by Ian Douglas
Koenig began processing that memory, then suddenly sat upright, eyes wide open. “Good God!” he said aloud.
“Sir?” Whitney asked, concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, Marcus. But, my God . . . this will change everything. . . .”
VCC Military Hospital Complex
Colorado Springs, USNA
1125 hours, CST
“Just tell me whether or not he’s going to be okay!”
Shay Ashton felt like they’d been giving her the runaround ever since she’d shown up at the medical center that morning. No one wanted to talk with her, and no one wanted to tell her the truth.
Dr. Patricia Gonzales looked up from the datapad in her hand and gave her a long and, Shay thought, sad look. Gonzales was an ancient, a truly old person, with intensely blue eyes that seemed to peer out at Shay from the depths of bone-rimmed sockets beneath a web of wrinkles set in parchment skin. She was by far, Ashton thought, the oldest human she’d ever seen. How old? In her hundreds, certainly. But she was a medical doctor. Was she simply way overdue for her anagathic treatments? Or was she a Purist?
Twenty years before, Ashton had known a member of the Purist sect of the Rapturist Church of Humankind . . . her old CAG on board the star carrier America. What was his name? Wizewski, that was it. Captain Barry Wizewski. The Purists believed that you needed to be fully human if God was going to save you from hell, and that meant no tinkering with the human genome, no genetic prostheses, no anti-aging treatments. A few rejected any form of medtech tinkering, including cerebral implants, a personal choice that paradoxically left them on the outside of a human society that depended on high-tech modifications to body and brain just to interface with that society. Humans, first and foremost, were tool makers, tool users—and by giving up the current available tool set, the Purists, she thought, were making themselves less human, not more.
She hoped there was another explanation for Dr. Gonzales’s extreme age. Having a doctor who didn’t believe in nanomedicine was in her mind one step removed from having a doctor who believed in leeches and incantations.
After a long moment, Gonzales shook her head. “I can’t tell you that, dear. Commander Cabot’s condition is extremely serious. We won’t know if the reconstruction is successful for some months, yet.”
“Reconstruction? What reconstruction?”
“NNR. Neural network reconstruction. They didn’t tell you?”
“Doctor, no one has told me anything.”
They were standing in the visitors’ lounge just outside the medical center’s critical ward, the psychiatric version of an ICU. The viewall beside them was set to show Cabot on a hospital bed, his body unnaturally rigid though no restraints were visible. Up the right side of the screen marched a steady, unfolding column of words. The audio from the critical ward had been switched off—the screaming tended to bother visitors—but Cabot was talking, an unending rush of words that almost made sense . . . until you tried to parse them out.
“ . . . and God is Goddess I feel You inside my brain when I can’t explain the luminous revelation of the transcendent because string theory proves, proves the existence of alternate realities that are manifest within the Gaia matrix that transforms our reality in ways that turn base lead into azure skies of radiant blessing that is the sacred marriage with the Divine . . .”
At least, Ashton thought, he no longer appeared to be convinced that things were crawling on him.
“Religious delusion,” Gonzales said, watching Ashton try to make sense of the monologue. “The technical diagnosis is delusional schizophrenia. We call what he’s doing there ‘word salad,’ and it’s fairly typical in cases like this.”
“He thinks he’s talking to God?”
“Possibly. He keeps referencing Gaia . . . but we’re not sure if he’s talking about the ancient pagan deity of Earth or the common expression of techno-transcendence.” Gently, Gonzales reached out and turned Ashton away from the screen. “Don’t try to figure it out. There’s a—a fault in his brain circuitry that makes it all but impossible for him to communicate sensibly. We record it all to look for clues that might help with the treatment, of course, but mostly it’s all scrambled-up garbage.”
“What if he really is talking to the Goddess?”
Gonzales stared at her for a moment, those blue eyes as penetrating as an X-ray laser. “You’re from the Periphery, aren’t you, dear?”
