Peter Watts - Blindsight

She has to be kidding.

Your incredulity must be showing. Bates addresses it: “I’m not completely unsympathetic. My gut doesn’t much like the idea of swapping reality for simulation, and it doesn’t buy that what-is-truth spin the Body Economic sells to get around it. Maybe there’s reason to be scared. Not my problem, not my job, just my opinion and it could be wrong. But if we kill each other in the meantime, we don’t find out either way. It’s unproductive.”

You see the dismembered bodies of your friends. You see pieces on the floor, still a little bit alive, and this cunt has the nerve to talk about productivity ?

“We didn’t start it,” you say.

“I don’t know and I don’t care. Like I said, it’s not my job.” Bates jerks a thumb over her shoulder at a door in the wall behind her, the door she must have entered through. “In there,” she says, “are the ones who killed your friends. They’ve been disarmed. When you go through that door the room will go offline and remain unmonitored for a period of sixty seconds. Nobody besides yourself will ever hold you accountable for whatever happens in there during that time.”

It’s a trick. It has to be.

“What do you have to lose?” Bates wonders. “We can already do anything we want to you. It’s not like we need you to give us an excuse.”

Hesitantly, you take the gun. Bates doesn’t stop you.

She’s right, you realize. You have absolutely nothing to lose. You stand and, suddenly fearless, point the weapon at her face. “Why go in there? I can kill you right here .”

She shrugs. “You could try. Waste of an opportunity, if you ask me.”

“So I go in there, and I come out in sixty seconds, and then what?”

“Then we talk.”

“We just—”

“Think of it as a gesture of good faith,” she says. “Restitution, even.”

The door opens at your approach, closes in your wake. And there they are, all four of them, spread up across the wall like a chorus line of Christs on crosses. There’s no gleam in those eyes now . There’s only a bright animal terror and the reflection of turned tables. Two of the Christs stain their pants when you look them in the eye.

What’s left? Maybe fifty seconds?

It’s not a lot. You could have done so much more with just a little extra time. But it’s enough, and you don’t want to impose on the good graces of this Bates woman.

Because she may at last be someone you can deal with.

Under other circumstances, Lieutenant Amanda Bates would have been court-martialed and executed within the month. No matter that the four who’d died had been guilty of multiple counts of rape, torture, and homicide; that’s just what people did in wartime. It’s what they’d always done. There was nothing polite about war, no honorable code beyond the chain of command and the circling of wagons. Deal with indiscretions if you must; punish the guilty if you have to, for appearance if nothing else. But for God’s sake close the doors first. Never give your enemy the satisfaction of seeing discord in the ranks, show them nothing but unity and flinty-eyed resolve. There may be murderers and rapists in our midst, but by God they’re our murderers and rapists.

You certainly don’t give right of revenge to some terrorist twat with over a hundred friendly scalps on her belt.

Still, it was hard to argue with results: a negotiated ceasefire with the third-largest Realist franchise in the hemisphere. An immediate forty-six percent decline in terrorist activities throughout the affected territories. The unconditional cancellation of several in-progress campaigns which could have seriously compromised three major catacombs and taken out the Duluth Staging Grounds entirely. All because Lieutenant Amanda Bates, feeling her way through her first field command, had gambled on empathy as a military strategy.

It was collaborating with the enemy, it was treason, it was betrayal of the rank and file. Diplomats and politicians were supposed to do those things, not soldiers.

Still. Results.

It was all there in the record: initiative, creativity, a willingness to succeed by whatever means necessary and at whatever cost. Perhaps those inclinations needed to be punished, perhaps only tempered. The debate might have gone on forever if the story hadn’t leaked — but it had, and suddenly the generals had a hero on their hands.

Sometime during her court-martial, Bates’s death sentence turned into a rehabilitation; the only question was whether it would take place in the stockade or Officer’s College. As it turned out, Leavenworth had both; it took her to its bosom and squeezed hard enough to virtually guarantee promotion, if it didn’t kill her first. Three years later Major Bates was bound for the stars, where she was heard to say

We’re breaking and entering, Siri…

Szpindel was not the first to register doubts. Others had wondered whether her assignment owed as much to superior qualifications as it did to the resolution of inconvenient PR. I, of course, had no opinion one way or the other; but I could see how she might strike some as a double-edged sword.

When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you want to keep an eye on anyone whose career-defining moment involves consorting with the enemy.

Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw ourselves between the monster’s jaws, let it chew at us with a trillion microscopic teeth until Theseus reeled us in and stitched us back together. We crept through Rorschach ’s belly in fits and starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.

Sometimes we got caught in the open. The Gang would squabble amongst itself, uncertain which persona was which. Once I fell into a kind of waking paralysis while alien hands dragged me away down the hall; fortunately other hands brought me home, and voices that claimed to be real told me I’d made the whole thing up. Twice Amanda Bates found God, saw the fucker right there in front of her, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the creator not only existed but spoke to her, and her alone. Both times she lost her faith once we got her into the bell, but it was touch and go for a while; her warrior drones, drunk on power but still under line-of-sight control, staggered from their perimeters and pointed their weapons along bearings too close for comfort.

The grunts died fast. Some barely lasted a single foray; a few died in minutes. The longest-lived were the slowest on the draw, half-blind, thick-witted, every command and response bottlenecked by raw high-frequency sound buzzing across their shielded eardrums. Sometimes we backed them up with others that spoke optically: faster but nervous, and even more vulnerable. Together they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face.

It hardly had to. Our troops fell even in the absence of enemy fire.

We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each others’ backs while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick. Sometimes we vomited into our helmets; then we’d just hang on, white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our headspace. And we’d give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent faceplates.