“Just basic stuff,” Dekker said. They were in the observation room, looking out through Spex that reflected their disturbed faces—disturbed, in his case, and Meg’s and Sal’s. Dekker, professional space-out, tried to tell them it was just norm.
“Spooky,” was Sal’s word too. “Seriously spooky.”
Ben asked uneasily, “They do computer work that way?”
“Basic functions,” Dekker said. “Basic stuff. For all I know, they do; armscomp, longscan—‘motor skills/ they call it. They teach the boards that way. Some of the sims are like that, when there’s one right answer to a problem. Anything you can set up like that—they can cut a tape. It’s real while you’re seeing it. Damned real. But you move right. You do it over and over till you always jump right.”
Wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. He said, ‘7’m not taking any damn pill. I’m already right. Righter than any guy this halfass staff has got, I’ll tell you. You let them muck with your head?”
“Just for the boards,” Dekker said, and cut the lights as they left. “Just to set the reactions. ‘Direct Neural Input,’ they call it. You do the polish in sims, and you do that awake—at least you’re supposed to...”
Two years he’d known the guy and he realized he’d never actually heard Dekker’s sense of humor. He decided that was a joke. A damned bad one.
Meg asked, “So what if it sets a bias that’s not right, once upon some time?”
“You aren’t the only one to worry about that. Yeah. It’s a question.”
“So what are they doing? Set us up to jump on the average we’re right?”
“That’s part of what they call ‘documentation’—meaning there’s nobody who’s flown the ship.”
“Nobody?” Sal asked; and Ben nearly managed unison.
“Docking trials, yeah. They got that part. Straight runs. Milk and cookies. Rotate and reorient. Do it in your sleep. But not with armscomp working. You got enough problem with system junk.”
“Like a damn beam-push through the Belt.”
“You got it. At that v it’s a lot like that. Only where we’re going—there aren’t any two-hundred-year-old system charts. You get stuff off the system buoy when you drop into a known system, where there’s regular traffic, but out at the jump points, there’s chaff you just don’t know’s there. And maybe stuff somebody meant to dump—ship-killers, scan-invisible stuff, you don’t know.”
“Shit.” Cold chill went down Ben’s back. “These guys ever made a run with Mama shoving you?”
“A lot of these guys have done it—if you mean the combat jocks. Yeah. That’s what it’s like. And we just run ahead and blow the sumbitches they dump out of the carrier’s path.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s what she does.”
“That’s the damn stupidest thing I ever heard!”
“That’s why they like us Belter types. Shipkillers and rocks—no difference. Same gut feeling for how rocks move— same thing that makes a good numbers man or keeps a Shepherd out of the Well, that’s what they want.”
“Hell if, Dekker, hell if. Not this Belt miner!”
“You a good miner?” Dekker had the nerve to ask.
“A live one! On account of I never let MamBitch boost us like a missile—except once. In which you figured, you son of a —“
Meg said, “Hell, Ben, they give you guns....”
“Yeah, and it won’t work—that’s what they’re doing in there, they’re brainwashing those poor sods, they brainwashed him, for God’s sake, blow rocks out of the way, hell! They got that on those tapes?”
“Not yet,” Dekker said, just as quiet and sober as if he was sane. “But they’d like to. Get the reactions right on one run, so they can bottle it and feed it into the techs— word is, that’s what they want to do, ultimately. Get one crew that can do it. And they’ll teach the others. Hundreds of others.”
“God,” Sal said, and hooked a thumb back at the human factory. “Like that!”’
Dekker shrugged. “That’s what they think.”
“That’s what they think,” Ben muttered. The human race was shooting at each other. Dekker said Union was building riderships, too—
“I thought the other side was where they wired you to a machine and taught you to like getting blown to hell. Not here. Not on this side, no way, Dek-boy. What the hell are we fighting for? That’s Union stuff in there!”
“They developed it, what I hear.”
“God.”
“ ‘Not yet,’ “ Meg quipped.
“Damn funny, Meg.”
Ben looked at Dekker, looked at Meg and at Sal, with this sudden sinking feeling—this moment of dislocation, that said he was surrounded by crazies, including the woman he went to bed with; including every hotshot Shepherd tight-ass in this whole establishment, and the CO, and the lieutenant.
“What’s it do to your reflexes?” Meg said.
Dekker said, “Screws ‘em to hell. Scares shit out of you. Like I said at breakfast. Hands move, you don’t know why, you threw a switch, you don’t know why. Moves are right. But you got to convince yourself they are. You can’t doubt.”
“Any chance it came around on this Wilhelmsen?”
Dekker didn’t answer that for a second or so. Ben wasn’t sure about keeping his breakfast. “Yeah,” Dekker said. ‘’But that’s the one thing you never better think. You never mink about it. Not in the sims. Especially in the real thing—“
Dekker’s voice wandered off. He stood there with his band on a door switch and looked off somewhere, just stood there a breath or two—then drew a larger breath and said,
“Worst enemy you’ve got—asking whether your moves are right. You just can’t doubt—“
“Yeah,” Ben said, with the sudden intense feeling they had to get him out of this hallway before a guard saw him or something. “Yeah, right. Why don’t we go tour somewhere else? Like what there is to do on this station?”
Dekker looked at him like he’d never thought of such a thing. “Don’t know that there is. This isn’t One.”
“What I’ve seen, it isn’t even R2. What do you do for life in this can? Play the vending machines?”
“Not much time for social life,” Dekker said faintly. Which reminded him there hadn’t been outstanding much in TI, either. Even attached to Sol One, where there was plenty.
“Not much where we’ve been,” Meg said. “Either.”
They walked down the hall in this place full of labs where human beings learned to twitch like rats, to guide ships that moved too fast to think about, and you couldn’t help thinking that helldeck on R2, for all R2’s faults, had been the good old days....
“So what do you want to do, Dek-boy? I mean, granted we all get our wants, —what’s yours?”
Scariest question he’d ever asked Dekker. And Dekker took a while thinking about it, he guessed, Meg sort of leaning up against Dekker, one visible hand on his arm— where the other one was might have something to do with his concentration....
But Dekker said, real quiet, “I want to be the one cuts that tape. I want to be the one that does it, Ben.”
He wished he hadn’t asked. Sincerely wished he hadn’t asked. Sincerely wished Meg would put her hand somewhere to disrupt the boy’s concentration and shake him out of his spook notions.
“There a chance?” Meg asked, quiet too; and he thought. God, it’s in the water, they got to put it in the water—
Dekker didn’t answer that one right off. ‘ ‘If they let me back in the sims, there is...” And a few beats later. “But I’m not doing it with you, Meg. I can’t do it with you.”
Silence from Meg. Then: “Yeah.”
“I don’t mean that.” Dekker stopped cold, took Meg by the shoulders and made her look at him. “I mean I don’t want to. I can’t work with you....”