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First Warden-Inmate Meeting w/ Jedao
The file does show up, as promised. It's actual paper, not milled stone but milled wood, and it's folded into some kind of off-white wobbly cardstock. It actually takes Jim a second to realize that's a fucking file folder. He takes it up into the ops deck, and starts reading. Might be that some people are delicate about it, ask their inmate before reading the file, but Holden doesn't have time to fence around, and he doesn't want to get into games with Jedao.
Which turns out to be a pretty ironic thought, as he reads about the game Jedao created as a cadet, the one that led to the suicide of a friend. He's barely even begun when the Roci lets out a completely unexpected chirp, an information downloading notification coming up on all screens.
That should definitely not be happening, not without authorization. "Rocinante," he says, "Cut off download." A negative chirp -- damn, what could he -- "Quarantine the download," he tries, but it's too late, the message wipes out, and a whole tree of files appears in the air above the center ops console.
He absorbs a few of the file names, dates and details that don't have any context, then he realizes what this is.
"Holy shit," he breathes. "How much did we just get?"
The Roci displays a number. Terabytes. Terabytes of information, video files and text and audio, thousands, and all of them about Jedao. Four hundred years, he realizes, of someone's fucking records. Way more than he could possibly review before Jedao contacts him to have a conversation. In fact, Jedao probably already has.
"Holy shit," he mutters, again, under his breath. "Can you index that?" A positive chirp. "How about -- by names, dates, locations -- if it has a location, and, uh. Actually, proper nouns. And tag them by category, type of file, if it's video, audio, text, hologram--" he wouldn't leave that out of the question -- "Or any other identifiable type." A beat. "And game. If there are any games, pull those out first."
The computer informs him that it would take actual days to go through all of it and create an interactive indexing system.
"Well," he sighs, "get started. But leave the files open for me to access."
The computer begins processing.
Holden returns to the file, and reads through the rest. It's thin. Ridiculously thin, for someone 400 years old, or 400 years dead, or whatever he is. He can't stop muttering curses and pausing, sometimes, to stare blankly ahead. Jedao killed millions -- an inconceivable number. And they kept him trapped in the dark, an inconceivable amount of time. He is a genius, resistant to mental coercion, brilliant, insane, but not as insane as people thought.
When he looks up, there is a game file that the computer has pulled out. With a gesture, he pulls it up. It's the game, the one Jedao made as a cadet, though as he opens the file, there are seventeen more games that the computer finds and populates into a list.
It's not hard to understand the rules, but it's very hard to figure out the context. Holden has to page back and forth, try it out in his head, twist the scenarios around before he realizes that the point is heresy. This whole thing, it's an obsession with heresy. Heresy as a game.
Not that Holden blames him. In a society like that, Holden would be obsessed with heresy too.
He sits back in the crash couch. He needs a way to get more time on this. He isn't processing half of what he just read, and there's a lot more here to unpack. This data might include a lot more information on Shuos and Kel and, what was it, Liozh?, as well as threshold winnowers and mothdrives and the High Calendar, and he wants to be a lot better informed before he goes into this conversation. So he needs a distraction. Something that'll buy him a day.
Games.
"Pause index," he tells the Roci. "Do you have any games on board?"
The computer brings up the list of -- twenty-one, now.
"No," he says, "I mean games like -- games from Earth, or Mars, or the Belt."
There's a pause, and an affirmative beep. Several of the crew apparently had personal game files, plus there's a few wargames that are part of the ship, probably for training purposes. Holden dismisses those with a swipe, and starts going through the rest. Most are pointless, shooting games or variants of chess, solitaire, blackjack, poker. He's not entirely sure what he's looking for, but then he finds it. A pandemic game, simulating disease spread throughout the solar system. It's an old one, that he remembers from when he was a kid -- probably some Martian from Earth kept it for nostalgia factor. It's a good one, too, simple rules and simple mechanics, but a new challenge every time.
"Are you able to unpack this?" he asks. "Reprogram it?"
The affirmative beep sounds, somehow, a little sarcastic.
"Okay. I want you to replace all mentions of disease with heresy. Physical symptoms to psychological things, like rebelliousness. You can draw symptoms from the DSM-70. It should still spread physically, but..." Radio. Heresy could travel at the speed of light. And it would; it would be impossible to stop. But that wouldn't make the game useful.
He keeps talking. "Win conditions are that you've wiped out heresy. Lose conditions... you're down to less than ten percent of the population, or you lose Ganymede, Earth, and Mars." Everywhere that can grow decent crops and produce oxygen in any quantity. "Or you start a war. Randomized what faction you're playing as, but it can be Earth, Mars, or Belters."
The faster-than-light is still a problem.
