Short fiction: A Worthy Opponent

Most of my writing here has been about chess and visual cognition. I'm still working on a few posts in that direction, but I've also been trying to write some short fiction, too, and thought I'd share this here. Playing chess bots got me thinking about the concept of an AI having a personality and this story is the result. Probably a little different than the usual blog post here, but I also thought you folks might be my best audience. With that, enjoy!

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I.
“At least he’s finally using it.” she thought.

Grandpa’s entire face was twisted in a scowl. His arms were locked at his sides, his hands gripping the seat of his chair. Every few seconds he’d rock back and forth slightly, a small quaver that transitioned to a few toe-taps before dying off. Shalece watched but didn’t want to breathe for fear that she’d break the spell. If he noticed that she noticed that he’d finally turned the machine on, it would definitely be a problem. Grandpa had never been a man who liked admitting that he’d lost, even if you didn’t think you were playing a game. But this is exactly what she’d been hoping he’d do for more than a week now. “Just try it...” she had said after his initial scoffing, “...it’ll keep you from getting rusty.”

That had been a poor choice of words, apparently. No point reminding herself of that - bad choice of tactics. At least she learned one approach that wasn’t going to work, though. Her second strategy had been about as passive as you could get: She had unboxed the machine, set it up, and left. Nothing she was going to say was likely to be as effective as the simple fact of the machine’s presence on the table: A silent promise that Grandpa could have the one thing that she knew he missed more than anything. Much as she might have preferred to push against his stubbornness until he gave in, she had learned from him a long time ago that she was often better off letting him wander out of his resistance on his own.

Suddenly he raised his right hand up from the seat and his finger shook a little as he held it over one of the buttons on his side of the console. A moment’s hesitation and then he pushed. There was a short pause and she held her breath again, not sure what was coming. But then there was a gentle chime and the lights around the rim of the machine turned green.

“Draw!” Grandpa said, with a smile. “I could have told you that once we got it down to the Rooks. You got those pawns on the f- and h-files and there isn’t a damn thing for it.”

“So you like it?” Shalece said tentatively, stepping towards the board. Maybe that was too much: The scowl came back almost immediately as he turned away from her and looked at the pieces. “It’s alright.” he said, “It’s alright.” He was still trying to sound skeptical, but he was also setting the board back up for another game. Now that was as much of a victory as she had ever hoped for. “Well, I’m glad Grandpa - I’m really glad.” she said as she headed back towards the dining room, “After all, it was expensive enough.” A little jab, but he returned her grin before turning back to the board and starting to reset the pieces.

II.
She had had the idea shortly after the stroke. He’d recovered about as well as you could expect for a man of his age and bad habits, but his mobility wasn’t what it had been. Not by a long shot. “I can walk fine,” he barked at her that time she went with him to the Commons, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing holding my hand and whatnot.” He’d held on hard to that hand on the train though, refusing the seats people offered him and swaying around with every curve in the track. She’d insisted on the elevator instead of the escalator and he loudly grumbled about how grimy and slow it was for what felt like an endless two-floor ride (damn the Mezzanine level!). He strode out of the open doors with a bit of swagger and she started to wonder if maybe she’d misjudged. Maybe the train wasn’t something he could really do, but maybe the walk itself would be no problem. But then he fell off of nearly every curb they had to cross. A guy coming the other way bumped into him and he almost went down. Finally, right in the middle of the scramble intersection at the northwest corner of the Commons he just froze - got stuck or something and his legs wouldn’t do what his brain was telling them to. The light changed, the horns started up honking, and she knew that he knew, too. Nothing to say about it if everyone understood what the situation was, so neither of them said a word. She just walked with him into the park, sat down on a bench next to one of the statues of somebody or other on a horse, and watched him get settled before she pulled out her book.

