Empire Games Series, Book 1(56)

COL. SMITH: Sure. It’s a very neat bit of engineering—a subdermal implant. Part of it is an ultra-low-powered computing device powered by a fuel cell running off blood glucose. The other part is a color e-ink display embedded just under the skin. Basically it’s a programmable tattoo. Properly equipped operatives like Rita—once we’ve recruited them from candidates among DRAGON’S TEETH—will be able to use the pressure-sensitive switches in the tattoo to feed the key generator the parameters of a trigger engram. Then it generates the knot and displays it on the skin of her forearm. It fluoresces under UV light, so she can see it in the dark if necessary. Or she can blank the display, in which case the adversary would need to X-ray her arm to realize she has an implant. I’m sure we’ll be able to do better in time, but for now it means she can access any time line for which she has a set of knotspace coordinates.

AGENT O’NEILL: Knotspace—

COL. SMITH: The trigger engrams resemble complex knots with a couple of standard topological deformations. Vary the deformations and you vary the destination time line. There’s some kind of quantization function, but basically the key can generate engrams for anywhere we’ve ever been and several billion time lines we haven’t visited yet.

AGENT O’NEILL: Sounds dangerous.

COL. SMITH: Yes, it is, in multiple ways. She could get lost in para-time—although the implant retains a stack-based memory of past engrams, so she can jaunt backward as well as forward. But there are other dangers. She could miss a digit and end up somewhere with no breathable atmosphere. There are some safeties—she can’t jaunt inside a solid object—but experimentation is discouraged. On the other hand, we can now send Rita to any time line we’ve visited.

DR. SCRANTON: And she’s a lot less conspicuous than a Predator C or a Rivet Joint aircraft.

AGENT GOMEZ: Doesn’t burn as much jet fuel either, I’ll bet.

COL. SMITH: Human intelligence has been the Cinderella of the intelligence services ever since the early 1960s when we were up against the closed societies of the Communist bloc. Look at the National Clandestine Service’s budget compared to the NSA’s, and weep. But ELINT and SIGINT won’t get you anywhere if the targets haven’t invented the vacuum tube yet and are still coordinating by smoke signals or semaphore. We’ve nearly forgotten how to do old-fashioned spycraft, let alone motivate Generation Z slackers to stay loyal to an abstraction while they’re in the pressure cooker. But the best-quality agents can deliver more and better intelligence than any given billion dollars’ worth of network sniffers. And that’s before we start thinking in terms of executive ops—

DR. SCRANTON: Let’s not go there, Eric. We’re not in that business anymore. I hope.

AGENT O’NEILL: But, but that assumes we’re looking at an adversary, doesn’t it? I thought all we’d found so far were Stone Age head-bangers? And the stuff in time line four, of course. The archaeological stuff.

DR. SCRANTON: BLACK RAIN.

AGENT O’NEILL: But we don’t know who they are yet! I mean, you talked about closed societies, like the Soviet Union—running agents in there always ended in tears. How is this any different?

COL. SMITH: The big difference is that Rita can jaunt. It’s very hard to trap a world-walker who’s expecting trouble: she can just click her heels and not be in Kansas anytime she wants.

DR. SCRANTON: The only way they can nail her is if they know about world-walkers and are expecting one. Now, it’s remotely possible that BLACK RAIN is where the Clan survivors have gone—but they’ve historically shown a strong preference for working under cover. So the chances of the BLACK RAIN people being able to grab her are slim. I’m more concerned with how we’re going to hang on to her, once she realizes she can go anywhere she likes.

COL. SMITH: I think we’re going to need superego handles.

AGENT O’NEILL: What?

DR. SCRANTON: Do tell.

COL. SMITH: We’ve got her relationship with her family. That’s a subconscious drive; call it her id. We’ve got her organizational relationship with us—ego level, she knows we trained her and pay her. And there’s a bit of idealism going on behind that carefully controlled shell—if BLACK RAIN is a closed society, I think we can count on her basic loyalty to bring her home. But to cement it on top, I want to give her a superego drive. A rational long-term explanation for why she should stick with us and not defect or desert. So I’m going to run her through the Valley of the Gate, give her the dog and pony tour, and see if the implications spook her as much as they spook everyone else.

AGENT GOMEZ: This is your motivational big stick, huh? It’s a bit limp—

COL. SMITH: On the contrary. Once she knows about the Valley, she’ll know rationally that she can run as far as she wants but she can’t hide. She can hide from us, but she can’t hide from them.

AGENT GOMEZ: Tenuous, very tenuous.

COL. SMITH: You really think so? Listen, I’ve spent some time with Rita now, and I think I’ve got her measure. She’s a high-functioning introvert, so she doesn’t open up easily—this is a good profile in a HUMINT asset. It means she’s deceptively compliant, even slippery. But she’s not a perfectly spherical human-shaped object of uniform density. Beckstein’s meddling counterculture mother picked the adoption family well. What Rita’s really about is her grandfather. She pretty much worships him, and my team finally worked out why Beckstein mère picked him—