The Colonel Read Free

the lot of them before they ever linked up, and if they were that dangerous—well, it seems like bad strategy.”
    He can’t disagree. Which is not to say it was unwarranted.
    â€œHives are dangerous, Lieutenant. Never doubt that for an instant. That said…”
    He considers, and settles for something like the truth.
    â€œIf killing’s the only option, I’d rather kill one than thirteen.”
    *   *   *
    Some threats lurk closer to home. Some are somewhat less—overt.
    Take the woman on the feed, for example: a tiny thing, maybe 160 cm. Nothing about Liana Lutterodt suggests anything other than contagious enthusiasm for a world of wonders. No hint of the agency that pays her expenses, sends her on these goodwill tours to dispense rainbows and a promise of Utopia.
    No hint of forces deep in the Oregon desert, using her as a sock puppet.
    â€œWe climbed this hill,” she says now, to the attentive host of In Conversation . “Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now.”
    Her background’s unremarkable, for the most part: born in Ghana, raised in the UKapelago, top of her class in systems theory and theistic virology.
    â€œNow we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view.”
    Little in the way of overt criminal activity. Charged with possession of a private database at thirteen, interfering with domestic surveillance pickups at twelve. The usual fines and warnings racked up by the young before they learn to embrace the panopticon.
    â€œSo we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill . No matter what direction we go, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. Naturally we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum.”
    Finally managed to drop off the grid legally by signing up with the Bicameral Order, which gets special exemption by virtue of being largely incomprehensible even when you do keep an eye on them.
    â€œBut what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here.”
    The Bicamerals. Named, apparently, for some prototype of reinvention that involved massive rewiring of their cerebral hemispheres. The name’s a coelacanth these days, though. It’s not even certain the Bicams have cerebral hemispheres any more.
    â€œBut you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.”
    â€œYou buy any of this?” The Lieutenant (a different Lieutenant—the Colonel has one in every port) glances away from the screen, lip pulled sideways in a skeptical grimace. “Faith-based science?”
    â€œIt’s not science,” the Colonel says. “They don’t pretend that it is.”
    â€œEven worse. You don’t build a better brainchip by speaking in tongues.”
    â€œHard to argue with the patents.”
    It’s the patents that have him worried. The Bicamerals don’t seem to have any martial ambitions, no designs of conquest—don’t seem especially interested in the outside world at all, for that matter. So far they’ve been content to hunker down in their scattered desert monasteries, contemplating whatever reality underlies reality.
    But there are other ways to throw the world on its side. Things are—fragile,