Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “Getting synthetic synaptic tissue to behave like a real brain was always the hardest thing,” Sandy explained for the table. This part of GI physiology she did know. “They tried many different methods. We still don’t know how the process of narrowing it down worked, but there’s evidence they started with lots of different methods, then boiled it down to a couple that worked. One method is mainstream, and was used to create just about every GI ever made. And the other created me, and Mustafa, and Jane—the extra-high-des GIs. What Dr Sasa is saying, aren’t you doctor, is that this is neither of those two.”

  The doctor nodded, brushing African braids back from her face. “This looks like a third generation mode,” she agreed. “Which we didn’t actually know the League were still working on.”

  “Because they’re not,” said Sandy. “But New Torah is.”

  More silence at the table. “The League government insists otherwise,” Chandrasekar ventured.

  “They say a lot of things.”

  “Cassandra,” Ibrahim ventured. “Do you have proof, besides Eduardo?”

  “No,” said Sandy. “But I’ll get some.”

  Sandy walked into the safe house’s wide dining room unannounced, and various important people turned to stare at her.

  “Excuse me,” the head of a very large communications firm asked, “but who is this?” Mustafa Ramoja rolled his eyes. Some of the guests did recognise her, with murmurs and gasps.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mustafa, “I wasn’t expecting company, but it seems the CSA has sent some anyway. Perhaps we can do this another time.”

  “Anyone thinking of reporting my presence here today,” Sandy told the gathering as they hurried for the doors, “might want to reflect on how I know who all of you are, and where all of you live, and how none of you are really supposed to be talking to the League without a Federation government representative present.”

  Doors opened and they filed out. Mustafa just watched Sandy, with resigned respect. Sunlight spilled through big windows onto a spartanly modernist floor, wide and spotless. Polished slate here, then two steps up to polished timber, and a bar. The look was so League, Sandy thought. So “future.” If one were stupid enough to presume that one could decide what the future looked like.

  “Have you any idea,” Mustafa asked her, ascending the two steps, “how long it took me to get that group together?”

  “Far longer than it took us to find out you were doing it,” said Sandy. Security came into the room from the outside, wondering what the problem was. They took one look at Sandy, recognised her, and paled. Wisely, they made not even a twitch toward their weapons.

  “It’s all right, Trudi,” Mustafa sighed, walking behind the bar. “She gets past even the best of us. You can go.” The security guards left, and closed the doors. “Though I had thought our security here a little tighter. You didn’t trigger anything?”

  Sandy shook her head. “Tanushan IT is superior even to the League, I’ve learned new tricks while I’m here.”

  “It does make sense, I suppose. Drink?”

  “Whisky. Straight.” Being unaffected by alcohol didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy the biting taste. Mustafa poured. “New Torah’s making GIs, I see.”

  “Do you?” He poured a glass for himself, and walked to her. “You’d be the first person to see that.”

  He tossed the glass to her, whisky and all. Sandy caught it neatly in her fingertips, and not a drop spilled.

  “You knew what he was,” said Sandy, watching him closely. “I’m sure you were under orders to bring him in yourself. Yet you sent us after him. Why?”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Unless you wanted us to know what your government won’t admit,” Sandy continued. “Unless you went against their express orders. But you’d never do anything like that, would you, Mustafa? Disobey an order? From the most moral, enlightened government in the human universe?”

  Mustafa walked to the windows and gazed out. Linked into the room network by means of devious infiltration even a League safe house was not equipped to stop, Sandy sensed the network suddenly change. Autistic mode. Sandy walked to his side.

  “Disobeying one’s government,” Mustafa said quietly, “is not the same as abandoning one’s people.”

  “Ah,” said Sandy. “So you’re following ISO orders. Which somewhere along the line have deviated from the League government’s.”

  “Politicians can be stupid.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I wanted you to help Eduardo,” said Mustafa. “I did not wish him dead, though it’s not exactly surprising. Either way, New Torah needs to be stopped.”

