by Peter Watts
“All career soldiers enjoy their work. If not the massacre—and many do relish that—it’s the practice of forging individuals into units and fitting them into a strategy. A mathematical pleasure, if you will.”
Charinda unlatches her ribcage. The umbilici unspool as the peacock steps out, tugging at her like ligaments. “It’s said you deserted the Hegemony when serving the side that always wins began to sour. No challenge, no sport.”
“A cynical opinion to take, not to mention sociopathic.” Lunha allows the bird into her lap, where it pecks at her secondskin, indenting the fabric with green triangles. “But my specialty is what it is, with just one kind of use.”
“You could take up another occupation.”
“I could, but I’ll always carry my name and my deeds.” Lunha’s swarm opponents are pinned down, one glimpse of whirring blades and eyes, before they dissipate under optical scatter-fire. The general pauses the sequence. “I’ve grasped how your predictives operate.”
Charinda watches Lunha’s expression closely. “How so?”
“I’ve been using the algorithms after I finish a skirmish. The results they produce are in line with how the game resolves—until I input my data. Your clusters can’t hold a behavioral profile. Grow one that can, feed it data of the implant and Esithu.”
In her place the peacock plays low, amused notes. “Even if it was that simple, my oracles aren’t easy to produce. To develop one to a stage where it’d have that capacity would take a decade.”
“Under what conditions are they grown?”
“Virtual wars,” Charinda says, after a moment. “I hardwire them with an instinct to proliferate, set them up with competitive templates. Winning clusters produce more sophisticated algorithms. It isn’t a battle game. The clusters aren’t units to be controlled, and the system is mine alone. Access isn’t something I will compromise.”
The general nods. “I could accelerate the process. What do you say to a restricted sync that’ll give me temporary control?”
Charinda sips the air through her teeth. “A sync is both ways.”
“By definition. Shall we get to it?”
When she was young, full-on sync was Charinda’s drug of choice—edgy and uncontrolled, an indulgence in abandon. That was before, when she could afford to be reckless, when her body was just a body. She does not like to think of herself as weaker now, but there’s a line of demarcation: before, after. Charinda of before a different nation with a language of her own, one that Charinda of after has chosen to forget.
This is compartmentalized, boundaries clear and hard between their data streams. Neither of them wishes to lose herself in the other. But permeability is inevitable.
The peacock rattles Charinda’s ribcage and her teeth quiver at the roots. Lunha’s recent memory stains hers like ink in water: the general piloting a reversal engine in vertiginous silence, her skin gray with dead-sun ashes. Probability fluxes making prisms on the viewport of her ship, compression ice making glass of her fingertips; one of her arms is dead from integrity bullets, plastic tendons snapped. A battle of foregone result—carefully sown implosions come to fruit, taking out a Hegemonic supply fleet.
The exchange feed stutters.
“When I was very little I thought of becoming a scholar, working with classics. Love poems, lightning-epics, sculpture-prose. The sensation of those things delighted me. I could feel them in my fingertips, in my bloodstream where they left imprints and swept through my dreams.” The voice is melodious and factual, as of someone reading off a biography, or perhaps a dossier. “A while later I thought of dance, music, pursuits through which I could regulate the display of myself. Later still I performed exceptionally well in an aptitude test. I do not need to name it. Save on Costeya birthworlds, all citizens of the Hegemony take it at a young age.”
The audio skips.
“To survive, the conquered must conquer in turn. It is a mechanism to lessen the trauma, the actuality, of subjugation. By participating in conquest, one may regain a degree of control. A logical progress, moreover encouraged. There are no recruits fiercer or more loyal than those from consolidated planets. Cradle-world officers are not so driven to perform, for they have nothing to prove and everything to lose. The system thus sustains itself.”
The audio distorts. The voice has flattened, quietly toneless.
“Tiansong was absorbed into the Costeya Hegemony on—”
Coming to, Charinda lies side by side with the general. The nexus cradle is hard against her back, her consciousness still unmoored, alienated from herself.
