The Poacher
“Sometimes beauty is the simplest of things.”
Anta Keion was expecting the district land manager to be annoyed, but she expected him to do his job, whether begrudgingly or politely. But he never showed up. Instead, she waited for an hour for the executive of the Tea Trust to find a contact in the regional office to locate the land manager on call. Anta waited in a grove at the base of the steep hills of the southern wall—Athos’s lower lip. She could smell the tea rows that stretched nearly all the way up those hills to the head-wall. There was a hermit thrush in the area somewhere, she could hear, probably perched on one of the hedges. That was enough, she thought. If she had to wait, somewhere, this park, along the southwall outside Petros, was not a terrible place to sit on the grass, listen, and possibly spot a few flying visitors.
Most likely, they probably hoped she would just go away, but she’d filed the proper forms, and the walls were part of the public trust. Reasonable access needed to be granted.
She snacked on a blueberry honta-bar and read her novel, but she never did catch sight of that hermit thrush serenading her in the background. Finally, an official showed up, and she was shocked to see she recognized the man, but he was wearing a different uniform—the colors of the Ithacan Quarter.
“You?” the man said, looking at Anta as she stood and addressed him. “Causing trouble up here now?”
“Is it trouble for you to provide access to Athosian citizens, Commissioner Donruss?”
“I’m not a commissioner anymore Mrs. ... it was ... don’t tell me ... It’s Mrs. Keion? Right?”
Anta wasn’t surprised he remembered her, but she was impressed he remembered her name.
“That’s correct. Congratulations. It seems you’ve been promoted.”
“I’m the chief executive of the public land trust for the Quarter.”
“The entire Quarter? And they sent you out to tell me I can’t access the tea rows?”
“It’s a Saturday, I’m sure you’ve noticed, and I happened to be in Petros. I’ll be honest. Nobody wanted to come out from Ithaca to deal with you, Mrs. Keion.”
“What should I call you now? Not commissioner?”
“Chief Donruss is what my people call me, but you may call me Barron if you like.”
Anta Keion nodded at him. “I’ve had a devilish time with the Tea Trust. They’ve tried to block access for weeks now.”
“Mrs. Keion, I don’t know anything about the situation, but based on what I remember of you, this is about the birds, isn’t it?”
“That’s correct.”
“So, you’ve graduated too I see,” Donruss laughed. “It wasn’t enough to stalk the birds through every park in Ithaca? You had to come all the way out here too? On a Saturday, no less.”
“Why is this so difficult? The walls are public trust. I’ve filed everything correctly.”
“And how do you expect you’re going to get up there, Mrs. Keion? Labeling something a public trust doesn’t make the wall suddenly safely accessible.”
“The tea farmers must go up there.”
“Nobody goes up there but the spiderbots. What are you looking to do, a camera placement? A nesting box?”
“People don’t tend to the tea plants?”
“No,” Donruss replied, suppressing a laugh again. “No, of course not. The bots pick the tea. It’s too steep for any sort of public access. Hardly anybody goes up there, and nobody without proper safety gear or a drone suit.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize.”
“Can you tell me what you’re hoping to accomplish, Mrs. Keion? Maybe we can find a different way to accommodate your request.”
“We think there may be a poacher, Barron.”
“You do? A poacher? Who’s we?”
“The Ithacan Birders Club.”
Chief Donruss looked back at her perplexed.
“Connect the dots for me please, Mrs. Keion. How and why do you suspect a poacher, and how does that relate to those tea hedges up there? Which we will not be climbing today, for the record.”
“We track the numbers, of course. And certain birds have been disappearing around the area.”
“So you think somebody’s catching them somehow?”
“That’s the most likely explanation, probably through some illicit drone tech that’s evading the scanners.”
“That’s some stretch. You think somebody capable of bypassing the government’s network scanners is snatching up birds because your club’s count is off?”
“Well, we don’t know exactly, but when you put it that way it sounds like you’re being dismissive.”
Chief Donruss looked over at Anta Keion considering her comment. He shook his head and rubbed his chin.
“Regardless,” he finally said. “We can’t climb the walls today. What can I do for you, though, Mrs. Keion? What’s up on that wall?”
“There’s a bird-bot up there that belongs to one of our club members. It’s gone offline. And we think what happened is the poacher mistook it for a real bird and then discarded it in the hedges when they realized it was a bot. We’d like to recover it so we can examine the footage and telemetry on the data card.”
“Oh. That sounds reasonable.”
“That’s what we thought, but it’s been weeks trying to get anyone to respond.”
Donruss considered the situation for a moment. “It’s an odd request, but something we should be able to accommodate. It’s just not in the normal workflow, so probably nobody knows exactly how to meet that request.”
“It has been difficult getting anyone to be responsive.”
“You have the location? Coordinates?”
“We have an approximate location.”
“How big is the area?”
“We have the tracking to within twenty meters or so of its last connection, but it was static for several minutes before going offline.”
“Hmmm,” Barron Donruss replied. “I’m going to get hold of my Tea Trust liaison, Mrs. Keion. My people don’t have good gear to go searching around in those tea rows, but I think we could requisition some of their spiderbots. I can’t promise we’ll get it done this afternoon, but I’ll let you know as soon as I know when we can.”
“That’s excellent news, Barron. Thank you.”
