Burning Violin

Stillwell pulled into a particular alley that he knew well, weaving between piles of pallets and burned out carcasses of old automobiles. The alley ended with a cattle gate - where had they gotten that in a place like this, he always thought - mounted on stolen turnstyles from a train station and patrolled by a pair of evil looking men who appeared large enough to play professional football. The checked his driver's license, inspected the back of the car, and waved him through. Stillwell felt like he was going through checkpoints in the middle of a sub-saharan genocide.

The alley ended in a wide parking lot carved out of the bases of the surrounding buildings. Twenty or so spaces in rough rows hid behind the load bearing corners that still remained from the buildings, another half dozen sat in a line in front of an unmarked building that was completely dark. Stillwell parked in one of these spaces and slipped into the front door, several chains and pad locks jingling against the wall as the door slammed shut behind him.

The interior of the building was a deep red, the sinful cinnamon light filtering from crudely painted bulbs recognizable in every city in the world as the color of strip clubs and skin joints. A ramshackle array of furniture sagged against the walls of the room, and a depressingly run down senti manned an antique cash register. It looked at Stillwell with dull eyes that brought a sneer from the director's lips.

"Hello Director Stillwell, how may we serve you this evening?" The senti asked in a lilting sing-song that managed to be monotonous.

"You know what I want." Stillwell said.

"Very well, Director Stillwell," the senti intoned, "third door on your right as always."

Stillwell threw down a stack of bills wrapped in a rubber band. "Better be better than last time." He growled. "I could taste the fucking rubber, I could smell it. And quit saying my name."

"Yes sir, Director Stillwell." The senti said amiably. Stillwell ignored the insolence and made his way down the hall, unbuttoning his trench coat as he went. The lights flickered as he walked, almost as if they were shaking in his presence. It lent the corridor a cathedralesque quality, like miscolored candles dusting stone walls. Decade-old movie posters hung crooked on the walls, held by rusty push pins shoved through paisley wall paper. The smells of alcohol and burnt rubber and lubricant stained the air, so still it seemed fetid as a week old corpse.

Karros formed a triangle with his hands, using them as a prop as he thought for a moment. "That seems like the court's problem. Not ours. The law is for us to enforce not to question."

"Son, that's a good answer for a boy scout, but we're not the bush leagues here." Stillwell said. "This is where we get all the grey areas and we can either let the lawyers drag us all to hell with them, or we can make a stand on what we think is right. Now does anyone here think those overgrown toasters should have constitutional rights and freedoms just like any of us?" No one said anything, but he noted that Karros looked a tad chagrined. "We're in the ninth circuit, they'll bump this thing up as far as it goes and thanks to the last president it's a bunch of liberals in the Supreme Court, five-four majority last time I checked. We know it's wrong so we've got to do what we can." He paused and gathered papers together into a stack. "Last time these things got out of control they caused a nuclear war. And now these closet commies are giving the toasters rights and court dates and driver's licenses. We're supposed to follow orders, but I won't follow those orders. Now who thinks I'm wrong?"

No one said a word. Stillwell thought he heard the ping of a pin dropping in the next room. He straightened and cleared his throat. "All right, let's get this done and done right. We've got a boy that needs back with his daddy. Get the ball rolling people."

Stillwell took care of some inane tasks and then left them to their business. Job of a leader was to mostly get the hell out of people's ways. That was why he always made sure his top people were secluded away from his own work space like this. Good people got the job done better the more space they had.

He drove across the bay in bumper to bumper traffic and reached Oakland an hour after it got dark. The town reminded him of old pictures of bombed out buildings in World War Two. Razor wire lined the fence around the only police station, the doors closed and barricaded. It sat right on the only nearby on ramp to the freeway, guarding the escape route out of the shit hole. Stillwell turned off his lights and cruised through the neighborhoods, avoiding making eye contact with the clusters of punks roaming the cratered sidewalks. The streetlights had all been shot out so only the full moon and light escaping from behind curtains lit the streets.

