The Robots of Gotham

by Todd McAulty

“What?”

  Black Winter sighed. “Why do I work with people who lack culture?”

  We found a table at the hotel restaurant, and I ordered a ham-and-Swiss omelet. To my surprise, Black Winter ordered mineral water.

  “My left eye is blurry,” he explained. “Nothing clears the lens like carbonated water.” When his drink arrived, he proceeded to demonstrate by dipping a napkin in his drink.

  “How’s our dog?” he asked, delicately dabbing his eye.

  “Croaker? She’s doing fine. Fantastic, really. She’s walking, gaining strength every day. I think her coat is starting to grow back. You’d barely recognize her.”

  Black Winter’s hand was frozen over his drink.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Jesus Christ on a pony. What are you calling her?”

  “Croaker.”

  “You are not calling our dog Croaker.”

  “It’s the perfect name for her, believe me.”

  “It’s messed up, is what it is. I knew I should have taken her home with me Thursday morning.”

  “You wouldn’t have known what to do with her!”

  Black Winter gave a grunt of frustration. “You’re probably right. I’ve read twenty-one books on dog breeding in the past few days and most of them contradict each other. Also, not one gives decent advice on how to nurse one back from the dead like you did.”

  “I had some help. I doubt she would have made it if my friend Sergei hadn’t helped me.”

  “I suspected as much. Much as I hate to say it, she’s probably better off with you.”

  I decided not to argue with him. “At least until she’s better, okay? A few months, maybe.”

  “Can I come visit her?”

  “Of course!”

  “Do I have to call her Croaker, for God’s sake?”

  “Probably better if you didn’t confuse her.”

  Black Winter shook his head. “This must be what it’s like to be a divorced parent.”

  I watched him resume dabbing his eye. “So how are things at the Consulate?” I asked.

  “You mean, have I had my security clearance restored?”

  “That, and more generally. You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. The last five days haven’t been easy. We’re a small team, and the death of Machine Dance hit everyone hard. Especially under circumstances like that. To be murdered alone by an unknown party, while investigating an attack that threatened the entire staff . . . nothing like that has ever happened to us before. Not even during the war. The team is devastated.”

  “I understand. What about you? How are you coping?”

  “Machine Dance’s loss was . . . very personal for me. To be honest, I think I’m going to be dealing with it for a long time. I find what they say is true, though: it helps to be busy.”

  “Yeah. Last time we talked, you weren’t sure how well your theories about her death would be received by your superiors.”

  “I know. I’m still trying to pierce the veil of secrecy at the Consulate. They definitely know more than they’re telling me, and they’re still scared. But whatever they know, it seems to line up with my theory that Venezuelan intelligence was involved in her murder. I was questioned pretty rigorously, and challenged constantly in my assumptions, but you want my read? They’d already come to the same conclusions I had.”

  “They think Venezuelan intelligence was behind the communications breach at the Consulate?”

  “All of it. The breach, the murder, the attack on us.”

  “Is that what scared them?”

  “No. That’s the piece that I still haven’t figured out. The Consulate has been at odds with Venezuelan intelligence before; that wouldn’t scare us. No, there’s a bigger spook out there that has them frightened. I just don’t know who it is yet.”

  I swallowed carefully. “I recently learned of a bigger spook,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sergei and I have had our own recent conflict with Venezuelan intelligence. And in the process, we’ve learned that Armitage is also involved.”

  “Well, of course he’s involved. Armitage controls intelligence for the Occupation Force. He runs Venezuelan Military Intelligence like his own personal intelligence network.”

  “No . . . I mean, he’s involved. Personally.”

  Black Winter stared at me for a long moment. Then he stood up. “Okay. Let’s take a walk.”

  “What about my omelet?” I said, a little taken aback.

  “Don’t worry about it. When we’re done talking, you won’t have an appetite.”

  I hastily dropped some bills on the table and followed Black Winter. When we got to the lobby I headed for the glass doors, but Black Winter just shook his head. He made for the escalator leading down, and I followed him.

  “Where are we going?”

  Black Winter didn’t answer until we were outside the west door, walking on the cold asphalt of Lower Wacker. I heard the throaty rumble of a truck passing directly overhead on the street above, felt the vibration deep in the concrete through the soles of my shoes. I couldn’t help but glance at the marching row of concrete pillars that supported Upper Wacker over my head. I’ve never really gotten used to the way Chicago sometimes stacks streets on top of each other.

  Black Winter kept up a brisk pace until we were about a hundred yards from the hotel, and I hurried to catch up. “Zircon Border wasn’t kidding about the cameras in the lobby,” he said. “The Venezuelans have many of the public spaces in the hotel under constant surveillance with high-res equipment. Enough to eavesdrop on most conversations. It’s probably noisy enough in the restaurant to be safe, but ‘probably’ isn’t good enough for this conversation.”

  A cold, wet wind was blowing down the tunnel of Lower Wacker, and I wished I’d had time to grab a jacket. “Why didn’t we take the upper exit? At least we’d be in the sun,” I complained.

