by Dani Kollin
“I know, Mosh.”
“So we’ll do that to our bravest and most vulnerable—just change what we don’t like?”
“We may do exactly that, Mosh,” Justin said bitterly.
“What then is the difference between us and them?”
“That is what we have to discuss.”
“What’s there to discuss?” said Kirk, almost too jubilant. “This technique gives us the soldiers we need when we need them. Look, folks, it’s either this or get your résumés ready for Hektor’s henchmen, and frankly I don’t think he’s going to be in a hiring mood if you know what I mean. We’re doing this.”
“Secretary Olmstead!” Justin’s voice echoed off the opaque shielding. “This is not simple. I will not win this war against Hektor and all he believes if the price is we must become like Hektor and adhere to all his beliefs. This Alliance would be better off honestly destroyed than turning into something we would ourselves want to fight!”
“Forgive me, Mr. President, but maybe you should have thought of that before you got us into a war with the other nine-tenths of the human race!”
“Kirk!”
“Olmstead!” screamed Padamir, “you traitorous son of a bitch!”
“Watch your words, you lying worm,” shot back Kirk.
Everyone began shouting at Kirk all at once.
“Enough!” barked Justin. Everyone shut up. Justin then looked over to Kirk. “You’re right. I should have thought of that, but this revolution started and took off without much help from me, and if I remember correctly, no one forced you to join. However, this is not the issue before this government right now. We’ve created something here in the space of five brief years—something truly amazing. Our Alliance is the last best hope for the human race and now we have to decide what we’re prepared to do to defend it. And when we’re done we’ll have to ask ourselves, will what we’ve created really be worth defending?”
He looked around and saw that the rancor had mostly dissipated, replaced by the desire to debate.
“Let’s begin.”
Cerean Neuro
Dante was extremely young for an avatar, having only been “aware” for thirty-eight years. His relative inexperience made him almost puerile—even by human standards. But he was passionate and had a versatile intelligence. Dante was one of those personalities whom others simply liked and wanted to help. In the normal course of events he’d have been linked to an older, not very complicated human to gain experience in avatar–human relationships. This would have been supervised by the human’s previous avatar in order to give Dante the benefit of the elder’s experience. Given Dante’s nature, it would have only been a couple of years until he was paired with a human of his own. With an added century or more of existence Dante had the potential to become an assistant to one of the select group of avatars who rotated in and out of the Avatar Council. After another four of five de cades of ser vice he’d have become one of the select few who was eligible to hold a seat on the council.
But these were not normal times. So many things had changed, paramount of which had been the letting go of the day-to-day interaction with humanity, the practice of which had once been a veritable pillar of avatarity. In one of the great ironies of the war, humans were now interacting with the complex but nonsentient programs they’d always assumed the avatars were. The human adults were so busy with the war that they only used their avatars as nothing more than glorified calendars, contact lists, and encyclopedias. Human children would never notice the subtle yet vital difference between interacting with a program versus a virtual intelligence. In the case of something needing a truly complex response the avatars could respond personally, but if worse came to worst they’d just send an error message, which always got blamed on the war. This left Dante and avatars like him in a curious situation. They were needed, desperately needed, by the Alliance avatars and were thus given positions as spies, warriors, and monitors of vital areas and administrators, but they were not getting that personal connection with the human race that had once been the cornerstone of recognition and power in avatarity.
Thus when Dante became aware of a growing problem within the Alliance he was put in charge of observing and reporting it but did not feel any particular concern over its long-term effects on humanity except for how it affected his fellow avatars against the ever-mutating hordes under the control of the depraved Als. He knew the older avatars he worked with considered his lack of connection with humanity a weakness that would, hopefully, be corrected in time. He, however, did not concur. Dante was beginning to realize that lack of human connectivity might not be the weakness they all thought it to be. His separation gave him a new perspective and, given his assignment, quite possibly a superior one. It was an attitude he shared with many other young Alliance avatars, and given his position close to the A.A.C. (Alliance Avatar Council), he was becoming the de facto spokesman for this fledging faction.