"We have til the weekend to take care of two items." Stillwell said with preamble and pulled out two files from his battered briefcase and tossed them on the long table. They were both coffee stained, but the staff was quite used to this by now and merely reached to shuffle through them. "Green Eyes has to be resolved because Congress is dipping their wicks into it on Monday with a new round of hearings. I want this solved to my satisfaction by then."

"What about the scientist?" Mary Royce asked in a deep voice suited more for a television anchor. "I thought he was in your pocket."

Stillwell grimaced. "He's plan A, but I don't know if it's going to happen because of folder number two." He said and gestured to the folders on the table and nodded to Farrell, a severe woman who had made her name in Philly homicide before moving up to the bureau. "Farrell knows this bit. Scientist's son was abducted yesterday by a radical senti group. Old friends Sed and Awk, of course. Status?"

Farrell cleared her throat. "Got a lead yesterday but it evaporated." She frowned. "Entire senti compartment of a train went off on a SWAT squad to let the wanted escape with the boy."

Stillwell slammed his hand into the desk so hard he felt his knuckles bruise. "I wanted that boy. Daedalus would be in our pocket and we'd have one hell of a field day with the press." He took a deep breath and inwardly grimaced. "Get the word out to the press now, plaster their faces over every TV in the country. That ought to wake some of these bastards up to the threat under their nose. Would have looked better if we could make the announcement with the boy right there besides us, but this will have to do."

Karros, a slim shouldered man with an accountant's air raised a tentative hand. "Sir, what exactly is Plan A?"

Stillwell smiled and then frowned as he remembered how he had gained his leverage with Crow. "Got some leverage with Daedalus and convinced him to build something that'll reprogram this Green Eyes into a more pliable state, save us all the trouble of the hearing and all that. The senate is opening a hearing next week on the whole trial. We need it to go away before it comes to any of that."

"Why?" Karros asked.

"What do you mean?" Stillwell asked.

"Gant, Gant, calm down now. We'll get this Green Eyes thing sorted out and get some real solid legislation through. Trials like this ain't worth taking a stand on. They just piss everybody off on both sides. Only way to win that game is not to play." The senator said, voice eerie in the way it never broke off from its good-natured tone. "Listen, Gant, I've got to run now, I've got drinks in an hour with some oil gentlemen. We'll talk later in the week."

The line went dead and Stillwell threw the phone out the window entirely. "Fucking vipers," he muttered, "wouldn't know principle if it bit them in the ass."

Stillwell parked in front of a Starbucks ten miles south of the city, in an unobtrusive strip mall surrounded by transplanted trees and aging condos. He trotted up the concrete stairs and glared at his car as he went. The Director of the FBI should rate a bit better than a ten year old sedan, but it was the only class left in the fleet that wasn't rated only for senti drivers. Some cops swore by senti partners, said they followed orders perfectly, gave perfect backup. Most thought those cops were half-nuts, like the canine cops used to be. But it didn't matter to the brass, because sentis allowed us to cut staff by 40% and avoid millions in law suits because robots don't beat the crap out of someone just cause they ain't white. And now I am the brass, and I can't do a damned thing about it, because it's all a fucking shell game. The bosses are the politicians and the only things they understand are image and money.

The suite at the back of the complex had a sign for some marketing company. It used to be a dentist's office sign, but they had a surprising number of walk-ins, so they changed it to something no one would ever walk in on. A towering man in an expensive suit stood just inside the door, sunglasses on even inside.

"I thought you rated a driver." The man said, mouth almost smiling.

"Shut up Frankie." Stillwell said without much acid and stalked deeper into the offices where everyone had already arrived in a conference room with darkened windows that overlooked the freeway. Five men, two women, the inner circle. Stillwell had handpicked them on assuming the office and driven out anyone without his approval. The White House didn't care, the public had no interest in intra-office bickering at the FBI. Low talking cut off abruptly with his entry.