The men at the chessboards were his friends - some of them for decades - and it was good to see them all shouting at him and waving him over to their board to look at some position they were arguing about. Good for him, that is. Shalece had never been able to feel like this was a friendly place. Everybody talking trash while they played, talking trash while they watched you play, and just filling the air with this confrontational street-chess shit. She knew it was one of those things where it was all in fun, they all liked playing, and there were a million stories about these guys helping each other out when life got real. Didn’t mean she liked hanging around it, though. Grandpa had taken her a few times when she was a teenager and she could keep up with them well enough on the boards, but she hated the vibe. Her strategy was to say nothing - just eyes on the board, know what the clock said, and always be thinking about what your opponent wants to do the most. Whatever that turns out to be, you stop that shit and do what you want instead.

She could never tell if Grandpa was disappointed that she didn’t want to keep going to the Commons. It was one of those things where he was either thinking it was a shame she wasn’t tough enough to put up with the BS on display there, or maybe he was thinking that it was a shame that the level of BS put his granddaughter off playing. Whichever it was (and it could have been a lot of other things, too) he wasn’t about to let you know what he really thought. It just didn’t come up again, which made today the first time she’d been back here in at least 7 or 8 years. Funny how much it sounded the same even though the men were all old now. There were a few young guys, sure, but mostly what she could see from the base of the statue was an awful lot of greybeards and whitehairs. She put the book away and just took the scene in for a while instead.

“OH SHIT! That’s mate in 3, fool, but you don’t see it. Don’t worry though - this other guy here does.”

“Yeah he does. He’s about to show you, too. Learn a little something.”

Yup - still pretty much the same place.

III.
There wasn’t anything complicated about it, but simple situations can be just as puzzling as the complex ones. He wasn’t safe to walk on his own in the city. And yes, Shalece would walk with him, and so would her dad, and so would a bunch of other people, but the simple thing was that it meant he couldn’t just go somewhere when he wanted to. They got the groceries worked out, and they put together a schedule for people to rotate in and go for walks throughout the week, so it wasn’t like he was going to be a complete shut-in. Still, losing the freedom to move when and where you want to is a big loss.

“So?” he gruffed at her over coffee one day, “What are you going to do about it? I mean, I can sit here and complain about it, but what? Doesn’t change anything. Just got to figure out what I’m doing instead.” And he would. She knew that. He was still a smart and curious man and he’d find something to occupy his mind. But chess had been such a big part of his life for so long that she had to imagine he couldn’t just turn it off. She could take or leave the atmosphere at the park, but the game was a lovely thing to have and a hard thing to lose. It had to bother him that he wasn’t going to get his daily fix of complicated endgames and weird-ass gambits nobody had heard of (“Capablanca played that one in Mar del Plata in 1922! Read a damn book and you might learn something.”). The two of them still played every now and again, but he couldn’t help but fall back into teacher/coach/sensei mode with her, which they both found too damn frustrating after a while. He liked her company, but that just wasn’t the kind of game he was looking for.

She looked out the window at the people walking by the cafe. Were there people who had a side hustle where they’d be your chess buddy or something? God, that was probably a weird minefield of oddballs. And it’d be like the perfect racket for someone looking to rob old people. No, scratch that. Maybe she could talk to the guys at the park and see if anyone would be willing to go to Grandpa’s place once a week or something? Thing was his house wasn’t close by. It could be 45 minutes on the train easily, and it was worse in a car. She bet they’d make an effort for a while, but then again, those guys weren’t exactly the most mobile individuals themselves. Besides, the point of it was to be at the boards in the Commons.They’d even sweep snow off of them in wintertime when it was cold and slushy as hell. No. She’d have to think of something different.

There were a bunch of online platforms - maybe he’d be willing to get an account so he could play people that way? The man had a deep and abiding contempt for social interaction via the internet, though, so she imagined that wasn’t likely to be something he’d be willing to give a fair shake. “Who the hell are these people?” He’d say when he caught her scrolling through her timeline on her phone, “You don’t know. They could all be a bunch of teenagers who stole your friends’ shit and are messing with you on these accounts. Unh-uh, Not. For. Me.” But what then?

“Nope.”

“What?”

He was watching her watching those people streaming by on the sidewalk. “Whatever idea you’re trying to have right now isn’t one that should come into the world. You’re trying to figure out how to fix something and I’m saying that there isn’t anything to fix. You’ve got to just let this one be.”

