Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  The girl just looked at her blankly. There was a chilling pause. No one in the room spoke.

  “Does this distinction mean nothing to you?” the interviewer persisted.

  “What distinction?”

  “The distinction between someone who is consciously betraying everything you claim to be defending, and someone who merely, through no fault of their own, does not have the biology to assimilate Pyeongwha’s NCT regime.”

  Another long pause. “Good God,” Anita murmured.

  The girl finally shook her head. “I don’t understand your point.”

  “So there’s no distinction in your mind between the different kinds of people you dealt with in prep?”

  “A traitor is a traitor. Pyeongwha society works a certain way. They knew that. They chose another path, and all societies have the right to defend themselves from those who attack them.”

  “And so all resistance or non-compliance becomes attack,” said Anita. “Thus justifying anything Anjula does in response.”

  “Hell, politicians do that here,” said Pushpa. “You brand a political attack with something morally unacceptable—racism, sexism, qualificationism—to try and make your opponents shut up.”

  “Attacking free speech isn’t the same as mass murder,” Vanessa replied.

  “I’m not saying it’s the same thing,” said Pushpa, spooning another mouthful of ice cream, “I’m just saying that you can observe the same rhetorical mechanisms at play in all societies. The consequences of those rhetorical mechanisms may vary wildly, but the mechanisms themselves all come from the same places and the same logic.”

  “Sure,” said Vanessa, “but that just leads to some soft civvies in places like Tanusha, who’ve never seen a real blood and guts disaster up close, thinking that all this shit is basically equivalent—freedom of speech here, mass murder there. It’s not.”

  Pushpa held up a pacifying hand. “No, you’re right, I agree. I’m just saying.”

  Sandy smiled. Pushpa and Anita were from what was, in Sandy’s opinion, easily Tanusha’s most intelligent segment of society—the freewheeling, free commercial, free everything underground. It made everything they had to say worth listening to. But Vanessa knew things they didn’t, first hand, and argued like a grunt—straight for the throat every time. What Vanessa liked about Anita and Pushpa was that they’d actually listen to a mere grunt, unlike many far more “capital Q” Qualified individuals who found security personnel irredeemably blue collar and beneath respectability.

  “Okay,” said Siddhartha, finishing the final screw that connected the brace to Sandy’s neck. “That’s all ready.”

  Rhian came across and peered at it. It was a simple enough device: a brace mount for an extremely strong, slim needle. The whole thing was rigged with microsensors, to measure every fraction of a millimeter.

  “I’d rather Rhian did it,” said Sandy.

  “Oh, no,” said Siddhartha, “the needle is so exceptionally small you’ll barely feel a thing. It shouldn’t cause you any reaction.”

  “I don’t care,” said Sandy. “If you’re poking around in the spinal column of a GI, anyone within arm’s reach is theoretically at risk. Rhian will do it.”

  “I’ll do it,” Rhian agreed. “What do I do?”

  “Oh, it’s all preprogrammed,” said Siddhartha. “You just need to activate it here,” pointing, “and keep an eye on the screen here to make sure the program works as written . . . and if it doesn’t, tell me immediately, because we only use these to sample normal humans, and while I’m sure the needle is strong enough, with a GI you never know.”

  “It should be fine,” Rhian said confidently. She knew quite a lot of medical-type stuff these days beyond even her early learning expertise.

  “I agree,” said Anita, knowing as much but for different reasons. She dashed for a bottle, poured Sandy a vodka, and handed it to her.

  “Won’t do any good,” Sandy reminded her.

  “I know. It just seemed appropriate.”

  Sandy sculled it and gave the glass back. Then she called up her full internal network diagnostic, so she could look at everything on overlaid vision and be certain nothing would be affected.

  “Ready?” Rhian asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” said Sandy.

  She felt the sting of first penetration. Then a strange, numb pain.

  “Okay?” Rhian asked.

  “Like I imagine an insect bite would feel, if I could feel insect bites. Is it going in?”

