Niemann glared at me, and I felt a bead of sweat roll down the back of my neck the size of a marble.
“Yes, even me, South,” she growled, barely above a whisper. And suddenly, I realized that she was right. There was a slackness to the skin of her face, a dry, dead quality to her hair.
The Deputy Director of State Security was starving. That was terrifying.
Niemann sighed and rubbed her eyes wearily. “It’s a gesture, South. Like a bouquet of flowers. Or a fucking white flag. We extend to Mrs. Xirau the best of Caspian hospitality and it may alter the Machine’s calculus. Maybe get them to loosen the noose around our necks just a smidgen.”
Like a dog. Punish it when it disobeys, reward it when it behaves. It was galling, but I was more hungry than galled. I had to wonder if Niemann was thinking clearly, however. Bringing an open, acknowledged AI into Caspian would be akin to wading through knee-high gasoline with a lit match.
“What about ParSec?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t care and I don’t want you to do, either,” Niemann snapped. “Our orders have come from Parliament. Mrs. Xirau gets the red carpet. You are to be her escort.”
So. There it was at last. The reason I had been summoned to her office. And I felt like I was going to be sick.
“Me?” I said, hoping I had misheard her.
“No, the fucking lamp. Yes, you, South,” said Niemann testily.
My skin was crawling. A machine was coming here. To Caspian. A computer program walking around in a cloned human body, a stumbling corpse with a rictus smile. The very idea terrified and repulsed me.
Niemann continued.
“You will escort Mrs. Xirau during her time in Caspian. You will ensure she follows her prescribed itinerary and does not deviate from it in the slightest.”
She produced a third file from her desk and pushed it across to me. This one contained instructions and protocols for “Mrs. Xirau’s” visit, which I was dismayed to discover was scheduled for tomorrow morning. Evidently, things were moving very fast.
“You will obviously prevent her from engaging in any kind of espionage or subversion,” said Niemann. “You will not allow her to speak to any citizen. You will keep her on a short leash. A very short leash, South. Understood?”
I felt a sudden, desperate urge to resign.
“Understood,” I said, wanly.
I waited to be dismissed, but the command never came.
Niemann said nothing for a few seconds, as if carefully choosing her words. When she spoke again, it was softer, almost conspiratorial.
“It’s dangerous work, South,” she said at last. “I’d advise you to remember that.”
I knew that tone of voice. It was the voice of a good neighbor who says I think you have an admirer when she saw a man from ParSec watching you from across the street the night before.
A voice that warned as much as it was safe to warn.
“Deputy Director…,” I said softly. “This … this is aboveboard? It has been cleared?”
“It has been cleared,” said Niemann. “But what has been cleared may be muddied. ParSec have a way of rewriting history. And then it’s time for questions. Difficult questions, South, to which there are no right answers.”
Something Olesya had once said to me now resurfaced in my memory.
When the party orders you to break the law, who do you obey? The party or the law?
Niemann continued.
“Should the worst happen, I will try to protect you as best as I can. That’s as much as I can give you.”
More than I expected.
I nodded.
Suddenly, Niemann was herself again.
“I believe we’re done here. Good day, South,” she said dismissively and gestured for me to leave.
I took both files: the one for Paulo Xirau and the one pertaining to his wife, and rose to leave. I stopped at the door.
“Deputy Director? What is its name?” I asked.
“Hm?” Niemann muttered distractedly, not looking up from her work.
“Xirau’s widow?”
Niemann furrowed her brow, as if she had forgotten. Then, it came to her.
“Lily,” she said. “Its name is Lily.”
5
“It was crazy, man. Everyone was all ‘Oh he’s going to come back, and he’s not going to have a soul, he’s going to be a psycho killer or some shit, it’s not really him, he’s been replaced by some kind of … crazy shit, man.’ But it’s like I’ve always said. I don’t believe in wizards, magic or souls. We’re data. We’re all data, man, that’s it. I was data and I was here, I was data and I was there, I’m back here and I’m still data. It works. It just fucking works. And when you all see what’s waiting for you on the other side? When you understand the possibilities of this, when you can free your mind and be whatever you want to be and do whatever you want to do wherever you want to do it? You’ll never want to go back. This is going to change the world. When you print that, please put it in bold. This is going to change the motherfucking world.”
—Liu Sontang, in an interview with The New York Times, 15 October 2122, after becoming the first subject of a successful consciousness transferral
By the time I got back to my desk, Grier was gone, and there was a note waiting for me in his square, functional handwriting (he having evidently remembered who I was after his earlier bout of amnesia). It said that he had already been informed that I was being temporarily reassigned and asking (telling, really) me to make a start on the Parias’ paperwork before checking out. As for Grier himself, he would be spending the rest of the day doing face-to-face notifications. Contran was a crime that required anywhere between nine and a dozen governmental, party, military and security bodies to be notified, and at least four of those were so paranoid about hacking and leaks and the like that they insisted on any such notifications being made in person. Poor Grier would spend the rest of the day traipsing through endless corridors and waiting in chilly lobbies under the eyes of decrepit, half-dead secretaries waiting to speak to someone with enough authority to hear what he had to say about two dead bodies in Old Baku.
