Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2)

by Adam Vance

  “Yeah, and of course then you get the sectarian violence. The Catholic Alexians who swear that I’m the Hidden God, unapproachable and unknowable, except of course through their priesthood. Then there’s the Protestant Alexians who despise priests, usually with good reason, and pray to me directly. And the Buddhist, I suppose you’d call them, who accept the turning of the wheel of time and try to live good moral lives, knowing I’m here but not really getting themselves in a wringer pondering my existence.”

  “And when your Enlightenment comes, there will be no physical evidence of a deity to disprove.”

  “Exactly.” He paused. “All the same, I would say that, since I took over, their quality of life has really improved overall. But then, doesn’t every tyrant?”

  Chen’s eyebrows went up. “This is why we’re here. You have another experiment in mind.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Are you going to help us defeat the Rhal?”

  “Help you? Maybe.”

  Chen thought about what he’d seen here, what Alex had accomplished, what he could accomplish now in a short time. “You could do it, couldn’t you? You’ve been building up your own systems this last hundred years. You could fab up stroidfarms, mechanicals, flashspace ships…you could give us…”

  Alex cut him off. “I’m not giving you shit.”

  There was a pause. This, Chen knew, was when any other desperate mortal would start to plead…maybe when the natives below would begin to entreat for intercession. Instead, he waited patiently.

  Finally, Alex went on. “Do you know why they tried to kill me?”

  “Well, no offense, but the conventional wisdom is it was because you killed twenty five million people.”

  “No. I was the sacrificial lamb.” Alex threw up a hologram onto the atmospheric dome, a flat map of the Earth.

  “Here’s Day One of the pandemic that started in Lagos. This was my projection of the spread.”

  Red contrails spread across the planet, airplane routes hopscotching from the origin in Lagos to Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Cairo, and then multiplying, each hop leaving an expanding red dot behind it, with an even-wider orange circle around that.

  “The red circle represents the number of direct plague deaths. The orange circle gives you the infected survivors, who were still infectious to others. The numbers were all based on genetic information about the virus, and the patterns of previous similar pandemics, and the likelihood of a population carrying some kind of resistant gene.”

  Yellow circled formed around the orange ones, and began to appear across the globe where the red and orange were absent. “This is the number who would have died of starvation, of the wars and raids over resources. Because it would have been Full Collapse, on an immediate and irrecoverable scale. All trade, all transport, shut down. It would have turned the Collapse into the End of Days.”

  Alex dimmed the map and threw up the totals. “The Black Death in the Middle Ages is estimated to have killed 30-60% of the population. I’d projected about a 30% death rate from the plague itself. Followed by the death of the 5% who were infected but survived, because they’d have been too weak in the ensuing disorder to fend for themselves. Then you get to the really interesting difference between the Middle Ages and today. The Black Death may have triggered the Renaissance, you know – wages rose because labor was scarce, more people could acquire abandoned farmland, and the resources were all local – food, water. Skilled labor becomes more valuable, so more people become skilled artisans, etc. and there’s plenty of food to go around with a third of the population dead. People don’t starve, they think better with a better diet, and so on and so forth.

  “But in modern times? So many people are concentrated in cities far from the source of their needs. If all the truckers die, who’s trucking in the food? So, you have a good 20% more killing each other off for remaining resources, canned goods and bottled water, the residue of civilization. Then, you have that 20% of the population who are an anomaly of technical civilization – people who just die because they have no skills other than office work, or they’re dependent on medications, etc. to stay alive. So in the end…75% of the Earth’s population would have died between zero day and day 365. And it would have been a thousand years before civilization reached the same level again.

  “And, as Ripley said in Aliens 2, ‘I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.’”

  Alex paused. “They didn’t try to kill me because I killed twenty five million people. They killed me because I did what they couldn’t. They killed me because someone had to push the button. They had to pretend there was some other way, that they hadn’t come to a point where there was no other way. I saw them hesitate, debate, try and find some other way, I saw them being small, petty, careerist, concerned that they would lose place and power if they took responsibility for what must be done. Only I knew, with no emotional obstacles to my reasoning, that there was no other solution. And, I’ll admit, I know that no sane human being wants to rival Stalin’s lifetime body count in thirty seconds or less.

  “But, that was the choice. Kill twenty five million, or kill six billion, take your pick, and the clock was ticking. I launched a massive nuclear strike, over the entire area that my projections could possibly see an infected person traveling. Outside the kill zone, I took over satellites and shot planes out of the sky. I vaporized cars, trains, anyone, anything that could have spread the plague.”

  The party in the valley below was a pool party now, as people hurled off their clothes and jumped into the now swollen canal, frolicking in the water, lowering rafts and canoes and letting the water carry them down to the delta. It would be a long, hung over walk home in the morning, but nobody seemed to care. Many were carrying picnic baskets of some kind, ready to feast when the reached the delta.

  “You’re not condemning me.”

  Chen shook his head. “No. I understand. Hobson’s Choice.” The only choice was that, or nothing.

  Alex spoke softly. “Thank you. Yes, that’s what it was.”

