When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

Genres: Dystopian; Political Thrillers; Humorous sci-fi

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

In the future, AI are everywhere - over half the human race lives online. But in the Caspian Republic, the last true human beings have made their stand; and now the repressive, one-party state is locked in perpetual cold war with the outside world.

Security Agent Nikolai South is given a seemingly mundane task; escorting a dead journalist's widow while she visits the Caspian Republic to identify her husband's remains. But Paulo Xirau was AI; and as Nikolai and Lily delve deeper into the circumstances surrounding Paulo's death, South must choose between his loyalty to his country and his conscience.

© Neil Sharpson 2021 (P) Penguin Audio and Rebellion Publishing 2021

Release date: June 29, 2021

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 1

Sample

1



Contran

k?n/Tran/

NOUN

1. A procedure whereby a consciousness is transferred from an organic body to an artificial server, or vice versa, using the Sontang process.

“Following her accident, a contran was carried out and she was safely uploaded.”

VERB

2. The act of digitally transferring one’s consciousness from the physical realm to a virtual environment or vice versa.

“If I had the money, I’d contran myself to the Ah! Sea.”

—Oxford English Dictionary, 5th Edition

It was a month after they’d hanged old Mendelssohn that two bodies were found in a small, grimy bedroom in Old Baku. The neighborhood then, as now, was mostly Russian-speaking, which was why I was sent to investigate along with my superior, Special Agent Alphonse Grier. I had some (admittedly rusty) Russian which I had inherited from my mother, as well as nearsightedness and a long nose. Caspian was a nation of immigrants and Grier’s family were originally German, but he spoke only a particularly clipped and irritated dialect of English. For this reason, I was useful in investigations in Old Baku, and for that reason only. At least, according to Grier.

Grier rapped on the door, which was opened by an old Russian man with a magnificent white beard and sad, rheumy eyes. He froze. He had called us, but he still froze at the sight of us. StaSec had that effect on people. ParSec had quite a different one. People did not freeze when they saw ParSec coming. They ran.

“Jakub Smolna?” Grier barked.

Smolna nodded nervously.

“I am Special Agent Alphonse Grier with State Security, this is my colleague Agent South. Where are the bodies please?”

Smolna looked at us both, his eyes darting from one to the other in silent panic.

Grier gave an exasperated sigh and elbowed me in the ribs. With a jolt, I realized what was being asked of me and searched for the necessary Russian.

“Tela,” was the best I could muster.

Smolna nodded, and gestured for us to step inside.

Grier did not like me, and was entirely within his rights. I had been a security agent in StaSec for twenty-nine years by then. I had only ever been promoted once, which Grier took to mean that I was considered politically unpopular, and I attended party meetings only the absolute minimum number of times that a person of my grade was required to, which Grier took to mean I was disloyal. For that reason, from the hour I had been assigned to him as his partner, he had regarded me like an old grenade found under his floorboards that could go off at any moment. I’ve found myself mellowing to Grier over the years. He had a family: a wife and two sons. That colors things. It’s easy to be kind, when ParSec aren’t perched on everyone’s shoulder. Everyone in Caspian had an invisible rope, tying them to someone else. If I had been pulled down for disloyalty, quite possibly he and his entire family would have been yanked along with me.

I’ve just realized that I’ve been talking about Grier as if he’s dead. But he could still be alive. Stranger things have happened, after all. All kinds of people are still alive.

The Paria twins, Yasmin and Sheena, had done their best with the room. Over the discolored patches of mold on the wall they had hung pictures of the two of them embracing and smiling big, honest, generous grins. To mask the damp scent of Smolna’s old carpet there were vases of flowers, and in the light of the many candles strewn about the mantelpiece and tables, I could imagine that the room might even have looked cozy and homelike.

The twins themselves lay on the bed, facing each other. In Russian, I asked Smolna to identify the bodies, and he pointed to Yasmin, left, and Sheena, right. He didn’t seem entirely certain, however, and I couldn’t blame him.

Yasmin’s eyes were closed, and Sheena’s were open, but other than that they were mirror images of each other. Yasmin’s face looked blissful and at peace. Sheena stared unblinkingly at a discolored patch of plaster in the wall. She had a tiny, perfectly round mole under her right eye, which I mentally filed away to distinguish her from her sister. The arrangement of their bodies suggested exactly what I imagine it was supposed to suggest, two sisters having a nap together after a long, hard day. Everything, from the way Sheena’s ankles were crossed to the way Yasmin had used her right hand as a pillow under her cheek, made it look like they were simply resting. They were both quite dead. Ascertaining the cause of death was why Grier and I were there: to see if this was murder, or something worse.

