Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (16 page)

“My point exactly!” said Anita.

“I and Rhian accept your toast on the basis that we’re both walking violations of countless laws anyway,” said Sandy.

“Precisely!” said Anita, very pleased, and drank. Sandy reflected on how much the Federation had changed in the seven years she’d been here. Back then, this would have been a very serious breach of law indeed. Now, not so much. Technology swept ahead, irresistible as all progress, and in that respect, the League’s vision of human society was certainly winning.

“Still interesting to speculate,” said Pushpa. “How much do you think that sample could fetch, ’Nita? Three bil?”

“Oh, at least,” said Anita. “Taken from Sandy, easily.” A Callayan dollar was fairly strong, but Tanusha was expensive. Most people made about forty thousand before tax, but an average apartment cost two hundred thousand. A house, five hundred. A nice cruiser, six hundred and up. Anita and Pushpa’s little software company, Sandy heard, turned over perhaps thirty mil a year . . . with just ten employees. They’d had plenty of chances to grow it larger, but preferred it exactly this size.

“Three billion dollars?” Rhian asked, blinking.

“Easy,” Anita repeated. “I mean, that’s the most advanced neural synthology ever made, that we know of. The stuff we know works, anyway. The proteins alone would be three billion. I reckon if we organised a little auction we could probably get it up to five or six. All the big companies would bid through proxies and stitch up finances somehow. They can afford it.”

“And they might get very little for it,” Pushpa added. “Or more likely, they’d unlock completely new markets spanning the entire Federation, and six billion would be an amazing bargain.”

“If I’m so fucking valuable,” said Sandy, “why am I poor?”

“Because you’re honest,” Anita laughed.

Pushpa nodded, pointing a finger. “There’s your mistake,” she agreed. “If you’d been selling bits of yourself to the right people, you’d make us look like paupers.”

“You’re not poor,” Vanessa teased her. “You earn twice the average wage and your accommodation is rent free, plus tax benefits for CSA personnel.”

“I feel poor,” Sandy complained.

“That’s not hard in Tanusha.”

“And seriously, Sandy,” said Anita, “if you’d like some extra money, make me some software!” She’d been pestering Sandy on this for years. “You’re a software magician. You have capabilities even I can only dream of, you could make a fortune if you wanted. I’ve even checked the CSA rules, and there’s nothing stopping you from making some extra money on the side, so long as it’s not security related. Look, I’ve got a couple of little barrier booster replication functions I’ve been working on, but I can’t get the bandwidth frequencies and field depth to match in their current matrix . . . you rock at that kind of thing. Do that for me and I’ll get you an equivalent percentage cut of the final product when we put it to market.”

“Who’s it for?” Sandy asked.

“Logistics company,” said Anita. “Nothing security related.”

“Logistics interfaces with central traffic control,” said Sandy. “Central traffic has AIs parsing their code line by line. They’ll find it. You know how AIs are with unusual patterns . . .”

“And it’s not security related, so they won’t care!”

“But it is security related,” Sandy persisted, “because like all centralised routines, central traffic has security routines running all through it, many of which activate in the event of emergency, which I know because I actually helped write a few of them, with no additional boost to my salary.”

“Well that’s just dumb, Sandy,” said Pushpa from her seat, a comfortable round lump in lime green salwar kameez. “No one works for free.”

“It was a part of my job, included in my current salary. And here’s the kicker: if there were an emergency, the first person they’ll ask to parse the code is me. I’m even better on League-specific patterns than AIs are, so I’d be writing on the appearance of my own code, written privately for your logistics company, in my report.”

“I can’t see how that would mean you’ve done anything wrong,” Anita said stubbornly.

“No,” said Sandy, “it just looks really, really bad. ’Nita, there’s very little in this network that doesn’t interface with security protocols at some point. All the stuff I write looks very specific, it’s very different from anything else. I use different processing routines to write it. And a lot of that process is kind of automatic. I process cyberspace like I process anything in three dimensions, without really thinking about it.”

