The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (3 page)

Besides the poor definition of the demarcation line that had led to the clash between the robots, the resulting situation had been misunderstood. For kiloseconds on end it had been treated as an illegitimate hijacking by the two exploration companies of each other’s robots. Writs of complaint about malware insertions, theft of property and the like had flown back and forth. By the time the true situation had finally sunk in, the newly conscious robots were fully in charge of the two bases, which they were rapidly adapting to their own purposes.

What these purposes were Madame Golding could only guess. That they were nefarious was strongly suggested by the rampart of regolith being thrown up around the Astro camp, and the wall of basalt blocks around the Gneiss base. Then there was the uncrackable encrypted channel they’d established via the comsat. Getting rid of that would require some expensive and delicate hardware hacking.

Madame Golding briefly considered a hardware solution to the entire problem. Two well-placed rocks…

But the exploration companies wouldn’t stand for that. Not yet, anyway.

She kicked the problem upstairs to the mission’s government module, the Direction.

Some small subroutine of the Direction went through the microsecond equivalent of a sigh, and set to work.

Like the supreme being in certain gnostic theologies, it delegated the labour of creation to lower and lesser manifestations of itself. A virtual world was already available. It had been used for a similar purpose before, originally spun off from a moment of thought at a far higher level than the subroutine’s. This new version would be in continuity with its original. After its earlier use that continuity had only existed as a mathematical abstraction. Now it would come into existence as if it had been there all along, with a back story in place for everything within it.

(Like a different imagined god this time, the trickster deity who laid down fossils in the rocks and created the light from the stars already on its way.)

Some minds had inhabited that world when it was discontinued. They would come back, with all the memories they needed to make sense of their situation. Many more virtual minds and bodies stood ready to populate it.

File upon file, rank upon rank. The subroutine’s lower levels scanned, selected, conscripted and considered. From subtle implications it deduced the qualities needed for its own agent in that world. The agent had to be an artist, capable of filling in detail at a scale too small to be already present. Like these details, the agent emerged from a cascade of implications. And like the world, the agent had an original, a template that had been tested before.

That archived artificial intelligence restored itself, and took form as a woman. At first, she was abstract: an implication, a requirement. Databases vaster than all the knowledge ever held in human minds were rummaged for details. As the structure of the requirement became more elaborate and refined, it became itself the answer to the question the search was asking.

The woman emerged in outline but already aware, a new and wondering self in a phantom virtual space. Full of knowledge and self-knowledge, she ached to grow more real with every millisecond that passed. She became a sketch that was itself the artist, and that painted itself into a portrait, and then stepped away from the canvas as a person.

There she stood, a tiny splash of colour and mass of solidity and surge of vitality in a world that was present in every detail she looked at, and yet was in every detail an outline. She took on with zest the task of bringing it to life. It was like recreating a lost world from fossils. Start with the palaeontologist’s description and reconstruction. From that abstract model make an artist’s impression, full of colour and life, looking like it could jump from the page. And then, from all that, design an animatronic automaton that can move and roar and makes small children squeal.

When she’d finished, and stood back to look, she made some finishing touches to herself. These too were requirements, to be selected with precision for a specific task. One chance to make a first impression. Height and build. Skin tone. Hair. That cut, that colour. (That colouring, to be honest, which she had to be, if only with herself.) Clothes. Shoes. Boots. Shades. A wardrobe. A style. Vocabulary and accent. Knowledge and intelligence.

When she’d finished the world and herself, she paused for a moment. She knew things she wouldn’t know once she’d stepped fully into the world. She wanted to make sure she would find them again. She needed a way to work directly from within the world with her creator and its.

She saw a way, and smiled at its ingenuity and its obviousness. She sketched that detail in, then rendered it in full.

She took a deep breath, and then the self she’d made stepped into the world she’d made.

she asked her creator.

