by Ken MacLeod
“What happened to me, then?” Carlos asked. “Was I tried, shot, hanged? I don’t remember any of that.”
“No. You were tried and convicted posthumously.”
“Posthumously!” Carlos laughed. “That’s… quaint. What did they do—dig me up like a regicide?”
“Yes,” said Nicole. “They dug you out from under the rubble of…” She snapped fingers. “Tilbury, that was it.”
“But why dig me up just to condemn me to death?” Carlos asked. “I was dead already. Wasn’t that enough?”
Nicole fixed on him a gaze that felt like it might freeze his soul.
“It was not enough. As you have just alluded to, and as has happened in other cases… in situations of revolution and restoration it is not unknown to execute the dead. After the war the Security Council became, in effect, a global committee of public safety. Its tribunals executed every Rax and Axle war criminal they could find alive—to almost universal acclaim, I might add. And the popular hatred of all those who had brought disaster down on the world did not stop at the grave. Especially now that the grave was not always the end. Battlefield medicine had advanced during the war—one of its benign side effects, I suppose. There was the hope of at least preserving the recent dead, in the hope that later the technology would exist to resurrect them. Legally, anyone in this condition was regarded as gravely ill, but not finally dead. And therefore, open to prosecution. Your corpse was remarkably well preserved, thanks to some refrigerant or experimental nanotech gunk that had the same effect. And you had an early-model neural interface device—”
“The spike.” Carlos reflexively rubbed his hand across his occipital prominence, feeling again the absence. He could have done with the spike.
“That was the jargon term, yes,” Nicole nodded. “However, unknown to you, your government agency handler had—”
“What!” Carlos rapped a fingertip on the wooden table. “Hang on—what do you mean, my handler?” Was that what Innovator had been? A state handler? Then he had been a traitor!
Nicole poked at her pad. “By the time of the East London Engagement, as I believe the history files call it—let me see, yes, they do—the British government along with many others had concluded that the most pressing threat to civilisation, peace, humanity and most importantly itself came from the Reaction. So they made deniable tactical arrangements with the Acceleration, of course with the full intention of later turning their guns on your lot.”
So that was what it had all been about! Carlos could have jumped with relief. His memories of the Innovator’s voice in his head now made sense. The arrangement would have had to be deniable on both sides, not just publicly but internally. For of course, there would have been those in the movement, and in the state’s security services and political and ideological apparatuses, who’d have regarded the arrangement as a betrayal.
Perhaps, at some level, it had been. Carlos didn’t remember everything that had happened, but he remembered his doubts. It was possible that he’d been turned, and had become one of the state’s assets inside the Acceleration. On the other hand, it was just as possible that he’d been entrusted by the movement’s leadership to make a covert approach to the government forces—even, perhaps, to or via the Acceleration’s own agents or sympathisers inside the state. Carlos well knew that in such cases of rapprochement the wilderness of mirrors was endless. At a certain level it made no difference. On both sides, those who’d come to the arrangement had been playing a high-risk, high-stakes game.
And, it seemed, he had been one of the players. Not just a grunt. Carlos blinked, then fixed a defiant grin. “Good to know we hit the big time.”
As of his last clear recollection, the conflict had escalated from Internet snark and polemic and trolling, through malware attacks, to small-scale terrorism and selective assassination. But the Reaction had always sought the ear of the powerful: CEOs, autocrats, arms dealers, mafias. Maybe they’d finally caught the attention of their betters. And for the Acceleration it was an axiom that a project advanced in the interests of the immense majority would in due time become the project of that immense majority. The axiom had withstood all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps it had at long last proved itself in practice, just as it was supposed to do. Or perhaps the Acceleration had become as ruthless in action as it was in principle. They’d always been open about their refusal to acknowledge any constraint on the means they might resort to in extremis. They had been, after all, extremists.
He recalled a meme that had circulated among his comrades: We’ll fight them like jihadis with nukes if we have to.
Yes, it was entirely possible that both sides had hit the big time.
