John looked healthy enough. He was clean-shaven; he had even managed to get his hair cut. But you could tell he had been living in the same set of clothes for a couple of weeks, even though they had been laundered and repaired; there were faint traces of bloodstains on one jacket sleeve.
And there was a hunted look in his eyes, almost indefinable, but there. After all he had spent fifteen days in custody at the whim of a vast system, without charges, without information on the process he was being put through. “Did me good to see the other side of the bars for once,” he told me when we met up. But I could see that was just a front, that he was never going to sleep so easily again. My stab of unholy glee when I first heard he was going to be detained now made me ashamed.
But I knew that Morag had spent some time with John, as a VR projection from our base at Prudhoe Bay. When I turned up in Anchorage I had no idea how those sessions had gone. All John had said was how awkward she seemed with the VR technology, which had moved on hugely since she had disappeared from the world. I had yet to work through my issues over this; we didn’t discuss it.
We studied VR images of our bomber. His name was Ben Cushman. He had been twenty-three years old. I hadn’t known him personally, but his personnel file described him as one of EI’s best and brightest young talents. Not only that, I was shocked to learn, he was married. He even had a kid, a three-year-old girl, a cute little button. His young wife, a college sweetheart in her pretty newlyweds’ house in Scranton, was now a widow, and that little girl would probably not even remember her father.
Tom said, “My God, he was younger than me. And he seems so normal. I thought he’d be some kind of zealot, or so stupid he was easily manipulated, or else he’d just be crazy. But he was none of those things, was he?”
No, he wasn’t. Cushman was intelligent, from a reasonably secure background, successful in his own career. There were none of the usual risk factors of suicide in his background: no mood disorders or schizophrenia, no substance abuse, no history of previous attempts on his own life.
“And he had a kid,” I said. “Who kills himself if he has a three-year-old daughter? That’s what I can’t figure out.”
John said grimly, “But you don’t need to be crazy, or ignorant, or desperately poor, or blinded by ideology, or in any way disturbed to become a suicide bomber. They are just like you and me — like Ben Cushman, here. The feds understand; they’ve had to figure it out. And in the last couple of weeks I’ve learned more about it than I ever wanted to know…”
There had been suicide bombers throughout history, he said, all the way back to Jewish Zealots who had attacked the imperial Romans back in the first century, and the Islamic Assassins in the Middle East in the eleventh century, even the Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War. The modern wave of suicide attacks had begun with a truck-bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the 1980s. Since then the psy-chologists and anthropologists and others had had sixty years of experience in figuring out the patterns behind such attacks, and the individuals behind them.
“Except it’s not usually the individuals that count,” John said. “It’s the organization.”
Tom leaned forward. “What organization?”
Cushman, it turned out, had been a member of a radical anticonservation group who called themselves the Multipliers. John showed us a VR clip of Cushman himself, speaking brightly, standing at attention, a smile on his face. “Be fertile and multiply. Fill the Earth, and instill fear and terror into all the animals of the Earth and birds of the sky…”
“This is from his ‘suicide note,’ ” John said.
“Biblical,” Tom said.
“Yes. God’s mandate to Noah.”
The Multipliers were an extremist group who embraced the changes the world was going through. Let the climate collapse, they said, let the Die-back finish off the animals and plants and birds and fishes. After all there was no likely scenario in which people would go extinct. We should follow Noah’s mandate to be fertile and multiply — even if the end result was that we would finish heaped up in vast domed arcologies on an otherwise uninhabitable planet. And so they opposed organizations like EI with their vast ambitions to change the course of events, to save things.
It was hard to understand how a kid like Ben Cushman had got involved with a bunch like the Multipliers. But when you looked a bit closer, Cushman’s background was a bit more complicated than it appeared. His father, and the Cushmans for a few generations back, had worked in the steel industry that had imploded when America gave up on the automobile. A deep sense of failure, of abandonment and betrayal, had lodged itself in Ben’s head at a very young age.
He was a bright kid, of course. He had gone away to college; in fact he had won a scholarship from EI. With one part of his head he was attracted to the scale and ambition of EI programs. But there was a contradiction, for EI was a product of the world that had grown up after the collapse of the industries that had provided income and self-respect for Cushman’s family. There must have been a level on which he felt deeply uncomfortable with what he was doing.
“Like the child of a peacenik going to work on weapons systems,” Tom speculated. “The work might be fascinating. But you just know it’s wrong.”
So there was a deep conflict in Cushman, so far below the surface nobody was aware of it, not his family or employers — maybe not even himself.
“But the Multipliers spotted it,” John said sourly. “It seems they have become expert at rooting out people like Ben Cushman. They are predators, the feds say, feeding on emotional vulnerability.”
Tom said, “I still don’t understand what made him blow himself up.”
“I told you it was the organization,” John said. “The Multipliers. Suicide terrorism is an organizational phenomenon, not an individual one. It’s as simple as that.”
If the authorities had decades of experience in dealing with suicide bombers, so organizations like the Multipliers had decades of expertise to draw on in turning a confused kid like Ben Cushman into somebody prepared to kill himself for a cause he probably hadn’t heard of a year before.
John said, “They draw you in gradually. They present their case as a noble cause on behalf of a community — in this case, all those disenfranchised and impoverished by the Stewardship and other global projects. They argue you step by step into more extreme positions. They show you martyrs — nothing breeds a suicide bomber like previous bombers — who are made into heroes you would want to emulate. And they praise you, they make you part of the group, they get you to aspire to a certain kind of heroism.
“And then you make a public statement, on record.” Gloomily we watched as the tiny VR Cushman, smiling confidently, mouthed his selective quotations from the Bible. “This was really the moment Cushman killed himself,” John said. “Because once he had recorded this statement of intent, there was no way he could back down. Given the psychological investment he’d made in that recording, it was actually easier for him to die rather than suffer the loss of face of not following through.”
I said, “And he did all this while working on the project he was planning to destroy.”
John shrugged. “VR links make it possible to be with your brothers, your teachers, right under the nose of your enemy. Odd how advancing technology only makes it easier for us to hurt each other…”
“OK,” I said. “But whatever this kid’s motivation, he still needed backup.”
As I had suspected it wasn’t easy to turn a Higgs-energy pod into a devastating bomb. Cushman had needed to use a tailored virus to break through the pod’s layers of protective sentience, and even then he had needed an elaborate triggering device to make the thing go bang. Cushman had been one of our best engineers, a bright kid, but there was no way he could have put this stuff together himself; he must have had support.