The Ghost Brigades (28 page)

“So piss,” Boutin said. “I don't mind. The crèche is self-cleaning, of course. And I'm sure your unitard can wick away the urine.”

“Not without talking to my BrainPal about it,” Jared said. Without communicating with the owner's BrainPal, the nanobots in the unitard's fabric only maintained basic defensive properties, like impact stiffening, designed to keep the owner safe through loss of consciousness or BrainPal trauma. Secondary capabilities, like the ability to drain away sweat and urine, were deemed nonessential.

“Ah,” Boutin said. “Well, here. Let me fix that.” Boutin went to an object on one of the lab tables and pressed on it. Suddenly the thick cotton batting in Jared's skull lifted; his BrainPal functionality was back. Jared ignored his need to piss in a frantic attempt to try to contact Jane Sagan.

Boutin watched Jared with a small smile on his face. “It won't work,” he said, after a minute of watching Jared's inner exertions. “The antenna here is strong enough to cause wave interference for about ten meters. It works in the lab and that's about it. Your friends are still jammed up. You can't reach them. You can't reach anyone.”

“You can't jam BrainPals,” Jared said. BrainPals transmitted through a series of multiple, redundant and encrypted transmission streams, each communicating through a shifting pattern of frequencies, the pattern of which was generated through a onetime key created when one BrainPal contacted another. It was virtually impossible to block even one of these streams; blocking all would be unheard of.

Boutin walked over to the antenna and pressed it again; the cotton batting in Jared's head returned. “You were saying?” Boutin said. Jared held back the urge to scream. After a minute Boutin turned the antenna back on. “Normally, you are right,” Boutin said. “I supervised the latest round of communication protocols in the BrainPal. I helped design them. And you're entirely correct. You can't jam the communication streams, not without using such a high-energy broadcasting source that you overwhelmed all possible transmissions, including your own.

“But I'm not jamming the BrainPals that way,” Boutin said. “Do you know what a ‘back door' is? It's an easy-access entrance that a programmer or designer leaves himself into a complex program or design, so he can get into the guts of what he's working on without jumping through hoops. I had a back door into the BrainPal that only opens with my verification signal. The back door was designed to let me monitor BrainPal function on the prototypes for this last iteration, but it also allowed me to do some tweaking of the capabilities to factor out certain functions when I saw a glitch. One of the things I can do is turn off transmission capabilities. It's not in the design, so someone who is not me wouldn't know it was there.”

Boutin paused for a second and regarded Jared. “But
you
should have known about the back door,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn't have thought to use it as a weapon—I didn't until I got here—but if you're me you should know this. What do you know? Really?”

“How do you know about me?” Jared asked, to derail Boutin. “You knew I was supposed to be you. How did you know?”

“That's actually an interesting story,” Boutin said, taking Jared's bait. “When we decided to make the back door a weapon, I made the code for the weapon like the code for the back door, because it was the simplest thing to do. That meant that it has the ability to check the function status of the BrainPals it affected. This turned out to be useful for a lot of reasons; not the least was letting us know how many soldiers we were dealing with at one time. It also gave us snapshots of the consciousness of the individual soldiers. This also is turning out to be useful.

“You were very recently at Covell Station, were you not?” Jared said nothing. “Oh, come now,” Boutin said, irritably. “I know you were there. Stop acting like you are giving away state secrets.”

“Yes,” Jared said. “I was at Covell.”

“Thank you,” Boutin said. “We know there are Colonial soldiers at Omagh and that they come into Covell Station; we've placed detection devices there that scan for the back door. But they never go off. Whatever soldiers you have there must have different BrainPal architecture.” Boutin glanced over to see Jared's reaction to this; Jared gave none. Boutin continued. “However,
you
tripped our alarms because you have the BrainPal I designed. Later on I got the consciousness signature sent to me, and as you might imagine I was floored. I know the image of my own consciousness very well, since I use my own pattern for a lot of testing. I let the Obin know I was looking for you. We were collecting Special Forces soldiers anyway, so this was not difficult for them to do. In fact, they should have tried to collect you at Covell.”

“They tried to kill me at Covell,” Jared said.

“Sorry,” Boutin said. “Even the Obin can get a little excited in the thick of things. But you can take comfort in knowing that after that point they were told to scan first, shoot second.”

“Thanks,” Jared said. “That meant a lot to my squad mate today, when they shot him in the head.”

