1. “I take it there was no real choice?”
2. “Indeed. That was the judgment I had to act upon.”
3. “Your own?”
4. “Partially. I was part of the decision-making process, though even if I’d disagreed I might still have acted as I did. That’s what strategic planning is there for.”
5. “It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.”
6. “Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally.”
7. “A terrible waste, three Orbitals. A responsibility.”
8. The avatar shrugged. “An Orbital is just unconscious matter, even if it does represent a lot of effort and expended energy. Their Minds were already safe, long gone. The human deaths were what I found affecting.”
9. “Did many people die?”
10. “Three thousand four hundred and ninety-two.”
11. “Out of how many?”
12. “Three hundred and ten million.”
13. “A small proportion.”
14. “It’s always one hundred percent for the individual concerned.”
15. “Still.”
16. “No, no Still,” the avatar said, shaking its head. Light slid across its silver skin.
17. “How did the few hundred million survive?”
18. “Shipped out, mostly. About twenty percent were evacuated in underground cars; they work as lifeboats. There are lots of ways to survive: you can move whole Orbitals if you have the time, or you can ship people out, or—short-term—use underground cars or other transport systems, or just suits. On a very few occasions entire Orbitals have been evacuated by storage/transmission; the human bodies were left inert after their mind-states were zapped away. Though that doesn’t always save you, if the storing substrate’s slagged too before it can transmit onward.”
19. “And the ones who didn’t get away?”
20. “All knew the choice they were making. Some had lost loved ones, some were, I suppose, mad, but nobody was sure enough to deny them their choice, some were old and/or tired of life, and some left it too late to escape either corporeally or by zapping after watching the fun, or something went wrong with their transport or mind-state record or transmission. Some held beliefs that caused them to stay.” The avatar fixed its gaze on Ziller’s. “Save for the ones who experienced equipment malfunctions, I recorded every one of those deaths, Ziller. I didn’t want them to be faceless, I didn’t want to be able to forget.”
21. “That was ghoulish, wasn’t it?”
22. “Call it what you want. It was something I felt I had to do. War can alter your perceptions, change your sense of values. I didn’t want to feel that what I was doing was anything other than momentous and horrific; even, in some first principles sense, barbaric. I sent drones, micro-missiles, camera platforms and bugs down to those three Orbitals. I watched each of those people die. Some went in less than the blink of an eye, obliterated by my own energy weapons or annihilated by the warheads I’d Displaced. Some took only a little longer, incinerated by the radiation or torn to pieces by the blast fronts. Some died quite slowly, thrown tumbling into space to cough blood which turned to pink ice in front of their freezing eyes, or found themselves suddenly weightless as the ground fell away beneath their feet and the atmosphere around them lifted off into the vacuum like a tent caught in a gale, so that they gasped their way to death.
23. “Most of them I could have rescued; the same Displacers I was using to bombard the place could have sucked them off it, and as a last resort my effectors might have plucked their mind-states from their heads even as their bodies froze or burned around them. There was ample time.”
24. “But you left them.”
25. “Yes.”
26. “And watched them.”
27. “Yes.”
28. “Still, it was their choice to stay.”
29. “Indeed.”
30. “And did you ask their permission to record their death throes?”
31. “No. If they would hand me the responsibility for killing them, they could at least indulge me in that. I did tell all concerned what I would be doing beforehand. That information saved a few. It did attract criticism, though. Some people felt it was insensitive.”
32. “And what did you feel?”
33. “Appalled. Compassion. Despair. Detached. Elated. God-like. Guilty. Horrified. Miserable. Pleased. Powerfill. Responsible. Soiled. Sorrowful.”
34. “Elated? Pleased?”
35. “Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly. I felt pleasure that my weapon and sensory systems were working as they were supposed to. I felt pleasure that despite my misgivings I was able to do my duty and act as I had determined a fully morally responsible agent ought to, in the circumstances.”