by Greg Chivers
‘I’m sure you’re aware of the theories flying around. The less responsible news feeds are already calling this the opening salvo in a new war of faith.’
‘Amos.’ His head turns at the uncommon use of his first name, even though as ministers of state we are theoretically peers. ‘I’m glad you called me in, we don’t get many opportunities to talk.’
He nods at the platitude. In theory we are supposed to attend regular shared briefings. City convention dictates the holder of the title ‘Minister of Antiquities’ is responsible for running the city’s approximation of an intelligence service, which is supposed to assist law enforcement as and when required. When I took the job on, intelligence gathering was an inconsequential addendum for a city largely spared foreign influence, but times change, and I have tailored the role to fit them. The network of informants and contractors I have built up is of questionable utility to the public, but intelligence work is by its nature covert, so no one delves too deeply into what they actually do. The only downside to the arrangement is I must occasionally provide a morsel of genuine information as a fig leaf, and even if he does not suspect my involvement in the current unrest, Amos Glassberg will not be satisfied with banalities.
‘I understand you’re worried about the fires. Who wouldn’t be? But I’m concerned they’re a sideshow, meant to distract us from more pressing issues.’
‘Pressing to whom, Silas? I asked for this meeting in the perhaps misguided hope you could tell me something about the fires. Would I have better consulted our fearless chief of police?’
He watches, studying me for any sign of vulnerability. The goad could be a simple attempt to play to my arrogance, or he could be digging deeper. It is not impossible I have been lured here under false pretences. Amos has historically been too preoccupied with the city’s ongoing crises to look closely at ministries beyond his own, but complacency is a luxury I cannot afford.
‘That would not be appropriate … I fear he may be involved in illegal activity; that’s why I wanted to talk to you personally.’
‘Fear? You?’
‘Not for myself. For the city, of course.’
‘For the city. Obviously.’
He knows I’m hiding something. He doesn’t know what. I must tread carefully. An uncharacteristic display of civic duty would arouse suspicion, but if I play my part as avatar of necessary evil, pragmatism and duty will force him to rise to the bait. Of course, any information from me will be suspect, but corroboration is not hard to arrange, and the spectre of high-level corruption in the police force cannot be ignored. Taking action will hurt him; Ayed, the venerable police chief, is the closest thing he has to an ally, but a martyr like Amos does not shy from pain. The script practically writes itself. Even at the highest levels, police pay is meagre. Ayed has four daughters; one of them was involved in that messy scandal with the rubber costumes, and an opportunist who caught the incident on camera is bleeding him dry to keep it off the news feeds. All I have to do is let Amos draw the dots.
‘And what urgent action must I take against the man who is your primary obstacle to becoming even wealthier, Silas? I don’t understand you at all, you know? As far as I can tell you don’t even do anything with the money.’
‘These are matters of state, Amos. You would do well to take them seriously.’
‘I asked you here to talk about the fires. If you don’t know anything, you might as well leave. We’re both busy men.’
‘And I wouldn’t dream of wasting your time, minister. I’ve requested a briefing from one of my analysts who’s been looking into the matter, but he’s running a little late. I was merely trying to make best use of the opportunity to talk. Communications between our departments are not what they might be.’
He nods acknowledgement, mollified or unwilling to press the point; I cannot tell which. This testiness is unusual. In another man, I’d say I’d touched a nerve, but it would be unlike Amos to show it. Could there be something else, deeper, troubling him? Is it possible the years spent papering the city-state’s cracks are finally taking a toll? He has always seemed eternal, immovable – a foundation stone for the city’s government while other ministers come and go – but the city is changing. The new faiths upset the old balances. The preliminary police report into the fires suggests a radical faction within the Greek Orthodox community may have been responsible for at least one, and the Machine Cult tops the list of suspects for the remainder. It’s all so wrapped in caveats as to be functionally useless. A discreet cough from the doorway interrupts the train of thought. A man in a grey suit hovers.