“Sarcasm!” Boutin said. “That's more than most of your kind can manage. You got that from me. Like I said, they can get excitable. As well as telling them to look for you, I also told the Obin they could expect an attack here, because if one of you was running around with my consciousness, it was only a matter of time before you found your way here. You probably wouldn't risk a full-scale attack, but you'd probably try something sneaky, like you did. We were listening for this sort of attack, and we were listening for you. As soon as we had you on the ground, we threw the switch to disable the BrainPals.”

Jared thought of the members of his platoon falling from the sky and felt sick. “You could have let them all land, you son of a bitch,” Jared said. “When you blocked their BrainPals, they were defenseless. You know that.”

“They're
not
defenseless,” Boutin countered. “They can't use their Empees, but they can use their combat knives and their fighting skills. Ripping away your BrainPals causes most of you to go catatonic, but some of you still keep fighting. Look at you. Although you're probably better prepared than most. If you've got my memories, you know what it's like not to be connected all the time. Even so, six of you on the ground was more than enough. And we only needed you as it is.”

“For what?” Jared asked.

“All in good time,” Charles Boutin said.

“If you only need me, what are you going to do with my squad?” Jared asked.

“I could tell you, but I think you've deflected me long enough from my original question, don't you?” Boutin smiled. “I want to know what you know about me, and about
being
me, and about what you know of my plans here.”

“Since I'm here, you already know we know about you,” Jared said. “You're not a secret anymore.”

“And let me just say that I'm very impressed about that,” Boutin said. “I thought I had covered my tracks well. And I'm kicking myself for not formatting the storage device I stored that consciousness imprint on. I was in a rush to leave, you see. Even so, it's no excuse. It was stupid of me.”

“I disagree,” Jared said.

“I imagine you would,” Boutin said. “Since without it you wouldn't be here, in many senses of the word
here
. I am impressed they were able to make a transfer back into a brain, however. Even I hadn't figured that out before I had to go. Who managed that?”

“Harry Wilson,” Jared said.

“Harry!” Boutin said. “Nice guy. Didn't know he was that smart. He hid it well. Of course, I
did
do most of the work before he got to it. To get back to your point about the Colonial Union knowing I'm here, yes, it's a problem. But it's also an interesting opportunity. There are ways to make this work. Back to it, now, and let me cut short any further deflections by telling you that how you answer will help determine whether what remains of your squad lives or dies. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you,” Jared said.

“Perfect,” Boutin said. “Now, tell me what you know about me. How much do you know about my work?”

“Broad outlines,” Jared said. “The details are difficult. I didn't have enough similar experiences to let those memories take root.”

“Having similar experiences matters,” Boutin said. “Interesting. And that would explain why you didn't know about the back door. How about my political views? What I felt about the Colonial Union and the CDF?”

“I'm guessing you don't like them,” Jared said.

“That'd be a pretty good guess,” Boutin said. “But that sounds like you don't have any first-hand knowledge of what I thought about any of that.”

“No,” Jared said.

“Because you don't have any experience with that sort of thing, do you?” Boutin said. “You're Special Forces, after all. They don't put questioning authority into your lesson plan. What about my personal experiences?”

“I remember most of it,” Jared said. “I had enough experience for that.”

“So you know about Zoë,” Boutin mused.

Jared felt a flush of emotion at the child's name. “I know about her,” he said, voice slightly husky.

Boutin picked up on it. “You
feel
it too,” he said, coming up close to Jared. “Don't you? What I felt when they told me she was dead.”

“I feel it,” Jared said.

“You poor man,” Boutin whispered. “To be made to feel that for a child you didn't know.”

“I knew her,” Jared said. “I knew her through you.”

“I see that,” Boutin said, and stepped away to a lab desk. “I'm sold, Jared,” he said, regaining his composure and conversation. “You are sufficiently like me to officially be interesting.”

“Does that mean you'll let my squad live?” Jared asked.

“For now,” Boutin said. “You've been cooperative and they're fenced in by guns that will shred them into hamburger if they get within three meters of them, so there's no reason to kill them.”

“And what about me?” Jared said.

“You, my friend, are going to get a complete and thorough brain scan,” Boutin said, eyes to the desk, where he worked a keyboard. “In fact, I'm going to take a recording of your consciousness. I want to get a very close look at it indeed. I want to see how much like me you really are. It seems like you're missing a lot of detail, and you've got some Special Forces brainwashing to get over. But on the important things I'd guess we have a lot in common.”

