Into the Light

by David Weber

  “Yes,” Roeder sighed.

  “Good.” Karahalios held his gaze for a second or two, then smiled slightly. “I know you’ve got a lot of material, so go ahead take the rest of today and tomorrow to tidy up. But starting Monday, I have another assignment for you.”

  “Understood.” Roeder actually managed an answering smile, and Karahalios nodded once, then turned and left the younger man’s workspace.

  Roeder gazed after him glumly, then turned back to his computer display and the modified NET headset on his bench. It looked pretty much like any NET gear, at least externally. For that matter, the hardware changes were minimal, mainly confined to the neural receptors which error-checked NET downloads. He’d had to modify them to give them both more sensitivity and greater bandwidth, since the basic system had been designed to minimize peripheral data eddies and strip away unwanted “sideband” elements when an experiential file, as opposed to simply a direct data transfer, was initially recorded and uploaded to the system. Nobody wanted the possibility of someone else’s trace memories or emotions wandering around inside his own head.

  The majority of the changes were to the software, however. Like every other Hegemony program, the ones controlling the NET process were loaded down with tons of safety features, most of which, in this case, were specifically designed to prevent what Roeder wanted to accomplish. He understood the potential risks, whatever Doctor Ramos and Doctor Karahalios might think. But the possibilities were so boundless!

  He activated his virtual keyboard and “tapped” its insubstantial keys, bringing up his latest software tweak and gazed at it pensively. He hadn’t dropped this one into the system yet. In fact, there were half a dozen he’d carefully tucked away on his individual workstation. Partly because he’d been doing them on his own time, and partly because most of them had been wild, off-the-cuff, blue sky, high-risk approaches. He’d never intended any of them as serious proposals—in fact, he’d been looking at the most extreme iterations he could come up with, in no small part to avoid them—but he’d rather doubted Ramos and Karahalios would recognize that if they ever saw them.

  The truth was, he conceded, that he truly had made himself a pain in the ass over this. By this time, both of his superiors were not unreasonably convinced that he was at least borderline irrational on the subject. So he’d decided it would be a good idea to keep the really crazy stuff to himself.

  Not that it had saved his project in the end, he thought glumly.

  He opened the most recent file and ran back through it moodily. It wasn’t as far off the reservation as most of the others. In fact, its risk factor was substantially lower, according to the models he’d run. But that also meant it was probably less likely to succeed. Unless.…

  His eyes narrowed as a sudden thought came to him. It had never occurred to him before, and it was undeniably off the wall. In fact, it was way off the wall. But at the same time, if there was anything to it.…

  He jumped out of the file and into a detailed schematic of the NET hardware. If he boosted the inductance a smidge, then loaded the mod he’d just been looking at, reduced the data transfer rate just a bit, opened the gate a tiny bit wider where those unwanted “peripherals” were concerned, and then.…

  He sat there, looking at the schematic, lips pursed in a silent whistle as he thought about it. He knew exactly what Karahalios or Ramos would say, especially if he suggested something this outlandish. In fact, Karahalios had just finished saying it. So it wasn’t like the idea was going anywhere. After the weekend, he’d be doing something else—no doubt valuable, but nowhere near as interesting as this—and that was that. But still.…

  Several minutes passed. Then he straightened in his chair and began tapping more keys.

  * * *

  “—SO I UNDERSTAND the potential advantages, Mister President,” Edson Soares said, “but I must confess that I still cherish some reservations.” He shrugged with a thin smile. “Perhaps the problem is that I am too well aware of how hard it is to understand some humans. It does not fill me with optimism where understanding aliens is concerned.”

  Dave Dvorak chuckled and shook his head, smiling at the Brazilian across the conference table. Soares had continued to serve as Brazil’s Foreign Minister until about five years ago, when he’d finally transferred to the Planetary Union’s Department of State. If he’d known what he was letting himself in for, he probably wouldn’t have. He’d ended up the Under Secretary of State for Human Rights, a thankless post which left him to deal with the remaining trouble spots—places like, oh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the portions of the old China which had resisted inclusion in any of the new successor states, and the lingering meltdown in Malaysia—which remained outside the PU and didn’t give much of a good goddamn about “human rights.” If anybody in the solar system had enjoyed ample experience of human irrationality, he was the man.

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Kent McCoury conceded, his Appalachian twang a sharp contrast to Soares’ Brazilian accent. “But we’re going to have to talk to other species sooner or later, Ed, and at least you and I have had lots of practice right here at home.”

  As Under Secretary for Political Affairs, he and Soares worked closely together, since at the moment, those trouble spots were the only remaining foreign powers with whom the Planetary Union was required to interact.

  “To be honest, this is why we even have a State Department these days,” McCoury continued. “As far as our remaining idiots here on Earth are concerned, we all know we’re basically just marking time. Eventually, they’ll either have to sign on the dotted line—which will mean satisfying your people on their human rights record—and join up, or else get so egregiously out of line the PU’s voters demand that we send in the troops and just get it over with.”

  “I’m not in a tearing hurry to intervene militarily,” President Howell said mildly from his seat at the head of the table. “I’m perfectly prepared to exert as much external pressure as we can short of that, but I believe history demonstrates that it’s a lot easier to shoot people than ideas. Dave?”

