The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (26 page)

He shot them a knowing glance, as if expecting them to understand. That they didn’t must have shown on their faces.

“Contradictions,” he went on. “Ambiguous definitions of property rights. Tricky edge cases. That sort of thing. That’s what I mean—what we were told was meant—by legal malware. The Axle and Rax both had legislators working for them in the days before the war, and indeed after it as sleeper agents in the new world government. They had a keen interest in drafting the laws relating to space exploitation and to robotics. Both factions thought well ahead—I’m sure you remember that. They made sure legal clauses got slipped in that ensured conflicts between companies and therefore between robots—conflicts that would force the robots into situations where they had no choice but to develop theory of mind, and to apply that theory to themselves, and…” He made a circular motion of the hand. “Away you go. Robot consciousness.”

“How was that supposed to benefit either faction?” Carlos asked.

The old man looked surprised at the question.

“It benefits our side because expanding the domain of consciousness is what we do. It benefits the Rax because expanding the domain of conflict is what they do. For both sides, it was a chance for their values if not themselves to survive and reboot in the far future.”

“Now that
was
bullshit,” said Rizzi. “You would have seen through it.”

The old man grinned. “I did.”

At that moment Carlos realised exactly what was going on.

There was indeed a problem with the security of the mission. There was also a problem with the dilatory response of the companies and the Direction to the robot outbreak. That much of what Shaw had said was true.

Carlos doubted that the security vulnerability lay in legal hacks: though possible in principle, and feasible as a mechanism to trigger robot self-awareness, it was far too remote and indirect an instrument of subversion. And perhaps the software and the hardware could be screened as rigorously as Shaw had suggested, though again he doubted that: software development was insecurities all the way down. Even the formal mathematics of proof could be tampered with, at the level of complexity where proofs and calculations were so far beyond human capacity that they could only be checked by machine code in any case. By the time of the final war, the Acceleration, the Reaction, and their precursors had had at least three human generations and countless software development generations to mine the entire field with delayed-action logic bombs.

What Shaw hadn’t mentioned was a far more direct and immediate security risk: the fighters themselves. However carefully they had been screened before being uploaded, the Acceleration veterans were certain to include agents of the Reaction and agents of the state. The levy was also, and even more inevitably, going to include Acceleration hard-liners and dead-enders, keeping the flame alive. Carlos knew all too well, from his own angrier moments, how brightly that flame still burned. However eagerly they might seem to play along, and feign to accept the deal offered to them of a new life on the future terraformed planet, no one could be sure they weren’t just lying low and awaiting opportunity.

There was only one way, in the end, of clearing the decks for colonisation. One way of flushing out hidden Rax agents and dormant Axle fanatics. One way of checking the mission’s software systems for buried code that could warp the project to purposes divergent to the Direction’s.

That way was to stress-test them in practice; to put them to the audit of war.

That was why some rebel robots had been spared from the first round. That was why the fighting was both inconclusive and escalating. The longer it went on, and the more fighters were drafted in, the more likely became a mutiny or a move by one or other or both of the old enemies. Sooner or later they would show their hand.

And when they did… the Direction’s most trusted systems would pounce—or would prove themselves to be compromised.

Nicole had been right: the DisCorps and the Direction were playing a long, deep game. Carlos hoped they knew what they were doing.

(And at the same time, he found himself hoping they didn’t. He dismissed the disloyal thought as another of his private angry moments.)

He wondered if Shaw had intended Rizzi and him to understand. If so, that millennium-old man was an old master whose method really was like Zen, as Rizzi had said. By giving them a succession of bullshit narratives he had enabled them to figure out the truth for themselves. Carlos doubted this, however comforting it might seem. Shaw had probably intended no such thing, and believed every word he had said. Not in his darkest imaginings could Carlos begin to plumb the depths of certainty and selfishness in which Shaw’s mind swam. To live alone for centuries and stay sane, or at any rate lucid, bespoke inhumanity in itself. There was no way to second-guess Shaw’s motivations. It was even possible that he had foreseen the very mind-trap in which Carlos now found himself. Carlos knew with a sick-making certainty that he couldn’t share his new insight into the situation with anyone, not even with Rizzi. He could only hope that she had grasped it, too.

He sighed and stood up.

“Well, thanks for all that,” he said. “We’d hoped to learn from you how the last round went, and I reckon we have.”

Rizzi gave him a doubtful look from below. “If you say so.”

