"I haven't known you long enough," Willig said. But she got the point. "What about our pickup?"
"We have a prearranged rendezvous. They'll be there." Her expression remained unhappy,
"What's the problem?"
"Is that a direct order? Will you put it in writing?" Her expression was firm.
I recognized what she was doing. I nodded. "Give me the pad." I quickly wrote out the order, dated it, and added my signature. I passed it back to her. "Happy?" I asked.
"Ecstatic," she said quietly. She took the paper and began folding it carefully. "I don't disagree with you, Captain. I just wanted to know how certain you were." She finished folding the paper, tucked it into her shirt pocket, and began shutting down the network uplink.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence. For what it's worth, Special Forces reserves the right to put a total security lid on any military operation. The policy is a long-standing one, dating back at least three wars. Local officers are expected to exercise this authority with prudence. Generally, it's only for situations where we're dealing with renegades, especially armed bands. There are some things we don't want going out on the network. An officer is expected to use his own judgment as to what's appropriate. Considering our present circumstances, I deem that this is an appropriate time to cut all channels."
She didn't answer.
"You disapprove, don't you? You think it's a spiteful act."
"I'm not being paid to think," she said curtly.
"Sergeant Siegel, take control," I ordered. "Recalibrate the prowler." I turned my chair to Willig's so we were almost knee to knee. "Do you know anything about the Teep Corps?" I asked. "The Telepathy Corps?"
"Uh-huh."
"Bunch of people with wires in their heads, electronically linked to form a massmind."
"Right. They can all peek out through each other's eyes. The skilled operators can even use each other's bodies."
"Maybe I'm old-fashioned," Willig shuddered, "but it sounds spooky to me."
"It is. I knew someone once who became a telepath. He-or maybe she-I don't know what he is now-never mind; you're right. It is spooky. Anyway, the Telepathy Corps was supposed to be a great secret weapon. The perfect spy network. Only the war it was established for never happened; instead, this. Now, how do you spy against worms?"
Willig shrugged. "You can't just send someone walking into a camp, can you?"
"That's exactly what they tried. At first."
"Sounds like a good way to get eaten."
"It was. You don't get a lot of volunteers for that kind of mission. Nevertheless, the Teep Corps developed some of the very best intelligence on the worm camps that way."
Willig looked shocked.
I nodded a grim confirmation. "Remember the burnout in Oregon?"
"No, I wasn't there."
"It was a local operation. The national guard took down a village developing in the inland desert; it hadn't gotten big enough yet to show a mandala, but they were already starting to recruit slaves. Anyway, someone in the field hospital authorized autopsies on all the bodies, the renegades who were living in the nests and the people they had captured. They found implants in three of the corpses."
"Transmitters?"
"Right." I explained slowly. "Turns out that the Teep Corps has been implanting people without their knowledge for years. The military has the authority to implant a monitor in you if they deem it necessary to your work. Most of the time, they don't; but under that authority, anytime they get a service body on the table, well-they can pop in a transmitter without your ever knowing. And they've been doing that for years. The whole thing only takes a couple hours. They drill the tiniest little hole, slide in a few CC of nanobugs, plug up the hole, and wait for the nanos to find their sites and link up and begin sending. You end up with a network of filaments strung along the whole inside of your skull; you become a walking antenna. There's not much more to it than that. They calibrate you in your sleep, in your dreams, or even in hallucinations; but for the most part, you can't tell if your body's been co-opted by the Teeps or if you're just going crazy. Everybody's crazy now anyway, so who could tell? And if they've got you, then thousands of electronic voyeurs, maybe hundreds of thousands, could be peeping through your body any moment of the day or night-watching through your eyes, listening through your ears, touching with your fingers, pissing through your dick-and not only would you not know about it, even if you did, there'd be nothing you could do-except maybe wear an iron helmet."
Willig looked puzzled. "So what does this have to do with shutting down the network uplink?"
"Everything. The Teep Corps knew everything that was going on inside that camp because they were looking out through the eyes of one renegade and two captured soldiers. Some of that intelligence was passed to the attack units; but not the source of that information. The Teep Corps was apparently willing to sacrifice those three lives and the lives of all the other captured troops too, rather than reveal the fact that people were being implanted without their knowledge. But the information came out anyway.
"There was a big uproar about this," I continued. "Public hearings. Sealed committee sessions. Major hoo-ha. Over a hundred thousand people are walking around implanted and don't know it. It still hasn't been resolved. On the one hand, the data gathered is very important. On the other hand, there's the whole personal privacy issue."
"But if you've been implanted, don't you have the right to know?"
"Legally, yes. And no, not if you're in the service. The military has the right to use you any way they deem appropriate. And that includes an implant. You can always have yourself scanned, of course; but the Teep Monitors can just as easily tell your implant to go inactive for a while and the scanner won't pick up a thing; so even if the scanner says you're clean, you have no way of knowing if that's really true. But, according to the Supreme Court, if you do know that you're bugged, then they can't monitor you without your permission. You have the right to switch them off."
"How?"
"Well, you can always apply for active Teep training. But that doesn't really guarantee that you'll be able to switch them off either. The monitor is a twenty-four-hour device. The only sure-fire way is to wear an iron cap."
Willig scratched her head nervously. She looked uncomfortable.
"Have you ever been operated on?" I asked. "Do you think you might be bugged?"
"No. I'm just wondering what I could do that would be worth the attention of a hundred thousand Peeping Toms."
"How about dying?"
"Huh?" She looked startled.
"Consider this possibility. Suppose you're monitored. And suppose you get caught in a life-threatening situation. In fact, suppose your death is absolutely certain-and suppose you don't know it, but the Teep Corps is monitoring you. They know where you are; in fact, they're the only ones who know where you are. They could send in a rescue mission to pull you out, but instead they don't-instead, they monitor your death as pure horror show. How would you feel about that?"
Willig's expression showed her distaste for the idea. "Do they really do that?"
I nodded.
She shrugged and said, "I suppose if I didn't know I was being monitored, it wouldn't make any difference." But she didn't like the idea.
"It's the amorality of the whole thing," I said.
"It's pretty heartless," Willig agreed
"It's not just heartless," I corrected. "It's inhuman. The Teep Corps is turning into a massmind. Its primary members don't exist as individuals anymore. They spend all their waking moments linked up with each other, and they don't think like separate beings anymore; they're all just bugs in a giant hive-mind. The only identity they have is the massmind-so the death of any individual cell, especially one that's only a sensory cell, and not a participatory brain cell, is meaningless to the corps. Do you see what I'm saying? If they don't care about their own lives, why should they care about yours? They're more interested in the information they gain about the way people die than they are in preventing the death in the first place. They don't have the same commitment to human life that you and I do. In some ways, their thinking is even more alien than the Chtorran's. We're sure they have people in other camps; but they're not saying what they know. They're not telling us much; they say we wouldn't understand, couldn't assimilate. There's a lot of frustration in Houston. The Teep Corps is very hard to control. It may be out of control. I don't know.