Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  I wondered if anything I said would change things. In a way I hoped not. Mankind should have had a better advocate than me.

  'Just looking after our own kind would have been a start. Caring for other species would have been a good sign. Even the most basic of things, like making sure the ecology of the planet wasn't running out of control, we haven't attended to.

  'Instead we're indifferent to the suffering of our own kind, we hideously exploit all other life, we regard even intelligent creatures like other primates as inherently inferior, to be at best patronised and at worst killed as vermin. And of course we treat the world like an industrial toilet.'

  Verity looked across at the tanks and the scenes from New York cleared. She sighed. 'Imagine what could've been done if all the effort and expense that'd gone into the technology of warfare had gone instead into constructive things. Do you realise that over half of all scientists dedicate their working lives to developing military technology? And the money—millions of dollars every minute.

  'I showed you the Cloud and, sure, that came originally from a technology very far advanced from our own, but it demonstrates the potential. The food we eat is just molecules constructed from carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and a few others. Tastes are just molecules, smells are just molecules. If the money that'd gone into military technology had gone into the technology of food, then we could've built food machines. Machines that could have produced perfect replicas of meat and plant material. We'd never have had to kill another animal or a plant again.'

  'We could change. I'm sure if everyone knew the menace we faced, we'd call a halt to killing dolphins and monkeys at least. That would be a start.'

  'It's not as simple as that. Man has reached technological maturity without the moral maturity that should've come with it.'

  'So what? Our technology is light years behind the aliens. How can we be any kind of threat to them?'

  'We're no threat to them, but we are to other species in the stars around. We're like an infestation in a garden. A parasite that has to be killed before it can infect and destroy other plants.'

  'There is life on nearby solar systems?'

  'The universe teems with it. We're surrounded by fragile, delicate cultures that have taken millions of years to develop. Where technology has been applied carefully, if at all. Societies existing within intricate moral and ethical structures which shine compared to our tawdry law and order systems.'

  A tank behind Verity cleared then showed an oil-blackened junkyard filled with disemboweled trucks and piles of tyres. To the right was a huge compactor and beside it, like some sleek waterfowl crouching in a swamp, were the grey swept-back lines of an F-15. The cockpit was open and empty of controls, but full of bare wires and torn upholstery.

  Verity continued as though oblivious to what was happening behind her. 'How would these communities fare when they came into contact with man? Technologically less advanced, they would automatically be regarded as inferiors. And their ways of living, alien beyond belief, would seem disturbing and even malign. There are beings who dwell in and glorify their own shit, who see it as the most potent symbol of life and renewal. Imagine how filthy and despicable they'd appear to our eyes. Or beings with the richest cultural aesthetics, who are nightmares of talons and mandibles—how would we cope with them? Surely not with tolerance; look at what a difference having black skin makes.

  'Or consider creatures so sensitive, so kind, who—when faced with what to our eyes would appear to be the most trivial of moral dilemmas—immolate themselves. How weak they'd seem, how beneath contempt. How infinitely malleable and exploitable! A sphere thirty light-years across is already polluted with the transmitted sleaze of our TV and radio. Planets where violence has been eliminated, even down to microbe levels, are suddenly finding themselves next door to a ravening tiger which seems to delight in killing even its own kind.

  'And amongst all the violent and evil images broadcast they see a planet made ugly by its inhabitants. Lesion-like cities cover its face, its atmosphere and oceans are corrupted. and its precious cargo, its wealth and diversity of life, is being exploited and abused by the dominant species…and then they see our space technology.'

  She sighed again, and relaxed back in her chair. 'They see us coming, and it frightens them.'

  For a second the clouds over the desert opened, and the junkyard was flooded with sunlight, gleaming dully off the few remaining polished patches on the airplane's fuselage. Then the Cloud was there, appearing at one side of the plane between wing and tail. For an instant it appeared as a compact cube, barely a metre on a side then it expanded out like an explosion in slow motion. Rising to a height of three metres it arced out sideways like a hand thrown net, obscuring the wing. Then it started to billow across the fuselage.

