Absorption (4 page)

For the tiebreaker Brett summoned all his concentration. He did a cannonball launch almost perfectly, ignoring the dizziness to curl up and spin fast enough to prevent his opponent from controlling the angle of grapple. He didn’t uncurl fast enough, and instead of grappling Thorne deflected the curled up officer towards the wall. Once again Thorne grabbed the handholds and was ready for action, while Brett flattened at the wrong angle and slapped against the mats. They absorbed much of his velocity, so he managed to grab a handhold before floating into the center of the ring. Not a victory, but not a humiliating screw-up either.

As he caught his breath, Brett tried to remember exactly what he had hoped to accomplish.

Thorne wasn’t too out of breath to speak. “Major, that was pretty good. Beating an unarmed combat instructor one time out of three is something to write home about.”

There was a certain emphasis on ‘one time out of three,’ but it seemed Thorne’s ego now required him to accord Brett a certain grudging respect in addition to the mandatory outward show due a Major.

“I got lucky,” Brett replied, hoping to sound magnanimous, although he spoke the simple truth. He reoriented himself so he could see Sergeant Thorne’s face.

Thorne grinned at him, “Maybe. OK, things have been getting to me a little, but it’s not going to be expressed this way again, sir.”

Brett hadn’t done so badly after all. Now that Thorne had started talking, he was positively loquacious. “I guess the troops have been a handful lately. Like you say, they’ve spent a lot longer than usual in the can, but it’s not just that. Don’t worry, they’re Space Force, and they’ll remember it as soon as we give them something concrete to do, sir.”

All true, and all things a sergeant should know how to cope with. Something else bothered Thorne.

Brett continued with the pretense that nothing could daunt the hard-faced sergeant himself, “So what would you say is really bothering the men?”

“What happens to anyone who gets taken prisoner, sir? I hear people get absorbed into the overmind.”

Brett was actually the right person to ask about that. He hadn’t been transferred to military intelligence because of any special cloak and dagger skills, but because of his study of the nanotechnological interfaces they had found on Roundhouse.

“A few idiots did, but those were civilians who went there deliberately. No prisoners were absorbed involuntarily. It’s apparently difficult to force on people.”

“A lot of horrible things happened on Roundhouse. War is like that, but I have to keep new recruits from dwelling on it.”

Brett nodded. “That’s what we’re counting on you to do. If it will help, just go through the records. None of the stuff that happened to prisoners is classified – it all came out in the trials later. There might be some things you wouldn’t want to emphasize, but nobody was assimilated into the Roundhouse overmind against their will.”

“Thanks, I’m sure I’ll find something helpful.”

Brett didn’t know if that was true or not, but the imperturbable sergeant was back again.

Brett changed his clothing and began the journey back to the 1-G level, near the skin of the ship. The civilians spent most of their time here. It didn’t make sense to encourage civilians to leave the 1-G VIP area. They might get to like fractional gravity. If they didn’t do their exercises, this created medical problems for them and a nuisance for some physician when they returned to full gravity.

When he arrived he saw Joyce Rollers sitting at the table. He had half expected to hurry up and wait. She was a few years older than Brett, and had made no attempt to disguise the few grey hairs mixed in with the brown ones. She wore a neutral blue jumpsuit. Some women didn’t make an effort to look alluring on a ship full of mostly male space marines who might not make planet fall for years. Brett’s assumption that the neutral look came naturally to Joyce had changed when he discovered a book she had written in the ship’s electronic library. The picture of the author made her look pretty and vulnerable.

She waited in a conference room reserved for Senator Peterson and his staff. Warships didn’t waste space, but these people received more than most. Wooden paneling concealed grey steel bulkheads, comfortable chairs surrounded the table,
and the
VIP section provided normal gravity.

A full pot of coffee stood on the table. Brett poured a cup. A sip confirmed that the best coffee on the ship could be found here. He sat across from Joyce. After perfunctory greetings on both sides she began her pitch.

“Brett, I want you to sign my report.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Even though I disagree with it?”

She replied, “It would be neater than you covering the same ground.”

It would be neater all right. The misleading report would go uncontradicted. Meanwhile Brett recognized the signatures of several people who had mentioned reservations to him.

“Neatness isn’t really your major concern here, is it?”

She replied, “This could be the bloodiest action the Federalist Worlds have taken for hundreds of years.”

Did this woman represent the Senator’s views? Was the decision already made?

He replied, “That’s not our decision. We assess the threat. Our superiors decide what to do.”

Joyce stared at him coolly. “So the blood won’t be on our hands. How convenient.”

Progress, in a way, more than Brett had expected when she insisted on this last meeting. She had just practically admitted that her real disagreement wasn’t with his analysis, but the conclusions she feared would be drawn from it.

Before Brett could reply, she took a deep breath and backtracked, “I’m sorry, Brett. That was uncalled for. I know you saw what happened at Skulton personally. Please don’t let that color your judgment now. No hive mind has committed war crimes on Oceania, or anywhere else besides Roundhouse. Even given your uncertainty, this opportunity won’t occur again. They’ve already agreed to stop exporting their technology, and we might even keep the embargo in place, with certain humanitarian exceptions.”

Brett said, “I’m not sure ‘uncertainty’ is the right word here.”

Joyce replied, “The war on Roundhouse was an ugly war, and the planet has a history of atrocities. Most of them happened before anyone brought nanotechnology there.”

Not ‘no evidence,’ Brett thought, but certainly no proof. They knew very little about the neural interface – or even the extent to which the implementation on Roundhouse had differed from Oceania.