Automatic. She thought of Poole playing the piano. Complaining that he couldn’t get the expression right, that it sounded flat, emotionless. Poole could play the piano the same way that Sandy could target ten ways at once in a firefight and hit all of them—it was instinctive, the processing of situational information at a very rapid speed, translated into mechanically precise action. GIs had very little conscious control over any of it. That was what made it so effective. She didn’t need to think about it—if she did, she might miss. And she never missed.

That was what Poole had been trying to do at his piano—to wrest back conscious control from the subconscious routines that dominated so much of a GI’s brainspace. To assert conscious domination of the automatic subconscious. To insert emotion, on purpose, into the mechanical precision of fingers flying over piano keys. That was why he played for hours on end. To try and inject variation, on command. GIs did not do variation well. She was designed to shoot things. Variation, in shooting things, meant missing.

Was that the real reason why she didn’t want to write software for Anita? Like the real reason she didn’t want to learn to play music? Hidden under all her excuses, was she really frightened that, laid out in her creations, exposed for all to see, would be patterns so automatic and predictable that everyone would immediately know it was her? Because GIs were truly that predictable—not genuine, free personalities at all, but controlled and automated collections of subconscious routines? And not all that different, in fact, from the brainwashed suicidals who had attacked her today, and slaughtered thousands on Pyeongwha?

“Hey,” said Vanessa, gently. Whatever Anita had said in reply hadn’t registered. She’d just been sitting, and gazing at nothing. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Sandy ran a hand over her face, tiredly. “I just had a really bad day.”

Vanessa put her head on Sandy’s shoulder and snuggled close. It was a big advantage for female soldiers, Vanessa had once observed. Both sexes knew that some things could never be made better by talking. But girls, at least, were not embarrassed to cuddle.

Sandy thought of the bodies in the hallway, of Ambassador Ballan’s staffers, even of the annoying journalist. She’d had post-stress tape, of course, so the memories did not knock her sideways. But still she had to wipe her eyes.

“Fucking Anjulans,” she said, with a glance back to the girl frozen in mid-interview on the display. “They got what they voted for and most of them aren’t technically brainwashed. Sometimes I think they all fucking deserve it.”

“That’s not why we hit them,” said Vanessa against her shoulder.

“No.” Sandy put her cheek in Vanessa’s hair. “No, we had to stop it spreading. But even so.”

Her own mood disturbed her. She felt so much more compassion these days for people on her side. Far more than she had back in the League. Living in Tanusha had shown her previously foreign things like family, children and friends. She knew the depth and breadth of what had been lost, even for people she hadn’t especially liked. But for her enemies, she felt less and less. Did that mean she was becoming less human, or more?

“I just hope Siddhartha finds something that can cure Radha,” she added. “Something good should come from today, at least.”

“If that means we can promote Ibrahim to FSA Director,” said Vanessa, “it’ll be a net win for Federal security.”

“And a net loss for Callayan security,” Rhian remarked.

Vanessa shrugged. “Maybe. There are some good options. But maybe it’s time we started putting the Federation first, not just Callay.”

“I’m not sure I feel comfortable amongst all this patriotism,” Pushpa remarked.

“Well, you refrained from muttering rude remarks about Ibrahim,” said Vanessa, “so there’s hope for you yet.”

On some matters, the underground and law enforcement would remain forever far apart. Like on the necessity of a lot of law enforcement in the first place.

“Well, I was going to say,” said Pushpa, “I’m surprised you’re not more involved in the investigations, Sandy. I mean, they’re not even sure if Ballan was the target. It might have been you.”

Sandy shrugged. “Perhaps. But there’s nothing I can do. I’m not investigations, I’m not static security, I’m kept deliberately ignorant of most of the security procedures in the Grand Council, like most people. I’m a shooter, a combat specialist. I just sit here and wait for them to tell us how badly people fucked up.”

