“Who are you. This is a soiree. Give us a nickname.”
“I am the Cripple.”
“If you have multiple personae, who else is there?”
“I am the Kid, the Student, the Spacer, the Cap, the Agent, the Assassin, the Ghost, and the Cripple. Mostly the Cripple. There is another who watches me, stops me. I call it the Censor, but it is not me.”
Sergei commented, “Doctor Marin tells me he has a medical monitor. If he tried to kill himself, could they have installed a routine to prevent suicide, something that reacts to severe stress?”
Leilani continued, soothingly, “That was another you this afternoon, working the ministers to get them talking. Who was that?”
“That was the Ghost. The Ghost understands the Mission. He is good at planning, at getting people to work together. He is ruthless and will kill you if the Mission requires it. Do not trust the Ghost. The Assassin is worse. Fear the Assassin.”
I was starting to calm down again. Leilani and Sergei were looking at each other, and I could recognize from their expressions that they were wondering. Mission? What mission? But I had already told them. Puck had told them. We were to find and follow the Path of Justice that leads to Peace. At any cost to ourselves.
I was still the Cripple, but the soiree had allowed my different personae to talk again. Like the ministers. There were still secrets to keep, because too many lives were at stake, but at least I was talking to myself again.
In the distance, outside myself, I saw Mahatma come up. “Anastasia and I both got a jolt of fear… Lady Tatiana, you are... I missed something, didn’t I?”
Sergei just shook his head.
Toyami looked fearful and angry, “Damn, what the hell just happened? Your terror came across the comm and almost paralyzed me.”
Leilani was putting the pieces together as I watched. “Doctor Toyami, he told me this often enough, but I never understood. Your life will be longer and happier if he never needs to tell you.”
Toyami was not reassured. “But it is my job to know. You are telling me I will die young and miserable because of it, but you still refuse to explain? What happened?”
Sergei shook his head again and put a finger to his lips. He and Leilani would discuss my past and might now understand some of my old reports. They would tell Toyami what she needed to know. My real secrets were safe and the ministers knew the scale of the disaster we faced. Of a sudden, I felt my souls realign again. The core of my team knew, and they did not hate me. We were fighting for the same cause, on the same mission. I just had to explain it to them properly.
I looked around with the lazy disconnection of the exhausted. Singh and Molongo both looked strained by my outburst over the comm, but Molongo was clearly responding to some other comm message as well. I watched without concern as he excused himself and left the Soiree. Slowly, slowly, I rejoined the discussion.
That night, after the soiree was over and dinner eaten, after a few rounds of Fleet Maneuvers, and an hour of meditation, I had the deepest, most peaceful sleep I could remember in years.
2357-03-04 19:00
The Rape
I woke from a beautiful dream, one of the ones you wish you could remember but never can. Chandrapati was prodding me.
“Stop it man. Stop it now. I need to sleep too.”
He looked haggard. Everyone else hovered around, as haggard as Chandrapati and mostly annoyed as well. I must have been broadcasting again.
“You do understand,” he continued, “that I am celibate? You have said the words, but I am not sure you really understand.”
“What was I broadcasting this time? Leilani warned me I might start sending kisses. Not to the whole team, I hope?”
I checked my internal logs. Yes, I broadcast to the whole team. At first. After that, individual messages to small groups and to individuals. I replayed a couple of them. Kisses followed by blow jobs, cunnilingus, oh God, the whole dictionary of sex, custom tailored to each group and individual. Every hour, another batch went out, probably every time I started dreaming.
Poor Chandrapati seemed to be the spokesperson for the group.
“The kisses feel like real kisses, and some of them carry extra passion. I suppose it is better than the nightmare, but I had to meditate for an hour every time just to quell the rush, and after that you started again. I feel like I have suffered all night in one of Yama’s hells of lust. And that was after the interrogations, which I can only say went badly after your scream of panic. Molongo was hardly in a forgiving mood before we started. By the time he arrived in person, he was ready to kill all three of them for sport.”
Molongo and Singh. I checked through the logs again. Almost as bad as the rest, if less explicit.
Leilani glared at me. “You spent part of our game last night looking through the lists of emojis.”
It was not a question, and I could only nod agreement. I remembered feeling disappointed that there were no emojis for group togetherness or karmic bliss. There were many others, both pleasant and bitterly unpleasant. I wondered who compiled the lists and why. It was bad enough that I had kept everyone awake with sex and love, but there were also emojis for suspicion, despair, rage, and personal hatred. Those could be weapons, and did not seem appropriate for any game that I wanted to play.
I could feel myself flushing with embarrassment, but I also felt an undercurrent of satisfaction for a job well done and a perfectly wicked glee for a totally successful prank.
Toyami picked up, “I had to masturbate every time you started sending, and what you put poor Leilani and Sergei through... That was sophomoric at best.”
I checked a couple of the messages I had sent to Leilani and Sergei. I had practically told them to screw in front of everyone, and then hosed them with... If they never spoke to me again, they would be fully justified. Especially Sergei, who had never been on a freighter. I closed my eyes because I could not look anyone in the face.
