by Ken MacLeod
Colonel Wan lowered his head. His visor obscured his face. “I’ll order a switch to pain and confusion loads.”
“Can’t you use something harsher than that? This is an open insurrection, Colonel. KaiDin has brought an armed mob into the interior of the capital.”
“Pain and confusion is the strongest load we brought with us, Overseer. I was given no reason to bring anything stronger.”
“You’ve still got half your force on the ship. Have them equip themselves with lethal loads. Get them in here. Put a stop to this.”
Colonel Wan snapped to attention and terminated the call. Fifteen minutes later, a mob charged down two corridors and converged on ElGari’s apartments. Colonel Wan’s soldiers responded by retreating down a third corridor, firing anesthetics as they went.
VinDu’s proteges were turning over furniture and creating barricades. His senior adviser was handing out sensory-deprivation loads that would neutralize every sense for a full half hour—the strongest load VinDu had stocked in his personal arsenal. Its after-effects normally included days of disorientation and agonizing depression. His situation reports displayed the images of cleanup crews moving among the breakage KaiDin had inflicted on the city. His missiles were now ten minutes from their target.
The Emissary was still broadcasting its message. It had used up the major languages and started working its way through Albanian, Coptic, and the minority languages of China and India. In every language the message was the same. The Solar System was now linked to a galaxy-spanning interstellar communications network.
I have been receiving information from other civilizations for over nine hundred terrestrial years, the message said. My databanks offer you a vast repository of knowledge and wisdom. More information is arriving every hour.
The images of three Overseers were lined up beside the fountain: MinFi, JenPol, and OgaRuto. KaiDin was observing the conversation but she wasn’t projecting an image.
“KaiDin knows she can’t force you to abort,” MinFi said. “You obviously can’t abort the missiles if you’re killed or incapacitated. But afterward . . . if you let them destroy the complex . . . ”
“Half the people in the Solar System will think it was a justified execution,” OgaRuto said. “Don’t underestimate the initial response to the Emissary’s message.”
VinDu held himself erect. There was no limit, it seemed, to the emotional devastation his genes and his post-natal processing could cover with a stone facade.
“I am not going to yield to her merely to save my life. Our polity is probably dead. I understand that. But there is still some hope it can survive.”
MinFi shook her head. Her eyes deepened. “I understand your feelings, VinDu. I might tell you to let the missiles do their work if I thought it would save whatever we have left of our government. You’d be teaching our successors the ultimate lesson. The next Overseer who contemplated violence and coercion would know it was a pointless thing to do. But our polity can’t survive if the people of the Solar System know an Overseer destroyed the Emissary complex. The combine will fall apart within a tenday.”
“We’ve lost,” OgaRuto said. “We may be able to hold something together if you abort the missiles. Let them strike and we’ll have nothing—no combine, and no Emissary either.”
VinDu waved his hand and the three Overseers vanished. The only image floating in front of him was the map that displayed the current position of the missiles.
“We are what we are,” KaiDin says. “We responded the way we were meant to respond. You made your decisions. I made mine.”
“And now we both have to live with the consequences.”
KaiDin eyes him over the top of her goblet. An impish flicker crosses her face. “You sound like you’re more concerned about my destiny than your own.”
VinDu reaches for his own goblet. It has been twelve years since KaiDin mounted her insurrection and she has been an exile ever since. She has been isolated from all hope that she would ever again be an Overseer.
“I felt it would be the harshest punishment we could inflict on you,” VinDu says. “I wouldn’t have asked for it if I didn’t feel that way. I felt you would be a living example to any Overseers who thought they should repeat your use of force. A ruler without a domain. Without any possibility of a domain.”
KaiDin smiles. “And we would both have our precious self-image. Our portrait of ourselves as virtuous, upright public servants.”
“We both made our concessions. We both made the kind of decisions we’re supposed to make.”
KaiDin raises her goblet. “The only kind of decisions we can make. That’s why I’ve made up the file I’m sending you, VinDu. Please study it carefully. My life as a researcher has been more satisfying than you might think. It hasn’t been easy. I’m not sure the more placid products of the Overseer cultivation process could have done it. But I’ve found something that should justify all the effort I’ve put into it. Once I finished the preliminary work the Emissary forces on you, I started looking for information about other species that have engaged in personality cultivation. I found five. Two of the species I examined spent centuries in a frighteningly destructive pattern—a pattern we may be initiating.”
VinDu presses the smooth firmness of the concubine’s knee as he listens. He is once again an Overseer. He is once again a resident of Anmei. But all his worst fears have been realized. He and three other Overseers govern a fragment of the TaiPark combine. Twenty cities defected in the first tenday after the Emissary broadcast its initial greeting. In every corner of the Solar System, major fractions of the population voiced their outrage when they learned the Overseers had hidden the Emissary for a century and a half. The Toremata Union intensified its offensive and the pressure split the Overseers into factions. The combine is now divided into three polities. The Overseers in each segment claim they are the true government of the entire combine.