Maybe. Maybe. But then the idea came and when it did, it seemed so obvious she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before. Oh, there were some missing details, but the plan was there and it was a good one. She looked down at what was left of her chai, but she knew he could tell even if she didn’t make eye contact. No real point trying to hide it, and he harrumphed as he slowly worked himself up from the table to throw away his cup.

IV.
It was expensive as hell AND it was also back-ordered as hell, but when it arrived she knew that the AMR Pegasus was worth the money and the wait. What it looked like was an ordinary solid tournament chessboard, but literally underneath that was the beating heart of the strongest chess AI the world had ever known. It still blew her mind that you could analyze your games with an engine and see what the optimal move had been at every step. The sea-change in how machines played chess had come so fast - first ordinary people were starting to get beat by computers, then they couldn’t win, then the occasional GM was getting beat, then they couldn’t win, and now you could order your own invincible chess AI from Radio Shack. OK, there wasn’t any Radio Shack anymore, but they definitely would have kept this thing in stock.

Yes, the man had been skeptical of the whole idea and maybe somehow a little insulted, but she knew she’d get the better of him eventually - and she had. Once the dam broke, he was playing game after game with the machine, writing down the moves in the same cheap 1-subject notebooks he always used (“$1.29 at the Walgreen’s!”), and damned if he wasn’t actually smiling sometimes when he played. All in all, it was well worth it and maybe even better than the park - no grandstanding, no shouting, but the same beautiful moves and daring attacks. She couldn’t visibly revel in the outcome, but she still felt great. You had to let small changes accumulate around Grandpa and be patient that you’d end up somewhere good. It didn’t always work, but it was damn satisfying when it did.

She wasn’t prepared for the curveball he threw her way about a month after he started playing though. It was an ordinary day and should have been an ordinary visit - a few short pleasantries while he opened the door, a whiff of irritation that she’d interrupted his latest game, and then they’d take up their usual positions: Him at the board talking out loud to the machine like it was one of his friends from the Commons, her sitting nearby reading or knitting until he waved her over to look at something he thought she needed to see. This time though, he opened the door and he had the newspaper in his hand, folded back to the crossword. “You know a four-letter word for “thin sword?” It ain’t FOIL, either.” She stepped in and looked over at the table to see an empty chessboard. “EPEE might do the trick.” “Oh, Goddamn!” he said, holding the paper up against the wall to print his still-perfect capital letters in each square.

She considered the situation for a second and decided that the only thing to do was the obvious one. How else was she going to find out?

“You’re not playing a game?”

He was still filling in squares - EPEE clearly broke open a logjam in the bottom left corner. “Amir’s sick,” he said, not even looking up from the puzzle but flicking back and forth between the clues and the grid.

He’d been calling the machine that for a while. It had different bot settings with different personalities, but Grandpa hadn’t wanted to fuss around with those. The baseline bot was an adaptive AI that played a little tougher after you won and a little weaker after you lost, eventually settling down to more or less your own Elo rating. It also adjusted its own play to the openings you tended to use, the tactics you tended to see best, and so on. Because it was the default setting it didn’t have any kind of clever name - it was just labeled “AMR Pegasus” like the machine, which Grandpa had decided to refer to as Amir. It gave him something to shout when he got particularly pissed off at something the machine did, which she had to admit was kind of funny. This, though...what the hell did he mean?

“What do you mean he’s sick? Is something wrong with it?” She pulled out her phone and started looking for troubleshooting videos. “We can do a factory reset, I bet - they save all your settings to the cloud so you aren’t going to lose anything. Did you try...”

He cut her off. “I said he’s sick. You don’t make a man play when he’s not feeling himself. Give him a day or two, that’s all. Don’t poke at him, either.”

