Vigiant (7 page)

The Ooloms treated me with sunbeam kindness... even as they perched on my shoulders to add more weight when I did push-ups. They knew the Vigil had to build back its numbers, and that meant encouraging anyone who could grit through the training. Even with two decades to recover from the epidemic, the Vigil was running strapped, barely enough proctors to scrutinize the governments of our world.

I grew stronger, more disciplined. That was the easy part. The hard part was yanking myself out of a pit of cynicism twenty years deep, up to a place where maybe I could believe in an ideal or two. When I talked to fellow students, lots of them felt the same way. They'd gloated when signing up for the Vigil: keen for the chance to rip into politicians, to show up important people as fools and to tell the world, "There, you blind buggers, that's the brainless corrupt government you elected."

But.

The Vigil wasn't about humiliating bad guys. It wasn't about punishing bureaucrats if they disregarded the side effects of some proposed bill. There were no scorecards, no banners, no late-night celebrations where senior proctors offered you champagne toasts for making heads roll.

When you succeeded, government worked better. Passed good laws. Met the public need. That was your sole reward—real people became better off. Safer, or more prosperous, or more blessed by intangibles. (Art. Freedom. Clean air.)

It takes time to shift your outlook: you start by thinking all politics is rat puke, all politicos are hypocrites, and oh, it'll be rare delicious to kneecap the bastards; but you end simply looking at laws, not lawmakers, and believing there is such a thing as attainable good.

Idealism. I, Faye Smallwood, was capable of idealism.

It surprised the bejeezus out of me.

I graduated from the College Vigilant in the twenty-seventh year after the plague. Standard Earth Technocracy years, not local ones: a.d. 2454. I had just turned forty-two.

My family threw me a surprise party the night before
müshor.
my rite of passage into the Vigil itself. Of course I knew the party was coming—our whole blessed household tittered with whispers, conversations stopping or lurching to silliness when I walked into the room—and I grumbled to myself about the obligation to act surprised when the moment came. Didn't I have other things to do? Weren't there a million last-minute details before heading for the Vigil Proving Center?

But I should have known better than to get the growls. My family made me happy... not through festive inventiveness, but just companionship and gold-hearted loyalty. When the lager'n'biscuits ran out, the other women shooed the men away, declared it "Sleepover Night for the Fortyish Fraus," then took me jointly to bed.

And here I thought I'd have to
act
surprised.

Twenty-four hours later, my skull top was missing, and I had far too clear a view of my own pink brain. In a mirror. While surgeons planted a link-seed in my corpus callosum.

Müshor.
My second birth.

This brain surgery,
müshor,
was the secret hinge of separation between the Vigil and others on Demoth. All those earlier years of training were skim-milk rehearsal for the real transition:
Homo sapiens
to
Homo vigilans.

Becoming a different organism. Blessed near a different species.

Here's the thing: joining the Vigil rewired your brain.

Years ago, I'd wondered how Zillif could link to the datasphere when she was paralyzed. How did she work the keys on her access implant? Answer: there were no keys. The implant was a link-seed, embedded directly inside her head.

And now I had one too.

Over the two-week retreat of
müshor,
the seed would sprout faux-neural tendrils, nano-thin vines threading through my cerebellum like parietal ivy. The creepers were electrotropic, drawn by EM sparks; they'd infiltrate the regions of my gray matter where neurons fired most profusely. The LGN and visual cortex. Broca's and Wernicke's language centers. A smattering of sites in the so-called reptile brain, controlling my heart, lungs and digestion. Once those major roots were established, the link-seed would take its time spreading into areas of lesser activity.

My memory.

My muscular coordination.

My dreams.

Two weeks to a brand-new me. And the moment the surgeons closed my skull, a ruthless black clock started ticking. Tick took, tick lock, adapt or die.

They laid me in a room with cool blue walls. An electronic nurse clamped itself to my wrists and ankles—if something went wrong, mere human reflexes wouldn't be fast enough to save me.

Three times out of a hundred, electronic reflexes weren't fast enough either.