  “Slowly,” said Rhian. A pause. “Very slowly.”

  “What’s the resistance meter?” Siddhartha asked anxiously.

  “Seven four two,” said Rhian. “Is that high?”

  “Ridiculously high. But it should withstand up to nine hundred.”

  “Seven nine one,” Rhian corrected.

  “The needle’s not going in?” Sandy sighed. It was predictable. All GIs were made tough. Herself, even more so. Her internal schematic was unchanged.

  “No, wait, here we go,” said Rhian. “It’s going in.” Sandy frowned. The pain was unchanged. That she felt it at all told her how unserious it was. Serious pain kicked in combat reflexes, which dimmed everything with natural painkiller—direct relief in the neural centers themselves, a redirecting of neural activity, not crude drugs in the bloodstream. “And now it’s out.”

  Siddhartha stepped back in to undo the fastenings and check the sample.

  “Oh yes,” he said, with some excitement. “That’s a very nice sample. Absolutely tiny, just a single molecular cluster. But more than enough to work with.”

  “Now,” Vanessa said sternly, “no sharing with anyone.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Siddhartha, nodding his head as the fasteners came away. “The sample won’t leave my lab, and will be locked in the most secure facility. Diamonds are not as well protected.” And Siddhartha was boss of his company, unlisted, with no superior to answer to.

  “Diamonds are nowhere near as valuable,” said Anita.

  Sandy rubbed her neck as Siddhartha packed up and left, very anxious to get back to his lab.

  “I get the feeling he’s going to have a very late night,” Pushpa observed once the door was shut. She’d put the ice cream back in the freezer, and was now started on cream whisky. Sandy was certain that if it weren’t for intestinal micros, Pushpa would be considerably plumper than she already was.

  “No sleep for forty-eight hours, I bet,” Anita agreed.

  “He’s a good guy, though,” said Sandy, taking some chocolate and a glass of red, and settling onto the couch next to Vanessa. “Ari’s known him a long time, says he’s always been above board. Absolutely obsessive, but then all the best experts are.”

  “Well,” Anita said brightly, pouring herself a drink, “I propose a toast! We all just broke the law!” Small cheers. “Including some very senior Tanushan law enforcement officials. I propose we toast a fine day for the restoration of sanity to the Federation’s biotech laws.”

  “I accept your toast only on the hypocritical grounds that everybody does it,” said Vanessa, raising her glass.

  “My point exactly!” said Anita.

  “I and Rhian accept your toast on the basis that we’re both walking violations of countless laws anyway,” said Sandy.

  “Precisely!” said Anita, very pleased, and drank. Sandy reflected on how much the Federation had changed in the seven years she’d been here. Back then, this would have been a very serious breach of law indeed. Now, not so much. Technology swept ahead, irresistible as all progress, and in that respect, the League’s vision of human society was certainly winning.

  “Still interesting to speculate,” said Pushpa. “How much do you think that sample could fetch, ’Nita? Three bil?”

  “Oh, at least,” said Anita. “Taken from Sandy, easily.” A Callayan dollar was fairly strong, but Tanusha was expensive. Most people made about forty thousand before tax, but an average apartment cost two hundred thousand. A house, f
ive hundred. A nice cruiser, six hundred and up. Anita and Pushpa’s little software company, Sandy heard, turned over perhaps thirty mil a year . . . with just ten employees. They’d had plenty of chances to grow it larger, but preferred it exactly this size.

  “Three billion dollars?” Rhian asked, blinking.

  “Easy,” Anita repeated. “I mean, that’s the most advanced neural synthology ever made, that we know of. The stuff we know works, anyway. The proteins alone would be three billion. I reckon if we organised a little auction we could probably get it up to five or six. All the big companies would bid through proxies and stitch up finances somehow. They can afford it.”

  “And they might get very little for it,” Pushpa added. “Or more likely, they’d unlock completely new markets spanning the entire Federation, and six billion would be an amazing bargain.”

