War in Heaven (77 page)

‘We got you off the planet; now tell us what you know,’ Black Annis said, trying to ignore me, her voice like stones being ground together.

‘I need some kind of guarantee, a deal, one you’re not empowered to make,’ Cronin said. Apparently he was much calmer now. His calmness was increasing in direct proportion to his distance away from Rolleston.

‘Dude, you know we can get this out of you if we want – it won’t even take us that long,’ Mudge said reasonably. He was smoking a virtual cigarette. That seemed even more pointless than virtual whisky. Still it did look tasty.

‘Oh, I don’t think so, Mr Mudgie,’ Cronin said with just a trace of smugness.

I was irritated to see him wearing a high-quality expressive icon made by Morag. He looked now as we had seen him when we discussed democracy on a system-wide broadcast after we’d released God onto the net. Dapper, well dressed, handsome and shrewd – in short everything the high-flying corporate exec should be. According to Pagan, the higher spec the icon, the easier to gauge the subject’s responses in interrogation. ‘You’re the good guys. I don’t think you’ll torture me.’

The smugness in his tone was enough to distract me from staring at Annis’s horrible blue-skinned visage.

‘Arsehole, everyone here wants to kill you,’ I told him. ‘I’d cooperate.’

‘You kill me, you’ll learn nothing.’

‘We’ve already raided your isolated system,’ Annis growled. Cronin’s head snapped around to look at her. Pagan turned to her, Merle was positively glaring at her, and even Rannu was shaking his head.

‘Bullshit. Demiurge would have enslaved you at best,’ he said, but he sounded unsure. He was good enough at his job to read our body language, even in here, and would know by our reactions that we were telling the truth. Then a smile spread over his face. I hadn’t been expecting that. It looked like hope.

‘I don’t see why you’re smiling,’ Annis said. ‘We know everything we need to about the attack.’

‘You’re going to have to buy your life,’ Rannu told him. It sounded pretty serious coming from the Ghurkha.

‘I’m afraid your masters will disagree. I am far too valuable to them. They will want to make a deal.’

‘You see any of them here?’ Mudge asked as he looked around the great hall. I could hear him getting angry. ‘I don’t think we have masters. I think we have people we work with, and I would have thought you more than anyone would know that we are very bad at doing what we’re told.’

‘I hadn’t credited you with stupidity, Mr Mudgie—’

‘You’ve never dated him.’ I would have thought that Merle was joking except for the deadpan delivery. What was more interesting, Cronin would not look at him.

‘Whether you like it or not, I have more useful intel and insight on the situation than anything you could get from Demiurge,’ Cronin told us.

‘How? Isn’t Demiurge omniscient?’ Pagan asked.

‘You know that the Earth authorities will need to deal with me.’

‘They will just torture the info out of you,’ Annis said.

I didn’t believe that, and I could tell most of the others in the room felt the same way. They’d make a deal. Cronin would disappear and someone with a new face would be welcomed back into the powerbroker fold.

‘He’s right. We have no choice but to run him through interrogation sense programs and kill him before we get to Earth,’ I said grimly.

‘I don’t think you could do that, Mr Douglas,’ Cronin said.

‘I’ve tortured and killed better men than you for information, Cronin. You may think yourself pretty important but to me you’re just another arsehole, and if you don’t think I’ll torture you then you clearly have no idea what we went through when you guys captured us,’ I told him.

Rannu was nodding. His face was cold and emotionless. I was pretty sure that he wanted to hurt this man as much as I did. To an extent Cronin was right – I didn’t want to torture him because I didn’t like to think of myself as that sort of person, but I would if I had to. I wouldn’t lose much sleep either.

‘You remember me, don’t you, Cronin?’ Merle said. Cronin’s icon blanched. ‘Well, you know what I was capable of on a job. Now imagine I’m angry because my sister got killed. Now imagine that I hold you at least partially responsible for that.’