  “And you think that the Federation might do it?” Sandy asked incredulously. “With the risk of war, with your mob still claiming New Torah as their own?”

  “No one really controls New Torah today,” said Mustafa. He was very grim, with none of his usual elegant amusement. “Our government abandoned them on the pretext that those systems were not economically viable. Well, now it turns out that New Torah has found a way to make itself economically viable. Only now, League administration doesn’t want to hear about it. New Torah is too difficult and too embarrassing. We abandoned a lot of people to an awful fate when we left. Millions of people.”

  “And now they wouldn’t have you back even if you tried,” Sandy surmised. The safe house was obviously ISO run from top to bottom for Mustafa to be talking so openly, even with the network systems jammed. She did not mind League officials hearing her, but Mustafa would. “How bad is it?”

  “Well, first,” said Mustafa with a hard edge of sarcasm, “most systems descended into bloody turmoil and economic collapse. The wealthy, the elite, the most well educated all found passage elsewhere. Those left behind were hardnosed working class, often without families, attracted by high wages and the prospect of fortunes. The Torah Systems were not a place to go for those interested in a grand vision of civilised virtue. There were many good people, just not enough.”

  “Frontier worlds,” Sandy agreed, nodding. “We have them here, too.”

  “So you can imagine who takes over.” He sipped his drink. “And who they kill as soon as they take power. Those are military industrial worlds; the only resource they have is weapons. It became incredibly brutal for several years, then a new stability emerged. There are several factions prominent now. They call themselves corporations but in reality they’re crime gangs. Incredibly well-armed crime gangs. They do business like regular corporations, but they solve contractual disputes with assassinations and minor wars. There are no laws or morals, only winners and losers.”

  “And League administration feels they’re not worth the trouble,” said Sandy.

  “Yes, because League administration’s judgment is so infrequently flawed.” The sarcasm was like nothing Mustafa had directed toward his government within her hearing before. “Like judging the Torah Systems unsustainable in the first place.”

  “Maybe they were right,” Sandy suggested. “Maybe they were unsustainable for a civilised government. The problem with uncivilised governments is that they often do quite a good job where civilisation has failed.”

  “Yes,” Mustafa agreed, darkly. “New Torah has been quite successful. They now threaten to become a major problem for the League. The ISO pleads for action, yet the government is too wrapped up in domestic issues, and insists otherwise.”

  “What kind of major problem?” Sandy asked.

  “New Torah is redeveloping ship-building capability,” said Mustafa. “Warships, to compliment the small merchant fleet that they have currently.”

  Oh, thought Sandy. It wasn’t often that she scooped the highest levels of Federal intelligence with something major. She’d enjoy seeing their faces when she told them. But that was the only happy thought in the information. She was no fan of the League or its new government, but the instability of what Mustafa was describing promised no good for anyone.

 
“Wealthy inter-system crime families posing as planetary governments and building military class starships,” she said. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  “And building GIs,” Mustafa added. “That, too.” Another scoop, though a long suspected one. She felt no joy at all at this one.

  “How many?”

  He shook his head. “Uncertain. Quite a few. They’re not all that good at it, though. Lots of experimentation.” His voice grew tight. “Failed attempts that do not immediately die.”

  They stood together for a while in silence.

  “You can feel that, can’t you?” Sandy said quietly after a moment. “That’s rage. Or outrage, perhaps. You haven’t experienced what I have, from the wrong end of when GI policy goes wrong, so you might not recognise the feeling. There are laws here protecting newborn human life from experimentation, incredibly strict laws. For GIs in the League, nothing.”

  “It’s not League government that’s doing it,” Mustafa countered.

  “That’s debatable, and you know it. There was plenty of it going on during the war, too. And you know that also.”

  “And what if,” Mustafa asked, “by preventing such experimentation, advances were slowed to such an extent that advanced GIs like you or I did not exist?”

