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would have lost most of her chest cavity. Also present were Vanessa, Ari, Admiral Alemsegad, Moon, Marine Captain Reddy, and Choi, a colleague of Moon’s, formerly an Anjulan police officer of considerable rank.
    “Streets are pretty quiet,” Choi was saying, with that East-Asian stilt to his English that was the standard Anjulan accent. “I’m not a social psychologist, but there’s going to be a big problem assimilating this. Many won’t accept it. Right now they’re stunned, they don’t know how to process it. But that doesn’t mean that when they do process it, we’ll like how they do it.”
    All com networks had been taken over, forced to run footage of Sandy’s discoveries, and the discoveries that were now continuing to pour out from the Marines that had now taken over the underground facility. Ari had suggested they just run the footage live and unedited, with jerky visuals, foul trooper language and all. Certainly, it was more effective that way, more authentic to a disbelieving public. On another channel were Anjulan rebels, transmitting from a Parliament office, scrolling through lists of names and inviting Pyeongwha citizens to come forward with names of their own, with photographs, medical records and DNA samples, if possible. They were getting a lot of response, but it was not overwhelming. Most of the security forces, the occupiers agreed, had not been eliminated, but had merely gone to ground, sheltered by the populace. Even with these new revelations, it was unclear which way the population would go.
    “It’s just the most fucking amazing thing,” Ari said, a steaming cup of chai in hand, looking worn and dazed. He had a moustache now, which Sandy didn’t think she liked. And he looked older. “The whole thing’s a giant, collective, mutually-agreed-upon brain fuck. I mean, they knew. They had to have known, there were so many clues, so few other alternatives . . .”
    “Oh, they knew!” Moon said loudly, shaking with emotion. “They all knew, half the damn population!”
    “It’s a feedback loop,” said Ari. “In most societies the population splits fifty-fifty on any question, but the genetic modifications made here didn’t stop once NCT took off; they accelerated. They were genetically pre-selecting the most well-disposed toward the technology, and those changes were in turn shaping the direction of NCT itself. Like a feedback loop on an unsecured microphone—sound produces vibration, vibration produces sound, round in circles until all you’re left with is out of control squealing.”
    “It’s no different from what we’ve seen in human societies before,” said Vanessa. “It’s just another variation of authoritarianism. We’ve just never seen it interact with technology like this before.”
    The footage from preliminary debriefings in the medical facility was the most chilling of all. Ordinary men and women, highly qualified, family people with no apparent psychological disorders, who saw absolutely nothing wrong in their daily work. Not in the killing, not in the experiments, and not in some of the truly horrific things that were emerging on the lower levels.
    “All human psychology has a natural inclination toward consensus,” Sandy said tiredly from her reclining chair. “NCT is a technology that actively creates consensus. With uplink technology it works like a kind of mass telepathy, a collectivisation. And it’s exhilarating, I bet. Made them heaps productive, wealthy, talented. I worried about it all the time in GIs. Tacnet and instantaneous communication is just so immersive, some come to not like the real world half as much. They’d rather stay connected all the time.
    “You add that to the genetic tinkering they were doing, actively breeding out the non-NCT compliant as an economic and social measure . . . at some point it just reaches some really scary place that the rest of us unconnected just can’t process; a place where people start to practise