“What kind of extremists?”
Rogue intelligences who don’t agree with our ultimate goals in creating the Brachiators, or any of the other intelligent species we’ve engineered in our long and distinguished history. That bombshell was followed by an even bigger one, as the implacable voice specified: Parties who will oppose us even if that means bloodshed and chaos among the organic intelligences.
When the time came to thank Artis Bringen for getting me involved in all this, I’d use my bare hands. “Why didn’t you tell me this when I arrived? Why did you have to be so bloody mysterious?”
Their voice adopted an incredulous, mocking tone. And what would you have had us do, Counselor? Provide you with a long, detailed printout of our interior code, with markers isolating the rogue intelligences from the rest of our shared consciousness? How would you make sense of what we provided you? How would you capture their intangible essences and bring them to your version of justice, let alone make sure that they would not take human lives again? Could you imprison them? Execute them? Even war on them without warring on us as well?
I couldn’t even begin to come up with an answer. “So what do they get out of killing human beings?”
The destabilization of our business here, aboard One One One.
“Which is…?”
Not relevant to your current investigation.
“Like hell it’s not—”
Excuse us, but like hell it is. The nature of the enterprise these malcontents seek to disrupt has no bearing on the crimes against your people on this station. Giving further details would not only jeopardize a state secret, but would also confuse an investigation already bogged down in entire layers of irrelevancy. Suffice it to say that the rogues, and their motives, are currently outside your reach.
I’d made the mistake of ignoring their phraseology before. I didn’t this time. They’d said my current investigation. They’d said the rogues were currently outside my reach. Both usages seemed deliberate. I rubbed my forehead again. “Then why haven’t you taken care of it yourselves?”
As we said: politics. They are among us, but nevertheless shielded from us. They are like terrorists hiding among your own population. You cannot reach them without causing pain and suffering to innocents. Likewise, we cannot eliminate our own dangerous factions without tremendous suffering.
I thought of Bringen’s hunger for a scapegoat. “And is this known to my people?”
It is suspected by some.
“Just like I suspect that none of what you’ve said to me qualifies as an official statement.”
Of course not. What good will it do relations between our people and yours to have it known that the true instigators of these crimes are currently beyond human reach? As your superior Bringen told you, you simply need to find a guilty party. Any guilty party. And this remains well within your current powers.
There was that word current again. They were certainly going out of their way to tease me with possibilities. “I won’t pick a name at random.”
We are not expecting you to. After all, your prosecution does need to stand up to later examination. The most relevant culprit, operating with substantial support from our extremist faction, is indeed a human being aboard this station.
“The same one who sent me those images of my own death.”
Correct. With, of course, the substantial technological aid of the extremist elements among our own people.
“The same one who taunted me as my hammock fell apart.”
Also correct.
“Whoever it is had a tremendous amount of personal information about me. Even some things I didn’t know, about some plans my superiors have made for me.”
Assuming you give those stories credence, a risky venture given that the criminal in question will say anything to throw you off your stride, we’re not surprised. You are here to make an arrest. Your saboteur would have had a significant amount of time to consult the considerable intelligence-gathering capabilities of our rogue intelligences, obtain the voluminous amount of information already compiled about you, and with that information on hand, construct a powerful campaign of psychological warfare, intent on forcing you off the case.
“Those hate mails I received, and that attempt on my life, strike me as more than just strategy. That’s obsession.”
True. But would that be incompatible with the kind of mind capable of committing these crimes in the first place? In human terms, this individual is broken, in ways that you are merely bent. If he, or she, recognized this while researching the prosecutor arriving to investigate the murders aboard this station, then the natural resentment that would follow could only exacerbate the obsessive potential of the delusional pathology responsible.
Terrific. I was fighting somebody who made me look like a paragon of mental health. “And that other voice I heard up there? The one that sounded like my superior, Artis Bringen?”
That was us. We imagined you would respond most quickly to orders from him.
It bothered me, on a deep, personal level, that they were probably right. “You didn’t have to stop with that. You could have sent help. Or summoned somebody for me.”
We could have, but that would have meant direct conflict with the rogue intelligences. There were, as we have said, political subtleties at play here, which rendered that inadvisable. It was enough that we startled you awake and gave you a chance to confront the moment on your own.
“I almost died.”
And we would have been saddened. But this needed to remain a fight between human beings.
Good point; I needed an enemy I could touch. “You know the name.”
Of course.
“Then, for Juje’s sake, tell me!”
We have already helped you, Counselor. We have warned you of impending attempts on your life. We have spoken to you, in the voice of your immediate superior, to alert you when such an assault was under way. We have intervened when you tested our goodwill with that maneuver in the skimmer. We have given you one small gift and have worked, hard, to provide you with another. We intend on offering you an even greater boon upon the conclusion of this business. We take all these steps because we consider you an important human being whose desires have been known to mirror ours: hence our prior observation that we have much in common. We look forward to discussing that with you later, at length. But right now the delicate politics of the matter prevent us from just providing you with an actual name. As convenient as that would be, there are too many impartial factions, inside us, who are observing these events with great interest in their natural resolution, and who would object if we overstepped the limits of our own prescribed involvement. So we are forced to operate within those impartial boundaries.