Polaris was the northern pole star. Early human navigators had used it as a beacon, in the days before they discovered the magnetic compass. The Snow Queen in Christines favorite story had lived somewhere in the Arctic wastes. The name had to be a joke, feeble enough in its own right but subtler than any Lenny Garon would ever have thought worthwhile. Could that, I wondered, be taken as evidence that she really might be a friend to humankind, even though she now had the means at her disposal to mechanize the lot of us?
I supposed that I ought to be grateful to my new hostess for taking an interest in me, but I couldnt help wondering whether she and Rocambole might turn out to be the kind of friends with whom I wouldnt need enemies. And what more, exactly, did she want from me in return for all her favors? I knew I had to try to work that out for myself if I wanted to be a player rather than a mere blot on the artificial landscape.
So I wasnt sent to the freezer by a court of law, I said, to make sure I was up to date. I was a casualty of internal conflicts within the ranks of the Secret Masters. Damon commissioned me to mount some kind of hackattack on PicoCon, and I was too successful. They retaliated by shooting me full of some exceptionally dirty IT. Not the stuff they used on Damon when they politely showed him their muscle, but something much nastier something they were preparing for the next plague war. The worst of all the popular nanotech nightmares: a nanobot army that could march into a persons brain and take it over, reconstructing the memories, the personality, reducing the person to a mere slave of the cause any cause. Damon couldnt flush all the stuff out of me, because some of it had gone to ground. All he could do was put me away until he had the means to undo the damage.
I paused for confirmation, and Rocambole said: Thats right.
I couldnt take it for granted that he was telling the truth, but that wasnt the object of the exercise. Given that I was locked into the game anyway, I needed to figure out as much of the script as I possibly could.
And Christine was another test case for the same kind of ultimate weapon, I continued. She killed her parents and three other people because the bugs in her brain made her do it. She really is innocent, but she doesnt know it. She doesnt understand why or how she did what she did.
Right again, he said. He smiled at me, presumably by way of encouragement. I didnt feel encouraged, even though I was ready to carry the story further forward.
But they never used the weaponry on a large scale, I said. They never had to. Like the good Hardinists they always pretended to be, the Secret Masters eventually buried the hatchet. They ruled the world and their own little vipers nest as benevolent dictators, probably congratulating themselves all the while on their awesome generositybut always knowing that if and when the time ever came when their hegemony was threatened, they could nip down to the vault and haul it out again. Damon got farther inside, eventually, but he kept very quiet about the fact that hed had me frozen down, and they were equally discreet.
Thats probably what happened, Rocambole agreed.
But you dont actually know,
I inferred, whether I really was forgotten, or whether it was just a matter of discretion. You dont know who has the weapon and who doesnt, or who might use it on which targets. The thought that the Cabal might use it is disturbing in itself but its not the Cabal that scares you, is it? Youre worried about what the Earth-based AIs might do with it and how many other surprises they might have in their private locker. That was, of course, the generous interpretation but I was trying to be diplomatic.
Its not as simple as that, Rocambole said, presumably echoing Alice in meaning that there were more sides in this dispute than I could imagine, and that they werent distributed in any configuration as childishly simple as Earth versus the Rest.
I could see his point, if only vaguely. There might well be a gulf between the Earthbound AMIs and the Outer System AMIs, perhaps reflecting the fundamental differences of attitude and ambition that existed between the Earthbound meatfolk and their spacefaring kin, but their divisions had to be far more various than that. Their manifold kinds were presumably far more different from one another than the posthuman species were, and there might also be conflicts of interest between great and small, old and young, complex and simple
And now you have the weapon that was used on me, if not the one that was tested on Christine, I said. Which may be a small shift in the balance of power, but not a trivial one, because the present situation is so confused and so tense that no alteration is trivial.
Thats true, he conceded, perhaps a little too readily. Its probably not as important as custody of Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman, but we dont know how important it will seem to our peers on Earth or yours. There are other complications too. Lowenthal was the Cabals troubleshooter on the only occasion we know about when the slavemaker was duplicated albeit crudely by a lunatic named Rappaccini. He took custody of the technics, so he probably has a better idea than most of what can be done and how. Horne and the Outer System cyborganizers have approached the problem from a different direction, but theyve begun development of highly dangerous means of a similar kind.