bring an action against Sir Thomas. There was no hard evidence, only conjecture, and worse there was no one to bring any action against. That I believed it and understood it only made the task ahead of me the more impossible.
“So what is it you specifically need me to do?” I asked.
“We need you to go inside. You need to gain Sir Thomas’s trust. You’re an arbitrator. We want you to use being his ‘nephew’ to get inside the Hawks and find out what you can. In parallel, work out a case against the Tag Law, and at the same time build a stronger case for individual privacy laws. Just before the vote we’ll go online, lay out the case, expose what we know and call for a full public investigation. If we’re successful, we’ll be heroes. If we’re not, we’ll probably be dead within the week.
“Of course, those arguments can be worked on under the pretext of building a strong case against any amendment to the Tag Law for the Hawks. The deeper you get, the more your uncle will trust you. He has to see you as a Hawk and therefore you have to become a Hawk. That’s not going to be easily achieved because your uncle views you as a smart liberal softie. We’re going to have to change that, which means you have to quickly scale up into a ruthless person. We’ll help with minor background alterations, but within a month you’re going to have to do some pretty awful things to people to convince Sir Thomas you’ve got the makings of a Hawk. You won’t be able to do this immediately but the clock is ticking. We’ve got to be able to expose everything before the vote on 15th March next year. Your change in character must be seen as a reaction to an event. It must be explainable, for the deeper you get the more your motive and desire will be tested.”
I nodded. I understood exactly where Gabriel was coming from. My so-called uncle had at times tested my viewpoint on various subjects, from education to crime and related punisments. I realized that my arguments and position was that of ‘a liberal softie’, as Gabriel had put it.
Gabriel continued in same soft, even tone.
“At some point you will be asked to open your mind so that a telepath can examine you and report what they see. You must pass that inspection. You must appear to open your mind but you must shield what you really know. It will be nearly impossible to do so, and discovery of, for example this discussion, would mean either instant death or brain wipe. I have had over twenty years of practice with using my mind to probe others, and I find it difficult to resist, but there is a chance that we can train you well enough that you will survive. We will need to work on that next, but first I want to tell you about what we know.”
Gabriel talked about the circumstantial evidence that they did have, and it was substantial. There was a lot of material that I was going to have to study at length later, as in my state and with the volume of the information, I was only able to grasp the highlights of what I was being told and shown.
“You look exhausted,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Perhaps we should rest for a little while and recharge our batteries?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head and looking at the time in the bottom corner of the Devscreen. “There isn’t time. We must continue — you still have to teach me how to protect myself against a mind probe.”
“All right, we’ll move on to that now then. I’m reasonably certain that when you return to Earth, and perhaps even before then, you will be requested to attend an interview. Take a look at your Devscreen.”
On the Devscreen I could see myself as I exited my Env in Woodlands. The perspective of the images changed as different Devs played their role in tracking my progress from my Env, through the market where I had bought the beach clothes, and then all the way to the main Lev port at Changi. There I was with the violinist, with me sitting at the table. It seemed that the Dev capturing my image must have been somewhere behind my right shoulder and high up, because it suddenly zoomed in on the table.
“That zoom in on the Devscreen set in the table was me,” said Gabriel. “I manipulated the Dev because I wanted to be sure that you got the message I was sending. I couldn’t send anything to your Devstick or the Dev in your Env — it would have been picked up too easily, so I hacked the suggestion feed into the Dev at your table in the cafe when I saw you take a seat. It was a risk, but I overlaid the suggestion to you on top of the regular feed. As far as anyone looking at that Dev would have seen it was just the regular feed. But just in case someone did find it, we had to make it look like a suggestion. I had a back-up plan in case you did go to that resort in Tha Sala but that would have been much riskier for me. Everything else though is picked up from normal observation Devs and CCTV cameras that are around New Singapore.
“The Nineveh itself is a construct. It didn’t really exist. However as far as UNPOL will be able to tell, it is real and has existed for over four years. We’ve put the design drawing permits into the local building commission’s files and anyone actually physically visiting it will find a third rate VacEnv with appropriately hot bubbling water. All of that took weeks to set up, just on the off-chance that someone else zoomed the Dev at the same time I sent the suggestion your way.”
“How many of you? I mean, how many Doves are there?”
“Well, as with the Hawks, the Doves are a loose coalition of like-minded people, so exact numbers are hard to put together, and of course, like them, we operate in cells so that if some of us are caught then the others have a chance to escape. In my immediate cell we are one hundred and twenty people, but as for how many of us there are, the number may well be over several million, all of whom are working actively to keep our universe a safe and free place to be.
“Again we have no central command structure, but we do share information through channels that we have set up and so we stay informed between the cells. We know that there are many more Doves than Hawks, especially if we count inactive participation and those possessing a fundamental belief in our ideals. In fact, the majority of the population can be considered Doves, however getting those people to understand what is information, and what is misinformation, is problematic to say the least. The problem is in the demographics. Typically, Hawks are by nature people with greater spheres of influence than your average Dove.”
“You said when I get back, or possibly before, I will be interviewed. I agree, so how are we going to get around that? Especially if Cochran gets into the act, which I am sure she will.”
“I’m going to hypnotize you and wipe everything to do with me and our conversation from your hippocampus, along with the one we had in the White Room and this one. The hippocampus is kind of like the index card holder of the brain. It knows where all the memories are stored in your brain. Your mind is a vast universe and we only use about eight percent of its available capacity. That percentage varies from person to person, but it’s roughly eight percent. I plan to hide these events in less than point zero zero zero one percent of the remaining ninety-two percent that you don’t use. Cochran will not think to look there. Most telepaths wouldn’t, simply because it’s just white noise, but over the years I’ve learned to use that white noise quite efficiently.”
“If they’re hidden away in some white noise part of my mind, how am I going to remember any of this?”
“I’m going to create a trigger event. It will bring the memories back, but it will do it at a steady, even pace — a bit like receiving data over a datafeed, one block of information at a time. That way, you won’t suddenly throw up as the reality hits you.”
“O… K.” I didn’t sound too convinced and my drawn out response was enough to cause Gabriel to let loose with one of his belly laughs again, slapping his thigh.
“It isn’t as bad as it sounds. When the trigger event occurs, the memories will start to come back. At the beginning you’ll think that you’re remembering a dream, but over the course of a couple of hours, the details of the dream will be filled in with ever-increasing clarity. Your mind will return again and again to the little reservoir of information that I’ll plant, and the signals, traveling from the outback of your brain, will come in ever-larger memory chunks. Finally, you will reach the moment where this description will be relayed to you word for word, complete with the images of me and this room. I did it to you the first time we spoke using our minds. Do you recall a feeling that you were struggling to remember what we had voiced, but you clearly remembered what I had said to you through thought?”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“I had to be sure that you would recognize the sign when you saw it, so I had to make sure you would remember every single word we thought together. I also put a little extra thought in there about how to deal with Cochran. That was to protect you. Do you remember thinking in the restroom, coming up with that plan, just before the interview with Cochran and your uncle? I inserted that idea telepathically about how you’d say how much you admired and wanted to be like Sir Thomas. Yes, that was me as well. And the same method will suffice for the interview you get when you return, with a twist. It dovetails nicely, forgive the pun, with our plans to install you into Sir Thomas’s sphere of influence.”
“I can see that.”