“I am sorry. Again. Doctor Toyami, we must find a way to shut down my nocturnal emissions – I am sorry – communications. There must be a way to block or filter these messages, preferably at my end. And I still do not understand how I can be sending them. This was not just a dream. It feels like a prank from my student days, but with the cunning and purpose of a propaganda campaign. Have you had a chance to talk with Sergei and Leilani yet?”
“No,” she replied, coldly, “we were all too busy last night, and are too tired to be coherent now.”
I checked the time. It was still night, with three hours till breakfast.
Leilani growled, “You stay awake for the next five hours while the rest of us sleep. Somebody needs to stay with him to ensure he does not have any more juvenile fantasies.”
Raul volunteered, “I will. Maybe we can discuss weapons and tactics. That should be safe.”
He dragged me off to the washroom, I assumed for a bit of privacy. Then he turned on me.
“Why the hell did you try to set me up with Molongo and Singh? They were not even in the same room. And if Leilani does not beat you to death herself, I will do it for her. That is, if I get a chance after Sergei and Toyami are done. Are you trying to drive us away? That was just despicable.”
Molongo, Singh and Raul? I checked the groupings of my dream messages. Mostly the doctors were together, with cuddly, affectionate emojis that only occasionally got explicit. Except Toyami, who was grouped half the time with Leilani and Sergei, always passionately explicit. Evgenia and Katerina were another close pairing, although Katerina was also included in some of the broadcasts to Sergei and Leilani. Evgenia always got lesbian emojis and I did not even know if she swung that way. Probably not, coming from Law Enforcement on the Earth. There was too much method in these groupings. The cold satisfaction I felt told me that the Ghost had made the arrangements, but it also felt like the Student and the Cap may have chosen which emojis I sent. And the Kid felt like he had stuck it to the Man.
There had been times before when one of my former personae see
med to take over and run my body. Most of the time, I thought of myself as the Cripple, the broken shell that held the other bits together, and it had taken years for the Cripple to seem like a real person. I did not want to explain those personae to Raul, and I was not even sure that the image of the Cripple was appropriate to the creature emerging now.
“Raul, when I returned from Mars, I was a broken man. I tried to kill myself a dozen times, each one more devious and spectacular than the last. The psychs who cared for me were forbidden to let me die because I was intended to be a weapon again should it become necessary. I would also bet that the original psychs expected to be present to guide the process when I was reintegrated. Who knows, some of them may be arriving on the ESK as we speak. I doubt they realize that we are all here on the Mao. But you and the team should probably think of me as a weapon, made for an unknown purpose by people who never explained their methods. Even I do not know what I was intended to accomplish, but I do remember that when I escaped from Mars I was on a mission that was never completed. I have thought about that mission for the last decade, how I failed and what might be done to rectify the problem. I gave you my summary yesterday, but that was just my conscious mind turning purpose into words. What I did overnight was probably the weapon starting to organize everyone for action, using whatever tools came to mind.”
“So, your great plan is to force us into group sex?” Raul’s disbelief was palpable.
“No, that was mostly the dream talking, using some of the emojis I already knew about, but the groups I set have a cold sort of logic that I would never have thought of rationally during the day. I really need to discuss this with Toyami, Sergei and Leilani, if any of them ever talk to me again. For now, though, think of me as a weapon, and perhaps we can find a way to target this weapon where it will do some good, and not just make a big bang.”
He looked like he wanted to hit me, so I thought about what I had just said, and finished with, “Sorry, I am kind of hung on sex right now.” And then wanted to apologize again.
We went across to the exercise room, which was empty. The marines explained that every available hand was employed trying to clean the ship and bring it back into fighting trim. There was little time for exercise, so this facility was available for our use until further notice.
That surprised me because we still had four guards outside our door, on a short corridor with a locked door through the bulkhead. I fired off a low priority suggestion to the Captain’s office that our guards be allowed to use the exercise room, something to keep them busy in what had to be the dullest chore in the ship.
We started a long cycle of exercise, discussing what kind of weapons would start with sex. My snap reaction was a social weapon for fighters who had no access to better methods, but then we started working through the lists of emojis. Each one felt like a real experience, acting not as words but directly upon our brains. It made sense, in a way. The medical monitor could sense the electrochemical activity in our brains, and could influence that behaviour by releasing psychoactive meds. Somebody, somewhere, thought it was a cool idea to couple the activities to give measured emotional responses controlled by the comm system. It scared the hell out of me.
We could set the intensity of each emoji separately from its content. The kisses I sent could have been polite social kisses, the first kiss of true love that makes the world stand still, or anything in between. I noted with some relief that I had not sent anything with full intensity while I was sleeping. If I had gone for the darker emotions overnight, I could have set everyone fighting each other in outrage, and we might all have been dead this morning.
We finally gave up on that line of inquiry, and agreed that the whole set was weird and frighteningly dangerous. All of us were vulnerable to these things, and I still could not imagine why they were in a standard comm unit. I checked in Fleet Maneuvers and found them buried several layers deeper in the game, but it made no better sense to have them in a conventional war game.
