When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

  “Terrible,” Niemann muttered.

  “Thank you,” I said, somewhat surprised by her sympathy.

  “These are state files, for God’s sake, it is not unreasonable to expect a degree of accuracy,” Niemann continued, writing a memo to herself: DISCIPLINARY ACTION RESEARCHER RE: SOUTH’S DEAD WIFE.

  Ah.

  “Moving on,” said Niemann. “Promoted to Security Agent Grade 2 after three years. Respectable, if not spectacular. And then, following your divorce…”

  Here she stopped, crossed a line out with a pencil and wrote in a correction.

  “Following your tragic bereavement…” She stopped, and with a somewhat theatrical flourish, she closed the file.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. You were promoted once. You have remained at the same rank, in the same section, for the past twenty-six years. Your work has consistently been acceptable and not a jot better than that. You attend party meetings. But only the absolute minimum number required for a man in your position. You have never been heard, or overheard, or observed to say or do or think anything remotely subversive, and I would know, South. Believe me.”

  For a moment, her attitude of bored indifference hardened into something considerably more unnerving.

  “If you had so much as a traitorous thought in your head I would have pried it out and stamped on it a long time ago. If you believe nothing else in this world, believe that.”

  I believed her. I believed her as much as I believed that I was here, in this room, listening to her say the words.

  “And yet,” she said, and the goddess of life and death was once again my bored office superior, “without exception, every supervisor you have had has commented on your almost palpable lack of zeal. You seem to have no ambition. No passion. No pride. No party connections. And, the seagulls notwithstanding, no friends from what I can see. You have toiled away, for over half a lifetime, in a tiny gray office, doing the same work you were doing when you were a young man, and doing it no better.”

  I felt a little dizzy. Was my work performance really so abysmal that the acting head of State Security had deemed it necessary to take time out of defending the nation to call me onto the carpet?

  “Deputy Director…,” I mumbled.

  Niemann’s voice cut across mine, like a knife through jam.

  “And then, four days ago. A notice goes up on the Agency’s bulletin board. There is an opening, a promotion, available for Security Agent Grade 3. And while looking through the hundreds of applications of bright young things, eager for new challenges and opportunities, ready and waiting to put their lives on the line to defend this great nation, I see the name of Nikolai Andreivich South. Now why, after twenty-six years, have you decided that you deserve a promotion?”

  Why indeed?

  I remembered that morning well. I had incautiously glanced at my desktop calender and been struck with the sudden, impossible realization that Olesya had been dead twenty years. And I had realized that I would not survive another twenty years like them. Something had to change.

  “Deputy Director, I entered the competition on a whim,” I said. “I did not expect to be seriously considered. I apologize. Please consider my application withdrawn.”

  Niemann folded her hands under her chin.

  “Oh no. It’s not that simple. You’re in my field of vision now, South. And that is a very dangerous place to be.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

  “Because now that I’ve noticed you, I’ve decided to make use of you. There’s a job,” said Niemann.

  Now that threw me. Was I being recruited? By the deputy director herself?

  “What kind of job?” I asked, and to my own amazement, I could hear a hint of excitement in my voice. It didn’t even sound like my voice.

  “The kind that it is bloody difficult to find someone to do,” she said.

  “Dangerous?” I asked, and would you believe, my heart leapt at the idea?

  Not that my life lacked for danger. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person and ParSec would find my neck as easily as anyone else’s. But what Niemann seemed to be offering was a chance to be killed for the state, not by it. That made all the difference. When a man reaches a certain age he gets a potent urge to start driving powerful cars too fast, or to parachute out of planes, or something equally likely to end in violent death. Ever since the purge of StaSec eighteen years prior, I had made an art of not drawing attention to myself, of not putting myself forward for anything too dangerous. In short, I had spent almost twenty years trying to stay out of this very seat in this very room.

  And yet, now that I was here, I found the idea of dangerous fieldwork irresistibly appealing. I think it was the sight of Sheena and Yasmin Paria lying dead, killed by the Machine’s false promises, that had rekindled my sense of duty. I was back in the fight. I did a quick mental inventory of ongoing StaSec operations and tried to guess what Niemann had planned for me. Investigating the rumored infiltration of the army by Ajay militants, perhaps? Making contact with pro-Humanist groups in America or Europe? Persian drug-traffickers? Armenian dissidents? Yozhik?

  But Niemann shook her head.

  “No. Or at least … not how you might think,” Niemann said. “The job itself is quite easy. But it’s the kind of job that, a few months down the line, if things go badly, could end with you standing in a darkened room, in front of a row of men whose faces you cannot see, being asked questions to which there are no right answers. But if you do it? You shall have accrued considerable goodwill with me. And that is not nothing, South. That, in fact, is some of the better currency out there. Do you understand?”

  I had absolutely no idea what this was all about.

  “I understand,” I said.

  She nodded approvingly.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  Niemann leaned back in her chair.

  “Because I need a man who is expendable. A man who does not and is not seen to have loyalty to any particular faction within the party. Who will follow orders without question. And, because I am such a sentimentalist, has no surviving family. I need someone no one would miss.”

