Shoggoths in Bloom (36 page)

And only the actualizing took place in the lab.

She kept thinking that until her search cluster turned up a paper by a Dr. Ionita in the ABM proprietary database. It was fascinating, and troubling, and she didn’t realize she wasn’t supposed to be reading until she was a few thousand words in.

FADE IN EXT: FOREST GLADE WITH BIRDS SINGING - MORNING

People were human. Accidents happened.

So Brigid told herself, her hands trembling with adrenaline reaction as she sat back in her chair.

It wasn’t a management honey trap: she had every right to be running this search. And every right to be reading the documents that turned up. With the exception of this one, which detailed how physiological primate social control mechanisms such as shame and the community urge might be hardwired to reinforce submission to authority. Her access of the file was already logged. But since its author had backed it up to the wrong virtual, her access was perfectly legit as far as the watchbots were concerned. There was nothing to trip a flag. Nothing. Unless human eyes went over the log and realized that Brigid Keating wasn’t affiliated with the Military Research division. And that she had no reason to be reading up—not just on ABM’s treatment of post traumatic stress and combat anxiety, which was well within her purview— but . . . other military and social applications. At first she assumed that the paper of Dr. Ionita’s she was reading was speculative, theoretical—until she skimmed back to the abstract, and then found the appended data. At that point, she couldn’t stop reading. But nor could she continue: the access log would show how long she’d had the file open. Of course, she had a lot of files open, floating all around her headspace. But there was a cutoff for plausible deniability.

She mirrored it to her secure space and closed the original file. And continued reading.

Rightminding applications had been in development for treating posttraumatic stress since the nineties and naughties. Their early successes and failures—along with those of techniques for managing obsessive compulsive disorder and other neurological imbalances—were the source from which the modern discipline of rightminding sprang.

But Ionita’s research wasn’t concerned with making soldiers immune to battlefield panic, or keeping them from freezing up in a crisis, or amending the damage done to human psyches by exposure to violence—or worse, by the creation of it. What Brigid read now—tea cooling, fork forgotten on the edge of her plate, shoulders hunched forward in a manner that would lead to pain in the morning—was a far more unsettling plan. This program, she realized, would create soldiers who could not disobey orders. And workers who could not disobey their superiors.

That’s ridiculous, Brigid thought. Her first urge was to go scurrying off seeking confirmation, but too-eager googling would leave a trail she suddenly didn’t want behind her. Hard to say she’d opened the mis-saved file by innocent accident if she’d promptly run off in pursuit of what it revealed.

Military organizations relied on the ability of soldiers to refuse an illegal order. Far too many of them never would, even under ordinary circumstances. The pressure to conform was great, the training to bow to authority even greater.

And, according to this file, one of her colleagues was having success removing that ability. This struck Brigid as not just ethically bad, but practically bad.

Brigid was agnostic on the topic of the existence of free will. She considered it a null argument, arising from a spurious and archaic distinction between conscious and unconscious minds. But even leaving aside for the moment the ongoing debate of what exactly free will was, and if it existed at all, order-following robots wasn’t what you wanted if you were trying to create a well-disciplined military, part of whose strength was in each soldier’s trained judgment and ability to think for her or himself.

But ABM did not work solely for the military. And Brigid could think of plenty of less enlightened corporate leaders that would reward yes-men, and those who could create yes-men.

As if the emotional pressures of primate social controls weren’t enough to enforce groupthink in most circumstances. Ethical rightminding applications increased individuality and autonomy. This was . . . . . . not that.

Brigid sat back. She was already soaked in perfectly normal sweat from the heat of the evening. It didn’t stop her breaking out in chills.

Monday morning, Brigid cycled in to the lab to confront the usual straggle of anti-rightminding protestors. Signs floated in virtual space around them—a few of them funny, most badly designed and punctuated. Someone jeered as she pedaled past. Brigid spared a moment to her habitual longing for the future day when she could telecommute completely—except for occasional Partnership Days, as so many of the paper pushers did. Remote surgery by robot and waldo was what she did now, and it shouldn’t be too much harder to do it from across town than from the next room.

The management was conservative, however, and Brigid suspected that they had the sort of mindset that supposed anyone who wasn’t under constant, direct supervision spent most of their time goofing off. As far as Brigid was concerned, this said more about the management than their employees. Most of the researchers she knew had to be told when to stop working—and have the edict enforced.

Normally, the sight of the lab lowered her blood pressure, rather than elevating it. But on most days, she wasn’t carrying the remnant neurochemical and fatigue poison cocktail of a stressed, sleepless night in her bloodstream. She’d finally had to dose herself with a regulator just to be able to lie down. But she’d thrashed in her bead, kicking at the sweat-wicking covers while sleep had eluded her for hours afterward and the implications of what she’d read chased each other’s tails through her weary mind.

She’d finally been able to doze when she’d decided what she would do. Dr. Ionita had obviously made an error in his or her backups. Brigid probably should report it to management—it was a security breach, and while she knew ABM’s security was a joke, the suits still took it seriously. Paternalistically so, in her opinion.

