Where the Axe Is Buried

by Ray Nayler

Exiles feed on empty dreams of hope. I know it. I was one. —AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon

Maybe to grow old well you had to allow others to take over your work. You had to know when your work had come to an end. Zoya was trying.

I am the only one left. Do you know what that is like? To be the only one left? To wait for the bullet, the drone, the poison—and have it never come? It is worse than death.”

But then I understood—you are real, but my digital eye cannot see you. Only my human eye can.

The woman drew a cylinder from her pocket. A green light glowed at its tip. “It is called a Birnam device. It maps the disturbance you create in the world and emulates the data that would exist in your absence. It doesn’t make you invisible—it replaces you with what would be there if you were not. Like our own minds replace the blind spot in our vision with what should be there. But only machines are vulnerable to it.

‘There is no solution to disagreement,’” she recited. “‘There is no technology that can overcome it, no leader that can repress it. There is only the eternal flow of argument…’”

“You aren’t here to kill me.” “You seem disappointed.” No winter to fear, yet. Except the one in the mind.

“We need you,” the woman said again, “but we cannot free you. So I have come to duplicate you.”

You couldn’t see the invisible loops limiting the movements of those on “conditional release.” Those circles were the city’s true geography. Overlapping orbits of limitation.

And then—this. Her freedom had been so fragile. Cut from paper. All it took to make it disappear was a visit to her father.

From that moment, we understood that the state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it was always with us. It shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was there to take us into its prisons when we made them.

The children always knew where there were no cameras.

That was what history was like everywhere he traveled: someone had sanded the splinters down.

The language models that wrote them were banned in her country. Her government claimed the models were filled with Western biases. In the Federation, they had their own self-censoring, patriotic machines to write stories for their citizens. What were they about? About how to be a good person. The same things the stories here were about, but what it meant to be a good person in her country was different. Were the stories in her country any good? Yes, they were very good—that was the problem.

When Nikolai had protested that the people would understand what had been done, when one leader spoke and acted so much like the last, Krotov had told him the state was not interested in whether people believed its lies. The state was not looking for plausible deniability. A good lie could always be punctured, with enough work. No, Krotov had said—all they needed was implausible deniability. A lie the population would see through immediately but would have to pretend they believed. Even to themselves. Making themselves believe the bad lie made them complicit. And no one would dare speak the truth. Few would dare even think it.

“It’s called having a memory,” Jeenbaev said. “An inconvenience in politics, and something you, conveniently, are not burdened by.

They would beat her in the street, as they still did sometimes, to demonstrate to other “citizens” that the state did not limit itself to controlling its citizens only through technology. There was plenty the state could do with tech, but it could also choose to beat you to death the old-fashioned way.

But here, in the horizonless world of the real forest, all she could do was die.

She had come back for a simple reason—she had come back to say goodbye to the one person in the world who had been there for her when no one else was. Who had cared for her when no one else would. Without doing that, she had known she couldn’t be fully present in her new life. And she owed it to her father—to tell him that this time, when she left, it would be forever.

There was always Krotov too. You didn’t need to copy Krotov’s mind. It copied itself. Krotov was fungal. He spread underground, attaching himself to the country’s root systems, trading information for nutrients. Krotov’s mind wasn’t in his skull: it was diffused in the soil. This thing in front of Nikolai called “Krotov” was nothing but a poisonous mushroom pushed up from the forest floor, born of the mycelium of violence woven through the dirt.

The first referendum for rationalization was close. Palmer remembered the protests, when the police, under PM orders, had laid down their shields and walked away.

In other countries, referendums passed by wider margins. Wider and wider, when they saw how calm descended on countries once a PM took over. Then it became inevitable. Everyone would rationalize. The incentives were right. It was easier: all their parliaments had to do under rationalization was busy themselves with bureaucratic details while the artificial minds of the Prime Ministers made the big decisions. The human parliaments got to tout the results—the minimum-wage increases, the social safety net improvements, the economic stabilization, the CEO pay caps, the pension funds that didn’t get raided or collapse.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the problem wasn’t the PMs—maybe it was the material fed into them to begin with. Maybe our lifeways are shit, Palmer thought, and feeding our shitty ideas into some new kind of intelligence was never going to turn them into anything but reprocessed shit.

It wasn’t quite true to say he’d never noticed the cameras before. It was that they had always been unimportant to him—a part of the background like the buildings they hung on. He’d never thought of the fact that they were looking—watching, searching for people. And now, perhaps, for him.

From that moment, we understood that the state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it was always with us. It shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was there to take us into its prisons when we made them.

We designed it to calculate human needs, and deconflict those needs in order to promote human thriving. Deconfliction of needs is the core of its assignment. But from the outside, it can look chaotic.

In the last revolution, before rationalization, the police had put down a riot with two walkers. The things had left a hundred rioters dead on the square. Not “rioters.” People. People on the wrong side. And those things hadn’t killed protesters—the people piloting them had. Either a person inside, or a person at a distance, piloting them like a drone, or a person who had set their parameters, wound the monsters up, and sent them into the world. Any way you looked at it, a human being was doing the killing. The machine was nothing but a tool.

Lilia found a way to look into a system from a distance and know its structure in the moment.