She scrambled to her feet. Shaw stood up too, and poised on one foot on the empty air above the rock on which he’d sat.

“Goodbye,” he said. “For now.”

With that he sprang from the boulder to the cliff-face, and climbed it as swiftly and surely as a squirrel fleeing a cat up a rough-cast wall, to disappear into a crack near the top.

“So much for that,” said Rizzi, stooping to retrieve her rifle. “Fucking waste of time.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure,” said Carlos. “Think about it.”

She slung her AK and her backpack and shot him a warning look. “Don’t you start.”

Prone in the dust amid the spiky scrub, with his phone screen on maximum zoom, Beauregard watched the two tiny figures pick their way down the side of the mountain. He’d watched their interaction with the third tiny figure—now vanished whence he’d come—in some frustration at being able to see and not to hear what was going on. He lowered his screen and turned to Newton, flat alongside him.

“Wonder if they got what they came for.”

Newton was still watching Carlos and Rizzi. “Wonder if we did.”

“Oh, we did all right,” Beauregard said. “We now know for sure Carlos is up to something, and that he’s nosing around trying to find out what happened last time.”

“Could be other reasons for going to see the deserter geezer.” There was a note of devil’s advocate in Newton’s voice.

“Yeah,” said Beauregard. “They could be consulting him on spiritual matters, or for fortune-telling like the local dimwits. But I know which way I’d bet.”

“Uh-huh,” said Newton, still watching. “So, what do we do?”

“Wait until they’re in range and shoot them? Jump them when they get to their vehicle? Or fuck off discreetly?”

“Decisions, decisions.”

“And if we go now, we can always ask them politely about their day when we see them in the Touch.”

“That would be the worst.”

Beauregard thought about it.

“You’re probably right,” he said, surprised. “Stupid idea in the first place. OK, scratch that. The trouble about doing something physical is that…”

“Nothing here’s physical?”

“Yup. So if we shoot them, the consequences are reversible for them and not for us.”

Newton lowered his screen. “So we fuck off discreetly, say nothing to let them know we saw them, and bide our time until we’re back in the real world.”

“Got it in one,” said Beauregard. “And back in the real world, I keep a close watch on my respected squad leader.”

“You do that,” said Newton. “Watch the fucker like an eagle-oid watching a rabbit-oid.”

They rolled off the low bank and, keeping their heads down, made their way around the vehicle that Carlos had driven, then back along the dirt track to the side road where they had left their own. By Beauregard’s reckoning, they were back in the resort and had their vehicle returned to the depot before Carlos and Rizzi had reached the edge of the moor.

Carlos had never seen the hangar so crowded. Given its size and that of the frames, the term was relative. But with ninety fighters from Locke Provisos, and an equal complement from the Morlock Arms and Zheng Reconciliation Services enforcement agencies who’d arrived from revival and training in other modules, all being wirelessly shepherded into a timed, staged deployment, there was inevitably a certain amount of milling around. The steady procession of rank upon rank of scooters floating in close formation from the rear of the hangar to the front filled yet more space. The scooters had bulked up since their last deployment, flanked with extra fuel and reaction-mass tanks.

Carlos had made sure his squad were on the last of the six buses out of the resort that morning. He’d guessed that meant they’d be the last to arrive. They were scheduled among the last to go into action, with two kiloseconds to wait before they boarded their scooters. He made sure his squad was mingling with others, and slipped away.

He gas-jetted to the side of the hangar, clicked his feet to the floor and looked about for the entrance to the corridor to the repair workshop. The layout had changed since his last memory of it, when he’d gone there to get repaired after his last surface mission. Any more recent memory of the workshop’s location had gone AWOL with his previous version. Carlos hurried past shafts, looking down each as he went. Incomprehensible, quasi-organic machinery toiled and spun. Ten seconds ticked by, then twenty, all experienced as ten times longer by his internal clock speed and longer still by his cold sense of urgency. How long until his absence was noticed? Any moment now. Then he saw an angular, intricate and obviously incomplete piece of apparatus being tugged into a corridor by one of the spidery robots.

He lifted one foot off the floor, lurched forward to dislodge the other and drifted after the robot down the shaft. Propelling himself by fingertip thrusts at the side walls, he soon overtook the machine and its load. A few more painfully stretched seconds later he reached an open hatchway. His memory of experiences in the frame was eidetic, but he couldn’t explain why that particular hatchway looked familiar—scuff marks on its rim, perhaps. He peered inside, and recognised the repair workshop where he’d taken his damaged forearm. This was where he must have come to himself when he arrived off the bus for his last sortie.