“We're different in one way I can think of,” Jared said.

“Really,” Boutin said. “Do tell.”

“I wouldn't betray every human alive because my daughter died,” Jared said.

Boutin looked at Jared, thoughtfully, for a minute. “You really think I'm doing this because Zoë was killed on Covell,” Boutin finally said.

“I do,” Jared said. “And I don't think this is the way to honor her memory.”

“You don't, do you,” Boutin said, and then turned back to the keyboard to jab at a button. Jared's crèche thrummed, and he felt something like a pinch in his brain.

“I'm recording your consciousness now,” Boutin said. “Just relax.” He left the room, closing the door behind him. Jared, feeling the pinching increase in his head, didn't relax one bit. He closed his eyes.

Several minutes later Jared heard the door open and close. He opened his eyes. Boutin had come back and was standing by the door. “How's that consciousness recording working for you?” he asked Jared.

“It hurts like hell,” Jared said.

“There is that unfortunate side effect,” Boutin said. “I'm not sure why it happens. I'll have to look into that.”

“I'd appreciate that,” Jared said, through gritted teeth.

Boutin smiled. “More sarcasm,” he said. “But I've brought you something that I think will ease your pain.”

“Whatever it is, give me two of them,” Jared said.

“I think one will be enough,” Boutin said, and opened the door to show Zoë in the doorway.

Boutin was right. Jared's pain went away.

“Sweetheart,” Boutin said to Zoë, “I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine. This is Jared. Say hello to him, please.”

“Hello, Mr. Jared,” said Zoë, in a small, uncertain voice.

“Hi,” Jared said, hardly risking saying any more because he felt like his voice could break and shatter. He collected himself. “Hello, Zoë. It's good to see you.”

“You don't remember Jared, Zoë,” Boutin said. “But he remembers you. He knew you from back when we were on Phoenix.”

“Does he know Mommy?” Zoë asked.

“I believe he did know Mommy,” Boutin said. “As well as anyone did.”

“Why is he in that box?” Zoë asked.

“He's just helping Daddy with a little experiment, that's all,” Boutin said.

“Can he come over to play when he's done?” Zoë said.

“We'll see,” Boutin said. “Why don't you say good-bye to him for now, honey. He and Daddy have a lot of work to do.”

Zoë turned her attention back to Jared. “Good-bye, Mr. Jared,” she said, and walked out of the doorway, presumably back to where she came from. Jared strained to watch her and hear her footfalls. Then Boutin closed the door.

“You understand that you're not going to be able to come over and play,” Boutin said. “It's just that Zoë gets lonely here. I got the Obin to put a little receiver satellite in orbit over one of the smaller colonies to pirate their entertainment feeds to keep her amused, so she's not missing out on the joys of Colonial Union educational programming. But there's no one here for her to play with. She has an Obin nanny, but it mostly makes sure she doesn't fall down any stairs. It's just me and her.”

“Tell me,” Jared said. “Tell me how she can possibly be alive. The Obin killed everyone at Covell.”

“The Obin
saved
Zoë,” Boutin said. “It was the Rraey who attacked Covell and Omagh, not the Obin. The Rraey did it to get back at the Colonial Union for their defeat at Coral. They didn't even actually
want
Omagh. They just picked a soft target to attack. The Obin found out about their plans and timed their arrival for just after the first phase of the attack, when the Rraey would still be weak from their fight with the humans. Once they pried the Rraey off Covell, they went through the station and found the civilians jammed into a meeting room. They were being held there. The Rraey killed all the military staff and scientists because their bodies are improved too much to make for good eating. But the colonist staff—well, they were just fine. If the Obin hadn't attacked when they did, the Rraey would have slaughtered and eaten them all.”

“Where are the rest of the civilians?” Jared asked.

“Well, the Obin killed them, of course,” Boutin said. “You know the Obin don't usually take prisoners.”

“But they saved Zoë, you said,” Jared said.

Boutin smiled. “While they were going through the station, the Obin did a tour of the science labs to see if there were any ideas worth stealing,” he said. “They're excellent scientists, but they're not very creative. They can improve on ideas and technology they find from other places, but they're not very good at originating the technology themselves. The science station is one of the main reasons they were interested in Omagh at all. They found my work on consciousness, and they were interested. They found out I wasn't on the station, but that Zoë was. So they kept her while they were looking for me.”

