Asimov's Science Fiction (12 page)

"Welcome, welcome!" he says, shaking Duyi's hand and then mine. "Friends, we live in exciting times. I think you'll find it quite fulfilling to be here with us, working toward a better future."

Duyi glances at me with a slight raise of an eyebrow. On behalf of both of us, I give Santiago a dry reply: "Yes. Quite."

"So you're skeptical. That's fine," Santiago says genially. He spreads his hands, gesturing while he talks. "Do you know why the Moserothi government is called a regency? On Earth, a regent was a temporary governor who took on the responsibilities of a child monarch until he was old enough to lead. A regency implies the intent to transfer power back to the rightful parties. This was never meant to be a permanent arrangement, and certainly not a hereditary one."

"Yes, I'm sure you're right," Duyi says. I can tell he's distracted.

Santiago looks a bit stunned, as if he is unaccustomed to anyone brushing off his idealistic proclamations. "Well, in any case, I thought we could start with a demonstration—activate some symrock for a few of the Freeminers to see."

"When can we see the doctor?" Duyi demands. Part of the deal with Santiago is that he provides access to a former neurotech who can remove my Imperative.

"There will be plenty of time for that," says Santiago. "She's been sympathetic to the revolution for years—it's not as if she's going to run off."

"We agreed to meet here because the doctor lives here. That was the deal: we
both
go free, and then we help you. I'm not going to touch an ounce of symrock for the Freeminers until Feng sees her."

Santiago scowls, and I feel my muscles tense—he has kept his word so far, but we don't have the luxury of being generous with our trust. He says, "I lost good men and women in that raid just to get you out. I don't think a show of good faith is too much to ask after that."

"No," Duyi says, his hands clenching to fists. "We see the doctor first."

Much to my relief, Santiago gives in—Duyi can become as immovable as stone when he puts his mind to something—and the labor organizer borrows a skimmer to take us. Santiago's doctor runs a small clinic in what passes for the nice part of town. We let ourselves through the unlocked front door and into a waiting room full of comfortable chairs. A moment later, a woman in a white doctor's uniform comes in and introduces herself as Dr. Anwang. She's thin, with gray streaks in her dark hair and bony, dexterous hands.

I frown. The doctor looks vaguely familiar, but I can't place her. Then an image flashes across my memory, as old and fuzzy as a corrupted datastream: she walked by my medical bay and snuck a glance at me, but when she saw I was conscious she turned away. "You were one of my technicians when I was wiped."

Her eyes widen and she leans away, as if the words were a slap. "Yes, I was."

Duyi steps forward anxiously, hands knotting together. "That doesn't matter, does it?"

"No," I say, too quickly. I take a breath to regain control, then add, "The past is the past."

"I suppose you should know it was you," the doctor tells me. "Why I left, I mean. I left because of what we did to you. When I joined the NeuroLogic Institute, I didn't think... they hadn't done a child in a hundred and thirty years. I thought we'd become civilized." She sighs. "If you're ready, we can proceed into the imaging room."

Duyi moves to follow me inside, but the doctor gives him a stern look. "Just the patient, please," she says.

"But..." he starts to protest.

"It's okay, Brother." I squeeze his shoulder.

He stares at me, as if searching my face for something, then finally acquiesces. "Fine, I'll wait here."

Anwang closes the door between us, and waves me over to a reclining chair. I lie down, anxious but perfectly capable of hiding it. She lowers some sort of diagnostic contraption over my skull.

"The imager will let me explore a 3-D representation of your neural pathways noninvasively. It will help me determine what kinds of treatment you might be a candidate for."

I don't know how long I lie there. Anwang tries to keep me updated about what she's doing, but it involves a lot of unfamiliar technical jargon, and I don't follow her. When she's finally done, she motions for me to climb out and sit with her in a pair of regular chairs tucked off to one side of the room.

"I'm afraid I don't have good news," she says grimly. "Your Imperative is too deeply interconnected with healthy brain function. As your brain developed, it looks as if you used the implant as a foundation upon which to build real neural pathways. I can't shut down the Imperative without damaging the part of you that's
you."

