The light fades, leaving a solid, dense block of impenetrable black, pressing down on my brain.
“Get them on board, strap them in. With the Induction rushed like this, they won’t be moving for a while.”
29
The information starts to unfold.
All Information Security principles boil down to three basic tenets.
First, that the more dangerous a piece of information is, the smaller the proportion of humanity that can rationally deal with it.
Second, that all information is dangerous to a lesser or greater degree.
And last, that all dangers to the mission must be minimized.
Upon these axioms, all ISec regulations are built.
Besides the rules, there are operating procedures and ciphers and training memories. In between the documents, data, experiments, films, and texts, long moments of hazy darkness ebb and flow like tides. Those blackouts are when powerful hypnotic-suggestion programs layer the rules ever deeper into my subconscious.
During the Induction, I cannot control my body. Only the straps hold me in the seat when the transport decelerates and makes its turns.
I am dreaming, but I am not asleep. When we reach our destination, I am still trapped in my head. I am floated down corridors with many doors. There is a room with beds and machines.
When it ends, I feel removed, separated from my own senses, even if I am aware of the faint light of the monitoring devices next to my bed. The feel of the bed against my back and the straps holding me down come through my nerves as though I am feeling them remotely, through a datafeed. And the smell of cigarette smoke?
Karla’s rich voice cuts through the silence, the steady thrum of the cooled air from the ventilation shafts. “Welcome to the Ministry of Information.”
I hear the deep thump of an explosion, but I cannot tell how far off it is.
She is there next to us, standing over us. Just looking.
I cannot see her clearly, my brain still unable to process the signals from my eyes. But I can sense the radiant warmth of her power, and she seems fearsome and tall, swallowing everything up in her cold light.
“Now, you both require sleep. Real sleep.” She snaps her fingers, and I sense Barrens in the bed next to mine going limp, sinking to deeper slumber. “That and we have to undo the hackjobs that burned out the tracking ganglia in your implants.”
Karla leans closer to me. She blows smoke in my face.
“And a good-night to you too.”
More brain surgery. When I wake up, I do not even notice the difference.
In a conference room in Karla’s office thirty meters under the district farm, we have barley and spinach, dill and tofu, carrots and onions. Bread. Coffee.
I feel lousy. Am I coming down with something? But I’ve felt this way, on and off, since my “escape.” My head aches. I feel tired even though I’ve just woken and showered. The food sits in my belly, too dense. The smell of tobacco in the air gets my guts to twist up, and it takes real effort not to vomit all of breakfast. This ISec Induction is rougher on me than it is on Barrens, even if I went through something like it before, in the holding cell.
All these revelations so close together, they have made a shambles of the neat, tidy society I knew. Barrens’s quest has brought him what he wanted to know about what happened to Callahan, and so much more.
“So. We got it mostly right,” he whispers, almost to himself.
“Yes. We did.”
In between the lines of the Induction, the last pieces can be found: the documents that justify ISec methods and history.
Barrens and I bounce our understanding back and forth between us, until it all falls into place.
A derelict alien ship crashed onto Earth, with technology that revolutionized everything. Psi-tech. But the Strangers’ ship also brought with it a terrible disease; one that spread far and wide before anyone understood what it was or where it came from.
It is not a fungus, bacterium, virus, or prion. After centuries of study, no one has come close to finding a cure; no one even truly understands its mode of action. The best guess is that it is a nucleic-acid-based nanomachine that selectively alters gene transcription.
Officially, it is designated Nucleic Machine Disease-1; but so few people even knew that it existed, even the ISec staff now calls it Mincemeat.
It is not the name that matters but what it does. The pathogen has an alternating sequential generation phenotype.
I and all the “normal” humans are G-0. The span of our lives is random, and sooner or later, we are all condemned to share Callahan’s fate, flesh rent asunder. Those of us in Generation Zero give birth only to monsters, only to the G-1 creatures.
They are animals gifted with supercharged psionic talents. Yet the G-1s have to be kept alive because their offspring are G-0 individuals. Without them, no more humans can be born.
“What pitiful things we are,” Barrens whispers.
A few records of the end of Earth are available to us at our current access levels. What we can see emphasizes the true danger of the G-1 beasts. Most have powers only a little greater than human-normal, but a dangerous few are orders of magnitude beyond us, and when they lose control in a mindless rage, they produce explosions of psi greater than the explosion of any atomic bomb. I cannot help watching one memory in my head, over and over. It is a view of Earth from orbit showing an entire city being annihilated by one brilliant white sphere of power.
An unregulated birth could result in the death of millions. And there were many unregulated births during those last years on Earth.
The alien ship is refitted in orbit by Earth’s survivors. Then, they leave. One last image from the Noah is a look back at dead Earth. The blue and the white are blasted away. The crust of the world is broken, leaving a sphere of blackened rock and bright red lava.