  'It's got to be spectacular. The execution, I mean. It's got to be seen to be justice.' Verity turned away from me to look at the tank.

  The Cloud was coming back now, finishing its clockwise tour of the plane, flowing over the tailplane before pouring itself back into a cube. Then it was gone.

  The plane seemed unchanged. Wires still hung loose and the cockpit cover was still missing.

  'Why'd it do that? What was it after?'

  Verity didn't answer but in response to my question the viewpoint in the tank altered, spinning round clockwise and down so that the plane was in profile. I found myself sighting down the port wing. It looked odd but I couldn't quite figure out why.

  I was about to admit my ignorance but Verity was talking again. 'The Cloud monitors this stellar cluster, about two million stars in all. It has access to all the temporal databases for all the planets. It checks them periodically in case intervention is required. Clouds are extremely intelligent but they're carefully constructed to avoid any sense of self. They have no feedback loops: they're just machines. The criteria they use for deciding on intervention are broad: they have to be, to cover the diversity of creatures they must deal with. The main ones concern interstellar communication, because that could result in a homogenisation of perspective. Sort of like what US TV does to the rest of the world.'

  I noticed Stallard leaving his office. His secretary was saying something urgent to him but he was waving her away. I saw him smile sadly and faintly heard him say goodbye.

  In another tank it looked like Rouse was being informed of the broadcast. The guy who told him was knocked aside, as Rouse charged by him into the corridor, gun in hand. The viewpoint followed Rouse as he barged through the fire door and ran down the stairs, taking four at a time. Travelling so fast he was almost out of control, he could only change direction by grabbing the bannister at each landing and whirling round.

  'What's he doing?'

  Verity didn't bother to answer. A sign Rouse rushed past said: 'Sub-Basement. Records and Bomb Shelter'. He sprinted along a brightly lit corridor at the end of which sat a uniformed guard reading a paper. Looking up with a jolt, the man began fumbling at his holster.

  'Freeze,' yelled Rouse, skidding to a halt, his gun levelled at the centre of the man's chest.

  'It's OK,' whispered Verity. 'The Cloud extracted all his bullets hours ago.'

  'Hands on your head and back against the wall!' The voice was diamond hard and filled with such ferocity the guard seemed to be moving involuntarily, banging his legs against desk and chair in his hurry to comply. Rouse darted forward towards a single heavy door to one side of the desk and jabbed hurriedly at the electronic code lock. The door swung open and Rouse was through, pulling it closed even before the guard could get his hand down to his holster.

  Rouse's movements were rapid, his hands blurring over a series of controls. I could hear the sounds of heavy bars slotting into place.

  Rouse leapt towards a corner of the room. Pressing his back hard against the join between the walls, he slid down until he was in a crouched position. The gun was now held in two hands and he was pointing it out into the room. 'Come and get me you fuck!' he snarled.

&
nbsp; 'Oh, I will,' said Verity.

  I looked back at Stallard. The man was in his car, heading out of the main gate. A guard saluted and Stallard smiled back.

  On the screen showing The Truth broadcast, the final holocaust was approaching as Logan's F-15 arced over Jersey. As it did so the tiny figures of Rouse and Stallard vanished from their tanks.

  I opened his mouth to ask a question just as the grey mistiness of a tank to my left started to clear. A house emerged, or rather a cabin that, it became clear, had been long since abandoned. Dense ivy caked its flaking timbers, and its window frames were edged with shards of broken glass. As the tank cleared, the space behind the house opened, and I found myself looking down a small hill to a meadow. At the end of this was the red-brown of a forest.

  Tanks around began to clear, showing the raddled interior from several viewpoints and views forward from the house. The place looked like something out of a fairytale, a deserted little cabin on a hill surrounded by dense woodland.

  On the tank by Verity, which showed what The Truth was broadcasting on Channel 7, Logan had begun his flight down 45th Street.

