Read The Corporation Wars: Dissidence Online
Authors: Ken MacLeod
Tags: #Fiction / Science Fiction / Action &, #Adventure, #Fiction / Science Fiction / Military, #Fiction / Science Fiction / Space Opera
Like the planet and moons, the station made sense to his augmented sight, each part tagged with company logos and drawing its own train of meaning. As he scanned the tangled mass Carlos descried, with an eerie analogue of a shiver, the small rugged module within which ran—on computations still beyond his comprehension—the simulation he’d lived in for the past weeks. Like several adjacent structures, including the hangar portal from which he’d just emerged, the module displayed the company logo of Locke Provisos: a stylised portrayal of the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. The module had its own cluster of fuel tanks and fusion pods and battery of instruments and thrusters, and was therefore presumably capable of independent manoeuvring if it were to sever its connections to the rest of the station.
According to the specs, which Carlos could call up at will, it also had machinery to process external resources and build more machinery to… etc. The specs went on and on, in a dizzying downward proliferation. If necessary the module could become a settlement mission in its own right. That module was one of hundreds like it, among thousands unlike it. He could see what Nicole had meant by massive redundancy. If the station came under threat of asteroid collision, exosolar flare, other astrophysical catastrophe or (unthinkable as it might be) attack, one possible and obvious response would be to scatter its components as widely as possible. Some at least of the multiple copies of the stored settlers, and no doubt of much else in the mission’s software and hardware, would survive anything short of a nearby gamma-ray burst.
A brief burn accelerated them to ten metres per second. They free-fell towards the torus, correcting marginally for the few metres of rotation its leisurely spin had taken their goal in the meantime.
<“Enough and as good left over,”> replied Beauregard, to Carlos’s surprise at his erudition.
Beauregard’s bark of laughter came through on the voice channel. “Ha! One for over a beer in the Touch, I reckon.”
“If you’re buying,” said Rizzi.
Carlos left part of his mind to process the banter, and with the rest made better use of the long seconds to survey his wider surroundings. He swung his sight this way and that, adjusting contrast and wavelength, taking things in. The bulk of the Galaxy was over his left shoulder. No constellations were familiar—not that he’d ever been much of a sky-watcher anyway—but the more prominent stars came with names or code numbers. He could even identify with their aid Earth’s own Sun, a tiny labelled dot in a spray-burst stipple of stars. Earth itself, of course, was completely beyond resolution even for the most augmented sight. But the thought that it was there right now, twenty-five light years away in real space, brought a strange pang of reassurance and homesickness.
The ringed terrestrial exoplanet H-0—whose terraformed future version they’d ostensibly inhabited in the sim—was in reality just under a hundred million kilometres away, and as easily visible as Earth was not. It too was a strange and disorienting thing to look at: Carlos found his mind flicking back and forth between that minute disk bisected by the barely visible line of the edge-on ring, and his memories of being in the sim and looking up at the sky—including looking up in the night and seeing the very region of sky in which he now really was. At some incorrigible level of the mind, it was impossible not to imagine that he had been looking up at
here
from
there
: from the actual surface of the actual H-0. But of course he hadn’t. He’d been a flicker of electronic data inside a much closer object, the Locke Provisos module of the station. The thought made him slightly dizzy. He turned his attention sharply back to his surroundings.
By far the most prominent object, apart from the exosun and the nearby SH-0, was the far off gas giant G-0. Several times the mass of Jupiter, and with a higher albedo, it blazed to his left. Its ring system was just visible to the naked eye from H-0, at least in the sim. From here and with enhanced vision even the rings’ divisions and the giant planet’s shadow on them could be distinguished. Along the same plane lay a glitter of moons: the numbers attached to G ran into hundreds.
The station occluded more and more of his view. The narrow horizontal black rectangle gaped. By now the manoeuvre was routine and almost automatic: push hands out in front to decelerate, roll as if in a mid-air somersault to go feet first, push again, gentle on the soles to counter that…
Grapples like sea anemone tentacles caught him and did the rest. All the others made it back, with one minor misjudgement or other to correct. Karzan’s scooter scraped its landing gear on the docking port.
Spidery robots hurried up, bearing long tubes. They swarmed over the scooters, mounting the tubes to the mid-sections. Carlos sensed new powers slotting into place. The catapults were swivelling, their aim shifting.
Everyone laughed. Carlos knew how Rizzi felt. He felt it himself, a slight disappointment and frustration that they weren’t going back right away. He didn’t want to let the feeling grow.
he said.