“Both species tried to cultivate rulers with desirable personality structures,” KaiDin says. “Both got into conflicts and started cultivating more aggressive personalities. Eventually they slipped into a kind of arms race—with each group trying to develop the most aggressive leaders. By the time they managed to reverse the process, both species had endured an era of mass destruction and wholesale death that nearly destroyed their civilization.”
KaiDin has placed her goblet in its holder. Her concubine has removed his hands from her shoulder and stepped back two steps, in response to the seriousness and intensity of the mood she is projecting.
“I’ve noted some disturbing indications,” KaiDin says. “I believe there is some possibility you and your rivals for the leadership of the combine may be contemplating a long term increase in the aggressiveness of the portion of the overseer pool you control. I’m sending you the results of my researches because I want you to understand the dangers. If you’re doing what you appear to be doing—you could be endangering our entire civilization.”
KaiDin’s image vanishes. VinDu stares into the space she has emptied. His hand traces the curve of the concubine’s lower leg.
“The compromise we made twelve years ago was like most compromises,” VinDu says to the concubine. “It satisfied everybody except the compromisers. I demanded that KaiDin be expelled from the Overseer pool because I felt she had to pay something. We had to do something that would make future Overseers hesitate when they started thinking they should imitate her little attempt at civil war. I thought it was the right decision at the time. It didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped, but I still think it was the right decision.”
He tips back his goblet and lets the mild tartness of the drink counterpoint the warmth of the bath and the curves and swells of the concubine’s body. KaiDin’s information sources seem to have missed an important aspect of the situation. In the cultivation facilities a short distance from his apartment, the cultivation specialists are, indeed, cultivating more aggressive Overseers. But VinDu and his three colleagues are also working
on a program that will produce more immediate results. Their personality modification staff is developing modification programs that will increase the aggressiveness of the current members of their Overseer pool.
“We have uncovered the weakness in Tai-Park’s vision,” VinDu says. “We are all public spirited personalities. But what public do we serve? Our own fragment of the combine? The combine itself, which can only be restored if we make war on the Overseers who control the other fragments? The human species as a whole? How do we answer such questions? And when we do answer them—when we choose the group that will command our loyalties—we pursue our objectives with a dedication that magnifies the intensity of the conflict. A detached observer might decide our species would be better off if we were merely normal selfish humans who pursued goals such as wealth and social status.”
VinDu rests his head against a self-adjusting support. He takes his hand off the concubine’s leg and slides forward until the water covers his chin. The concubine catches his mood and starts singing a series of wordless variations based on an ancient Mongolian melody.
“We are what we are,” VinDu says.
The Observer
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
And so we went in.
Combat formation, all five of us, me first, face masks on so tight that the edges of our eyes pulled, suits like a second skin. Weapons in both hands, back-ups attached to the wrists and forearms, flash-bangs on our hips.
No shielding, no vehicles, no nothing. Just us, dosed, altered, ready to go.
I wanted to rip something’s head off, and I did, the fury burning in me like lust. The weapons became tools—I wanted up close and I got it, fingers in eyes, fists around tentacles, poking, pulling, yanking—
They bled brown, like soda. Like coffee. Like weak tea.
And they screamed—or at least I think they did.
Or maybe that was just me.
The commanders pulled us out before we could turn on each other, gave us calming drugs, put us back in our chambers for sleep. But we couldn’t sleep.
The adrenaline didn’t stop.
Neither did the fury.
Monica banged her head against the wall until she crushed her own skull.
LaTrice shot up her entire chamber with a back-up she’d hidden between her legs. She took out two MPs and both team members in the chambers beside her before the commander filled the air with some kind of narcotic to wipe her out.
And me. I kept ripping and gouging and pulling and yanking until my fingertips were bone. By then, I hit the circuits inside the door and fried myself.
And woke up here, strapped down against a cold metal bed with no bedclothes. The walls are some kind of brushed steel. I can see my own reflection, blurry, pale-skinned, wild-eyed.
I don’t look like a woman, and I certainly don’t look like me.
And you well know, Doc, that if you unstrap me, I’ll kill the thing reflected in that brushed metal wall.
After I finish with you.
You ask how it feels, and you know you’ll get an answer because of that chip you put in my head.
I can feel it, you know, itching. If I close my eyes, I can picture it, like a gnat, floating in gray matter.
Free my hands and I’ll get it out myself.
Free my hands, and I’ll get us all out of here.
How does it feel?
By it, I assume you mean me. I assume you mean whatever’s left of me.
Here’s how it feels:
There are three parts to me now. The old, remembered part, which doesn’t have a voice. It stands back and watches, appalled, at everything that happens, everything I do.
I can see her too—that remembered part—gangly young woman with athletic prowess and no money. She stands behind the rest of us, wearing the same clothes she wore to the recruiter’s that day—pants with a permanent crease, her best blouse, long hair pulled away from her horsy face.
