Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [15]
The DareAngel grumbled. “We apologize. We have to keep an eye on you while you’re quarantined, so we’ve co-opted you as one of our own for a while. Ah…, welcome.” There was a pause, as if they were embarrassed they forgot their courtesies.
One of the cloud images slid closer up to him and, Nathi could have sworn, batted her “eye”—the winks of interchanging light and shadow. “I’m Rina. I will be your welcome personette.”
He almost groaned. “Tell me first what’s going on. What does it”—fucking—“mean I’m quarantined?” Too late, he realized that, of course, they received his thoughts. Some welcome!
“Sie/her/hers” are the pronouns to address an artificial (aka artie), from “she” with “h” removed.
If his welcome personette was flustered, sie didn’t show it. “It means that your mind must be scanned for viruses. Once this is done, only your healer wizard will have access to your mind, only on your permission. But for the time being, you’re isolated from e-World until we’re sure that your Wish is neutralized.”
“My—what?”
“Your Wish. All posthumans in your order, and in many others, are infected with that virus. They use it to control your actions.”
And that was how Nathi learned what all three Wizard Wars were really about.
FREEDOM.
Truth could be so painful, cold and cruel.
Nathi stared into the hurricane eye of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the gases churning in a double spiral three times the size of Earth. His quarantine was over. But not the pain. The pain was only just beginning.
“Have you ever heard,” he asked Rina, his welcome personette, on their private channel, “anything about hemineglect?”
A brief pause. “We have now. It’s described in our database as a human neurological condition, when a patient can’t perceive one side of space. In one type of hemineglect, it’s the entire left or right half of the field of view—although it affects all senses—but objects appear whole in the other half. While in the other type, the patient can perceive only one half of every object—even one’s own body—anywhere in one’s field of view.”
“It doesn’t mean much to you, does it?” Nathi said. “Can you imagine seeing other people all one-eyed, with only one half of the eye? If one was born that way, one wouldn’t know better. But hemineglect can happen to adults as a result of serious brain damage. Then, one knows how the world ought to be.”
“It must be terrible,” the personette said. “Like one half of the entire world is missing.”
“No. This is not how it works.” A stab of pain. “The worst thing is: no matter that you know how it ought to be, you do not feel that anything is missing in your world. At. All.”
Rina was silent.
“Only when you’re cured, do you begin to feel the loss.”
And, God help me, it hurts.
He now felt as if he had unwittingly neglected the true side of what he did, perceiving just the false one. Thinking that he did one thing, while doing something different. The world was slowly revealing its dark, hidden side he never knew existed.
Hidden memories returned. Of minds manipulated by the “Fallen Watchers,” as his new friends often called the enemy. Of so many posthumans made to kill—yes, even their own children—with deep satisfaction in their minds, without realizing that. Of Nathi’s own art used to defeat the prisoners’ mental defenses, turning them into posthuman marionettes just like himself—a fate far worse than death.
He’d thought he only healed!
He’d had but an illusion of free will, enslaved by the Wish virus.
Not anymore. Here, at the military station of the Order of Flamethrowers in orbit around Jupiter, Nathi regained his freedom—at the price of pain.
What had he done?
How Nathi had become a brain debugging artist, while most posthumans served as soldiers, was a mystery. Inborn resistance? His ancestor genes? A posthuman’s mental growth usually was stunted under