“And his motivations,” Szilard said. “Not knowing those is the most dangerous thing for us.”
“I’m more worried about what he knows,” Mattson said. “Even with just what’s naturally in his head, that’s still too much. I have teams pulled off their own projects to work on updating BrainPal security. Whatever Boutin does know we’re going to make obsolete. And Robbins here is in charge of combing through the data Boutin left behind. If there’s anything in there, we’ll find it.”
“I’ll be meeting with Boutin’s former tech after we’re done here,” Robbins said. “Lieutenant Harry Wilson. He says he has something I might find interesting.”
“Don’t let us hold you up,” Mattson said. “You’re dismissed.”
“Thank you, sir,” Robbins said. “Before I go, I’d like to know what sort of time constraint we’re working under here. We found out about Boutin by attacking that base. No doubt the Eneshans know we know about their plans. I’d like to know how much time we think we have before a retaliation.”
“You have some time, Colonel,” Szilard said. “Nobody knows we attacked that base.”
“How can they not know?” Robbins said. “With all due respect to Special Forces, General, it’s difficult to hide that sort of assault. “
“The Eneshans know they’ve lost contact with the base,” Szilard said. “When they investigate, what they’re going to find is that a rocky chunk of comet the size of a football field hit the planet about ten klicks from the base, obliterating it and everything else in the immediate area. They can run all the tests they want; nothing will show anything but evidence of a natural catastrophe. Because that’s what it was. It just had a little help.”
“This is very pretty,” Colonel Robbins said, gesturing at what looked like a miniature light show on Lieutenant Harry Wilson’s holographic display. “But I don’t know what you’re showing me here.”
“It’s Charlie Boutin’s soul,” Wilson said.
Robbins pulled himself away from the display and looked up at Wilson. “I beg your pardon,” he said.
Wilson nodded toward the display. “It’s Charlie’s soul,” he repeated. “Or more accurately, it’s a holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness of Charles Boutin. Or a copy of it, anyway. I suppose if you want to be philosophical about it, you could argue whether this is Charlie’s mind or his soul. But if what you say about Charlie is true, he’s probably still got his wits about him, but I’d say he’s lost his soul. And here it is.”
“I was told this sort of thing is impossible,” Robbins said. “Without the brain the pattern collapses. It’s why we transfer consciousness the way we do, live body to live body.”
“Well, I don’t know that it’s why we transfer consciousness the way we do,” Wilson said, “since I think people would be a lot more resistant to letting a CDF technician suck their mind out of their skull if they knew it was just going to sit in computerized storage. Would you do it?”
“Christ, no,” Robbins said. “I nearly wet myself as it was when they transferred me over.”
“My point exactly,” Wilson said. “Nevertheless, you’re right. Up until this”—he motioned at the hologram—“we couldn’t do it even if we wanted to.”
“So how did Boutin do it?” Robbins asked.
“He cheated, of course,” Wilson said. “Before a year and a half ago, Charlie and everyone else had to work with human-derived technology, or whatever technology we could borrow or steal from other races. And most other races in our part of space have more or less the same level of technology as we do, because weaker races get kicked off their land and die off or get killed. But there’s one species who is light-years ahead of everyone else in the neighborhood.”
“The Consu,” Robbins said, and pictured one in his mind: large, crab-like and almost unknowably advanced.
“Right,” said Wilson. “The Consu gave the Rraey some of their technology when the Rraey attacked our colony on Coral a couple years back, and we stole it from them when we counterattacked. I was part of the team assigned to reverse-engineer the Consu tech, and I can assure you that most of it we still don’t understand. But one of the bits we could get our brains around we gave to Charlie to work with, to improve the consciousness transfer process. That’s how I came to work with him; I taught him how to use this stuff. And as you can see, he’s a quick study. Of course, it’s easy to get things done when your tools improve. With this we went from banging rocks together to using a blowtorch.”