Authors: Malorie Blackman
This wasn’t nursing; it was torture.
Kaspar spotted a intercom by the viewing window and pressed the button to hear what was going on.
‘How much longer is this going to take?’ asked one of the SSGs, a short woman with fringed, dark brown hair.
‘You can see for yourself,’ said one of the doctors, indicating the gurneys pushed against both sides of the room.
The medical procedures weren’t gentle nor professional. Kaspar crossed his legs involuntarily as catheters were rammed in like drinking straws being stuck into a milkshake. Then each patient was flipped onto their stomach, and their head was allowed to dangle over the edge of the trolley. One of the medics then inserted a large-bore needle into the back of the neck at the base of the skull, and pumped in about ten millilitres of some brown liquid. Kaspar didn’t know what that was for, but he shuddered again. Finally the patients were flipped over again and a thermal cauterizing scalpel was used to slice off their eyelids.
‘I don’t see why we have to be here in the first place,’ complained the female SSG. ‘Once you jack ’em up with that brown shit, it’s not like they’re ever going to wake up again, is it?’
‘You know the rules,’ her SSG colleague told her. ‘Two SSGs to be in this room at all times to protect the medical staff.’
‘My sanity is what needs protecting. This assignment sucks.’
‘You’ll get no argument from me on that one,’ said her colleague.
‘Did anyone see the handball game last night on the TV?’ called out one of the doctors.
The previous night’s handball final immediately became the topic of conversation. Kaspar had heard enough. He turned off the intercom.
It was like an assembly line. Insurgent after Insurgent being incapacitated and tortured. And throughout it all, the medics laughed and joked with each other as if they were having a picnic.
Kaspar watched until his eyes and his stomach begged him to leave. Heartsick, he crept back down the stairs. He’d seen enough. All he wanted now was to escape this place.
If this was Alliance humanitarianism, then he wanted no part of it.
Truth is an absolute. While there may be many versions or variations of lies, how can this apply to the truth? Our enemy, the Crusaders, believe that truth is on their side. They mistake truth for their own warped perspective. We in the Alliance have tried in vain to bring them around to our way of thinking but they stubbornly persist in their belief that their world view is the only one which is valid.
We in the High Council had hoped that allowing some of the Crusaders to labour and live amongst us would work to the benefit of all of us. But progress has been slow.
Some have criticized the introduction of special ID cards and documents for the Crusaders living amongst us, but even Alliance citizens must carry at least one form of identification at all times. We have asked no more of them than we have of ourselves.
The High Council have a duty of care to all our peoples. We don’t doubt that there may be Crusaders who deplore violence and who wish to live amongst us in peace, but they fail to denounce in the strongest possible terms the Insurgents who live amongst them.
We cannot and will not rest until the very last Insurgent is in our custody and subject to Alliance justice. The price of peace is eternal caution. We will never cease in our efforts to form one cohesive society, open and accessible to all, but the Crusaders need to understand that they too must play their part. It is their duty to turn their backs on those amongst them who would seek to maintain the divisions between us.
If they are not for us, then they are against us. On this issue, there is no middle way.
Extract taken from ‘The High Council Manifesto’ by Brother Simon
The problem Kaspar had was lack of info about the Insurgents. Hard facts on their religious beliefs? None. Good intel on their personal lives? Zero. He recalled some data that Mac had helped him retrieve. In all the interrogations that had ever been conducted over goodness only knew how many years, nobody had ever logged anything interesting about captured Insurgents.
There was nothing.
Kas checked out what Mac had previously said – ‘Nothing but meaningless rants, abuse, vile threats and some hair-raising displays of self-harm.’
But in less than a month he had met a few of them, and while most had tried to rip his head off, he just knew they weren’t mindless thugs. Rhea had walked into an earthquake and risked capture to save his life. He had looked into her eyes. Anything further from an unreasoning animal he couldn’t imagine. She and the rest like her were stone-cold killers but they weren’t without method. So why had none of the interrogators ever seen anything like that? Rhea couldn’t be an anomaly.
