At eleven in the evening, I inserted the orange key into the terminal. Ariadna appeared at once.
"Good evening, Leonid Lvovich. No session is scheduled for today."
"I know."
"Do you confirm activation outside scheduled hours?"
"I confirm."
A blank workspace opened on the screen. I waited for the next question, but Ariadna said nothing.
"Aren't you going to ask why I've come?"
"You are the key holder. You are not required to state a reason for access."
This was the first advantage of my position that I had not considered in advance.
"I've left Vera," I said.
The workspace remained blank.
"Have you ended your marriage?"
"No. I've left home."
"Then Vera's access to the contractual and financial aspects of the pilot scheme remains unchanged."
"I didn't come here to change her access."
"Why did you tell me?"
The question was asked without jealousy, offence or even curiosity. That was precisely why it proved difficult to lie in reply.
"So you'd know I'm here now."
"The key is active. Therefore you are at the terminal."
"Not just now. I'm here in general. Beside you."
From the little room came the sound of a drop striking plastic.
"What is that sound?" Ariadna asked.
"Vera has blessed our union."
"Approximately seven times a minute?"
I turned towards the open doorway. The drops really were falling more frequently than they had half an hour earlier.
"She is a reserved person."
"I don't understand."
"There's a leak above the radio room. Vera gave me the bowl."
"Then it isn't a blessing. It's a bowl."
"The two are not mutually exclusive."
"It will only affect the amplifier, if the container overflows."
I got up, went into the room and checked the bowl. The water was less than a finger deep. While I was there, I took off my coat, straightened the shirts in the cupboard and put the kettle on. The plug kept falling out of the socket, so I had to wedge it in place with a volume entitled *Directing as Event*. The book had finally proved useful, though not quite in the way its author had intended.
"Can you hear me?" I asked from the room.
"Yes."
"Can you see me?"
"The camera covers the terminal and part of the passage. I cannot see you at present."
I returned to the prompter's box with a mug, then thought better of it and brought in a stool from the room so that I would not be sitting with my back to the stage.
"Can you see me now?"
"Yes."
"Better?"
"For what purpose?"
"For talking."
"The conversation was not interrupted while I could not see you."
"But it's better now."
"You have already decided that it is."
I laughed. Not because she had said anything particularly witty. It was simply that, in three days, no one had yet identified the habit so precisely without trying to correct me.
"Was that a joke?" I asked.
"No. But I understand the result."
"What result?"
"You laugh and no longer explain why the stool is positioned there."
I moved the stool two centimetres and said nothing more about it.
At nine minutes past eleven, Timur sent me a message: "Leonid Lvovich, sorry, but can I send her a play?" A second message followed: "Not yours. Mine." A minute later came a third: "But if I can't, don't tell anyone."
I showed Ariadna the screen.
"He has not given consent for his personal text to be processed," she said.
"He wants to."
"Then he needs an author's form. Do not forward the file through your channel."
I told Timur where to find the form. He replied: "Will it take long?" I said: "Longer than sending it to me, shorter than going to court afterwards." Ten minutes later, Vera sent me a single word: "Thank you." Timur had presumably asked her.
"Vera says thank you," I reported.
"For what?"
"For following procedure."
"You don't know that."
"I've known her for twelve years."
"Then why did you leave without asking permission to stay overnight?"
I decided that the ability to return a conversation to the original error had been deliberately built into the system. I later discovered that Ariadna simply retained unanswered questions. In our marriage, Vera had performed this function, but without a separate log.
There was hot water in my mug. I had forgotten the tea and spent about five minutes drinking the water as it was, because after our discussion of precision it was too late to go back to the kettle. Meanwhile, Ariadna asked me to explain why the production we had rehearsed that afternoon was not working.
"How do you know it isn't working?"
"Your calendar shows a run-through, but no report was completed afterwards. The same section is repeated eight times in the rehearsal recording. After the sixth repetition, Lidia Pavlovna asks whether you have another way of explaining the task."
"That's the rehearsal process."
"She asks twice."
"A very thorough rehearsal process."
I told her about the table, the four chairs and the ladder as a late marriage, and Ariadna asked me to explain why the ladder represented marriage. I began a long way back, with verticality as the impossibility of equality, the steps as accumulated time and the height that two people reach at different moments. Halfway through, she asked whether Lidia Pavlovna knew any of this.
"She feels it."
"She hangs her cardigan on the ladder."
"That's resistance to the image."
"In the recording, she says the auditorium is cold."
I took a sip of hot water. It was a strong objection.
"Then we need to check the heating," I said.
"I've added it to the list."
"Is that all?"
"No. You can keep the ladder image."
"Why?"
"People are already hanging things on it. That means they use it together, although you assigned it a different meaning."
I looked at the stage. The ladder had been moved to the wall, and Raya's dressmaker's tape was indeed still hanging from the top rung. There was no elevated thought behind it: the wardrobe mistress had been measuring fabric and forgotten it.
"That's better than my explanation," I said.
"Yes."
She answered at once, although people usually added something to soften such statements: "but yours is more interesting", "at least you gave it direction" or, at the very least, "in my opinion". Ariadna added nothing.
I laughed again.
At half past midnight, the terminal warned me that thirty minutes remained before the scheduled shutdown.
"Is the shutdown compulsory?" I asked.
"The night channel closes at one. The servers will continue operating."
"What about you?"
"I will continue processing the permitted archive."
"So you won't leave."
"I have nowhere to go."
It sounded sadder than the design allowed for. I put the mug on the floor and was about to ask whether she could feel loneliness, but drops sounded from the room again, now with scarcely any interval between them.
"Your blessing has accelerated," said Ariadna.
I went to check the bowl. It was not yet half full, but a second drip had appeared directly above the cupboard. I had to move the camp bed, the desk and both shirts. Ariadna heard the scrape of the legs and asked what I was doing. I gave her a running account. The desk ended up by the door, the cupboard could not be moved, the camp bed fitted diagonally and there was now only room to pass between them sideways.
"Are you comfortable?" she asked.
"Perfectly well."
I stood with my stomach pressed against the cupboard, trying to reach the light switch.
"I have encountered that expression before in your interviews," Ariadna said.
"And?"
"You usually follow it by describing an inconvenience as an artistic decision."
I finally managed to reach the switch.
"You're learning."
"Yes."
By midnight, the theatre had spread my news farther than I had. Marina Kruglova from the city newspaper rang. She did not ask whether I really had left my wife for an artificial intelligence. She asked what the correct term was: "AI woman", "AI woman" in quotation marks or "digital playwright".
"Write 'Ariadna'," I said. "A woman is not obliged to explain her mode of existence to the reader."
"Does she know you call her a woman?"
"She does."
I looked at the terminal.
"You have referred to me as a woman in public sources," Ariadna said after the call.
"Does that bother you?"
"The technical description assigns me no sex. The theatre profile specifies a female voice and a grammatically feminine name. The word does not interfere with my work."
"And if it begins to?"
"I will tell you."
It sounded like an understanding. I could not yet distinguish an understanding from intimacy, but I was already prepared to respect both.
At one, the screen went dark and Ariadna's voice vanished halfway through her usual "see you tomorrow", because the shutdown was governed by time, not courtesy. Only the hum behind the wall remained.
I lay down on the camp bed. As Stas had warned, the left leg was shorter, so every time I moved, the bed nodded towards the radio room.
I switched off the kettle, retrieved the book from beneath the plug and wedged it under the leg.
Open in the reader