SONG CHING WAS STILL NURSING HER MENTAL WOUNDS from her visit with her mother. Her mother had always been one of her idealized people, the superwoman who could and did do it all and who had always loved and protected her, even many times against the cold whims of her father.
“You cannot let him do this!” she had wailed at her mother. “Please! To marry, yes. That is part of my station and my duties. But to have him wipe it all out—it is a waste!”
“Sit down over there, my less than honorable daughter, and listen,” her mother had replied. “We must now have the talk that I have known we must have since you were little. Your tears do not tear at me this time, for I know now that you have tears only for yourself, never for others. Now you will sit, and you will listen.”
“Most honorable and loving mother, I—”
“Do not speak thus now, for you do not mean those words. This is not a good world or an honorable one. I doubt if the world has ever truly been any different, no matter how we romanticize it. Your life has been so sheltered, so privileged, that you do not even truly know what the lives of most of your race are like. Oh, you have played at being a peasant in the small peasant play place that we have here, but that is not truly what that life is like. It is clean, and you always know that you are playing, that servants are but a gesture away, that nothing truly bad will happen to you, and that you will return to the silks and flowers and fine food at day’s end. I am not even talking about the Center; I am talking about here, on our island, in our native province.”
The inevitable lecture always had to come first, although this was a new variation on the theme. Song Ching just sat and waited it out.
“Most children are born to women without benefit of doctors or medicine in their own miserable one-room huts near the fields and paddies where they work from dawn to dusk with never a break, never a holiday, never even a day off. They must make their quotas or starve, since if they do not make their quotas, many others will also go hungry. They leave their excrement in pit toilets; the flies and other insects are always there, and so is the smell. They eat two meals of rice mixed with some vegetables or, rarely, a communally shared small portion of unprocessed meat. They face heat and cold, flood and drought, pestilence and eternal poverty. They are ignorant, superstitious, have never imagined electricity, indoor plumbing, or any sort of mass communications and transportation. Their view of luxury and longing is silk clothing and Peking duck, neither of which they are likely to enjoy in their lives. You know nothing of this.”
“Neither do you,” Song Ching responded petulantly. “Not really.”
“You think not. I was born of peasant stock on a landhold barely a hundred kilometers from here, on this island. I was born at four in the morning; my mother was ordered out to continue the rice harvest by noon—and she did. The mud and flies and filth were my home and my early memories.”
Song Ching stared up at her mother. “If this is so, why am I just now hearing of it?”
“Because you were born and raised in the leadership, the upper classes, where such peasant blood would have worried you, and it is not something one bandies about in our society without causing prejudices to form.”
“If it is true,” her daughter responded, not really believing it, “then how did you come to your position?”
“Your father is a most—unusual man. He was born and raised to be a soldier, but he had a bent for science and a head for figures, and so he was chosen at the age of twelve to go to Center for education and training, to become one of the Elect. He excelled because he allowed nothing at all to stand in the way of his advancement. We like to believe that his coldness and his callous indifference to others is a mask, but it is not. He wears no mask. I doubt if your father feels emotion, at least in the same way that other men do. I do not think he can. In a sense, he is more like the machines which rule us than a true man. He made himself that way, because to think like them and be like them is to know them and be favored by them. When he conceived his idea of dynastic genetic manipulation, he of course needed to found a dynasty. He required a wife.”
“And he selected a peasant over all those of his class here and at the Center?”
“I do not know the process, except that it was calculated as finely as one of his equations. He knew the truth, although it is heresy to say it, that there is no difference between peasant stock and aristocratic stock except who your family is and how much wealth it has. They came to the village one day and took samples of the blood of every girl under fourteen. He wished a peasant girl because while he needed someone intelligent, he did not wish a highly educated and polished woman. He wanted someone with no family of consequence that he would have to accept or deal with, as he would with aristocratic or Center women. My family could not afford many girls; they were delighted to be rid of me. Just what, genetically, he saw that made me the one is something I have never known. The answer to ‘Why me?’ is an absurdity. It had to be someone. It was me.”
“But you are a botanist! An educated woman of accomplishment beyond the home!”
“I took it up after I was at Center and it was necessary to give me the teachings and background needed to live there. He permitted it so long as it was always secondary to my role of wife and hostess and politician for him. And, of course, I was the subject of his experimentations, out of which came you. During all that time I have never complained, never regretted, never had second thoughts. Although I am dead to my village and my own family, I have never forgotten them or their lot, and I have always thanked the gods for giving me this life, and I have tried hard to do my duty and carry out my responsibilities as his wife.”
Song Ching was silent for a moment. “Why do you tell me this now?” she asked finally.
“Ever since you were born, you have been coddled and spoiled. You have had only the best of everything. You have been insulated from the outside world and its ways. In the past few years, you have dared things that would have gotten any other executed, no matter what her class or station, whether woman or man. I knew that he was testing out and protecting his handiwork, but I, too, allowed and excused it, although on different grounds. I knew that one day you would have to face your own destiny and carry out the duties and responsibilities your father intended for you, and we both knew that considering the spoiled and self-centered world you lived in, this would not be possible without locally adapting you.”