"What if the heretics were trying to keep it secret?" he asks, out loud. "Spread it slowly, at first, and then when they get caught, go all-out?"
The computer flashes a lack of understanding.
"If all ports that are infected with heresy are quarantined," says Holden, "they all broadcast at once. Heresy starts spreading at the speed of light, and the longer it goes on before you jam it, the more people are infected at once, everywhere."
The computer starts displaying dozens of questions, decision trees for the programming. Holden has to get down into that for a few minutes, straightening out the true/false conditions. He ends up adding in Ceres as the best vector for infection for the Belt. Cringes a little, but Eros is one that's a port of call for tourists everywhere, so that one's got the most far-flung connections. It's hard to spread through the Belt, but hard to eradicate all the little asteroids where heresy colonizes. It's easier to spread across Earth, because of the hundreds of network connections across the ocean can't all be severed, and trade and travel are so ubiquitous. It's hard to get onto Mars, because the vector is most likely to be diplomats or military vessels, but once you've got Mars, they spread it onto every ship they inspect. You can absolutely without question eliminate any place with heresy, but don't drop the population too far...
He spends actual hours on this, and it's a pretty clumsy effort, but thankfully the base game is simple enough and solid enough that it's not too broken. He makes it very hard to win. There are a few more twists, similar to the broadcasts: Belters can hide heresy better, because their language is difficult for outsiders to understand and they're already so independent, Mars has a tendency to strike back if any of its facilities are struck, and Earth has internal variation and borders that mess with transmissions. Something can spread easier from China to Mars than North America to Mars.
"One last thing," he says. "If you open your ports, and let the heresy in, then I want a way to win without bloodshed."
And this ends up being a very narrow path, too, and dependent on Mars not getting provoked, but it can work.
Finally, it's done -- or, as done as it can get, and he downloads it to one of the portable devices from the ship. He ducks outside, and places the little tablet outside Jedao's place, and thankfully makes it back before Jedao sees. On the way back, he drops a note on the network: Look outside your door.
And now he gets to work.
A few searches ("Shuos" turns up most of the files, "Kel" only slightly fewer, but combining the names of all seven of the factions brings up only about a hundred, easy enough to screen through them) gets him to a sort of treatise about the factions, describing roles and traits as though to a child. It's probably some kind of brainwashing material, but it gives him a good place to start. Liozh aren't mentioned anywhere; that means he has to search again and screen through those results before he can figure out that Liozh were philosophers and ethicists, idealists, and, wow, no fucking kidding they were wiped out from this society.
Next, the High Calendar, and every image that Jim sees is worse than the last. Some of it isn't so bad; base six numerical system, a year is this long, this is how you tell time, but then he gets into the cultural components. Every holiday that he pulls up more information on has a bloody and awful history, and some of them come with graphic images of torture and dismemberment. He has to steel himself against it, try to pull back from it, distance it from what he's personally witnessed. And he knew there was ritual torture, but the extent of it, how widespread and often, the way it's used as a common and acknowledged and normal tool, appalls him. He's starting to wish he pushed a little harder on the do you think it's worth it, instead of backing down the second he realized he was thinking more about the protomolecule than Jedao.
But, he remembers the conversation about the geese -- bite their hands off -- and he thinks, no, Jedao doesn't believe this is worth it.
But he slaughtered millions to get in a possible position to take it down. Just possible; not guaranteed. And as far as Holden can tell, mostly what he did was get himself killed at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Weird name. Maybe it sounds better in the native language.
The scale of it is literally unthinkable. And Holden is tempted, several times, to call up the Admiral and call this whole thing off. How the hell is he even supposed to attempt to redeem someone a dozen times more clever, more thorough, more experienced, and a cold-hearted bastard on top of it?
He keeps reading, though. Because a lot more than millions are gonna be at risk if he doesn't manage this task. Humanity could get wiped out. It's already on the verge. He has to.
All of this crap is long on info and short on analysis. The file had some, but not enough. It's all just so thin. And Holden has never been good at connecting dots like this, seeing inside someone's head. Most people that he's dealt with in his life had pretty straightforward problems, things that could be eased or solved by listening and doing some pretty simple stuff.
This problem compounds the longer he reads. He goes through the battles at Scattered Needles over and over until he gets the basic gist of the technologies involved, and grasps most of the strategy (though the propaganda game is beyond him; how are you supposed to convince anyone to be on your side with images like that?). And then there's... shit. There's documentation of the threshold winnower.
Image after image. It takes him a shocked second to realize that he's looking at people, otherworldly tears in their flesh, not just blood and scars but horrific immediate mutations. People who clawed their own eyes out, or ripped flesh off the bone. One body that convulsed so hard its spine was at a horrible, wrong angle.
