Cai wiped the car’s memory with a direct cord and sent it driving on auto back to the city. There it would reconnect with traffic central, finally find a park, and alert its owners where it was. In a city of sixty-two million people, rogue cars and glitches happened frequently enough that checking each one would be time-consuming. If found, the car could not tell where it had been, and its location would be central Tanusha.
A hundred kilometres north of Tanusha, Sandy led the group along a path by the riverside. Thick tropical foliage overhung the dark waters, insects flittered, and fish broke the slow-moving surface. Here and there, a few house lights shone through the trees. This was Greenwood, a light residential zone more than a town. Most folks out here commuted but preferred life away from the urban crowds. Aircars had hollowed out many Earth cities, leading to urban collapse as citizens chased cheap land to commute from by air. Around Tanusha, environmental protections made this land even more expensive than the central city, and the houses that peered through the lush forest were large.
The path passed several riverfront homes, their gates lit by small lamps, swarming with flying bugs. All had cruiser ports—no roads here; they were air access only. Four houses up, beside a leaning swarm of riverside bamboo, Sandy pushed through the gate of a house on stilts, front porch well over the river.
The asura bounded on the porch to greet them, ears pricked attentively. Danya and Svetlana were not surprised, having been warned. But they ran as Kiril emerged from a doorway and grabbed him in a three-sided embrace. A lump fought its way into Sandy’s throat, but here in the house there were approaches to guard and security possibilities to consider, and all without the usual assurance of uplinks. Combat reflex reasserted, and she walked the perimeter to check, noting Ragi on the sofa with heavy bandaging where his hand had been. Jane was around the back, lying flat on a mattress in the rear bedroom, rifle by her side. Eyes watching impassively upstream, even as Sandy passed before her. She’d be changing positions every five minutes, Sandy knew—endless pacing just drew attention. Anyone scouting this house would watch for a long time, so there was no need to keep moving. Just watch each approach, intently, for any sign of movement or observation.
Jane volunteered nothing, and Sandy went back to the living room, a wide space surrounded by windows with river views. Not the most defensible, perhaps, but with window tints it was easier to see out of than into . . . and when defended by high-des GIs, line of sight was nothing to mess with.
“Whose is it?” Poole asked, cracking a beer in the kitchen. When he’d acquired that taste, Sandy didn’t know. CSA training, perhaps.
“It’s on the market,” she said. “No personal connections to trace, it’s just empty. We won’t be here long.” Poole offered her a beer, forgetting that she’d rather drink the brown river water. Offered it to Ragi instead when she refused, cracking it for him first so he could drink one-handed. Sandy looked at the tight bandaging on his wrist stump.
“Kiril helped,” said Ragi, looking worn and pale. Worn and pale for a GI, anyway.
“This is really good, Kiri,” said Sandy, as Cai put a kettle on for himself and Sandy. Searched the cupboard for coffee or, failing that, tea. “Did you help wrap this?”
Danya and Svetlana were still standing with Kiril. Kiril was crying again, softly, as his siblings comforted him. Which had set Svetlana off too. She looked at Sandy now, accusingly. Do something, that meant. Sandy felt offended. Keeping them alive was going to be hard enough . . . now she had to keep them emotionally stable as well? She barely knew how to do that for herself half the time.
“Kids?” Cai asked quietly from the kitchen. “Would you like some tea?”
“No!” snapped Svetlana. “I don’t want anything!” Danya looked at Sandy helplessly. Looking back at him, Sandy felt the combat reflex dropping, for the first time since the beach.
“Guys,” she said. “Guys, look . . .”
Suddenly her heart was pounding, and her face was hot. For a moment she thought perhaps she’d been hacked again, those damn Talee trace codes still lurking in her system to ambush her . . . but this felt nothing like that. Her gut tightened, and suddenly she was short of breath. She gasped, a hand on the sofa for balance.
“Cassandra?” asked Ragi. “Cassandra, are you . . . ?”
