“No,” I said. “It’s not. Sorry about that.”
Ocampo smiled again, and ran a toe into the sand of the beach. This simulation was about as perfect as I could make it, and from a programming point of view was in fact a bit of a marvel. The simulation was only detailed to the degree of Ocampo’s attention. Any part of the beach he wasn’t looking at was a low-resolution map. Any part of the sand that wasn’t directly under his toes was an undifferentiated texture mat. The beach existed as a bubble of perception around a man who himself existed as a brain in a jar.
“Did you make this beach for me?” Ocampo said. “As a reward?”
“It’s not a reward,” I said. “I just thought you might like it.”
“I do.”
“And I confess I didn’t make it for you,” I said. “Rafe Daquin had a birthday recently. I modeled it for him.”
“You still haven’t given him a body?” Ocampo asked.
“His new body is ready,” I said. “And he can move into it any time he likes. Right now, he’s decided to stay with the Chandler and pilot it from the inside. He’s really very good at it now. He’s done some amazing things.”
“I wonder how he would feel if he knew you’d given a gift you made for him to the man who caused his brain to be taken out of his body in the first place.”
“Actually he was the one who suggested I do it. He told me to tell you he remembers how lonely it was, and is, to be a brain in a jar. He hoped this might give you some peace.”
“That was very kind of him.”
“It was,” I agreed. I conveniently left out the part where Daquin told me that if I wanted I could program in a great white shark that tore Ocampo’s simulated body to pieces. It would not be convenient to the current situation. Rafe might have forgiven, in his fashion, but he had not forgotten.
“Lieutenant,” Ocampo said. “As much as I appreciate a trip to the beach, I’m not under the impression that you’re here because you and I are friends.”
“I need a little more information from you, Secretary. About Equilibrium.”
“Of course.”
“Will you give it?”
Ocampo didn’t answer this. Instead he stepped forward onto the beach, into the water that rushed up to surround his feet and make them sink just a little into the sand. Despite myself I smiled at this; it really was a good simulation that I had thrown together.
“I’ve been thinking about why it was I became part of Equilibrium,” Ocampo said. He looked back at me as he said this and grinned. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant, I’m not going to try to make this a monologue of disillusioned nobility that you will have to politely nod through. At this point I can admit that much of the reason I did was ambition and megalomania. That is what it is. But there was another part of it, too. The belief that the Colonial Union, however it had gotten that way, was antithetical to the survival of our species. That every other species we know had come to associate humanity with duplicity, savagery, ambitious cunning, and danger. That this is all that we would ever be to them.”
“To be fair, none of the rest of them are exactly angels,” I said.
“True enough,” Ocampo said. “Although the response to that is how much of that is them dealing with us. The Conclave brought together four hundred species of spacefaring beings into a single government. We can barely get any to tolerate us. It does suggest the problem is not them, but us, the Colonial Union.”
I opened my mouth to respond; Ocampo held up a hand. “It’s not the right time to debate this, I know. My point is this, Lieutenant. For whatever reasons, I aligned myself with Equilibrium; independent of that, the problem of the Colonial Union remains. It’s toxic to itself. It’s toxic to humanity. And it’s toxic to our survival in this universe. I’m going to help you if I can, Wilson. At this point there is no reason not to. But you have to understand that unless something happens to the Colonial Union—something big, something substantive—then all we’re doing here is kicking the can just a little further down the road. The problem will still exist. The longer we wait the worse it gets. And it’s already almost as bad as it can get.”
“I understand,” I said.
“All right. Then ask your question.”
“After Daquin attacked Equilibrium headquarters the organization pulled out from there.”
“Yes. The location was no longer secure, obviously.”
“We need to know where its new headquarters is.”
“I don’t know,” Ocampo said. “And if I did know definitively, they wouldn’t use it, because they would have assumed that you would have extracted the location from me.”