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“She knows the song ‘Wild Thing,’ but sometimes she’ll sing it and other times she won’t,” Beck says. “Isadora?”

“Yes, Beck?”

“I brought you a new animal.” Beck delves in her huge handbag and pulls out a small stuffed toy. “This is a baby koala. Spelling: k-o-a-l-a.”

Isadora giggles. “It is nice?”

“Yes, very nice. Koalas are sleepy, and furry. They have claws, they eat eucalyptus leaves, they live in Australia. What else do you know about koalas, Isadora?”

The head seems to think: It tilts slightly, adjusts the focal length of its eye-lenses, then swivels on its neck and projects an image onto the brick wall using its eyes. It’s a photograph of a koala bear in a tree, holding her joey. “Koala,” Isadora says, in the singsong voice of a child reciting a poem, “Phascolarctos cinereus. Kingdom: animalia, phylum: chordata, class: mammalia—”

“Thank you, Isadora, that’s enough. You can power down now. Good night.”

“Good night, Beck. Good night, Clare.” The head abruptly becomes inanimate again, like a puppet whisked off of a hand. It’s disturbing, as though I’ve just seen something die.

Beck is pleased. “That was better than usual. She remembered you were here. In previous iterations she would have been so focused on the koala that she’d forget her manners.”

“You’re making a child robot?” I’m puzzled.

“The end goal isn’t a child AI, but I decided to give her a childhood; I’m testing Alan Turing’s Child Machine theory. He wrote that an AI might ultimately be more successful if one programmed a simple machine and allowed it to learn, like a child. I am letting Isadora ‘grow up’ like a real girl. How old would you say she was, if you spoke to her on the phone?”

“Seven, maybe? But she’s more like a childish adult, somehow. She’s a little ditzy.”

Beck laughs. “I like ditzy, I’ll try to keep some of that. But the goal is an AI that can pass the Turing test and then some. I want her to be empathetic. And I’m trying to make an AI that can understand beauty.” Beck pours coffee into two mugs and offers me one. We sit in the folding chairs and regard Isadora. From this angle, she looks like a pile of randomness.

I say, “I like that. But why beauty? I get slammed by critics for making art that’s ‘too beautiful.’ They always say beauty is elitist.”

“True beauty is not elitist. I want Isadora to be able to love. To find beauty and goodness in places that humans might not. To find something beautiful is to begin to love.” Beck turns her head and finds me staring at her; we lock eyes for a moment, and I look away, blushing. Beck hesitates, then continues, “Because Isadora is a tabula rasa in a way that babies aren’t, I can define beauty for her. She will value symmetry but also aberration, she’ll have an affinity for big-eyed children and puppies but also for crystalline structure and trigonometry. She’ll know that Black is beautiful and she’ll be a little partial to art made by women. She’ll find aging aesthetically pleasing.”

“She won’t be able to taste or touch. Or smell.”

Beck regards me with a certain steely humor I haven’t seen in her before. “What makes you so sure? She looks like a machine now, but in a few years computers will be inseparable from humans. She’ll be using our senses to take in the world. She’ll be able to experience everything we can, but more so.”

To me this sounds terrifying, but Beck seems pleased about it. She says, “I’m building Isadora around the problem of beauty because she’s going to be the curator in my virtual museum. I’m building the Museum of Lost Souls as her natural habitat. She needs a place to go when the world becomes too much, a place where all the lost things live.”

“I thought that was the internet?”

Beck grimaces. “Once upon a time the internet might have been that, but now it’s just a wasteland of porn and trolls. When I try to visualize the internet I imagine a desert full of burning cars and tornados.”

“Didn’t she just access Wikipedia? To find the koala?”

“No, I built her a private library. She’s not ready for the internet; maybe I’m just an overprotective robot mom, but I’m not sure I’ll ever unleash her unsupervised into the web. It’s too sick; there’s too much racism and sexism. Too much ‘ism’ altogether. Isadora could be an antidote to all that.”

“But doesn’t that mean she’ll be too innocent to understand the world? How can she comprehend beauty if she doesn’t know anything about ugliness and horror?”

Beck gets a distant look in her eyes. “We’ll see,” she says. It’s what I say to Alba to shut down a conversation. Beck stands up briskly. “Would you like to visit my museum?” She gathers some headsets and guides me to the middle of a large platform, at the far end of the studio, near the wall of servers. She helps me put on a headset, shows me how to use the hand controls. I stand still, feeling suddenly unbalanced, looking at blackness. I hear rain, oscillating fans, Beck walking away, small computer sounds—typing, a quick burst of music—then Beck returns. “I’ll come with you,” she says. “I’m right here.” Beck puts her hand on my wrist. “Are you ready?”

“I think so?”

“Here we go.” A huge, dim room materializes, and I see Beck’s silhouette standing beside me. Then everything is color: diffused sun comes through a huge skylight—we’re in the Detroit Institute of Arts, in the large courtyard, looking at Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals. Maybe this is what time travel feels like: boom, you’re somewhere else. I turn my head and then walk in a small circle, taking in the two long panels, frescos of factory workers manufacturing V-8 engines; I spot Henry Ford looking sour amid the swirl of activity. Other panels represent the pharmaceutical, chemical weapons and vaccine industries; raw materials; four races of humankind stare down from the highest panels like deities. Men and machines. Life and death.

“I haven’t been here in years,” I tell Beck. “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is.”

She nods. “I always begin here. It’s home in more ways than one.” Beck walks toward the door at the far end of the courtyard. I follow her, expecting to hit a wall. Before that happens, Beck uses her handset and the door swoops toward us; it makes me dizzy. She puts her hand on my wrist, turns me around. “This way.” We step into the next room, a tiny, dusty alcove with only one painting on the wall: The Concert, by Vermeer. It looks so real, but I don’t remember this painting hanging in such a forgotten place. “Wait, wasn’t this the one that was stolen from the Gardner Museum?” I ask.

“Yes,” Beck replies. “I put it in a little side gallery in the Louvre. I like to rearrange things. Why not?” I glance out the window and see the I. M. Pei glass pyramid against the gray skyline of Paris. There’s snow on the ground; someone has made a few snow angels, but there’s no one in sight. The light that falls on the painting is slanting winter-morning light.

I follow Beck through a long gallery in the Victoria & Albert Museum, strewn with discarded children’s toys and broken pieces of sidewalk, and punctuated by large trees whose crowns obscure the ceiling; a museum in Kolkata I’ve never been to called the Marble Palace, where all the paintings are so dark with varnish that they are dull brown mirrors; a plain, whitewashed New Orleanian church whose altar is covered in prosthetic limbs; a safe-deposit vault in a bank, where Beck unlocks a box and shows me a trove of love letters, before and after burning, and another box full of shed snakeskins; and then, a familiar door, a familiar room: sixteen wooden columns, six thirteenth-century pots, four softly illuminated Japanese screens and a bench. We are in the Ando Gallery at the Art Institute, where I first met Beck.