And, when he touches the screen at the wrong moment, one body is isolated and a picture pulls up. A short summary. A name.
Holden stumbles to his feet and the next thing he knows, he's in the head, vomiting up... well, acid, mostly, because he hasn't really eaten in a while. He puts his head between his knees, curled against the cool wall, and breathes, breathes, breathes. The minutes tick away, endless.
Maybe he falls asleep, because he gradually becomes aware of a soreness in his neck that wasn't there before.
He washes out his mouth, and gets back up to the ops deck, and goes back in -- dismissing the images of the winnower.
The rest isn't even fully indexed yet. He starts looking through some of what Jedao was pulled out to do during his centuries of death, and he can't focus. He's on the verge of asking the ship for some juice, when he stops.
He's approaching this totally the wrong way.
He leans back in the crash couch, eyes on the ceiling. He's pretty sure his communicator pinged a while ago. It's long past the time he should have fallen asleep -- starting to approach the time he should be waking up. There's no rush on this and he shouldn't have pulled an all-nighter, but hey, he just had an epiphany, and maybe it required a half-conscious mind to make that happen.
He's been doing this wrong. He's been trying to figure out Jedao from the details of his life, but Jedao's been doing all he can, for hundreds of years, to obscure his thoughts by adding noise to those details. The big-picture stuff isn't the problem.
-- Which is fucking unbelievable, given how awful the big-picture stuff is. Even Jim, though, can understand how people can get driven to do insane things in an insane world. Doesn't mean he's going to let Jedao off the hook for it, of course.
The problem is the way Jedao treats individuals.
And once he thinks this thought directly, the Admiral's reasoning clicks into focus. Jedao purports to be someone who is good -- or, no, purports to be someone who's crazy, but underneath, he's trying to do good, or so it seems to Jim. That doesn't gel with the way he terrorizes people near him, people who aren't innocent, but only insofar as they participate in an un-innocent system. The key to this is going to be breaking Jedao down so he can connect. Start to heal, from being fucking raped and brutalized himself, from causing his friend's suicide and being trapped in a box for 400 years and being driven to the point where he felt he had to commit mass murder in order to have a hope of being good in a society like this.
Jedao didn't succeed. He isn't good, and the threshold winnower is a perfect example of that. But he didn't just knuckle under, and Jim can work with that.
For the first time, Jim feels a stirring of hope. He's still totally out of his depth, stranded in the black, but at least he knows which way to go.
So he goes, and he sleeps for a while, and after he gets up and shaves and has something to eat, he pulls out the communicator. He checks for messages first, but, regardless of what's there, he texts: My cabin?
There's literally no way in hell he could conceal the fact that the Roci's a military ship of the line, on the inside. Might as well get it over with, because Jedao's gonna know that sooner or later. Jim's just picked over a significant part of Jedao's life, and he already owed Jedao one anyway.
Which turns out to be a pretty ironic thought, as he reads about the game Jedao created as a cadet, the one that led to the suicide of a friend. He's barely even begun when the Roci lets out a completely unexpected chirp, an information downloading notification coming up on all screens.
That should definitely not be happening, not without authorization. "Rocinante," he says, "Cut off download." A negative chirp -- damn, what could he -- "Quarantine the download," he tries, but it's too late, the message wipes out, and a whole tree of files appears in the air above the center ops console.
He absorbs a few of the file names, dates and details that don't have any context, then he realizes what this is.
"Holy shit," he breathes. "How much did we just get?"
The Roci displays a number. Terabytes. Terabytes of information, video files and text and audio, thousands, and all of them about Jedao. Four hundred years, he realizes, of someone's fucking records. Way more than he could possibly review before Jedao contacts him to have a conversation. In fact, Jedao probably already has.
"Holy shit," he mutters, again, under his breath. "Can you index that?" A positive chirp. "How about -- by names, dates, locations -- if it has a location, and, uh. Actually, proper nouns. And tag them by category, type of file, if it's video, audio, text, hologram--" he wouldn't leave that out of the question -- "Or any other identifiable type." A beat. "And game. If there are any games, pull those out first."
The computer informs him that it would take actual days to go through all of it and create an interactive indexing system.
"Well," he sighs, "get started. But leave the files open for me to access."
The computer begins processing.
Holden returns to the file, and reads through the rest. It's thin. Ridiculously thin, for someone 400 years old, or 400 years dead, or whatever he is. He can't stop muttering curses and pausing, sometimes, to stare blankly ahead. Jedao killed millions -- an inconceivable number. And they kept him trapped in the dark, an inconceivable amount of time. He is a genius, resistant to mental coercion, brilliant, insane, but not as insane as people thought.
