside, after which the extractor fan's noise became tolerable.
At four, Misha brought in an orange token.
It was thick and rectangular, with a metal ring and a faded label reading `ADMINISTRATOR 01`. There was no case. I had expected at least a velvet pouch, but the token lay in a transparent bag with two screws and a fire safety leaflet.
"This is the root key," Misha said. "Do not lose it, leave it in the terminal or transfer it without a signed handover. A copy is not normally made. While the pilot scheme is your responsibility, there is one holder."
He held the bag out to Vera. Vera did not take it.
"Under the contract, Leonid Lvovich is responsible."
The token passed to me.
I took it out of the bag. It weighed more than it appeared to and sat comfortably in my palm. In the theatre, one often has to deal with objects that represent authority: seals, prop pistols, keys to the city, golden crowns made of plastic. This one represented nothing. That made it more impressive.
"Can it be worn around the neck?" I asked.
"You can," Misha said. "But don't."
Vera closed the folder.
"The handover form makes no provision for necks."
I put the token in my inside pocket. The ring remained outside, and I had to move it again so that it would not spoil the line of my jacket.
The first start-up was performed without voice activation. A grey background appeared on the terminal, followed by the date, the pilot number and the line: `REGISTRATION OF THE SOLE ADMINISTRATOR REQUIRED`.
"Will they change the wording later?" Vera asked.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked.
"Nothing," she said, and reopened the contract.
Registration was scheduled for eleven that night. Before then, the operator had to check the secure environment, upload the theatre's permitted archive and make certain that Ariadna could not see any folders for which we had not given consent. Misha asked everyone to stay out of the radio room, whereupon Stas immediately went in to fetch a screwdriver, came back out, handed it to an installer and announced that he would not go in again.
By six, everything was ready. The grey cabinets hummed behind the closed door, the terminal in the prompter's box remained dark, and the empty auditorium was reflected in its screen. From the fifth row, the equipment rack was almost invisible, but anyone beside it could be seen perfectly.
Before the general systems check, Misha gave us training on data use. He gathered us in the auditorium: me, Vera, Stas, Raya, Lidia Pavlovna, Timur and Nina Ivanovna from the box office. He put four folders on the screen and asked us to decide what could be uploaded.
The first contained published reviews. Everyone agreed at once. The second contained internal rehearsal recordings. I agreed to those as well, but Vera asked about the actors, and it emerged that the old contracts permitted archival storage but not processing by an external system. Separate signatures would be required.
"That covers twenty years," I said. "Half those people don't even work here any more."
"Then we don't upload half of it," Misha replied.
"We'll lose the theatre's history."
"The history will remain with the theatre. The system won't read it."
The distinction seemed bureaucratic until Raya asked whether the recordings included backstage conversations. They did. On one old run-through, she had spent twenty minutes discussing her sister's illness with Lidia Pavlovna because her lapel microphone had not been switched off. The recording had been stored as rehearsal material, but Raya refused permission for it to be processed.
"Delete it?" Misha asked.
"From the system," Vera said. "Before we remove it from the theatre archive, we'll show it to Raya."
I wanted to point out that the recording might contain unique observations about the production. Raya sat one seat away, looking at me. I said nothing, though at the time I still regarded this as an act of personal tact rather than her right.
The third folder contained letters from audience members. Vera had already divided them into those whose authors had permitted publication and all the rest. Misha explained that publication in a newspaper did not amount to consent for match-finding. Nina Ivanovna asked whether complaints could be uploaded without names. Sometimes they could, it turned out, provided the text did not identify the person. We opened the first complaint: "At the performance on 9 March, the actor Granov sat on my scarf in the front row." The author's name was absent, but I, the date and the scarf were all identifiable enough.
"The scarf was on the seat," I said.
"Does that alter the access permission?" Misha asked.
"It alters the picture."
The complaint was not uploaded.
The fourth folder contained material that people had submitted specifically for the pilot scheme. Consent had already been given, but in different forms: permission to read, look for a form, issue invitations or disclose part of the context to the director. Misha showed us the icons. Stas asked why people could not simply tick a box saying 'I consent to everything' once and for all. Vera replied that someone might want to tell a story on Monday and not want to see it on stage by Tuesday.
"Then they can untick the box," Stas said.
"What if we've already made a copy?"
Stas looked at the cabinets, where the fans were preserving our future complications, and said nothing.
The training took two hours. By the end, Timur had authorised access to his own student play, Lidia Pavlovna had placed a blanket ban on dressing-room recordings from every year, and Nina Ivanovna had demanded the removal of customers' voice messages from the box-office archive. I learnt that the theatre held an enormous amount of material which, until Ariadna arrived, we had considered ours simply because it happened to be in our possession.
I checked this twice.
Vera spent the entire time reading the appendices. On her way out, she left Misha a list of seventeen questions. He looked at the first page and said he would send a lawyer. I had one question: could Ariadna's voice be changed after registration? Misha replied that the holder would be able to choose another from the catalogue.
"Who chose this one?"
"The operator. For the pilot scheme."
"She didn't choose it herself?"
"The system hasn't been started yet."
The voice that, three days later, I would call the voice of the woman in my life had been assigned by an engineer I had never seen before. The fact did not seem important to me. In the theatre, too, an actor is given a role first and fills it with freedom afterwards. Even then, I knew how to prepare a justification before the doubt arose.
Vera and I went home together. On Mondays she usually bought bread, and I bought something for dinner if I remembered. That evening I forgot, so we ate buckwheat with yesterday's chicken. At the time, no one had yet endowed with destiny the very packet of buckwheat I would carry out of the flat three days later and send back in a taxi.
Vera put the contract beside her plate and carried on reading.
"You shouldn't read while you're eating," I said.
"Why not?"
"You don't notice the flavour."
"Buckwheat with yesterday's chicken can take it."
She reached the appendix on authorship, folded down another corner and asked what I would do if Ariadna wrote a play and the operator refused permission for us to stage it.
"I'll come to an agreement."
"With the operator?"
"With Ariadna."
"She isn't a party to the contract."
"Not yet."
"‘Not yet’ isn't a legal form."
"But it is the time in which everything changes."
Vera looked at me over the top of the page.
"You're already talking as though it's after opening night, and they haven't even switched her on."
"I'm preparing."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
At the time, I decided that Vera was afraid of the technology. It was convenient and untrue. She was not afraid that Ariadna would become human, but that everyone around her would begin using her before agreeing on how to hear her say no.
After dinner, Vera drafted an email to the lawyer. I chose a shirt for the registration that night. The white one produced too formal a glow in the light from the screen; the dark one blended into the auditorium. I chose grey. Vera asked why I needed to change at all when only Misha would be on the call.
"A first meeting is still a first meeting."
"To him, it's an installation."
"He isn't the one I'm meeting."
She stopped typing.
"Lyonya, don't rush to decide her place before you've spoken to her."
"I'm choosing a shirt."
"You never simply choose a shirt."
We laughed. Both of us. That Monday, there was no other woman between us yet, only a contract, grey cabinets and a voice assigned by the operator. If stories were arranged fairly, that evening would later have proved a warning that cancelled everything. But warnings do not cancel actions. They merely deprive a person of the right to say he saw nothing.
Before I left, Vera straightened my collar. I said I would be back by two. She asked me not to wake her and left the hall light on.
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