“I know everything about it that matters here. You never tried anything back on Earth that you didn’t know you could be best at. If you weren’t best, right from the start, then you ran away from it. True or false?”
Dabeet wanted to lash out with some cruel retort, but everything that came to mind was foolish. Childish. Because there was no rational answer. “That’s true,” he said, grudgingly.
“When you got here, we all called you ‘Test Boy,’ because it was the only thing you were willing to do, because it was the only thing you were really good at. Anything you actually had to work at to learn, you hid from. The battleroom, martial arts, even the calisthenics that keep our bones strong and straight—anything that everyone else was good at, and you weren’t, you didn’t even try to learn. So … Test Boy.”
“Why do you say it like it was … contemptible?”
“Because it is,” said Monkey. “You and I are in this corridor, counting alcoves and looking for passages, because the whole station is in danger, partly because of decisions you made. And you’re angry at me because you don’t know as much as I do about things I’ve done all my life. That’s not the contemptible part. What’s contemptible is that you could have been better than you are by now, and you chose not to, because you couldn’t win at it.”
“But schoolwork isn’t nothing. My being good at that isn’t—”
“We’re training to go out into space, discovering goldilocks planets and exploring them and reporting on life-forms and habitability, and getting perfect scores on schoolroom tests won’t prepare you for that in any way.”
“They’re teaching us subjects that we need to know in order—”
“No, Dabeet. No and no and no. Think what it means to take a test in a class. They say they’re giving us problems that we’re supposed to solve. But that’s never true, is it? Because they give us problems to which the solutions are already known. That’s why they’re able to give us grades. So all you do in classroom tests is solve problems that have already been solved.”
Dabeet had never thought of it that way.
“Even that coded message you got, the one that Zhang He helped you with—it wasn’t a real problem, it was a test, because there was already a known solution. You didn’t know it, but you knew how to get it, and you would have solved it eventually, even without Zhang’s help, because you knew there was a solution or it wouldn’t have been sent to you. Right? All you know how to do is solve solvable problems.”
“Outguess the teachers.”
“You aren’t guessing,” said Monkey. “You really do figure things out. But there’s no pressure, because you know that somebody, somewhere, already knows the answer, which means there is an answer.”
“Well, what’s the point of solving problems when there isn’t an answer?”
“That’s how we’re going to spend our lives, Dabeet. When we go down to a planet, we’ll have procedures we’re supposed to follow—but only as long as those procedures yield desirable results. We have to know when to stop following them because they’re not working, or they’re counterproductive.”
“They’ve never been solved,” said Dabeet. “So we don’t even know if there is a solution.”
“If we fail spectacularly, everybody dies except the orbital team. If we find out that there’s no way humans can establish any kind of permanent base on a planet, then we leave, right? And we don’t even count that as a failure, because we now know that it’s a goldilocks planet that, for whatever reasons we report, is off-limits for settlement. We go there with a test question—‘Is this planet a potential human habitat?’—and if we do our work properly, then either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will be the right answer.”
“They sent me a coded message because they knew I’d solve it,” said Dabeet. “They think of me as Test Boy, too.”
“No, you had to solve it, I mean, there was nothing wrong with that. But why did they send it? Why do they want you to do the things they’ve told you to do? What will really happen to your mother? Why haven’t you enlisted your secret pal on the ansible to protect her? Why are you letting them manipulate you and put all of us in danger?”
Dabeet covered his face with his hands. “Because she’s the only person in the whole human race who cares whether I live or die.”
“Well, I care,” said Monkey. “Though I doubt I care as much as she does.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on, but how can I know whether I’m right?”
“Exactly the problem,” said Monkey. “You can’t know whether you’ve found the right answer because there is no right answer. This isn’t a problem to which a solution is already known. But you have to be ready to adapt to whatever happens. And here’s what doesn’t work: trying to solve it by yourself. On classroom tests, if you don’t solve it alone, it’s called cheating and they kick you out of school. But in space, if you try to solve things alone, you endanger everybody because we’re all in it together, and no one person can think of everything.”
“I get it, I get it,” whispered Dabeet. “I’m the most stupid useless person here because I don’t have any useful skill.”
“It’s not about you,” said Monkey. “It’s not about whether you’re the most of this or the least of that. It’s about the whole community that lives in this fragile habitat. I’m sounding like my own father now, but it’s the lesson we all learned by the time we were four. We never, never, never do anything without telling somebody else what we’re doing, and where, and why, and for how long, because our lives all depend on knowing everything about everybody else.”
“I shouldn’t have kept my problem a secret.”
“Obviously,” said Monkey. “And when Zhang He realized that whatever was going on, it was a potential threat to all of us, he told everybody in our building club. The people who actually know you and work with you. We know you’re not stupid, but we also know you do everything solo, and we decided we couldn’t let you keep acting like that because it was going to get us all killed.”
