Free The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross Page B

because she looks
at me bleakly and says, "Yes." I nearly bite my tongue. (Foreign
female
professor of philosophy in the snobbish halls of a New England college.
Worse: non-WASP, judging from the Irish accent.) "Some other time. What
was the topic of your thesis again?"
    Is it my imagination or does she sound
half-amused? This isn't part of the script: we're meant to go for a
walk and talk about things where we can't be overheard, not ad-lib it
in a café. Plus, she thinks I'm from the Foreign
Office. What the hell does she expect me to say, early Latin
literature? "It's about"—I mentally cross my fingers—"a proof of
polynomial-time completeness in the traversal of Hamiltonian networks.
And its implications."
    She sits up a bit straighter. "Oh, right. That's interesting."
    I shrug. "It's what I do for a living. Among
other things. Where do your research interests lie?"
    The businessman stands up, folds his newspaper,
and leaves.
    "Reasoning under conditions of uncertainty." She
squints at me slightly. "Not prior probabilities stuff, Bayesian
reasoning based on statistics—but reasoning where there are no
evidential bases."
    I play dumb: suddenly my heart is hammering
between my ribs. "And is this useful?"
    She looks amused. "It pays the bills."
    "Really?"
    The amusement vanishes. "Eighty percent of the
philosophical logic research in this country is paid for by the
Pentagon, Bob. If you want to work here you'll need to get your head
around that fact."
    "Eighty percent—" I must look dumbfounded,
because something goes click and she switches out of her
half-sardonic Brief Encounter mode and into full professorial
flow: "A philosophy professor earns about thirty thousand bucks and
costs maybe another five thousand a year in office space and chalk. A
marine earns around fifteen thousand bucks and costs maybe another
hundred thousand a year in barrack space, ammunition, transport, fuel,
weapons, VA expenses, and so on. Supporting all the philosophy
departments of the USA costs about as much as funding a single
battalion of marines." She looks wryly amused. "They're looking for a
breakthrough. Knowing how to deconstruct any opponent's ideological
infrastructure and derive self-propagating conceptual viruses based on
its blind spots, for example. That sort of thing would give them a real
strategic edge: their psych-ops people would be
able to make enemies surrender without firing a shot, and do so
reliably. Cybernetics and game theory won them the Cold War, so paying
for philosophers is militarily more sensible than paying for an extra
company of marines, don't you think?"
    "That's"—I shake my head—"logical, but weird." No
weirder than what they pay me to do.
    She snorts. "It's not exceptional. Did you know
that for the past twenty years they've been spending a couple of
million a year on research into antimatter weapons?"
    "Antimatter?" I shake my head again: I'm going
to get a stiff neck at this rate. "If someone figured out how to make
it in bulk they'd be in a position to—"
    "Exactly," she says, and looks at me with a
curiously satisfied expression. Why do I have a feeling she's seen
right through me?
    (Antimatter isn't the most exotic thing DARPA
has been spending research money on by a long way, but it's exotic
enough for the average college professor; especially a philosopher who,
reading between the lines, has any number of reasons for being cheesed
off with the military-academic complex.)
    "I'd like to talk about this some more," I
venture, "but maybe this isn't the right place?" I take a mouthful of
beer. "How about a walk? When do you have to get back to your office?"
    "I have a lecture to deliver at nine tomorrow,
if that's what you're asking." She pauses, delicately, tongue slightly
extended: "You're thinking about coming to work here, why don't I show
you some of the sights?"
    "That would be great." We finish our drinks and
leave the bar—and the bugs, real or imagined—behind.
     
    I can be a good