'The obvious. In ten years, or a hundred, or a million, somebody else will come up with the idea. And they'll be squashed, too. But then in another ten or a million years, somebody else will come up with it. Sooner or later, somebody will threaten to use it. Or not even threaten. Just do it. Because they hate the world enough they want everything to die.'
There was another long silence. 'Well,' I said, 'that solves one mystery. People wonder where physical law comes from. I mean, supposedly, all the laws governing matter and energy had to be created with the pinprick that began the Diaspora. It seems impossible, or unnecessary.'
'So if Belda's right,' Amelia said, 'physical law was all in place. Twenty billion years ago, someone pushed the 'reset' button.'
'And some billions of years before that,' Belda said, 'someone had done it before. The universe only lasts long enough to evolve creatures like us.' She pointed a V of bony fingers at Amelia and me. 'People like you two.'
Well, it didn't really solve the first-cause mystery; sooner or later there had to be an actual first time.
'I wonder,' Reza said. 'Surely in all the millions of galaxies there are other races who've made this discovery. Thousands or millions of times. They evidently have all been psychologically incapable of doing it, destroying us all.'
'Evolved beyond it,' Asher said. 'A pity we haven't.' He swirled the ice in his whiskey. 'If Hitler had had the button in his bunker... or Caligula, Genghis Khan...'
'Hitler only missed the boat by a century,' Reza said. 'I guess we haven't evolved past the possibility of producing another one.'
'And won't,' Belda said. 'Aggression's a survival characteristic. It put us at the top of the food chain.'
'Cooperation did,' Amelia corrected. 'Aggression doesn't work against a saber-toothed tiger.'
'A combination, I'll grant you,' Belda said.
'Cooperation and aggression,' Marty said. 'So a soldierboy platoon is the ultimate expression of human superiority over the beasts.'
'You couldn't tell that by some of them,' I said. 'Some of them seem to have devolved.'
'But allow me to keep this on track.' Marty steepled his fingers. 'Think of it this way. The race against time has begun. Sometime within the next ten or a million years, we have to direct human evolution away from aggressive behavior. In theory, it's not impossible. We've directed the evolution of many other species.'
'Some in one generation,' Amelia said. 'There's a zoo full of them down the road.'
'Delightful place,' Belda said.
'We could do it in one generation,' Marty said quietly. 'Less.' The others all looked at him.
'Julian,' he said, 'why don't mechanics stay in soldierboys for more than nine days?'
I shrugged. 'Fatigue. Stay in too long and you get sloppy.'
'That's what they tell you. That's what they tell everybody. They think it's the truth.' He looked around uneasily. They were the only people in the room, but he lowered his voice. 'This is secret. Very secret. If Julian were going back to his platoon, I couldn't say it, because then too many people would know. But I can trust everyone here.'
'With a military secret?' Reza said.
'Not even the military knows. Ray and I have kept this from them, and it hasn't been easy.
'Up in North Dakota there's a convalescent home with sixteen inmates. There's nothing really wrong with them. They stay there because they know they have to.'
'People you and Ray worked on?' I asked.
'Exactly. More than twenty years ago. They're middle-aged now, and know they'll probably have to spend the rest of their lives in seclusion.'
'What the hell did you do to them?' Reza said.
'Eight of them stayed jacked into soldierboys for three weeks. The other eight for sixteen days.'
'That's all?' I said.
'That's all.'
'It drove them crazy?' Amelia asked.
Belda laughed, a rare sound, not happy. 'I'll bet not. I'll bet it drove them sane.'
'Belda's close,' Marty said. 'She has this annoying way of being able to read your mind without benefit of electricity.
'What happens is that after a couple of weeks in the soldierboy, you paradoxically can't be a soldier anymore.'
'You can't kill?' I said.
'You can't even hurt anybody on purpose, except to save your own life. Or other lives. It permanently changes your way of thinking, of feeling; even after you unjack. You've been inside other people too long, shared their identity. Hurting another person would be as painful as hurting yourself.'
'Not pure pacifists, though,' Reza said. 'Not if they can kill in self-defense.'
'It varies from individual to individual. Some would rather die than kill, even in self-defense.'
'Is that what happens to people like Candi?' I asked.
'Not really. People like her are chosen for empathy, for gentleness. You would expect being jacked to enhance those qualities in them.'
'You just used random people in the experiment?' Reza asked.
He nodded. 'The first one was random paid volunteers, off-duty soldiers. But not the second group.' He leaned forward. 'Half the second group were Special Forces assassins. The other half were civilians who had been convicted of murder.'
'And they all became ... civilized?' Amelia said.
'The verb we use is 'humanized,' ' Marty said.
'If a hunter-killer platoon stayed jacked for two weeks,' I said, 'they'd turn into pussycats?'
'So we assume. This was done before hunter-killers, of course; before soldierboys were used in combat.'
Asher had been following this quietly. 'It seems to me absurd to assume that the military hasn't duplicated your experiment. Then figured out a way around this inconvenient aberration, pacifism. Humanization.'
'Not impossible, Asher, but unlikely. I'm jacked, one-way, with hundreds of military people, from private to general. If anyone was involved in an experiment, or had even heard a rumor of one, I would know.'
'Not if everyone in authority was also jacked oneway. And the experimental subjects isolated, like yours, or disposed of.'
That was worth a moment of silence. Would military scientists have inconvenient subjects killed?
'I'll admit the possibility,' Marty said, 'but it's remote. Ray and I coordinate all the military research on soldierboys. For someone to get a project approved, funded, and implemented without our being aware ... possible. But it's possible to flip a coin and come up heads a hundred times in a row.'
'Interesting that you bring up numbers, Marty,' Reza said. He'd been scribbling on a napkin. 'Take a best-case scenario, where you have everyone agreeing to become humanized, and lining up to get jacked.
'First of all, one out of ten or twelve dies or goes crazy. I'm already trying to figure ways to get out of it.'
'Well, we don't know – '
'Let me go on just a second. If it's one out of twelve, you're killing six hundred million people to ensure that the rest of them won't kill anybody. You're already making Hitler look like an amateur, by two orders of magnitude.'
'There's more, I'm sure,' Marty said.
'There is. What do we have, six thousand soldierboys? Say we build a hundred thousand. Everybody has to spend two weeks jacked-and that's after they spend five days getting their brains drilled out and recovering. Call it twenty days per person. Assuming seven billion survive the surgery, that's seven thousand people per machine. It sounds like a hundred forty thousand days to me. That's almost four hundred years. Then we all live happily ever after-the ones who live at all.'
'Let me see that.' Reza handed the napkin to Marty. He traced the column of figures with his finger. 'One thing that's not in here is the fact that you don't need a whole soldierboy. Just the basic brain-to-brain wiring, and IV drips for nourishment. We could set up a million stations, not a hundred thousand. Ten million. That reduces the time scale to four years.'
'But not the half-billion deaths,' Belda said. 'It's academic to me, since I only plan on living a few more years.
