Chapter 12 Mattie #2
"And even if we somehow manage to get them out, what do we do with them?
" The look in his eyes was pleading with her to see reason.
"These women have been confined to a compound their entire lives.
They don't know anything else. They have no understanding of the outside world.
You can't just drop them off at a bus station and wish them luck. "
Mattie opened her mouth to respond, but Dimitri wasn't finished.
"At least here they have stability. Medical attention.
Food. A roof over their heads." He looked at the Eight as if seeking confirmation.
"Right? The conditions in the enclosure are decent.
Am I correct?" He shook his head. "I mean, there is nothing decent about what these women are subjected to, but given the alternative… "
Number One was quiet for a moment. "We don't know what decent means by your norms, but the women and children are housed in a separate compound with adequate food and basic medical care, and the children have a large outdoor area for recreation.
" The measured cadence of his voice suggested that this was a topic the hive mind had visited before.
"It's good to know that they don't live in squalor," Dimitri murmured.
"What is considered squalor where you come from?" Number One asked. "We do not have a basis for comparison."
"Decent conditions don't make it less of a prison," Mattie said. "They might not live in squalor, but their lives are still miserable."
Dimitri squeezed her shoulder. "Mattie, I understand what you're trying to do. I do. But this is unrealistic."
"I know." She turned to look at him. "But great things are never achieved by reasonable means.
It takes the uncompromising, the unreasonable, to effect change, and I choose to be that.
You and Petrov can negotiate the merge, the escape route, and the timeline.
That's your concern. The dormant women and their young children are mine. "
What passed through Dimitri's eyes was frustration mixed with admiration and a healthy dose of fear.
She could see the arguments queuing up behind his expression, ready to be deployed in their logical, devastating sequence, but he also knew her well enough to recognize that she had made up her mind long before the conversation had started, and that nothing he said in the next five minutes would unmake it.
He looked at Number One. "Is this even something you'd consider?"
Mattie expected an immediate refusal, but it didn't come.
The eight bodies were silent for several seconds, which in Dave-time was an eternity. Dave's silences were processing periods, the collective consciousness turning a problem over and examining it from several simultaneous angles.
"Mattie's idea changes the parameters of the escape radically," Number One said.
"The original proposal involved several individuals leaving the island, which wasn't overly complicated.
Adding everyone in the Dormant enclosure to the operation changes this from an escape plan to a liberation operation. This will take much longer to plan."
"So, it's impossible," Dimitri said.
"I did not say that. I said that the planning will take much longer."
Dimitri blinked. "You're actually considering it?"
"We need time to think."
The surprise on Dimitri's face would have been funny in any other context.
He had clearly expected Dave to shut the idea down with the same blunt pragmatism that he and Petrov had demonstrated yesterday.
Instead, the collective consciousness was doing something that neither Dimitri nor Petrov seemed to be capable of doing. Keeping an open mind.
Who could have expected that?
Petrov hadn't moved from his bench, but he had stopped writing and was watching the conversation with hawkish attention.
"The logistics of moving hundreds of women off an island in the middle of an escape are not something you solve by thinking about it," his voice rumbled from across the lab. "You need to solve it with resources that you don't have."
"We might have resources that we haven't considered before," Number One said.
"Then we look forward to hearing about these resources when you've finished your ruminations." Petrov returned to his notes as if the subject was closed.
Number One's mouth twitched, but it might have been irritation rather than amusement. It was hard to tell with Dave.
"You don't have to rescue all the women at once," Mattie said, pressing the advantage while the window was still open. "Start with your mothers. That's eight women. Eight is manageable, even with your current escape logistics."
Number Five stirred, which was the first independent movement Mattie had noticed during the conversation from anybody other than Number One. His head turned toward her, and his expression was subtly different from the others. Softer. Or maybe she was imagining it.
"Our mothers," Number One said, and the clinical distance of biological mothers from earlier was gone. Just our mothers. Two words that were impactful in their simple, quiet delivery.
"Eight women," Mattie repeated. "You know the enclosure. You probably know exactly where they are. It's not a full-scale liberation. It's a targeted extraction. You, Dimitri, Petrov, me, and eight women."
"Nineteen bodies are more difficult to move undetected than eleven," Dimitri said, but the heat had gone out of his objections.
"But not significantly so. There could also be siblings involved. If they haven’t been taken to the training camp yet, the mothers will likely want to bring them along, so the total number might be greater than that. "
The Eight were silent again. The processing silence. They were feeling something. All eight of them, or all one of him, or however the mathematics of shared consciousness worked. The mention of their mothers and siblings had reached something that Mattie's strategic arguments had not.
Good.
"We need time to think and ruminate on the idea," Number One said.
"Before committing to anything," Number Eight finished.
"Take all the time you need," she said. "But please take into consideration how important this is to me. Not as a strategic add-on. Not as a nice-to-have. This is my condition for supporting the merge."
Number One's gaze held hers. "You understand that once we escape, we will not come back for the others. The escape will be a one-time opportunity. There will be no return mission."
The words were hard. Those they didn't take would remain behind, and the chance of a future rescue would shrink from improbable to impossible.
"I know," she said quietly. "I would like to save all of them. Every woman, every child. But if that's not possible, and I understand that it might not be, then some is better than none."
The silence that followed was of a different flavor than the processing silences. It was the kind of silence that happened when something had been said that could not be unsaid, and the people in the room were adjusting to the new shape of the conversation.
"We will consider your condition, Mattie," Number One said. "We will analyze the probabilities and give you an answer when we are done."