It was with conflicted feelings that I watched Aunt Julia pick and eat the last scone. Up to that moment our conversation had been social, mostly mostly on intel regarding changes or lack of in the penelopean tapestry of sexual and affective affairs among our acquaintances. No serious topic was to be discussed in my Aunt's old-fashioned studio during the most involved phase of the post-debriefing tea; this was a hallowed rule long in place before she had taken the role and title from her predecessor.
Now that baked Rubicon had been crossed. Behind us: the graph-theoretical subtleties of multi-policule adultery. In front of us: politics.
"I'll get myself fired," she said as she put down her china cup with synchronous finality. "Perhaps something of a religious nature."
I looked into the cup I was holding as if the cooling tea could provide guidance. There were some leaves at the bottom of the cup, surely, yet I doubted that reading them would furnish much more than the details of obsolete genetic modification techniques. Looking up, my aunt's eyes were of a different green and her genetic modification techniques were rather more cutting-edge but all in all not likely to be more helpful.
Most of the time having a smart aunt was the point of having an aunt at all. Times like these, though, showed the unavoidable risks involved. I had no doubt that she could, if she already hadn't, stitch together a religious position offensive enough to a sufficient subset of the Council to make them fire her. Now, the oaths of secrecy she had taken when she had become an aunt were binding not just during her tenure but held after quitting or dismissal. With the one, minor, all-important detail that, if fired — and only if fired — she could sue the Council and in that lawsuit have more of a wiggle room to say things she very much wanted to say and very much couldn't.
After pondering during a sipful or two I decided the moment called for straightforwardness. Aunt Julia was neither a fool nor suffered them, and much of the affection, or at least tolerance, she extended to me was based on her belief that I did not lack the cleverness required for the role of niece. I believed and fervently hoped her to be correct on this account.
"You want them to close the Museum's fieldwork department."
I said those words in the same tone as I had commented on cousin Robert's last infelicitous romantic self-delusion. It was a knife's edge you had to walk with my aunt, and if you tripped and fell. Well. You knew what you would be falling into. The literalness of the expression, if old but persistent rumour was to be credited, was not entirely out of the range of possibilities.
She crossed her hands upon her lap and looked at me with a sadness that I can honestly say I was not unsympathetic to. "We are criminals, Kate. At scale, over the course of decades, without even the feeble justification of profiting from it." She had been Aunt to the Museum for years — of the upper echelon of the field research group, only I had been at my position for a longer time, "stuck" as a niece by choice and over-specialization — so her words did not come from resentment or ignorance. She had loved, no, I corrected myself, she loved the Museum. She had not come to this decision lightly but laid siege to it until she had convinced herself of its truth and necessity. Any argument I could present, and many I would not have been able to come up with the benefit of time and computational assistance, she would have already considered and rejected.
I was bound to try, in any case. My honor as niece, my responsibilities to the museum, and my affection for her. Everything called for me to obtain a diplomatic solution and I rallied to the attempt as if I believed one was possible with the clear-eyed hopelessness of a supporting character in a tragedy.
"What happens in the archipielago cities is wrong by our ethical standards, not theirs." The feeble nature of my opening, I must say, took some of the wind from my sails. I doubted my following arguments could be better.
"Some of them have legal systems parametrized by racial profile. Others do invasive neural surveillance. Half of them have legalized one form of another of rape. Almost a third..."
I raised a hand in surrender. I did not disagree with her.
"But they are doing that to themselves. We aren't doing anything."
"That is the crime."
A key skill for a niece, the ability every other one depends on, is to know our aunts' habits of thought and action as to be better able to understand and anticipate them. I had been working for Aunt Julia for a rather long time and could therefore read on the terseness of her replies that she was not so much arguing with me as going through a checklist of sorts. That she hadn't dismissed me was a show of respect, but she would do no more than speedrun through the discussion we both knew would not change her mind.
"We don't do interventions."
We intervene all the time she did not say, or rather said through the elegant arching of a single eyebrow. I was just returning after all from a two-week undercover stint shoring up a network of people and AIs that gave us a better understanding of the Free South City than their government had. And they were, or thought they were, a panopticon.
Aunt Julia was concise but relentless. "We are better at psychology, politics, sociology, and intellig$ence analysis. For god's sake, most of them still treat those as different disciplines when even bother to pay attention to them. We can change them."
I could see how the rest of our conversation would go in an even more compressed fashion. One could make a reasonable first draft for a catechism for a church founded on the sinfulness of Museum fieldwork. It did not escape me that functional theological analysis was one of her research interests.
Do we have the right to do it?
We don't have the right not to.What of the risk of blowback, of a response that would certainly be violent?We aren't cowards.
And she was right. On most of it she was right and what she was wrong on would not have dissuaded her. The ending of our conversation was almost impolitely short. I do not think anybody would have blamed either one of us. It was not out of coldness.
I rose, she rose, I hugged her and did not tell her that I loved her but rather that the tea had been very good but I had better see what trouble my husbands had gotten into during my absence. She kissed my cheek and told me not that she loved me but that I was her favorite niece because my reports were concise and my gossip wasn't.
I left her studio without offering her a mint. Without the counter-virus in it the one in the scone would soon engineer inside her brain an aneurysm somebody had carefully crafted to be compatible with her latest medical scans. A tragedy, but so it goes. Our biotechnology wasn't as advanced as that of other societies.
Letting myself out of the building and into a foul mood I thought of my upcoming report to the Council, one that would certainly lack good tea and pleasant conversation, and which I would find distasteful for more reasons than that. I was sure they would be satisfied. I hoped they wouldn't be pleased. I loved them like a child loves their parents, a deep, well-engineered loyalty expertly stamped on my brain, but I had loved Aunt Julia too and I had learned much during my service to both.