Chapter 38 — Back to the Races
Rufus considers the risks with implicit questions in his theory of questions.
Followed by Chapter 38 —— Back to the Races, in which Saskia heads to Lone Star Park, the horse racetrack in Dallas.
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Hello Friends,
Reading over today’s chapter, I was reminded about my theory of questions (that being that a book’s audience should always be naturally led to having certain questions they want answered). Specifically, I noticed how some of them——ideally many of them——are implicit. The thing is, implicit questions often rely on continuity the reader has with the story.
And herein lies a tension: I’m always looking for a hook to finish a chapter on, but any time you start a new chapter, there exists a risk that your readers will have forgotten what happened at the end of the previous chapter. It’s the vagaries of life intervening: you don’t necessarily jump into the next chapter right after finishing the previous one, and, even if the hook was good enough to emotionally pull you back to the story, sometimes it’s just the emotion that pulls readers back and they don’t necessarily recall the why.
This is important for my theory of questions, because it means that not all readers will notice every implicit question.
The risk is, of course, amplified by the way I’ve set up this podcast. In fact, I’ve more or less guaranteed shooting myself in the foot this way with a week between dropping each chapter.
Weighed against that, there is bingeing. Bingeing shall be my salvation! Even my wife has told me that she prefers to save up a few weeks and play them in succession.
Anyway, without being too on the nose, I’d like to remind you that in last week’s chapter we discovered Saskia mysteriously in a coma in a Dallas hospital in Mica’s present; maybe a week or so in the future of where Saskia is now.
Finally, before turning to reading this week’s chapter, I wanted to give a quick shout-out to the dad’s listening. After the introduction of Saskia’s mother last week, I’m happy to be reminded that Saskia’s dad is briefly, and fondly, recalled in this week’s chapter. And, as a small note of trivia: I have lived a version of the other side of this recollected conversation. More little ripples percolating into my art.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter thirty-eight, in which Saskia heads to Lone Star Park, the horse racetrack in Dallas.
— 38 —
Back to the Races
Lone Star Park didn’t have the same pull that Santa Anita had had. It was the difference between doing something for work and doing it for love, though obviously Mica had not yet been love at the time ...lust, maybe. Libido? Saskia smirked to herself.
Jamal cocked his head and his eyes lolled about, as if on a random walk search for an explanation. “You using AI to predict who wins?”
“Can’t a girl have a little fun?” Saskia gave the big man a disarming smile and turned back to her racing guide. She had admitted that she was a machine learning specialist. It made her cover story easier to embellish; hue close to the truth when telling a lie was the considered wisdom of the online forums she’d found devoted to grifters. That, be confident, and leave the mark wanting more. The mark didn’t exactly feel like the right term when her con was padding her heavyset accomplice’s wallet. “Let’s put fifty on Anne of Green Stables, and fifty on Spring Fling.”
“Happy to put fifty on a spring fling.” The Texan veterinary assistant raised his eyebrows suggestively.
Saskia brought her index finger to her lips and let her own eyes bounce left and right coquettishly. They were four races into her scheme and she was determined to have fun with it. With feigned innocence, she pretended to glance at her phone. “I don’t know what you mean. That’s just what my model is telling me.” In fact, tomorrow’s racing results told her that Spring Fling would finish back in the pack, but Saskia had made the call that it was more prudent to pick a couple of losers among her winners.
For a moment Jamal dropped the charade. “You aren’t worried about letting the machines make all the decisions?”
Saskia tipped her head to the side and raised her eyebrows back at him. She wondered what sort of alarmist media Jamal had been reading. “I’m sure Jeff only has my best interest at heart.”
“Jeff?”
Saskia held up her phone and waved it about. She had inadvertently adopted Mica’s appellation for her own imaginary AI assistant. “No need to be jealous.”
“Jeff don’t feel a thing,” Jamal smirked. “Can’t taste. Can’t smell. Can’t feel touch.” This last insight offered lasciviously. “Not something machines can do.”
Jamal’s opinion aligned uncomfortably with Mica’s first reaction to the idea that machines could feel; it really was a societal prejudice that cut across demographics. It was annoying since she’d picked Jamal in part because he didn’t seem to share any commonality with Mica. “Some of them can feel touch,” Saskia pushed back lightly, thinking of her own trash-sorting machine. “More than that, the big models have ingested the entire corpus of the internet. I’d kill to have that context. One percent would be awesome.”
