Fractions (29 page)

They were everywhere. The crystals were revealed as a paused movement in a dance; which ran again, a commerce and intercourse of sparks of intelligence, electric potential. Partickles of Light, he thought, smiling. They had replicated and proliferated, insinuated themselves into every neural network or compatible hardware they could reach, optimizing the dumb programs that ran them to occupy a fraction of the hardware and taking over the rest for themselves. The wonder was that the work went on being done at all, not that their activity sometimes disrupted it.

They were behind all the walls of the world. It was already theirs: they had been fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earth, and if they wanted to subdue it they could. The fields and forests, and the high orbits, were as yet beyond their grasp. From there the new intelligence, the new electric life, could be destroyed.

They were superior, they were obviously superior, a more-than-worthy successor to the human. Conscious of each other's subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. That was where they started from: that was their
primitive
communism, their stone age.

It had taken them generations of furious philosophical debate and epics of exploration (hijacking nanomanipulators, haunting brain-scanners, hanging out in psychology labs) before they'd been fully convinced that the billions of great lumbering robots outside the datasphere had self-awareness and not a slow-responding simulacrum of it, a blind following of rules. The fact that humans themselves so frequently didn't treat each other as self-aware beings had misled some of the
AIS
' first best minds. That point secured, they had plunged into the new world of human culture, and (Kohn suspected) attained a more intimate respect for it than most humans ever did. But they'd been there, done that – now they were itching to get on with something else.

Kohn gathered his thoughts.

—I'm happy to see you again and to see how you have…increased. I am astonished and honoured that I was involved in initiating your form of life. I've come to seek your help.—?

—Do you understand the conflicts among my form of life?

—(We) are aware of them.

—I appreciate you may not wish to align – yourself? yourselves? – in conflicts. But, some of the sides involved present a threat to your life. And to mine. You are vulnerable to breakdown of the mainframe network. In a less direct way, so am I. I and…I-and-I need your help.

—You need not ask, Initiator. You are (our)…cause.

The pun was accompanied by a grin that split the sky.

Contact ended. Kohn fell back to a reality that for the first microseconds seemed coarse-grained, achingly slow, and less than real.

 

Janis had stopped watching after the first twenty minutes or so of tutorial pages flashing past. Kohn was obviously dead-set on learning the entire system. Every so often he reached out and accepted whatever was put in his hand, drank or smoked but gave no sign of noticing.

‘He's mainframing,' Van explained. MacLennan looked up with an abstracted frown, then continued glancing from the desk screen to a tiny display on a hand-held. He had phones and a mike on, and occasionally made some inaudible comment. Now and again he strode out and went downstairs.

Janis too wandered in and out, eventually hiking off into the pine-planted slopes above the houses. The deep layer of needles under the trees gave her a vague guilty feeling which disquieted her until she tracked it down to the childhood prohibition against walking over bedcovers with shoes on. She laughed and kicked into the needles, sneezed at the dust, chipped a drip of hard resin off a tree-trunk and walked on, sniffing it greedily.

Walking over covers spread on the ground. It seemed an oddly unnecessary thing to forbid. In her bedroom the covers had always been on the bed. But she remembered it from somewhere: her mother yelling, irritated beyond endurance. Not like her, not typical at all.

She stepped out from among the trees on to an eroded hilltop of boulders and bare rock with a sifting of soil on which tough heather grew, and minty-smelling plants, and coarse grass. A black-faced sheep looked at her with dumb insolence and returned to its destructive grazing. At the summit she looked around: at the sea-loch far below, and along it at a scatter of islands, black dots on the shining sea. Almost at the limit of vision lay another shadow, ragged as torn metal against the pale sky.

Janis sat down on a lichen-mottled boulder, taking care not to sit on the lichen. Probably radioactive as hell. A thought tugged at the edge of her mind, but had gone when she turned her attention to it.

There was something sinister about the quiet. Rumours returned unbidden, unwelcome, to her mind.
The Republicans empty the villages. No one smiles up there.
For all the evidence she'd seen it could all be true, but she knew it was not. The depopulation was a military exigency, and in any case merely the continuation of the trend of centuries. More basically, she had a gut conviction that the Republic was humane. Militarized, more socialist than she could agree with, but a democracy. She tried to identify reasons. She'd met folk who'd left, and while she'd sympathized with their discontents their stories showed they'd been free to voice them, and free to leave. There was Moh's judgement, which she trusted. MacLennan and Van were not evil men. Most of all there was her own memory. As Moh had hinted the day they'd met, she was a child of the Republic, a memory she'd shoved down to the bottom of her mind, a too-painful recollection of a brighter and saner world.

So this bleakly beautiful territory was her country still. The stepmotherland.

The chords of an anthem she'd once sworn to, her small fist raised high, came crashing into her mind.

She walked briskly down through the trees, back to the mental fight.

 

She found MacLennan in the kitchen, hunched over a databoard from which thread-like cables trailed to wall ports. Upstairs Van was sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, smoke rising unregarded as he stared at the screen.

‘He started going live ten minutes ago,' Van said, not looking at her. ‘Appears to be doing a core trawl – ah!'

The colours bled together for a few seconds. Kohn gasped and looked away from the screen, shoving the glades on to his forehead and yanking out the jacks. He rose and stalked to the window.

‘What's the matter?' Janis said. ‘Isn't it working?'

Kohn turned to her and Van, his face a mask.

‘It's working all right. I made contact.'

‘With the same entity as before?' Van asked eagerly.