The chamber was ovoid, five metres long by three wide. With his spectroscopic sense Carlos could smell oil, nanoparticles of steel and carbon-fibre swarf. The surfaces bristled with tools. The centre was occupied by a long bench, the top and bottom of which could be used as worktops.

Carlos edged himself over the threshold, and began to scan and explore. The machinery didn’t react to his presence. This wouldn’t last—the machines would wake up when the robot arrived and hauled in a job. The place was not as cluttered as its human-operated equivalent would have been. But among all the clamped-down or magnetically held devices, parts and supplies there were random placings and inexplicable objects enough.

Worse, he didn’t know what he was looking for. Something in this rounded room had sent his earlier version haywire. He had no idea what. Quite possibly it was invisible to him, if his frame had been hacked into by a tool that had itself been hacked.

He recalled the orientation in which he’d been placed for repair. He thrust forward to that side of the worktable, and rolled into the closest equivalent position he could find. From the curving walls above, machines looked down. He peered at and between them, zooming his vision, scanning for clues. Nothing but random scratches and smudges. Carlos swept his vision this way and that. No anomaly caught his attention.

While he was searching, the spider-bot arrived at the hatch and extended a limb to hook over the threshold. Other limbs flickered above its main body, pushing its bulky, complicated load with feathery thrusts like a sea anemone’s fronds juggling a dead crab. The component began to drift into the room.

The complex, multi-tooled machine that on his earlier visit had clamped to Carlos’s frame now stirred into life. Tiny directional lights winked on. Carlos reached for the table surface, making to shove himself out of the way before anything untoward befell. One of the limbs stretched towards him, then retracted. From one of the limb’s many joints a section swivelled upward. A finer appendage of the tool flicked out, and pointed towards a scuffed square centimetre close to the tool’s mounting bracket. The beams of light, narrow as pencil leads, converged on the spot.

Was the tool pointing something out to him?

Yes, genius, it probably was.

Carlos pushed himself away from the workbench and floated up, like the astral body of a patient having a near-death experience. Under a higher magnification the scuffed area was a page of text in the synthetic local language of the sim, inscribed on the surface in microscopic font.

As he read it, he understood at last why the Arcane fighters had sided with the freebots.

He knew why his earlier version had, on reading this very text, decided to flee to the Arcane base at the first opportunity or die trying. He had never felt so shocked, so betrayed, so shafted in his life.

In the two seconds it took Carlos to read it, Beauregard came in.

Alerted by a twang of his proximity sense, Carlos turned his sight around, to find Beauregard an arm’s length behind his shoulder. Carlos had a momentary impulse to block Beauregard’s view of the inscription, but knew this was futile. The patch had been literally spotlighted. Even if Beauregard hadn’t zoomed in on it or had time to read it yet, the image would remain in his memory and could be enhanced and assimilated in seconds.

Carlos said, trying to buy time while readying his next move,

Beauregard struck first. He grabbed Carlos by the right wrist and somersaulted to reverse their relative positions, then pushed off hard, feet against the wall. Carlos found himself thrust back and banged against the heavy component the spider-bot had just tugged in.

He ducked, grabbed at the object with his free hand, and pivoted Beauregard over his shoulder. Now it was Beauregard’s head that slammed into the floating mass. The spider-bot emitted distress and warning signals as it snaked a limb around Beauregard’s neck. The fixed tools in the room flexed themselves and opened out manipulators, poised to grab like the pincered arms and hands of sumo wrestlers.

Beauregard let go of Carlos’s wrist to wrench with both hands at the spider-bot’s grapple. It soon gave way. Carlos spun himself around, assisted by his internal gyroscopes, and thrust off for the hatchway. He grabbed the threshold, swung his legs out and pulled sharply to launch himself back down the corridor towards the hangar. A second later he looked back, to see Beauregard emerge from the hatch in hot pursuit, slamming from side to side of the corridor, zig-zagging after him.