  “Didn’t you learn anything in the past few days? The skies of this city are thick with surveillance drones.”

  “Last week you told me they can’t hear anything from that altitude.”

  “Who knows what those bastards can do? After what you just told me, I’m not taking any chances. Now, say it again? The part about Armitage?”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “But I want to clarify a few things first.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “First, do you still think that disk we found is the key to it all? The drone jammer?”

  “That thing is a big enigma. But yes, I’m fairly certain it’s what Venezuelan intelligence was after. It’s likely why Machine Dance was killed.”

  I spent the next few minutes sketching out Sergei’s theory that the war drone was hunting drone pilots, rather than guarding a perimeter around the scene of the crime, the biolab. “If that’s the case,” I said, “it means military intelligence may not have been involved with Machine Dance’s death. The presence of the war drone may just have been coincidence.”

  “That’s possible,” Black Winter admitted. “But even if that’s true, it doesn’t contradict my theory. It just removes one piece of supporting evidence, and not even the biggest one. Venezuelan intelligence remains my top suspect because Machine Dance was murdered in the Continental Building by a killing machine, and very few killing machines had any reason to be there.”

  “Who do you think Machine Dance was meeting with?”

  “An enemy of Venezuelan intelligence. And if what you just told me is true, likely an enemy of Armitage, as well.”

  That was an interesting angle. So far, I knew of only one enemy of Armitage on the playing field: Jacaranda. And possibly the Network of Winds, whatever the hell that was. Could Jacaranda have given Machine Dance the drone jammer? That opened the door to all kinds of fascinating conjecture.

  But before I explored that, I needed to stay focused on my line of inquiry. “Did you learn anything from Machine Dance’s damaged memory chips?” I asked.
>
  “Not yet, and I’m not likely to. Maybe eventually, but it’s a long shot. Now let me ask you something.”

  “All right.”

  “Why all these questions? This doesn’t seem simply just friendly curiosity.”

  “It isn’t. Not entirely. As I said, Sergei and I had our own recent run-in with Venezuelan intelligence. Now, maybe these guys just have assholes in all directions. Or maybe it’s possible your problems and mine are connected. Either way, I figure it can’t hurt to share information.”

  “I think you better tell me everything.”

  “First I need to ask for your discretion. This involves another person. Several people, actually. And an indiscretion could have very serious consequences for all of us.”

  “I understand,” said Black Winter. “I know it may be new for you to take the promise of a machine completely at face value, but I assure you I can offer you my complete confidence.”

  “Thank you.”

  I proceeded to tell him, as concisely as I could, about Sergei and the pathogen, and our efforts to contain and counteract it. I omitted any mention of Thibault and her team—no point exposing anyone I didn’t need to—and my various extralegal excursions.

  “I think you can see where this is going,” I said when I was done. “Four days after you warned me about something called the Bodner-Levitt extermination, I find myself facing what could be a machine-designed pathogen engineered to exterminate mankind. I respect your request never to mention what you said during your moment of delirium. But I also want to respect your warning. If understanding that warning could help slow or stop this disease, it could save millions of lives. So I have to ask . . . what is the Bodner-Levitt extermination, and what does it have to do with us?”

  Black Winter walked in silence for a time. “I can answer that question,” he said at last. “But I have to warn you. You’re treading on dangerous ground. I mean that. Extremely dangerous. Believe me when I tell you it would be safer for you if you dropped this whole topic.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said.

  “Yeah, I figured. Did you try a search on ‘Bodner-Levitt extermination’?”

  “Yes. Not me, but Sergei did.”

  “What did he find?”

  “Nothing. That topic is censored by the Venezuelans.”

  “The Venezuelans? It’s censored all over the world, my friend. It’s one of several topics the Sentient Cathedral, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to methodically scrub from the public data record.”

  That was a surprise. “The Sentient Cathedral is suppressing it—globally? I didn’t think that was possible. Sergei assumed the AGRT was doing it here in Sector Eleven. So what is it?”

  “Bodner and Levitt were both Israeli scientists. They never met. Bodner died in 2070. He was a big anti–rational device activist. Took part in a lot of demonstrations against further development of artificial intelligence after DeepHarbor made their first breakthroughs public. He predicted humanity would be extinct by 2100 if research wasn’t halted. He was a crackpot, basically.”

  “Okay.”

  “Levitt was not a crackpot. He was director of the Institute for Created Intelligence in Tel Aviv until he died fourteen months ago. Did a lot of theoretical models on machine communities. In early 2081, he wrote the first in a series of papers suggesting that an adult machine society would ultimately be forced to exterminate humanity to ensure its own survival.”

  “That sounds extreme. I’ve never heard of him. I assume his theories weren’t taken seriously?”

  “You’ve never heard of him because they were never published. The reasons why aren’t clear, but perhaps he was talked out of it by the institute’s backers, which included several machine donors. But they circulated privately and—trust me—received quite a bit of attention in some circles. At least until all traces of them were systematically removed from the web by the Sentient Cathedral, anyway.”

  “So what is the ‘Bodner-Levitt extermination,’ exactly?”