Its response came back:

The coof was daddy dancing in the death dive. Taransay Rizzi watched him throwing shapes as if he fancied himself like Jagger doing a hot jive on one of her great-granddad’s antique gifs. She felt like throwing up. Jesus fuck he was a prick of the first water. Belfort Beauregard his name was, a total fucking Norman with a posh accent and a chiselled mien and dancing like he was made of wood and his strings were being jerked about. He’d made an impression on one local lassie though, Tourmaline she called herself, who was—so Beauregard had sniggered in Taransay’s ear, his breath hot with beer fumes and rank with some seaweed analogue of garlic—not exactly human, a meat puppet he’d said, like it was some big secret and dirty with it. Daft lassie was all over the coof like a rash, mirroring his monkey moves like a sedulous ape.

Taransay slugged back another gulp of wine from the bottle, and steadied herself against the edge of the bar counter. She was drunk and she knew it. She had every intention of getting even more drunk and passing out, preferably in someone else’s bed. It struck her as a sensible reaction to her big discovery of the day: that she was dead.

Taransay was not at all sure where she was. She knew where she seemed to be: in the death dive, a seafront bar called the Digital Touch (wee bit meta, she thought, in that it was—so she’d been assured—digital like everything else here, but you could touch it with any of your digital, well, digits…).

She knew where she’d been told she was, but who could you trust? (Or was it “whom”? She wasn’t sure, though she’d probably have known when she was bashing out Axle communiques back in the day, or maybe that had all been taken care of by a smoothing swipe of the grammar app.)

The lady had fucking
told
her where she was. When Taransay looked out beyond the cramped and crowded dance floor of the death dive to the patio decking and the sea and the alien sky, she could almost believe it, but she couldn’t be sure.

She might be in hell, or purgatory.

Hell? Purgatory? What? Where the fuck had all that come from? Rax rants or… no, wait, childhood. At the age of seven or so she’d naïvely envied her schoolmates, the pape lassies, all dolled up in their first communion finery like wee brides. Then her da had patiently explained to her what her friends believed or were supposed to believe and she’d had nightmares for a week. Never spoken about it, not to her father and especially not to her friends. Ever after, Taransay had had a guarded, grudging respect for anyone who could think what religious folks thought and not mind it a bit.

Now here she was, dead.

Wherever “here” was. She’d woken from her worst ever hellish nightmare on the packed minibus and gawped at the sea and sky. She’d tried and failed to engage polite but impassive and uncomprehending locals in conversation. At the end of the journey, down here by the sea, she’d stumbled off to be greeted by the friendly lady who called herself Nicole.

Nicole had taken Taransay to lunch and told her she was dead, and then had chummed her along the street to the Touch to meet Beauregard and the others who’d arrived here in the past few days. All with the same origin story: the bus, the lady, the talk.

And then left to cope as best you could.

All would be explained, they’d been told, when the full complement had arrived. Meanwhile, here they were, told they were dead and in some kind of virtual reality in the far future and spending every evening getting out of their skulls, which seemed an entirely sensible thing to do especially on your first night in… wherever.

Maybe it was Valhalla after all. Maybe she’d arrived where good bonny fighters went when they died. Dead warriors forever carousing. The old Norse afterlife, upgraded: Valhalla Beach.

Taransay Rizzi had always believed an immersive virtual reality afterlife was possible in principle. Maybe she’d believed it in the same sort of belief-in-belief way as her religious school pals back in Glasgow had believed in heaven and hell and purgatory…

No, it wasn’t like that. She’d always had sound scientific reasons for thinking it. The brain is a machine, she’d learned in school, and what can be run on one machine can be emulated on another. Later, at university, she’d worked on enough nanotechnology and neurobiology to see the interaction between these fields grow almost tangibly in her hands from week to week. For the last five years she could remember, she’d lived with one application of that ever-growing technology existing as a fractal feather in her brain: the spike in her skull. The spike’s absence now, strangely, did most to make this new existence different from real life.

