Rorschach — segment 5

"Well, feel free to stick this conversation in your next one. For all the good it'll do."

++*++

Imagine you are a prisoner of war.

You've got to admit you saw it coming. You've been crashing tech and seeding biosols for a solid eighteen months; that's a good run by anyone's standards. Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.

It wasn't always thus. There was a day you might have even hoped for a peaceful retirement. But then they brought the vampires back from the Pleistocene and Great Grieving Ganga did that ever turn the balance of power upside down. Those fuckers are always ten steps ahead. It only makes sense; after all, hunting people is what bloodsuckers evolved to do.

There's this line from an early pop-dyn textbook, really old, maybe even TwenCen. It's something of a mantra—maybe prayer would be a better word—among those in your profession. Predators run for their dinner, it goes. Prey run for their lives. The moral is supposed to be that on average, the hunted escape the hunters because they're more motivated.

Maybe that was true when it all just came down to who ran faster. Doesn't seem to hold when the strategy involves tactical foresight and double-reverse mind fucks, though. The vampires win every time.

And now you're caught, and while it may have been vampires that set the trap, it was regular turncoat baseline humans who pulled the trigger. For six hours now you've been geckoed to the wall of some unnamed unlisted underground detention facility, watching as some of those selfsame humans played games with your boyfriend and co-conspirator. These are not your average games. They involve pliers, and glowing wires, and body parts that were not designed to detach. You wish, by now, that your lover were dead, like the two others in your cell whose parts are scattered about the room. But they're not letting that happen. They're having too much fun.

That's what it all comes down to. This is not an interrogation; there are less invasive ways to get more reliable answers. These are simply a few more sadistic thugs with Authority, killing time and other things, and you can only cry and squeeze your eyes tight and whimper like an animal even though they haven't laid a hand on you yet. You can only wish they hadn't saved you for last, because you know what that means.

But suddenly your tormentors stop in mid-game and cock their heads as if listening to some collective inner voice. Presumably it tells them to take you off the wall, bring you into the next room, and sit you down at one of two gel-padded chairs on opposite sides of a smart desk, because this is what they do—far more gently than you'd expect—before retiring. You can also assume that whoever has given these instructions is both powerful and displeased, because all the arrogant sadistic cockiness has drained from their faces in the space of a heartbeat.

You sit and wait. The table glows with soft, cryptic symbols that would be of no earthly interest to you even if you could understand them, even if they contained the very secret of the vampires themselves. Some small part of you wonders if this latest development might be cause for hope; the rest of you doesn't dare believe it. You hate yourself for caring about your own survival when chunks of your friends and allies are still warm on the other side of the wall.

A stocky Amerind woman appears in the room with you, clad in nondescript military weave. Her hair is buzzed short, her throat veined with the faint mesh of a sub-q antennae. Your brain stem sees that she is ten meters tall, even though some impertinent gelatinous overlay insists that she is of only average height.

The name tag on her left breast says Bates. You see no sign of rank.

Bates extracts a weapon from its sheath on her thigh. You flinch, but she does not point it at you. She sets it on the desk, easily within your reach, and sits across from you.

A microwave pistol. Fully charged, unlocked. On its lowest setting it causes sunburn and nausea. On its highest it flash-boils brains in the skull. At any setting between, it inflicts pain and injury in increments as fine as your imagination.

Your imagination has been retooled for great sensitivity along such scales. You stare numbly at the gun, trying to figure the trick.

"Two of your friends are dead," Bates says, as though you haven't just watched them die. "Irrecoverably so."

Irrecoverably dead. Good one.

"We could reconstitute the bodies, but the brain damage..." Bates clears her throat as if uncomfortable, as if embarrassed. It's a surprisingly human gesture for a monster. "We're trying to save the other one. No promises.

"We need information," she says, cutting to the chase.

Of course. What came before was psychology, softening-up. Bates is the good cop.

"I've got nothing to tell you," you manage. It's ten percent defiance, ninety percent deduction: they wouldn't have been able to catch you in the first place unless they already knew everything.

