Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 76

CHLOE: Really?

MAUDE:.

[lowering voice]

I just wasn't interested in s.e.x anymore. I'd come home from work, and it seemed like he never helped out around the house. I got so frustrated.

CHLOE:.

But it seems like you have a great relations.h.i.+p!

MAUDE:.

We do. Now.

CHLOE:.

What did you do?

MAUDE:.

I finally realized that I couldn't change Ajit. But I could change myself.

CHLOE:.

You saw a counselor?

MAUDE:.

Oh, no. Something much more effective. I went to A Beautiful Mind. They helped me bring my expectations in line with reality,and I've never been happier. [whispering]

And our s.e.x life is fantastic!

SMASH TO: t.i.tLE CARD.

V/O:.

A Beautiful Mind Because you deserve to be happy.

The drive back to New London was exhausted and mostly happy. Brigid still fretted slightly at the edges of her inability to lead the 5.11, but she had the sense to keep it to herself-and to try to enjoy the warm post-exercise glow of all the routes she had sent. She told herself it was human to fret about one failure in the face of many successes. She told herself that telling herself that helped.

"If you're not falling off," Val said, interpreting her silence correctly, "you're not climbing hard enough."

She shot him a sideways look.

He grinned. "Eyes on the road."

As if the car wasn't driving itself, anyway. Brigid dropped Val off and returned the ZIPcar to the charging station. The nearest tram stop was transmitting a half-hour wait, so she retrieved a community bicycle to transport her and her backpack full of gear back to her aptblock.

It was a twenty-minute ride, pedaling slowly under the weight of rope, pro, and other gear balanced across the bike's panniers. The evening was summer-soft, a breeze off the waters relieving the humidity that had made the hike up Ragged Mountain such dripping misery. Brigid cruised past the salvage sites where workers were disa.s.sembling the uninhabitable old buildings doomed to be consumed by the rising waters of Long Island Sound. Brick by brick, stone by stone, beam by beam, the ante-Peak materials would be repurposed and reused.

In the cooler evening, the streets were busy with pedestrians, cyclists, pedicabs, trams, and a few automobiles. About half of the people on the street were privacy-s.h.i.+elded, skinned tight against curious eyes. The bike, fortunately, kept track of their locations for her, limiting the potential for collisions.

Brigid pa.s.sed the waterfront Jay Street market just as the farmers were closing up shop for the evening. Her skins told her what was available. She paused and bought a melon, greens, and some farmer's cheese. With pasta, it would make supper-even after a day of climbing.

Her block was a reconstructed building, originally built in the 1800s. The old pale granite facade remained, ornate with a band of archlike engraving below the roofline-but the roof itself had been retrofitted to a modern green farm, the huge old apartments broken up into modern convertibles, and the whole building enclosed in a sunfarm sh.e.l.l. The leaves of the sunflowers were furling for the night as Brigid returned her bike to the rack across the street.

She shouldered her pack with a sigh. The straps had dug bruised spots across the tops of her shoulders. Her calves ached with tiredness as she climbed broad, dished front steps.

Brigid's apt was on the third floor. Normally, she'd run up. Today, her exhaustion and the weight of her rope made each step an exercise in concentration. But her door opened to the touch of her hand on the security pad. She dropped her climbing gear in the narrow hall closet and kicked her shoes in after.

Padding barefoot across the apt's soft gra.s.s, she carried her dinner to the corner still set as a kitchenette and placed it on the counter. She started water boiling before heading to the bathroom, kicking balled clothes towards the cleanser. Five minutes under warm mist and sonics and she was fit to live in her own skin.

Her apt was s.p.a.cious: close to seventy square meters of living s.p.a.ce, still set for sleeping since she'd left in a predawn hurry. There was no point in putting it back now. Instead, she took her dinner out to the balcony in her pajamas, plate balanced on one hand and her Omni in the other. She should pay attention to the food, but by the time she was done eating odds were she'd fall into bed almost without cleaning her teeth, and the need to research nagged at her.