  “We’re both like the children of rape victims, Mustafa. The child bears no blame at all for the act of his creation, but that does not excuse the horror of what befell his mother.”

  Mustafa sighed. “I cannot accept such a narrow and pessimistic view of our existence. The League’s experiments were with strict controls. They did not churn out misshapen monsters before arriving at us . . .”

  “That you know of.”

  “And I know an awful lot more than you. The experimentation was at laboratory and simulation level only, and failures never achieved consciousness.”

  “Bullshit,” Sandy snorted. “You know I don’t believe that.”

  “Your experiences in the military have clouded your reason,” Mustafa said calmly. “You suffered great mistreatment, it’s true. But those were the people who used GIs, not those who made them.” Sandy said nothing. “With New Torah, however, your anger is justified, and shared by me.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Sandy. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  Sandy took a train to Montoya. She liked to do it sometimes, to remind herself of the people it was her job to protect. They filled the maglev, a predominance of South Asian brown, the rest an equal mix of white and black, as was Tanusha’s immigration pattern. They wore interlink visors, chatting silently or out loud on calls, or read books or worked. One elderly Sikh gentleman, clearly an eccentric, read a real, worn paper book. Some sat or stood with friends and talked, but this was largely a working crowd, 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, travelling alone in working attire.

  None recognised her, in her baseball cap and sunglasses. The city sped below the windows, very green, now passing low-rise roofs of suburban neighbourhoods as the track curved toward a high-rise urban cluster. There the train slowed, almost soundlessly, from over 200kph to very little. Tall buildings slid past, then the base of a mega-rise, towering the best part of a kilometer into the sky. On the streets here were crowds on well-designed pavements, busy streetfronts alive with shops and cafes, roads jammed with centrally regulated traffic. The details still amazed her, even after so long. As they approached the elevated station, a huge screen advertised Ramprakash Road’s latest musical hit, an extravaganza of dancing girls and dazzling colours. Then the station, doors of the tube sliding open, people coming and going. People on the platform. A mother with kids in an automated stroller. Tourists consulting a display map. A young guy with dreadlocks and a guitar case. At least six hundred people on this platform alone. Maybe five thousand in the open-tube body of the maglev.

  Sometimes, if she allowed herself to think upon it, the scale of the responsibility was more frightening than the dangers of the job itself.

  At Montoya, the station stopped five hundred meters from the Grand Council Assembly building. Sandy took the stairs down to street level instead of the escalator, and marvelled at how the whole neighbourhood looked so permanent, when just five years ago it had been forest. On the sidewalk, she walked, as the buildings gave way to grassy parks—a three hundred meter security buffer about the Assembly perimeter, and the reason the maglev station was as far away as it was.

  The Assembly was a monster, far larger than the Callayan Parliament. Architects stated it was inspired in part by the old coliseum in Rome—a huge circle, with straight walls a hundred meters high, inset with huge pillars and grand atrium entrances. Somewhat larger than the coliseum, then, but Sandy reckoned the Romans would have loved it just the same. That old building had been a place where contestants fought and died for the entertainment of crowds. The Grand Council Assembly was less bloody, and (its critics complained) less entertaining, but most of those familiar with it agreed the comparison was apt.

  About it, all roads terminated. Ahead, Sandy could hear the shouting of crowds. Then she saw them, protestors at a gate, a great mass spilling onto the neighbouring grass. Some police riot vans blocked them, and more cops in armour, plus a few in huge, intimidating walkers—metal gorillas with human drivers, ten feet tall with dispersant foam cannons in powerful fists.

  She detoured to walk past them. There were banners and placards, and lots of shouting. About five thousand people, she reckoned, switching to a network link from a nearby camera, which gave her a good overhead view. A CSA passcode gave her a police feed, which estimated about the same. News networks, anything up to twenty thousand . . . predictable overestimation, that was. But five thousand was plenty. The rule of thumb was that anything over two thousand, in party town Tanusha, indicated a serious hot-button issue.

