Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,74
qualitative copy?”
“Yes. Biology is inherently noisy. There is always some measure of error, but the Warwick node appears to perform a sort of error-correction to the data it transcribes.”
“How could that work in principle? If you change something, by definition it’s not a copy.”
Thomas whistled a melody. I recognized it after the second measure.
“That’s Jieshi Diao Youlan.”
He stopped and asked, “How did you know that?”
“It’s a unique melody.”
“Yes, and you recognized it despite the subtle differences in key and tempo. The same holds true for the copy of a consciousness imprinted on the object. Four plus three or five plus two, the end result is identical. Given everything we’ve encountered, it clearly seems to have worked for centuries.”
When I thought about what Thomas was saying, I felt a vague sense of terror. For eight hundred years, the ones who controlled this technology had stolen bodies and erased lives. People with friends and family, their own history and dreams for the future completely gone. Every use of the Warwick node meant eliminating a person’s existence in the purest sense.
“What do you think would have led Katerina to work for these people?” I asked. “Is it money?”
“No. Katerina enjoys her comforts as much as the next person, but she’s not motivated by wealth. She’s an idealist.” He said the word with some distaste.
“What do you mean? How could any idealist possibly work for these… vampires?”
He pursed his lips disapprovingly. “That’s hardly an apt analogy. If you insist on using a folklore analogy, this is much closer to demonic possession than vampirism. To your question, I don’t ever claim to know what another person is thinking. People don’t make enough sense for that. All I can really say is that based on Katerina’s personality, if she has decided to work for the Eleven, it’s because she has convinced herself that they are somehow acting for the benefit of the entire human race.”
“I don’t see how a murder to prolong their own lifespan benefits the species.”
He waved one hand dismissively. “How many people is that really? A hundred and fifty or so over a few centuries? The first day of the Eight Year War killed ten thousand times that.”
“That doesn’t justify it. Whether you kill one or a million, it’s still ethically the same.”
“I’m not trying to justify it, I’m merely saying that’s the perspective that makes it possible. Individual lives mean almost nothing when weighed on the scale of eons.”
“If that’s what you mean by Katerina’s idealism, I’m glad I don’t have it.”
“Make no mistake, Tycho, you’re an idealist as well. Nearly as dangerous as Katerina, in a different way.”
I didn’t particularly want to hear where he was going with that one, so I changed the topic. “Speaking of, how the hell did she escape? That room was secure, and she was tethered.”
“Ah, yes. That.” He wiggled another silica wafer free and stared at it for a second, muttering in a distracted way. Then he went on. “I’ve been down to Interrogation 01, and it seems she had a dead drop in the room itself. The space is barely thirty cubic centimeters, but that’s more than enough to accommodate a lockpicking kit. A panel on the floor acted as the gesture lock and was fed by an isolated circuit connected to a ten-year fuel cell. It does not appear on any record and was likely added by Katerina herself years ago.”
“She had that installed before she disappeared?”
“So it would seem, yes.” He nodded.
“I had a closer look at our network endpoints once I realized what she’d done.” Thomas disconnected a large section of the Warwick Node’s central wheel and pulled it out to have a closer look. “It appears we had a number of endpoints I cannot account for.”
“Our system was compromised even before the attack?” The thought was troubling. What if our enemies had owned our system all along? What had Katerina been up to?
“I can’t be sure, honestly. It would take a detailed, long-term analysis of our system just to establish the full extent of the damage. This is a classic insider threat situation, and the most difficult to counter.”
“So this facility is compromised both physically and electronically.”
He frowned slightly. “Well, yes. But that hardly matters. No one was supposed to know we were here in the first place.”
“So what are we doing about it?”
“We’re already doing it. We’re abandoning this facility and destroying any evidence that we were ever here. That’s why I’m dismantling this Warwick node, Tycho.”
“Okay. So what