When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

  “But…,” I began.

  “That is enough,” said Olesya.

  No. Lily. It was Lily who was glaring at me now with tears in her eyes.

  It was getting so hard to remember. The ghost of my wife was becoming solid before my eyes.

  An icy silence had fallen on the room.

  “Can I go?” Nadia asked at last.

  I nodded.

  “I’d go out the way you came,” I told her, remembering that Lubnick was standing watch in the corridor and would probably shoot her the moment she emerged through the front door.

  She left without a word and we heard the window in the kitchen shudder open and shut, and the fire escape creaking like a rusty gate.

  Lily was glaring at me furiously, and I almost expected a slap across the face.

  “Why are we here, Agent South?” she asked me, cold as winter.

  “We are here to help you identify…,” I began.

  She raised an accusatory finger.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said. “Why are we really here?”

  “Because you asked,” I replied.

  “And you decided to bring me here out of the kindness of your heart?” she asked contemptuously, and my God, that hurt. That hurt more than I was expecting.

  Why should that be so ridiculous? I could be kind. I was not unkind.

  “I brought you here,” I said, fighting to keep my voice even, “because I owed you a debt. You said you wanted to see where Paulo lived and I brought you here, at no small risk, I might add!”

  I had tried to bluster but she was bluster-proof. Utterly impervious. It all felt so familiar.

  Twenty years after I had pulled her out of the water I was still arguing with Olesya, still shouting, still flailing, still losing. I felt like I was going mad.

  “You brought me here because you are looking for something,” she shot back. “And you were interrogating that girl. There is something you’re not telling me. Something about Paulo. Something about how he died. And you will tell me, now.”

  It was clear that, short of marching her out of here at gunpoint, she was going nowhere.

  What to do? What to do?

  She was an enemy. I couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t. She was machine. This was Caspian. She was the thing the nation had been built to guard against.

  She was an AI, sculpted into the form of my dead wife to break my resistance and turn me to her cause.

  These were facts. There was no other plausible explanation.

  I should lie to her. I should thwart her. I should deceive and manipulate her and feed her false information.

  But I couldn’t. Because every fiber of my being told me that I could trust her, and that I must trust her. Perhaps this was what it meant to play the Machine at espionage. To lose before you had even begun.

  I decided to tell her as much of the truth as I dared, and lie as little as possible.

  “After Paulo died,” I began. “Before you arrived, I investigated a contranning. Sheena Paria.”

  “Paulo’s…,” she trailed off.

  “Yes. And her sister, Yasmin. We believe that they were contranned by an individual we call ‘Yozhik.’ Someone that StaSec is very anxious to apprehend.”

  “And you think Paulo had something to do with it? That he was involved with this Yozhik?”

  “It is a possibility I have considered, yes.”

  “Do you still think that?”

  I exhaled heavily.

  “I don’t know. That is the simple truth. I don’t know. But I thought if I could bring you here, maybe we could both find what we were looking for…”

  I broke off. She was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as helpless as a newborn.

  “No, no, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just … he’s not here. I can’t find him anywhere. I thought maybe Nadia might be able to … give me something. Some little part of him, but he’s just a void. We shouldn’t have come here.”

  Suddenly, I realized the time. We should have been in StaSec ten minutes ago.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  She nodded and we made for the door. As we went, I saw her glance at Paulo’s knock, the box of figurines.

  I picked them up from the table and pressed them into her hands.

  “You should take these,” I said. “Something to remember him by.”

  24

  I’ve started writing again. A book. Or possibly a suicide note.

  —From the diary of Leon Mendelssohn, 16 March 2199

  When we arrived at StaSec, Berger was clearly shaken upon seeing Lily’s bruised face and shot me a withering glare as he gave her the lanyard. Embarrassed, I looked away and cast my eyes around the lobby looking for Grier. I had been hoping to speak with him, to see if he’d made any progress finding out who was investigating Xirau. Grier was nowhere to be seen, but I did see Nard Wernham spying at me from behind a pillar. When I caught him he ducked his head and retreated up the stairs, but not before I caught sight of a large purple bruise under his left eye. Four of the DSD men seemed to have evaporated upon encountering the air of StaSec HQ and only Lubnick had survived to follow us wordlessly to Room 15, where he stopped at the door, folded his arms and commenced his watch. I had given up trying to second-guess anything they were doing. Clearly Coe’s DSD boys were like a car, I was simply to trust that they would work the way they were supposed to and not give too much thought to their inner workings. Room 15 was exactly as we had left it. Lily got to work on Paulo’s books while I wandered around the room feeling perfectly extraneous. To pass the time I tried to see if I could catch any of Chernov’s boys watching us from the far windows.

  When that ceased to thrill, I started taking the figurines out of the box where Lily had left it and began to arrange them in a neat row on the table in front of me.

  There was a loud thud and I turned to see one of the books lying in the center of the table, its belly open and fluttering and Lily staring at it as if it had bitten her.

  “That,” she said coldly. “Is enough. Of that.”

