by Todd McAulty
Nineteen Black Winter
Defense Attaché
Consulate General of the Kingdom of Manhattan
Sector One
I sat in the chair by the window and read the letter twice. Black Winter was certainly in the right line of work. He wrote a damn good letter, for a machine. And yes, it was short notice, but if he’d managed to find an open restaurant, I’d be happy to let him buy me lunch.
I spent the next few hours working. The owners of Ghost Impulse are paying me good money to grow their company into a sellable asset, and that means cultivating a nice pipeline of global customers and prospects. Challenging enough when you’ve got top-notch communications at your disposal—but when online traffic has been interdicted by the occupying authorities, virtually all the phone lines have been cut, and there’s not even functioning postal service . . . it gets a lot more complicated. I’d come to Chicago because the city has world-class data infrastructure, and I figured once the shooting stopped, we’d be able to use it again. It was taking longer than I thought for the city to get back on its feet, and in the meantime I made do with what little I had. At the moment, that meant a small fortune every month in courier bills and—when I had to, and when one was available—paying exorbitant fees for a private data channel.
Selling is a funny thing. You can spend months chasing phantom leads, submitting bids, and cultivating the right relationships, and end up with nothing. And then a plump contract will land in your lap out of nowhere. Forecasting revenue in this business is a joke, but the owners don’t really care as long as you deliver more business than last quarter. I work hard and I’m good at what I do, but sometimes I think the only virtue that really matters in this business is luck.
I didn’t have much luck this morning. By lunchtime I was more than happy to take a break. I made the short walk over to the Piazza Trattoria, where Nineteen Black Winter was already waiting for me.
I really enjoyed our lunch. Yeah, it was a bit awkward at first. Machines don’t actually eat lunch, for one thing. But before too long we were chatting like old friends.
It’s tough to explain why I find Black Winter so fascinating. It’s not just the novelty of talking casually with a high-end machine. I’ve met plenty of machines, although admittedly few of them socially. Black Winter is different. He jokes that it’s because he was trained in human diplomacy, but it goes deeper than that. There’s something about him. There’s a sincerity to him that makes him profoundly easy to talk to.
He’s also supremely well-informed. After the waitress brought my Reuben sandwich he made a wry comment about the administrative incompetence of the AGRT, and I decided to ask him about something that had been bugging me since the conversation at breakfast this morning.
“Is it true the AGRT is just the Venezuelan army in a different uniform?” I said, sipping my tomato juice.
“Now there’s a question,” Black Winter said, leaning back. It was too cold to sit comfortably outside, but we were seated in wide chairs by the window. Black Winter was reclining in his chair like a tourist on the beach, his legs stretched out, his fingers toying with a spoon on the table. I’d never seen a machine intelligence with quite so relaxed a demeanor. I was sure it was at least partly affected, the carefully cultivated manner of a machine accustomed to putting humans at ease, but it was nonetheless very disarming.
“I don’t blame you for asking—sometimes it seems like it, doesn’t it?” he said. “But believe it or not, there are real differences between the Venezuelan Occupation Force and the AGRT. There are tens of thousands of volunteer peacekeepers from over thirty countries in the AGRT, for one thing. The Memphis Ceasefire forced the victorious Coalition members to withdraw from American soil and cede authority to an international peacekeeping force, but it took time to assemble one.”
“When is the withdrawal supposed to happen?”
“When? Technically, it’s already happened. The Venezuelan high command formally handed over Sector Eleven to the AGRT on January thirtieth. It was the last sector to be transferred.”
“Formally, sure. But I still see a lot of troops in Venezuelan uniform back at the hotel. I don’t see them getting ready to pull out any time soon.”
“Ah, that’s what you mean.” Black Winter leaned forward now, resting his elbows on his knees and showing real interest in this part of the discussion. “The problem is that the Memphis Ceasefire didn’t say anything about the make-up of the peacekeeping force. The SCC bowed to enormous international pressure and signed the ceasefire, but they were in no hurry to actually withdraw. So they demanded that the force be adequately sized and resourced before they’d cede authority. That meant the AGRT had no choice but to absorb a huge influx of troops from Venezuela, Argentina, and other Coalition members.”
“I see. How many?”
“The numbers aren’t public, so it’s tough to be precise. But here in Sector Eleven, where I’ve seen the evidence firsthand, I estimate at least fifty percent of the AGRT is composed of Venezuelan troops and officers. Maybe more. As for changing uniforms, in most cases they didn’t even bother—the AGRT has only existed for three months, and uniforms haven’t really been a priority. And virtually all of the command structure is Venezuelan, anyway.”
“Including Colonel Perez?”
“Especially him. He was the man who brought Chicago to its knees last year—and who drove the Union Syndicate out of the city two months ago.”
“So nothing has changed, then.”