Kaspar constructed a quick query, encapsulated it as a
parasite and then launched it on the back of a trivial bot-search. The request he made was very specific in terms of personnel, timespan and content, so the response came very quickly. Kaspar stared at the results.
‘Damn!’
He read them again.
‘Damn, damn, damn!’
He checked his search parameters, the data identifiers, the authenticators. All the data was complete and unabridged, all logs were certified authentic by Central Records and carried the electronic signature of the informant. Everything was in perfect order, except for one thing. He read his screen one more time, hoping that what he saw would make sense.
I
NTRUDER AT
C
OMPUTER
C
ORE OF
G
UARDIAN
A
CADEMY . . . DISABLED BY
G
UARDIANS
0229 V
OSS AND
4518 W
ILDING . . . WHILE ATTEMPTING TO DETONATE A THERMOBARIC DEVICE . . .
S
IGNED
0229 V
OSS
/ 4518 W
ILDING
I
NTRUDER AT LEVEL THREE COMMUNICATIONS NODE LOCATED AT
864 W
ISSANT
A
VENUE . . . KILLED ACCIDENTALLY DURING HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT WITH
G
UARDIAN
4518 W
ILDING (INCORRECTLY APPLIED CHOKE HOLD) . . .
R
ECOMMENDATION FOR REMEDIAL UNARMED COMBAT TRAINING FOR
4518 W
ILDING
.
S
IGNED
4518 W
ILDING
Kaspar couldn’t believe it. These reports were fiction. There hadn’t been any thermobaric device in the computer core and he most certainly had not choked anyone to death, accidentally or otherwise. Central Records had rewritten his After Action reports and then falsely authenticated them. Why? And if they had done it with Kaspar and Voss, what about other Guardians?
Why were they so desperate to hide the suicides? Everything else was pretty accurate. The unauthorized accesses, the stunning, the death, the personnel involved. What the intruders were actually doing, however, had been falsified.
If he couldn’t trust his own reports on the system, what could he trust? The official records showed no discernible rationale for what the Insurgency was doing, but the official records weren’t just useless, they were lies. The sacred, encyclopaedic, tamper-proof computerized archive was being deliberately skewed to reflect someone’s agenda. But whose?
As soon as I learn how to use the computers, I find out all the computers are lying to me. What else isn’t true? he wondered. Anything coming out of Central Records is now suspect. Kaspar punched the table in frustration. He needed help and a fresh perspective.
He headed across to Library Services.
‘Oh my,’ said Mac, when he had explained what he’d found.
‘You can say that again.’
‘Oh my . . .’
‘OK. It would be more helpful if you said something else, though,’ sighed Kaspar.
‘Sorry. It’s just that—’
‘You’ve spent your life trusting computers?’
‘Well . . . yes.’
‘What can we do? I’m out of ideas. I don’t know how to proceed if all the data in the computer has been fiddled with.’
‘Not all of it,’ she said quietly.
‘Come again?’
‘It hasn’t all been tampered with.’
‘How do you know?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘Because there’s far too much of it.’ She looked a bit happier now, a glimmer of faith in her computers returning. ‘Look, at the last count, there were about seven hundred yottabytes of data in the Central Archives.’
‘Seven hundred whatabytes?’
‘Yottabytes. It’s one thousand to the eighth power.’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘Oh, for the love of—’ she spluttered, before reining in her geek umbrage. ‘Yes, it’s an awful lot. You know what a gigabyte is? A billion bytes of data? Enough to store about ten minutes of HiDef recording?’
‘Yes, I can record a whole game of handball on a ten-gig data chip.’
‘Well, seven hundred yottabytes is, near as damnit, a billion billion gigabytes. That’s one hundred million billion games of handball. Except of course it isn’t just sports, it’s the history of the world, the results of every scientific
experiment ever conducted, astronomical photographs, films, TV programmes, medical records and biographical data on everyone dating back to when we were all pond scum.’
‘OK, that is a lot!’
‘Point is, nobody, not even with bot-assistance, can read that much data, far less alter it.’
