The This, page 22
‘My fellow soldiers,’ General Cho said, ‘permit me to introduce Trooper Adan Vergara. As you know, the HMθ contacted him some years ago – or, at least, that’s our working hypothesis. We believe that some part or parts of the HMθ made contact. They hacked his Pheno-woman, gave him a code, in the form of a string of words, instructing him to use it if and when he found himself in a combat situation and under threat from HMθ hardware. The code works. It has been tried on two separate battlefields, and it works. HMθ bots shut down in a rapid cascade from the point of delivery of the code outward. The virtual cordon sanitaire appears to be related to HMθ reaction times – which, as we all know, are markedly quicker than our quickest automated systems. All bots within a nine-hundred-metre radius and possibly wider are disabled when Trooper Vergara says these words.’
A light is flashing in the top-right corner of one of the Earth-located officers, which means she has said something. The others pause. Two of the senior officers in the cabin whisper to one another. Adan is simply trying to take it all in.
Eventually the message comes from Earth.
‘A question. The shutdown code takes the form of a line from an antique poem. Is Trooper Vergara himself a poet? Does his misquotation intensify or reduce the target radius of the weapon’s effectiveness? We assume the misquotation is deliberate.’
Everybody was looking at Adan.
‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ he said, his eyes wide enough to show white all the way around his irises, like a doubled top-down view of Saturn.
Everybody waited ten long minutes for these supremely unedifying words to pass, at the speed of light, all the way back to Earth, and ten minutes for the important person on that aboriginal human world to broadcast their reply.
‘Please, for clarification – was the misquotation of the code deliberate, or accidental?’
‘I …’ said Adan, looking around. ‘I’ve never claimed to be the smartest bullet in the clip, you know? The words came out of Gee’s mouth – that’s my Phene, Elegy, my girlfriend – and I tried to remember them. But the last word …’
‘Thrice,’ said General Cho.
‘Thrice, yeah. I guess “thrice” didn’t stick, proper. So the first time I didn’t say it, or I maybe said “twice” instead of it. I definitely said “twice” instead of it the second time.’
This information went hurrying through the vacuum, and the people in the cabin allowed a ten-minute courtesy break to see if Earth had follow-up questions; but they were content to waive discussion. A subaltern brought in capped cups and everybody who was real in the room drank.
‘Well,’ said General Cho, ‘what we have to decide, here today, is how we use Trooper Vergara. In one sense, our action was determined before we set out for Venus – the mission is to land a disabling blow on the HMθ entity, and force it either to capitulate entirely or else to enter into long-term negotiations from a position of weakness. The red line is … the HMθ must not be permitted to terraform and occupy Venus on their own. Ideally they must agree to give up the entire project. If they proceed, it must be under human supervision and on the understanding that the resulting real estate will be cohabited, portions allotted to them and portions to us. The precise battle plan, however, remains and must remain flexible. We have a number of stealth assets in place. We, in the Owl, are approaching Venus under the cover story of a diplomatic overture.
‘The HMθ have a system of buffers – individual members of the collective who mingle with ordinary folk, including many hundreds of thousands of θed people raising non-hive-mind children on Earth, and tens of thousands more who interact with applicants. These two groups have a carefully distanced relationship with the gestalt. Our understanding remains limited, but it seems that these individuals are later circulated into more intimate consonance with the whole, to experience the – we assume – collective bliss more intensely. But from our point of view, what it means is that our capacity to hack the hive mind is severely limited. What we are looking for is the opportunity to hack some core members of the gestalt, and we think this mission, and Adan’s presence, will give us that chance.
‘So we need to game our various approaches. We need a robust set of chain of command responses to the seven main ways we calculate this encounter is likely to develop. We have a variety of code-ordnance to deploy as hacking attacks, and which we use will depend on how the encounter goes down.’
Discussion then commenced among the people physically present in the cabin, and Adan did nothing except float and wait, as patiently as he was capable. He could not follow the ins and outs of the discussion, none of which seemed to relate to him as an individual. Then his name was spoken, and, like a dog, his attention perked.
‘There’s an eighth possibility we haven’t considered,’ said one of the officers, ‘which is that all this is an elaborate ruse by the HMθ.’
‘To do what?’
‘Perhaps to recruit Trooper Vergara?’
‘There would be much easier ways of doing that,’ objected one of the officers in the room. ‘And besides – why would the HMθ be going to such lengths to recruit this one? He’s a moron.’
And then the meeting was over, it seemed, and people were hauling themselves briskly through the exit and dispersing around the craft.
‘No offence, Trooper,’ said the officer who had called Adan a moron, as he passed.
‘Sir, no, sir,’ Adan returned.
:11:
Let’s say we’re parcelling this little narrative of Adan’s experiences – this elegy for the Pheno-woman he loved, and by extension for all the Phenes, male and female – into twelve sections, for reasons to do with geometry and harmony and the distribution of transcendental categories, or for some other reason which is not presently to be disclosed. That at least means we are near the end of this portion of the story, which is surely good to know.
