by Peter Watts
“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, halfway 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 Defense 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 aud
io 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 said. “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.
She wondered if there was any sort of pattern to that variability.
“Safeguards should be put into place at the very least.” The moderator was going for the middle road. “Ways to monitor these, these hybrids remotely, shut them down at the first sign of trouble.”
Becker snorted. Wingman didn’t take orders in the field, couldn’t even hear them. Sure, Becker could channel some smiley little spin doctor through her temporal, but he was just a peeping Tom with no access to the motor systems. The actual metal didn’t even pack an on-board receiver; it was congenitally deaf to wireless commands until someone manually slotted the dorsal plug-in between Becker’s shoulders.
Deliberately design a combat unit that could be shut down by anyone who happened to hack the right codes? Who’d be that stupid?
And yet—
Transmit. Speed-dial.
“—are only a few on active duty—they won’t tell us exactly how many of course, say twenty or thirty. A couple dozen cyborgs who can’t be blamed if something goes wrong. And that’s just today. You wouldn’t believe how fast they’re ramping up production.”
Forty seconds. On the nose.
“Not only do I believe it, I encourage it. The world’s a tinderbox. Water wars, droughts, refugees everywhere you look. The threat of force is the only thing that’s kept a lid on things so far. Our need for a strong military is greater today than it’s ever been since the Cold War, especially with the collapse of the US eco—”
Speed-dial.
“—and what happens when every pair of boots in the field has a machine reading its mind and pulling the trigger in their name? What happens to the very concept of a war crime when every massacre can be defined as an industrial accident?”
Thirty-two.
“You’re saying this Becker deliberately—”
“I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m concerned. I’m concerned at the speed with which outrage over the massacre of civilians has turned into an outpouring of sympathy for the person who killed them, even from quarters you’d least expect. Have you seen the profile piece Amal Sabrie posted on the Star? It was almost a love letter.”
A shutdown command, radioed to a system with no radio.
“Nobody’s forgetting the victims here. But it’s no great mystery why people also feel a certain sympathy for Corporal Becker—”
Becker kept wondering who’d be able to pull off a trick like that. She kept coming up with the same answer.
“Of course. She’s sympathetic, she’s charismatic, she’s nice. Exemplary soldier, not the slightest smudge on her service record. She volunteered at a veterinary clinic back in high school.”
Someone with an interest in controlling the narrative.
“Chief of Defense couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned—”
Dial.
“—should be up on charges is for the inquiry to decide.”
Forty-two seconds.
She wondered if she should be feeling something right now. Outrage. Violation. She’d thought the procedure was only supposed to cure her PTSD. It seemed to have worked on that score, anyway.
“Then let the inquiry decide. But we can’t allow this to become the precedent that tips over the Geneva Conventions.”
The other stuff, though. The
compassion, the empathy, the guilt. The moral center. That seemed to be gone too. They’d burned it out of her like a tumor.
“The Conventions are a hundred years old. You don’t think they’re due for an overhaul?”
She still had her sense of right and wrong, at least.
Brain must keep that somewhere else.
• • •
“I THOUGHT THEY’D shipped you back to the WTP,” Sabrie remarked.
“This weekend.”
The journalist glanced around the grotto: low light, blue-shifted, private tables arrayed around a dance floor where partygoers writhed to bass beats that made it only faintly through the table damper. She glanced down at the Rising Tide Becker had ordered for her.
“I don’t fuck my interviews, Corporal. Especially ones who could snap my spine if they got carried away.”
Becker smiled back at her. “Not why we’re here.”
“Ohhhkay.”
“Bring your jammer?”
“Always.” Sabrie slapped the little device onto the table; welcome static fuzzed Becker’s peripherals.
“So why are we in a lekking lounge at two a.m.?”
“No drones,” Becker said.
“None in the local Milestones either. Even during business hours.”
“Yeah. I just—I wanted a crowd to get lost in.”
“At two in the morning.”
“People have other things on their mind on the middle of the night.” Becker glanced up as a trio stumbled past en route to the fuck-cubbies. “Less likely to notice someone they may have seen on the feeds.”
“Okay.”
“People don’t—congregate the way they used to, you know?” Becker sipped her scotch, set it down, stared at it. “Everyone telecommutes, everyone cocoons. Downtown’s so—thin, these days.”
Sabrie panned the room. “Not here.”
“Web don’t fuck. Not yet, anyway. Still gotta go out if you want to do anything more than whack off.”
“What’s on your mind, Nandita?”
“You got me thinking.”
“About?”
“The price of safety. The next Michael Harris. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”