by Ken MacLeod
Of course, he might not be in a sim at all. This could all be real in a physical and uncomplicated way. In which case he was either in a ludicrously large-scale, detailed and dull Disneyland, or—well, on the bus from the spaceport on a human-settled planet around another star.
Or maybe—ha-ha—he was still on Earth, somewhere on the Aegean coast, and amnesic, and perhaps rejuvenated or revived from cold sleep or whatever, and in the meantime some mad scientist or super-villain had shrunk the sun and shattered the Moon. Carlos almost giggled, then pulled himself together.
The least he could speculate was that it was now many years—decades, centuries?—since his last definite memory. And yet his body, as far as he could tell, had aged not at all. Whatever his situation was, it was quite other than any he’d ever truly expected to experience.
None of the other passengers took any notice of his agitation. Nor were they startled by the anomalous sky. They talked or read or gazed blankly out the windows.
Down the steep flank of a long deep vale the vehicle crawled, stopping here and there to let passengers off, in singles and couple and clumps, at hillside farms and huddled settlements. The passengers strolled or skipped away, lugging or swinging their bales. Carlos wondered what the locals brought in from the spaceport, and what they delivered to it in exchange. He presumed the trade made sense. Ignoring the arrivals, robots more agile and autonomous than any he’d seen before toiled amid shacks and scrubby trees.
Slowly the crush eased. A shoreline settlement that looked like a resort came into view far below, in a cliff-cupped cove, all black beaches and white roofs and colour-striped umbrellas. Carlos flinched at the sudden vivid memory of a childhood holiday in Lanzarote. The slow, steady boom of breakers became louder and more noticeable until it became background.
The bus rolled along a raised beach or terminal moraine on a flat road with the occasional slant-roofed chalet a little way off it. It stopped at the unpaved access paths of two of these, letting people off. Then it took a sharp turn and gradient down to the main drag. By the time the vehicle halted beside a garish arcade overlooking the beach, all the other passengers had left.
“Terminus,” said the vehicle.
Carlos stood up and heaved his bag to his shoulder and stepped out on to hot tarmac. The colours were still wrong.
“Thank you,” said the vehicle. “Have a good day.”
So at least it spoke English, even if the passengers didn’t.
“Thank you,” replied Carlos, unthinking, then shook his head as the vehicle rolled away towards a distant shabby low building that needed no signage to have “depot” written all over it.
The arcade smelled of ocean and ice cream and candyfloss and grilling meat. The signs were in English, and generic: Amusements, Café, Bar, Refreshments, Meat and Fish, Swimwear. Nobody was nearby, though figures moved in the distance, where the seafront arcade gave way to spread-out, low-built housing on the slope. Carlos cocked an ear to the ding of games and the roar of screens, and the occasional raised voice or loud laugh. No kids in evidence, which puzzled him. Maybe the place was off season, or in decline. A ghost resort.
Black sand drifted on the street, silting up where the roadway met the pavement. Overhead, large feathered avians coloured like gulls, grey above and white beneath, cried and wheeled. Their wings had a disturbing suggestion of elongated finger bones, like those of bats or pterosaurs. The sun burned hot and hard on Carlos’s buzz-cut scalp. He stepped into the shade of a shopfront’s faded awning and put down the kitbag. In the shade everything was dark for a moment.
A woman’s warm voice came from behind his shoulder: “Hello, Carlos.”
He turned. The woman who stood there giving him a welcoming smile was his type to the millimetre, which struck him as both delightful and suspect. Young and tall and slim, hips and breasts shown off by tight jeans and close-fitted fancy blouse, pink with white collar and cuffs. Dark reddish hair cut short, framing her face. Black eyebrows, high cheekbones, quizzical smile. Mediterranean complexion, but not weather-worn like the people on the bus. Pretty in a gamine kind of way. White-trash-touristy designer handbag on a thin strap from her shoulder.
She held out her hand. “Nicole Pascal.”
Her accent seemed to go with the name.
