by J. N. Chaney
That’s basically what the Nighwatch was supposed to be for Marcenn, a distributed copy of himself, like a flesh-and-blood AI. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. All the copies were corrupt, and they went on a deranged killing spree on a scale I’d never seen before.
“Alright,” said Andrea. “I’m not saying I buy any of this, but sure. You agreed to help?”
“I agreed to help, and I brought Anton and Stefan into the project. The work was simple, essentially just constantly recording Julian’s mental activity and appending that information to the data model.”
“Jargon, Lucien.”
“It’s not jargon, that’s the simplest way I can say it. Anyway, it worked. We made a copy, a complete and working copy of Julian Huxley’s mind. By the time his body died, his android proxy was already complete.”
“So, you’re saying he’s out there somewhere? In an android body?”
“I can’t be sure.”
“Why can’t you be sure?”
“I haven’t heard from him in a long time. I don’t know what’s up with him. He… changed.”
Andrea didn’t say anything, she just sat there waiting for him.
Klein was struggling for words, but at last he came out with it. “Over time, Julian became… really comfortable in his new existence. He used to tell me what it felt like, the sensation of connecting to vast computer networks, experiencing the flow of information like waves and currents washing over him. You wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t understand. He’s the only one who would, the only one in all of history. And then one day he vanished.”
“What do you mean exactly? He was already in seclusion, right?”
“Yes, but I always knew how to reach out to him. If I went to a certain node on my dataspike he would show up soon afterward, and we could discuss anything we needed to discuss. But then one day the node was gone. Julian had burned it himself. There was no way to reach him, and I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Why do you think he did that?”
Klein shrugged. “I mean, he’d been getting weirder and weirder. It’s no wonder really. But he disappeared, and for all I know he’s plugged into some network somewhere, riding those currents. Anyway, before he vanished, Julian personally ordered the diversion of advanced weapons research projects to Venus, care of August Marcenn. He got it all set up, made sure everything was in place, and then he burned the node.”
“Like he was covering his tracks?”
“What good would that do? I knew he had done it. I knew he was responsible for it. But his body was dead, the man couldn’t be convicted of anything.”
“His body was dead?” I interjected. “You mean he was dead. Whatever you built, it wasn’t him.”
“How do you figure?”
“It was a rogue android, an unusually clever rogue android. But it wasn’t him. An android is not the same thing as a human being, not even if you copy over some information from one to the other.”
“Okay, smart cop. Is every cell in your body the same as on the day you were born? It’s the Ship of Theseus problem.”
No one took the bait, which didn’t stop him from expanding on the topic. I knew it wouldn’t.
“You know, Plutarch? If Theseus gets some boat repairs and they replace a few parts, it’s still the same ship, right? But then he gets repairs again, and again, and again, and eventually there isn’t even a single board from the original ship left. Is it still the same ship, or not?”
“No,” said Andrea.
“Yes,” said Veraldi.
“What?!” said Bray.
All more or less at the same time.
Klein grinned. “Or George Washington’s ax, same thing. The head and the handle have both been replaced, so is it still George Washington’s ax?”
“You’ve seen George Washington’s ax?” asked Bray.
Klein closed his eyes and took a deep breath. While he was did, Bray winked at me. He wasn’t as dumb as he looked.
Andrea sat up suddenly and cocked her head to the side, a common reaction to receiving a dataspike message. Then she mouthed the words keep him talking to Veraldi, who nodded in response. She gestured to me, and I followed her out of the room.
Once we were out in the hallway again, she shook her head. “What a piece of work. I hope they nail that guy’s head to the wall.”
“He’s really something. But what was that?”
“That was Thomas Young. He’s got something to tell us. We’re going to meet him in the basement.”
12
“Hold on, Andrea.” We were walking down the hall, heading for the basement and whatever Thomas Young wanted us to see.
Andrea paused, looking back over her shoulder. “Yeah?”
“You’re going a little too fast for me here. I need to catch up.”
She smiled a little. “You were hurt in the shoulder, not the legs.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Okay. Young will be annoyed, but I can give you a second. Come in here.”
She went through a door, which led to a small private study. There were a few reproductions of famous sculptures like Rodin’s Thinker and a few old books. It was all just as generic as the art on the walls, and I started to think of the place as a fake mansion, built solely for use as a safehouse and put together to withstand casual scrutiny. From that perspective, it didn’t really matter what paintings were on the wall or what sculptures or books were in the study, because none of it was real. The Grotto was a prop.
Andrea sat on a swivel chair and swung around to face me.
“What do you make of Klein’s story?” I asked.
She frowned. “What do I make of it? I don’t make anything of it. I don’t make anything of anything really. You don’t get too far by speculating, so it’s better just to let all the pieces pile up until you can fit them together.”
“But the implications of it… Andrea, he’s telling us some amazing things here. A man having his consciousness mapped to a machine? Intrinsic immortality?”
