“Here’s what we know,” I began. It had been surprisingly easy to convince Jude that I should be the one to speak. No doubt because I’d make a convenient scapegoat when we failed. I doubted any of us had much hope that this was going to work. But I didn’t let it show.
I projected the basics onto the ViM embedded in the conference table. Files popped up, and photos of the corridors we’d seen. This was it, I thought. There was no more hiding now, and no more pretending to buy the crap that BioMax was selling. Which meant they wouldn’t have to pretend either. If this body broke, they were the only ones who could fix it, or replace it.
But that mattered only if I let myself care.
“You’re stealing downloaded neural patterns, lobotomizing them, and turning them into cyber slaves.”
I waited for them to deny it.
Call-me-Ben shifted in his seat—that familiar org weakness, the inability to keep his feelings, his guilt, his surprise, to himself. But the other man, M. Poulet, didn’t move. His gray, stony face betrayed nothing. It was Kiri who reacted, pivoting between the two of them, obviously waiting for a denial of her own. She didn’t get it.
“This is true?” she exclaimed, rising to her feet. “You’re actually doing this?”
“We’re doing this,” M. Poulet said calmly. “Or have you forgotten who deposits the credit in your accounts?”
“No,” Kiri said, “I didn’t sign on for this. Lia, trust me, I didn’t know.”
I was concentrating on keeping my own reactions under wraps. So I couldn’t admit I believed her—and I couldn’t reveal my relief.
M. Poulet looked at her like she was exuding a bad smell. “If our discussion is making you uncomfortable, you’re perfectly free to go. You can drop off your security credentials on the way out.”
I didn’t expect her to actually go. I appreciated the moral outrage, just not as much as I would have appreciated the moral support. She didn’t ask my opinion. Her chair scraped back, the door slammed, and then she was gone. Call-me-Ben looked perturbed; M. Poulet looked bored. “Can we get back on track, please? We’re well aware of your hijinks at our recent event, and your intrusion into private property. But we’re willing to overlook it. Keep it between us, as it were.”
“Private property?” Jude said angrily. I hoped it was for show, because if his real emotions were bleeding through, then he’d been thrown more off balance than I thought. “You want to talk about private property? How about the theft and destruction of our private property? Are we supposed to overlook that? While you kill us off one by one?”
“We’re doing nothing of the sort,” M. Poulet said, indignant.
“You’re stealing copies of our brains,” I said quietly, before Jude could fire back. “And then you’re stripping them. There are people in those machines. Don’t you get that?”
“They’re not people.” It was the first time Ben had spoken. He leaned toward me, elbows on the table, his best earnest expression fixed on his face. “That’s what you’ve got to understand. Without the crucial subroutines that control emotion, memory, all the things that make a personality, these are nothing but arrays of electronic data. There’s no consciousness.”
“How do you know? What if they can still think? Or feel?”
“They can’t. They’re machines, computers. Nothing more.”
“Did you join the Brotherhood while I wasn’t looking?” I snarled. “Because your Savona impression is awesome.”
“This technology is a miracle,” Ben said, eyes shining. “It’s brought you—all of you—back from the dead. And that’s only the beginning. We’re talking about the fusion of man and machine—the possibilities of this technology are limitless.”
He didn’t have much future as an evangelist. Though even Rai Savona lacked the rhetorical prowess to gloss this over.
“We’re not technology. We’re people.”
“You’re people, yes—but we’re not talking about you. How does it hurt you to donate a copy of your brain to a good cause? How does it change anything to know that a copy of some of your synapses is helping protect the nation or heal the sick? How does that do anything to you, except perhaps make you proud?”
“Funny,” Riley said softly. “Almost sounds like we volunteered.”
“If this is such a wonderful advance for orgs and mechs alike,” I said, “then why keep it a secret?”
“You see how you’ve reacted,” Ben pointed out. “We needed to ease the way. Help people understand. Once they do—”
“Enough,” M. Poulet cut in. “We don’t have to defend ourselves to…” He flicked a hand at us. “These.” He stood up and pushed in his chair, as if to say, Meeting’s over. “I would think that with popular opinion of you and your kind at such alarmingly low levels, you’d have better things to worry about than trivia like this. I’d suggest you focus on the bigger picture here.” “Trivia like you turning us into war machines?” I said, disgusted.
“Lia, enough,” Jude said. “They obviously didn’t come here to reason with us, and we didn’t come here to reason with them.”
“Ah, finally,” M. Poulet said. “We get down to it.”
Jude stood up too. A beat later Riley and I joined him on our feet. Only Ben stayed seated, looking bewildered about how the meeting had slipped out of his control. “You’re going to stop this,” Jude said. “Stop abusing the stored copies. Stop experimenting on us like we’re animals. And then you’re going to give us the means to store our own uploads, and to repair and replace our own bodies. You’re going to set us free.”
“I assume there’s an implied or?” M. Poulet asked dryly.
“Or we go public,” Jude said. “And it doesn’t matter what you try to do to us here—there are people waiting for my signal. If they don’t hear from me in the next hour, they’re going to release everything we have on the network. You’re done.”
It was no bluff. Zo was waiting.
“Do to you?” M. Poulet sounded like he was holding back laughter. “What exactly would we do to you?”
“What wouldn’t you do?” Jude said.
Now the peals of laughter burst through, cold and hollow. “I don’t know what kind of gangsters you children are used to dealing with, but this is a business. You come in here, wasting our time, making your petty little threats, acting as if we could ever have something to fear from you.” As he spoke, the joviality drained from his voice, until all that remained was steel. “Let me be perfectly clear: We have nothing to fear from you. You’re children—not even that: mechanical copies of children. While we are a multinational corporation offering the world a new and exciting technology that will improve the lives of millions. You think anyone’s going to repudiate that because we’re ‘inconveniencing’ a few skinners?” He smiled coldly. “And you’re assuming that releasing information on the network is your right, rather than a privilege you’re accorded by the corps who sponsor the zones. You’re assuming that BioMax has neither the power, the technology, nor the will to scrub the network—every inch of it—of any inconvenient allegations.”