When he looks up, there is a game file that the computer has pulled out. With a gesture, he pulls it up. It's the game, the one Jedao made as a cadet, though as he opens the file, there are seventeen more games that the computer finds and populates into a list.
It's not hard to understand the rules, but it's very hard to figure out the context. Holden has to page back and forth, try it out in his head, twist the scenarios around before he realizes that the point is heresy. This whole thing, it's an obsession with heresy. Heresy as a game.
Not that Holden blames him. In a society like that, Holden would be obsessed with heresy too.
He sits back in the crash couch. He needs a way to get more time on this. He isn't processing half of what he just read, and there's a lot more here to unpack. This data might include a lot more information on Shuos and Kel and, what was it, Liozh?, as well as threshold winnowers and mothdrives and the High Calendar, and he wants to be a lot better informed before he goes into this conversation. So he needs a distraction. Something that'll buy him a day.
Games.
"Pause index," he tells the Roci. "Do you have any games on board?"
The computer brings up the list of -- twenty-one, now.
"No," he says, "I mean games like -- games from Earth, or Mars, or the Belt."
There's a pause, and an affirmative beep. Several of the crew apparently had personal game files, plus there's a few wargames that are part of the ship, probably for training purposes. Holden dismisses those with a swipe, and starts going through the rest. Most are pointless, shooting games or variants of chess, solitaire, blackjack, poker. He's not entirely sure what he's looking for, but then he finds it. A pandemic game, simulating disease spread throughout the solar system. It's an old one, that he remembers from when he was a kid -- probably some Martian from Earth kept it for nostalgia factor. It's a good one, too, simple rules and simple mechanics, but a new challenge every time.
"Are you able to unpack this?" he asks. "Reprogram it?"
The affirmative beep sounds, somehow, a little sarcastic.
"Okay. I want you to replace all mentions of disease with heresy. Physical symptoms to psychological things, like rebelliousness. You can draw symptoms from the DSM-70. It should still spread physically, but..." Radio. Heresy could travel at the speed of light. And it would; it would be impossible to stop. But that wouldn't make the game useful.
He keeps talking. "Win conditions are that you've wiped out heresy. Lose conditions... you're down to less than ten percent of the population, or you lose Ganymede, Earth, and Mars." Everywhere that can grow decent crops and produce oxygen in any quantity. "Or you start a war. Randomized what faction you're playing as, but it can be Earth, Mars, or Belters."
The faster-than-light is still a problem.
"What if the heretics were trying to keep it secret?" he asks, out loud. "Spread it slowly, at first, and then when they get caught, go all-out?"
The computer flashes a lack of understanding.
"If all ports that are infected with heresy are quarantined," says Holden, "they all broadcast at once. Heresy starts spreading at the speed of light, and the longer it goes on before you jam it, the more people are infected at once, everywhere."
The computer starts displaying dozens of questions, decision trees for the programming. Holden has to get down into that for a few minutes, straightening out the true/false conditions. He ends up adding in Ceres as the best vector for infection for the Belt. Cringes a little, but Eros is one that's a port of call for tourists everywhere, so that one's got the most far-flung connections. It's hard to spread through the Belt, but hard to eradicate all the little asteroids where heresy colonizes. It's easier to spread across Earth, because of the hundreds of network connections across the ocean can't all be severed, and trade and travel are so ubiquitous. It's hard to get onto Mars, because the vector is most likely to be diplomats or military vessels, but once you've got Mars, they spread it onto every ship they inspect. You can absolutely without question eliminate any place with heresy, but don't drop the population too far...
He spends actual hours on this, and it's a pretty clumsy effort, but thankfully the base game is simple enough and solid enough that it's not too broken. He makes it very hard to win. There are a few more twists, similar to the broadcasts: Belters can hide heresy better, because their language is difficult for outsiders to understand and they're already so independent, Mars has a tendency to strike back if any of its facilities are struck, and Earth has internal variation and borders that mess with transmissions. Something can spread easier from China to Mars than North America to Mars.
"One last thing," he says. "If you open your ports, and let the heresy in, then I want a way to win without bloodshed."
And this ends up being a very narrow path, too, and dependent on Mars not getting provoked, but it can work.
Finally, it's done -- or, as done as it can get, and he downloads it to one of the portable devices from the ship. He ducks outside, and places the little tablet outside Jedao's place, and thankfully makes it back before Jedao sees. On the way back, he drops a note on the network: Look outside your door.
And now he gets to work.
A few searches ("Shuos" turns up most of the files, "Kel" only slightly fewer, but combining the names of all seven of the factions brings up only about a hundred, easy enough to screen through them) gets him to a sort of treatise about the factions, describing roles and traits as though to a child. It's probably some kind of brainwashing material, but it gives him a good place to start. Liozh aren't mentioned anywhere; that means he has to search again and screen through those results before he can figure out that Liozh were philosophers and ethicists, idealists, and, wow, no fucking kidding they were wiped out from this society.
