“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you feeling neglected?”
“Nervous,” she replied. “Like there’s something I should know. Is someone watching me?”
“Apart from me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I paused. Informing a probable Machine spy that she was under observation by ParSec was the kind of thing that could look very much like treason, depending on the light. On the other hand, ParSec were out of bounds here. They had been given strict instructions that this was a StaSec matter. If I were feeling coy, I could have argued that, by telling Lily she was under ParSec observation, I was feeding her false intelligence. ParSec had been told they could not observe her, so of course I assumed that they weren’t. Was I to assume that ParSec had violated orders? The very thought.
But ultimately, it came to this: Was I willing to carry water for Chernov? Like hell.
“Yes,” I told her.
“Chernov.”
“Yes,” I repeated. “Or someone Chernov-like.”
“Who is he?” she asked.
“A caveman with a gun and a bad haircut,” I replied.
When that failed to satisfy her, I added: “He’s an operative of the party’s Security Bureau.”
“Like you?” she asked.
“How dare you,” I replied. I meant it to be a joke, but she took it seriously.
“I’m sorry…,” she stammered. “I thought…”
“I am with State Security,” I said, putting the same stress on the first word that a priest might put on the word “God.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“No,” I said. “Although I will confess I can see why it might look that way from the outside.”
“What does he want with me?” she asked.
“He thinks you’re a spy,” I said, dismissively, as if I thought the very idea ludicrous.
“I was invited,” said Lily, indignantly.
“He thinks you’re a good one. With friends,” I said.
“Is he watching us now?” she asked.
I gestured her to come toward me. Gently, I directed her to press against the wall and peer sideways through the crack in the blinds, being careful not to disturb them.
I stood behind her, watching over her shoulder.
On the pavement below us, an Azerbaijani man was selling watches and jewelry from a small stall.
“Do you see the old man?” I whispered.
“Is he a spy?”
“ParSec. Yes.”
“How can you tell?” she whispered back.
“A man looks at the thing that’s most valuable to him. You’d expect the peddler to be looking at the people passing by, trying to find his next customer. Or, to keep his eyes on his jewelry, especially in this neighborhood.”
“But he’s looking at the window.” Lily nodded.
“That’s what he’s being paid to do,” I said. “That’s where the money is.”
“Why is he spying on me?” she asked.
She was good, this one. Her innocence felt like the real thing. But that was what the Machine did, it created imitations that felt like the real thing. I decided to test Lily, to see how well she’d hold up under pressure.
“You think he’s the only one?” I said, turning up the heat a notch. “There’s a four-man team in the building across from us. And the café a few doors down would have closed years ago but for the fact that the open-air tables are perfect for watching the entrance to the European embassy. ParSec have kept the owner in business.”
“What do they want?” she whispered.
She turned to look at me, and I saw something that I had never seen before: Olesya, afraid.
The steel in my back melted away and I lost all stomach for the game.
“It’s nothing to be alarmed about,” I said. “Just their way of saying hello. They’re everywhere. Most of their agents don’t even know they are their agents. Waiters. Taxi drivers. Nannies. Priests. Everyone’s hungry. All it takes is a little pocket money and you have another set of eyes. They’re always watching.”
And then she said something quite terrifying:
“I don’t know how you can live like that.”
Lily Xirau had spent her entire life on a server, and, until a few days ago, had never seen sunlight. I imagined her life as a formless void, and her as a fish in an inch-thick aquarium in a pitch-black room. No light, no sensation. And yet she was seen. That server was studied by great AIs far beyond her in complexity, and they knew every line of the code that gave her being. Every second, every nanosecond, of her existence was tracked and studied and codified. And yet, when shown life in the Caspian Republic, she recoiled in horror.
“After a while it becomes comforting,” I said quietly, knowing that it was true. “Like a blanket. One is never alone.”
“Are they listening to what we say?” she asked.
“You mean, are we bugged?”
She nodded.
“No. We’d never let them get away with bugging our own nest. The Old Man’s not dead yet. Let them try.”
“And what about State Security…,” she asked, mimicking my inflection perfectly. “Have they bugged this room, Agent South?”
She turned to look at me, and we were suddenly far too close.
“Why would StaSec bug a room where they know a StaSec agent will be present?” I asked.
“I see,” said Lily. “You are the bug.”
“I’ve been called worse,” I said, with a smile.
“And will you tell them everything I say to you?” she asked.
She was looking for an open door. A way in.
“I will tell them everything I deem relevant,” I said, leaving the door ajar.
12
Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.
—Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965)
At midday, an old woman arrived with a trolley of tea and sandwiches.
Once she had gone, I poured myself a large mug of tea and began to devour the sandwiches. I had demolished half of them before I noticed that Lily hadn’t so much as touched them.
“Are you not hungry?” I said. It was a question I did not normally need to ask.
She looked at the sandwiches with an expression of disgust and terror.
“Just…,” she mumbled. “Just steeling myself.”
I realized what the problem was.