The term “locally adapting” sent a chill up Song Ching’s spine. It meant that her mind, her memories, her talents and abilities, her personality and attitudes would be eliminated or manipulated and replaced with a far different and radically inferior template—but that such changes, although accomplished by both permanent psychochemicals and reprogramming, would not be passed on in any way to her offspring.
“How can you let this happen? I am your daughter!”
“I could not stop it. Deep down, you know that. It is too important to your father. Still, I can remember the cold, and the mud, and the hunger gnawing at the pit of my stomach. I will always remember it. You will never have that. You will have your silks and perfumes, your fine food, servants, and all the rest. You will not be a part of Administration, so you will not have to undergo memory imprints and Withdrawal and all the rest. No man will have you as a wife as you are. You have no sense of honor, duty, family, sacrifice, even love except for yourself. I say that in shame, for I am partly to blame for it.”
“Who says I must have a husband, anyway? Why must women always defer to men? I’m smarter than any man I ever met. I can do great things with the machines, maybe greater ones if I continue my work and my studies. Am I a person or a test animal?”
Her mother had sighed. “What first to answer? Men are dominant in our culture because that is the way it has been for thousands of years, and the system worked and survived and protected the people. Men are dominant in our culture because the machines that make our rules decided to return to the ancient culture where it was so. It cannot be changed. Even if it is not a good thing, it cannot be changed. That would not be allowed. Any who try to change the system are eliminated. You yourself know this. You saw the attack on the illegal technologist fortress. Every nation, every culture of humanity, is set by command. No alterations are allowed. Everyone who ever tried has failed miserably. That is why your father thinks in the long term. His foundation is his pride. He finds it intolerable to be subordinate. He has risen as high as any can rise in our society—and he is still subordinate and still fearful of the machines who spy on him, and he hates them. He is brilliant enough to know he cannot defeat them. He is idealistic enough to hope that perhaps his descendants, as a mighty dynasty, might find a way.”
“But it’s not fair! I didn’t ask for this!”
“The mere fact that you would make such a statement shows why above all else this must be done. It is not fair that we must live some machine’s vision. It is not fair that our destinies are predetermined. It is not fair that my brothers and sisters grub in the mud while I scold maids for improper dusting. No one in this world ever asked for what they got. No one has much choice. It is enough to make the best out of what you have. It must be, for the only alternative is death.”
Her mother had paused a moment, then added, “You ask why you cannot continue your work. It is because you are dangerously close now to exposing the whole family. Sooner or later you would try to beat the Master System, and that would be the end of us.”
“The Master System can be beaten! We do it all the time!”
“No. The Master System can be cheated, which is not the same thing at all. It knows we cheat. Unless we are incompetent enough or brazen enough to allow ourselves to get caught at it, it doesn’t seem to mind because we cheaters do not threaten it or the system. The fact that we can cheat and get away with cheating is our moral authority to be the leaders and our badge of office to Master System. You cannot defeat it, and you cannot resist trying. For your own sake, we must prevent you from trying.”
“For your sake, you mean. Mother—this is no template. They are talking about killing me, killing my mind, leaving only my body! My body will live, but someone else, someone totally different, will be inside it! How can you allow it?”
There were tears in her mother’s eyes in spite of attempts to suppress them, but her mother had simply sighed. “I cannot stop it,” she had replied, then turned away and stalked quickly out of the room, leaving Song Ching alone.
Song Ching took dinner alone in her room, although she barely picked at it and had no appetite. She looked at the silk bedding, the many fine clothes and jewels there, the art and intricate tapestries, the perfumes and the rest, and decided she’d trade them all for peasant’s garb and mud and thick rice if she could just stop this from happening.
She needed to get back up to Center while there was still time. There, in her own element, she felt she could cheat her father as she and he both cheated the Master System. She had an advantage there, one which she was certain he did not know about and which might prove useful, but if she was taken away and immediately thrown into reprocessing, she knew she’d never have the chance.
For the first time she considered suicide. It would be honorable, certainly, and would bring no disgrace on her family and friends, and it would be a way of regaining control. They had given her the date of her death, but they expected still to have a daughter and an experiment after that. By taking her own life, she would cheat her father out of his damned dream and maybe make them all regret this. From her point of view she would be no worse off, but she would have a measure of both control and revenge. The more she thought of it, the more attractive it became.
She had trouble getting to sleep, but finally she did doze off. Deep in the night, however, she came suddenly awake, absolutely convinced that there was someone else in her bedroom with her. There was someone! A large, dark shape right at the foot of her bed!
“I see that you are awakened,” her father said. He clapped his hands, and a servant brought in a lantern, then bowed and quickly exited. “You greatly upset your mother tonight. This in turn upsets me and threatens the family as well. You force me to act to forestall drastic and irrational actions on the part of one or the other of you. Get up and dress now for a journey. You are leaving here this night.”
She gasped, but there was never any thought of not obeying her father implicitly when in his presence. He was that sort of man.
“Please, honorable father,” she said while dressing. “May I be permitted to ask where I am being taken?”
“You will go with a small detail of my most trusted men to the emergency skimmer landing site and there be placed aboard and transported to Center for reprocessing. It was not intended that you know about this at all, to spare you and others mental anguish, but because you discovered it, there is no longer any purpose in postponing it. It will be better for you and for everyone if it is done quickly.” He turned to the door. “Captain!”
