The Colonel Read Online Free

would almost be an act of mercy.
    â€œâ€”a common misconception,” Lutterodt is saying. “The hive’s not some jigsaw with a thousand little personalities, it’s integrated . Jim Moore doesn’t turn into Superman; Jim Moore doesn’t even exist when the hive’s active. Not unless you’ve got your latency dialed way down, anyway.”
    â€œEven worse.”
    She shakes her head, a little impatiently. “If it was bad thing you’d already know it first-hand. You’re a hive mind. You always have been.”
    â€œIf that’s your perspective on the Chain of Command—”
    â€œ Everyone ’s a hive.”
    He snorts.
    She presses on: “You’ve got two cerebral hemispheres, right? Each one fully capable of running its own standalone persona, running multiple personae in fact. If I were to put one of those hemispheres down for the count, anesthetize it or scramble it with enough TMS, the other would carry on just fine, and you know what? It would be different than you . It might have different political beliefs, a different gender—hell, it might even have a sense of humor. Right up until the other hemisphere woke up, and fused, and became you again.
    â€œSo tell me, Colonel; are your hemispheres suffering right now? Are there multiple selves in your head, bound and gagged, thinking Oh Great Ganesh I’m trapped! If only the Hive would let me out to play! ”
    I don’t know , he realizes. How could I know?
    â€œCourse not,” Lutterodt answers herself. “It’s just timesharing. Completely transparent.”
    â€œAnd Post-Coalescent Psychosis is just an urban legend spread by the tinfoil brigade.”
    She sighs. “No, PCP is very real. And it is tragic, and it fucks up thousands of lives. Yes. And it is entirely a result of defective interface technology. Our guys don’t get it.”
    â€œNot everyone’s so lucky,” the Colonel says.
    A man with cosmetic chlorophyll in his eyes arrives, bearing their orders. Lutterodt gives him a smile and digs into a cloned crab salad. The Colonel picks through bits of avocado he barely remembers ordering. “Have you ever visited the Moksha Mind?”
    â€œOnly in virt.”
    â€œYou know you can’t trust anything you experience in virt.”
    â€œYou can’t trust anything you experience at this table . Do you see that big honking blind spot in the middle of your visual field?”
    â€œI’m not talking about nature’s shortcuts. I’m talking about something with an agenda.”
    â€œOkay.” She chews, speaks around a mouthful. “So what’s the Moksha agenda?”
    â€œNobody knows. Eight million human minds linked together, and they just—lie there. Sure, you’ve seen the feeds from Bangalore and Hyderabad, the nice clean dorms with the smart beds to exercise the bodies and keep everything supple. Have you seen the nodes living at the ass end of five hundred kilometers of dirt track? People with nothing more than a cot and a hut and a C-square router by the village well?”
    She doesn’t answer.
    He takes it for a no . “You should pay them a visit sometime. Some of them have people checking in on them. Some—don’t. I’ve seen children covered with stinking bedsores lying in their own shit, people with half their teeth fallen out because they’re wired into that hive. And they don’t care . They can’t care, because there is no them any more, and the hive doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the pieces it’s built out of any more than—”
    Human torches, blazing in the Ecuadorian rainforest.
    â€œâ€”any more than you’d care about a single cell in your liver.”
    Lutterodt glances down at her drink. “It’s what they aspire to, Colonel. Freedom from sa ṃ s ā ra. I can’t pretend it’s a choice I’d make for myself.” She