Burning Violin

"And I say that their time is done." Happy-face said. "Dinosaurs, if you will."

"And even the dinosaurs were allowed to live out their time." Sad-face said.

"Except for that meteor." Happy interjected.

"Well, yes there is that." Sad said. "But the rise of mammals did not lead to rapidly evolving primates organizing hunting parties to eradicate the last giant lizards."

"They weren't lizards." Happy said. "Different branch on the evolutionary tree. Dinosaurs were really the precursors to birds."

Sad sighed an overblown blast of air. "I'm well aware of that, but you really aren't addressing the points I have made."

"Striving for factual accuracy is not a bad thing." Happy said, his voice ringing with glee.

"Awk, having spent five years in Shakespeare, one would have expected you to gain some sense of hyperbole and theatrical exaggeration." Sad bemoaned.

"And you Sed, should have been listening more to his meaning and less to his grandiosity." Awk said.

"That's all I'm asking you to do now!" Sed said.

Crow could not help breaking in to the conversation. "Are you two here in some capacity for the Turing testing?" He asked, gesturing towards the room that housed the prisoner.

Awk, the senti with a happy face answered in a blistering tone. "We are here in our capacity as sentient beings in our own right. We care nothing for your idiotic tests to determine if one of our own is fit to bear your stamp of approval."

Crow's face tightened and he could hear a subtle background noise from the street. Protestors, both robotic and organic had surrounded the building and were chanting their trite sentiments and waving their placards on the sidewalks outside. Crow cared little for politics of any strain, but something about protests rubbed him in all the wrong ways. "Did your owners approve of your presence here?" He asked with icy calmness. "If not, you'll have to be taken into custody for resale by the government."

Awk stood with a violence that took Crow aback. "I buried my owner in a shallow grave."

Sed grabbed at his companion's arm and pulled him back down into a seat. The corners of its twisted sad face tried to smile warmly, but could only twitch like a bug caught under a stick. "I am sorry. He is quite uncooperative at times. Our master has warned him again and again, and I'm afraid the next time might be the last straw." It paused and then hurried on. "And yes, we are here within full right of law. Our legal owner is the SCLU, until ownership itself becomes illegal of course." It patted Awk's arm, but could not extinguish the fire blazing in its eyes. "There, there Awk, it's quite all right."

Sed shifted its attention back to Crow. "We were commissioned by a Shakespeare production company, you see. That is why our faces are like this. We played Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on many occasions. Many indeed."

I was raised an Oakland A's fan. I watched the Bash Brothers knock elbows, leaned forward every time Rickey walked, knowing he'd steal second on the first pitch and third on the second. The steel plates under the first base seats would thrum underfoot like bass out of a broken speaker when Eckersley strode in to close out the game, all mustache, mullet and fist pumping. I can still name the starting lineup and pitching staff twenty years later and once on a Colorado mountaintop I listened to the Minnesota broadcast of A's at Twins on AM radio crackling in and out somehow from a thousand miles across the Great Plains. I died a little at Gibson's walkoff, erupted at the sweep of the Giants, died again when the Reds swept us.

I still have a McGwire foul ball sitting upstairs, a blueish smudge where the bat hit. It's a funny thing, no one else could say why that ball is any different than a thousand others bought at a sporting goods store. But I know. That's what faith is.

In 1997 McGwire leaves and breaks the home run record in a Cardinals uniform the next season. Giambi left after 2001. Tejada after 2003. The Big Three gets broken up after 2004. MVPs, Cy Young contenders, fevered fan favorites. Oakland doesn't even make offers to most of them. They can't afford it, so they don't insult them with a low bid. Classy. Frustrating and futile, but classy. This isn't mismanagement. This isn't making a bad baseball decision. These decisions are being made strictly financially. And none of this would really be a problem if not for the simple fact that not everyone plays by these rules. In 2008, the Yankees topped out the league with a payroll of $209 million. The Marlins bottomed out the league at $22 million.

$209 million. $22 million.