Cai came over. Sandy’s head was pounding, and she felt nauseous. Still her heart accelerated further, galloping fit to explode. She went down on one knee, trying to breathe, trying to stay focused and get enough air as Cai knelt before her and tilted her head back to gaze in her eyes. Slapped her cheek, quite hard, to gauge instant response. . . . Sandy felt the combat reflex kick back in briefly, an abrupt calming of the heart . . . but it was only Cai, and her conscious brain didn’t believe what the automated hindbrain was telling it.
“Sandy?” Danya came over, all concern. “Cai, what’s wrong?”
“I think she’s having a panic attack,” said Cai.
“Oh fuck,” Sandy muttered, and put her head down, focusing just on breathing. “First time for everything.” She’d never seen it before, in any GIs. Had never heard of it happening. But if anything could get her this paralytically scared . . .
“Just breathe,” said Cai, a hand on her back. “It will pass soon, just breathe.”
“Sandy,” said Danya, kneeling and putting an arm around her. “It’s okay, we’re all safe. You saved us, Sandy.”
She looked up at him, and her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve never been so scared,” she managed. “It’s one thing when it’s just me or my friends, but they’re trying to kill my babies and I’ve never been so scared. . . .”
And then Svetlana was hugging her too, and apologising, and she clung to them both tearfully until her heart began to calm and her breathing returned to something approaching normal.
“Svet,” said Danya against her shoulder, “Sandy has to focus. She can’t comfort us and fight them at the same time.”
“I’m sorry,” Svetlana repeated. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Sandy wiped and blinked her eyes clear. Took a deep breath. “Okay. Svet and Kiri, you do what Danya says. He’s in charge. And he’ll do what I say. We have to be a team. Can we do that?” Earnest nods. “And I’ll try to be nice, Svet, but when I’m in combat mode it’s just really hard. You just have to trust that I love you and not keep asking for reassurance, okay? I know it’s hard when you’re scared.”
Svetlana nodded. Sandy smiled and kissed her. “I want a hug too!” Kiril complained.
Sandy laughed and went to him. “Oh, you poor neglected boy, come here.” She scooped him up and smothered him in kisses until he laughed.
“Good lord,” Jane said drily, watching from the bedroom doorway. “I used to just accept that you could kick my ass. Now I’m embarrassed.” Sandy showed her a middle finger with her free arm.
“Talee have words for it,” said Cai a little later, as they sat in the living room with the auto shades drawn. With both Cai and the asura, the potential for ambush was slight. Kiril sat by the animal on the floor rug, having decided it was his friend. Sandy didn’t like that either, but the asura seemed to know who it shouldn’t make angry. “But the words won’t mean anything to you. Talee language is difficult.”
Sandy watched him carefully, sipping coffee, pistol on the coffee table. Poole alongside, with Danya and Svetlana beside that, eating sandwiches they’d bought from a store on the way here.
“Talee are double-brained,” Cai continued. “So are humans, technically, with left and right hemispheres, but in Talee the separation is even more pronounced. In humans, conscious thought can be traced to specific locations, in the left or right sides. In Talee, the conscious thought arises from somewhere between two hemispheres. Like binocular vision, if you close one eye, you see only what that eye sees. But open both together, and the brain combines them to make a composite image, overlaying one image atop the other.”
“But that’s an illusion,” Ragi said cautiously. He w
as reclined on another sofa, bandaged arm across his middle. The shock of losing a hand was mostly psychological, Sandy knew. Though not a combat GI, physically he could take far worse damage and still function. For a while at least. “There is no single image, it’s the brain creating an entirely new one. A third image, an internal construction.”
“Exactly,” said Cai. “Talee consciousness is a construct of a third image, if you will—neither entirely left nor right brain, but something in the middle. It makes them very clever, perhaps cleverer than humans, if one can measure such things. Talee have vast imaginations. Arts and science, for Talee, are much the same thing.”
“You know,” said Jane, “this would be absolutely fascinating, if they weren’t trying to kill us.” For once, Sandy found Jane’s derision agreeable.