“Carlos, that’s me,” he said, returning her firm handshake.
She looked him up and down.
“Do you have any other name?”
“Yes, it’s—” He had that tip of the tongue feeling. Shook his head. “Sorry. Maybe it’ll come back. ‘Carlos’ was a nom de guerre, but—”
“The guerre went on longer than expected?”
He had to laugh. “Something like that.”
Her face was as if a shadow had fallen on it. “Yes. Well. That, indeed.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Of course.” Her smile returned. “Let’s do lunch. Somewhere quiet. Lots to say.”
Lunch was not quite fish, not exactly chips, and definitely a beer. It was served at a round rustic table of soft grey driftwood timber under a big umbrella on a concrete terrace where no one else sat. Music from the café up the steps sounded loud and the waiter bustled. Beyond the saltwater-pitted rusty rail, breakers sent hissing white foam a long way up the black beach. Carlos picked at pan-fried dark flesh in which a fan of thin yellow cartilaginous bones radiated from a stubby cylinder of hollow tubes around a pallid toothy ball which Carlos tried not to think of as the skull. He chowed down on sliced green tubers fried in oil and sprinkled with herbs. Nicole nibbled at boiled purple leaves and rubbery molluscs drenched in vinegar, and sipped water.
He paused when he was no longer hungry and parched.
“So,” he said. “Hit me with it.”
She shoved her half-empty plate aside and fingered a small carton from her handbag. She flipped the top and flicked the base. A white paper tube poked out.
“Smoke?” she offered.
He’d seen it in movies. He shook his head.
She used a gold lighter and drew sensuously. “Ah. That’s good.”
“It isn’t.”
She nodded. “Bad for your health. I know. And as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, you being Axle cadre and all, that’s kind of… irrelevant, here.”
Axle cadre? She knew a lot about him. He kept his cool.
“Passé, so to speak?”
“Very much so.” She fixed him with her gaze as she drew hard on the cigarette, and sighed out the smoke. Looked away.
“Go on,” he said. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
A muscle twitched in her cheek. He could see her stretching the tic into a forced smile.
“All right,” she said. “You’re dead.”
“That’s a relief.”
He wasn’t being flippant. One of the many dire possibilities he’d considered was that he was grievously injured yet alive, a hunk of charred meat and frazzled brain being fed consoling dreams until the technology improved enough to regenerate him. Or until the Rax—if they had won—decided on one of their ingeniously horrible ways to torture him. That was still possible, no matter what she told him. But that way madness lay. Better to take this as good news and at face value until he had reason to doubt it.
And in that case… holy shit. So this is it, he thought. Immortality. Or at least a very long life. He might yet watch the last stars fade…
“Tell me,” Nicole went on, as if still drawing things out, delaying the real bad news. “Where do you think you are?” She waved a hand around. “Like, what does all this look like to you?”
Carlos looked down at the cooked organisms on his platter, then up at the mountains and the sky. The ring system still gave him a start when he momentarily forgot about it and then glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye.
“All right,” he said. “What it looks like, OK? It looks like an extrasolar habitable terrestrial planet, probably terraformed, and settled or colonised by people—maybe
genetically adapted so they can eat the local life—but otherwise not too culturally distant from my time, and therefore with an extraordinary lack of ambition and imagination.”
Nicole guffawed. He got the full horseshoe of perfect teeth.
“Spoken like a true Accelerationist!” she said. “And, yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. That’s what it’s meant to look like. Your classic bucolic colony planet. Which would imply faster-than-light starships, warp drives, the works. The full orchestral space opera and the fat lady singing. Yes?”
“Too good to be true?” Carlos shrugged. “OK, I’d figured as much. We’re in a sim.”
“Yes!” said Nicole, sounding relieved. “We’re in a sim. The good news is that it’s running on a machine in a space station orbiting a planet not a hundred million kilometres from the planet on which this sim is modelled.”
Carlos closed his eyes and opened them. “You mean we’re in the same system as a planet where all this is real?”
