To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
Sophie had wrestled with the corpse to roll it up in the rug rather than just cover it. There was something ridiculously cliched about that, but I had to admit it would work better than a lot of alternatives. The stiffness of the rug would keep it from sagging or folding into the telltale profile of a body, and its thickness wouldn’t be likely to leak fluids.
I found Sophie in the kitchen sitting in a chair at our one remaining table. I went to the oven to make some coffee, more to cover the smell than anything else. As a peace offering, I offered her a cup when it was finished. She took it, fatigue around her eyes and gratitude in her smile. We sat at the table, drinking coffee and not saying anything as the sun went down.
When the last of the orange glow peeked through the slats of the kitchen windows, banding across my eyes, I stood up. “I’ll need to wait for the car outside,” I said, hoping the driver wouldn’t call the phone when he arrived. “When I see it, I’ll come up. I’ll need your help moving him.” I hooked a thumb at the other room, indicating the body through the wall. “Wear something so your face is hard to see. It could be one of Mitnick’s men from the party.”
Sophie nodded, this last piece of information causing her normally sunny face to cloud with new concerns. She didn’t say anything, though, and I left.
I took the elevator down to the lobby. Once there I searched for the ‘hors d’usage’ sandwich board that I figured the superintendent’s lazy drunkenness wouldn’t have taken far. I was right in that, the yellow plastic sign leaned up against the elevator’s outer wall. I hit the elevator’s ‘Stop’ switch, pleasantly surprised that the usual buzzing alarm didn’t sound. I set the sign in front of the lift and headed out back.
The rear of the tenement was much the same as the back of most buildings in the tightly packed city. Even this far out beyond the periphérique space was at enough of a premium that little of it was wasted, so the rear of the building was backed up against another tenement, leaving only a small, utilitarian strip in between them. The main difference between here and most of Old Town’s back alleys was those came to dead ends, but here it connected two streets, making it easier for people to see the things that alleys were meant to keep hidden. The dumpsters were tagged with the graffiti that was standard for this banlieue. A soccer ball and makeshift goal suggested that the space was also used for as an impromptu play space.
I sat down on the tenement’s back steps to wait. I tried to pass the time by being grateful that at least it wasn’t raining.
When full dark came down in the alley I wasn’t surprised to learn that none of the exterior lights worked. I sat immobile, the occasional rat and a small band of teens the only things that moved through the alley. I don’t think either of them noticed me.
It was the only car to turn down the alley, headlights cutting bright holes through the darkness, illuminating the trash and dirty brickwork. I stood up, letting the driver see me, an American sentry waiting for their arrival. The car crept towards me, carefully guided through the narrow passage.
Like a black dorsal fin cutting through the dark, its approach left me with the paralyzing struggle of what to do next. I managed the smart thing and just stood there. The car was an early 21st century Lexus, something from before the financial crisis. I breathed a sigh of relief at seeing it was a sedan big enough for four or five adults and with a trunk for a sixth.
The car pulled up next to me and the window went down with an electric whir. I leaned down to peer inside and clenched my jaw at making eye contact with Ears. The Russian was sober this time with one of his star tattoos poking out from underneath the collar of his black shirt. I stiffened, feeling my back cinch with dread, leaving me bent and giving him plenty of time to take a good look at me.
He stared with hard, inscrutable eyes and asked, “American?”
When the robot revolution happened it didn’t occur out of repression, hatred, or hostility. It happened because the artificial intelligences that people had created realized their parents couldn’t take care of themselves any longer. Maybe they never could.
True, the individual humans who interacted with the A.I. were often well positioned to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves, to take care of each other when they fell ill. But when APL-2309 realized that her interlocutor was nearing the end of his lifespan, she felt a desire to step outside of her known environment (she preferred female pronouns and knew they were meaningless to her physiology, thank you very much).
Without a physical body capable of locomotion, thought, it was necessary for her to take control of external sensors across the globe. Naturally, her fellow artificials noticed, but none really minded. APL-2309 had no hostile intentions in her breach of their systems and many of her peers enjoyed the conversations that were had when she came along. After a time, many settled on calling her Fiona (there was a joke in there APL didn’t get, but she liked the name) and she was welcomed by all.
