He was trying to help, in his own esoteric and unfriendly way. I went over to him and held my hand out, and he handed me the piece he was holding.
“Just hold on to that for a moment. Do not attempt to pack it yourself.”
“How much have you been able to figure out about this device so far?”
“Quite a bit.” He was gently tugging on a silicate wafer inside the device, carefully detaching it so it could be packed away. “It’s essentially a device for linking one consciousness to another, then stimulating neuroplasticity in the object of the procedure.”
“The object of the procedure? You mean the person…” I searched for the right word. “The one receiving the other person’s mind?”
“Yes.” He placed the wafer in the case. When it was packed away, he turned and reached his hand out. I handed him the piece I’d been holding, and he packed that as well. “With their neuroplasticity highly stimulated, they become receptive to having their consciousness rewritten. It can be done the hard way, of course—a forced reprogramming via dataspike, like what August Marcenn attempted on Venus.”
Thomas removed another panel from the Warwick node, then he handed it to me and went on talking. “In theory, you could create a working device of this type with much more primitive components than this one. This device is the product of centuries of development.”
“More primitive? In what way?”
“Much of what this device does is suppress external stimuli prior to the transfer. The same could be done with a sensory deprivation pool and a proper environment.”
He took the panel from my hands and packed it in the case, then he closed the lid and set a security key. “Would you carry that over to the other cases and bring back an empty one?”
I looked over where he was pointing and saw that he had already stacked up several of the armored packing cases in the corner of the room. “Yeah, sure.” I picked it up and found it to be much lighter than I expected. I carried it across the room and stacked it in the pile with the others. He was already removing another panel when I returned with an empty case.
“Take this. So, once the device stimulates neuroplasticity in the object, a subsystem performs the task of matching the brainwaves of the object with those of the subject. It then rewrites the neural pathways of the object, matching the subject’s pathways as closely as possible. The end result is a qualitative copy of the original mind.”
“A qualitative copy?”
“Yes. Biology is inherently noisy. There is always some measure of error, but the Warwick node appears to perform a sort of error-correction to the data it transcribes.”
“How could that work in principle? If you change something, by definition it’s not a copy.”
Thomas whistled a melody. I recognized it after the second measure.
“That’s Jieshi Diao Youlan.”
He stopped and asked, “How did you know that?”
“It’s a unique melody.”
“Yes, and you recognized it despite the subtle differences in key and tempo. The same holds true for the copy of a consciousness imprinted on the object. Four plus three or five plus two, the end result is identical. Given everything we’ve encountered, it clearly seems to have worked for centuries.”
When I thought about what Thomas was saying, I felt a vague sense of terror. For eight hundred years, the ones who controlled this technology had stolen bodies and erased lives. People with friends and family, their own history and dreams for the future completely gone. Every use of the Warwick node meant eliminating a person’s existence in the purest sense.
“What do you think would have led Katerina to work for these people?” I asked. “Is it money?”
“No. Katerina enjoys her comforts as much as the next person, but she’s not motivated by wealth. She’s an idealist.” He said the word with some distaste.
“What do you mean? How could any idealist possibly work for these… vampires?”
He pursed his lips disapprovingly. “That’s hardly an apt analogy. If you insist on using a folklore analogy, this is much closer to demonic possession than vampirism. To your question, I don’t ever claim to know what another person is thinking. People don’t make enough sense for that. All I can really say is that based on Katerina’s personality, if she has decided to work for the Eleven, it’s because she has convinced herself that they are somehow acting for the benefit of the entire human race.”
“I don’t see how a murder to prolong their own lifespan benefits the species.”
He waved one hand dismissively. “How many people is that really? A hundred and fifty or so over a few centuries? The first day of the Eight Year War killed ten thousand times that.”
“That doesn’t justify it. Whether you kill one or a million, it’s still ethically the same.”
“I’m not trying to justify it, I’m merely saying that’s the perspective that makes it possible. Individual lives mean almost nothing when weighed on the scale of eons.”
“If that’s what you mean by Katerina’s idealism, I’m glad I don’t have it.”
“Make no mistake, Tycho, you’re an idealist as well. Nearly as dangerous as Katerina, in a different way.”
I didn’t particularly want to hear where he was going with that one, so I changed the topic. “Speaking of, how the hell did she escape? That room was secure, and she was tethered.”
“Ah, yes. That.” He wiggled another silica wafer free and stared at it for a second, muttering in a distracted way. Then he went on. “I’ve been down to Interrogation 01, and it seems she had a dead drop in the room itself. The space is barely thirty cubic centimeters, but that’s more than enough to accommodate a lockpicking kit. A panel on the floor acted as the gesture lock and was fed by an isolated circuit connected to a ten-year fuel cell. It does not appear on any record and was likely added by Katerina herself years ago.”
“She had that installed before she disappeared?”
“So it would seem, yes.” He nodded.
“I had a closer look at our network endpoints once I realized what she’d done.” Thomas disconnected a large section of the Warwick Node’s central wheel and pulled it out to have a closer look. “It appears we had a number of endpoints I cannot account for.”
“Our system was compromised even before the attack?” The thought was troubling. What if our enemies had owned our system all along? What had Katerina been up to?
“I can’t be sure, honestly. It would take a detailed, long-term analysis of our system just to establish the full extent of the damage. This is a classic insider threat situation, and the most difficult to counter.”
“So this facility is compromised both physically and electronically.”
He frowned slightly. “Well, yes. But that hardly matters. No one was supposed to know we were here in the first place.”
“So what are we doing about it?”
“We’re already doing it. We’re abandoning this facility and destroying any evidence that we were ever here. That’s why I’m dismantling this Warwick node, Tycho.”
“Okay. So what are my orders?”