“Multijointed arms with a central mass?”
“God no. Just a flicker, really. If it was anything at all, it was probably just Amanda’s rubber ball floating around up there.”
“Probably.” Szpindel seemed almost amused. “Couldn’t hurt to check for leakage in the shielding, though. Just in case. Not like we need something else making us see things, eh?”
I shook my head at remembered nightmares. “How are the others?”
“Gang’s fine, if a bit disappointed. Haven’t seen the Major.” He shrugged. “Maybe she’s avoiding me.”
“It hit her pretty hard.”
“No worse than the rest of us, really. She might not even remember it.”
“How—how could she possibly believe she didn’t even exist?”
Szpindel shook his head. “Didn’t believe it. Knew it. For a fact.”
“But how—”
“Charge gauge on your car, right? Sometimes the contacts corrode. Readout freezes on empty, so you think it’s empty. What else you supposed to think? Not like you can go in and count the electrons.”
“You’re saying the brain’s got some kind of existence gauge?”
“Brain’s got all kinds of gauges. You can know you’re blind even when you’re not; you can know you can see, even when you’re blind. And yeah, you can know you don’t exist even when you do. It’s a long list, commissar. Cotard’s, Anton’s, Damascus Disease. Just for starters.”
He hadn’t said blindsight.
“What was it like?” I asked.
“Like?” Although he knew exactly what I meant.
“Did your arm—move by itself? When it reached for that battery?”
“Oh. Nah. You’re still in control, you just—you get a feeling, is all. A sense of where to reach. One part of the brain playing charades with another, eh?” He gestured at the couch. “Get off. Seen enough of your ugly guts for now. And send up Bates if you can find where she’s hiding. Probably back at Fab building a bigger army.”
The misgivings glinted off him like sunlight. “You have a problem with her,” I said.
He started to deny it, then remembered who he was talking to. “Not personally. Just—human node running mechanical infantry. Electronic reflexes slaved to meat reflexes. You tell me where the weak spot is.”
“Down in Rorschach, I’d have to say all the links are pretty weak.”
“Not talking about Rorschach,” Szpindel said. “We go there. What stops them from coming here?”
“Them.”
“Maybe they haven’t arrived yet,” he admitted. “But when they do, I’m betting we’ll be going up against something bigger than anaerobic microbes.” When I didn’t answer he continued, his voice lowered. “And anyway, Mission Control didn’t know shit about Rorschach. They thought they were sending us some place where drones could do all the heavy lifting. But they just hate not being in command, eh? Can’t admit the grunts’re smarter than the generals. So our defenses get compromised for political appearances—not like that’s any kinda news—and I’m no jarhead but it strikes me as real bad strategy.”
I remembered Amanda Bates, midwifing the birth of her troops. I’m more of a safety precaution….
“Amanda—” I began.
“Like Mandy fine. Nice mammal. But if we’re cruising into a combat situation I don’t want my ass covered by some network held back by its weakest link.”
“If you’re going to be surrounded by a swarm of killer robots, maybe—”
“Yeah, people keep saying that. Can’t trust the machines. Luddites love to go on about computer malfunctions, and how many accidental wars we might have prevented because a human had the final say. But funny thing, commissar; nobody talks about how many intentional wars got started for the same reason. You’re still writing those postcards to posterity?”
I nodded, and didn’t wince inwardly. It was just Szpindel.
“Well, feel free to stick this conversation in your next one. For all the good it’ll do.”
Imagine you are a prisoner of war.
You’ve got to admit you saw it coming. You’ve been crashing tech and seeding biosols for a solid eighteen months; that’s a good run by anyone’s standards. Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.
It wasn’t always thus. There was a day you might have even hoped for a peaceful retirement. But then they brought the vampires back from the Pleistocene and Great Grieving Ganga did that ever turn the balance of power upside down. Those fuckers are always ten steps ahead. It only makes sense; after all, hunting people is what bloodsuckers evolved to do.
There’s this line from an early pop-dyn textbook, really old, maybe even TwenCen. It’s something of a mantra—maybe prayer would be a better word—among those in your profession. Predators run for their dinner, it goes. Prey run for their lives. The moral is supposed to be that on average, the hunted escape the hunters because they’re more motivated.
Maybe that was true when it all just came down to who ran faster. Doesn’t seem to hold when the strategy involves tactical foresight and double-reverse mind fucks, though. The vampires win every time.
And now you’re caught, and while it may have been vampires that set the trap, it was regular turncoat baseline humans who pulled the trigger. For six hours now you’ve been geckoed to the wall of some unnamed unlisted underground detention facility, watching as some of those selfsame humans played games with your boyfriend and co-conspirator. These are not your average games. They involve pliers, and glowing wires, and body parts that were not designed to detach. You wish, by now, that your lover were dead, like the two others in your cell whose parts are scattered about the room. But they’re not letting that happen. They’re having too much fun.
That’s what it all comes down to. This is not an interrogation; there are less invasive ways to get more reliable answers. These are simply a few more sadistic thugs with Authority, killing time and other things, and you can only cry and squeeze your eyes tight and whimper like an animal even though they haven’t laid a hand on you yet. You can only wish they hadn’t saved you for last, because you know what that means.
But suddenly your tormentors stop in mid-game and cock their heads as if listening to some collective inner voice. Presumably it tells them to take you off the wall, bring you into the next room, and sit you down at one of two gel-padded chairs on opposite sides of a smart desk, because this is what they do—far more gently than you’d expect—before retiring. You can also assume that whoever has given these instructions is both powerful and displeased, because all the arrogant sadistic cockiness has drained from their faces in the space of a heartbeat.
You sit and wait. The table glows with soft, cryptic symbols that would be of no earthly interest to you even if you could understand them, even if they contained the very secret of the vampires themselves. Some small part of you wonders if this latest development might be cause for hope; the rest of you doesn’t dare believe it. You hate yourself for caring about your own survival when chunks of your friends and allies are still warm on the other side of the wall.