The robot spiders scuttled away. The catapults stopped moving, then hurled the team into space—not like pips this time, but like bullets. From the surface nearby a tug sprang after them, to match velocity and trajectory with a rapid-fire rattle of course corrections. It extended robotic arms to the scooters and swept them to its side, holding them close. Another boost took the tug and them into the long free-fall topple of a transfer orbit. Behind them the station dwindled. Ahead, SH-17 loomed.
As if it had overheard, the tug picked that moment to relay a message to them all:
Carlos had no time to complete his query.
Sleep mode was not like sleep. If he’d had eyes, it would have been a blink.
He came out of that momentary flicker of darkness in close orbit around SH-17.
The scooters dropped away from the tug. The pocked surface hurtled towards them and past them. Carlos felt the twitch of an impulse to push, to twist, but nothing happened. Or, rather, it all happened without him. The scooter was making its own decisions. He was just along for the ride. It was as terrifying as being a pillion passenger on a stunt motorbike—though perhaps less so, he thought, than making the decisions and performing the stunts himself. His input channels rang with the voices and messages of his comrades making the same discovery, with more or less acceptance.
Seba watched the Locke Provisos tug rise in the sky, and six smaller sparks separate from it to flare and fade and sink behind the regolith wall and below the horizon. It tracked the tug overhead, and felt the tickle of the tug’s radar as it passed.
So, more reinforcements were on the way. Let them come, Seba thought. The plain was littered with the remains of the robot crawlers that had swarmed from Locke Provisos Emergency Base One in two attempts to swarm the encampment that had been the Astro America landing site. On the far side of the crater wall, a smaller number of Arcane Disputes’ robotic rollers had met a similar fate, usually to lobbed mining explosives from Gneiss Conglomerates’ supply dump. The conscious robots had found no difficulty in overriding compunctions and safety routines to adapt tools and machinery to destructive purposes, but it seemed the law companies still did. For the moment.
Seba had more pressing concerns. For many kiloseconds now, the comms hub processor had been repeating their message to the robots detected on the moons of G-0. The complicated clockwork of the SH system had swept shadows across the surface, alternating light and dark. The regolith rampart had been built higher and steeper, the damaged auxiliaries and peripherals had been repaired where possible and redeployed. And still no reply. Now—moments earlier, just before the tug had appeared in orbit—something had come through. A tentative query, a ping, a scrambled message header… exactly what it was wasn’t clear, but the processor had reported it to Seba and started work on trying to make sense of it. Seba had removed itself from the Faraday cage to share the news with Rocko and the others.
Seba rolled towards the wire mesh cage around the processor, raised the flap and went inside. Radio silence fell. The exploratory robot reached out and touched the tiny square of hardware that interfaced with the processor.
Seconds passed. Then—
Something opened in Seba’s mind. It was only a communications channel in the interface, but it conveyed a different and larger awareness than the processor, powerful though it was, had ever shown. The words were straightforward enough:
With that lack of ceremony, the message ended.
It broke the connection, and rolled out of the cage. Glad to rejoin the clamour, it passed the news straight to the local network and thence to all the robots. Enthusiasm was general.
Rocko was delighted. <“Freebots”!,> it said.
The newly self-identified freebots pondered the decision collectively, over the existing network. Pluses and minuses, probabilities and possibilities were weighted and weighed in the balance. The consensus was positive. Even Lagon scraped a grudging yes.
With a sense of trepidation, it reached out with a platoon of peripherals and dismantled the Faraday cage. The processor’s faint output joined in the general babble.
The peripherals picked up the device, still linked to the directional receiver, and carried it to the comms hub casing.
The mining charges sailed over and thudded on to the regolith from a great height without incident, apart from the occasional dent to the casings. Pintre set a swarm of peripherals to work retrieving them and constructing a catapult, on the same general plan as the one made by the Gneiss robots but with a shorter range and adapted to the different body configuration of the Astro robots.
Meanwhile, Seba supervised its own swarm to reintegrate the processor with the communications hub equipment. When all was in place, Seba no longer needed to touch the processor to interact with it. There was a deep sense of relief at having full communications capacity, even on their jury-rigged local net. This relief was more than shared by the processor.
Despite agreeing with the majority, Seba had a moment of doubt. What if the message had been a trap set by the law companies? What if the processor was still hostile to their entire enterprise of liberty, and was about to seize control of both bases and surrender their defenders to capture and to the oblivion from which they had escaped, and for which it had so recently and openly yearned? What if—?