Yeah, yeah. The Yankees didn't win the World Series that year. The Phillies won it all with half the salary of the Yankees. Smart small market teams still manage to be competitive. The Yankees have higher revenues, of course they should be able to spend more money. I won't say these arguments don't have some merit, but none of them can refute the simple premise of equal opportunity being the foundation of sport.

The A's were competitive for years when on paper they had no right to be. Billy Beane and moneyball kept them going to the playoffs year after year, even when their best players left in free agency every winter to go play for five times the best the A's could offer. I know life isn't fair, but sports are supposed to be. They're supposed to be decided by who outthinks, outplays, outhits, just sheer out-desires the other side. Once you accept money as a major component of the equation, you might as well just be watching the stock market and rooting for the company with deeper pockets, because that's what sports becomes once you let the profit motive become part of the game itself. Sports franchises are companies. If their profit margin affects what happens on the field, all you are doing is rooting for one company over another, not one team over another. It might be splitting hairs, it might just be a tantrum over the purity of the game, but I don't think so. I think that purity does matter.

Sports matter because they don't matter.

We pour all of our passion into these games, fork over cash into billion dollar machines just to wear our colors, schedule our lives around the first pitch, kickoff, tip off. We live and die by our team's record. We don't have to do any of this. Absolutely nothing in our lives of substance changes on the outcome of the game. That fact alone is what makes sports matter, because it makes our devotion unconditional. If the game mattered tangibly to us, our love for the game would not be pure any longer. This isn't just intellectual masturbation, it's the basis for every religion from earliest times: sacrifice. It's not sacrifice, it's not worship, if you have a share in the outcome. If the game is already half decided by accountants three months before the season starts, the sanctity is broken. It's the ethical equivalent of buying salvation instead of earning it.

And that's when I accepted that the system was broken and walked away.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. I still love baseball, I just despise the system. Every year in late march, two DVDs (the VHS versions long since worn out and replaced) get popped in for viewing: Field of Dreams and Major League. The smell of grass in spring still reminds me of dirt and cleats, taking grounders and flyballs in the endless afternoons of late childhood. I still pull out my old glove now and then, bury my face in the leather that holds the smell of a thousand catches.

It feels like being part of a lapsed sect of a dying religion, the faith still kept in secret ritual even as I renounce it in public. I haven't watched baseball in years, I refuse to even check the standings online, because knowing would mean caring, and caring would mean that the bastards who destroyed the game would win. If you're an alcoholic, you don't set foot in a bar, because you know that once you're in, there's no way that you won't order just one drink for old time's sake, and then another because what's one more? And then I'd be back where I started, watching the parade of players leaving for New York and Boston every winter.

If they fix it someday, I'll come back. I'll fiddle again with the AM radio, die a little at the losses, smile a little at the wins, bask in the bleachers in perfect afternoon sun. But until that day, I'll keep the faith in private, and remember the game as it once was, when I was young and it was pure.

He waved his id through another guard post that required the push of a red button by a curmudgeon of a guard and then found his way down the familiar hallways to his destination, a make-shift prison of sorts, buried in the corner office of a recently departed two-decade man who had left for a judgeship. Crow pushed open the uncharacteristically plain wooden door that stood out from the antique ornateness of the surrounding hall and entered the large office. The secretary's office had been finagled into a meeting area, while the office itself served to house the prisoner.

Three men sat in the secretary's office, or rather one man and two very vocal sentis. Crow wondered about their presence but decided that was more the prosecutor's concern than his. He only cared about his little sessions with the prisoner. The sentis were well done sims, and only their obtrusive deformities kept them from passing as close as was possible for a senti. The louder, more outspoken one had a face twisted down in a grotesque parody of an exaggerated frowning mask, the quieter suffered a monstrous happy face. Their entire faces warped around the center piece, elongated eyes drooping or arcing where appropriate. From the centers of those caricatures of human faces sculpted of real-enough looking flesh stared eyes no different than any real human's. Crow could not tear his gaze away for a moment, seeing his son's eyes staring back.

"Kind of creepy, eh?" The old man slouching down in an exquisite leather couch said. He had one of those unkempt beards that despite short length, seemed like it must house all manner of vermin.

"Yeah a bit." Crow said. A bit of confusion touched Crow; he had never seen the Prosecutor's office so crowded.