There's one brutal reason why few people on Demoth or elsewhere have direct brain-links to the datasphere. The technology is centuries-old, simple, inexpensive... but it takes granite-hard discipline to use without blowing out your frontal lobes.

Each year, for example, a handful of ambitious business execs bribe some less-than-scrupulous surgeon to plant link-seeds in their brains. The witless saps dream of getting an edge on the competition; they salivate at the thought of instant data access, with no risk of being overheard whispering to a wrist-implant. "And discipline?" they say.
"I've
got discipline. I didn't bludgeon my way to CEO of Vulture Incorporated without having discipline."

Believing a link-seed is just a faster, hookup-free method of direct braingrab.

Two days later, all blissful confidence, they try their first unfiltered download. A market quotation on some stock they think is important. Which drags along quotations on related stocks. Then the whole financial sector. Then the entire planetary market, and markets on other planets, and every corporation prospectus registered with the InHand Exchange, and quarterly economic statistics on every planet in the Technocracy, not to mention major trading partners and up-League envoys...

Like trying to sip from a firehose. Only in this case, the firehose sprays info-acid all over your hippocampus.

The condition is called "data tumor." A possibility I faced myself, lying in that cool blue room.

If I was lucky, the electronic nurse would raise a baffle field before it was too late. Block the incoming flood by broadcasting static—jam me into radio isolation from the datasphere till the surgeons could remove enough of the link-seed that it stopped working. If the nurse was a microsecond slow in detecting a tumor bloom, I would sit there stat-shocked while the link-fibers in my brain got toasty warm from the electrical activity of downloading reams of bumpf.

What do you think happens when a network of molecule-thin wire heats a few hundred degrees inside your brain? Cauterization. Blood brought to the boil. High-pressure juices squirting out the edges of your eye sockets.

The College Vigilant had made me watch a doc-chip of patients collapsing in data tumor. Don't ask me which was worse: the sights I saw before the camera lens got blotted red, or the sounds I heard after. But neither the sights nor the sounds were pleasant things to remember while lying in a cool blue room.

There was precious little time to feel my way forward—the link-seed spread its tendrils unstoppably, connecting to new neuron clusters every second. Sixty seconds every minute, favoring me with a tinnitus of hiss in my left ear, then a spasm of muscles in my lower back, then a flash enhancement of color sense in my right eye. (Cool blue chilling left, electric blue stabbing right.)

Lying in an empty room, clamped down by a nurse machine that loomed over me like a spider... rippled by sensations that were all in my brain... no clear line between waking hallucinations and dreams when I fell asleep... nightmares of being raped by some metal monster that pinioned my body, impaled my mind...

I want to tell you how it changed me. I do. But like making love or throwing punches in a fistfight, some experiences can't be broken down into words. There's no way to tell everything, everything all at once. You have to pretend there's a throughline, a sequence... when the whole point is it's happening simultaneously, all your brain cells firing together. Sensations in your body, in your eyes, in your ears, bristling along your skin, rasping in your throat, pressing sharp on your stomach, squeezing around your temples, burning in your chest. And those are just the chance physical offshoots of becoming a link-trellis, transient side effects of the tendrils snaking through your mind. There's also the gasping moment when a vine tip pierces a pleasure center. Or a pain center. Or, by ugly coincidence of timing, both at once.

Emotions float up. You find yourself crushed with soul-ripper grief, weeping in heartbreak for ten bleary seconds till suddenly everything switches to funny, which infuriates you, which depresses you, which bores you, which makes you feel wise as an angel, then wicked as an imp.

All you can hold on to is your Vigil-trained discipline: keep breathing, one breath at a time, take in what's tearing you up without trying to fight it. Observe it without trying to process it. Get out of your head, because your head is damn-fool busy. Let everything come, let it pass, let the changes happen.

The seconds pass, sixty seconds to a minute. What you are is just what you are, not what you have to be.

There's no linear unfolding. With a link-seed, input comes to your brain in gestalt, an instantaneous neural activation matrix: not this-then-that, but a billion neuron clusters simultaneously receiving their piece of the whole, a single gush of comprehension. Everything all at once.

