***
All those devil’s bargains and no-win scenarios. All those exercises that tore her up inside. Turned out they were part of the fix. They had to parameterize Becker’s remorse before they could burn it out of her.
It was a simple procedure, they assured her, a small part of the scheduled block upgrade. Seven deep-focus microwave bursts targeting the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Ten minutes, tops. Not so much as a scar to show for it afterward. She didn’t even need to sign anything.
They didn’t put her under. They turned her off.
Coming back online, she didn’t feel much different. The usual faint hum at the back of her skull as Wingman lit up and looked around; the usual tremors in fingers and toes, halfway between a reboot sequence and a voltage spike. The memory of her distant malfunction seemed a bit less intense, but then again things often seemed clearer after a good night’s sleep. Maybe she was just finally seeing things in perspective.
They plugged her into the simulator and worked her out.
Fifty-plus male, thirtysomething female, and a baby alone in a nursery: all spread out, all in mortal and immediate danger as the house they were trapped in burned down around them. She started with the female, went back to extract the male, was heading back in for the baby when the building collapsed. Two out of three, she thought. Not bad.
Sniper duty on some post-apocalyptic overpass, providing cover for an airbus parked a hundred meters down the road below, for the refugees running and hobbling and dragging themselves towards salvation. A Tumbleweed passing beneath: a self-propelled razorwire tangle of ONC and magnesium and white phosphorus, immune to bullets, hungry for body heat, rolling eagerly toward the unsuspecting evacuees. The engineer at Becker’s side—his face an obvious template, although the sim tagged him as her brother for some reason—labored to patch the damage to their vehicle, oblivious to the refugees and their imminent immolation.
Oblivious until Becker pitched him off the overpass and brought the Tumbleweed to rapture.
The next one was a golden oldie: the old man in the war zone, calling for some lost pet or child, blocking Becker’s shot as a battlefield robot halfway to the horizon took aim at a team of medics. She took out the old man with one bullet and no second thought; took out the bot with three more.
“Why’d you leave the baby for last?” Tauchi asked afterward, unhooking her. The light in his eyes was pure backwash from the retinal display, but he looked eager as a puppy just the same.
“Less of a loss,” Becker said.
“In terms of military potential?” They’d all been civilians; tactically, all last among equals.
Becker shook her head, tried to put instinct into words. “The adults would—suffer more.”
“Babies can’t suffer?”
“They can hurt. Physically. But no hopes or dreams, no memories even. They’re just—potential. No added value.”
Tauchi looked at her.
“What’s the big deal?” Becker asked. “It was an exercise.”
“You killed your brother,” he remarked.
“In a simulation. To save fifty civilians. I don’t even have a brother.”
“Would it surprise you to know that you took out the old man and the battlebot a full six hundred milliseconds faster than you did before the upgrade?”
She shrugged. “It was a repeat scenario. It’s not like I even got it wrong the first time.”
Tauchi glanced at his tacpad. “It didn’t bother you the second time.”
“So what are you saying? I’m some kind of sociopath now?”
“Exactly the opposite. You’ve been immunized against trolley paradoxes.”
“What?”
“Everybody talks about morality like it’s another word for right and wrong, when it’s really just a load of static on the same channel.” Tauchi’s head bobbed like a woodpecker. “We just cleaned up the signal. As of now, you’re probably the most ethical person on the planet.”
“Really.”
He walked it back, but not very far. “Well. You’re in the top thirty at least.”
***
Buried high above the streets of Toronto, cocooned in a windowless apartment retained as a home base for transient soldiers on missions of damage controclass="underline" Nandita Becker, staring at the wall and watching the Web.
The wall was blank. The Web was in her head, invited through a back door in her temporal lobe. She and Wingman had spent altogether too much time alone in there, she’d decided. Time to have some company over.
The guest heads from Global’s Front View Mirror, for example: a JAG lawyer, a retired professor of military law from Dalhousie, a token lefty from Veterans for Accountable Government. Some specialist in cyborg tech she’d never met, on loan from the Ministry of Defense and obviously chosen as much for disarming good looks as for technical expertise. (Becker imagined Ben Monahan just out of camera range, pulling strings.) A generic moderator whose affect alternated between earnest sincerity and failed attempts at cuteness.
They were all talking about Becker. At least, she assumed they still were. She’d muted the audio five minutes in.
The medallion in her hand glowed like dim cobalt through the flesh of her fingers, a faint nimbus up at 3MHz. She contemplated the feel of the metal, the decorative filigree (a glyph from some Amazonian culture that hadn’t survived first contact, according to Sabrie), the hairline fracture of the interface port. The recessed Transmit button in its center: tap it once and it would squawk once, Sabrie had told her. Hold it down and it would broadcast on continuous loop.
She pressed it. Nothing happened.
Of course not. There’d be crypto. You didn’t broadcast anything in the field without at least feeding it through a pseudorandom timeseries synched to the mothership—you never knew when some friend of Amal Sabrie might be lurking in the weeds, waiting to snatch it from the air and take it home for leisurely dissection. The signal made sense only at the instant of its creation. If you missed it the first time, wanted to repeat it for the sake of clarity, you’d need a time machine.
Becker had built her own personal time machine that very afternoon, stuck it at #1 on speed-diaclass="underline" a three-line macro to reset her system clock to a dark moment weeks in the past, just before her world had turned to shit.
She unmuted audio on the web feed. One of Global’s talking heads was opining that Becker was as much a victim as those poor envirogees her hijacked body had gunned down. Another spoke learnedly of the intimate connection between culpability and intent, of how blame—if that loaded term could even be applied in this case—must lie with the technology and not with those noble souls who daily put their lives on the line in the dangerous pestholes of a changing world.
“And yet this technology doesn’t decide anything on its own,” the moderator said. “It just does what the soldier’s already decided sub—er, preconsciously.”
“That’s a bit simplistic,” the specialist replied. “The system has access to a huge range of data that no unaugged soldier would ever be able to process in realtime—radio chatter, satellite telemetry, wide-spectrum visuals—so it’s actually taking that preconscious intent and modifying it based on what the soldier would do if she had access to all those facts.”
“So it guesses,” said the Man from VAG.