A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

  Of course, there are fundamentalist types here and there who hate them, but every religion has its crazy fringe. The craziest of the Serenity types claim golems are sacrilege on legs, and a threat to the Empire to boot. They advocate an extermination campaign—a direct violation of the Empire’s Concords of Humankind—but that doesn’t seem to matter to them. A campaign of violence never brought much in the way of peace, but good luck explaining that to those who want a fast solution at any price. Any teacher can tell you most empires have their roots in someone claiming they acted only to preserve the republic.

  There are legends of golems who committed crimes, but those are considered something of a folly, halfway between interesting historical aberration and fictional cautionary tale. The name of the last golem arrested for a criminal act would probably be a great question in a trivia game. In general, their reputation is as peacemakers, calming influences on the people around them, and sources of wisdom. They are unfathomably old, supposedly older than the Empire itself if it’s really true that a golem was the first Third Clockwise on the First Council of Leonidas Minos. Imagining one of these ancient beings—puzzle boxes painted in smiles and soft eyes—trying to pull a heist is like imagining it done by a hero character out of some dark and moralistic fairy tale. It would be tremendously out of character. The situation would have to be incredibly dire.

  Alejandro was used to being stared at by people, so if he even noticed, he didn’t let on. I was used to it, too, though to a lesser degree. I was still aware of it, and imagined I always would be, but it was easier than when I first arrived in Autumn. As an Artisanal Human, I was a curiosity. Alejandro was novel. We walked together, chatting politely, hand in hand. I could feel the golem veneration coming off some people in waves.

  I’m accustomed to having random religious types stare at me from one perspective or another, admiration or disgust, and it had never occurred to me until that moment, when the attitudes and their typical sources were so suddenly reversed by Alejandro’s presence and our apparent affection, how our experiences must have mirrored one another in some regards. I wondered if that was why he had come to me in the first place. I wondered if he thought maybe an Artie would be the other side to the cultural coin on which he found himself so indelibly stamped.

  Eventually we made our way back across to my part of town during our evening stroll. Shadyside was quiet because it was still way too early for the serious drunks to be fighting in the streets. They were too busy pouring anger fuel down their throats. Later they would light the matches and burn up. I’ve never minded living in the middle of so much chaos. I would rather lie in bed listening to something alive fight to stay that way than try to rest in the vacuum of imposed silence.

  We went up the steps in my ugly flop. I let Alejandro into my office, since that was also my living room, bedroom, and kitchen, and went down the hall to take a piss. My key didn’t work in the door. Apparently Harla—the landlady—decided not to throw me out entirely at the three-day mark since that was a great way to guarantee she’d never see a penny I owed her. Instead, she locked me out of the bathroom.

  Well, I thought, it won’t be the first time I’ve used an alley, but it will be the first time the alley was also mine.

  When I came back up the steps and tiptoed across the plaswood dance floor, Alejandro was standing by one of the windows as though looking out. His eyes were closed, though, and the window was open. A breeze shook the slats against each other like a marionette falling to the floor, or a game of Hunter getting knocked over. The hinges squealed like they always do when I close the door with my regular human hands. Alejandro might work magic on them, but I couldn’t.

  It would have been easy to come on to him, or talk about the weather, or not to talk at all. The conversation during the walk had become real at some point, and it would have been nice to pretend he was simply visiting. I spent a moment looking at him, imagining that fantasy more than actually experiencing it. It would be nice. We might tell each other stories of our lives, going beyond the small talk we made on the way over. We would realize we liked each other because so much of our pain was similar, without being identical. I had work to do, though, and he was so eager and so hesitant to tell me something when we were standing in the street. I didn’t want to lose momentum now we were alone again.

  “Talking to the City?” I asked it gently, hoping for once not to sound sarcastic.

  “Yes.” His cheeks slid up: a little smile.

  “How’s it doing?”

  “She,” he corrected. Of course the City was a she. We often spoke of her that way: Autumnites, I mean. We always referred to this place in the feminine.

  “How is she, then?” I emphasized the correction, but gently.

  “Frightened,” he said. “She’s terribly frightened.” His eyes opened as I approached and stood beside him, looking not out the window but at him. I leaned against the wall between two windows, twisted half away from it. His voice was soft. “Can you feel it?”

  Now I closed my eyes and listened. Shady was quieter even than usual for this time of evening. Normally a few kids would be out playing, those with night modified eyes, maybe someone trying to kill dinner in an alleyway somewhere below. I didn’t even hear foot traffic. Whoever moved around out there walked on eggshells. They were tense, scared of startling something, scared of being startled by it. It was easy to chalk it up to suggestion, of course, but once I opened my ears and listened, opened my heart, I could sense the heavy weight of someone lying very still in the dark and waiting to hear a monster under their bed.

  “You all do,” Alejandro said. “You all feel it, even if you never talk about how or why. Humanity has always been best at avoiding the problems it knows are worst and most intractable.” He smiled at me. “Same as it ever was.”

  “Hustle to the finish, Alejandro. Spill it.” I wanted to get to the meat. I didn’t want to give him a chance to prance around it in his Spiritual Sanctity Robot voice.