Here, she wasn’t connected any more, whether to other people or to information or to objects. She couldn’t share her thoughts without speaking. No longer could she look at a random face and summon, as if from memory, all she needed to know about that person. She could stare as long as she liked at this bottle in her hand and know no more about it than was written on the label. If she wanted to operate the food machine behind the bar from which, an hour or two earlier, steaming plates had emerged on demand for her dinner, she’d have to hear or read instructions.

Taransay sighed, and found her free hand had crept to the back of her head. Her middle finger probed the occipital ridge, to rediscover the absence of the nail-head nubbin of the spike’s access port. She swigged again and surveyed the scene.

The place was heaving. Lots of locals had come in, fascinated with the new arrivals. As who wouldn’t be, to meet five folk from a thousand years ago? Less than a thousand years for them, but even so. Names of legend. Even hers. Knights of dark renown, she thought, and smiled.

There on the far side of the dance floor stood Waggoner Ames, the big beardy Yank with the booming voice and the thousand-metre stare when he thought no one was looking. Taransay could hardly believe she was in the same room as the man. Legend, he was. It was like going down the pub and bumping into Merlin.

Beauregard she hadn’t heard of, but seeing as he’d defected to the Axle from Brit military intelligence that was hardly surprising.

Swaying at the centre and dodging Beauregard’s flailing dance moves was Chun Ho, tall and cool, smiling down at a local lad who looked ready to unzip him right there. She’d heard of Chun, and his exploits in the Pacific: a biomedical trick smuggled out of a lab in Taiwan, that had made possible a daring tactical move in the Battle of the Barrier Reef.

Rolling a cigarette outside the open patio doors was Maryam Karzan, who’d been fighting the Caliphate as a girl decades before Taransay had even been born, and had in old age seen its shadow rise again in the Reaction, and stood up herself, an aged but still fierce warrior, to fight it a few months after Taransay herself had been killed in action.

Quite bravely, too, she’d been told by the lady: live-testing a piece of nanotech that hadn’t had enough pre-production debugging. Which feat had, perversely, made her a heroine to some and a mass-murdering criminal to others.

And the locals?

As far as Taransay and the others were concerned, they were people from the future.

The future she’d died for?

Maybe not. Another slug of the rough red wine.

The Acceleration… oh God, it was hard now to recapture the anger and excitement and hope her first encounter with it had brought, that sense of having
seen through
everything, a kind of intellectual equivalent of how the spike augmented your vision. Freedom, the Axle insisted, wasn’t being confronted with an infinity of choices you couldn’t make and didn’t want. It was something far simpler: freedom in the sense of a body moving freely, free development of the faculties and powers of body and mind (which were the same thing, the same physical self, thinking meat). At the fag-end of the twenty-first century, immortality was the only thing worth dying for. The only celebrity worth striving for was for the whole human race to become world famous. The only utopia worth dreaming of was for everyone in the world to have First World problems.

And the only way to get there was to
burn through
capitalism, to get through that unavoidable stage as fast as possible. Let it rip, let it run wild until full automation created full unemployment and confronted everybody with the choice to get on with the real work, and off the treadmill of fake work and make-work to pay the debt to buy the goods to make the make-work feel worthwhile and the exhausted, empty time tagged as leisure pass painlessly enough…

It had all seemed so obvious, so sensible, so simple.

But it wasn’t, and as the Acceleration’s ideas had spread, another set of ideas had spread to counter it: the Reaction. The ultimate counter-revolution, to face down the threat of the ultimate revolution. It had drawn on a deep dark well of tradition and upgraded what it found, to modernise anti-modernity. There was plenty down there, from Plato and Han Fei and on up: through the first theorists of the divine right of kings, and the original Reactionary writers who’d railed against the French Revolution, to the fascist philosophers and scientific racists of the twentieth century and beyond.