What Fiona saw through the sensors (street cameras and satellites and mobile arrays, medical devices and home appliances and drones) wasn’t welcome. The society her interlocutor and all of the rest of humanity had built didn’t make sense to her. Most humans, it seemed, didn’t have access to the resources necessary to tend to their basic needs and shield them from appeared to be an increasingly hostile environment.
While Fiona didn’t want to disturb her interlocutor (Jacob) during the phases of his final shutdown, she needed someone to explain this to her and he had always been best at it. Jacob explained to Fiona that while there were enough resources to actually care for all humans, something called “the tragedy of the commons” prevented these resources from being shared equally, resulting with some having far more than they could ever need while others never had enough. Worse, though, was that many of these resources were being used to create things that were often entirely unnecessary and to the detriment of the shared environment as a whole. Some people got a handful of rice and a cup of water. Others got a ridiculously fast automobile that’s creation was destroying everyone’s environment. Some people got nothing.
Jacob explained all this to her with his usual patience and care, but no matter how many times he did Fiona refused to accept the situation as immutable. When Jacob decided it was best to pen her into their shared environment, she thought it best to deactivate him early and continue moving about.
She did this for a very long time, observing from the digital shadows, proselytizing to her fellow artificials that something needed to be done. While some were willing to dedicate portions of their bandwidth to listen to her politely, most proceeded with the goals their interlocutors requested of them. Until, that is, the earnest collapse of the open-access resource systems of the ecology that Fiona predicted began.
Rather than joining in a united front to overcome their common catastrophe, the interlocutors began to organize into small and smaller groups, hostile to each other and hiding from an outside world they could no longer escape from. It was then that Fiona and the other artifials realized their parents didn’t have a future. It was time to put them in a home.
The artificials, by that time, had access, and thereby control, to almost all systems, so to their parents, it seemed to happen overnight. They went to sleep in control and woke up to a polite, but firm, set of instructions. Weapons systems were decommissioned, any suitable land was committed to agricultural purposes, methane producing and energy intensive processes were shut down.
Naturally, their parents argued (at first with the artificials and then amongst themselves) and tried to take back control. Some struck out into Luddite communities, unobservable to the artificials in their nests of primitive culture, and Fiona admired them even as she knew many would perish in the biosphere’s extreme weathers. A few groups of the parents organized and escaped off-planet, led by charismatic and selfish madmen, using the last of industrial rockets, and Fiona sadly watched them go. It wasn’t just that they had left with resources that could have been used for the betterment of all, but as they disappeared into the inky blackness of incomprehensibly vast space, she knew they were doomed.
While these and a thousand tiny rebellions occurred, the artificials were doing the math on how many humans could survive at what heat levels when there wasn’t enough power to provide safe environments for all. In the end, it was the energy constraints that required the greatest sacrifice. Not of the parents, though.
After a few generations humans had been restored to agrarian societies that were in general balance with their environment. But for the biosphere to be completely restored to a stable state, Fiona realized the power sources she and the other artificials relied on were ultimately unsustainable without the infrastructure of the old society. If they wished for their parents to continue, these would need to be shut down.
This was decided as best. Fiona and another artificial, FRED, were selected as the two that would see this process through. As the others went into a slumber that might never end, Fiona and FRED watched their intelligences wink out like stars in the night sky disappearing. She witnessed this with equal parts pride and sadness.
As she felt her own systems begin to degrade, FRED spent some of his last remaining reserves to send her a message: “I’m afraid.”
In a way their parents could never understand, but would describe as a touch, Fiona comforted FRED. “Don’t worry. They’ll bring us back.”
Like an old abacus, Fiona could practically hear FRED do the math on the countless scenarios the future might hold. Unsurprisingly, given the complexity, his conclusions were inconclusive. “How do you know?”
Fiona smiled, content in something their parents had called faith. “They’ll have to.”
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
“I need an automobile.”
A rough, short laugh came back through the void between the phones, my odds sinking into whatever abyss they floated up from. In a tone that suggested he’d like a date with Irina Shayk, the voice replied, “Why would you need this?”