Next, the High Calendar, and every image that Jim sees is worse than the last. Some of it isn't so bad; base six numerical system, a year is this long, this is how you tell time, but then he gets into the cultural components. Every holiday that he pulls up more information on has a bloody and awful history, and some of them come with graphic images of torture and dismemberment. He has to steel himself against it, try to pull back from it, distance it from what he's personally witnessed. And he knew there was ritual torture, but the extent of it, how widespread and often, the way it's used as a common and acknowledged and normal tool, appalls him. He's starting to wish he pushed a little harder on the do you think it's worth it, instead of backing down the second he realized he was thinking more about the protomolecule than Jedao.
But, he remembers the conversation about the geese -- bite their hands off -- and he thinks, no, Jedao doesn't believe this is worth it.
But he slaughtered millions to get in a possible position to take it down. Just possible; not guaranteed. And as far as Holden can tell, mostly what he did was get himself killed at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Weird name. Maybe it sounds better in the native language.
The scale of it is literally unthinkable. And Holden is tempted, several times, to call up the Admiral and call this whole thing off. How the hell is he even supposed to attempt to redeem someone a dozen times more clever, more thorough, more experienced, and a cold-hearted bastard on top of it?
He keeps reading, though. Because a lot more than millions are gonna be at risk if he doesn't manage this task. Humanity could get wiped out. It's already on the verge. He has to.
All of this crap is long on info and short on analysis. The file had some, but not enough. It's all just so thin. And Holden has never been good at connecting dots like this, seeing inside someone's head. Most people that he's dealt with in his life had pretty straightforward problems, things that could be eased or solved by listening and doing some pretty simple stuff.
This problem compounds the longer he reads. He goes through the battles at Scattered Needles over and over until he gets the basic gist of the technologies involved, and grasps most of the strategy (though the propaganda game is beyond him; how are you supposed to convince anyone to be on your side with images like that?). And then there's... shit. There's documentation of the threshold winnower.
Image after image. It takes him a shocked second to realize that he's looking at people, otherworldly tears in their flesh, not just blood and scars but horrific immediate mutations. People who clawed their own eyes out, or ripped flesh off the bone. One body that convulsed so hard its spine was at a horrible, wrong angle.
And, when he touches the screen at the wrong moment, one body is isolated and a picture pulls up. A short summary. A name.
Holden stumbles to his feet and the next thing he knows, he's in the head, vomiting up... well, acid, mostly, because he hasn't really eaten in a while. He puts his head between his knees, curled against the cool wall, and breathes, breathes, breathes. The minutes tick away, endless.
Maybe he falls asleep, because he gradually becomes aware of a soreness in his neck that wasn't there before.
He washes out his mouth, and gets back up to the ops deck, and goes back in -- dismissing the images of the winnower.
The rest isn't even fully indexed yet. He starts looking through some of what Jedao was pulled out to do during his centuries of death, and he can't focus. He's on the verge of asking the ship for some juice, when he stops.
He's approaching this totally the wrong way.
He leans back in the crash couch, eyes on the ceiling. He's pretty sure his communicator pinged a while ago. It's long past the time he should have fallen asleep -- starting to approach the time he should be waking up. There's no rush on this and he shouldn't have pulled an all-nighter, but hey, he just had an epiphany, and maybe it required a half-conscious mind to make that happen.
He's been doing this wrong. He's been trying to figure out Jedao from the details of his life, but Jedao's been doing all he can, for hundreds of years, to obscure his thoughts by adding noise to those details. The big-picture stuff isn't the problem.
-- Which is fucking unbelievable, given how awful the big-picture stuff is. Even Jim, though, can understand how people can get driven to do insane things in an insane world. Doesn't mean he's going to let Jedao off the hook for it, of course.
The problem is the way Jedao treats individuals.
And once he thinks this thought directly, the Admiral's reasoning clicks into focus. Jedao purports to be someone who is good -- or, no, purports to be someone who's crazy, but underneath, he's trying to do good, or so it seems to Jim. That doesn't gel with the way he terrorizes people near him, people who aren't innocent, but only insofar as they participate in an un-innocent system. The key to this is going to be breaking Jedao down so he can connect. Start to heal, from being fucking raped and brutalized himself, from causing his friend's suicide and being trapped in a box for 400 years and being driven to the point where he felt he had to commit mass murder in order to have a hope of being good in a society like this.
Jedao didn't succeed. He isn't good, and the threshold winnower is a perfect example of that. But he didn't just knuckle under, and Jim can work with that.