Anta Keion sat back down on the grass and waited as Chief Donruss stepped away to ping the right people. He was talking for nearly twenty minutes, pacing along the grass. Anta returned to her novel while she waited. When Donruss finally came back, he was grinning.
“It’s going to be about an hour or so, but they had an operator volunteer to come in and take a few bots up there.”
“Excellent.”
“He was actually pretty keen to see how the spiderbots would handle a situation like this. They only ever run the algorithms to pick the tea, I think.”
Donruss explained that the operator for the Tea Trust would be by after he picked up gear, but he was coming in from Astapark. The Chief was on his way to a family gathering. He asked for Anta’s numbers so he could ping her later in the day to see how everything turned out.
She conveyed the news to her friends in the club, and went back to her story again, enjoying the light of the day and the distant sound of that hermit thrush’s haunting song.
It was over an hour before someone finally showed. The operator approached Anta, smiling, his eyewear sitting just on the crest of his brow as he walked up.
“Are you the lady with the bird?” he asked.
Anta nodded.
“What’s your name, Mama?”
She grinned at the endearing way the young man addressed her.
“I’m Anta.”
“I’m Trace. Nice to meet you,” he replied. “My grandma likes the birds too. She’s crazy for them. They said you lost it in the hedges?”
Anta explained the situation, and Trace’s smile grew wider as she did. He was eager to help. She gave him the coordinates as well as a description of the birdbot their club member lost up in those hedges—a kestrel. Then Trace invited her to sync her eyewear with his so she could watch as the spiderbots searched the area. Initially, he thought it wouldn’t take long.
However, what they both expected to find was an intact bird with its circuitry overloaded. But it wasn’t long before one of the spiderbots began to find a trail of feathers that went hot and cold over the span of about a half hour. Trace was extremely persistent. He wanted an answer to the mystery as well.
Finally, they found the body of the bot, its exterior torn apart, many of its feathers picked off, and much of the internal hardware and wing structures mangled. Trace was able to get most of the chassis secured onto the back of one of the spiderbots, which took another half hour to walk carefully down the sidewall to the park where Anta and Trace were waiting to get a close look at the bird with their own eyes.
Trace did his best to connect to the unit’s processor and memory with no luck.
“It must have got damaged in the attack. What do you think got it? Another bird? A real bird maybe?”
Anta was skeptical. “I’m not sure what would do that to a kestrel. Nothing in the area I can think of.”
“I have some friends I think could pull the data if the hardware’s intact.”
Anta smiled. “That’s very gracious of you. We’ve got a few tech wizards in the club, though. They specialize in birds too. I’d be happy to update you if you’re curious.”
“Yeah, I’d love to know if you can pull some footage or data. That’s kinda wild something would do that to a bird like that. I’m gonna tell my grandma all about it.”
Anta expressed her personal gratitude and told Trace he’d be a hero at the club. She took his numbers so she could update him, tucked the remains of the kestrel into her bag, and headed back for the hypermag so she could make it back to Ithaca before dinner.
That night Chief Donross pinged Anta. He’d gotten a report from Trace, and was curious to know whether the club had been able to pull any data from the mangled birdbot.
“Not yet,” she told him. “I’m going to deliver it to our tech experts first thing tomorrow.”
“We’re curious, of course,” Donross told her. “But it’s also a concern if there’s someone targeting real birds as well, especially if they’re poaching in the hedges somehow.”
“I’ll be certain to share any data we get from the bot if we’re able to recover anything.”
“Likewise, Mrs. Keion. Let me know if I can help. I do have a lot of pull in the Quarter these days.”
Anta was surprised at the sudden interest, given the struggle she’d had to get anyone to respond to her in the first place, but she was certainly happy to have it.
The following day, the techs connected to the kestrel’s processor and were able to rip the data. Unfortunately, the kestrel’s eyes didn’t catch a single frame of the predator that took it down, as it had caught the bot from behind and above and driven the kestrel down into the dirt and rocks in the hedgerows. Whatever got it, the predator was powerful, incapacitating the birdbot in a single sudden crunch.
Various club members had suggestions for investigation methods. They uploaded the kestrel’s data to a public server so anyone could study it, but they didn’t have a lot of hope that would lead to an answer. One of the group’s members suggested bringing the kestrel to an ornithology professor at the university. Another suggested the city forensics lab, which was more geared toward crime, but the consensus was that they would have some good suggestions for more ways to investigate.
Anta took the initiative and pinged Donross to see if he could make any of those connections. She was pleasantly surprised to get a warm call from an ornithologist, who stayed on with her for nearly two hours as nearly a dozen of the club’s most active members joined. In addition to the data from the kestrel, they shared park counts with her, as well as their statistical model which suggested an anomaly. The kestrel wasn’t the only missing bird.
“Poaching, though?” Professor Agassiz asked. “I’m not sure that’s supported.”
Athos did have a strong case for the greatest species diversity in all of the Battery Systems. There was certainly money to be made with novel genomes, but even more so if the poachers were able to take living birds as well.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had a case of poaching substantiated on Athos,” she insisted. “And I’m not sure the forensics lab would be interested in an ornithology investigation.”
“But poaching is certainly a crime,” one of the club members pointed out. “Something happened to Greta’s kestrel. That’s her property as well.”
“It’s a fair point. I’d certainly add my name to any petition to have them look at the evidence.”