“It sounds like they would be less susceptible to compulsive narrative syndrome than humans,” Ragi offered.
“Yes,” Cai agreed. “Normally that would be true. But Talee psychology has a drawback. Mostly in the form of drugs. Talee have used them to alter chemical neurology for as long as they’ve known how to brew, just as humans with alcohol. But the effect on Talee is different, and targets different parts of the brain. This shuts down the cross-referencing process, or parts of it. Which turns a Talee from a thoughtful, cautious, farsighted individual into a far more focused and straightforward one.”
“A drone?” asked Ragi.
“No. A believer.” A quiet pause. The asura yawned, a flash of long, sharp teeth. Kiril scratched its head. Sandy wondered if the animal enjoyed the sensation as much as Kiril thought it did. “Most Talee are thoughtful. Though flexible, they can be conservative in their own way and not rush to judgement. But an ‘impaired’ Talee will think in straight lines. The uncertainty of cross-referencing between hemispheres disappears, to be replaced by something far more predictable.
“When humans are drunk, all judgement is impaired. When Talee are impaired, mental faculties actually improve, in some directions. Linear thought process improves. Mathematics, certainly. Many of the great geniuses who have driven Talee scientific progress have been ‘users.’ Today, many still use, despite death penalties for usage and possession. This is the attraction, the ability to focus mental process. Talee in this state are significantly more intelligent than the most intelligent humans. It’s not a boast, believe me.”
“I believe you,” said Ragi. Ragi, of course, was the most intrigued of them all. The smartest of them all, perhaps, though with Cai that was uncertain. The one with the most questions to answer about what it was that Takewashi had used to create him, and why. “And the Talee blame this . . . ‘impaired’ state for their two near-extinction events?”
Cai nodded. “Current research indicates a spiral of competing interests forced into usage by the need to keep up with each other, and that usage descending into mindless animosity.”
“And how do they stop people from using?” Sandy asked. “A police state?”
“There is less diversity in Talee society than human,” Cai explained. “They do not fragment so easily. Consensus on large matters does not require a police state. But enforcement is strict, yes . . . though largely consensual.”
“Largely?”
Cai shrugged. “Every society has its criminals.”
“And its revolutionaries.”
“And there are types of uplink technology that create a similar effect to other forms of drug usage?” Ragi pressed.
“Yes,” said Cai. “The worst.” He looked at Kiril, sitting by his new animal friend.
“What does it do?” Sandy asked quietly.
“Like the uplink effect in humans, it’s not noticeable in individuals or small groups. Only when you monitor the overall direction of large group thinking does it begin to appear. Individually, our narratives are small. Favourite foods, favourite activities. Favourite people. Our preferences do not shake the world. But all uplink activity establishes commonalities over time. Uniformities.
“Neural Cluster Technology is humanity’s version—it’s very crude, very simple technology compared to anything Talee use. It does not differentiate between different kinds of mental signals to be shared. It shares too much, and absorbs too much, without filters. The consequence is somewhat akin to brainwashing, as you’ve seen with your Pyeongwha terrorists here.
“The condition is called aiwallawai.”
Dead silence in the room. Cai’s lips twisted to pronounce it in an accent unlike the approximate Federation-neutral with which he usually spoke. Alien technology, alien words, never before spoken on this world . . . that anyone knew of. And now here they sat, five synthetic humans, plus the organic kids. Listening to the words and sounds of this strange species whose thoughts had made the technology that created them.
Sandy thought of Takewashi, now dead in his beachview chair. She’d hated him, once. Perhaps she still did. But that was a personal luxury, born of what it now dawned on her was misplaced spite. It was not easy to confront the things that made you, especially when you were dissatisfied with the result. And now she wondered if she should have accepted Takewashi’s offer of fatherhood and been comforted. As Jane had. She glanced at Jane and saw sullen disapproval. Was that normal for her now? Or was it because she felt she’d just lost her father? It wasn’t like they’d had any time to talk about it.
“Aiwallawai,” Ragi murmured. “It’s a phonetic palindrome.”