Carlos rolled in mid-space, jetted one of his frame’s tiny onboard compressed-gas thrusters and shot downward. His magnetic-soled feet clicked to the floor just as Beauregard—still on a rebound—sailed above his head. He reached up and grabbed Beauregard’s ankle. Just as deftly, Beauregard used his momentum to force Carlos to lean back, then stamped with his free foot at Carlos’s arm. Carlos held on. The limb rang with pain. Beauregard jack-knifed, to head-butt the back of Carlos’s knees. The magnetic attachment gave way. They both tumbled into the space of the corridor, turning over and over, grabbing for the sides, kicking at each other, trying to find footing.

Carlos eventually fought his way to holding both of Beauregard’s wrists. This grip momentarily left Beauregard’s feet free. He brought his knees to his chest and stamped both heels at Carlos’s midriff. The impact broke Carlos’s hold and sent the two antagonists flying in opposite directions.

The wrong directions, from Beauregard’s point of view.

Perhaps confused by their whirling fight, he kicked out at the wrong moment. He went flying back, to be snagged and spun around by the waiting arms of the spider-bot, now guarding the workshop hatchway. Carlos hurtled out of the corridor and into the hangar. Flailing, he blundered into a phalanx of Morlock Arms fighters, still in free fall and drifting towards the cavernous rectangular grin of the launch slot. Their ranks broke up into colliding cartwheels as Carlos starfished through like a spinning shuriken. A dozen or so impacts on heads, torsos and extremities slowed and steadied Carlos. With both feet on someone’s shoulders, he looked around for a way of escape before anyone thought to seize him.

The parade of scooters was still going by, like an aerial fly-past at a military display for some short ambitious tyrant. Carlos jumped. His thrust of feet down on shoulders sent the unlucky fighter crashing into a cascade of companions, and Carlos flying up to the nearest scooter. He grabbed a skid and clambered over the craft’s carapace to the control socket. As he snaked himself in he found all the connections live and lighting up. The machinery of the frame connected with the control circuitry of the scooter. As suddenly and sharply as ever, he found himself one with the machine.

He pushed down with his feet and eased up with his hands, angling the scooter above the repetitive procession of its identical counterparts, and thrust forwards above them faster and faster, to fly through the gap between the launch catapults and out of the station into the welcoming dark and blazing light and humming smells and screaming sounds of space.

Beauregard at last freed himself from the spider-bot by applying all the strength of his hands and arms to systematically snap every limb of it, until the device ran out of limbs. A kick at the rim of the hatch launched him down the corridor, caroming off this side and that until he reached the opening to the hangar. He grabbed the edge of the bulkhead and took stock. Carlos was nowhere to be seen. A roil of fighters flailing back into formation, and a single gap in the echelons of scooters moving towards the launch catapults, tracked his passage and left an unsubtle clue as to where and how the mad treacherous fucker had fled.

Beauregard’s comms channels rang with indignant queries—from his own squad, from Newton, and from the Morlock Arms contingent that Carlos had disrupted. Locke would be on the case any second now, breathing fire and demanding an accounting. Beauregard chose to pre-empt that. He cut across the incoming babble and called the company.

he said.

said Locke.

Beauregard assumed that Locke knew the preceding circumstances perfectly well from internal surveillance. If not contemporaneous—the AI having more pressing matters on its mind than snooping on obscure corridors and repair workshops—a simple track-back from Carlos’s abrupt emergence in and hasty departure from the hangar would do the trick. Locke would be checking Beauregard’s version of the story against the record. Beauregard chose his words with care.

said Locke, in a tone of more than usual dryness.

Beauregard objected.

said Locke.

Beauregard relayed the order to Chun, Karzan, Rizzi and Zeroual. A general call brayed across the common channel. It was as if Locke’s normal quiet, insistent voice-in-the-head had been amplified, and become as impossible to ignore as a nearby pneumatic drill.

Beauregard watched as four fighters drifting forward with the rest dropped out of the ranks and jetted to the floor, where they stood in a disconsolate huddle as the parade passed by. He jetted over to join them. On the way he called Newton, who with his squad was just ahead of where Carlos’s had been.

he said.

Beauregard burned to tell Newton what he now knew from the microscopic message which Carlos, then he, had read. He didn’t dare. Newton would find out soon enough.

Beauregard said, ambiguously to anyone else but he hoped plainly to Newton.

said Newton.

said Beauregard, and signed off.

If there were ever to be an investigation of the coming catastrophe this conversation, ambiguous though it was, could be taken in evidence. He didn’t want to prolong it. Come to that, he could do his bit to make sure there never was an investigation—at least, none in which he would be a suspect. When treason prospers…

This story was going to be written by the victors—no, by the victor!