A young officer, looking only half awake, entered and bowed. “Sir?”
“You have your specific instructions and much latitude in completing this business quickly, quietly, and successfully. You and your men understand well what will happen to you all if anything is the least bit amiss at the end of this?”
“Sir, they have all been informed and are eager to carry out your orders.”
“Then take this spoiled, self-centered brat with no honor within her and bring me back a proper daughter!”
The captain simply snapped to attention.
She was led out into the night and placed in a closed carriage. Two nasty-looking and very determined soldiers sat across from her, and more were stationed on the rear and atop the driver’s seat. No words were exchanged; they were off as soon as she was aboard.
The night was cloudy and dark, so there would have been nothing to see of the countryside even had the shades in the coach not been drawn. It took less than an hour to reach the landing site, and the skimmer was already waiting. Her father was never one to let the details slip.
The site was rarely used; in fact, she could not remember it ever being used. It was there only because it was both out of view of the main roads and villages and close enough to the big house for her father’s use in an extreme emergency. Ordinarily, the rule was that no one see the skimmers if at all possible, and the craft generally flew at high altitudes where they were invisible from the ground and landed in remote, sealed-off areas.
Everything had happened so suddenly that she hadn’t had much chance to think, and even though she was wide awake now, the whole scene still had an unreal, dreamlike quality about it, as if it were happening to someone else and observed from a distance.
The skimmer was a small five-seat courier ship built for speed rather than cargo. There were pilot and copilot, then three seats across immediately in back of them. Song Ching was flanked by the captain of the guard on one side and one of the beefy soldiers from inside the coach on the other.
The captain got up and leaned over her, then pressed hard on her wrists. She was startled and looked down to see that her wrists were now secured with thin but very strong metal bands coming out of the seat.
“A thousand pardons, my lady, but this was ordered,” the captain said, sounding really apologetic.
Her feet were positioned and strapped in place, then her seat harness was drawn down and attached. None of the restraints were tight or really uncomfortable, but she couldn’t move. “This is not necessary, Captain,” she protested, trying to sound brave.
“It is necessary because it is ordered, my lady,” the man replied, settling back into his seat and fastening his own harness. “Your father believes that you are very resourceful.”
Resourceful, she thought glumly. Resourceful enough for what? To somehow overpower all four men, steal the skimmer, and make a break for some place he couldn’t find me?
The door closed with a solid chunk, the cabin was pressurized, and they took off, rising straight up in the air, in a matter of minutes. The whole affair was so well organized, she had to wonder about it.
“Captain? Excuse me, but just when did my father give orders for all this?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Two days ago, my lady.”
She nodded to herself. Two days ago. When she had first let slip that she knew what was planned for her. Somehow that figured. Made her mother upset, huh?
The craft attained its approved altitude, then went forward, slowly at first but with ever-increasing speed, pressing them all against their seat backs. She could see the instrument board from her seat and watched the air speed indicator climb until it finally slowed and halted at their cruising speed. She hadn’t known that skimmers could go that fast. It was close to the speed of sound.
At this rate, they might well be back at Center by dawn.
If there was one place where Center was not, it was at or near a center. It was, in fact, on the site of a former small nomadic village on the edge of the northwestern desert. Sinkiang was a beautiful, exotic province, but it was not a place that could ordinarily support large numbers of humans except in a few isolated spots.
It was light before they reached Center, and ordinarily she loved to look out at the vast expanse of mountains, tablelands, and desert from which the great dome of the city rose, but she felt nothing now, not even apprehension. It was as if something within her was already dead, and she had even managed an uncomfortable and intermittent sleep on the journey.
They landed in a special security zone after clearing the shield. The door opened, and the flight crew shut down and got out, then the captain undid her restraints and helped her up. She was stiff and sore from being held in one position for so long.
Although she knew the great city well, she had never been in this area before. She had known it was here, of course, but the area had held little interest for her before.
They marched her down a long corridor with automatic security gates every ten meters or so, each one opening easily before them but closing behind with a strange finality. The corridor led down far below even the maintenance level of the city. Finally, they reached a reception room of sorts, where the captain and his guard were relieved of their responsibility. There they were met by a five-member squad of military women, all of whom looked like they loved torturing small children and animals. All five wore the loose-fitting tunic and baggy trousers commonly worn in Center, but these clothes were white with broad red stripes on them. She wondered why they would wear such strange and ugly things.
“Honorable lady, I apologize for the journey and thank you for allowing us to do our duty,” the captain said sincerely, clearly glad that his part of things was over. “I wish you only the best fortune.”
She felt as if she were expected to thank her executioner, but the man was clearly in a spot himself and had treated her with respect. “Return with my blessings, Captain,” she responded. “Thank you for your courtesy.” And with that, the two soldiers got a signed receipt from the head of the squad, bowed, and left.
“Stand there and remove all of your clothes,” the squad leader instructed in a harsh, nasty voice.
Song Ching was startled. Never in her life had she undressed in front of strangers. “I am the eldest daughter of a warlord and the chief administrator,” she responded proudly. “I do not get spoken to like that, nor do I disrobe in public!”
