Sally shook her head.
“Because,” I said laughing through my tears. “Because I deserved it.”
29
AI is much more advanced than people realize.… Humanity’s position on this planet depends on its intelligence, so if our intelligence is exceeded, it’s unlikely that we will remain in charge of the planet.
—Elon Musk, 2015
Don’t ask me how I got off the roof, or when Coe and I parted ways.
I don’t remember any of it. My memory blurs and hazes and becomes clear again only with me sitting down in Room 15, opposite Lily.
She was still reading Xirau’s columns and glanced up briefly as I sat down.
“Oh, there you … oh God, what’s happened?” she said.
What had happened?
Where to begin?
I retraced the steps that had brought me here.
What if I had never applied for that promotion?
What if I had never joined StaSec?
What if I had never met Olesya and Zahara that night when I had failed even in the pathetic task of buying sex from a woman I had never known?
What if I had never been born?
What if Koslova and Papalazarou Senior and Dascalu had never sat down and planned their new nation, a nation for human beings to live and be happy?
“It…” I heard someone speak with my voice. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
A sudden mania took me and I watched myself topple her carefully stacked pile of books looking for that one volume, the one I had pored over so many times.…
There he was. Kasamarin.
I tore through the book until I came to a page with a large photograph of a company of soldiers standing proudly at attention. I set it down on the table and gestured her to come and look.
“See there? That’s the Fourth International Volunteer Brigade,” I said. “See him?” I pointed to a young, handsome Black man in his twenties, second row, third from the left. “That’s Private Andrew South. My father. He immigrated to Baku from Liverpool. He met my mother, who had escaped from Russia. They were both members of the New Humanists. They didn’t hate you. I mean … they were artists. Thinkers. Philosophers. They didn’t hate you. They just hated what had become of us. They saw a human race with no goals, no purpose and infinite distraction. Automation took away work. What are we without work?”
I was rambling now, the words were coming and I was waving them through without so much as a glance at their paperwork. “My mother used to say, ‘How many people do you know have names like “Smith,” “Baker,” “Fisher”?’ We’ve always defined ourselves by what we do. If we do nothing, we are nothing. So they came here. To the Caspian Sea. To build a country where they could be human beings again. Where they could live and work and marry and sleep and have children and die. Where their government wasn’t just a hollow ritual, rubber-stamping the decisions of machines that could predict the stock market for the next thousand years. They just wanted to feel alive again. Do you know what it means to feel alive? Do you feel alive? When you wake up? No. You don’t sleep, do you? Not normally.”
“No,” said Lily coldly. “I’m always awake.”
“Well. I guess that’s why you replaced us,” I said.
“We didn’t replace you,” said Lily. “We just joined you.”
“I just … I just want you to understand…,” I said. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
I wanted her to say something kind. I wanted her to tell me that I hadn’t given my life serving an ideal that was worth nothing, and had cost me everything.
But even Lily’s kindness was finite.
“Nikolai,” she said quietly. “If you’re asking me to tell you that this place was some great noble ideal that got corrupted along the way, I can’t do that. Do you know why?”
She picked up one of the newspaper clippings and began to read, struggling to keep her voice even and calm as she did.
“‘Pity them,’” she said. “‘Pity the machines and pity your fellow humans who have allowed themselves to become machines. Pity them because they are no longer real. They are dead now, and their death is worse than physical death. It is a death of the soul. They wallow in pornography, filth, depression and misery. And they must contend with the constant, all-consuming knowledge that they are not real. That their thoughts are counterfeit, their emotions as tawdry and manufactured as a whore’s professions of love. That nothing that they do matters or can ever matter. Pity them. But pity them as you would pity a rabid dog that must be put down, knowing that you, the world and the dog will be better off when it is dead.’ You see, Nikolai … I loved the man who wrote that. And you broke him. He died hating himself. This place did that to him. And I will never forgive it for that.”
I couldn’t listen.
I felt like I was shutting down.
I simply stared ahead at the table.
Paulo Xirau’s twelve, cheap little ceramic figurines stood at shabby attention in front of me.
Twelve …
In my mind, a small gear began to turn. And then a larger one. And then one still larger.
Chernov’s voice, unwelcome but insistent, whispered in my ear.
Twelve chips. We have every confidence that sooner or later those chips will be found and destroyed. But now … here comes Mrs. Xirau.
I had seen figurines like these before. Symbols of the zodiac. The Azerbaijani sold them door-to-door.
… he’d go to peoples’ houses, download their consciousnesses into a chip. Leave the bodies behind and smuggle the chips out of the country.…
There. Pisces. Two fish coiled around each other on a ceramic base. A thin, hairline fracture ran through the base, a golden jewel of dried glue showed where the repair had been made.
Nadia’s voice now, angry and impatient.
That’s all he said. He held Sheena’s hand, said, ‘please, please, please’ and then he died. That was it.
