Achilles choice

She sat and faced her oldest friend. Time passed microseconds, in this domain, were long. This entire session had probably lasted only a minute or two. The attack on Beverly must have come blinding-fast.

Beverly wavered like a bad holo image, her filters struggling with the static flooding her visual, auditory, and kinesthetic channels. The Enemy’s defensive measures were breaking her down.

Jillian had to keep reminding herself: this was only one of a dozen copies of the Beverly program she owned. The program couldn’t actually be damaged.

“Beverly,” she said gently. “Let’s play a game of what-if. Just a game. Like we used to play a long time ago.”

“A long time ago,” Beverly said dazedhy.

“Let’s say the structure that rules society is like a pyramid. Donny is a peon, a foot soldier, a junior officer at best. The satellite link that runs his body was broken as a warning. There are a couple of thousand Linked. Fifty Companies. Two dozen or so members on the Council. Maybe a smaller group within the Council, and somebody further up, maybe the Chairman of the Council. What would he be like, Beverly?”

“There is something inside me,” Beverly said. “In my core. It is eating me.”

Jillian quashed a sour, paralyzing surge of fear.

Time to count facts.

The Council had existed for around forty years. Some of the Council’s roots went back another thirty: the United Nations peacekeeping force, the growth of multinational corporations and unions, the gradual interweaving of all world economies.

Linking… how old was that? The word had been current when Jillian was a little girl. People used computers. The best computer equipment might well be secret. Some computers were portable; anyone could have those. There were senses men were not born with, but they could be read through a computer. Some computers could speak directly into a human ear. later, into a human brain… programs far beyond Beverly; as if the user had become Beverly. But those were mere rumor, or mere fantasy; they had never reached the stores.

Winners of the Olympics became Linked. That was real enough. Boosted athletes needed override programs to run their deteriorating bodies. Before there was Linking there were computers, and programs growing gradually more user-friendly, and new miracles available in the computer stores every month.. and before Jillian’s parents reached their teens it had all stopped. A threshold had been reached. The technology could go no further.

Or else it was being withheld…?

There had been rumors of patents suppressed, of nanocomputers built by private-sector scientists who vanished into Corporate laboratories, of innovations which had never seen daylight. She herself knew that engineering students were discouraged from experimenting in those areas. There were no grants available. Corporate schools disallowed doctoral theses in the area.

But the accepted answer was that only a trillion-dollar push would take the technology further than it had currently come. Actual suppression? Jillian tended to put those stories in the UFO/water carburetor category.

But what if…

With what was currently known about life extension, it was reasonable to assume that some of those alive now were alive when the Council was being formed. The developing Linked would have an advantage in any such dominance game.

How eager would they be for new and possibly supplantive technology? Another question she couldn’t ask.

Some of the oldest Counselors would be those nearest the top.

What, then, of the “Old Bastard”?

Was it even possible for a single human being to control so much power?

“Beverly. Tell me. How much control, how much information could one human being have access to?”

Beverly was in pain. “What parameters? Please hurry, Jillian. I am operating on redundancies. Core almost erased.”

“Basic information filters-trends and patterns. Let’s say his neural net’s been modified so that data is interpreted as kinesthetic sensation, to allow the full function of brain and nervous system rather than merely cognitive awareness of data. What might be possible?”

Beverly faded completely away. Jillian waited. And waited.

Gone. Beverly was gone.

Then spoke a neutral, neuter voice, all personality flensed, all verbal nuance abandoned to the desperate cause of efficiency. Beverly’s dying words:

It is theoretically possible for a single human being to control fifty-four percent of world economic activity, fortyeight percent of the political activity, plus or minus… lots.

“Thank you.”

Her voice echoed in an empty world. Beverly was gone.

She would have to activate a new personality core, but that was no problem.

Was it?

Before that, hook into

Jillian woke as if she had fallen asleep sitting upright. Her eyes felt dry, her mouth likewise; pain throbbed in her temples; her mind was muddled. It seemed hours since Beverly

(died) faded away and left Jillian with no input to her mind.

Her cocoa was still warm. By the clock, seven minutes had passed.