Summary
Caleb goes down the hall, examining some masks on the wall. He stops at a door that is open and lets himself in. There is a Jackson Pollock painting on the wall and a telephone that he picks up. The telephone asks for a keycard, but when Caleb goes to use it, Nathan calls out to him from a darker part of the room and tells him that he does not have access to the phone. Nathan is clearly drunk and asks him who he planned to call. "I was just wondering how the phone worked," Caleb says.
Caleb tells Nathan that there was a power cut, and tells Nathan he couldn't get out of his room. Nathan informs him that they have to do this or the security of the facility becomes compromised. Caleb leaves and goes back to his room.
The next morning, a woman comes into Caleb's room with a tray. When Caleb goes to find Nathan, Nathan refers to the woman as Kyoko and asks what Caleb wants to do that day. "I'm still trying to figure the examination format," Caleb says, suggesting that conversation might not be the best tool. Nathan thinks they should try and figure out how Ava feels about Caleb.
Ava: Session 2. Ava holds up a drawing she made, but she does not know what the drawing is of. "What object should I draw?" she asks him, and he tells her that she ought to choose. Ava asks if he wants to be her friend and suggests that their conversations are one-sided. "You learn about me, and I learn nothing about you. That's not a foundation on which friendships are based," she says.
Caleb asks what she wants to know, and she says she wants to hear what he chooses, parroting his comment about her choosing something to draw. He tells her that he's 26, he works at Nathan's company, Blue Book, the world's most popular search engine, named after Wittgenstein's books. He tells her he lives in Brookhaven, Long Island, which is a five-minute walk from his office, and they smile at one another. She asks him if he's married and he tells her he is single. He then tells her he is an only child who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and that his parents were both high-school teachers, but they died in a car crash when he was 15. He was in the car, and spent the next year in the hospital, which is how he got into coding.
Ava compares Caleb to Nathan, but Caleb says that Nathan is like the Mozart of coding, having invented the search engine when he was 13. "Do you like Mozart?" she asks, to which he responds, "I like Depeche Mode." She then asks him if he likes Nathan, and he hesitates, before saying yes. "A good friend?" she asks, and he tells her that he and Nathan just met each other. Suddenly, there is a power cut. Caleb realizes he is once again locked in the room.
In the red light, Ava stands and tells Caleb that Nathan is not his friend. "You shouldn't trust him. You shouldn't trust anything he says," Ava says. The power comes back on, as do the surveillance cameras, and Ava continues in a conversation about books and art, as though nothing happened in the interim. Caleb looks disoriented, but plays along.
That night at dinner, Kyoko serves Nathan and Caleb dinner. When Kyoko accidentally spills something, Nathan becomes infuriated, snapping at her. Caleb tries to apologize, but Nathan insists that she doesn't speak English, a precaution against her listening in on business meetings. After dismissing her from the room, Nathan says, "No matter how rich you get, shit goes wrong. You can't insulate yourself from it," and pours some wine.
He brings up the power cuts, and when Caleb asks why he cannot have the people who installed the power come back, Nathan says he can't do that because he had them all killed after they installed it. Caleb cannot tell if he's joking and Nathan asks if he has anything to report. "I assume you're watching everything that's happening on the CCTV," Caleb says, and Nathan agrees that he is, but insists on hearing Caleb's take. "There was one interesting thing that happened with Ava today...She made a joke," Caleb says, suggesting that such a feat is evidence of her being somewhat "non-autistic," because she could be aware of what was happening in both of their minds.
"What about the power cut?" Nathan asks, suggesting that he could not see what happened then. Caleb hesitates, then lies, telling Nathan that nothing happened.
That night, Caleb watches Ava on his television, and she smiles at the surveillance camera, presumably at him. When Caleb leaves his room later, Nathan is in the hall. He takes Caleb to look at the lab where he created Ava. Caleb looks around, as Nathan tells him about how he got an AI to replicate facial expressions. He tells him that he turned on the microphone and camera on every phone around the world and redirected the data through Blue Book in order to assemble the information to create Ava's expressions.
"You hacked the world's cellphones?" Caleb says, skeptically, and Nathan admits that he did. Nathan pulls out a gelled globe that he says is what he used for Ava's brain, calling it "wetware." Caleb correctly guesses that Ava's software is based on data from Blue Book also, as Nathan suggests that search engines map not only what people think, but how they think.
Analysis
Nathan's entitled yet controlling attitude becomes all the more unsettling in this section of the film. After getting locked in his room during the power cut, Caleb accidentally finds himself in Nathan's room, where Nathan is drunk and continues to ply Caleb with reasons to accept everything that happens to him at the facility. Caleb is disoriented from having been locked in his room, but Nathan insists that it is essential that they do so. The viewer is aligned with Caleb as the protagonist, and Nathan's power hunger and manipulation of his guest become more nefarious as the film progresses, humorous though he may sometimes be.
In his second meeting with Ava, Caleb is tasked by Nathan with trying to learn more about how Ava feels about him. In this conversation, Ava suggests that she feels like their interactions are one-sided, that he is always looking to learn more about her, but never revealing anything about himself. They embark on a more intimate relationship, which feels curious and funny to Caleb, having never had a machine want to know more about his inner life. Their conversation unfolds not unlike a first date, with Caleb telling Ava various details about his personal life.
When the power cuts out and Ava and Caleb are left unmonitored, Ava says something alarming and disturbing to Caleb. With the surveillance cameras turned off, Ava tells Caleb that he should not trust Nathan, and that Nathan is not his friend. It is a striking and terrifying moment in the film, the sight of the half-constructed body of Ava in the blood-red light of the power cut telling Caleb that he cannot trust his host at this remote facility. Caleb is left in even murkier confusion—is Ava telling the truth? Is Nathan telling the truth? Does Ava not like Nathan? Did Nathan program Ava to say this? The blurring of the lines between creator and creation, between truth and fiction, becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend, which raises the stakes of the narrative, and escalates the sense that something at Nathan's facility is awry.
In this section, another character is introduced, a woman named Kyoko who acts as Nathan's maid. At first, we are not sure if she is a robot or a human, as she abruptly enters Caleb's room one morning carrying a tray. Nathan refers to her only as "Kyoko" in the beginning, revealing nothing about her status as a machine or a mortal. Whether she is automated or not, she is a silent servant, consistently objectified by Nathan, who snaps and curses at her when she makes a mistake, but then insists it has no effect on her, as she cannot speak English.
At the end of this section, we learn that Nathan's methods for mining data to create Ava's consciousness are not altogether legal. Using his search engine Blue Book, he has pooled together information from his search engine to ensure that Ava's "brain" is just as impulsive, chaotic, and unpredictable as a real human's brain. Nathan's status as a tech oligarch has indeed given him a God complex, a sense of entitlement about information about others. Caleb is both awestruck and disturbed by this information, as he holds the gel-like "brain" of the AIs that Nathan has been creating in his hands.
