by Toby Weston
“Okay, see you, Segi,” replied Stella, watching him go. “Are you sticking around, Marcel? Want to say hi?”
“Sure, I’ll hang around. Why not?”
Stella deployed a virtual Camera Bee and arranged herself so that the King was behind her bobbing dolphin’s head.
“Hey, Subs. Stella here!” she began. “Do you recognise me? Long time no see, right?! My old friends, Tink and Marcel, are here with me tonight at the AOL Spring Solstice. King Niato will be talking soon…”
It was easy to fall back into the rhythm. This would be one of her first streams since her hiatus. N had suggested a stealth launch. It had been six months since she had been kicked out of TeenLife™—an eternity for her over-caffeinated demographic. She wondered how long it would take to get her first subscriber—or if, perhaps, she was past it, over the hill at twenty-nine. Perhaps this stream would join the slush heap of dross that nobody would ever watch.
After the dancing, the King returned to his pedestal. The throne, tables and chairs had been removed; collapsed and stowed into a functional grey tender and taken back to the island.
“Friends!” Niato said, raising his hands. The lights flared and the music ebbed. “Thank you all for joining me again at our Spring Solstice. Today, I want to start with some quick highlights. Our country is growing up! It’s a beacon to the world. Proof that technology and dignity can build a place where people want to live. Phase two of Atlantis City is complete. The keys of all properties within the second meander have been handed over to their new residents… many of you must be here tonight! Make yourselves known!”
There was a small cheer from the happy owners and some applause.
“The Grand Canal project is completed; flooded and flowing. Phase three of the city is well underway. We are out of the ground for everything within the fifth turn. Foundations and basements are completed, and bespoke waterfront construction of fifty kilometres of canal-front luxury is either completed or underway. Friends… we have a capital city!”
This garnered a good swell of enthusiastic cheering.
“Now to the economy. The rest of the world is puzzled by our model. The crown guarantees food, safety and shelter to every citizen. All people, human and other, can expect security. Counter to the pronunciations of mass apathy, we have full employment, and nearly ten per cent of our productivity comes from our non-human citizens.”
Stella glanced over at Tinkerbell. Ironically, she didn’t seem to be paying attention.
“But not everything is so positive,” continued Niato. “Under the flimsy guise of anti-piracy and free trade enforcement, we are under extreme sanctions and our allies are under persistent attack. Our enemies provoke us daily with atrocities against our extended citizenship. We are small and we are peace loving, but we are not weak…” The King let this hang, deliberately, feeding the rumours of weapons being developed beneath the King’s palace and confirming what was rarely mentioned in polite conversation, that the naval base at the north of the island was growing faster than even Atlantis City.
“I am convinced that we are on the right side of history. Scientists and artists from all over the world are queuing up to join us. They will become your neighbours, living beside you along the banks of Atlantis City’s Grand Canal. At times, their journey will have been difficult. Please make them our friends.”
Stella focused on the King, but let several more virtual Bees skim over the boats and barges, watching reaction and gauging the mood. Many faces were pixelated, a consensus version of the physical masks the N-Kin wore.
Most people seemed happy. Perhaps this was utopia?
“We don’t believe in conflict. Conflict is caused by scarcity and contention for resources… we don’t believe that either are necessary anymore. There is enough energy and abundance everywhere. The limiting factor now is not how much or how fast you can mine, but the carrying capacity of our planet. As soon as asteroids made of gold and platinum start arriving, this will become self-evident. The Forwards and the mandarins of Çin want to dig up all the metal and burn all the oil. They might even succeed in covering the whole planet with city and suburb, but by then the oceans will be dead and the air too foul to breath. We know that to survive is to expand, but we know that we need to leave this place and expand somewhere else. Into space…”
This was new. Stella sent her Bee in closer, invisible, hovering only a few metres from Niato’s face.
“I am initiating a new project today.”
Surprising apparently everybody, Niato strode towards the edge of the barge and sprang gracefully into the water. His crown slid a visor over his face, to then become an ornate scuba mask. On contact with the water, his prosthetic lizard tail, which Stella had assumed was only fancy dress, began to undulate back and forth, churning photoluminescence from the water and sending him quickly down.
A few others with the presence of mind to follow stayed with him. Amongst them were Stella, Tinkerbell and Marcel. The moon and the lights above quickly disappeared. After several minutes of diving, they realised they were over a hundred metres deep. Tinkerbell chirped an apology and headed back to the surface for a breath of air.
The King invited the dozen or so still with him to project their points of view and dive the remainder of the distance in consensus.
They dropped together through the water, which was suddenly as insubstantial as a vacuum. After minutes of freefall, lights on the bottom, still kilometres below, became visible. A gigantic snake, coiled in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral, was illuminated by hundreds of angry blue lamps. The rough, dark seabed was itself visible in disks surrounding the spots of illumination. Swarms of drones, from apparently tiny to the size of industrial excavators, filled the water around the snake with activity. The scene looked more like a deep space mining adventure than undersea construction.