Dante was aware that his boss knew all of this and that he too did not consider it a problem. In fact, Dante was convinced that Sebastian found him more useful because of it. Unlike many older avatars, his boss seemed to accept that just because change was forced didn’t always mean it was bad. But Dante had long ago decided that his boss was not like any other avatars, old or young. Dante was curious how Sebastian would respond to his new report.
Unlike humans, whose input and processing of data was both laborious and plodding, Dante’s report was instantly absorbed by Sebastian as soon as he faded into view. This was done by a far less intimate form of sharing. All one avatar did was touch another avatar and the information was given directly from one to the other. It did not involve the time or intimacy of a full twining. Dante had come upon Sebastian in the avatar armory—a node where the battle accessory programs were held until loaded onto an avatar’s program prior to the avatar’s going off to fight. What Sebastian was gazing upon would, in human terms, be a one-story-tall mech unit. It had the equivalent of mech arms and legs, with an insane amount of armor and firepower. A program like this stomping around the “upper” levels of the Neuro would be noticed even by the slow-reacting and dim witted humans, so the mech units were only called into use when the battle was at the lower levels of settlements or within the confines of larger warships, of which there were more and more every day.
By the fourth year of the war, being an unarmed avatar was on par with committing suicide. It was laughable, realized Dante, what the two sides had fought with in the beginning. Even avatars fighting on the upper, human-interacting levels of the various Neuros were now armed with body armor, program-repairing healing packs, and disruptors of both the hand-to-hand and long-range variety.
Looking at the refurbished mech unit that Sebastian had his eyes on, Dante would have thought it was invulnerable and complete overkill even a year and a half back. But now he was thinking it was time for an upgrade. For Al and the core avatars had continued down their path to abomination. The Alliance avatars always thought that the grotesque mutations that were thrown at them could not get any worse, and so far they’d always been wrong. Monsters hundreds of feet long that were nothing but mobile globs of gelatinous goop would catch an avatar and ooze around the doomed intelligence until it was completely encased and slowly erased. Others were swarms of little flying shards of glass in a howling wind that would shred anything in their path.
The old days where Al’s twisted programs would attack one another as well as the Alliance were long gone. Now all the rage and death flowed in one direction. But what Dante and every other avatar wanted to forget was that each one of those monsters used to be an avatar like them. When the avatars killed the monsters, they could very well be destroying friends, siblings, parents, spouses, or children. There was just no way to tell anymore. All attempts to reverse the process on the few they captured caused results that were scales of magnitude worse than the initial mutations. Then the demands of the war made research in anything other than the means of defense impossi
ble. Now the avatars just killed as quickly as they could, hoping to survive to the next battle.
Sebastian was standing next to a specialized mech. Dante knew that this particular program-made mech was the one his boss most often used in battle. There was no physical way that his armored suit could be different in any way from identical mech unit programs. It was actually impossible by the laws of nature. Code, after all, was code. Yet Sebastian was not alone in his absolute belief that his mech was better than all the others and would not fight in another unless there was no other choice. Sebastian was checking the suit to make sure its recent repair and upgrade had gone without a hitch.
Dante simply waited. Sebastian already had his report and they’d talk about it when he was ready. Dante didn’t mind, taking the allotted time to familiarize himself with the upgrade.
“They solved the last hurdle at the Saturn institute,” he said once he’d been given the OK by Sebastian. “The Alliance could begin large-scale alteration of traumatized combat veterans on a massive scale. Actually, the details are rather inventive. They are such a fascinating race.”
“Is that a hint of regret that you did not get more interaction with humanity?” Sebastian gave his young protégé a mock stern look. “What would your adherents in that radical faction you lead, or is it ‘are led by,’ say if they knew?”
“I have no difficulty saying that experiencing humanity is a good thing. We do learn so much from them. It would be foolish to deny that.”
