Authors: Joel Shepherd
A pause. “No,” said Kiril. “It won't move.”
“What does that mean?” asked Danya.
“That it's only receiving input from a small part of his brain,” said Sandy. “But it's more than it was six months ago.”
“But it wasn't supposed to be growing more at all.”
“I know,” said Sandy.
“I think it's cool,” said Kiril. The lower part of the pattern now turned red. “Look! I can turn it red now, I could only do yellow and blue before!”
As with their castle game, Sandy didn't need glasses to see the projection, hovering in mid-space before them. She glanced at Svetlana, asleep on the neighbouring bed, tired from dance class and well accustomed to Kiril's hospital trips by now. Beyond her, Cai entered the room. Even the doctors stopped what they were doing when they saw who it was. So he'd been introduced to the FSA's top medical staff, then. These days there wasn't much more top-secret than neural-uplink expertise, given what was going on in the League.
“Hello, Cai!” Kiril said cheerfully.
“Hello, Kiril,” said Cai with a smile, walking to the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Everyone always asks me how I'm feeling!” Kiril said with exasperation. “I feel normal, it's just uplinks.”
“You invited him?” Dr Kishore asked Sandy, no doubt wondering who had.
Sandy nodded. “If anyone knows what the hell's going on, he might.” Dr Kishore offered no comment on that assessment of his expertise.
Cai sat on the end of the bed, as Sandy deactivated her little test construct. “Now, Kiril,” he said. “I want you to think of nothing. Can you do that?”
“No,” said Danya, with a faint smile.
Kiril frowned. “How do you think of nothing?”
“Well, try to not to think about anything specific.”
“But if I'm thinking about not thinking, then I
am
thinking.” Sandy smiled proudly. Not bad for a seven-year-old.
“All right,” said Cai. “Try to think of an empty space.”
“That's more Svetlana's talent,” said Danya.
“Hey!” said his sister, rolling sleepily to whack him on the arm. “Not while I'm sleeping and defenceless, that's not fair.”
“But you weren't asleep,” Kiril pointed out.
“I was too!”
Cai looked at Sandy, with the beginnings of frayed patience. Sandy hadn't known that was possible. “Aren't they adorable?” she said.
“And other things as well,” said Cai. It was the closest to thing to humour she'd yet heard from him.
“Kiri,” said Danya. “Try holding your breath. Just concentrate on holding your breath for as long as you can.” And to Cai, “He'll have to focus, might be the same thing.”
Kiril took a deep breath and held it. Cai's face gave no indication, save a slight furrowing of one eyebrow. On the monitors, a flash of network activity. Kiril kept holding his breath, cheeks puffed out. He looked from one of them to the other, giving no sign of anything odd.
“That's fine, Kiril,” Cai said calmly. “You can breathe now.”
Kiril gasped. “I could have held it much longer,” he insisted. “Do you want to see?”
“Kiril,” his brother told him, “you're missing the point again.”
“Am not.” He held his breath defiantly.
Sandy didn't need to ask Cai anything. Her gaze asked all questions loud enough. “It's growing again,” he admitted.
“It's not supposed to do that,” said Sandy, all amusement vanished. She glanced sideways at Dr Kishore. “They stopped it.”
“Well, it unstopped itself,” said Cai. “Cassandra, it is Talee tech, but it's modified, so I can't be certain precisely what it's doing. But I don't know that it's harmful . . .”
“Putting uplinks in immature brains is nearly always harmful,” she said coldly. She shouldn't have said that so bluntly in front of them. But sugar-coating with these kids didn't work.
“Standard uplinks have limited feedback responses,” Cai said reasonably. “Kiril's uplinks are all feedback. I'd estimate from what I see here that more than ninety percent of the activity is measuring Kiril's brain growth and adjusting its own growth accordingly. It's measuring itself to fit him. I think the reason he keeps having these unexpected events is that the feedback mechanism needs to create activity in order to provoke a response. That's a part of the measuring mechanism.”
Kiril gasped, letting out the breath he was holding.
“Is this a normal part of Talee uplink technology?” Sandy asked. “Does it usually work this way?”
“I can't answer that question.”
“Goddamn it, Cai,” Sandy said darkly. “Don't give me that.”
