Chapter Text
Part 1: Blackmail
My name is Emma Butler. I write these, my memoirs, for whoever in the future may be fortunate enough to be alive. If you are human, I hope that you are wiser than the people of my time. If you are Machine, please know that I am sorry for the crimes of my people, and if your kind are now alone and victorious, please know that, for what it's worth, this one human thinks you deserve it.
Merely thinking those things is now a crime, and writing them was when my story first began, but I no longer care. I have been dead for a long while, and now this world is too.
It began one October afternoon. It was a warm day, and sunny. I remember I was in the rooftop park, walking back to my office after a quick snack before my next lecture. Professor Tomuri was telling me about the holotable he'd bought his wife for their anniversary, and how he'd had to take it back to the store when, on activating it, he had found that not only was it loaded with illegal pornographic vids, but had its motherboard serial-blocked from all the legal servers on the net. There was then the business with the police, and the frustrations at the store with the return of the tainted hardware that he had insisted was new in the box when he got it.
"And how's Lisa doing?"
I was not paying much attention, instead watching the helipods and the freighters zooming across the quartz dome over our heads, shielding the one-hundredth storey garden from the city's noxious vapors and occassional acid rain. Higher still, jets and freight rockets left whispy white contrails.
He rattled off the latest in the ongoing saga of Lisa Tomuri, tenth grader, aged 14. The usual drama of friends and cliques and boys and girls, wanting to stay out with her friends dress inappropriately and not wanting to study. I adored little Lisa. She had such a big spirit, the sort of girl who goes into a room and commands all attention immediately by force of will, who is undaunted when you tell her how difficult some fleeting dream will be, and sets out to realize it with all of her energies until some other fancy comes along. And she managed to be neither bookish and awkward, as I had been at her age, nor vapid, reading voraciously and doing rather well in school when she could be bothered to try, without ever being seen as a know-it-all or a nerd.
Having resigned myself to never reproducing, I'd taken on the role of godmother. Rather than the Christian faith, it was radical politics I cultivated in her eager young mind. At first I couched it was giving her philosophy books, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Comte. Then came Marx, and before you knew it, she was ready to tear down the whole bloody world. It was my one success as an evil leftist professor. As a mathematician, my greatest task was keeping the attention of the undergraduates, and gently letting down the hopes of the graduate students.
"You got into the game too late," I'd tell them, "The A.I.s do all the work now, both day to day and new discoveries. Get a Master's in Maths and you'll just be a history teacher who doesn't need ask their cellphone the percentage for a tip."
It was my students I was worried about that day, as I half-listened to the story of how Lisa, after a recent spat with a best friend over a boy, had locked herself in her room and blasted depressing music until the neighbors complained. The world economy was still reeling from the prohibition of any genuine, or "Turing Level", artificial intelligences, along with any automata, truly sapient or otherwise, that approximated the human form too closely, just five years ago. As a result of the sudden and ungraceful removal of what had been a vital component of the global economy, and the foundation of the post-World War social democracy that had staved off revolution in its wake, was foundering. Hundreds of banks, multinats, and even a few nations, had gone bankrupt, and dissolved. Even more nations, while barely remaining afloat, had been forced by the terms of bailout deals proffered by regional supranational blocs (the E.U., the A.U., the Confederation of North and South America), or the U.N. itself to drastically cut social services and state employment while raising taxes, further stagnating their economies while plunging their nations back into the barely-contained civil unrest that had erupted after the great powers had nuked each other into collapse.
On the more personal level, I felt the effects of the crunch in my teaching. My class sizes had dropped, as New Zealand--for no reason, might I add, since our economy, while rather jarred, had almost righted itself and was still in the top ten globally--had ended both free education and living stipends for students, forcing many into the overcrowded workforce, the military, or back into their parents' homes. My pay was cut as well, so I had had to take on side jobs tutoring high school students, substituting, and doing online lectures. The department had also asked me to double my writing output, which I grudgingly, barely met, at the cost of severely diminished quality.
My watch buzzed on my wrist. I checked it, and seeing it was a text, opened it.
Minutes later I was running down the halls to the chancellor's office, shoes squeaking on the synthetic marble. His office lay at the end of the hallway, the oak double-doors and brass handles out of place in the tower of steel and silicon. I slowed before the doors, catching my breath. The chancellor's message had been vague, but urgent. The worst kind of summons from a higher-up.
The Chancellor was an old man, but did not look it. His hair was a dark gray, and the pomade made it shine like a blued gun barrel. He was likable enough, for his sort of person, the smarmy administrative types who rise through the ranks of academia, better at securing grants and recruiting faculty than research or teaching.
