When the Sparrow Falls Read online

  “What took you so long?”

  2

  The Caspian Republic is located on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea and occupies almost the entirety of the historic territory of the now-defunct Republic of Azerbaijan as well as the province of Syunik, seized from the Armenian Republic during the brief Caspian-Armenian War of 2158. Following waves of inward migration in response to the AI Revolution, tensions between the local Azerbaijani and the New Humanists erupted into open violence, culminating in the overthrow of the government and the seizing of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku (renamed Ellulgrad) in 2154. The New Humanist Party has maintained total control of all political power in the nation since its founding, and espouses a militantly Organic Supremacist and Anti-AI ideology. A recent UN report ranked Caspian as one of the “least free” nations in the world. The United States government has also named the Caspian Republic as a state sponsor of terrorism, with the Ellulgrad government known to have supported Organic Supremacist groups in many nations, including the United States.

  —CIA Sourcebook entry on the Caspian Republic

  “Contran” we called it, an ugly contraction of the even uglier “Consciousness Transferal,” and there were procedures to be followed.

  Grier and I stood outside of Smolna’s doorway, Grier smoking some ghastly cheap Russian cigarette as we waited for the ambulance that would take the Parias to the morgue. There, they would be examined before burial in an unmarked grave, two more secrets to be hidden in the soil of the Caspian Republic. Such secrets formed the very bedrock of the nation. They were the ground we walked upon. Grier and I would make our reports, which would be checked and double-checked and cross-checked.

  As the bodies of the two women were loaded into the ambulance, Grier scanned the windows above us like a lion scanning the savanna and several curtains twitched beneath his glare. We watched the ambulance pull away and Grier dropped his cigarette and stamped on it.

  “We’ll have to tell The Bastards, of course,” Grier said. “The Bastards” were Party Security.

  “The Parias weren’t party members,” I said feebly.

  “How charming that you think they’d care,” Grier replied sourly. He was right. Technically, any crime, even contran, that was not committed by a member of the party was outside of ParSec’s jurisdiction. And yet ParSec would nonetheless be tearing Smolna’s home apart by nightfall, and quite likely tearing Smolna apart in their headquarters at Boyuk Shor.

  Grier fired his thumb at Smolna, who watched us nervously from the doorway. “Tell him not to go anywhere,” he said and got into the car.

  I approached Smolna who looked at me like a child wanting to be reassured that they had done nothing wrong.

  Taking care to ensure that Grier was not silently looming over my shoulder, I whispered to him in Russian, “There will be others, coming. ‘ParSec,’ yes?”

  Even speaking the word was a form of assault. Smolna blanched and his pupils seemed to shrink.

  “I would advise being elsewhere when they arrive,” I mumbled, and I turned on my heel and walked to the car.

  The drive back was a tense affair. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Grier knew what I had done. Warning Smolna had been reckless. If ParSec caught him (and they would) he would give them my name. I might find two gullivers waiting in my kitchen for me by the time I got home tonight, idly toying with knives and batons in the darkness. Or maybe they’d do nothing. My name might be squirreled away in some file, waiting in the dark to be discovered, like a cancer in remission.

  Grier said nothing, his underbite jutting out aggressively as he tried to leave the filthy winding streets of Old Baku without running over an urchin. A contran case was guaranteed to put Grier in a bad mood. A simple murder or suicide meant a day of paperwork. But a contran was not simply a criminal matter, it was a security matter. A military matter. A party matter. A government matter. No fewer than nine separate agencies and bodies would have to be notified, all with their own unique and gallingly obtuse methods of notification. Nobody wanted to know of course (with the obvious exception of The Bastards), but Grier still had to tell them. And of course, this was not one case of contran, but two. As the agent in charge, a week and a half of grueling paperwork now lay ahead of Grier, and as he gunned the engine I half wondered if he wasn’t about to plow into a wall at full speed just to avoid having to do any of it. As if the thought had just occurred to me, I mentioned to Grier that since the Parias had been found in identical circumstances he simply had to write one set of paperwork for Yasmin and then replace her name with Sheena’s, thereby halving his workload. Grier took his foot off the accelerator, and the car returned to a legal speed.

