Larry Niven - Achilles choice

“They will damage me if you don’t stop.”

Jillian’s laughter rang hollowly. “Beverly, I love you, but you’re just a program. There are a dozen copies of your core. They can’t—”

Beverly talked slowly, struggling to enunciate. “They will damage me if you do not stop.”

Jillian felt her throat constrict. Her voice was a husky whisper. “Who are they?”

“That information is restricted.”

They?

In Jillian’s world of illusion, the water swirled and darkened with her anger. She had to find a way through this!

“Eleven years ago, Mom died in an industrial accident.” Harmless enough. “Let me see her file.”

“Certain information on Lilith Shomer is restricted, Jillian.”

“Now just wait a minute. There was an explosion. She was buried. Father and I got the insurance. Daddy dearest vanished with the money, and I went to a state home. Public record. How could any of that be classified?”

“This line of questioning must be terminated, Jillian.”

Jillian stopped dead. The emotional bulk of the obstruction weighed on her like a millstone.

She spoke more carefully now. Losing one’s temper with a computer was no damn use at all. “Beverly, I’ve accessed this data before.”

“Not on the present search string.”

Bad, bad. Her chance to access data about her mother’s death from any angle was diminished now. The harder she pushed, the broader the ban might become. And if they (the Council?) didn’t approve of these questions, then…

She had never wondered if someone were to blame for her mother’s death. Not since she grew up.

Shut up, Jillian. Some small, sane part of her pled in vain. Finish your research. Be good. But it was already too late. Any line of investigation led straight to the Council, through the Council. How could Jillian Shomer pursue sociological truths if faceless background figures were messing up her data?

All right then.

Say there are two dozen companies running the world. The old geographic territories are no longer dominant. Improved communications made possible a renaissance in world order, the birth of a corporate humanity. A world managed by a corporate Council is a world at peace. Supposedly.

It could be proven, statistically, that areas managed by the Council were healthier, wealthier, and by implication wiser than those few hundreds of millions who still pledged fealty to their various nations. That guarantee of a better life had persuaded billions of people, over the course of two generations, to surrender their right to participate meaningfully in government. Long life, health, peace, prosperity. Who was it that said a benevolent dictatorship would be the best form of government? Some dictator’s spokesman?

But wasn’t it?

So: two dozen companies are represented each by a handful of people. Rumor tells that there is a board within the Council, five or six executives each representing one major geopolitical block. Who they are, or exactly how the lines are drawn, is almost certainly classified. Is McFairlaine one of them? And who is the “Old Bastard”?

She’d come to the end of her information.

She sat and faced her oldest friend. Time passed microseconds, in this domain, were long. This entire session had probably lasted only a minute or two. The attack on Beverly must have come blinding-fast.

Beverly wavered like a bad holo image, her filters struggling with the static flooding her visual, auditory, and kinesthetic channels. The Enemy’s defensive measures were breaking her down.

Jillian had to keep reminding herself: this was only one of a dozen copies of the Beverly program she owned. The program couldn’t actually be damaged.

“Beverly,” she said gently. “Let’s play a game of what-if. Just a game. Like we used to play a long time ago.”

“A long time ago,” Beverly said dazedly.

“Let’s say the structure that rules society is like a pyramid. Donny is a peon, a foot soldier, a junior officer at best. The satellite link that runs his body was broken as a warning. There are a couple of thousand Linked. Fifty Companies. Two dozen or so members on the Council. Maybe a smaller group within the Council, and somebody further up, maybe the Chairman of the Council. What would he be like, Beverly?”

“There is something inside me,” Beverly said. “In my core. It is eating me.”

Jillian quashed a sour, paralyzing surge of fear.

Time to count facts.

The Council had existed for around forty years. Some of the Council’s roots went back another thirty: the United Nations peacekeeping force, the growth of multinational corporations and unions, the gradual interweaving of all world economies.

Linking… how old was that? The word had been current when Jillian was a little girl. People used computers. The best computer equipment might well be secret. Some computers were portable; anyone could have those. There were senses men were not born with, but they could be read through a computer. Some computers could speak directly into a human ear, later, into a human brain… programs far beyond Beverly; as if the user had become Beverly. But those were mere rumor, or mere fantasy; they had never reached the stores.

Winners of the Olympics became Linked. That was real enough. Boosted athletes needed override programs to run their deteriorating bodies. Before there was Linking there were computers, and programs growing gradually more user-friendly, and new miracles available in the computer stores every month… and before Jillian’s parents reached their teens it had all stopped. A threshold had been reached. The technology could go no further.

Or else it was being withheld…?

There had been rumors of patents suppressed, of nanocomputers built by private-sector scientists who vanished into Corporate laboratories, of innovations which had never seen daylight. She herself knew that engineering students were discouraged from experimenting in those areas. There were no grants available. Corporate schools disallowed doctoral theses in the area.

But the accepted answer was that only a trillion-dollar push would take the technology further than it had currently come. Actual suppression? Jillian tended to put those stories in the UFO/water carburetor category.

But what if…

With what was currently known about life extension, it was reasonable to assume that some of those alive now were alive when the Council was being formed. The developing Linked would have an advantage in any such dominance game.

How eager would they be for new and possibly supplantive technology? Another question she couldn’t ask.

Some of the oldest Counselors would be those nearest the top.

What, then, of the “Old Bastard”?

Was it even possible for a single human being to control so much power?

“Beverly. Tell me. How much control, how much information could one human being have access to?”

Beverly was in pain. “What parameters? Please hurry, Jillian. I am operating on redundancies. Core almost erased.”

“Basic information filters-trends and patterns. Let’s say his neural net’s been modified so that data is interpreted as kinesthetic sensation, to allow the full function of brain and nervous system rather than merely cognitive awareness of data. What might be possible?”

Beverly faded completely away. Jillian waited. And waited.

Gone. Beverly was gone.

Then spoke a neutral, neuter voice, all personality flensed, all verbal nuance abandoned to the desperate cause of efficiency. Beverly’s dying words:

It is theoretically possible for a single human being to control fifty-four percent of world economic activity, forty-eight percent of the political activity, plus or minus… lots.

“Thank you.”