“Agent South,” she said breathlessly. “I cannot begin to express how appalled I am at what happened to your guest and I assure you the Morrison…”
“Please be quiet and listen to me very carefully,” I said.
She did so, but I could practically hear her cracking with the effort.
“As soon as the doctor has seen to Mrs. Xirau we will require a new room. I am going to make a call to StaSec to request additional security. Until they arrive, two of your staff will stand watch outside the door. No one is to be allowed into the room other than myself and Mrs. Xirau. Do you understand?”
She nodded but protested that it would take perhaps twenty minutes to prepare a second room and that we would have to wait here in “the museum.” I didn’t understand what she meant by that but it didn’t seem important and time was of the essence.
“Do you know what caused the blackout?” I asked.
“Someone broke into the utilities room in the basement and flipped the circuit breakers,” she said.
“Did anyone see him?”
“No, but the lock on the door was smashed.”
So Brother A breaks into utilities to throw the hotel into darkness, which allows Brother B to race up the stairs, break into Lily’s room and try to abduct her. Only two men in the hotel, with possibly a third outside in a car. A sloppy job. Manhandling a struggling woman down the stairs in a pitch-black hotel was a job for three men, not one. Hence why they had failed.
I cast a look over at Lily, sitting on the bed while the doctor applied dressing to her nose. She looked as calm and relaxed as if she were getting her hair done, chatting amiably to the doctor, but her face was still bruised and bloody. My fist involuntarily tightened. Whether it was the lingering instinct to protect Olesya, or a new protectiveness of Lily, I couldn’t say. But I resolved that whoever had done this would have the Old Man hunting them through the streets.
I turned back to the manager. “I will need a list of all your staff who would have known that Mrs. Xirau and myself were staying in Room 104.”
Her eyes widened slightly. Lists of names were dangerous things.
“I’m not sure I understand…,” she mumbled, playing dumb.
Yes, you do.
“The men who did this to Mrs. Xirau knew exactly where she was staying. Ergo, somebody on your staff told them. I will require that list within half an hour. I will be comparing it against my own investigation, so I would advise you to be thorough. Err on the side of caution. Do you understand?”
She looked sick. She would survive.
“Now,” I said. “I require a telephone.”
* * *
“Switch.”
“South, Nikolai. C4017.”
“Go ahead.”
“I need to speak to Niemann.”
All forms of artificial intelligence, even the most basic learning-capable programs that had been in use for well over two centuries, were outlawed in the Caspian Republic. And yet, speaking with a StaSec switchboard operator might convince you otherwise. They were so utterly emotionless, so unerringly regular in the dull, metallic cadence of their speech, that you could not quite believe that they were flesh and blood. So it was with a perverse sense of accomplishment that I actually heard the operator pause for a second. Well. It’s not every day that the very base of StaSec asks to be transferred to the very apex.
“One moment,” the operator finally said.
As I waited to be put through, I rehearsed my lines over and over and over again. I was in no little danger here. The decision to leave Lily alone in our room, albeit with the door locked, during dinner, had seemed perfectly reasonable before her attempted abduction. Now it felt like gross negligence on my part. It was vital, therefore, that I be the one to inform Niemann, and that I control the flow of information to her as tightly as possible, while not stating anything that could be definitively proven later as a lie. The goal was to make Niemann feel that I was in charge of the situation and not something to worry about, leaving her free to devote her attention to more pertinent matters.
“Niemann.”
The voice took me by surprise and I lost several precious half seconds while my mind went blank in panic.
“It’s South,” I finally stammered.
“I know. What is it, South?”
Despite the lateness of the hour, she was still in her office. Niemann, famously, did not seem to sleep.
“There’s been an incident. At the Morrison. Two men tried to abduct Mrs. Xirau from our hotel room.”
“Where is she now?”
If Niemann was shocked, it wasn’t in her voice.
“She’s being looked at by the hotel doctor.”
“How bad?”
“She took a blow to the face. Nothing too serious. I think she’s all right. But I’ll need additional security.”
“Of course. I’ll send my best man over. Is she there?”
“Lily? No, she’s upstairs.”
“Get her. I wish to speak with her. I’ll wait.”
It took me a second to realize what she was asking. For a moment I considered refusing. Putting the Deputy Director of State Security in direct contact with the Machine seemed like the kind of thing that Niemann’s men in shadowy rooms might be asking me about months from now. Why did the deputy director want to speak to Mrs. Xirau, Agent South? You don’t know? You didn’t ask? You didn’t think it unusual? You didn’t think there was any risk? Did you think at all, Agent South?
But of course, I didn’t refuse. I left the phone off the hook and ran upstairs to fetch Lily. She was now wearing a large wad of cotton over her nose, and when she took the handset and spoke her voice was slightly high and nasal.
I removed myself from earshot while Lily spoke with Niemann and tried to shut off the part of my brain that desperately wanted to know what they were talking about. Lily seemed mostly to listen, occasionally nodding her head and murmuring agreement or understanding. Finally, she turned to me and beckoned me over.
“She wants to talk to you again. I’m going to go back to the room.”