  I watched the city go by, out of masochism more than anything. Ruined and boarded-up buildings, lines of people queuing sullenly outside a grocer’s. Three bearded vagrants fought in the street, punching and biting each other with such ferocity that it was impossible to tell who was on whose side, or if there even were sides.

  And there, clinging stubbornly to the carcasses of old, ruined homes, old posters. Mantras of a future long past. In English and Russian: WE ARE THE TRUE HUMAN BEINGS, ONE BODY, ONE LIFE, THE MACHINE WILL NOT REPLACE US and lastly THE TRIUMVIRATE IS…, the final few words having been torn away by enemies of the state, or possibly the wind. This had the effect of making the poster’s message seem even more threatening.

  The Triumvirate is what? Watching? Waiting? Plotting? Marshaling its forces for our final, total destruction? Yes. All were true.

  Those posters should be replaced, I thought to myself. In that condition, they bring shame to the party. They should be replaced.

  I thought that, and yet I did not think that.

  For I did not give a damn about the posters, truly.

  And yet the thought had come unbidden, like an unwelcome guest making itself at home in my mind.

  It was an eerie phenomenon I had first noticed many years ago. What I thought of as myself, I, Nikolai South, would be trudging about his day, hunched and fearful, when a bland cheery voice in my head would offer me unsolicited advice.

  That old woman is stealing from a fruit cart. Report her.

  That young man. Have you seen him before in this neighborhood? Looks dark. Possibly Ajay. Suspicious.

  Mrs. Jannick in the flat below yours. She speaks in hushed tones whenever she sees you coming down the stairs. What is she hiding?

  I called this voice the Good Brother. I liked to pretend that he was simply a paid operative that the party had somehow managed to squirrel away in my mind when I had let my guard down.

  I wondered if I was the only one who had a Good Brother. I glanced briefly at Grier, hands clenched on the steering wheel, lower jaw jutted out like a battering ram against the world. Did he have a voice of his own, chiding him, rebuking him, infuriating him?

  No. Grier didn’t have a Good Brother. Grier was a Good Brother. StaSec was full of Good Brothers. I alone had been cursed to have one living inside me.

  That, at least, was what I told myself.

  It was easier than admitting that these thoughts were my own, and that at least part of me was now occupied territory.

  “Why do you think of yourself as occupied?” the Good Brother asked me. “This is the Caspian Republic, and you are loyal, aren’t you?”

  Yes. I was loyal. But I resented the price of that loyalty. I resented, above all, the fear.

  Nominally, the currency of the Caspian Republic was the moneta, but in truth the coin of the nation was fear. Whoever could inspire fear was rich, whoever lived in fear was poor. Fear of StaSec, fear of ParSec, fear of hunger, fear of the Triumvirate that ruled vast swathes of the outside world. Fear of pain. Fear of loss. Fear of death.

  For we were true human beings, the party told us.

  Born of earth and flesh. Created in the image of God. Second only to the angels.

  And as such, we suffered.

  3

  The sea change in opinion on Capitol Hill on the i
ssue of super artificial intelligence has been sudden and decisive in the aftermath of Confucius’s first six months in operation. Perhaps no better illustration of that is the fact that Senator Mark Sorenson (PD-Illinois), once considered one of the loudest voices on the dangers of SAI, is now openly advocating for an American Confucius. I asked the senator how he had learned to stop worrying and love SAI. His answer was sobering: “I haven’t. I’m every bit as worried as I was five years ago, if not more so. But where we are now, asking ‘Should we create super intelligent AIs?’ is like asking if we should be using protection while we’re going into labor. The question is pretty moot. The baby is here. China has uncorked the bottle and let the genie out and the results speak for themselves. If we do not move quickly to create an American Confucius, we are done as a global power. It’s that simple.”