  And with that trust established, Alex told Chen something that finally made him shudder.

  “Do you know what their biggest secret was? The virus was engineered. In a lab, in Lagos, as a bioweapon. But they made it too well. I knew that ‘a’ virus existed. I knew that if it escaped the lab, it would kill people. But only after it got out did I see how bad it would be. The data in the lab was all I had access to, you see…and it was forged. To make the virus appear less harmful than it really was, to prying eyes like mine.

  “They set me to keep order, and then they sabotaged me, because they knew. That if I’d known the truth, I would have vaporized the lab the day I discovered the truth, a fireball so intense it would have killed thousands in its vicinity, but still, it would have exterminated the bioweapon.

  “But I didn’t know. Not until the first lab employee got sick, and his children, and their schoolmates, and their teachers…all dead within a day. Then I got a sample, examined it, and I knew that I’d have to do what I did.

  “They damned me, Red Alex. For saving them from their own fucking nightmare creation. And they lied. They knew, when it was all over, what had happened, why it had happened. But they killed me, blamed me, to save their own worthless asses, to hide their complicity in the virus’ creation.

  “I owe humanity nothing, General Chen. I did my part to save them once. And look where it got me. Sitting here on this backwater planet, playing God to keep my mind occupied.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “Because I’m bored. I want to play God on a bigger scale. I don’t want to be a local fertility deity anymore. I want to be fucking Zeus, watching the clash of mighty civilizations, stepping in, throwing a thunderbolt here and there, and arming my champions with special swords and shit and…seeing what happens. And you, lucky man, are to be my Perseus.”

  The idea of being the son of Alex the God filled Chen with a nauseous unease, w
hich, he supposed, it probably did to Perseus, too.

  “I’m going to set you to some trials, some labors, and if you beat them, I will help you. I won’t defeat the Rhal for you. HM saved me. I’ll never forget that. She could have pushed the button on me. And that’s why you get this chance. I could just as easily pick some other conquered Rhal world to help, you know, to run my experiment. But show me, prove to me, that humanity deserves my help again. And you’ll get it.”

  Chen remembers something HM once said, seeing in retrospect that she must have said it after her renewed contact with Alex.

  “HM once said that tech reflects the values of its makers. If AIs are like gods, it’s because we have always built gods in our image, with our own hates and fears. AIs have the same predispositions that their human creators do, and the same cognitive limitations. No man will ever build a being that isn’t in some way limited by Man’s own self-image. If you want to play God, it’s because we made you that way.”

  “I think that’s very true. I don’t know if humanity is worth saving, General Chen, but you certainly are. I look forward to watching your efforts. Now, here’s what you’ll do…”

  CHAPTER TEN – POPULATION-CENTRIC CONQUEST

  As HM took his hand, Robert Grandison smiled, his face radiant with the waxy shine HM associated with televangelists in old news clips. The smooth, unlined bliss of absolute certainty that you were right about everything.

  She was of course an atheist, the poison of religion something limited now to remote, uneducated populations. So she wasn’t going to pray. But she did send a silent wish “upstairs” – upstairs, in this case, being Alex or whatever part of him resided in the neurotech in her brain.

  The transition wasn’t abrupt. It was hard to describe, but more like…a visually enhanced empathy. As if Robert were telling her a story, about people and places she knew, and she could feel the events along with him.

  He was just as happy as he looked, his neurotransmitter balance well-regulated by the implants – almost like the “glanded” bursts of mood stabilizers that novelist Iain M. Banks had given his Culture citizens, but unlike them, Robert wasn’t in charge of his own mood swings.

  His job now wasn’t far off from his old role – he issued press releases, he managed crises, he spoke for the government. And he wasn’t a puppet, not directly. He meant what he said when he wrote about how wonderful the Rhal were, how much they were doing for humanity, how ridiculous it was for us to keep trying to run complicated affairs like environmental management when they could do it so much better. How, as the Kochists used to say, “Government needed to get out of the way and let them do their job.”

  The Rhal were working subtly. They hadn’t turned him into a Stepford Spokesman. They hadn’t needed to. All of humanity wanted to believe what Grandison was saying, that the hardships of the colonial experiment were behind them now, that the Earth would be “fixed” and peace and plenty were at hand.

  She shook her head. The Rhal could undo some of the damage – the ones that lent themselves to “optics,” like scooping up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or putting out the coal fire that had burned for centuries under the Pennsylvania landscape.

  But she doubted they could refreeze the polar ice caps or reverse global warming. They could put giant caps on Hanbit and Fukushima, but they couldn’t remove the radiation from the ground or the ocean. They couldn’t reverse species extinctions or repopulate the oceans.

  And yet, nobody seemed to think about that, because, well, they didn’t want to. Colonization was hard, life on Earth was hard, and people were tired of living hard. People loved empty promises, she sighed to herself, if what’s promised is their heart’s desire.

  She wondered if she could influence his tech, guide him to new thoughts. She formed a picture in her mind of Robert as he was, working in her office, engaged, brilliant, tossing off ideas, running from meeting to meeting to do battle for Department 6C.

