Giraud had, Prang added, maintained an ironclad and prickly secrecy about his department, his operations, and his personnel; she recalled he had had arguments with the first Ari on that topic.
The first Ari, Ari thought to herself, hearing that, had isolated herself, had set everybody at distance, didn’t read the people she was living with as well or as impartially as she read everybody else she dealt with.
Read a stranger? Absolutely. Instantly.
Read a group of people? Easily.
Read the Nyes? Not well enough. The first Ari had grown up with them; been a child with them. Of courseshe knew them. If you stared at a thing a long time, after a while you weren’t really seeing it. Your mind started being busy, and you knew what you were staring at hadn’t moved, but maybe you didn’t see every detail. You didn’t notice when it blinked or its eyes dilated. You didn’t know when it changed its mind. You didn’t notice when loyalty to something else had gotten to the surface and started to move its thoughts in another direction. You didn’t notice that, the older Giraud got, maybe, the more Giraud was being run by his younger brother–who was the real Special, as Ari knew, and brilliant in azi psych, but who wasn’t a damned good Supervisor. Do this for me. Do that. Don’t let them know. Don’t let them inquire. Giraud, fix it for me. Giraud, keep them out. Giraud, she’s dangerous. She’ll be rid of us…
Major blind spot. Giraud loved her, not many had, but Giraud had, and of course she could trust Giraud’s motives.
Put thatin the notes to her successor: mind her own relationships.
Like Justin. Like Amy. Like Yanni. It was scary. It was one thing to say the first Ari should have done it; it was another, to think of doing it with Florian, with Catlin, Justin, and Amy…
“He won’t come through it,” Prang said bluntly, regarding their chances of dealing with Kyle at this point. “He won’t likely survive it.”
“Is the block likely in the deep sets?” she asked. “Did Defense have anybody that could do it that way?”
“The fact that they didn’t have anybody who could,” Prang said solemnly, “doesn’t mean they didn’t try. They had a high failure rate. There were azi we never saw again. Killed in combat. Always killed in combat. Alphas, no less.”
“How many were lost?”
“Twelve. None that belonged in combat. None psychologically fit for it. They didn’t want usenabling combat in an alpha. They wanted their career officers to run them, not have an azi taking combat command. They were clear on that score. Ari–your predecessor–worked to get them all back, and it took the turning point in the War and a slowdown in our production to bend them.”
“Betas lost?”
“I don’t recall the numbers. High hundreds. Gammas. God. Near four thousand.”
That made her mad…mad, and she thought she’d lie awake tonight thinking about it. That attitude in Defense, and then Prang’s little shrug, as if–what could we do? What could anyone do?
She’d spent a very little time with Prang, which put her on the edge of furious.
Then she wanted to go ask Jordan about what he remembered, but that wasn’t going to work, if she went in on a frontal assault.
So she went to Justin’s office instead–went just with Florian, and asked him and Grant if they’d reached any results in the case she’d given them.
Justin said, “I can’t tell you where any block is. I can tell you, if I were good, where I’d put it, if I were working on the psychset in the original manual. Grant agrees.”
She sat down by them and let them show her, just where; and it was where she thought.
But then she asked, “What if you were a total fool? If you weren’t that good, and you just wanted to go ahead anyway, and you weren’t that smart?”
They both frowned, even Grant, who rarely did. And then Grant said, “If you were a fool, maybe,” and searched the file and showed where you could put it in the secondary sets, and it made sense to her–secondaries was where ethics went, and they played off the deep sets, but they were shifty things, and interrelated, and they mutated considerably over a lifetime. It was whyazi went back time and again for refresher tape.
Ethics…and emotional needs.
“Could be,” Justin said, and added: “Kyle was a cold bastard, whenever I had to deal with him. I can’t say my opinion’s entirely clinical. I’ve tried to get past that. I’ve asked myself if it was partially null‑state, on his part. And it could have been. I could have misinterpreted it.”
“You mean when you were arrested.”
“He was there, during some unpleasant sessions. I knew him. I can’t say I know him lately–I can’t say I can do an impartial assessment on him, at all. Except–the azi this original manual should have produced–would have had some emotional reaction. He didn’t. That’s why I say, subjectively, it could have been a partial shutdown.”
“He could have done that,” Grant said. “Justin and I have talked about it. We think it’s not just that the axe code didn’t take. He’s self‑adjusted, possibly even to the point of being his own reason the axe code didn’t take. He’s been running internal adjustments, whatever situation he’s in. If he takes tape, which I’m sure a provisional Supervisor would want him to do, he takes it surface‑level, absorbs it as a behavioral guide. It steadies him down, re‑teaches him what his responses ought to be in order to fool everybody. He has an emotional capability: that’s currently completely engaged with his Supervisor. He gets pleasure out of doing the best he can, but he probably knows how messed up he really is. He knows, constantly, that he’s lying to the one he’s attached to, except when he’s dealing with his Supervisor in Defense, whoever that is–and whether it’s been the same person all along, or whether that’s changed, he’ll be loyal, and emotionally engaged, and if what they ask him to do throws his deep sets into confusion, his actions will still be clear, even through the conflict. I’ve studied the military sets. Actions are the real loyalty. That’s the mantra way deep in what they used to set. Do what you’re told.”
She could see it, in what Grant pointed out, the ethic to follow instructions and do no harm until one could get to a Supervisor, the sort of thing you’d set in for somebody who had to survive where Supervisors weren’t going to be as close as the nearest office. It was a beta kind of setting. Grant was more complex on that issue. Florian–
Florian, right beside her, was capable of intense argument: you had to know how to get him to do what he didn’t want to, and you had to make it clear to him it really was an order.
And then he’d do anything. Absolutely anything. Catlin would do it even faster, and not need advice and sympathy after; Florian did.
So what sort was AK‑36?
By all she’d read, he’d have been a Catlin sort. Point him at an enemy. He was setted for headquarters security, and that was what he’d been intended to be, in the purest form of his psychset.
But somebody had done something with the secondaries, and he had become, to all intents and purposes, self‑steering ever since, and they’d flung him into Supering combat betas and other alphas. Surviving. Trying to comply with his deep sets. Everybody did. Even born‑men did that, in their own chaotic way.
Ask Florian? There was a level at which she didn’t mess with her security’s working mindsets. Theory was a designer question, and she wasn’t as good yet as she would be. It was, more specifically, a Grant kind of question, if you were going to ask an alpha.
It was a Justin or a Jordan kind of question, if you were going to ask a designer.
She left, thinking about it, and she went into the security office and, in a small conference room with Florian, she called Jordan.
“It’s Ari,” she said. “Do you have a moment, ser?”