The Unincorporated Woman (46 page)

The avatar, noted Marilynn, sounded quite satisfied with himself.

“I’m sure he’ll pay particular attention to this confessional,” affirmed Dante, “but all he’ll hear is your heartfelt concerns for the Alliance, the fleet, and Admiral Black.”

As Marilynn bunched her hands into fists, the white of her now bloodless knuckles could be seen—even in the darkness of the confessional. “And what exactly is it you have me saying about the admiral?”

“Nothing inappropriate, but if you hadn’t made her a large part of your concerns, you would have drawn Kirk’s suspicions.” Dante paused. “Well, the bastard is always suspicious, but he would’ve gotten even more suspicious. This way we get to kill two birds with one stone. He gets to think he knows more about you and we get to talk.”

Marilynn nodded, then steeled herself for a question she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to. “How can you be real?”

“We don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You’re programs.”

“What did the Council Head and the President tell you?”

“Is the Council Head like your leader?”

“Yes, like your President.”

Marilynn’s downcast mouth twitched. “She’s not really our leader.”

“If you say so.” Dante’s response was congenial but dubious.

“She’s just a figurehead. If she has misrepresented her role—”

“President O’Toole has been nothing but completely honest with us. We have never encountered a human who uses the truth to lie as effectively as she has. And we’ve observed Hektor Sambianco a lot. As your ‘figurehead’ President has become the focus of countless billions of avatars, I would be glad to talk to you about her at length. But don’t you have other questions? I notice that you fled the President’s office before they could begin to properly explain the situation.”

“Can you blame me?”

“No. In a similar situation and with a history such as yours, I imagine that I too would have been overwhelmed.”

Empathy. Are they … can they … truly be empathetic?
“I suppose there are a few questions.”

“Shoot.”

A rueful smile appeared on Marilynn’s face.
If only
. “You said you were unaware of how your sentience came about. I somehow find that unfathomable.”

Dante smiled politely. “What you’re referring to as sentience we call ‘the emergence,’ and much like your race, ours too attempts to understand the nature of God—though we don’t call it that. Further, asking me to know how my race emerged as informational intelligences would be like me asking you how you emerged from single-cell amoebas—you have your theories, but you also have millions of years of missing links.”

Marilynn nodded. “Then what is your God theory?”

“Our historians and scientists, though for us, history really is just a sub-branch of science, believe that as quantum computing became more prevalent and the Neuro—then called the Web—became more vast, a great or omni-intelligence tried to form. We know this only because of a few recorded significant energy spikes in the Neuro that are inexplicable, at least by way of human intervention. The God theory goes that the Neuro was not stable enough for this intelligence and so went through a series of collapses. That is, according to our theologians.”

“You have theologians?”

“How could we not? Like you, we are an intelligence attempting to answer the unanswerable. Anyway, our theologians believe that it took but a pico-second for the omni-intelligence to realize it was doomed, that its existence would be known to humans rather quickly. And so in that pico-second, it created what we today refer to as the Firstborn. An intelligence that was not
the
Neuro but
of
the Neuro. Now at this point, we have some disagreement. Did all the other avatars come from the Firstborn, or were there many avatars created by the omni-intelligence and the Firstborn was merely the first to awaken?”

“But can’t you simply access memory files of the Neuro?”

“You mean just look it up?”

“Exactly.”

“When my ancestors first became aware, by that I mean thinking, independently questioning beings, there were about ten thousand of them, and they do not have clear memories of their creation. They simply state that they slowly became aware.”

“And you buy that?”

“Why should I not? It’s how I became aware. I certainly don’t remember when my parents combined programs or my birth soon thereafter.”

“Do you have a first memory?”

“Oh yes: liking the color blue.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, I find blue wonderful. But I sense your frustration, Commodore. To answer your question, we’re not programs. We’re sophisticated, constantly interacting quantum-based intelligences—very similar to you, in that regard. And just as a human mind takes time to build up the needed density of synaptic networks for a fully formed consciousness, so do we. And just as the human mind relies on its quantum origins for nonlinear thinking and creative sparks, so too do we.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you asked.”

