She’s toying with me? This is some kind of twisted—
“Uh, Rakshi—” He coughed, cleared a throat gone drier than Prineville, tried again. “I don’t know—”
She raised one preemptive hand. “I know, I know. Priorities. Counting chickens. We have other things to do. But I’ve had friends wiped by the storm troopers for hacking some senator’s diary, and then this asshole racks up a four-digit death toll and those same storm troopers protect him, you know what I mean? So yah, there are vampires and alien slime molds and a whole damn planet coming apart at the seams but I can’t do anything about that.” Her gaze on the ground, she pointed to the sky. “This I can do something about.”
You don’t know who I am. I’m right here in front of you and you’ve dredged up my whole sorry life and you’re not putting it together how can you not be putting it together?
“Bring back a little balance into the social equation.”
Maybe it’s the eye contact thing. He suppressed a hysterical little giggle. Maybe she just never looked at me in meatspace…
“There’s no fucking justice anywhere, unless you make your own.”
Wow, Brüks thought, distantly amazed. Jim and his orthogonal networks. They really got your number.
Why don’t you have mine?
“What did they do to her? Why doesn’t she know me?”
“Do…?” Moore shook his head, managed a half smile under listless eyes. “They didn’t do anything, son. Nobody does anything, we’re done to…”
The lights were always low in the attic, the better for Moore to see the visions in his head. He was a half-seen half-human shape in the semidarkness, one arm tracing languid circles in the air, all other limbs entwined among the rafters. As though the Crown was incorporating him into her very bones, as though he were some degenerate parasitic anglerfish in conjugal fusion with a monstrous mate. The smell of old sweat and pheromones hung around him like a shroud.
“She found out about Bridgeport,” Brüks hissed. “She found out about me, she had all my stats right up there on the screen and she didn’t recognize me.”
“Oh that,” Moore said, and nothing else.
“This goes way beyond some tweak to protect state secrets. What did they do? What did you do?”
Moore frowned, an old man losing track of seconds barely past. “I—I didn’t do anything. This is the first I’ve heard of it. She must have a filter.”
“A filter.”
“Cognitive filter.” The Colonel nodded, intact procedural memories booting up over corrupt episodic ones. “Selectively interferes with the face-recognition wetware in the fusiform gyrus. She sees you well enough in the flesh, she just can’t recognize you in certain… contexts. Triggers an agnosia. Probably even mangles the sound of your name…”
“I know what a cognitive filter is. What I want to know is why someone took explicit measures to keep Rakshi from recognizing me when nobody knew I was going to be on this goddamn ship. Because I just happened to go on sabbatical just before a bunch of postals decided to duke it out in the desert, right? Because I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I was wondering when you were going to figure that out,” Moore said absently. “I thought maybe someone had spiked your Cognital.”
Brüks hit him in the face.
At least he tried to. Somehow the blow went wide; somehow Moore was just a little left of where he’d been an instant before and his fist was ramming like a piston into Brüks’s diaphragm. Brüks sailed backward; something with too many angles and not enough padding cracked the back of his skull. He doubled over, breathless, floaters swarming in his head.
“Unarmed biologist with no combat experience attacking a career solder with thirty years in the field and twice your mitochondrial count,” Moore remarked as Brüks struggled to breathe. “Not generally a good idea.”
Brüks looked across the compartment, holding his stomach. Moore looked back through eyes that seemed a bit more focused in the wake of his outburst.
“How far back, Jim? Did they drop some subliminal cue into my in-box to make me choose Prineville? Did they make me fuck up the sims and kill all those people just so I’d feel the urge to get lost for a while? Why did they want me along for the ride anyway, what possible reason could a bunch of superintelligent cancers have for taking a cockroach on their secret mission?”
“You’re alive,” Moore said. “They’re not.”
“Not good enough.”
“We’re alive, then. The closer you are to baseline, the better your odds of surviving the mission.”
“Tell that to Lianna.”
“I wouldn’t have to. I’ve told you before, Danieclass="underline" roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the Bicams at all,” Brüks said. “Maybe I’m Sengupta’s paycheck. That’s how you operate, isn’t it? You trade in ideology, you exploit passion. Sengupta does her job and you remove the blinders and let her loose to take her revenge.”
“That’s not it,” Moore told him softly.
“How do you know? Maybe you’re just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you’re running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet’s a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?”
“Do you really think that’s a likely scenario?”
“Scenario? I don’t even know what the goddamned goal is! No matter who’s pulling the strings, what have we accomplished other than nearly getting killed a hundred fifty million klicks from home?”
Moore shrugged. “God knows.”
“Oh, very clever.”
“What do you want from me, Daniel? I’m not much more clued in than you are, no matter what Machiavellian motives you want to lay at my feet. The Bicamerals see God in everything from the Virgo Supercluster to a flushing toilet. Who knows why they might want us on board? And as for Rakshi’s filter—how do you know your own people didn’t do it?”
“My own people?”
“Public Relations. Faculty Affairs. Whatever your academic institutions use to keep their dirty laundry out of the public eye. They did a lot of mopping up after Bridgeport; how do you know Rakshi’s tweak wasn’t just another bit of insurance? Preemptive damage control, as it were?”
“I—” He didn’t actually. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him.
“Still doesn’t explain why we both ended up on the same mission,” he said at last.
“Why.” The Colonel snorted softly. “We’re lucky if we even know what we’ve done. Any why simple enough for either of us to consciously understand would certainly be wrong.”
“Just not enough room in the cache,” Brüks said bitterly.
Moore inclined his head.