Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"The next five days, maybe…" He was so very tired.

"I know what I'm doing, Killjoy. Trust me on this."

Desjardins managed a feeble laugh. "People keep saying that."

"Maybe. But I mean it." She drew him to his feet. "Besides, I have something to tell you."

He couldn't bring himself to enter the Pile, after all; too many ambient ears, and discretion prevailed even without Guilt Trip. For that matter, even walking under the open sky made him a bit queasy. The heavens had eyes.

They walked, letting chance choose the course. Intermittent beds of kudzu 4lined their path; the filamentous blades of windmills turned slowly overhead on the tops of buildings, along pedestrian concourses, anywhere that a bit of fetch could insinuate itself into the local architecture. Alice Jovellanos took all of it in without a word: Lubin, Rowan, Guilt Trip. Autonomy thrust upon the unwilling.

"Are you sure?" she asked at last. A streetlight flickered on overhead. "Maybe he was lying. He lied about Rowan, after all."

"Not about this, Alice. Believe me. He had his hand around my throat and I just sang , I told him stuff the Trip would never 've let out."

"That's not what I mean. I believe you're Trip-free, for sure. I just don't believe that Lubin had anything to do with it."

"What?"

"I think he just found out about it, after the fact," Jovellanos continued, "and he used it to his own advantage. I don't know what was in those derms he was giving you, but I'd bet a year's worth of Mandelbrot's kibble that you could walk past those bloodhounds right now and they wouldn't even twitch."

"Yeah? And if you were in my shoes, do you think you'd be quite so optimistic?"

"I'd guarantee it."

"Fuck, Alice, this is serious ."

"I know, Killjoy. I'm serious."

"But if Lubin didn't do it to me, then who—"

Her face was fading in the twilight, like the smile of a Cheshire cat.

" Alice ?" he said.

"Hey." She shrugged. "You always knew my politics were a bit radical."

" Fuck , Alice." Desjardins put his head in his hands. "How could you?"

"It was easier than you might think. Just build a Trip analog with an extra side-group—"

"That's not what I mean. You know what I mean."

She stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

"Listen, Killjoy. You've got ten times the brains of those felchers, and you let them turn you into a puppet."

"I'm not a puppet."

"Not any more, anyway."

"I never was ."

"Sure you were. Just like Lubin."

"I'm nothing like—"

"They turned you into one big reflex arc, my man. Took all that gray matter and hammered it into pure hardwired instinct, through and through."

"Fuck you. You know that isn't true."

She put her hand on Desjardins's shoulder. "Look, I don't blame you for being in denial about—"

He shrugged it off. " I'm not in denial! You think instinct and reflex can handle the decisions I have to make, every hour I'm on the job? You think weighting a thousand variables on the fly doesn't require a certain degree of autonomy? Jesus Christ, I—"

— I may be a slave, but I'm not a robot . He caught it at the back of his throat; no sense giving her any more ammunition than she already had.

"We gave you back your life, man," Jovellanos said softly.

"We?"

"There's a few of us. We're kind of political, in a ragtag sorta way."

"Oh Christ." Desjardins shook his head. "Did you even ask me if I wanted this?"

"You would've said no. Guilt Trip would've made you. That's the whole point."

"And just maybe I'd've said no anyway , did you ever stop to think of that? I can kill a half-million people before lunchtime; you don't think it's a good idea to have safeguards in place? Maybe you remember the buzz on absolute power ?"

"Sure," Jovellanos said. "Every time I see a Lertzman or a Rowan."

" I don't care about Lertzman or fucking Rowan! You did this to me !"

"I did it for you, Achilles."

He glanced up, startled. "What did you call me?"

"Achilles."

" Jesus. "

"Listen, you're safe. The hounds will find Trip in your blood like they always have. That's the beauty of it, Spartacus doesn't touch the Trip. It just blocks the receptors."

"Spartacus? That's what you call it?"

Jovellanos nodded.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Look it up. The point is—"

"And why now , of all times?" Desjardins threw his hands in the air. "If you were going to do this to me you couldn't have picked a worse time if you tried ."

She shook her head. "Killjoy, you're up at bat and the whole world's hanging in the balance. If you ever needed a clear head, now's the time. You can't afford to be chained to any corpse agenda. Nobody can afford it."

He glared at her. "You are such a fucking hypocrite, Alice. You infected me. You didn't ask, you didn't even tell , you just stuck me with some bug that could get me thrown out of my job, or worse—"

She raised her hands, as if to ward off his words. "Achilles, I—"

"Yeah, yeah, you did it for me. What an altruist. Ramming Spartacus Brand Home-Cooked Autonomy down my throat whether I like it or not. I'm your friend, Alice! Why did you do this? "

She stared at him for a moment in the fading light.

"You don't know?" she said at last, in a cold angry voice. "The goddamned boy genius doesn't have a clue? Why don't you do a path analysis or something to find out?"

She spun on her heel and walked away.

"Achilles, you can be such a raging idiot sometimes I just don't believe it.

"You know what I was risking, coming clean with you yesterday. You know what I'm risking sending this to you now —it'll autowipe, but there's nothing these assholes can't scan if they feel like it. That's part of the problem, that's why I'm taking this huge risk in the first place.

"I'm sorry I stomped off like that. Things just weren't going like I hoped, you know? But I do have some answers for you if you'll just hear me out, okay? Just—hear me out.

"I heard what you said about trust and betrayal, and maybe some of it rings a bit more true than I'd like. But don't you see there was no point in asking you beforehand? As long as Guilt Trip was running the show, you were incapable of making your own decision. You keep insisting that's wrong, you go on about all the life-and-death decisions you make and the thousands of variables you juggle, but Achilles my dear, whoever told you that free will was just some complicated algorithm for you to follow?

"Look at bumblebees dancing some time. You wouldn't believe the stuff they talk about. Solar elevation, topographic cues, time-stamps—they write roadmaps to the best food sources, scaled to the centimeter, and they do it all with a few butt-wiggles. Does that make them free agents? Why do you think we call them drones?

"Look at the physics of a spider spinning its web. Hell, look at a dog catching a ball—that's ballistic math, my man. The world's full of dumb animals who act as though they're juggling third-order differentials in their heads and it's all just instinct , man. It's not freedom. It's not even intelligence. And you stand there and tell me you're autonomous just because you can follow a decision tree with a few dozen variables?

"I know you don't want to be corrupted. But maybe a decent, honest human being is his own safeguard, did you ever think of that? Maybe you don't have to let them turn you into one big conditioned reflex. Maybe you just want them to, because then it's not really your responsibility, is it? It's so easy never to have to make your own decisions. Addictive, even. Maybe you even got hooked on it, and you're going through a little bit of withdrawal now.