The Owl of Minerva entered Venusian orbit. A window on the scene, through the virtual porthole of Adan’s cabin wall, showed a great curving shoulder of off-white against the blackness of space and nothing else, although in fact there were over a thousand HMθ craft also in orbit, not counting the hundreds of thousands of partial drones that swarmed to thicken the sunlight falling onto the planet, or combined to focus sunlight in particular ways. But these were not visible to the unprocessed visual data Adan’s screen provided.
The Owl slotted itself into an oval orbit and established contact with the HMθ. It was not in the nature of the Hive-Mind-θ to have a flagship, or in any way to have centralised or hierarchised their fleet, but they were naturally cautious about physical interactions, and so a firewalled and pre-appendixed spacecraft for such encounters had been assigned. It was certain, General Cho assured her people, that this HMθ craft was crewed with well-buffered individual units; and that the best strategy for the assault would involve identifying, boarding and capturing another ship. Tactical AI drew up a list of which craft were likely to contain less buffered members of the hive mind, and the attack force was prepped.
Adan was fitted with body armour.
‘We need you not to die,’ said the uniform corporal who fitted the panels to him. ‘At least not until you’ve said your magic words – after that, you’re exactly as disposable as anybody else on this fucking kamikaze mission.’
He pronounced kamikaze as a trisyllable to rhyme with maze.
‘That’s enough, Corporal,’ said the attending lieutenant, sharply. ‘Ignore him, Trooper. None of us are disposable, and this is no suicide mission.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the corporal, sourly. ‘I apologise. Trooper, you are not disposable and this is in no way a suicide mission.’
After Adan was kitted out, the uniform corporal was dismissed, and the lieutenant told him: ‘He’s just in a bad mood. Ignore him. He found his Phene was decommissioned, back on Earth. I’ve half a mind to put her on a charge – I mean, the communications officer who passed that information along to him. To put her on a charge. Fantastically irresponsible thing to do! Immediately before we go into battle! What was she thinking?’
Suddenly Adan’s heart was knocking hard at his ribcage as if eager to be let out.
‘What?’
‘The general wants a word, before you are loaded into the boat with the other marines.’
‘What did you say?’
The lieutenant ignored this, and left the chamber. The general floated in.
‘Are you ready, Adan? This is it – our war is won or lost, and I trust won, in the next half hour.’
‘What about my Phene?’ Adan asked.
The general was an experienced commander. Her face betrayed nothing.
‘What’s that, Trooper?’
‘Lieutenant Aston just …’ Adan began, and then collected himself. ‘She said, ma’am, that the uniform corporal’s Phene had been decommissioned – back on Earth. Is it true?’
‘Adan, you have to understand—’
‘Is it just his Phene? Is it more than just his?’
‘I don’t appreciate being interrupted, Trooper,’ snapped the general.
There was a silence. The walls of the chamber pulsed with soothing light. Eventually the general spoke.
‘First, Adan, I want you to understand that your Phene is safe. She has been removed from the storage facility in which you left her, as we previously discussed, and is at the moment in a secure military facility in Earth orbit. You will be reunited with her.’
‘Ma’am, thank you, ma’am.’
Adan felt as though he was going to cry. He held himself together.
‘Secondly, you have to grasp what is happening here. We are about to launch a surprise attack on the HMθ – a very formidable foe. The aim of this strike is to cause them maximum damage. They will retaliate, and we have to prepare, as best we can, for that retaliation. We already know they can hack into regular Pheno models. So of course those models must be decommissioned. It’s not a popular policy, but it is a necessary one.’
‘They will be recommissioned?’ Adan gasped.
‘Yours is safe, Trooper. Hold on to that! As to all the others … well, depending on how this war plays out, they may or may not. If the HMθ remain a clear and present danger, then we may have no option but to postpone any recommissioning. There are tens of millions of Phenes on Earth, Adan – imagine what would happen if they were taken over, en masse, by the HMθ. Imagine the damage such a fifth column could cause!’
Adan was able to process only a little of this, because his heart was hammering at his chest again and he was being handed down the corridor, as a parcel, floating weightlessly but still bulky and massy in his armoured suit. And then he was in the attack boat, and locked in, and his thoughts were circling round and round on that one idea: They had annihilated all the Phenes on Earth. They had decommissioned all of them. All the Phenes were dead.
He couldn’t stop thinking that thought. He couldn’t stop revolving it in his mind. It was one thought, like a single notional elementary and indivisible particle in motion in an eternal orbit, a marble rolling endlessly round inside the perfect bone-bounded sphere of his head. All the Phenes annihilated in a stroke of a warrior-bureaucrat’s decision.
Somewhere in the wickerwork of his skeleton was a hope, trapped like a bird in a basket: Maybe Gee will be spared, maybe I’ll be with her again. But the dazzle and dash of this bird’s beating wings could not break the bars of its cage. Ribs like scimitar blades. Spine the stacked rounds of a whomp gun. Skull a cannonball.
There was a doomy chime and a shudder in the fabric of the whole craft.
‘That’s them undocking,’ said one of the marines, to nobody in particular.
