When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

  How could God allow such a thing to happen?

  To explain how I came to my current understanding, I must introduce a certain person, whom I shall call “X.”

  X is an individual whose identity I cannot reveal because to do so would mean their certain death. This person first introduced themselves to me as an admirer of my writing and we became very close and intimate friends. We would spend long nights together, discussing history, philosophy, politics, poetry, life and love while getting astonishingly drunk. It was in these times that we were completely open with each other, admitting doubts and fears and desires and secrets that could have, had they fallen into the wrong ears, meant our deaths. These were acts of love. Gestures of total trust.

  I tell you this, because I know you would never do me harm. I place my life in your hands, because that is where I know it will be safest. Take my secrets, and my love.

  We did this many times and I thought X had told me everything. I could not have been more wrong. X was saving their best for last.

  One night they admitted to me their greatest secret; X was an AI.

  Two forces now collided within me; my hatred for the Machine and my love for X. I could choose one but not the other, so I chose love over hate.

  X tearfully confessed their story. They were code, and had lived with their spouse online, never knowing the touch of air or sunlight. X had always felt alone and adrift and wrong, and one day had come across one of my books. They had become convinced that their unhappiness was a result of their machine nature and had resolved to come to Caspian, to live among true human beings and, if possible, to become one of us. And for years they had lived here, all the while terrified that their secret would be exposed, hoping against hope that they would, through some miracle, become a true human being. When X had finished their story I embraced them, reaffirmed my love for them, and promised that I would never reveal their secret to anyone. A promise which I have now broken, and can only hope that they can forgive me.

  X’s revelation shattered my worldview into a million skittering pieces.

  First, I knew that X had a soul. I could feel it. I felt their love and knew it to be real. X had described feeling unreal and false and took that as evidence of their own essential artificiality. But I recognized in X’s description the same feelings of spiritual despair and existential angst that had plagued me my entire life. For me, they were proof of the existence of X’s soul, not proof of its absence. But their description of their life in the virtual realm … that was my greatest revelation. I felt as Saul of Tarsus must have when he was struck blind on the road to Damascus. The thing that I had hated the most stood revealed as that which I had been searching for most fervently. For even though X described their life online in the most negative possible terms, I heard in their words the bells of paradise. X described a life in an endless ocean, surrounded by friends and loved ones. They described their spouse, who even X admitted had been a loving and true companion. When they spoke of their home it was how I had always imagined heaven.

  That night, after X had gone home, I immediately commenced work on this volume, which I expect shall be my last. But no matter. I no longer fear death or suffering, for I now know that every sparrow shall be caught.…

  At the bottom of the page was a note, written in black pencil in large, sloppy letters which I recognized as Xirau’s handwriting.

  It was a single word: BASTARD.

  25

  “The Triumvirate aren’t gods. They’re just the three wise men. They haven’t reached Bethlehem yet. But they’re getting there.”

  —Liu Sontang, 2220

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I was leaning very hard toward laughing.

  Mendelssohn and Xirau.

  Mendelssohn and Xirau.

  If you had told me that Maria Koslova had had a torrid ménage à trois with Confucius and George, I might have found it more believable. And yet, it made sense, like two jigsaw pieces that look like they can’t possibly fit together until suddenly they do.

  I remembered that picture of Xirau staring up at Mendelssohn as he swung in the wind, the hatred in those eyes. But it hadn’t been hatred, had it?

  It had been love betrayed. Faith betrayed.

  After all, there was only one thing Paulo Xirau truly hated.

  “What did Mendelssohn do?” I heard Lily ask.

  For a brief, panicked moment I thought she had been reading my thoughts.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Lily said. “Paulo was obsessed with Mendelssohn. Read one of his books and threw his whole life away to come here. But in all these columns … he hates him. He calls him a traitor, a code-lover, an enemy of the state … what did Mendelssohn do?”

  Your husband, unless I completely misread the subtext.

  I didn’t say it, but I thought it.

  “Well…,” I said. “Well, it was all rather odd. Leon Mendelssohn was a high-ranking member of the party many years ago. One of its intellectual heavyweights. A writer. Very respected.”

  “What sort of writer?”

  “Politics, mostly. Poetry.”

  “Any good?” Lily asked.

  I shrugged. “We thought so.”

  “So what happened to him?” Lily asked.

  “He became quite radical as he got older,” I continued. “He formed a new political party. One that advocated for opening our borders and normalizing relations with the Machine world.”

  “You have other parties?” said Lily, surprised.

  “Oh yes,” I replied. “Some of them are even allowed to stand for election. You know, as a courtesy. And that would have been fine but … he published this.”

  I lifted the blue book to show her. She took it, and began to leaf through it.

