The Algorithmic Portrait of Harry Larson: Part One
A portrait in greed.
Something was up with Harry Larson’s social feed. Notifications were pinging in almost as fast as he was driving. He couldn’t take his hands off the wheel—the car was a vintage hybrid—but he couldn’t resist a look at his phone. Several blurred blocks later he’d figured out the cause. His portrait had jumped in value. This triggered another question. What was the causation behind the cause? The deduction took just two more blocks. The artist had to be dead.
Larson placed a call to his business manager. One ring, two rings, three. Larson had a “five rings” rule with all of his people. Answer after five rings, or our business relationship is done. In the frictionless economy, it was so damn easy to replace people.
“Hey, Harry,” #HODL said. “How’s my favorite client?”
“What are my calling about?”
#HODL didn’t reply. Any question required an answer; another one of Larson’s rules. #HODL—actual name Elliot Schwartz—had three meatware assistants Larson knew of, and probably double that number of AI assistants. Five seconds had passed. With that kind of contracted intellectual capital, #HODL should have already had an answer.
“Oh wow,” #HODL said.
“Tell me what happened.”
“Shotgun.”
“Where?”
“His cabin up in Oregon.”
Oregon, Larson thought. Oh yeah, that was right. The artist had moved up there from Frisco.
“How old was he?”
Another short pause. Larson tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
“Thirty-six.”
“Damn,” Larson muttered. “Just a year out.”
“I don’t follow.”
#HODL had no culture. “Van Gogh was thirty-seven.”
“Oh well, can’t win them all.”
“I guess not.”
“You want me to arrange some flowers?”
What #HODL lacked in culture, he made up for with his knowledge of societal norms.
“Yeah, that’s good thinking,” Larson said. “Oh, have that fancy English company generate a note to go along with them.”
“Oh yeah, Marlovian. You want me to give them access to your personality grid?”
Larson rubbed his chin. “Nah. I barely remember the guy. Besides, I don’t trust those Brits. When you send the note, make sure to put it up on my social.”
“Gotcha. Anything else?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Larson ended the call. He looked at his watch. The client meeting in Seattle wasn’t for another four and a smidge hours. Was there enough time to get home and check on the portrait? The tires screeched as he turned the car around in the street. He couldn’t afford to risk missing a transfiguration. In general, a transfig was meant to last for two to three months, but recently the portrait had been playing up. The last but one change had only persisted for a couple of days. On the specialist forums, several other portrait owners had reported the same thing. Was there a connection to the artist’s death?
Twenty minutes later, Larson was back home. He rushed inside the house. The lights were flickering slightly, a sign that the home management system had switched over to standby power. It was a long story—a seemingly endless dispute between the state utility and an algorithmic trading firm.
He went through to the main living space. The automated blinds were down and it took a few seconds for the lights to come on. The dynamic, social connected, algorithmic portrait was the last thing to be illuminated. Larson saw himself. Naturally—no, synthetically—the portrait had already absorbed the news of the artist’s death. The death of its creator, Larson thought. What a trip. His instincts in the car had been right. There had indeed been a transfiguration. The entire style had changed. Chiaroscuro, it was called, a technique that played on the contrast between light and dark. On a less expensive display frame, the effect wouldn’t have worked nearly so well.
Beyond the surface style, Larson saw the change in the face. His face. As always, the portrait had captured his inner thoughts. The expression matched the one he’d seen in the car’s little vanity mirror. It was an ugly expression, one that said: “I’ve won again.” A man had died, a family had suffered a terrible loss, yet Harry Larson had benefited. To see the truth laid bare like that was too much for most people. But Larson wasn’t most people. He drew strength from being able to look inward.
How did the portrait produce such stunning insights? Despite his technical chops, Larson had practically no idea. There was probably only one person who’d ever really known, and he was now dead. The core algorithm that drove Larson’s portrait, along with the artist’s other commissions, was insanely clever; some people called it otherworldly. Annoyingly, it was one of the few things that Larson didn’t own. All he had was the customized frame and access to a simple modular algo that kept track of his biometric details.