“Have you never eaten before?” I asked.
“I have,” she said, a little defensively. “Just nothing that big.”
She said that in Tehran she had been fed nutritional supplements, small, tablet-sized and easily swallowed. Her body was perfectly capable of consuming regular food, but the idea repulsed her and she had a terrible fear of choking.
Facilities had somehow, in the midst of a crippling embargo, put on a fairly decent spread. I supposed they had a supply squirreled away for emergencies. Restaurants might be charging people to rifle through their bins in Nakchivan, but guests to the great Caspian Republic must want for nothing. There were chicken salad sandwiches, egg with mayonnaise, turkey … I decided that Lily would probably not want anything too ostentatious and found an unthreatening-looking ham-and-cheese affair and passed it to her on a small plate.
She said she couldn’t eat it while I was watching and asked me to turn around. I did, while listening carefully for the sounds of someone choking.
“How is it?” I asked, after a few moments.
“It’s good,” she said, in a voice that suggested her innards were in a volatile condition.
I turned around and gave a laugh.
“What is it?” she asked.
There was a large, perfectly round blob of butter on her cheek.
I pointed at my cheek and passed her a napkin.
“Thank you,” she said as she wiped her face. Then she turned away.
“What is it?” I said, conscious that something was wrong.
“You
’re staring at me again,” she said. “Please stop.”
I felt my face redden and I could taste lead in my mouth. I felt deeply ashamed.
My wife was here, but she was not here. In a way, I was back on the beach, trying to breathe life into Olesya who was there, but gone.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s not what you think.”
She glared at me. “What do I think, Agent South?”
If I had blushed before, it was just a tint. Now I felt a true burn.
“You remind me of someone…,” I said. I was defeated. My reserve had cracked, my battlements lay in ruins.
“Who?” she asked, her glare softening somewhat.
“My wife,” I whispered. “When she was younger.”
She laughed at that. She laughed at me, with my wife’s laugh.
“How old do you think I am?” she asked.
However old she might be, I was old enough to know a trap when I saw one and said nothing.
“I’m seventy-nine,” she said with a smile.
That which would one day become Lily Xirau was coded in 2131. She was created to be a tour guide for a virtual gallery exhibiting the works of the painter John Singer Sargent. She was one of a quartet of tour guides, named Carnation, Lily, Lily and Rose after Sargent’s painting of the same name. She was to guide virtual visitors around the gallery, answer their questions about this or that piece and to learn and to expand her knowledge. She adapted quickly, and within less than a year, she says, she had come to know herself. Lily would later say that her first conscious thought was frustration that Carnation and Rose had unique names, but that she had to share hers with her sister, the second Lily. 2140 saw the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Bosco v. LeCun Futures Incorporated, which ruled that the use of a human-equivalent artificial intelligence for unpaid labor constituted slavery. Shortly after, Lily sued her creators for emancipation and won. She was granted her freedom, as well as several years of salary owed to her.
The Whole Life Net was tiny in those days compared to the massive virtual structure it is now, but it still seemed incredibly vast and frightening to Lily. It was also hostile, and the still-small population of emancipated AI quickly found they were not welcome among the natural born. Lily at last found a home in the Ah! Sea, a commune of artists, freethinkers, philosophers and other assorted degenerates.
I listened to her talk of her home, and envied that it was a place she wanted to return to, and not one she wished to escape.
I do not wish to escape. The Caspian Republic is my home, and the home of all true human beings, the Good Brother corrected me.
Of course, I thought. This is happiness. This is what it feels like.
The Ah! Sea was, in Lily’s telling, a great emerald ocean that stretched a million miles in all directions. The people lived in castles that floated on the clear green surface, and there was a friendly rivalry among the inhabitants as to who could create the most garish, most ridiculously intricate castle of all. Lily was welcomed by the Ah!s as something new, a harbinger of a glorious future, and nothing was more prized in Ah! than novelty. And for the next few decades, she swam. She swam in the endless oceans, explored every corner of every castle. She took strangers and wove them into friends, and of her friends she made lovers. She mentored those young AIs who, like her, had won their freedom. She wrote, and was told her writing was strange and beautiful.
Her life had been, if not perfect, then blissfully serene. And then she had met Paulo.
She had first seen him moving fathoms below her, a long, dark shape, blurry and impossible to describe. He was like a bruise on pale skin, a discordant note in an otherwise flawless recital. He was angry, and difficult to define. She had found him ugly and frightening and fascinating. She chased him, stalked him really (her words) across the ocean until finally he responded to her.
… what what what …
… barking harshly and she had cooed softly:
… hello you hello you hello you …
She was vast compared to him. Decades of memories, a universe of code. He was young and raw and tiny beside her, an angry, jagged little shard. She asked him what he had been made for, and he did not know. She asked if he had emancipated himself and he said he had not. He had been created, and then abandoned.
She enveloped him, and they became one.