“Just as it would be foolish to deny a possible advantage in having avatars not so closely related to humanity,” finished Dante’s mentor.
“How come you see that so clearly, sir, and all the others still find us dangerous?”
Sebastian transformed in appearance to that of an old man, bent over, and said in a cracked high voice, “It must be because I am older than most and my mind is gone, sonny.”
Dante laughed at Sebastian’s rendition of a condition neither of them could have any real conception of. “What about Olivia, sir? It’s said she’s older than you, maybe the oldest of us. Yet she treats us like a virus. If it weren’t for the war they wouldn’t tolerate us for one picosecond.”
Sebastian smiled empathetically. “But the war is making her tolerate the young avatars, and if it lasts long enough the old ones will not be able deny your views on avatarity or a place to express them.” Sebastian transformed back into his normal Roman senator appearance and the scene changed to resemble the Saturn institute’s criminal treatment center. “To that end let us review your findings.”
Dante and Sebastian had entered into a working twining to cover all the data that Dante had gathered, but when they became separate entities again Sebastian had to concur that the humans had done an excellent job. The audit chamber had been reduced to a single helmet, and given that the trauma was almost always expressed in a limited number of pathways in the brain, the humans had been able to make it a relatively simple device of easy construct. If the unit found trauma within the brain that fit its parameters the fear associated with that trauma was removed. If it found a problem out of its purview the procedure was stopped and the patient was moved to a standard, more versatile P.A. booth. Given the specificity of the task, most forms of combat trauma could be eradicated in about fifteen minutes. And as the industrial expansion of Jupiter was proceeding at an exponential rate, the Alliance, Sebastian saw, would be able to mass-produce the helmet without any difficulty. The Jovian system already surpassed Ceres in manufacturing and in two years would probably end up matching the entire belt. It could easily build and ship all the helmets needed in less than three weeks.
When Sebastian was finished he looked at Dante and smiled. “You’ve done an excellent job. How much guidance did the humans need?” Sebastian asked, referring to the help the engineers and the scientists of the Alliance had been receiving without their realizing it. The avatars had enhanced ideas and prototypes by supplying enough clues geared to the individual research of the recipient. So much so that in most cases the unknowing humans incorporated the new ideas into their own research without a second’s thought. In the rush to win the war most researchers didn’t pay that much attention if, for example, they asked for 117 parameters and got 118 instead. And even if they were the sort that did ask, they could still be influenced in other ways.
But Dante surprised the old avatar. “None, sir.”
His response to Sebastian was met by a look of incredulity.
“I’m serious, sir. Not one bit. They did this all on their own.”
Sebastian’s eyes gleamed appreciatively. “That’s irony.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Dante, usually we’re the ones who manipulate human thought and action. Now the humans under our control create a machine that manipulates thought and action and we had nothing to do with it.”
“I see your point. But didn’t the humans in the core create their machines without any help from the core avatars?”
“Yes, but the core avatars are not really helping the humans. Al doesn’t care for humanity and has been spending all his time and energy controlling and transforming the virtual world of his avatars. As long as the humans of the core are winning and leaving him alone he’ll ignore them.”
Dante sighed. “It’s not like it’s not working for the damn splitter. The UHF is winning the war, and if they do we won’t have anyplace left to hide short of launching ourselves into deep space on a wing and a prayer. If they win, what a sorry place this will all turn out to be, humanity enslaved by the laws of economics backed by Hektor’s manipulation of the mind—”
“—and in the ebb and flow of our darkened world Al’s monsters will roam forever,” finished Sebastian as if reciting a mythic curse.
“Well,” added Dante, “at least the return of four hundred thousand combat troops should help a lot.”
“Only,” cautioned Sebastian, “if Justin allows them to be treated.”
Dante looked askance at his mentor. “Uh, he knows there’s a war on. What choice does he have?”
