by Peter Watts
“Why now?” Becker asked. “Why not before?”
“First round’s on the house. I was amazed enough that they even cleared the interview. Didn’t want to push my luck.”
Wingman flashed an icon; a little judicious frequency-hopping would get around the jam. If they’d been in an actual combat situation it wouldn’t even be asking permission.
“You realize there are other ways to listen in,” Becker said.
Sabrie shrugged. “Parabolic ear on a rooftop. Bounce a laser off the table and read the vibrations.” Her eyes flickered overhead. “Any one of those drones could be a lip-reader for all I know.”
“So what’s the point?” (FHOP?[y/n] FHOP?[y/n] FHOP?[y/n])
“Perpetual surveillance is the price of freedom,” Sabrie said, half-smiling. “Not to mention the price of not having to worry about some random psycho shooter when you go out for sushi.”
“But?”
“But there are limits. Your bosses are literally inside your head.” She dipped her chin at the jammer. “Do you think they’ll object to you providing a few unprompted answers? Given this new apparent policy of transparency and accountability?”
(FHOP?[y/n])
(N)
“I don’t know,” Becker said.
“You know what would make them even more transparent and accountable? If they released the video for the night of the 25th. I keep asking, and they keep telling me there isn’t any.”
Becker shook her head. “There isn’t.”
“Come on.”
“Really. Too memory-intensive. “
“Corporal, I’m recording this,” Sabrie pointed out. “16K, Slooped sound, no compression even.” She glanced into the street. “Half those people are life-logging every second of their lives for the sheer narcissistic thrill of it.”
“And they’re streaming it. Or caching and dumping every couple of hours. I don’t get the luxury of tossing my cookies into some cloud whenever my cache fills up. I have to be able to operate in the dark for weeks at a time: you stream any kind of data in the field, it points back at you like a big neon arrow.
“Besides, budget time rolls around, how much of your limited R&D funding are you going to take away from tactical computing so you can make longer nature documentaries?” Becker raised her expresso in a small mock toast. “You think the People’s Republic is losing any sleep over that one?”
Which is awfully convenient, remarked a small voice, When you’ve just—
She shut it off.
Sabrie gave her a sidelong look. “You can’t record video.”
“Sure I can. But it’s discretionary. You document anything you think needs documenting, but the default realtime stream is just numbers. Pure black-box stuff.”
“You didn’t think you needed to document—”
“I didn’t know. It wasn’t conscious. Why the fuck can’t you people—”
Sabrie watched her without a word.
“Sorry,” Becker said at last.
“It’s okay,” Sabrie said softly. “Rising bubbles. I get it.”
Overhead, the sun peeked around an office tower. A lozenge of brightness crept onto the table.
“You know what they were doing out there?” Sabrie asked. “Tionee and his friends?”
Becker closed her eyes for a moment. “Some kind of fishing trip.”
“And you never wondered why anyone would go night fishing in a place where there wasn’t anything to catch but slugs and slime?”
I never stopped wondering. “I heard it was a—cultural thing. Keep the traditions alive, in case someone ever builds a tuna that eats limestone.”
“It was an art project.”
Becker squinted as the hockey puck bounced sunlight into her eyes. “Excuse me?”
“Let me get that for you.” Sabrie half-rose and reached for the center of the table. The parasol bloomed with a snap. The table dropped back into eclipse.
“That’s better.” Sabrie reseated herself.
“An art project?” Becker repeated.
“They were college students. Cultural anthropology and art history majors, wired in from Evergreen State. Re-enact the daily lives of your forebears, play them back along wavelengths outside the human sensory range. They were calling it Through Alien Eyes. Some kind of commentary on outsider perspectives.”
“What wavelengths?”
“Reesi was glassing everything from radio to gamma.”
“There’s a third-party recording?”
“Nothing especially hi-def. They were on a student budget, after all. But it was good enough to pick out a signal around four hundred megahertz. Nobody can quite figure out what it is. Not civilian, anyway.”
“That whole area’s contested. Military traffic all over the place.”
“Yeah, well. The thing is, it was a just a couple of really short bursts. Half a second, maybe. Around eleven-forty-five.”
Wingman froze. Gooseflesh rippled up Becker’s spine.
Sabrie leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”
“You know I can’t discuss operational details.”
“Mmmm.” Sabrie watched and waited.
“I take it you have this recording,” Becker said at last.
The journalist smiled faintly. “You know I can’t discuss operational details.”
“I’m not asking you to compromise your sources. It just seems—odd.”
“Because your guys would have been all over the bodies before they were even cool. So if anyone had that kind of evidence, it would be them.”
“Something like that.”
“Don’t worry, you don’t have a mole. Or at least if you do, they don’t report to me. You want to blame anyone, blame your wing man.”
“What?”
“Your preconscious triggers tie into some pretty high-caliber weaponry. I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you what kind of games physics plays when multiple slugs hit a body at twelve hundred meters a second.”
Momentum. Inertia. Force vectors transferred from small masses to larger ones—and maybe back to smaller ones again. A pair of smartspecs could have flown twenty meters or more, landed way up in the weeds or splashed down in the lagoon.