For the first time, Jim feels a stirring of hope. He's still totally out of his depth, stranded in the black, but at least he knows which way to go.
So he goes, and he sleeps for a while, and after he gets up and shaves and has something to eat, he pulls out the communicator. He checks for messages first, but, regardless of what's there, he texts: My cabin?
There's literally no way in hell he could conceal the fact that the Roci's a military ship of the line, on the inside. Might as well get it over with, because Jedao's gonna know that sooner or later. Jim's just picked over a significant part of Jedao's life, and he already owed Jedao one anyway.
no subject
"We took it out while Eros was becoming... whatever it was becoming," he admits. Center of operations, he means. "But there was another base, and I think it's gotta be near Jupiter. Jedao, there is no fucking way I am letting anyone on this boat get access to the protomolecule, or leave with it, so if that's in your head, it better fucking get out."
Holden is more serious than Jedao has seen him yet. If he thinks that's a risk, this thing spreading to other universes, he's gone. He's gone.
"I would rather watch my universe go down in flames than spread it somewhere else."
no subject
"It's not in my head," he says, not really expecting to be believed. He wouldn't believe him. It's in his liver somewhere, maybe, formless and useless, utterly impractical self-destructive longing. It's not the kind of feeling he's going to make any decisions on; it would run completely counter to every priority he has now. It's not even the kind of madness that he acts on in smashed-open watershed moments. It's just a wisp of a pure and terrible dream.
no subject
"I know you saw that Ganymede is one of the system's food producers," he says. "But it's also the safest place to have children outside of Earth, because of the magnetosphere. Lowest incidence of birth defects and genetic mutations. So the whole thing is set up to provide care for kids. Was set up." Damn. It's just so unbelievable that Ganymede could be gone. "Lotta kids with rare genetic disorders ended up there. So... we stumbled on something."
He's tempted to pull up the image of Praxideke Meng, of Mei. But it would only be to push his own buttons, make sure that he's still capable of feeling for a girl that might be a monster by now.
"A handful with the same immune disorder all went missing. We followed the breadcrumbs," beat the shit out of a hacker, did it without batting an eye, got a guy killed on his own freighter, hands going bloodier and bloodier as Holden hunted what he hoped desperately were the last remnants of the protomolecule, "and we found where they released the test."
His hands go into fists, braced on the edge of the console. "They were using the kids, Jedao," he says, desperately. "They were making them into two meter tall monsters with glowing blue eyes, so strong they could rip through metal with their bare hands, and I tell you, I didn't fucking see anything human in that. There was nothing." You can't do this, is what Holden is saying; even if you have that craving, you can't do this. It's too horrifying. It's too monstrous.
no subject
"Human isn't always a thing you can see," he says, very quietly, his accent thicker than usual. His hands are clenched and all his knuckles are white.
He isn't angry at Holden, despite the pointed objection. He doesn't blame him for the phrasing, for his fear or his assumptions. Maybe he's even right. But in the longer stretches in the cradle, Jedao knows he became an unrecognizable thing, nameless and thoughtless, a thrashing wraith too stripped down even to gnaw itself. But there was enough of him left to suffer it, if not to endure. There enough of him left to reel back out and feed into the hard reset of anchorage. He can't help but imagine something was left, in another unrecognizable weapon. And he got himself into that; he didn't, couldn't know what he was doing, but he did it. All this kid did was get sick.
no subject
But Holden can't maneuver all of that into an explanation; the words tangle up inside him. He just makes a sound of frustration and turns away, doing his best not to remember that ice-cold feeling of his suit pumping him full of painkillers.
"It got onto my ship," he manages, after a moment or two. "Almost killed all of us." If it had gotten to the core...
"We didn't find all the kids, either." There are more out there, being transformed. While people on the Belt, in the outer planets, are gonna start starving; while a generation of mothers have children without adequate protection. While Earth and Mars maneuver and maneuver, fingers on the trigger.
no subject
"Humans can lose their minds," he says, as quiet as before, but more gently, face turned slightly away. "Or have them taken." It doesn't mean Holden was wrong about whatever he was facing, or wrong about what it was capable of or what had to be done. It just - Jedao doesn't even know why it's important to say, it isn't a helpful point, he doesn't actually know anything about the situation. It's completely semantic, maybe, something about what Jedao means by the word human.
It just. Feels important to say.
He breaks his stillness, gives both of them a few moments of space as he turns, paces as much as the small area of the Ops deck allows him, hands folded behind his back, shadow slinking after.
"We're going to handle it," he says. "We're not going to fucking figure it out today, but we will figure it out."
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"Yeah," he says. In this case, it's kind of a meaningless word; expresses ambivalence, not quite agreement. Acknowledgment of what Jedao said.