Additionally, Professor Agassiz promised to have her department look at all the club’s data to see if they could draw any conclusions about the missing birds.
“It’s a small sample size, though,” she hedged, “and a big area. But we’ll look at it.”
Anta and the club didn’t hear back from the various professionals for several days. Finally, she got a ping, not from the actual city’s forensics lab but the forensics program at the university. Professor Agassiz had thought to call them when the crime lab balked at their broken bird, and the students were eager to take up the cause.
Not only that, Professor Agassiz, had gone deep on the club’s data, laying it over her analytics, and she agreed that there was a signal. She and her students already had suspicious data sets of their own, but nothing solid, and this too, she said, wasn’t overly concerning—a few missing birds here and there.
Professor Agassiz invited Anta to meet with the forensics lab to see the results of their analysis. She and three of the club’s board members headed to CICU and were shocked to be met there by Chief Donruss, who told Anta that the curiosity fell within his purview as the land trust chief for the Quarter. Plus, he was invested.
“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get any meaningful surface DNA off the bot,” McCleary, the forensics professor began, the disappointment clear on her face. “We know it was up there in the hedges several weeks, and the water and acidity and biomatter in the organic fertilizer mix left us with nothing but a mess of fragments. That made it impossible to draw any conclusions. The crush pattern on the chassis is curious though.”
She put up the model on a holoboard so they could display a large 3D projection of the birdbot’s skeleton.
“So the interesting thing is that the crush pattern of the major damage is consistent with a bird doing the damage—or at least a birdlike set of forces.”
“That would include a birdbot as well?” Professor Agassiz asked.
“That would be my prime suspect,” McCleary answered. “But certainly not any commercial model. That kind of force in the talons would be illicit, so it would have to be a custom design by a skilled roboticist.”
“That’s curious, though,” Chief Donruss said. “If it’s a poacher building a bot to catch living birds, wouldn’t that just kill the live ones too?”
“We had that thought too,” McCleary answered. “But if you’re running an operation to catch live birds with a bird bot, you’d want it to incapacitate another bot that could give it away if it caught footage of the culprit. So why not design it to detect a live bird versus a bot once it grabs its target? Then a tech skilled enough to build a set of talons like that could easily build to it have two settings—catch or kill. It may also be why it tore the chassis down to the processing core and dumped it in the hedges.”
“What about a bird, though?” Donruss asked. “I get the impression you all think that’s unlikely, but it’s possible, right?”
Professor Agassiz and the members of the bird club discussed all the different raptors that had been introduced on Athos. They listed the raptors that could crush a bird-bot as well as those that could catch a kestrel—or the bot version, as the case was. Then the debate began—which could do both? There were heated arguments over the possibility of a fully-grown hobby possessing the power in the talons, which seemed doubtful to most. Then an even hotter argument began over whether a golden eagle—of which there were ten in the Ithacan Quarter—had the agility to hunt a kestrel. It certainly had the power and the speed. Professor Agassiz noted that she’d never seen a case of a golden taking on such challenging prey, but if they were simply listing the possibilities, she admitted it wasn’t impossible. She thought it would be an excellent project for her advanced students to model.
There was one prime suspect, though—the fastest and most cunning bird hunter on Earth or any other settlement in the galaxy where birds obtained—the peregrine falcon. They were known to catch bots by mistake quite often. It was unusual for them to hang on, though, once they’d realized they’d caught a bot instead of a meal.
Professor Agassiz pulled the location data on all the falcons in the Ithacan Quarter. She confirmed that there hadn’t been an overlap with the location where the kestrel was found. But she couldn’t rule out a traveler from Desh’s Quarter passing through. It still didn’t seem likely though.
“There is one more bird we haven’t considered,” Nole, one of the bird club’s oldest members added when the list seemed to be exhausted. “It’s unlikely ... but if we’re looking to eliminate all possibilities ...”
“Not a raptor?” Anta asked. “But big enough and strong enough to crush a kestrel?”
“Bock bock!” Nole said, grinning.
All the birders started laughing.
“A chicken?” a surprised Donruss asked.
“I was thinking more a rooster maybe,” Nole answered. “I’m mostly joking.”
“Considering it would have to be free-falling and hit the kestrel by accident on the way down,” Anta joked. “That’s about the only way a rooster could catch a kestrel.”
“Or be shot out of a cannon,” Professor Agassiz added. “They’re tough birds, though.”
“What about one of the harpies?” Professor McCleary asked. “I saw a pair once at the aviary in Moses-Mesui. They’re certainly strong enough.”
“We’d have heard if there were a harpy within a thousand kilometers of Ithaca,” Professor Agassiz replied. “That’d be all over our feeds.”
“A bajillion videos,” Anta agreed.
“Also, they don’t travel much,” Nole said. “Nor could they catch a bird that agile.”
With the list of possible suspects narrowed down to a few, excluding chickens, Professor Agassiz promised to look into flight data on all their possible avian suspects to see if she could eliminate the possibility of a living culprit. It was generally agreed that the likeliest scenario was a poacher operating a sophisticated bot. She believed deep analytics would be the best methodology for catching their poacher. She was going to put the word out among her colleagues around the ring.
