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“How–”
Chal said, then stopped herself, trying to figure it out. She
couldn’t. “How are they planning on using them?”

“Various
possibilities,” Johnner said. “It would be difficult to
stop an invading force made up of conscious digital intelligence.”

“But India has
tons of digital intelligence,” Chal said.

“That just
makes it worse,” Johnner said. “If Singapore tried to
invade a non-digital nation, they’d be sunk. You can still use
guns on anyone, after all. But everything in India has been developed
with digital intelligence, including their military arsenal. And
they’re not allowed to fight back with anything even remotely
dig-int if the invading force is emotionally conscious.”

Chal went silent,
considering the possibilities. If they had indeed developed digital
intelligences of the same sort, there was no reason they couldn’t
have used them as spies, even before invading. The digital
intelligences themselves wouldn’t be able to fight, but so
what? They could be used for reconnaissance, or simply as cover for
the non-digital arsenal. They could spread through the world
unknowingly. Or they could be used to incite a breach of the
MacLaurin conventions, to spark a world war. Chal’s head spun
as the true possibilities of the research became clear to her.

“That’s
why all the guards with guns,” she said. “Is everybody
here military except for me?”

Lieutenant Johnner
nodded. “This laboratory is now considered a combat zone under
M.I.D. command.”

“A
combat
zone
?” Chal was aghast. So that’s why it was all men
working in this lab.

“Always a
possibility.” Johnner seemed unfazed. “It was in the
paperwork you signed upon arrival.”

“Right, one of
those stacks of paperwork,” Chal said. She hadn’t read a
single page. There had been no time. No time –

“The
NorAm-Soviet consulate considers the research here a prime target for
its work in emotional sentience,” Johnner said. “All the
more so now that an outside nation has declared war using emotionally
conscious intelligences.”

“Nobody
thought of this beforehand?” Chal said. She looked at
Lieutenant Johnner accusingly.

“We did,”
he said. “We just thought we’d be the first ones to
develop them.” He looked slightly embarrassed.

Chal stood. She was
tired, and she felt as though her brain was moving slowly, as though
in a dream.

“So...the
prototypes?”

“Yes?”

“You’re
planning to use them as foot soldiers?”

“More like
defensive aids. They won’t be fighting against any actual
people, just other biologically-grown intelligences.”

Chal blanched.
“What’s the difference?”

“I’m
afraid we’re talking at cross-purposes, Dr. Davidson,”
Lieutenant Johnner said.

“We certainly
are.” She wasn’t going to help the military create a
second tier of fighters. It was immoral, atrocious. She turned on her
heel to leave.

“Dr. Davidson,
there was something else. The reason I was going to look for you.”

“Yes?”
Chal asked. She was already seething with contempt, and the last
thing she wanted to do was spend one more second in front of
Johnner’s desk.

“I’m
returning the project’s lead to Dr. Friedman,” he said.

Chal wasn’t
sure she had heard him correctly. “You’re what?”

“Dr. Friedman
will be in charge of the project from here on out,” Johnner
said. “As a sensitive M.I.D. project, this experiment needs to
be under military command.”

“Is that
protocol?” Chal snapped.

“No, Dr.
Davidson, it’s not just protocol. It’s me replacing a
scientist who has endangered the success of this mission–”

“Mission?”
So it was a mission, not a project. Of course.

“–who
has bordered on destroying a priceless prototype–”

Chal leaned over the
desk and spoke over Lieutenant Johnner. “You said this was an
emergency scientific project, not a mission. I am working in this lab
as a
scientist
–”

“–and
having sexual contact with the subject of the experiment!”

“The android
was malfunctioning,” she said, jaw clenched. “I didn’t
do
anything.”

“Apart from
your misconduct in the laboratory,” Lieutenant Johnner said,
continuing on as if he hadn’t even heard Chal, “you’ve
compromised the success of this mission from the beginning.”

“How?”
Chal asked. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“You lied
during the initial medical examination,” Johnner said cooly.