  —“An American Confucius? ‘When,’ Not ‘If,’” The Washington Post, 03 September 2149

  The building that would one day become State Security Headquarters had begun its life as the Neftchilar Grand Hotel, once considered the finest hotel in Ellulgrad.

  You would never have thought it to look at the place now, so perfectly did it suit its current purpose. As you mounted the grim, exhausting outer staircase, the façade loomed over you like a grim temple in a foreign land. Once inside, you were in what had once been the lobby of the hotel, and was now the reception area of StaSec. Perhaps it had been intended to impress visitors with its magnificent scale and forest of brown marble pillars that extended past the grand stairway and led one’s eye toward the reception desk. But now the impression it gave was that one was an animal alone in a forest walking in plain view of anything that could be lurking in the shadows.

  The ones who entered were always watched, the ones who watched were always unseen. As I say, it was difficult to imagine that the building had ever been anything but StaSec HQ.

  Grier and I fell into a silent lockstep as we crossed the vast checkered marble floor, our footsteps echoing against the pillars. So vast was the space that it took a few moments to realize that we were not alone in the lobby.

  Lounging against a pillar, like a weasel on the roof of a chicken coop, was Nard Wernham. He had worked under Grier before me and, as far as I could see, he was the lone human being that Grier actually seemed to like on a personal level. Wernham took his place beside Grier as he walked and it was as if I did not exist, which suited me fine. I knew the Wernhams of this world, and knew well enough not to draw their attention. Like Grier, Wernham was ex-army. He’d served in the north of the country in the Poleador Rayon. Buy him a drink and he’d start to make “jokes” about being involved in the Shaki massacre. Personally, I doubted that: He would have been only in his late teens at the time. But you can tell a lot about who a man is from the kind of man he pretends to be, and in Wernham’s case I loathed both of them.

  “How are you, Brother?” Wernham asked cheerily. “You look happy.”

  “Fuck off,” Grier muttered.

  Wernham tutted with mock disapproval.

  “Tell me your troubles, Grier,” he said, in an approximation of sympathy that he had honed over the years to a kind of rough semblance of the real thing.

  “Double contran in Old Baku,” Grier growled. “A banquet of shit has been laid before me, Wernham. Seven fucking courses.”

  “Oh well. Not to worry. You’ll find the man,” said Wernham. “Oh, by the way. Are you fond of Brother South, at all?”

  I stopped. So did Grier. Wernham was fixing me with a shiny-eyed grin. The weasel had entered the chicken coop.

  “South? What do you mean?” Grier barked.

  “He’s been called upstairs,” said Wernham. “Niemann wants to see him.”

  I felt the kind of weightlessness and panic that can usually be induced only by a doctor with a grave face and a hushed voice.

  “Me?” I whispered.

  “South?” said Grier, incredulously.

  “That’s right,” said Wernham. The man enjoyed pain. I wondered why ParSec hadn’t snapped him up.

  Grier fixed me with a cold, indifferent stare.

  “I know no one by that name,” he said. “I never have, and I never will.”

  And with that, he walked off with Wernham, who was chuckling, “I thought you might say that.” I felt like my bones had turned to water. I had run through seven or eight scenarios as to what would happen when it was discovered that I had warned Smolna to run. None of them, not the worst, most bizarre, most paranoid of them had involved a summons to the office of the Deputy Director of State Security.

  What could Augusta Niemann possibly want with me?

  * * *

  We called her the “deputy” director, but that was a mere technicality. The director of State Security, Samuel Papalazarou Junior, had been bedridden for eight years. Indeed, we in StaSec spoke of him, on the rare occasions we did speak of him, as someone already dead. Parliament had not had him removed from his post out of respect for his family, who were one of the great founding clans of the Caspian Republic. Instead, he lay barely conscious in his villa on the shore of the Caspian Sea, the immense power of his office pooling in the tips of his insensate fingers.