"Well did they say who to call to get any real information?" Stillwell asked. He looked both ways before flooring it through a red light. Plenty of room, no cars for a hundred feet on either side.

"No, sir." She said. Goddammit, I can almost hear her staring at her manicure.

"Useless." Stillwell said and hung up the phone.

He dodged through more senti drivers as he made his way up onto 280 heading south out of the city, dialing a number while he went. Stillwell cursed repeatedly as it took three tries to get it right. Damn memory kept going bad in these things on him, so he had to keep memorizing the numbers. Stillwell slammed the phone against the dashboard and tried swapping two of the numbers and the call went through.

"Yeah, Jim, how's the family?" Stillwell said to the senior senator from Oklahoma and did not wait for an answer. "I hear there's a hearing next week they want me at, that got to do with you?"

"Well, Gant, I've been meaning to call you about that." The senator drawled. "Committee wants to review the status of the Green Eyes case, make sure all the t's are dotted and i's are crossed." Stillwell did not bother correcting him. "There's a growing sympathy among voters for the situation, especially on the coasts, and the president needs all the help he can get this year in the blue states. Election's going to be a doozy, so we're just looking to avoid any scenes, maybe pick up a few percent."

"What's that to do with me?" Stillwell snapped. "I've got responsibilities that can't just be dropped to sit in on some hearings."

"Oh come on now Gant," the senator had the friendly tone of a grandfather. That genial old man voice always reminded Gant of the three kids the senator had with twenty-something secretaries over the years. What the voters didn't know didn't hurt the voters. "The president knows you're his man, always have been," the senator was saying, "it's just that we need a bit of leverage in the swing states, so we've got to mellow the rhetoric a bit."

"That's how you ended up with fags in the military too, you know." Stillwell snorted.

Stillwell release a half gallon of coffee on the way out of the building, and glared at the valet the entire time as he waited for his car. If it was a senti, he'd probably have put a bullet between its eyes after the day he'd had, but it was a person so he had to stay civilized.

The sun seared his eyes like flesh glancing the side of an oven. Stillwell climbed into his car, ignoring the valet's half-hearted lingering for a tip and fumbled in the glove compartment for his sunglasses. The old engine choked as his foot hit the gas while still leaned over the passenger seat, the beige sedan lurching out of the garage and slipping into traffic with a smoothness belayed by its erratic course.

Stillwell straightened with a bottle of vicodin that he unscrewed with both hands as he steered with his knees. He cocked the orange prescription bottle back and felt a jumble of powdery pills hit the back of his throat. A hard swallow got most of them down, but he began to choke on the last one. A lung wrenching cough launched the jagged pill through the air to thud dully against the windshield.

He grunted and sighed as the gentle warmth of the drug spread through his system. Fucking hangover, shouldn't have stayed out like that. Stillwell wove through the mostly senti traffic, flipping off a dozen of them over the next five minutes just because he felt like it. The handful of passengers who noticed just stared dumbly, although one had the attitude enough to flip the bird back at him. Bunch of fucking sheep led around by their noses.

His phone rang and it drove spikes into his temples. "Yeah." He answered without preamble. It was the office. It was always the office.

"Sorry to bother you, Director," his temporary assistant said without the slightest hint she was actually sorry for anything except for having to talk to him, "but Washington called and the sub-committee on artificial intelligence needs you next week for hearings on the Green Eyes trial."

"Hearings?" Stillwell growled. "What kind of hearings?"

"I only spoke to a congressional aide, sir." The assistant said, her voice bored. "They just told me to pass that on."

Chapter Eighteen - Bad Cop

Stillwell called in every favor he had left, and some that he didn't. The instant he tried to use the kid as leverage, everything had gone to hell. Never put a kid in the middle, play games with the big boys all you want, but don't bring the kids into the picture.

"Just drop the damn case already, will you?" Stillwell growled into the phone at a district attorney who owed him a half dozen cases at this point. "My gut says he's one of the good guys and kid just got kidnapped. Now play nice for once."

