He is standing almost upright, a clearcut sniper target even in the chaos of the bombardment. I throw myself across the open ground and knock him into the cover of a ruined wall. When I roll him onto his back to see what’s happened to his face, he’s still screaming. I pull his hands away from his face by main force and the raw socket of his left eye gapes up at me in the murk. I can still see fragments of the eye’s mucous casing on his fingers.
‘Jimmy, JIMMY, what the fuck…’
The screaming sandpapers on and on. It’s taking all my strength to prevent him going back for the other undamaged eye as it wallows in its socket. My spine goes cold as I realise what’s happening.
Viral strike.
I stop yelling at Jimmy and bawl down the line.
‘Medic! Medic! Stack down! Viral strike!’
And the world caves in as I hear my own cries echoed up and down the Innenin beachhead.
After a while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly about what else they have not yet done. The fevered imagining of what is still to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and blades themselves.
When you hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up what little bile you have left in your stomach.
Imagine a satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It’ll take up most of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things you can tell at a glance. Is it a planned development or did it grow organically, responding to centuries of differing demand? Is it or was it ever fortified? Does it have a seaboard? Look closer, and you can learn more. Where the major thoroughfares are likely to be, if there is an IP shuttle port, if the city has parks. You can maybe, if you’re a trained cartographer, even tell a little about the movements of the inhabitants. Where the desirable areas of town are, what the traffic problems are likely to be and if the city has suffered any serious bomb damage or riots recently.
But there are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify and reel in detail, it can’t tell you if crime is generally on the increase, or what time the citizens go to bed. It can’t tell you if the mayor is planning to tear down the old quarter, if the police are corrupt, or what strange things have been happening at Number Fifty-One, Angel Wharf. And the fact that you can break down the mosaic into boxes, move it around and reassemble it elsewhere makes no difference. Some things you will only ever learn by going into that city and talking to the inhabitants.
Digital Human Storage hasn’t made interrogation obsolescent, it’s just brought back the basics. A digitised mind is only a snapshot. You don’t capture individual thoughts any more than a satellite image captures an individual life. A psychosurgeon can pick out major traumas on an Ellis model, and make a few basic guesses about what needs to be done, but in the end she’s still going to have to generate a virtual environment in which to counsel her patient, and go in there and do it. Interrogators, whose requirements are so much more specific, have an even worse time.
What d.h. storage has done is make it possible to torture a human being to death, and then start again. With that option available, hypnotic and drug-based questioning went out the window long ago. It was too easy to provide the necessary chemical or mental counterconditioning in those for whom this sort of thing was a hazard of their trade.
There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.
Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts.
A heated iron inserted into your vagina.
The pain. The humiliation.
The damage.
Psychodynamics/Integrity training.
Introduction.
The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the Corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.
The red hot metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar in your ears. You know it won’t stop them, but you still scream, begging—
‘Some fucking game, eh pal?’
Jimmy grinning up at me from his death. Innenin is still around us, but that can’t be. He was still screaming when they took him away. In reality—
His face changes abruptly, turns sombre.
‘You keep reality out of this, there’s nothing for you there. Stay removed. Have they done her any structural harm?’
I wince. ‘Her feet. She can’t walk.’
‘Motherfuckers,’ he says matter of factly. ‘Why don’t we just tell them what they want to know?’
‘We don’t know what they want to know. They’re after this guy Ryker.’
‘Ryker, who the fuck’s he?’
‘I don’t know.’
He shrugs. ‘So spill about Bancroft. Or you still feeling honour-bound or something?’
‘I think I already spilled. They don’t buy it. It’s not what they want to hear. These are fucking amateurs, man. Meatpackers.’
‘You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.’
‘That isn’t the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.’
‘Yeah.’ Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at the clotted gore within. ‘See your point. Well, in a construct situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right?’
During the period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humour, as the Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigades were surgically implanted with a quarter-kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on demand, turn the surrounding fifty square metres and anything in it to ash. It was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was fury-related and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy. There were a number of involuntary detonations.
Still, no one ever volunteered to interrogate a member of the Black Brigades. Not after the first one, anyway. Her name—
You thought they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is babbled—
As I was saying…
Her name was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends that had not yet been slaughtered by Protectorate forces. Her last words, strapped to the interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are reputed to have been: That’s fucking enough!
The explosion brought the entire building down.
That’s fucking enough!
I jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion and the sound of small waves lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole through which low angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk and the sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred, the nipples intact.