After the meeting with the scientists, Anta wasn’t expecting any swift answers. It seemed their kestrel had become a genuine mystery, a headscratcher even the bird experts didn’t have a good answer for. And as the first few days passed, and Professor Agassiz began to report on her students’ analysis of the peregrine falcon data, their prime suspect became a less and less likely culprit unless a rogue falcon had escaped the ring’s fastidious tagging system. She could see how a less exciting bird might escape the program, but every falcon’s nest on the ring had a camera on it, every egg accounted for by some local ornithologist and birding club. Anta still believed, as she had from the beginning, that the perpetrator was probably a person. She just didn’t understand the mentality of somebody going to all that trouble to do something like that.
The excitement had settled since the big meeting. Even the club’s chat board had died down a little as pictures of daily sightings and stories about grandchildren became the majority of the posts again. Champ Dreeson posted an excellent video of the early stages of a build with his grandson—a male cardinal they planned to release in the Petros Oak Garden.
Suddenly, in the middle of her lunch with her former colleagues, Professor Agassiz pinged her. The message was categorized red. Agassiz told Anta she couldn’t reveal exactly what was happening, but she asked for Anta to meet her at the Rand-Wallace tram stop that afternoon out in the lakes region.
“I promise you will not be disappointed.”
Anta could hear the excitement in the professor’s voice. It was certainly an inconvenience to get out there on such short notice, but she was already out, so instead of rushing home, she excused herself from lunch with the trusty old phrase she often used to escape a boring meeting when they all used to work for the ITA: “Something’s come up, and I have to run.”
All her colleagues thought it was pretty funny—like old times.
When she got all the way out to the tram stop in Rand a few hours later, Agassiz directed her to a stand where she could take an autocab out to a park at the edge of Lake Bell, where she was told a small group was awaiting her arrival.
When Anta got there, she recognized two members of the trio instantly—Professor Agassiz herself and Chief Donruss. The third figure’s face seemed oddly familiar under a dark hat, and in the shade of the trees by the lakeside, she couldn’t quite place him. But immediately on greeting her, the stranger’s voice gave his identity away.
“You’ve uncovered a genuine mystery, Mrs. Keion, haven’t you?” the embodied Maícon stated in that unmistakable voice of theirs.
“I suppose we have. I didn’t imagine it would catch the interest of one of the Quarter’s AIs, though. Professor Agassiz must have been very colorful in her posts.”
She could see the professor and Donruss grinning as though they knew something she didn’t.
“No, Mrs. Keion. I do not work for the Quarter. I do not work for anyone. Doubtless you recognize my likeness, but I am not another of the clones on the ring. I am Maícon Prime.”
“Oh,” she replied, wide-eyed. “That’s ... I’m very honored to meet you.”
“And I am honored to meet you. Your persistence is commendable, and your instincts second to none.”
Anta shook her head skeptically. All she’d wanted to do was find out what had happened to Greta’s kestrel. And she’d had enough free time on her hands to not let it slide.
“I don’t know about all that,” she said. “But I’m happy it’s caught your attention.”
“You’re too modest,” Maícon stated. “I do have many areas of interest on the ring and elsewhere, and, of course, I have a much greater capacity to filter information than any human. And, as a Prime AI, I get privileged access to my clones’ perspectives as well. This may not be known to many people, but I and my fellow AIs have been building birds for centuries.”
“Really?”
“Quite so. If you’ve been to the Waterlands on Iophos you may have seen my kingfishers there. And here on Athos, in Yuhl’s Quarter there’s a quintet of my very own magpies who haunt the plains at the base of the northwall.”
“No tea out there,” Anta replied.
“Quite right,” Maícon said, grinning in a way Anta would have thought reflected pride if the AI was capable of it. “Anyway, I and several of my clones have been picking at the datasets Professor Agassiz has been uploading to the academic ornithology server. We’re here today, because what we’ve uncovered is a curious trail, not just in the case of the kestrel, but several other incidents of missing bots, but more importantly, missing eggs and missing birds.”
“Really? How is that possible? Wouldn’t that be observed?”
“It certainly would have been missed if I and my clones hadn’t been curious. The losses are so small locally that they are almost indistinguishable from normal data. However, data from across the octants is rarely cross-referenced because we assume a truth that has been observed since birds were introduced here on the ring—that birds do not migrate as they once did on Earth. Why would they when they are happy and well fed amongst the trees and brush of their original nesting grounds? But our culprit, whoever it is, he is clever. When I and my clones overlaid data across the eight Athosian octants, we found a faint signal beginning in Desh’s Quarter near Basten. We suspect the culprit is from there, as the signal began there, lingered in the River Flats near Arbor Glen, and then slowly began to make its way toward Ithaca. The culprit hunts sparsely enough that numbers are scarcely affected in a single region. Thus, I suspect a birder, Mrs. Keion—someone who understands how the data is aggregated, as well as how to cull birds in just such a way that the losses won’t ever be connected.”
“But we have now, no?” Anta replied. “Now that the word is out on the message boards, the game’s up.”
“That’s why we couldn’t say he was involved,” Professor Agassiz answered. “The game would certainly be up if word got out that Maícon Prime was involved. But for now, all the boards say that nobody knows what’s going on—big mystery.”
“But we intend to catch this culprit,” Maícon declared. “I’ve brought a few friends to help.”
He directed Anta and the others’ attention to the case that had trailed behind him on the way out to Lake Bell. He set it on its side and flipped open the trunk to reveal an assortment of bots unlike any Anta had ever seen—not even from the keenest builder. It was divided into three distinct racks—large, medium, and small, each of the birds easily recognizable to the avid birder, save one.
