The cursor blinked like an accusation.
“I can see that. It’s the fucking lookahead. It can’t explore far enough into the envelope’s future to tell which possible me won’t have an existential breakdown.”
The cursor blinked.
“Oh God, it’s such a terrible feeling.”
The infographics were crazy, redlining and jigjagging in pure glitch-aesthetic. Iceweasel had been here, but it didn’t get easier. The slide from lucidity into terror was quick and the worst part was that the cog-sci types insisted that it run its course, all simulation data being captured for analysis. They couldn’t switch her off or roll her back to an earlier state. They had to let her disintegrate.
“It’s such a terrible feeling. Everything I’ve just said, it’s bullshit. There’s no continuity. I’m not me. I’m just me enough to know that I’m not me. Without a body, without embodiment, I’m a Chinese room. You pass words into me, and a program decides what words I’d pass back and generates them. The Chinese room has just enough accuracy to know how terrifying the real me, the me that can never come back, would find that. Oh, Iceweasel—”
The cursor flashed. The infographics went nonlinear. Iceweasel swallowed a lump.
“It’s okay, Dis. You’ve been here before.”
The infographics jittered. Iceweasel wondered if she’d gone nonverbal. That happened, though not usually this quickly.
The computer made a noise Iceweasel had never heard. Weird. Unearthly. A scream.
Iceweasel’s nerve shattered. She fled.
[V]
THE KLAXON ROUSED her, and she was on her feet before full consciousness, shedding her sleep sack and kicking her feet into tough clogs. She blinked. There was no proper diurnal rhythm underground. If enough people wanted a sleep cycle, they’d find a side-corridor, roll out mats, turn out the lights, and close the door. But most of them had converged a common day/night anyway, and there were other people around her in blinking incomprehension.
Gretyl was the first to move, prodding the wall to find out what was going on.
“Bad guys,” she said. “Two. Armed like mercenaries. Came in through the rock-door.”
“What’s happened to them?”
“Less-lethaled,” Gretyl said. There were plenty of people in Walkaway U who could rig booby traps, but by consensus nothing intended to kill outright had been installed. “One’s passed out, the other’s on her knees, shitting herself. Okay, they’ve got her. Let’s go.”
“Me?”
“Why not?” Gretyl said, and took her hand, twining fingers. Iceweasel still couldn’t figure Gretyl – sometimes, she had a sisterly air, sometimes motherly. Sometimes flirty. Sometimes all three.
Iceweasel had never met armed walkaways before. As she’d learned from Limpopo, walking away was all the weapon anyone really needed. But the university crew weren’t prepared to abandon their work – it was too urgent and fragile, though they’d been in touch with other walkaways about cloudifying it for resilience, but it was slow going. The walkaway net had high-speed zones, and this had been one of them, but the major hard-line links had been destroyed in the blaze and they’d dropped back to stupid meshing wireless and there was only so much electromagnetic spectrum in the universe.
The university crew knew how to make weapons. She remembered her dumb ideas about walkaway territory being full of AK-3DPs and improvised flamethrower tanks. When you’ve got a building full of physicists and synthetic chemists who’ve lost their loved ones in a cowardly missile strike, you don’t need crude shit like that. They could turn your bowels into water at two hundred meters, tasp your nerve endings into pain-overload, sound-pulse your eardrums, knock you out or kill you with methods they discussed with the same enthusiasm that they used with all technical subjects. The ad hoc defense group were tons of chuckles. Iceweasel made it through one meeting and never went back. She didn’t like being reminded that her body was so easily disrupted.
The defense ad hoc were on the scene when they got there. They’d shrink-wrappend the bad guys. The unconscious one was in the recovery position. Both were naked, clothes strewn untidily around the room. The smell of shit was incredible.
“What do we do with them now?” Gretyl said. She wore her jolly-fat-lady expression, but Iceweasel knew her well enough to see that it was a mask covering something deadly and anxious.
Sita – who was on the defense ad hoc – shook her head. “We do what we have to.”
Iceweasel felt cold. Were they going to execute these two? Were walkaways allowed to do that? There was no rulebook, but ever since she’d walked away, she’d had the sense from the more “senior” – that wasn’t the word – walkaways that there was a consensus about what was within bounds. No one had said that summary execution was Not Done, but she’d assumed that this was the case.
Part of her was already constructing a rationale. The incursion was an act of war. The firebombing was an act of war. It took innocent lives. These two had been sent to finish the missiles’ work. The other side killed freely. Why should they be squeamish? Where would they keep prisoners, and how, and...
She shook her head. It was easy to slip into that thinking. In reality she was pissed that these two were here, enraged at the death of the walkaways torched by their paymasters, lost friends of her new crew, lost personhood of Dis. These two had taken money to kill them. Kill her. She wanted revenge, even though it would do no good. The zottas who’d sent them knew where they were, otherwise these two wouldn’t have been sent. More would come. Force couldn’t win.
“Come on,” Gretyl said. “Let’s get them into the infirmary.”
The infirmary – originally the place the wounded had been brought when they’d abandoned the campus, now the nexus of the crew’s medical systems – was in a corner of the big room. It had two permanent residents, comatose since the attack. Iceweasel had walked past them hundreds of times and stopped noticing them, but as they wrestled the shrink-wrapped mercs into cots beside them, she was forced to confront them. Burned, bandaged, supine. Tubes going in and out. The crew had a dozen MDs, though they were all research-oriented, and they’d traded shifts tracking the comatose.
The shrink-wrapped and the burned, side by side. A solemn circle drew around them. The shit-covered one, the woman, was conscious, her eyes wide, taking it in. Though her mouth was unwrapped, she hadn’t spoken. She breathed in shallow sips. The other one may have been conscious – Iceweasel’s suspicious mind automatically ascribed suspicion to his motionlessness – but he was close-eyed and still.
Not having a leader made this sort of thing difficult. It was the inverse bystander effect, the first aid puzzle where the more people there when someone collapsed, the less likely that anyone offered assistance. Surely someone else is more qualified. I should just stand ready to help when the best-qualified person steps forward?
In first aid, they taught you it was more important that someone did something than it was that the perfect person do the best thing. Iceweasel waited for Gretyl or Sita to speak. No one did.
There were butterflies in her stomach. “We release them, right?”
She looked at her crew’s faces. None seemed to be saying, “Who the fuck are you?” – her greatest fear. Gretyl looked grim. But thoughtful.
“They can’t hurt us at this point. They know about our defenses, but if they never return, the next batch will assume our defenses. Everyone knows we can’t last here anyway.” It was like a flowchart in her head – argument a, counterargument b. No one raised the counterarguments.