This was her life now: her body completely recovered from the sailing accident in her teens that had cost her both fathers but her mind still fighting the post-traumatic urges to play it safe, to limit her futures and her horizons. Twenty years ago was not long enough; not as far as the fear was concerned.

Sometimes she could still see the black water tossing below the tilting rail, taste salt and wind and hear her Papa Kevin's voice loud and forcedcalm, saying Just swing over. If you fall, it's only into the sea. That was hardwired in, now, locked into her memory through a series of neurological adaptations that she'd spent twelve years educating herself about.

She knew how trauma response and traumatic memory formation worked. She knew how cognitive tactics worked. Using the latter to control the former should have been child's play, right?

All she had to do was keep climbing. Even though it scared her. And keep trying to trust people, even though they always went away.

Someday, maybe she'd even get on a boat again.

And of course, she thought, that has nothing to do with why you share this great big s.p.a.ce with exactly n.o.body, and all you have to do on a Sunday night is catch up on the journals.

She set the pad down on a table, tapped it on, summoned up a virtual interface-left-handed, so she could eat with the right-and began using the Omni's touchscreen to flick research windows into the air. She started in the public cloud, looking for popular overviews and opinion-working in a field could mean you lost touch with public perceptions, and public perceptions were part of what she needed to know.

She didn't stay there long. Her work permissions included deep access to ABM's research files, and she subscribed to a series of venerable research aggregators such as Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Technology Review, Neurology Journal, Applied Neuromechanics, and half a dozen other technical publications, the cost of each averaging a cool 327.5 revals per annum. Even with the venerable Scientific American in there-and who could miss their "50, 100, 150, and 200 years ago:" cloudfeature?-to bring the cost-per-journal down, it was a little daunting.

She cruised through pages, skimming and flipping, indexing for keywords and metatagging for later perusal. She thought she'd get an overview tonight, sleep on it to integrate, and come back fresh in the morning. She could sleep in. While Brigid had one of the few jobs that still meant reporting to work in the morning-centrifuges and neurosurgery suites didn't grow in AR-she certainly didn't need to go into the office every day. A lot of her job was a.s.similating, synthesizing, and actualizing.

And only the actualizing took place in the lab.

She kept thinking that until her search cl.u.s.ter turned up a paper by a Dr. Ionita in the ABM proprietary database. It was fascinating, and troubling, and she didn't realize she wasn't supposed to be reading until she was a few thousand words in.

FADE IN EXT: FOREST GLADE WITH BIRDS SINGING - MORNING.

V/O.

Are you riddled by guilt because of your inability to sustain a healthy relations.h.i.+p? Do you find yourself raising your voice-or your fists- to your loved ones every week?

Every day?

Sometimes it's hard to know what's appropriate and inappropriate behavior in the home. If you find yourself unable to control your temper, striking your loved ones, or using physical or verbal coercion to control them, we can help.

t.i.tLE CARD WITH CONTACT INFORMATION FOR HARTFORD INTERVAL HOUSE.

V/O.

Domestic Violence. It's all in your mind.

The preceding has been a public service announcement.

People were human. Accidents happened.

So Brigid told herself, her hands trembling with adrenaline reaction as she sat back in her chair.

It wasn't a management honey trap: she had every right to be running this search. And every right to be reading the doc.u.ments that turned up. With the exception of this one, which detailed how physiological primate social control mechanisms such as shame and the community urge might be hardwired to reinforce submission to authority. Her access of the file was already logged. But since its author had backed it up to the wrong virtual, her access was perfectly legit as far as the watchbots were concerned. There was nothing to trip a flag. Nothing. Unless human eyes went over the log and realized that Brigid Keating wasn't affiliated with the Military Research division. And that she had no reason to be reading up-not just on ABM's treatment of post traumatic stress and combat anxiety, which was well within her purview- but ... other military and social applications. At first she a.s.sumed that the paper of Dr. Ionita's she was reading was speculative, theoretical-until she skimmed back to the abstract, and then found the appended data. At that point, she couldn't stop reading. But nor could she continue: the access log would show how long she'd had the file open. Of course, she had a lot of files open, floating all around her heads.p.a.ce. But there was a cutoff for plausible deniability.