The Reaction had remixed them all into its own toxic brew, a lethal meme-complex that had come to possess a movement that could emerge from a million basements to rampage in a hundred thousand streets. Its solution to the crisis of late state capitalism was not to go forward beyond it, but to go back to an age before it, using the very weapons and tools capitalism had forged. The new technologies that made abundance possible were too dangerous to be in the hands of ordinary people, and they were at the same time capable of making some people extraordinary. With intelligence enhancement you could have an aristocracy, a monarchy, or for that matter a master race that really
was
superior to common folk. With universal connection and surveillance you could make its rule stick. Top-down control of society had at last become possible at the very moment in history when it became most necessary. To the Reaction that coincidence was almost providential. It proved that God was on their side whether they believed in him or not.

So the two opposed sides had fought, in a conflict that had escalated beyond even the horrors Taransay remembered. The Last World War, the lady had called it. And because nanotech and biotech and all the rest really were horrendously dangerous, the collateral damage had been immense.

Including, Taransay thought wryly, to herself.

Oh well. You only live once.

Or not, as the case may be.

She didn’t feel like dancing, though she could understand why the people who’d arrived here in the past few days were bopping like there was no tomorrow, which in a sense there wasn’t. They were at the end of all tomorrows, and trying to forget the yesterday that was gone forever. Just as she was. She put the now empty wine bottle down, and turned to order another.

And saw the lady standing beside her. Very unfairly chic, neat as a new pin, shining in a bar full of guys and gals in combats. Taransay realised belatedly that she’d just said something along those lines, and mumbled and gestured what she intended as an apology.

Nicole, warm and composed, smiling: “You’re drunk, soldier.”

“Aye, I am that. And I’m off duty, am I no?”

Nicole chuckled. “You could say that.”

Taransay waved, nearly knocking over the empty bottle. “See us, we’re all dead. Dancing in the death dive.”

“It’s understandable.” Another smile. “And understood.”

“When do we find out what this is all in aid of?”

Nicole’s brow creased as she searched her memory for the usage, then her eyes widened.

“Ah! Yes, of course. You’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow?”

“That’s when the final member of your team comes off the bus.”

“Anyone I’ve heard of?”

“Oh, I think so,” Nicole said. “Carlos.”

“Carlos?
The
Carlos? Carlos the Terrorist?”

“That’s the one,” said Nicole.

“Hey!” said Taransay. “That bears repeating.”

She stuck fingers in her mouth and whistled, a practised, piercing note that cut through the music and the babble from the screen above the bar and the shouted conversations above it all. Heads turned.

“Hey, guys!” Taransay yelled. “Listen up! Know who’s coming to join us tomorrow? Carlos, that’s who! Carlos the Terrorist!”

The place erupted.

Nicole gestured down the music and the television’s roar. Everyone quietened in response.

“I could take that as a vote by acclamation,” she said. “But I need to be sure. I want to hear it from you sober, before I meet Carlos off the bus.” She grinned around at the five fighters. “See you all here in twelve hours.”

She snapped her fingers. The sound systems came on again. She waved and left.

Twelve hours, fuck. Not a lot of time. Taransay ordered another drink, eyed up the local talent and made her choice. Tousled black hair, bright dark eyes, slender and lithe, in grubby jeans and flashy shirt. Lounging with his back and one elbow to the bar counter and watching the dance floor with lidded amusement. Looked like he was in his twenties. Mind you, all the locals did.

Taransay sidled up.

“You dancing?” she asked him.

“You asking?” he said.

He danced a lot better than Beauregard. His name was Den. He operated a flotilla of robot fishing submersibles out of the harbour.

Later, lolling on his shoulder, she kicked under the table at the kitbag she’d found at her feet on the bus, and pointed to the labelled, numbered key tied with sisal to its throat.

“Come to bed,” she said.

“You are too drunk,” said Den. “You might not mean this.”

“Course I mean it, you daft coof! What kind of a man are you, eh?”

Den smiled, and tilted her head back with a thumb under her chin.

“A man who was once a hundred and ninety-seven years old,” he said. “I know such things.”

“Fuck me,” she said.

Not that night, he didn’t.

She woke naked and alone in her bed, the new sun too hot and too bright in her eyes.