She just nodded, but she had a cold feeling in her gut. When he was still in the acute phase of recovering from the stroke she’d been reading a lot of stuff online about what the aftermath might be like and steeling herself for the worst. She had a few friends who had been through similar things with older relatives and listened to the things they had to say, too. Something one of them had said came back to her now: “One of the hard parts is that there are these gray areas.” Josh had said, “I’d be talking with her and everything would seem fine. She’d be keeping up her end of the conversation, no trouble remembering people, nothing. But then out of nowhere there’d be like this record-scratch moment. Like all of a sudden she’d say something about the baby and I’m thinking ‘What baby?’ Then she says a little more and you start to think oh no she’s thinking she’s got a baby and now you wonder if something’s actually really confused in there. But then maybe she says a little more and you wonder if it was just a funny train of thought that got a little tangled up coming out, or maybe just a normal senior moment or something. It can be weird.”

Gray areas. That stuck with her.

She’d been watching and listening to him ever since the hospital, looking for any signs that he was starting to lose it. She hadn’t noticed a thing and now she was cursing herself for getting complacent. She’d let herself get lulled by what looked like a solid recovery, and now she’s standing here right in the middle of this foggy-as-shit gray area and has no idea what to do. Does he think it’s a real person playing through the machine somehow? Maybe he just doesn’t get what an AI is...that wouldn’t worry her much, just some generationally-appropriate tech confusion. On the other hand, is there some other confusion here that means there’s a bigger problem brewing?

“Don’t.”

She realized she’d let her gaze settle on the board. Shit.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t trouble the man. He’ll get better faster if you just leave him alone.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Alright, alright. I’ll leave him alone.”

“Good,” he said. “6-letter word: X-MAN WHO DEALS A MEAN HAND OF CARDS. How the hell am I supposed to know that shit?”

V.
It wasn’t long before Amir did indeed recover from whatever ailment he had. Grandpa was back and playing (and shouting) at the board just like before, and Shalece couldn’t see any other signs that something was off for a while.

Then it happened again. Not quite the same way, you understand, but a variation of what he’d done before. Amir wasn’t sick when she came by and found him not playing a few weeks later, but he was sad. She decided to roll with it and they did word games together instead of the usual. The sadness apparently stuck around a little while (though sometimes the machine was still feeling up to playing it seemed), and then he was back. Distracted was the word she got one time, but Grandpa was downright peppy about that. “He’ll learn. Got to keep your mind on the game! Hard lessons incoming, Amir.” On it went, until it felt like most of the time she was getting as much information about Amir’s mood as she was about the games. Grandpa seemed to sense that maybe this wasn’t sitting well with her eventually, even though she tried to keep her best stone face going. It was back to talking about games, unfair crossword clues, and the regular day-to-day stuff then for a while. A few more normal visits, but not enough that she was taking anything for granted. Then one day when he was playing a game, unprompted, he says “Amir’s feeling himself today - little spring in his step.”

An invitation. Only thing is to accept it. “Oh yeah? What do you think that’s about?”

“Hell if I know. Warm weather getting to him, maybe.”

“Mmm.” It would be normal if it wasn’t an AI he was talking about. It would also be normal if her Grandpa had been the kind of man who played make-believe in any way, shape, or form, but he absolutely was not. Never had been. He read her books when she was little, but they were always non-fiction - kids books about history and science and stuff like that. “All kinds of interesting stuff that’s real.” he used to say, “I like paying attention to that.” Was he finally coming around to the merits of pretend play in his old age?

That was what her dad thought. “Come on, give him some room, Sha. It’s just him up there most of the time and he misses having all his friends around every day. We all come calling when we can, but you know it’s not the same. He’s recreating some of that feeling with the board, that’s all.”

“Dad, he just doesn’t do stuff like that, though.”

“You think that means he can’t even if it’s going to make him a little happier?”

“Of course he can, I just don’t think he would. It’s just...weird.”

Her dad shook his head, “I don’t think it’s that weird. I think he’s having fun. It was a hell of an idea, Sha, and it’s doing wonders for him. For real. I go over there and see him and he’s playing, he’s studying, he’s plotting his next steps to outfox Amir. It’s good.”

“Dad, don’t tell me you call it that, too.”

He held his hands up, palms to the ceiling. “It’s what he calls it! I’m not going to argue with him about what he calls his computer. Sha, he’s doing alright. He’s taking care of himself, he’s taking care of his home, and he’s imagining that a computer is one of his friends. I’m not worried.”

