“… Sofiyko?”
Whatever happens, I’ve got your back.
But Sofiyko’s gone, if she was ever even there.
Blackout
Moore hands him off to Metzinger. Metzinger regards him without a word, with a look that speaks volumes: flips a switch and drops him into Passenger mode. He doesn’t tell Asante to stay there. He doesn’t have to.
Asante feels the glassy pane of a tacpad under ET’s hand. That hand rests deathly still for seconds at a time; erupts into a flurry of inhumanly-fast taps and swipes; pauses again. Out past the bright blur in Asante’s eyes, the occasional cough or murmur is all that punctuates the muted roar of the Lockheed’s engines.
ET is under interrogation. A part of Asante wonders what it’s saying about him, but he can’t really bring himself to care.
He can’t believe they’re gone.
No Control
“Sergeant Asante” Major Rossiter shakes her head. “We had such hopes for you.”
Acosta. Garin. Tiwana.
“Nothing to say?”
So very much. But all that comes out is the same old lie: “They were just … children …”
“Perhaps we can carve that on the gravestones of your squadmates.”
“But who—”
“We don’t know. We’d suspect Realists, if the tech itself wasn’t completely antithetical to everything they stand for. If it wasn’t way past their abilities.”
“They were barely even clothed. It was like a nest…” “More like a hive, Sergeant.”
Digits on the same hand …
“Not like you,” she says, as if reading his mind. “ZeroS networking is quite—inefficient, when you think about it. Multiple minds in multiple heads, independently acting on the same information and coming to the same conclusion. Needless duplication of effort.”
“And these …”
“Multiple heads. One mind.”
“We jammed the freqs. Even if they were networked—”
“We don’t think they work like that. Best guess is—bioradio, you could call it. Like a quantum-entangled corpus callosum.” She snorts. “Of course, at this point they could say it was elves and I’d have to take their word for it.”
Caçador, Asante remembers. They’ve learned a lot from one small stolen corpse.
“Why use children?” he whispers.
“Oh, Kodjo.” Asante blinks at the lapse; Rossiter doesn’t seem to notice. “Using children is the last thing they want to do. Why do you think they’ve been stashed in the middle of the ocean, or down some Arctic mineshaft? We’re not talking about implants. This is genetic, they were born. They have to be protected, hidden away until they grow up and … ripen.”
“Protected? By abandoning them in a nuclear waste site?”
“Abandoning them, yes. Completely defenseless. As you saw.” When he says nothing, she continues: “It’s actually a perfect spot. No neighbors. Lots of waste heat to keep you warm, run your greenhouses, mask your heatprint. No supply lines for some nosy satellite to notice. No telltale EM. From what we can tell there weren’t even any adults on the premises, they just … lived off the land, so to speak. Not even any weapons of their own, or at least they didn’t use any. Used bears, of all things. Used your own guns against you. Maybe they’re minimalists, value improvisation.” She sacc’s something onto her pad. “Maybe they just want to keep us guessing.”
“Children.” He can’t seem to stop saying it.
“For now. Wait ‘til they hit puberty.” Rossiter sighs. “We bombed the site, of course. Slagged the entrance. If any of ours were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be getting out. Then again we’re not talking about us, are we? We’re talking about a single distributed organism with God-knows-how-many times the computational mass of a normal human brain. I’d be very surprised if it couldn’t anticipate and counter anything we planned. Still. We do what we can.”
Neither speaks for a few moments.
“And I’m sorry, Sergeant,” she says finally. “I’m so sorry it’s come to this. We do what we’ve always done. Feed you stories so you won’t be compromised, so you won’t compromise us when someone catches you and starts poking your amygdala. But the switch was for your protection. We don’t know who we’re up against. We don’t know how many hives are out there, what stage of gestation any of them have reached, how many may have already … matured. All we know is that a handful of unarmed children can slaughter our most elite forces at will, and we are so very unready for the world to know that.
“But you know, Sergeant. You dropped out of the game—which may well have cost us the mission—and now you know things that are way above your clearance.
“Tell me. If our positions were reversed, what would you do?”
Asante closes his eyes. We should be dead. Every one of these moments is a gift. When he opens them again Rossiter’s watching, impassive as ever.
“I should’ve died up there. I should have died off Takoradi two years ago.”
The Major snorts. “Don’t be melodramatic, Sergeant. We’re not going to execute you.”
“I … what?”
“We’re not even going to court-martial you.”
“Why the hell not?” And at her raised eyebrow: “Sir. You said it yourself: unauthorized drop-out. Middle of a combat situation.”
“We’re not entirely certain that was your decision.”
“It felt like my decision.”
“It always does though, doesn’t it?” Rossiter pushes back in her chair. “We didn’t create your evil twin, Sergeant. We didn’t even put it in control. We just got you out of the way, so it could do what it always does without interference.
“Only now, it apparently … wants you back.”
This takes a moment to sink in. “What?”
“Frontoparietal logs suggest your zombie took a certain … initiative. Decided to quit.”
“In combat? That would be suicide!”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
He looks away.
“No? Don’t like that hypothesis? Well, here’s another: it surrendered. Moore got you out, after all, which was statistically unlikely the way things were going. Maybe dropping out was a white flag, and the hive took pity and let you go so you could … I don’t know, spread the word: don’t fuck with us.
“Or maybe it decided the hive deserved to win, and switched sides. Maybe it was … conscientiously objecting. Maybe it decided it never enlisted in