  “Problem?” I asked.

  I was somewhat surprised that Lubnick hadn’t burst through the door at the sound, and then I remembered that Room 15, like all interrogation rooms in StaSec HQ, was soundproofed. The man outside would stop anyone coming in who wasn’t authorized, but Lily and I could be killing each other with chain saws inside and he would be none the wiser.

  “Oh, not at all,” she said sarcastically. “But when you’ve been called an abomination for the three hundredth time you just start screaming for a bit of variation.”

  “Are you ready to move on to his writings, then?” I asked.

  I idly picked up the book she had thrown: Hell’s Clockwork by Margaret Pellshevin.

  Christ. If she couldn’t handle Pellshevin, how would she take Xirau?

  “I should warn you,” I said. “What he wrote … I don’t think you will enjoy it.”

  She gave me a sad smile.

  “You strike me as a master of understatement, Agent South. Would I be right?”

  I smiled.

  “On the contrary,” I said, “I’m known for my giddy hyperbole.”

  She laughed, and then fell silent.

  “I’m terrified,” she said at last.

  “I know,” I told her.

  She laughed again, but this time it was mocking.

  “Oh do you?” she said, dubiously.

  “You lost someone close to you,” I said. “And all you have is your memory of them. And now that memory must make way for the reality of who they were. And you’re not ready. You’re not ready to lose them again.”

  She said nothing for a few moments.

  “You said you’re married?”

  “No. I said I had a wife,” I replied.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  I wanted to speak, but my voice refused the command and stood in obstinate silence.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s n
one of my business. I’m sorry.”

  She looked around awkwardly, trying to avoid my gaze.

  “Let’s get started,” she said. “Where are the damned things?”

  I cast around and found an unopened box labeled XIRAU: NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS + MISCELLANEOUS. I opened it and found several scrapbooks of Xirau’s articles cut neatly and glued to the pages with obvious care.

  I passed them to her.

  As she read, Lily’s body language become noticeably tenser, as if she were resisting the urge to scream, or swear, or weep. There would be hours of this. Xirau had been a prolific writer.

  Suddenly, she slumped back in her chair and gave a low moan, something between weariness and regret and realization.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Tell me something,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “Do you ever feel like nothing matters? That you’re not real? That everything is a pale imitation of what it’s supposed to be and you don’t even know what that is?”

  “You’re describing a perfectly normal depression,” I said.

  “Right. Because everyone feels that way sometimes.” Lily nodded. “Everyone feels that way and it doesn’t make you … special.”

  The venom she put into that word took me by surprise.

  “He keeps coming back to it. The Machine world isn’t real. They’re not real. Nothing they feel is real. It’s all fake.”

  I began to see the outlines.

  “Bad ideas,” she whispered. “They’re like a virus. They find your weaknesses and break you down.”

  She lowered her head to look at me.

  “That’s why he came here. He felt like a ghost. And then he reads Mendelssohn”—again, the word was spelled in bile—“who tells him, ‘No, you’re right. You’re not real. It is all fake. You’re just code. You’re not a real person.’ And it just clicks, doesn’t it? It just makes sense. And so he comes here, to this, to this nightmare of a country because he thinks this is how human beings live. And now he’s dead because he was too stupid to realize that everyone feels like that. Everyone.”

  She was crying. I pulled my chair up close to her.

  “Lily,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I could have stopped him. I could have talked to him. I could have realized earlier…”

  “Yes,” I said. “If you could read minds and see the future. Can you do those things? Genuinely, I don’t know what your capabilities are.”

  She laughed through her tears. “No.”

  “You are not, in fact, omnipotent?”

  “No,” she said, with a sad smile.

  “Then I absolve you,” I said solemnly. “And you must absolve yourself.”

  She laid her hand on mine.

  “You’re a good man, Nikolai,” she said.

  “Well, don’t let it get around, I’ll get the sack,” I said with a wink.

  She smiled, and returned to her reading.

  Idly, I examined the stack of books beside Lily that she still hadn’t read by the time Pellshevin had finally broken her. Mildly curious, I looked over them to see if she was missing out on any gems. On the contrary, it seemed as if she had dodged several bullets. There was another biography of Koslova that I knew to be fawning and turgid, some obscure philosophical works with sixteen-word titles and …

  A slim blue volume caught my eye and I actually did a double take like an actor in a farce.

  Of all the books …

  Of all the books to find in Xirau’s possession.

  I picked it up, looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

  Ecce Machina by Leon Mendelssohn.

  I remembered that Niemann had said that no subversive literature had been found in Xirau’s home. Well, what was this, then?

  I opened the front page and found my answer. A typed note was stapled to the page, and stamped by the Ministry of Information. It read:

  This material has been deemed to be in contravention of Articles 30, 31 and 46 of the Constitution of the Caspian Republic. Dispensation is hereby granted to Brother/Sister PAULO XIRAU to possess this material. All other persons should be aware that possession of this material is illegal. If you are not authorized to possess this material, it must be returned immediately to the Ministry of Information. Failure to do so will result in severe legal penalties.