"So there's nothing to be done?"

She shrugs helplessly. "If I shut off the Imperative, it could result in frequent seizures as your brain tries to access the dysfunctional pathways. If I surgically remove the whole NeuroLogic, you wouldn't have any physical side effects, but... well, more of you would be gone. You were programmed so young, it's hard to know what mental faculties would be affected. You might have to re-learn very basic skills, like walking or reading. In your case, I can't recommend treatment. I'm sorry."

"No, don't be. It's fine." On some level, I think I already knew that the Imperative was too deeply wound inside my mind to ever be pulled apart again. I had to fully accept it in order to master it, and now it's a part of me. "It's just... do you think we can tell everyone the operation worked? That you turned the Imperative off?"

Anwang gives me a quizzical look, but says, "If that's what you want."

I nod. "That's what I want." Duyi would take it too hard, to come all this way only to fail. I'm not sure I see it as a failure—this is simply the way the world is—but Duyi would.

I go out into the waiting room, and Duyi stands as I approach. "All done," I say. He won't look me in the eye, and for a moment it baffles me, but then I understand. "Oh. You thought turning it off would change things for us."

"I hoped it would." He finally looks up, his expression pained. "You should be free of me."

"That was never what I wanted. Free of
it,
yes," I say, waving a hand at my skull, "but not free of you. Brothers forever, remember?"

He relaxes, the tension leaching out of his body. He throws his arms around me in a quick embrace, then backs away, embarrassed. "I thought I was going to lose you."

"Never."

When Duyi was ten and a half, he overheard one of the staff referring to me as his "robot toy," and he later demanded I explain to him why. I was torn—on the one hand, I had picked up on the fact that he was not supposed to know about my Imperative, but I also sensed that not knowing made him feel like the butt of a cruel joke. So I told him.

He got very angry with me, as if this were some kind of betrayal. I remember feeling bewildered at how upset he was. After all, it wasn't as if I told him that
he
had an Imperative in his brain. Shouldn't I have been the one who was mad?

He refused to see me for a whole day, until his nursemaid explained I would be punished for displeasing him if he didn't forgive me.

With my visit to the doctor over and a new day dawning, Santiago is eager to give us a tour of his operation. In the back room of a pub, he hands Duyi a small chunk of stolen symrock, and Duyi demonstrates his ability for a half-dozen of Santiago's "lieutenants," as he calls them. Then we follow him to a warehouse where he stocks supplies for the revolution. In the dim lighting between the stacks of crates and boxes, Santiago seems to wax sentimental.

"When I came here as a child, I thought all the Moserothi were rich, since everyone used symrock technology." His parents were political refugees from the Bene-Jaakan system; I know because Duyi looked up his file when we first contacted the Freeminers. "It took me a while to understand that each world has a unique relationship to technology. These, for example."

He lifts the lid on one crate, revealing three long rifles nested snugly next to each other in their hard-foam packaging. I lean in for a closer look—the design appears modern, but unfamiliar.

"Pulse weapons," Santiago says, answering my unasked question. "They're standard issue off-world, but not much use on Moseroth III—too volatile to use around so much symrock. But we can exploit their design defect to turn them into explosive devices."

I glance up at him, surprised, though I suppose I shouldn't be. It's Santiago's ingenuity at work again.

He shows us stashes of stolen symrock, stockpiles of equipment, parts for building old-fashioned vehicles that don't rely on antigrav technology. One end of the warehouse is divided into two stories, and we go up to the second floor, to the single large room that makes up his local headquarters.

One side of the room hosts a bank of communications and monitoring equipment, and an enormous table-screen dominates the center of the room. Santiago activates it with a touch, calling up a map of Moseroth III and an overlay of stratagems in red.

"The forces loyal to the Regency are effective, but small. We can't hope to beat them in a fair fight, but we can overwhelm them—generate enough chaos that they must spread their forces too thin..."

We spend the rest of the afternoon in this vein, discussing strategy and meeting revolutionaries. That night, Duyi shakes me awake, one finger pressed to his lips. We slip out of the guest house and past the sentry Santiago posted outside to protect his investment in us. Duyi leads me through the dark streets back to the warehouse, and up to the headquarters.