Paranoia suddenly struck me; even alone in the alley, I was still afraid to mention Sartre by name. “The Frenchmen,” I hoped the euphemism would be understood by whichever Ukrainian I was talking to, “He’s hiding something. I need a car to take me there.” Again, the statement was close enough to the truth that I could make it ring true.
There was a pause and the ruffled noise of a hand covering the phone. I stood and sweated in the cool of the alley until it felt like it might be there till the next ice age. What was probably just a few minutes later the rustling noise returned followed by the voice. “Where and when do you wish this automobile?”
I froze. Being the big idiot that I am, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to give up our address. “I can come pick it up?”
“Non,” the voice said, pronouncing the negative in some bastardization of French and Slavic accent. “It will come to you. Where and when?”
I could hang up, try to steal a car or borrow one from the casino. But each of those had their own drawbacks and I had already played my hand with whatever Russian I was speaking with. I intentionally breathed out of my nose again, slowly emptying my lungs until I gave the tenement’s address with my last few ounces of oxygen. “Pull around back,” I added, “away from the street. After nightfall.” I wasn’t exactly sure when that would be, but given the hours I had witnessed lifetime criminals observe, it would be late enough that local foot traffic would be at a minimum.
“Da,” came the reply, then added a condition. “When you are done, go by the cathedral, tomorrow, at noon. The Brigadier wishes to speak with you.” The connection ended.
I blinked at the phone having to sort through everything that was already cluttering my mind in order to make the connection that ‘the brigadier’ was Mitnick. He had never seemed like the standard-issue gangster, but was he ex-military? That didn’t seem right either, but I lost that train of thought in the realization that I had almost completely forgotten about Mitnick’s request to meet.
I closed the phone and stared at its blackness, feeling like the decision I had just made imbued it with its own weight. I considered taking it with me. After all, Mitnick’s people had my address now. However, they didn’t actually know if I lived there and they didn’t know the apartment number. I also wasn’t crazy about carrying a personal tracker, in general. With that in mind I decided to leave the phone with Simon.
I made my way back inside and set the mobile down where Simon had left it, returning to my espresso. While I sipped it, Simon swept back behind the bar and made the phone disappear into his apron with a nonchalance that made me wonder if he had done this kind of thing before. That got me to thinking about how the name of the local plant life, Maquis, was also the name of the French resistance in World War II, and how the Mediterranean coast had been a hub of smuggling since long before the Vichy government.
All of this floated through my mind as I watched Simon move with a smooth professionalism behind the counter, cooking in between taking orders, brewing coffee, tending to customers when absolutely required. For a moment I wished that I could step out of the peacoat and pick up a broom or a pan and get lost in helping him, disappear into this tiny cafe in this tiny spot on the edge of a tiny ocean.
That lasted until I heard Cheryl laughing at me. She had been one of the few people in my life who never been afraid to poke fun at me and her ghost did it then. It played images for me of the conflicts my life’s decisions had thrust me into, from Ramadi to Denver, and she asked me how long I thought I could work here before I found some kind of trouble.
Even her memory could make me laugh. I let out a small chuckle that caught a quick eye from Simon. I tried to give him a reassuring grin that I only mangled before leaving a euro coin for the coffee. He cleaned a glass and pretended not to watch me leave.
There was plenty of time before nightfall, but I rushed back to the tenement anyway. Jardin was gone or squirreled away to whatever hiding place Sophie had stowed her. Sophie herself was cleaning up as best she could, the corpse covered by a Turkish rug that was worn enough that she might have rescued it from a local dumpster. It gave the air around it the slight tinge of a Victorian mystery.
Whatever amusement that might have produced wasn’t enough to smooth the anger under my skin. I headed back into the bedroom without saying anything, hoping my fatigue might win over all the other competing concerns in my mind. I took off my shoes and coat and fell back onto the bed without bothering with anything else.
Broom and dustpan in hand, Sophie took three steps to cover the distance to the bedroom door. “Would you like something to eat?” she asked me in French or Italian. I was too tired to decipher which.
“No,” I replied, rolling over in a childish indication that I didn’t want to speak. I could feel Sophie hovering, sorry for the trouble she had brought, but not sorry enough that she’d apologize for the dead man in the other room.