“You couldn’t have known that, because you didn’t know about the threat from—”
“We know all about the threat from people thinking they can fix big problems without the embarrassment of telling other people how they screwed up. When it affects everybody, there’s no shame in telling about your mistakes and the potential bad results. Until you learn that, you can’t be trusted on any exploratory team.”
“The South Americans have me jumping through hoops.”
“Which means they almost certainly aren’t South Americans at all. Oh, the people who kidnapped you probably are, but they’re obeying somebody else’s orders.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“Somebody who was tracking you. You. Why would your name even come up in any South American country?”
“Because of my test scores.”
“If it’s because of your test scores, then they really are stupid and our danger is probably a great deal less, though they could still screw up and kill us all. Dabeet, haven’t you followed any news reports from Earth? Battle School students and graduates back on Earth are getting kidnapped, only they don’t get returned, like you did. But you were kidnapped before all the other kidnappings, weren’t you?”
“I don’t know. I heard of a couple, so…” Dabeet thought carefully about what that could mean. What if his kidnapping wasn’t an isolated event? What if it was merely an early kidnapping? “Those kids were taken because they were trained military leaders.”
“And you were a trained test-taker. Test-taking is an obedience test. Will you do what the test tells you to do?”
“So I wasn’t picked because of my ability,” said Dabeet. “I was picked because I follow instructions. Because if they told me the right story, I’d betray everybody in Fleet School.”
“There’s no shame in that,” said Monkey. “They didn’t choose you because you wanted to be a traitor, they chose you because you were extremely skilled
at figuring out very hard problems with known solutions, and because you had one person in the whole world that you loved.”
“I don’t even know if I love her,” said Dabeet. “She isn’t even my biological mother. No genetic connection. All I know is that she loves me.”
“Do you think the people who kidnapped you were smart enough to figure all that out?”
Dabeet shook his head. “I wondered how they knew so much about me,” said Dabeet.
“Come on, Dabeet, you were so proud of being smart that it didn’t surprise you at all that they found you.”
Dabeet was almost dizzy with Monkey’s heartless, relentless cataloguing of his mistakes and ignorance. “You figured it out.”
“I figured things out mostly because I walked these corridors with you and you also told me about your mom and the South Americans. Nobody else knew all that, and neither did anybody on Earth. So who is really behind this? Not some South American country trying to get the IF to intervene. Maybe those clowns who took you believe that, but whoever told them about you, whoever came up with whatever asinine plan they’re following, that’s who figured out that you were the one they needed.”
“And who was that?” asked Dabeet.
“Nobody knows who’s taking all those Battle School alumni,” said Monkey. “But whoever it is has found a way to track every one of them, wherever they went all over the world.”
“Maybe it’s a whole bunch of countries taking the kids.”
“No, Dabeet. Read the news. All the countries used legal process before Battle School even closed down. Very openly. All the kids were repatriated to their legal country of origin. The kidnappers are taking them somewhere else. Or killing them.”
“But why take me? The most ignorant kid in Fleet School, the least experienced in space—”
“They knew you’d be feeling disconnected. No loyalty to Fleet School, no friends,” said Monkey. “Easy to intimidate.”
“Scaring me doesn’t confer on me the competence to do anything. And who is it who’s manipulating me?”
“I don’t know,” said Monkey. “But that’s a real question. We don’t know if there is a solution. Maybe all my assumptions are wrong. There’s no answer key that will be compared to our decisions and checked off whenever we get an answer wrong.”
“I’m so out of my league.”
“By ourselves, we all are. Together, maybe just as badly off. But with more brains working on it, bringing different experiences and perspectives to the problem, maybe we can come up with better hypotheses.”
“I get it now, Monkey, I really do. It would be insane for me to keep this secret any longer.”
“Well, don’t go crazy on me here,” said Monkey. “You don’t know that there isn’t a co-conspirator here on the station.”
“You mean, besides me.”
“You’re not a conspirator, you’re a tool. Like somebody who holds up a bank because the real robbers are holding their family hostage.”
“If there’s another conspirator, then what’s with all the door-opening?”
“If investigators afterward are steered to evidence showing that you opened the doors and you let them in—because they held your mother hostage—then they’re not going to look to see who the real inside guys were here in Fleet School, are they?”
“So I’m not just a tool, I’m the patsy.”
“See? Isn’t it a lot more fun to count alcoves in the corridor?”
“When did you figure all this out?” asked Dabeet.
She looked at him in consternation. “I haven’t figured anything out. We don’t know if we’re right about anything. I’ve been brainstorming this with you right now, I only know what I think of when I hear myself say it. Like you. That’s how working things out as a team works.”
Dabeet could only agree with her. “Of course I’m only really useful because I’m the sole witness of the original kidnapping. I mean, this is bound to work out like doing the wall structures in the battleroom. You or Zhang He or somebody will take over and make all the plans and—”
“Maybe that’s how it’ll go,” said Monkey. “So what?”
“I’m just saying, it’s not like I’m useful for anything except telling everybody how stupid I am.”
“Self-pity—that’ll make them all respect you.”