“Excuse me?”
Chal said.

Johnner picked up a
folder from his desk; Chal saw the logo of her graduate university on
the top page.

“Chal
Davidson, twenty-one years of age. Suffers from ongoing episodes of
depression–”

“Give me
that!” Chal reached for the folder, but Johnner leaned away.

“–episodes
of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder brought about by her
childhood experiences in wartime.”

Chal was trembling,
her face burning hot. “That’s private information,”
she said. “They shouldn’t have released that to you.”

“At this level
of security there is no private information, Dr. Davidson,”
Lieutenant Johnner said.

Chal’s
expression deadened. She was white with fury, her hands clutching the
edge of the desk. She wanted to scream at the lieutenant, wanted to
slap him with all of the rage that had built inside of her. She
wanted to resign right then and there, and demand to be taken back to
California. Right now California seemed worlds away.

“I take it I’m
to leave, then?” she asked instead.

“You can’t.”
Johnner said.

“Excuse me?”

“This
laboratory has been locked down due to the political crisis on the
surface,” Johnner said. “Nobody goes in or out.”

Chal blinked and
paused a second before continuing; she hadn’t expected
something so drastic. “I’ll stay in my quarters, then. Do
you know how long it will be before I can go?”

“I don’t
know,” Lieutenant Johnner said wryly. “How long do wars
usually take?”

Chal’s gaze
glittered with anger, but she forced herself to back away from
Johnner’s desk.

“Thank you,
Lieutenant,” she said, at the doorway.

“You’ll
be notified as soon as the laboratory is unlocked,” Johnner
said.

“Thank you,
Lieutenant.”

***

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Chal left Johnner’s
office, her eyes burning with tears she would not let escape. She
wanted to leave right then and there; she wanted to stay with Alan,
the most precious experiment she had ever been a part of. He was a
sentient being, an emotional being, and she had helped to bring him
into existence. How dare they take the project’s control away
from her!

In her quarters Chal
fell onto her bed. Every part of her seemed dead, and there was a
buzzing in her ears. She felt as sorry for herself as she ever had.
These feelings weren’t normal. She was always able to separate
herself from her work. All of her achievements meant precisely
nothing, she knew, and neither did any of her failures. She had
always been able to work and just enjoy the work, enjoy the feeling
of acting competently, creating something where before there had been
nothing.

She thought of what
it would be like to have her consciousness – how had Johnner
put it? – turned off. Chal had always thought of death as
something to be accepted just as any part of life was accepted, but
she only thought of it in an intellectual sense. The fabric of the
universe shifted and changed. At one time she had been nothing, and
someday in the future she would be nothing. Right now she was just a
flicker of consciousness in a vast dark sea of unconscious material.
It didn’t faze her to think that one day the flicker would be
extinguished in her body and ignited in someone else’s.
Grieving over death made as much sense as grieving over the crashing
over the waves against the sand. New waves formed and crashed, and
there was no loss, just the endless cycle of a process put into
motion a long time ago.

This project was
different, though, and as she tossed and turned over on the bed she
tried to separate the strands of her work from the emotions that were
indelibly tied to it. She couldn’t help but think of how Alan
would react during the next questioning. If they tried to ask him
about his own mental states again –

“No.”
She whispered to herself, her face turned to the wall. “No!”
She was no longer concerned about herself; she didn’t care how
long she had to stay underground, locked into this laboratory, but to
leave him behind... it wasn’t possible. She didn’t want
to stay, but she didn’t want to go back to the world either.
Not without him.

Chal felt something
inside of her fall apart, and the wall which had been holding her
emotions at bay was no longer there. Tears streamed down her eyes and
she let them roll, her body racked with sobs. Her entire being felt
as though it was burning up from the inside, and, not caring anymore
who observed her pain, she cried aloud in terror for the man she
could no longer do anything to save.

In time, she ran
out of tears.