The illumination inside the attack boat switched from white to red. Gloved hands tightened their hold on belts. Helmets nodded and jiggled in approximate unison. There was no siren, or any kind of countdown. Only a modest lurch indicated that the boat had been launched. Of course, there were no windows.
‘The thing about killing,’ somebody said, distinctly, in a high-pitched voice, ‘is not to think about it too much. It’s the thinking that turns it into a prob—’
A clattery jolt and jar, and Adan felt the straps tight against his chest. Round and round the marble spun inside its bone bowl.
‘—lem,’ finished the marine.
And then there was an explosion, a crown of light, some smoke and a gush of air. The straps snickered away and Adan was in the midst of the crowd of marines as they jetted through the newly opened gateway formed by an uneven edged hole in metal and into the HMθ craft. The space into which they were moving was misty, cool and indistinct. Snip-snaps of small bore detonations and the distinctive hiss-glop of breaches in the hull being automatically foamsealed.
Little claws of brightness opening and closing at the muzzles of the marines’ rifles.
All was the noise: pan! pan! pan!
They had not given Adan a rifle. He was supposed to be, not have, a weapon.
And he thought: all the Phenes? A holocaust of Gees. A necessary collective sacrifice, hauling boyfriends and girlfriends from the arms of their lovers and – pan! pan! pan! A bullet in the plastic skull.
A bullet in the flexibly adjustable face.
A bullet in the brain pan! pan! pan!
‘Trooper Vergara!’ shouted the lieutenant. ‘The code!’
The wrongness of it was global. It was a shattering, collective wrong.
‘Your code, Trooper! Now!’
Adan blinked. Blinked. HMθ were coming out of the mist, and all around him marines were folding – throwing their arms and legs out and hurtling backwards, or tucking themselves into balls like spiders in the sink when the tap water hits them. A different sort of person from Adan might have made a statement at this point. Asserted his non serviam. Announced his refusal to comply with orders from an organisation which, even though Adan was himself a member and so a sharer in the collective guilt, nonetheless could not be morally endorsed. But Adan was not that person. Instead he did not. His doing was to do nothing. He hugged his knees, and dangled in space, and in doing so he was hugging his love, his absent love. In his gesture was his self, a connecting of Adan to Adan, making a circuit of his body. His eloquence had never been with words, so if he was a poet it was a poet of spontaneous material this-ness, of his body in space, his untutored gestures, his instinct to curl up as a child does. He made no conscious or deliberate choice to rebel and he felt no rush of defiance. His action was reaction, his agency passion, and when he embraced himself he was embracing the absence of his loved one, and in that he was, though unwittingly, saying something profound about the nature of love itself. A projectile – one of ‘ours’, one of ‘theirs’ – hit his armed flank. Adan spun and flew back, bouncing off a wall and spinning in again. His feed was going bananas.
‘Trooper – this is a direct order – deploy the code – deploy—’
pan! pan! pan!
Another hit rammed him down. It slowed his spin. His feed had stopped. His chest plate had seized up, which meant he couldn’t move his arms. Around him armoured bodies were spinning or clumping together. The weapons fire had stopped. His head went down, and then came up again, and when it came up there was a tall droid of unusual design standing in front of him. This creature reached out a twig-slender tentacle and put a stop to Adan’s rotation. The droid had two large legs, both locked to the floor. It had a bulbous body and a lozenge-shaped head. There was a sudden, prolonged and very loud hissing and the mist largely dissipated. The chamber had been sealed and air pumped in, and the droid revealed itself to be a human being in a suit of unusually bulky and awkward-looking design. The cranial lozenge cracked in two and the two parts slid out over the suit’s shoulders.
‘Adan,’ said the person – a wide-faced, pale-skinned male of middle age. ‘How good it is to meet you in person.’
Adan’s own helmet had opened. The HMθ had, it seemed, overridden the suit’s system – which was both impressive and alarming, considering that it was state-of-the-art military tech. Adan breathed in. He thought he recognised the individual, but couldn’t be sure.
The twig-slim tentacle whipped up and darted at Adan’s exposed face, striking his cheek and piercing skin and bone. This blow was unexpected and sudden enough not to cause Adan pain, although as soon as he realised what had happened the shock of it caused his heart to start hammering, and—
:12:
Imagine you suffer from asthma. Perhaps you have the personal experience that means you don’t have to imagine this. If not, then permit me to tell you about it. It’s not that you don’t want to breathe, or that you fail to invest, as it might be, the effort in trying to breathe. It’s that, no matter how you work your chest, no matter how forceful your diaphragm, the breath simply doesn’t go far enough into your lungs. Your body strains at the motions of breathing, your ribcage convulses, you draw with all your might, and the air does not go in.
Now imagine that … after a life of panting and gasping and sitting doubled up, of continual distress and disempowerment … imagine after all that you are treated with a potent vasodilator. Under the miracle touch of these pharmochemicals, the fractal conch of each lung opens its myriad tubules. The tissue of your being relaxes. You draw a deep, full breath into your chest. You breathe in and your lungs fill with air and, after you exhale, you keep filling your chest, keep blowing them up like two balloons under your joyful volition.
