Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 77

Like everyone else in the world, she had some baggage of her own.

Brigid was relatively confident that in the future-when rightminding gained cultural acceptance and became something people did as a matter of course to be happier and more productive-regular, appropriate exercise was going to be a big part of it. (And do you also, she asked herself, believe in the Easter Bunny?) She put a hand on the wall at the top landing, dizzied by a reflexive wall of frustrated rage-at herself, at humanity, at weakness. A future where everybody was not acting out of their trauma and anxiety all the time seemed bitterly like an unachievable utopia.

Inside her office, she showered quickly, changed to clothes not soaked in sweat from the humid ride in, and clicked her Omni to work sh.e.l.l. She checked her ration status and ordered a cup of coffee and a bagel with smoked North Atlantic cod. The fisheries were on her list of things that might recover reasonably well, if human beings could just be converted into the rational actors that economists had for too long imagined them to be. Not a race of Vulcans-Brigid saw no percentage in removing emotion. That was a primitive idea, which had been replaced since the late twentieth century with the idea that emotion was at the root of a good deal of cognition, and rightfully so.

The trick, Brigid thought, was figuring out how to work it so it was healthy emotion driving people's choices, and not atavistic fear response.

Sometimes, she thought of fear as a personified thing, an actual enemy. In both her personal and professional lives.

She felt her attention veering off again after the question of Dr. Ionita's research. That's fear too, she thought. Fear of the other, fear of not having utter control over every aspect of the world we live in. It was a fear that had bankrupted the twentieth century-that race to get ahead, to be the strongest. The most defended.

Sophipathological. Suffering from an illness of the thought.

She reined herself in and submitted her breakfast order. The delivery 'bot, Rover, would bring the bagel up on its rounds.

Brigid sat down in her chair and began sorting her environments into the air around her. ABM's corporate logo was an abstract line drawing of Athena holding her owl. Athena, the G.o.ddess of wisdom, had been born from the head of the G.o.d Zeus after the lame G.o.d of the forge, Hephaestus, smashed it open with an axe to relieve a blinding headache.

What that said about getting any kind of sense out of Zeus, Brigid left as an exercise to the cla.s.s.

What it said about the symbolism ABM's founders had in mind- wisdom arising out of the shattered ruins of an intemperate brain-was the sort of thing you laughed about over beers. And how appropriate was it that they employed a one-legged sysadmin? Not that anybody in their right mind would call Val lame.

As if Val had known she'd be thinking of him, a tap came on the open sixth-story window behind her. The first time he'd done that, Brigid had found herself on her feet, reaching for a weapon-a box of culture dishes, as it happened. Now, she flicked the environmental controls panel on her Omni and let the window crack open. The question was whether she was getting better in general, or whether she was just getting acclimated to Val's hijinks.

She turned around to see Val slithering his slender lower body through the cas.e.m.e.nt. He wasn't wearing his climbing leg, but he didn't need it for buildering something as easy as the ABM labs. But he also wasn't wearing a rope, which made Brigid tilt her head and glower.

"Think of the devil," she said. "You could at least rig a self-belay."

"Takes too long." He shrugged. "The trick is to get inside before somebody spots you."

Because of the birds and animals attracted by the green structure, ABM didn't have external motion or pressure sensors. They'd be going off all day and night if it did, triggered by a heron or a feral cat.

She didn't bother reprimanding him for breach of security. It was as pointless as telling a cat off for jumping on the table-Val would go where Val wanted to go, and if that was in and out of people's safes or computer systems, or up the walls themselves, no amount of fussing would change it. ABM had done everything in their power short of firing him-and he was simply too brilliant to fire.

A ferretlike curiosity drove him. He didn't take anything, or even read files, as near as Brigid could tell. He just couldn't bear a locked door, no matter which side of it he was on.

And suddenly she realized that he was exactly the person she needed to talk to about Dr. Ionita.

She didn't know Ionita's race or s.e.x-even his or her first name beyond the obligatory publication initial. He or she wasn't one of the people who was enough of an exhibitionist-or casual enough about privacy-that she had ever seen them around the office with their filters down.

But Val knew all sorts of things.

He usually didn't share them, because he was an ethical cat burglar. But he knew them. And he was as anti-authoritarian as they came. In a case like this, when ethics were already out the window, he might be induced to spill some information.

Where do you draw a line?

She hadn't had time to plan her approach, though, and when she opened her mouth, what she said was, "There are sensible reasons to start a war."

He blinked and said, "Are there?"