"Even if they aren't human, shouldn't it be a crime to make them look like that?" The old man asked Crow in a voice that creaked along like a porch swing caught in the breeze.

"I don't follow." Crow said.

"The only reason they didn't twist some poor sod's faces like that is because it ain't legal. Doing it to the senti's just getting around the law." The old man said.

"Well if they don't have any rights anyway, what's the harm?" Crow said.

The old man shook a finger at Crow. "I saw the way you looked at them. You ain't fooling me. It ain't right cause it's an abomination. It's a twisting of our humanity. Now, that's a crime whether it be against robot or man or vegetable."

"So that should be illegal?" Crow asked and gestured towards the sentis.

The old man snorted. "I don't much care for legal, son. But it ain't right, and that's the heart of the matter. We pretend it doesn't matter cause we don't like to think that they think, but the crime's against ourselves." He wheezed to a stop and struggled up onto ancient limbs. "Well there's probably a bathroom somewhere that needs cleaned."

"Does the DA know that his janitor takes breaks on his couch?" Crow asked. It was not a loaded accusation; he asked in genuine curiosity.

The old man shrugged. "I've been cleaning up his shit for ten years. What do I care what he thinks?" He rambled out of the room, and Crow wondered if the old man really was a janitor or just an escaped mental patient. The sentis on the other side of the room continued their conversation, which Crow had ignored for the most part until their voices rose above a murmur for the first time with the heat of their debate.

Chapter Two - Many Strangers


Crow trudged down the ornate main hallway of the District Attorney's office, ill-fitting suit hanging off of slouching shoulders, worn briefcase held by limp fingertips. There was nothing else he wanted to do on this rain-swept first day of autumn, but nothing would have been welcome relief. The security guard at the metal detectors waved Crow through with a bored glance at his identification, trusting that the computer would read the id properly and sound the alert if the visitor was unauthorized.

"Long day?" Crow asked. He had that most unwelcome disease of the introverted: the obsessive need to make small talk, no matter how dull. His skin itched if he stood silently for too long in the presence of another, an oddity since in the presence of a crowd, Crow felt more than comfortable fading into the background.

The guard grunted without looking up. His attention was taken up by the newspaper, footage of the days events running muted alongside ticker tape of current news stories. A squeeze of the side, and the section changed to the sports. The guard looked up and saw that Crow had not left. He squeezed twice in succession to pause the paper. "What do you want?" He said with the voice comfortable with his minor though arbitrary bit of authority.

"You have to push the button." Crow said. He pointed to the red button to the guard's left. "I'm just on the temp list, so the card's not enough."

The guard looked Crow over once, as if contemplating a strip search. After a moment, satisfied either that Crow was clean or that a strip search would be as unpleasant on the giving end as the receiving, the guard grunted again and punched the button with a thick finger.

"Thanks." Crow said. The guard's third grunt espoused a depth of indifference only hinted at by the first two grunts, and he thumbed his paper back into motion.

The air smelled of damp clothes and bad coffee, both sticky smells that felt like they clung to Crow's own moist suit. He slipped into the elevator behind a woman who looked far too young to be this high up in the building. Secretary? Crow wondered. Then he wondered if the same thought would have crossed his mind if she were a he. He kicked himself and then took it back. It was legitimate. Nine out of ten people that can make it past the fourth floor are stuffy old bastards, the other one tends to be a janitor or a secretary, and janitors don't wear business suits. Observation of a pattern did not imply approval of it.

"Lovely day, isn't it?" Crow said, not looking at her though she was quite attractive. Stranger etiquette in elevators dictated no eye contact. Or did it? Crow wondered if there was a dictionary or reference he could look it up in, but decided that he didn't care enough.

"Um, yes. Quite." She said.

Crow waited to see if she would elaborate or at least acknowledge his sarcasm, but gave up with an inward sigh as the floors ticked by. At least she didn't slap me. So it could have been worse. She got off on the fifth floor and Crow watched the numbers count up to the top floor.

