Papalazarou strode before his agents with a long, clipped gait. Almost marching. The general addressing his troops.
I realized that this was all for him.
Whatever the purpose of this was, it was nothing that could have not been achieved with a memorandum circulated to the department heads. But Papalazarou wanted us standing in front of him so that he could march before us and make us listen to him. The man’s insecurity was sown into every inch of his face.
“Two days ago, a trove of documents was discovered in the possession of the treasurer of the Progressive Caspian Peoples’ Party,” Papalazarou told us.
Documents were always being found in Caspian in those days, and always in troves. And always finding their way into the possession of people like Papalazarou. For such a paranoid nation, people really were shockingly careless with their paperwork.
“These documents prove beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt that the PCPP has been actively colluding with machine intelligence agents. In fact,” he said, as if slowly withdrawing a knife from a wound only to plunge it back in, “we now believe that fully half of the senior leadership are code operatives, planted in Caspian with the intent of weakening the government and ultimately destroying the state.”
The PCPP had also recently made impressive gains in the last election. If their support held in the next election, they stood a modest chance of forming a coalition government with several of the smaller parties, which would send the New Humanists into opposition for the first time since the Founding.
An entirely irrelevant detail, I don’t know why I even mentioned it.
“Therefore,” said Papalazarou, lifting a piece of paper high above his head like a magician showing the crowd the handkerchief that he will be turning into a dove in a few moments, “the prime minister has signed Ministerial Order 84–1687, immediately proscribing the PCPP as a criminal organization, with its entire membership to be taken into custody.”
There was silence.
We all knew, of course, that a Rubicon was being crossed. The elimination of an entire political party was a milestone on the long bloody trail from what Caspian had started out as to what it would inevitably become. A new era was dawning, we could all sense it. And very few of us liked the look of its teeth. But we said nothing. That is how such moments come and go. In silence.
Papalazarou then raised his finger and pointed to an empty area of the site.
“Brothers!” he barked. “Over there!”
Spinning on his heel he pointed to another spot opposite the first.
“Sisters!” he continued. “Over there!”
No one moved. We had no idea what he was asking us to do.
“Male agents over there, female agents over there and what, I ask, is so complicated about that? Move! Thank you!” he bellowed as we began to part.
I joined the other hundred-odd male agents while the elfin-haired girl and her stocky companion joined the women on the other side in a group around a quarter of the size of ours.
Papalazarou stalked in front of the female contingent. They were all dressed, like us, in shirts and ties and gray trilbies and the sight of them seemed to fill him with a seething contempt that set the ends of his beard bristling. He stopped in front of the thin girl and barked at her: “Brother, you are either deaf, mentally incapable or insubordinate, now which is it?”
She simply stared at him, a tiny smile tucked away in the corner of her mouth, waiting in silence for him to realize his mistake.
Finally, it registered with him and he growled in irritation and moved on. He stopped beside the stout woman, who was standing at the end of the line.
“You’re an agent, are you?” he snapped at her.
“Yes, Director,” she replied.
“Well…,” he said, as if to himself. “Tonight’s the night. We’ll learn if you are.”
He turned and crossed over to where we stood.
“Brothers, your department heads will now split you into teams. You will each be provided with a list of names and addresses. You are to return to Ellulgrad, apprehend the individuals on your list and return with them here. That is all.”
We were divided into groups of six or seven and assigned a list of names and a meat wagon.
There was room for two and the driver in the cab, while the remainder had to sit in the cell.
So it was that I found myself sitting in near total darkness listening to the whispered chatter of three other junior agents as the meat wagon rocked and juddered around us on the long road back to Ellulgrad.
“What I don’t get, right,” said a voice in the darkness, “is why we have to bring the Progs way out here instead of back to HQ? It’s going to take all bloody night!”
“They’re not going to HQ,” said another voice, across from me and to my left. “Not enough cells anyway. They’re all going to be five-twoed. That means army. We’re probably going to hand them over to them at the site and they’ll take them back west.”
There were murmurs of agreement in the darkness. That made sense. All persons imprisoned under Article 52 went into army custody, and the army’s bases and facilities were all out farther west, the better to protect the border, and nice and safely away from the capital. The government in Ellulgrad viewed the military high command with a healthy degree of suspicion, and fears of a coup were never far from their minds.
The first voice wondered what Papalazarou was playing at by keeping the women behind. Some suggestions were offered and, on a rising tide of filthy laughter, a scenario was laid out where Papalazarou tried to treat himself to a massive orgy only to actually see the female contingent of StaSec in the flesh and take a vow of chastity for the rest of his days.
A voice to my right offered good odds that someone called “Niemann” would bite Papalazarou’s manhood clean off if he so much as came near her.