“I’m a traitor. Nobody’s going to respect me.”
“Well, if you tell us your history, and then you shut us all out the way you did with the wall-building team, then é, that’s right, everybody else will solve the problem without you because you’ll do your normal thing and refuse to take part. Otherwise, you’ll be part of the team, and you’ll think of whatever you think of, and so will everybody else. And nobody will care who thought of what, as long as it works.”
“In utopia, maybe. People care who thinks of stuff.”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s right, you’re right. We had a major system failure on my ship when we were three months out of the nearest port. The problem was enormously technical so let me just summarize it by saying that there wasn’t enough breathable air to get us all to a port alive. People set up all kinds of possible solutions, including having about half of us voluntarily step out into space so there’d be enough air for the remaining half.”
“Would they have done that?” asked Dabeet.
“Maybe. We’ll never know. Because somebody thought of a much better idea that involved an alteration in the way the hydroponics functioned. We’d stop growing food crops and convert everything to oxygen production—a different set of plants—but it could be done in time. And we did it, and it worked, and nobody had to leave the ship.”
Dabeet nodded. “You thought of the solution,” he said.
“I hung around in the hydroponics fields a lot because it was fresh air. I used to pretend I was on Earth and I was in a meadow. Only it was a meadow stacked up in ten layers under artificial sunlight.”
“So it was you.”
“In recognition of my valuable contribution, my parents’ corporation paid for my place here in Fleet School. This is my prize—meeting you and maybe getting blown to smithereens by the criminals who are manipulating you.”
“So it does matter who thinks up solutions.”
“I was also the person who screwed up the oxygen-delivery system in the first place,” said Monkey.
Dabeet digested that for a while.
“It was a clumsy accident but I immediately told my parents what I had done and they told the ship staff and that’s when everybody started brainstorming solutions.”
“So you were the idiot who caused it and the genius who solved it.”
“Happens that way a lot,” said Monkey. “But we were on a ship, and even though it was corporate we long since became like family to each other. Nobody condemned me for my mistake, because they all knew that everybody makes mistakes, and I hadn’t tried to hide it, so there was still maybe time enough to do something before we all died.”
“Did I tell anybody when there was still time?” asked Dabeet.
“Well, I’m the first student you told, so … we’ll find out if this leaves us enough time.”
“So maybe we should go tell everybody else on the wall squad,” said Dabeet.
“Are we through mapping this interior corridor?”
“No, but—”
“Let’s go to them with data. Actual knowledge. Maybe even some potential ideas for a plan.”
“Though we still don’t have any idea what the raiders will do, when and if they actually raid Fleet School.”
“Here’s what I think, based on what you’ve told me so far. I think that whoever is behind all the kidnappings, yours and everybody else’s, I think it’s somebody who hates Battle School and every kid who was ever in it.”
“But this isn’t—”
“It’s the same Lagrange-point station that used to be Battle School. Let’s say it was somebody who was up here and washed out. Somebody familiar with the l
ayout of the station. And they hate this place. They—he or she—they want to punish everybody. What happens if that’s the motive behind all the kidnappings?”
“They aren’t coming here to hold us all hostage so the IF will intervene on Earth,” said Dabeet.
“They’re coming here to kill everybody,” said Monkey.
“So they don’t even have to come inside,” said Dabeet. “Just breach the hull and—”
“Too many hulls, so it isn’t feasible, and besides, they don’t just want to destroy Battle School or Fleet School or whatever we are. They want to punish the school and everybody who was ever in it.”
“They want the Fleet to find the bodies,” said Dabeet. “And not just dead from oxygen deprivation. Dead with blood and guts everywhere.”
“Dead so that when the bodies of children are shown on the nets back on Earth and out in space, it makes everybody so sick and angry, so insanely furious, that…”
When her voice trailed off, Dabeet prompted her. “So insanely furious that what?”
“I have no idea. And I hope I’m completely wrong. But I think we need to act as if that is their plan.”
“You mean, we should treat them as killers even before they’ve killed anybody,” said Dabeet.
“That’s what we need to discuss, don’t you think?”
14
Submission from Dabeet Ochoa in Basic Decision-Making 01.
The assignment is to explain the difference between the decision-making process in exploratory expeditions as opposed to military ones.
The only important differences are (1) the tools used and (2) the overall imperative not to harm the enemy.
In all other ways, the geology, atmospherics, and biota of a thitherto unknown planet are the enemy, in that they conceal the means they would use to destroy us, they cannot be trusted to act as they seem arrayed to act, and they adapt their tactics to our actions, including direct assault and passive reconnaissance. Also, it remains true that no plan we make will survive first contact with the enemy.
Instead of shuddering and pretending that our presence is not an assault on a planet whose systems are determined to resist us, let us simply admit that our entire program of exploration and colonization is designed to promote the dispersal and therefore survival of the human race regardless of the fact that this cannot possibly be accomplished in any case without extensive collateral damage to the enemy—the planets and ecosystems into which we obtrude ourselves.