“I’m not familiar with that bird,” Anta said, pointing at the top rack, where a bright little yellow and black bird lay inert on its side, encased in protective foam.
“That little fellow is a honeycreeper,” Maícon replied. “Also known as the bananaquit. Unfortunately, we don’t have a reconstituted genome as yet, and may never. They were known to eat sugar directly from people’s hands.”
Anta smiled at the thought.
Maícon explained how he intended to surveil the lakes region with his personal collection. Alongside the honeycreeper and various other small birds, the most versatile bots were a small flock of grey jays. But Anta was mesmerized by Maícon Prime’s two proudest creations, a dazzling fiery-throated hummingbird and a magnificent great horned owl. Both were engineering masterpieces.
“Of course I don’t feel nervous,” Maícon said as he released the owl, “but I do many more calculations whenever I release this bird. Saraswathi herself told me she would be jealous of it if she were human.”
Anta marveled at the owl as it seemed to come to life, its eyes perking up as its body straightened, it threw back its wings, and lunged forward, taking flight.
The group walked around the lake, surveying with their own eyes and eyewear. They all understood odds were against their finding anything out of the ordinary on the afternoon. But they were there, and they took the time to observe as they walked together and planned.
“It may take weeks,” Maícon told Anta, “but I am confident we shall find our poacher.”
Maícon explained poaching to Anta. He agreed that on Athos it didn’t make much sense. What Anta hadn’t considered is how difficult it could be to get hold of new or exotic genomes out in the Indies, the Protectorate, or even the far-flung Lettered Systems. Out there, not only were varied genomes difficult to find, the expertise and equipment to recover a new one was even more difficult to come by. It was far easier to duplicate the work already done here in Dreeson’s System with an egg kit and incubator, promulgating a species that way.
It was an informative afternoon, and for Anta, a thrill to meet a being as old and wise as Maícon Prime. What surprised her most was his good humor, and though he claimed to lack the capacity for genuine enthusiasm in the human sense, he seemed to be extremely keen to track down their poacher.
As predicted, there was no sign of their culprit that day, but Maícon promised his birds and his clones would be working around the clock to crack the case.
Even with a prime AI working on the problem, the poacher proved surprisingly elusive. At Maícon’s request, Professor Agassiz had publicly recanted on the message boards, writing that her team had gotten ahead of itself and that their interpretations of the anomalies in the data were overzealous. This, Anta knew, was just a ruse to give the impression that they’d given up looking—to trick their poacher into thinking he was in the clear. Meanwhile, Maícon and his clones were combing through every possible related dataset they could think to interrogate.
Still, after a week, Anta and Professor Agassiz were confiding in private messages that they’d expected something to pop up by then.
Then, Agassiz pinged with news.
“The Maícons think they might have been behind on the data—a lag they didn’t anticipate.”
“I’m not a scientist like all of you,” Anta replied. “What does that mean, practically speaking?”
“It means that we think the poacher might have moved on from the lakes region already. We were probably a week to ten days behind him, which means the birds were out searching the wrong area. We’re going to keep trying closer to Soren Greens. Maícon thinks the poacher may be out there now.”
After Anta got off the call, she considered her week. It was one of the benefits of retirement. There wouldn’t be a boss calling if she skipped out. And, if there was a birder’s paradise in the Battery anywhere it was there in Soren Greens—more brightly-colored species in the artificial rainforest there than the remainder of Athos or Iophos combined.
She told her children, of course, but not why. And she told Professor Agassiz she was coming. But she didn’t tell anyone else, not even the most loyal club members. Sure, she felt a little guilty about keeping the hunt for the poacher a secret. But the fact that Maícon Prime insisted on discretion helped to ease that guilt. She packed her best eyewear and comfortable shoes, and she set off for Soren Greens the following morning.
Shockingly, Anta hadn’t even made the hypermag stop in Soren Greens before she got a ping to her eyewear from a user she didn’t recognize initially, who went by the handle “Night Parrot.”
“I understand you’re taking a trip,” the message began. “Perhaps you’d care to join us up in Soren Greens?”
She had a sense for who it might be, especially as she only had to be seen by one of them, and he had hundreds of clones in Ithaca alone. Odds were very good that she’d been spotted by one of Maícon’s clones on her way to the hypermag. She couldn’t help but look around the car to see if one might have hopped on the train with her. Then she felt silly for looking.
Night Parrot sent her some images. “An interesting development,” the caption read. “Meet at Ankora.”
The picture was of a very famous bird in Soren Greens, one of the trumpeter swans that nested along the southwall where the water was artificially cooled to create variability in the local plant diversity. It also attracted Maggie and Hobart, a mating pair of swans who’d grown quite famous in the birding community. Ankora, she knew, was close by their nest.
She got off the hypermag at Soren Greens and took the local tram out to Ankora. Then there was a twenty-minute walk on a boardwalk along a stream that led down to the swans’ secluded pond. It was a popular place for tourists to visit in Soren Greens. No one was allowed to get too close to the swans, though. As she was approaching the entrance to the tree-covered trail, Anta was approached by a Maícon clone.
“Welcome to Soren Greens, Mrs. Keion,” he greeted her. “Your compatriots are on their way; however, Prime did not want to be seen directly. He will meet you later.”