‘You’re late, Belloc.’ My rebuke elicits a subtle wince.
‘My sincere apologies, ministers. I was in the field, gathering data. I felt, in the circumstances, accuracy was a more pressing concern than punctuality.’
Amos gives a nod of acceptance. Belloc is a boring little man, but he’s a useful asset for occasions like this, where the important thing is that work is seen to be done. He wears the air of carefully cultivated anonymity common to analysts who prefer the thrill of secret knowledge to any vulgar outward display. If you didn’t know he was a spook, you’d perhaps think he was back-office staff in one of the financial institutions. He walks busily across the room to where the digital display still flickers.
‘May I?’
‘Please, go ahead.’ Amos straightens his spine and steeples his fingers, assuming a pose of quiet authority.
‘Where should I begin? Do you want detail?’
‘No, I’ll ask for detail if I need it. My question is “Why?”. Why is this happening now? We’ve always had our troubles – this is Jerusalem – but something is different now. I need to understand what it is.’
‘Data is still coming in, but what we have does lead in a certain direction.’ The map on the digital display flickers out of existence, to be replaced an eye-blink later by a page filled with graphs and charts. ‘As you’re aware, the insurrection in Southern and Western Europe has driven large numbers of Europeans to claim refugee status.’ The deadpan delivery pauses for Belloc to gauge his listeners’ ability to absorb the flow of information. Amos gestures for him to continue. ‘In raw terms, the numbers we’re facing in Jerusalem are not large, even for a small city-state, but the cultural impact they have is disproportionate.’
‘I can see that. What is it about the newcomers that pisses people off? We’ve had Christians in Jerusalem for as long as there have been Christians. What difference does a few more make?’
‘It’s a matter of cultural homogeneity. The Greek, Armenian, and Syriac Orthodox Christians can trace their roots here back to a time before the old state of Israel, or even Islam itself – they’re part of the furniture. They behave like people from the Middle East because, in large part, they are. The Missionaries, while they call themselves Christian, and observe much of what we would call classic Christian ritual, are importing a foreign brand of syncretism that potentially poses a threat to all the established religions. The one thing they can agree on is that they don’t like the newcomer.’
‘So you’re saying it’s a matter of theology? I thought rioting about that stuff went out with the Byzantines.’
An uneasy smile curls the corners of Belloc’s lips. ‘If you can forgive some speculation …’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s not the message, it’s the messenger.’
‘What do you mean?’
Belloc pauses, nesting his chin between thumb and forefinger. ‘The Mission is almost entirely run by women, both in its charitable endeavours and its commercial offshoots in agriculture outside the city. In Europe that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow; the wars have slashed the number of men in the workforce. Here, it is visibly foreign, an enclave of a world we rejected on a societal level, and it is growing.’
Amos sags. ‘Good grief, how fragile are we that we’re threatened by a bunch of women running their own soup kitchen?’ Belloc opens his mouth. ‘No, no, I know there’s more to the Miss
ionaries, but still, it’s enough to provoke despair. Thank you, you can go.’
The analyst gives a bow and turns to face the still-open door; then he hesitates. ‘You don’t want our provisional assessment of responsibility?’
‘Is it anything more than a list of the usual suspects seasoned with speculation?’
The frankness of the question raises a smile from Belloc: a warm, genuine expression I’ve not seen in his briefings with me. He appears to think for a moment. ‘No.’
Amos raises a plastic-bound folder containing the police report from his desk. ‘I’ve already got one of those.’ He waves it in a casual dismissal. ‘Oh, one more thing. What’s your name?’
‘Belloc, sir.’
‘Thank you, Belloc. You’ve been most helpful.’ He turns to me. ‘You know, Silas, I never cease to be impressed by the quality of your people. Perhaps the rest of the city government might benefit from adopting your ministry’s recruiting practices.’