  “If I’m so fucking valuable,” said Sandy, “why am I poor?”

  “Because you’re honest,” Anita laughed.

  Pushpa nodded, pointing a finger. “There’s your mistake,” she agreed. “If you’d been selling bits of yourself to the right people, you’d make us look like paupers.”

  “You’re not poor,” Vanessa teased her. “You earn twice the average wage and your accommodation is rent free, plus tax benefits for CSA personnel.”

  “I feel poor,” Sandy complained.

  “That’s not hard in Tanusha.”

  “And seriously, Sandy,” said Anita, “if you’d like some extra money, make me some software!” She’d been pestering Sandy on this for years. “You’re a software magician. You have capabilities even I can only dream of, you could make a fortune if you wanted. I’ve even checked the CSA rules, and there’s nothing stopping you from making some extra money on the side, so long as it’s not security related. Look, I’ve got a couple of little barrier booster replication functions I’ve been working on, but I can’t get the bandwidth frequencies and field depth to match in their current matrix . . . you rock at that kind of thing. Do that for me and I’ll get you an equivalent percentage cut of the final product when we put it to market.”

  “Who’s it for?” Sandy asked.

  “Logistics company,” said Anita. “Nothing security related.”

  “Logistics interfaces with central traffic control,” said Sandy. “Central traffic has AIs parsing their code line by line. They’ll find it. You know how AIs are with unusual patterns . . .”

  “And it’s not security related, so they won’t care!”

  “But it is security related,” Sandy persisted, “because like all centralised routines, central traffic has security routines running all through it, many of which activate in the event of emergency, which I know because I actually helped write a few of them, with no additional boost to my salary.”

  “Well that’s just dumb, Sandy,” said Pushpa from her seat, a comfortable round lump in lime green salwar kameez. “No one works for free.”

  “It was a part of my job, included in my current salary. And here’s the kicker: if there were an emergency, the first person they’ll ask to parse the code is me. I’m even better on League-specific patterns than AIs are, so I’d be writing on the appearance of my own code, written privately for your logistics company, in my report.”

  “I can’t see how that would mean you’ve done anything wrong,” Anita said stubbornly.

  “No,” said Sandy, “it just looks really, really bad. ’Nita, there’s very little in this network that doesn’t interface with security protocols at some point. All the stuff I write looks very specific, it’s very different from anything else. I use different processing routines to write it. And a lot of that process is kind of automatic. I process cyberspace like I process anything in three dimensions, without really thinking about it.”

  Automatic. She thought of Poole playing the piano. Complaining that he couldn’t get the expression right, that it sounded flat, emotionless. Poole could play the piano the same way that Sandy could target ten ways at once in a firefight and hit all of them—it was instinctive, the processing of situational information at a very rapid speed, translated into mechanically precise action. GIs had very little conscious control over any of it. That was what made it so effective. She didn’t need to think about it—if she did, she might miss. And she never missed.

  That was what Poole had been trying to do at his piano—to wrest back conscious control from the subconscious routines that dominated so much of a GI’s brainspace. To assert conscious domination of the automatic subconscious. To insert emotion, on purpose, into the mechanical precision of fingers flying over piano keys. That was why he played for hours on end. To try and inject variation, on command. GIs did not do variation well. She was designed to shoot things. Variation, in shooting things, meant missing.

  Was that the real reason why she didn’t want to write software for Anita? Like the real reason she didn’t want to learn to play music? Hidden under all her excuses, was she really frightened that, laid out in her creations, exposed for all to see, would be patterns so automatic and predictable that everyone would immediately know it was her? Because GIs were truly that predictable—not genuine, free personalities at all, but controlled and automated collections of subconscious routines? And not all that different, in fact, from the brainwashed suicidals who had attacked her today, and slaughtered thousands on Pyeongwha?

  “Hey,” said Vanessa, gently. Whatever Anita had said in reply hadn’t registered. She’d just been sitting, and gazing at nothing. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Sandy ran a hand over her face, tiredly. “I just had a really bad day.”