“It does not escape me,” Lunha says in a clear, calm voice, “that this was your desired outcome from the start.”
Charinda disconnects from the cradle. Air quivers in her larynx, in her lungs which have been knotted and reshaped to fit around the cage like fistfuls of thread. “What did you see?”
“Not much.” Lunha finger-combs her hair roughly, the most human gesture Charinda has seen from her. “Mostly tactile memory from before your accident. If I intruded, I didn’t mean to.”
“I saw—”
“It doesn’t matter.” The general’s voice has assumed the staccato cadence of doors sliding shut. “The present interests me more.”
“I did say that I meant to make a bid for freedom. Esithu values me and delivering superior predictive clusters would go a long way in relaxing my leash. They can’t be deauthorized from my implant, not really.” Charinda blinks past a double vision, remnant of the sync: she sees herself through Lunha’s eyes overlaid with biometrics. Measurement of her vitals, a heat map in fisheye. The quiet mantra of joint actuators. It passes. “When did you realize?”
“To me it seemed unlikely that you couldn’t develop an advanced cluster on your own, but you didn’t have enough data on Esithu—no one does—so you chose to input me. Perhaps not a complete profile, but sufficient. I’m a public figure.”
The general is not known for her cruelty, but she is efficient with those who would bring her harm. Charinda does not move. If Lunha wants her death, her efforts at self-defense would be less than pathetic. A low thrum vibrates through the bars. The peacock’s heartbeat. Hers.
Lunha’s gaze betrays nothing. The lines of her features are tranquil in the way of spiritual icons revered on Tiansong. “I don’t resent you. We all do what we must to survive and thrive. You’ll find the clusters I’ve guided to triumph the best of your oracles yet, but you’ll also find that they will ignore input related to me.”
Charinda does not doubt it, but she is a scientist. She plucks one of the newest clusters and kills it. The fruiting algorithm is more expansive than any she’s bred to date; it does not take so much as Lunha’s physiological profile. “I can appreciate that.”
“I’m sure you will attempt to find a way around it,” the general says, and her mouth flexes, almost a smile. “Altogether, would it not be fair if you hand me a small colony? A fraction of the crop I nurtured, so you’ll still come out ahead.”
“I thought you didn’t need ghost prophets.”
“Perhaps one day I’ll encounter an opponent I cannot overcome. Perhaps I’ll find another use for them. Who knows? I may not always be a soldier.”
In her lap Charinda holds the bird that is her life, where it swishes its tail and murmurs children’s mnemonics. “You knew from the start I’d never allow anyone into my cortices, that this was the one way you could interface with them.” She loads a dead-drop module up with an intelligence colony, and presses the sleek, thin tube into the general’s hand. “I shouldn’t have tried to outplay you.”
“Does it matter? We both obtain what we wanted.” Lunha pulls on a fibrous mesh that absorbs light, a set of clothes that would belong in any city, on any planet. Gloves and jacket the color of pomelo shadows at high noon. “I’ll ration them. When I’ve won and the Hegemony is in ruins, I’ll return what’s left.”
“I wouldn’t want them back. Go with your ancestors’ blessings, or the ble
ssings of whatever entity you still believe in.”
The general takes Charinda’s hand, kisses it: formal, cupping her fingers just so. “Don’t get caught. I’d hate to come back to find Laithirat a heap of ashes and stellar debris just because you harbored me for a month.”
When the Hegemonic birthworld Salhune falls, Charinda watches the broadcast from under one of her trees. The planet consumes itself in a chain reaction of neutron plants and tectonic reactors—the scale of destruction is spectacular, the calculation behind it peerlessly precise.
Charinda feeds the peacock slices of persimmons which seep verses of genocide, elegies of annihilation: this season’s fads, surprisingly nutritious. She sips at tea made from synecdoche leaves; it is a harmony of flavors, full of assonance. Her face is in bloom, petals like supernovae, stamens heavy as warships.
In the battlefield of her cortices, the oracles continue to fight.