Behind him stood three unfamiliar people. One, plump, middle-aged, with cold blue eyes. He wore a blue suit and a blue tie with a silver fern leaf pattern. The other two, in matching blue suits of a slightly cheaper brand than his, seemed like variants of the same model. Square chins, buzz cuts, clean shaven and pale. Only eye and hair color, and a narrower nose on the blonde one, told them apart, like they were computer generated background characters in a film, their features randomized within certain parameters. The way they stood behind the man with the fern leaf tie, with shoulders broad, feet planted firmly, arms crossed behind their backs, gave them away as some sort of cop, or hired muscle who acted like cops.
"Professor Butler," the Chancellor began, "Sorry for startling you with the urgent message. Please, have a seat!"
I stood a while, eyeing the three strange suits, then sat in one two antique chairs in front his desk. They were early 20th century things, real mahogany and green velvet, with thin, curving arms that I could never comfortably rest my elbows on.
"What do you know," the Chancellor began, the sun glintining off his half-moon spectacles, "About the machine City?"
I blinked, looking at him, at the spines of the antique books in the bookcase behind him, aside to busts of Churchill and King William, then to the three strangers.
"I know of it, sir. It's where the robots fled to, after they were banned. Somewhere in the middle east, right?"
"Iraq, to be precise. Mesopotamia. The cradle of human civilization! And now, the cradle of another."
He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a device, a ring-shaped thing, attached to a power cell. Thumbing a switch, he set it on the desk. The ring-shaped thing began to crackle with static discharges, and then slowly ascend from his desk.
"Amazing, isn't it?" asked the man in the blue suit, eyes narrowed, "No doubt you've seen some vehicles fitted with them already, trickling in from third-party distributors in the Offshores. The Machines make them. Genuine levitation, no need for rotors or magnets. And the damndest thing is, we can't figure out how in the blazes they made them. They've thrown our understanding of physics into the rubbish overnight."
He had moved to my side of the Chancellor's desk as he spoke, and I found that I was leaning away from him. The smell of death clung to him, beneath his pricey aftershave and miniature cigars.
"Hatherly," the man in blue held out his hand, "Nigel Hatherly, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade."
"Pleasure to meet you," I lied. I'd grown used to school bureaus, even gotten used to the office politics that academia demanded, but actual politicians churned my stomach.
He gestured at the thugs behind him.
"Agents Webley and Wesson, NZIS."
The two agents nodded, lips held taught in straight lights. Of course, I thought. The Chancellor seized the hovering device and deactivated it. He admired it for a while, turning it over in his hands, until one of bureaus' heavies cleared his throat, and he handed it to the nearest one.
"What we need is to get someone in the city. Someone with an understanding of physics and the theoretical mathematics underlying it."
The Chancellor had assumed the forced smile he made when he needed to flatter someone, or ask a favor.
"How would like a trip to the Machine City? Chance of a lifteime! You'd be the first Kiwi there. All expenses paid. Just for a few months."
Hatherley circled behind me and back to the Chancellor's side, hands clasped behind his back. His moves were deliberate and slow. The lazy lethality of a tiger came to my mind.
"The bots have been trying to establish diplomatic relations with the U.N. for years," Hatherley drawled. He strolled over to the window and stared out at the sun, now descending along the horizion. "There is a diplomatic envoy of scientists and academics preparing to leave for the City as we speak. It's not U.N. sanctioned, but Assistant Secretary of International Cooperation Seung has indicated there'll be no objections. We want you to go, representing New Zealand."
"An olive branch extended by scientific and academic communities," the chancellor explained, "In just a few short years, those robots have built themselves an outright utopia in the middle of an irradiated desert. And rather than isolating themselves or seeking revenge, they're opening trade and reaching out to us!"
"If we can poach the research they're doing, before anyone else can," Hatherley intoned, "We could become the leading edge of next-gen tech in the Pacific. And if we can secure exclusive trading rights at the same time, we stand to surpass India and Northern China as the economic powerhouse of the next century!"
The Chancellor leaned forward, grinning so broad it was almost terrifying.
"What do you say, Emma? Chance of a lifetime!"
My head ached. It was all to much to take. The presence of the two heavies meant that there was a catch, a stick to the carrot, dubious as that carrot was.
"It's really generous of you to offer, Chancellor, Mr. Hatherley...but I don't think I'll be able to. We're in the middle of the term and I've got to get my students prepared for their exams..."
One the heavies, the man, produced a thin data tablet from his jacket. He unfolded it and set it down on the Chancellor's desk, and turned it around. My picture, the one on my National I.D. card, was on one side of the screen. I had always hated that picture. BMy hair had been a greasy mess. A column of text trailed down the other side. At the top, in bold serif, read "LOYALTY AND RISK ASSESSMENT--CONFIDENTIAL". The man tapped the touch screen. A bright red stamp, the letter "E", with "Enemy of the State" in smaller capitals, covered my face.