  Vanessa put her head on Sandy’s shoulder and snuggled close. It was a big advantage for female soldiers, Vanessa had once observed. Both sexes knew that some things could never be made better by talking. But girls, at least, were not embarrassed to cuddle.

  Sandy thought of the bodies in the hallway, of Ambassador Ballan’s staffers, even of the annoying journalist. She’d had post-stress tape, of course, so the memories did not knock her sideways. But still she had to wipe her eyes.

  “Fucking Anjulans,” she said, with a glance back to the girl frozen in mid-interview on the display. “They got what they voted for and most of them aren’t technically brainwashed. Sometimes I think they all fucking deserve it.”

  “That’s not why we hit them,” said Vanessa against her shoulder.

  “No.” Sandy put her cheek in Vanessa’s hair. “No, we had to stop it spreading. But even so.”

  Her own mood disturbed her. She felt so much more compassion these days for people on her side. Far more than she had back in the League. Living in Tanusha had shown her previously foreign things like family, children and friends. She knew the depth and breadth of what had been lost, even for people she hadn’t especially liked. But for her enemies, she felt less and less. Did that mean she was becoming less human, or more?

  “I just hope Siddhartha finds something that can cure Radha,” she added. “Something good should come from today, at least.”

  “If that means we can promote Ibrahim to FSA Director,” said Vanessa, “it’ll be a net win for Federal security.”

  “And a net loss for Callayan security,” Rhian remarked.

  Vanessa shrugged. “Maybe. There are some good options. But maybe it’s time we started putting the Federation first, not just Callay.”

  “I’m not sure I feel comfortable amongst all this patriotism,” Pushpa remarked.

  “Well, you refrained from muttering rude remarks about Ibrahim,” said Vanessa, “so there’s hope for you yet.”

  On some matters, the underground and law enforcement would remain forever far apart. Like on the necessity of a lot of law enforcement in the first place.

  “Well, I was going to say,” said Pushpa, “I’m surprised you’re not more involved in the investigations, Sandy. I mean, they’re not even sure if Ballan was the target. It might have been you.”

  Sandy shrugged. “Perhaps. But there’s nothing I
can do. I’m not investigations, I’m not static security, I’m kept deliberately ignorant of most of the security procedures in the Grand Council, like most people. I’m a shooter, a combat specialist. I just sit here and wait for them to tell us how badly people fucked up.”

  “Pretty badly,” said Vanessa, leaning forward to pour herself another drink.

  “Well, it’s an inside job, pretty obviously,” said Anita, looking at Sandy. They were the two main software experts in the room—Pushpa was talented, but business was more her field. She handled the money and lined up the jobs.

  Sandy smiled faintly. “Like I’m just going to discuss Federal level security with you,” she teased.

  Anita made a face. “It’s just not fair that there’s no known way to get a GI drunk.”

  “Thank God for it, too,” said Vanessa. “I mean, can you imagine?”

  Sandy was mildly offended. “I think I’d be a very good drunk.”

  “A good drunk who can bend steel barehanded.”

  “I think I’d be a friendly drunk,” Sandy corrected, thinking about it. “A very friendly drunk.” She grabbed Vanessa.

  “Hey!”

  “I think I’d cuddle too much and do inappropriate things.”

  She tried to bite her neck. Vanessa yelped and fought back, with new augmentation that their sofa could not handle, and overturned.

  “You idiot,” said Vanessa with affection, as they lay in a laughing heap on the floor.

  “Hey, wow,” said Sandy, looking at Vanessa’s drink. Even after their scuffle and the fall, she hadn’t spilt a drop. “That’s crazy. Your hands are nearly as good as mine now.”

  A month later, Sandy hung from her knees in the CSA gym, and pulled on the steel U-beams in the floor. Muscles rippled and tensed, as she began to heave upward, slowly at first, waiting for the unpleasant catch of pain in her rib. Today it was almost gone, just a dull tingle that was more a memory than anything real.