“No, that’s not true. I hear people say that, but that’s because they weren’t here when the Venezuelan army was pounding the shit out of Chicago. Trust me, the Venezuelans are a lot more well behaved these days. More than a third of the soldiers and support personnel on the streets now are volunteers, here to help in the rebuilding, and that’s kept things civil. Perez is still in charge, yes. But these days, at least nominally, he reports up through the AGRT chain of command, instead of Venezuelan high command. And it will stay that way until the ultimate fate of this sector is decided at the permanent peace negotiations in Clarksville.”
“Why does Perez want to be here?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Perez and his men are just biding their time while the wheels of politics slowly grind forward. If Sector Eleven becomes part of Venezuela, as many think is likely, they’ll all be part of the Venezuelan military again soon enough. They’ll end up on Venezuelan soil, right where they want to be, and they won’t have to move an inch.”
“Clever. That explains a lot,” I said.
“Also, if you want the truth, Perez is a diplomat, but he’s a military man first. Privately, I’m certain he suspects the estimates of the strength of the American Union Eighth Army in Kentucky are grossly understated. It’s perhaps the largest mechanized force in North America. Perez won’t willingly pull his men out of Sector Eleven until there’s a permanent peace that all parties sign off on—and maybe not even then.”
Since Black Winter was being so forthright, I decided to ask something else I’d been curious about. “What were you doing at the hotel?”
“I told you, I’m a loyal subject of my queen, and this is where her majesty needs me to be. My job is to open relations with Sector Eleven before it formally becomes part of Venezuela. Plus . . . while I’m not yet a full-fledged ambassador, I hope to be someday. And in many ways, I am an ambassador to America. This is virgin territory for me . . . and for all machines. It’s the only country in the world that passed the Wallace Act, outlawing research and development in artificial intelligence. For the last sixteen years, there have been no rational devices on American soil. This is what the war was really all about, the struggle for machine emancipation. I’m like a free black man, journeying to the Deep South after the end of the Civil War. I’m here to begin the healthy process of integration with a culture that has become dangerously out-of-date with the rest of the world.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” I said carefully. That was a clumsy parallel,
for a whole lot of reasons, but now probably wasn’t the time to get into it. In any event, it was obvious Black Winter and I saw the roots of the war very differently. “But I meant, what were you doing in front of the hotel yesterday? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“When the Juno attacked, you mean? No, I don’t mind. I was trying to win points with the colonel, if you really want to know.”
“Colonel Perez?”
“The man himself. I’ve been trying to ingratiate myself with him since I got here—with no success, I might add. My primary task is to get his signature on a binding treaty with the Kingdom of Manhattan, and I can’t even get him to take my calls. Now the Juno attack was a tragedy, and you can call me an opportunist if you like, but it was the best opening I had, and I took it.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I can be blunt for a second . . . Manhattan doesn’t have a lot to offer Sector Eleven. The Kingdom sided with America after our secession from Panama in September, and we paid a price for it. We have virtually no armed forces left, and barely have a functional economy. But what we do have is information. And in particular, our surveillance is excellent. We detected the approach of the Juno. The mech focused all its attention on jamming the fleet of Venezuelan recon drones, but it overlooked our tiny aerial units.”
“Aerial units—you own some of those flying monsters?”
“You’ve run into the dumb Venezuelan units, I presume? Ours are a little . . . different. Smarter, capable of observing from high altitude. In any event, I had the best intel on the ground that morning, and I was sharing it with the colonel.”
“That was decent of you.”
“For all the good it did. The mech was on top of us before the colonel could make much use of my intel. I’ll tell you one thing—that pilot was one gutsy son of a bitch.”
“He sure chewed up that big robot guarding the hotel.”
“He did. Don’t believe the propaganda the Venezuelans put out about ‘inferior’ American Union tech. The Union Syndicate is isolated, underfunded, and politically unstable, but they’ve still managed to field the most impressive war machines I’ve ever seen. And they know how to use them.”
“I hope the colonel was grateful for your intel, at least,” I said, nibbling at my sandwich.
“I have no idea. He still hasn’t returned my calls,” said Black Winter, a little sullenly. “But I’m sure he’s busy with pressing affairs.”
“Do you know why he only evacuated part of the hotel? I saw barely a hundred civilians in the street that morning.”
“That’s all there is in the hotel—at least for now. The colonel is holding most of the floors in reserve, probably to billet his officers.”
“A hundred people? The hotel can’t possibly be breaking even with just a few floors open.”
“You’re right about that. I’m sure the owners are hoping the colonel will open more floors to civilian occupancy once things calm down. If so, the Juno attack was likely a serious setback for them.”
“Whatever he does, I hope he doesn’t close the floor I’m on,” I said. “I’ve got a great view.”
Our conversation wandered to other topics. “What does a ‘defense attaché’ for the Kingdom of Manhattan do, anyway?” I asked.
“Not terribly much at the moment,” he admitted. “The truth is, I’ve been put on what they call ‘light duty.’ They checked me out after our little adventure, and I didn’t pass the physical.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing serious. The machine physicians on staff at the Consulate were able to sort out most of my motor ailments. No insult intended to the men and women of the Venezuelan motor pool—who unquestionably saved my life—but the work they did was not exactly to spec. Nor were the parts they used.”