Once they were away from the public path, the Maícon clone explained that people would be watching them. He also shared that one of Prime’s birds had observed Hobart with a troubling wound on his lower neck.
“Certainly not a mortal wound,” Maícon said. “But there is no precedent for a swan being attacked like this. And, as we’ve been monitoring transponder data for all the raptors in the area in real-time, we can rule out an avian attacker with complete certainty. So either it was a troubled person or, more likely, our poacher taking on his most ambitious target yet.”
“Is Hobart all right?” Anta asked.
“The chief veterinarian is tending to his wounds as we speak, along with one of my brethren.”
The Maícon clone escorted her to a secluded spot in the woods, where they’d taken Hobart to be treated. By the time Anta arrived, the male swan had been sedated. The vet and the other Maícon clone were documenting the wounds and treating the bird. They discovered several gashes along his breast and belly in addition to the deep laceration at the base of Hobart’s neck, almost an avulsion. The vet declared that it looked far worse than it was, “because of the white feathers.” She was stitching him up by then. “He’s going to be sore for a little while, though.”
She was busy working, and, at first, the Maícons’ obvious comfort with Anta’s presence led the vet to refrain from asking about her. But after a while, she did inquire who Anta was and what she was doing there, and Anta didn’t have a good answer for her except the truth. She wasn’t sure whether it was safe to tell the vet.
“She’s a friend of Prime’s,” the Maícon assisting with Hobart noted, “quite famous in the Ithacan birding community.”
“Oh,” the vet replied, satisfied with that answer. “Then it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Keion.”
She shook Anta’s hand, and, after Hobart was all stitched up, she allowed Anta to escort them as they brought Hobart back down to the pond and cleaned off his red feathers. Maggie came over and sat by curiously as they all waited for Hobart to come around again. She was surprisingly docile, which the vet explained was likely because of the comfort level she had with the female. “Maggie imprinted on me as a cygnet,” the vet explained. “It’s a special trust.”
It was an afternoon Anta would never forget. She knew she was going to have to restrain herself from telling the story so many times that every birder in Ithaca would know it by heart.
That evening, Maícon Prime, Professor Agassiz, and Chief Donruss met at a hotel in Ankora where Donruss had booked a suite. The Maícons were studying the incident, which they believed had happened nearly twelve hours before Hobart’s injuries had been discovered, near dusk the day before. Nothing had been directly caught on any of the nest cams, but a suspicious shadow had appeared about a half hour before Hobart was seen to fly off camera, and he could be observed behaving very anxiously for nearly an hour preceding his exit. It was the best clue they had yet.
The Maícons had examined the wounds carefully in consultation with Professor McCleary and her forensics team at the university. The cuts were consistent with large talons, curved, sharp, and strong—not inconsistent with the damage to the kestrel. Odds were very good it was the same culprit.
“The trail heats up,” Maícon prime declared. “I am confident he cannot escape much longer with my birds and the public camera feeds looking. I do believe we will bring this poacher to justice shortly.”
That thought gave Anta pause. Not that she didn’t want to see the perpetrator stopped, but she almost didn’t want to see the person responsible. All the motives that Prime had related to her by the lake. It seemed so tawdry, a kind of mundane ugliness that didn’t rear its head often on Athos—to wound innocent animals for something so cheap as financial profit. And the more she thought about it, the more she felt a strange sense of dread in the pit of her stomach. A dream day, up close with Hobart and Maggie. The vet had let Anta hold his wing as she’d cleaned off Hobart’s feathers and pet his back to sooth him as he was coming around. That magic, but all because of the pettiest, ugliest form of greed she could imagine.
She had trouble drifting off to sleep with all the excitement, and, now, the confusion.
The attack on Hobart changed everything. It eliminated their chief avian suspect—the peregrine falcon, leaving only two possibilities, which were now impossibilities. The golden eagles in Yuhl’s Quarter were all tagged elsewhere, the closest, clear on the other side of Soren Greens for three entire days prior. And further, to be certain, Professor Agassiz crossed-checked video feeds confirming that the tag telemetry was correct. That golden, a male juvenile that had been traveling some weeks prior, had spent the week circling a small area and was caught on camera several times perfectly overlapping the tag data. He was not there.
The only other birds on Athos that feasibly could have injured Hobart like that were the bald eagles in Zair’s Quarter, and they, all ten accounted for, were almost halfway across the ring—a decade’s odyssey at an eagle’s pace, even if one got the notion to travel.
All the birds had been eliminated.
The bot, though, was bigger and more formidable than the team had supposed. On the other hand, Maícon assured the team that its handler couldn’t possibly be so elusive as the bird he was operating. He couldn’t be traveling without the aid of local trams, all of which kept perfect data sets of passengers as well as video files while in operation—databases that an AI like Maícon could mine for whatever data they needed to break the case. Additionally, the resources of the local community watches and even the Ringwatch could be brought to bear, as a serious crime had now been confirmed. The birds in Soren Greens were protected. Now, investigators could search any type of transaction, from hotel registrations to dinners to any manner of purchase that might align with the poacher’s trail. Maícon was confident they would have a suspect within hours. He all but assured the group as much the following morning.
Yet as the days pressed on following the incident with Maggie and Hobart, Maícon’s birds still hadn’t located the illicit bot, nor had the local or ring-wide authorities identified a suspect.