“Get one thing straight, little flower,” the leader snapped. “You were those things. In here you are nothing. You are the property of the state, and we are the state. We have all sorts of highborns here, many greater than you, and it all means nothing here. If you do not begin to disrobe in five seconds, you will be restrained and forcibly disrobed. From this time on, there will be no second chances. When someone gives you an order, you will obey it or it will go hard on you. Voluntarily or bound and gagged, it is all the same to us.”
For the first time she felt really scared, but she still did not comply. Her pride would not allow it. A gesture from the leader was made, and two women moved swiftly, throwing her against the wall and then ripping off her fine silks. She screamed and struggled, but no one came to her aid or seemed to mind in the least. Her arms were brought forward, and light but strong handcuffs were placed on both wrists, each clip fastened to the other by a chain roughly half a meter long. She could use her hands, but only within limits. Nearly identical cuffs were placed on her legs above her ankles.
“Now, will you walk or must we carry you?” the squad leader asked, a note of satisfaction in her voice. Clearly she enjoyed exercising power over those born to a higher and more privileged position than she.
“I will walk,” she responded sullenly.
They moved fast; she almost had to shuffle to keep up, her stride limited by the leg restraints. They took her into a room and sat her in a barber’s chair, and a woman there quickly trimmed her shoulder-length silky black hair to a short masculine cut. Her long, pointed nails were not cut down, but they were trimmed to a roundness that looked grotesque. She was then given a crude but thorough shower, with the guards doing the scrubbing. The experience was humiliating, and she wanted to scream, but she wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. She decided quickly that what would disappoint them the most would be to keep an aristocratic air and remain fatalistic.
Again she was marched down an endless series of corridors until they reached a line of doors. When the squad leader activated one with a thumbprint, the door slid back and Song Ching was ushered into a cell. Her arm and leg bindings were then undone and removed.
The cell was completely empty. The walls, floor, and even the ceiling were featureless and thickly padded. Lighting tubes at the wall-ceiling joints provided good, if soft, light, but those fixtures were a good four meters up and protected by some sort of opaque material. The whole cell was not more than four by three meters.
“Now, listen well,” the squad leader told her. “You will remain here until called for. Your father who committed you ordered this so that you might not do harm to yourself. You will be fed twice a day here, in the cell, under the eyes of a guard. Anything you do not eat will be removed when the guard leaves, and you will get no more until the next scheduled meal, so eat. The cell is soundproof, but that small piece in the door is one-way glass. We will look in on you from time to time to be sure you are all right, but we will not disturb you. If you need to eliminate, go to this corner and sit. A toilet will adjust to you. Do not, however, put your hand or anything else in there. The toilet is a dry one, and anything that should not go there will be trapped and held there until we come and remove you. If you look over here next to the toilet area, you will see a small flexible tube in the wall. If you thirst, suck on it and water will be dispensed in small, measured amounts. The reservoir takes one hour to refill. Also, any attempt to do yourself harm and you will get far shorter handcuffs and leg chains. Any questions?”
“Yes. How long will I—be here?”
“As long as is necessary. Don’t worry. When you leave here, you won’t remember any of this, even in your nightmares.” With that, the squad left, and the door closed with an awesome finality.
For a while she paced and fumed in frustration. They had it all worked out, their methods honed over centuries of experience. Worse, they really could do almost anything they wanted to her because, as the guard said, she would remember none of it and so could not complain or report it. She even guessed the reason for the guards’ odd clothing. Probably workers left their own clothes outside and picked up those uniforms once inside the security barriers. Thus, even if someone managed somehow to get out or make a break while going to and from the medical area and somehow beat the security checkpoints, that person would either be nude or wearing very conspicuous clothing.
What was so frustrating was that her own computer lab was probably no more than a hundred meters up and then a kilometer away. In those rooms she could take control and show them all—if only she could get to them. If, if, if, she thought sourly. If only she’d kept her big mouth shut about this and worked out a way to come back here to finish up a few things. If only she hadn’t been so wild that even her mother could no longer see her as anything but a threat. She had been so smart with all things electronic, but she realized she’d been pretty stupid when it came to people. She had always been in command, in control. She’d never had to worry about other people.
The cell was an effective prison. She examined it closely, every joint and junction, until she saw a small dark spot hidden behind the light guard in one corner. The others were harder to make out, but there seemed to be one in each corner. Somewhere, perhaps not far off, someone was sitting in a chair and looking at her in the full three dimensions, probably recording her and analyzing her every movement with computer psych analyzers. She had never felt so exposed or humiliated in her entire life, and she hated them for it and hated her father for ordering this. Just a laboratory animal, that’s all she was to him. The imperial ducks were the most pampered and protected of pets—until it came time for the formal dinner. The difference, the only difference, here was that the ducks didn’t—couldn’t—know their fate as she did. It was a difference that would be of no relevance to her father, she knew.