“Yeah.” As soon as Black Winter had arrived at the restaurant, I’d noticed his mobile core had been completely replaced—again. He looked good as new. “I hope I can get a rebate on some of those parts I bought. I paid a fortune for them.”
“And I appreciate it, believe me. Those components saved my life. But it was a patchwork job, and they needed to be replaced. Did you notice I was walking better today?”
“I did. You practically danced in here.”
“Let me tell you, you don’t fully appreciate your spine until it stops working. Anyway, everything checked out physically after the Consulate did its work. But they weren’t satisfied with some of my cognitive results. There’s no damage, far as they can tell, but there’s a gap of over seventy minutes in my cognitive record.”
“When you lost power?”
“Yes, exactly. Simple enough to account for, considering my condition. But a cognitive gap that long is an immediate red flag in an occupation as security-conscious as mine. My clearance had been revoked, and I’ve been denied access to most of the data feeds I need to do my job.”
“That sucks. I’m sorry.”
“It’s temporary. But it makes a few things . . . difficult.”
“Like what?”
Black Winter tapped his fingers on the table, as if he was thinking. “This is a little awkward,” he said at last. “Can I share a confidence with you?”
“Of course,” I said.
Black Winter leaned a little closer and lowered his voice. “A friend of mine at the Consulate has gone missing. And because of my situation, I’ve been locked out of the details.”
“Missing? Were they injured in the Juno attack, you think?”
“No, my friend wasn’t anywhere near the attack. She went to the Continental Building yesterday morning, and never returned. There’s been no word from her for nearly thirty hours.”
“Your friend has been missing for thirty hours, and you’ve been denied access to the details? That seems strange. Is that strange?”
“Yes. Very strange. My superiors tell me it’s because of my lack of a security clearance, but I’m not so sure. Others at the Consulate have been kept in the dark as well, and that makes no sense. Something’s going on. Something serious.”
“How much can you share?”
“I suppose that’s one advantage of all this. Since I’ve been denied access to anything confidential, there’s nothing preventing me from sharing everything with you.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“Machine Dance is one of the most cautious and competent members of the Consulate staff. She’s not prone to mistakes.”
“Machine Dance? That’s her name?”
“Yes. She’s our director of security. She doesn’t take unnecessary risks. Last time we spoke, she was investigating strange network traffic at the Manhattan Consulate. Something very unusual. I don’t have all the details, but I believe she had a lead that took her to the Continental.”
“She went alone?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Has anyone gone looking for her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I have no idea. No one is talking, and I can’t learn anything on my own. It’s hard to express how frustrating this is. Machine Dance’s disappearance has triggered a senior-level crisis at the Consulate. With both myself and Machine Dance out of commission, the Consulate is critically shorthanded. The Consulate General is very cautious—overly cautious, if you ask me. I think he’s waiting for instructions from Manhattan before making a move.”
“Awaiting instructions? What’s taking so long?”
“That suspicious network traffic I mentioned? It’s gotten worse. In fact, there’s been a dramatic spike since Machine Dance’s disappearance. Almost from the very moment it happened, actually. They’re linked somehow; I’m certain of it. It’s possible our entire communications network has been severely compromised. The Consulate General has ordered it shut down, and that’s forced us to fall back to slower and more secure methods of couriering messages to Manhattan.”
“So everyone’s waiting for instruction
s. And you don’t agree with waiting around, I take it?”
“No. As I said, Machine Dance is a friend of mine. I think she may be in real danger. I want to investigate, but I’m virtually helpless. Until my security clearance is restored, I can’t draw on Consulate resources. That means I can’t get what I need to begin my investigation. I can’t even get access to the Continental Building.”
I didn’t respond right away. I was deep in thought for a moment. “Who would hack into the Manhattan Consulate?” I asked at last.
“I have no idea who Machine Dance suspected. But you want my guess? Her top suspects were likely the American Defense Department and a member of the SCC.”
“The SCC? Why would they be hacking you?”
“There’s still bad blood between Manhattan and the SCC. And there has been, ever since Manhattan seceded from Panama and pulled out of the war.”
“So we think either the Americans or the SCC hacked the Consulate. And your friend went to the Continental Building to collect evidence. Maybe to meet someone?”
“That’s a solid working theory, yes.”
“And once she was there . . . what? She was ambushed?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Sure, but . . . In a city as dangerous as this one, there’s no need to invent threats. Any number of things could have delayed her return. An encounter with the American Union. Looters. A damaged cable that dropped her to the bottom of an elevator shaft. No need to jump to conclusions just yet.”
“I think if those things were likely, the Consulate would have sent someone immediately.”
“Are you certain they didn’t?”
“I’m only certain of one thing: the senior staff at the Consulate knows something we don’t. They’re scared, and they’re not talking.”
I chewed on that for a moment. “Any idea what they’re so afraid of?”