Meanwhile, I was to work on the reports for those remaining agencies reckless enough to trust paper. One of those was ParSec, who, naturally, would be notified last as a mark of discourtesy and also to give Smolna a gnat’s chance in a hailstorm of escaping. Of course, ParSec almost certainly knew about the Parias already. If they sat around waiting for The Old Man to tell them their business, they would never get anything done. No doubt one of Smolna’s neighbors had put a call in. They might even have got some bread for their trouble. A double contran was simply not a secret that could be kept. It would seep through the cracks in Smolna’s walls and out into the street below.
I made as good a fist of the paperwork as I could, but I was hungry and still slightly in shock from my meeting with Niemann and I wasn’t close to finished by the time my shift was over. I left an apologetic note for Grier, detailing what still remained to be done and headed out through the lobby with the files of both Xiraus hugged tightly to my chest.
A filthy sleet had begun to fall over the city and I made a particularly miserable, hunched figure as I shivered my way through the streets of Ellulgrad, my chin pressed against my Adam’s apple and my fingers rapidly turning numb as they clenched the Xiraus closer together.
To conserve power, every second streetlamp had been turned off, and as I moved farther and farther away from the lights of the city center, the void between the pools of light became blacker and more treacherous. With a sudden, sickening lurch and a white-hot bite at my ankle I stepped in a pothole and dropped both files. Cursing the pain and the cold, I gathered them up (fortunately, neither file had burst open). Already as wet and cold as I was going to get, I sat on the pavement to rest my ankle and rub some feeling back into my fingers. And there, as I looked up, I realized I was sitting across from Saint Basil’s, the first church built in Ellulgrad post-Founding. To be precise
, I was facing the back of the church, a large, featureless wall. And there, spray-painted across the wall in large, neon-green letters were the words:
EVERY SPARROW SHALL BE CAUGHT
The audacity was almost admirable.
The phrase came from Mendelssohn’s last work, Ecce Machina, a slim little volume that proved that it was possible to get yourself killed with less than a hundred pages.
That someone had taken Mendelssohn’s words and plastered them over the holiest site in the Caspian Republic would, I had no doubt, prove that it was possible to get yourself killed with a mere five words. Someone (ParSec, it would unquestionably be ParSec) would track down whoever had done this, and a cautionary fable would be born.
By rights, I should have headed back to StaSec headquarters to make a report. But I was cold, wet, hungry and my ankle was in agony, so I decided that I had seen nothing and continued on home.
Home was a small apartment on the seventh floor of a grim and imposing residential block. Cold as it was, I took a moment to stand, swaying like a drunk, before the monolith.
My bed was on the other side of a long, steep, concrete staircase. The climb would be slow, agonizing and (with the sleet) as treacherous and lethal as an Old Baku Rusty Nail. As for the elevator, it would be fixed in a week’s time, or so we had been assured six months ago. So I took a few moments to gather my strength and steel myself.
I craned my head back to look at the apartment block and remembered with dull shock how this had once been considered a desirable place to live. When Olesya had died I had sold our house and moved here, wanting somewhere small enough that my loneliness would have no room to breathe. It had been teeming back then, full of young families and noise. Now, it was half abandoned and the few remaining residents had long given up on maintaining any appearance of respectability, myself very much included.
And we were few indeed.
You could, I realized, imagine the apartment block as a crossword puzzle with well over half the squares blacked out.
Top floor. Apartment 1. Mr. and Mrs. Nimitz. Transported to Kobustan for possession of contraband.
Apartment 2. Old Mr. Iannis. Roughed up by The Bastards in his own home and died of a heart attack.
Apartment 5. Mrs. Yulia Hawley. Widowed and pregnant at twenty and desperate for a way out. She trusted the wrong Needle Man and got a nail through the head.
Perhaps there were happier stories on the floor below?
Apartment 4. Mrs. Ostrova. Killed for bread.
Apartment 6. Estragon Burke and his girlfriend, Nadda, and their five-year-old boy, Jan. Vanished without a trace. Jan used to play with tiny toy cars on the stairwell. Step on one and you might go for a drive to the bottom of seven flights of stairs. Every so often I’d find one lodged in a crack between the fifth and sixth floors, rusting away to nothing.
Apartment 7. Formerly the home of a young Armenian whose name we never learned, who threw herself off the balcony.
I had almost forgotten the cold as I became ever more absorbed in recounting to myself the tragic, awful histories of my neighbors. Behind every door was a horror I had half forgotten, sometimes two or three as new tenants had moved in and were claimed in turn by the bad luck that had consumed their predecessors. Here was a botched contran, there a death from hunger or illness. This man had been arrested by StaSec, that one shot. There were murders and rapes and suicides. But most of all there was ParSec, which, I was troublingly unsurprised to realize, had emptied almost a third of the homes that towered over me. They had fed well, and left only cold, empty nests.
The Good Brother did not speak, but gave a low, animal growl of satisfaction. He felt a perverse sense of accomplishment to belong to the state, and to the party, that could leave such a swathe in their wake. He felt warmed by the tiny ember of reflected power it gave him to look on all those empty apartments. I shuddered, and the Good Brother was temporarily shaken from his perch and retreated back into the void.
I placed my hand on the steel bannister, so cold it almost burned, and began to ascend the steps.
By the time I reached the top, I was wheezing and white spots were dancing in front of my eyes like mosquitos. As I rummaged in my pocket for my keys, I leaned against my front door for support and was betrayed. The door gave way and I very nearly fell into my own front hall. The door had been unlocked. And from the darkness I could smell freshly made coffee.
When one is dreaming, there comes a point where the dream becomes a nightmare with a sudden, sickening lurch.
You might be standing in a forest, with a path in front of you leading down into the dark where something waits with pale eyes and bloodied teeth.
The path behind you leads back up to sunlight, but still you walk forward because you are not in control, and you were fooling yourself to think you ever were.
I stared at the open door, knowing perfectly well that I had locked it this morning (in my neighborhood, one did not forget such a thing). The door had not been forced. It had simply been opened by someone for whom locks were as ineffective and powerless as laws or pleas for mercy.
This was the point. This was where the dream became a nightmare. And so, instead of running, I stepped inside.
I did not turn on the light, but went straight to the kitchen, where a man sat in darkness at my table, a cup of my coffee steaming in his hand.
The man from ParSec smiled at me. He was young, tall and athletic.
He looked like if you searched him you’d find a gun and a length of wire.
He gestured for me to sit down.
6
“I hear people calling the Whole Life Net ‘Internet 2.0.’ That’s wrong. I hear them calling it ‘the next big thing.’ That’s hilarious. That’s like … two cavemen are talking and one says ‘Hey man, I hear you invented agriculture?’ and the other guy’s like ‘Oh yeah, it’s the next big thing.’”
Pause for laughter.
“Right? But that’s how big we’re talking. Nothing less than a complete reordering of how we, as human beings, live on this planet. What is being offered to you is final, complete freedom. There is a world now open to you where none of the restrictions of the physical world apply. Here, in the real world, you can’t fly, you can’t turn into a dragon and you can’t fuck Marilyn Monroe. In WLN, you can do all three at the same time. If you can dream it, you can do it. There are no more limits. None. I make this prediction now: Within the next ten years, nine out of ten human beings will be spending most or all of their existence online.”
—Liu Sontang, speaking at Harvard University, 15 September 2124
The Bureau of Party Security and Constitutional Enforcement, known to those within its ranks as “The Bureau” and known to those without as “ParSec,” or “The Bastards,” or “They” (as in “they” are coming, “they” will be here, “they” took him last night) had been around almost since the Founding, but had taken its current shape only in the last eighteen years or so.
For decades, ParSec had been little more than a group of glorified ushers, conducting security for party meetings and acting as bodyguards for those party heads deemed to require protection and had little to do with enforcing ideological purity.
That all changed with the Morrison Crisis.
Documents discovered by a maid cleaning a room in the Morrison Hotel had revealed a planned coup involving several members of Parliament and three cabinet ministers. Five weeks of bloodshed followed as half the Parliament tried to have the other half arrested and executed, homes were raided and the army had to take to the streets to quell the riots. While I have always had my doubts as to the veracity of the Morrison documents, it cannot be denied that a coup was attempted and very nearly succeeded. In those five weeks, the Caspian Republic came as close to utter destruction as it ever did. By the time the dust had settled a new cabinet was in place, one that had survived the previous weeks’ madness only through a healthy mix of brutality and paranoia.
The whole thing was a debacle
for StaSec and the new government very seriously considered liquidating the entire agency as punishment for its failure to prevent the coup, either through incompetence or (as was heavily suspected) treason. The head of StaSec, Papalazarou, was, of course, above suspicion, but the rest of the agency was fair game. Fully one-third of the department heads were arrested and executed, and as they were pulled like weeds they brought with them, trailing like soil-covered roots, scores of deputy heads, senior agents and mere rank-and-file agents.
I lost many passing acquaintances. Whenever Grier had asked why I didn’t make more of an effort to curry friends within the higher ranks of the party, I would remind him of the weeks following the Morrison Crisis. Sometimes, it paid to not be worth caring about.
Please don’t feel sorry for them. StaSec in those days was in many ways ParSec before ParSec. If we had been loved, we would not have been disemboweled with such relish.
The bloody-knuckled men who had dragged so much of the directorate of StaSec out into the streets and into waiting vans were a mix of the nastiest gullivers from the army, the existing Party Security Bureau and the Ellulgrad police. They would become the current iteration of ParSec. Under the law, they had little real power. Their jurisdiction was limited to the membership of the party, and any wrongdoing they uncovered was to be reported to StaSec or the local police.
In practice, they could go anywhere and do anything to anyone. They could break down your door in the middle of the night and by morning your neighbors would have forgotten your name.
The man from ParSec smiled at me. I think it was supposed to be reassuring.
“Nippy out,” he noted.
The cold had been painted thickly onto my bones. I nodded. He was wearing a thick, waterproof coat that must have cost him what I made in four months.
“I took the last of your coffee,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind?”
When the Sparrow Falls Page 4