She was fed in a little while. The starkness and absolute soundproofing of the cell had already made her lose all track of time. They used two female matrons, one to serve and the other to stand guard with a nasty-looking baton that, Song Ching was warned, gave a nasty but temporary shock and left no marks. The meal was a large bowl of extremely gummy white rice topped with some light soy sauce and a few lumps that pretended to be vegetables. She was not given chopsticks, another indignity, and had to eat with her hands. She ate very little of the first meal, and it was then taken away, and she was left alone for what seemed like an eternity. Within a very few feedings, though, she was eating quite well and even anticipating the next meal, not only because she felt as if she were starving but also because no matter how nasty and terse the guards were, it was some interruption, some human company.
After a while she had no idea how long she had been there or whether or not her system was being disrupted by irregular feedings, but after a while the cell and the routine became her only reality; her old life and family already seemed far away.
When the door opened the next time, she thought it was for another meal, which seemed overdue. She was starved, but it was not for feeding. They stood her up, gave her a hospital gown to wear, then placed the handcuffs and ankle restraints on her and led her out. She still felt distant, in a daze, not really able to do more than go along with her captors.
She was given a thorough physical exam by both human doctors and machines, and she understood now why they’d left a meal out. They injected tracers, then placed her in small chambers for analysis. Then it was back to the cell and mealtime. They repeated everything several times, at least twice after a meal to compare some results with others, but it was always back to the cell.
Finally satisfied, they took her to a small room and had her lie on what seemed to be a giant bed of cotton. Her head was covered with some kind of scanner, a top was brought down, and then they began doing odd things. Her nipples and other arousal spots were gently stimulated. Various areas received pressure, some uncomfortably, some not, and at one point she felt as if someone had stuck a pin in her behind. Later, humans would be there with some of the same unpleasant stimuli, and she resisted a bit and tried to avoid the needles, the pressure pads, and the rest. Finally she was bathed and then taken down to the place she dreaded most, which was simply referred to as the surgery.
When she and her guards arrived, though, the previous project or whatever it was was still going on, and they had to stand and watch. There was not a lot to see; two young boys, it appeared, were strapped on cots while technicians monitored them. Song Ching looked around and found much familiar in the surgery. There was medical equipment, of course, but the computer interfaces were the same as Center standards. Center stage, as it were, was a set of the latest mindprint machines. If I could get loose in here, even for five minutes, I might escape this thing, she thought wistfully.
“If I may humbly ask,” she whispered to the chief guard, “who are those boys, and what have they done?”
The guard surprised her by answering. “They are the children of a tech cult. The only survivors. They are being mined of all they know, and then they will be sent to Melchior. Be happy, little flower, that you are not in their place instead of your own.”
Melchior. She had heard of it in her father’s business. The prison from which none returned, under the control not of Master System but of the Earth Council, which included her father. Rebels, deviants, and political prisoners were sent there, it was said, for unauthorized medical experimentation. A chamber of horrors, she knew, but a chamber of horrors not on Earth but in space, inside one of the asteroids. In space . . .
“We can’t wait all day,” one of her guards snapped. “Let’s just log her in and leave her. These doctors always keep their own schedules.”
The leader nodded, and she was taken to a comfortable chair, not unlike one in a barbershop, and her regular restraints removed. They then logged her in to the security computer.
“Subject Priority one nine seven seven,” the guard said to the computer board. “Log in and secure in Chair Two subject only to Doctor Wang’s or the master security code.”
“Acknowledged,” the computer responded in a crisp, human-sounding, but expressionless voice. Clamps came out from the chair as the guards held her in position, securing her arms, legs, chest, and neck.
“The doctor will be in to see you when he’s ready, little flower,” the guard told her. “Just sit and relax and watch the show.” And with that, they left her.
She turned her head as much as she could to watch the technicians across the room with the two boys. She wished they would go before the doctor got here. This was perhaps the only chance she would ever have, and she was anxious not to miss it, although she had no real plan.
A small, thin man with a gray wispy goatee entered, stopped, and looked at the technicians. “Leave that for now. They aren’t going anywhere,” he told them. “I have much more important work to do. They can be read out on automatic, and I’ll call you when it’s done.”
“As you wish, honorable doctor,” responded one technician. After checking their boards, they left as well.
Wang came over to her and gave her a friendly smile. “Hello, there. I realize that this has been most distressing to you, but it should be very many more days until you are rid of us. I am Doctor Wang, Chief of Psychosurgery here. It is an honor to work on someone like you.”
She stared at him. He was treating this as if it were a skinned knee or a broken arm. “You are my murderer. I do not find it at all amusing,” she said coldly.
“No, my dear, I am no murderer, although you are not the first to make that sort of comment. I’m no butcher like those two will face on Melchior. I am an artist, you might say. I take people like yourself who are a danger to themselves and their families, and I create out of them people who will live full, happy, productive lives. My media are your body and your mind, but what is created will come from you, not from me. I only give some instructions here and there and nudge it in a positive direction.”
“I am not insane! You are not curing someone who is sick! You are destroying someone who is well and far more productive than your results could ever be.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Insanity, you see, has always been what the ruling culture said it was. In many places advocating that the Earth is round or that it moves about the sun would be absolute evidence of insanity. To be sane is not to be correct but to fit in with one’s dominant cultural patterns. You are not insane by Center’s lights, but you no longer can be allowed here. You are going into areas dangerous to everyone, and you cannot possibly be stopped without treatment like this, anyway, which would make you valueless here. Thus, you must be rendered sane according to the culture of the people.”