  “Well,” I said. “When you put it like that I seem somewhat overqualified.”

  She gave me a smile that may have been kind, or merely pitying.

  She took my file and swept it into her desk as if she were cleaning away a stain.

  “I’m finished with this file. I find it rather dull,” she said.

  She took out another file, red this time, and set it down in front of me.

  “Now this one,” said the deputy director, with a gleam in her eye. “Full of drama and mystery, South.”

  I took the file, and opened it. And the first thing I saw when I opened it was a photograph.

  It was a man in his late thirties. Handsome, with the long, regal features of a Roman emperor. He was bald, and so had no hair to conceal the massive purple bruise that marred his temple over his left eye.

  He was dead.

  He was also, I was shocked to realize, Paulo Xirau.

  4

  The word “machine” was everywhere, in Caspian. A loose, pliable concept on the tongue of virtually everyone I spoke to. It was noun, adjective and pejorative. Once, perhaps, it had solely referred to those individuals who were coded online and had not been born organically. But now, it had expanded and grown immense. Anything could be “machine,” or anyone. If you’ve ever been contranned, regardless of the circumstances of your birth, you are “machine.” If you’ve ever loved someone who was born code, you are “machine.” If you believe in the rights and dignities of artificial citizens, you are “machine.” A book can be “machine.” A sentence. A word. The concept of “machine” had grown to encompass everything beyond the borders of the Republic. Hence their name for us: “The Machine World.”

  —Vika Melkovska, Enclosed Sea, Enclosed State: A Journalist Undercover in the Caspian Republic

  “Xirau’s dead?” I gasped.

&nb
sp; “Oh, you knew him?” Niemann said, mildly. I caught the rebuke. Yes, Deputy Director, even I had heard of Paulo Xirau.

  Everyone in the party knew Xirau. Anyone with ambition read his weekly column in The Caspian Truth, or at least claimed to. Nothing too challenging there. It was basically the same theme reiterated over and over. Once you had read one, you had read them all. Long, fiery, venomous diatribes against the Machine and its human chattel. Punishing stuff to read, even if you were aligned with his beliefs. I would have called them “jeremiads,” but that would have been unfair to a prophet who had at least a gift for vivid imagery. Xirau’s prose was a sledgehammer: dull, pounding and relentless. He died the most widely read writer in the whole country.

  “Cause of death?” I asked. “Or is that the mystery?”

  “Oh no, no,” said Niemann. “Believe me when I say that Mr. Xirau’s death is by far the least interesting thing about him.”

  “You intrigue me, Deputy Director,” I said.

  “Oh, I am glad,” said Niemann with, perhaps, just a touch of sarcasm.

  I leafed through the file. A picture slipped out from between two pages: Xirau standing in a line of party functionaries in front of Mendelssohn’s hanging corpse. Every other man and woman there is looking away but not Xirau. Oh no, Xirau is staring up at him like an apostle, his eyes clear and bright.

  I suppressed a shudder, and continued reading.

  Xirau had not been born in the Caspian Republic. I hadn’t known that, but it was obvious in retrospect. No one is as fanatical as the recent convert. He had emigrated twenty years ago from Persia, and taken a low-paying job in a cannery in Bonogady. I had met a few cannery workers in my time and some of them even had all their fingers. Not typically the kind of work one risks their life and leaves behind everything they’ve ever known for. While in the cannery, Xirau had penned some articles for the union newsletter, which had gotten him noticed by his bosses in the union, and, through them, the party. For a writer’s work to be circulated among the upper levels of the party was usually a precursor to them coming down with a rather permanent case of writer’s block, but not this time. Xirau was offered a position at The Truth (then viewed as a rather out-of-touch and elitist organ), and asked to bring his rough, authentic, working-class voice to the paper’s readers, who were left with nothing to do but wonder what they had done to deserve it.

  From there, he had become the closest thing the modern party had to an intellectual voice, and when you had said that, you had said everything. I glanced back at that picture of Xirau at the hanging and remembered the tales of what he done there.

  Xirau spitting on the corpse of Leon Mendelssohn. That was where we were, now.

  That was the Caspian Republic.

  “Did you read Xirau, South?” Niemann asked me.

  “Occasionally,” I replied, warily.

  “What did you think of him?” she said.

  I felt insulted. She didn’t have to set the trap while I was looking right at her, that was just rude.

  “He was a loyal party man,” I heard myself say.

  “I’m loyal, South,” said Niemann with a furtive smile. “He was a bloody fanatic.”

  I wanted to return the smile. But the Deputy Director of State Security could say such things, I could not.

  “Do we believe that his political writing led to his death?” I asked. Xirau had been fond of darkly hinting that members of the party and the two main security agencies were in league with the Machine Powers. The party leadership encouraged this as it kept everyone on their toes. But maybe someone had found one of Xirau’s vague hints to be just a little too specific?

  Niemann simply chuckled.

  Irritated by her coyness, I skimmed ahead through the file until I reached the account of Xirau’s death. It was, as the deputy director had promised, depressingly anticlimactic.

  Xirau had died in a bar fight.