That again. She sighed. “Yes. The D.C. swamps.”
“Is Lieutenant Commander Cabot your . . . your husband?” She said the word with a hint of distaste. “Or a sex partner, perhaps?”
“No.”
How, Ashton wondered, could she explain to a non-Prim? Was there any sense in even trying? Newton Cabot was a fellow Prim and a fellow former Navy pilot, nothing more than that . . . but the fact that they both were outsiders with similar backgrounds within the far larger cultural background matrix of modern society put them in the same foxhole. It gave them something in common, more powerful, more intense even than their shared naval experience. Husband . . . no. But she did tend to think of him as a brother.
“I meant no offense, dear,” Gonzales told her. “You seem to be . . . deeply attached to him, that’s all.”
“He’s a fellow pilot in my squadron,” she said, avoiding the issue of them both being Prims. “That makes us close, yes.”
Gonzales nodded, but her expression suggested that she didn’t quite believe Ashton.
“Official policy here at the Center is to withhold all patient information from anyone except next of kin, designated marriage partners, or people designated by the patient. Newton listed family in the Boston Periphery . . . but your name wasn’t on it.”
Ashton came close to exploding. Primitives living marginal existences at the edge of high-tech modern culture tended to bond in pairs . . . a survival mechanism when larger groups tended to be threatened by internal politics, and were harder to feed. Centuries ago, that had been the norm in human culture, at least outside of the Theocracies, but within the context of modern culture, monogamy was seen as . . . a mild perversion.
And damn the prudish aristocratic societal traditionalists who passed judgment on anyone who insisted that everyone hold the same beliefs, follow the same cultural mores, and live the same lives!
Gonzales must have seen the storm building behind Ashton’s eyes. She held up a hand. “Easy, dear, easy. I was simply explaining Center policy, and why you were having a hard time. I can tell you’re close, and I’ll tell you what I can.”
Ashton forced herself to relax. “I’m . . . sorry, Doctor. I feel like I’ve been slamming my head against plascrete walls all morning.”
“I do know the feeling. Essentially . . . the web of neurons inside Newton’s cerebral cortex has been . . . partially unwired, partially rewired. This sort of thing happens in cerebrovascular trauma—strokes—or when a feedback effect from a hostile virtual network affects the brain’s neuronal net. Fortunately, it wasn’t enough to cause major physical damage. But he is insane.”
“Permanently?”
“We hope not. There is a treatment plan, though we have to basically start him off at the beginning. We have already injected him with medical nanobots to disassemble his in-head circuitry, to take him down to bare brain, with no technological augmentation. The next step will be to inject his brain with his own stem cells, and use cranial nanosurgery to begin rewiring the neural net within his cerebral cortex. It’s called neural network reconstruction, and the idea is to break the connections that formed—re-formed, really—in his neurons when he was hit by the active intrusion countermeasures . . . the . . . what do you call it?”
“ICEscream.”
“Funny name. The ICEscream, yes. The . . . the jolt that was fed back to his organic brain while he was in the virtual simulation rewired significant portions of his cerebral cor
tex. It also fried portions of his implant hardware, which is why we’ve had to dissolve it. With luck, we’ll be able to regrow most of what was lost . . . and disassemble connections that are . . . are interfering with his ability to communicate with the outside world.”
“But that means he’ll be better, doesn’t it?”
Gonzales pressed her lips together, then shook her head. “I wish I could tell you, dear. At best . . . at best, he’ll be sane . . . but it’s possible, even probable that he won’t remember people important to him . . . that he’ll have lost some of his major skill sets, chunks of his training and experience. He might suffer massive amnesia and have to retrain from the very start, as if he’s gone back to a blank slate, like a newborn’s.”
“And the worst case?”
“He probably won’t die. There doesn’t seem to be any involvement of his motor cortex or autonomic functions. But he may be . . . in a world of his own. A world that doesn’t really relate very well to the world you and I experience.” She shrugged bony shoulders. “He may just continue talking to the Goddess, and not relate to the rest of us at all.”