The pointed ambiguity is unmistakeable. The people who come to work for me do so for money, or for power, not for any high-minded ideals of public service, and yet, for now at least, Amos seems satisfied to reap the benefits. The sound of footsteps on polished cedar wood confirms Belloc’s departure. I count to thirty-six, letting the silence stretch between us before turning in my seat to face Amos. He looks tired.
‘What do you want to do?’
He shakes his head, and the bushy grey brows furrow. ‘About the fires? Or about the rest of the bloody mess out there?’
‘Either.’
‘I’m not sure what I can do, Silas. Jerusalem has survived three and a half thousand years of history: plague, famine, and war. The city has outlasted all the empires that laid claim to it, but it has never had to contend with women who do not know their place.’
11.
Clementine
The museum storage facility is a cave of wonders cloaked in anonymity. It has the same battery of cameras covering the approaches as any of the other warehouses or light industrial units nearby, and probably a fat guard inside, not watching the feed. They are not the problem; the problems will come in forms I cannot see.
Metal pierces the nodules of scar tissue along my spine. The sharp tips of my dorsal antennae emerge bloodlessly through skin and clothing, but not without pain. Apparently I wanted it that way, a recurring, jagged memento to humanity forsaken. I still have gaps from the time before the operation. It seems stupid now, but acts of creation are haphazard things: no chance to learn from mistakes.
The aerials resonate, electrons flow between dipoles within the metals, and the body’s hurt fades, drowned in a flood of new sensation, the stink and hum of multi-wavelength transmissions as interpreted by my nervous system. The human brain is not equipped to perceive or interpret microwave and radio frequencies directly, but it takes only a minor augmentation to process them into functioning analogues of sensory input, primarily tastes and smells. Still, I don’t have much time. The activity exhausts and terrifies the animal brain: like a glimpse of the sacred, it will leave you deaf, dumb, and blind if you stare too long.
The warehouse is an eye of calm in the sensory storm of the city’s transmissions; the wireless networks, the phone calls, the radio chatter, they all slide around its edges. It must be shielded; a vast cage of copper or silver concealed within those grey walls renders it opaque to my senses. There will be a data link somewhere, hard-wired, buried and sheathed, no doubt, but if I’m right about this place, I won’t need to start digging up the pavement.
A rudiment of my consciousness concentrates on maintaining a nonchalant walk past the unmarked entrance, as if I were heading towards the plumbing supply centre at the end of the lot. That part of me is essentially a minor sub-routine now, performing an unimportant, achingly repetitive task while my higher self works at the speed of thought. In this state, normal vision becomes the opposite of a dream, images totally real but empty of meaning. The hacker’s art is to inhabit two worlds and to see the moments they intersect.
Blue light bathes a jowled face behind the reception desk. It does not turn at my passing, absorbed in a vidfeed that numbs the tedium of a job the guard must hate. My nose wrinkles at the reek of the trickle of data flowing to the device in his hands; no security system devised by man can withstand the relentless destructive pressure of boredom. There is my intersection.
My body continues its slow, meaningless progress while my higher consciousness follows the flow of sports updates and tepid retro porn into the device and then emerges into the cool, clean waters of the warehouse’s sealed internal network. Three distinct odours assail me: inhuman presences dwelling within this cloistered pool. Two I recognize; one is unfamiliar. A sharp, citrus tang is a top-of-the-line Shimezu AI running the visual-surveillance systems. That’s a nasty surprise – something like that belongs in a war zone or a bank, but it shouldn’t matter, I’m not here to fight. As long as I remain passive, I should be undetectable to the watchdogs, bathed in the odour of used data. A menthol reek is the wave patterns of something Chinese-built: a respectable generic clone of a security system created for some other purpose. The strange smell is like toffee, but musty. Maybe something locally built? It feels old.
