“I’m here,” Tam said, “because I don’t want to die. The same reason all these people are here. It’s just they’re all scientists and they dress it up in high-toned bullshit about universal access to the fruits of the human intellect and other crap. When I got here, I couldn’t believe the groupthink. These people need someone to give them a reality check.”
“Lucky they have you,” Iceweasel said, without managing to keep the sarcasm out.
“They are, actually. But now they’ve got this, all bets are off. Your girlfriend is going to lead the charge to give those two mercs cold sleep. Why not? If you can ‘upload’ them first”—she made finger quotes—“what’s the harm if they end up vegetables? This is save-game for wannabe Frankensteins.”
Iceweasel decided she didn’t like Tam. “What do you want from me?”
“Once the campuses got bombed, everyone nontechnical left the campus, except me. That made me the only person who hadn’t been indoctrinated by science-ism. Now there are two of us. If those two mercs in there are enemy soldiers, we can execute them. If they’re not, we can let them go. But stealing their minds and then performing medical experiments on their bodies is not an act of mercy, and you and I are the only people in this place who are cognitively equipped to debullshitify their dumb-ass consensus that the thing that happens to be most convenient is also the most moral.”
“Could we do this at another time? I’m—” She broke off and scrubbed her eyes. “We’re about to bug out, which is what you want, right? This fight of yours, it’s not mine. I’ve heard your opinion and I don’t know if I’m convinced—”
“That’s because not being convinced lets you do the easiest thing—not fighting with all these nice people who are your friends and have let you do fun, rewarding work playing nanny to a post-human upload. Probably the most meaningful thing that could happen to someone from your background. No offense.”
Back in default, Iceweasel was a ninja master at telling people to go fuck themselves. Her years in walkaway had destroyed her skill set. It was the fear of seeming stuck up, the sense of being an outsider. “I don’t want to have more of this conversation, thank you, good-bye.”
“You had a chance. Remember that when they call you a war criminal.”
[vi]
Tam was right about the mercs. The news that Dis was running—the fact that you could wander up to any screen and converse with her—settled any question about the mercs. When word got around that they would be sedated, uploaded, and deadheaded, she got a sick feeling. But she made herself attend. They converted the cavern to an operating theater. Iceweasel realized the coffin-like machines she’d ignored since her arrival were brain-imagers. She watched the comatose Walkaway U crew get inserted into their maws. Sita whispered a commentary about interpolating simultaneous scans, their clever noise-reduction, the de-duping process that made storing and modeling it manageable. Iceweasel was annoyed by, and grateful for, the distraction.
Deadheading was easier than she’d expected, taps fitted to their IVs, the infographics showed their metabolisms spinning down until it was barely distinguishable from death.
That’s what the fuss is about. But these two were their crew, comatose, no prospect of recovery. The mercs—she hadn’t learned their names, though she thought CC had, because he was thorough—were capable of walking out on their own. Could it be worse to put them into suspended animation than to kill them? What kind of fucked-up ethics put execution on a higher moral plane than pausing-out someone’s life?
The low ceiling was claustrophobic. All the people crammed in together. Some of them are spies. It was only logical. Some of them think I’m a spy. Also logical.
Underground living left her in a state of drifting unreality and unmoored circadians. She had probably missed sleep. Or slept too much. She was often surprised to discover that she was gnawingly hungry, sure she had just eaten.
The mercs waited on their hospital beds, infographics regular. They’d been unshrink-wrapped and sluiced clean of shit, tucked under white sheets. They were deep under, the kind of general anesthetic trusted by paranoid WU survivors. They scanned the man first. It was fast. They wheeled over the woman, the one who’d spoken. The one who’d told them to get it over with.
She had parents. People who loved her. Every human was a hyper-dense node of intense emotional and material investment. Speaking meant someone had spent thousands of hours cooing to you. Those lean muscles, the ringing tone of command—their inputs were from all over the world, carefully administered. The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.
She felt vertigo. What business had the walkaways thinking they’d just wing it when it came to civilization? The zottas weren’t anyone’s friend, but they had an interest in the continuation of the civilization whose apex they occupied. These scientists, weirdos, and jobless slackers weren’t qualified to run a planet. They were proud of their lack of qualifications. It was plausible when they were harvesting feedstock and putting up buildings and cooking for each other. Now they were putting a stranger’s body into a machine that was supposed to record her mind, and they were going to bring her body to the brink of death. They did it without law, without authority, without regulation or permit. They were winging it.
The room tilted. She stepped back. Gretyl caught her. She’d subliminally known Gretyl was there, smelled her familiar smell, sensed her bulk. Gretyl’s big arms went around her waist and she surrendered, leaning back into her bosom. Gretyl’s face was at the place where her throat became her shoulder, breath passing through the pores of the long-wearing refu-suit she’d put on when she left on her rescue mission. She rinsed it out when she remembered, but it hardly needed it. The breath warmed her.
“You don’t need to watch this.”
Yes I do, she thought. Now CC prepared to deadhead the mercs, holding up the vial he would administer to the lab cameras, fitting it to the IV feed, squeezing the valve to start the flow. All actions he’d performed moments before on comatose members of their crew, but different. This was a Rubicon they crossed for all walkaway. When this became public knowledge, the world would change for everyone they knew. She was there, and she did nothing to stop it. Would anyone?
Tam watched raptly. Her expression reminded Iceweasel of the intense concentration of trying to attain an elusive orgasm. It was sexual, a mixture of recklessness and transcendence. Transcendence, that was it. Other adventurers had dabbled, fretted about venturing into the jealous realm of the gods, but walkaways fearlessly burst from mortal into mythical.