“Damn! There it is again!” Sara elbowed her boyfriend and pointed to the wall of a corner restaurant as the pair walked down the steps of the Rialto bridge. “Hey, Giangi, what ad are you seeing on that wall over there?”
“Huh? Where?” Gianluigi shook his head for a second, as if to orient himself back in the real world, then turned in the direction Sara was pointing. “Oh, there. Yeah, just another ad for a VR game. Why?”
Sara laughed as they continued on down Salizzada Pio X. “You and your gaming. You need to find yourself some more interesting hobbies, babe.” Sara knew he had other interests, but she couldn’t help teasing him about that particular one.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her off. “So what’s up? What are you seeing?”
“Just a nanocosmetics ad, but it’s set out in front of that old building with a scratched-up wooden door I keep seeing everywhere.” Sara quickly sidestepped a pair of tourists headed back towards the bridge, paying more attention to their aug-guides than to where they were actually walking. “I’ve mentioned it before. You sure you haven’t seen something like that anywhere lately?”
“Nah, doesn’t sound familiar. Weird place to CG a cosmetics ad, huh?”
“It’s not just this ad. I see the same door and building all sorts of places.” She grabbed Giangi’s arm to stop him, so that he could see the concern on her face. “I mean, everywhere. As stock photos on totally unrelated blog articles, in all sorts of neuro-ads, in videos. I see the damned thing at least once a day! It’s driving me crazy.”
“Ah, sweetie. Don’t worry,” he said with mock concern. “You can’t get any crazier than you already are!” He took a quick step to his right, just barely dodging a left jab to the shoulder Sara had been quick to throw.
“Be serious a sec, would you?” she said as they continued walking. “Why would I keep seeing the same exact image in so many different places? Do you think it means anything?”
“Now that I think about it, hon, I’d heard about this gamer dude a while back who kept claiming he was seeing the same scene in odd places in-world.” He stepped to one side to let Sara walk ahead of him down a calle too narrow for them to fit side by side. “They were saying that maybe someone had hacked his neurofeed somehow and was just messing with him. Haven’t heard anything about the guy lately, though. Not sure how it all turned out in the end.”
“You think I’ve been hacked?!” Sara stopped suddenly and turned to face Giangi.
“Nah.” He put a hand on her shoulder and gave a light push, motioning for her to turn around and keep walking. “Can’t imagine why someone would want to hack you just to show you some old building. It’s probably just a glitch. Some wires crossed somewhere.”
“Wires. Yeah, right,” she scoffed. “Be serious, will you? It’s kinda freaking me out.”
“Why don’t you ask that absentee father of yours? Isn’t he supposed to be some kind of cyber-genius?”
“Artificial intelligence. Guess he’s still trying to figure out why his AGI failed all those years ago.”
“AGI?!” Now it was Giangi’s turn to stop in his tracks. “I thought they’d finally figured out a truly self-aware AI could never be achieved.”
Sara stopped to look back at Gianluigi. “Dunno. Last I heard he was convinced it’s possible. And he must still have some corporation or other bankrolling his research.” She shrugged and turned back around. “Covertly, of course.”
Sara sat outside her favorite café in Campo San Leonardo, in the heart of Venice’s Cannaregio district. Giangi was in Piazza San Marco for a mixed-reality meetup of some sort, and she welcomed some alone time to think. She would be presenting her thesis on “Art, Technology, and the Evolution of Society Between the First and Second Italian Renaissances” next week, and she still had no idea what she would do once her studies were complete. Her relationship with Giangi had been good for her and had helped her get through graduate school with her sanity intact, but the only thing about which she felt certain when it came to her future was that he wouldn’t be a part of it for very much longer.
“Signorina?”
Sara looked up. She hadn’t noticed the waiter standing there.
“Un cafetín, per cortesia. Ma la cicara, non massa calda.” Few people actually spoke Italian anymore, much less Venetian dialect, but tourists liked the authentic experience, so service workers in Venice all had to keep up appearances. Sara just loved the language and liked to see if she could trip a waiter up now and then, but she remembered this one and had no doubt he would bring her espresso in a cup that wouldn’t burn her lip.
She had her coffee in no time. Some things didn’t need nanotech to provide instant gratification, and that was what Sara liked most about espresso. Strictly speaking, though, nanotech was needed to keep the old espresso machines working after all these years. The same could be said of Venice as a whole, of course. The city would have sunk into the lagoon decades ago if it hadn’t been for nanobots rebuilding the foundations and restoring the city to its original splendor and beyond. Far, far beyond.
This was true of every city and every structure Sara had ever seen or studied, which made the image of the old, rundown building that had been popping up everywhere even more unusual. She called up the image from her implants and ran another search for it on the Net. She had done this several times before and wasn’t expecting this time to be any less of a failure.
“What the — ?”
There on the tabletop, rendered for only her to see, was the image of the old building and a map indicating a location in the Italian Alps, three hours from Venice at most.
“Why now?” she wondered out loud.
“Why now, what?”