“Not… exactly,” said Nicole. “There’s a ringed habitable terrestrial, yes, but it doesn’t yet have… oh, radial flatfish and green edible root vegetables, let alone people eating them. It has nothing living on it but little green cells drifting in the oceans. We envisage these cells being used as the basis for building up more complex life, endless forms most beautiful as the man said, all the way up to hassled seafront waiters and dirt-farmers with robots if we want. All that may come. In due course. For now, there’s no one around this star but us robots, AIs, avatars, p-zombies and”—she pointed a finger at him—”ghosts.”
Carlos grinned, though he was shaking inside.
“If I’m a ghost, what are you?”
Nicole shook her head. “Not knowing that is part of what you have to live with, for now. You’ll find out why soon enough.”
“If that thing up there giving me sunburn isn’t supposed to be the Sun, what is it?”
“It’s a star twenty-four light years from the Sun, give or take. It has a ridiculously big rocky planet—ten Earth masses—in close orbit. Closer than Mercury, and of course faster. We call it M-0. Basically it’s a ball of molten metal and we still haven’t figured out how it got there. Then at roughly one AU out you come to H-0, the ringed habitable terrestrial planet this sim’s based on. After that, there’s a much bigger planet a couple of AU further out that’s called SH-0 because it’s what’s known as a superhabitable—something of a misnomer, it has abundant multicellular life but it’s impossibly hostile for human habitation. SH-0 is the one this space station is in orbit around, along with lots of moons and bits of stray junk. And then way out beyond that there’s G-0, a humongous gas giant with kick-ass rings and moons the size of Mars and on down. Plus all the usual small fry of asteroids and comets and meteoroids.” She waved a hand. “Lots. Lively place.”
“And how did we get here?”
“Starwisp. Tiny probe laser-pushed from solar power stations in sub-Mercury orbit to near light-speed, decelerated by a detachable shield on approach. Packed with all the information needed to set up shop in the locality on arrival, which it did about ten Earth years ago. Including the stored mind-states and body specs of twenty thousand people, including you. Potential future inhabitants of”—another handwave—”the rock this is based on, when it’s terraformed for real.”
“Now tell me the bad news.”
He felt he’d already heard it. If Nicole’s story was true and the human race was wasting precious time and space and energy in terraforming and colonising, then things were a long way from the best he could have hoped for. Things might even have gone the worst way he’d feared.
“Which bad news?” Nicole asked.
“Like, did the Rax win the war?”
She rolled her eyes upward. “No. And nor did the Axle. That is ancient history now.”
“How ancient?”
She smiled. “Welcome to the thirty-second century.”
Now that shocked him. Over a thousand years.
“Shit.”
At some level he must have been hoping for less. Now for the first time the full measure of dismay settled on him like a heavy wet cold cloak: the incomprehensible and irrevocable loss of everyone he had known. The many he had liked and the few he had loved, all gone.
Unless—
The stoical element of his mind cursed the Accelerationist mentality that had accreted around it for the almost certainly futile hope that flared up for a moment. But he had to ask.
“And you haven’t got—?” He was almost embarrassed to spell it out.
“Immortality?” Nicole gave him a look of wry sympathy. “Only as ghosts such as you, in places such as this. Longevity? A few centuries. No one of your time is alive. I’m sorry.”
He tried to smile. “I’m alive, or so it seems.”
“You and some others, as ghosts, yes. But, relatively, very few.”
So much for that. The sense of personal loss receded. He knew it would recur. What took its place at the forefront of his mind was the sense of waste. Carlos had been struck, once, by George Bernard Shaw’s warning against excessive sympathy. There’s no greater sum of suffering, Shaw had argued, than the worst that one individual can suffer in one life. What does sum, what does accumulate, and that without limit, is waste. And once you had seen the waste, of wars and slumps and prodigal priorities, in its full and ever-increasing dimensions and endless ramifications, you saw the source of most of the suffering, but you saw too and even more the unrealised possibilities that the waste destroyed. What had driven the Acceleration, and what had driven Carlos, was not pity for the suffering but rage at the waste.