On the third day of
müshor,
third day of delirium, I nearly lost my grip. Battered weary by emotions, delusions, physical jiggery-pokery (itches, stabbing pains, dead numbness), wanting to shout, "Stop, leave me be, let me rest!"... my mind suddenly filled with the image of a peacock's tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a hundred eyes wide-open, watching me with all the calm in the universe. Colors fanned over every grain of my vision; I couldn't feel my body, no artificial prod to laugh or cry, nothing in me but the sight of that tail, reaching high as the stars and low as the planet's core, filling my thoughts, my world.

And the sound of it: feathers rattling, demanding attention. Look at me.
Look
at me.

Placid. Even affectionate.

I don't know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)... but I could handle the new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I'd passed through the center of
müshor
and was coming out the other side.

At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a peacock's tail. I didn't have long to ponder the question—too many distracting fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened to seize on as a life preserver.

I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.

At the end of
müshor,
my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a pummeling-hard work out.

But different. Transformed.

Link-seeds do more than just provide passive information from the world-soul. More even than giving your senses a friendly boost and speeding your reflexes cat-nimble. Those are minor perks, side effects of having new, electron-fast pathways routed through your brain.

Here's the thing: a link-seed destroys your capacity to ignore.

As simple as that. As devastating too.

That's why you become a new person. Why the Vigil works, without turning petty or abusing its power.

When I download information from the world-soul now, it becomes a direct part of me. Unfiltered. I can't skip past any parts that jar with my vision of the universe. I can't discard facts I'd prefer not to know. They're all incorporated, instantly-directly-viscerally, into what I am. Into the physical structure of my brain. The primal configuration matrix.

Unlike bits of info I read or hear through conversation, a direct linkload is unmediated. Raw. Undeniably present. Unavoidably transformative.

I can't pretend new data doesn't exist—it's already changed me. It's molded my thoughts, reweighted my synapses, overwritten whatever I was before. I can't even
want
to ignore the input, because it's already there.

No sublimation. No turning a blind eye to unlikable facts. The link-seed left me wide-open. Vulnerable to storms and stars.

And that openness gushed over into the rest of my life. Not just with dry downloads from the datasphere, but things that were already in my brain. I couldn't dismiss them for my own smug convenience. I couldn't look away. Which is the very definition of a proctor: someone who doesn't/won't/can't look away. Someone immune to the blind wishful thinking that infects all politics like the clap. Someone who doesn't just call a spade a spade, but who
sees
the damned spade is a spade, without thinking maybe it could turn into a backhoe with the right tax incentives.

It's not virtue or saintliness; it's just the way my new brain works. Of course, there are still thresholds—I'm not mesmerized by every speck of dust that drifts past my eye, nor do I think deeply over every word and inflection that reaches my ear.

But... I no longer ignore the obvious. I'm mentally, physically, incapable of that. Selective inattention is for sissies.

I shiver brain-naked in the data flow. Aware to my very gut that actions have consequences, and unable to dupe myself otherwise.

A member of the Vigil.

The Vigil left me two weeks free after
müshor.
Recovery time. Rearrangement time. A chance to clear the decks.

I no longer needed the electronic nurse perched over me, but data tumor was still a possibility. A white-knuckled looming terror if the truth be told. And data tumor was just the messiest way I could stop being me; there were other more subtle ways the link-seed could wipe out the Faye Smallwood I'd known. Facts and memes infecting my unprotected brain. Long-loved perceptions swept away, erased by casual input... because I deep-down believed I was so full of crap, when pure truths started coming in, not a drop of the old Faye would be able to stand up for itself. Of course, I'd fretted over the same dreads before getting the link-seed... but my old brain could repress the fear, pretend things wouldn't be so bad. I could watch the doc-chip of that data-tumor victim spewing blood out his eyes, and I could say, "He must have been a weak-willed mook." Ignoring that the dead man had slaved through the same Vigil training I had, and passed the same tests to prove he was ready for a link-seed.