  I winced at the severity of the blast, watching as the contents of the UN followed the remnants of the plane. I saw the billowing cloud that condensed out and fell into the East River like volcanic ash from a cinder cone.

  The viewpoint then shifted, touring the devastated Plaza, showing graphically the death and destruction that Logan's plane had wrought. Text began to appear on the bottom of the screen.

  'One hundred and sixty two people have died in this outrage. I have survived. The assassination attempt was planned by Colonel Rouse and initiated by Edward Stallard of the Central Intelligence Agency. This kind of action, and anything else which hurts your fellow men, will not be tolerated in future. For any such aggressive or violent action there will be a reaction against the perpetrator to an exact degree.'

  The screens shifted to an aerial view of the cabin in the woods. As the camera moved in I checked the internal tank views and saw Stallard and Rouse, pale and vomiting on the filthy cabin floor.

  Rouse was the first to recover from the ordeal of 4-space. His eyes looked wild. 'What the hell's going on?' he yelled.

  While Stallard gasped for breath, Rouse was up and moving, checking doors and windows, the barrel of his gun jerking round dementedly in a desperate search for sources of threat.

  The text message continued. 'Stallard's and Rouse's victims died in many ways. Their deaths will be the fastest and most merciful of all those they meted out to others. This is neither for punishment nor for revenge, but from necessity.'

  The screen split, the right hand side continuing to show the two men in the cabin, the left hand a woman at a control console. She was young and dark, with shoulder length black hair and naive but eager eyes. I vaguely recognised her but couldn't place her for a second. As she worked the controls, cueing in music tapes and titles, someone walked by and she gave a shy little smile, casting her eyes down quickly to her work.

  More text appeared: 'Inez Herman, a 19 year old Production Assistant at the Main Studio of the UN General Assembly. You see her sixty seconds before her death.'

  I groaned. The girl was smiling to herself, perhaps thinking of her plans for the evening. To her right Rouse was shouting angrily at Stallard. 'I'm not taking the rap for this.' Stallard's hands were up, trying to calm him. I thought I saw resignation.

  On the second screen the view was down 45th Street, away from the General Assembly, with Logan's Eagle frozen in the centre. Then another plane appeared in the tank showing the woodland.

  Suddenly Logan's F-15 flashed towards the viewer just as on the right the other F-15 accelerated, fuselage confined by what appeared to be fine strands of wire.

  Belatedly I recognised the strands as part of The Cloud. 'No!' I yelled, but I was too late. I lurched out of my seat trying to reach her, to do God knows what.

  Instantly it was like I was encased in transparent cement. Although I could just breath, I was otherwise paralysed, unable even to close my eyes.

  I just had time to make out the four rolling waves along the wires, propelling the right hand plane, then the viewpoints backed off rapidly and in synchrony. When they stopped we were looking over Inez’s shoulder on one screen, and out of the window between the arguing forms of Rouse and Stallard on the other.

  The planes had been lost in the rapid backwards movement but not for long. I saw again the vortices of debris coming towards me along 45th Street. To my right I saw the other plane as a speck in the otherwise flawless sky.

  'The Cloud took the precaution of flattening the lift out of the wings,' I heard Verity say. 'It makes it so much easier to control.'

  Immobilised though I was, I was able to suck in a lungful of air as both aircraft seemed to fly out of the screen at me. At the last minute the scenes froze, then started to progress but in very slow motion.

  In the right hand tank the girl, perhaps experiencing a premonition, was in the process of turning her head to look back into the cavernous Assembly Hall. She would never complete it. The plane was already in there with her. Like a huge white shark it closed in.

  Both views synchronised and scaled to perfection, I saw the wings of the planes slice cleanly through the bodies of all three people, just before their remnants were obliterated by storms of debris.

  'Justice is done, and is seen to be done,' read the screen text. I felt my tears, flattened by the transparent restraint, smear across my cheeks.