  “I’m not sure we’re up against ideas as much as bigotry, intolerance, hatred, personal ambition, and megalomania,” Dvorak replied in measured tones. “Of course, history also demonstrates that it’s a lot easier to shoot people than any of those things, either.” He shrugged. “In any case, unless we want to ‘make a desert and call it peace’—which, I will admit, has a certain appeal when I’m most frustrated with the idiots—I don’t think military intervention’s the way to go. Not, at the very least, until there’s a genuine, identifiable, grassroots, indigenous resistance movement like the one that’s finally emerging in Pakistan. That’s why your and Ed’s people are doing every damned thing we can think of to generate exactly that, Kent.”

  “I know.” McCoury nodded. “I’m just saying that I think we’ll reach a point where public opinion will demand that we step on the cockroaches and just get on with it. We’re already seeing that tide rising. People’s reaction to Pakistan’s a good example of that, as a matter of fact.”

  “Maybe,” Howell acknowledged.

  The president’s tone was just a bit repressive, and Dvorak resisted the urge to shake his head. Public opinion hadn’t moved quite as far in favor of intervening in Pakistan as McCoury’s last sentence suggested. It was certainly moving in that direction, but the situation was still … fluid, to say the least, and the original move to oust Baseer Badrashi’s government was busy breaking down into a nasty, multi-sided internal dogfight. All the Resistance’s factions had been united in hating him; now their competing agendas were duking it out, and it was obvious that many of the elements which had united against Badrashi weren’t a lot fonder of each other than they’d been of him. Some of their supporters had taken to the streets against their recent allies, and there were still a lot of weapons floating around.

  Under the circumstances, Dave Dvorak heartily endorsed the president’s decision against trying to pi
ck winners and losers in that kind of internecine bloodfest. But although Howell had never said so in so many words, Dvorak suspected he’d had more motives to avoid military interventions in general than he’d ever actually enunciated. Not that the ones he’d given weren’t fully sufficient to justify his position. For example, he was right about the Sisyphean nature of any attempt to impose outside solutions. And from the very beginning, he’d insisted that any nation-state’s decision to join the Planetary Union had to be internal. He would not increase the PU’s mandate by force of arms lest he undermine its ultimate legitimacy, and military intervention to impose a PU-sponsored local government was all too likely to do precisely that. But places like Pakistan had also provided handy horrible examples to remind people who had joined the Planetary Union of some of the alternatives, and the PU’s patience with such obviously outlaw regimes could only encourage faith in the federal government’s promise to respect the local sovereignty of the Union’s member states. In the end, there was no doubt in Dvorak’s mind—or in the minds of any of the other three men present, he was sure—that sanity would break out even in the remaining lunatic asylums. When it did, Howell would support the opposition to the hilt, and at the end of the day they would know that they’d rebuilt their own nations when they decided to seek PU membership.

  “Getting back to the topic at hand,” Dvorak said now, “Kent’s right about having to talk to them eventually. And if we need to do that, then obviously the Sarthians are the place to begin.”

  “Do we really want to start with a Level Three civilization?” Soares asked soberly. “I know there are many arguments in favor, but would it not be better to begin with the Calgarths or the Ranthors?”

  “They’d make a safer test case, possibly,” Dvorak said dryly. “I suppose our own reaction to the Shongairi could be considered an argument in favor of that conclusion.”

  The Calgarths and Ranthors had been the other two species on Fleet Commander Thikair’s list before he bloodied his nose on Earth. The Calgarths were a Level Five culture on the Hegemony’s classification system, which meant they were basically at a 16th-century level of technology. The Ranthors were a bit more advanced, probably on the border between Level Five and Level Four, with a very early steam-age level of technology but not yet into anything much more sophisticated than the telegraph. Of course, those were the levels they were projected to have attained based on their capabilities at the time they were surveyed, somewhat longer ago than Earth had been surveyed, so no one knew how accurate those ratings actually were. Humanity was proof that the Hegemony’s projections could be just a bit off. On the other hand, humanity was also a sharp exception from the rule of the Hegemony’s hundred-and-fifty-millennia experience, so they were probably right about both the Calgarths and Ranthors.

  The Sarthians, however, were projected to be at Level Three, roughly equivalent to Earth’s capabilities in, say, 1940 or 1950. Because of that, they’d been protected by the Hegemony Constitution, which mandated that species at that level be left to develop to interstellar capability—or not—on their own. They were also omnivores, which had made them even more of a hands-off proposition for the Hegemony. Unlike carnivores, who were confidently expected to exterminate themselves before they got loose among the stars (the Shongairi were the only unfortunate exception to that rule), omnivores were considered much stronger candidates to make the cut. Some of them could be just a little … edgy by the standards of the Hegemony’s herbivore majority, however, and the Sarthians seemed to fall into that category. That meant they were more likely to react poorly to the Hegemony’s attitude towards other species, and also that they’d probably attained a level of technology which could be much rapidly improved upon without quite as much utter dislocation as the introduction of Hegemony-level tech would produce on a 16th-century world.