“Klein’s a blowhard, a corporate reptile who thinks he’s a tech genius just because he manages actual tech geniuses. I wouldn’t take anything he says too seriously.”
“I sure as hell don’t want to. It creeps me out a bit, honestly.”
“Yeah, you were like that on Venus. Any time any of the Nightwatch officers would try to talk to you, you would just kill them on the spot. It was kind of funny, because they sure weren’t talking to anyone else. We used to joke that you’d make a terrible intelligence operative. Don’t take that personally, because I honestly think you would make a great intelligence operative, but that was our joke. That your whole interrogation method was just to kill the prisoner before he could talk. We called it pulling a Tycho.”
I didn’t know what to make of any of this—the fact that she was joking around about people dying, the fact that they were joking around about me after I was gone, or the fact that I had become part of their private slang, but however I chose to take it, she was not exactly playing it straight.
I didn’t shoot anyone we had taken prisoner. I was shooting Nightwatch officers who were still armed and dangerous, it’s just that I did tend to freak out and start shooting when they tried to talk to me. The fact that they always said the same thing was a big part of that. You haven’t really killed us is a creepy thing to hear, especially when you’re hearing it for the tenth time and you’ve already killed the last nine guys who said it.
“You are completely misrepresenting what I actually did.”
She laughed. “Oops, looks like you’re taking it personally after all. Well, don’t pull a Tycho on me. I’ll shut up.”
There was no way I could win. Now that they’d all decided what pulling a Tycho meant, any complaint would only be held against me. “Never mind, never mind. But seriously, Andrea, you must have some opinion on what Klein was telling us.”
“I do have an opinion. My opinion is that Klein is a pretentious fuckw
ad who thinks he’s way smarter than he really is just because he can quote some fat old English guy to make his point. His story is just that: a story. Without hard evidence, it doesn’t really mean anything.”
“I guess that’s all there is to it, really.”
“Don’t get all sad on me, Barrett. We’re conducting an investigation here. We’re following leads. When we’ve followed enough leads as far as they will go, we’ll start to get a picture of what the truth is. And who knows? It might even look something like that fairytale Klein was trying to tell us. But I wouldn’t bet money on it.”
Now that Gabe was dead, Andrea seemed to have taken on Gabe’s role in my life. He used to tell me all the time: don’t bother speculating, don’t get bogged down in what-ifs and maybes. Follow your leads and see where they go, or you’ll wander off into your own daydreams and lose sight of the big picture. Byron would say the same thing; it was Arbiter doctrine. It was never the same hearing it from Byron, though. He just seemed to lack imagination, so maybe not speculating came easy to him.
“Alright.” I shook my head, wondering when I was ever going to learn what Gabe was trying to teach me. “Let’s go see Young.”
Andrea stood up and patted me on the shoulder in that jokingly condescending way of hers. “It’s okay, Tycho. There, there.”
She walked out the door, and I followed her with my cheeks burning. At the end of the hall, she came to a mantrap and pulled it open. It opened on a staircase, which led down to the Grotto’s basement.
“No security code?” I asked. “No secret password?”
She played along. “We’re planning to have a fake wall installed in that study. Swiveling bookcase, the whole business. Takes a while to get the expenses cleared on that kind of thing.”
“Yeah, no doubt.”
She went down into the basement, calling out to Thomas Young. “We’re here, Young! What was it you wanted to show us?”
His voice was irritated, as she had known it would be. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t too time sensitive. Otherwise, I’d be forced to explain to you how the resulting crisis was entirely the fault of your procrastination.”
“I wasn’t procrastinating. Tycho had a question to ask me.”
“Tycho?” His head popped out as I walked down the stairs, and he frowned as he saw me. “Oh, yes. Him.”
Young’s face looked disdainful, with a hint of confusion. Like he was pretty sure we had met at a boring cocktail party, but he couldn’t quite place me because the conversation had been so unmemorable.
Andrea laughed. “You’re such an asshole, Young. You knew perfectly well that he was on his way here.”
“I can’t be responsible for keeping track of every stray you decide to adopt.”
I reached the bottom of the staircase and took a look around. It was a finished basement, of the sort the original owner of this house might have called a “rumpus room” or a “man cave” if he had ever actually existed. Young had cleared away most of the arbitrary games and bric-a-brac and was examining the cyborg bodies on what might have been a snack table.
“Well, I’m here now.” Andrea waved in the general direction of the cyborg bodies, which were still concealed beneath their Faraday bags so they couldn’t receive or transmit anything we didn’t want them to.
Young pursed his lips at her and continued in an officious tone. “Very well. Here is my report. I have completed my preliminary teardown of the cyborg remains. Component data and network access history from the bodies of the men suggests they both recently spent several days in northeast Nunavut, triangulated by signal strength to an area in the city of Sif.”
Andrea frowned. “Sif? What the hell would they be doing all the way up there?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.” Young had a prissy way about him, but this was largely just for show. Although his mind was unusually keen, he was every bit as competent and ruthless as his fellow Section 9 agents. Andrea waited for him to give us more, and in a moment, he obliged her. “I did check for behavior patterns to compare them to known profiles. Given the dates and duration of network access, I suspect the men were in the area to find something or someone.”