  Apparently he had tried to kiss a woman whose boyfriend had old-fashioned ideas about that sort of thing. “A case of mistaken identity” according to the file. A punch had been thrown and Xirau had cracked his head against a table and died almost instantly. Xirau’s killer, a man named Oleg Mansani, had a criminal record that was long but shallow: drunk and disorderly behavior, a few counts of assault, low-level hood work. It was considered unlikely that Xirau’s writings in The Truth were what led to his death, given that Mansani was borderline illiterate. Xirau’s death was exactly what it seemed. A sordid, bloody little accident. A life ending in a whimper.

  I was starting to wonder why the deputy director was showing me this when I turned the page and a paragraph detailing the coroner’s findings jumped out at me like a bandit. I almost dropped the file in shock.

  It was impossible. Of all people.

  Niemann was grinning at me.

  “He was an AI…,” I muttered, to her or myself.

  “He was.”

  “A cloned body,” I said.

  “Yes. Meaning that the man known as Paulo Xirau was a computer program. Part of the Infernal Machine, as he most likely would have put it himself,” Niemann replied.

  I felt light-headed and my mind raced. If Xirau (Xirau!) could be Machine, then who else? How many were walking among us? Had they infiltrated StaSec? The Parliament? Had we already lost?

  No.

  There were methods of detecting cloned bodies. High-ranking members of the party were regularly screened. I, in fact, had administered the test myself hundreds of times. You started with the teeth. Plaque and microcavities from a lifetime of eating food were difficult to fake. You then moved on to a spit sample, all the while engaging the suspect in casual conversation to find flaws in the accent or pronunciation of various words that might indicate that language had been implanted digitally rather than learned aurally.

  These methods were fairly effective, though far from infallible. For “infallible,” you needed an autopsy. The reason Xirau had chosen to work at The Truth was, despite his fame and influence, he was still technically only a rank-and-file party member and not likely to be screened.

  “A spy?” I asked. If not that, then what?

  “Bloody terrible one if he was,” said Niemann. “The body was a civilian model. Xirau had been living here for a good twenty years. We have searched his rooms and there is not a shred of evidence he engaged in any espionage whatsoever. No subversive literature. No coded instructions. Nothing. It was the cleanest search I have ever undertaken. This Machine was a model human citizen.”

  I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. They felt too large for my head, somehow.

  “Let me see if I understand you,” I said. “Twenty years ago, a sentient computer program downloads itself into an off-the-rack cloned body. Immigrates to what is, for it, the most dangerous country in the world, and takes a low-paying job risking life and limb in a cannery before moving to the state newspaper where it writes tracts on the soulless, inhuman Machine of which it is secretly a part.”

  “Told you he was interesting, didn’t I?” said Niemann with a grin. I did not share her good humor.

  “What the hell was it thinking?” I wondered aloud.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Niemann said, suddenly all business again.

  “It doesn’t?” I said, incredulously.

  “Not to you. Xirau was coded in a lab in Bonn and spent much of his life on an American server. He claimed both American and EU citizenship. They have jointly asked that his … wife be allowed to come here to Caspian and identify him.”

  I stared at her.

  “Wife?” I said at last.

  “You heard me.”

  “It had a wife?”

  “It was a program who had a program that was programed to call itself his wife,” Niemann snapped irritably. “I don’t understand it, you don’t understand it, but then we are sane. Regardless, Parliament has agreed to this request.”

  That shocked me more than anything I had heard today, and it had been a banner day.

 
; “How is that possible?” I stammered. “The law—”

  “Can be bent, overruled, interpreted imaginatively or, in extreme cases, simply ignored,” Niemann interrupted with a wave of her hand. “Xirau’s wife program, or rather widow program, is to be granted a special dispensation. It is to be considered an ‘honorary human.’”

  This was insane. Gravity had reversed itself and the sun was setting in the east.

  “Why would the party…,” I began.

  “You look very pale, South,” Niemann said.

  I was the only Black man in StaSec, and for a moment I thought she was making a joke.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Did you have a hearty breakfast this morning? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  I had been certain when I stepped into the office that Niemann knew about my warning to Smolna. That might make anyone pale.

  “No. I missed breakfast this morning.” A lie, technically, but my breakfast had been so meager that it didn’t feel like one.

  “Tut-tut, South. Most important meal of the day. I suppose the shops were out by the time you got there?”

  “Yes,” I said, conscious that I was being drawn deeper into a lie.

  “Was there a queue?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have it quite lucky here, you know,” Niemann said philosophically. “Outside the city, restaurants have started charging people to rummage through their bins.”

  I said nothing. Sanctions had been in place against the Caspian Republic for decades, but the hanging of Mendelssohn had evidently broken new ground in the Machine’s loathing for us. George, Confucius and Athena rarely agreed on anything, but they had agreed that the Caspian Republic must starve, and Congress, the Standing Committee and the European Parliament had dutifully complied.

  “Let’s not beat about the bush, South,” said Niemann. “The embargo is starting to bite and we’re all feeling it. Even me.”

  At that I did something very dangerous. I actually snorted. Ridiculous. As if someone as high up in the party as Niemann could know hunger. What was that saying they had in Old Baku? What kind of party doesn’t have food?