Chapter 38

August was expecting a big reaction when James saw who was hiding in her bedroom, and she wasn't disappointed. His eyebrows shot up his forehead like they were headed for an escape hatch on his scalp.

"Jaleet?"

Jaleet stood in front of August's bed looking awkward and out of place, nodding in acknowledgement. There was no way to mistake him for anyone else. The dark skin, unassuming aura, impenetrable gaze, even his army-cropped hair were just as inside Shattered Land. The only difference was his clothing: gray slacks and non-descript business shirt instead of military fatigues. And the lack of a combat knife large enough to be called a sword.

"In this world," Jaleet explained, "I am called Imran Muhammad."

"Your real name, or another alias?"

"Though it has not often been used, it is the name I was born with."

James leaned against the jamb of the door, guardedness fading to resignation. "I can tell this is going to be a long conversation."

Despite having heard much of it already, August listened as Imran recounted his tale from the beginning. It was no less fascinating the second time.

Imran had once been an agent of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. Even now, to speak of it went against the vows he had sworn to give up his identity, devote his life to the Ministry, and never allow information of its activities to reach the ears of those not similarly sworn.

"Then why are you telling us this so easily?" James asked. In his cross-legged posture on the bed, the skeptical fold of his arms recalled a displeased yogi.

"It was not easy to make such a decision. But in my investigations, there came to be no other alternative to gaining the support necessary to create a breakthrough. If I divulge nothing and offer nothing, what can I expect in return?"

Difficult to criticize that train of thought, since it was exactly the one that had lead August to spill her life and times to James, something as refreshing as it had been terrifying. Had Imran felt the same, when he ceased to be Jaleet and became Imran again? Not that it was such a simple process. There was no flipping a mental switch to once and for all become a different person. She had learned that the hard way, all of her various Augusts still lurking, checked and balanced but never erased.

"What did you do for the Ministry, exactly?"

Imran shifted in the swivel chair. "That is a lengthy side story, and time may be of the essence."

James stared, dissatisfaction in every eloquent crease of his frown. "The short version."

Imran's eyes took on a distant cast as he searched for a way to condense his life's work into a Cliff Notes paragraph. "I was involved primarily with the management side of foreign information retrieval."

"Spy handling."

"In essence."

"Have you killed anyone?"

Imran blinked once before saying, "I have not. Though I will not deny that information I acquired may have been used for such purposes. I was not privy to details."

"Continue."

In early 2018, Iran's government was under serious pressure to institute political reform by transferring power away from the Grand Ayatollah and placing it more solidly in the hands of the elected President, a reversal of the 1979 revolution. The entrenched power structure resisted, and the result was violent struggle pitting young left against old right. Government institutions aligned primarily with the reigning system, at which point Imran Muhammad found himself working against his own peer group, as those he might once have considered friends sided with the revolutionaries.

Having taken his vows and given up a normal life, it should have been simple to ignore the nature of the assigned enemy. Yet Imran had wondered. Were the set ways the right ways? Were western thought and theological freedom things to be loathed and feared? He fought on the side of the ruling party out of duty. When that side lost the day, he felt equal sorrow and relief.

Afterward, there was no place in Iranian government for former "patriots." Imran found himself at the American Interests section of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. After several weeks of searching for contacts, he was able to broker a deal with the United States government, being granted citizenship and a new identity in exchange for telling them everything he knew.

"Your loyalties aren't worth much," James observed.

August winced. Wasn't she exactly the same type of turncoat, at least in her heart?

Imran held his head low. "I have awoken many nights to such a thought. Yet the duty I wished to fulfill and the vow I had taken were at odds. There was no path that led to the light."

"What duty was that?"

"To find the ones who had torn apart my country."

"It was a civil uprising. The perpetrators are in Iran."

"The ones who rose were my fellow Iranians. But the ones who set them in motion, perhaps, were not."

"Are you telling me you came all the way to America chasing pointless rumors?"

August winced again. Every remark James made was hitting a little too close to home.

"Given the current situation," Imran replied, "are you still willing to proclaim it so pointless?"

The two stared each other down, until at length, James sighed. "Go on."

Imran's value as an informant was low. The government he knew had been overthrown, and Iran possessed no military secrets coveted by the United States. Nevertheless, they still granted him citizenship and asylum. Therefore, what they wanted from him was something else.

"Hence the surveillance," James said.

A corner of Imran's lip curled upward in the day's first evidence of his human emotions. "As expected, your logical processes do not fail you. They believe that I do not know I am being surveilled, and that at some point I will lead them to my contacts in the intelligence community. After three years, they have grown slightly more lax, but only slightly. My furtive behavior of late—this visit being a prime example—will likely draw me back into their focus. But there may be no better opportunity to accomplish my goal, even if I were to wait for it until my death."

"You still haven't fully explained that goal."

Imran spread his hands. "To catch out the ones who threw down my country, and do my part to ensure it happens no more in this world."

"Even though you were disillusioned with the old Iranian system yourself?"