“The scenes are a screen projected onto the surface. They aren’t the information: they conceal it. She called the pictures ‘the scrim’—like the semitransparent screen in a theater set. The scenes project an image. A metaphor, as you said, for a generalized state. But underneath the scrim is the real pattern, the full pattern, which can only be seen when the dioramas are linked up to the full system Lilia invented. Then they allow us to look into a person’s skull. To read the state of their entire connectome.

I think we only believe in the quantum world while we are running an experiment or writing a paper. Then it fades away. We have breakfast in our macro world. We get dressed and do other things quantum realities make meaningless. Every time we look away from that quantum world, we disavow it. We couldn’t live otherwise.”

We cannot wait. We must act immediately, and take the consequences. We must debate their results, and act again. Action cannot be the product of a final conclusion. Action and argument must be bound up together, driving one another forward, each correcting the other’s course. Action and argument together form an experiment, and nothing but constant experimentation will get us where we need to be. The system that contains us is not threatened by what we think of it. It is threatened by what we do about it. And the time for doing is always now.

Once the regimes had been emptied of ideology—once power became about power alone—there was no breaking them. They had no morality. They did not become disgusted with themselves and turn away from killing. Their will did not break, no matter how many protesters they had to arrest, beat, or kill. They had no conscience, and so they were not stung by guilt.

The only thing they feared was the loss of their own power. They understood the simple rule, proven time and again: to hold on to power, never give up power.

The regimes had learned, from watching how other autocratic systems were toppled, that compromise was death. They made no reforms. They promised nothing. They simply jailed, beat, har...

If something ever needed to be done to Nikolai’s family, it would be done by someone else. The President did not need to know where the people he’d decided to kill lived, or what their names were, or how they had been killed. The power of someone like Krotov was the kind that required knowing the details of Nikolai’s family life. The power to not know such things was the kind of power the President had: to destroy others in perfect ignorance of the details.

They did not talk anymore about isolation. Instead, they talked about incompatibility. About how the extension of rationalization had gone too far. Rationalization might work in the West, the pundits said, but there were countries out there that were not ready for it, the talking heads insisted. The Republic was one of those. This failure had been caused by hastiness, by overreach, by thinking that “we” (and the meaning of that “we” kept shifting) could push our values on a world “not ready” for development.

That was how it was. One day you had your own country. The next day you were a refugee. You were in a line, waiting to be someone again. To be legal again. Not to be nothing. You could spend your whole life waiting.

It wasn’t the money that was the worst of the problem—it was what you had to do to get it. It was how tired the extra work made you at the end of the week. It was how many times you couldn’t afford to rest, how many Saturdays were spent working, how many Sundays. It was not walking in the park with your child. It was not laughing with them in the evening. It was what all of that took from you. The years it took off the end of your life. And the years it took along the way. Her mother stopped writing her memoirs. She stopped speaking of the past. Nostalgia took energy. Memory came at a cost.

“Would it bother you,” the man who found her asked, “to work your whole life, to do terrible things, but never know if any of it made a difference?” he asked. She shrugged. “Isn’t that just—life?”

“Their system isn’t for us,” her mother said. “We were left out of their calculations from the start.” “The PMs are supposed to promote human flourishing.” “The question is who gets to be a human. That has always been the question. You look tired. You should sleep more.”

Someone had taken the time to replace a wounded bird’s foot, just so it could do that most important thing of all—live. Squabble and bicker with its tribe, chatter aimlessly, make more life.

How could he ever know what side anyone was on? Or even how many sides there might be? He had imagined two sides, but of course there could be many.

“We named the problem we had after that hoax. We called our problem the immortal Turk. Because the PMs were supposed to be artificial intellects, and their decisions were supposed to be rational, people accepted reforms from them that they never would have accepted from a human government—in

“That’s how it is in the West. Here, it is the most dangerous book ever written. So dangerous the regime banished its writer to the taiga. So dangerous that reading it or quoting from it carries a death sentence. There, it is just another book, with a sales code on its back cover.” “But you carry a copy of that death sentence with you.” “Everything I do is a death sentence,” Taisiya said. “I may as well read what I feel like reading.”

But if there was someone left to write about him, it would mean the world was not over. That was the catch, wasn’t it? We keep imagining the apocalypse, but we also imagine what comes after.

Why did Nikolai have to live in this time? All he wanted was a quiet place. Somewhere between all the events of history—the war and butchery, the revolutions that smeared cobblestoned streets with blood, the religious fanaticism, the burning of cities—there must have been so many quiet times, so many safe places. Gaps in which a person could hide an entire life: times when a person could live from birth to death without the events of history destroying their happiness. A life lived in simple comfort. A life of meals, celebrations, births, deaths that occurred in their prescribed, generational order.

There must have been millions of human lives lived like that, people watching their children grow, tilling their fields or running their shops, content in the silence between history’s wars and plagues.

Nothing good ever happens. Good only exists when nothing happens at all.

But now, thinking of the wasps and the mantis, I take comfort. One day, this regime will know what the wasps know: For every hunter, there waits a hunter.

He wanted to take the worst of it on himself. He wanted to be the first to get hurt—and if possible, the only one. Zoya had never been that way: She had needed others to be hurt with her. Alongside her. So that she would not be alone. This was solidarity for her—the sharing of pain.