The command came with a slap to the recruit's wrist, which she responded to with a painful yelp.
The instructor snapped toward another recruit, the obvious bookworm of the bunch.
"Akoto, why does the rebellion have a prohibition on AI use?"
"OPSEC, Sir," replied Akoto. "The Empire has data sharing agreements with all major computing vendors. Anything we do feeds right into thier intelligence. We may as well just announce our attacks on whatever they're calling thier microblogging platform now."
"Correct," said the instructor. "So, if we don't use AI, how is a puny little rebellion supposed to keep up with the terabytes of data produced every second by a big 'ol Empire? Their sheer size means that somebody, somewhere is likely to drop a nugget of intel now and again. How do we separate the gold from the slag? Yuo?"
Recruit Yuo leaned back in thier seat with the swagger of an aspiring pilot. "Is it another one of them hound things?"
"It could be you if you don't learn to show more respect to the Cause," threatened the Instructor, "but her conditioning certainly has some similarity to your average hound's. Class, today, we're going to meet our division's Canary."
She sat in an ornate, gilded cage that stretched up 12 feet into the ceiling, glimmering, superconductor-coated bars each humming at a different frequency.
The woman within wore a skin tight black and yellow jumpsuit, some sort of latex/carbon fiber composite that dripped with communications and life support hookups. She perched on a rickety barstool and attacked a bucket of kettle corn with the ferocity of a tiger.
"Class," said the instructor, "Meet Polly. Polly, the new batch of recruits."
The woman in the cage darted off her stool, spilling popcorn everywhere. She stopped at the bars, weaving skinny fingers around them.
She sniffed the air. "Fresh blood? Very good very good." She pointed at a recruit near the back named Rook. "This one will be a good logistics coordinator. Apologies in advance about the death of your wife at the seige of Callisto."
"My wife? Miss Polly, I'm single? Also I'm straight?! And there's nothing on Callisto, it's unpopulated."
"Polly, let's hold off on the prophecy for a spell. You'll scare them," chided the instructor.
"They should be scared," retorted Polly.
Ignoring her, the instructor turned to the class. "So, no AI. We train flesh and blood instead. Safer this way, and more humane: the cost is borne by just a few people instead of many. And as you can see--" Polly scratched her ribs and started collecting popcorn from the floor, "there IS a cost."
"What we've done here is train a woman to process and sift through reams of information on a near constant basis. Thanks to radio implants throughout her body, Polly here can receive six channels at once."
"I get YouTube on my left kneecap," she volunteered.
"To process this," continued the instructor (with an exasperated glance to Polly), "most Canaries turn to music. Hence the name. A deep sense of harmony and rhythm helps the mind make sense of the noise; discord indicates that something doesn't fit in the picture. That's our intel. As somebody who does this for 12 hours a day, every day, Polly here has also developed a strong intuition around the shape of the future, even if they're mostly pet theories. Don't take them as gospel."
Rook nervously glanced at the shapely recruit next to her.
Akoto raised her hand. "So is Polly a volunteer?"
"As much as the hounds are," replied the intructor..
As much as the hounds. So, sort of? Nobody signed up to be a hound, but nobody said no when asked, either. Duty and all that, but there was some freedom too, in a Faustian sort of way.
Akoto followed up, "So what kind of freak secretly wants this treatment?"
"You do," stated Polly, popcorn spilling out of her mouth in a cascade matching her straight, blonde hair.
Akoto looked taken aback. The Instructor just shook her head with a smirk.
"Top of your class, interest in the intelligence service. First soprano. Narcicisstic personality disorder. Generalized anxiety disorder. Lust for information. Bottom. And who the hell takes independent study in music theory as an elective? (It's me, I did that.)"
Polly continued, slowly pacing to the front of the cage. "You wanna be a star, Akoto? Not a hero, no, but a star. You want the spotlight, all eyes on you, all ears poised to listen to the honey that drips from your lips? You wanna give everything to your craft, to chase perfection, to know all, to be all?"
She clutched the bars of her cage.
"You want real control, Akoto? The kind that only comes from being pampered? From being not quite human enough to be accountable?"
Akoto locked eyes with Polly, transfixed.
"I know you, Akoto. I've read your fan fiction. I've seen what your friends say about you. Freedom is wasted on you. Make the trade, Akoto. Freedom to buy power, buy fame, buy knowledge, and, for your comrades, buy that cheap, petty freedom that the rebellion claims to fight for."
She reached a finger through the bars.
Only the background chatter of the base could be heard for a moment.
Then Akoto took it. Nobody volunteered, but nobody said no when asked.
"Class dismissed," said the instructor. "I'll get the transfer filed."
As the group dispersed, Akoto stayed with Polly. They sang, two soprano voices and doom itself filling the hallways like a gas leak.
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