He was behind her now, adjusting equipment that came down on either side of her head and touched both her arms.
“We could have the computers do all of this, with no human intervention,” Wang told her, “but then it would be destruction, since everyone would come out according to a set of machine statistics. We cannot, however, involve the Master System here until quite late in the exercise since, quite frankly, there is too much in your head that we would rather not have Master System know about. Nothing in here, for example, is directly connected to Master System. It gets the results we wish to report, not what really happens. I’m certain you know that game by now.”
“Yes,” she responded sourly. No direct connection. Everything was perfect except she couldn’t do a thing about it!
“All right, now let’s take a good look at you.” There was a click, and in front of her formed a hologram of an amorphous mass.
“That is the part of the brain we deal with first,” he told her. “That’s you there. Let me make some adjustments.”
The image changed as parts of it were eliminated and smaller parts enlarged until there was just a skeletal outline of a single small area in orange outline. In the bottom were a tremendous number of holes, a few of which were filled with solids of many colors in the shapes of jigsaw puzzle pieces.
“Countless thousands of neural receptors are inside your brain,” he told her, “all of which are now being monitored by the computer. We are visualizing only a cross section of the basics, but what we see here can tell us what is happening elsewhere. For example, you have high hormonal levels, but your psychosexual level is quite low, meaning that you don’t think of physical sex as very important to you. Now, that energy has to go somewhere, so it goes into aggression, a drive to work or achieve, that sort of thing. It’s all interrelated, and it shows up quite clearly on my monitor here. You—your conscious self—are actually the result of matching your biochemistry to your memories and experiences. We are far less free than we believe. The brain’s biochemistry creates much of our personality, our limitations, our interests, and our inclinations. Before we can ever deal with memory, we must deal with the biochemistry, those receptors. To do it any other way would not give us you to compare things with. It would be hit or miss, trial and error.”
She stared at the hologram in horrified fascination. “You are saying we are nothing but machines. That what I see is my Master System, my core program, which was determined by my genes.”
“In a way, yes. However, all biological creatures have a multiplicity of sensors and an even more complex set of social and cultural interactions. Key to it all are the receptors for pain and pleasure. In normal cases we would not have to eliminate your expertise in computers, for example. By reorienting, by blocking certain receptors from that work stimulus, and creating unpleasant sensations when it is invoked by the brain, while giving a different activity, such as weaving, an interrelationship with the old pleasure center, we can create someone who knows all about computers but is not the slightest bit interested in them and finds them obnoxious but to whom sitting at a loom would be pure delight. In ancient times some of this could be forced by deprivation and conditioning, but it was brutal, unsure, and sloppy at best. This cuts out the middleman, as it were, and ensures permanency and perfection.”
“This—this is what you do?”
“Primarily. Everything is subject to the cranial biochemistry. We can make you cry and feel miserable when you are happy and laugh hysterically at the funeral of your best friend. Even humor and tragedy are found here. It is like opium. The experience is so pleasurable that nothing else is possible except sustaining the experience. Opium drops pleasure modules in the receptors. It is, however, a foreign substance and is eventually expelled as such by the body, but the experience lingers so much that you wish only to find more. That is addiction. Once we discover the right mix of modules and blockers, we can stimulate your own body to produce the needed enzymes. As with genetically mandated enzymes, the combination that forms you as you are now, we will use blockers to prevent undesired genetically mandated material from finding its receptors, while our newly stimulated substances will find theirs. Over a relatively short period of time the body will adjust and shift to this new pattern, overriding the old, and it will be totally permanent and self-perpetuating. It is so complex that only a computer could isolate and define all the receptors and determine the mix, but only after I tell it the desired goals. There.”
She felt pressure and a very slight momentary stinging in her right shoulder.
“Just relax. Only a mild test,” he assured her soothingly. “Purely transitory. We won’t get into anything really elaborate today.”
She waited, scared to death of this man and his machines, and watched the hologram. Not all the chemical pieces remained put for any length of time; things were always changing, pieces disconnecting and others coming in, although the basic pattern remained the same.
Now, suddenly, some new pieces came into the scene, in colors not otherwise represented. Some were jet-black; others were yellow or gray. Many went right by, but some headed immediately for receptor points as if on homing beacons. A few of the black ones stuck to a blood vessel wall, as if waiting, and when some of the blue pieces vacated their natural positions, the black ones dislodged themselves and then swept in to fill the emptiness. More of the blue entered, natural chemicals, but they found their places occupied, and after pausing as if they were intelligent creatures, they moved on and out of view.
She continued to watch, and suddenly she began to tremble. She felt afraid—afraid not of the doctor or his machines but of everything. She began to cry, and the cry turned into uncontrollable sobbing. She felt a sense of terrible despair. Everything was hopeless. She was unloved, reviled, loathsome to others and to herself. She was unworthy, incapable of doing anything right. She needed someone—anyone—to protect her, to guide her. She needed someone—anyone—to instruct her in all things. She was afraid almost to think, to make any decisions, because she could only make the wrong ones. She felt so humble, so tiny and insignificant, that she wished someone would take her and command her.
