They were the only such books in all of Vox, and they had been created explicitly for the use of the Uptaken. The books were mostly histories, assembled by scholars and translated into simple English and five other ancient languages. They were reasonably reliable texts, according to my understanding. Turk was interested but intimidated by the dozens of titles, and I helped him pick out a few volumes:

The Collapse of Mars and the Martian Diaspora

On the Nature and Purpose of the Hypothetical Entities

The Decline of the Terrestrial Ecology

The Principles and Destiny of the Polity of Vox

Cortical and Limbic Democracies of the Middle Worlds

—and a couple more, enough to give him a rough sense of what Vox was and why it had fought its battles back in the Ring of Worlds. The titles, I told him, were more daunting than the texts.

“Really?” he said. “So what are, uh, ‘cortical and limbic democracies’?”

Ways of implementing consensus governance, I explained. Neural augmentation and community-wide Networks had made possible many different kinds of decision-making. Most of the communities of the Middle Worlds were “cortical” democracies, so called because the brain areas they interfaced with were clustered in the neocortex. They used noun-based and logically mediated collective reasoning to make policy decisions. (Turk blinked at the words but kindly let me keep talking.) “Limbic” democracies like Vox worked differently: their Networks modulated more primitive areas of the brain in order to create an emotional and intuitive (as opposed to a purely rational) consensus. “To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Why the distinction? Why not a cortical-limbic democracy? Best of both worlds?”

Such arrangements had been attempted. Treya had studied them in school. The few cortico-limbic democracies that had been created had worked well enough for a period of time, and some had seemed idyllically peaceful. But they were ultimately unstable—they almost always decayed into Network-mediated catatonic loops, a kind of mass suicide by blissful indifference.

Not that the limbic democracies had fared much better, though I didn’t say so where the walls might hear me. Limbic democracies had their own weaknesses. They were prone to collective insanity.

Except our own, of course. Vox was an exception to all the rules. At least, that was what I had been taught in school.

*   *   *

I kept my troubles to myself, mainly because I didn’t want to give Oscar more leverage to use against me. More important, I didn’t want to raise any doubt in Turk’s mind that I was Allison Pearl, that I preferred to be Allison Pearl, and that I would remain Allison Pearl until the day they strapped me down and forced a Network node into my brain stem.

But the situation wasn’t as simple as that.