“When completed in four years’ time,” said the King, “this launch tube’s spiral will extend three hundred kilometres all the way around Bäna. Its final stretch will tunnel up through the mountain, terminating in a ten-kilometre spire from the peak.”
Niato drifted in the black, his face lit with diffused light. Trident in one hand, tail swaying gently to keep him level and oriented, Stella thought he did look a bit like a god, especially hanging, as he was, above his expansive benthic realm.
“We will be able to put cargo into orbit hundreds of times cheaper than even our bamboo rockets. A thousand times cheaper than the Forwards or Çin can manage.”
The speech continued for another half an hour. Niato explained about the endless possibilities that this, and other technologies, would enable, and how the next phase of Atlantis would take them up onto a new ocean of infinite possibilities.
The King finished and they ascended. Niato had allowed his body to drift towards the surface while he was talking. Once they caught up, regrouping with Tinkerbell and a small pod of dolphins who had apparently stayed with the King, it was only a few short minutes before they broke the surface and rejoined the party.
The atmosphere had become electric. Everybody was talking about the King’s latest audacious folly.
Stella said goodnight and signed off. But before heading off to find Segi, she quickly checked her numbers. Unbelievably, she already had nearly a million subs; apparently, she had been the only person in the right place at the right time to capture the King’s underwater speech and tour. It was hard to believe that this was mere good fortune. More likely, her new Nebulous Kinmates had called in a favour. Either way, she couldn’t have wished for a better scoop to launch her channel.
Chapter 15 – Arachnophobia
A baleful tune intruded on Zaki’s dreams. Anosh and Segi were playing on the swings in a favourite children’s park. The eight-year-old Zaki was watching from a tree, a million miles away. He had climbed too high. He wanted to come down, but the ground was frighteningly far away. Dreamlogic prevented Zaki from shouting and Anosh couldn’t hear him calling on his Companion, even though its ji
ngle tone was loud in Zaki’s own ears—
The tune repeated. He stirred again, dream fading into existential vertigo: claustrophobic darkness; the whirring of air-conditioning units; an industrial echoing.
When it repeated for the third time, he was alert enough to recognise it as a cybernetic bleat for help. He groaned, forced himself to roll over and nudged his Companion to life. It felt like only minutes since the last intercession, but softly illuminated numerals told him it was five-thirty in the morning—surprisingly, he’d managed a five-hour chunk of sleep.
Although it might not currently feel like it, his bot-daddy life was becoming incrementally easier. Disturbed sleep had been more of a problem during the excavation and shoring up, with a litany of mini emergencies keeping him up every night. He had been working with N to upgrade his team for a year now and, with each algorithm update, he could see his blundering, idiotic, oid children becoming increasingly independent.
Excavation and preparation of the cavern below the barn had wrapped up a few weeks ago. The chamber’s floor was now level and its walls supported by graceful, braided arches. When the mechOids had first finished the interlocking brick vaults, which decorated its domed roof, the chamber had felt like the ornate Roman catacombs one might find beneath some ancient cathedral. Sadly, this ornamental detail was now hidden beneath a thick layer of smooth white polymer, which, while effective at keeping the space dust and moisture free, had the side effect of hiding the elegantly engineered skeleton.
Zaki screwed his eyes closed, blinked away the grit of desiccated mucous and stumbled to his feet. There was some shuffling and clunking coming from beyond the polythene dust partition; at least some of his mechOids were still working. He requested illumination; respecting his body clock, his Companion called for a warm light. The glow flowed into his alcove-like bedroom, casting soft shadows across the nest of rugs and pillows. He took a couple of gulps of water from a metal cup and reached for his paper suit and breather from their hook. Then, muttering foully, he unzipped the dust screen and joined his frustratingly needy children in their cavern.
He took in the scene. Four mechOids were finishing the installation of the last of the parallel ceiling rails, which stretched the full length of the cavern. Another two were busy assembling the gantry, which, once completed, would hang from the rails and allow the printhead to move, like the pen of a giant plotter, reaching any point within the volume of the cavern.
It was not difficult to find the delinquent mechOid. It was standing, frozen in a corner, surrounded by a confused tangle of tubes and cables. Zaki located the installation guide the mechOid had been working from, then spent nearly an hour getting up to speed, trying to match what he saw to what the guide described. Eventually, he found the bug. This time, it was not the Oid’s fault; the instructions for plumbing the printhead to its reservoirs of toner and resins were wrong. He pulled up an editor and corrected the erroneous section, then he checked the updated documentation back into the Nebulous repository, where autonomous routines scrutinised his updates for consistency.
As soon as the commit was made, the battle-suit perked up. Reality and expectations were now aligned. It was time to get back to work.
By the time Zaki could return to his nook, it was seven o’clock. He was tired, but knew he was going to struggle to get back to sleep.
This was a beta test. They were guinea pigs. Issues were to be expected, Zaki tried to tell himself.
The rest of the family would be getting up by now. Ten metres below ground, there was no sound from the surface, but he knew the ZKF construction crew would be arriving soon, or would already be working on the radio mast. There was no chance for him to nip out for a stroll, or to pop over to the newly rebuilt Çiftlik and sit at the kitchen table until his mother made him breakfast…
The engineers were the reason for Zaki’s confinement. The brothers were supposed to be dead. Segi’s ZKF uniform and bristly new moustache made an adequate disguise, but they couldn’t risk somebody recognising Zaki’s distinctive limp and twisted arm.