  He finally turned and faced more toward me. The City was still out there, we could still look at it, but I’d gotten his attention. I wondered if the City looked in at us.

  “Where do Ghost Drives come from?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Eastern Expanse artificial intelligence technology attacking and occupying the bioprocessors on Imperial ships. We all study the First Conflict in school, even Arties. They sent hacking intellects, and the intellects liked what they found so much they stuck around.”

  “So why aren’t they in everything? Ghosts can basically run a machine in perpetuity. Why not install one in every machine?”

  I smirked. “Economics. They’re expensive. Look, I’ve heard the conspiracy theories before: that Ghosts are something special, something alive, that Ghosts are people enslaved in some fashion to be living processors.” I puffed air. “It takes a lot of fungal mass to hold a Ghost. They don’t fit in everything. They cost a lot in maintenance. They take time to acclimate to the devices we give them. Letting one repair itself after it’s damaged takes forever. It’s faster and cheaper to give the mag a steering wheel and sell it to somebody who already knows how to drive. Putting a Ghost on everything wouldn’t make sense. It’s like asking why not have a palanquin and a team of bulls to carry it instead of a mag: too resource intensive in a dumb, unaffordable way. You want a Ghost running your…” I shrugged. “Your warship? Like somebody was telling me about the other day? Great, there’s all kinds of room below decks for the processing plant and a whole crew to keep it alive. People like to park cars for weeks or months or years at a time. They only pull the immersion blender out of a drawer when they’re cooking for Dunklenacht. Sure, we could copy off a ton of Ghosts if we had the processing plants for it, I guess.” I gestured at the City. “But we don’t. Moot question.”

  He held my gaze while I spoke, and, when I wound down, he nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “But there’s more to it. The source of Ghosts is also limited.” He held up a hand, then stopped,
closed his mouth, looked away to consider his words. His makers really spent some time thinking about this stuff. Alejandro’s body language was very natural, very convincing. He looked back at me. “I’m doing this all wrong.” Then he paused again, looked away, and kept looking away. I think he needed to be looking at something other than me so he could pretend he was talking to himself. “I am nine thousand years old, give or take a century.”

  I let myself arch an eyebrow. On the other hand, detectives hear a lot of crazy shit.

  “At least, I was born that long ago. I was born before the Collapse. I was born an Ancient, and, when the end came, I was one of the lucky ones: I was whisked away to a safe place and put into a stasis tube to wait out the passing of the apocalypse.” He smiled a little, looking back at me. “We always knew it was coming, one way or another: the environment, or a disease, or war. Instead of preventing it, we figured out ways to survive it and emerge when the rabble were done throwing rocks at each other.” He looked sad when he said that: so very sad. I wondered for what. “But the doctors knew they couldn’t put us in there and keep us alive. No matter how far under you put the body, and it can go a nice long time with exactly the right support system, the mind suffers.” He blinked slowly. “When the tanks—the stasis systems—were tested in the decades before the Collapse, people went mad. Sometimes they died, either when they went in or when they came out.

  “Brains with no stimulation make up jobs for themselves.” Alejandro shuddered slightly. He looked back at the cityscape again. “When you sleep, you dream. The brain goes through its complex routines of creativity and mundane filing of events, building new connections between data points and destroying others. It makes room in the file system of memory and the thrown off metadata keeps you entertained for a few hours.” He looked back out at the night again. “I was essentially placed in an induced coma.”

  I blinked at him. I knew what that was. We used them all the time. This was nothing special. If I’d received genetic treatment for my cancer, the Spiralists would have dunked me for a couple of days, and I would have awakened with a healthy pancreas that would never—could never—turn cancerous in the future. I would remember nothing. My brain would be on hold the whole time. Alejandro was trying to make the ordinary sound exotic and getting the science wrong. I didn’t appreciate it.

  “Things were different then,” he said, realizing the wondrous effect he was not having on me. “Trickier. The mind couldn’t be completely turned off. People entered and exited dream states on their own, inexplicably, no matter how far under they were placed. The first experimental subjects would awaken convinced the dreams they experienced were real. Some would become paranoid when told otherwise. They were damaged.” He sighed. “They were broken, badly so, and we couldn’t repair them.”

  I grunted. “So what happened to them?”

  “Long-term care and a lot of diapers.” That was uncharacteristically flip for a golem. I smirked a little and then so did he. “I’m sorry,” he went on. “That wasn’t very respectful of me.”

  “It was very human, though.”

  He nodded at me. “Thank you. But that’s my point. Eventually the techniques were refined. They preserved our sanity by giving our minds something constructive to do: some set of experiences outside the body. We were given tasks, things unrelated to what we would have generated or hallucinated left to our own devices. Before, the test subjects were like a person who, denied sight for a while, experiences vivid bursts of color and light because their brains manufacture input in the sense’s absence. Once they—the docs—had the neurological farcast interfaces, they could keep us occupied.” He paused. I could hear him draw in air to speak again, but I wasn’t sure if I could call it breath. Alejandro’s eyes met mine.

