Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (67 page)

Her eyes flicked over one series of reports from Angel—a large League world of nearly three hundred million, a wealthy place but now struggling with various troubles. The articles listed were obscure, almost trivial—a shooting, the description of a political squabble, an incident of road rage, a first person account of a big social event . . . this was the contents of Chancelry’s top secret vault? You could find this stuff anywhere, Tanusha included. This was what a League warship, Vanessa had hair-raisingly informed her, had been trying to nuke Droze over, rather than have the outside world find out?

News clippings were grouped by planetary heading, and then further grouped into a broader statistical framework that at first glance did not seem to make sense. That framework organised into various charts and graphs, with strange letters for heading that might be acronyms.

These in turn linked into more files. Public opinion surveys. Interface polling. Aha. Very large scale interface polling . . . damn, it looked like every world in the League had been comprehensively polled. Something that large could only have been run by a very coordinated central government program. Spying on its own citizens, attempting to discern public preferences, opinions, social breakdowns by net traffic intensities across various indices. And there were other references she didn’t recognise . . . she herself had come across her little psychological profiling trick for large network constructs that had so freaked out her CSA friends, probably League operatives had their own little tricks. Was that what this was? A giant attempt to psychologically profile the entire League population? Well that would certainly be a bombshell if League media ever got a hold of it. No doubt the government would come crashing down, a scandal of monstrous proportions. But enough to try and nuke Droze? Not even close—politicians were scared enough of losing office, to say nothing of their lives. The League had used their death penalty far more often than the Federation during the war, sometimes even against wayward or traitorous politicians. No doubt a few would like to use it on her, if they could.

And here on various graphs, whatever-it-was that they were measuring, was absolutely taking off across the last . . . five years? Sandy frowned, trying to make sense of it all. On one world after another . . . well, the curve was inconsistent, but it was definitely rising, and now she was seeing a pattern in the organisation of all these files. They all led back to that series of uprising graphs. Measuring what? A preference for chocolate? Group sex? Damn stupid sociologists, what were they trying to . . . ?

She flipped to some new graphs, and suddenly, a series of acronyms she recognised. FD. Fifth Dispersal. That was the technical term for a form of synthetic neurology, one of the means of achieving sentience. But that was purely GI-specific. Nothing from that strand of research had ever made it into regular humans. What the hell was it doing here, in a study of a huge population of regular, organic humans?

Oh no.

Time stopped, and her blood turned cold. The other acronyms. DPO. Delta Pattern Osmosis. MD. Mitochondrial Duplication. Shorthand terms for microscopic processes that took entire volumes to explain. GI tech. Talee tech. But the indices were clearly measuring trends directly across the entire League population.

“Oh, fuck you!” she shouted, tearing away from the uplinks. She kicked the wall so hard she put a hole in it. And stumbled back around to a chair, pulled it out and sat in it, hands to her face, then in her hair. Staring at the wall in blank horror.

“Sandy?” asked Rishi, a little nervously.

“They never admitted GI technology came from Talee,” Sandy said. She could barely hear her own voice. Could barely comprehend the monstrosity that she saw before her, emerging from this data. It was too horrible to contemplate. And too huge. “So of course, they never admitted they used Talee tech in standard human uplinks. Like all people have, in League society.”

“And Federation, right?” said Rishi.

“Not like this,” said Sandy. “Because the Federation never kept big secrets like this. League kept this secret. Our secret, our Talee origins. And once they kept a big secret, the little ones didn’t seem so bad. Especially once the war started, and suddenly secrecy was everything. They used the same Talee tech in standard uplinks that they used to make us. Federation never did—they used their own indigenous tech instead. League loves all high tech, it’d give them a big economic boost over the Federation, League loved to stick it up the Federation. What a great idea, so long as you don’t admit where it came from.

“It went wrong, Rishi. It’s like Pyeongwha all over again. They used neural tech they didn’t fully understand and the technology’s great, but it’s causing second and third generation mutations in human brain function, and League society’s going nuts. That’s what all this documents . . .” and she waved a finger at the exposed mainframe in the wall, “. . . it’s all this stuff in League society, it’s not just the dislocation following the war at all. It’s Neural Cluster Tech again. It’s Compulsive Narrative Syndrome, and it’s taking off exponentially. They’re getting weird behaviour they’ve never seen before, strange social divisions, cults, political movements . . . and if it all keeps building up at this rate, they’ll tear each other apart.” Suddenly one of the graphs she’d flicked over made perfect sense. “Three years. Maybe. This whole segment of humanity’s on the verge of becoming homicidally dysfunctional. Billions of people. And all because these fucking League elitist bastards think they can run everything themselves without sharing with the rest of us.”

Rows of bodies in the caverns. Six hundred thousand casualties on Pyeongwha. Pyeongwha had been one world, with three hundred million people. League had five billion. She just couldn’t believe what the League leadership had done. It was unspeakable. Sandy was Federation, and didn’t like the way the League worked, but this was so far beyond any concept of petty tribalism or revenge. League civvies were just people like people anywhere—it wasn’t their fault their system sucked. They sure as hell didn’t deserve this.

“No wonder League wanted to nuke us rather than let it get out,” someone said quietly. Sandy could only nod, still staring at the wall. No wonder also that Ramoja had betrayed her to get at this. His civilisation was dying, his government had been trying drastic covert things to fix it, and he’d wanted in. At any cost.

And the Talee must have known what was going on here. Somehow, they must have known, and decided it shouldn’t be covered up. Perhaps they were scared too. Perhaps they knew things about this technology, this horrifying phenomenon, that they’d not yet shared with humanity. Evidently someone over there felt strongly about it, to have destroyed a League warship in full view of everyone, to keep the truth alive.

“So . . .” Rishi said slowly, “they’ve been working with Chancelry to . . . try and find a cure?”

“Looks that way,” said Sandy. “Try all kinds of new stuff. Try it fast, because they’re running out of time. I’m sure League’s trying lots of other stuff themselves at secret bases, but New Torah Chancelry’s the only corporation with access to the original tech. So if they want to find a solution at the source, they’ve no choice but to come here, and since they’re using GI tech in straights, experiments on GIs directly might be the best way to find answers. This way you can separate the synthetic results from the organic interference. God knows what Chancelry asked from them as payment.”

“Independence,” said Rishi, with certainty. “I bet you.”

Sandy nodded slowly. It made sense. “Starships. Sovereignty. A guarantee of non-interference from League and Federation both.” Thus the League going to such lengths to keep the Federation out of it. And the ISO, whom they obviously didn’t trust. Probably Mustafa and his friends were a big part of that, given the kind of research being done on Pantala. Wherever the hell Mustafa was now—no one had found him yet. More unfinished business.

“So what happens now?” Rishi asked. “You think there’ll be another war?”

“Oh, only if we’re lucky,” Sandy said bleakly. “A war like the last one would be a best case scenario. Pyeongwha was only getting started when we intervened—if left alone, it would have gotten much worse. If this is as bad as Pyeongwha, spread over five billion people with the firepower the League still has at their disposal, we could lose half the species. Unless the Federation does something fast. Probably something very violent and very unpopular.”

Given the Federation’s track record on such recent matters, it seemed a small hope at best.

Joel Shepherd is the author of seven SF & Fantasy novels, including the Cassandra Kresnov Series, and the
A Trial of Blood and Steel
quartet. He is currently completing a PhD in International Relations, for which he’s living for a year in India. He also has a short screenplay in development, has had an “interested” Hollywood feature producer, and other entertaining distractions.