“Then you should be Euru-thirteen.”
“Just call me junior, it’s simpler.”
“And do you believe you’ve retained your human faculties?”
“I don’t have affinity, of course, which I regard as distressing. However, as I won’t be in existence for very long, it’s absence is tolerable. Apart from that, I am fully human.”
“Volunteering for a suicide isn’t a very healthy human trait, and certainly not for an Edenist.”
“None the less, it’s what I committed myself to.”
“Your original self did. What about you, have you no independence?”
“Possibly if you left me to develop by myself for several months, I would become reluctant. At the moment, I am Euru senior’s mind twin, and as such this experiment is quite acceptable to me.”
The First Admiral frowned, troubled by what he was witnessing. He hadn’t known Gilmore’s team had reached quite this level. He gave Euru a sidelong glance. “I’m given to understand that a soul is formed by impressing coherent sentient thought on the beyond-type energy which is present in this universe. Therefore, as you are a sentient entity, you will now have your own soul.”
“I would assume so, admiral,” Euru junior replied. “It is logical.”
“Which means you have the potential to become an immortal entity in your own right. Yet this trial will eliminate you forever. This is an alarming prospect, for me if not for you. I’m not sure we have the moral right to continue.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Admiral. However, my identity is more important to me than my soul, or souls. I know that when I am erased from this construct, I, Euru, will continue to exist. The sum of whatever I am goes on. This is the knowledge which rewards all Edenists throughout their lives. Whereas I now exist for one reason, to protect that continuity for my culture. Human beings have died to protect their homes and ideals for all of history, even though they never knew for certain they had souls. I am no different to any of them. I quite plainly choose to undergo the anti-memory so that our race can overcome this crisis.”
“Quite a Turing test,” Mae Ortlieb said sardonically. “I bet the old man never envisaged this kind of conversation with a machine trying to prove its own intelligence.”
“If there’s nothing else,” Gilmore said quickly.
The First Admiral looked in at the cylinder again, contemplating a refusal. He knew such an instruction would never be allowed to stand by the President. And I don’t need that kind of interventionism in Navy affairs right now. “Very well,” he said reluctantly.
Gilmore and Mattox exchanged a mildly guilty look. Mattox datavised an instruction to the clean room’s control processor, and the glass turned opaque. “Just to protect you from any possible spillback,” he said. “If you’d like to access the internal camera you can observe the process in full. Not that there will be anything much to see. I assure you the spectrum we’re using to transmit the anti-memory has been blocked from the sensor.”
True to his word, the image the delegation received when they accessed the sensor was pallid, the colour almost nonexistent. All they saw was a small blank disc slide out of the electronic module, positioning itself over the encapsulated eye. Some iconic overlay digits twisted past, meaningless.
“That’s it,” Mattox announced.
The First Admiral cancelled his channel with the processor. The clean room’s window turned transparent again, in time to catch the disc retract back into the electronic module.
Gilmore faced the AV lens. “Junior, can you hear me?” The lens’s diminutive sparkle remained constant.
Mattox received a datavise from the construct’s monitoring probes. “Brainwave functions have collapsed,” he said. “And the synaptic discharges are completely randomized.”
“What about memory retention?” Gilmore queried.
“Probably around thirty to thirty-five per cent. I’ll run a complete neurological capacity scan once it’s stabilized.” The CNIS science team members smiled round at each other.
“That’s good,” Gilmore said. “That’s damn good. Best percentage yet.”
“Meaning?” the First Admiral asked.
“There are no operative thought patterns left in there. Junior has stopped thinking. The bitek is just a store for memory fragments.”
“Impressive,” Mae Ortlieb said reflectively. “So what’s your next stage?”
“We’re not sure,” Gilmore said. “I have to admit, the potential for this thing is frightening. Our idea is to use it as a threat to force the souls away from their interface with this universe.”
“If it works on souls themselves,” Jeeta Anwar pointed out.
“That prospect is bringing about a whole range of new problems,” Gilmore conceded cheerlessly.
“Let me guess,” Samual said. “If anti-memory is used on a possessed, you will also erase the host’s memories, and destroy their soul.”
“It seems likely,” Euru said. “We know a host’s mind is still contained within their brain while the possessing soul retains control of the body. The host’s reappearance after zero-tau immersion forces the possessor out proves that.”
“So, anti-memory cannot be used on an individual basis?”
“Not without killing the host’s soul as well, no sir.”
“Will this version work in the beyond?” Samual asked sharply.
“I doubt it would ever get through to the beyond,” Mattox said. “At present, it’s too slow and inefficient. It managed to dissipate Junior’s thought processes; but as you saw, it didn’t get all the memories. The areas of the mind which are not employed when the anti-memory strikes are likely to be insulated from it as the thought channels which would ordinarily connect them are nullified. If you analogise the mind with a city, you’re destroying the roads and leaving the buildings intact. Given that the connection a possessing soul has with the beyond is tenuous at best, there is no guarantee the anti-memory would manage to pass through in its current form. We must develop a much faster version.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“No sir. These are estimations and theories. We won’t know if a version works until after it’s proved successful.”
“The trouble with that is, a successful anti-memory would exterminate every soul in the beyond,” Euru said quietly.
“Is that true?”
“Yes, sir,” Gilmore said. “That’s our dilemma. There can be no small scale test or demonstration. Anti-memory is effectively a doomsday weapon.”
“You’ll never get the souls to believe that,” Lalwani said. “In fact, given what we know of conditions in the beyond, you wouldn’t even get many of them to pay attention to the warning.”
“I cannot conceivably permit the use of a weapon which will exterminate billions of human entities,” the First Admiral said. “You have to provide me with alternative options.”
“But Admiral—”
“No. I’m sorry, Doctor. I know you’ve worked hard on this, and I appreciate the effort you and your team have made. Nobody is more aware than myself of just how extreme the threat which the possessed present. But even that cannot justify such a response.”
“Admiral! We’ve explored every option we can think of. Every theorist I’ve got in every scientific discipline there is has been working on ideas and wild theories. We even tried an exorcism after that priest on Lalonde claimed his worked. Nothing. Nothing else has come close to being viable. This is the only progress we have made.”
“Doctor, I’m not denigrating your work or your commitment. But surely you can see this is completely unacceptable. Morally, ethically, it is wrong. It cannot be anything other than wrong. What you are suggesting is racial genocide. I will tell you this, the authorization to use such a monstrosity will never come from my lips. Nor I suspect, and hope, would any other Navy officer issue it. Now find me another solution. This project is terminated.”
The First Admiral’s staff ran a quiet sweepstake to see how long it would be before President Haaker datavised for a conference, the winner called it in at ninety-seven minutes. They sat facing each other across the oval table in a security-level-one sensenviron bubble room. Both kept their generated faces neutral and intonations level.
“Samual, you can’t cancel the anti-memory project,” the President opened with. “It’s all we’ve got.”