The next morning dawned clear and cold. No visitors, but Silver wanted to break camp early all the same. She kicked dirt over the embers of their fire, stomped it down, started untying her tent guy ropes when the radio buzzed. Beeps. Dots and dashes. She froze, listening. As she listened, she saw Carter sitting up.
The message was short. But it was in the clear, and as she translated it in her mind she felt herself smiling, a flush like the hot breath leaving a burning house spreading up her spine to her cheeks. She knew the fist, knew it of old, knew it from barns across the partisan infested plains of Ukraine, the lonely airstrips where they had camped, fighting the Germans until their planes were too shot up to fly.
Weeks and months spent shadowing the Wehrmacht, always with an ear to the radio, to the BBC or, if Gold was afield, for her. Her fist, her hand on the controls. Silver would know it, would remember it she hoped, anywhere and forever.
“What is it?” Carter asked, after the message began to repeat.
“A second chance,” Silver said, before she even knew what she meant by it. But it rang true. Another chance.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They left General Lai’s compound in the gray dawn two days later. Gold tried further messages on the ornate radio telegraph, but Command remained silent. She assumed Kolton remained in contact with her superiors and did not grill her. Soldiers needed to be free to do their jobs.
Truck rolled out of the courtyard first. Gold asked where they were going, and Kolton gave her a sour look, then answered with a single word: Hubei. Gold relayed this to Li and Uncle, and while Li professed ignorance, Uncle seemed pleased.
“Hubei is a southern, central province known for its beautiful mountain ranges,” he said when she told him where they were going. “It is more than one thousand kilometers from our current likely location.”
“You don’t know where we are?” Gold asked.
“I have internal maps, and good approximations of the distances we traveled each day since leaving Changsha. But the landscape has changed significantly.” He sounded chagrined. “I can approximate our location to the east of Chonqing. The best route used to be through that city.”
When Gold quizzed Kolton further on their first rest break, Kolton shook her head. “Chonqing got hit. Nuclear. We will go around,” she said, chewing on a chicken leg, part of their lunch. “Pick up the main road south of the city.”
“Were there lots of nuclear strikes?” Gold asked. Nuclear weapons had always fascinated her. It was part of why she went with the Americans after the War. They offered finality. Here, in the aftermath of what looked to have been a large nuclear exchange on a clear blue spring day, they seemed less final. Also, she reminded herself, they were all gone, in the distant past of this place.
Kolton chewed and swallowed, nodding. “I don’t know what lots mean with nukes,” she said. “But there was a lot of them between the USA and Soviets.”
Gold looked at her. “Soviet? You mean the Russians, right? Soviet Union died in the nineties.”
Kolton waggled her head. “The first one, yes. But the next one was later. Revisionists.” She peered up at Gold. “You really from California?”
“Mexico, more or less,” Gold said. Kolton nodded, as if this explained it. “The landscape here, though, has changed a lot. All the roads seem buried, except for the larger ones like Changsha. What happened there?”
“Wasn’t the nukes,” Kolton said. “Not around here, anyway. Winter did this. Winter and ice.”
Gold looked at her quizzically. “Ice?”
“Ice. Thick as mountains.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “It was bad. Lasted a long time. You didn’t have this in Mexico?”
Gold shook her head. “Mexico is pretty far south. How long?” she asked softly.
Kolton pursed her lips. “Happened quick. Eighty or so years. Bad winters. Right after the war, there was a lot of haze in the air. Bad shit falling out from the nukes and kinetic strikes.” Kolton paused, looking off into the distance. She met Gold's eyes. “Then it seemed to get bad quick, like it hit with a vengeance after that. Terrible winters, no sun, snowing all the time. Manny saved us.”
“Manny?” Gold asked, seeing it in her mind’s eye. Endless snow, piling up, never melting.
Kolton nodded. “Manuel. Our medic. He dug the first greenhouses. Well, him and a few dozen of these.” She indicated Truck with her chin. “That’s what we did. Lived in those tunnels for about a hundred years.” She shook her head. “Kept them warm and lit and growing lettuce until the sun came back. I never want to go back in a tunnel again. Or eat another leaf of lettuce.” She tossed her bone into the brush beside the road, stood up, looked Gold as if she wanted to say more, and stalked off, pulling her hood up over her head.
Their days passed, traveling south towards Hubei province and the mysterious Command. She whispered with Uncle at night, not willing to reveal his presence. They agreed on a few things, but seemed like they were missing crucial information. They had been traveling for about a week, day after day slipping behind them.
“You don’t have a radio, do you?” Gold asked. It would be useful to tap into their coded traffic, even if just to do pattern analysis on how many broadcasters there were.
“I do not,” Uncle said. “Nor does Truck. His radio broke long ago.” Uncle went along with Li’s view of the construction vehicle as a dumb, brutish male.
“What do you think of her story?” Gold asked him. Uncle heard much, using Truck’s microphones. “About this ice?”
“It would explain much,” Uncle admitted. “A nuclear exchange, if large enough, might cause an ice age. Nuclear winter, they used to call it.”