“Double-brained,” Sandy echoed. Perhaps that was connected.
“It is like chemical impairment, only more subtle,” Cai continued. “The uplinks are designed to focus traffic into specific portions of the brain. The user experiences aiwallawai but also becomes a link in a conduit of like-minded neural interface. This interface can induce other brains into a similar state. Like an infection. The user does not realise the condition, and this adds to its lethality.
“Unwitting sufferers are rehabilitated in isolation. Implementers are executed. Most Talee have no difficulty with this policy.”
“Do you?” Sandy pressed. It might explain his current situation.
Cai smiled faintly. “I’m not Talee.”
“Semantics.”
“No, it’s not. I’m human. Being here has taught me about myself, and how I’m different. And made me wonder at the uses to which my creators put me.”
“You’re not an assassin,” said Sandy. “You’re a spy. These others trying to kill us are something else again.”
“They have a name I will not share. They are from what you might call an internal security force. The one that implements the executions among Talee.”
“Yeah, well, buddy,” Poole growled, “we’re not in Talee space anymore. You’re trespassing.”
“They have a foreign operations wing,” Cai continued, ignoring Poole. “For humans. This is the first time they’ve used it.” Something about that didn’t sound right to Sandy. Was Cai’s answer a lie? Or was it just incomplete? The difference between the cautious, sensible policy of Talee toward humans to date and now this all-out aggression and insanity was stark. Far too stark to be the result of disagreement between security agencies, surely? Was Cai merely feeding her that because it sounded like something she’d be familiar with? Cai still served his people, in his own way, she had no doubt. And serving his people, in the past, had meant only telling humans as much about Talee as suited Talee interests at the time.
“How long have they been scared humans would move on aiwallawai technologies?” asked Ragi.
“The information Takewashi and Chancelry Corporation recovered from Pantala over a century ago made it inevitable eventually,” said Cai. “It’s the primary reason my kind were created, though other intelligence activities have proved useful. To see if the technology would be reached here. Takewashi was warned. But League’s circumstance caused him to ignore that warning.
“The war drove synthetic neural technology faster than Talee had hoped humans could progress. Cassandra was of concern to Talee higher-ups
. Then Jane. And Ragi, of course.” Looking at each of them in turn. “The final straw.”
“Gee, thanks,” said Poole. “Nothing about me, huh?”
“You three showed the proficiency that humans were gaining with the technology.” Pointing to all but Poole. “But such are matters for Talee security. Ordinary Talee do not think much on security matters, for all their imagination. The twin catastrophes make such thoughts a taboo subject. Everyone is nervous to have strategic thoughts. It makes the authorities uncomfortable.
“It’s not so dissimilar to the Federation, where most civilians leave trouble with the League to Fleet, especially after thirty years of war. They don’t want to think about it. And they don’t ask too many questions, so long as the job gets done.”
“So Talee security created synthetic humans to assassinate us covertly, if necessary,” Sandy completed. “And these guys answer to different people than you do.” Raising her eyebrows at Cai, inviting him to jump in.
Cai smiled. “I share as much as I need to. But not that.”
“That’s okay, I can guess. More moderate forces.” Cai shrugged. “And you dislike their methods?”
“I dislike the fact that they were created in the first place,” Cai said flatly. “I find it an insult to my kind. To our kind.” Looking about at them all. “We are free individuals, and most Talee treat their creations well. There are synthetic Talee too, you know. Most are subjected to nothing like this.” Another bombshell, but a predictable one. Of course Talee made synthetic copies of their own kind before applying it to aliens. How could they not? “I and others like me have protested, and our Talee friends as well. Our protests have been noted, but ignored, on the grounds of security necessity.”
The human-made GIs looked at each other. It all sounded depressingly familiar.
“That’s great,” Jane said sourly, from over by her bedroom doorframe. “How do we beat them?”
“I’m not sure you can,” said Cai. “Not here. They have been surprised, and my defection has helped you. But they will recover, and they are more the combat experts than I.”
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