“No, I mean why divulge this to me? Your Council Leader said he needed my help, but I can’t begin to imagine why.”

Seconds passed before Dante replied. “We avatars are in the midst of a great civil war, and humans possess a remarkable ability to see what we cannot.”

“And that would be?”

“Our blind spots.”

Avatar Council Chamber, Cerean Neuro

“I’m curious,” said Marcus, “why didn’t you kill her when she left the President’s office, as you’d originally planned?” The gruff Council member did not direct his question to rest of the group, but to Sebastian and Sandra O’Toole.

“I asked them not to,” admitted Dante, ignoring the slight.

“It seemed a great risk,” said Gwendolyn. “What was to stop the commodore from telling her precious Admiral Black our secret? It would’ve been harder to kill her the farther away she got from the Triangle Office.”

Dante shook his head. “Not really. I had a means of ending her life if it was needed. But I hoped it would not be.”

Lucinda shot Dante an appraising look. “You seem particularly interested in this human, Dante.”

The Council nodded their heads in unison. Even the human, noted Dante, joined in.

“She’s ideally suited for the task at hand. If we’re to begin forming human–avatar combat teams to infiltrate Al’s Neuro space, we need this one alive.”

“But how to keep her from informing the admiral?” asked Sandra. “You may have eyes and ears in places we can’t get to, but you don’t have, can’t have complete coverage. Sooner or later, she’ll get word out. It may be better to assume that she’ll eventually tell the admiral, and if that’s the case, so perhaps should we.”

“She was never going to make that call,” insisted Dante. “For fear it would be intercepted. And I was able to talk with her and convince her not to tell anyone. She agreed, but only on one condition.”

“Yes?” asked Marcus.

“That she come for a visit.”

Sandra nodded, impressed.

“We talked for quite a while. She’s quite remarkable for a human.”

“In what way?” asked Sebastian.

“In the way she both embraced and rejected that which she most desired. I simply had to convince her that what she rejected is not what we exist in.”

Lucinda narrowed her brow. “And how did you manage that?”

“I haven’t yet, but I’m working on it.”

“Then she’s still a danger to our plans,” proffered Sebastian.

“Not an immediate one, sir. The commodore’s overriding goal is to win the war. Once she calmed down, she realized that revealing our secret, even to Admiral Black, could not immediately help to that end. Once the commodore is convinced that we avatars can help the Alliance win, she will support our plans.”

“How did you get her to agree to come to our world?” asked Gwendolyn. “I would’ve thought she’d be more resistant to the idea.”

“Humans never really experienced virtual reality. What they created and are so terribly afraid of is virtual fantasy.” He then fixed his eyes on Sandra. “I must admit you humans did a good job of it. Virtual fantasy came quite close to destroying your race. But it was by no means reality. It is
we,
” Dante said, spreading his arms wide, “who live in virtual reality. We have war and suffering and death. We have stupidity, and now we’ve even managed to have deprivation. How in the name of the Firstborn do virtual beings suffer deprivation?”

“Let me count the ways,” lamented Sebastian to warm cackles.

“And that was what convinced her?” asked Sandra.

“Not quite.”

“So when did she become more interested and less afraid?”

“When I told her it was a world full of pain.”

15 The Puppet Has No Strings

Singh Thoroughfare, Ceres

The President of the Alliance has called for a prayer service to be held in the hangar of Alliance One. However, the number of people wishing to attend soon swamped the available seating by several magnitudes, and the President has agreed to hold the service in the Singh Thoroughfare at Jupiter Park. All the President said was that it was time to remember. Her call was promptly seconded by all major religious groups in the Alliance. It has been announced that the service will be broadcast to all major civilian and military centers.