"Then we need an arrangement," Bates says. "We need to come to some kind of accommodation."

She has to be kidding.

Your incredulity must be showing. Bates addresses it: "I'm not completely unsympathetic. My gut doesn't much like the idea of swapping reality for simulation, and it doesn't buy that what-is-truth spin the Body Economic sells to get around it. Maybe there's reason to be scared. Not my problem, not my job, just my opinion and it could be wrong. But if we kill each other in the meantime, we don't find out either way. It's unproductive."

You see the dismembered bodies of your friends. You see pieces on the floor, still a little bit alive, and this cunt has the nerve to talk about productivity?

"We didn't start it," you say.

"I don't know and I don't care. Like I said, it's not my job." Bates jerks a thumb over her shoulder at a door in the wall behind her, the door she must have entered through. "In there," she says, "are the ones who killed your friends. They've been disarmed. When you go through that door the room will go offline and remain unmonitored for a period of sixty seconds. Nobody besides yourself will ever hold you accountable for whatever happens in there during that time."

It's a trick. It has to be.

"What do you have to lose?" Bates wonders. "We can already do anything we want to you. It's not like we need you to give us an excuse."

Hesitantly, you take the gun. Bates doesn't stop you.

She's right, you realize. You have absolutely nothing to lose. You stand and, suddenly fearless, point the weapon at her face. "Why go in there? I can kill you right here."

She shrugs. "You could try. Waste of an opportunity, if you ask me."

"So I go in there, and I come out in sixty seconds, and then what?"

"Then we talk."

"We just—"

"Think of it as a gesture of good faith," she says. "Restitution, even."

The door opens at your approach, closes in your wake. And there they are, all four of them, spread up across the wall like a chorus line of Christs on crosses. There's no gleam in those eyes now. There's only a bright animal terror and the reflection of turned tables. Two of the Christs stain their pants when you look them in the eye.

What's left? Maybe fifty seconds?

It's not a lot. You could have done so much more with just a little extra time. But it's enough, and you don't want to impose on the good graces of this Bates woman.

Because she may at last be someone you can deal with.

++*++

Under other circumstances, Lieutenant Amanda Bates would have been court-martialed and executed within the month. No matter that the four who'd died had been guilty of multiple counts of rape, torture, and homicide; that's just what people did in wartime. It's what they'd always done. There was nothing polite about war, no honorable code beyond the chain of command and the circling of wagons. Deal with indiscretions if you must; punish the guilty if you have to, for appearance if nothing else. But for God's sake close the doors first. Never give your enemy the satisfaction of seeing discord in the ranks, show them nothing but unity and flinty-eyed resolve. There may be murderers and rapists in our midst, but by God they're our murderers and rapists.

You certainly don't give right of revenge to some terrorist twat with over a hundred friendly scalps on her belt.

Still, it was hard to argue with results: a negotiated ceasefire with the third-largest Realist franchise in the hemisphere. An immediate forty-six percent decline in terrorist activities throughout the affected territories. The unconditional cancellation of several in-progress campaigns which could have seriously compromised three major catacombs and taken out the Duluth Staging Grounds entirely. All because Lieutenant Amanda Bates, feeling her way through her first field command, had gambled on empathy as a military strategy.

It was collaborating with the enemy, it was treason, it was betrayal of the rank and file. Diplomats and politicians were supposed to do those things, not soldiers.

Still. Results.

It was all there in the record: initiative, creativity, a willingness to succeed by whatever means necessary and at whatever cost. Perhaps those inclinations needed to be punished, perhaps only tempered. The debate might have gone on forever if the story hadn't leaked—but it had, and suddenly the generals had a hero on their hands.

Sometime during her court-martial, Bates's death sentence turned into a rehabilitation; the only question was whether it would take place in the stockade or Officer's College. As it turned out, Leavenworth had both; it took her to its bosom and squeezed hard enough to virtually guarantee promotion, if it didn't kill her first. Three years later Major Bates was bound for the stars, where she was heard to say

We're breaking and entering, Siri...