He went over to the display and pressed the capture button on the side of the frame. Usually, he would have posted the image to his social, but not this time. The look of avarice on his face didn’t paint him in a good light, especially given that it was Global Charity Week. He stepped back to consider the portrait again. Was there the trace of a smirk on the lips? No, he told himself, it must have been there before. The refresh rate on the display was designed to be glacial; otherwise, dynamic effects got too disconcerting.
He still found himself moving closer to the portrait. Sometimes you had to do that to appreciate the incredible subtleties the algorithm was capable of. The temperature in the room seemed to fall away. The pools of shadow in the background were so incredibly dark. What he saw next made him pull back in fear. A shape shifting in the shadows. A black rose unfurling; no, a blasted tree twisting in the wind. When he turned around, he saw Jing Liling, his housekeeper, standing in the doorway.
“Mr Larson,” she said. “I thought you’d left for Seattle.”
“I had,” Larson replied, his voice shaky.
He rubbed his temples. Had it been Jing’s reflection he’d seen in the portrait? No, that didn’t make sense. The display technology produced fathomless black tones. It must have been a trick of the mind.
“I better get back on the road” Larson said, half to himself. “I’m a little behind schedule, so I’m gonna call a copter. Can you put the car back in the garage for me?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, and while you’re at it could you check on the PCU?”
“Playing up again?”
“Seemed that way.”
Jing nodded. Vintage car maintenance was one of her many skills, alongside HVAC engineering, horticulture, combat techniques, and haute cuisine. Larson walked out of the living space, and Jing closed the door behind them. She tended to stay away from the portrait, finding it unsettling. It was hard to blame her.
Larson walked outside and retrieved his travel bag from the car. As he waited for the copter on the lawn, his thoughts turned back to the algorithm. He was trying to remember if the old smart contract that governed the portrait had included any clauses about the artist passing away. It must have been a consideration. Creatives of all types—artists, musicians, writers, ad men—tended to be deeply troubled individuals. On average, they lived shorter lives than normal people; he was fairly sure he’d read that somewhere. Might the artist’s passing create an opportunity to own the algo outright? It was a question for a legal intelligence; either a meatware lawyer in a slick suit or the artificial kind.
The copter was on approach. Larson winced as the downwash from the rotors ripped through one of Jing’s immaculate flower beds. The copter touched down at the centre of the lawn and the side door popped open. He got inside. Dozens of tiny motors whirred as the seat adjusted itself to his usual preferences. Relaxing music then began to play. The flight operating system had picked up on his restless state of mind.
The flight to Burbank took just ten minutes. Five minutes later he was boarding the Hypervac. The premium capsule was about half full, and Larson recognized most of his fellow passengers. Annoyingly, there were a couple of neophytes who didn’t know the usual rules of engagement. They moved from their allocated seats to the two empty seats facing him. Predictably, they wanted to hear his views on the hottest AI startups. It was public knowledge that he was an advisor to a couple of specialist VC firms. In truth, the positions were mostly for show. In the long run, no human could hope to outperform an AI board member.
Just after the Frisco stop, #HODL was back in touch to say the flowers had been sent. Larson opened up his aggregated social feed. There were two new posts. The first one showed the flowers. They looked incredibly strange. Grayscale petals with angular edges, a translucent central stigma and spiral-shaped stamens topped with bone white spheres. Larson had no idea whether they were the result of 3D printing or freaky bioengineering. The second post was the accompanying note. Larson read it through several times. You had to hand it to those Brits. The note did indeed read like it had been penned by Shakespeare, or Marlowe, or the Earl of Oxford, or whoever the hell had written those old books. Looking up, Larson noticed both of the young businessmen staring at their phones. No doubt they were scrutinising the same posts.
