“It predicts.”
“And that doesn’t open the door to error?”
“It reduces error. It optimizes human wisdom based on the maximum available information.”
“And yet in this case—”
Becker held down transmit and sacc’d speed-dial.
“—don’t want to go down that road,” the lawyer said. “No matter what the neurology says.”
Thirty-five seconds. Gone in an instant.
“Our whole legal system is predicated on the concept of free will. It’s the moral center of human existence.”
That was so much bullshit, Becker knew. She knew exactly where humanity’s moral center was. She’d looked it up not six hours ago: the place where the brain kept its empathy and compassion, its guilt and shame and remorse.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
“Suppose—” The moderator raised a finger. “—I get into a car with a disabled breathalyzer. I put it into manual and hit someone. Surely I bear some responsibility for the fact that I chose to drink and drive, even if I didn’t intend to hurt anyone.”
“That depends on whether you’d received a lawful command from a superior officer to get behind the wheel,” Ms. JAG countered.
“You’re saying a soldier can be ordered to become a cyborg?”
“How is that different from ordering a sniper to carry a rifle? How is it different from ordering soldiers to take antimalarial drugs—which have also, by the way, been associated with violent behavioral side effects in the past—when we deploy them to the Amazon? A soldier is sworn to protect their country; they take that oath knowing the normal tools of their trade, knowing that technology advances. You don’t win a war by bringing knives to a gunfight—”
Speed-dial.
“—may not like cyborgs—and I’m the first to agree there are legitimate grounds for concern—but until you can talk the Chinese into turning back the clock on their technology, they’re by far the lesser evil.”
Twenty-eight seconds, that time.
“It’s not as though we ever lived in a world without collateral damage. You don’t shut down such a vital program over a tragic accident.”
A tragic accident. Even Becker had believed that. Right up until Sabrie had slipped her a medallion with a burst of radio static in its heart, a cryptic signal snatched from the warm Pacific night by a pair of smart-specs on a dead kid walking. A signal that was somehow able to offline her for intervals ranging from twenty to sixty-three seconds.
She wondered if there was any sort of pattern to that variability.
“Safeguards should be put into place at the very least.” The moderator was going for the middle road. “Ways to monitor these, these hybrids remotely, shut them down at the first sign of trouble.”
Becker snorted. Wingman didn’t take orders in the field, couldn’t even hear them. Sure, Becker could channel some smiley little spin doctor through her temporal, but he was just a peeping Tom with no access to the motor systems. The actual metal didn’t even pack an on-board receiver; it was congenitally deaf to wireless commands until someone manually slotted the dorsal plug-in between Becker’s shoulders.
Deliberately design a combat unit that could be shut down by anyone who happened to hack the right codes? Who’d be that stupid?
And yet—
Transmit. Speed-dial.
“—are only a few on active duty—they won’t tell us exactly how many of course, say twenty or thirty. A couple dozen cyborgs who can’t be blamed if something goes wrong. And that’s just today. You wouldn’t believe how fast they’re ramping up production.”
Forty seconds. On the nose.
“Not only do I believe it, I encourage it. The world’s a tinderbox. Water wars, droughts, refugees everywhere you look. The threat of force is the only thing that’s kept a lid on things so far. Our need for a strong military is greater today than it’s ever been since the Cold War, especially with the collapse of the US eco—”
Speed-dial.
“—and what happens when every pair of boots in the field has a machine reading its mind and pulling the trigger in their name? What happens to the very concept of a war crime when every massacre can be defined as an industrial accident?”
Thirty-two.
“You’re saying this Becker deliberately—”
“I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m concerned. I’m concerned at the speed with which outrage over the massacre of civilians has turned into an outpouring of sympathy for the person who killed them, even from quarters you’d least expect. Have you seen the profile piece Amal Sabrie posted on the Star? It was almost a love letter.”
A shutdown command, radioed to a system with no radio.
“Nobody’s forgetting the victims here. But it’s no great mystery why people also feel a certain sympathy for Corporal Becker—”
Becker kept wondering who’d be able to pull off a trick like that. She kept coming up with the same answer.
“Of course. She’s sympathetic, she’s charismatic, she’s nice. Exemplary soldier, not the slightest smudge on her service record. She volunteered at a veterinary clinic back in high school.”
Someone with an interest in controlling the narrative.
“Chief of Defense couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned—”
Dial.
“—should be up on charges is for the inquiry to decide.”
Forty-two seconds.
She wondered if she should be feeling something right now. Outrage. Violation. She’d thought the procedure was only supposed to cure her PTSD. It seemed to have worked on that score, anyway.
“Then let the inquiry decide. But we can’t allow this to become the precedent that tips over the Geneva Conventions.”
The other stuff, though. The compassion, the empathy, the guilt. The moral center. That seemed to be gone too. They’d burned it out of her like a tumor.
“The Conventions are a hundred years old. You don’t think they’re due for an overhaul?”
She still had her sense of right and wrong, at least.
Brain must keep that somewhere else.
***
“I thought they’d shipped you back to the WTP,” Sabrie remarked.
“This weekend.”
The journalist glanced around the grotto: low light, blue-shifted, private tables arrayed around a dance floor where partygoers writhed to bass beats that made it only faintly through the table damper. She glanced down at the Rising Tide Becker had ordered for her.
“I don’t fuck my interviews, Corporal. Especially ones who could snap my spine if they got carried away.”
Becker smiled back at her. “Not why we’re here.”
“Ohhhkay.”
“Bring your jammer?”
“Always.” Sabrie slapped the little device onto the table; welcome static fuzzed Becker’s peripherals.
“So why are we in a lekking lounge at two a.m.?”
“No drones,” Becker said.
“None in the local Milestones either. Even during business hours.”
“Yeah. I just—I wanted a crowd to get lost in.”
“At two in the morning.”
“People have other things on their mind on the middle of the night.” Becker glanced up as a trio stumbled past en route to the fuck-cubbies. “Less likely to notice someone they may have seen on the feeds.”