“I am not a clone,” I said.
“No,” he said, suddenly thoughtful. “You’re not. You’re the stepsister who cut off her heel to fit the glass slipper—or rather, her brainstem to fit the glass skull. But the blood told, Maya Tatyanichna. The blood told, as blood will.”
“Erase that,” I said aloud. Horus appeared behind Voskresenye’s head, nodded briefly, was gone.
“Oh, all right then,” Voskresenye said, highly amused. “I will give you the generic version that you seem to crave. It is very simple. Anything in a Netcaster that doesn’t conform to the official vision of humanity is screened out. If it can’t be screened out, it is filtered out. And if it is too big to screen or filter, they put a cable in your head and tear it out of you.”
“And what do you think you can do about it?”
“In the Netcast that your unfortunate audience is presently viewing, I have recorded all the ways in which the Army’s vision of humanity is enforced. And I have gathered in everything that is dangerous and messy and petty and horrible and human, to give it back. I have tracked down every form of vice and dissidence—all save one. And that too I think I will manage before long.”
Unnerved by his expression, I said, “What good do you think you can possibly do? People will just turn it off.”
“Oh, Andreyeva, I had thought better of you,” he said scornfully. “What I have shown the world is terrible and painful, parts of it; but it is something new—or rather, something so old and so long-forgotten that it will seem new. There are those who will listen.”
“Not if Netcast shuts it off, they won’t,” I said. “In fact, they must already have shut it off. I’m hardly getting any feedback.”
“I am certain that our audience is dwindling by the second,” he said coolly. “It matters not at all. The whale will ensure that it gets out.”
I leaned forward. “You mean that the whale can control—”
“No, no. I don’t mean the whale herself will do it; I mean the idea of the whale, the hysteria about the whale. This is the Net-cast of the year—you know that. Every advertiser wants his viruses in it, and every distributor wants the fees for carrying the viruses; they are fighting News One even now. They will fail in most places, but somewhere, in some obscure corner, they will succeed. And if it is seen by one person, it will be seen by everyone. Anything connected with the whale will be distributed. The demand will find it—even if it has to be ripped out of your head, Maya Tatyanichna.”
I felt a wave of fear that wasn’t feedback. “What good will it do?” I asked, more plaintively than I had meant to. “So people feel what it’s like to be—a Christian, whatever—once. They’ll only forget. A year from now, it will all be as though it never happened.”
“But I have also shown them how homogeneity is enforced; and that is something they will not forget so quickly.”
“They already know that,” I hissed. “Do you think there’s a person in Russia who doesn’t fear the Weavers?”
“Resentment gains by being given a focus,” he said. I started to interrupt, but he cut me off, saying: “I did not claim that I would beat the Weavers overnight, Maya Tatyanichna. I have struck the blow that I can strike; others will carry it forward, or they will not. But now we come to the other reason for my action, which is much more pressing.”
He fell silent. “I’m listening,” I said.
“I told you of my adventure with the encryption virus,” he said slowly. “About how, under cover of a failed attempt to take control of certain programs, my cohorts and I changed those programs—doing it subtly at first, and expanding slowly, so that the change was imperceptible. From this there was a logical conclusion: could you not do the same thing with minds?” He shook his head sadly. “It took me far too long to realize that. I have reason to believe that the Weavers had thought of it some time before.”
“You think they somehow altered our minds?”
“They are doing so even now. They are trying to hack the archetypes—to change what makes us human. You might say they’re trying to revoke original sin.”
“How do you know?”
“I have found the vector.”
“Some kind of worm program?”
“Not a single program; an entire ecosystem. The change they wish to make has been divided into a thousand independent parts— many thousands, perhaps; I do not know how many are still unfound, or perhaps still unreleased into the world. Each of these infinitesimal parts is carried by not one, but three viruses.”
“For redundancy?”
“Quite the reverse. Suppose that I gave you three slides, one with a picture of a boat, one with a landscape, one with a distant bird beneath a cloud. Alone, each seems to have its own crude purpose; but project the three together, and the boat becomes a mouth, the sail a nose, the bird an eye, the clouds a lock of hair. If you transmit the slides by different routes, this is an excellent way to send a secret message. And that is what the Weavers have done. Each virus packs a small payload—a few dozen neurodes or lines of code, with some irritating but harmless function, destined for a particular address in moist or dry memory. The next triplet loads itself into the same place, interlacing with the first. And when the third arrives, it overwrites the last of the camouflage code, and the resulting program carries out its true purpose. Imperceptibly, a tiny sliver of the soul is changed. The code then disappears, having served its purpose. Since it is active for such a brief period, it is almost undetectable.”
“Then how did you find it?”
“I had ever been a starer at stars and a seeker of patterns. I created a chart of the regions in moist memory that viruses attacked; when I noted how often those regions were the same, or fit into each other like puzzle pieces, I was on my way to the answer.”
“You can’t have been the first person to do that.”
“Probably I was not. History does not record the fates of the others, but you may imagine.”
“Why would the Weavers go to so much trouble?” I asked. “Even if they were as bad as you say they are, they’re Weavers. They could just keep the whole plan intact, and call it the next release of Mind-OS.” My spirits lifted, incautiously; the certainty of execution yielded to the dream of commendation. “And if it’s as subtle as all that, maybe they just haven’t found it. Have you tried sending in an anonymous tip? Maybe—”
“Maya Tatyanichna,” he said, “who else but Weavers could create such a subtle and elegant plan? An overnight change in the soul would be detected; those without the new OS would note the difference in those who had it. The Weavers wished to make their change over the course of decades, to escape detection—for after all, they are Weavers, and can take the long view.
“And if that is not enough, I have a further proof: the Weaver virus-cleaning software. Let loose on an incomplete triplet, it detects it, then disables it—by erasing the useless camouflage code. The remaining portion is not detectable by virus scan, but it is just as functional as before.”
“How far has it gone?” I said, beginning to be convinced despite myself. “How much have they changed?”
“These are early days yet. The average person carries ten or fifteen uncompleted triplets, and has completed, at most, one or two. Not much change; but when necessary, the Weavers see to it that it is the right sort of change. They rarely send transgressors to the Postcops anymore; the days of hauling in a galuboy for a suppressor chip are over.”