Page 76 - Demo

“My parents weren’t lowlifes. And I had a norma-”
“Zegema Beach? Risa? Normal? Those weren’t your parents. They were your custodians. Your legal ‘guardians.’ You were shown an imaginary paradise to strive for. Not their perfect utopias, their data-palaces and holographic galaxies. They took you to an amusement park and told you it was the standard of life.”
“Why not any other justiciar, if there are others?”
“Because you were different. Get that through your thick skull. You never left the cave, and yet found true justice within it. You found your partner before Achlys could predict it. You keep defying her predictions. You fascinate her. She sends you her most complex problems, and watches with all of her eyes your every move. You are beholden to two ideas, you see, and she cannot understand that. You work to do good by the GalCop and its people, yes, but you work for them too. You are pulled in different directions because you have love for some one, rather than just the many. Because of that, she forgoes the normal proxy networks and comm channels to have your case history uplinked directly to her.”
“So that’s why. You need my communications to find this ‘Achlys’. What will you do then?” I concluded.
“Destroy her. Justice is something only the sapient can truly grasp (Alfarabi 943, p. 3939, s. 69). And like a pole star, the whole system will fall with her. (Kongzi 221BCE, 2.1) Those unclassed ‘founders’ will have to commingle with the corpse of their parent’s dreams.”
“And what will come after? What if it is more unjust than Achlys? Would you forsake this apparently middling present for a future unknown? (Oakeshott 1956, 169)
“I would trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday, so that we could fight to make today better.” he pleaded.
I thought. Had I been played like a fool? Was it all a lie? Had I never escaped that old Earthen allegory? What was the harm in handing it to him, my code? I thought of them. What would they do? Would the—he was right. How did he know about them?