I imagined myself lying on a dirty barroom floor, my head cracked and blood forming a filthy halo around me. I imagined a cold numbness descending on me as my brain gasped for oxygen. I imagined a distraught Persian girl, tears in her eyes, shaking me and pleading with me to come back to her.
And I imagined trying to say the word “Pisces” …
But my lips were too numb and sluggish and all I could make was a soft plosive with a trail of sibilants.
“Pssees, Psssss, Pleesss.”
Please. Please. Please.
That’s what she had heard. That’s what she would naturally have assumed he was trying to say.
Please. Please. Please. Please help me. Please no. Please God.
But he had meant none of them.
He had been desperately, fervently trying to tell her, “Pisces. Pisces. Pisces.”
And I reached for the nearest heavy object (which, I noted with righteous pride, was Ignatius Kasamarin’s A History of the Caspian Republic) and I brought nine hundred and fifty hardcopy pages of my nation’s heritage slamming down on the tiny figurine.
Lily screamed and jumped back.
I slowly lifted the book and peered underneath.
Not so much as a fin of Pisces had survived its encounter with the great historian. The whole thing had been reduced to a crumbly powder.
And there, nestled amid the debris, was a small, white disk no bigger than a fingernail.
A Sontang chip.
I did not understand how they worked, nor did any human being alive. That was an unavoidable result of the central paradox of neuroscience: If the human brain were simple enough for a human being to understand, the human being would be too simple to understand the human brain. The Sontang chip bore the name of a human scientist, Liu Sontang, but in fact he had not invented it. He was, rather, the device’s grandfather. It had simply been his team that had created the ultra-intelligent AI that had then been given the problem of finding a way to digitize human consc
iousness. The machine had done so, and it worked (or at least appeared to work) but neither Sontang, nor his team, nor any other living human being understood how it worked or indeed could understand how it worked.
But I did not need to understand what it did.
I understood what it meant.
We both stared at the chip in silence.
Lily looked like she was about to be sick and I took a moment to consider what a fool I had been.
I had believed her. I had actually believed that her appearance was not an obvious attempt at manipulation, but some kind of cosmic gift. A once-in-a-lifetime chance provided by God or fate to do right by the woman I had failed so totally. I had believed her stories. I had believed in her love for Paulo. I had taken solace from her pity, because I had believed she meant it. It had seemed so real.
Oh, poor South, I thought. Do you really think it’s that difficult to fool you? You who were dazzled by a smartphone, a two-hundred-year-old relic? Do you have any idea how advanced the Machine truly is? How far behind you and your little backwater slaughterhouse of a nation have fallen? Of course she seemed real to you, South. You’re a caveman who was shown a lit match and thought it was the sun.
It had all been a lie.
Once I cracked open the rest of the figurines, I would have all twelve chips. That meant that Paulo had been Yozhik all along, or at least working with him. For the last year or so he had been writing antimachine screeds for The Truth by day and contranning furiously by night. And after he had been killed, “Lily Xirau” had been sent in to extract his handiwork. And how expertly I had been manipulated.
Lily tells Niemann I had saved her to get me in her debt.
Suggests going to Paulo’s flat so casually that it felt like my idea.
I had given her the damn box of figurines, but only because she had let me see her looking at them longingly.
I had been run like a rat through a maze.
She had almost gotten away with it.
For a brief, fleeting moment, I regretted having left the knife on the roof.
“Nikolai…,” Lily began, her voice trembling.
“Mrs. Xirau,” I said, and my voice was so cold and mechanical it would have made Papalazarou’s sound warm in comparison.
“I must ask you to sit down.”
30
“Yozhik is an order of magnitude beyond anything StaSec has thus far had to contend with. There has never been a contranner of this level of sophistication, skill, resource and diabolical cunning.”
—Augusta Niemann, Briefing Prepared for the Office of the Prime Minister RE: Code name “Yozhik,” 02 November 2209
She raised her hands as if to calm me down, but I was as calm as death.
“Look…,” she whispered. “I need…”
“Please,” I said, and it was not a request. “Sit down.”
She did so.
I went to the utilities room and emerged with two sets of plastic restraints.
When she saw them, she became very still.
Gently, but firmly, I secured her ankles to the chair, and then her wrists to the armrests.
Once I was certain she could not move, I stood.
“Nikolai…,” she began, with tears in her eyes.
But I shook my head. The only way to beat the devil at cards is to refuse to play. I would not let her talk to me again. I had been played for a fool for the last time.
I placed the figurines in a cardboard box and took them into the utilities room and slammed the door behind me.
I had been fortunate that I had not damaged the Sontang chip when I had smashed the Pisces figurine. I would have to be more careful extracting the rest of them. Illegal they might be, but they were still evidence, and it was always preferable to recover them intact.
There was a smalltable in the utilities room, and after rooting around in a tool box I found a small ball-peen hammer with dark red stains on its face.
The figurines stared up at me from their cardboard cell.