There are dreams in her eyes—or there were then. Now they’re cloudy, disillusioned, lost.
If you’d just given her the money, let her get the education first, she’d be an officer or an engineer or a goddamn tech soldier.
But you gave her that test—biological predisposition, aggression, sensitivity to certain hormones. You gave her the test, and found it wasn’t just the physical that had made her a good athlete.
It wasn’t just the physical.
It was the aggression, and the way that minute alterations enhanced it.
Aggression, a strong predisposition, and extreme sensitivity.
Which, after injections and genetic manipulation, turned her into us.
I’m the articulate one. I’m an observer too, someone who stores information, and can process it faster than the fastest computer. I’m supposed to govern the reflexes, but they gave me a blocker for that the minute I arrived back on ship, then made it permanent when they got me to base.
I can see, Doc; I can hear; I can even tell you what’s going on, and why.
I just can’t stop it, any more than you can.
I know I said three, and yet I didn’t mention the third. I couldn’t think of her, not and think of the Remembered One at the same time.
I’m not supposed to feel, Doc, yet the Remembered One, she makes me sad.
The third. Oh, yeah. The third.
She’s got control of the physical, but you know that. You see her every day. She’s the one who raises the arms, who clenches the bandaged and useless fingers, who kicks at the restraints holding the feet.
She’s the one who growls and makes it impossible for me to talk to you.
You know that, or you wouldn’t have used the chip.
An animal?
She’s not an animal. Animals create small societies. They have customs and instinctual habits. They live in prides or pods or tribes.
She’s a thing. Inarticulate. Violent. Useless.
And by giving her control of the physical, you made the rest of us useless, trapped inside, destined to watch until she works herself free.
If she decides to bash her head against the wall until she crushes her own skull or to rip through the steel, breaking every single bone she has, if she decides to impale herself on the bedframe, I’ll cheer her on.
Not just for me.
But for the Remembered One, the one with hopes and dreams and a future she squandered when she reached for the stars.
The one who got us here, and who can’t ever get us out.
So, you say I’m unusual. How nice for me. The ones who separate usually kill themselves before the MPs ever get into the chamber. The others, the ones who integrate with their thing, get reused.
You think that the women I trained with—the ones not in my unit, the ones who didn’t die when we got back—you think they’re still out there, fighting an enemy we don’t entirely understand.
I think you’re naïve.
But you’re preparing a study, something for the government so that they’ll know this experiment is failing. Not the chip-in-the-brain thing that allows you to communicate with me, but the girl soldiers, the footsoldiers, the grunts on the ground.
And if they listen (ha!) they’ll listen because of people like me.
Okay. I’ll buy into your pipe dreams.
Here’s what everyone on Earth believes:
We don’t even know their names. We can call them The Others, but that’s only for clarity purposes. There are names—Squids, ETs—but none of them seem to stick.
They have ships in much of the solar system, so we’re told, but we’re going to prevent them from getting the Moon. The Moon is the last bastion before they reach Earth.
That’s about it. No one cares, unless they have a kid up there, and even then, they don’t really care unless the kid is a grunt, like I was.
Only they don’t know the kid’s a grunt. Not until the kid comes home from a tour, if the kid comes home.
Here’s what I learned on our ship: Most of the guys never came home
. That’s when the commanders started the hormonal/genetic thing, the thing that tapped into the maternal instinct. Apparently the female of the species has a ferocious need to protect her young.
It can be—it is—tapped, and in some of us, it’s powerful, and we become strong.
Mostly, though, no one gets near the ground. The battle is engaged in the blackness of space. It’s like the video games our grandparents used—which some say (and I never believed until now)—were used to train the kids for some kind of future war.
The kind we’re fighting now.
What I learned after a few tours, before I ever had to go to ground, was that ground troops, footsoldiers, rarely returned. They have specific missions, mostly clearing an area, and they do it, and they mostly die.
A lot of us died that day—what I can remember of it.
Mostly I remember the fingers and the eyes and the tentacles (yes, they’re real) and the pull of the face mask against my skin.
What I suspect is this: the troops the Others have on the ground aren’t the enemy. They’re some kind of captured race, footsoldiers just like us, fodder for the war machine. I think, if I concentrate real hard, I remember them working, putting chips places, implanting stuff in the ground—growing things?—I’m not entirely clear.
And I wonder if the talk of an invasion force is just that, talk, and if this isn’t something else, some kind of experiment in case we get into a real situation, something that’ll become bigger.
Because I don’t ever remember the Others fighting back.
If Squids can look surprised, these did.
All of them.
So that’s my theory for what good it’ll do.
There’s still girls dying up there. Women, I guess, creatures, footsoldiers, whatever they want to create.
Then we come back, and we become this: things.
Because we can’t ever be the Remembered Ones. Not again.
But you know that.
You’re studying as many of us as you can. That’s clear too.