“They used her as blackmail,” Jared said.

“No,” Boutin said. “More as a goodwill gesture. And I was the one who demanded things from them.”

“They held Zoë, and you demanded things from
them,
” Jared said.

“That's right,” Boutin said.

“Like what?” Jared asked.

“Like this war,” Boutin said.

 

Jane Sagan edged closer to the eighth and final gun emplacement. Like the others it tracked her and then warned her the closer she got to it. As near as she could tell if she got closer than about three meters, the gun would fire. Sagan picked up a rock and threw it directly at the gun; the rock struck and bounced off harmlessly, the gun's systems tracking but otherwise ignoring the projectile. The gun could differentiate between a rock and a human.
That's some fine engineering,
Sagan thought, not very charitably.

She found a larger rock, stepped up to the edge of the safe zone, and chucked it to the right of the gun. It tracked the rock; farther to her right another gun trained on her. The guns shared targeting information; she wasn't going to get past them by distracting one of them.

The bowl they were in was shallow enough that Sagan could see over the lip; as far as she could see there weren't any Obin soldiers in the area. Either they were hiding or they were confident the humans weren't going anywhere.

“Yes!”

Sagan turned and saw Daniel Harvey coming toward her with something squirmy in his hand. “Look who's got dinner,” he said.

“What is that?” Sagan asked.

“The hell if I know,” Harvey said. “I saw it slithering out of the ground and caught it before it went back in. Put up a fight, though. I had to grab its head to keep it from biting me. I figure we can eat it.”

By this time Seaborg had limped over to look at the creature. “I'm not eating that,” he said.

“Fine,” Harvey said. “You starve. The lieutenant and I will eat it.”

“We can't eat it,” Sagan said. “The animals here aren't compatible with our food needs. You might as well eat rocks.”

Harvey looked at Sagan as if she had just taken a dump on his head. “Fine,” he said, and bent down to let the thing go.

“Wait,” Sagan said. “I want you to throw that.”

“What?” Harvey said.

“Throw that thing at the gun,” Sagan said. “I want to see what the guns will do to something living.”

“That's kind of cruel,” Harvey said.

“A minute ago, you were thinking about eating the damn thing,” Seaborg said, “and
now
you're worried about cruelty to animals?”

“Shut up,” Harvey said. He cocked his arm back to throw the animal.

“Harvey,” Sagan said. “Don't throw it directly at the gun, please.”

Harvey suddenly realized that the trajectory of the projectiles would lead directly back to his body. “Sorry,” he said. “Stupid of me.”

“Throw it up,” Sagan said. “Way up.” Harvey shrugged and launched the thing high into the air, in an arc that took the thing away from the three of them. The creature writhed in midair. The gun tracked the creature as far up as it could, roughly fifty degrees up. It rotated and shot the thing apart as soon as it came back into its range, shredding it with a spray of thin needles that expanded on contact with the poor creature's flesh. In less than a second there was nothing left of the thing but mist and a few chunks falling to the ground.

“Very nice,” Harvey said. “Now we know the guns really work. And I'm still hungry.”

“That's very interesting,” Sagan said.

“That I'm hungry?” Harvey said.

“No, Harvey,” Sagan said, irritated. “I don't actually give a damn about your stomach right now. What's interesting is that the guns can only target up to a certain angle. They're ground suppression.”

“So?” Harvey said. “We're on the ground.”

“Trees,” Seaborg said, suddenly. “Son of a bitch.”

“What are you thinking, Seaborg?” Sagan asked.

“In training, Dirac and I won a war game by sneaking up on the opposing side in the trees,” he said. “They were expecting us to attack from the ground. They never bothered looking up until we got right up on them. Then I almost fell out of the tree and nearly got myself killed. But the
idea
worked.”

The three of them turned to look at the trees inside their perimeter. They weren't real trees, but the Aristian equivalent: large spindly plants that reached meters high into the sky.

“Tell me we're all having the same bugshit crazy thought,” Harvey said. “I'd hate to think it was just me.”

“Come on,” Sagan said. “Let's see what we can do with this.”

 

“That's insane,” Jared said. “The Obin wouldn't start a war just because you asked them to.”

