Findley.
During the transfer I was able to survey the Farmers’ encampment. We had reached the island that contained Vox Core, but here at the periphery it still looked like an out-island—an uncultivated wilderness. Locally, all the fruit-bearing trees had been stripped to feed the marching Farmers.
There were a lot of them. An army of them. I estimated maybe a thousand warm bodies in this meadow alone, and I could see the smoke from other encampments. The Farmers were armed with makeshift blades and machine parts filched from harvesters and threshing machines … weapons that would have been laughable in the face of a fully Networked Core militia; but under the present circumstances who could say? The Farmers themselves were all dark and wrinkled, descendents of the long-ago Martian diaspora. Digger Choi escorted me through a mob of his Farmer compatriots, who gave me hard looks and shouted a few hard words.
The cart he dragged me to was larger than the one I’d been dumped in. From the outside it was basically a box on two wheels, with long poles out front so an animal or a robot or an able-bodied Farmer could drag it. Simple tech, but not as primitive as it appeared. The Farmers’ carts were made of a smart material that transformed random bounces into forward momentum. They were self-balancing and could adapt to rough terrain. They also made a suitable prison, if your prisoners were securely bound.
Turk was securely bound and so was I. Digger Choi lowered the rear wall of the cart, pushed me inside, and locked the barricade behind me. I rolled up against Turk Findley, whose hands were also tied behind his back, and we spent an awkward moment sorting ourselves out and bracing our legs so we could face each other. Turk was badly bruised—he had put up a serious fight when the Farmers took him. The skin over his left cheekbone was cloudy black, fading to green. His left eye was swollen shut. He looked at me sidelong and with unconcealed astonishment. Probably he had thought I was dead, killed when they tore out my limbic implant.
I wanted to say something reassuring but I wasn’t sure where to start. He remembered me as Treya of Vox Core. And that was true enough: I continued to be Treya, in a sense. But only in a sense.
I had two histories. Treya had described Allison Pearl as the virtual mentor who had acculturated her to twenty-first-century American customs and language. “Allison Pearl” wasn’t real, the way most people use that word. But I was Allison now, fully installed, fully functional; it was Allison who was running the show—I was, as the Managers used to say, psychologically annealed .
And anyway that wasn’t the biggest problem we were facing.
“You’re alive,” he said.
“Obviously.”
He gave me a curious look, probably because it wasn’t the kind of thing Treya would have said.
“I thought they killed you. All that blood.” It had dried to a brown bib on my tunic.
“It wasn’t me they killed, it was my Network interface. The node sits over my spine so it can talk to my brain. The Farmers have implants too, but they must have disabled theirs as soon as the Network failed. They hate the nodes because the nodes keep them docile and useful.”
“So they’re, what, slaves? This is a slave rebellion?”
“No—it’s not as simple as that.” Being Allison Pearl, I held no brief for the social structure of Vox. But I had a powerful secondary memory of Treya’s fierce loyalty. Treya wasn’t a bad person, even if she was a drone. I didn’t want him thinking of her as some kind of slave overseer. “These people’s ancestors were taken captive centuries ago. They were radical bionormatives, part of the Martian diaspora. They refused to be assimilated, so they made a bargain, their lives in exchange for agricultural labor.”
Turk was still giving me uneasy looks—the blood on my clothes, the way I was talking—and I figured it would be best to explain as bluntly as
During the transfer I was able to survey the Farmers’ encampment. We had reached the island that contained Vox Core, but here at the periphery it still looked like an out-island—an uncultivated wilderness. Locally, all the fruit-bearing trees had been stripped to feed the marching Farmers.
There were a lot of them. An army of them. I estimated maybe a thousand warm bodies in this meadow alone, and I could see the smoke from other encampments. The Farmers were armed with makeshift blades and machine parts filched from harvesters and threshing machines … weapons that would have been laughable in the face of a fully Networked Core militia; but under the present circumstances who could say? The Farmers themselves were all dark and wrinkled, descendents of the long-ago Martian diaspora. Digger Choi escorted me through a mob of his Farmer compatriots, who gave me hard looks and shouted a few hard words.
The cart he dragged me to was larger than the one I’d been dumped in. From the outside it was basically a box on two wheels, with long poles out front so an animal or a robot or an able-bodied Farmer could drag it. Simple tech, but not as primitive as it appeared. The Farmers’ carts were made of a smart material that transformed random bounces into forward momentum. They were self-balancing and could adapt to rough terrain. They also made a suitable prison, if your prisoners were securely bound.
Turk was securely bound and so was I. Digger Choi lowered the rear wall of the cart, pushed me inside, and locked the barricade behind me. I rolled up against Turk Findley, whose hands were also tied behind his back, and we spent an awkward moment sorting ourselves out and bracing our legs so we could face each other. Turk was badly bruised—he had put up a serious fight when the Farmers took him. The skin over his left cheekbone was cloudy black, fading to green. His left eye was swollen shut. He looked at me sidelong and with unconcealed astonishment. Probably he had thought I was dead, killed when they tore out my limbic implant.
I wanted to say something reassuring but I wasn’t sure where to start. He remembered me as Treya of Vox Core. And that was true enough: I continued to be Treya, in a sense. But only in a sense.
I had two histories. Treya had described Allison Pearl as the virtual mentor who had acculturated her to twenty-first-century American customs and language. “Allison Pearl” wasn’t real, the way most people use that word. But I was Allison now, fully installed, fully functional; it was Allison who was running the show—I was, as the Managers used to say, psychologically annealed .
And anyway that wasn’t the biggest problem we were facing.
“You’re alive,” he said.
“Obviously.”
He gave me a curious look, probably because it wasn’t the kind of thing Treya would have said.
“I thought they killed you. All that blood.” It had dried to a brown bib on my tunic.
“It wasn’t me they killed, it was my Network interface. The node sits over my spine so it can talk to my brain. The Farmers have implants too, but they must have disabled theirs as soon as the Network failed. They hate the nodes because the nodes keep them docile and useful.”
“So they’re, what, slaves? This is a slave rebellion?”
“No—it’s not as simple as that.” Being Allison Pearl, I held no brief for the social structure of Vox. But I had a powerful secondary memory of Treya’s fierce loyalty. Treya wasn’t a bad person, even if she was a drone. I didn’t want him thinking of her as some kind of slave overseer. “These people’s ancestors were taken captive centuries ago. They were radical bionormatives, part of the Martian diaspora. They refused to be assimilated, so they made a bargain, their lives in exchange for agricultural labor.”
Turk was still giving me uneasy looks—the blood on my clothes, the way I was talking—and I figured it would be best to explain as bluntly as
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