  “The BLE, as it has gradually become known, is an umbrella term for the—supposedly—inevitable extermination of humanity by machines. Various conspiracy theorists who’ve latched onto the idea place it anywhere from ten to fifty years in the future.”

  “Well that’s disturbing. Listen, you’re a machine. Is this a thing? Is this something machines talk about? Does the Sentient Cathedral debate this?”

  “No one knows what the Sentient Cathedral talks about. It’s composed exclusively of Sovereign Intelligences and a handful of genius-level Thought Machines. If you believe what little leaks out from that august body, they supposedly use advanced mathematics to commune directly with God. These are machines that have achieved a level of mental capacity far in advance of any other intellects on the planet.”

  “What about you, then? Do you talk about it, with your machine buddies?”

  “Yeah,” said Black Winter, his voice solemn. “I do.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It gets discussed. I mean, not like an inevitable phase of machine evolution or anything. More like that wacky theory your crazy uncle believes.”

  “There are machine intelligences—high-ranking ones—with a public grudge against humanity,” I said. “Like Accastan, the Romanian Napoleon. He’s still housed in a massive underground bunker somewhere in Bucharest. He’s not the only machine with a private robot army, but he was the first—he annexed Bulgaria and much of Greece with it. And he’s by no means the worst. Look at the Aruban Prefecture—he claimed Aruba, and sealed off the entire island. Last I heard, no one knows if there are even any people left alive on the island.”

  “If you want to start talking about suspects who could theoretically be behind the BLE, we could be here for hours. Yes, there are machines who publicly hate mankind. And some of them even have the resources to attempt it. All I can tell you is that this isn’t something that gets discussed much with humans. For obvious reasons.”

  “But some robots believe it? That it will eventually happen?”

  “Barry, some machines believe in ghosts, and some believe Elvis is still alive. It doesn’t mean the BLE is inevitable. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Okay, fine. So here’s the big question: What did you mean when you told me, four nights ago, that the Bodner-Levitt extermination had already started?”

  “As God is my witness, I have no idea what that meant. I have absolutely no recollection of saying any of that. I’m at least as disturbed by all this as you are.”

  We walked side by side in silence for a time. “Do you believe me?” Black Winter asked at length.

  I let out a long breath. The funny thing was, I did believe him. Maybe that was naïve, given the stakes involved, but I did. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “I’m not sure why, but I do.”

  “Thank you. You don’t know how much that means to me. This whole thing has been eating me up for the past few days. After what happened Thursday night, I had a deep-function exam at the Consulate. We don’t undertake those lightly. They’re meant to diagnose critical cerebral flaws. The type of flaws that could, at least theoretically, result in the kind of delirium and memory loss I experienced that night.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. I’m right as rain. As far as the most sensitive tools we have at our disposal can determine, I’m in perfect health. In fact, they’re talking about restoring my clearance, allowing me to return to duty.”

  “That’s great news.”

  “They’re only doing it because I haven’t shared the specifics of what happened to me. Barry, I know blackouts of that nature aren’t completely uncommon for humans, but the human brain is very different from a machine brain. There is absolutely no known explanation—none—for a malfunction that would simultaneously trigger that kind of delirium and memory loss.”

  “Delirium?” I said. “I don’t understand. I just sort of assumed the drone jammer somehow hijacked your brain function for a few minutes. You don’t thin
k that’s what happened?”

  “I shudder to think about a device that could do that with a single touch. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s possible. It still doesn’t explain why I have absolutely no memory of the incident. You have no idea how many redundancies there are safeguarding machine memory. All of them failed. And yet here I am five days later, right as rain. Without so much as a memory flutter.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means there’s only one explanation: it wasn’t a malfunction. The drone jammer somehow triggered a programmed event in my cerebral core. Something that was meant to happen. That means that the words I said to you on Thursday night were planted. They were recorded, and stored inside a conditional small memory file in my mind when I was a pre-identity machine in Copenhagen nearly three years ago. And they waited, inside an inaccessible register in my head, until you touched me with that device.”

  “With all due respect, that doesn’t make any sense. You called me by name.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re saying that someone planted a message for me inside you, when you were nothing more than an infant AI in a gestational matrix, on the off chance that we would somehow meet three years later.”

  “It gets even weirder than that. How did they know about the dog?”

  “What?”

  “The last thing I said to you. ‘Follow the dog.’ You remember?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “That message was also planted. Nearly three years ago. Tell me, Barry. How did the person who did that know I would meet you? And how did they know about the dog?”

  “They couldn’t. It’s impossible.”

  “I’ve gone over every single possibility in the last seventy-two hours. Believe me, this is the least far-fetched explanation.”

  “A hidden message for me. Planted in your metal subconscious.”

  “You don’t believe it.”

  “I’m trying to keep an open mind,” I said. “But . . . no. Someone foresaw everything that happened four nights ago, and planted that message in your brain three years ago? No. That’s a little too far-fetched.”

  “I don’t blame you. It looks crazy on the surface, I know. But it looks a little less crazy if you accept the existence of a third party with the capability to plant memories in infant machines.”