by Toby Weston
Singularity’s
Children
Book Two
Disruption
By
Toby Weston
Copyright
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Published by
Lobster Books
Copyright © 2017 by Toby Weston
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Cover Illustration © 2017 by Toby Weston
1.0.12
Preface
The Earth of this book is not ours.
This is not important.
It is mostly a literary device to allow the author lenience with dates and with histories past and future.
Mostly.
A glossary of technologies and locations from the books and a
full dramatis personæ of characters available at:
www.tobyweston.net
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Edward Abbey
Chapter 1 – There’s Always War
A sponge, arguably the first creature to build its body from more than a single cell, is barely an ‘it’ at all. What appears as one organism, is better described as a semi-autonomous collective. A host of loosely cooperating individuals building a shambling whole. Force a sponge through a fine sieve and the cloud of cells will happily reform, members taking on new roles, while the whole reassembles anew.
The minds of humans are similarly a curious assembly of barely integrated parts. Fossilised cognitive impressions of the Lizard and the Mouse contest with the many archetypes of the Man for control. Viewing through the same physical eyes, each facet of the self sees the world from a different perspective. The lizards and mice scurrying around inside our skulls want to fuck and flee. They live for the now. Complex arguments are lost on them, yet those nervous little animals dominate our emotions, give us our joie de vivre, and make our hearts race with terror or lust.
Sitting in there, among the dashing rodents and skulking reptiles, are patient academics scrutinising the world’s patterns; planning, preparing, and bickering.
The din of voices within grows so loud it penetrates the honeycomb soundproofing of the skull, allowing the inadequacies, cognitive blind spots and perversions of the sub-ego choir to escape to echo across society.
The din drowns out the voices of the few enlightened individuals who have their own internal vermin under control. The rutting, racist majority, whose hyperbolic discount functions force inactivity in the face of anything but the most immediate pressing crises, run the show. The result is a massive drunken stagger, a comical lurching lunge across a darkened, danger-strewn globe.
Ignorance and idiocy—with a last-minute frosting of genius—create our familiar anarchy perpetually balanced on the verge of catastrophic Armageddon.
***
Keith tried to stay focused as the last hundred years of European and colonial succession were dissected and splayed on the 3D screens. The revolutions that decapitated the Ottoman and Russ empires in 1911; the fall of the Holy Empire in 1928; the new, straight lines that so disastrously redrew Europe in 1956 after the World War; the inevitable fragmentation and civil war from Kabul to Kitzbul, when the era of state power entered its twilight years; finally, the creeping spread of the Islamic Caliphate which, by 2030, stretched in one green block from Pakistan to Morocco. The accelerated history illuminated the growth and decay of states and their dogma, giving the appearance of organic living things, pulsing their colours across its surface like amoebae battling in a petri dish.
The perceived needs, dictated by the menagerie of pre-sentient, pseudo-personalities, motivated men to kill and take—or, more often, motivated leaders to command others to kill, take and deliver.
This was the mess Keith and his new chums would live in. Tasked by the populist, furiously optimistic, UK Forward Government with the patently impossible task of maintaining a crumbling imperial remnant against a growing list of fourth-generation actors: distributed republics, criminal cartels, trading bots, and pseudo-states. Old survivors, like the newly resurrected Caliphate or the Catholic Church, were also playing again, despite having sat out whole turns of the game. After languishing for a thousand years, they had shuddered and grabbed the dice, jumping from parchment, past industrialisation, directly to ad hoc distributed meshes of power, information and reputation.
The vivid reds, blues, and greens violated Keith’s sensitive retinas. His head hurt, and not just from last night’s Absinthe. It was a fucking nightmare. All over the map, people were killing each other, ostensibly for vague esoteric reasons involving gods or ancient wrongs; but, from the maps and charts, it was clear they were fighting for the scraps left on the table after the party had moved on.
The Captain barked again.
‘At ease’ meant standing more erect than Keith’s most puffed-up preening.
‘Attention!’ implied unobtainable levels of verticality.
The base was thirty kilometres outside Prague. A strange, fungal cluster of bulging tumours embedded in an onion of razor wire. The bombproof structures were poured from a mix of concrete and carbon fibre into hollow inflated forms that, once the concrete had solidified, were removed to leave buildings like unfortunate stranded jellyfish. The cluster was built on a low hill that protruded from the surrounding pine forest. Streaked and weathered, stained variously piss yellow or puke green, the bulbous structures looked sick.
Keith felt sick. Sick of the army that had finally caught up with him after stalking him patiently for most of his life. It had been like some ever-present, lurking predator. As money and hope ran low, it had sensed weakness and crept closer. He’d managed to put some distance between him and it when he had gone to work for Ben and his father, but that period of relative affluence had ended shortly after he violently assaulted his boss in a jungle bar. The Business Class flight back to London had been his last taste of corporate nipple. Official termination papers had been waiting at his apartment, and so began his unenthusiastic slide into itinerancy.