Andrea smiled. “Thank you, Thomas. That wasn’t really so hard, now was it?”
“Hmmph.” He turned to me, no longer pretending not to know who I was. “Well, Mr. Barrett, it’s so good to see you again. How have you been keeping?”
“How have I been keeping?” It was a strange idiom, and it threw me for a second.
“Yes, how have you been… doing? Has your social life been eventful and your… pastimes stimulating?”
Young’s attempt at small talk was so bizarre that I couldn’t even begin to think of how to answer him. I looked to Andrea for help, but all she did was shrug.
Fuck it, I thought. “No, Thomas. My social life has been depressing and I don’t have any pastimes worth speaking of.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that. I can’t imagine what a person like you would do without a diverting pastime.”
“What exactly are you saying, Thomas?”
Andrea grabbed my arm. “We don’t have time for this. You can force Thomas to explain exactly how he was being condescending to you later. You need to get cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up? I thought you did a pretty good job dressing the wound…”
I turned my head to look at my shoulder.
“I’m not talking about your injury; I’m talking about you. If you think I’m getting back in a car with you before you’ve had a shower and a change, then you just don’t know how bad you smell right now.”
“Oh, that. I guess that’s valid.”
After everything I’d been through, I thought I should probably be praised for not smelling worse. But sitting in a car with me for several hours in my current condition might be a bit much to ask, especially considering that she’d already done it once.
“Come on.” She headed back up the stairs. “I’ll show you where the shower is, but first we need to find you a clean set of clothes. I assume you’re happy to wear all black?”
“It seems a bit… conspicuous. Don’t spies need to blend in?”
“You’re not a spy yet, are you, Tycho? We’ll get you clothes in every style and color, but only after you join the club and get the secret decoder ring. Until then, you’ll have to settle for the Tourist Package.”
She ended up dressing me in a black turtleneck with black jeans, black socks, and shiny black shoes. I think if she could have found a black beret, she would have forced me to wear that too.
13
Sif was an ugly town, like most former boomtowns are. Unlike Grise Fiord or Whale Cove, it didn’t have a history. There was no ancient Inuit settlement there or even an old trading post. It was an overgrown mining site, born in a minerals rush less than a hundred years before. What started as a man camp made up of Quonset huts and mess halls was now a grimy and prosaic little city with far too many taverns, brothels, and gambling establishments per capita for its own good. I was reading up on the local culture on my dataspike as we approached, trying to prepare myself for whatever we might run into. It didn’t make for encouraging research.
In Sif, municipal corruption and organized crime are too closely intertwined to be discussed as separate topics. Essentially, local offices of all kinds—from mayor to dog-catcher—are controlled by one of several political clans. Members of these clans own nearly all the city’s semi-legitimate businesses such as bars and gambling establishments, and they are believed to exercise total control over prostitution, drug-dealing, and other forms of vice.
Raven leaned in from the back of the car. “Learning anything interesting?”
“Mostly that Sif is a horrible, horrible little place.”
“Yeah, well…”
She turned on the screen, and the interior of the car suddenly showed a panoramic image of the outside world. The building on our right was like a huge, squat cube, painted in a senseless
patchwork of off-white and green. Rust patches stained its surface. To our left, the waves of the Arctic Ocean crashed against the docks, where two cadaverous yellowish-brown polar bears picked through a huge mound of trash. They looked up as we passed but showed little interest. Their eyes gleamed in our headlights, but otherwise the creatures looked half-dead.
Raven gestured at the screen. “I hate this place already.”
“It’s not like we’re on vacation.” Andrea shut the screen off. “Come on, let the car find a parking spot downtown and then we’ll get started. It’s time for your mission briefing.”
“Mission briefing?” I wasn’t one of them, at least not officially. She couldn’t technically brief me.
“That’s right, your mission briefing. Don’t quibble with me, Tycho, just be quiet and listen.”
“You got it, boss.”
She glared at me. “Okay. In my opinion, those Augmen were in town for one of two reasons. Either they needed to meet a contact, or they were tracking down a target.”
“Could be both,” Raven pointed out.
Andrea nodded. “Could be both. If they had a contact here, their contact could have had information about how to find their mark. The reason I’m leaning more toward contact is the StateSec record for the past week.”
“Something unusual?” I asked.
“I guess you could say so, considering that the murder rate here in Sif is about ten times the national average. People get killed here so often they don’t bother to bury them all. If you don’t have family here, your body gets dumped in front of the nearest hungry polar bear.”
I was mildly appalled by this. “That doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
“It probably isn’t, but on the other hand it may be the reason Sif has one of the last remaining wild polar bear populations, so there’s that. Anyway, there were no murders on the books last week. Not even one.”
Raven seemed amused by this. “They should hold a parade. Sif is really turning around.”