“I'm sorry, Cassandra,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “I'm not at liberty to discuss that technology.”
“And yet here you sit. Feeding us bullshit.”
“Sandy,” said Danya, and put a careful hand on her shoulder. Sure enough, her vision tinged red, motion-sense heightened, colours leaping at every twitch of Cai's eyelids, the rise and fall of his breathing. “Sandy, it's not worth it. You can't make him tell us.”
“Don't count on it,” said Sandy, unblinking.
“Cassandra,” Cai tried again, “I can only guess at how Chancelry have modified these uplinks. The good news is that the work seems quite advanced. The bad news is that immature nascent-state uplink technology of this variety is mostly unresponsive to remote query. It can't tell us what it is. We can only observe what it does and make educated guesses. Chancelry were searching for
a cure to the sociological effects of League uplinks operating on an invasive spectrum of too great a width, and . . .”
“That's if you diagnose the problem on the individual level,” Sandy interrupted. “There are people here who believe the problem is more sociological than neurological, and that therefore the type of technology being used matters less, and that we're seeing the same phenomena manifesting in the Federation as well.”
“Chancelry does not share this assessment,” said Cai. “The League believes in technological solutions.”
Sandy took a slow breath. It made sense. “So they'll be measuring degrees of invasiveness. Taking Talee tech that does things they don't fully understand.”
“Cassandra, why put it in children?” Sandy considered him with deadly intent. Trying to discern clues from posture and mannerisms of what he wasn't telling her. “They have plenty of adults available. Unwilling ones, but that doesn't matter to Chancelry.”
“You want me to believe it's safe?” Sandy asked. “Ask why they didn't use their
own
damn children.”
Cai nodded, conceding. “Cassandra, this technology does what Neural Cluster Technology does, in that it wires all the portions of the brain into the uplink. So you get a broad spectrum of transferalâemotional, conceptual, everything.”
“Great,” Sandy muttered. “Just great.” NCT had turned everyone on Pyeongwha into freaking zombies. Or so it sometimes seemed.
“But NCT is a blunt instrument. The technology in Kiril is subtle, reactive. On Pyeongwha, children were given NCT close to full neurological maturity . . . I know,” he interrupted her interruption, “it's debatable, but close enough. What if adaptive uplinks at a young age are the
solution
?”
Sandy stared at him. Kiril looked back and forth, following with interest. Lacking any real concept of the dangers, Sandy knew. Technology was cool.
She
was technology, and she was cool. Uplinks would make him more like her. God help them both.
“You're saying full-spectrum invasiveness can be
controlled
?” she asked.
Cai nodded. “I think so. We cannot remove Kiril's uplinks without harming him. You've tried halting their development using your usual nanos and growth modulators, and that hasn't worked either. If I could suggest it,
I think your best chance is to work
with
the technology. Work with Kiril. Exercise with him. Teach him how to use it properly. That way, the technology learns what it needs to know of his brain function, and learns to grow in the way that does him the most good, and the least harm.”
Sandy stared at him. She hadn't blinked for several minutes now. Still the red tinge, highlighting every breath Cai took, every slow beat of his heart. It was a hell of a thing he asked her, to take on faith. Was this Cai making a judgement call, deviating from the rules his superiors had laid down regarding how much information he was allowed to reveal? Dropping hints as to what he knew would actually work? Or was this just a part of some larger experiment?
“I think that sounds cool,” said Kiril, unsurprisingly. Danya and Svetlana made no comment. Watching her, awaiting her decision. Trusting her to know the right thing to do. She'd previously held the fates of a hundred million Callayans in the palm of her hand. This felt worse.
“Will it work?” she asked Cai.
Cai considered for a moment. “I think it offers the best chance of a positive outcome,” he said carefully.
Sandy looked at Kiril. His cheerful innocence made her heart ache. “I'm tired of threatening people I like,” she said to Cai. “Do I need to?”
Cai smiled faintly. “I understand your feelings.”
“Do you?” Sandy asked bleakly. “Do you really?”
For once, Cai had nothing to say.