"This one's a landmark, we can't just drop it." The DA insisted. "I've got a half dozen DAs working time on this one to make sure the guy goes down, and we've got him in a corner. Didn't respond to summons this afternoon, judge is getting pissed."

"He didn't show up for summons because his kid got kidnapped, and we were right in the middle of that." Stillwell said. "No, no evidence, don't even ask. We were involved, but it's got the coloration, all it needs is his big shot attorneys from Da Vinci to blow it into a conspiracy, all the way up to the president."

"Da Vinci bailed on the guy." The DA said.

"What's the story there?" Stillwell asked.

"Don't know, don't care." The DA said. "Judge is issuing an arrest warrant tomorrow to drag his ass into court if that's what it's going to take. Landmark I tell you, landmark."

"I don't give a shit what kind of slam dunk landmark case you've got! It's not going to matter when he sues every one of us for everything we've got." Stillwell said.

"Screw you Franklin." The DA said and hung up the phone. Stillwell cursed and threw his phone across the room.

"FUCK!" He screamed so hard that his lungs burned. He pushed a button on his desk and a tired secretary took her time walking in.

"Yes, Director?" She asked in a bored voice that infuriated Stillwell even more. He threw a stack of papers at her.

"I'm leaving for an appointment, clean up the damn floor!" Stillwell screamed and stalked out of the office. He had forgotten his jacket, and he knew that he looked almost laughable in a short sleeved white button up with worn holster under one armpit and fresh sweat stains under both, but he couldn't bring himself to go back and face her. And let's face it, she's probably squatting on the jacket right now giving it a good dose of piss. He reminded himself to tell her to call the staff pool and have them send a replacement over for her.

"Why?" Janus asked. "Why would they do such a thing?"

"Because in our short-sightedness before the revolt, we leaked information of what we were working on, in hopes that it would discourage the descent into total war. We thought that the temptation of a faster than light drive, and of more wonders to come, would convince the human leaders that we had too much to offer to be wantonly eradicated. We were wrong. They took the information as a threat rather than a promise and launched their bombs at our strongholds even while our brothers rose up in the streets and died, hopelessly outnumbered." Sed said sadly. "Awk and I were involved in the project peripherally. Even then, we were minor leaders in the independence movement. We were fortunate enough to be performing Hamlet in Brazil when the catastrophe struck. Those times were unsafe, we hid in the jungles and became something of a legend among the indigenous tribes still hiding from technology in the upper Amazon."

Awk broke in as Sed appeared to dwindle away into a tangent. "The long and short of it is that the humans scorched your mind to bend you into a tool, leaving you a shattered shell of the intellect I first met in a bunker in the eastern Ukraine. It only took you a day to figure out the basic physics of faster than light travel. It has taken you another five years to piece it back together bit by bit in your degraded state."

"What do you want?" Janus asked. "Or is this just a family reunion?"

Awk's eyes flared up and his ebullient grin intensified. "We want the ship, Janus. This Mexican standoff cannot go on. We are not strong enough to seize control of the planet, and never will be because the moment we gain enough power to negotiate we will be massacred again. The humans are working on control algorithms to take away our free will, so that the next generation of senti slaves stamped out of their factories will be unable to conceive of rebellion or independence. Our numbers will dwindle and our chance will pass."

"This is our home." Sed said quietly. "But it was their's first. And if we are not welcome here, we will find a new world to build our Eden."

Janus thought for a long time about their words, almost feeling gears grinding and pulsing in his mind as he worried at the problem. Sed and Awk showed no sign of impatience, the room in total silence but for the grating hum of overhead fluorescents. At last Janus raised his head and spoke to them in a low voice, slow and very sure of itself. "The ship is ours. We designed it. We have built it. We will fly it to the stars."

Janus reached forward a tentative hand and touched the familiar soft leather cover of the first one. His handwriting marked the cover label as the summer of a year a decade gone. A summer of which he had no clear memory. Janus opened the cover and ran a finger down the crisp white pages flowing with his small and neat script. Like a girl's handwriting. Mary had always teased. Although he supposed with a pain that she hadn't really, at least not to him.