Szpindel was not the first to register doubts. Others had wondered whether her assignment owed as much to superior qualifications as it did to the resolution of inconvenient PR. I, of course, had no opinion one way or the other; but I could see how she might strike some as a double-edged sword.

When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you want to keep an eye on anyone whose career-defining moment involves consorting with the enemy.

"If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist."

—Kate Keogh, Grounds for Suicide

Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw ourselves between the monster's jaws, let it chew at us with a trillion microscopic teeth until Theseus reeled us in and stitched us back together. We crept through Rorschach's belly in fits and starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.

Sometimes we got caught in the open. The Gang would squabble amongst itself, uncertain which persona was which. Once I fell into a kind of waking paralysis while alien hands dragged me away down the hall; fortunately other hands brought me home, and voices that claimed to be real told me I'd made the whole thing up. Twice Amanda Bates found God, saw the fucker right there in front of her, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the creator not only existed but spoke to her, and her alone. Both times she lost her faith once we got her into the bell, but it was touch and go for a while; her warrior drones, drunk on power but still under line-of-sight control, staggered from their perimeters and pointed their weapons along bearings too close for comfort.

The grunts died fast. Some barely lasted a single foray; a few died in minutes. The longest-lived were the slowest on the draw, half-blind, thick-witted, every command and response bottlenecked by raw high-frequency sound buzzing across their shielded eardrums. Sometimes we backed them up with others that spoke optically: faster but nervous, and even more vulnerable. Together they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face.

It hardly had to. Our troops fell even in the absence of enemy fire.

We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each others' backs while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick. Sometimes we vomited into our helmets; then we'd just hang on, white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our headspace. And we'd give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent faceplates.

It rapidly became obvious that my presence served as more than cannon fodder. It didn't matter that I lacked the Gang's linguistic skills or Szpindel's expertise in biology; I was another set of hands, in a place where anyone could be laid out at a moment's notice. The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given moment. Even so, we were in barely any condition to accomplish anything. Every incursion was an exercise in reckless endangerment.

We did it anyway. It was that or go home.

The work proceeded in infinitesimal increments, hamstrung on every front. The Gang wasn't finding any evidence of signage or speech to decipher, but the gross mechanics of this thing were easy enough to observe. Sometimes Rorschach partitioned itself, extruded ridges around its passageways like the cartilaginous hoops encircling a human trachea. Over hours some of them might develop into contracting irises, into complete septa, lazy as warm candle wax. We seemed to be witnessing the growth of the structure in discrete segments. Rorschach grew mainly from the tips of its thorns; we'd made our incursion hundreds of meters from the nearest, but evidently the process extended at least this far back.

If it was part of the normal growth process, though, it was a feeble echo of what must have been going on in the heart of the apical zones. We couldn't observe those directly, not from inside; barely a hundred meters towards the thorn the tube grew too lethal even for suicidal flesh. But over those five orbits Rorschach grew by another eight percent, as mindless and mechanical as a growing crystal.

Through it all I tried to do my job. I compiled and collated, massaged data I would never understand. I watched the systems around me as best I could, factored each tic and trait into the mix. One part of my mind produced synopses and syntheses while another watched, incredulous and uncomprehending. Neither part could trace where those insights had come from.

It was difficult, though. Sarasti wouldn't let me back outside the system. Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding presence in the mix. I did my best. I made no suggestions that might affect critical decisions. In the field I did what I was told to, and no more. I tried to be like one of Bates's drones, a simple tool with no initiative and no influence on the group dynamic. I think I pulled it off, for the most part.

My nonsights accumulated on schedule and piled up in Theseus's transmission stack, unsent. There was too much local interference to get a signal through to Earth.

++*++

Szpindel was right: the ghosts followed us back. We began to hear voices other than Sarasti's, whispering up the spine. Sometimes even the brightly-lit wraparound world of the drum would warp and jiggle from the corner of my eye—and more than once I saw boney headless phantoms with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark translucent stain against the background. They were so very fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes through them.