I mentioned this to Raul, who asked whether I noticed that Katerina had sat out our tournament of Fleet Maneuvers the previous night. I had, but had not thought much of it because interplanetary war games were not her style of fun.
“More than you might think,” Raul replied. “She actually played solitaire and won the opening scenario without firing a shot.”
“Really? How?”
“Patience, apparently. She blockaded the asteroid, captured any incoming freighters and threatened the warships into flight. The scenario included resupply of food, water and air and has no time limit, so she reasoned that the base would run out of supplies in a blockade. If it had even a primitive AI guiding the behaviour of the virtual inhabitants, they would get concerned as their air and water ran low. She started sending in marines to deliver ultimatums, but with strict orders not to shoot under any circumstances. Three were killed delivering their ultimatums, but the fourth received a request to surrender. Game over, with three casualties. She finished before any of the rest of us and may have got an hour of sleep before you started screwing around with everyone.”
“You don’t suppose I can pass it off as a lingering after-effect of the stims, do you? The spacers will know I am lying, but... No, I guess not. You know the damnedest part is that I did not get any sexual satisfaction last night. I do not know about anyone else, but it was the weirdest party I ever attended, even though I was the host who deliberately made it weird. Today it feels like I am remembering a party someone told me about, as though I was not actually there.”
Raul looked at me even more strangely. “You better talk to Toyami when she wakes up.”
2357-03-04 19:30
Maintenance
After that we were quiet for a while. I began to check through the messages that had arrived overnight, when it hit me that I had not been woken up by the arrival any of these messages, which just went into a queue. There might be a way to queue up my outgoing nocturnal messages for a delayed delivery, after I had woken up and checked them.
Before I started searching for ways to queue up messages, I found a zinger waiting in my inbox. It was from someone I had never heard of, a certain Alexander the Pantocrator. Not just Alexander the Great, this was Alexander the God Most High, Ruler of Heaven and Earth. It was marked extremely urgent and carried an MI certification with a very high security classification. A week ago, I would not have hesitated to open it. Today, I did not want to read its subject without first doing a deep scan, and the only tools that could crack it were supplied by MI. I had a horrible feeling that even if it checked out as clean, I would still be hit by an emoji of total conviction as the message confirmed, “You are proud to be a dedicated servant of the Martian Imperium.”
I summarized my discovery out loud, “Crap. What do I do with this?”
Raul replied, “Did you just find the message from Pantocrator? We all got them about two hours ago. Molongo, as well. He is going to check it out and get back to us. He is still awake, like me, but by now is probably working with the Captain on securing the ship.”
On the next cycle of exercise, I got a message from Wang, “At last you are awake. Why is everyone still asleep? You are the only MI officer on the ship after Molongo, who is exhausted. Could you get to the MI office – the marines will take you there. We have hundreds of messages stacked up, both incoming and outgoing, with no one to clear them.”
Everyone was going to be mad at me if I did anything odd with the message queues, and Raul could not supervise me in such a sensitive location. At the same time, the only other MI officer I knew was on the ship was Leilani, who desperately needed sleep and was only seconded into MI. I tried to explain.
“I kept everyone awake most of the night, including Molongo and Singh. Raul is keeping me company while they get some rest. They should sleep until just before lunch. I will probably need someone to watch me as well, to make sure I do not drop off to sleep or start making mistakes or sending out crazy messages.”
Not stri
ctly true, of course, since I was well rested, but I still felt uncomfortable.
He snapped back, “Get your butt over here. Even the internal comm channels are screwed up. They have been running wide open for the last twelve hours or have been completely blocked, with no one to manage the filters or adjust the priority queues. Marcus knew just enough to prevent the MI traitors from destroying us, but not enough to run the system. I do not have anyone to spare for the job even if he would authorize them to try.”
That answered my indecision. I had to go, for the sanity of the whole ship. I explained the situation to Raul, who insisted on accompanying me to the MI office, even if he had to wait outside the door to fend off visitors for the rest of the morning. It took a little more persuading to convince the marines to take both of us, especially since I had armour and Raul’s was not expected to arrive until lunch. He would have to travel in a vacuum suit, and the only one not being used during the clean-up was stored near the engine room. Fortunately, the Mao was not huge, so half an hour after the Captain’s request, Raul was waiting outside the MI office, and I was inside reading through the operating manuals as I learned how to filter messages, embargo suspect messages, turn on and off the queues, and adjust their priorities to balance the flow. Molongo had left to get some sleep the moment I arrived.
Part of the problem is that the MI operator on duty when they were all arrested had been busy editing something complicated with a horrendous name: PZXXF98257. Whatever it was, it had required halting a couple of important message queues for engineering and weapons control. It took a lot of reading, but I finally found instructions on how to sandbox an editing session, restoring the working copies of the files to their former states without losing the edited copies.
Gingerly, I restarted the halted queues. Error and warning messages popped up everywhere, and I realized I should have screened the halted messages before releasing them. More to the point, I should have broadcast a warning that the queues were restarting. Regardless, I received only a few protests from the engineers, after which the system seemed to correct itself. Or, more likely, several people were franticly scrambling around resetting the systems that had been left in limbo for so long. At least nobody reported any explosions.
Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust Page 31