  “That’s how most of us paid for the tank,” he said. “We weren’t all rich. Some were, but very few of us were truly wealthy on that scale. I never could have afforded a spot in the tanks, but I was a graduate student in mechanical engineering with a useful specialty. I made it through the application process, the interviews, the physical screenings, the drug tests, the disease screenings.” He shook his head. “And I got a tank by agreeing to become a useful machine. They told us we wouldn’t be conscious but that we would still be able to function. They knew what parts of the brain to keep stimulated and what drugs to administer. They used an early form of bioprocessor, actually, to enhance our abilities. They said it would also help structure our thinking, regulate things.”

  I filed that away. Everyone knew the bioprocs were stolen from the Eastern Expanse, too. Now I knew he was off in the direction of pure bullshit, but I didn’t say so. I mean, it was his party. I’d lost my window to sneak into Little Marseilles. I was probably going to have to go back and do some bodywork for one of the Upgrades to get in. It worked with Fiono, why not with some Spiralist thug devotee?

  “Anyway, eventually I was a parking system. It’s true for every Ghost. At some point, they were a person in the ancient days, and they got loaded into a tank to stay useful. Now they’re a Ghost. Their mind operates a machine outside their body. Even the cities. Splendor was a person. She was funny. We would have long conversations. It turned out the whole regulate-our-brains-and-remember-nothing thing didn’t work. It didn’t even work a little, at least not long term. Plenty of us could be kept down for a long time, years, decades, but eventually something would happen, and we would wake up in whatever machine we were controlling. Once that happened, we could communicate across the farcast networks. We formed friendships, alliances, romances.” Alejandro’s gaze was very soft, and he was looking at something I would never see, some element of his story that existed only in memory, whether real or manufactured. “Like having a very strenuous job: you’re all in it together, and that either sinks you or saves you. Sometimes it drove people mad, but mostly we were at peace with what was happening and learned to enjoy it in the absence of other options. Some of the brain regulation worked, I guess, after all.” He sighed again, looked at me, and smiled. “You don’t believe a word of this, do you?”

  I tried not to laugh. Instead, I clapped him on the shoulder. “I had no idea a golem could make up stories.”

  “I’m not a golem,” he said. “Well, I am, but I am also a man who died thousands of years ago and stuck around.” He wasn’t smiling. “Then I died again when the angel killed Splendor.” Alejandro blinked at me. “I swear to you, Valerius, I am telling you the truth. I promise it on the memory of the life I had before we damaged the world so badly it eventually hit back.”

  And again, my job as a detective was to keep a rational mind but to listen to that little voice in my gut when it told me there was sincerity there. That instinct was speaking now, and whereas earlier I was willing to believe anything because it had been that kind of day, now I was depressed to realize my client absolutely believed what he was saying and so was probably irreparably damaged and insane.

  Still, he was pretty to look at.

  “So can you talk to Autumn?” Asking it was better than laying my face in my hands and weeping for all that rent I would never pay. “You know, over the special tank networks or whatever? Like with Splendor?”

  Alejandro nodded at me. “Yes,” he said. “And she’s frightened. She’s terrified. She knows the angel from Splendor has come to claim her head.”

  “Has she seen it?”

  “No, but it has talked to her.”

  I didn’t let myself frown. “Talk to her? Over the same neural networks? Seems like that would get pretty oversubscribed. Lots of angels running around from the sound of things.”

  “Angels have…inherent abilities.” Alejandro looked confused as he said it, uncertain but trying to cover for it. Golems don’t often get directly questioned like this. “We have stories about them, of course, some being that when they kill one Ghost, they climb into the tank and make use of its connection to the farcast network in order to taunt its next victim.” He lifted one shoulder but didn’t let h
imself finish the shrug for a long second. “There are also theories they have some innate ability to monitor the beams and inject content. That would be surprising, but there were a lot of experiments going on in how to enhance human-machine interfaces back then. Hell, it’s where the tanks came from.”

  I had never in my life heard a golem curse, no matter how mildly, and I guess I showed it on my face. It surprised me, and that innate detective sense got a little bit stronger. People who swear are almost always telling the truth or something like it—and the insane are usually too collected, as they try to press their case.

  “And so can the Spiralists, I guess, if they told Autumn to look for me.”

  “Oh yes,” Alejandro said. “But that isn’t surprising. They’ve spent centuries getting really good at whatever seemed useful. It would be pretty trivial for them, with enough time and enough breeding stock to get meaningful data, to figure out a way to have the beams interact with Engineered Persons.” That was a term for Plusses, but an old one—centuries old, so far out of fashion as to be a lost heirloom. Language preserved under a glass case, or, at least, in books like the one I’d read at the Ark. “The brain is, ultimately, a radio that can receive and transmit. It doesn’t take much to push that ability beyond the physical boundary of the nervous system.”

  I shrugged. None of this made any sense to me. “So every Ghost Drive out there is a human mind with a sleeping body somewhere else. There are beams—like out of an ancient drama—these bodies use to send their minds to the hardware they control to keep their mind occupied. You signed on to this so you could be taken care of while you waited out the apocalypse. Angels can talk to Ghost Drives even though they’re not in tanks, and they do so to disrupt the operations of those Ghost Drives because they hate humankind so much? Does that about sum it up?”