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It was a war old Tom would have never been able to fight. His need for reassurance and peacemaking would have made the ruthlessness of conflict impossible. He would have caved, for sure. But what he found now, in his first weeks as a lone wolf (and he would go entire days speaking no words out loud other than “Call,” “All in,” and “The number forty-two with the hot sauce, please”), was that life without the approval of a guiding figure was not the emotional wasteland he had always feared it would be. That he really could be content with being his own man—how had Patrick put it?—going his own way. Wasn’t that what true alphas did? And as for reassurance, does it come in sweeter, more concentrated form than the sight of bills growing in his desk drawer to little currency turrets, slowly but surely, indicating without a doubt that one is doing things right?
Things were going well, great even, and the troubles at the apartment were a small price to pay for his good fortune. Besides, he would probably move out soon, at this rate.
Yet Logan’s proposition posed a dilemma: If given the chance to make a ton of money by less-than-unimpeachable means, would he take it? If he agreed to play Logan’s game, making an easy living off of drunk businessmen, he wouldn’t be the best. In fact, he would have qualms about even calling himself a real poker player. But his fears about the future would be gone, and in no time he would again be a wealthy young man, someone who’d made it. It was, he realized, a question he’d managed to keep at bay throughout his years of meteoric success, when the two things had proceeded conveniently parallel: Did he really want to be the best at poker, or did he just want to be rich?
The hours crawled by at geological speed. If it weren’t for the dealer shifts—every thirty minutes, even with no game actually taking place, with change-of-the-guard-type solemnity—it would be easy to think the high-stakes room existed outside the domain of Time. A couple more regs showed up later in the morning, but neither stuck around long.
By the middle of the afternoon, conversation at table 14 sounded like something out of Beckett.
“We should start a game,” said Bryan.
“I’m gonna die if I don’t,” said Eike.
“I’m dead already,” said JJ.
“It’ll just be the four of us,” Calvin said. “Nobody else will play.”
“I don’t think he’s even coming,” said JJ.
“We should still start a game,” said Bryan.
lol
It was all so much bigger than her. There was so much at stake she barely understood, and yet here she was. Technological advancements threatening the future of century-old jobs, gender and age discrimination, the rights of the workers versus the owners’ drive to keep an industry afloat. Thousands of families, children, lives sweated out under the desert sun, the entire economy of a region, the political balance of a key swing state in the upcoming election. And at the center of it all, Mary Ann, a harpsichord, and the flimsy plastic toy bulging awkwardly against her left thigh.
The big reveal, the secret plan Wiles wanted Lindsay to unveil to the world, was a surprise partnership with Gifty’s Zach Romero. Romero was the most beloved young businessman in Las Vegas, so different from Wiles in age, aspect, and demeanor that Lindsay was having a hard time picturing them in the same room. Yet now the two richest men in town were joining forces, and would revolutionize the hospitality game forever, or so it seemed.
Gifty would provide the digital platform, a clever reimagining of their social media algorithm as an opt-in service for hotel visitors; Wiles supplied the infrastructure, his entire network of Vegas resorts available for capillary microcustomization of the tourist experience; an army of dedicated workertainers (as a sly PR initiative, job offers would be first sent out to Wiles Group personnel made redundant in the last two years) would strive to bend the confines of the collective to the benefit of the individual, constantly repackaging Las Vegas to suit each visitor’s algorithmically determined tastes and needs.
She could say no, and still have the life she wanted. This was how they tempted you, by presenting the way of the market as the only way to achieve what you want. It’s me or What’s New in Henderson forever, honey. But she could move to San Francisco on her own, she could finish her stories, query a few agents, wait the excruciating months or years before someone at the gates decided to let a young woman from the forgotten periphery of America inside the secret world of Letters. She could forget all this even happened.
She would say no, because she had to. Didn’t she?
He finally saw that he’d looked at the Cardanus incident all wrong. He’d focused on his own mistakes, obsessing about the ways he was different from the computer. But that wasn’t the important part. What mattered was how similar they were. The computer hadn’t played some radical new style that had taken them all by surprise. It had played more or less like they did, just better. So what was impressive wasn’t that a reinforcement learning system had gotten really good by playing trillions of hands. It was that they, the Brains, the simple, flawed humans, had been going in the right direction all along. That decades of slow, dumb, suboptimal evolution of the game—from the cowboy-hatted romantics to the number-crunching nerds—had gradually led humanity as a whole to the level of play Ray was able to express: not perfect, but pretty goddamn good. What mattered, that is, was not the fight between a multiagent AI and himself—an individual, discrete consciousness. What mattered was the discovery that humanity itself was a multi-agent system, and that each of us is but a node, a single agent, both fundamental and useless at the same time. And since humanity didn’t act like a supervised system, but much like Cardanus, a self-governing one, that meant that exploration of all possible policies was as important to it as the exploitation of established knowledge. To the whole huge system—Humanity—failing was good. It was vital.
fun
As a matter of fact, Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés looked a lot like the bistro at the Paris Hotel in Vegas. The tables outside with the same checkered cloth, the menus in dainty cursive, the waiters in black vests and white shirts. It had that same air of manufactured ambience, the same postcard Parisian flair, almost fake. It was the real thing, and still it wasn’t. Mary Ann had been too harsh on Las Vegas, or maybe she just had a talent for ending up in places like these. Maybe she was attracted to artifice.
lol
[...] What Tom began to understand now was that the same wanting that had looked to him like a sign of confidence really made Trevor a slave. He was a single-minded machine of desire, a straight arrow of want. He had an urge for something outside himself, constantly, endlessly. He’d wanted people, of course (and what was there more explicitly telling of an unquenchable thirst for people than the life of a pick-up artist?), he’d wanted places, he’d wanted recognition. Maybe that hunger, that need to engulf more life within himself that had seemed foreign and blissful to Tom, maybe that hunger wasn’t good. Maybe it wasn’t even pleasant. It made him shiver to say it—especially since it seemed to imply the opposite was true of himself—but for a brief, lucid moment it sounded undeniably true: people like Trevor would never be happy.
[...] Gallant, one suspects, similarly sees and meets people and then invents what becomes a precise landscape of their world. There is no vanity or self-aggrandizement in her process and the portraits are always tough as well as generous. For instance her satire is sharp in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” and yet she will take us beyond that satire to feel compassion for a character we would never have believed could be sympathetic. The tenderness does not replace or override the earlier portrait, Peter is still pathetic, but now there is that one moment where something happened, where the man's awareness of human nature was suddenly profound.