“You don’t. It’s like saying ‘This statement is false.’ It’s just a hole in logic,” Teresa said. “I mean . . . isn’t it?”
“Not if you play it more than once,” Colonel Ilich said. “You play it over and over and over for a really long time. Every time the other player defects, you defect the next time. And then you go back to cooperating. It’s called tit for tat. There’s a pure game theory analysis of it I can give you if you want, but you don’t need it for this.”
Teresa nodded, but slowly. Her head was thick, the way it got when she was thinking about something without quite being conscious of what it was. Usually something interesting came up shortly afterward. She liked the feeling.
“Think of it like you were training Muskrat back when she was a puppy,” Ilich said. “The puppy wets the rug, and you scold it. You don’t go on scolding it forever. Just once, when it happens, and then you go back to playing with it and petting it and treating it like a puppy. It defects, then you defect, then you go back to cooperating.”
“Until it figures out that there’s a better strategy,” Teresa said.
“And it changes its behavior. It’s the most basic, simplest way we can negotiate with something we can’t talk to. But what if you do the same thing with the tide? Punish the waves for getting the rug wet?”
Teresa scowled.
“Exactly,” Colonel Ilich said as if she’d spoken aloud. “If you scold the tide, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t learn. And most of all, it doesn’t change. Your father is going to play tit for tat with the force that killed the Romans. And we’re going to see if it changes its behavior. If it doesn’t, we’ll take the hypothesis that they ran up against a law of nature like gravity making tides or the speed of light. Then we can study it, and find ways around it. But if it changes . . .”
“Then we’ll know it’s alive.”
“That’s the difference between exploration and negotiating,” Colonel Ilich said, pointing at her. She felt the bloom of pleasure that she always got when she’d answered a knotty problem well, but something nagged at her.
“But it killed the Romans.”
“War’s a kind of negotiation too,” he said.
Teresa’s rooms were in the north wing of the State Building, as were her father’s. It was the only home she’d ever had. A bedroom built to military specifications, a private bathroom, and the room that had been her playroom and was now her office, the difference being mostly cosmetic. When she’d been ready to strip away the decorations of cartoon dinosaurs and puppies, she’d said so, and the next day a designer had come to help her choose a new color scheme and layout. Her corner of the State Building wasn’t large or ostentatious, but it was hers to customize and re-create. Her little bubble of autonomy.
She’d chosen to make the office look like a science station. Her desk was tall enough to stand at, but also had long-legged stools along the side if she chose to sit. The east wall was a single screen set to run animations of simple mathematical and geometrical proofs when she wasn’t watching a news or entertainment feed. It wasn’t that she understood all the math, but she thought it was pretty. There was an elegance to the proofs, and having them there made her more aware of her intelligence. She liked being aware of her intelligence.
But she also had a couch long enough that she could lie down on it and still have room for Muskrat, her Labrador, to curl up at her feet. And a real glass window that looked out over a ceremonial garden. There were whole days when, if she wasn’t with Colonel Ilich or in class, she’d curl up on the couch with Muskrat and read books or watch films for hours at a time. She had access to everything the censors approved—her father was very liberal about giving her access to literature and film—and she gravitated to stories about girls who lived alone in castles or palaces or temples. For such a specific genre, it turned out there were quite a few.
Her present favorite was a ten-hour feed made on Mars back before the gates opened called The Fifth Tunnel. In it, the hero—who, at twelve, was now younger than Teresa, but had been older when she first watched it—discovered a secret tunnel under a city called Innis Deep and followed it to a whole buried community with elves and fairies who needed help getting back to their dimension.
It all seemed wildly exotic, and the idea of a girl who lived her whole life underground captured her imagination so much that she’d put a blanket over her windows and pretended that the darkness was made of Martian dirt. When her father told her that part was true—that there was an Innis Deep and that Martian children did live in tunnels and buried cities—and that only the elves and fairies were inventions, it had astounded her.
She was watching it again when her father came by. She’d just gotten to the part where the girl—whose name was never mentioned—was running through a dark hallway with the evil fairy called Pinsleep chasing her, when the knock came. She was just getting up to answer it when the door opened. Only her father opened the door. Everyone else made her get it.
The treatments had changed him over the last few years, but just growing up had changed her. It didn’t seem weird. His eyes had developed more of their oil-on-water shimmer in the whites and his fingernails had gone darker at the cuticles, but that was all just looks. In every way that mattered, he was the same.
“Am I interrupting?” he asked, the way he always did. It was half a joke, because she didn’t have anything to interrupt, but only half. If she’d ever said yes, he would have let her be.
The nameless girl shrieked as Pinsleep lunged for her. Teresa paused the feed, and prey and predator both froze. Muskrat huffed, tail thumping against the couch as her father scratched the dog’s wide ears.
“I have a briefing in two hours,” he said. “I’d like you to attend.”
Teresa felt a little prick of annoyance. She’d meant to go out and visit Timothy as soon as the feed was done. If they’d found out she was leaving the grounds without permission . . .
“Did I do something wrong?”
Her father blinked, then laughed. Muskrat pushed her head up into his hand, demanding more attention. He went back to rubbing her ears. “No, not at all. It’s Admiral Waithe’s report on the expansion plan for Bara Gaon Complex. You aren’t expected to contribute, but I’d like you to listen. Then afterward, we can talk about it.”
Teresa nodded. If it was what he wanted, of course she could, but it sounded dull. And strange. Her father’s eyes went unfocused for a moment, the way they did sometimes, and then he shook his head like he was trying to clear it. He leaned against the arm of the couch, not quite sitting but not standing either. He tapped Muskrat’s side firmly twice in a way that meant petting time was over. The dog sighed and flopped her head down on the cushion.
“Something’s bothering you,” he said.
“You’ve been asking me to do this more often,” she said. “Am I doing it wrong?”
His laughter was warm, and it made her relax a little.
“When I was your age, I was pushing for early entrance to upper university. You’re like me. You learn fast, and I want to keep up with you. I’m bringing you in more because you’re old enough to understand things now that you weren’t able to when you were a child. And Colonel Ilich says that your studies are on track. Even advanced.”
She felt a little glimmer of pride in that, but also confusion. Her father sighed.
“It’s hard work, keeping people safe,” he said. “Part of that is that we’ve come up against very dangerous, unknown things. I can wish that weren’t the case, but I can’t take it back. And the other part is that we’re working with people.”
“And people are terrible, terrible monkeys,” Teresa said.
“Yes, we are,” her father said. “We have a very close horizon almost all the time. Including me. But I’m trying to get better.”
The way he said it, he sounded tired. She leaned forward, and Muskrat took it as a sign that she was looking for someone to pet. She shifted, breathing hot on Teresa’s face until she gently pushed the dog back.
“Is the Bara Gaon Complex expansion really important, then?” Teresa asked.
“Everything’s important. All of it,” her father said. “And so every part of it needs to be able to fail without destroying the whole project. Including me. Which is why I’ve been asking you to come to the briefings more often.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I’m fine,” her father said. “Everything’s fine. There isn’t a problem. It’s only that . . . if there were to be, sometime later. Decades from now. Someone would need to understand the shape of the whole plan, and be able to step in. And people trust what they already know. Having a new high consul would be difficult under any circumstances, but it would be less difficult if there were a story with it. A succession. I want to train you to be that, if—God forbid—something happened to me.”