  It also lent rather more point to Soares’ concerns about how they might react to visitors from another star. They’d be considerably more capable of doing something about it if they reacted … poorly. However—

  “I’ll agree there’s a higher potential risk factor with the Sarthians,” Dvorak continued. “I think that’s outweighed by the potential pluses of where we expect them to be about now. More to the point though, they’re in range.”

  Soares frowned, but he also nodded.

  Upon occasion, in the not-too-distant past, some Terran astronomers had asserted that the binary 61 Cygni star system possessed massive planets, only to have those claims debunked by later observations. But what the debunkers had not been able to detect prior to the invasion was Sarth, orbiting 61 Cygni A at roughly 56,000,000 kilometers—about 0.38% of Earth’s orbital radius.

  More importantly for the purposes of this conversation, 61 Cygni was less than eleven light-years from Earth, whereas Calgarth, otherwise known as 26 Draconis, was forty-six light-years away and Ranthor, listed as Eta Corona Borealis A in Earth’s catalogs, lay just over sixty from Earth. Humanity had managed to tweak the phase-drive as it had so much of the Hegemony’s technology, but not as much as in other instances. By accepting a greater possibility of failure (all the way up to once in every eleven hundred years of operation), the first human starships—which were well advanced in construction—would be capable of just breaking into the beta bands of p-space. That would allow them an advantage of better than seventy-five percent over the Hegemony’s best apparent interstellar speed, but that was still only eleven times the speed of light. Which meant that even a mission to 61 Cygni would require a voyage of almost a full year each way. Calgarth’s round-trip time would be almost eight and a half years, however, and Ranthor’s would be almost eleven.

  “Assuming we actually have several centuries before the Hegemony gets back around to us, that probably doesn’t really matter all that much,” Howell observed. “From the perspective of human beings who aren’t accustomed yet to thinking in those sorts of terms, though, I think finding out within a couple of years whether or not our first mission succeeded has a lot to recommend it.”

  “Agreed.” Soares nodded. “I suppose—”

  Howell’s phone chimed. His eyebrows rose, since his day was always tightly scheduled, and people knew better than to interrupt him for anything short of crisis-level events. But then it chimed again, and the eyebrows which had risen lowered as he recognized the priority of the tone, and he raised one hand, halting Soares.

  “Friday, identify incoming caller,” he said.

  “Secretary Lewis,” his phone replied.

  “I see.” He glanced at the other three men, then shrugged. “Put her through. Public view.”

  “Public view,” the phone acknowledged, and Fabienne Lewis and Damianos Karahalios appeared above the conference table as the phone linked to the ceiling-mounted HD unit.

  “Fabienne. Doctor Karahalios.” From Howell’s courteous tone one might have assumed he was equally happy to see both callers.

  One would have assumed incorrectly.

  “I understand you wouldn’t have interrupted unless it was for something important, Fabienne,” the president continued, “but I have another meeting scheduled in only about twenty minutes.”

  “Yes, Sir. I know. I checked your agenda before we called. But I think you’re going to want to hear about this.”

  “About what?”

  “First, let me show you a short video clip,” she said, and he nodded a bit impatiently.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Lewis and Karahalios disappeared, replaced by the image of a youngish looking, brown-haired man in what was obviously one of Bastion’s labs. Howell and his secretaries watched as he settled a NET headset onto his head. Then his right index finger moved, clearly hitting a key on a virtual keyboard projected onto his contacts.

  For an instant, nothing seemed to happen. Then his entire body spasmed, his head slammed back, and he shuddered like someone experiencing an epileptic seizure. It went on for several seconds—almost a full minute—and the
n, just as suddenly, he stopped shuddering as abruptly as he’d begun.

  The HD zoomed in on his open, staring eyes and the burnt skin under the headset’s contacts. It held there for a moment, then his image disappeared, replaced by Lewis and Karahalios.

  “He’s alive,” Lewis said. “Well, the body is, anyway. There’s no brainwave activity, though.”

  “What the hell did he do to himself?” Howell demanded.

  “Let me guess,” Dvorak said grimly. Lewis glanced in his direction. “Brent Roeder, right?”

  “Got it in one.” Lewis nodded, then turned back to Howell. “Doctor Roeder was one of the cyberneticists working with Doctor Ramos and Doctor Karahalios’ team. He was especially interested in creating direct neural interfacing with our computers. He believed it would not only be a huge step forward in interface efficiency but that it might well prove the first step toward achieving genuine, self-aware AI. That if human brains could communicate directly with the existing AI, they could learn from us, instead of the one-way street we have now with NET.”

  “And that’s what he was working on when this happened?” Howell waved one hand at the space the accident’s imagery had occupied.

  “Not anything he was authorized to be working on, Mister President,” Karahalios put in. “In fact, we were going to assign him to an entirely different project.” He shook his head, his expression sadder than Howell had ever seen it. “I’m afraid that’s what pushed him to this … rashness.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that Doctor Roeder’s dead, of course,” Howell said, “but what makes this tragic accident so important that you brought it directly to me?”

  “Because that’s not exactly what happened, Sir,” Lewis said. “The NET didn’t kill him.”