Our first stop was in Massling, a fairly prosperous suburb in Ellulgrad’s Southern quarter. We knocked on a door and after a few minutes a small, gentle-looking man in his sixties with thick-rimmed glasses and wispy silvery down clinging to the base of his bald head answered in his pajamas.
We explained that we were with State Security, and that he was to come with us.
He nodded, as if this was all to be expected, and politely asked if he could change into something warmer. We said that he could.
After a few minutes he reemerged, now suitably dressed for the time of year. His wife had now joined him, still wearing her nightgown, and she did not share her husband’s sangfroid.
“Where are you taking him?” she kept repeating as we bundled him into the meat wagon. “Where are you taking him? You have to tell me where you’re taking him, it’s the law. It’s the law. You have to tell me.”
We ignored her, and continued with our work, but all the while our prisoner was trying to make our lives easier, saying, “Nariya, Nariya, please. Please. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m just going to straighten this out.”
She was still shouting at us as we drove off. Standing there in her white nightgown, screaming like a prophet before judgment day.
You have to tell me. You have to tell me. It’s the law.
22
“The Progressive Caspian People’s Party. A footnote that dreamed it was a chapter.”
—Samuel Papalazarou Junior
So we continued.
Almost none of the Progs resisted. The majority were certain that they had done nothing wrong and that this was simply an escalation of the harassment they had been subjected to in the run-up to the election; frightening and infuriating to be sure, but something to be endured and then bragged about to their party brothers and sisters in the pub a few days later. Most of them, I have no doubt, assumed that they would be back in their beds by the following night. One man, it’s true, when we came knocking on his door, bolted out the back window and made us chase him on foot halfway around the neighborhood. But he suddenly stopped, as if realizing wh
at he was doing, and raised his hands and walked back to the meat wagon and stepped inside without our even having to lay a hand on him, all the time apologizing profusely for his idiotic behavior.
We drove back to Kobustan, and once again I was in the cell with three other agents. But this time there were now eight PCPP prisoners with us, handcuffed to the steel bench, and the cell had become sickeningly hot and dank. All four of us now were on edge. We were tired and hungry and light-headed from the heat and our discipline was suffering. One of the prisoners, a woman in her forties, begged for us to stop the van so she could relieve herself. A voice in the dark barked a long, lurid string of obscenities at her and told her to be quiet and not to speak again.
She said nothing, but after a few minutes we heard her hissing in pain and frustration, and then smelt ammonia in the air.
We swore and yelled at her, not just we agents but also her fellow prisoners. She said nothing, retreating into silence, perhaps hoping that the darkness would form a cocoon around her.
By the time we arrived we were fit to kill. The three who had ridden in the cab opened the door to let us out and we shoved past them and told them that they would be sitting in the back next time and if they didn’t like it we would kick their teeth in. We scrambled out and took some deep breaths of night air like drowning men and then roughly pulled the prisoners out one by one. They emerged, staggering and confused and blinking in the harsh light from the floods and we marched them forward until we realized we had no idea where we were supposed to go, so we ordered them to halt. And we all just stood there, we StaSec agents trying as hard as we could to pretend that this was all according to plan. The site was almost deserted now, at least compared to the throng that had been there hours before. A meat wagon had just pulled out of the entrance and was back on the road to Ellulgrad. A second was parked ahead of us and another team of agents were marching their own prisoners out and, like us, looking around and wondering what to do next. From behind one of the concrete walls, a contingent of around five female agents emerged, their leader carrying a clipboard, the rest carrying pistols.
She approached the other group first, compared the names on her clipboard with their prisoners and, once satisfied that all groceries were accounted for, gestured for two of her companions to take the prisoners back the way she came.
Then she approached us. She called out names and each of our prisoners said “Here” in turn. They were then instructed to follow the other two female agents back behind the concrete wall.
She betrayed no emotion, other than to wrinkle her lip in disgust at one of the prisoners, a dark-haired woman with a large dark patch on her dress.
“Wait here,” she told us. “We might have another list for you.”
She turned to leave and I cleared my throat. She glared at me.
“What?” she asked.
“Is SSA Manukov here?” I said.
“No,” she said. “He went home. Sick, or something.”
We waited beside the meat wagon. It was starting to get cold, so we took turns sitting in the cabin, which was slightly warmer. The cell, obviously, was too soiled and foul smelling to shelter in and in any case hardly warmer than outside.
I can’t say for certain when we realized what was going on.
The army were conspicuous by their absence.
I heard a noise in the distance. It sounded like someone slamming a door after a bitter argument.
It seemed very far away, and garbled and muffled in its own echoes.
Then silence.
Then it came again. No, not a door slamming. A firework going off. Or …
Someone looked up.
“Was that…”
“You know, Brother, I think it was?”
“Fuck me. Should we…”
“You should sit your arse down, Brother. That’s what you should do. Whatever’s going on over there, it can stay over there.”
“Fuck me.”