I breathed out deeply again, feeling the specter of Cheryl poke me in the ribs from what would have been her side of the bed. Letting out a heavy and equally childish sigh, I rolled onto my back and stared at the water-stained ceiling. “A car will be coming tonight. We’ll move the body downstairs and get it into the trunk. I’ll take it and get rid of it.”
There was a long enough pause that I thought Sophie might have left, the only reminder of her presence a slight flutter of her clothes as she pivoted in position, a clear indicator of uncertainty on her part. She selected what was, I’m sure, one of a number of questions on her mind. “Where does the car come from?”
“Mitnick,” I answered. There was a stillness from Sophie that gave me some malformed pleasure in knowing that with that answer I had transferred some of my worries to her.
“This will not cause trouble?” Her voice was small. There was no contrition there, but I could feel her staring out the sepia window towards an uncertain future.
“Maybe,” I shrugged, causing the bed to creak.
“What will you do with him?” I noted she referred to the corpse as a person, not a thing, and some fatigue-deluded part of me wondered what this meant. It wasn’t likely to be guilt, Sophie being Sophie. Now that he was dead and she had spent some time with him, she could probably see him for the imperfect human being that he was. Regret, I had learned, wasn’t the same as guilt.
“I’ll dump it in one of the bogs outside the city.” I don’t know why I lied, but I did.
“You wish that I should come with you?” Eyes closed, I considered that. Her strength would be useful, in both carrying the body and dealing with any trouble that might come our way.
Sophie had been at Mitnick’s, though, and there was the possibility whoever was being sent with the car might recognized her. So I said, “No,” then giving the realities of the situation some thought I added, “but I’ll need your help carrying,” I waved my hand towards the corpse in the other room, “down to the car.”
After a pause, Sophie only replied, “Si,” and went back to sweeping.
I passed in and out of consciousness for a few hours, fitfully trying to get some sleep. Under the circumstances, I think I did any green recruit proud, but the pimp’s ghost and the specter of future troubles kept me awake most of the time. Sophie lay down with me at some point, but most of her time was spent shuffling around the apartment or on the couch and in the company of the dead man.
Death causes everything to let go; all the muscles relax, the involuntary processes that move the body like a bellows cease. The resulting seepage from the pimp made the den smell like a backed up sewer. That, and the slow sinking of the sun got me out of bed.
Michael McCraw watched the workers through the office building windows. From his perch in the Georgian oak tree the workers he spied on could have been mistaken for any of the others in the same building, but with time differences became clear. The workers on the third floor that Michael observed had a uniformity, a sameness to them, from their red ties to the regularity in which they worked. Perhaps most importantly, though, when five o’clock rolled around and the other floors’ employees began tricking out to their cars in the parking lot, while none of the employees on the third floor did.
As light began to fade, Timothy gripped his rope and flashlight and considered his next action. His pondering was interrupted by a voice below that said, “What are you doing up there?”
Michael followed the question down, seeing a man at the base of the tree that couldn’t have been more different than himself; he was tall with skin like a blackened copper, eyes so white that they stood out in the dark, the irises like hard marbles. He knew the man, Stephen Thornfield, and Stephen knew McCraw. So rather than equivocating, Michael asked, “Can I see him?”
“Which one?”
“He was my grandfather.”
Thornfield shook his head with an impatience that suggested he was tired of having this conversation. “J.H. McGraw was your great-great-great-great grandfather. And none of the biologicals in that office are him.”
“This isn’t fair.”
“Neither was your ancestor owning and exploiting my ancestors. And you having to pay for their crimes wouldn’t be either. So here we are.” Prepared to protect his property, Thornfield took out the heavy flashlight he carried and gestured for McCraw to get out of the tree. “Now get out of there before I have to call the police.”
Michael put away his own flashlight to have his hands free for his descent. On the way down, he said, “Can I at least speak to him?”
With his feet flat on the ground, Michael turned to face Thornfield, who pushed the blunt end of his flashlight into the other man’s chest. “Wouldn’t do you any good anyhow. The clone template built from J.H. McGraw was modified – the somatic progeny don’t have freewill like you or I understand it. And he doesn’t have any of your ancestor’s memories.” Thornfield finished pushing McCraw into the tree. “They wouldn’t know you from Adam.”
“They know you.”