I try sending it some neutral data packets routed through the city’s municipal net and the guard’s handheld device. There’s no response, no sign this thing’s even aware of the data. The other AIs are bristling with transmissions across the wavelengths, checking feeds from security cameras and microphones, but this one’s like a sleeping dog. I tiptoe up to it, telling myself not to fall into the trap of my own metaphor. The sense-analogues are one thing – a reliable algorithmic transposition of one form of data to another; but metaphors are guesses, products of self, not process.
The interface is straightforward. This thing isn’t asleep, it’s just really stupid, barely even a proper AI. It self-identifies as the warehouse interior, taking inputs from tactile and pressure sensors in the floors and shelves, comparing them against pre-set norms and that’s it. Its output is pretty much binary – is something touching me or not? Apart from answering that question 1,200 times per second, all it does is recalibrate every time something new comes into the warehouse: learn the new object, reset parameters, yes-no yes-no yes-no until doomsday.
I disconnect before the warehouse interior wakes up. The antennae retreat into their half-inch-wide housings within my vertebrae without sensation. An errant foot hits the floor too hard, my body clumsy and tired from too long on autopilot. At a safe distance, I turn around to look at the warehouse’s physical reality, human senses and human thoughts wrestling with the uncomfortable data won through my intrusion, trying to marry it with what I see. The building sits on a kind of raised concrete foundation to put its floor level with an average truck bed. There are steps at one side of the platform leading to a blue metal door with a square window and an intercom system. The big stuff comes in and out through a rolling metal shutter-door facing the truck bay: superficially an easy way in but there’ll be multiple layers of redundancy on those sensors. It would be good to see a delivery happening, but I’ve hung around too long already.
By the time my perception’s realigned with my physical self, I’m at the plumbing store, guided by some primal instinct to queue. A man in a long brown overall is looking at me like I already stole some priceless treasure from their shelves of grey PVC tubing. I buy some copper wire to look respectable; then I walk half a mile to get out of the local sense-nets before calling Levi. Interface with the voice network feels painfully slow after the freedom of my intrusion, but in reality it is only seconds before we connect.
He cuts me off without a word – busy, or spooked by a contact he doesn’t recognize. I don’t have time for this. I push aside my fatigue to force open a connection via the city-net. The security protocols of his implant are as archaic as most of the software in Jerusalem. The line between us stays silent, not even the sound of breath, but he’ll know it’s live.<
br />
‘Wait … What?’ The first words I hear are confusion as he tries to disconnect. ‘How the fuck? I can’t …’ He starts talking to someone else. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve just got to take this real quick.’ A pause. ‘OK, dickwad, I’m not going to ask how you pulled whatever this shit is, just tell me who you are and what you want.’
‘Relax, Levi. It’s me.’
‘Oh, it’s “me”. That’s obviously OK then.’
‘Levi …’
‘Just so we’re clear, it’s not fucking OK for you to be in my head. And how the fuck did you do that? No, never mind, I’m busy right now.’
‘What? I’m not supposed to call you? We’ve got a job to do.’
‘Believe it or not, I have other things to do, also relating to the job. What’s this about?’
‘I’m going to need some kit, something bespoke.’
‘Something else? Listen, I’m not going to be able to cover all these expenses. These jammers and transponders and whatnot are already bleeding me dry.’
‘I’m not talking about optional extras here, Levi. This is how we do the job. Don’t worry yet. This thing might not cost if we’re smart about it.’
‘OK, hit me. What is it?’
‘We need to make a delivery to the warehouse.’
‘A delivery? What are we going to deliver to that place?’
‘It doesn’t matter. The important thing is, whatever we deliver has to weigh, let’s say, five kilos, and we’ve got to be able to make it disappear.’
‘Disappear? What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘You’ll work it out, Levi. You’re a smart guy.’
12.
Levi
What kind of a name is Clementine anyway? She sounds French, but when did they start naming people after fruit? How does she know she needs this shit? If I had the luxury of time, or options, I’d be asking some questions about my new-found partner in crime, but I don’t.