  'Its one of the constraints I work under.' Suddenly free to move I slumped back in my chair. 'I can't inflict anything on anybody unless they've already done the same thing to somebody else. The Cloud makes sure any execution is finely calculated.'

  'Middleton,' I muttered, 'I guess that explains it.'

  'Yes. It was even the same knife. The Cloud tracks the weapons down if they exist. If they don't it just mimics them.'

  'It seems so elaborately...perverse.'

  She looked at me almost tearfully. 'I'm not evil. I'll save who I can, if I can afford to. Like your lover, when the Israeli fired on her. I would've saved Edwards, your bodyguard on that night, but you were the focus for my analogue. He was killed two blocks away.'

  'How did you save her?'

  'The Cloud just pulled her ana as the Israeli fired, then pulled him ana as well and switched them round. It took about half a second, too quickly to suffer that terrible vertigo, but she had to undergo considerable acceleration and braking. That's why she was so breathless afterwards. The Cloud kept on firing after the Israeli had been substituted.'

  'But had he killed anyone like that before, to justify such a death?'

  'No. In fact Edwards was the first person he ever killed. If that hadn't been so I would have had the Cloud execute him in St. Louis.

  'Real intent is enough. The Cloud could only act after he'd fired the first shot, and after it'd calculated the trajectories to ensure that the bullet would have hit Ms. Carter. Similarly with Stahl and her crony; the Cloud pushed the bullets out of the magazines in the microsecond after they pulled the triggers. If they hadn't tried to shoot Durrell, it would've been his ammunition that would've been removed. Think of The Cloud as millions of tiny filaments, hovering ana a scene in 3-space. It can affect any point almost instantaneously.'

  'And Durrell. That was nasty!'

  Verity pursed her lips. 'He's a bastard. Check it out if you like,' she said, pointing to the tanks. 'What he did to that Russian soldier was unforgivable. That was a lie about the Russians shooting at the child and the horse. The helicopter just happened to be passing, taking medical supplies to the garrison.

  'Those bombers saved Durrell's life, for otherwise the Russian would have died from Durrell's gunshot, and I would have killed him the same way. Point men leech out the violence, their very presence precipitates it. A lot of innocent people have been killed, yet never directly by Durrell's hand. He deserved it.'

  'You sound like you wished y
ou could've done more.'

  ‘Yes, and that's why these constraints are so necessary, to make sure I don't abuse my power. Try and realise that the aliens don't understand us. If they could understand us, they wouldn't need their integration computers. And in any case there are far too many different types of life-form in the universe for them to attend to. The ear of wheat analogy is in fact quite inappropriate. There are ten billion trillion stars in the universe, and most apparently have indigenous lifeforms. Far too many for The Integral to shepherd personally. That has to be left to machines like the Cloud. Killing is its last resort but it can do so without compunction. It does need guidelines, however.

  'In some cultures killing, in certain circumstances, is both desirable and a good thing. Even on Earth voluntary euthanasia is practised in some countries.

  'That's something that's easy to understand. But imagine a culture whose members underwent dangerous changes in later life. Perhaps the biological desire to produce offspring becomes so great that it overcomes moral and ethical restrictions. Then murder would perhaps be justified, the method perhaps considered an important part of the ritual. In such circumstances an Interface should not be allowed to kill in any way she wished. That wouldn't be justice.

  'There are many kinds of death for many different types of organism. Who could say which was really the best? Mirror-image retribution is the simplest solution, it certainly prevents me from indulging myself. It's also highly instructional. Nothing modifies behaviour better than knowing action and reaction will be equal and opposite.'

  'Interface?'

  'Yes, that's what I am—the interface between the rest of the cosmos, and us.'

  'Are you still really human, Verity?'

  'Yes. Physical changes have been small, at least in 3-space. A few dormant viruses removed here, an arterial plaque removed there. It could be a kind of immortality. The Cloud could keep me alive for thousands of years, if both it and I wanted it to. But the mental changes have been too great and the responsibility too much.'