Being forced to spend weeks like a mole-man was inconvenient, but there were benefits to hiding their illicit Fab within the bureaucracy of an autonomous militia. For example, it had suddenly become a whole lot easier to take delivery of tons of suspicious high-tech equipment. Checkpoints, inspections, bribes, theft and endemic clumsiness had all evaporated to become somebody else’s problem.
As long as N was able to fudge the ZKF supply chains—inserting and substituting items at will—they would not need to rely on the glider kites, which Razzia aggression were making increasingly unreliable for critical deliveries.
It had taken a bit of time to become comfortable with their new roles. They were imposters; but, rather than simply infiltrating the host organisation, they had seen it being rebuilt about them with the sole intention of providing them protection and sustenance. They were nest beetles, brood parasites, relying on the stings and mandibles of an army of stooges, while they munched through its stores of food—although, in true Kin spirit, the relationship was more symbiotic than parasitic. The ZKF had been woefully unprepared for a cyber conflict. It had taken only minutes to break into their networks and utterly compromise their automation. A real enemy would have corrupted, spoofed and degraded, until the ZKF were just a bunch of guys with broken, fried Companions and weapons jammed with uncooperative smart bullets. Instead, Nebulous had provided the Cyber savvy necessary to create a credible force.
Zaki unpeeled his paper suit and hung it back on its hook. He took some milk out of the small, noisy fridge and made himself a bowl of chocolate cereal. While he ate, he played another of Stella’s flicks. The video went on for ten minutes. It was mostly inane, but was marbled through with cutting satire. Stella was clearly trying not to alienate her fans, but N was smuggling a little subliminal propaganda into their media diet. Towards the end, the flick degenerated into jingles and amusing cut scenes of cat slapstick. Zaki thought it was a little cheesy—he recognised that the war for minds needed to be fought, but was happy to leave the fighting to others.
He must have dozed again, as he woke to another alert. This time, a pair of mechOids digging the exit tunnel were broadcasting a deadlock—one had dug through into an existing fissure and, as it tried to clear the debris, it had found itself in conflict with its colleague trying to fill in a new hole that didn’t appear on any of the plans. The same shovel of broken rock had been moved from A to B, then back to A, until it became apparent that the mechOids were stuck in a loop. Unable to resolve their conflict, they had frozen, calling for their daddy and dropping into power-save.
No rest for the wicked, Zaki thought, through a bleary fog. He didn’t need his paper suit this time, as the exit tunnel was still a mass of dust and rubble.
***
Work continued to progress over another winter and the summer that followed. After eighteen months on secondment to Nebulous, the world was beginning to look like a single system to be optimised. It was a game. Zaki played it like a grandmaster. Using the Mesh’s fungal web, linking together pools of resources—both material and cognitive—with global sinks of demand, Zaki and his Kinmates were able to assemble ever more capable hierarchies. Scripting a FAC on the Mesh was becoming steadily more accessible, while, each year, the capabilities of these Fully Autonomous Corporations were becoming ever more godlike. The Open Launch Vehicle FAC, with its beautifully simple bamboo rockets, was among the boldest and most successful, but every day thousands of smaller, more trivial, examples were showing up on the Mesh.
The Mesh scripting languages were now at such a high level that developing their artisanal brick manufacturing pipeline—including its commerce infrastructure—had taken Zaki just a morning:
MAKE bricks WITH oids AND mud.
IF enough bricks AND price is right,
THEN sell bricks to customers.
When Zaki was born, a quarter of a century ago, brick-making oids would have been a novelty. Even a decad
e ago, the Synthetic Cognition required to run a custom robotic assembly line would have taken months to program. Now, however, Zaki could use the function ‘make bricks’ in his scripts and expect the program to execute without issue—although he might need to specify additional parameters, like how big, or what price. The worst bugs these days were not that the program might not run properly, but rather it might run too well. If he forgot to tell the Oids when to stop, he might go away and come home after a few years to find a new chasm, or a towering brick pyramid, its peak wreathed in cloud.
The presence of the Mesh was like a night-time view of the Earth; some countries were dusted with brilliant diamonds, others were inky voids. The people living in the dark—mostly Çin and the Forward Coalitions—were starved of possibility. They produced nothing for themselves. Instead of creativity and self-reliance, they occupied their time purchasing things from monopolies and relied for calories and information on government spigots discharging all-you-can-eat quantities of nutrient-free artificial sustenance.
The Çiftlik was a growing star of capabilities in the Mesh’s network of gems. Zaki found it almost impossible to resist an ever-growing smorgasbord of world-changing projects clamouring for his input. The digital was more real than the unreal real-world. He spent entire weeks working, hardly surfacing. His brother and mother both pointed out how he was growing pale and wasted, but it was only when Stella complained that he was becoming remote and distracted that he accepted he might have a problem—