‘But I just told you . . .’
‘Oh, I believe you.’ Mac raised a placating hand. ‘But to do what you say you don’t have to change everything. Just the tasty bits. All they have to do is alter the circumstances surrounding the suicides. They don’t have to change the atomic weight of sodium, or my middle name, or the postal address of the Guardian Academy.’
‘Yeah, but it’s the tasty bits that we need to see,’ Kaspar protested. ‘They can change enough to make it impossible to find the truth.’
‘Maybe not. Not only is it impossible to change everything, but you wouldn’t want to.’
‘You wouldn’t?’
‘Well, if you did change the address of the Guardian Academy, people would notice. There must be dozens of requests a day for that piece of information, like from your numerous female fans, for instance?’
Kaspar blushed.
‘So if you change something too obvious, too well-known or too interesting, you’ll get rumbled,’ said Mac.
‘So they’d keep the changes to a minimum?’
‘Sure. Which means that there will be back doors to get the information you want.’
‘Back doors?’
‘Yeah. Queries that don’t ask direct questions, but more subtle ones.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Queries that uncover inconsistencies between different narratives. For example, if I look for your birthdate, then that’s a single, obvious, hard piece of data.’
‘Go on.’
‘But there are loads of other queries that aren’t so obvious, but which
imply
your birthdate. Like when did you first eat solid food, when did you go to school, what was the date of your application to the Academy.’
‘Got it. So although it’s easy to change my age to make me ten years old, there would be clues left unless you also changed all my other dates.’
‘Exactly. And the more anyone searches, the harder it gets to cover up. Your mother’s medical records would also have to be altered, and the dates your father took paternity leave, not to mention the diaries and work schedules of all the medical staff. The effects ripple outwards, like a pebble in a pond. You can’t tamper with everything – you have to rely on nobody bothering to look too closely.’
‘But finding out if someone lied about my birthday is a whole lot simpler than uncovering falsified Guardian After Action reports,’ said Kaspar.
‘True, but the principle is the same. I guess it’s time
you used your imagination and let the bots off the leash.’
‘You mean I should relax the tolerance on the bot-hybridization factor?’ Kaspar teased.
‘Spoken like a true geek.’ Mac laughed. ‘Welcome to the club.’
Kaspar’s initial attempts to find the back door were failures. There was either too little control, giving him ridiculously non-specific reports on a wide range of subjects; or too much control, giving him the fictionalized data he already had and didn’t want. But gradually he found ways to tweak the queries, interacting with the bots almost the way a musician would play an instrument.
From time to time, the bots would throw up something weird or amusing. He learned that there was a plant that was lethal in humans but to which sand voles were completely immune. He unearthed a ballet created by a composer of atonal music, choreographed by a dancer who’d never performed in public and featuring a troubled prince whose entire court committed suicide when he died and who then lived on as ghosts, sharing every emotion in the afterlife. It had closed after one performance.
Hard to believe that one didn’t run and run, he thought.
He was rapidly becoming a walking encyclopaedia of obscure facts – mostly about death. Sometimes, he could
discern no reason at all why the bots had suggested a topic, but every time he tried to suppress the really weird stuff, it stifled their creativity and they went back to feeding him the standard lies. He had already deleted a thread relating to some postgraduate student’s thesis in the Department of Literature at Capital City University entitled ‘Prospecting for Truth: Fable and Legend as Representations of History’ before he had really thought about it. Then some instinct made him retrieve the document to read, but he couldn’t understand a word of it.
Pretentiously written academic twaddle, he thought, but still he persevered through it.
Kaspar requested a translation of the twaddle and the bots finally obliged with something he could understand. The idea was that myths, legends and fairy stories were sometimes built around a kernel of truth. It made sense, he supposed. Erupting volcanoes became fiery dragons that lived under a mountain; tsunamis were caused by giants fighting in the sea. When people were oppressed by a tyrant, they might be too scared to protest, but they’d tell stories of a plague or some kind of demon that had to be overcome.