‘That wasn’t me! That was Rolleston! I’m telling you, he’s sick! He’s completely lost it! Same with the torture. It was all him!’ The boardroom polish was slipping. His Detroit street roots could be heard now.

‘Arsehole, there’s only one deal to make and it’s with us. And the only deal is that you make it to the end of this voyage,’ Mudge told him.

Cronin looked around at us all. I don’t think he liked what he saw.

‘You’re all fucking crazy. You’ve no idea what an asset I am,’ he said desperately.

‘Convince us,’ Mudge told him. ‘If you live long enough then you can make your deal when we get back.’

Like fuck, I thought.

Cronin had my attention now though I couldn’t stop looking over at Black Annis from time to time. She would never meet my eyes.

‘So you and Rolleston wanted to rule the world and now you’ve had a falling out?’ Mudge asked.

‘No. That wasn’t what we were going to do.’

‘Oh no, this is the next big step for humanity,’ I said acidly.

‘We evolve to slavery?’ Mudge asked.

Cronin looked pained. He had an expression on his face that suggested even if he explained it to us very carefully, using small words, we still wouldn’t get it.

‘Have you ever thought about the potential of each individual, even the dumbest, least ambitious and least imaginative? If nothing else they have huge potential for industry, potential vastly enhanced by our interface with technology. Then think about all the intelligent, ambitious, imaginative and hard-working members of the human race. Now imagine what we could accomplish if all of us pulled together. If we all locked step and moved forward trying to improve ourselves as a race, as a whole, instead of bickering and fighting over ultimately meaningless things. With the war we’ve seen what humanity can accomplish almost working together, the leaps in technology, the co-operation—’

‘The constant fucking misery,’ I added.

‘Now imagine we don’t require the stimulus of an external threat. Imagine every one of us is working together towards a common goal, the progress of us as a species. Imagine what we would accomplish.’

‘Is this how you sell totalitarianism to yourself?’ Mudge asked.

Cronin looked deeply frustrated. ‘How do you walk upright?’ he demanded.

‘We understand you. You’re not the smartest person in this room by a long shot,’ I snapped, angry at his patronising tone.

‘It’s not Jakob either,’ Mudge said, grinning.

I glared at him. He was right though.

‘Look, you’ve been told a lie. We don’t all have a right to what we want. Sacrifices have to be made. We are talking about a vast paradigm change. We’re talking about humanity becoming an almost new organism.’

‘You’re talking about the death of individuality,’ Morag said.

Why was our interrogation sounding like a philosophy discussion? I hated this bullshit. It was wank that got in the way of life. Why couldn’t people just get on with it?

‘Yes!’ Cronin shouted enthusiastically. ‘But you say that as if it’s a bad thing. At the root of it all we’re all just one step away from lizard-brained animals. We’ve been brainwashed to the point where all we can think of is our own selfish desires. We were going to work together, all of us.’ Then he looked around. ‘I mean, individuality, how’s that working out for you? You all happy?’

Again his smugness left me with the strong urge to hit him.

‘I am,’ Mudge said.

‘Mr Mudgie, I have actually read your profile. You’re not happy; you’re on drugs. There is a difference. Look, everyone in the world is miserable—’

‘You’ve been a significant contributor in that,’ Pagan said.

‘And everyone’s lonely.’ I saw Mudge glance involuntarily at Merle. I wondered if Morag was looking at me. ‘The experiment of individuality has failed.’

‘Free choice isn’t an experiment,’ I said angrily.

‘No, it’s an illusion. You’ve had little choice throughout your life. Anything that feels like free will has always been within parameters set by others. The closest you came to breaking that resulted in a conflict that may destroy humanity. Do you understand how selfish and destructive it is?’

‘We could just as easily lay that responsibility at your door,’ Pagan told him. ‘All we wanted to do was give people the chance to understand what was going on and make decisions themselves.’

‘People don’t want that. People want easy lives.’

‘Which they don’t have,’ I said.

