Spin State - Chris Moriarty [39]
For the rest of Li’s life, the fight against the Syndicates dominated human politics. The breakaway constructs created the first fully syndicated genelines. KnowlesSyndicate was born, and then Motai and Bartov and the half dozen others whose names soon became words of fear throughout UN space. The Syndicates annexed one restless colony after another, until they held the whole long arc of the Periphery between Metz and Gilead. Antigenetic sentiment gained ground in the Assembly and on the streets of every UN planet. The word construct took on a new and sinister meaning, while the corporations that built the original constructs either closed up shop and abandoned them or went bankrupt in the spate of scandals that followed the breakaway. And every time another ex-colony went over to the Syndicates the UN’s antigenetic faction gained a few seats in the Assembly.
The Assembly passed the Zahn Act when Li was fourteen, placing all full genetics in UN space under direct Security Council supervision, barring them from the civil service and the military, revoking passports and imposing mandatory registration.
Li’s adoptive parents delayed, hoping the massive destruction of records during the Riots might mean she’d been forgotten. The delay paid off. By the time the registration bureaucracy caught up with them, Li’s mother had a signed and stamped death certificate that said her only daughter had died of vitamin A deficiency—and Li was already making a name for herself in the trenches of Gilead.
Meanwhile the Syndicates did . . . well, no one knew what they did. No subject of the Syndicates came to UN space. No UN citizen went to the Syndicates. No news escaped from the orbital stations that circled the remote Syndicate homeworlds. The Syndicates had no press and no visible government, unless you counted the shadowy point committees of the individual genelines. They had no political parties or political dissidents. No parents. No children. And, above all, no property.
Only the Syndicates owned things, and the things they owned were their constructs. They owned their minds, their bodies, their labor, everything. Each construct gave him- or herself completely, intimately—and, if the propaganda was to be believed, willingly. It was not enough to say that they didn’t want freedom. They didn’t believe in freedom. They had, as their political philosophers were endlessly proclaiming, evolved beyond it.
Only when Li met her first postbreakaway constructs in the interrogation rooms on Gilead did she begin to understand this. They seemed to belong to some other species, one that had nothing to do with humans. The first ten identical prisoners came in, and people commented on them, wondered about them, perhaps even felt sorry for them. Then the next hundred, the next thousand, the next three thousand arrived, and the wondering turned to fear and revulsion. Words failed in the face of such cold, impersonal, mass-produced perfection. Compassion failed. Belief in the universality of human nature failed. Everything failed.
By the time Li had spent a month on Gilead the only thing she knew for certain about her enemies was that they hated her. No. Hate wasn’t the right word. They despised her, just like they despised every construct who still worked for humans. They despised her the way wolves despise dogs.
And what about Sharifi? What about the woman who had left so little of herself in this room, who had brought an entire mine down on her head, who had promised to work miracles, then covered her tracks like a thief? What did Sharifi believe in?
Was she a dog or a wolf?
Li sighed,