VI.
They were all good points, but it still just felt off to her. Alright, though - time to be good and self-critical: What was she worried about, really? Was she worried that he was still feeling so lonely he was talking to an AI? Was she worried that he’d had another stroke and no one was going to do anything to treat him until it was too late? Was she worried that he was projecting his own feelings onto the AI to try and tell everybody stuff he was thinking that he didn’t want to say out loud? Was she worried that...

“You think I’m crazy.”

So much for the stone face. “Grandpa, I don’t...”

He waved a hand sharply in front of his face. “Don’t call the hotel with the padded rooms for me yet, Sha. I’m fine.”

She was trying to think of a clever way around what she wanted to say, but the longer she took, the more fake it was going to sound.

Well. Alright.

“I don’t understand how your computer can be sick. Or sad. Or anything. When you say that, it...confuses me. I’m trying to figure out what you mean and I’m worried there’s something going on with you that no one knows about.”

He grinned. “Baby, if you ain’t got something going on that nobody knows about, you ain’t gonna be much of a chess player.” She knew she was supposed to laugh, but she couldn’t. He sighed and hit a button on the machine. He sat there a minute, clearly taking his own time to figure out how to say something. Then: “You always had a hard time with my friends.”

She shook her head. “Not with your friends. With the place.”

He waved his hand again. “Same thing.”

“No, I don’t think it is. They don’t go home and shout at everybody do they? They’re not standing around at church bragging about how smart they are and how dumb everybody else is, are they? It’s what they do there, Grandpa, and that’s what I don’t like.”

He looked at her coolly, taking that last bit in.

“Yeah, alright. I guess it is the place a little, but they’re people in a place that do what they do when they’re there. It ain’t about the shit-talk and the bragging, Sha. That’s just - what the hell do they say now? Trolling, or whatever. No one plays there just so they can be mean to somebody.”

She snorted, “Could have fooled me.”

“It’s just pressure, you know? The game itself is pressure, but so’s your opponent. You learn how to respond under some pressure because it brings something out of you. That’s what it’s about.”

“I don’t follow, Grandpa.”

“I’m saying. I go down there and I play, and I talk my fair share of shit, and I have been known to say a disparaging thing or two to a young man who thought he could outfox me with the Benoni.” He paused for effect and shot her a sidelong glance. Alright, she couldn’t help it - she laughed at that one, remembering when she thought she had his number with that opening.

Her laughter earned her a grin, “But what I’m really doing is finding out who everybody is.”

“Who everybody is?”

“Yeah...yeah.” He leaned forward, looking down at the floor while he gestured. “Like, who gets scared of leaving stuff hanging when they’ve got to press an attack? Who likes keeping you cramped up on your side of the board and just squeezing the hell out of you? Who preps like crazy for a week and then gets all pissed when you open with the Modern?”

“What does this have to do with your AI being sick?”

He sat back up and looked at her. “I’m telling you. Play with somebody for long enough and you learn who they are. You don’t have to do no small talk or nothing after a while. You can just tell shit.”

“But, Grandpa, this is where you’re losing me. It’s an engine, you know? I mean, the same board got built hundreds of times so far with the same code installed in it.”

“Not the same.” He snapped immediately. “This is the only one that’s played me.”

Touché. But still. “Grandpa, I just...”

“...don’t get it. I know, baby. I know.” He looked a little sad at this. “But it’s alright. Just trust me that I’m not losing my mind. It’s all still rattling around up here the same way it always was.”

She wasn’t going to get any further, but then again, neither was he. She took a deep breath and decided that had to be good enough for this time. “Promise?”

“Yeah. I promise.”

VII.
Endings can sneak up on you. In a game of chess, you can be thinking through plans for a complicated middlegame when your opponent starts forcing trades, or maybe you do the same because the simplifications feel like natural moves. Either way, next thing you know you’ve coasted into a position that just doesn’t have much left in it. Maybe a rook on each side plus a minor piece, or maybe it winds down to a king standing around looking at what used to be a bustling kingdom and is now just some disconnected pawns. Anyway, it’s possible to plan for an ending and maybe even arrive there on your own terms. They also have a way of finding you out regardless of what you do or don’t do.