Collateral
Peter Watts
They got Becker out in eight minutes flat, left the bodies on the sand for whatever scavengers the Sixth Extinction hadn’t yet managed to take out. Munsin hauled her into the Sikorsky and tried to yank the augments manually, right on the spot; Wingman swung and locked and went hot in the pants-pissing half-second before its threat-recognition macros, booted late to the party, calmed it down. Someone jammed the plug-in home between Becker’s shoulders; wireless gates unlocked in her head and Blanch, way up in the cockpit, put her prosthetics to sleep from a safe distance. The miniguns sagged on her shoulders like anesthetized limbs, threads of smoke still wafting from the barrels.
“Corporal.” Fingers snapped in her face. “Corporal, you with me?”
Becker blinked. “They—they were human . . . ” She thought they were, anyway. All she’d been able to see were the heat signatures: bright primary colors against the darkness. They’d started out with arms and legs but then they’d spread like dimming rainbows, like iridescent oil slicks.
Munson said nothing.
Abemama receded to stern, a strip of baked coral suffused in a glow of infrared: yesterday’s blackbodied sunshine bleeding back into the sky. Blanch hit a control and the halo vanished: night-eyes blinded, ears deafened to any wavelength past the range of human hearing, all senses crippled back down to flesh and blood.
The bearing, though. Before the darkness had closed in. It had seemed wrong.
“We’re not going to Bonriki?”
“We are,” the Sergeant said. “You’re going home. Rendezvous off Aranuka. We’re getting you out before this thing explodes.”
She could feel Blanch playing around in the back of her brain, draining the op logs from her head. She tried to access the stream but he’d locked her out. No telling what those machines were sucking out of her brain. No telling if any of it would still be there when he let her back in.
Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t have been able to scrub those images from her head if she tried.
“They had to be hostiles,” she muttered. “How could they have just been there, I mean—what else could they be?” And then, a moment later: “Did any of them . . . ?”
“You wouldn’t be much of a superhuman killing machine if they had,” Okoro said from across the cabin. “They weren’t even armed.”
“Private Okoro,” the Sergeant said mildly. “Shut your fucking mouth.”
They were all sitting across the cabin from her, in defiance of optimal in-flight weight distribution: Okoro, Perry, Flannery, Cole. None of them augged yet. There weren’t enough Beckers to go around, one every three or four companies if the budget was up for it and the politics were hot enough. Becker was used to the bitching whenever the subject came up, everyone playing the hard-ass, rolling their eyes at the cosmic injustice that out of all of them it was the farmer’s daughter from fucking Red Deer who’d won the lottery. It had never really bothered her. For all their trash-talking bullshit, she’d never seen anything but good-natured envy in their eyes.
She wasn’t sure what she saw there now.
Eight thousand kilometers to Canadian airspace. Another four to Trenton. Fourteen hours total on the KC-500 the brass had managed to scrounge from the UN on short notice. It seemed like forty: every moment relentlessly awake, every moment its own tortured post-mortem. Becker would have given anything to be able to shut down for just a little while—to sleep through the dull endless roar of the turbofans, the infinitesimal brightening of the sky from black to grey to cheerful, mocking blue—but she didn’t have that kind of augmentation.
Blanch, an appendage of a different sort, kept her company on the way home. Usually he couldn’t go five minutes without poking around inside her, tweaking this inhibitor or that BCI, always trying to shave latency down by another millisecond or two. This time he just sat and stared at the deck, or out the window, or over at some buckled cargo strap clanking against the fuselage. The tacpad that pulled Becker’s strings sat dormant on his lap. Maybe he’d been told to keep his hands off, leave the crime scene in pristine condition for Forensic IT.
Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.
“Shit happens, you know?”
Becker looked at him. “What?”
“We’re lucky something like this didn’t happen months ago. Half those fucking islands underwater, the rest tearing each other’s throats out for a couple dry hectares and a few transgenics. Not to mention the fucking Chinese just waiting for an excuse to help out.” Blanch snorted. “Guess you could call it peacekeeping. If you’ve got a really warped sense of humor.”