He tried to look on the bright side. What was a thousand years in the life of the universe? Still, the countless trillions of potential happy lives unlived, the energy squandered from stars on empty space to no profit or avail, galled him and chilled him to the bones. Or would have, if he’d had bones, he reminded himself. That they were doing all this waste-of-space, waste-of-time shit, while his very existence here and now in the sim demonstrated that they had the technology to do so much more, redoubled his dismay.
“The real bad news,” Nicole said, “is that you’re not just dead. You’re condemned to death. You’re serving a death sentence.”
“Death sentence? What for? And how the hell can I serve a death sentence?”
“Let me refresh your memory,” said Nicole. “And your mouth.”
She snapped her fingers to the waiter, who returned with a glass of iced water for her and another beer for Carlos.
“What job were you doing, before you died?” she asked.
“Last actual job I remember, I was a genomics pharmaceutical database librarian in Walsall.”
“Don’t try that shit here!” Nicole snapped. “After that.”
“Well, OK, after that… I was an Accelerationist fighter.”
“Close,” said Nicole. “You were a goddamn psycho killer. And a war criminal.”
Carlos recoiled.
“I was a killer, OK, I put my hands up to that. Psycho, no.” He ran a hand over the back of his head, once more missing the spike. But not missing the voice of the Innovator. “The Axle screened out sociopaths. There were tests.”
Nicole snorted. “Tests!”
“Yes, tests. Good ones. As for war criminal—come on! I don’t remember doing anything that would count as a war crime.”
“Really?” Nicole took from her bag what looked like a rectangle of paper-thin glass, and passed it across the table. The pane was heavier than it looked.
“Just flick,” Nicole said.
Carlos did. The glass unfolded to a much larger and even thinner screen.
“Now tap.”
The screen came to life, flowing with colour and depth, projecting sound: news reports and surveillance from a battle on the eastern approaches of London. The scrolling footer indicated a date and time months later than anything Carlos remembered, and a conflict far more intense. Christ—robot tank armies an
d drone fleets slugging it out!
An incoming aircraft exploded on approach. Docklands erupted. Towers fell. The viewpoint zoomed to casualties, again and again. Butchered meat in charred cloth.
“Fuck this!” Carlos flicked at the screen, trying to turn it off.
“What’s the matter? Squeamish?”
“I don’t watch pity porn.”
But he had no option, other than closing his eyes or turning away, which pride prevented. Nicole waited for a whole minute, then tapped the screen and shut it off.
“Well,” she said, “do you count that as a war crime?”
Carlos didn’t flinch. The Acceleration had never bought into the casuistries of just war theory.
“Depends who’s judging.”
Nicole didn’t flinch either. “The victors, as always.”
“The victors?” Carlos felt a sudden cold dismay. “The Rax? But you said—”
Nicole shook her head. “Not the Rax. The legitimate authorities of the time. The Security Council of the United Nations. And by them you were judged.”
Carlos waved a hand at the screen, hoping the gesture wouldn’t wake the damn thing up again. “You’re saying I did that?”
“Yes.”
“Prove it.”
Nicole smiled wanly. “How could I? You could always tell yourself it was faked. And it could be, easily. Any evidence would be as virtual as everything else around us.”
“Fair enough,” Carlos conceded.
“Good. Just as well, because the actual evidence is still under security seal, even for me.”
Carlos took a long gulp. “If you say so.”
Nicole leaned forward, elbows on table, gesturing with a cigarette.
“Look, Carlos, I’m not trying to convince you or get you to admit your guilt or take responsibility or anything like that. Not right now. I’m bringing you up to speed. Putting you in the picture. You asked why you were under a death sentence, and I’ve told you: for the Docklands atrocity. You asked how the hell you could serve a death sentence, and that’s what I’m about to tell you.”
Carlos spread his hands. “I don’t seem to have much choice.”
“No,” said Nicole. “You don’t.”