Here, in this closed population, where monitoring is easier to enforce, the ship’s crew sets up a stable society. It is easy to get the cooperation of all while they watch Earth receding from the ship’s observatory, a wasteland, everyone burdened by survivor’s guilt. The primary protocols are developed. G-0 humans are indoctrinated against the instinctive social behaviors around blood relationships. Their monstrous G-1 children are taken from them before they can be subjected to the trauma of seeing what is born from their bodies. These beasts are kept asleep almost through their entire lives, their only purpose to live long enough to breed and give birth to the next generation of we G-0s, given to Keepers to raise to propagate our otherwise doomed species.
People want their children’s children to be spared the burden of these secrets.
The cycle of life and death on the Noah is set in stone. The decades go by, and humanity is made to forget rather than heal.
Only, sometimes, mistakes slip through the cracks.
Most of our neural Implant functions have to do with monitoring our health, to warn the Retirement Office when a citizen is about to become symptomatic. At times, the automated monitors fail to catch the occasional rapid progression of the disease, and the remains are seen before they can be cleaned up. As with Callahan. Sometimes entire groups of witnesses need to be Adjusted. A child dying in a classroom. An old man drinking in a bar.
Occasionally, one of the weaker G-1s escapes into the unmapped regions, necessitating long, dangerous hunts in the dark. The Enforcers are not meant to combat dangerous crewmen; the police and ISec handle that. The Enforcers’ true purpose is to keep the G-1s contained.
After keeping us waiting for an hour, the doors slam open, and Karla stalks in.
“What next?” I whisper.
She examines us, reads us, and smiles crookedly. She seems satisfied with our reactions to the Induction. She is all business and briefs us on Ministry operations. All of the ship’s staff, including the Enforcers, have been put at the disposal of Information Security for the duration of the crisis, except for a skeletal crew of specialists required to keep basic ship functions go
ing, as well as maintain lockdown on the G-1 Prison City.
The gates separating each section of the Habitat have been closed. One by one, the sections are being pacified by a combined force of ISec field agents, Enforcers, policemen, volunteers, and Adjusted conscripts.
“Pacified?” Barrens clenches his fists. His knuckles pop.
She lights another cigarette with the fire of her talent. “After the combat guys destroy all resistance, Behavioralists are sent in. One pocket at a time. Those who are willing to focus on the mission have the last month of their memories edited. Every single other survivor is Adjusted. The deepest form. We are still on the defensive here in Paris Section, until reinforcements arrive and it is our turn.”
When I ask her why, the indignation flames her cheeks pink. Barrens asks too. Her anger presses us back in our reclining chairs. I keep asking. About the drop in efficiency. About why such extremes are needed.
“Why can’t you just dull their emotions? Enough to get them to submit? Why turn them into puppets? Given enough time, they’d still be willing to carry out the mission, even knowing that we all have the … Mincemeat. The first-gen crew managed.”
Her laugh is half-crazed, veering from genuine amusement to insincere scorn. “So naïve. Back then, humans were held together by the shared trauma of witnessing the end of Earth. The Council has written off this generation of crew. Free thought is too dangerous for them now.”
“I don’t under—”
“Of course you don’t understand! You two, two … fuckwads!” Karla tosses the cigarette away, incinerates it with a thought. Her power flings the ashes into a trash can. She sighs, lights another. “Oughta pull the guts out the ass of whichever of your mutineer friends decided it would be a great idea to put Psyn in the fucking food supply. The cheap grain/protein mash that most people have to eat for one or two meals every freaking day.”
Nobody believes in God, any God. We are raised to believe only in ourselves, in our responsibilities, our duties, on this long, lonely watch as the Noah traverses the space between the stars. I want to pray for someone to fix this. All those people, slowly being driven to psychosis.
But there is only us. We have to make this right.
“Can you picture it? Psyn making everyone edgy. Then the announcements and memories and documents and Mincemeat being broadcast on the Nth Web.”
Barrens’s hands are gripping the table between us so hard, I hear the material flexing, starting to crack. “Okay. We get it.”
“Do you? This is nothing compared to how much worse it can still get.”
What is she saying?
“It is terrible, knowing about the Builders, about the disease. But why would that stop the mission? It is still the only hope for our species.”
Karla’s lips twist into a sly smile. “Imagine a secret so much worse that just knowing it will cause a critical mass of the population to choose chaos, choose failure.” She blows smoke, directs it to linger around us, needles of irritation shaped like grim gray butterflies. She spits into the dregs of her coffee. “All that stuff you just learned. That is not the secret of secrets.”
What?
Barrens puts his hand on mine, shakes his head. “No.” He bites his lip hard enough to cut it. “It won’t help us fix this.”
“Oh-ho!” Karla cocks her hip to one side, blows a kiss to him. “Oh-ho! Loverboy is starting to understand! He glimpses the forbidden fruit.”
“But—”
Hana. I don’t want to know any more. We need to focus.
Survival is basic human instinct. Nothing can make so many people give up, not with the indoctrination we all grow up with. We are all taught from birth of the importance of the mission, it is explicitly taught by our Keepers, and more subtly reinforced with subliminal messages in our stories, in our music. No. Give up on the human race itself? Wait.