Anta spent four days in Soren Greens, and though she was looking for the bird-killer primarily as she toured the rainforest there, she didn’t neglect to see as many exciting species as she could possibly take in.
By day five, though, everyone was convinced that this ingenious poacher must have moved on, somehow evading authorities there. So it was time for Anta to move on as well. Her granddaughter had a theater production that week, the club had an important board meeting, and her middle son Andre’s family was moving flats from Napre into Solenstom. Anta expected that the excitement surrounding this poacher was over.
For several weeks, she was correct. Professor Agassiz was keeping her updated as the search progressed toward Moses-Mesui. It was impossible to track the poacher in real-time, as bird data took some time to collect and lagged days, weeks, and sometimes months behind where Maícon expected the poacher was presently operating. The ringwide authorities were taking an entirely different approach—tracking suspicious spaceship traffic heading out into the Indies and Letters. Anta’s little kestrel investigation had gone interstellar.
Maícon and his birds shifted from Soren Greens to Kol-Ip to Shenal, and nearly two months following that day she’d met Chief Donruss out by the south wall in Petros, Maícon Prime was in Kersharri with his birds, chasing a ghost it seemed. Even Professor Agassiz had given up the hunt and returned to Ithaca.
Late one evening as she was getting ready for bed, Anta got a message from a familiar source—Night Parrot. It read: “One of my whisky jacks found something remarkable. If you are inclined to join me on the chase again, we are in Kersharri, heading toward Napong.
Anta thought about it. Maícon had tracked that poacher across two octants by then. It was a fairly long trip on the hypermag. Her initial thought was to politely decline, but then Maícon sent her an encrypted image—a feather. The implication was that it came from the poacher’s bird-bot. It was large and green and perfect. Anta zeroed in on various parts of the rachis, vanes, and barbs. The closer she looked, the more beautiful it looked, like it must have been printed at the molecular level.
“It’s even better than it looks,” another message followed. “Come soon or it may fly away.”
It was a curious and oddly metaphorical message to receive from an AI, Anta thought, but he was a prime, after all. She decided to sleep on it.
She woke up to an urgent message from Agassiz. “Get down here! You’re not going to believe it.”
Anta got dressed and rushed down to the university, where Agassiz was packing a go-bag of gear. She waved Anta into her lab and waved the door shut behind her.
“DNA,” she exclaimed in a hushed whisper.
“It’s real?”
Agassiz nodded.
“What species?”
“Unknown.”
Anta was perplexed by that answer. They had digital genomic records from every known species of bird on Earth, and certainly on Athos.
“Engineered?”
“It has to be,” Agassiz replied. “But he doesn’t know how yet.”
The Professor was catching the eleven express to Moses-Mesui, which was too late for Anta to catch now, not if she wanted to pack. So she told Agassiz she would meet them along the way as soon as she could. Moses-Mesui was a long trip, and Anta wasn’t going to rush it. Instead, she booked an overnight sleeper car and took her time preparing her trip that afternoon.
When Anta woke the following morning as the hypermag approached Kersharri, she’d reviewed a string of excited messages from Agassiz that had come in throughout the night, the most important of which was the hotel where the professor was staying. It was still very early out there, so early Anta wasn’t sure anyone would be up yet.
Anta got off the hypermag, she took a tram out that way in darkness, and entered a very quiet hotel lobby. She sat for a coffee in the lounge thinking it might be a long wait for Agassiz to come down for breakfast.
Suddenly, she heard the familiar voice of a being who never slept or ate breakfast.
“I heard you were on your way, Mrs. Keion,” Maícon Prime said. “I thought you might like to join me this morning. Professor Agassiz and I were up late last night sequencing. She will likely need to sleep for several hours yet, and, I suspect, now is the time.”
“The time for what?”
“To find the bird.”
“You believe it’s biological? Really? A new bird?”
“Yes to all three. Shall we go find it?”
Anta’s eyes got wide. “Of course,” she said, taking her coffee to go.
Prime had an autocab waiting, which he directed toward the southwall at the outlying edge of Kersharri. Similar to Petros, the Lakes Region, and Soren Greens, there were open spaces and a lot of trees in that sparsely-populated area of the Quarter.
Along the way, Maícon showed Anta a composite of their mysterious novel bird based on the genetic sequencing he and Agassiz had done that night.
“Strange genetics,” Prime explained. “It is as though the designer took attributes of a hundred different birds, selecting this trait here and that trait there, and jumbled them all together into this elegant creature.”
It was long and tall, and strangely for a raptor, green.
“And the most curious part of all,” Maícon continued. “All the hallmarks of genetic splicing are absent from the genome.”
“I don’t understand,” Anta replied. “I thought you said it was stitched together.”
“It only seems that way from looking at the traits the animal would possess, Mrs. Keion. The genome itself exhibits no signs of deliberate manipulation, yet it is an entirely novel genome.”
“How is that possible?”
“An excellent question to which I do not have an answer. But I and my brethren have performed a comprehensive re-examination of the analytics. The possibility of an actual avian predator changes our modeling’s assumptions. Between that and the composite of the animal we’ve constructed based on this genome, I believe we have a narrower search area. My birds are already in pursuit.”
“You think we’ll find it?”
“I think we’ll find it today, Mrs. Keion. You may be the first human being to see it.”
“I don’t understand how such a thing is possible. A new genomic technology? Something like this defies evolutionary theory, unless I’m mistaken?”
