Achilles choice

Chapter 5

“In Matthew 26:11 Jesus said that the poor will always be among us,” Jillian said. Her words appeared as white strokes upon a blue visual field. They floated in the air like crisply perfect skywriting.

“And in that sense, he may have been the first theorist in the social applications of fractal geometry.

“The concepts of cognitive dissonance and the inevitable breakdown of communication therefrom have been understood for centuries. However, the unavoidable disintegration of systems as those systems become more complex and unwieldy has rarely been considered within a sociological lattice.”

She stopped for a moment, thinking and sipping cocoa. Sunlight filtered through the dorm window at an oblique angle. Despite the intensity of her concentration, the external world intruded. The air reverberated with the grunts and heavy footfalls of Olympians training outside.

Jillian had taken the day off from her grueling athletic schedule, protesting a sore hip.

It wasn’t her hip that was sore, it was her head. The headache had been a continuous thing, sometimes hovering in the background, sometimes thundering into her mind like a crazed animal, destroying calm and thought and sleep. And every pulse was Donny Crawford. Donny falling, Donny sick and weak on the ledge. Beautiful, perfect, confident Donny whimpering into the morning darkness.

Jillian was afraid. But worse than that, she was confused.

“Even surrounded by the greatest wealth and comfort, a human being will experience a measure of irritation. Confined in the most squalid and demeaning circumstances, he will find some small thing to take pleasure in.

“This trait, and others, make it impossible to eradicate the final bit of chaos from our minds, as well as our social systems. The powers which govern… one might even say oppress…”

Oppress?

Did the Council want a certain amount of suffering? More than the absolute irreducible minimum?

“Couldn’t be a war if he did something, old bastard.”

Leave it for the moment.

“A stable society functions much like an organism, with communications between the organ systems, the organs, the tissue structures, the cells, and the organelles. As instructions flow from one level to another, and the inevitable distortions in communication accumulate, what happens?

“At the top, a plan may be shaped to provide the greatest good for the greatest number. But no plan conceived at one end of the spectrum can take into account all of the individuals at the other end. It simply is not possible-there is too much breakdown in communication along the way. Conversely, any system which is modular enough to deal intimately with those at the bottom is too unwieldy to be governed from the top.”

She stopped, rubbing her temples fiercely.

“Fortunately for those who govern, the appearance of fair play is more important than the reality. At least that’s what Machiavelli thought.”

She looked at the words she had dictated, and knew what the headache had been about, and knew what she was about to ask Beverly to do.

God help her.

Carefully, with somber formality, she drew a mesh headset of wires, microphones, and black oval pads from a sandalwood box on her desk.

She prepared the apparatus: plastic electrode pads which clung snugly to her temples. Earphones. A combination throat mike and sensor. Dark eyecups like lightweight goggles.

“Void, Beverly.”

Anyone Linking into the Void must create her own kinesthetic analogy. For one it might be the Library of Congress, crammed to the skylight with talking books. For another, being seated in a vast lecture hall surrounded by experts who had the precise answers to all questions. Jillian’s programming teacher had taken her own image from literature: Gormenghast, an immense, sprawling castle-city of a million infinitely varied rooms.

The adult mind was too rigid, its worldview too set, to build such an analogy. It must be created in childhood; but after that, it grew.

Jillian closed her eyes and breathed deeply ten times, with each breath sinking into a world of total relaxation, a specialized trance leading to the Void state.

The earphones hummed gently. Breathing. Heartbeat sounds, slowing. The purr of breakers against a shore. Synthesized into and among those sounds was a chorus of voices too distant to be consciously perceived. Lights flashed in her goggles, so dimly and quickly that she could never focus upon them. At her temples, tickles of pressure and electricity buzzed and caressed her skin, eased her into a state combining deep relaxation and total awareness.

Gradually the speckles of light congealed into searchlights playing through a fog. Then smoky swirls of color, and she was in her Void, in a mental ocean of layered oils, a phantasmagoria of sensation created by the union of an exquisitely conditioned mind and a dozen seamlessly orchestrated channels of sensory input.

The water cleared. Only a few varicolored fish, dazzlingly bright, betrayed the chaos beneath the tranquil structure of her illusion.

She sank through the depths until she felt sand and shells beneath her feet. A dolphin playfully nosed against her, and then scooted away into the murk.

She walked along the ocean floor toward a ring of shattered coral reefs. This was her place. In the reef was set an ancient and barnacle-encrusted door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years ago.

The door yielded to her touch. In the middle of the ring stood a chair, and a wooden grade-school desk. Carved names and slogans had been added over the years; otherwise the desk hadn’t changed since Jillian’s seventh birthday.

Seated in it, awaiting her, was Beverly.

Beverly wore a frilly white sundress, barely ruffled by the tide. Her high cheekbones were those of Lilith Shomer, Jillian’s mother. Her heavy brows and strong mouth were mapped from Gregory Shomer, Jillian’s father. Her hair was blond with a gleam of fine copper threads. Her eyes were a deep and tranquil brown.

Beverly smiled. “Jillian, darling. What do we need today?” Her voice was honeyed with a Carolina lilt.

Jillian’s accessing of Beverly took the external form of a conversation, a conversation that existed out of ordinary time. Her talks with Beverly seemed to last for hours or days, but upon emerging from trance she invariably learned that only minutes had passed, minutes during which a vastness of information had entered her long-term memory.

Jillian sat down opposite. Emblazoned on the desk was a fifteen-year-old carving. It read: JILLIAN LOVES. Jillian kept changing the name following “loves.” She’d finally left it open.

She was home. She relaxed to a degree inaccessible in her waking state.

Where to start? “I need to know about Donny Crawford.”

Beverly smiled tolerantly. “The same Donny Crawford you’ve been mooning over for four years?”

“The same. We finally met. He went through some kind of fit this morning during his exercise up on the mountain. He said strange things, babbled about ‘war.’ He cautioned me not to tell anyone. My first guess is that his Link with the satellite broke.”

Beverly’s eyes dropped to her desk. A moment later she said, “Satellites EE23 and EEO8 both went off line at five fifty-two local. Energy is blaming both events on random meteoric debris. EE23 will have to be replaced.”

“Is Donny that dependent on satellite Links?” It was something she’d suspected; it was one argument against Boost. Donny had won. Even if Jillian won gold, she’d be a hybrid, a cyborg, magnificent but fragile.

Beverly’s mouth opened to speak, then closed. Jillian felt something like a vast, compulsive yawn rack her body, and Jillian stood before an ancient and barnacle-encrusted reef. In front of her was the door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years before. What?

A power outage? An industrial accident?

Something serious, if Beverly had been forced to reboot. Jillian blinked twice, calmed herself, and stepped through the doorway.

Beverly smiled at her, “Hello, sugar. What can I do for you?” Her voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.

Jillian felt something that she had never before experienced when in the Void. Sleepy. Headachy. She straightened herself with an effort.

Beverly leaned forward, concern sparkling in her bottomless dark eyes. “I think you could use a little nap, darling.”

“I want information. Why would Donny Crawford need to conceal a satellite interrupt?”

Beverly’s mouth opened, and her lips moved soundlessly. The water shifted and blurred. Beverly’s face became indistinct, and started to fade— And Jillian woke up.