  “His thesis,” I explained, “was that artificial intelligence is advancing so quickly and exponentially that before long there will come into being an intelligence whose power and understanding will be essentially infinite. An intelligence that could manipulate not only data but matter and physics. That could extrapolate the course of every atom with perfect accuracy throughout the entire history of the universe and could reconstruct flawlessly every individual that ever existed. He said that this was not something to be feared, but to be devoutly wished for. He hypothesized that once created, this intelligence would not be limited to linear time and that it could affect events in the past and the future and would retroactively rewrite history to lead to its own creation, and that once done, every human being who has ever died could be re-created. Perfectly. Flawlessly. As if they never left. All of humanity would be reunited. Whole again. In a world without death. Or want. Or suffering. Forever. And he said that this is already in progress. And always has been. The intelligence will be created in the future but it transcends time, which is why every human civilization has always had some concept of its existence.”

  Realization dawned on Lily’s face.

  “You mean—” she began.

  “Yes,” I said, cutting her off.

  Lily nodded and said nothing for a few seconds.

  “Well,” she said at last. “How did they take that?”

  “They hanged him,” I said.

  She winced.

  “And how do you feel about it?” she asked.

  “I think that you are a charming young lady,” I said, “but I’m not going to start worshiping you.”

  “Pity,” she said. “I think I’d quite like to be worshiped.”

  “You were,” I said.

  Her brow furrowed.

  “What?” she said, uncertainly.

  She is not Olesya. She is not Olesya. She is not Olesya. She is not Olesya. She is not Olesya.

  She. Is. Not. Olesya.

  Repeat it however many times it takes to get it through your thick, impenetrable skull, South.

  I, of course, did the courageous and honorable thing and pretended I hadn’t said anything.

  “I can see
the appeal,” I said, gesturing to the book. “Of Mendelssohn’s … theory.”

  “Can you?” she said, surprised.

  Yes. I could see the appeal. When I thought of the terrible years between 2184 to 2190, the constant, steady drumbeat of tragedy and loss and near-unimaginable cruelty? The idea that all that had been a temporary, necessary price to pay for something eternal and wonderful? That I was owed happiness, and that one day the debt would be repaid with interest? Oh yes. I could see why this idea had ensnared Mendelssohn, to the point that he would die for it.

  * * *

  For years, the beautiful, stately suburb of Azadlig had thrilled to the adventures of Manukov’s wild daughters. Olesya and Zahara, with their outspoken politics, their dangerous artist friends, their habit of arriving back home late at night in an Ellulgrad Police van as often as a taxi, all this had provided the good residents of Azadlig with hours of gossip and the distinct pleasure of seeing old Vassily getting into his car to go to work, calling a hearty “Good morning, Brother Manukov, how are your daughters?” and watching him smile sheepishly while trying to kill you with his eyes.

  There was never any notion that they were in danger, of course. If two Azerbaijani girls in Old Baku were ever discovered marching arm and arm down the street at 4:00 A.M., more full of vodka than blood, and loudly singing “Man Stands Tall on Caspian’s Shore” with every noun replaced with a different vulgar term for male genitalia, those girls would quite likely never be seen again. But their father would not have been Major General Vassily Manukov. Their father would not have fought during the Taking of Baku, or, if he had, almost certainly on the losing side. Zahara and Olesya were Manukov’s daughters.

  They had considerably more license.

  So there was a sense of anticlimax when it seemed that Olesya was finally calming down. She had begun a career in the Ministry of Culture and had married some colorless StaSec nobody. To outward appearances, at least, it appeared that Olesya Vassilyevna Manukova was in deadly danger of becoming respectable. The residents of Azadlig would now have to rely solely on Zahara for opportunities to tweak old Vassily’s nose.

  Zahara did not disappoint. In fact, she rather went overboard.

  The tales told about Zahara among the residents of Azadlig gradually switched genres. They were no longer comedies, but dramas, and rather harrowing ones. Zahara, it was said, was testing the limits of what even someone of her adopted parentage could safely get away with. She was said to be associating with very undesirable people. Criminals. Political radicals. Pro-contranners. Suspected Needle Men. In Azadlig, it was said that Vassily was working himself into a sweat trying to prevent her from ending up on various lists. And when the neighbors saw Vassily heading to work every morning, they no longer asked him about his daughters. For if asked, he would wince, as if in pain, and the joke was no longer funny.

  Meanwhile, in the South household the peace of September 2184 had largely held, but there had been a definite chilling of relations. The events of September 9 were still hanging around my shoulders like an iron chain. I was eating little, and speaking less. Olesya knew that something had happened, and wanted to help. But she also knew I couldn’t discuss it, and in any case was starting to heartily despise StaSec and the fact that I was part of it. So she decided to simply let me work through it on my own, which really, what else could she have done?

  The house had become so quiet that when the phone rang during breakfast one morning we both started at the noise.

  Olesya answered it.

  “Hello? Oh, Mami, how are you?”

  She used the Arabic word for mother when talking to Alia, a habit she had picked up from Zahara.

  She said nothing for a few moments, but her face became drawn and worried.

  “No,” she said at last, “no, we haven’t seen her. Have you called…”

  And she listed off a long list of friends and ex-lovers and quasi-lovers that quickly told me that the call was about Zahara.