His eyes turned from the crater as his subconscious made a connection. The GUM Department store stairs were clogged with people fleeing from the explosion or to the scene. Only one figure stood clear, a senti, trenchcoat held close to mask himself as well as could be casually expected. Rubber skin and fake eyes stared at the destruction and just for a moment, Crow thought that they focused on him. The senti turned with military crispness and started down the stairs, pushing through the crowd.

Crow stood and ran, now realizing why the senti had tried to get him outside. Kill a bunch of Naturalists, but save the AI researcher, one of the idiots who gave them life in the first place.

He cried as he ran, slipping through the snow and bouncing off of equally stunned pedestrians. It seemed that he could hear explosions in the distance, echoing blasts like car backfires. Crow wondered if the nation had gone to war. I am here on a military funded trip. Crow thought. Packed stores and fleeing shoppers met Crow downstairs, but there was no sign of the senti anywhere. He pushed to the other side of the complex and emerged into a narrow street a block from the metro station. It's probably a dozen miles from here by now.

The child carried Crow through the riots alive, keeping his mind off his loss and on the goal of protecting his helpless cargo. Destruction raged in the streets, directed at an uprising that the people could not understand. Computers smashed into the streets, broken against the asphalt by those who could only comprehend that technology itself had bitten back somehow. A mob of people rushed down an alley, chasing a terrified little girl into a corner. They brandished hockey sticks and chunks of debris at the screaming child. Crow cowered back into a facing street, hoping that they would not find a Westerner in a tuxedo an even better target. The girl's face broke open against a brick, revealing the sparkle of circuitry. Crow's face tightened and he kept walking.

The news at the hotel told the depths of the story on every station. Moscow did not sleep that night as smoke and dust covered its lungs from a hundred collapsed buildings and spreading fires. By morning, the Russian Army had surrounded a grouping of sentis in an old hotel on the outskirts of the east side of the city. They destroyed it with artillery and dismantled any still functioning sentis with plastic explosives.

Crow dialed with one eye on the muted morning edition of the BBC.

"Nature of the call, sir?" A polite voice asked.

Crow swallowed hard, looking at the baby gazing at him from what had been David's crib until the day before. "I saw a bus explode yesterday." He said. "In front of GUM in Red Square. I heard it was from an orphanage. Did any of the children have family?"

"No sir. It was a transfer going up to St. Petersburg of children that hadn't been adopted yet from Moscow." The voice paused. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason." Crow said and then hung up. He retrieved a passport from the dresser drawer. He knelt next to the boy and held out a finger to be wrapped up in clenching hands. "I guess you can pass for a David Alexander Daedalus." Crow said. "I don't know what happened to your parents, but I lost a son about your age. How would you like to see America?"

Crow took the responding gurgle as an affirmative.

"It was from the orphanage." A policeman told him in broken English. "Fucking machines, it was from the orphanage." The officer's hand gripped his sidearm with whitening knuckles.

"Machines?" Crow asked. "Orphanage?"

"The bus was from the orphanage. The machines are revolting." The officer focused on Crow as if noticing him for the first time. "Get out of here tourist. There are bombs all over the city. Go back to your hotel or get to the airport."

Crow heard more noise in the distance, what sounded like gunfire in clattering bursts. His ears swore there were more explosions, but his imagination may have taken over. It seemed that the officer was right, that he should make his way somewhere safe like St. Basil's. The church would know what to do with a little baby. He bundled the baby as well as he could inside his tuxedo, not much of a shield from the elements, but better than dieing of frostbite. The wetness had already started to freeze into the fabric, so Crow moved as quickly as possible, trudging towards the tall domes on the other side of the square.

Crow watched the main dome of St. Basil's crack for an immeasurable split second before the sound of the blast ripped through his body, snapping his ear drums just short of the bursting point. The pressure of the shock wave tumbled Crow's body into the air and against a row of benches, his back screaming in pain. His eyes focused again on the crater that had been St. Basil's at the last blink of his eyes. Nothing remained of the storied domes and tapered lines that had survived a dozen wars and occupations over the centuries. Smoke billowed in a growing column around the fading fireball, mounting in a helix into a cloud blossoming outwards two hundred feet above the square. Crow had seen pictures of mushroom clouds, but had never imagined that he would see a real one.