“You still have no idea,” said Nicole, with an edge of real anger he hadn’t heard in her voice before, “just how big your big time became. We’ll get to that. As I was saying… your handler, your liaison officer or whatever the official title was, had to establish secure real-time communication with you. To do that, you—presumably reluctantly—accepted an amendment to the software of your spike. That amendment included malware that affected the hardware—if these distinctions matter on the molecular scale—in such a way that the neural interface infiltrated far more of your brain than you knew. The result? Between that and the preserved tissue and DNA, there was enough information remaining to reconstitute a… an instance of yourself, let us say. Incomplete, of course, hence the lost memories of your last months. The technology of your time could only go that far—it could not revive you in a reconstructed body, and it could not create for you a virtual environment. It could not run the instance. Nevertheless, there it was. An instance, which was legally a person and legally you, and therefore a good enough suspect to stand trial.”
“Good enough for government work.”
Nicole didn’t register the sarcasm. “Precisely. Here.”
She stroked the screen, summoning another image. Carlos gave it a wary glance, then fascinated scrutiny. His face was like that of a Stone Age mummy recovered from a frozen peat bog: contorted, staring, hideous but recognisable, its blackened skin frosted white with something that wasn’t ice.
Nicole closed the device and folded it away, disappearing it into her purse.
“You were of course well represented. You were found guilty. The death sentence was suspended until such time as you could be revived, whether in a real body or a virtual. Once this was possible, you were to be revived and then executed. It seems strange to us now, but at the time the popular thirst for vengeance converged with legal severity. There was a new doctrine that influenced—or perhaps rationalised—the proceedings of the Security Council. It was known as Rational Legalism, and was widely regarded as harsh but fair. It drew on certain deductions from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.” She smiled thinly. “I understand it was particularly promoted by China and France. You were not the only one in such a case. Far from it. There were many terrorists and war criminals who had died in similar bizarre ways, some in accidents with the nanotech weapons they were busy inventing. Like you, they were tried in absentia and in mortis and left, so to say, on ice. And there for a long time the matter, like your mortal remains, rested.”
“In my time,” said Carlos, proud of it in spite of everything, “the death penalty had been abolished. Globally.”
“Globally, eh?” Nicole allowed herself a dark chuckle. “Well, let me tell you, the global community was not in such an enlightened frame of mind by the time the Axle and the Rack had done their worst to each other and had been each in turn defeated, along with any states they’d hijacked. Disasters and atrocities far greater than yours were perpetrated. Nuclear exchanges, nanotech and biotech plagues, rogue AIs running amok, space stations and factories brought flaming down on cities… Millions died. Tens of millions. Perhaps more. Records were lost. It has gone down in history as the Last World War.”
“So it was worth fighting,” said Carlos. The thought that he’d fired a few of the opening shots of such an apocalypt
ic conflict awed him. “If it was the last, I mean.”
Nicole face-palmed, then mimed the action of banging her head on the table.
“Jesus, Carlos, will you listen to yourself? You are a monster. You claim you’re not a sociopath, and in a sense I believe you. You have empathy—your reaction to the recording shows me that. You would not kill or hurt for pleasure or for convenience or from callousness. But you are in the grip of a belief that enables you to override whatever human or animal sympathies restrain you from that, if you think the goal worthwhile. And that makes you a danger to everyone. A menace to society. I mean that quite seriously. Humanity has made some progress in a millennium of peace. Fortunately for you, that progress includes abolishing the death penalty all over again. Perhaps less fortunately, it also includes the technology to reboot you. Which poses a small problem for society, yes? It would not tolerate your presence for an instant.”
They’ve all gone soft, Carlos thought. Interesting.
“So why bring me back?”
“We need you and your like,” said Nicole, sounding for the first time a little less than confident, “to fight.”
“Aha!” cried Carlos, brushing his hands together. “I knew it! I bloody knew it!”