  “What do we want?”

  “Justice for Pyeongwha!”

  “When do we want it?”

  “Now!”

  Some might have found the chant amusing. “Pyeongwha” was Korean for “peace,” an optimistic name for a new world. So the protestors demanded “justice for peace.” Which to Sandy’s mind was precisely the trade they were proposing.

  Sandy picked her way through the crowd. Many were young, a lot looked like students. They didn’t look like Pyeongwha ex-pats, though—Pyeongwha immigration patterns had given them a sixty-percent East Asian demographic, while East Asians here looked about the usual Tanushan ten percent. Plus they just looked like Tanushans. Even the crazy, fringe types were just a little too well dressed to be convincing—jewellery clashed with dyed T-shirts, and brand name shoes completely ruined the effect of ascetic robes or lungi.

  The crowd silenced to hear a speaker with a megaphone. “These Federal warmongers have attacked and raped the peaceful world of Pyeongwha!” A roar of displeasure from the crowd. “Pyeongwha never attacked anyone!” Another roar. “Pyeongwha is a major exporter of Neodymium, currently one of the most valuable rare metals in the Federation! This is nothing short of a Federal coup to control the Neodymium trade, for which the innocent people of Pyeongwha are being murdered in their thousands!”

  Sandy recalled the “medical” facility beneath Anjula. The bodies, the storage facilities. The skulls being sliced open. Some of those people had been conscious at the time. The peaceful world of Pyeongwha? Peaceful to whom?

  She reached the front of the crowd, pushed through the thickest concentration, and flashed her badge at a policeman. He let her through, and she passed through police lines and barricades to the perimeter gate. There an armed officer gave her a more thorough network scan.

  “Good morning, Commander,” he said cheerfully as the scan results showed him her identity. “Lovely day for a protest.”

  “Isn’t it always,” Sandy said sourly. The officer grinned.

  She started up the path from the gate, through the lovely gardens that, as always, were a front for massively overlapping security layers. One false move within this perimeter, a
nd even a GI could be dead at the touch of a button.

  Suddenly a girl was chasing her, a cameraman in tow. Dammit, Sandy thought to herself. Smaller protests were so common the media usually didn’t bother to send reporters directly, and in the throng she was good at blending in. But now, on the grounds, she was conspicuous.

  “Excuse me! Commander Kresnov!” Sandy thought of walking faster, but that always looked bad on camera. Media training kicked in and she slowed, took off her glasses, and fixed her most pleasant, agreeable expression. The girl came alongside, very excited. “Commander Kresnov, Sushma Sen, KIN Network.” That was a big one, with Federation-wide distribution. The cameraman arrived to zoom on Sandy’s face, holding the automated mount steady with a light touch.

  “Hi,” said Sandy.

  “What brings you to the scene of this enormous protest?”

  Enormous? “I’m not at the protest, I’m at the Grand Council Assembly.”

  “But you came in at the side exit, right by the protest, when most VIPs go through the main entrances. Are you impressed by its size?”

  VIPs? “I’m very pleased to live in a society where this kind of free expression is encouraged,” Sandy gave the rote answer.

  “The protesters are angry at the apparently unprovoked military invasion of Pyeongwha. Were you yourself involved in the invasion?”

  Invasion? Military? Unprovoked? “I’m not allowed to comment on that kind of stuff.”

  “Some commentators on the invasion have noted that you haven’t been seen around Tanusha for the past month and more.”

  “Neither has Santa Claus,” said Sandy with a smile. Defuse with humour, her media trainers encouraged. “I’m fairly sure he wasn’t on Pyeongwha either.”

  “So what have you been doing this past month?”

  “I’ve been not commenting on things I’m not supposed to talk about.” Halfway to the Assembly steps now, just keep walking and don’t fuck it up. Who gave this idiot a grounds pass anyway?

  “Can you comment on the progress of your GI friends as they wait for their asylum claims to be processed?”