She mirrored it to her secure s.p.a.ce and closed the original file. And continued reading.

Rightminding applications had been in development for treating posttraumatic stress since the nineties and naughties. Their early successes and failures-along with those of techniques for managing obsessive compulsive disorder and other neurological imbalances-were the source from which the modern discipline of rightminding sprang.

But Ionita's research wasn't concerned with making soldiers immune to battlefield panic, or keeping them from freezing up in a crisis, or amending the damage done to human psyches by exposure to violence-or worse, by the creation of it. What Brigid read now-tea cooling, fork forgotten on the edge of her plate, shoulders hunched forward in a manner that would lead to pain in the morning-was a far more unsettling plan. This program, she realized, would create soldiers who could not disobey orders. And workers who could not disobey their superiors.

That's ridiculous, Brigid thought. Her first urge was to go scurrying off seeking confirmation, but too-eager googling would leave a trail she suddenly didn't want behind her. Hard to say she'd opened the mis-saved file by innocent accident if she'd promptly run off in pursuit of what it revealed.

Military organizations relied on the ability of soldiers to refuse an illegal order. Far too many of them never would, even under ordinary circ.u.mstances. The pressure to conform was great, the training to bow to authority even greater.

And, according to this file, one of her colleagues was having success removing that ability. This struck Brigid as not just ethically bad, but practically bad.

Brigid was agnostic on the topic of the existence of free will. She considered it a null argument, arising from a spurious and archaic distinction between conscious and unconscious minds. But even leaving aside for the moment the ongoing debate of what exactly free will was, and if it existed at all, order-following robots wasn't what you wanted if you were trying to create a well-disciplined military, part of whose strength was in each soldier's trained judgment and ability to think for her or himself.

But ABM did not work solely for the military. And Brigid could think of plenty of less enlightened corporate leaders that would reward yes-men, and those who could create yes-men.

As if the emotional pressures of primate social controls weren't enough to enforce groupthink in most circ.u.mstances. Ethical rightminding applications increased individuality and autonomy. This was ... ... not that.

Brigid sat back. She was already soaked in perfectly normal sweat from the heat of the evening. It didn't stop her breaking out in chills.

FX:.

A shattering, swirling, migraine-aura blot of jagged red and green and yellow images, sucked down into a dark singularity at the center. Occasional bright yellow-white flashes briefly wash out the whole of the image.

V/O:.

In the benighted twentieth century, normal human response to trauma was treated as a moral failure. Soldiers and others suffering from trauma-related biological changes to the brain were called neurotic, cowards, or worse.

We know better now.

As a result of traumatic experiences beyond your control, do you suffer from: nightmares anxiety hypervigilance sadness flashbacks feelings of intense distress loss of joy the inability to trust your loved ones numbness or other symptoms of trauma-related endocrine and neurological disorder?

FX:.

The chaotic swirling begins to resolve towards soothing blues and whites.

V/O:.

Cure pathological trauma response. Proven success.

A Beautiful Mind You don't have to be afraid anymore.

Monday morning, Brigid cycled in to the lab to confront the usual straggle of anti-rightminding protestors. Signs floated in virtual s.p.a.ce around them-a few of them funny, most badly designed and punctuated. Someone jeered as she pedaled past. Brigid spared a moment to her habitual longing for the future day when she could telecommute completely-except for occasional Partners.h.i.+p Days, as so many of the paper pushers did. Remote surgery by robot and waldo was what she did now, and it shouldn't be too much harder to do it from across town than from the next room.