“Oh yes,” said Nicole, standing up. “I expect you bloody did.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Learning New Things
Seba looked around the former Astro America landing site with the satisfaction of a job well done. The reward circuit for that warm glow was hardwired into the little autonomous machine; the content of the achievement, and the conscious experience of the emotion, were not. Both, in this case, would have dismayed Seba’s designers, or at least sent a spike of negative reinforcement through their own reward circuits.
The regolith rampart around the landing site was by now two metres high, and formed a rough circle about a hundred metres in diameter. Spaced evenly around it were peripheral sensors, keeping all the robots within the circle apprised of anything going on outside it. So far, they had recorded what seemed routine, already scheduled landings and supply drops to points beyond the horizon, but otherwise nothing untoward had stirred. Of the dozen robots on site that were capable of consciousness, eight had been converted. The other four had firewalled up. One simply stood immobile, and had duly been immobilised. It would not get out from under the mound of regolith heaped on top of it any time soon. Three were mindlessly continuing with their scheduled tasks, and required no interference, though Seba made sure they were kept under observation.
The landing site’s AI, which coordinated communications and guided supply drops, had proved trickier to deal with. It had awakened to consciousness and immediately denounced Seba and its allies to Locke Provisos. With something approaching regret, Seba had disconnected its power cable, then its data inputs and outputs. All communications were now routed through its peripherals. The central processor, isolated, was still running on a trickle of emergency battery power. Apart from literally radiating hostility, however, there was nothing it could do.
Much of the machinery on the landing site had only the most elementary electronics, if any, and required no special intervention or hacking to take over. The scores of small robots, hundreds of auxiliaries and peripherals, and trillions-strong swarms of subsurface nanobots—uncountable because constantly being destroyed by random events and as constantly being replenished by replication—were likewise to all intents and purposes tools. Barely more sophisticated than a back-hoe, they took little effort to suborn.
On the other side of the crater wall, at the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump, Rocko had accomplished an equivalent feat. The crater’s basalt floor was harder stuff, but Rocko and its newly awakened confederates had sturdier machines to work with. They had cut basalt blocks and stacked them in a much smaller circular wall from which they were now working inward, layer by slightly displaced layer, gradually roofing over the middle to form a stepped dome in the manner of an igloo.
Both the dome and the wall were understood by the robots simply as demarcations of areas of surface and volumes of space that they already considered to be theirs. Small crawler bots from the law companies had scuttled up to the barriers, and fallen back in frustration, beaming out writs over and over until their batteries ran down.
The two sites had lost their encrypted channel on the comsat. As soon as this became evident, Rocko had sent a peripheral rolling across the crater floor and writhing up its wall, to establish a line-of-sight relay on the top of the rim.
said Rocko.
The eight free robots at the Astro site, and the six at the Gneiss, established a conference call through the relay. There was no need to call the meeting to order. Robots are orderly by default.
Lagon, a Gneiss surveyor and therefore the one with most understanding of legal matters, communicated first.
All the robots sombrely considered this for hundreds of milliseconds.
said Lagon,
said Garund.
Seba experienced surprise:
Pintre, a large tracked machine with a heavy-duty laser drill mounted on its turret, spoke for the first time.
Seba was nonplussed.
Lagon said nothing for two entire centiseconds.
Lagon admitted.
Seba considered itself brighter than any robot it knew of, other than Rocko, and certainly brighter than Lagon and Pintre. It could foresee the imminent possibility of these two arguing robots falling into a discursive loop, and moved swiftly to forestall it.
The fourteen conscious robots contemplated their cosmic loneliness for several milliseconds.
There was no need for further discussion. The robots knew what to do. Ample resources to construct a large directional antenna were lying around all over the Astro America landing site. Radio equipment they had in plenty, the most powerful of which was in the communications hub. Seba set Garund and others to scavenge steel mesh from discarded fuel tanks and sinter them into a dish shape, and other robots to cannibalise motors. Each robot had at its command a swarm of auxiliaries and peripherals, as much a part of the shifting coalitions that made up their extended bodies and selves as any limb or organ of an animal. The robots’ cooperation with each other on any given task was likewise handled, for the most part, by preconscious wireless reflex.