(And even if the administrators weren’t listening, the Coryphaeus surely was. I had been thinking a lot about the Coryphaeus… but I didn’t want the Coryphaeus to know that.)
I also wanted Turk to have at least a basic understanding of the geography of Vox Core and how it operated, because the knowledge might be useful later. So for the next few days I tried to act like a compliant and acceptable liaison, doing what Treya had been trained to do even though I was no longer Treya nor wanted to be.
I introduced Turk to the book room just down the corridor. The book room had been prepared years in advance as a way of educating the Uptaken, and it was just what the name suggested: a room housing a substantial shelf of books.
They were the only such books in all of Vox, and they had been created explicitly for the use of the Uptaken. The books were mostly histories, assembled by scholars and translated into simple English and five other ancient languages. They were reasonably reliable texts, according to my understanding. Turk was interested but intimidated by the dozens of titles, and I helped him pick out a few volumes:
—and a couple more, enough to give him a rough sense of what Vox was and why it had fought its battles back in the Ring of Worlds. The titles, I told him, were more daunting than the texts.
“Really?” he said. “So what are, uh, ‘cortical and limbic democracies’?”
Ways of implementing consensus governance, I explained. Neural augmentation and community-wide Networks had made possible many different kinds of decision-making. Most of the communities of the Middle Worlds were “cortical” democracies, so called because the brain areas they interfaced with were clustered in the neocortex. They used noun-based and logically mediated collective reasoning to make policy decisions. (Turk blinked at the words but kindly let me keep talking.) “Limbic” democracies like Vox worked differently: their Networks modulated more primitive areas of the brain in order to create an emotional and intuitive (as opposed to a purely rational) consensus. “To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they
“I’m not sure I understand. Why the distinction? Why not a cortical-limbic democracy? Best of both worlds?”
Such arrangements had been attempted. Treya had studied them in school. The few cortico-limbic democracies that had been created had worked well enough for a period of time, and some had seemed idyllically peaceful. But they were ultimately unstable—they almost always decayed into Network-mediated catatonic loops, a kind of mass suicide by blissful indifference.
Not that the limbic democracies had fared much better, though I didn’t say so where the walls might hear me. Limbic democracies had their own weaknesses. They were prone to collective insanity.
Except our own, of course. Vox was an exception to all the rules. At least, that was what I had been taught in school.
I kept my troubles to myself, mainly because I didn’t want to give Oscar more leverage to use against me. More important, I didn’t want to raise any doubt in Turk’s mind that I was Allison Pearl, that I preferred to be Allison Pearl, and that I would remain Allison Pearl until the day they strapped me down and forced a Network node into my brain stem.
But the situation wasn’t as simple as that.
So, the question I woke up with every day and went to bed with every night: was I
In the most obvious sense, no. How could I be? Allison Pearl had lived and (presumably) died on Earth ten thousand years ago, back when Earth was a habitable planet. All that remained of her were a few gigs of diary entries that had somehow survived to the present day. The diary began in Allison Pearl’s tenth year of life and ended for no apparent reason in her twenty-third. Treya had absorbed all those diary entries (and thousands of ancillary details about twenty-first-century life) both cortically and limbically, as data and as identity. Certainly Treya had never believed herself to “be” Allison Pearl. But she had carried Allison Pearl like a copybook deep in the meat of her brain. The Network had installed Allison Pearl in Treya’s psyche, and the Network had built and maintained rigorous barriers between Allison and Treya.
Rigorous, but not rigorous enough. Because here was a secret I had told no one: even before the Network went down, even before the rebel Farmers destroyed my node, Allison had been bleeding into Treya. And Treya had never objected, nor had she complained to her administrative handlers. Instead Treya had kept the steady drip of Allison Pearl into her daily life a secret—a guilty secret, because there were qualities in Allison that Treya had coveted for herself.
Treya was obedient. Allison was defiant. Treya was willing to submerge her identity in the greater identity of Vox. Allison would sooner have died. Treya believed everything she was told by duly anointed authorities. Allison distrusted all authority, on principle.
But even that distinction falls short of absolute truth. Better to say that, through Allison, Treya had begun to discover the possibilities of skepticism, defiance, rebellion.
So ask again. What
No! Neither. I was a third thing.
I was what I had made of myself from all these incompatible parts, and I was entitled to
Fuck
Though Oscar had agreed to withdraw the surgical knives, he hadn’t abandoned the project of convincing me to submit to surgery. He conducted the campaign secondhand, confronting me with people I couldn’t refuse to speak to, people who were or had been Treya’s friends and family.
They were my friends and family, too, in a real sense, though I wasn’t the person they had known, much less the person they wanted and expected me to be. And I was human enough to be hurt by their incomprehension and their grief.