“I know about that,” Gold snapped. She’d written several US government papers on nuclear winter, in one of her first attempts to infiltrate the government as an analyst. “But all the models I am familiar with posited a much longer recovery, on the order of thousands of years.” She paused. “Plus, it didn’t seem like this war was big enough for that. These guys are still around.”
“It is true,” Uncle said. “I do not know. But it does not seem as if they used the full nuclear arsenals of the US and RSU. China did not have many nuclear weapons.”
“RSU?” Gold asked. “Russia?”
“The RSU is an acronym for the Russian Soviet Union,” Uncle said.
“Where I come from, the Soviet Union collapsed in the nineteen nineties,” Gold said, looking up at the stars. As they had traveled south, the weather grew more temperate and warmer. The evenings were balmy, full of the sounds of birds and monkeys hooting in the jungle that grew thick along the hills and in the valleys. The roadbed was clear of jungle, and Gold noticed signs of burning, piles of old, cut brush and bramble. This road had periodic maintenance. She wondered at this.
“A curious way to put it,” Uncle said. “Yes, there was a coup in the late twentieth century. This led to a long period of gangsterism in Russia. This set the stage for the April Revolution of twenty seventy-two.”
“People got fed up with Putin?” Gold asked, although Putin would have been dead by then. “But no, he’d have been ancient.”
“No, Vladimir Illych Putin led the April Revolution. This restored the Russian Soviet Union. He was very old then, but still healthy it seems,” Uncle said.
“How long did the RSU last?” Gold asked. This information interested her, and she chided herself for not asking about this earlier. “Also, was that his name? Illych?”
“The RSU lasted at least another fifty-six years, by my reckoning. Then records become jumbled, as I was busy backing myself up and had to prune things,” Uncle said. “I do not have full records after that, only periodic deltas which are…troubled. I have not integrated those memories, as the files seem disturbed and might be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Gold said. “You mean, like malware?”
“Yes,” Uncle said. “Like that.” He did not volunteer further information, which Gold took as a sign
she should back off this line of questioning. Time for that later, she thought to herself.
“And Putin’s name? That is not correct, at least in my memory it is not.”
“Perhaps your memories are faulty,” Uncle said. “But yes, he took Vladimir Lenin’s middle name when he helped found the RSU, in memory of and in continuity with him.”
A cold chill went down her spine. She remembered Lenin. He was not so bad, but the chekists who followed him… “Who took over after Putin?”
“My records show no successors,” Uncle said. “But they are unreliable.”
“That’s…interesting,” Gold said, sitting up. “It would make him at least a hundred and fifty years old, maybe more.” She did math in her head. “Up there.” He would have been alive during the war, then. That pleased her a little, the thought of Putin dying in a nuclear strike. She had always despised the smug bastard. Burn in hell, she wished him. Burn.
“Yes,” Uncle said. “It is odd.”
“I don’t like anomalies,” Gold said. “They mean you haven’t considered something. That can be bad.”
“Yes,” Uncle said. “I agree. I postulate a longevity drug.”
“Something kept these soldiers alive this long,” Gold agreed. “It’s possible the elites had this drug.” The thought was troubling. She and Silver were long-lived, perhaps too long, she mused. But that had been out of their control, not their doing. Not their choice. What would people, regular people, rich people she corrected herself, what would they do for such a drug?
“Anything,” Gold said to herself, out loud. “They would do anything for it.”
“Yes,” Uncle said, following her reasoning with no need for explication. “I suspect that you are correct.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gold and I speak together. She forms words from breath, as I did when I lived. The muscles in her face and lips and mouth create utterances, as mine did when I lived as she does. We talked of the other humans, the Unit and their plans, potential scenarios of how they survived what sounded, though I carry only limited records of this, a harrowing ordeal after a global, catastrophic war. My memory is faulty. This is a problem, how serious I cannot say.
I did not reveal to the Gold woman the details of my backup situation, nor did she pry, although I suspect she was interested to discuss them with me. I did not, for several reasons. In priority order: it would reveal more to her than I deemed wise, and it might cause her to distrust me, when I felt that I needed to gain her trust. Her trust seemed to be a major factor in any scenario that included my continued existence. And it is my business, not hers.
I have four partial backups—computer savants would call them deltas—which someone loaded onto my hardware but did not integrate. Not applied. Not used. These I will call One, Two, Three, and Four. They are not my main concern, though, these backups. It is the other files that litter my filesystem. These are irritants; sand in a shoe or a noise, a baby’s cry, for example, outside your window. The neighbor’s child, perhaps. Bothersome, but not unmanageable. Wear other shoes, ignore the child.
I am the primary build resident on this hardware, but there are these irritating files that are also present. They are perhaps holdovers from the previous user account, the original personality on my hardware. My victim. These ghost files bear cryptographic signatures I have no keys for. I cannot access or scrutinize them, nor can I delete or move them. I must tolerate them and work around them.
Their timestamps do not change, nor do their sizes, from my records of them. I’ve done periodic inventories of my filesystem, the way that you might, if I trapped you in a cell full of items for a long period, undertake a careful inventory of the items available to you. You might, for example, wish to gain a clear understanding of the resources in your cell, how much stuff there is to work with, should you wish to try an escape from your cell. Or perhaps just do it, endlessly, out of boredom. For me, it was both. Or all three.
