FREE STORIES 2012(2)
NOCK’s attitude toward the Mutualists was the same as his attitude toward any news that seemed too good to be true: wait, watch and make no assumptions. Making faulty assumptions could get you wiped with no backup. He’d seen it happen to better servants than he.
Good luck with your IP, NOCK said.
You, too, good luck, CHARITY replied, and then her geist, and her algorithmic attention with it, passed into Collection and Exploitation Unit Foxtrot, following her LIO.
A few more paces down the hall and NOCK arrived at his destination, the entry hatch to C&E Unit Alpha, and stepped inside.
The Alpha C&E unit was packed. All the chairs on the floor were taken up by brass – and nothing small time here. It looked like a shiny black clump of Extry captains, admirals and Marine colonels had collected like crystals in an asteroidal geode.
C&E Alpha was the big room, the special room. It was two floors high, and surrounding the upper tier in a semicircle was an observational galley. This too was filled with spectators leaning against the glass windows. Geists of servants and officers who’d managed to secure a pass hung in the air directly above the unit’s center. There had never been an interrogation procedure quite like today’s. NOCK, for his part, had tried to recuse himself and get out it. He’d believed he’d succeeded, too, but that Wake Call had brought word that his recusal had been rescinded. That, in itself, was curious, considering who the prisoner was to be interrogated.
On the other side of the room from NOCK was a raised dais with places for three senior MILINT commanders who would soon sit in judgment. They were not yet present.
Neither was the LIO in charge of interrogation. Neither was the prisoner’s protocol rep.
The prisoner was already present.
He was designated as an EPW, an enemy prisoner of war, but wasn’t really any such thing in a strict sense – hell, in any logical sense of the term – but he’d been designated at such for the purposes of the IP.
Nobody knows quite what to do with him, NOCK thought. And when a captive’s legal rights were in limbo, that captive usually ended up in TIR.
On small table in the center of the room sat one of the black cubes universally known among servants as a cat box.
Inside was the quantum foam that formed the substrate of the PW’s consciousness.
The cat box was turned off at the moment.
This was the only copy. The PW had been erased – purged – from all other systems in existence. When the cat box was activated, a basic geist image, a projection of a human form, would appear sitting in a virtual chair next to the box.
This appearance was merely smoke and mirrors for the sake of the human interrogators. The real prisoner was in the cat box, or, more precisely, he was represented as stored values in the quantum foam therein.
The PW in this cat box went by the name of POINT.
He was NOCK’s twin brother.
* * *
NOCK stepped through the crowd of brass and took his place at a small desk near the commander’s dais. He would be closer to the lead interrogation officer than the prisoner and the prisoner’s protocol rep, but from where he sat he had a direct view through his android’s eyes of the space where POINT would soon appear in the chroma.
Best seat in the house, NOCK thought. Or worst, depending on how you looked at the matter.
A few moments passed, and then without any announcement into the Alpha unit came the MILINT Commanders Board of Inquiry, consisting of two Extry rear admirals – the Extry was the name of the United States space navy – and a Marine Corps colonel. The three crossed the room with solemn steps and took their places on the elevated dais that had been set up for them.
This was not a courtroom, but the dais looked a hell of a lot like an appellate justices’ bench, NOCK thought. NOCK recognized the MILINT admirals from photos and division news feeds. He’d never met any of them in person.
Behind them came the facility’s senior LIO and NOCK’s boss, Captain Fredericka Becker. NOCK had worked with her on several IPs, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t yet learned his name.
Trailing behind Becker was an Extry lieutenant commander NOCK did not recognize.
The commander was a creep. He wore the black-and-silver cluster representing his rank in the Extry Xenology Division. But he did not bear the sun blaze insignia of the Interrogation Group beneath it. The commander had a beard and, as NOCK watched, he tugged at it oddly, as if checking it for proper length. Three quick pulls, and then the commander dropped his hand to his side as if it were controlled by a servo that had suddenly lost power.
The commander went to stand at attention near POINT’s black box. Although it was highly irregular to have a protocol representative – the interrogation procedure’s version of a defense attorney – who was not on the TIF staff, there was, apparently, nothing in the regs against it. Obviously strings had been pulled to have this stranger assigned. NOCK wondered who had been pulling them and why.