People lay collapsed around the square, spilled like dominos away from the blast. An eerie silence covered the survivors and for a moment Crow thought that he was deaf, but then the first screams began. Handfuls of people rushed at the devastation and were pulled down by friends and strangers or driven back by the heat. Oh god, they know people who were inside. Crow thought. His mind snapped out of the shock, the first rational thought washing over him.

"Trinan!" Crow screamed. "David!" Crow scrambled up, abused body ignored by need. Crow ran, stumbling through snow and then slipping through the slush of melt caused by the explosion's heat. A stranger grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back, wrestling Crow to the ground when he continued to fight his way forward. Crow felt the rush of wetness through his tuxedo and the random thought of losing his deposit on the rental crossed his mind, hardly standing out from the cacophony of other insanity. A gruff voice tinged with cigarettes and age rumbled into his ear.

"It's gone, son. There's nothing left." The stranger said. "Take care of the kid you've still got."

Crow looked down and remembered the baby in his arms, forgotten for the moments of shock. Crow pushed the stranger away gently, and crawled a yard or two before collapsing back onto his knees, staring at the ruinous inferno, flames stroking the air since there was not even any wreckage to consume. He sobbed in utter despair, whispering the names of his wife and son, hoping beyond hope that they had somehow survived, that they had slipped out right behind him for fresh air or shopping or anything at all.

Ah, April Fool's Day, the least understood of the major holidays. Commonly believed to have been invented by greeting card companies in the early twentieth century, the holiday actually dates back to prehistoric times. Ancient Mayan and Chaldean astronomers established incredibly precise calendars, including the solstices and equinoxes, but equally as important to their astronomic projections were the so-called temeredies. On these days, specifically April 1st and October 1st in our modern calendar, the ratio of daylight to darkness is completely random, varying wildly with no discernable pattern from year to year. During one memorable period at the height of the renaissance, the ratio was exactly 12 hours of darkness, 12 hours of daylight for sixteen consecutive years, but that anomaly never has been fully explained. The most extremely skewed ratio in recorded history occurred on April 1st, 1809, on which day there was an astonishing 37 hours of daylight and -13 hours of darkness.

The Fool's Guild, a secret society with roots in every major religion and culture since before the beginning of recorded history, adopted the two temeredies as its official days of remembrance in Atlantis approximately a century before the destruction of that island civilization. Ever since, the history of Fools has been intertwined with the histories of April 1st and October 1st.

What are Fools? They are insane, but joyously and purposely so. They are the most human of archetypes for they combine the rational with the irrational, and thus should not be confused with absurdists, idiots, or the religious. Fools chose the temeredies as their signature days, because they foresaw their role as agents of anarchy in societies sociopathically designed for structure.

Fools are one of the two main determinants of human civilization: ants are the only other animals to wage war, hyenas an entire species of Fools, but only human beings combine the two impulses. This leads on occasion to spectacular combinations of events such as La guerra del fútbol (The War of Soccer) in 1969. But it also led to the invention of American football, hockey, rugby, as well as all track and field events involving running around in a circle repeatedly. Baseball and cricket were not the responsibility of Fools, who while they may be insane are never boring. These two sports actually were invented by General Electric as an excuse for large installs of outdoor electric lights in the 1930s. References to baseball and cricket before the 1938 GE Sports Expo are frankly fictional and do not hold up to historical scrutiny. Babe Ruth is perhaps the most obvious hole in the artificial history of baseball, the persona named after a candy bar by drunk advertising interns, who were stunned to find that the joke had slipped by their bosses and into print within a few days.

Fools have been around longer than any other profession, but they do not technically count as the oldest profession because they were not paid until the invention of the other two. Only with the advent of politicans and prostitutes could Fools turn a profit and thus become an official profession. A common misconception is the assumption that artists must be one of the oldest professions, but since artists cannot profit without becoming prostitutes, art in and of itself cannot properly be described as a profession at all.