“Really?” Boutin said. A sneer crept onto his face. “And you know this from your vast, personal knowledge of the Obin? Your years of study on the matter? You wrote your doctoral thesis on the Obin?”

“No species would go to war just because you asked them to,” Jared said. “The Obin don't do anything for anyone else.”

“And they're not now,” Boutin said. “The war is a means to an end—they want what I can offer them.”

“And what is that?” Jared asked.

“I can give them souls,” Boutin said.

“I don't understand,” Jared said.

“It's because you don't know the Obin,” Boutin said. “The Obin are a created race—the Consu made them just to see what would happen. But despite rumors to the contrary, the Consu aren't perfect. They make mistakes. And they made a huge mistake when they made the Obin. They gave the Obin intelligence, but what they couldn't do—what they didn't have the capability of doing—was to give the Obin
consciousness
.”

“The Obin are conscious,” Jared said. “They have a society. They communicate. They remember. They
think
.”

“So what?” Boutin said. “Termites have societies. Every species communicates. You don't have to be intelligent to remember—you have a computer in your head that remembers everything you ever do, and it's fundamentally no more intelligent than a rock. And as for thinking, what about thinking requires you to observe yourself doing it? Not a goddamned thing. You can create an entire starfaring race that has no more self-introspection than a protozoan, and the Obin are the living proof of that. The Obin are aware
collectively
that they exist. But not one of them
individually
has anything that you would recognize as a personality. No ego. No ‘I.'”

“That doesn't make any sense,” Jared said.

“Why not?” Boutin said. “What are the trappings of self-awareness? And do the Obin have it? The Obin have no
art,
Dirac. They have no music or literature or visual arts. They comprehend the concept of art intellectually but they have no way to appreciate it. The only time they communicate is to tell each other factual things: where they're going, or what's over that hill or how many people they need to kill. They
can't
lie. They have no moral inhibition against it—they don't actually have any real moral inhibitions against anything—but they can no more formulate a lie than you or I could levitate an object with our mind power. Our brains aren't wired that way; their brains aren't wired that way. Everybody lies. Everybody who is conscious, who has a self-image to maintain. But they don't. They're perfect.”

“Being ignorant of your own existence is not what I'd call ‘perfect,'” Jared said.

“They
are
perfect,” Boutin insisted. “They don't lie. They cooperate perfectly with each other, within the structure of their society. Challenges or disagreements are dealt with in a prescribed manner. They don't backstab. They are perfectly moral because their morals are absolute—hardcoded. They have no vanity and no ambition. They don't even have sexual vanity. They're all hermaphrodites, and pass their genetic information to each other as casually as you or I would shake hands. And they have no fear.”

“Every creature has fear,” Jared said. “Even the non-conscious ones.”

“No,” Boutin said. “Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it's not the same thing. Fear isn't the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential. The Obin are not existential in the slightest. That's why they don't surrender. It's why they don't take prisoners. It's why the Colonial Union fears them, you know. Because they can't be made afraid. What an advantage that is! It's so much of an advantage that if I'm ever in charge of creating human soldiers again, I'm going to suggest stripping out their consciousness.”

Jared shuddered. Boutin noted it. “Come now, Dirac,” Boutin said. “You can't tell me that awareness has been a
happy
thing for you. Aware that you've been created for a purpose other than your own existence. Aware of memories of someone else's life. Aware that your purpose is nothing more than to kill the people and things the Colonial Union points you at. You're a gun with an ego. You'd be better off without the ego.”

“Horseshit,” Jared said.

Boutin smiled. “Well, fair enough,” he said. “I can't say I'd want to be without self-awareness, either. And since you're supposed to be me I can't say that I'm surprised you feel the same way.”

“If the Obin are perfect I don't see why they would need you,” Jared said.

“Because they don't see themselves as perfect, of course,” Boutin said. “They know they lack consciousness, and while individually it might not matter much to them, as a species, it matters a great deal. They saw my work on consciousness—mostly on consciousness transference but also my early notes on recording and storing consciousness entirely. They desired what they thought I could give them. Greatly.”

“Have you given them consciousness?” Jared asked.

“Not yet,” Boutin said. “But I'm getting close. Close enough to make them desire it even more.”

“‘Desire,'” Jared repeated. “A strong emotion for a species who lacks sentience.”

“Do you know what
Obin
means?” Boutin asked. “What the actual word means in the Obin language, when it's not being used to refer to the Obin as a species.”