After months of couch surfing, serially exhausting the hospitality of his remaining friends, options had persistently failed to materialise. His support network had become a dying camp fire, a fragile contracting circle of light, unable in its diminished state to hold back the hunters in the night. As patience and money had run out, the old nemesis had crept in. Keith, weak, out of options, unable to protest, had felt it close cold jaws around his leg, then watched, as if disembodied, while it dragged him out of the firelight to join hundreds of other disillusioned young men with similar stories.
The familiarity of his new life had been the first shock. Stand up, sit down, drop and give me twenty. It was public school again: discipline, achievement and unflinching obedience. Keith at least knew the rules of the game, unlike some of the other unfortunate victims, who were still reeling from the novelty of informal hazing and officially sanctioned violence.
Geopolitics over for the day, their brains were granted a fifteen-minute reprieve to replenish stimulant levels. Keith filtered out of the lecture hall with the others. Coffee was available. He took an aluminium beaker and went to stand in the drizzle with his new friends from the north end of the long dormitory. Most were smoking. Jones, the obligatory Welsh boy, was enduring some gentle racial abuse from Sten, a wiry cockney of East African descent. Keith cupped his beaker in both hands and sipped the astringent liquid.
“What’s next?” he asked.
The others, happy to turn away from what had become a predictable exchange of racial stereotypes, acknowledged Keith’s arrival with nods and grunts. He was ten years older than most, which translated to a perceived seniority, and he was usually left out of their primate social jostling.
�
��IEDs and shit,” Jones replied.
“Yeah. One million and one ways to die in the East,” someone added.
“We’re heading off-base again tonight. You coming, Special?” Sten asked Keith.
“Yeah, why not? Might be the last chance for a while.”
“Why’d you say that?” Jones asked.
“They don’t grant this many passes, unless we are gearing up, right K?” one of the others offered.
“Yeah, that’s probably how it works,” Keith replied. “After three nights on the town in Prague, we’ll all have hangovers so big that house-to-house in a bombed-out ghost town will feel like a spa weekend.”
Cigarettes were toked upon and coffee sipped as these words of wisdom were digested. The soon-to-be soldiers were lost in themselves. Six months of training were coming to an end. It had been hard. Two months ago, the brutal repetitive physical programme of the Aberdeen base had transitioned into a mix of drills, lectures and exercises on kit, tech, and vehicles. Three weeks ago, they had moved to their current home, out on the edge of Europe. More squads were arriving each day.
Sleek, silent, almost invisible VTOL attack drones slid over the fence at all hours, returning with little fanfare, to be refuelled and rearmed and sent back out. At least once a night, one of the ancient noisy tiltrotors thundered off from the other end of the base, carrying men to do work too dirty for machines.
A flat-sounding buzzing announced playtime was over, prompting cigarettes to be crushed and dregs to be flung out onto the parade ground.
The rest of the morning passed in a blur of DNA-triggered charges, high-altitude glider-launched kinetic energy impactors, assassin snake-bots, and dozens of other novel and interesting toys the Surgies had cooked up to kill them. Tomorrow would be software attacks. The instructor had happily informed them that firmware hacks to their own weapons systems were the most apparent threat, accounting for as many deaths as roadside bombs.
Cabbage, potato and what was allegedly pork were piled on Keith’s plate, lashed with a brown, viscous, salty goop. Even the catering seemed to be run according to the same system as his school.
The recruits sat on pine benches, morosely looking at their plates, the table, or their fingers. Cold bodies dressed in drab olive, hair shorn to the scalp, rings under the eyes from exhaustion. Callouses on hands from a surprising, and likely pointless, amount of rope climbing.
“Cabbage!”
“Calm down, Burt. Let’s not have another flare-up isn’t it!” Jones urged.
Keith was slightly below average height, medium build, brown stubble, pale skin. The canteen was filled with half a thousand similar entities. Blank disks being programmed by essentially the same system that had successfully turned people into psychopaths for thousands of years.
“I don’t like cabbage!”
Even now, as they prepared for their first deployment, they didn’t feel like killers. They felt like lost children, and that was as it should be. Now, they just needed to accept a new daddy—or, rather, a whole hierarchy of daddies. Eat your cabbage like daddy says, then go and kill the bad man.
“Jesus, Burt, just eat the fucking cabbage or don’t. Just stop the fucking whining!” Sten shouted.
Burt, the spotty youth, glowered at Sten, who was sitting a few places away, and sawed through a chunk of rubbery flesh. He speared the chunk of gristle and began chewing. Keith looked at his own plate. He would have liked to have a little tantrum of his own, but he had been here before. The groups had been mixed again, and relationships were still being defined. Keith knew the other ‘boys’ would latch on to weakness. He remembered that petty mistakes in the first few days would take terms of heroic behaviour to undo.