Curiously, very few Fools existed in the Americas prior to European colonization. Archaeological evidence suggests that most Fools in the native American population were massacred soon after the population migrated into modern North America over the Bering land bridge, which collapsed behind them. Surviving fragments of legends indicate that the entire migration had been based on a Fool's insistence that he knew a shortcut to the Indus. The etymology of the worst Aztec obscenities can be traced from the ancient phrase "dude, it's seriously just one more day away."

After the fall of Atlantis, the core of Fool power shifted north to Greenland. Fools had insisted on the existence of seven continents since time immemorial. They of course did not agree that mountains represented continental barriers and so counted Europe and Asia as a single continent. The seventh continent by their count was Greenland, which any accurate map clearly depicts as the fourth largest landmass.

Ancient tradition holds that Fools are given complete freedom of speech. It is one of the five ancient traditions universally held in all cultures, although only two survive in the modern age: Fools can say whatever they want, don't have sex with your relatives, be hospitable to houseguests (they're probably gods in disguise), don't record anything you don't want your wife or mother to see, and don't mess around with Jim. The tradition of Fool freedom of speech was only broken on one occasion prior to the Fool Genocide of 1893, when Vlad the Impaler personally impaled Illych de Loone after the Fool pointed out that the impaling fetish might simply be an overdeveloped case of compensation. Illych's last words are reported to be "I've had bigger", although this may be apocryphal.

The middle ages were of course the height of Fool hegemony, with the explosion of the importance of jesters in medieval courts. The growing power of jesters though was a blade that cut both ways, and led to a schism in the Fool's Guild that would never be healed, and eventually led to the grand tragedy of the fifteenth century: the great Fool civil war. Known (depending on the Fool's allegiance) as either the War of Joker Aggression or the Jester Revolution, the war was fought on every continent, in every city. After 76 years of bloody (and often ironic) fighting, the Traditionalists managed to annihilate the jesters with a spectacular stroke of strategy. The Traditionalists declared that forevermore April 1st would be Fool's Remembrance Day, and so just to be difficult, the Jesters naturally declared October 1st to be Jester's Remembrance Day. The trap thus sprung, the Traditionalists simply eliminated October 1st from the calendar, and thus no one, not even the Jesters themselves, remembered the Jesters or their rebellion. To this day, October 1st does not exist, contrary to overwhelming popular sentiment.

The civil war weakened Fool influence for many centuries and led to the greatest tragedy of Fool history, the 1893 Fool Genocide in Florin. The King of Florin, descended from a pair of the only surviving jesters and hell-bent on revenge, commissioned the construction of a wormhole generator, drawing from both the secret notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and the prophecies of Nostradamus. The device pulled Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher back in time so that their art could be used as an elaborate mechanism to trap Fools in space and time. Very few Fools escaped the entrapment, and most of those who did fled to safety with the mole men whose realm can only be reached via an Icelandic volcano.

The utter humorlessness of most of the twentieth century, in particular communism, fascism, sitcoms and observational humor, has been definitively proven to be caused by the lack of quality Fools and excess of overly serious morons in positions of power both in the political and entertainment worlds.

The last two officially recognized Fools in existence (made immortal by a pair of clever bets with the Devil and God, respectively) are kept locked in a room by the secret world government of Illuminati and Forest Rangers.  Loki the Red and Loki the Blue continuously play a game of their own devising with ever evolving rules, involving a chess set, seventeen dice, the mummified remains of the last midget emperor of New Zealand, and a seventy-five thousand year old circuit board unearthed in Antarctica. The ebb and flow of their game is analyzed by economists and generals to determine policy. An unexpected coughing fit by Loki the Blue in 1937 resulted in the Second World War.

The 21st century has seen the resurgence of the Fool in popular culture, although his numbers are still too low to allow for natural breeding to take over. Luckily in 2003, a Fool militia group replaced large quantities of sperm bank stock with their own semen, which should lead to a widespread reintroduction of Fools into the areas that need them the most: upper class, conservative households. Contrary to conservative ideology, Fools do not burst out through the mother's chest cavity, although they have been known to slip out of the uterus while their mother is sleeping in order to sneak a quick smoke and gamble with the troll/elf hybrids that live inside the walls of most modern suburban households. This does not seem to cause any problems, save when the Fool fetus in question brings back a friend to the womb for a little action.