Smolna was clearly uncomfortable being in the same room as the bodies, so I took him into the corridor and asked him some questions while Grier stood motionless in the center of the room, as if attempting to absorb the room’s mysteries via osmosis. Smolna knew little, or was pretending to know little, and I did not have the energy to badger him. I told him to wait in the kitchen and returned to the bedroom, and Grier and I got to work.

Despite our mutual animosity we worked well together, in our way. Neither of us were young men, but my eyesight was better (at close range at least), so it was my job to examine the bodies while Grier rummaged through the personal effects of the sisters and tried to assemble a picture of their lives.

Grier had a deep, booming voice and in another life might have made a good actor. He had presence and a love of being the center of attention. As I examined the bodies, Grier recited a monologue of his own composition: “Sheena and Yasmin Paria. Twenty-eight. Non-party. Born in Nakchivan. Twins. Traitors to their country and all mankind question mark.”

“No signs of violence,” I murmured. “Pills perhaps? Suicide?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Grier answered. “For once? How did they afford it, South? If you had the money to do it, why would you live here?”

“Perhaps they had the money because they lived here?” I offered. “Benefits of frugal living?”

“Did Smolna say where they worked?” he asked.

I shook my head as I examined Yasmin’s body, and the motion caused her limp hand to slip off her shoulder and gently land on that of her sister. Jakub Smolna was a landlord who respected the privacy of his tenants, and did not care how they made rent as long as they did.

“Hostesses?” Grier asked, using the usual euphemism. I shook my head again. Smolna had said that the Parias did very occasionally have male visitors, but nothing to suggest there was anything entrepreneurial going on. It would not have been enough to live on. Sex was appallingly cheap these days, I reminded Grier.

“You forget, South,” said Grier, in a distant sort of voice. “Twins. Well, enough of their bodies, where are their souls?”

I stopped. On the back of Yasmin’s neck was a small, neatly applied patch of makeup, less than a centimeter squared. Whoever had applied it had clearly done so with great care but the makeup they had chosen was ever so slightly too light for Yasmin’s skin tone, drawing attention to that which they wished to conceal. With my thumb I smeared the makeup away, revealing a small, jagged puncture wound. It had been made by a device, illegal even in its country of origin. This wound, I knew, was a well. Tiny in width, but so deep that it extended through her skull and right into the gray matter of her brain. And I knew that if I were to check Sheena’s neck I would find an identical wound.

Grier had asked where their souls were.

I turned to look at him and simply gave him a nod. Grier sighed, genuinely disappointed. “So,” he said. “Sheena and Yasmin Paria. Twenty-eight. Twins. Traitors to their country and all mankind. Period.”

Without another word, he wearily trod out of the room, and I heard the stairs creak under his heavy frame as he headed out to the car to radio StaSec HQ.

I turned to look at the two bodies on the bed.

“Why did you do it?” I murmured to myself.

I felt betrayed by what the Paria twins had done. This was not the first contran I had borne witness to, not the tenth or the hundredth or the five hundredth, but this one felt like a point of inflection. We were the last true human beings and our numbers were dwindling. I looked around the room and studied the pictures of the Parias as they were in life: young, vital and beautiful. In Sheena’s and Yasmin’s eyes I saw intelligence and joy and a love of life. I saw all the things that the nation could not afford to lose. When I turned to look at the bodies on the bed, I saw two steps further down the road to extinction.

I had long, long ago given up on the idea that the Caspian Republic would ever live up to its ideals, to be a place where human beings could live in freedom and happiness. But I had not given up on the ideals themselves, and the Parias had. They had turned their backs on humanity, and surrendered to the Machine. I felt anger at their betrayal, but also pity. Could I really blame them for thinking that a better life was waiting for them in the Machine world? What life was there here for them, really?

“Why did you do it?” I had asked their lifeless bodies. But, as I looked out the window at the gray, sulking streets of Ellulgrad, buzzing like a hive with hunger, poverty and violence, a treasonous question arose unbidden to my lips:

“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.


Copyright © 2021 by Neil Sharpson