“Pretty badly,” said Vanessa, leaning forward to pour herself another drink.

“Well, it’s an inside job, pretty obviously,” said Anita, looking at Sandy. They were the two main software experts in the room—Pushpa was talented, but business was more her field. She handled the money and lined up the jobs.

Sandy smiled faintly. “Like I’m just going to discuss Federal level security with you,” she teased.

Anita made a face. “It’s just not fair that there’s no known way to get a GI drunk.”

“Thank God for it, too,” said Vanessa. “I mean, can you imagine?”

Sandy was mildly offended. “I think I’d be a very good drunk.”

“A good drunk who can bend steel barehanded.”

“I think I’d be a friendly drunk,” Sandy corrected, thinking about it. “A very friendly drunk.” She grabbed Vanessa.

“Hey!”

“I think I’d cuddle too much and do inappropriate things.”

She tried to bite her neck. Vanessa yelped and fought back, with new augmentation that their sofa could not handle, and overturned.

“You idiot,” said Vanessa with affection, as they lay in a laughing heap on the floor.

“Hey, wow,” said Sandy, looking at Vanessa’s drink. Even after their scuffle and the fall, she hadn’t spilt a drop. “That’s crazy. Your hands are nearly as good as mine now.”

A month later, Sandy hung from her knees in the CSA gym, and pulled on the steel U-beams in the floor. Muscles rippled and tensed, as she began to heave upward, slowly at first, waiting for the unpleasant catch of pain in her rib. Today it was almost gone, just a dull tingle that was more a memory than anything real.

She tensed up further, locked her knees hard, and really gave it a pull. Anti-projectile-armour strength alloy squealed and groaned. They’d had it installed in the SWAT gym several years ago as a Christmas present, walked her in with her eyes closed and revealed it to her—custom designed steel beams driven into alloy-reinforced walls to a depth of four meters and surrounded by buffers of hard, synthetic rubber so the walls didn’t crack—the kind of engineering usually used to hold up freeway overpasses. Now she could hang and pull, and stretch nearly every muscle out fully without breaking any equipment. Muscles ripped tighter and tighter, swelling and flexing down shoulders, abdomen, thighs and buttocks, with a release of synthetic endorphin into her system that felt quite exhilarating.

She held it for a full minute, intensifying one muscle group after another. After thirty seconds, she could feel the heat of high-intensity combat myomer nearly burning her skin. After the full minute, she was dripping with sweat, her body temperature reaching levels that would be dangerous if sustained. She stopped when the forty-centimeter-wide beam she hung upon started to squeal from two meters deep in its wall socket, and she dropped to the floor. Of course, she was now completely surrounded by gym rats, watching with the same expressions motorsport enthusiasts wore at rocket racer weekends.

“What?” she laughed at them, and sat to stretch out. Most of them were men, all SWAT colleagues and friends, but some of the newer ones were still unaccustomed to seeing her do this. Among straights she usually pulled her punches, literally and figuratively. But exercise was a universal human requirement, organic or synthetic.

“How’s the rib?” Kohla asked her.

“Excellent,” she said. “Wow, I haven’t been able to do that for a while.” A side effect of the endorphins, of course, was that surrounded by this many fit men, all staring at her in her gym clothes, she was struck by the predictable urge to grab one of them and take him somewhere private. But she was very senior here, and took her job as commander and mentor very seriously. These guys were not GIs, fraternisation could harm them, and the thought was never more than entertaining whimsy.

“Can I help you with that, Commander?” asked Banipal. His colleagues laughed and egged him on. Banipal was new and young, a good soldier and not shy with any woman.

“Absolutely,” said Sandy, seated with legs splayed, grabbing her toes. She had to grit her teeth, and Banipal’s hands on her back helped. Flexibility was never the strongpoint of any GI. “Just keep your hands above the waist or I’ll have you up on charges.”