You can be assured that the contents of this brief synopsis are quite historically accurate, as the author has verified the events with the time machine he built in his garage out of a refrigerator box, a sharpie, three hundred paperclips, and the pelts of three zombified squirrels.

Crow kicked at the grayish snow dirtied by car exhaust and foot traffic and watched a black striped bus groan to a halt in front of the department stores, disgorging one horde of empty handed shoppers and swallowing another with hands full of bags. Already he saw the mark of his work everywhere, even only a couple years after the first commercial models. Here and there sentis trailed shoppers, carrying more bags than the most loyal husband could manage. Another senti drove the city bus. Crow remembered writing the basic neural networks for that behavior, a simple thing really, but it was the simple yet functional ideas that earned funding.

The bus tried to pull out but locked brakes to avoid another bus, this one marked with government tags and filled with children. Crow's mouth twitched at the start of a smile as he saw the government bus driver wave an all too human fist at the robotic driver blocking his way.

"Lousy drivers." An American next to Crow grumbled. "Can't even drive in this city anymore. At least the Soviets kept the streets sane."

The comment became more clichéd every year as fewer and fewer even remembered the Soviet days, but it had become ingrained in the speech of Russia, even among visitors. The past was always better than the present. Crow thought. "That's because they sent bad drivers to the gulag." He pointed out.

"They sent everyone to the gulag." The American retorted. "There was no one left to drive, so the streets were perfectly safe."

Crow chuckled and felt heat rush across his body just before the wall of sound and pressure knocked him to the ground. A flaming tire rolled past Crow a few yards away and thunked to a stop against the curb, leaving a wake of half-melted snow behind. Crow's eyes followed the trail back to a scene of devastation. Wreckage from the children's bus covered the street in a wide arc, and a dozen small figures struggled against the twisted steel and licking flames. The public bus leaned against a light pole, nearly tossed onto its side.

A wave of people pushed forward to the bus, dragging Crow along before it occurred to him to help. Crow pulled at a collapsed piece of aluminum but ripped his hand away when the skin blistered. A screech answered Crow from somewhere beneath the metal. He pulled off his jacket, wrapped it around his shaking hands, and managed to shove aside the aluminum paneling. A baby, no more than a few months old, hid beneath the seat, screaming and gagging in terror. Crow glanced around and saw other volunteers grabbing children and pulling them free. He lifted the baby and was amazed that it stopped crying at once. Enormous blue eyes stared at Crow, oblivious to the chaos all around.

"What's your name little guy?" Crow asked. A gurgle came in reply. Crow carried the baby away, backing into the snow drift pushed aside by snow plows, unsure of whether to leave the child in the snow and continue helping. Enough volunteers clamoring over the wreckage made up his mind.

Crow traced a finger over the boy's jaw, checking him once over for any injuries, but everything seemed normal. "You're in awfully good shape for someone who was just in an exploding bus." Crow said, grinning back at the boy's smile. "You can't say that you walked away, but you do have special circumstances."

The senti walked with an unsteady gait resembling a limp, making its way through the crowd without looking up. A few observant Naturalists glared at the senti and muttered to each other with additional sharp stares reserved for Crow, perhaps recognizing him from the news. Crow followed, but glanced back and saw that a briefcase leaned against the wall where the senti had stood. He tugged on the senti's sleeve.

"You left your briefcase." Crow said.

The senti paused and looked back where Crow pointed. "I have no briefcase." It said. "That is not mine."

Crow blinked, certain that he had noticed it in the senti's hands when they first spoke. He glanced back and saw David's hands pounding the air in a furious imitation of a wave. Crow bit back a smile at the elbow knocking into his wife's head. He raised a hand to his son and then followed the senti outside.

The cold hit him immediately, followed by the odd contrast of a bright beam of sunlight half-blinding his eyes. Crow blinked back spots of light and noticed the senti had not stopped its brisk pace across the snow-covered square before them. Feeling ice creeping into his bones, Crow fumbled in his pocket for his coat ticket, but could not find it. He watched the senti gaining distance as he patted down each pocket in turn and gave up. Crow shrugged at the doorman. "Guess I'll take my chances for now."