“Joyce, one properly trained Oceanian with a few pounds of densely packed storage crystals and nanomachines could start another world on the path towards a new overmind.”

She countered, “Maybe on an industrialized world. It would be hard to hide, easy to stop, and take many people a long time.”

She still didn’t get it. The guard of the Federalist Worlds would gradually become lax as decades passed, and the blockade became another budget expense. Meanwhile, there were many who found something seductive about becoming part of an overmind – possibly even her.

Brett tried again, “Joyce, part of what happened on Roundhouse was that some people wanted to use Nannies and others were concerned about the long term consequences for their world. A government could go quite a long way secretly.”

“- if they wanted. But if nanotechnology is so terrible -”

Brett interrupted, “Same principle as involuntary quarantine for those who won’t cooperate during an epidemic. Some think a disease is not so dangerous until too late, especially if they’ve got it.”

She didn’t reply. Brett allowed the silence to stretch, until the faint breeze of the air circulation impinged upon his consciousness. Then he returned to something Joyce had never addressed.

“After the war on Roundhouse ended and the surviving perpetrators of the Rape of Skulton had the nanotechnology removed from their bloodstream, they testified they never would have done such a thing if it weren’t for the nascent Roundhouse overmind. The Oceanians were pretty vague when we asked them about it. Maybe they really don’t know themselves, even the people who understand the technology best admit they as individuals can’t fully understand the emergent superminds. This makes it a little hard to accept a commitment that the overmind will cease trying to reproduce itself at face value.”

“Brett, I explained before. Some things about the trials were classified secret.”

He nodded agreement. “And you have access to information which you think is relevant. The Senator has access too, so he can decide.”

She hesitated, then switched tacks, “Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

Brett could feel his temper rising. He held himself rigidly still. “In most criminal trials, it may be better to see many guilty go free rather than one innocent convicted. When something threatens trillions of lives, no.”

Joyce sighed. “Brett, have you noticed lots of people have some kind of emotional fear of overminds? Apart from any reasons they might give, some kind of feeling that its mere existence is offensive, there’s something wrong about it?”

He nodded with affected casualness, leashing his anger. Brett was almost certain that the Oceanians attributed the Federalist Worlds actions to some sort of ineffable fear. “Oh yes. As a matter of fact I’m one of them, so maybe everything I say is invalid. I’ll just delete … no wait. Did you notice up until a decade and a half ago, there was kind of a mania for it in the Federalist Worlds as the next step in human evolution? Some people even started moving to Oceania. It was like believing in the supermind was religion without the hard parts, or unscientific parts, depending on who you asked.”

Joyce replied, “Some people have the wrong idea about Oceania. Only a few of them are part of the overmind, and none of them act as part of it all the time. They live normal lives like the rest of us.”

Brett raised an eyebrow. “I’ve studied all the information we have, and I’d like to know how you’re so certain of that. They do seem to spend some time away from the high bandwidth connections they use as part of the supermind. We don’t know what, if anything, is left inside.”

“What exactly would it take to convince you?”

Brett stopped to think. What would it take to convince him the overmind was safe to leave as it was? He couldn’t imagine a realistic answer, given what he knew. What would convince him to say it was safe when he didn’t believe it? Nothing.

He answered the implied question rather than the one spoken aloud, “You’re absolutely right.”

Without more argument, he pulled the computer off his belt and ordered his report sent. Joyce had a few seconds to stop him, but she didn’t try. Instead she did the same.

Brett had reserved the room for another half hour. They sat in silence as some of the tension diffused. Joyce asked idly, “So what now?”

Brett grinned, suddenly realizing how little their struggles would probably mean in the scheme of things. “Well, I’m sure Senator Peterson has left word that as soon as Colonel Barr receives our reports, he should alert the Senator immediately, even if he’s asleep.”

Joyce made a derisive sound between a laugh and a snort.

Brett frowned, as if in exaggerated surprise. “Don’t tell me you think they’ll be ignored unless someone wants support for something they’ve already decided to do?”

Joyce didn’t even nod, possibly assuming the question was rhetorical.

There was something classy about sitting in 1-G in one of the few wooden chairs in the ship, but Brett was actually ready to get up.

Joyce wasn’t quite through. “It would have been harder for them to ignore our report if it had been unanimous.”

He didn’t bother pointing out that she could have signed his. “Not so very. We don’t really have that much more hard data than we did when we arrived, so we don’t have much of an advantage over the analysts at home. Senator Peterson is hardly going to give our opinions more weight because we’re physically near him.”

Brett started to stand. Joyce could have the room to herself if she wanted to. The faint but ever present smells of humanity and metal ship were somehow filtered out of the air, and Brett didn’t want to let himself get used to that. The levels of the huge ship near 1-G were used intensively to keep the troops fit and ready to fight in normal gravity, except for the small civilian section.

“Brett.”

He glanced up and she continued. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to go along with everyone else? I mean, nobody could condemn you for coming to the same conclusion everyone else did.”

“It would have been easier. I wonder if that’s part of the attraction some people have to the idea of a supermind: going along with everyone else, while pretending to be part of something higher instead of lower than an individual?”

She replied, “I suppose you’re going to accuse me of going along with the crowd?”

“Heck no – you were leading it.”

“Doesn’t that make me worse than a passive go-along-with-the-crowd enemy of individualism? More dangerous because I don’t practice what I preach?”

Brett didn’t reply verbally to her teasing, instead he looked ostentatiously around the room, waiting for her to ask what he was doing.