Sara turned to see Giangi standing there behind her.
“Oh, uh, nothing.” She instinctively swiped her hand across the table to turn off the display despite knowing that Giangi couldn’t have seen it. “Just a thing for school. No biggie. What’re you doing here? That MR event already finished?”
“Not even close. We’re taking a dinner break, and I just took a quick detour here to let you know there’s a group of us that’ll be making a weekend of it.” He looked down at his watch, apparently in a hurry to be somewhere else. “It’s turned into an MR adventure all over the lagoon, hopping from island to island. That cool with you?”
“Me? Sure. I mean, it’s not like we’re married or anything.”
“Yeah, I know. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t have anything planned for us this weekend.”
“No, we’re good. You have fun!” She wondered for a moment if Giangi would pick up on her forced enthusiasm, but figured he’d be preoccupied with thoughts of his weekend of fun. It didn’t matter. Sara, too, was already busy making plans for her own impromptu outing to the mountains.
There was no tube line that ran north into the Alps, so while Sara had barely had time to settle into her seat in the fifteen minutes it took to cross the hundred-plus kilometers from Venice to Verona, the one-hour train ride from Verona to Bolzano had given her ample time to book an auto that would take her the rest of the way towards Stelvio Pass. The entire trip, including the walk from her Cannaregio apartment to the Venice tube station, had taken just under three hours as expected.
There was no road to the exact coordinates she had found for that image, so the auto stopped alongside the road just above the tree line in the Ortler Alps. Sara estimated she had a twenty-minute hike ahead of her to reach her ultimate destination, but she hesitated for a moment and looked back at the auto. She had essentially been on autopilot herself to this point, and now the rest of the way would be all up to her.
There wasn’t any real trail to follow, so she set off in the general direction of the coordinates she had been given — by whom, she didn’t know, and she was trying not to speculate. Now, though, the distractions of civilization were far below her, leaving her mind free to wander. Had she been hacked after all? Her research was important, to her at least, but surely not anything that would have attracted this sort of attention. Her father then. Was he into something dangerous? Could someone be after her in order to get to him? But why? Artificial General Intelligence? Could it be possible after all? Had he already achieved it? She shook these thoughts from her head and turned her attention to the hike.
She remained above the forest at first, the occasional glimpses of chamois on the rocks above underscoring the remoteness of her location, but as she neared the destination, it became clear that she would need to descend into the forest to find what she was looking for. The terrain through the trees was steep and made even more arduous by loose dirt, gravel, and pine needles. She ran, slid, and jumped down the slope, clutching at branches and aiming herself tactically towards trees to slow her descent. Just as she was getting into a comfortable rhythm, she planted her foot on a rock hidden beneath a pile of pine needles and tumbled to the ground.
Sara pushed herself up into a sitting position and tested her ankle. It was sore, but she could move it and nothing seemed to be broken. She stood and brushed herself off, and as she looked around now, she saw that she had reached a clearing where the ground leveled off and grass was again able to grow. Here, across the meadow to her right, just at the edge of the clearing, was the old house that had been stalking her for so long.
She knew it was no coincidence that she had been able to find this place now, after so many failed attempts, and at the same time that Giangi was going off on a spur-of-the-moment outing with friends, leaving her free to get away on her own without having to make up an excuse. He would have said the whole thing was silly and would certainly have talked her out of it. But who could have orchestrated all of this? And why? She began to think that coming here by herself had been a mistake.
Sara gathered her courage and set out across the meadow through the tall grass, which brushed her bare shins and irritated the scratches from her fall. The grass grew all the way up to the house, save for a meter-wide strip of concrete running along the ground from one corner of the building to the other. The façade was exactly like the image she had been seeing — the cracked, stone wall; the white paint worn away by the passing of time, and the door looking as though it would fall apart at the slightest touch.
Now what? She was here, but the door was padlocked shut, and the lock looked as if it were rusted to such an extent that it wouldn’t have opened even if she did have the key. Should she knock? She knew that was what people used to do before technology had rendered even doorbells pointless and old-fashioned. But who could possibly be inside?
Sara glanced over her shoulder to confirm that she was still alone, then reached out and pressed lightly on the door. It was much sturdier than she had expected, but what surprised her even more was the way the wood itself felt to the touch. It wasn’t the inert, dead wood it should have been, but was alive with the activity of nanobots! As she jerked her hand away, the door began to open inward, slowly and silently. Inside, there was only darkness.
“Come in, Sara,” her AI assistant said. “There is much that you must see.”
About the author
A professional wordsmith for over a decade and a futurist at heart, Grey’s creative writing — both fiction and non-fiction — explores technology, language, and human evolution with an optimism that is all too uncommon. Born and raised in the Pacific northwest, he spent 24 years living in northern Italy before returning to the States. After a year in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, he is now enjoying life back in northern California. He is an Italian translator and is currently working on his first full-length, science-fiction novel based on his short stories set in the “Autonomy” universe.
“On the Threshold” was originally published on Medium, but has been moved to its new home on Substack.