She’d lived her whole life in—or occasionally and clandestinely just outside—the State Building on Laconia. Since she’d been a toddler, other children had been brought in to be her friends and classmates. Usually from the most favored families of the empire, but sometimes because her father wanted her to know a variety of kinds of people. He wanted her to have as close as she could get to a normal life. To be as close as she could be to a normal fourteen-year-old. And it worked as well as it worked, but since she only had her own life to judge from, she couldn’t really say how successful it had been.
She felt more like she had friendly acquaintances than actual friends. Muriel Cowper and Shan Ellison particularly treated her best, or at least most like they treated other students in her peer group.
And then there was Connor Weigel, who had been in her classes almost as long as she’d had them. He had a special place in her heart that she found herself curiously unwilling to examine.
If she was lonely—and she assumed she was—she didn’t have anything to compare it against. If everything in the world was red, no one would know it. Being everywhere was just as good a way to be invisible as not being anywhere. It was contrast that gave things shape. Brightness made darkness. Fullness made emptiness. Loneliness defined the borders of whatever not-loneliness was called. They were comparative.
She wondered if life and death were like that too. Or life and not-life, anyway.
“What killed them?” she asked, opening her eyes. Everything looked blue. “Your Romans, I mean.”
“Well, that’s the next step, isn’t it?” Colonel Ilich said. “Figuring that out and then building a strategy around what to do about it. We know, whatever it is, it’s still out there. We’ve seen it react to things that we do.”
“The thing on the Tempest,” Teresa said. She’d seen the briefing on it. The first time Admiral Trejo used the Magnetar-class ship’s main weapon in normal space, something had happened that knocked out people’s consciousness all through Sol system for a few minutes and left a visual distortion on the ship itself, locked to its frame of reference. It was why James Holden had come to the palace, which was really the aspect of it that had the biggest impact on her.
“Exactly,” Ilich said. He rolled onto his belly and propped himself up on his elbows to look at her. Eye contact was how he signaled that something he said was important. “It’s the most serious threat to our security. Either the Romans died because they ran up against some natural force that they weren’t prepared for, or because an enemy killed them. That’s what we’re finding out first.”
“How?” she asked.
“We don’t know how they killed the Romans. We’re still just at the edge of understanding what they were compared to us.”
“No. I mean how are we finding out if it was an enemy or a natural force?”
Colonel Ilich nodded to say it was a good question. He pulled out his handheld, tapped on it a few times, and brought up a grid.
TERESA
COOPERATES
JASON
COOPERATES
JASON
DEFECTS
T3, J3
T4, J0
TERESA
DEFECTS
T0, J4
T2, J2
“Prisoner’s dilemma,” Teresa said.
“You remember how it works?”
“We both decide without talking whether to cooperate or defect. If we both cooperate, we both get three points. If only one of us cooperates, they don’t get any points and the defector gets four. If we both defect, we both get two. The problem is that no matter what you choose to do, I’m better off defecting. I get four instead of three if you cooperate or else two instead of nothing if you defect. So I should always defect. But since the same logic applies to you, you should always defect too. And then we wind up both making fewer points than if we’d cooperated.”
“So how do you fix that?”
“You don’t. It’s like saying ‘This statement is false.’ It’s just a hole in logic,” Teresa said. “I mean . . . isn’t it?”
“Not if you play it more than once,” Colonel Ilich said. “You play it over and over and over for a really long time. Every time the other player defects, you defect the next time. And then you go back to cooperating. It’s called tit for tat. There’s a pure game theory analysis of it I can give you if you want, but you don’t need it for this.”
Teresa nodded, but slowly. Her head was thick, the way it got when she was thinking about something without quite being conscious of what it was. Usually something interesting came up shortly afterward. She liked the feeling.
“Think of it like you were training Muskrat back when she was a puppy,” Ilich said. “The puppy wets the rug, and you scold it. You don’t go on scolding it forever. Just once, when it happens, and then you go back to playing with it and petting it and treating it like a puppy. It defects, then you defect, then you go back to cooperating.”
“Until it figures out that there’s a better strategy,” Teresa said.
“And it changes its behavior. It’s the most basic, simplest way we can negotiate with something we can’t talk to. But what if you do the same thing with the tide? Punish the waves for getting the rug wet?”
Teresa scowled.
“Exactly,” Colonel Ilich said as if she’d spoken aloud. “If you scold the tide, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t learn. And most of all, it doesn’t change. Your father is going to play tit for tat with the force that killed the Romans. And we’re going to see if it changes its behavior. If it doesn’t, we’ll take the hypothesis that they ran up against a law of nature like gravity making tides or the speed of light. Then we can study it, and find ways around it. But if it changes . . .”
“Then we’ll know it’s alive.”
“That’s the difference between exploration and negotiating,” Colonel Ilich said, pointing at her. She felt the bloom of pleasure that she always got when she’d answered a knotty problem well, but something nagged at her.
“But it killed the Romans.”
“War’s a kind of negotiation too,” he said.
Teresa’s rooms were in the north wing of the State Building, as were her father’s. It was the only home she’d ever had. A bedroom built to military specifications, a private bathroom, and the room that had been her playroom and was now her office, the difference being mostly cosmetic. When she’d been ready to strip away the decorations of cartoon dinosaurs and puppies, she’d said so, and the next day a designer had come to help her choose a new color scheme and layout. Her corner of the State Building wasn’t large or ostentatious, but it was hers to customize and re-create. Her little bubble of autonomy.
She’d chosen to make the office look like a science station. Her desk was tall enough to stand at, but also had long-legged stools along the side if she chose to sit. The east wall was a single screen set to run animations of simple mathematical and geometrical proofs when she wasn’t watching a news or entertainment feed. It wasn’t that she understood all the math, but she thought it was pretty. There was an elegance to the proofs, and having them there made her more aware of her intelligence. She liked being aware of her intelligence.