***

When she next awoke,
Chal had the sensation of waking up in a completely foreign place.
The lights in her room had been turned off, and she stumbled to the
doorway, her fingers scrabbling at the wall before she could turn
them back on. She leaned against the wall, letting her eyes adjust to
the brightness.

Her face was
blotched and red, her clothes slept in, but who cared? There was
nothing left for her to do here but wait until they let her leave.
She splashed some water on her face and headed toward the substrate
lab, where she had left her computer.

Rounding the corner,
she saw the lab assistants wheeling Alan back from the main lab. The
sight stopped her dead in her tracks. His face looked peaceful, and
for a moment Chal was sure he was dead. Then she saw his chest rise
in breath, and his head turned to one side. The gurney was wheeled
into the room, and he was gone.

Her heart was
twisted in jealousy. Dr. Fielding had taken the project, had taken
him
. She blinked hard and forced herself to walk normally,
past his room and down the hall to the substrate lab.

Nobody was there but
the animals. Chal walked to the back of the lab. The octopi were
hiding in the underside of the coral, their legs only partially
visible through the craggy holes in the rock. She bent down,
scrutinizing the heads of coral.

When she was a
child, she had made her own seawater tank, jury-rigged with a filter
she had found in a scrap heap somewhere. Most of the coral that grew
in the Mediterranean were the red, sticklike colonies of coral. Once
she had found a white blooming coral that she transplanted ever so
carefully to her tank. She was fascinated by the way the polyps grew
slowly but surely, spreading their exoskeleton millimeter by
millimeter. Most children would not have the patience to take care of
something which grew so imperceptibly, and her mother had often
wondered aloud if she would not like a fish or two to put into her
tank, something more like a pet.

“Something
alive,” her mother had said.

“Coral
is
alive,” Chal remembered saying.

“It just looks
like rocks to me,” her mother said. “
Tcha
,
whatever you want!”

Standing back up,
Chal thought back to her childhood, which had seemed so happy even in
distressed times. Her mother always let her play, never stifled her
curiosity even when her curiosity involved taking apart the only
working radio in the house.

These happy thoughts
were broken up by the chattering of the mice, which were at the
moment fighting over a cardboard tube which had been chewed and
shredded so much that it was falling apart. Chal’s gaze went
past them, focusing on the door which stood so unobtrusively at the
very back of the lab.

Chal approached the
metal door, reaching her fingers out to touch it. The door was cold
against her palm. All those bodies, lining the walls. All those
bodies, cold but breathing, their stares empty and eternal.

She leaned forward
and pressed her cheek against the wall, goosebumps instantly rising
on the back of her neck. It was just her imagination, maybe, but when
she closed her eyes she thought she heard the air whistling through
their perfectly-formed noses, their biologically pristine bodies
taking the oxygen from the air at near one hundred percent
efficiency.

“Dr.
Davidson.”

Chal jumped a
little, starting back from the door. She spun around to find Dr.
Fielding standing against the mice cages.

“I seem to
always be startling you,” he said.

“That’s
what happens when you keep an eye on someone,” Chal said. She
breathed heavily, trying to compose herself.

“I’m
sorry,” he said, and Chal had the odd feeling that he meant it.
It was to be expected, anyway. Generosity was easy in victory.

“Congratulations,”
she said. “You’ve got the project back.”

His mouth twisted
sideways in what could not be called a smile.

“We just
finished a session,” he said.

She nodded, knowing
she looked pale and tired but not caring. “I saw him coming
out.”

“He asked for
you.”

At these words
Chal’s heart jumped, and she could not believe that she had
heard correctly. “For me?”

“He said that
he wanted to talk with you.”

“What was the
session about?” Chal asked. “What happened?”

“Emotional
states.” Dr. Fielding took the drive out of his pocket and slid
it over toward Chal’s computer. “You should watch it
before the next questioning.”

“Why me?”
Chal said, her hand resting lightly on the drive. “You’re
the questioner now.”