I collapse, fists against my skull. Just skimming the border puts the taste of death on my tongue.
“Dempsey!” Barrens’s hands on me, gentle. “What’s happening?”
“Please,” he begs Karla. “Stop it!”
She laughs. “It’s not me doing that.” Ugly. Hateful. Karla’s laughter is the most expressive vocalization she’s got. “Every time you think in dangerous directions, ISec programming in your Implant will erase a little bit more of you. Better discipline your thought patterns—too much, and it will start scarring the wetware. You’ll get seizures, go nuts. It’s a security measure, to guard us, we guardians of dangerous data.
“Now, if you’ll stop fucking around questioning procedure, we have work to do.”
Karla points a finger at Barrens. He jumps to his feet, staggers back.
Leon!
He presses his hands to his face. Breathes deeply.
“Just giving the man his assignment, darling.”
He is pale. But he steadies himself and drops his hands. Fumbles for one of his cigarettes. His face is stone.
“I—”
“You have your mission.” Her eyes flash green. “Go.”
Barrens looks away. He won’t meet my eyes. He presses his lips to my forehead and murmurs, “See you later.” Don’t ask me, Hana. I’ll still have to do it.
He stalks away.
“And now, you. While you slept, I took the liberty of reading your memories.”
What? But … How? That usually takes a Deep Adjustment session. It—
“Don’t look so shocked. The package I put in your brain back at the detention center also includes a back door into all memories acquired after its installation. Surely you didn’t think I gave you the keys just like that?” Karla blows a few more smoke butterflies about me. “Hah. And now this indignation from you. Delicious. Worry not, darling, I don’t care how good he is in bed. And out of bed. I was saving time, or did you want to waste one week in debriefing sessions?”
I focus on the trembling of my fingertips. What could I do to her even if I wanted to hurt her?
“Excellent. Hold that attitude. Now. I have run your plan by the data researchers. That AI of yours is really something. They agree that your approach is our best chance for regaining control of the Nth Web.”
Wait. What? She’s still calling it mine? “So. Impressed, were they?”
“Oh, yes. Very. They say you are the most brilliant machine learning savant of the age. For centuries, people have dreamed of artificial intelligence. They theorized about it, wrote stories about it, and failed at every attempt to make a real one, where you alone have succeeded. And in your spare time. They say that if your viral argument cannot grant you control over it, nothing can.”
How can she not know Archie’s origins? Even now, I cannot get hold of my thoughts. They race over and over through my conclusion that Archie’s growth is because of the Builders’ algorithm fragments. Maybe I started it, but Archie is as much a product of the ship’s environment as it is of my design.
“We’ve set up a software-development center for you down the hall. Room E55. You have a team and everything; better than the amateurs you had with you in the tunnels. You need to improve it, finish it. Chop-chop! Get control of your toy and we can bring the Nth Web back up, communications, ship controls, everything. It is only your creation that allowed this childish uprising to get this far. With it on our side, ISec will ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”
She can’t read my thoughts about Archie. At all. Not even through her back door into my memories. How?
I am already walking out of her office.
Almost afraid to try it. Archie?
A cheerful chirp sounds inside my skull. Impossible. Archie should be completely nonfunctional without the Network linking its components spread throughout the ship.
How?
I get a flicker of imagery, a young girl who looks like me, but is not. In my thoughts, it is there. And I understand. Ever since it first showed me the memory from the Builders, it’s been there. It is in my head, in my dreams, riding on the nanoprocessor
s of my Implant. Just one part, one unit in the swarm. But the most important one. The true spark of sentience.
The last ghost of the Builders’ intelligence, or perhaps the first being of a totally new form of life, exists in my head.
30
Karla may be an exceedingly powerful talent and a genius in many ways, but she is not a programmer, and the software-development center she said was ready for me is anything but ready. Its machines are centuries-old terminals. They probably date back to the first-generation crew. There are actual physical keys that click as we type.
The first task of my team is to adapt software to interface between the low-level machine language that runs directly on the hardware, and DREAM33, the latest version of the high-level language developed by the Noah’s crew over the centuries. These ISec specialists might be able to work directly with alien assembly language, but I cannot. The bottom-level language requires intimate knowledge of the underlying structure, using unintuitive commands manipulating memory addresses, pushing data from here to there, adding this or that; it is clumsy and unforgiving and requires knowledge of quantum mathematics to even begin to properly manipulate the circuitry. DREAM abstracts away the intricacies of the hardware, lets a programmer deal in ideas and content and logic.
What is to be done with Archie must be precise and reliable.
At least, that is the lie I tell these young, gifted teenagers who look at me with a mixture of revulsion and awe. To them, I am a reformed traitor, but I am also the one to reach the holy grail of true AI, even if by accident.
It takes a day and a half to make the necessary modifications to the existing terminals.
Then it is my turn, and I show them what lies beneath Archie’s skin.
The Forever Watch Page 32