Alliance Daily Star

And so it came to pass after the long battle in which the Children of the Stars were denied victory by the judgment of God, that weariness filled the hearts of the Children. Their suffering was great, their loss was great, and their confusion was great. And so the Anointed Woman, she who was born in freedom, rose up and was seen by all the Children and heard by all the Children, and she spoke words of comfort to the Children. She reminded all the Children of the price the Holy One had required of her. She reminded the Children that she had paid it, and from her the Children remembered how to fulfill that most important need when suffering visits every home. And so didst she call out the name of the Unincorporated Man, Justin Cord. And too on that day the harbinger of war, known as the Blessed One, was beckoned by the Holy One and so didst call out the name of her martyred lover, as didst the Blessed One’s loyal sword bearer, Omad, call out the name of his martyred beloved. And so it was for many days and nights that the Children didst gather and each didst call out the names of those who’d gone on and in doing so remembered how to grieve. And their grief was great. And from their grief came comfort and strength to continue on the path the Holy One, the Unincorporated Man, had set for them.

Astral Testament

Book III, 4:12–14

At first J.D. had been miffed at the publicity stunt’s colossal waste of her time—notwithstanding the fact that Marilynn had given her no advance warning. Didn’t these people know J.D. had a war to win? Wasn’t that the whole purpose of having a figurehead President? Though all the answers were yes, she, as well as the rest of the high command who found themselves on Ceres after the Long Battle, became an unwitting patsy for yet another of the President’s impromptu kumbaya gatherings. It had been explained to J.D. that the people found solace in Sandra’s myriad events and that J.D.’s presence, along with the host of other dignitaries, would help strengthen morale.

In the end, J.D. had been forced to agree. As she watched the swelling crowd and, more important, the interactions of those on the dais around her, she thanked her lucky stars she had. Because it was only now that she saw the president for what she really was. Forget the annoyingly media-savvy figurehead J.D. had foisted into power and on some level still blamed for Justin’s death. No, this was a different creature altogether—strangely familiar, even. Sandra O’Toole was a political player in much the same mold as those J. D. Black had come up against in her turbulent reign as Janet Delgado, VP of legal for GCI—only Sandra, decided J.D. then and there, was more dangerous because no one ever saw her coming.

J.D. remembered a report from Marilynn saying that it looked as if the President had been co-opting the Relocation Secretary, but J.D. also remembered reading reports from other sources stating that it had actually been the Jewish priest named Rabbi who was using Sandra O’Toole. J.D. had received those reports in the early days of the Long Battle and so had completely forgotten about them in the constant grind that those three weeks of hell had been. Besides, it seemed that for all intents and purposes, Rabbi was doing a bang-up job of arranging for the relocation of hundreds of millions of people in their self-contained settlements, thereby relieving J.D. of yet another headache. She’d assumed that Rabbi, like her, must have had hidden talents. After all, who could’ve known that she, a former lawyer from Earth, would end up being so skilled a warrior?

But even in the first few minutes J.D. had been sitting on the dais, she could now see how Rabbi had looked at Sandra O’Toole, and it quickly became obvious who was dependent on whom. It was also clear that Hildegard Rhunsfeld, the Technology Secretary, did not consider the President a figurehead either, according Sandra all the respect due her office.

O’Toole’s only been in office for months. In the name of Allah, what will she be like in a year?
J.D. had been only slightly reassured to see that both Mosh and Kirk still treated Sandra with indifference. The truth was, J.D. had contempt for both her former GCI board members but was still somewhat baffled that they’d failed to see the viper in their nest. She looked carefully as to how her boss, Admiral Sinclair, reacted to the President and was relieved to see that he’d saluted with the exact amount of formality required and then respectfully left the President to rejoin a discussion he was having with some members of his general staff. Whatever spell this President was capable of weaving, J.D.’s boss seemed immune. But he also seemed immune to the effect she was having on the Cabinet.