I nodded, and took the phone.
“South,” I said.
“Did you enjoy your meal?” Niemann asked.
Dead. I am a dead man.
There was a weary sigh at the other end of the line.
“South. I have absolutely no issue with you getting a good meal. That’s why it was prepared for you. But if Mrs. Xirau did not wish to go down for dinner, why not simply have them bring your meal up to the room?”
I said nothing for a few moments.
“I … didn’t know you could do that,” I whispered. “I’ve never stayed in a hotel.”
Another weary sigh, but this one seemed more melancholy than frustrated.
“All right, South,” said Niemann. “The truth is, we’ve both fucked up here. You left Mrs. Xirau alone in your room, and I underestimated just how stupid ParSec could be, and frankly I think mine is the more obvious mistake. So perhaps it’s for the best if we both pretend this little escapade never happened.”
I felt as if an iron weight had been lifted from my chest.
“Thank you, Deputy Director.”
“Besides, you did save Mrs. Xirau and in her eyes you’re a hero. So I can’t exactly rake you over the coals, can I?”
What did she mean by that? I hadn’t saved anyone.
“Speaking of, are we sure it’s ParSec that’s behind this?” Niemann asked.
“Who else?” I asked.
“I can think of a few people who might take issue with Mrs. Xirau’s presence. We’ll have to tread carefully here. Obviously this will have to be answered but I don’t want a war with ParSec, either. That’s the kind of thing that may end up in Parliament, and the Old Man’s credit is not too good right now. Restrained brutality. That’s what we need.”
18
When I pushed my way into the burning building, we had to climb over the bulging hoses of the Berlin fire brigade, although as y
et there were few onlookers. A few officers of my department were already engaged in interrogating Marinus van der Lubbe. Naked from the waist upward, smeared with dirt and sweating, he sat in front of them, breathing heavily. He panted as if he had completed a tremendous task. There was a wild, triumphant gleam in the burning eyes of his pale, haggard young face.
—SS Oberführer Rudolf Diels, police report on the Reichstag fire, 1933
I finished my call with Niemann and returned to the room where I had found Lily. She was standing by the wall, examining a framed picture. There were, I realized, similar frames hung all around the room at regular intervals, like the stations of the cross in a Catholic church. I remembered that the manager had called this room “the museum,” and it dawned on me that this was exactly what the room was. This was no ordinary hotel room, hence why it had been unlocked and why Lily had been able to hide here. The room was an exhibit given over to commemorating a single historical event: The Morrison Crisis. The décor and furnishings were all twenty years old, preserved exactly as they were a decade before the turn of the century. Along the walls were framed newspaper cuttings and photographs with plaques giving context to the events of those terrible weeks. The first read:
02 July 2192. Here in Room 114, hotel staff discovered a trove of documents implicating many members of the government in a treasonous plot against the Caspian Republic. The goal of these Anti-Humanists was to overthrow the legitimate government of our nation and surrender it to the control of the Machine Triumvirate. The Morrison Hotel maintains this exhibit as a reminder to all citizens of the importance of vigilance and as a memorial to the many brave citizens who lost their lives defending our nation.
“Our room will be ready soon,” Lily said.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have been there.”
She shook her head.
“It’s not your fault. It’s theirs. Nobody else’s.”
“What did … did you tell Niemann I saved you from that man?”
She blushed, and looked embarrassed.
“I panicked,” she said. “She asked where you were when the attack happened and I told her you were at dinner. Then I realized that might get you in trouble, so I added the part about you saving me. It wasn’t too much of a lie really. You were on your way up, after all.”
It’s difficult to know what to say to someone who may very well have saved your life. “Thank you” just doesn’t seem sufficient.
“This is all very interesting,” she said, gesturing to the walls. “I didn’t know any of it.”
“Around half of it’s true,” I said sourly.
“Oh?” she said, surprised.
“Well, for instance…,” I said, and pointed at a newspaper clipping showing a building on Khagani Street enveloped in flame. The plaque beside it explained that government forces had wrested control of the building, only for the rebels to bomb it with incendiaries, burning four hundred men alive. I explained to Lily that the exhibit was accurate in so much as there had been a building and it had indeed been burned down. But the rebels had been inside the building, and the government forces outside. And there had been no bombs. The army had simply set fire to the building and shot anyone who tried to escape. That was how my cousin, whose death certificate stated that he had died in the fire, nonetheless had a bullet hole in his head that I had always suspected to have been a contributing factor in his death.
“Your cousin was a rebel?” she asked.
“He certainly wouldn’t have thought of himself as such,” I said. “You have to remember, half the government was fighting the other half. Everyone thought they were protecting the legitimate order from an illegal coup. Who was the government? The ones who lived. Who were the rebels? The ones who died.”
She nodded and walked down the wall to another exhibit, this one showing a collection of political cartoons from the period.
One showed a shadowy cabal seated around a table. They were dressed in black robes and instead of faces they had various arcane symbols, the signs of the zodiac. She looked at me questioningly.