Perhaps she’d mention it to Ionita, and let him or her decide what to do. Who was she to destroy somebody else’s career over a simple error?

But she didn’t know Ionita, who worked in a different area of the building and—from a brief survey of Brigid’s contacts—seemed to be the sort who lived most of his or her existence behind privacy filters. And there was the content of the research . . .

It’s none of your business, Brigid told herself.

The lab was a modern green building, elevated on stilts above the climaterisen waters of New London Harbor so it could easily use temperature differentials and wave energy for its massive electrical needs. The building itself was greened, every surface shielded by taro plants suited to the warm temperate climate of modern Connecticut. Broad, heart-shaped leaves tossed in the sea breeze, revealing a gorgeous variety of greens—from pale and speckled to a color bordering on black. An elevated causeway led from the shore, above the sparkling clean waters of the harbor, to the lab’s shaded veranda. Spectacular, and certain to impress visiting venture capitalists . . . but it did mean there was only one approach.

A bored police woman kept that approach clear, but Brigid still had to run the gauntlet of shouted insults. Her stomach contracted to a chilly lump as she approached.

They can’t hurt you.

But social disapproval was a pain of its own. Hardwired in, from an era of human evolution when ostracism equaled death. And worse, when you had already lost a family.

Eyes front, spine straight, Brigid passed through the protestors, wondering as she did so how anyone could be so wedded to their pain, their neurosis that they’d want to defend it. Or maybe that was an adaptive response gone haywire, too? You defend the trauma response, because the trauma response keeps you away from things that can destroy you.

Trauma response could lead to the expectation of a limited life. No belief in a future, marriage, children, a decent job, a fulfilling career. It could lock you into a cage of anhedonia and self-fulfilling prophecies. If the person who hurt you was someone you loved and trusted, doubly so.

It could happen, Brigid thought, even if the person who hurt you would have done anything other than hurt you, if they could. Even if they had hurt you by saving your life, and not their own.

She thought about Val, and wondered. He had—as far as she knew—a good home life. His boyfriend was delightful. Sometimes Brigid wasn’t sure which of them she envied more. And there was that locked feeling in her own heart, that sense that if she reached out past it, ever, she would shatter.

Maybe I should get a cat.

Brigid locked her bike into the (internal, secured) bike rack, passed through the usual security theatre dance, and climbed the stairs to her lab. Six flights: she was on the top floor. She trotted up them. All that time under a pack paid off.

It also helped manage her neurochemistry. It just couldn’t get rid of the cowardice.

Val would tell her that she was applying an unreasonable standard to herself, that societal expectations—in this, as in so many things—were bankrupt and unrealistic. Intellectually, she could find it in herself to agree with him. But the understanding and the internalized perceptions— those were in direct conflict on this, as on so many things. It made her understand why so many people drew a bright line between aspects of the self, even if she didn’t agree with them.

Like everyone else in the world, she had some baggage of her own.

Brigid was relatively confident that in the future—when rightminding gained cultural acceptance and became something people did as a matter of course to be happier and more productive—regular, appropriate exercise was going to be a big part of it. (And do you also, she asked herself, believe in the Easter Bunny?)

She put a hand on the wall at the top landing, dizzied by a reflexive wall of frustrated rage—at herself, at humanity, at weakness. A future where everybody was not acting out of their trauma and anxiety all the time seemed bitterly like an unachievable utopia.

Inside her office, she showered quickly, changed to clothes not soaked in sweat from the humid ride in, and clicked her Omni to work shell. She checked her ration status and ordered a cup of coffee and a bagel with smoked North Atlantic cod. The fisheries were on her list of things that might recover reasonably well, if human beings could just be converted into the rational actors that economists had for too long imagined them to be. Not a race of Vulcans—Brigid saw no percentage in removing emotion. That was a primitive idea, which had been replaced since the late twentieth century with the idea that emotion was at the root of a good deal of cognition, and rightfully so.

The trick, Brigid thought, was figuring out how to work it so it was healthy emotion driving people’s choices, and not atavistic fear response.

Sometimes, she thought of fear as a personified thing, an actual enemy. In both her personal and professional lives.

She felt her attention veering off again after the question of Dr. Ionita’s research. That’s fear too, she thought. Fear of the other, fear of not having utter control over every aspect of the world we live in. It was a fear that had bankrupted the twentieth century—that race to get ahead, to be the strongest. The most defended.

Sophipathological. Suffering from an illness of the thought.

She reined herself in and submitted her breakfast order. The delivery ’bot, Rover, would bring the bagel up on its rounds.

Brigid sat down in her chair and began sorting her environments into the air around her. ABM’s corporate logo was an abstract line drawing of Athena holding her owl. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, had been born from the head of the god Zeus after the lame god of the forge, Hephaestus, smashed it open with an axe to relieve a blinding headache.

What that said about getting any kind of sense out of Zeus, Brigid left as an exercise to the class.