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mass slaughter and not see the problem. Their value structure is completely consumed into the NCT network.”
    “There is a report,” said Alemsegad, his lanky frame lounged on a chair. His manner was sparse, inscrutable, his sentences short. Ethiopian heritage, Sandy guessed. “A classified report. Fleet Intelligence. On NCT and brain structure. The network software was changing brain structure.”
    “All uplinks do that,” said Ari. “Ours too.”
    Alemsegad shook his head. “Not just increasing existing pathways. Overall structure, composition, processing order. Actively, short term, not long term.”
    “Shit,” Vanessa murmured, almost as fascinated as horrified. “Really?”
    “Write new software, new brain structure appears. Two years, maybe less. So, at what point does the brain write the software? Or the software write the brain?”
    Silence in the room. Moon and Choi looked particularly uncomfortable. Almost certainly they’d had some form of NCT augmentation. The technology was variable, as were degrees of augmentation. Many non-compliants had rewritten their implant software, dialed it down, and escaped the worst effects. But nearly everyone on Pyeongwha had it done. It’d been mandatory for twenty-four years now, and semi-mandatory for another forty before that.
    Neural cluster tech wasn’t so different from League synthetic biology, though. Human psychology had been adjusting to neural implants for a long time now—several hundred years, with the more basic tech. League tech copied natural brain function to the degree that the human brain did not recognise it as foreign, and that caused the brain to naturally rewire itself, certainly, in ways that were still surprising many researchers, growing new pathways to cope with network information flows that could never occur in nature. NCT was different in that it allowed a lot more two-way interaction, telling the brain what to do in ways that League tech, being purposely more passive, didn’t.
    Could synthetic biological implants cause a brain to rewire itself to look more like the implant and less like the original brain? As an entirely synthetic entity herself, Sandy didn’t like the idea. If regular organic brains were that rewritable, what did it say of a GI’s chances? And yet, she thought, it might explain some things. League researchers designing GI tech for the war hadn’t been like peacetime scientists, sharing information in the spirit of open discovery. They’d been shut away in massively funded, isolated institutions, concentrating on the sole purpose of building better fighting machines. Sandy knew from experience they’d been less than honest about exactly what they’d discovered, and how GIs really worked—even with each other.
    “I don’t buy it,” Sandy decided. There was still a moral issue at play, after all. “Blame the technology. Maybe NCT leans them in one direction, but people still get to choose.”
    “And you didn’t hear it from me,” Alemsegad finished, giving Sandy a long, skeptical look. That didn’t surprise her. A lot of Fleet officers remained cool toward her. They’d thought the Federation’s war against the League had been a war to defeat the scourge of artificial humanity—GIs, like her. That it had actually been about liberating, or presenting the choice of liberation, to the most advanced GIs, was not something that a lot of them accepted. She could see it in his eyes as he looked at her: I lost all of those good friends for this?
    “So how do we do this?” Vanessa asked Moon and Choi. “You two know the place. How many of the population are as hardcore as the administration?”
    “It’s not how many are that hardcore,” said Choi, shaking his head. “It’s how many are prepared to accept an alternative. When something is your whole world, it’s hard to believe it’s not true, even when someone shows you proof.”
    “There will be conspiracy stories,” Moon agreed, nodding vigorously.