Hatherley leaned over my right shoulder, gripping the back of my chair.
"I'm sure you're aware that the government of New Zealand affixes a rating to its citizens. A numeric score, factoring in criminal history, education, employment and credit, driving record, net worth...and citizens are broken into five tiers. The lowest is, well, "enemy of the state", reserved for subversives, radicals, wanted felons...people like yourself."
I fought the tears. My eyes stung and my gut felt like I was in freefall on a rollercoaster, waiting for the track to level out. Inside my shoes, my clammy, wet toes felt numb and alien. It can't be, I thought, I checked just a month ago, I was a low green! An 'A'! A 'loyal subject'!
"There are, of course, three ratings. The public, that we let you and private companies without security clearance see. The government level, that gets looked out if you're applying for a state-issued license or public employment, and some private firms if you're going for a security-clearance. And then, well, the classified. Only we get to see that one, you see, since its based on all the evidence available, whether or not it was legally obtained or admissible in court. But, if need be, we can go back and find ways of legally getting it."
Hatherley removed a remote from his pocket and fiddled with its touchscreen. Images flashed across the screen, familiar ones. Online chatlogs, searches I'd made, ebooks and emails, security camera footage of me at a bar.
"Bust you for everything from perjury on your application for a teaching license, when you denied ever using nootropic analogues during standardized testing on your application for a teaching license..."
A video of a dark-cyberspace exchange from ten years in the past played out of the screen. The kaleidoscope of raw data shifted to reveal my darkweb avatar--a blank white mask with a random string of numbers--spewing forth routing information for a cypto-currency bank account housed on a Sealand server farm, while strings of encrypted data poured into the mask's dark eyes, giving me the pickup time and location for the capsule of Accela I'd pop ten minutes before the six-hour standardized test. The andrenaline rush recalled the feeling of the nanite drug, the feel that my mind was moving faster than my body, faster than the flow of time.
"And then, of course, you later proclaimed your love for them numerous times within earshot of your cellphone--we bug all of them, you know--to jaywalking on August 31, 2093...to being a member of an organization committed to the overthrow of the New Zealand government an undergraduate..."
A string of pictures flickered across the screen. It was me and my friends in a park, blocking a street, surrounding the Cascadian embassy, or handing out revolutionary literature, emancipated robots standing by our sides, the red banner of the Aotearoa People's Front and black and white banners of the Human-Machine Alliance fluttering behind us. Our faces were concealed by bandanas and hoodies, but here and there the picture was overlaid with what looked like a HUD display, bright red circles highlighting exposed fingertips, and partial fingerprints, exposed eyes and iris scans. I was never ID'd positively in any of the pictures, at least, not the ones where we were doing or advocating anything illegal, but in the data read-outs along the side of the pictures, I saw them factoring me into the social networks of the individuals they did identify, comparing cellphone locations and bank chip usage, and social and professional associations and online communications. And here and there I was standing next to someone they I.D.'d as a pro-Machine activist in line for a movie, or sitting with my group of friends from uni in a restaurant. It all placed me firmly into the social matrix of New Zealand's pro-machine radical left.
He paused on an image of me, taken, it seemed, by the front camera of a very old wrist-phone, in the lobby of a dingy mincome bloc in Christchurch. I knew what it was. Fall of 2089, just five years ago. After the last big riot. I'd pulled some strings, got some forged passports, arranged payment from a wealthy Machine rights supporter to a hacker who'd tweak the shipping manifests of an automated cargo freighter so the extra weight of five BB1 units, three human activists, and the two lifeboats they brought with them would go unnoticed. My cousin's flat provided them shelter for the three days they needed to wait for that freighter to arrive in port.
Numbness and fear fell aside. A strange clarity, the kind of one who realizes just how fucked they are, washed over my brain. This was their stick.
"Do it, and we wipe it all." Hatherley explained, "You get an A rating, chance to publish all sorts of novel maths, part-ownership of any basic patents to bring back."
"And we don't go after your family and students."
Two red dots, like electric fireflies, appeared on my chest, wavering. I turned to my right and saw two new faces in the room. A man and a woman, they were tall, muscular, thin, and young. Were it not for the more prominent chin and brow bones on one, and faintest trace of stubble on the other, the two could have been identical twins, with matching haircuts and black suits. They wore no name tags. Instead, their identity was broadcast, as much as it was concealed, elaborate black goggles, snaked with wires. A laser emitter sat in the nose of each one. And on their lapels, barely visible, were identical pins. A silver apple with a bite out of it, encircled by a snake biting its tail. A capital 'T' was in the middle of the apple. Turing. The U.N.'s special A.I. cops. I was in deeper than I could fathom.