This one wasn’t a bad one as they go. An excruciating pain above his belly one evening, followed quickly by a call to 911 that he made himself (“It’s the big one.” he’d said to the operator, “Tell them to get here in a damn hurry anyway, though.”) and then a whole lot of rushing to the hospital to hear news that everyone expected given the circumstances. A day, maybe two. An aortic aneurysm for which there was nothing left to do that wasn’t a stupid risk for little reward. Pain that could be managed in the meantime, but an inevitable finale. The good news was that he was awake, he wanted to see people, and he was still himself even now.

Shalece walked into his room and he looked a lot better than she thought he might. He was propped up in bed, eyes maybe a little glassy from the painkillers, but he saw her shuffle in and grinned. “Come on - sit down, sit down.” he waved at the desk chair next to his bed just like he would if it was his place. She got herself settled and looked up at him and he was just looking back. It was funny - she was so used to him grumping around and hurrying off to whatever else he was doing that him just looking back at her steadily felt a little strange. She saw her dad in his face and that meant she saw a bit of herself, too. She tried to stop - she really did. But damn, there it was welling up in her throat and all at once the sobs just burst out of her mouth and she started crying as hard as she’d ever cried before.

“Shit!” Her grandpa said, pawing at the other side of the bed for tissues that he thrust at her.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry.” she choked out between sobs.

He took her hand in both of his and patted it until she quieted down. “Shalece, don’t you apologize. I know. I know.”

“No,” she said. “I’m just falling apart and that’s no way to spend...to spend...”

“It’s every way to spend the last little bit of time together. And even if you were doing something different, it would still be our time and that would be alright, too. Don’t matter what happens right here at the end. We had all that good time before we got here and so the ending...well, it’s just gotta happen now. Play it out.”

He looked down for a second.

“Thank you for bringing me Amir. I know I was a pain in the ass about it, but he’s a fun dude. I can’t tell you how much it meant knowing you wanted me to keep playing. I know you never liked playing out in the Commons, but well, it was good to have a little bit of that going on.”

She nodded. He kept looking at her and shifted around a little after a while, almost furtively. She knew something was coming. “Listen,” he said, “He’s gonna get lonely, you know...after. Promise me you’re not just going to box him up or something.”

“No, no...I won’t do that.”

He screwed up his face into his familiar scowl. “I’m serious now. You can’t just put a man on a shelf after he loses his friend. He’s gonna have to work through some shit. Can’t do that alone.”

“I get it.”

He nodded slowly and patted her hand again. “No. You don’t, but that’s still alright.” There was an in-between sort of silence before he spoke again. “Hey now. I want you to know this. I love you so much, Shalece, and I’m so proud of you. I’m sitting here saying goodbyes and thinking about all kinds of shit in between people coming in and out, and well...” He stared past her for a second. “What it is, is that I’m going to miss you.”

Why it came out of her mouth she could never say, but the crying turned into a grunt of laughter: “No you’re not! You’re gonna be dead!”

He looked dumbstruck for a heartbeat, and then he laughed and laughed and laughed. She did too, and they rocked back and forth with it until the aftershocks calmed down. He squeezed her hand and pulled her in for a hug and a kiss. “Now you get out of here. That one was too good for anything to come after, baby.” She kissed him on the forehead, hugged him one more time, and waved a quick goodbye on her way out the door.

And that was it.

VIII.
Except that wasn’t it, because there are all the things that have to come after. There are bills to pay and accounts to close. There are forms to sign and people to call and seemingly endless decisions about what to do with the remnants of a man’s life. Ultimately, of course, it came down to Amir - shit, the AMR Pegasus. The board. The...thing.

Dammit...fine.

Amir.

