by Peter Watts
She wondered if there was any sort of pattern to that variability.
“Safeguards should be put into place at the very least.” The moderator was going for the middle road. “Ways to monitor these, these hybrids remotely, shut them down at the first sign of trouble.”
Becker snorted. Wingman didn’t take orders in the field, couldn’t even hear them. Sure, Becker could channel some smiley little spin doctor through her temporal, but he was just a Peeping Tom with no access to the motor systems. The actual metal didn’t even pack an on-board receiver; it was congenitally deaf to wireless commands until someone manually slotted the dorsal plug-in between Becker’s shoulders.
Deliberately design a combat unit that could be shut down by anyone who happened to hack the right codes? Who’d be that stupid?
And yet—
TRANSMIT. Speed-dial.
“—are only a few on active duty—they won’t tell us exactly how many of course, say twenty or thirty. A couple dozen cyborgs who can’t be blamed if something goes wrong. And that’s just today. You wouldn’t believe how fast they’re ramping up production.”
Forty seconds. On the nose.
“Not only do I believe it, I encourage it. The world’s a tinderbox. Water wars, droughts, refugees everywhere you look. The threat of force is the only thing that’s kept a lid on things so far. Our need for a strong military is greater today than it’s ever been since the cold war, especially with the collapse of the US eco—”
Speed-dial.
“—and what happens when every pair of boots in the field has a machine reading its mind and pulling the trigger in their name? What happens to the very concept of a war crime when every massacre can be defined as an industrial accident?”
Thirty-two.
“You’re saying this Becker deliberately—”
“I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m concerned. I’m concerned at the speed with which outrage over the massacre of civilians has turned into an outpouring of sympathy for the person who killed them, even from quarters you’d least expect. Have you seen the profile piece Amal Sabrie posted on the Star?”
A shutdown command, radioed to a system with no radio.
“Nobody’s forgetting the victims here. But it’s no great mystery why people also feel a certain sympathy for Corporal Becker—”
Becker kept wondering who’d be able to pull off a trick like that, hide a secret receiver under the official specs. She kept coming up with the same answer.
“Of course. She’s sympathetic, she’s charismatic, she’s nice. Exemplary soldier, not the slightest smudge on her service record. She volunteered at a veterinary clinic back in high school.”
Someone with an interest in controlling the narrative.
“Chief of Defense couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned—”
Dial.
“—should be up on charges is for the inquiry to decide.”
Forty-two seconds.
She wondered if she should be feeling something right now. Outrage. Violation. She’d thought the procedure was only supposed to cure her PTSD. It seemed to have worked on that score, anyway.
“Then let the inquiry decide. But we can’t allow this to become the precedent that tips over the Geneva Conventions.”
The other stuff, though. The compassion, the empathy, the guilt. The moral center. That seemed to be gone too. They’d burned it out of her like a tumor.
“The Conventions are a hundred years old. You don’t think they’re due for an overhaul?”
She still had her sense of right and wrong, at least.
Brain must keep that somewhere else.
“I thought they’d shipped you back to the WTP,” Sabrie remarked.
“This weekend.”
The journalist glanced around the grotto: low light, blue-shifted, private tables arrayed around a dance floor where partygoers writhed to bass beats that made it only faintly through the table damper. She glanced down at the Rising Tide Becker had ordered for her.
“I don’t fuck my interviews, Corporal. Especially ones who could snap my spine if they got carried away.”
Becker smiled back at her. “Not why we’re here.”
“Ohhhkay.”
“Bring your jammer?”
“Always.” Sabrie slapped the little device onto the table; welcome static fuzzed Becker’s peripherals.
“So why are we in a lekking lounge at 2 a.m.?”
“No drones,” Becker said.
“None in the local Milestones either. Even during business hours.”
“Yeah. I just—I wanted a crowd to get lost in.”
“At two in the morning.”
“People have other things on their mind in the middle of the night.” Becker glanced up as a triplet stumbled past en route to the fuck-cubbies. “Less likely to notice someone they may have seen on the feeds.”
“Okay.”
“People don’t—congregate the way they used to, you know?” Becker sipped her scotch, set it down, stared at it. “Everyone telecommutes, everyone cocoons. Downtown’s so—thin, these days.”
Sabrie panned the room. “Not here.”
“Web don’t fuck. Not yet, anyway. Still gotta go out if you want to do anything more than whack off.”
“What’s on your mind, Nandita?”
“The price of freedom.”
“Go on.”
“Not having to worry about some random psycho shooter when you go out for sushi. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“You know I was being sarcastic.”
Becker cocked her head at the other woman. “I don’t think you were. Not entirely, anyway.”
“Maybe not entirely.”
“Because there were shootings, Amal. A lot of them. Twenty thousand deaths a year.”
“Mainly down in the states, thank God.” Sabrie said. “But yes.”