Three more shots as we spoke. Three more in the silence after. I glanced at my watch and considered timing how many shots we heard in a minute, before realizing I did not want to know.
We had been told to wait by the van, so we did.
I mused that there must be a judge or someone, maybe sitting behind a makeshift bench, carefully reading the case made against each prisoner. Then, once he was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt of the guilt of the accused, he would give a weary sigh and gesture for them to be taken out behind the wall and shot.
Or perhaps there was another list, a separate list.
Papalazarou had said that the PCPP was infested with code. AI did not get trials. AI were not to be mourned. That was it. The prisoners were being sifted, scrutinized, and when a code was found they were taken away. Doubtless the other Progs were gaping at each other in horror at each new revelation.
“He was Machine? But I trusted him!”
“Not her, no, not her, surely!”
But most of the Progs would be fine. They would probably be returned home soon, a chastened, humbled and purified party.
The shots continued their dull, arrhythmic beat through the night air, the door furiously slamming hard enough to rip its hinges.
They would return home soon.
A wiser party. A more vigilant party.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
A smaller party.
Bang.
A much smaller party.
It was after around an hour that the shots stopped.
Somebody lit a cigarette and said, “Well, that’s it then.”
We all breathed in relief. Whatever this was, it was over.
After around twenty more minutes of silence someone said:
“Don’t know about you, Brother, but my balls are just about frozen clean—JESUS!”
He broke off as we heard a sound so awful I thought that the Earth’s mantle must have cracked and the sounds of Hell were erupting upward. There were screams, and shouts, and the low, horrific, indescribable sound of human beings trapped in the last mile between agony and death.
We reached for our guns but there was nothing to shoot at, only sound. We glanced desperately from one to the other and we swore: “Fuck! What the fuck was that?! What the fuck are they doing?! What the fuck! What the fuck!”
Nothing. We did nothing.
And then a figure came. Male or female, I could not say.
Running barefoot over the gravel, kicking a storm of dust behind them.
Arms handcuffed behind their back, they ran toward us like a burning red comet.
Barefoot, arms and legs and chest slick red with blood, and the head half destroyed.
A half-skull flapped wet on a hinge of scalp and hair, an eye had escaped from its socket and run as far as it could until it reached the cheek and rested there.
The nose, absent.
I was the closest and fear did my thinking for me. I reached for my gun and ended the apparition.
The figure leaped, skidded, rolled and was still.
On the ground, the dust settled on the body, robbing the blood of some of its redness.
It was still now. An object.
We stood around it. Unable to look away.
We looked up as we heard someone else running toward us.
It was her, the elfin girl. Her face was pale and her eyes seemed too large for her face.
She stood there, caught in the floodlights. She took us in. The seven male StaSec agents. The body on the ground. The smoke still coiling from the barrel of my gun.
Her eyes met mine and there was a look of total gratitude in them. I felt almost loved. I could see her thin, pale lips subconsciously coiling back to form a “T” sound. To say “thank you.”
But she didn’t.
Instead she cleared her throat, and in a voice that sounded too high said:
“We’re finished. We can go home.”
23
“Fine! But apart from global prosperity, the GHI, the Martian Landings, solving the carbon cris
is, universal contraception, eradicating cancer, restoring the biosphere, open borders, clean energy, digital rights and world peace … what have the Triumvirate ever done for us?”
—Anonymous
“Are you all right?”
Lily was looking down at me as I lay on the bathroom floor. I tried to get up but couldn’t. I was simply too exhausted, and my ribs ached from where I’d been punched on the stairs.
“I’m fine,” I said. “We do this all the time in the real world. Just lying on the bathroom floor. It’s perfectly normal. Didn’t they tell you that?”
She gave a sad smile and slowly, carefully, lay down next to me.
“Hmm,” she said, staring up at the ceiling. “This is nice.”
“Did I wake you?” I whispered.
“I was awake,” she said. “I heard crying.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been me. I’ve been lying on the floor, which is perfectly normal, as I explained.”
“It must have been someone else.” She nodded.
“Must have been.”
“I wish I could help them. They sounded like they were in real pain.”
“I’m sure they would be very grateful to hear that. And I’m sure they would very much like to confide in you. But I am equally sure that they cannot.”
“I understand,” she said.
I felt a panic attack rising in my chest. I started breathing faster and faster.
Her hand gave mine a gentle squeeze, and I gripped it far too tightly but she did not flinch.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here.”
The moment passed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for this. I’m sorry for what happened. I’m sorry for your husband.”
“Do you often apologize for things that aren’t your fault?”
I pushed on.
“I’m sorry for how I have treated you. I have not been kind to you.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “You’re my favorite person in this whole country.”
“Now there’s damning with faint praise.”
“Well,” she said. “I have had better holidays.”
When the Sparrow Falls Page 16