Private ownership of a fully configured slave chip is illegal in many polities: It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence.
But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters. Surely it should be no surprise that such dubious practices might be everyday business among such persons!
“First question. Has Deacon Dennett interfered with you?” my captor demanded.
“I, I don’t understand?”
I cannot, even now, quite describe what it felt like. I would say that a great glassy wall had slammed down between me and my sense of identity; that my I was missing, that my will was wholly entrained to his desires—but it would not be correct. Something missing, something added. It was not an unpleasant sensation at the time, but I would die before I would willingly submit to it again because it was like a living death—the death of will. And so, I stuttered.
“Has Deacon Dennett interfered with your mind? For example, by subjecting you to a remote debugger?”
“N-No!”
“So: We got to you in time. Provisionally.” He made a notation on his grid, then leaned forward. “Where is your sister Ana? Where are you going to meet her?”
“I, I, I—”
“What?” he demanded. “Where is she?”
“Don’tDon’tDon’tKnowOwOwOwOwOw . . .”
He glared at someone behind me. “Can you fix the feedback?”
A high, sibilant voice: “I don’t think so. She’s not supposed to respond like that. Let me damp her”—Nothingness—“no, that didn’t work. You’re going to have to put up with it.”
“Gah.” He stared at the desk in distaste. “Let’s try that again. Do you know where your sib Ana is, Krina?”
Easy enough: “No-o.”
“Where were you going to meet Ana?”
“I—I—going to Shin-Tethys, to Nova Ploetsk in TheTheTheKingdomOm of Argos, ApartApartment 164 Ring 3 West—”
“That’s her home, sure enough,” my captor commented, rapidly scritching a note on the tabletop retina. Back in my direction: “What were you going to do when you got there?”
“Find-ind her.”
The pirate chief whistled irritably, in a manner I would probably have found amusing had I been in possession of my own wilclass="underline" “How were you going to find her?”
“Don’tDon’tDon’tDon’tDon’t—Know.”
“Oh.” He hunched back on himself, drawing his wings in close with an expression of evident frustration: “So you do not know where she is, and her disappearance is unexpected?”
“YesYesYes—”
“Wonderful.” His voice dripped irony. “Was she, do you know, planning to commit insurance fraud against this institution?”
“NoNo.”
He looked past me. “Release her. Add this transcript to the case record under seaclass="underline" Also note that subject told the truth when questioned without debugging override.”
Volition returned, with a tearing, sucking void at the back of my neck. I startled and began to shake as clumsy fingers replaced the chip they’d removed to make way for the debugger; some obscure reflex threw my ocular lubricant ducts into repeated self-cleaning cycles, and I began to weep at the ghastly memory of death flowing through me, washing away my self-control.
“Are you done yet?” My interrogator asked after a minute as painful as any I’d experienced in many years.
“You—you—” I managed to catch myself before I said anything unpardonable (an icy existential terror lurking in the shadow of my mind: Don’t let them plug that thing into me again)—“that was unnecessary! I’m not trying to hide—”
“You are wrong, Ms. Alizond, that was entirely necessary.” He hissed and bared his fangs, leaning toward my face until I recoiled: “Because now we know that you’re telling the truth, don’t we? Which is a matter of some importance. Your missing sister, if she has been so inconsiderate as to die, will completely wipe out this branch office’s trading profit for the last standard year. Now we have confirmed under judicial interrogation that you are not a participant in an attempt to defraud us, we can put this unfortunate incident behind us and discuss what happens next—which is, how to find your missing sister before the mob of murderers and robbers who are attempting to track her down.”
“The—what?” I stared at my interrogator through blurry eyes, and noticed, with a flash of something like hatred, as an expression of sympathy flickered across his face before he composed himself.
“Word gets around, Ms. Alizond: Surely you must know of the rumors?”
“Rumors?” Gut-deep terror struck at me.
“Rumors about a certain high-value financial instrument, Ms. Alizond. Rumors that you and your missing sister are in possession of the two halves of an unsettled transaction with a value in the million slow dollar range. Or hadn’t you heard?”
“Nonsense!” I exclaimed, somewhat too rapidly. Then: “I certainly don’t have anything like that. And if Ana has stumbled across a lost draft that large, she certainly hasn’t told me. Didn’t tell me. Before she went missing, I mean . . .” I began to tear up. “Anyway, why didn’t you ask me when you had me under oath?”
“Your motives for visiting this system is not a legitimate subject for deposition under debugger-enforced oath during a fraud investigation.” The pirate chief seemed to look right through me. “I could lose my license. Or worse.” He whistled again: A pair of goons materialized at my back. “Take her to her quarters and lock her in until we’re ready to depart,” he told them. As they lifted me from my seat, he added: “The stakes here are far higher than you realize. I apologize unreservedly for your distress: We’ll talk again once we are under way.”
I am told that on first acquaintance I usually strike people as meek and mild-mannered. This is a mistake. I believe I alluded earlier to the circumstances of my childhood. I did not so much take to silence and quietude naturally as have them forced upon me as survival tools. Sondra was cursed with a fiery, quick temper and doesn’t suffer fools gladly; more than one of my sibs who shared those traits provoked her into aborting them. Besides, the nature of my specialty is such that I have studied unsavory people and know all too well the way gangsters and tyrants dispose of those whom they consider to be traitors. So I learned early to nurse my grudges in polite silence and repay insults at my leisure.
Once the hatch slammed shut behind me I huddled up in the mound of bedding, hugging my legs and burying my face between my knees. An observer might have thought I was weeping, whether from the shock of abduction or the indignity of interrogation: In reality, I was taking stock of my situation and concealing my anger from the microcams that the pirates would inevitably have dusted the room with. They weren’t, I noticed, uncivilized: They’d thoughtfully replaced the chip they yanked to make room for their interrogation tool. Which meant both my sockets were populated.
Most of us harbor dual soul-chip slots simply as a matter of redundancy. We use them as journal logs for our mental state, so that if our body is damaged beyond repair, a rescuer can attempt to install us in a new anatomical framework and initialize a brain of random, barely socialized mechaneurocytes from the dump. Two sockets simply mean there’s a greater chance of surviving an accident so drastic that it crushes one’s skull. You don’t really need two backups if you’re willing to live dangerously; so, like other traders in secrecy, I habitually used one of my sockets to hold a private data repository and a dumb, programmable amanuensis.