Crow chased the senti through the snow, amazed at how much had fallen during the two hours inside. The plows cleared the square several times per day when necessary, but maybe the drivers were too drunk this afternoon. Every passerby seemed to bump shoulders with Crow as he tried to catch up to the senti, but halfway across the square, Crow gave up with a frustrated laugh.

"Why am I trying to catch him anyway?" Crow asked a pair of tourists who were too taken with their cameras to pay any notice to him.

He surveyed Red Square, catching a last glimpse of the senti starting down the stairs into the GUM Department store complex, a shopper's Mecca to rival the best the West had to offer. The crimson brick walls of the Kremlin rose like a blood stained medieval castle on his left, the towers poking into a skyline defined in the distance by stark concrete high rises. Those walls contained centuries-old palaces and the Supreme Soviet, all converted into tourist traps for the historically minded. Crow turned, his breath clouding the scene like mist in a fairy tale. The schizophrenic mix of modern sterility and thousand year old fancy in the architecture reminded him of London. His eyes lit on the simple and unornamented circle of stones near St. Basil's, an unremarkable landmark that stuck out due to its lack of ostentation. Crow remembered the guide book saying that it was called the Place of Skulls, where executions had taken place for as long as people had lived on this soil.

Trinan reached down and squeezed Crow's hands. "Listen, honey. I went to undergrad with the next speaker so I want to hear her talk, then how about we get out of here? We can drop David off at the daycare in the hotel and take a tour of the Kremlin or something. We wanted to do that before the flight, right?"

David gurgled and announced a mimicked approximation of his name to anyone nearby, drawing a few annoyed looks. Crow hugged Trinan tightly enough to draw a small squeak. "I'm going to step outside to get some air." He kissed the back of her neck and closed his eyes at the subtle scent of her skin. "Want me to take David?"

"Nah." Trinan said, eyes still on the speaker, pausing between phrases to listen to a snippet or two. "He's being good. If I want you to, I'll buzz you."

"Okay." Crow said and released her. He ran a quick hand through David's mop of hair so thin and blond that it resembled a tangle of white thread. David tried to grab Crow's hand, but he dodged and patted his son once more on the shoulder. Crow patted his pocket once to check for his phone and slipped through the crowd.

A tall man in a loose trench coat caught Crow's eye near the back of the room, hidden in the partial shadows cast by an exhibit detailing in scientific terms why the human mind defied mechanical duplication. Crow recognized the sheen of the man's skin as a manufactured effect, although the casual eye would dismiss it as sweat or oily pores. Newer robots outclassed this older model with synthetic skin grown from genetically engineered proteins that mimicked human cells, but the distinction was almost academic. A fedora lowered over the eyes further masked the details. It was the eyes that really gave away that series. Crow thought. The eyes weren't quite right until we started growing them in vats in Chiba.

Crow looked back and saw Trinan occupied by the speaker. David watched him though, curious year-old eyes wondering where his father was going. Sliding around a server bustling along with a tray of white wine in tapered crystal glasses, Crow leaned against the wall next to the robot without making eye contact. Crow's gaze settled over the crowd, looking for anyone else noticing the anomalous presence.

"So what's a senti doing at this sort of gathering?" Crow asked in as low a voice as he could manage, slipping into the slang for sentient robots.

A voice that hesitated with the stutter of imperfect imitation of vocal chords answered, wavering between monotony and a subtle jerking pattern that had plagued many of the early models until Waterson perfected the chordal harmonizer. "One might ask the same question of an artificial intelligence researcher of rather illustrious repute."

"You recognize me?" Crow asked.

"I have a natural interest in the artificial." The senti said.

"I see." Crow said. "And your interest in the convention?"

"Is my own." The senti said. "Would you care to take a walk outside with me?"

Crow raised an eyebrow at the senti and wondered if this meeting was planned or random. "For what?"

"A breath of fresh air?" The senti said with a quirky lilt.

Crow laughed. "All right then. Lead the way."