“And you say it will be months before you know?”
“We’ll know the stem cells are replacing damaged neurons successfully within two to three weeks. We won’t know how much of his memory has been affected for another six to eight weeks. The retraining, if it becomes necessary, could take a year or more.”
“A year?”
Again, a shrug. “How long does it take a baby to learn to be human? Even with downloads, once his implants have been rechelated across his cerebral cortex, it takes time to integrate the training.”
“I . . . see. Thank you, Doctor. I appreciate your taking the time to explain.”
“Not at all, dear.” She turned and looked at the figure on the bed revealed by the ICU viewall. “I wish the news was better . . . but too often we realize that what we’re doing here is the art of medicine. We like to think of it as a precise and high-tech science, but it’s not. It may never be. Medical science does not have all the answers. . . .”
Ashton wanted to ask Gonzales about her beliefs—specifically about why she was so old at a time when most humans lived healthy and relatively youthful lives well into their second or third century, thanks to nanoanagathic life extension.
But if she was avoiding life extension because of religious reasons, she might easily take offense. The White Covenant discouraged any questions about a person’s religious or spiritual beliefs.
She watched Cabot on the bed for a moment, the column of word-salad nonsense continuing to crawl silently up the screen as he babbled somewhere within the labyrinth of the center’s psych ward. Ashton didn’t believe in God, not as most people seemed to use the term, but she was familiar with the Gaia hypothesis . . . and with the newer idea of the Gaia matrix.
Centuries before, an environmentalist named James Lovelock had suggested that Earth—or, rather, Earth’s tightly interconnected biosphere—might in fact constitute a kind of higher order—self-regulating, internally consistent, an emergent phenomenon arising from the complexity of all life and the way it worked together. He’d called it the Gaia hypothesis, after the Greek goddess of Earth. Some after Lovelock had gone so far as to suggest that the system was self-aware or becoming so, that humans and their electronic communications networks were, in fact, Gaia’s nervous system, her means of becoming self-aware.
More recently, believers had pointed out that both human minds and the AIs they worked with tended to link together into higher and higher orders of awareness and consciousness. A crude example might be the tactical link for a fighter squadron, the electronic network tying together all of the pilots and their ship AIs and, when it was close enough, even the main AI back on board the carrier into a kind of physically dispersed but tightly organized single entity. Just as humans were made up of trillions of cells linked together, just as human consciousness could be seen as an emergent epiphenomenon from the neural net of the cerebral cortex, all interconnected humans and artificial intelligences might together comprise a far vaster, far more powerful, far more deeply aware entity called the Gaia matrix.
Ashton had seen no evidence that such an entity existed . . . but, then, was a single cell inside a human liver or in the skin on the tip of the nose or within the glia of the brain itself aware of the whole organism, the person? If it was true, that higher-level organism didn’t seem to take much interest in the cells that made up its being, no more than Ashton, most of the time, was aware of the tip of her nose. If Gaia didn’t bother her, she wouldn’t bother Gaia.
As she looked at the lone figure inside the psych ward, though, she was reminded of a poem, a snippet of verse from centuries ago, which made fun of the then-city of Boston and of the families that made up its rather closely knit aristocracy.
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
Ashton didn’t know the poem’s background. She had no idea what a cod was, or why beans should be exclusively linked to Boston. She did know, however, that old Boston had been long dominated by several old and aristocratic families, the so-called Boston Brahmins, including the Cabots and the Lowells. That had been centuries ago, before rising sea levels and a couple of weapons impacts in the Atlantic—the fall of Wormwood in 2132, and a high-velocity impactor strike during the Turusch attack of 2405—had all but obliterated the low-lying city. The Cabots had included important industrialists, business leaders, politicians, and doctors, hence the joke.
But now Newton really was speaking “only to God.”
