Forever Peace (23 page)

"Maybe so. Maybe so." The waiter was bringing our drinks. Marty looked at me and stroked his chin. "You feel up to jacking?"

"I suppose."

"Free at ten tomorrow?"

"Yeah, until two."

"Come by my place. I need your input."

"You guys are going to hook up together and change the world?" Amelia said. "Save the universe?"

Marty laughed. "That's not exactly what I had in mind." But it was, exactly.

JULIAN HAD TO BICYCLE a mile through much-needed rain to get to Marty's lab, so he didn't arrive in too festive a mood.

Marty found him a towel, and a lab coat against the airco chill. They sat on a couple of straight-back chairs by the test bed, which was literally two beds, equipped with full-face helmets. There was a nice view of the sodden campus, ten stories down.

"I gave my assistants the Saturday off," Marty said, "and routed all my incoming calls to my home office. We won't be disturbed."

"At doing what?" Julian said. "What do you have in mind?"

"I won't know for sure until we're linked. But I'd just as soon keep it between ourselves, for the time being." He pointed to the data console on the other side of the room. "If one of my assistants was here, she could patch in one-way and eavesdrop."

Julian got up and inspected the test bed. "Where's the interrupt button?"

"You don't need one. You want out, just think 'quit' and the link is broken." Julian looked doubtful. "It's new. I'm not surprised you haven't seen it before."

"Otherwise, you're in control."

"Nominally. I control the sensorium, but that's trivial for conversation. I'll change it to whatever you want."

"One-way?"

"We can start out one-way and go limited two-way, 'stream of conversation,' on mutual consent." As Julian knew, Marty couldn't jack deeply with anyone; he'd had the ability removed for security reasons. "Nothing like you and your platoon. We can't really read each other's minds. Just communicate more quickly and clearly."

"Okay." Julian hiked himself up on the bed and let out a long breath. "Let's get on with it." They both lay down and worked their necks into the soft collars, slipped the plastic sleeves off the water tubes and moved their heads around until the jacks clicked. Then the front half hinged shut over their faces.

An hour later the masks sighed open. Julian's face was slick with sweat.

Marty sat up, looking refreshed. "Am I wrong?" "I don't think so. But I'd better go to North Dakota anyhow."

"It's nice this time of year. Dry."

IT WASN'T RAINING WHEN I left Marty's lab, but that turned out to be temporary. I saw a squall line coming at me down the street, but was providentially right by the Student Center. I locked up the bike and got through the doors just as the storm hit.

There's a bright and noisy coffee place under the dome on the top of the building. That felt right. I'd spent too long cooped up in two skulls, contemplating skullduggery.

It was crowded for a Saturday, I guess because of the weather. It took me ten minutes to get through the line and negotiate a cup of coffee and a roll, and then there was no place to sit. But the inside of the dome had a ledge at the proper height for parking against.

I reviewed what I'd taken from Marty's brain:

The 10 percent casualty figure for jacking didn't tell the whole story. The raw figures were that 7.5 percent die, 2.3 percent are mentally disabled, 2.5 percent are slightly impaired, and 2 percent wind up like Amelia, unharmed but not jacked.

But the classified part is that more than half of the deaths are draftees who were slated to be mechanics, killed by the complexity of the soldierboy interface. Many of the others are due to undertrained surgeons and bad operating conditions in Mexico and Central America. On the large scale Marty was talking about, you wouldn't use human surgeons at all, except for oversight. Automated brain surgery, Jesus. But Marty claimed it was a couple of orders of magnitude simpler when you didn't have to wire into a soldierboy.

And even if it were ten percent death, the alternative is one hundred percent, chasing life all the way out to Hubble's Wall.

Still, how do you get normal people to do it? Civilians who do it fit pretty narrow profiles: empaths, thrill-seekers; the chronically lonely and the sexually ambiguous. A lot of people who are in Amelia's position: someone they love is jacked, and they want to be there.