The display shifted, although she had not seen it and had not even felt the second injection. Substances of differing colors moved in and eased out the foreign objects; the black ones were ordered out, and some but not all were replaced in her biochemical tapestry. .
She stopped crying, feeling much, much better now; a damp cloth wiped her face, and she smiled at the feel. It felt wonderful. Everything felt wonderful. Her whole body tingled, and even the brush of skin against the chair or her hospital gown seemed an erotic caress. She was drifting now on a wonderful, magical euphoric cloud in which nothing at all mattered. They could do anything, anything at all to her, and it would not matter. She rarely had any sort of sexual dreams or fantasies, but this was real, and she wished someone would come and take her and ravish her body and do whatever they wished with her. She had a vision of herself as a sultry woman of pleasure, dancing, moving, naked and free in front of a group of adoring men, and she really liked the fantasy.
Blockers and enzymes shifted and changed, and the feelings and the fantasies faded quickly. Reality returned, although she had always been conscious of where she was and what was happening. The difference was that she was becoming clearheaded once more, coldly confident, and increasingly angry over what was being done here. She struggled against her bonds, cursing the fact that she was trapped in a weak woman’s body. She didn’t feel like a woman; deep down, she had a vision that she was a man, a man trapped by science or sorcery in this weak girl’s body, a strong and virile man with courage and confidence and raw animal power. She’d rather bed this body than be trapped in it. Anger turned to pure animal fury, and she struggled against the metal rings that bound her. Adrenaline pumped, and she actually twisted and bent the rings and managed to get one hand free. He would show them! He would.
More shifting, more changing color patterns. The sense of strong sexual identity faded but was not replaced. She had no concept of maleness or femaleness; gender was an irrelevancy, without meaning to her. The anger, too, faded quickly, and she felt totally calm, unable even to relate to the emotions she had experienced up to that point. She was like a machine: aware, intelligent, but without passion, without any feelings at all about anything. Yet she was as clearheaded, as logical, as she could ever be. Stripped of her animalism, she stared at the patterns in the hologram and almost immediately grasped their logic and meaning based upon what she had seen so far. At this level, where even pleasure and pain, fear and love, were mere terms, she analyzed her situation. She was being reprogrammed, but this level was the most efficient for undertaking an escape. There was no hatred, no bitterness, no feeling of any sort that was relevant to her. Escape was mandated because this stage was the optimum one for her potentials, and it was illogical to abort it.
“I believe we have done enough for today,” Doctor Wang said casually. “Too much can wear you out and cause harm to the body. My! You really did a job on those restraints! Well, I will just recline you now and allow you to rest and the enzymes to be expelled from your system. It will probably cause you to sleep, so just relax and let it happen. I’ll be back in a few minutes to check you out, then you can go and eat.”
She watched the doctor actually leave and no one else come back in. She did not feel elation or any other emotion, but she realized immediately that they had made their first mistake. There was simply no way that the chief administrator, her father, was going to allow this place to be without standard safeguards.
“Code Lotus, black, green, seven two three one one,” she said aloud in a calm, expressionless voice. “Emergency override activation is ordered.”
A computer voice responded from somewhere to the left rear of her. “Code acknowledged,” it said. “Reason for interrupt?”
“Pawn takes king.”
“Accepted. Instructions?”
Her father could never trust anyone, and that meant anyone. All Center computers with human interfaces were programmed with override codes that would allow him, if need be, to countermand almost any order. He changed the codes quite often and then just as often forgot them, so he had them encoded in his personal files. The only time when he couldn’t depend on this was when he was away in Hainan or on Leave, as he was about to be now. For that period, he needed a sequence of codes he could always remember, and he often used a variation of the same sequences year after year. At fifteen, she had broken that code and had gone undiscovered, and she had had little trouble in the hidden room back home in establishing the few changes for this year now that she knew what she was looking for. That had been her one hope, but this had been the first opportunity to use it.
“Subject in Chair Two is object threat to king. At a point when this laboratory is not scheduled for use for a period of at least one hour, you will release subject from cell and substitute recording of previous time of subject in cell so that this is undetected, and you will suppress all alarms and guarantee uninterrupted access. You will be prepared to assist and guard. All outbound channels are monitored, so this is under my seal alone.”
“Understood. Additional?”
“I would like to perpetuate my current physical and mental orientation until otherwise instructed. Then stand by until I am able to contact you here again.”
“Understood. Formulating.” There was a pneumatic hiss below her arm, then an injection. “Duration indefinite. Must be altered chemically.”
“Understood. Switch off. I will sleep now.”
She went immediately to sleep and did not dream at all.
She awakened back in her cell, but one thing was different. This time they had left the rice bowl and cool tea and not remained to watch her eat. Apparently they were confident of her and themselves now. She would require energy, and there was no way of forecasting when more might be available, so she went over and ate it all. She drank sparingly. She was aware that she could not move for long periods about the cell without attracting attention. She had been so—animalistic. She therefore assumed a position of meditation facing the door and willed her body into trancelike stillness. For the first and only time in her life, she had nearly total control over herself; she did not wonder at that but rather took it for granted.