“I guess.”
“Shame we’re not Americans. They don’t even sign on to those treaties, do anything they damn well please.” Blanch snorted. “It may be a fascist shithole down there but at least they don’t knuckle under every time someone starts talking about war crimes.”
He was just trying to make her feel better, she knew.
“Fucking rules of engagement,” he grumbled.
Eight hours in IT when they landed: every aug tested to melting, every prosthetic stripped to the bolts while the attached meat sat silent and still and kept all the screams inside. They gave her four hours’ rack time even though her clockwork could scrub the fatigue right out of her blood, regulate adenosine and melatonin so precisely she wouldn’t even yawn right up until the point she dropped dead of heart failure. Might as well, they said: other schedules to clear anyway, other people to bring back across other oceans.
They told her not to worry. They told her it wasn’t her fault. They gave her propranolol to help her believe them.
Four hours, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling.
Now here she was: soul half a world away, body stuck in this windowless room, paneled in oak on three sides, crawling with luminous maps and tacticals on the fourth. Learning just what the enemy had been doing, besides sneaking up on a military cyborg in the middle of the fucking night.
“They were fishing,” the PAO told her.
“No,” Becker said; some subconscious subroutine added an automatic “sir.”
The JAG lawyer—Eisbach, that was it—shook her head. “They had longlines in their outriggers, Corporal. They had hooks, a bait pail. No weapons.”
The general in the background—from NDHQ in Ottawa, Becker gathered, although there’d been no formal introduction—studied the tacpad in his hand and said nothing at all.
She shook her head. “There aren’t any fish. Every reef in the WTP’s been acidified for twenty years.”
“It’s definitely a point we’ll be making,” Eisbach said. “You can’t fault the system for not recognizing profiles that aren’t even supposed to exist in the zone.”
“But how could they be—”
“Tradition, maybe.” The PAO shrugged. “Some kind of cultural thing. We’re checking with the local NGOs but so far none of them are accepting responsibility. Whatever they were doing, the UN never white-listed it.”
“They didn’t show on approach,” Becker remembered. “No visual, no s
ound—I mean, how could a couple of boats just sneak up like that? It had to be some kind of stealth tech, that must be what Wingman keyed—I mean, they were just there.” Why was this so hard? The augs were supposed keep her balanced, mix up just the right cocktail to keep her cool and crisp under the most lethal conditions.
Of course, the augs were also supposed to know unarmed civilians when they saw them . . .
The JAG was nodding. “Your mechanic. Specialist, uh . . . ”
“Blanch.” From the room’s only civilian, standing unobtrusively with the potted plants. Becker glanced over; he flashed her a brief and practiced smile.
“Specialist Blanch, yes. He suspects there was a systems failure of some kind.”
“I would never have fired if—” Meaning, of course, I would never have fired.
Don’t be such a pussy, Becker. Last month you took on a Kuan-Zhan with zero cover and zero backup, never even broke a sweat. Least you can do now is stand next to a fucking philodendron without going to pieces.
“Accidents happen in—these kind of situations,” The PAO admitted sadly. “Drones misidentify targets. Pillbox mistakes a civilian for an enemy combatant. No technology’s perfect. Sometimes it fails. It’s that simple.”
“Yes sir.” Dimming rainbows, bleeding into the night.
“So far the logs support Blanch’s interpretation. Might be a few days before we know for certain.”
“A few days we don’t have. Unfortunately.”
The general swept a finger across his tacpad. A muted newsfeed bloomed on the war wall behind him: House of Commons, live. Opposition members standing, declaiming, sitting. Administration MPs across the aisle, rising and falling in turn. A two-tiered array of lethargic whackamoles.
The General’s eyes stayed fixed on his pad. “Do you know what they’re talking about, Corporal?”
“No, sir.”
“They’re talking about you. Barely a day and a half since the incident and already they’re debating it in Question Period.”