The afternoon was another briefing. The entire company was seated on flimsy plastic chairs, obviously designed for children—Keith couldn’t tell if this was:
a) due to incompetence,
b) the effects of crushed budgets, or
c) devilishly refined psychological priming.
The session kicked off with the Major standing on a podium and giving another long, motivational speech about the importance of their mission. Keith wasn’t listening. Instead, he was looking at the vast collection of seized weapons arranged on folding tables, standing neatly about the repurposed mess hall, which was another colossal distended dome of concrete. Soon, people across Europe and Asia would use nasty things like that to try to kill him.
After the speech, the men were instructed to wander around and familiarise themselves with the improvised killing gear on the tables and ask questions of the soldiers, who had made themselves experts in their use and construction.
The first thing Keith looked at was an old tablet, with a bulky case permanently epoxied onto it.
“Custom radio shoe,” a red-bearded engineer explained. “Interfaces to the tablet and provides a standard TCP/IP stack implementation. It’s a custom radio that does 10km line of site, good wide-band for use in urban environs. Also does Doppler and artificial aperture. This one can sense a beating heart through 80cm of concrete wall. The Chinks or the Clans build these, and they find their way into the hands of everybody from the Surgies to the ZKF.”
“What’s a usage scenario?” Keith asked, trying out the jargon.
“Battlefield comms and command and control. A bunch of Bohunks with these can run a pretty tight squad. GPS target designation, friend or foe tagging, secure comms. Does pretty much the same as our HUDs, and they can put them together for a thousand times less.”
The spook moved on to a squat armoured drone, with four tiny gimballed jet engines and pylons for mounting nasty little weapons.
“With the right software, these things can work as a swarm, spotting and attacking, feeding everything back to their battlespace,” he said, nodding back towards the tablet on the previous table.
“So if our enemies are tooled with all this, what’s our edge?”
The answer came too quickly and was accompanied by two seconds of unblinking challenge that communicated equal measures of amusement and pity.
“Training and experience.”
“Great.”
***
A spring morning, replete with shafts of sunlight, babbling brooks and singing birds. On such a morning, Keith allowed himself some optimism.
Training had been exhausting and tiresome—months of helpless frustration at the arbitrary beck and call of pedantic officers—but it was a cake-walk followed by a picnic compared to deployment. His new job mostly consisted of flying around the Balkans, while getting shot at by every diverse ethnic category conceivable. For over a year, their battle-scarred little bunch had been variously inserting themselves between terrorists and critical infrastructure, or genocidal maniacs and their terrified dehumanised victims. On this bright spring morning, Keith’s squad was backup to a team of forensic anthropologists investigating rumours of some nasty little local episode of racial intolerance.
Vivid green leaves burst from twigs in a slow-motion explosion of vitality. Life, which had been biding its time waiting for an irrefutable sign that the bleak, desperate winter was over—finally convinced there would be no more cruel tricks to catch naive, irresponsible optimists—was partying with Mardi Gras abandon. The winter had been especially bitter. The evidence still lay skulking in the shadows, hiding from the spring’s ascendant sun as it went house to house, banishing the last resistance of the winter; melting solidified cores of snowdrifts into translucent ice sculptures riven with chambers and miniature waterfalls.
In a moment of weakness, with all the rural beauty and the spreading contagious enthusiasm of spring, Keith had found himself thinking pleasant thoughts. It had been a tough few decades for the planet, but there would be a spring. Okay, there had been some erosion of freedom, but fewer people were starving these days. Perhaps it was worth it? In another thousand days, Keith would be out of the army and free to start again. The AIs would continue to take on more of the dangerous, routine and tedious jobs and
leave Keith free to focus on living and loving.
It was then, with his visor up, thinking these pleasant thoughts—the warm spring sun on his face—that Keith found the grave. He felt his foot sinking slowly through the thin crust of ice, into something soft below. Looking down at his feet, initially he did not understand what he was seeing. Gigantic teeth seemed to close on his foot, but, as he sank deeper with a crackling popping, teeth resolved to ribs. His armoured foot was dragging grey flesh and skin into the abdomen as it sank, leaving incongruously white bone to catch the morning sunlight.
‘How the fuck did I end up here?’ he thought to himself.
As he waited for the forensics team to clear him for foot extraction, he let his mind wander, trying to find an adequate answer to the question. He knew the first-order reason: he was here because he had humiliated his boss in front of the smug bastard’s entire management team. Perhaps he was getting numb, because, literally knee-deep in horror, Keith still smiled at the pleasant memory of punching Ben in his grinning face.