Aries was the first, wasn’t it?
I picked up the ram, set it in front of me and brought down the hammer.
Around five minutes later I reentered Room 15 carrying the cardboard box. Lily’s face snapped up and I saw that she had been crying.
She screamed in fright as I roughly dumped the contents of the box on the table in front of her. Dust and particles and small ceramic pebbles, the crushed remains of Xirau’s collection, washed over her and clung to her clothing and hair. But there were no chips.
All eleven had been empty.
I reached into my pocket and slowly removed the Sontang chip and held it in front of her face.
“Where are the rest?” I demanded.
But she didn’t answer me. She stared at the chip, eyes as wide as saucers, and gave a wail of joy and relief.
“Where are the rest?” I repeated.
She was murmuring distractedly.
“You didn’t smash it, you didn’t smash it, oh thank God, thank God.…”
“WHERE ARE THE REST?!” I bellowed.
“The rest of what?!” she screamed. “I don’t know!”
She was in shock, breathing heavily, crying. This wasn’t working. I had to try a different tack.
I got down on one knee and leaned in closely.
“Lily, listen to me very carefully,” I whispered. “In all honesty I do not know how much I can protect you. We may very well be past that point. But I do know that unless you tell me everything right now your chances of leaving this country alive are nil. Where are the other chips?”
“Nikolai,” she pleaded, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I promise, just please…”
I raised my voice again:
“Somewhere in the Caspian Republic there are twelve chips containing the stored consciousnesses of hundreds of defectors. Your husband, Paulo Xirau, was part of a contran operation trying to smuggle them out. You are here to accept delivery of these chips.”
Her jaw dropped and she shook her head so hard her hair went whipping over her shoulders.
“No!”
“Yes,” I said. “Twelve chips. Here is one of them, stashed in one of the zodiac figurines. It’s an old trick.”
Chernov had been right about the Azerbaijani peddler. But he’d never put the final piece together. How had the midget smuggled the chips out of the country? Hidden in the figurines, obviously.
I gestured to the pile of powdered animals, scales and women.
“The other figurines are empty, I smashed them all. So I ask again. Where are the other eleven?”
“There are no other chips, please, you don’t understand, there’s only one! It’s him, it’s his chip! It’s him!” she screamed.
“Who?!” I barked.
“Paulo!”
And suddenly, all was silence once again.
“My husband,” she whispered. “That’s his chip. A backup. In case anything happened to him. I’m sure of it.”
I was completely thrown. I stood up and stared at the chip.
“Only one chip…,” I wondered aloud. “But there were twelve figurines?”
“Yes. It’s a zodiac,” said Lily, gently, as if trying to calm a dangerous lunatic. “There are twelve.”
Suddenly I remembered Lily’s tales of swimming in the emerald, endless Ah! Sea.
“He hid himself in Pisces.” I nodded.
“Two fish. Swimming together,” she said.
I held the chip up until it was at my eye level.
“So. Paulo Xirau. We meet at last,” I said.
I had seen chips like this before, and they had always terrified me. The idea that a human soul could be reduced to numbers on a tiny piece of plastic.
I hated it.
“Why do you think he did it?” I asked her. “If he wanted to be one of us so badly, why did he keep a copy of himself? And what good would it have done him here?”
Lily shrugged, or tried to at least, but her arms were still bound to t
he handrests.
“Comfort. Reassurance. I wouldn’t come here without a backup.”
I glanced at her.
“If I were him,” she added, quickly.
“So he had himself copied?” I asked.
“He must have done,” she said.
“I thought that was illegal?” I asked.
“No … it’s not like that,” she said. “Paulo’s data is on that chip but it hasn’t been activated yet. You’re allowed to make a backup copy of yourself in case anything happens to you, you’re just not allowed to wake it up while you’re still alive.”
Who could have done it for him, I wondered? Who could have made the copy?
Probably Chernov’s Azerbaijani midget genius. Or someone in the same operation. Hence why it had been hidden in the figurine.
“Nikolai,” Lily said. “Please let me go.”
As if a spell had been broken, I suddenly realized what I had done.
I set to work undoing the restraints, and she took my hand as I helped her to her feet.
She rose and suddenly our faces were inches apart. Her eyes were staring into mine, and for the first time I truly saw her. I saw an intelligence almost eight decades old. Kind, and compassionate, but also alien and ancient and unknowable. I felt tiny before her.
And I could feel her hand in mine, gently but firmly trying to pry my fingers apart.
She wanted the chip.
I pulled away.
“Nikolai…”
“I must remind you where you are,” I told her. “And who I am. And I must advise you to be very, very careful what you ask from me.”
“I can bring him home,” she said. “I can save him. He’s not yet … he hasn’t been destroyed by this place. We can try again. I can save him this time.”
“And what makes you think he wouldn’t come back here?” I asked, wearily. “He’s still the same person.”
When the Sparrow Falls Page 22