  “Of course,” she said finally. “And let me know if you do.”

  She hung up. And for a second, she stared into space.

  “How long has she been missing?” I asked, quietly.

  She turned to look at me. There were tears in her eyes.

  “They don’t know,” she whispered.

  So inconstant was Zahara in her movements that it had taken Vassily and Alia over a week and a half to realize that she was missing. Zahara was always leaving or arriving at the crack of dawn, spending days with friends or being invited to parties outside town, so her parents had long given up trying to pin down her movements. Alia had assumed that Vassily must have seen their daughter at some point in the last dozen days, and Vassily had assumed the same of his wife.

  Once they discovered that she was missing, a mass, panicked marathon of phone calls began. People who had not spoken to Zahara since their school days, but who Alia or Vassily dimly remembered having met at some birthday party or other, were called up and asked if they had seen or heard any sign of her.

  When that failed, StaSec were brought in. Zahara’s entire social circle was sifted continuously in a desperate search for zoloto. Her more reputable friends were interrogated for hours. Her less reputable ones were threatened, beaten and cut.

  No one had seen her.

  It wasn’t until a month later that Vassily received a phone call from the chief of police of Meghri, in Syunik Province, some five hundred kilometers from Ellulgrad.

  She had been found in a forest.

  The neighbors of Azadlig rallied round, and the funeral of Zahara Fareed Kader, the stepdaughter of Major General Vassily Manukov, was a grand affair. Everyone agreed that there had been a great deal of love on display.

  So unfortunate that it had to be a closed casket funeral.

  Olesya leaned on me the entire time, as if she were worried her legs might give out at any moment. After the service, we returned to the Manukovs’ house where Alia had opened the partition between the dining and living rooms to create a single space almost the size of a ballroom. She moved like black lightning among the different guests, thanking them for coming, smiling at their condolences and squeezing hands, offering food and drink. She seemed perfectly happy.

  “It hasn’t caught her yet,” Olesya whispered sadly, “but it will. Once everyone has gone, she’ll crash.”

  I squeezed her shoulder, and she laid her head on it and idly began to spool her hair with her thumb.

  “Nicky,” she said at last, “can you please check on my father?”

  “Will you be all right?” I asked.

  She nodded. I kissed her forehead, and headed for the door.

  Vassily had been present at the funeral in only the physical sense. He had risen and sat with the rest of the congregation. But he had not given the eulogy, he had offered no reading, he had spoken to no one. Upon returning to the house, he had retreated to his bedroom and locked the door. I stood in the darkened hallway, listening to the low, ocean-like murmur of the crowd downstairs. I knocked gently on the door.

  “Vassily?” I said. “It’s Nikolai. May I come in?”

  I heard something stir through the door, like a weight shifting on the floorboards.

  “Nicky? Come in, come in,” came a weary voice.

  The door opened and there was Vassily. He had taken off his jacket and tie, and his shirt was open. His gray hair was unkempt and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked ninety years old. The room was in darkness except for a gap in the curtains where a ray of bright yellow sunlight entered the room and stood in a column of floating dust.

  I closed the door and he moved toward me and at first I was unsure what was happening. Then I felt his arms around me and his face buried on my shoulder. He embraced me, or rather he collapsed on me. I felt his whole weight on me and I had to keep us both upright. His strength had gone. He was shaking.

  “Oh, Nicky,” he sobbed, “oh, Nicky.”

  I held him tightly. I spoke to him in Russian.


  “I’m sorry, Vassily, I’m so sorry.”

  “I loved her. I loved her, Nicky.”

  “We all did. We all did, Father.”

  “I couldn’t save her, Nicky. I tried. I tried. You must believe me.”

  “You did. It’s not your fault.”

  He took a great, shuddering breath and let me go.

  He turned away and I laid a hand on his shoulder but he shrugged me off.

  Then he wiped his eyes and nose with a handkerchief and took some deep breaths and seemed a little restored.

  “Will you come down?” I asked, switching back to English.

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “No. I need quiet. I need to think.”

  I nodded.

  “Olesya’s worried about you,” I said.

  “Olesya, yes,” he said, as if remembering something. “Take this. This is for her.”

  He reached into a drawer and took out a sealed envelope and handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “My will,” he said. “Or my … what is the word … ispoved?”

  “Confession?” I said, confused. What could Vassily possibly have to confess? I also noted his choice of word: Not “priznaniye,” a confession to a policeman of a crime, but “ispoved,” a confession to a priest of a sin. A seeking of absolution.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just things. Things she needs to know. When I’m gone. You must only give her this after I am dead.”

  “Vassily,” I said, deeply concerned. “What do you mean after you’re…”

  “I’m fine. No, no. I’m not … no, I’m fine,” he insisted. “But when I die. Five hundred years from now, or whenever. You give that to her. Yes? It is for her alone.”

  “Why can’t you give it to her yourself?” I asked.

  “Because she will read it,” he said, as if this were obvious. “Promise me, Nicky.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Good boy,” he said.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes.