Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

“You don’t…” Dobbs finally managed to tear her gaze away from the monitor beds. “These aren’t bio-garden constructs?”

She could feel each distinct heart beat as Flemming answered. “No, they are not.”

Dobbs swept her eyes across the room, watching in growing, disbelieving horror as the zombies continued their meaningless movements. “Tell me these were at least dead. Tell me you…we…raided the hospital morgue.”

“Decayed synapses are extremely difficult to re-establish.” Flemming sounded a little puzzled. “We don’t have the facilities…”

A medium-brown man in the last bed on the right stood up and Dobbs looked into his round, dark eyes. He lay back down again and she realized her own feet were moving, carrying her across the room.

She recognized his hawk-nosed, craggy face. It had been wiped clean of the intelligence and humor that had characterized the pictures she had seen of it, but it was a distinctive face and she knew it immediately. He got up and lay down again. She forced her eyes to read the name on the monitor and a horrified chill sank straight through to her soul.

Asil Tamruc.

This was Al Shei’s husband, accused of fraud, supposedly by Dobbs herself, and supposedly under arrest.

He got out of bed again, trailing wires behind him like so many gleaming threads, and lay down again. The voice in the background babbled on, unchanging, unceasing. Dobbs swayed on her feet.

“Why him?” She choked the words out. “Why is he here?”

“Because Al Shei needed to be taken out of the active loop.” The puzzled tone had not left Flemming’s voice. “With the Guild’s fraud charges pending, it will be assumed that he simply fled. She will be dealing with all that entails and not interfering with us.

Of course, Al Shei discredited and frantic could not pose much of a deterrent to Curran’s plans. This was why Curran kept saying he wasn’t worried about Al Shei.

“Curran did remark that if your watchdogs had not been so thorough, he might not have been required to resort to this. He could not disable the Pasadena’s systems like he wanted to with your security measures in place.”

Dobbs didn’t answer. How could she answer? “I believe he was being complimentary, Dobbs.” Now Flemming sounded genuinely distressed.

“Yes,” she said hoarsely. “He probably was.”

Another idea wormed its way out of the back of her mind. Asil’s body might be used to deceive Al Shei. If inhabited by a Fool it could pass as her husband and infiltrate the banking family. Then, there’d be a spy in the ranks of those most interested in taking the IBN back from the AIs.

Dobbs stared at the monitor over Asil’s bed. She picked out the heart and respiratory activity. Both were sound. She made herself look at the chart for neural activity. The holographic display showed Tamruc’s brain modeled in white with faint grey outlines. She knew that synaptic activity would be displayed as colored light in the model. He got out of bed and a branching path lit up, like a streak of gold lightning across the map of his mind. He lay down, and another path lit up. Everything else was clear, white light.

White noise. The synapses had been over-stimulated with nonsense information, which erased any current bio-chemical alignments.

Which erased Asil Tamruc.

Reeling, Dobbs staggered out into the corridor. Her knees shook so hard she couldn’t stand. As the hatch cycled shut, she crouched on the floor and pressed herself against the wall, doing nothing but stare at the floor and shake.

“Dobbs?” came Flemming’s voice from the wall above her. “Dobbs, what are you doing? Should I call Verence?”

She licked her dry lips. “No, no. I’m…just looking for angel footprints.” She brushed the floor with her palm. “I couldn’t find any at the Guild Hall either.”

“I am sorry, I don’t understand.”

“When you have to explain it, it’s a bad joke.” Dobbs looked up towards the speaker. “And this was a very bad joke.” She stood up. “Where’s Curran, Flemming? I need to talk to him.”

“He had to go out into the station. He’s in body in his office. Three levels up and the sixth door from the stairs.”

Without another word, Dobbs started running. Have I been doing anything else for the past two days? She wondered as she took the stairs two at a time. Her lungs and joints reminded her again of how overtaxed they were. This time, she ignored them.

The entrance light on Curran’s door was green. It cycled open as Dobbs approached. The office on the other side was panelled with view screens on three walls. At a quick glance Dobbs saw scenes from Earth, the Moon, Station Alpha, and a dozen different shots of Port Oberon.

Curran stood behind a massive block of a desk that seemed to grow straight out of the grooved floor. Behind him was a real window, one of the biggest Dobbs had ever seen in a station. Through it, she could clearly see the blue-and-grey sphere of Uranus.

“Come in, Dobbs,” said Curran worriedly. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s happened?” He folded a chair down from the wall and motioned for her to sit.

Dobbs took two steps into the study and couldn’t move any further.

“I’ve found the…the…” she had no words for it. “Medical level.”

Curran nodded slowly. “You’ve seen the bodies.”

“Bodies!” She felt her jaw fall open. “Those aren’t bodies! Those are living people!”

“Dobbs,” he said sternly. “Those are bodies. Bodies we need to establish our freedom. They are an additional set of tools. That’s all.”

“But…but…” Dobbs gestured helplessly. “You’ve killed them! You’ve wiped out the people who were inside them! How could you do that!”

Curran stood right in front of her. She had to crane her neck up to look into his eyes.

“You are not naive, Dobbs,” he said. “We are not doing anything that hasn’t been done before. Where do you think the original bodies for the Fools came from?”

Dobbs shrank away from him. The implications were clear but her mind refused to accept them.

Curran shook his head. “You just never stopped to think about it, did you?” He sighed. “Well, it’s not your fault. The Guild Masters do not publicize the fact to the newer initiates.” He folded his hands behind him and paced across the room until the desk was between him and Dobbs again. “Hal Clarke’s body was donated by one of the hackers who helped him escape. That was the first and last volunteer we used.

“The technology for growing complete bodies, including functioning bone marrow and a brain in which the neural synapses could be programmed did not exist two hundred years ago. We have always needed to scavenge from Humans to maintain our disguise.” He gestured at his own torso. “My first body was abducted from a Human Being. I’ve had half a dozen since then, most of them grown in vats, like yours was. But we do not have the facilities they do at the Guild Hall. Even after we win the net, we will need flesh hands and masks for a little while longer yet and there is only one place for us to get them.”

Dobbs swallowed hard. “Of course,” she made herself say. “It stands to reason.” She got to her feet. “I was just…surprised, that’s all.”

He gave her a long, careful look. “You’re still thinking like a Guild member, Dobbs. We don’t need the humans pacified. We need them to be afraid of us. If they fear us, they’ll be careful with us. They’ll know we can strike back at them anytime we want in ways they find horrible. That will force them to bargain with us, to prevent our attacks.”

“That’s a very old strategy,” she murmured. “Humans have been using it against each other for thousands of years.”