“We wouldn’t have even known to look,” Becker murmured.
“We did.” Sabrie sipped her drink. “Want to hear it?”
Becker sat absolutely still.
“I know the rules, Nandita. I’m not asking you to ID it, or even comment. I just thought you might like . . . ”
Becker glanced down at the jammer.
“I think we should leave that on.” Sabrie reached into her blouse, fingered the luminous medallion hanging from her neck. “You have sockets, though, right? Hard interfaces?”
“I don’t spread my legs in public.”
Sabrie’s eyes flickered to the far side of the street, where a small unmarked quadrocopter had just dipped into sight below the rim of the parasol. “Let’s talk about your family,” she said.
Monahan didn’t seem put out.
“We thought she might try something like that. Sabrie’s hardly in the tank. But you did great, Corporal.”
“You were monitoring?”
“Like we’d let some gizmo from the Sony Store cut us out of the loop? I could’ve even whispered sweet nothings in your ear if I’d had to—acoustic tightbeam, she’d never have had a clue unless she leaned over and nibbled your earlobe—but like I say, you were just fine.” Some small afterthought made him frown. “Would’ve been easier if you’d just authorized frequency hopping, of course . . . ”
“She had a lot of gizmos on her,” Becker said. “If one of them had been able to pick up the signal . . . ”
“Right. Good plan. Let her think it worked.”
“Yes sir.”
“Just Ben. Oh, one other thing . . . ”
Becker waited.
“We lost contact for just a few moments there. When the umbrella went
up.”
“You didn’t miss much. Apparently the collateral was doing a school project of some kind. Art history. They weren’t actually fishing, it was more of a—a re-enactment, I guess.”
“Huh. Pretty much what we heard.” Monahan nodded. “Next time, might help if you went to active logging. You know, when we’re out of contact.”
“Right. Sorry. I didn’t think.”
“Don’t apologize. After what you’ve been through I’d be amazed if you didn’t make the occasional slip.”
He patted her on the back. Wingman bristled.
“I gotta prep for a thing. Keep up the great work.”
All those devil’s bargains and no-win scenarios. All those exercises that tore her up inside. Turned out they were part of the fix. They had to parameterize Becker’s remorse before they could burn it out of her.
It was a simple procedure, they assured her, a small part of the scheduled block upgrade. Seven deep-focus microwave bursts targeting the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Ten minutes, tops. Not so much as a scar to show for it afterward. She didn’t even need to sign anything.
They didn’t put her under. They turned her off.
Coming back online, she didn’t feel much different. The usual faint hum at the back of her skull as Wingman lit up and looked around; the usual tremors in fingers and toes, half-way between a reboot sequence and a voltage spike. The memory of her distant malfunction seemed a bit less intense, but then again things often seemed clearer after a good night’s sleep. Maybe she was just finally seeing things in perspective.
They plugged her into the simulator and worked her out.
Fifty-plus male, thirtysomething female, and a baby alone in a nursery: all spread out, all in mortal and immediate danger as the house they were trapped in burned down around them. She started with the female, went back to extract the male, was heading back in for the baby when the building collapsed. Two out of three, she thought. Not bad.
Sniper duty on some post-apocalyptic overpass, providing cover for an airbus parked a hundred meters down the road below, for the refugees running and hobbling and dragging themselves towards salvation. A Tumbleweed passing beneath: a self-propelled razorwire tangle of ONC and magnesium and white phosphorus, immune to bullets, hungry for body heat, rolling eagerly toward the unsuspecting evacuees. The engineer at Becker’s side—his face an obvious template, although the sim tagged him as her brother for some reason—labored to patch the damage to their vehicle, oblivious to the refugees and their imminent immolation.
Oblivious until Becker pitched him off the overpass and brought the Tumbleweed to rapture.
The next one was a golden oldie: the old man in the war zone, calling for some lost pet or child, blocking Becker’s shot as a battlefield robot halfway to the horizon took aim at a team of medics. She took out the old man with one bullet and no second thought; took out the bot with three more.
“Why’d you leave the baby for last?” Tauchi asked afterward, unhooking her. The light in his eyes was pure backwash from the retinal display, but he looked eager as a puppy just the same.
“Less of a loss,” Becker said.
“In terms of military potential?” They’d all been civilians; tactically, all last among equals.
Becker shook her head, tried to put instinct into words. “The adults would—suffer more.”
“Babies can’t suffer?”
“They can hurt. Physically. But no hopes or dreams, no memories even. They’re just—potential. No added value.”
Tauchi looked at her.
“What’s the big deal?” Becker asked. “It was an exercise.”
“You killed your brother,” he remarked.
“In a simulation. To save fifty civilians. I don’t even have a brother.”
“Would it surprise you to know that you took out the old man and the battlebot a full six hundred milliseconds faster than you did before the upgrade?”
She shrugged. “It was a repeat scenario. It’s not like I even got it wrong the first time.”
Tauchi glanced at his tacpad. “It didn’t bother you the second time.”
“So what are you saying? I’m some kind of sociopath now?”
“Exactly the opposite. You’ve been immunized against trolley paradoxes.”
“What?”