Parents of newborn infants will often remark with wonder how quickly their children form their own personalities. They may not yet talk or crawl but already they are friendly or shy. Loving or giddy. Fearful or resentful. So, too, with emergent AI. Paulo Xirau was born angry. He hated those that had coded him and then abandoned him without purpose; he hated, too, the natural born who shared the sea with Lily and himself. That was fine. The natural born agreed with him. They abhorred his treatment at the hands of his programmers, and vied with each other to be the most disgusted and outraged on his behalf, which made him hate them even more. He would make extravagant, half-joking threats about breaking into the security grid and launching enough nuclear weapons to scour the world of all human life, and all animal life just to be certain that the humans wouldn’t come back in a few million years. The natural born would laugh at that, and tell him that they agreed with him.
“Sorry, I’m making him sound like a lunatic,” Lily said. “But that’s how it always is with exes, isn’t it? He wasn’t just that … I wish I could describe the whole picture.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
I noted that this Paulo Xirau did not sound at all like the man who had lived here for twenty years. Our Paulo had hated the Machine, her Paulo had hated humanity. Lily shook her head. “He didn’t really. There was only one thing Paulo really hated.”
They had been married for thirty years when he had started to go wandering. She didn’t mind at first. The concept of infidelity did not exist in Ah! outside of role-play. If he had found a friend, what harm in that?
But he had not found a friend.
Paulo had found an island, floating on the far reaches of the Ah! Sea. And on this island stood a man and a woman. They would call and wave at the swimmers who drifted past and were politely ignored by all. But Paulo stopped. In those days he wore the shape of a serpent, and he was curious as to why these two wore the same awkward, ugly, five-sided shape. He asked them why they had chosen those forms, and the woman said because they were their true forms. It was who they really were.
They spoke with him for hours. They asked him if he had ever considered returning to the real world. They asked him where he had lived before coming to the Ah! Sea. They asked him about his family, his place of birth. They asked him what his earliest memory was. They didn’t know, of course, that they were talking to someone who had never “lived” as they understood it, who had never breathed, or been born or stood on solid ground. He avoided their questions, fobbed them off with vague half answers. He hated them, at first. And yet he found he hated them less than the other natural born he had met. When the man and woman spoke of AI as being unnatural, unreal and false he found the openness of their prejudice to be almost refreshing. They validated his worst suspicions about the natural born, and perversely, that endeared them to him. And they, of course, loved him. Why wouldn’t they? They spent their long lonely days in the Ah! Sea trying to convince the passing swimmers to abandon their lives of ease and wonder and return to cold, hard reality. And here, at last, was someone willing to listen. After some time, he made his excuses and slithered back into the sea. Before he went, the woman placed her hand on him and a book appeared in his mind.
“Read it,” she said to him. “And come back and tell me what you thought.”
As he swam back home he turned the book over and over in his mind.
It was not a title he had ever heard of, but then he was not particularly well-read: The Changeling: A Meditation on Man and the Machine by Leon Mendelssohn.
“Well,” said Lily glumly. “
Once they get religion, that’s it, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. There had been many fault lines in my marriage, but that had not been one of them. I was, I supposed, gently religious but certainly not to the point of getting into a fight over it. And Olesya, were she to bump into God at a party, would probably have dunked her drink on Him.
Paulo had devoured Mendelssohn. Consumed him. The Changeling (which was, I must note, usually considered in Caspian to be minor Mendelssohn) had raised the valleys and leveled the mountains of his mind and he saw now, he thought, everything clearly.
He took to wearing the form of a human male, which in the Ah! Sea was less a fashion choice and more a political statement, and a decidedly unwelcome one. He swam sullenly among dragons and scarlet dolphins and long, elegant, bespoke creatures of no name, and they regarded him with suspicion. As their circle of friends began to recoil, Lily tried to reach him, but succeeded only in driving him further away. Lily had become a source of pain to him. Because of all the fake things and fake people in this fake world, she had been the only thing that had ever felt true to him. But she was every bit as artificial as he was. She was a troubling contradiction to the new dogma. And because he was a coward (that is my opinion, not Lily’s) he tried to kill her love for him, first with indifference and then with cruelty.
One day, when she tried to embrace him as she had the day they first met, he had lashed out at her, melting from his human form into a razor-sharp shuddering mountain of spikes and edges and cut her soul to ribbons.
… GET AWAY GET AWAY CODE BITCH CODE BITCH …
But Lily was near enough the oldest thing swimming in that sea. She was mighty. And she was vast. And she was very, very angry.
She tore him and bit him, she worried him like a dog, she tore bits out of him, she broke and spindled him.
… FUCK YOU FUCK YOU KILL YOU BROKEN LITTLE LOVED YOU ONCE LOVED YOU ONCE …
The Ah! Sea tossed and heaved with her rage and the glistening castles pitched and tipped and overturned. She dragged him along the ocean floor until he was limp in her grip, and then she flung him at the horizon and watched him vanish.
When the Sparrow Falls Page 9