And Shay wondered again if modern medicine was making an unwarranted assumption here. What if he really was in direct contact with an emergent goddess arising from human electronic networks?
If the doctors managed to break that connection, would he be grateful? Or would he mourn the loss?
She doubted, somehow, that she would ever know the truth.
Chapter Thirteen
9 March 2425
York Civic Center
Jefferson Government Complex
Toronto, USNA
1345 hours, TFT
The York Civic Center was a sprawling metropolis in its own right, seated on the banks of Lake Ontario and extending on artificial terrain far out over the waters to the south. The Jefferson Tower rose in sweeping curves above the waterfront, offering an unparalleled view of the city and the lake.
It was, Koenig thought, a relief to be back up and in the light, natural light rather than the glowing light panels of the bunker kilometers below. For months, with only occasional respites on ceremonial occasions, President Koenig and his staff had been squirreled away in the Emergency Presidential Complex far beneath the streets of Toronto, sheltering from the possibility of another Confederation nano-D attack like the one that had vaporized a three-kilometer-wide crater into the heart of downtown Columbus, the former capital of the USNA. His security detail could fuss and fidget; he was going to make the most of this, and had arranged for the staff meeting with Gray and his people in a broad, open briefing room in the sky over a third of a kilometer above Toronto’s central business and government center.
There were military units surrounding the city, of course, and on the Atlantic coast, and in orbit, all watching for another attack. If an alarm came through, Koenig and those with him could be in the bunker complex within a few minutes, thanks to dedicated high-velocity mag-rail elevators in the building’s spine.
He didn’t think it was going to happen. There’d been no repeat of the atrocity, and despite President Denoix’s disquieting remarks a few days before—about the possibility of more nano-D attacks—the new Confederation government had been backpedaling on the issue, blaming a cabal or rogue element of some sort within the Confederation mi
litary.
Koenig looked down from the Jefferson Building’s 194th floor on the crowded expanse of York Plaza and prayed that the Confederation continued to behave . . . continued to abide by the commonly accepted terms and restrictions of civilized warfare. Despite Denoix’s vague threats, the Confederation seemed to have received enough of a backlash from the rest of the world, even from the nation-states that were still members of the Confederation, to have renounced nano-deconstructor warfare as a weapon.
The whole idea of civilized warfare was a colossal oxymoron, of course. War by its very nature couldn’t be civilized. Centuries ago, the advent of nuclear weapons had forced certain restrictions on warfare, if only to avoid the unthinkable—a nuclear holocaust on a global scale. Certain lines could not be crossed, certain borders could not be violated even when the enemy was operating freely on both sides. The notion of limited warfare had cost lives and even eventual victory in some of those wars. “There is no substitute for victory” had been a quote by General Douglas MacArthur—but in one way, perhaps, MacArthur was wrong. The human species had survived, after all, when the increasingly deadly weapons of modern warfare had threatened Humankind with utter extinction. If it hadn’t been victory, at least, it had been an accomplishment more important than mere military or even political success. Extinction is appallingly permanent.
The stakes had become higher since humans had encountered alien civilizations out among the stars . . . and especially since the Sh’daar Ultimatum. It was almost impossible for humans to understand alien motivations or cultural limitations. Worse, when the survival of the entire species was at stake, it made no sense whatsoever to put limits on what could and could not be done in war. The Confederation and the United States of North America had to share the planet, no matter what the outcome of the civil war; the various Sh’daar client species that had attacked Earth over the past decades weren’t concerned with such niceties. Presumably, they would save a habitable garden world for their own use if possible . . . but if they had to boil away Earth’s oceans and turn the surface into glass they would do so. Koenig remembered the object lesson of a species known to the Agletsch as the Chelk, and suppressed a shudder. Their world, and every living creature on it, had been destroyed twelve thousand years ago by the Sh’daar. The Chelk homeworld’s fate might well become Earth’s if humans couldn’t get their act together and present the Sh’daar with a unified front.