"I can get you data on the players. The Secretary-General of the UN probably doesn't matter. Only got the job because he used to be a political prisoner, kind of a martyr." Or at least that's what some of Holden's parents think, and he trusts their judgment. "In the Belt, there's Fred Johnson, and there's Anderson Dawes. I don't know about Mars. Jules-Pierre Mao matters, too."
He crosses his arms. "At first, I thought I'd just make the protomolecule never exist," he says. "Then I started trying to think of strings to pull -- Canterbury never responded to the Scopuli, the Donnager won the fight, someone else found the protomolecule, Julie Mao figured it out sooner -- but this isn't exactly a skill of mine." Rueful. "In the Navy, I was a button-pusher, and I got cashiered out for assault on a superior officer. A genius tactician, I was not."
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"I'm not even surprised," he mutters, but there's warmth to it.
"Can anyone ask Rocinante for files or do you have to introduce me? I'll want to do a slow crawl through a lot of boring archival material, just to get a more granular sense of - everything."
He's fairly sure, given that Jim's own provenance of the ship is rather dubious, that he could get in without permission if he had to, but that isn't how he wants to proceed here.
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And, in this context, no one except Holden. And given the five force-recon Marine armor sets in the armory... well, he won't be sharing control with anyone. Definitely not Jedao. At least the Admiral didn't duplicate the nukes in the torpedo bays, and for that, Holden sends a brief prayer of gratitude.
"I can load some onto one of the tablets," he says. Translation: he's not making introductions. He's fiercely protective of the ship. Not as much as Alex, of course, but he can just imagine Alex-Amos-Naomi's look of disapproval at Jedao. That image makes his lips quirk. "Anything you want to focus on, or should I just have it smart-select for high activity systemwide?"
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"...are you serious? If I wanted piecemeal chunks of prefiltered intel with minimal reconfigure options I'd just keep talking to you."
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"I did offer to let you set the filters," he points out.
Indisputably, having the Roci to help sort is gonna be a lot better. But, putting her in the hands of Shuos Jedao...?
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Bitterly sarcastic.
"You don't have to trust me. But don't ask me for help and then make me jump through stupid hoops like a cadet with homework."
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"Alex is gonna kill me," mutters Holden. "Rocinante. Give Jedao access to all archived information broadcast around the system, and historical files. Read-only. He can only input data on text files that he makes, and you're not to run those as programs under any circumstances, or let him modify any programs. Personal files are off-limits." He doesn't know what Naomi or Alex or Amos or Prax keep in here, but if they keep anything sensitive, he's gonna look at it first.
He pauses, giving Jedao a long look. "Physically, he can have access to the head and the mess, but he's only getting on the ops deck with me around, and he doesn't get anywhere else." A beat. "No, he can have one of the empty bunks." In case Jedao wants to sleep here. He's okay with that. "Acknowledge."
The ship gives a beep, displays a list of accesses, visibly makes a profile with a tagged image of Jedao from internal feeds.
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"Does having mean I get to lock it?"
It's a nonsense question, of course. Even if Jim says he can, Jim automatically has the ability to override it. But he feels like seeing how Jim answers.
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Holden can open any door that ends up getting locked on the Roci, unless it's determinedly sabotaged shut, and there's no reason for Jedao to do that. But Jedao would know that, so why's he asking the question, anyway? Is it just a test?
It's a test, isn't it.
"This is a test, isn't it," says Holden, because he can feel yawning traps opening around any possible response.
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"It could be an actual question. Is it my berth, or just one I have access to? Your phrasing was ambiguous."
Those not being precisely the same things; Jim can open any door, but others he might invite aboard might not. And Jim put so much effort into being specific about the rest of it.
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He means this completely. And not only does he mean it, this is the only answer he ever would have given, regardless of if Jedao probed him on it or not. And it's not about trust, either, since Holden has taken enough precautions to not immediately worry about his ship's systems getting hijacked; Holden genuinely feels that other human beings deserve a baseline level of consideration, when feasible.
"And if you don't have access to something you need, you know how to ask." Namely: by not being sketchy about it.
He admits: "Honestly, I was thinking about the public showers. I wouldn't enjoy that." And it defeats the purpose if he wouldn't let Jedao come in here and lock the door behind him.
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"I'm not exactly shy. You wouldn't believe the ditches we washed in sometimes on land campaign. Does she actually have water showers? If it's such a premium that you have to haul it - but I suppose that'd push reclamation tech." He skips ahead of his own question.
He leans back a little. Tilts his head.
"Did you have barn cats, on your farm?"
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And also doesn't help.
Weird subject change. Holden blinks. "Yeah," he says. "Can't really have a farm without it. Why?"
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He waits for a moment, but not enough for Holden to actually respond.