"Now that we're free, we have to plan our next move," he explains in a hushed voice.

"Aren't we staying with the Freeminers?" The moon is visible through a broad skylight that runs the length of the warehouse, but the glass directly above is clouded with dirt, so I turn on the lights for Duyi's sake.

"For now," he agrees, walking over to the table-screen, "but we should have a backup plan. In case they prove to be less worthy of our trust than we might hope."

He calls up the map and I join him at the edge of the table, looking down at the web of roadlines and towns laid out before us. "If we're to plan an escape route, it'll depend on whether or not we can get our hands on a skimmer, and if so, which model."

"Or one of Santiago's off-road vehicles, if any of them have been assembled yet," Duyi adds.

"Do you think—" I start to say, but never get the chance to finish the sentence.

We are interrupted by shouts and crashes, and a rain of shattered glass falling on us from above.

Moserothi have a complicated relationship with symrock. It's the foundation of our economic system, the source of our wealth and comfort, the linchpin of our technology. But our dependency on symrock binds us to the Regency government. Symrock gives us power and freedom, and in the same stroke takes it away.

Likewise, the word "symrock" is an all-purpose exclamation: blessing, prayer, and curse all wrapped into two syllables. How typical of the Moserothi way of thinking—the assumption that all good fortune comes hopelessly entangled with unwanted baggage, and the reciprocal belief that even the worst misfortune has a speck of hope attached, like a tenacious parasite, to its side. The scales may tip toward bad or good for a while, but it's a trivial and temporary distinction. They are both ever-present.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to live on a world of clear delineations, of winnable battles. I think Santiago sees the rebellion with the off-worlder perspective of his parents, as if the conflict is concrete and finite, as if one side will attain a de-finitive victory. But we are Moserothi—we cannot win without losing. This has been my experience, anyway. I've never felt able to tease apart the good from the bad in life.

We duck and cover our faces as the skylight cascades down upon us in thousands of pieces. My senses kick into high gear, adrenaline hot in my veins, and I reach for Duyi's arm, knowing only that we have to get out of there. But there's no time.

Ropes fall through the gaping hole in the ceiling, and half a squadron of Regency guards zip down to the floor. They're decked out in gray ceramic body armor and faceplates, and each one is carrying a rifle.

I drag Duyi toward the stairs, but there's another pair of guards silently ascending, and we're forced back. One of the guards behind us speaks into a comm, "Target acquired. We're clear for the regent."

I share a glance with Duyi, and though neither of us says it, we're both thinking,
She came in person?
I can hear her enter the warehouse, her heels clicking on the concrete floor. The sound echoes. It seems to take her forever to cross the length of the building and climb the stairs. We're both breathing fast, even though there's nowhere for us to run.

The regent arrives with another pair of guards as escort. She looks immaculate in royal blue business-wear, her black hair slicked back in a tight bun. Duyi backs against the nearest wall—not so much for tactical advantage as out of sheer lizard-brain terror—and since my hand is still on his arm, I go with him. Better to face this together.

Oddly, the regent turns her sharp gaze on me first, as if Duyi weren't present. I cannot recall her ever addressing me directly before. "Guardsman Feng, you have allowed your charge too broad a sense of freedom. It is time to escort him home. That's an order."

I brace for the Imperative to respond. It gives a single reflexive kick, the old familiar pressure behind my eyes. But betraying Duyi would not make him happy, would not make him safe, and I focus on this truth to quell the sensation. I accepted my Imperative—I trained it instead of allowing it to train me—and now this program in my brain, this artificial seed of our real friendship, can no longer be used against us.

Steadily, I say, "I'm afraid I don't take orders anymore, regent. We go where we wish to go."

"I gave you everything!" she says, her tone turning cold as ice and sharp as glass. "Did you know your father—a cripple with too many mouths to feed—practically begged them to take you away? He traded you away for a comfortable pension. I gave you a livelihood, a purpose—you were selected over other candidates to receive this honor. And how do you repay me?"