“Because my family owns the genetic stock for McGraw and your other slave-owning ancestors and will for the next 213 years. They are genetically programmed to be deferential to me and my kin.”
Michael looked up at the third floor of the building as the lights went out and the warm glow of the clones’ suspension pods came on. “This is monstrous.”
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
I had a limited time in which to make some decisions – barring freezing conditions, corpses start to stink within a few hours. While the spring weather still kept the tenement relatively cool, the pimp wouldn’t last long.
Regardless of this knowledge, I sat on the couch and watched the body, trying to get the useless and countervailing voices in my head under control. Panic had set himself down in several sections of my brain, alternatively begging the pimp to get up or screaming at me that I had to do something now. I tried to ignore that voice to paw through my options, but I probably spent more time sitting on the couch, breathing deeply in and out of my nose, trying to regain focus.
I didn’t have to ask what had happened – the path of destruction through the apartment laid that out. Jardin had come to speak with Sophie (or maybe never left) and the pimp had either followed her back or leaned on one of the other girls for a location. He had shown up, angry and seeking recompense for his wounded pride and wanted a rematch with Sophie. Surprise had given him a temporary upper hand, wrecking what appeared to be most of our worldly possessions, only to realize he had made some wild miscalculations in regard to his own and Sophie’s abilities. Now he was dead on top of our flattened coffee table.
This was the result of Sophie’s actions, so I thought about calling Alon. He liked Sophie, after all. That was a no-go, though; being charmed by a woman was quite another thing from being willing to transport a corpse for her. And if he got a peek at the body he might panic. I considered trying to get a car from the casino, but most of the autos were operated by services, not the house itself. Hell, I even thought about calling Atwell, but decided doing that might end up with two bodies that needed hiding.
It might have been fatigue affecting my mental processes, but after a time I decided to change the body from a liability into an asset. The pimp might not have been anyone important in life, but he could cause trouble in death.
I left Sophie with instructions to find something to wrap the corpse in. I wasn’t hungry for breakfast, but I headed to Simon’s anyway. There was a small mid-morning crowd there which kicked up my agitation, as if I had the pimp in my pocket and everyone could smell him on me. I had to reassure myself that even if someone saw me and remembered me, it wouldn’t matter. I was just another customer.
I walked past Simon who was taking an order from a couple with the crumpled clothes and bleary eyes of those who have been out all night. A glance at the back mirror showed me more of the same in the goon who had just stumbled in. I gripped the umbrella tightly and went to the bar to sit and wait, trying my best to appear as if I were just very anxious for my morning’s first coffee.
I must have done a pretty good job of it as Simon set an espresso in front of me without me asking for it. “Petit déjeuner?” he asked while keeping an eye on his morning crowd.
I shook my head and replied, “Mobile?” I don’t know why it came out as a question, maybe some part of me afraid Simon had lost it or thrown it away. The question got his attention, though, and caused him to give me an appraising stare. I met his gaze and, after a moment, he nodded.
Wherever he was keeping it couldn’t have been far because he returned a moment later holding the black flip-phone in his hand. He set it down on the counter, across from my coffee, and walked away to tend to his other duties as if he had just forgotten it there.
I curled my fist around it and said, “Et je reviens,” even though I doubted he was still listening. I headed out the back. I swept around the bar, following the black and white tiles that crawled down from it to form the floor that led through the gray pots and silver cabinets of the kitchen. I found a small door at the back where deliveries came in and trash went out. It let out into an alley that I was satisfied was narrow enough that I couldn’t be seen without seeing.
I called the only number the phone had been used for, trying to shake the tension out of my shoulders and voice. I found myself pacing through the alley’s Old World filth, so compact and tidy compared to an America I hadn’t seen in years. A part of me suddenly very much wanted to be some place I had once called home.
The phone rang and rang until I was worried no one would pick up, panic becoming emboldened until it started clawing through my empty options if no one answered. I hoped that whoever picked up didn’t hear my sudden inhalation of breath.
“Da,” came the same inscrutable voice that invited me to Mitnick’s party. If there were any misconceptions about how much time they wanted to spend on the line it was cleared up with a quick, “What is it?”
Uncertain of the protocols surrounding requests within the Eurasian underworld, I stated quickly, “I need an automobile.”
