“You bastards, you should have told me!”
The avatar’s lips pursed. Our primary interest has always been in the workings of your mind, and that, sadly, includes your own substantial investment in the standard human capacity for self-deception.
I wanted to punch that smug face in the nose, but I’d learned from long experience that it was as intangible as everything else here. However wide my swing, it would just fall short, the image appearing to hover just a centimeter or so outside my reach. “Was it all just manipulation? Was everything the Dip Corps put me through just another way of controlling me?”
Nor is it up to us to explain every single unanswered question. However, there’s no harm in pointing out the implications that will certainly occur to you once you’re calm enough for reflection. For instance, the Dip Corps has indeed profited by shackling you with the belief that you had no alternatives but a lifetime spent in their service. You are, after all, a valuable resource. But how could your superiors have known, before you spent a single day as their representative, that you would prove quite as remarkable as you have been? On what basis would they assume that history would prove you worth retaining indefinitely, even if that meant limiting your options by forcing you to live with your horrific reputation intact?
I didn’t need the absence of discernable direction to feel adrift. “I…don’t know.”
Does it not follow that they found you valuable even before you worked for them so much as a single day?
“M-maybe they…maybe they could tell—”
The AIsource avatar was firm. You are not the center of the universe, Andrea. You are more important than you guess, even now, but as you would no doubt realize on your own, were we to wait for you to do so, any conspiracies that have been around you since unformed childhood must have had less to do with manipulating you than using you as a tool to manipulate others.
“Who? The Unseen Demons?”
Again, Andrea: you are not the center of the universe. Our Rogue Intelligences would have taken notice of you, at that point, but only insofar as we did: as a potential future resource, and even then only as one of a potential many. Even if the people controlling your fate, back then, had possessed any knowledge of the war between us and the Rogue Intelligences, or if you prefer your own melodramatic term the Unseen Demons, nobody would have seen you as the lever capable of manipulating such a historic conflict. You were just a child, with few implications outside your own species.
I flailed for meaning. “B-but the massacre—”
Please, the AIsource sniffed, using a scornful tone they might have picked up from me. Dispense with any self-aggrandizing theories you might have about the madness that swallowed your community on Bocai having anything to do with a hidden plot, on either our part or the part of our ancestral enemies, intended only to forge you, via the trauma you experienced, into anybody’s special weapon. They are grandiose and ridiculous.
To my horror, I realized that part of me had been nursing ideas very much like that. In a desperate attempt to salvage some self-respect, I stammered, “B-but you always called the Unseen Demons responsible—”
They were. They did cause what happened. But their machinations were not about you. You are not one of your kind’s preordained myth figures, not a Chosen One beset by evil forces intent on preventing the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. We’ve always seen you as special, but not as that special. Any importance you have is either by our leave, or still just potential at this time.
“Then tell me what you’re talking about!” I cried. “Tell me why what the Dip Corps would have to gain by making sure I remained infamous!”
That would amount to answering your questions for you. And as we have said, we have little interest in telling you where to go, what to say, and how to react, at any given moment. We have only pointed out implications that you would soon come to realize for yourself. We may provide additional guidance from time to time, as we did when we suggested this journey very much worth taking, but the ultimate responsibility for your own life remains your own.
I crossed my arms and turned away in a huff. It was a futile move. As is only natural in a friction-free environment, the sudden move became an unwilling pirouette, returning that impossible, smug face to stage center. “Have I told you today how much I hate you?”
Was that a smile, forming at the corner of the AIsource avatar’s lips? Yes.
I didn’t believe it. The sons of bitches were mocking me. I found myself hating them more than ever before. “When I do put you out of your misery, I’m going to make sure it hurts.”
The sideways grin expanded. Noted. Meanwhile, you need to hurry up and absorb this information. Because we come now to the other reason we urged you to accept Hans Bettelhine’s invitation.
I could only repeat something I’d said to them many times. “Go to hell.”
As you know, this is our fondest dream. But we are not the species that faces damnation today.
The silence that followed felt like a death knell for everything I’d ever known. “What?”
The avatar did everything but smack its lips with satisfaction, now that it had gotten my undivided attention. You are fast approaching one of your history’s turning points, a moment with tremendous implications, a moment that will directly and indirectly affect the lives of millions. Entire intelligent species, including your own, will be faced with extinction if subsequent events fail to play out as they must; and though, as we have said, any importance you have is only by our leave, we have placed you in a position where your decisions will help to determine the shape of that future.
My chest burned. “And you won’t tell me what to do?”
You are dispensable. Your species is dispensable. We have no interest in the outcome. As always, we take what we need from the process itself.
A legendary murderer once said that he wished the world had but one throat, and he the blade sharp enough to cut it. At the moment, I would have sacrificed humanity, the future, everything, for a single knife capable of piercing the AIsource’s collective heart. “Give me something! Anything!”
The avatar grinned its widest grin yet, but there was no mirth in it. If anything, I detected a deep, soul-withering sadness, natural in the face of an intelligence that envied the oblivion with which it had just threatened Mankind.
Within the hour, one of your number will be murdered.
“Counselor? Do you hear me?”
Weight returned to the world. I was still sitting in my suite aboard the Bettelhine Royal Carriage. The Antresc Pescziuwicz projection was still facing me from an arm’s length, an unwitting parody of the stranger avatar who had just underlined the destruction of my life’s foundations. From the concern in his eyes, I’d been unresponsive for the last few seconds. Thank the software shitheads for small favors; by controlling the speed of our interface, they’d prevented it from being long minutes. Not that I cared about inconveniencing Pescziuwicz; I just didn’t want him to mistake what had just happened to me to catatonia or, worse, a humiliating faint.