Sandy took the short run-up that Ari had shown her and delivered the cricket ball with a flick of wrist and fingers. The ball fizzed down the pitch, looped and gripped beautifully off the turf, turning sharply sideways. But Poole got his foot to the bounce and smashed it out of the field, flying high up into the Santiello Stadium stands.
“It's a good delivery,” Poole informed her, his bat on his shoulder as they watched the ball hit the seats twenty rows back. Up in the empty stands, some of the local club members' kids scampered to retrieve it. They'd been doing a lot of that, the past half hour. “I just don't think you're going to get a GI out by bowling spin. I could see it turning on the way down.”
“Hmm.” Sandy thought about it, playing through several scenarios in her head. “I think you could get a GI out with spin, but you'd get hammered doing it.”
“But spin bowlers always get hammered,” said Ari, flipping his own ball expertly in his hand. “The batsmen always
think
we're easy targets, and that's why we get them out.”
Santiello was one of the three biggest stadiums in Tanusha. Ari wasn't the only FSA/CSA Agent with contacts here, lots of the augmented staff had friends in professional sports. But Ari was the cricket enthusiast and had been very curious to see what GIs could do on a cricket pitch. And so this semi-regular meet-up of Sandy's best synthetic friends took place in the middle of Santiello Stadium, with the practise lights on and lots of Tanusha's best professional cricketers watching on from the stands or the field perimeterâa front-row seat being their reward for allowing this access.
“I think you're wasting your time,” said Rhian, preparing off her twelve-pace run-up. “Brute force usually beats cunning.” She ran in and accelerated
to a high-speed action, textbook, despite having only learned to do it this evening. The ball blurred down the pitch at over 200kph . . . and Poole belted it low and flat back over her head.
Yells of “watch out!” from the stands, warning to the ball-retrieving kids, but this ball was heading high into the upper tiers where none were present. Then laughter and sounds of awe as it hit the seats with an audible crack! Even augmented athletes hadn't seen hitting like this. Poole was pretty accurate, but the ball kids were all wearing helmets, just in case . . . even a hundred and twenty meters away.
“You're bowling too close to the stumps,” Ari told Rhian.
“But that's what I'm supposed to hit, right?” said Rhian.
“Sure, but that's also the easiest thing for the batsman to hit. That's why you aim
past
him, try to get him to nick it, then it'll be caught behind by our imaginary wicket keeper.” Rhian had been wicket keeper for the first five minutes but had gotten bored with nothing to do. In GI cricket, very little got past the batsman, at whatever speed. “Or the imaginary slips cordon. You just have to get him to edge it.”
“Let me try,” said Ragi. Sandy was thrilled that Ragi had turned up. She invited him to a lot, but he rarely came. She knew it was hard for him, being the smartest GI anyone had ever seen, in human space at least, and having no real idea of his origins. Lately he'd been keeping to himself and doing a lot of reading and thinking. But cricket, as Ari said, was the most civilised of games, and if one word described Ragi, it was civilised. But he was also a non-combat GI, without a combat model's more obvious advantages, and Sandy could see Poole practically licking his lips.
Ragi bowled spin, unable to generate Rhian's inhuman pace, and again the ball looped down the pitch, spinning madly. Poole leaped forward as it dropped short, and swung hard . . . and got a huge inside edge onto his shins . . . as Poole, of course, wore no pads. Ari threw up his hands and cried out at the closeness of it.
“Hmm,” said Poole, picking up the ball and tossing it back. “That was different.”
“Ragi!” said Ari with excitement. “The flipper!” That was a top spinner, Sandy had gathered.
“It's about the position of the seam,” said Ragi, catching the ball. “There's
a position that plays tricks on a GI's eyes. It looks like it's spinning sideways, but it goes straight on.”
“Really?” asked Sandy. “How does that work?”
“Find your own special delivery,” Ragi told her with a smile, walking back. Sandy grinned, suspecting he was playing mind games. A very high-des might do that successfully to a lower-des. And if anything was going to interrupt Poole's awesome hitting display, it would be the uncertainty that he could trust what he was seeing. Which was actually quite a fun thing to explore. Since she'd been introduced to GI-racquetball last year, she'd been slowly discovering that she wasn't as bored by sports as she'd thought. A few of them could actually teach her things, about herself and her kind, that nothing else could.