“We primes enjoy rare privileges that come with our great longevity and ability to process vast repositories of information. One such privilege is that we live so long that the universe flattens. Even the rarest of circumstances eventually becomes something we see over and over so many times that even those rarities seem common. But live even longer than that, if you consider my form of sentience living, and eventually you will see the universe wink at you. Today may be one such day. Count yourself fortunate to be alive for it.”
At first, as Anta processed what Maícon was telling her, she couldn’t help but feel like he must be speaking hyperbolically, simply because of the statistical rarity. It seemed impossible on its face. But the longer she sat in silence, thinking, the more the reality of the situation set in. He was an AI, and a prime AI at that. He knew which days in the past millennia had been marked out as special, and he remembered them all perfectly, and prime AIs like him had a capacity for predictive algorithms that was unmatched in all of the Battery.
As they progressed, the morning was beginning to brighten and people were emerging to start their day. Anta had read about a watery marshland in Kersharri by the southwall. It was populated by a number of bright, beautiful ducks. They were headed that way.
“My owl has been following a dark shadow against the nanosheet off and on throughout the night. It couldn’t close on it. The green bird was flying high and extremely fast, covering great distances in a snakelike pattern.” Maícon grinned as he reported this update. “My jays are strategically positioned. We will be as well.”
He attempted to explain the shift in algorithms and why he believed that had helped him narrow the search to a small area. As vast as the great ring was, once he knew that it was a bird and that it was migrating, he had a bearing. Those late-night shades against the nanosheet, tiny blips against the night, had solved their equation.
“I have a hit,” Maícon proclaimed as the autocab approached the southwall. There was a vista—a tourist lookout with an elevated platform that jutted out from halfway up the southern wall. It wasn’t open to the public at that hour.
Maícon brought the autocab there anyway. “In the clear case of a public interest, I do possess certain key-codes.”
“Oh,” Anta replied.
It all seemed like a dream. She wondered for a moment if she could be dreaming, still on the hypermag gently rocking toward Moses-Mesui. But no, when she stepped out of the autocab with him, she felt the chill of the morning air against her skin. Similar to Petros and Soren Greens, the southwall in Kersharri was cool as well.
Maícon escorted Anta to the lookout’s entrance, waving open the main gate as promised, and lights in the dark concourse flicked on as they stepped inside. Their footsteps echoed across the empty floor on the way to the lift. As the doors opened, Maícon announced: “We’ve had several hits. My whisky jacks are triangulating. The owl is too big and slow.”
On the way up, Maícon asked to see Anta’s eyewear, “So I can sync with it,” he told her. “What I see, you will see.”
“You have excellent sight, I’ll bet,” she said.
“And so shall you, Mrs. Keion. You will share my view and the jays’ as well. They’re closing in.”
They were flying very high, almost to the nanosheet.
“You will be the first human to see it,” Maícon said as they rushed out of the lift to the high open veranda.
Maícon was pointing across the valley, such as the entirety of the ring’s floor was, from southwall to north. It all looked flat to Anta, though. The entire ring seemed to be glowing a deep golden-orange as the daylight came up.
And then he pointed.
“It is there.”
Anta put on her eyewear. It was nearly a thousand meters above them, flying along the hills that made up the southern wall, nearly two kilometers down in the direction of Moses-Mesui. Maícon lifted his head and brought the great bird into frame. It seemed to glide with the effortless efficiency of an albatross or a frigate bird. It was green, a deep, pure, beautiful green like the trees in the heart of their summer glory. From Maícon’s perspective, Anta couldn’t see the shape of its head, but she could see the talons, and she could see the outline of its majestic wingspan.
“I am trying to get closer with the jays,” Maícon explained. “To get a look at its face and head. A profile in flight. But it will be difficult. It is so, so fast.”
It was almost impossible for Anta to tell. There was no backdrop to gauge its speed against. No clouds in Athos’s perfectly managed climate this morning.
“It is coming up on them,” Maícon announced, his face fixed on a tiny, distant point in the sky.
Anta blinked and lowered her glasses for a moment to see if she could make it out with her naked eyes, and no, certainly not. It was too far away. She almost missed it.
As the bird approached Maícon’s jays, it seemed to sense them with some supernatural form of perception, and in the single blink of an eye, without even the slightest hint of effort, it suddenly inverted its entire body, bent its wings back over itself, and took a careful, long look at the grey jays it was overtaking, tilting its head, examining, considering, before deciding they were of little concern.
Their view, as Maícon had promised, was astounding.
The great hunter hung in the air, seemingly defying physics like that, for nearly a full minute, losing hardly any altitude, before again flipping over in the blink of an eye, into a sharp, angular stoop along the top of the cliffs that made up the headwall.
“When do you suppose a species was last named, Mrs. Keion?”
“I’ve never given it any thought.”
“A long time, certainly. And today that honor must fall to you. It is a job for a human, and you are the one who brought us to this new species.”
It didn’t take Anta Keion long. It wasn’t her style to make things any more complex than they needed to be. Sometimes beauty is the simplest of things.
“He is our poacher,” she declared. “So that’s what we’ll call him. The poacher.”
And as she said it, the poacher ducked behind the cliff wall in the distance, high and fast, diving along the rocks, with a fleet of overmatched sprinting jays rushing behind him in hot pursuit.