Irina wakes in bed alone, hears Philip in the shower.
There’s a silver coffee service on the table. On the salver is a handwritten note in English from the hotel’s director of security informing her that both coffee and service have been controlled from the first stages of their manufacture, and that an in-house mass-spectroscopic analysis of the coffee—attached—has found no toxicity or unexpected compounds. Her heart warms toward the hotel and its policies.
She feels exhausted, thinks of going back to bed, realizes that what she actually wants to do is hide. She downs her coffee, pours another cup.
The water goes off in the bathroom as she looks up the node on a map on the room’s TV. It’s about a mile away, in some drab industrial building. Cabs keep records; they might as well walk. She looks out the window at the falling snow.
* * *
The sidewalks are slick with ice and the two of them hold each other for balance, which makes for an uncomfortably dependent image. They follow a printed map, like tourists from the last century.
The row of high-end hotels becomes just another Tokyo street. Her breathing is faster than she’d like but she can’t slow it. Strangers flow by, and for once she takes no interest, doesn’t try to deconstruct their cues of dress and manner—the street might as well be a stage set, the people extras.
Snow is falling so thickly it’s like walking through a cloud. Drones zip by overhead, more than she remembers from her last time in Japan. Cordon or no, if one of them is Cromwell’s, and recognizes her, then, however profound Japan’s xenophobia, and however strict its ban on guns, she is, in that moment, done.
“OPEN” blinks into red neon life in English and Japanese in the window of a restaurant below the level of the street. She grabs Philip’s hand and pulls him down the stairs.
Hole in the wall, she thinks. Narrow, three tables and a counter. Smells of steam, fish, soy, tea. The counterman says something. She sits at the far end with her back to the wall.
Green tea before her. Philip looking concerned. Her hands are shaking. The table’s cheap plastic veneer is filmed with cleaning fluid. Philip is intent on the lozenges of yellow egg behind the counter’s glass; she looks three seconds into the past, sees him start pretending not to notice her disturbance.
“I don’t…” she says, then stops.
Philip regards her, bright, friendly, purely helpful.
“Too many drones,” she says.
“Oh. I think I can take care of that.”
“How?”
“The Yakuza.”
“Really? I know you like to poke around in dark corners, but you’re so … scrupulous.”
“True, but I still have contacts in the Yakuza. Well, not in, it’s more like friends of friends. It’s not that big a deal—they’re not Cosa Nostra or the Downtown Aztec Kings. They’re … socially integrated. They have business cards, and websites without euphemism. It’s just a part of how things get done.”
“I won’t see you indebted.”
“Eh,” says Philip. “I have leverage. My company has patents on the best race-car engines in the world, and the Mitsui keiretsu wants to get into the high-end sports-car market. It therefore behooves them to keep me happy. They’re a major industrial player, so of course there are ties of reciprocity with the Yak…” He makes a gesture conveying a resigned acceptance of the inevitable entanglement of industry and organized crime, then takes out his phone and taps out a message.
“Sake?” he asks, looking up.
“Early.”
“Not in California.”
“I need to be fully present.”
And calm, she feels him not say.
“Maybe a small one,” she says.
She makes herself drink the sake slowly. Her eyes stray to the prisms of tuna behind the counter, their colors somewhere between ruby, eggplant and blood. She once saw a tuna in an aquarium, its body molten silver, its face like a totem of pelagic sleep.
She might float out of her skin.
“And, done,” Philip says, glancing back at his phone.
“At what cost?”
“No cost.”
“Oh, that must be how obligation works here.”
“It might dilute our profits by some fraction of a percent. I don’t care. It’s worth it, if only to impress you with my superpowers, for once.”
“Not so super.”
“Quite adequately super. There’s no one like you. It seems so improbable that we’re not just friends but old ones and I get to see you now and then. Anyone, literally anyone else, and I’d say they’re attempting too much, but you? You might win. Unless you feel like you’re not up for it, in which case we bail and I help you disappear.”
She can hardly quit with half a mile to go. “I’m still game,” she makes herself say. “Flatterer.”
He looks over his shoulder, says, “It looks like our window is opening.”
She looks outside. Goes to the window to get a better view. More drones than ever in the air. Most are red and black, of a single, beetle-like design, and grappling with the other drones—it looks like insects mating—and pulling them from the air.
She opens the door, admitting cold air and tinny chanting.
“This is madness,” she says.
“Well,” he says, “it’s tolerated.”
“What are they saying?”
“I believe it’s a counter-protest to the protests against Japan’s annexation of the new mainland territories. A standard vehicle of far-right expression. It was already scheduled, but they moved it up for me.”
The non-fascist drones are fleeing. She wonders if these assaults are common enough to be covered in their programming.
They walk down the street under red and black drones forming kanji that cast shadows in the fall of snow.
“It’s beautiful,” Philip says. “Probably the most reactionary propaganda, and viciously racist to boot, but even so, beautiful, no?”
The kanji pulse, dissolve, re-form. The city seems older now. No one is watching. She links arms with her friend, brushes snow from the shoulders of his overcoat. She feels a sense of impending relief, as on the last stage of a journey.