The basic strategy is, first, you don't give it away. One thing we've learned from the Universal Welfare State is that people devalue things they don't pay for. It would cost a month of entertainment credits—but as a matter of fact, you'd be spending most of that month unconscious, anyhow.

And the empowerment factor will become compelling after a very few years: people who aren't humanized will be less successful in the world. Maybe less happy, too, though that's harder to demonstrate.

Another little problem was what to do with people like Amelia? They couldn't be jacked, and so they couldn't be humanized. They would be handicapped and angry—and able to do violence. Two percent of six billion is 120 million people. One wolf for every forty-nine sheep is another way of looking at it. Marty suggested that initially we relocate all of them onto islands, asking all the humanized islanders to emigrate.

Anybody could live comfortably anywhere, once we use the nanoforges to make other nanoforges and give them out freely to everyone, Ngumi or Alliance.

But the first order of business was to humanize the soldierboys and their leaders. That meant infiltrating Building 31 and isolating the high command for a couple of weeks. Marty had a plan for that, the War College in Washington ordering a simulation exercise that required isolation.

I was to be a "mole." Marty had had my records modified, so that I'd just had an understandable episode of nervous exhaustion. "Sergeant Class is fit for duty, but it is recommended that Portobello take advantage of his education and experience, and transfer him to the command cadre." Prior to that, he would do some selective memory transfer and storage: I would temporarily forget the suicide attempt, the takeover plot, and the apocalyptic results of the Jupiter Project. I would just go in and be myself.

My old platoon, as part of another "experiment," would stay jacked long enough to become humanized, and I could be inside Building 31 to open the door for them when they came in to replace the security platoon.

The generals would be treated well. Marty would have temporary attachment orders cut for a neurosurgeon and her anesthesiologist from a base in Panama; together they have a phenomenal success rate of ninety-eight percent in jack installation.

Today, Building 31; tomorrow, the world. We could work outward from Portobello, and downward from Marty's Pentagon contact, and quickly have all of the armed forces humanized. The war would end, incidentally. But the larger battle would just be beginning.

I stared out at the campus through the blurring sheets of water while I ate the sweet crab-apple roll. Then I leaned back against the glass and surveyed the coffee shop, coming back down to earth.

Most of these people were only ten or twelve years younger than me. It seemed impossible, an unbridgeable chasm. But maybe I was never quite in that world— chatter, giggle, flirt—even when I was their age. I had my head in a book or a console all the time. The girls I had sex with back then were in the same voluntarily cloistered minority, glad to share quick relief and get back to the books. I'd had terrible earthshaking loves before college, like everybody, but after I was eighteen or nineteen I settled for sex, and in that era there was plenty of it. Now the pendulum was swinging back to the conservatism of Amelia's generation.

Would that all change, if Marty had his way—if we had our way? There's no intimacy like being jacked, and a lot of the intensity of teenaged sex was fueled by a curiosity that jacking would satisfy in the first minute. It remains interesting to share experiences and thoughts with the opposite sex, but the overall gestalt of being male or female is just there, and is familiar a few minutes after you make contact. I have physical memories of childbirth and miscarriage, menstruation and breasts getting in the way. It bothers Amelia that I share cramps and PMS with my platoon; that all the women have been embarrassed by involuntary erections, have ejaculated, know how the scrotum limits the ways you sit and walk and cross your legs.

Amelia got a taste of that, a whisper, in the two minutes or less we had in Mexico. Maybe part of our problem now was rooted in her frustration at having had just a glimpse. We'd only had sex a couple of times since the abortive attempt the night after I saw her with Peter. The night after I jackfucked with Zoe, to be fair. And there was so much happening, the end of the universe and all, that we hadn't had time or inclination to work on our own problems.

The place smelted kind of like a gym crossed with a wet dog, with an overlay of coffee, but the boys and girls didn't seem to notice. Searching, preening, displaying—a lot more outright primate behavior than they revealed in a physics class.