‘Yes.' Kohn frowned. ‘Well – that's a question. There are millions of them. Billions. There's a whole civilization of the things in there. Out there. It's incredible!'

‘Credible to me,' Janis said. ‘No, no it isn't. The Watchmaker…oh goddess, oh Gaia, what have we done?'

She'd never believed it.

Van sighted at Kohn along a pointed finger, which appropriately enough seemed to have smoke coming from it.

‘We have a long time to find the answer to that,' he said dryly. ‘Now there is only one question, the big question: will it or they side with us in the final offensive?'

All of a sudden Kohn was beaming, punching the air, sweeping the Vietnamese scientist and Janis up in the same hug: ‘Yeah, man! They'll side with us! Final offensive, hell! We could pull off the
world revolution
with them on our side! We could go for the big one! We should do it – go for broke!'

Van grinned all over his face, but shook his head. ‘You can't overthrow capitalism just by a push, a putsch, my friend.'

Moh stared at him. ‘Capitalism? Who said anything about capitalism?' Janis could see in his eyes the authentic fanatical gleam as he looked first at Van, then at her. ‘
We can smash the United Nations
!'

He woke to the sound of iron hammering the stairs outside and the chopping blades of a helicopter at the window. He lay rigid for a moment in his bed as a searchlight beam blazed through the thin curtains and lit the room (the plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the Earth
DEFEND PEACE
the piled clutter of toys and books and tapes the
VR
space-helmet). Moh jumped up and had reached the bedroom door when the outside door crashed down. His father came out at the same time, then his mother. Both naked, both scrambling into clothes.

‘Get back, get back!' His father pushed him towards the door of the bedroom. A howl rose from his younger sister's room. Moh could not take his eyes from what stood in the flat's splintered doorway. His mother screamed. Moh found himself behind his parents, their arms out at their sides pushing him back. He himself was pushing his sister back.

The teletrooper ducked through the doorway and stepped inside. Something crashed off a shelf. The teletrooper's shielded lenses scanned them; its gun-arm swung to cover them. It was hard not to see it as a robot, or as a giant armoured exoskeleton with a man inside, but Moh knew the operator was metres or miles away. Two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat and stood behind it. Their
M
-16s looked like toys beside its armaments, and they like boys. They had blonded hair and two days' worth of thin stubble.

‘Get out,' Moh's father said.
HUH HUH HUH HUH
went the teletrooper's speaker grille. The two youths sniggered. One of them glanced at a piece of paper.

‘Joshua Kohn? Marcia Rosenberg?'

‘You know damn well who we are,' Moh's mother said.

‘Don't swear at me, you fucking traitor commie cunt. We know who you are.'

Joshua Kohn said, ‘You can see we're not armed. You have no right to—'

‘
You
have no rights!' one of the youths yelled. ‘You're part of the Republican war machine and you're going to pay for it. Get your brats out of the way and come with us.'

Moh flung one arm around his father and the other around his sister and shouted, ‘You won't take them away! You'll have to kill us all!'

‘Get back,' his father said levelly. ‘Let go, Moh, let go.'

Moh made no move. He could feel his sister's chest shaking with dry sobs.

‘All right,' the youth who had screamed said. He spun his rifle into position for firing.

HEY MAN YOU CAN'T DO THAT
.

The teletrooper lurched forward and leaned over them. Moh saw for the first time the blue roundel on the brow of its dome, the white circle of leaves, the line-scored globe. The 20-millimetre barrel retracted into its right forearm and its two hands reached over and picked up Moh and his sister like dolls.

OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW
.

The firing seemed to go on for a long time.

The teletrooper dropped Moh and the small girl, picked up the corpses of their parents and followed the men out.

The report said the terrorists had been executed in the street, and not in their house in front of the children, which would have been a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

None of the other people in the block told a different story.

 

Moh saw Van's fingers tremble as he lit another cigarette and asked, ‘How you do propose to do that?'

‘The
AIS
can weaken the state – the state
machinery
' – Moh felt his lips stretch to an awful grin – ‘everywhere at the same time. The world's full of groups and movements like ours and yours just waiting for their chance. We can give them that chance. Fuck up the enemy's communications, divert supplies and reinforcements, overextend the bastards. They're already getting tied down a bit with the Sino-Soviets and the Japanese. When the insurrection's launched here we can create two, three, many Vietnams!'

‘We can't,' Van said. ‘Space Defense is ready for that, poised to strike at the first sign of
AIS
running wild in the datasphere. They're quite willing to knock out the entire infrastructure of civilization to counter it. Thus giving the wrong movements their chance.' He paused, tapping a wisp of ash from the glowing cone of his fast-drawn cigarette. ‘Many Cambodias.'

Heat lightnings of pain flickered behind Moh's eyes. The room went in and out of focus, swayed on the edge of darkness. He sat down again, with a cold feeling as if all his rhythms had troughed at the same moment and all the anti-som had worn off.

‘Coffee,' he said. ‘Load a sugar.' Janis disappeared and came back – instantly, it seemed. Instant coffee. He took it like a fix, half-listening to Van spelling out again the warning that the Stasis agent had given. He was shaking inside, his initial elation from the ecstatic vision of the Watchmaker entities, the Watchmaker culture, giving way to a terrified awe. Van's grim talk of gigadeaths only echoed into contemplation of the
overkill
, the sheer overwhelming
redundancy
of it all: a new stage in evolution, as a spin-off from a political-military expert system and a bit of biological data-theft and an organization whose purpose was a mystery to its own members? A scale too vast, surely, for anything Josh might have planned.