Just under two hours after leaving Burbank, the Hypervac was pulling into the Seattle Downtown terminal. When he got topside, the sky was slate gray. Lord knows why they didn’t put at least part of the city under a geodesic. From the terminal, the client had laid on a driverless to their corporate campus. The fifty mile journey took just under thirty minutes. The campus was predictably gorgeous. There was onsite education including a top ranked university, indoor and outdoor sports arenas, and a licensed replica of the Olympic Sculpture Park back in Seattle. Larson guessed that the majority of the workforce lived within the landscaped grounds.
The driverless came to rest outside the HQ building. A client liaison was there to greet him. From the glazed look in her eyes, Larson guessed that she was stimmed. It was certainly one way to strip the emotion out of a business relationship. The liaison then took him to a fancy meeting room where he was given a rundown of the problem. It was the usual M.O.—a misbehaving algo in a sensitive part of the company. While he wouldn’t be able to publicize his work, which was frustrating, the client was promising a hefty fee uplift.
After the meeting, the liaison showed him to his temporary lodgings. There was no time to relax though. All through the evening, he was visited by a steady stream of starry-eyed execs. They were there to pay their respects, but they also wanted to hear Larson’s stories; his tales of tech derring-do, the famous algo rescue jobs that had made his name. There was no option but to play along. The client had purchased his services, and by extension his time. It was three in the morning before the last of his guests left. Finally, he was able to take a proper look at the smart contract. He quickly identified several gray areas, but it would take a proper legal mind to find the holes. He filled out a legal brief, then fired it off to a firm that #HODL had recommended.
He was up and around at lunch the next day. The liaison took him to the AI quarantine area, and left him alone to do his thing. He always insisted on privacy. It was an essential part of the Harry Larson act. The algo whisperer, they called him. There was no real magic to his work though. He was wholly reliant on a suite of powerful analytical tools. Some of the tools he’d built himself, others he’d purchased from the Chinese, the current leaders in the field of AI.
It took a couple of hours to get a handle on the scale of the problem. It was bad. There were red lights flashing across the board. The original training data had been full of holes, the network plumbing was on the verge of collapse, and he’d identified at least three historic resets that the client didn’t seem to know about. It was a frustrating situation all round. The job was going to occupy most of his intellectual bandwidth, making it difficult to focus on the portrait algo. By now, his competitors were sure to be sniffing around. Joris Jansen, Venture Daddy, Nebuchadnezzar V, and that fraud, Jack Nazarian. The moment he got out of the quarantine area, Larson fired off a note to #HODL, telling him to keep an eye on competitive developments.
That evening, the legal people sent through their initial findings. In summary, there weren’t any obvious holes in the smart contract. Larson had been pinning his hopes on the portrait upkeep arrangements, but the lawyers were saying “no dice”. The annual payments had been going to a cultural collective rather than to the artist directly. It could only be assumed that the arrangement would continue as before.
A little more digging revealed the collective was controlled by the artist’s widow. Larson had a vague recollection of having met her in the artist’s old Frisco studio. There might have been an argument, something about SF politics. Perhaps he could get #HODL to put together a research dossier on her. The artist had been famed for his chaotic lifestyle, and there was a good chance the widow was similarly inclined. Armed with some juicy rumors, it might be possible to build a case that she was unfit to have custody of the algo. On reflection, Larson decided to hold fire. As yet, the widow had done no harm to him.
The client work continued. It took two whole days to resolve the issues with the training data. One day to strip out the problematic real data, and another day to find a synthetic data provider to fill in the gaps. After that, there was another two days of rewiring the old capsule networks. On his last night at the campus, the client threw him a going away party. It was hardly the L.A. EXPer scene, but Larson appreciated the effort. Two of the original founders even showed up, looking half their documented age. Larson had never quite got used to the life-extenders—the weird marble skin, the vacant eyes, the shockingly weak handshakes.
In the end, he couldn’t wait to get away from the pristine campus and the eager execs. A driverless took him back to the Hypervac terminal in Seattle. On his way down to the platform, his phone started ringing. It was #HODL.
Larson picked up. “You got something?”
