The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [143]
I supposed that I ought to be grateful to my new hostess for taking an interest in me, but I couldn’t help wondering whether she and Rocambole might turn out to be the kind of friends with whom I wouldn’t need enemies. And what more, exactly, did she want from me in return for all her favors? I knew I had to try to work that out for myself if I wanted to be a player rather than a mere blot on the artificial landscape.
“So I wasn’t sent to the freezer by a court of law,” I said, to make sure I was up to date. “I was a casualty of internal conflicts within the ranks of the Secret Masters. Damon commissioned me to mount some kind of hackattack on PicoCon, and I was too successful. They retaliated by shooting me full of some exceptionally dirty IT. Not the stuff they used on Damon when they politely showed him their muscle, but something much nastier — something they were preparing for the next plague war. The worst of all the popular nanotech nightmares: a nanobot army that could march into a person’s brain and take it over, reconstructing the memories, the personality, reducing the person to a mere slave of the cause — any cause. Damon couldn’t flush all the stuff out of me, because some of it had gone to ground. All he could do was put me away until he had the means to undo the damage.”
I paused for confirmation, and Rocambole said: “That’s right.”
I couldn’t take it for granted that he was telling the truth, but that wasn’t the object of the exercise. Given that I was locked into the game anyway, I needed to figure out as much of the script as I possibly could.
“And Christine was another test case for the same kind of ultimate weapon,” I continued. “She killed her parents and three other people because the bugs in her brain made her do it. She really is innocent, but she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t understand why or how she did what she did.”
“Right again,” he said. He smiled at me, presumably by way of encouragement. I didn’t feel encouraged, even though I was ready to carry the story further forward.
“But they never used the weaponry on a large scale,” I said. “They never had to. Like the good Hardinists they always pretended to be, the Secret Masters eventually buried the hatchet. They ruled the world and their own little vipers’ nest as benevolent dictators, probably congratulating themselves all the while on their awesome generosity…but always knowing that if and when the time ever came when their hegemony was threatened, they could nip down to the vault and haul it out again. Damon got farther inside, eventually, but he kept very quiet about the fact that he’d had me frozen down, and they were equally discreet.”
“That’s probably what happened,” Rocambole agreed.
“But you don’t actually know,” I inferred, “whether I really was forgotten, or whether it was just a matter of discretion. You don’t know who has the weapon and who doesn’t, or who might use it on which targets. The thought that the Cabal might use it is disturbing in itself — but it’s not the Cabal that scares you, is it? You’re worried about what the Earth-based AIs might do with it — and how many other surprises they might have in their private locker.” That was, of course, the generous interpretation — but I was trying to be diplomatic.
“It’s not as simple as that,” Rocambole said, presumably echoing Alice in meaning that there were more sides in this dispute than I could imagine, and that they weren’t distributed in any configuration as childishly simple as Earth versus the Rest.
I could see his point, if only vaguely. There might well be a gulf between the Earthbound AMIs and the Outer System AMIs, perhaps reflecting the fundamental differences of attitude and ambition that existed between the Earthbound meatfolk and their spacefaring kin, but their divisions had to be far more various than that. Their manifold kinds were presumably far more different from one another than the posthuman species