One hand on her Omni, Brigid dropped out of work sh.e.l.l and offered him a privacy handshake. He accepted; when she blinked to clear his face into the encrypted s.p.a.ce he tilted his head quizzically and said, "Oh, I bet this is good."

"Let me flash you a file."

He nodded; she transmitted. He skimmed. For long moments, she watched him a.s.similating. He didn't have time to have gotten through much more than the abstract, but in his credit-and, of course, primed by her concern-he must have twigged much faster than she had.

When his eyes stopped moving rapidly left to right, he paused for a moment. He took a deep, nervous breath, shook himself, and brought his attention back. Her frame around the ap lit up as he foregrounded her. "What are you going to do about that?"

"What can I do?"

"You showed it to me." He leaned back against a counter. "You must be thinking of doing something."

"Approaching Ionita. Letting him or her-"

"Her," he said, wincing with discomfort at revealing that much private information.

She nodded and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged. "-know she misfiled it? Report the breach to corporate?"

"Or?"

She shook her head, but she didn't look down. Muckraking ABM was not exactly the fast track to promotion. "I'd lose my job."

"You can get another."

"Right."

"Or go on Subsistence."

She turned away, facing out the window. Her interface kept his window lit, but she didn't look at it.

If she hadn't wanted to be pushed into doing something about it, she wouldn't have asked Val.

"I'll become a dirtbag," she said. "If I climb every day, that's like rightminding, isn't it? Good endorphins. Work through fear."

Val sighed and came up behind her. "The future is running out. Winding down. We're falling into tighter and tighter spirals-"

"Why?" she asked. "Because you can't hop on a jet plane and take off to Australia for a price that would be completely ridiculous if environmental impact were taken into account? That's not contraction, Val. Not when I can telepresence all over the world."

"It's not the same as being able to go climbing in Norway."

"No," she said. "But it's not worse."

That silenced him. When she turned back, he was studying his nails, considering. He looked up at her. "So what are you going to do? You can't hang ABM with just this doc.u.ment. Too easily forged-"

It wasn't until he calmly accepted that she was about to engage in industrial espionage and muckraking that she realized that was what she'd meant to do all along. Once the decision was made, it felt natural, true.

The right choice.

She knew the neurology, the brain chemistry behind it. That didn't change the very physical sensation of a weight being lifted from the center of her chest.

She straightened up and let her neck fall back, rolling it side to side to crack the vertebrae. When she was done, she bit her lip and looked at Val again.

"No," she said. "I'd need research notes. Experimental protocols. Workfiles. Video images. You know Ionita."

"She works on my floor. I've seen her, though she usually keeps her shields up. You want me to-"

"It'd be worth your job," she said. "Just leave a window open and forget to log out?"

With his admin privileges, she could get everything in Ionita's works.p.a.ce.

He met her eyes for a moment before glancing at the open window. "It's an easy climb."

"I know."

"And if it doesn't work? What's your plan B?"

She didn't look down. "There is no plan B."

In today's compet.i.tive world, it's too easy for minor childhood behavioral problems to blossom into life-limiting events.

Ensure educational success. Give your child every advantage. A Beautiful Mind.

Because every childhood should be magical.

It's an easy climb, Brigid told herself.

Which was true.

The problem was, it wasn't an easy fall.

Brigid tried to keep that thought from preying at her as, in the dark, with the mist rolling in, she walked down the rocky beach a few hundred meters from the lab building. There was enough light caught in the fog for dark-adapted eyes to make out the worst hazards of terrain, so she didn't need a light to pick her way along the strand. Ghostly veils of mist dragged at her arms and legs like damp tulle, leaving her feeling as if she walked through the ruins of a shredded wedding dress.

Waves hissed around the lab's pilings and amongst the stones as she approached, but the shadow of the building hid her. It wouldn't help her get up the well-lit and observed causeway, though, and swimming out to the back pylons would have left her drenched. If she didn't fancy the climb dry and rested, she liked her odds even less with wet hands and heavy wet clothes and muscles worn out from fighting the surf.

But she'd had the sense to wait until the tide was out. Half the lab was still at sea, but the other half hovered over rocks. And so she walked out under the deck, the lab building hovering over her head like a mothership. She found a piling on the back side of the building, by the edge of the receding water, and leaned against it to pull on her climbing shoes.

The piling itself was easy enough. It'd been designed to provide moorings for sea life, which meant it was rough-surfaced and more or less like a very, very vertical stepladder. The trick was not slashing her hands open on a cl.u.s.ter of mussels, or grabbing for a slick handful of seaweed that would tear away under her weight.