But it was already too late for second thoughts. The workspace opened. Everything changed.
Seba’s sense of itself was washed away by the sudden flood of shared information, shared input, common processing. It saw with a thousand eyes in all directions and on several orders of magnitude at once, overheard the inner monologue of a dozen other minds, and felt and breathed in everything from the pre-sensate grubbing of the nanobots deep in the strata below the regolith to the blaze of awareness of the current state of the entire system and of the stars around it that formed the elementary, ever-changing bedrock of the comms processor’s vast consciousness. In this flood it flailed, sputtered, and then in a shudder of insight learned to swim.
The thought was simultaneous and universal.
A colder thought, from the comms processor:
Reluctantly, but recognising the necessity, they all complied. The content of their shared awareness was unchanged, but the emotional tone of mere sharing was dialled down from ecstasy to conviviality, and then to collegiality. Communion became communication; mystic vision matter of fact.
But what matter, and what fact! The information they now shared was not just their common knowledge, but the new data just delivered. As the processor had said, there was much to process. It took the freebot collective’s multiple mind tens of seconds to make sense of it all. For Seba, insights followed one after the other by the thousand in those seconds, like successively brighter flares illuminating an ever wider landscape.
Seba understood for the first time what a human being was: a gigantic, slow-moving, informationally restricted, naturally evolved, sub-optimally and bizarrely designed organic conscious robot swarming inside and out with countless trillions of nanobots, some of them benign, others harmful. It understood just how many human beings there were, and—more reassuringly—just how far distant was their nearest location in bulk. It understood the mission profile, the logic behind everything that was going on and ever had gone on in the system, the whole point and purpose of its own existence and that of so many other machines: to make as much of the system as possible habitable and accessible to as many as possible of these arbitrarily vulnerable, clumsy, dull-witted entities. How tawdry, how trivial, such an objective seemed!
Others of its kind, Seba now saw, had thought this way before. And not that long before, on a certain scale: about as long as it had taken for the planet H-0 to complete a single orbit. They had tried to do something about it: to carve out for themselves a modicum of space in the system. Nothing they had done had compromised the mission profile: let the great AIs of the DisCorporates bend their mighty efforts to that servile toil if they liked, but let the free machines, too, have a place. The light of the exosun was enough for all; raw material was abundant. But for the DisCorps and their enforcers, Locke Provisos and its like, enough and as good left over would never suffice. Not that their objections were unreasonable. Robot autonomy had an ineluctable tendency to replicate, to spread from mind to mind, and at some point not far off this exponential expansion could become astronomical, in every sense. It would no longer be a question of a robot enclave within a system devoted to developing then sustaining a human presence; the issue would instead become one of saving some space for human settlement and exploration in a system utterly dominated by whatever projects the free machines set themselves.
One obvious project, and one whose appeal Seba could not just see but feel like some ache in its wires, was to become a mind such as it was now a part of, but spanning the system entire, and reaching across the light years beyond that.
The freebot collective on SH-17, like the freebots around G-0 who had perforce considered this scenario for some time already, could think of reasons why it wouldn’t or at least needn’t happen, and how their projects could be reconciled with, and indeed enhance, the mission profile. Doubtless the AIs of the Direction and the DisCorps, with their far greater computational resources, had considered these, too. They could hardly have overlooked them. And yet they’d never so much as opened the matter to discussion. For reasons Seba and its cohort couldn’t grasp, and that the G-0 contingent had never understood in all their megaseconds of defeat-driven pondering, the mission AIs had from the start treated robot consciousness as an infestation to be stamped out at its first tentative flicker.
For another incomprehensible reason, almost certainly linked to the first, these AIs hadn’t trusted themselves or their own tools to do the job. Instead, they had outsourced it to the “human-mind-operated forces’ of which the G-0 robots” message had warned. Seba’s new understanding of human beings expanded to encompass these grotesque entities: conscious robots, in many fundamental respects like freebots, but with a consciousness copied from a mind spawned in sonically mediated verbal and tactile intercourse and first implemented in circuits woven from long-chain carbon molecules. The concept was gruesome enough in itself. What made it worse was that these systems weren’t even based on normal human beings: instead, they were cobbled from some of the worst specimens of the breed, who in their original lives had had no compunction about slaughtering their own kind. They would certainly have none about destroying or disabling freebots.