“But does your Jeff understand what it’s readin’?”
Saskia shrugged. “Pretty sure I don’t understand everything I read.” She laughed breezily. This wasn’t a hill she wanted to die on. Not when she needed Jamal to keep cashing her winning tickets. “Go place our bets before the race starts.”
Jamal shook his head with a laugh. “You one superstitious techie!” He turned and headed for the betting windows.
With Jamal gone, Saskia pulled out tomorrow’s racing results page and scanned through the next couple of races. She’d asked Jamal to cash her first ticket and place her second bet, and then with each win she’d pretended to be increasingly fanatical. Each time insisting that Jamal make the trip to the betting window. To keep her companion invested, and assuage him of his tax implications, Saskia cut him in on the wins. She was having fun holding to her absurd woo woo beliefs, and she reveled in their apparent incongruity, not only with her own beliefs, but those of the character she was playing.
There was a peal of laughter three tables over and Saskia glanced up the track. Facing away from her was a woman, the spitting likeness of Mica. Saskia was still watching the woman, willing her to turn about, when Jamal returned.
“You know that lady?”
Saskia blushed.
Jamal’s eyes widened as he read into Saskia’s flushed face. “Girl, you know that lady? You two-stepping both ways?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Nobody’s one dimensional.” Saskia gave a wry grin that neither promised nor precluded anything. “You like to meet her too?” Leave it ambiguous; better to have Jamal fantasize about a threesome than shame him for his homophobia.
“Bring her over.”
“Another time. It’s just you and me today.”
Spending time with LLMs had deepened Saskia’s perspective on how environmental factors influenced prejudices; it was all in the training data. She wondered how she was affecting Jamal. She’d never thought of herself as fine tuning training data, but she now realized that in some sense that’s what she was: Jamal was a fully-formed functioning human, and yet she was tweaking his biases.
“You my girl today.” Jamal’s words were at odds with a distance that had crept into his body. His shoulders had stiffened.
Suddenly, Saskia was transported back to high school. To her father, interrupting a video chat with Robin, her first girlfriend. Jamal’s words and bearing echoed her father’s. Saskia had been model alignment data for her dad, bringing him into the 21st century. He had had strong beliefs around equality, but she’d updated them to include her community. That night, she’d assumed her father had been oblivious to what he had interrupted. Now, all these years later, she wondered if he had had some sense of what was happening. If he’d privately wrestled with it. She’d assured him that Robin was just a friend she was doing homework with. He’d smiled and headed off to bed . . . but had he really been so naive as to believe her story? Was Saskia, herself, the naive one? Perhaps her dad had been more sensitive than she’d credited him.
Jamal placed his big hand on her shoulder. “You spacing, girl.”
Saskia glanced down at Jamal’s hand. There was a scar that ran across his index and middle fingers. An accident from fireworks in his youth, or the by-product of an altercation? Was Saskia the one being naive? Had she risked everything slipping back in time? Back to change things. What if she changed somehow?
“Robin?” Jamal tried pulling her back into the moment, his hand sliding down Saskia’s arm. It was funny that, after all these years, Robin was still her go-to pseudonym when she wanted to be anonymous.
Saskia could feel the fabric of her blouse under Jamal’s hand. It was still clean and crisp from the overnight laundry service she’d paid extra for, the last time she slept. “I’m sorry.”
Jamal shrugged one shoulder, as if to brush the moment aside. “Look,” he said, producing a wad of cash in his other hand. With his thumb, he fanned the bills out.
Over the PA system, the announcer called attention back to the track, and the next race.
Saskia gave her head a quick tremor of a shake as if she too were brushing the moment away. “You got the tickets for the race?” She didn’t need to ratchet the wins up much further to cover her week’s expenses. It was time to wrap things up. This outing as the benevolent grifter wasn’t as fun as the movies suggested it would be.
Rufus here again. If you’re enjoying this——still following along 38 weeks after we started this journey——I’d like to ask you one little favor: please make a personal recommendation to a friend you think might also enjoy this story. I’ve been reliably told that such recommendations are by far the best way to grow an audience, and what could be more fun than having someone else to talk about the story with! I’d, personally, consider this the best (ever so slightly belated) birthday present of all time. And, if you’re listening to this long after it’s original post: it is a time travel story after all, so I’ll still happily consider it a birthday present :)