"I know you do, because you made me that game. You wiggled some bait. So you get it. But you don't all the way get it."
He flexes his hands, then takes out his cards, shuffles without looking at them. "I thought you knew what you were doing, showing me your world. And I get that even if you did, or did in some sideways Earth perspective way, you couldn't be sure it would work, or work right away, and obviously it wouldn't be absolute."
This probably clears up very little.
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"I wasn't trying to mess with you," is what he says, uncertainly. Just buy a little time, make an overture in a way that made common ground, be a little mischievous at the same time.
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"That was both transparent and delightful. I'm not saying, don't bait me. I'm not saying I couldn't resist. But I am saying - don't bait me if you don't want me to pounce."
He flips the first three cards off the top of the deck: deuce of eyes, deuce of gears, deuce of feathers. "I have multiple instincts. You don't - oh, of course." And then he laughs, softly.
"You don't have to trust me to have me on your team. You've never had that thought in your life, have you?"
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"I don't have to trust someone for them to be an ally," he says. "But, one of my people? It's not just my trust. It has to go both ways." And he thinks of Naomi, what she did with the protomolecule, and his stomach goes all twisty and anxious and unhappy. His expression darkens; not at Jedao, at something more distant.
Well -- maybe he can make exceptions, then.
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"I'm not talking about family. Think about it like -" He doesn't say like a Shuos. "- a game. If it's a game, are we competing, or are we coordinating? Are we playing against each other, or are we on a team? Obviously that isn't a pure binary. We both have multiple objectives, and some of them align and some of them don't. But you can sort by priority and get a first approximation. I don't have to be your people to work with you. And I have certain ways of doing that."
He sweeps up the cards, shuffles again, then deals seven cards. He picks them up and shows them, fanned out. A Glory of Feathers. The Kel are a team, even though he was lying to them too, killed plenty of them. Team members can, under the right circumstances, ask each other for resources. Shous never would, unless it was a layer in some other scheme.
Holden made the face people always make, when they are weary of dealing with Shuos. It's obviously not quite as simple as treating him like a Kel instead, and letting him enjoy the illusion. He is a Shuos. But that also means: he'll play with whoever's playing, and he'll play more like a Shuos the more he feels like he's on his own.
He doesn't think Holden was wrong to restrict his access - nor does he think it was entirely about him - but he responded to the bait, moreso because of the degree of suspicion that preceded it, in response to something he did ask for directly. And if Holden wants him to ask for things, instead of being sketchy about it -
"You did point me at a war." Kel bait, instead of Shuos bait. Inviting him onto a team with a particular objective. I thought you knew what were doing, he'd said, and approved.
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"Actually," he says, "on this, I do trust you." It's not that life-or-death bond that formed between his four people. That doesn't mean it's not trust, and when he says that, he does it directly, taking the half-step back up to the console, looking at Jedao. "Because I think you tried to be a good person, and that matters. And I think you look at this and you see a puzzle to solve, and, beyond that, you're gonna want to save those kids."
He taps his knuckles on the console, briefly obscuring the projection of Saturn. "For this? I want you on my team. For the Barge? For you?" There are too many teams inside Jedao already, thinks Holden.
He considers, for a moment, telling Jedao that he thinks he knows what Jedao's biggest problem is, according to the Admiral. He could point Jedao at interpersonal relationships and tell him start there. It just doesn't seem like the right time, or like Jedao is in a place where he'd necessarily believe Holden's assessment. That has to come more organically.
"Jesus Christ, Jedao," swears Holden, soft and angry, "every single fucking person that I saw in that file who had power over you has tortured you. What the hell reason do you have to think I won't do the same?" His voice breaks a little on that. And Holden would never, not on purpose, he would never, but you don't let go of that kind of pain that fast, especially when you don't even know how wrong all that is. God, Jedao was subjected to horrors, and Holden doesn't even know how to begin on that stuff.
"You've survived by having however many plans going at once, and contingencies, and by being crafty and making lying into a way of life." A beat. "And a way of death, and even with the whole thing spelled out for me, I went off on the wrong track for hours. You're smarter than I am, and you're more experienced, and you're faster and more graceful and stronger. And you're a prisoner here. So of course I don't trust you, even though we're coordinating, not competing, because I don't see any reason for you to trust me." And as long as he thinks Jedao has reason to have plans in place against him, he's going to expect that Jedao will.
"But you're right, I invited you on -- in my cabin, I know it's not my ship," even though the illusion is giving him a lot of comfort. "I pointed you at a problem. Because I need you on it, or someone as smart as you, and because I can't think of a better way to start getting that trust in than working together on something." And that's a tactic he employed on the Cant -- getting suspicious people to engage in projects with each other. It even worked sometimes.
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