“Back before the panopticon, people could just walk into some school or office building and—light it up.” Becker frowned. “I remember there was this one guy shot up a daycare. Prechoolers. Babies. I forget how many he killed before they took him out. Turned out he’d lost a sister himself, six months before, in another shooting. Everybody said it tipped him over the edge and he went on a rampage.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“That shit never does. It’s what people said, though, to explain it. Only . . . ”
“Only?” Sabrie echoed after the pause had stretched a bit too far.
“Only what if he wasn’t crazy at all?” Becker finished.
“How could he not be?”
“He lost his sister. Classic act of senseless violence. The whole gun culture, you know, the NRA had everyone by the balls and anyone who so much as whispered about gun control got shot down. So to speak.” Becker grunted. “Words didn’t work. Advocacy didn’t work. The only thing that might possibly work would be something so unthinkable, so horrific and obscene and unspeakably evil, that not even the most strident gun nut could possibly object to—countermeasures.”
“Wait, you’re saying that someone in favor of gun control—someone who’d lost his sister to gun violence— would deliberately shoot up a daycare?”
Becker spread her hands.
“You’re saying he turned himself into a monster. Killed twenty, thirty kids maybe. For a piece of legislation.”
“Weighed against thousands of deaths a year. Even if legislation only cut that by a few percent you’d make back your investment in a week or two, tops.”
“Your investment?”
“Sacrifice, then.” Becker shrugged.
“Do you know how insane that sounds?”
“How do you know that’s not the way it went down?”
“Because you said nothing changed! No laws were passed! They just wrote him off as another psycho.”
“He couldn’t know that up front. All he knew was, there was a chance. His life, a few others, for thousands. There was a chance.”
“Wasn’t me, remember? It was Wingman. That’s what everyone’s saying.” Wingman was awake now, straining at the leash with phantom limbs.
“But you were still part of it. You know that, Deet, you feel it. Even if it wasn’t your fault it still tears you up inside. I saw that the first time we spoke. You’re a good person, you’re a moral person, and—”
“Do you know what morality is, really?” Becker looked coolly into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s letting two stranger’s kids die so you can save one of your own. It’s thinking it makes some kind of difference if you look into someone’s eyes when you kill them. It’s squeamishness and cowardice and won’t someone think of the children. It’s not rational, Amal. It’s not even ethical.”
Sabrie had gone very quiet.
“Corporal,” she said when Becker had fallen silent, “what have they done to you?”
Becker took a breath. “Whatever they’re doing—”
Not much initiative. Great on the follow-through.
“—it ends here.”
Sabrie’s eyes went wide. Becker could see pieces behind them, fitting together at last. No drones. Dense crowd. No real security, just a few bouncers built of pitiful meat and bone . . .
“I’m sorry, Amal,” Becker said gently.
Sabrie lunged for the jammer. Becker snatched it up before the journalist’s hand had made it halfway.
“I can’t have people in my head right now.”
“Nandita.” Sabrie was almost whispering. “Don’t do this.”
“I like you, Amal. You’re good people. I’d leave you right out of it if I could, but you’re—smart. And you know me, a little. Maybe well enough to put it together, afterward . . . ”
Sabrie leapt up. Becker didn’t even rise from her chair. She seized the other woman’s wrist quick as a striking snake, effortlessly forced it back onto the table. Sabrie cried out. Dim blue dancers moved on the other side of the damper field, other things on their minds.
“You won’t get away with it. You can’t blame the machines for—” Soft pleading words, urgent, rapid-fire. The false-color heatprint of the contusion spread out across Sabrie’s forearm like a dim rainbow, like a bright iridescent oil slick. “Please there’s no way they’ll be able to sell this as a malfunction no matter how—”
“That’s the whole point,” Becker said, and hoped there was at least a little sadness left in her smile. “You know that.”
Amal Sabrie. Number one of seventy-four.
It would have been so much faster to just spread her wings and raise arms. But her wings had been torn out by the roots, and lay twitching in the garage back at Trenton. The only arms she could raise were of flesh and blood and graphene.
It was enough, though. It was messy, but she got the job done. Because Corporal Nandita Becker was more than just a superhuman killing machine.
She was the most ethical person on the planet.
Seventh Sight
Greg Egan
1
On my twelfth birthday, my cousin Sean sent me the keys to the rainbow. I carried them around in my phone for six days, unused, burning a hole in my pocket. Sean had hacked his own implants almost eighteen months before, so I was fairly sure that it would be safe to follow him, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what would happen if my father caught me rewiring my retinas.
I waited for a Sunday afternoon, when my parents were preoccupied with a movie. I closed the door to my room and drew the curtains. The door had no lock, so I lay in bed with my head under the covers, staring at my phone until the screen went dark. In the blackness I thought about my grandfather, blinded by nothing more than the gene we shared, but sightless for so long that the implants had been powerless to bring him back into the light. My confidence in the trail Sean had blazed began to waver; his implants and mine were the same model, but everyone’s body was unique. I did not want to end up blind—and even if the changes I wrought were reversible with a trip to the optometrist to restore the implants’ settings, that was not something I could do without my parents finding out.
