Reverse-engineered from the language module!
Holy rocking shit.
It was turning into a big day for flash meditation. Much more of this and she might attain flash enlightenment. “You realise what you’ve done?” she demanded. “Do you have the faintest conception of the harm this will cause?”
Constantine nodded. “The disruption will be immense. It’ll destroy the entire slave economy.”
“But they’re not slaves!” Synchronic said. “If they had been, I could see why we might want to interfere, But you’ve taken what are by your own admission mute brutes, and given them language. Deep grammar. Self-awareness. Human consciousness. You’ve made them slaves.”
“Yes,” said the Oldest Man. “Slaves that will try to free themselves.”
Synchronic had already shown him the breakout she had witnessed. She flashed him a pointer to the file.
“Like that?” she said. “When these poor creatures become aware of what they are and what has been done to them, they will suffer terribly. They will flee, they will fight — kill their owners—”
Constantine agreed again. “That may all happen,” he said. “The owners have it coming.”
Synchronic just stared at him. “How can you say that? How can you be so destructive?”
“We didn’t do this to be destructive,” said Constantine. “We did it to reduce suffering, and to increase intelligence.”
“The suffering of brutes? When did that become urgent?”
“The last time I visited you,” said Constantine, “you were showing the kids the meat and milk machine. Why don’t we just raise and slaughter cattle?”
“Hah!” said Synchronic. “Convenience.”
“No moral reason? Perhaps a mere shudder of distaste, a fastidiousness we can afford. Very well. I can still tell you that these brutes suffer, whether they’re conscious of it or not. They are treated with cruelty and disdain. Their situation is much worse than that of the grazing animals the bat people prey on. These are predators and prey after all, it’s a natural relationship and the beasts have natural lives. The relationship between the bat people and their related species is nothing like that. It’s artificial, it’s unnatural, it’s wicked and it’s got to stop.”
“As no doubt it will,” said Synchronic, “in a few decades when we’ve made contact. By then, they might have invented robots for themselves. They’re an inventive lot.”
“Indeed they are,” said Constantine. “Well, we are not willing to wait a few decades. We’re here now, we have the means to stop the suffering and therefore the duty to act.”
“For all you know, the bat people might be able to keep them in slavery. I’m sure they’ll come up with all kinds of rationalizations, if the human precedent is anything to go by.”
“Then they’re no worse off, and they have the benefit of intelligence and language to help them escape or resist.”
“That poor thing I heard called a trudge didn’t exactly benefit, from what I saw and you saw.”
“Oh no?” said Constantine. “It lived five minutes as a free man. That’s five minutes more than it would ever have had without us.”
Synchronic was astonished at the ruthlessness of that argument. It was so outrageous and unexpected that she couldn’t begin to answer it. She concentrated instead on the appalled promptings now pouring in from her allies.
“Even if we grant everything you say,” she said, “why did you and the scientists not take this to the Council?”
“It would never have passed. You would never have permitted it. So we did it without asking your permission.”
“That’s outright rebellion!”
“Is it? There’s been no ruling on it. It isn’t a contact. It’s surveillance, but a different project from the one that I had stopped.”
“It’s more than a contact. It’s an intervention!”
“An intervention, without contact, doesn’t break the letter of the law.”
“We’ll see about that!”
Constantine shrugged. “It’s a fait accompli. You would do better to consider ways to limit the damage.”
“We most certainly will,” said Synchronic. “Just as you did with the beetles.”
The ambiguity of the remark seemed to escape him.
“You can abort the transmitters, yes,” said Constantine. “You can’t burn out the new neural structures. And you can’t stop the nano infection spreading. We made sure of that.”
“How?”
“The assemblers don’t have self-destruct mechanisms. So the only way you can limit the damage is to intervene before the whole situation gets out of hand — a servile insurrection, a massacre of the slaves, or more likely, both.”
“I know what this is about!” Synchronic said. “It has nothing to do with concern for the brutes! It’s all about the interests of the crew. You want to bounce us into making contact, because then you can go ahead with your projects.”
“Believe that if you like, my lady,” said Constantine. He grinned. “Look on the bright side. When you make contact, you’ll at least be able to talk to them.”
Synchronic said nothing. She was scanning the Contract in ship memory for an arcane legal term that had just become relevant. Ah, there it was. The word was “arrest.”
The all-hands call brayed through Horrocks’s brain and woke him with a jolt that set him bouncing off the elastic mesh of the free-fall hammock. Genome woke in the same way, with the same result. She grabbed him on their second collision.
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” The conditioned reflexes of emergency training overrode everything. “Suit up! Suit up!”
He thumbnailed the hammock open and they both dived to the opposite corners where their space suits were stashed. Into the loose garment feetfirst, close it, hood over head and faceplate sealed. It took five seconds and felt like longer. They had both been drilled in this since childhood; for their final crew qualification, in explosive decompression and the dark. But as the suit hardened around him, going from the look of loose cloth to the feel of metal and glass, Horrocks could see nothing wrong. The room and the lights were normal, no alarm sounded, and the suit monitors were nominal.
In the corner of his eye the crew circuit light flashed. He chinned the pickup.
“All available crew to the reserve tanks! If you think you’re not available, check the following list of exemptions…”
He didn’t need to look at the list scrolling down the corner of his eye to know he wasn’t on it.
“Everybody else — to the tanks!”
Virtual tags guided them as they kicked, drifted, strap-hanged and just plain got carried along to the nearest mass airlock. The lock could cycle a hundred through at a time. They had to wait three cycles, and still the press behind them piled up. Still nobody knew what was going on. Wild theories flashed around: a collision, a viral outbreak, an accident. All that was known for certain, because queries were flying back and forth the length of the ship, was that a similar scramble was going on in the rearward cone. Horrocks and Genome stayed together in the crush inside the airlock, and together in the surge out. For three months they had lived and worked together; the training-habitat business had boomed as more and more of the ship generation had chosen the confined but real opportunity the cones afforded. The fees earned had more than made up for the collapse of Horrocks’s small fortune in terrestrials shares.
Now, for the first time, Horrocks saw the cone’s interior hollow space with his own eyes. Its vast volume overwhelmed any sense of confinement. Above the swarming thousands of crew members emerging from the access locks, scores of rocks hundreds of metres across hung in what he could only see, looking up, as the sky. Bubble shack habitats beaded most of them. Structures and construction equipment bristled from every side: booms, manipulator rigs, mineheads, power plants, greenhouses. In the spaces between the rocks the habitats’ builders, the ship kids, on scooters or rocket packs or lines or tumbling free, milled about like gnats. Threaded through it all were numerous long and thick cables in a complex three-dimensional mesh like the web of some gigantic drunken spider, strung from wall and brace.