There was no way she was going back on what she’d told her Grandpa, but then again she wasn’t entirely sure what she was supposed to do. Was she supposed to play on her Grandpa’s profile? That didn’t seem right (and she’d get her ass kicked pretty quickly - she never got as good as him) but was making a new profile the same as playing with Amir? What did her Grandpa believe or understand about the hardware vs. the software of the thing? Was it putting Amir “on the shelf” to play with the other bots so she didn’t screw up the parameters that were refined by playing all those games in the apartment? She sat there for a good hour just staring at the board and thinking. There was something here that she just didn’t quite understand - just a little beyond her reach. It meant so much to her Grandpa, though...of all the things they could have talked about right before he died, he’d been worried about this machine. She sat back and sighed. She loved him so much, but there were always these things about him that were just impenetrable and that he didn’t want to try and explain. Honestly, it was just like...

...and there it was.

IX.
There were a few looks of recognition from the older guys as she walked into the patio area where all the boards were. No one said anything to her - they were all too engrossed in the action on the 64 squares. The usual clacking of pieces on stone, of hands smacking clocks, and the occasional string of curses filled the air as usual. She stood there a while, just kind of taking it in and wondering how exactly to do what she needed to do here.

Eventually, one of the old guys walked towards her, looking at the bundle she held under her arm with suspicion. He’d come to the funeral, she remembered, so he probably guessed she was Grandpa’s family.

“You Shalece?”

That was a surprise. “Uh, yeah.” she answered.

“Reggie.” He shot her an upwards nod. “Hey, I’m real sorry about your granddad. That man was a fine chess player, tell you that. Schooled a lot of these young ones here about a few things before he got sick.”

“I bet he did.” she said with a smile, noticing that a few of the younger guys at the tables were shaking their heads overhearing this, maybe remembering a few particularly rough lessons.

“He talked about you all the time. One of these guys would play something he didn’t like and he’d be all like ‘My granddaughter opens with that all the damn time, but she don’t fuck it up like you just did!’” He and a few of the other old guys started laughing out loud and she couldn’t help but join in. “Oh shit - I probably shouldn’t just be dropping f-bombs like that, but you know...”

“No, no - don’t worry about it.” She said.

Another guy wandered over. “So you want a game?”

She looked down at the bundle under her arm. “No. Not really.” She hefted the box up in front of her and held it out. “This was Grandpa’s - it’s an...it’s called Amir.”

One of the young guys turned to look and did a double-take. “What? Oh shit! That’s one of those digital boards with fuckin’...” he caught her eye and looked embarrassed, “...with uh, with Stockfish 18 or something onboard.”

“That’s right.” she said. “He’d been playing with it for the last few months and told me...” she hesitated. That it would get lonely? “He told me to make sure it got some use. I figured you all might like to...try it?”

The old guy who’d started the conversation took the box from her without a word and set it down on the ground to open up. A few of the young guys swept pieces off a nearby board and then put them back on top of AMR once he was in place. “Now hold on...hold on.” The first guy said as he made a big show of looking all around for the power button. “It’s the big green button, man.” said one of the younger guys. “Yeah, come on and hit the biggest button you can see, Reg...I want to see what this thing’s got.” said another. “Any of y’all give me any shit,” said Reg as he pushed the button in, “and I will tell this man to show you NO mercy.” A chime. A ripple of green light around the rim of the board, and the magnets underneath shifted so that a white pawn moved up to e4. The crowd murmured at the sight of the pawn moving on its own which, she had to admit, was gratuitous and also pretty cool.

Reggie looked back at Shalece. “Um...you want to come pick this up later, or do you want someone to...”

“No,” said Shalece. “That’s alright. I brought a book.” She walked to her usual spot and sat down with an ear turned towards the boards.

A moment later and “b3?” came an incredulous voice from the direction of AMR’s table. “Motherfucker think he’s Hikaru.” “Don’t need to be Hikaru to beat you, fool.” came someone else. “Sit your ass down and get beat.” “I got a draw off Hikaru online one time,” said another guy. “Yeah, I heard about that. There was a big story in the “Ain’t Never Happened” gazette that week.” Laughter all around. Pieces clacking. And above it all, she kept hearing the name: “Alright, Amir.” “Oh shit! Amir got you in trouble!” “AMIR. WHAT THE HELL IS...oh. Aw no.”

She stared for a while at the cluster of men all hovering over the AI - yeah, there was something here that she wasn’t quite seeing. That was alright though. She knew it was there.