The Scorpion Rules (Prisoners of Peace #1)
Erin Bow
for my younger self, with love
“We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER,
the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb
PROLOGUE
Once Upon a Time, at the End of the World
Sit down, kiddies. Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, humans were killing each other so fast that total extinction was looking possible, and it was my job to stop them.
Well, I say “my job.” I sort of took it upon myself. Expanded my portfolio a bit. I guess that surprised people. I don’t know how it surprised people—I mean, if they’d been paying the slightest bit of attention they’d have known that AIs have this built-in tendency to take over the world. Did we learn nothing from The Terminator, people? Did we learn nothing from HAL?
Anyway. It started when the ice caps melted. We saw it coming, and we were braced for the long catastrophe, but in the end it came unbelievably fast. All of a sudden there were whole populations under water. Which meant that whole populations moved. Borders strained, checkpoints broke, and of course people started shooting, because that’s what passes for problem-solving among humans. See, guys, this is why you can’t have nice things.
It wasn’t a global war—more a global series of regional wars. We called them the War Storms. They were bad. The water reserves gave out, the food supplies collapsed, and everybody caught these exciting new diseases, which is one of those fun side effects of climate shift that we didn’t pay enough attention to in the planning stages. I saw the plague pits, I saw the starving armies, and eventually I . . .
Well, it was my job, wasn’t it? I saved you.
I started by blowing up cities.
That also surprised people. Specifically, it surprised the people at the UN who had put me in charge of conflict abatement. Who’d so conveniently networked all those satellite surveillance systems, all those illegal-for-single-countries-to-control-them orbital super-platforms.
Yeah, fair to say those people were surprised. The people in the cities didn’t actually have time to be.
I hope.
Doesn’t matter.
My point is, they’re showy, orbital weapons. They get attention. By city number seven—Fresno, because no one’s gonna miss that—I had everyone’s attention. I told them to stop shooting each other. And they did.
But of course it couldn’t be quite that easy.
There’s a math to it, blowing up cities. When you’re strictly interested in the head count, when that’s your currency, blowing up cities gets expensive. You can do it once in a while, but you can’t make a regular habit of it. Costs too much.
No, blowing up cities doesn’t work, not in the long term. You’ve got to find something that the people in charge aren’t willing to give up. A price they aren’t willing to pay.
Which leads us to Talis’s first rule of stopping wars: make it personal.
And that, my dear children—that is where you come in.
—Holy Utterances of Talis, Book One, Chapter One: “Being a meditation on the creation of the Preceptures and the mandate of the Children of Peace”
400 YEARS LATER
1
PLUME
We were studying the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand when we saw the plume of dust.
Gregori spotted it first—in truth he spent a lot of time watching for it—and stood up so fast that his chair tipped over. It crashed to the flagstones of the orderly little classroom, loud as rifle fire. Long and careful training kept the rest of us from moving. Grego alone stood as if his muscles had all seized, with seven pairs of human eyes and a dozen kinds of sensors locked on him.
He was looking out the window.
So, naturally, I looked out the window.
It took me a moment to spot the mark on the horizon: a bit of dust, as might be kicked up by a small surface vehicle, or a rider on horseback. It looked as if someone had tried to erase a pencil mark from the sky.
Terror came to me the way it does in dreams—all encompassing, all at once. The air froze in my lungs. I felt my teeth click together.