“So what am I supposed to do?”
Fifer gave a gentle shrug. “You have several paths open to you, as we’ve discussed already. You can resign your commission and become an enlisted man. You can simply turn in your wings, become a non-flight officer. Or you can fold yourself in, hunker down, and ride it out where you are.”
Or I can go back to the Ruins, Gray thought. The hell with the Navy, with the government, with all of it. …
“That is certainly one option,” Fifer told him, “but I can’t recommend it. You would be found. You would be brought back. You would face a court martial for desertion, and you would either serve time in a military prison or you would be reconditioned.”
Gray started. He hadn’t spoken out loud about deserting. “You’re reading my thoughts!”
“Your personal daemon is linked in with the AI coordinating this session,” Fifer told him. “It can pick up surface thoughts, at least, yes. How else do you think I monitor your free-form regressions?”
Gray was trembling, though whether from fear, anger, or some other long-repressed emotion, he couldn’t tell. He was beginning to realize that what he resented most about the Navy was the constant high-tech monitoring, the fact that even when he wasn’t linked in, there were machines and AIs in the Net-Cloud that could follow where he was going, watch where he went, listen in on his conversations, even hear what he was thinking.
“I noticed a peculiar, extremely sharp spike in the intensity of your emotions just now,” Fifer told him. “Can you tell me about what you’re feeling?”
“There’s a lot of stuff,” Gray admitted. “I don’t like the constant snooping, the feeling that AIs and Authority monitors are always looking over my shoulder, watching what I do. And …”
“And what?”
“I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what? The monitoring?”
“No. I don’t like it, but I’m not afraid of it.”
“What then?”
Gray was trying to put it into words, but found he could not.
“I’m … not sure.”
“That’s okay. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say some words and phrases, list them. Things I mentioned a moment ago, when you had that emotional spike. Just listen to each phrase, think about it. Tell me what you feel.”
Gray was sweating now. “Okay …”
“‘One option.’”
Gray felt nothing, and shrugged.
“‘You would be found.’”
He felt a quiver of emotional discomfort, but he shook his head.
“‘You would be brought back.’”
“No.”
“‘You would face a court martial.’”
Again, he shook his head, but his heart was pounding now. Damn, he hated this kind of probing.
“‘You would serve time in prison.’”
“No.”
“‘You would be reconditioned.’”
“Damn it, Doctor!” Gray was shouting now. “What does any of this have to do with—”
“It’s okay, Lieutenant. Just relax. Deep breath …”
Gray’s heart was pounding in his chest. He wanted to leave, wanted to run. …
“You see, Trevor, as I told you at the beginning of these sessions, we’re recording everything as we proceed with the session. I can call up any part of our conversation, read it on my in-head display. And we can match each phrase with your emotional output. I notice an extremely strong response on your part to the idea of reconditioning. Is that true?”
“You can also tell when I’m lying,” Gray said, the words close to a snarl.
“Yes, but that’s beside the point.”
“I don’t like the idea of … of reconditioning. No.”
“And what is it that bothers you about it?”
“What is it that—” Gray broke off his reply. “Having my brains scrambled, my memories stolen … shouldn’t that bother anybody?”
“There are a lot of public misconceptions about the neural reconfiguration, Lieutenant. It’s not what you think.”
“No? Then explain that to my wife.”
Gray didn’t know that the docbots at the Columbia Arcology had planted new memories in Angela’s brain. The medtechs hadn’t told him much of anything. But he’d known that the Angela he’d spoken to after her stroke treatment had not been the Angela he’d married. Oh, she’d looked the same, had the same body, the same face … but when she’d looked at him she’d been … different. The love he’d always seen in her eyes was gone, and her conversation seemed … distant. As though she were speaking to a stranger.
The Angela he’d married never would have turned him away, never would have told him she never wanted to see him again.
Fifer had a faraway look on his face as he reviewed records he was calling up within his mind. “Angela Gray,” he said. “I see. A serious stroke. Partial paralysis.”
“And she changed,” Gray said. The words were hard. Bitter. “She changed toward me.”
“That can happen. A stroke can destroy established neural pathways. Those that control movement in muscles. And also those that govern memory, recognition, even attitude and belief.”
“They told me they had to adjust her,” Gray said.
“Adjustment isn’t the same as neural reconfiguration,” Fifer told him. “It’s not reconditioning.”
“No? It made Angela different. It changed her.”
Fifer sighed. “Without direct access to Columbia Arcology’s medcenter, I can’t really say this for sure, but I suspect that what changed her was the delay in getting her to competent treatment. It says here it was almost twenty-four hours before you got her to a medcenter.”
“It took that long to get them to look at her.”
“Yes, well … there were social considerations.”
“Yeah. To them I was a damned filthy primitive, a squattie, with a wife, of all obscene things.”
“That might have been part of it. So was the lack of med insurance, though. That’s how you came to join