The management was conservative, however, and Brigid suspected that they had the sort of mindset that supposed anyone who wasn't under constant, direct supervision spent most of their time goofing off. As far as Brigid was concerned, this said more about the management than their employees. Most of the researchers she knew had to be told when to stop working-and have the edict enforced.

Normally, the sight of the lab lowered her blood pressure, rather than elevating it. But on most days, she wasn't carrying the remnant neurochemical and fatigue poison c.o.c.ktail of a stressed, sleepless night in her bloodstream. She'd finally had to dose herself with a regulator just to be able to lie down. But she'd thrashed in her bead, kicking at the sweat-wicking covers while sleep had eluded her for hours afterward and the implications of what she'd read chased each other's tails through her weary mind.

She'd finally been able to doze when she'd decided what she would do. Dr. Ionita had obviously made an error in his or her backups. Brigid probably should report it to management-it was a security breach, and while she knew ABM's security was a joke, the suits still took it seriously. Paternalistically so, in her opinion.

Perhaps she'd mention it to Ionita, and let him or her decide what to do. Who was she to destroy somebody else's career over a simple error?

But she didn't know Ionita, who worked in a different area of the building and-from a brief survey of Brigid's contacts-seemed to be the sort who lived most of his or her existence behind privacy filters. And there was the content of the research ...

It's none of your business, Brigid told herself.

The lab was a modern green building, elevated on stilts above the climaterisen waters of New London Harbor so it could easily use temperature differentials and wave energy for its ma.s.sive electrical needs. The building itself was greened, every surface s.h.i.+elded by taro plants suited to the warm temperate climate of modern Connecticut. Broad, heart-shaped leaves tossed in the sea breeze, revealing a gorgeous variety of greens-from pale and speckled to a color bordering on black. An elevated causeway led from the sh.o.r.e, above the sparkling clean waters of the harbor, to the lab's shaded veranda. Spectacular, and certain to impress visiting venture capitalists ... but it did mean there was only one approach.

A bored police woman kept that approach clear, but Brigid still had to run the gauntlet of shouted insults. Her stomach contracted to a chilly lump as she approached.

They can't hurt you.

But social disapproval was a pain of its own. Hardwired in, from an era of human evolution when ostracism equaled death. And worse, when you had already lost a family.

Eyes front, spine straight, Brigid pa.s.sed through the protestors, wondering as she did so how anyone could be so wedded to their pain, their neurosis that they'd want to defend it. Or maybe that was an adaptive response gone haywire, too? You defend the trauma response, because the trauma response keeps you away from things that can destroy you.

Trauma response could lead to the expectation of a limited life. No belief in a future, marriage, children, a decent job, a fulfilling career. It could lock you into a cage of anhedonia and self-fulfilling prophecies. If the person who hurt you was someone you loved and trusted, doubly so.

It could happen, Brigid thought, even if the person who hurt you would have done anything other than hurt you, if they could. Even if they had hurt you by saving your life, and not their own.

She thought about Val, and wondered. He had-as far as she knew-a good home life. His boyfriend was delightful. Sometimes Brigid wasn't sure which of them she envied more. And there was that locked feeling in her own heart, that sense that if she reached out past it, ever, she would shatter.

Maybe I should get a cat.

Brigid locked her bike into the (internal, secured) bike rack, pa.s.sed through the usual security theatre dance, and climbed the stairs to her lab. Six flights: she was on the top floor. She trotted up them. All that time under a pack paid off.

It also helped manage her neurochemistry. It just couldn't get rid of the cowardice.

Val would tell her that she was applying an unreasonable standard to herself, that societal expectations-in this, as in so many things-were bankrupt and unrealistic. Intellectually, she could find it in herself to agree with him. But the understanding and the internalized perceptions- those were in direct conflict on this, as on so many things. It made her understand why so many people drew a bright line between aspects of the self, even if she didn't agree with them.