I jiggled the phone and it lit up again, showing the circular rainbow of the app’s startup screen. The hues in this fanciful icon were crisper and clearer than those of any rainbow I’d seen in the sky, but then my bio-sighted friends had assured me that they could never make out the mythical “seven colors,” either, and I had no reason to doubt them. My implants did their best to mimic the color vision of the human eye, by matching the typical responses of the three kinds of human cone cells. But this mimicry was a matter of choice, not necessity—and I wouldn’t need any new hardware inside my skull in order to move beyond it.
The quantum dots scattered across my artificial retinas included millions of spares, ready to step in if any of the currently active sensors failed. These spares were not pre-committed to any particular color, lest the demand for replacements skewed green or blue and left the red ones wasting space, like some unpopular flavor of Skittles. But since the choice was made, not with pigment molecules or colored filters, but by setting a series of voltages across a quantum well, there was nothing to constrain the possibilities to the three traditional colors. The app Sean had sent me could instruct the implants to wake all my spares—and tune them to four new bands, between and beyond the original three.
I ran a fingertip along the rainbow’s edge, trying to reach a decision. The implants made me normal, they allowed me to fit in. Why ask for anything more? Left to my biological fate I would not have been fully blind for another decade, but my parents had opted for replacement as early as possible, giving me the best chance of adapting to the device.
But that had been six years ago. If I didn’t try this experiment now, while my brain was still flexible enough to make sense of the new information, I might die without ever knowing what I’d missed.
I lifted my finger from its stalling arc and tapped the button above: CONTINUE.
The app needed to know the implants’ serial numbers and service password, but both were printed plainly in my owner’s manual. The manufacturer’s warranty had expired, leaving nothing to void, and the app’s screed claimed that it could hide its actions from any health professional making routine adjustments. So long as nothing went wrong that I couldn’t fix by sending the spares back to sleep, there was a chance that my spectral trespasses would remain undetected.
The next screen showed response curves. The standard red and green ones already overlapped considerably, while the blue one stood almost aloof from them. The app’s default choice was to squeeze two new curves in between blue and green, and then add one at the near-infrared end and one at the near-ultraviolet. There was also a set of default “opposition formulas,” which specified the way in which information was to be extracted from various combinations of the new primary colors—just as the difference between the red and green responses was computed in every human eye and passed along to the brain.
The idea of editing any of these details—adding my own idiosyncratic twist to the process—made my hands sweat. I would not have known where to start constructing my own private notion of the ideal palette. But if that also proved that I was in no position to make an informed choice to accept the defaults, I took some comfort from the orderly appearance of the seven curves on offer. They covered the spectrum, evenly and efficiently, each little hill in the serried row peaking at a wavelength some fifty nanometers away from its neighbor. Nothing about them looked strange, demanding elaborate justifications from the depths of biophysics. Nothing cried out to be changed.
I hit ACCEPT, and moved on to the next page.
WARNING
Activating and retuning spare sensors in your artificial retinas (ARs) may lead to permanent changes in your brain’s visual pathways. While this app can restore the ARs to their original state, we make no such promises about your visual cortex.
The deci
sion is yours alone.
The Rainbow Project
This disclaimer did not unnerve me at all. That the brain was altered by the information it did or didn’t receive was old news to me, writ large in my family’s history. The implants had come just in time to help my father, but not as much as they had helped me, and my uncles and cousins of various ages joined up the dots. The more I thought about it, the surer I became that the most frightening thing would be to lose this chance, while Sean and his friends sprinted far ahead of me and disappeared into the far end of the rainbow.
I tapped PROCEED.
The warning gave way to a flickering Bluetooth icon and a progress bar. I watched the text above the bar spelling out the stages as the app and implants worked together: cataloging the spare sensors, testing them internally, retuning them, testing them again.
The progress bar paused at ninety-five percent, then the app asked me if the sky was clear and I’d obtained a suitable prism. It was, and I had. I climbed out of bed and opened the curtains to admit a narrow wedge of sunlight, then I placed the prism Sean had given me on my desk and moved it back and forth until the spectrum it cast on the wall formed an uninterrupted band.
Following the app’s instructions, I turned my head slowly, shifting my gaze steadily across the spectrum from left to right, starting just before the red end. In my earbuds the app counted down the nanometers as it verified its tweaks to the quantum dots at every wavelength. It was all reassuringly mundane, like a human version of the procedure after changing an ink cartridge, where you print and scan an alignment page.
The app said, “Done.” I looked down at my phone, and the progress bar had reached one hundred percent. The image zoomed out to show the circular rainbow again, then it shrank to a point and the app quit, taking me back to the phone’s home screen.
I opened the curtains and let the sunlight fill my room. Nothing looked different; I’d been warned that any change in the way I perceived the world could take days or weeks. But my impatience was offset by a sense of relief: whatever else I’d done, at least I hadn’t damaged the implants and left myself blind.