“Everybody talks about morality like it’s another word for right and wrong, when it’s really just a load of static on the same channel.” Tauchi’s head bobbed like a woodpecker. “We just cleaned up the signal. As of now, you’re probably the most ethical person on the planet.”
“Really.”
He walked it back, but not very far. “Well. You’re in the top thirty at least.”
Buried high above the streets of Toronto, cocooned in a windowless apartment retained as a home base for transient soldiers on missions of damage control: Nandita Becker, staring at the wall and watching the Web.
The wall was blank. The Web was in her head, invited through a back door in her temporal lobe. She and Wingman had spent altogether too much time alone in there, she’d decided. Time to have some company over.
The guest heads from Global’s Front View Mirror, for example: a JAG lawyer, a retired professor of military law from Dalhousie, a token lefty from Veterans for Accountable Government. Some specialist in cyborg tech she’d never met, on loan from the Ministry of Defence and obviously chosen as much for disarming good looks as for technical expertise. (Becker imagined Ben Monahan just out of camera range, pulling strings.) A generic moderator whose affect alternated between earnest sincerity and failed attempts at cuteness.
They were all talking about Becker. At least, she assumed they still were. She’d muted the audio five minutes in.
The medallion in her hand glowed like dim cobalt through the flesh of her fingers, a faint nimbus up at 3MHz. She contemplated the feel of the metal, the decorative filigree (a glyph from some Amazonian culture that hadn’t survived first contact, according to Sabrie), the hairline fracture of the interface port. The recessed Transmit button in its center: tap it once and it would squawk once, Sabrie had told her. Hold it down and it would broadcast on continuous loop.
She pressed it. Nothing happened.
Of course not. There’d be crypto. You didn’t broadcast anything in the field without at least feeding it through a pseudorandom timeseries synched to the mothership—you never knew when some friend of Amal Sabrie might be lurking in the weeds, waiting to snatch it from the air and take it home for leisurely dissection. The signal made sense only at the instant of its creation. If you missed it the first time, wanted to repeat it for the sake of clarity, you’d need a time machine.
Becker had built her own personal time machine that very afternoon, stuck it at #1 on speed-dial: a three-line macro to reset her system clock to a dark moment weeks in the past, just before her world had turned to shit.
She unmuted audio on the web feed. One of Global’s talking heads was opining that Becker was as much a victim as those poor envirogees her hijacked body had gunned down. Another spoke learnedly of the intimate connection between culpability and intent, of how blame—if that loaded term could even be applied in this case—must lie with the technology and not with those noble souls who daily put their lives on the line in the dangerous pestholes of a changing world.
“And yet this technology doesn’t decide anything on its own,” the moderator was saying. “It just does what the soldier’s already decided sub—er, preconsciously.”
“That’s a bit simplistic,” the specialist replied. “The system has access to a huge range of data that no unaugged soldier would ever be able to process in realtime—radio chatter, satellite telemetry, wide-spectrum visuals—so it’s actually taking that preconscious intent and modifying it based on what the soldier would do if she had access to all those facts.”
“So it guesses,” said the man from VAG.
“It predicts.”
“And that doesn’t open the door to error?”
“It reduces error. It optimizes human wisdom based on the maximum available information.”
“And yet in this case—”
Becker held down TRANSMIT and sacc’d speed-dial.
“—don’t want to go down that road,” the lawyer said. “No matter what the neurology says.”
Thirty-five seconds. Gone in an instant.
“Our whole legal system is predicated on the concept of free will. It’s the moral center of human existence.”
That was so much bullshit, Becker knew. She knew exactly where humanity’s moral center was. She’d looked it up not six hours ago: the place where the brain kept its empathy and compassion, its guilt and shame and remorse.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
“Suppose—” The moderator raised a finger. “—I get into a car with a disabled breathalyzer. I put it into manual and hit someone. Surely I bear some responsibility for the fact that I chose to drink and drive, even if I didn’t intend to hurt anyone.”
“That depends on whether you’d received a lawful command from a superior officer to get behind the wheel,” Ms. JAG countered.
“You’re saying a soldier can be ordered to become a cyborg?”
“How is that different from ordering a sniper to carry a rifle? How is it different from ordering soldiers to take antimalarial drugs—which have also, by the way, been associated with violent behavioral side-effects in the past—when we deploy them to the Amazon? A soldier is sworn to protect their country; they take that oath knowing the normal tools of their trade, knowing that technology advances. You don’t win a war by bringing knives to a gunfight—”
Speed-dial.
“—may not like cyborgs—and I’m the first to agree there are legitimate grounds for concern—but until you can talk the Chinese into turning back the clock on their technology, they’re by far the lesser evil.”
Twenty-eight seconds, that time.
“It’s not as though we ever lived in a world without collateral damage. You don’t shut down such a vital program over a tragic accident.”
A tragic accident. Even Becker had believed that. Right up until Sabrie had slipped her a medallion with a burst of radio static in its heart, a cryptic signal snatched from the warm Pacific night by a pair of smart-specs on a dead kid walking. A signal that was somehow able to offline her for intervals ranging from twenty to sixty-three seconds.