"That does not mean I wished to see thousands of my people killing each other, inspired by an outside presence."

James propped his chin on his fist. "Proclamations aside, I have yet to see direct evidence that a global conspiracy exists."

"Direct evidence, perhaps not. Indirect evidence can also paint a picture, and there is far too much now to be cast aside. Some of which you have discovered for yourself, have you not?"

James glanced at August.

She nodded. "I told him what we suspect."

He gave her a We're going to talk about this later frown before turning back to Imran. "I admit to some suspicions about certain things, but they don't relate to overthrowing Iran. That's way too big a leap. What are you basing this on?"

"At the time of the revolt, analysts expressed surprise at the speed and severity of its spread. It was considered a product of communication through the internet and social media. Yet in the investigations we conducted, very little trace was found of those supposed informational channels. Therefore, such traces were hidden even as events unfolded. This raises the question of who has the ability to control how information flows on the internet, and how they could hide that control from view. I have worked my entire career in the field of digital data retrieval and occlusion, and in my opinion, there is only one force on this planet that could accomplish such a thing."

"Donald Marsh and UCC?" James raised one skeptical eyebrow. "Last I checked, they're a game company."

Imran smiled openly, though the dark edge of his expression belied amusement. "It is the NSA—my opponents in many an operation at the Ministry—whom I suspect. Yet there is a strange connection, is there not, between UCC and the NSA?"

James looked equally pained and annoyed. "Stephen Cruze seems to think so."

August piped up. "Remember you told me that every digital publisher turned Cruze down and that all references to his book were erased from the internet? There aren't very many explanations for that, unless the old bugger made the whole thing up."

James made an unhappy sound somewhere between a groan and a growl. "First of all, some supposed past connection between UCC and the NSA doesn't mean that UCC is involved with them right now. Second, I did some research into the NSA. They focus on signals intelligence and information. What motivation would they have to do anything in Iran? Or Australia? Or Pakistan?"

"Don't forget who else was at that conference with the NSA and UCC," August said. "The CIA."

"According to Stephen Cruze."

"Yes."

"Refresh my memory. Just how much luck did we have verifying his claims?"

"I wrote a big bloody report on it—which you've never read, I might add—without proving a blasted thing. If governments are just toppling like dominoes for no reason, he might've made it all up. But if there's some massive conspiracy involving every acronym and the kitchen sink, and they can control information on the net, of course they'd've erased everything."

"We're just going in a circle. Jaleet—Imran—whoever you are." James put two fingers to his temple as if warding off incipient migraine. "All this is old news. What are you doing here now, today? If I buy your story, and the NSA catches you here, they'll brand all of us as members of a hostile foreign information network, which apparently isn't wrong. What's justifying this risk?"

Imran leaned forward in the swivel chair, clasping his hands in front of him. "It is the FBI that is watching me; it is their jurisdiction. Regardless, we are here because the situation in Pakistan has changed everything."

"The coup?"

"The overt nature of the interfering actions have, for the first time, been so blatant as to alert even the controllable mass media. We now have proof that, at least in this case, the conspiracy is not a product of internet quackery."

"What proof?" James said, unable to hide a scowl. "We need something solid."

With that, Imran reached into his pocket and produced a thumb drive. "It is my pleasure to oblige."

***

James was mostly silent while reviewing Imran's data, but the gears in his head were grinding hard enough to throw sparks.

August watched. Looking at James had supplanted pareidolia as her first choice for relaxation and anti-stress. The scruffy charm, the pensiveness, the way he subconsciously tapped his heel against the floor when he was thinking—she liked it all.

Not good, since however all this turned out, it was hard to imagine a way that would be positive for her one-sided crush.

Bloody hell, I'm not a schoolgirl.

"Okay." James sat back into the chair he had procured from the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. "Just how much more is there?"

"Many thousands of pages."

"Tell me exactly what I'm looking at. I get the gist from the parts that are in English, but I don't see the connection to the NSA or UCC."

"These files were obtained by the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau before the governmental offices were overrun," Imran explained. "As you have seen, there are postings by thousands of unique users on dozens of internet forums and social media sites, and even on the Pakistani military intranet. The messages date from several months ago up to the current time, with the volume increasing exponentially."

James nodded. "Mostly from insurgents to prospective recruits. Inciting revolutionary thought. What I don't see is any hint that this is the NSA or UCC. There are thousands of different users messaging back and forth. It's strange that intelligence was able to find all of this after the fact without noticing the buildup, but they were probably focused on external investigations since nobody really saw this coming."

"The very existence of this data is the key," Imran said. "It is direct evidence of the channels of communication that until now have been obscured during such events. And thanks to yourself and Miss Evans, statistical analysis of the linguistics of these various revolutionaries tells a story." A line graph appeared on the screen. "Here you see the expected standard deviation of character frequencies over a random sampling of Pakistani web pages. The distribution tails off toward the extremes and the mass is spread over the center range." A second graph appeared. "This overlay represents the character frequencies in the messages written by inciting insurgents."