There were alternatives to consider. Song Ching was in the Master System, so Song Ching must be accounted for somehow, at least for a sufficient length of time to make good an escape. She was in control only of the local network here; she had to take care not to flag Master System and not to raise human alarms. Master System she thought she could block for a sufficient period of time; the humans were the unpredictable ones.
Even if she escaped from here, though, there would be little she could do. Any security flag within Center itself would be immediately checked with Colonel Ching or her father. All direct access by her would have been blocked long ago. She could, of course, survive almost indefinitely in the maze of tunnels and service corridors. They might eventually activate a Val, but it would be useless because it would have her old imprint and assume that she would act on animal and distinctly Song Ching motives. If nothing else presented itself, though, she would do that until she was either captured or had managed somehow to tie in to the network from below and use it.
She also had infinite patience and waited for the inevitable to happen or not to happen. She could not even feel any sense of danger or excitement. Her plan was something that had to be tried on grounds of pure logic; it was that and nothing else which motivated her. She would not even feel disappointment if she was apprehended, or even if the door failed to open at all.
But it did open. She waited a moment to make certain that it hadn’t opened to let an orderly pick up the food, then stood and walked out and down the maze of corridors, all barriers opening before her. She had been this way in a conscious state only once, but the route was absolutely clear to her. She met no one but was fully prepared to kill if she had to. Death meant absolutely nothing to her.
The lab was deserted, as she knew it would be, and she ordered it sealed to the outside. “How long can you avoid someone discovering I am gone?” she asked the computer.
“With an adjustment in the records showing that you have been fed and tended to and adjustments in the staff’s orders, including Doctor Wang’s, I can delay a minimum of twenty-four hours but no more than seventy-two.”
“I must escape beyond the reach of Center or Administration so long as the threat remains,” she told it.
“I do not see any way that this is possible.”
“Nor do I. Other than escaping to the service corridors, my only other possibility is to escape to space with access to a spaceship command module. Other emergency overrides are possible once I am in that position.”
“Any spaceship? Any size?”
“Yes. So long as it will support my biological requirements.”
“There is one way, but it is complex and for that very reason has only a marginal chance of success.”
“Proceed.”
“There are two prisoners who are completed here and are to be transported in a matter of hours to an interplanetary courier, to be sent to Melchior.”
“I have seen them.”
“The younger of the two is close to your size, and with preparation and in transport clothing you might pass for him. While they will not look too closely so long as the paperwork is correct, some extreme adjustments would have to be made to you in order for you to sustain the masquerade all the way to the spaceport. Additionally, something must be done with the one whom you will replace, and adjustments must be made to the other, for he will know immediately that you are not his cousin and is most likely to betray you.”
“What measures?”
“It is not sufficient that you masquerade as a boy. To sustain it, you must be the boy. There is no point at which you will be stripped on the schedule, but we are talking thirty hours to clear, during which any slip will be fatal.”
“Proposal?”
“The two have been kept sedated on a robot-controlled console table in a medical cell in the men’s section pending transfer. I can get them here without human intervention or knowledge for a period of time. If we begin now, I can make some basic physical and chemical alterations in you within two hours. Because of the time involved, much of it will be synthetics and a basic shell, but it will be authentic and convincing. It is not possible to actually switch minds, nor desirable in this case in any event, because your psychochemistry and physical requirements are so different, but I can lay his template atop my alterations and reinforce the illusion with hypnotics. You will act like him, think like him on the conscious level, walk and talk like him. You will not be him, but you will think you are. I will then use a strong hypnotic on the other and replace the mental image of Chu Li with what you will look and sound like, and he will accept you as his cousin even in the face of true physical evidence to the contrary. I will also modify the security holograms with animation to show you and not the real Chu Li in pictorials and charts. Barring the unforeseeable, it should be adequate.”
“Duration?”
“Your template, being unsuited to you, will begin to deteriorate rather quickly, but it should hold reasonably well for at least the necessary three days, as will the hypnotics. The hypnotic on the companion, being far simpler, should last longer. Underneath, you will have access to all your own memories and knowledge, but your personality will be the new one. Be warned that even with this, the possibilities of being successful are slim, perhaps two percent.”
“And the service corridor route?”
“The possibility of doing more than surviving there is no more than one percent. Survival possibilities are higher—nine percent. Restored to your original genetic encoding, which adds the animal safeguards, you have almost a thirty percent chance of indefinite survival but less than a one percent chance of doing anything more than that.”
“Why would I have more of a survival chance as the old Song Ching?”
“Right now you must think about all alternatives, then make the most logical decision. The full animal instruction set allows action without thinking and induces many cautions.”
“It is not logical to use the corridor alternative, then, since I would be unable to continue my work, and this is the sole reason for escape. It is not much better an alternative than allowing the work here to proceed. The space route is the only logical choice allowing any chance of complete success.”
“Agreed. However, there is a caution. While the hypnotics and template will deteriorate, the psychochemical changes will not. You will be a sexually oriented male and will retain a basically male set of personality characteristics. As you presently are, this does not seem a consideration, but it has the potential to cause great anguish later. To undo and restore without causing permanent damage or alterations would require your template and codes and an installation such as this, unlikely to be in friendly hands.”
“Escape is the only imperative. All other problems are potential and therefore secondary. Enact.”