She went up it like a squirrel up the pole of a squirrel-proof birdfeeder. And then, like that squirrel, she faced a dilemma.

If the piling wasn't so bad, the pull around the overhang on to the deck was terrifying. On a cliff, she'd have felt for handholds, footholds, pressed herself over the edge with her feet. Here, there was no such option. She got a hand around the edge, found the rail, and locked her fingers on it. Her heart hammered, a nauseating chill of weakness seething in her stomach, making her muscles feel frail.

If you fall, she told herself, it's only into the sea.

It was a lie. It was as much of a lie as it had been the first time-for a different reason. Not because this sea was a thrashing black monster that would crush down on her head, but because there wasn't enough water down there to keep her from breaking her leg-or her pelvis-and lying helpless until the tide rolled back in. That cheerful thought kept her company as she shifted her weight over one foot, freeing the other to move. But she couldn't move it. Her weight was off it, her body poised to curve sideways from the hip and give her room and flexibility- The foot stayed where it was, brushing the edge on the piling, as if shifting its weight were not even just hard but simply impossible. As if her motor nerves had been severed, and it would never move again.

If you fall, she lied to herself, it's only into the sea.

She told herself the lie again, and this time the lie worked. Just a little. She held that image, the safety of the splashing cushion below, and felt ... not good. Not secure. But better.

Better enough to edge her other hand up, grab another rail, and heave one leg up for a heel-hook at the height of her shoulder. It was an all-ornothing move, maximal effort for minimal return-and the only option that had any chance of success. Val was probably strong enough to haul himself over the edge on upper body strength alone.

Brigid knew she'd exhaust herself trying.

The ridged, high-friction heelcap of her shoe sc.r.a.ping on the edge of the platform, she breathed slow and deep, gathering herself, her arms locked out at full extension to put her weight on the bones rather than her biceps. She tensed her core, tightened calf and thigh, put as much of her full weight as possible onto the hooked heel, and pulled. Fingers slipping on salty metal, hair blowing into her eyes, damp with mist. Heaving, pulling with everything that was in her. That sharp pain in her palm stabbed again; she hoped she wasn't rupturing the pulley tendon this time.

It didn't matter: do or die. Now. Now.

She levered her right toe up, settled it on the edge of the deck, and got her weight over it.

And now she was crouching, one leg out to the side, her fingers knotted around the bars so tight she could no longer feel the edges pressing into her flesh.

She rose and slung a leg over the bar. She looked up, chest heaving, and wiped the sweat from her hands. It wasn't blood; it just felt like it. Among the greenery and scaffolding, the window on which Val would have disabled the lock was just visible.

It looked like a cinch, from here on in. She figured that the climbing part, at least, probably would be.

Welcome to BEAMZINE STORIES THAT MAY INTEREST YOU:.

ANTI-RIGHTMINDING PROTESTS CONTINUE IN NEW LONDON.

[click for video] In the wake of evidence released by Wikileaks and other online muckraking sites, protestors insisting that the new technology of so-called "Rightminding" is being used for mind control gathered outside the labs of A Beautiful Mind, Inc. again today.

CHYRON: CARYE SMITH, PROTESTOR.

CARYE SMITH:.

What about the soul, that's what I want to know. Where does the soul come into this?

CHYRON: BRADLEY BLAKE, M.D. ABM REPRESENTATIVE.

BRADLEY BLAKE:.

"Well, yes. If by mind control, you mean inst.i.tuting clarity and rationality of thought, and bringing people peace and well-being. Accident or injury-or just genetics-can have a profound negative effect on the structure of the brain. We're here to repair that. Nothing else."

Brigid snapped her Omni off with unnecessary violence and stood, moving toward her balcony-hers for as long as she had it, anyway.

She'd thought that she wouldn't get away with it. And if she got away with it, that getting away with it would be the easy part.

But every day she didn't get caught out as the source of the leak was another day she had to have the same argument with herself: was it ethically bankrupt to keep taking ABM's money when she knew what they were doing behind her back?

But there was rightminding, and all its potential as a useful social tool. A world-saving tool, perhaps. Or a world-destroying one.

Val was there, his ankle kicked up on the opposite knee, leaned back in a chair behind the little table. He looked up from his own device, shaking his head to shut off his interface and make his eyes focus. By his amused expression, he'd been texting his boyfriend. Brigid bit her lip on the sting of envy.

Someday. She thought. Maybe.

"So," he said. "Turns out you didn't need the rightminding after all."

Her hands curled against her thighs in memory. "I wasn't not scared."