Though I guess if they did have any, the plots would be pretty boring.
She chewed her lower lip for a moment. Then she said, “Please may I have some coffee?”
I gave her the coffee I was already working on, once it was strained and ready. I half expected her to throw the scalding fluid in my face, and was ready with the gravity if I saw her arm go back. But I guess she realized that even if she burned me, she’d still be chained to a stanchion, and she probably wanted that coffee a lot more than she wanted an empty gesture.
I mean, I know I would have.
There was a name for what I was trying to do to her, I was pretty sure. I wished Singer were here to remind me what it was.
Imprinting?
No, Stockholmification.
Right. From an ancient city name, back on Earth. Funny how words like that got into the language and never left. Stentorian. Colossal. Stockholmify.
All I had to do was make sure I didn’t accidentally Stockholmify myself.
Or let her do it to me.
CHAPTER 19
I BROUGHT FARWEATHER HER COFFEE AND a bowl of oatmeal enriched with space nori and sat down a few meters away across the corridor to enjoy my own breakfast. Enjoy was even the right term. It was so nice to be eating something other than algae, or algae with space shrimp, that I didn’t even mind that with the two of us sharing the food that had been meant for her alone—plus my gleanings from the algae tanks—we were on pretty tight rations.
At least my space suit had stopped expanding around me for the time being. And there was still a good quantity of coffee.
She sipped hers between taking bites of oatmeal—and pulling disgusted faces—and said, “You still haven’t managed to come up with an argument I find convincing, you know.”
“For the Synarche?”
She waved her spoon in the air. “For why you let an AI control what you think and feel, and can’t seem to survive without it.”
“Well for one thing,” I said calmly, “that’s a misrepresentation.”
“Oh?”
“Oh. Nobody controls what I feel except me, and rightminding lets me actually control what I feel, instead of being at the mercy of a whole bunch of very messy evolution. If anything, it makes me able to be more me, and less whatever random genetics and misadventure have installed.”
“Huh,” she said. She licked the back of her spoon. “Well, it’s nice that you think so.”
I ate my oatmeal.
“What about Judicial?”
“Recon?” I asked.
“If that’s what you want to call brainwashing, sure.”
“It heals people,” I pointed out. “When you’re too antisocial to know you’re antisocial, society has to intervene. Like parents teaching children responsible behavior.”
I tried not to think about the fact that—angry at her as I still was, craving revenge as I still was, wanting to kick that spoon right up her smug, pert little nose as I found myself and being unwilling to correct that feeling, to let go of it—I was probably not currently in any position to decide what was and what was not antisocial behavior. At least not on an emotional and desire level.
She smiled at me condescendingly.
“We’re monsters,” I said. “Atavistic horror shows. We can’t exist in a civilized society without fixing the ways in which we are evolutionarily maladapted to that civilized existence. Not without constantly harming one another.”
“The Freeports and Freeholds do just fine,” Farweather said.
I gawked at her. I almost said, It’s nice that you think so.
“I turned out all right,” she said, with her most devilish smile.
I have my limits. “It’s nice that you think so.”
“If you’re so confident that you’d do better, I dare you to meet me on equal ground.”
“What do you mean?”
She smiled slyly, only half her mouth rising. “Turn it off.”
“My rightminding?”
“All of it.”
“That’s pathological.”
“Well,” she said, “if the way you were raised—the civilized way you were raised—produces so much better, better-adjusted people than the free-range upbringing I got, prove it to me. Without chemical or mechanical crutches. Turn it off.”
“I don’t engage in murdering sentients for commerce,” I said. “Case closed.”
“You’re programmed not to,” she admitted. “That’s not ethics. I want to know the real you.” There was a pause while she examined her fingernails. “Unless you’re afraid of what you’ll learn.”
Of course I was. I was terrified of what I might learn. And not just because of growing up in the clade and not really feeling like I had a me to fall back on. But also because of the Judicial oversight.
I was damaged. I always would be. How much of that oversight held me together? Would I even be functional without it?
“I dare you,” she said.
“Drink your coffee,” I replied.
“Why do you do what you do?” she asked me.
“It gives me a lot of freedom,” I said. “I don’t like feeling trapped.”
“The Freeports would give you more freedom.”
“Sure,” I said. “As long as I subscribed to their… sorry, your… ideology. It’s the freedom to do whatever I want, as long as I’m willing to agree that other people’s well-being doesn’t matter unless they can enforce it.”
She looked at me blankly.
“Who cleans up the messes selfish people make? Somebody has to. With children, it’s parents. When it’s an adult with social power, what then?”
Farweather ducked her head so she could scratch her nose. “Well, cleaning it up is not my problem. I mean, I don’t have to worry about that.”
“I don’t want to live in that world.”
Farweather seemed to be thinking. “You’d rather let other people put their well-being over yours?”
“When they need it more? Sure would.”
“Huh.” Shaking her head gently, frowning, neck slightly twisted, she hunched her shoulders. She drew away. Probably would have walked away, if she hadn’t been chained to a stanchion.
Brave words, Dz. And yet, if I admitted it, her sophipathology—no, I needed the older word, the archaic word—her sociopathy, her social sickness… It was attractive. Not being beholden to anybody. Not being responsible for anybody but myself. Not caring what effect my actions had on others.
I thought of Connla when he had that dialed up. His confidence. Unapologetic skill. Ability to get through the most stressful situations without self-criticism, self-consciousness, or choking.
What would it be like not to be worried all the time about what effect my actions had on other people?
Maybe Farweather was right.
Maybe that was freedom.
I wondered what would happen if I just… turned my ethics off again.
The freedom had felt good. It had been nice to worry only about myself and the pragmatic results of whether what I was doing right now would get me what I wanted, right now or in the immediate future. I’d needed Farweather for my own purposes, so I could be confident that I probably wouldn’t kill her.
Could I rely on that need to keep me from killing her? It would be a lot easier to get through this if I weren’t so damned worried and conflicted all the time. Thinking about the future was really doing a number on me.