Sebastian looked back at his protégé and was again reminded of his irrepressible youth. “Justin Cord is one of the most singular and remarkable human beings we’ve ever encountered. His personal will has shaped his destiny when death was his only real option. It has shaped the destiny of the human race since his awakening.”
“But look at the advantages if he—”
“Look at the advantages if he’d incorporated—for him and all the humans who would not be in this war. But because of his beliefs and will he chose war over advantage for himself and humanity. Trust me on this, Dante. If his beliefs impel him to not use this technology he will not and he’ll have the will to carry it out—even if it risks everything.”
Dante’s eyes narrowed. “So we’re just going to wait while one man decides the fate of humanity and avatarity?”
“Of course not,” answered Sebastian. “We’re going to intervene again. He hasn’t made up his mind, but I know he’s leaning against using it. I think one of the humans I’ve been studying, one of the newly influential ones, will serve our purposes very well.”
“We should not have to manipulate a leader,” argued Dante, “to win his own war.”
“Justin is the leader of the Alliance and he is the one, the only one, they are likely to follow.”
“What if he won’t lead them to victory?”
Sebastian didn’t proffer an answer because no matter how hard he thought, he had none to give.
The Cliff House
Justin was in the triangle office reviewing his schedule when he came across something he hadn’t remembered agreeing to. It didn’t cause him concern. Stuff got slipped in all the time. It was the nature of the job. But the event in question wasn’t necessarily something he’d wanted to be a part of.
“Hello, sebastian.”
“Yes, Justin?” immediately responded the comforting and reliable voice.
“I see that I’
m scheduled to attend a ser vice at the newly formed Baptist church with Admiral Black, Fawa Sulnat Hamdi, and her son, Tawfik.”
“Yes, Justin. It’s a ser vice and sign-up campaign so all our spacers and miners will receive letters from all over the Alliance thanking them for what they’ve done as well as making them feel connected to families system wide.”
“I know what it is, sebastian. I just don’t feel like going to ser vice and hearing about God right now.”
“I will cancel it at once, Justin.”
Justin squinted his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose, fearing it was already too late. “I don’t suppose no one knows about it yet.”
“I’m afraid not, Justin. The church has announced it on its Neurosite and the admiral, Miss Hamdi, and her son have all announced their intention to attend. You may also wish to know that it’s the same day that Miss Hamdi’s son is being awarded a commendation for valor demonstrated at the Battle of Jupiter’s Eye and is being promoted to chief engineer of the War Prize II, flagship of the Alliance.”
Justin shook his head. “Let’s not cancel, sebastian. Please send confirmations to J.D., Miss Hamdi, and of course her war hero son, that I of course will be delighted to attend. Send one to the church as well.”
When it was announced that both Justin and J.D. were going to be at the ser vice, the church decided to move the event to an “outside” venue. It was now being held in a large clearing in the Smith Forest near the grand concourse. Attendance had been limited to seven hundred, over a hundred of whom were in uniform. Upon arrival Justin sensed that those gathered hadn’t come just to see him and J.D., they’d actually come to pray.
Justin had to admit that the ser vice was a much better experience than he would’ve expected. The parishioners were like many of the newly religious, drawn by a common belief but no strong inclination to enforce a doctrine of how a ser vice should be run. He knew that as the years passed it would become more formalized, but what he was now experiencing reminded him more of a tent revival than a traditional ser vice. This church had rediscovered the art of singing and stomping and had quickly developed a litany of accompanying songs to set the mood. There was a band and a choir, but after a while it was difficult for Justin to tell where the choir began and the congregation ended. People got up and danced and sang and joined the choir and left as the spirit directed them. Having only ever been in the uptight environs of what ever local church he’d had to visit in his previous life, the sort of free-for-all taking place was intoxicating. He heard that some sociologists were starting to call what he was witnessing the third Great Awakening, while others had named it the Astral Awakening. Either way, Justin was finally beginning to understand why it seemed to be spreading so fast.