“You went with him,” I said. “Did it ever occur to you that he might have been controlling you against your will?”
“Oh, I knew that right way. He had a subteemer aimed at my pleasure center, and he gave me a happy jolt every time I considered what he was saying, a negative jolt every time I doubted him. Of course, it was very tiring for him, keeping such a close eye on me for days on end, but he was able to manage until we met up with his people and he was able to install the automated system.” She indicated the octagonal chip on her wrist. “But the truth is, it wasn’t even all that necessary by then. I’d seen the brilliance of his ideas. I believed in him the way earlier generations believed in God. His dreams were my dreams, his ambitions my ambitions. I lived to realize his vision of Mankind’s future.”
The Porrinyards grimaced in disgust. “Soul-rape.”
“Love,” Mrs. Pearlman shot back. “Passion.”
I said, “He made you feel that way.”
“The finest gift he could have given me.”
Skye said, “The girl he found on that university campus might not have thought so.”
“She was a vapid little idiot.”
Yes, I thought. A vapid little idiot capable of thinking for herself, and acting for herself, and of some concern for human beings other than the one who had replaced whatever value system she might have had with one designed to serve his own purposes.
I found myself remembering the night of madness that had overtaken my family and neighbors on Bocai. We’d lived in peace until the moment when, with no warning, we’d all found ourselves wanting to kill each other. Then we became other people. Could Magrison’s means of mind control be the same weapon the Unseen Demons had used on us?
Could it be associated with the upcoming extinctions the AIsource had spoken of?
Skye was asking Mrs. Pearlman, “Did he ever take physical advantage of you?”
Mrs. Pearlman’s eyes darkened. “You’re mocking me. You know his philosophy. He hated to be touched. He thought all human beings are deprived of their true potential by the animalistic drives that force us to crave the approval of others. He wanted to free us from that. As far as sex was concerned, there was only one thing he liked, and he refused to render it pleasurable for me; the defilement and degradation his lovers experienced was very much the central point.”
Vernon Wethers, whose prissiness had already impressed me during dinner, went a little green at this; he murmured an excuse-me and rushed to the bathroom, his cheeks ballooning.
Mrs. Pearlman watched him go, with defiant pleasure at his discomfort. Then her eyes softened again, and her voice became breathless, even giddy. “Want more? Sometimes, when I was good, when I’d solved a problem or furthered his plans in some other fashion, he’d send as much joy as my heart could stand, directly into my brain, and stay with me for hours while I felt touched by God. Once he even went on a trip for six weeks, and as a special treat left the transmitter on maximum while he was gone. He had to leave people behind to keep me fed and watered and clean and turn me so I wouldn’t get bedsores. It felt like hundreds of years. When he came back and turned it off, I would have done anything to be touched like that again. Anything. I wept. I even begged him to do the thing he liked. I told him he could befoul me as much as he wanted if he’d just leave me in that place again, even if only for another five minutes. One time, he—”
Monday Brown interrupted. “Counselor! Isn’t this enough, already?”
Much as I hated to admit it, the man was right. The psychological destruction of one young woman, and her transformation into a creature capable of furthering the nihilistic ambitions of the terrorist history knew as the Beast Magrison, did exert a sick fascination, especially given its resemblance to what my people had endured on Bocai, but it had little to do with the reason we were here. I took a deep breath, glanced at the now-weeping Paakth-Doy, felt a moment of sympathy for her that made me hope she did not turn out to be the Khaajiir’s murderer, and pressed on. “What was your personal contribution to the development of Magrison’s Fugue?”
“For five years I worked on the team that developed the strain. It was not easy, you know. Anywhere people can afford AIsource Medical they also have nanites, screening out all biological infestations, whether natural or artificial. The developers had to make a sheath capable of interacting with those defenses and turning them into allies. I was one of those refining the actual symptoms, taking out everything that damaged cognitive function and enhancing only those elements that caused pain at the sight and sound of other human beings.” She beamed. “When the chaos started on the worlds we infected? He said that the victory was at least ten percent mine. He was even moved to kiss me.”
The room fell silent, no two of the observers willing to look at each other. We all knew the history that followed. Before it was contained, Magrison’s Fugue had infected seventeen inhabited worlds and over fifty billion people, with over ninety-five percent dying in whatever hiding places they could find because they preferred starvation and thirst to the agony they only felt in the presence of other human beings.
There was still life, and civilization of a kind, in the places that remained. The people who lived there wore AIsource prosthetics over their eyes and ears, to prevent them from sensing anybody else except as hypothetical abstractions, more like the stick figures in a child’s drawing than as living, recognizable individuals. Their prosthetics talked to each other and negotiated agreements with each other and allowed something like an organized, sustainable society on worlds where every inhabitant, down to the infants being born to mothers who would never love them, could only view every other as silhouettes rendered indistinct by sensory veils.
Only military blockades on the part of the Hom.Sap Confederacy, imprisoning all the victim populations on their affected worlds, and blowing several infected vessels out of the sky, had prevented Magrison’s contagion from infecting all of humanity.
There was no cure. Those worlds remained quarantined today.
But even that was not the worst of it.
The Confederacy remained in contact with the survivors, who had no problem communicating with us in text format, as long as we eliminated all personal pronouns and all details of social interaction in the outside universe from our responses. They could make their needs known. We could send food drops, tech, even a few brave volunteers in isolation suits, to deal with whatever they required to keep their infrastructures going. But we couldn’t call what lived on those worlds anything but damned. A few more generations of artificial insemination brokered by AIsource proxies, and automated child-rearing by more AIsource proxies, and I’m not even sure you could call the beings who walk there human.
But that was not the worst of it.
Wethers returned from the bathroom, looking pale, tiny beads of moisture glistening on his forehead. He murmured an excuse to Brown as he sat. It would have been easy to feel sorry for him, had he not been a willing participant in the empire that employed a monster like Dina Pearlman. He was like other bureaucrats, guilty of signing the papers that made atrocities possibility but lost the stomach the second they were shown the abattoirs they’d authorized.
But he was not the worst of it, either.
I coughed, swallowed spit to soothe a voice that would emerged as a dry croak, and dealt with the very worst of it: The question that obsessed some of my colleagues in the Dip Corps to this very day. “Mrs. Pearlman… do you know where Magrison’s hiding today?”