  Augusta Niemann, therefore, was the unchallenged head of State Security in everything but name. As I waited outside her office, I thought how easy it would be for her to make me disappear. Niemann’s secretary was typing something with great gusto on her terminal. I resisted the urge to lean over her shoulder and look for the words “warrant,” “execution” and “South.” The intercom on her desk crackled and I heard a feminine voice, deep and almost aristocratic, boom, “Marta? Where is South?”

  Marta, the secretary, gazed blankly at the intercom and then stammered that if the Deputy Director would look out her window she would see the uppermost tower of the Ministry of Agriculture, which was (Marta believed) due south of the …

  I cleared my throat.

  “I think she means me,” I said.

  * * *

  “I’m glad to see you, South,” said the deputy director as I stepped into her office.

  This surprised me.

  “Oh?” I said, or rather, whispered.

  “Yes. My secretary had led me to believe you were about five seconds away from flinging yourself off the roof of the Ministry of Agriculture. I was quite offended.”

  Niemann was a large woman, in her early fifties, and built like a wrestler. There was, now that I think about it, a “StaSec face.” Grim, square, jaw set, perpetually irritated. Grier had it, and Niemann did, too. But there was something in her eyes that Grier decidedly lacked. A kind of merriness, buried beneath the grim façade like a pearl in snow.

  “Please. Sit.” She gestured to the empty chair in front of her desk. Niemann’s office had once been the bridal suite when the building had been the Neftchilar Grand Hotel. As such, it boasted a magnificent view of the waterfront and more space than Niemann could ever have needed. I felt stranded as I sat down at her desk, like a rabbit on open ground, far from the nearest burrow. Slowly, deliberately, Niemann took her seat. I was waiting to hear her first word, and I had an awful premonition that it would be Smolna. As it turned out, I was wrong.

  “We haven’t met before, have we? The Christmas party, perhaps?” Niemann said. I shifted uncomfortably.

  “No. I’m usually out of the city that time of year.”

  “I think I know you,” she said. “You have an undeniable smack of familiarity about you. Stand up.”

  She made me stand up and turn 180 degrees so that I was facing the door. I had a sudden urge to run but my nerve held.

  “There is a lot you can tell from the back of a man’s head, South,” I heard Niemann say behind me. “For example: You have your lunch every day, weather permitting, sitting out on the white bench on the waterfront. You bring a blue flask of soup and a sandwich. And, even with food as scarce as it is, you still tear the crust off and feed it to the seagulls. How am I doing so far, South?”

&nb
sp; “Correct in every particular, Deputy Director,” I replied.

  “Do you know how I know?” she asked.

  “One imagines the Deputy Director of State Security has her sources.”

  She laughed. Not an unpleasant sound, had the circumstances been different.

  “Oh, she does. Do you think I’ve had you bugged and followed? Turned your friends against you? Put a camera in your bedroom mirror so I can watch you sleep?”

  Yes. I thought. I do think that. Everyone thinks that. It’s safer that way.

  “No, Deputy Director,” I said. “I think your office window overlooks the waterfront.”

  I couldn’t see her face, but you can hear a smile, can’t you?

  “It’s always the simplest explanation, isn’t it, South?”

  “As you say, Deputy Director.”

  “Sit down,” she said.

  I took my seat again. Niemann had a thin blue file in front of her, which she leafed through as if it were a particularly colorless magazine in a dentist’s waiting room.

  “Now,” said Niemann. “Nikolai Andreivich South. Fifty-three. Twenty-nine years in the agency. Party member. Obviously. Divorced.”

  “Widowed,” I interrupted.

  Niemann glanced up at me sharply. She tapped the file with her fingernail.

  “This says ‘divorced,’” she said, as if that settled the matter.

  For a moment, the taste of salt and sand was on my lips. “She died,” I told her. “Before the papers went through. A swimming accident.”

  She had been pulled from the sea, cold as ice and white as snow. They had lain her on the sand and I had tried, oh God, I had tried, to breathe some life back into her. Her eyes had gazed up at me, stunned and confused in death, as if she couldn’t believe that this was where we would end. What are you doing? she seemed to be asking. Are you really going to let me go? Do something, Nikolai. Do something.