I explained that the documents found in this very room had included the minutes of a meeting between twelve individuals where they discussed imprisoning the prime minister, half the cabinet and many members of the Army General Executive, and opening borders to troops from the Machine Powers. No names were given in the document, and the twelve individuals were each assigned a code name based on the signs of the zodiac. It was now taken as fact that Defense Minister Ayaru Pompeo had been Aries, the chairman of the meeting, and Deputy Anastas Kofteros had admitted in court to being Scorpio. Beyond that, nothing was certain. Virtually every official account of the plot assigned different signs to different individuals. Sometimes Deputy Such and Such would be named as Leo, later as Capricorn, later still his name would be omitted entirely and someone else would be Leo or Capricorn. But the list would never be complete. The party knew how to keep its powder dry.
A joke:
PARTY MEMBER #1: You’re under arrest, Brother.
PARTY MEMBER #2: On what charge, Brother?
PARTY MEMBER #1: We just found out you’re Aquarius.
PARTY MEMBER #2: It’s a lie, Brother! I was born in March!
But the signs were movable feasts. Anybody, some day, might discover that they had been Aquarius all along.
“And who are they?” she asked pointing at the cartoon. Over the table holding marionette paddles with strings connected to the twelve zodiac-headed figures, were three puppet masters. An elderly Asian, rather horribly caricatured with a long beard and moustache, a white man wearing a powdered wig and eighteenth-century military uniform, and a woman wearing a crown and toga. All three had cruel, malicious eyes and smiles full of razor-sharp teeth.
“Don’t you recognize them?” I said, surprised.
“Should I?” she asked.
I remembered that Lily came from a very different world, and that visual cues that might be obvious to me would be meaningless to her.
“It’s the Triumvirate,” I explained, pointing to them in turn. “Confucius. George. Athena.”
Many had scoffed when, six decades ago, China had unveiled the first iteration of Confucius. A superintelligent AI (by the standards of the time at least), Confucius was intended to mimic its namesake as an adviser to China’s ruling class. It was tasked with assessing the global trends and the world economy and to make recommendations that would improve the living conditions of the greatest number of Chinese possible. The world’s skepticism quickly turned to panic as China almost immediately shot ahead of the rest of the world by every conceivable economic, scientific and social metric. Any concerns about the philosophical and moral implications of human beings allowing themselves to be ruled by AI were immediately swept away. In the end, after all, people only care about results. The tyrant’s eternal claim had been proved true: We were not fit to govern ourselves. A few short years later the Americans proudly announced the creation of George and, after an initially disastrous rollout, the United States was soon on track to regain parity with China. The European Union was allowed limited consultation with George until, a few years later, they launched their own Athena. These three AIs, collectively known as the Triumvirate, now governed the vast majority of human life on Earth. Virtually every government on earth conducted itself according to the direction of one of these three. There was lively debate as to which AI was superior. George, it was claimed, was slightly better than its peers at predicting economic trends and maximizing revenue. Confucius, supposedly, was superior in social engineering and environmental restoration (Confucius had been instrumental in resolving the Carbon Crisis). Athena, it was agreed, was simply a good all-rounder with no real strengths or weaknesses. Which brand of artificial wisdom you lived under was largely a matter of geography. Most of the Western Hemisphere fell to George, East Asia to Confucius, and Europe and much of Northern Africa to
Athena. The rest, particularly the Near and Middle East, was a patchwork of nations constantly switching between one or the other. Interestingly, the only question any of the Triumvirate would categorically refuse to answer was which one of them was superior, presumably out of professional courtesy. Many found this frustrating as it was often the only political issue worth debating anymore: “If elected, I will take our country out from under the yoke of Confucius! Athena for Insert Your Country Here!”
That was the thing, of course. On paper, the situation was just the same as it had ever been. In America, a president was elected every four years, Congress still passed laws. But a law had not been passed that contradicted George’s advice for decades now. Indeed, fourteen years after George was brought online, the Conservative-Republican Party narrowly won election on an “Anti-Georgian” platform, promising to return governance of the country to human hands. The subsequent recession and unrest nearly resulted in an impeachment and by the next election the Conservative-Republicans were on the ash-heap of history, resting among the bones of the Whigs, the Bull-Moose Party and the New Trumpists.
Now George’s word was absolute. It had been named, of course, after America’s first president. But many had noted the irony that, in its near absolute power and the deference it received, George most resembled not General Washington but a different American ruler of that name.
Over four hundred years after declaring its independence, George was once again king of America.
Lily moved from one exhibit to the next, studying each one in turn, reading the plaque and then moving on.
The museum’s purpose was to tell a story, and one with a happy ending. Lily stood before the final exhibit, a photograph celebrating what had been briefly called “The Second Founding” (although that term had quickly fallen into disuse). The picture showed a black-tie ball, with hundreds of men and women smiling and waving at the camera, all dressed up in their finest. The plaque explained that this was a gala dinner to celebrate both the one hundredth birthday of Maria Koslova and the first anniversary since the Morrison Crisis. The people in the photograph were smiling because they had survived. They were the government, now.
When the Sparrow Falls Page 13