* * *
A frozen cloud has settled over the street which makes nearby things look like distant abstractions, and the air is so cold it burns her lungs and then Philip looks up from the map and says, “This is it.”
Before them is a blank facade encrusted with snow, and at first glance its featurelessness reads as sinister but actually it’s just functional, the kind of nameless structure she’s been ignoring all her life.
Philip leads her into an alley floored in dirty, fragmented ice and half-interred beer cans. The building’s side is as blank as the front except for an unmarked door. It’s like the secret entrance to a monumental tomb in industrial vernacular. She remembers the ziggurat Cromwell plans to raise in Magda’s honor. Philip does something with his phone—the door’s lock clicks.
“The locks here are easy,” Philip says. “Probably because no one really steals. Suckers.” He opens the door for her, her gentleman companion bowing her into the abyss.
She steps into a blackness absolute except for geometrically precise grids of winking green lights. It’s a server farm, she realizes, as her eyes adjust; the lights are from computers in their wall-mounted racks.
Corridor upon corridor and all alike. No windows and the only sound the humming of machines. She checks her phone’s GPS—they’re almost at the node’s latitude and longitude, but still fifty feet too high.
There’s an elevator but it’s key-card access. Philip says, “Might draw attention. Better not.”
She finds what looks like a closet door opening onto a metal spiral staircase, going down. It’s cramped, steep, barely wide enough for her shoulders, probably to make space for more servers, a function of the stratospheric prices of Tokyo real estate.
The stairs lead down to a second floor identical to the first one. More stairs, more floors, and she starts to feel she’s in a nightmare of repeated rooms and useless motion. The last staircase opens onto a concrete tunnel lined with still more racks of servers.
“Looks like a civil defense tunnel,” Philip says. The echo confirms her budding claustrophobia. “From when they thought the U.S. was going to nuke them again. A friend of mine found one under his house and turned it into a wine cellar.”
Phone in hand, she trails a fingertip over the servers’ uniform black chassis. Even colder, down here—she wishes she had gloves. The altitude is right, and then the latitude is right, and then she finds the one.
The node, the famous node, seems to be a server like any other. She scrutinizes it closely but finds nothing, wonders if she’s been wasting her time. No way you could run an AI on it—all the servers in the building would barely be enough for a toy one.
“That’s it?” Philip asks. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“Hmmn. Let’s have a look at the network traffic.” He makes passes on his phone, cursing quietly at first, then with ardor. “Done. It’s oddly proactive about looking for new wireless networks, and, Jesus fuck, the bandwidth is really high. No matter … There’s a lot of traffic but it’s hard to interpret. Have a look.”
He hands her his phone. Data trickles by on the screen so she ups the resolution and now it comes in a rush, faster than the eye could follow but all written into her other memory, and as it accumulates she sees it’s encrypted but she shrugs off the encoding and stares into the flow of revealed static for a long moment before her perception starts flickering and she know what she’s seeing.
“It’s glyphs,” she says. “It’s sending and receiving glyphs. It really is an AI.”
Philip regards the server skeptically. “That seems like a stretch. They could be recorded. Want me to open it up?”
She nods and he produces a multi-bit screwdriver from inside his coat, the same Calatrava he wore to Fantôme. His hands explore the server’s hull with a deftness she remembers. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been this hands-on,” he says. “God, it’s cold. Reminds me of the old days of theft and poverty. Ah, youth.”
He sets aside the top half of the server’s case. “Christ,” he says. She looks over his shoulder, sees an ordinary-looking motherboard and on it a lump of metal the size of a golf ball, gleaming bluely in the dim light, its surface slightly crystalline. It’s wired directly to the power supply.
“What is that?” she asks.
“A gross manufacturing error, I’d say, in other circumstances. As it is, I can’t imagine.” He touches it gently with a fingertip. “It feels wrong for explosives, so that’s something.”
“Wait,” she says. “I know what this is. I saw it in Cromwell’s office. He said it was a kind of computer, but the one he had didn’t work—he said it was an improperly assembled prototype. The AI must be running on this.” It crosses her mind that this is, in some sense, the AI’s soul, and how fitting, for such an ethereal being, that its soul is purely material. “Can I borrow your phone?”
She can see Philip formulating objections, but he says nothing, gives her his phone.
She taps in her soldier’s number.
It’s evening in California. He answers on the first ring.
“I’m going to create an opening,” she says.
“When?”
“Probably the next ten minutes.”
“Very good. We’ll get in position.”
She remembers what happened with Cloudbreaker, wonders what she’s getting into. “If you see an opening, go. Don’t hesitate. I might be unavailable.”
“Acknowledged. I’ll attack as opportunity affords,” he says, sounding detached now, like he’s already subsuming himself in his function.
She hands the phone back.
“Here I go,” she says.
“Are you sure this is a sound plan?” Philip says. “Cromwell is rational. It seems obvious that this is bait, and that he’ll be exposing himself. Okay, so he likes Magda, but there are other women.”
“Maybe so, but would you do it for me?”
He says nothing.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” she says. “Keep an eye on me, okay?”
“Okay,” he says.
She turns on her implant’s wireless.