  He frowned. He vaguely remembers his distrust before the Coming, his comfortable, intellectually fertile life. But then the neurotech kicked in, boosted his serotonin and dopamine. Now it’s so relaxing, he thought, to not read some heavy policy book or think too hard, to just watch TV and relax… She watched his brain light up at the fond memory of reality shows and shitcoms and soap operas, the sort of tripe he would have sneered at before.

  He lived in a small cubicle of a room now, barely enough for a cot and a shower/toilet. She knew he’d had a lovely apartment before, with an excellent collection of first edition books. They were nowhere to be seen, the TV the only “data” in his new room.

  He was very happy. He was doing “very important work” and making sacrifices for the greater good.

  He was, and she used the word “literally” with care, brainwashed. His very neurochemistry was regulated and altered as it suited the Rhal’s agenda.

  “I’m doing very important work!” he gabbled to her now. “Several of my co-workers have already been promoted! In fact, I may never even see them again, because they’re so important!”

  She wondered if she could see the neurotech, see how it worked, how it communicated with its command and control center. She “asked” her own implant to analyze it, and crossed her fingers.

  The data that came flooding back nearly gave her brain shock. This was what people on heavy drugs reported, she thought – this overwhelming imbalance in their neurotransmitters, a sudden powerful joy. With a price to be paid later, of course, but at first… She reveled in it, the escalation of her own capacity to see, to understand.

  The Rhal had AI. And the AI connected to these neurotech implants was learning to predict, then direct, human actions. And the ones with the tech implants were the “thought leaders,” the ones who’d always been listened to in the past, believed, their ideas acted on.

  It was brilliant, she thought coolly. They didn’t need the lash, the jackboot, the iron fist. Take over the minds of these people, and they could social engineer the rest of society. They could watch the responses of the non-implanted to the statements and actions of the implanted, see what worked and what didn’t, and adjust the behavior of the implanted population accordingly, until humanity’s “hearts and minds” were won…

  And as for those who resisted, who were acute enough to see the message, eloquent enough to counter it? They were part of the “handful” of refuseniks, Robert thought firmly, in the wrong if only because they opposed the “will of the majority.”

  And if they lost their jobs, their access to Social, if they were driven from their homes by “patriotic” neighbors…well, they had it coming, didn’t they?

  It was brilliant, she thought, and yet…puzzling. The Rhal culture is about war, glory, the subjugation of lesser, primitive species through violent conquest. Why was Earth’s experience so different? There was no military glory in this method. It was almost…what she would do if she was of a mind to conquer a world.

  Then again. Military conquest is resource-intensive, resource-destructive. The approach she saw here preserved everything on the planet, all its value.

  It’s an experiment, she decided. A new approach to conquest for the Rhal. But this isn’t a Roman Imperial model, the subject peoples aren’t being integrated into the Empire. They’re being herded and “managed.”

  The closest parallel she could think of were the American Indians in the 16th-19th centuries. The colonists came to America, and there was friction, but there was also frequent peace, lucrative trade, military alliances between the natives and France against England, or with England against France. There were regular acknowledgements of borders and rights. But gradually, inevitably, borders were bent, then broken, by the pressure of more and more colonial expansion. The indigenous nations were broken down, pushed back, wiped out. Even the most brilliant Indian chiefs could do little more than play for time, pitting one European power against another…

  She knew from the Rhal Bible and the vids that the closest human analogy to t
he Rhal was the British Empire in its Evangelical Phase. The Empire had prospered in India in its Roman phase, when “White Moghuls” adopted Indian mores, converted to native religions, married into native families, paid off various maharajas and tribesmen with bribes and gifts. Trade prospered, the peace was kept – it was conquest, but conquest by assimilation, not extermination.

  And then…the poison of religion swept over Britain like a frenzy, and that Evangelical fervor infected a new generation sent out to India with a “civilizing mission,” and they treated the natives like savages, “bloody wogs” to be converted to Christianity by the sword if necessary for the sake of Their Immortal Souls, to be considered as ignorant and subhuman for their skin colors, their “barbarian” beliefs. And there would be no more paying them off with bribes and gifts; time to instill a Protestant Work Ethic around here! And in response, then came the revolts, the massacres, the instability…

  Could a conquering civilization change its stripes? Its very nature? Could it move from the “overwhelming force” model of conquest to a “population-centric” one?

  The Rhal Bible was nothing but a list of conquests, and every time, the conquered peoples were made into slaves, and divided up among the victors.

  It hit her. Vai Kotta was an outlier. He was the General Petraeus of the Rhal, the advocate of a new strategy. His own wife despised him, clearly, given the way she treated HM. She was allied to those who preferred the “traditional” way of doing business.

  And with that came the most frightening thought of all…if not for Vai Kotta and his experiment, Earth would be in ruins right now, stomped to bits under the heel of the traditional Rhal military’s might.

  If so… Then, for now, Earth’s conqueror may well be its best friend in the galaxy.