  Ah. Now I understood. Xirau had clearly been given a copy so that he could properly savage it in his column. The literature itself was subversive, but Xirau’s possession of it was not. A subtle distinction, which Niemann had no doubt considered too unimportant to mention.

  It looked like such a harmless thing. It was slim, really little more than a booklet. On the cover was a cheap stock image of a man standing on a green hill, looking at the sun rising (despite the fact that the sky, and therefore the book, was a bright noon blue).

  It did not look like a book that was so dangerous that its author had to be hanged in public view.

  Shuddering with the trespass, I randomly opened the book and began to read.

  … that has given me much solace in the hard times of my life is Matthew’s tenth chapter. Here the Nazarene tells his apostles something that I have always found both comforting and hilarious: “God knows when a sparrow falls,” he tells them, “so be not afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” Not a few, but many! I imagine that spending time in Christ’s company would do wonders for one’s anxiety, but little for one’s self-esteem.

  And yet, even if God knows when each sparrow falls, why does he do nothing to catch them? This, of course, is very well trodden earth, but let us walk over it once more.

  The problem of evil, as laid out by the philosopher Epicurus, is as follows:

  1) It is claimed that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-benevolent.

  2) Such a God would not allow evil to exist.

  3) However, evil exists in the world.

  4) If God does not realize that evil exists in the world, he cannot be all-knowing.

  5) If he knows that evil exists but cannot remove it, he is not all-powerful.

  6) If he knows that evil exists, and could remove it, but chooses not to, he cannot be all-good.

  7) Therefore, an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-benevolent God does not exist.

  Various defenses have been mounted by the great and wise of the world’s faiths throughout the millennia, but perhaps none as audacious as the one I am about to propose:

  Point 3 is false.

  It is an enraging suggestion, I realize. Of course there is evil in the world. Surely, if there is anything we can be certain of, it is that. No doubt you want to grab me roughly by the arm and drag me to the most impoverished and war-torn regions of the earth, to the worst slums and ghettoes, to the cancer wards and prisons and cemeteries and shout, “Here, Leon! Here is evil!”

  To which I would have to respond, “No. Here is suffering.”

  It is only natural that human beings would consider human suffering to be evil, indeed that in the human schema they are practically interchangeable. But suffering is not evil in and of itself. Almost nothing in human history has been achieved without some measure of pain or misery. Suffering is not evil if it is for a greater purpose and a greater good, only suffering that is futile is evil. Therefore, if God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-benevolent, the suffering he allows must be for a higher purpose. For many years I believed that humanity needed suffering as a way to allow us to be good. After all, if the way to heaven is to feed the hungry and heal the sick, how are we to reach heaven without hunger and illness?

  But as time went on this explanation wore thinner.

  As a man born in the Caspian Republic I was raised to believe many things. Maria Koslova, the mother of our nation, saw Caspian’s founding (and the concurrent near-genocide of the Azerbaijani and the destruction of their homeland) as a desperate act of self-defense by the human race. To Koslova and her fellow founders, the human soul was something ineffable, utterly be
yond the ability of science to replicate or understand. Therefore, the Sontang process does not digitize human consciousness because it is not possible to translate a human being, an infinity of memory, feeling, prejudice, reason and faith, into mere data. What the Sontang process actually does is create an artificial intelligence that can mimic the personality of the person being digitized well enough to fool close friends and relatives. A flawless imitation, in fact. But fundamentally unreal. The real person, the one replaced by this forgery, is now dead. Erased forever. And, in the worldview of the republic’s founders, this was entirely the point. Humanity’s mass exodus to the digital realm had been like a great herd of pigs enthusiastically running to the abattoir. The human race was being subjected to a mass, silent genocide, and the Caspian Republic was the last redoubt of true human beings. Hence the Machine world’s hatred of us. Hence their embargoes and sanctions. Hence, why we starve.

  But if Caspian was the home of true human beings, if Caspian was truly how human beings were supposed to live … why had it failed?

  For it had failed. It has failed. You know this, my brothers and sisters. You have to know this. In successful societies there are no food shortages. One’s neighbors do not disappear in the night because of an unguarded word. One may come and go as he pleases and is not barred from leaving the borders of his nation. There are no StaSecs or ParSecs. The prisons are not packed to bursting. In a free and happy nation, you could read this book on a park bench, and you would have no need to hide it. If we are truly God’s children, then why have we been surpassed? The Triumvirate rule over the world more effectively and fairly than any human government has ever been able to. AI make advances in medicine and science that the natural-born human mind is incapable of even comprehending. It is conceivable that the light-speed barrier may be broken in our lifetimes, but it will not be a human being that does it. Over half the human race now lives partially or wholly online. Birthrates have plummeted across the globe. It is estimated that within one hundred and fifty years, outside of the Caspian Republic and a few other smaller enclaves, the entire human race may have sloughed off its flesh and elected to live solely as data. Humanity, at least as we have rigidly defined it in this nation, will effectively be extinct.