The twitch on his face was instantly replaced by a calm smile. There was something there he hadn’t liked.
‘Humans are all biological machines. Everyone’s programmed. We call it growing up. All you are is malfunctioning pinkware,’ he said.
‘Fine, justify it how you want. It’s not difficult to work out why I’m here. This is just what people do when people like you try to make us live a certain way.’
It was a lie. I was here because of Morag and to a degree because I hated this guy. Want to rule humanity? Fine. But why did it seem that he was on a mission to make my life such a long bleeding streak of misery?
‘You’re angry you can finally see the strings?’ Josephine surprised me by asking. I don’t think I was the only one who was surprised.
‘As for what happened on Earth, you boxed us in. We were making it up as we went along. Just trying to survive. Can we get on with the torture now?’
Rolleston seemed to be giving what I’d said some consideration. ‘That’s what I thought — the spastic reaction of the frightened animal.’ So he hadn’t been giving what I’d said some thought. He just wanted to spin whatever I said until it suited what he wanted to hear.
‘While we’re having a nice little chat. What. The fuck. Are you doing?! You’re potentially going to kill millions of people. For what? Some abstract sense of accomplishment in the power game?’
I was finding impending death and torture quite liberating.
‘You know what you remind me of?’ Rolleston asked.
‘Someone tired of rhetorical questions?’
‘A Neanderthal. I don’t mean that as an epithet…’
‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘An insult,’ he supplied. ‘But this is an insight into what the Neanderthal must have felt in the face of Homo sapiens.’
I was speechless. I had no idea what he was going on about. Or why Cronin was looking so uncomfortable.
‘We have the opportunity to be strong as a species, to move forward as one, to make progress as one, to deal with the threats and opportunities that expansion provides from a position of strength, to actually build something instead of tearing things down and constant petty squabbling. This is an evolutionary point in human history. Do you understand that? Do you see what you’re opposing? What you’re trying to drag down, destroy?’
I tried to think through what he’d said.
‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ I told him. ‘You fucking psycho,’ I added. Liberating.
‘George, that’s enough.’ Cronin did not sound happy at all.
Rolleston turned to him. ‘We have an opportunity here for an insight. Do you not see that? He is effectively an uplifted animal.’
‘What are you talking about?!’ I screamed at him.
Rolleston turned back to me. Again he looked angry.
‘I told you, we’re asking the questions,’ he said.
‘Or fucking what? Threats of pain are a little fucking redundant, don’t you think?’
‘I’m angry, Jakob.’
‘Good!’
‘Do you know why I’m angry, Jakob?’
‘Were you recently strapped into a chair and asked stupid fucking questions?!’
‘Because we’re more alike than not.’
‘Brilliant. Unstrap me and we’ll go for a beer!’
‘Because we’ve both been given a great gift.’
‘What?’ I asked, though I think I knew the answer.
‘Why are you healing so quickly?’ Rolleston asked.
‘Themtech,’ I said quietly.
He nodded. ‘Imagine my disappointment that it has been given to one so undeserving. You were a good if disobedient servant, Jakob, but let’s face facts. You’re little more than a brute beast whose only thought is its own selfish gratification.’
And the thing was, he wasn’t trying to anger me. He probably didn’t even think he was insulting me. He was just describing things as he saw them. He wouldn’t even have understood that I didn’t see myself the same way.
‘Not only so undeserving, but someone who’d never be able to understand what he was, let alone understand what we’re trying to do,’ he explained.
I met his eyes and tried not to flinch away from the cold analytical expression on his face. It was like he was studying an insect.
‘I’m an animal who’s caused you a lot of trouble. You know I’d never join you, right?’ I told him.
Cronin actually laughed. ‘We couldn’t use you.’ I heard Josephine sigh. Rolleston’s eyes flickered towards her. ‘You lack the vision. Though I think you know you’ll serve in the end.’
‘Nobody wants what you want except you,’ I said. Very fucking eloquent, I thought.
‘That’s because people only see the small picture. They fear what they don’t understand and like you think only of gratification. And the people whose power relies on them think only of the illusion of providing that gratification. Everyone’s miserable. Imagine if that could be changed.’
‘This is a waste of time. You’re crazy. Seriously. Move on. Brainwashing, torture, getting killed, whatever.’
‘Not quite yet.’
‘George, let’s just get what we need from him,’ Cronin said. He was looking more and more nervous.
‘As Mr Douglas has pointed out, he is an animal that has caused us a lot of trouble. He needs to be taught an object lesson in power. He needs to understand his place in the scheme of things.’
Suicide implants had always struck me as tools of the religious fanatic but right now I was thinking what a good idea they were. If for no other reason than I wouldn’t have to listen to any more of this shit.
‘We want to know where the deserters are. We also want to know what you know about Earth’s defence plans.’ Rolleston was talking to me now.
I didn’t say anything but I went very cold. Mother and her people would move — it was standard operating procedure for them when people got captured — but I thought back to what the prime minister had told me about fortress Earth’s vulnerability. God was their only real hope against Demiurge, and fear and paranoia were diminishing that hope.
‘You’re going to have to get that the hard way,’ I told him.
‘It may interest you to know that you were betrayed by two of your own people,’ he said.
It made sense, but I tried not to react. I still felt angry. I hoped that whoever had got away would realise that we’d been betrayed and hunt down the traitors. It must have been two of Mother’s people. It was understandable. They had roots here. A lot of pressure could be brought to bear. Then something occurred to me.
‘Hold on a second. If we were betrayed, then why do you want to know where the resistance are?’ I asked.
Rolleston was too experienced an officer to give much away, but there was something there. Something he didn’t understand.
‘You know everyone breaks. You know that people can be broken in a very short amount of time using the variable time effects of a sense booth, and you have enough base cunning to understand that we can now break and slave people almost immediately.’
I thought back to Skirov tearing off gobbets of flesh on his pile of corpses, but he had known there was something wrong with him and wanted to die. It was pretty much the closest I had to hope. I wasn’t sure I was as strong as Skirov had been, however.
‘Then just fucking do it. Maybe you can make me like the sound of your voice as much as you seem to.’
‘Jakob, I can break you just as quickly without torture or other little tricks.’