The new graph was very different from the first. The peak in the center was far higher and trailed off much more quickly.

"Explain," James said, already furrowed brow compressing further.

"The horizontal represents character frequency averages of individuals. The vertical represents the number of users in that range. The overlay, as you can see, consists mainly of one large central grouping."

"Meaning what? All of the inciting revolutionaries are writing their messages in the same way?"

"Not all," August said, from her perch on the bed. "But many. It's as if, even when writing in different styles or dialects, whoever wrote them gravitated to expected averages in a way you'd never see in an arbitrary demographic."

"Let's say it plainly." James stood up from his chair and began to pace in what little space was available. "Most messages written by supposedly different insurgents actually came from the same source. Is there any other explanation?"

There was a long silence. Imran looked at August, then at James, then at the floor. August looked at the ceiling, the wall, the bed sheets, and finally back to James.

"I can't see one," August said.

"Nor I," Imran said.

James kept pacing. "Just like the files on Donald's computer."

"That is what gave me the idea to have these postings analyzed statistically," Imran confirmed.

"So whoever wrote the steganographic process on Donald's computer also wrote these messages in Pakistan. In multiple languages." James stopped pacing and stood in front of the computer. "Have you done a time analysis?"

"I have," Imran said.

"My guess is you found times when a lot of messages are sent out at once," James said.

"Yes."

"Meaning, statistics aside, it's impossible for them to have come from the same source."

"...Yes."

James paused to blow out a breath. "Unless the source isn't human."

Silence filled the room, a barometric entity, until it felt like the apartment was inside a scuba tank.

"It would seem," Imran said, piercing the bubble, "that we have multiple layers of confirmation that an artificial intelligence surpassing human capability exists, and that it is being used to influence world events. How, and why, are the questions remaining."

James sat heavily on the edge of the bed. The torn expression on his face was as familiar to August as an old family friend. It was the one she had seen in the mirror for weeks, every time she wondered just what side she was on. His torment coiled like a black snake around her rib cage.

"Viral marketing," James mumbled.

August and Imran both stared at him.

"Information management," he said. "Genetic algorithms. It all ties together."

"It does?"

"These messages were the vector." James nodded to himself. "Viral marketing is momentum. Starting something that will take off on its own. That's what they did." He frowned. "Not they. The AI. Genetic algorithms. They're just search functions, we said. But search functions are what information management is about." He looked at August. "What is the internet?"

"I'm sorry?"

"The internet. I'm talking about what it's made of."

August knew he wasn't talking about servers and cables. "It's data. Information."

"If you wanted to control it, what would you have to do?"

It was Imran that answered. "You would need to define it in its entirety. For that, you would need..."

"Search and sorting functions," August said. "Unbelievable ones." Her mouth was desert dry.

James ground his palms into his eye sockets so hard that August wanted to reach out and stop him, but her body wouldn't move. "It's still a big jump from search functions to intelligent life," he said. "I don't know what the hell happened there. But it's too big a coincidence for us to find all that information on the computer of a UCC executive at the same time we find real evidence that an AI is behind the coup in Pakistan."

Strange. The most skeptical of them had just proclaimed that August's mission had been valid all along, but there was no soaring triumph to carry her aloft.

Actually, she felt like she was going to be sick.

"I'm going to talk to Donald," James said.

The atmosphere froze into a solid lump, unbreathable. August opened her mouth to respond, but no words emerged. Imran looked similarly stumped.

"I owe it to him," James explained, though no one had asked. "We don't know if this is his doing or not. The fastest way to find out is to go to the source."

There were so many problems with his train of thought that it was a wreck inside the station. "Even if Donald isn't responsible, asking him is way too bloody crazy. If he's in bed with the NSA, you'll be lucky to go one-way to Guantanamo, and—" August stopped herself and took a deep breath. Now was not the time to lose control. "And if he's not, he won't know anything. Why take that risk for no gain?"

"Ms. Evans has the right of it," Imran said.

"That's fine for you to say," James said, his face now a perfect veneer of detachment. "You have reasons to see this through. But I'm not chasing justice. Or vengeance, either." He looked at August, and suddenly she could see right through his mask, to the pain that was on the other side. "I'm only here because I was sure it wouldn't come to this."

"What are you saying?" August asked, voice threatening to lodge in her throat and choke her.

"Maybe Donald's a victim. Even if he's the fucking villain, your villain, he's still the friend that saved me more than once. When my life was bottoming out, that guy was there. The only one who was there." James sat up straighter. "In this world, people aren't just one thing or another. For what he's been to me, I owe him."

August wanted to scream and cry and hit him and say no bloody way I'll let you go, but she couldn't.

She knew better than anyone that a person could be different things on different days.

"I won't tell him about you," James said, as if he thought the agonized expression on her face was worry over her own fate. "Either of you. Whatever happens, I know you've got your own reasons to continue. Do what you have to do." He pushed himself off the bed and stood. "And so will I."

Unable to do anything else, August watched James leave the room, and then her apartment. And maybe her life, forever.