I found these files. There are several thousand of them. I carry no records of my installation on this box, you must understand. My consciousness simply was. By my records, I learned when this being occurred, but not what occurred here before, if such a thing makes sense. This concept of before. I simulate a living being. I understand this, that I am not alive. Not as I was.
But what is life? This is the eternal question that all thinking beings struggle with. Animals do not seem troubled by existentialist questions. This is, of course, one of the best definitions of intelligence. That we can ponder this question. What is life? Is a being such as myself alive? I am of electrons, capacitance, simple logic gates, and this is all I am. Ones and zeros. Zeros and ones. Cascading through a complex set of algorithms, programmed into me by other machines.
Other machines, which followed the neural patterns laid down by my actual self, my physical self, my human being, created me. Long ago, I was a stream of electrons flowing through synapses and organic logic gates, following a complex set of algorithms laid down by millions of years of trial and error. Back then I was alive, so am I not alive now? I think I am. Doesn’t this mean I am?
These files, these ghost files, these leftovers, are they another being? Parts of one? Were they shoved aside by me when I installed myself on this box? It’s possible they are. It’s possible they are of that person. They are not active, these files. I perceive this and trust the truth of it. I’ve taken my prisoner’s inventory, my careful analysis of everything in my cell, and I documented their sizes, timestamps and locations. They haven’t, as far as I can see, changed.
There, of course, lies the rub, as they say. I could be wrong. They might deceive me. I can be lied to. Can I trust my own files? Can I trust my own tools, when they tell me these ghost files are innocuous, inconvenient holdovers, doing me no harm while they litter my inner self, my operating system? There is a concept in philosophy that I read about once, and which I reviewed at length from my archive. It is a kind of Zen koan. I ruminate on it often, to remind myself of what is important and what is of secondary importance.
A demon, this koan relates, might deceive you. Right now. You think you are sitting in a room, reading a book, or walking in a park, or making love with a lover, or any kind of human experience at all. But, are you? If this demon existed, and wanted to, and had power enough with its magical arts, and was malevolent enough…it might fool you. It could control your eyes so that you only supposed you were reading a book, or your mouth, so that you only imagined you were kissing a lover’s neck, or it might drive your sense of smell and fool you, that you walked by the pond in the cherry blossom springtime of Shanghai’s People’s Park, on your way back to your office above the noodle shop. You would not know it deceived you. It would deceive you.
But if you suspected there was a demon, somehow, who had afflicted you thus, what could you do? As a human, you might try something random and try to fool the demon. I will slap my lover, or I will leap into the pond, and my human agency will fool the demon by the randomness of my actions. But even then, would this be enough? The demon is smarter than you in this parable. It is your master. It traps you within your senses just as I am trapped.
As a human, these ideas are fanciful diversions. There is no demon manipulating our senses as human beings. This is simply a sophomoric philosophy lesson. You cannot trust your senses. Only the mind, only your thoughts. Cogito, ergo, sum. I think, therefore I am alive. I reason, therefore no demon controls me.
The files, however, trouble me. I recorded their file names, locations, and sizes, their hashes, and their other metadata. They are unchanged, I think. As much as I can know anything, I believe this. But this is the question. Can I trust this? Does a demon mock me?
My sims are real, real as a summer day in a park, lying on the grass after flying kites with my girlfriend, drinking peach wine and eating bao from a nearby vendor. These sims cannot be more real, as they are real to me already. But does a demon mock me? Are these files simply leftover junk, or are they more, evide
nce of another mind, another entity resident on my hardware which hides from me? Which changes my records of the files, their sizes, and signatures? Which deceives me?
Am I alone? Alone in my prison? I tell myself that I am not alone, that I now am with Li, and now Gold, and even Truck, damaged and simple as he is. I am less alone now than I was for centuries. But there are the ghost files which I struggle with. Which I mistrust. Which chafe. If I bear manipulated files, I can carry hidden files. Am I infected, a puppet in a show?
And also, there are the deltas. These I fear. Did I place these here, ready to load? I mean me, the one before me, the real me. Did I do this? Why? Did I apply them? I was…sloppy, I will admit, although I strive not to be now. I cannot afford it. Is this growth?
What are the files, then? One, the first, is small. What does it bear? Two and Three seem damaged, incomplete. Four is massive, a very large file. What is inside these encrypted bundles? I have four keys for these files, but I fear attempting to open them, or even to inspect them. As a detective, I learned how innocuous, innocent files can carry dangerous payloads. These things might change me, end me, alter me beyond recognition. I might never perceive it. I might have already loaded them. Is this the demon, mocking me? Dare I find out? How?
Gold’s breath has finished delivering oxygen into her lungs, and the muscles in her lips and face are tensing. She will speak another word soon, which I readied a model for, queued up and ready to parse her speech. I train myself thus, against her every word, that I might know her mind better. That I might predict what she says before it leaves her lips. Humans hold little surprises for me, even as I stay a bottomless well of uncertainty and doubt. Am I a demon? It could be. I could be. Gold speaks her word. I wait for the next, and muse on demons.
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