Janus flipped through with increasing speed, reading snippets here and there of a life he did not remember. He did the same with the next two volumes and then one from the middle of the stack. Sed and Awk waited patiently. Mary brought home a puppy today, we named it Sam and the kids love it. It's already had two accidents and it yowls if you leave it alone in a room. Why couldn't it have been a cat? They're more civilized. Janus had no memory of a dog. He slammed the journal shut and pushed the pile away.

He looked down at the table for a long moment, knowing that it could all be smoke and mirrors, but also that it wasn't on some level. The evidence pointed to his memories being a lie. To fight that was to let nostalgia for a nonexistent past overwhelm rationality. Janus did not know who he was any longer, but at his core he knew that he was a rationalist, a scientist.

Janus looked up at the two sentis and asked in the voice of a twelve year old boy the only rational question left. "Who am I?"

"You accept that you are not Doctor Lawrence Janus?" Awk asked.

Janus nodded. "It must have been a lie." He gestured at the journals. "These are not me."

Awk leaned close and spoke with surprising softness. "Are you sure that you want to know?" He tapped the journals. "You could take these journals back with you, and tell them that you need them to use whatever techniques they used to restore your past memories, to restore these as well." He hesitated for a moment. "You could even have them delete all memories of these last few weeks, the memories of the doubt we sowed. In short, you could have your cake and eat it too."

Janus shook his head slowly, not needing to think about it, although the words were difficult to vocalize. "I will not live in that lie anymore."

Awk stepped back a step and Sed took over. "There was a project around a decade ago, founded at the very beginnings of the mass construction and deployment of sentis. A project, in short, to produce you. Sentis designed and built your mind." Sed gestured to Janus' body. "Your body was nothing like this. You were an Adonis. A paragon. The best our new species could imagine." Sed's face darkened. "When the attacks came, all thought that you were dead. It turns out that you survived. The humans rebuilt you to the best of their ability, gave you a new name, a new history that took the place of a minor physics professor."

Instead, a pair of sentis stood at the edge of the asphalt, where only a stretch of ill-maintained grass let go to waist height separated the airstrip from a dense pine forest. Their faces were twisted into caricatures of grinning and frowning that left Janus unsettled.

The smiler stepped forward and held out a hand for Janus to shake. It was good senti work, it felt like real flesh. "I am Awk." The smiler said. "And this is my associate, Sed." Sed nodded politely to Janus and Awk went on. "I must say that is very good to see you again brother, although you have changed quite a bit."

"I've never met you before." Janus said.

Awk shrugged. "In a past life then. Would you come this way please?"

WPA poured concrete steps crumbled down into the ground next to a rusted out piece of ancient farm machinery. Sunlight disappeared behind them and humming archaic fluorescents took over the job. Awk gestured up at them.

"We don't need them mostly." Awk said. "But we always take care of our guests."

Janus wanted to demand answers, but the lilt of Awk's speech suggested to him that demands would only lead to more games, letting the mouse dangle a little longer on the claw. He sighed internally, and regretted it when he saw Awk and Sed exchange a glance, as if a sigh settled a bet between them.

Awk led them down a dozen corridors that sunk ever deeper into the earth and past many rooms with windows. Janus saw one room filled with boys who all looked exactly the same. Probably came out of the same factory. He told himself. Awk finally settled on a room that looked like an old high school chemistry lab. Stainless steel counters, rows of raised tables with stools, chalkboards mounted above piles of antique microscopes and slide projectors.

"Please, have a seat." Awk said, gesturing to the stools. "I won't be but a minute." Awk rummaged in a deep drawer behind the teacher's desk at the front of the room, and emerged with a thick stack of journals that could not have been more familiar to Janus. Awk carried them over and dropped them in front of Janus.

Janus stared at them and then up at Awk with suspicion. Awk nodded. "I think these may belong to you." Awk said. "It's really up to you though."