“Yeah. Where are you?”
“About to board my Vac.”
“Ah … You might want to get off in Portland.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Uh-huh. Word is that Jack Nazarian has already been to see the widow.”
“Already?”
“Yeah. Only left it a couple of days.”
Larson was about to call Nazarian’s behavior distasteful, but caught himself. It would have been the height of hypocrisy; the only reason he hadn’t visited the widow had been the client job. Nazarian had no right to be be sniffing around though. He’d always been at the tail end of the artist’s waiting list, and couldn’t possibly know about the algo’s precious qualities.
“Still there, Harry?”
“Yeah. What’s the connection with Nazarian?”
“Word is he was friends with the artist.”
Larson shook his head. “Jack doesn’t have friends. But thanks for the tip.”
“No problemo.”
Larson boarded the premium capsule. He put his bag down on the empty seat opposite him to prevent any unwanted interruptions. He pulled up the smart contract on his phone. By the time he found the clause he was looking for, the pod was already decelerating for the Portland stop. He picked up his bag and walked to the door. Once he got outside, he called a copter.
The flight out into the country gave him some time to think. The Nazarian tip had changed the game. Now Larson simply had to have the algorithm. Its value went way beyond the surface level of the portrait output. The algo could read a person’s mood. He’d seen it so many times in the past. Hell, the last transfig had been a case in point. Had the Larson in the portrait been saddened at the news of the artist’s death? No, of course not. His doppelgänger had already been thinking about the potential opportunity. From just one look at the portrait, he—the real Harry Larson—had been able to see that.
A soft alarm started chiming. Larson’s eyes went to the display on the copter’s forward screen. They were just a couple of miles from their destination. Looking around, he saw a sea of green. Clearly, the artist had been serious about escaping the rat race. The copter spent the next ten minutes trying to find a decent place to set down. It finally settled on a small grazing pasture beside what passed for a main road. The side door popped open and Larson got out. He’d have to walk the last mile in his designer sneakers.
It was a lovely day, which meant the bugs were out in force. La Casa Rosa, the artist’s residence, was at the end of a twisting gravel track. It was a predictably strange building, a hybrid metallic/wooden construction which had seemingly been designed around the existing trees on the plot. Larson also noted the high end security. Once you attained a certain level of notoriety, you had to learn about such things. Ignorance simply wasn’t an option when there were so many stalkers in the world.
He knocked on what he assumed was the front door. A couple of minutes later, the door swung open. The widow stood before him. She was barefoot, of course. There wasn’t a great deal of emotion on her face, certainly nothing that could be classed as grief. It could have been drugs or the result of a remote neural stimulation session with a counsellor. No, it certainly wasn’t the latter. Her gray eyes still looked sharp. When you were stimmed, you tended to lose that.
“Harry Larson,” she said, almost accusingly.
A promising start.
“The one and only,” he said.
“To what do I, a grieving widow, owe this pleasure?”
“I happened to be passing through and—”
“Happened to be?”
“Yes, that’s right. And I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to see inside the great man’s studio.”
The widow was about to reply—about to explode, more correctly—but somehow managed to stop herself. That told Larson a few things. One: she had exceptional powers of self-control; two: she wasn’t going to be a pushover; three: she’d been the one dealing with the artist’s business affairs. Point three made a lot of sense. When it came to financial matters, the artist had always seemed utterly clueless.
“Someone has been reading their smart contracts,” she said.
Larson smiled. He’d certainly been doing that on the Hypervac. There was a clause in the contract stating that as the portrait’s owner, he was entitled to visit the artist’s studio on a biannual basis. It was a special perk he’d paid a little extra for; perks being an idea that had been popular at the time. Granted, there was also a sub-clause about him announcing his visit in advance, but Larson was ready to argue that point if need be.
“I’m glad to be so transparent,” he said.
“Oh, you’re crystal.”
“Less time gets wasted that way.”
The widow attempted an ugly smile, but it wasn’t really in her nature.
“Very well,” she said.