Watching all that casual mating ritual simmering, I felt a little sad and old, and wondered whether Amelia and I would ever completely reconcile. It was partly that I couldn't get the picture of her and Peter out of my mind. But I had to admit that part of it was Zoe, and all her tribe. We'd all felt kind of sorry for Ralph, his endless harrying after jills. But we'd also felt his ecstasy, which had never diminished.

I shocked myself by wondering whether I could live like that, and in the same instant shocked myself again by admitting I could. Relationships emotionally limited, temporarily passionate. And then back to real life for awhile, until the next one.

The undeniable lure of that extra dimension—feeling her feeling you, thoughts and sensations twining together—in my heart I'd built a wall around that, labeled it "Carolyn," and shut the door. But now I had to admit that it had been pretty impressive just with a stranger; however skilled and sympathetic, still a stranger, with no pretending about love.

No pretending: that was true in more than one way. Marty was right. Something like love was there automatically. Sex aside, for several minutes she and I had been closer, in terms of knowing, than some normal couple who'd been together fifty years. It does start to fade as soon as you unjack, and a few days later, it's the memory of a memory. Until you jack again, and it slams back. So if you kept it going for two weeks, it would change you forever? I could believe that.

I left Marty without discussing a timetable, which was literally an unspoken agreement. We wanted time to sort through each other's thoughts.

I also didn't discuss how he was able to have military medical records altered and have pretty high-ranking officers shuffled around at will. We hadn't been jacked deeply enough for that information to come through. There was an image of one man, a longtime friend. I wished I didn't even know that much.

I wanted to postpone any action, anyhow, until I had jacked with the humanized people in North Dakota. I didn't really doubt Marty's veracity, but I wondered about his judgment. When you're jacked with someone, "wishful thinking" has a whole new meaning. Wish hard enough and you can drag other people along with you.

JULIAN WATCHED THE RAIN for about twenty minutes and decided it was not going to let up, so he splashed on home through it. Of course, it stopped when he was half a block from the apartment.

He locked the bike up in the basement and sprayed the chain and gears with oil. Amelia's bike was there, but that didn't mean she was home.

She was sound asleep. Julian made enough noise getting his suitcase to wake her.

"Julian?" She sat up and rubbed her eyes. "How did it go with—" She saw the suitcase. "Going somewhere?"

"North Dakota, for a couple of days."

She shook her head. "Why on earth ... oh, Marty's freaks."

"I want to jack with them and check for myself. They may be freaks, but we may all be joining them."

"Not all," she said quietly.

He opened his mouth and shut it, and picked out three pairs of socks in the dim light. "I'll be back in plenty of time for the Tuesday class."

"Be getting a lot of calls Monday. The Journal doesn't come out till Wednesday, but they'll be calling everybody."

"Just stack 'em up. I'll tap in from North Dakota."

Getting to that state was going to be harder then he thought. He found three military nights that would zigzag him to the water-filled crater Seaside, but when he tried to reserve space he was informed by the computer that he no longer had a "combat" flag, and so would have to fly standby. It predicted that he had about a fifteen percent chance of making all three flights. Getting back on Tuesday would be even more difficult.

He called Marty, who told him he'd see what could be done, and called back one minute later. "Give it another try."

This time he got all six flights booked with no comment. The "C" for combat had been restored to his serial number.

Julian carried his armload and the suitcase into the living room to pack. Amelia followed him, shrugging into a nightgown.

"I might be going to Washington," she said. "Peter's coming back from the Caribbean so that he can do a press conference tomorrow."

"That's a change of heart. I thought he'd gone down there to avoid publicity." He looked up at her. "Or is he coming back mainly to see you?"

"He didn't exactly say."

"But he is paying for the ticket, right? You don't have enough credit left this month."

"Of course he is." She folded her arms on her chest. "I'm his coresearcher. You'd be welcome there, too."

"I'm sure. Better that I investigate this aspect of the problem, though." He finished packing the small suitcase and looked around the room. He stepped over to an end table and picked up two magazines. "If I asked you not to go, would you stay here?"

"You would never ask me that."

"That's not much of an answer."

She sat down on the sofa. "All right. If you asked me not to go, we would fight. And I would win."