‘People want others to make the hard decisions for them. Most people barely want to think. The reason that Earth is mobilising to fight us, the reason that people like you were sent after us, was because other powerful people have a lot to lose if we’d succeeded. Whether you like it or not, we were going to give people what they wanted. You see, all the pain you feel is because of your individuality. We were going to end that. We were finally and for all time going to make humanity both happy and constructive.’

‘A perfectly ordered clockwork society,’ Pagan said.

‘This is bullshit,’ Merle said. ‘I don’t want to hear him justify himself.’

‘But thank you for your contribution, Mr Sommerjay, and yours, Mr Nagarkoti, and of course –’ he turned to look at Pagan ‘– we couldn’t have done it without your help, Mr Simm.’

Pagan looked stricken. The rigours of the mission, the repeated wounds, the guilt at his betrayal, all seemed to have aged Pagan, even in here.

Good. Fuck him.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘Have Demiurge possess everyone? That’ll only work on everyone with neural cybernetics.’ Then I realised that thanks to the war that was almost everyone, certainly everyone that mattered. Mattered. I was starting to think like them.

‘Possession by Demiurge wouldn’t lead to co-operation; it would lead to an orgy of pain, violence and suffering that would finally wipe us out,’ Rannu said.

Cronin was nodding.

‘Good plan then,’ Mudge commented.

‘Mr Nagarkoti is correct. It would, but Demiurge was only a part of what we’d planned and it didn’t turn out quite the way we thought it would.’

‘So how?’ I asked again, getting more irritated.

‘We were going to remake humanity. Nanite biotechnology derived from Themtech. Imagine Them but with drive, imagination, purpose, creativity, skills and knowledge.’

I’m not sure why, but the thought filled me with horror. It made me think of humanity as a swarm of hungry insects eating everything in its way across the stars.

Merle laughed. ‘This is evil-genius bullshit. This is like some viz. Nobody does this shit,’ he said. Maybe he was trying to convince himself.

‘Mr Sommerjay, once you get to a certain level of influence, subverting governments and mass-controlling populations becomes relatively easy. All we were doing was utilising technology available to us in the most useful manner for humanity.’

‘And you can do this?’ I asked. Cronin just looked at me as if I was stupid. Of course they could. ‘Delivery?’ I asked. Now Cronin seemed surprised. I saw some of the others exchange glances.

‘I don’t know. I assumed that was the information you took from Demiurge at the Citadel.’ He was looking around at us questioningly.

‘Jakob was injured; he hasn’t been briefed yet,’ Pagan told Cronin as if he was reassuring him.

Cronin turned back to me. ‘It’s nanotechnology, Mr Douglas. It will not be difficult to smuggle to Earth and infect the populace.’

‘Didn’t even tell you, huh?’ I asked.

‘It was compartmentalised. It wasn’t my area of responsibility. I didn’t need to know.’ Obviously Rolleston was really paranoid.

‘I’m interested why you get to make this decision for us?’ Morag demanded.

‘Because they have the power and the resources to fuck with us. Same as it ever was,’ Merle said.

Cronin was nodding. ‘Humanity elected us to do it. If not, we would not have been allowed to manoeuvre ourselves into the situation we find ourselves.’

‘Or to put it another way, you’re arrogant and delusional pricks who think you know what’s best for us,’ Mudge replied.

‘Besides, surely the fact that we’re all here shows that people don’t want this,’ Rannu said quietly.

‘Or it’s a knee-jerk fear reaction before a major change.’

‘And you’d be joining the collective?’ Mudge asked.

‘People need to—’ Cronin began.

‘I thought not.’

‘There are management concerns and issues of vision.’

‘Oh yes, we couldn’t have a rudderless race of zombies roaming space,’ Mudge said sarcastically.

‘They don’t have masters,’ Morag said. ‘They are a true collective.’

The fact that she was sticking up for Them angered me for some reason.

‘They are also not truly sentient and only react to stimuli. We’re talking about our race acting in perfect concert.’