by Ken MacLeod
While that work was smoothly and swiftly going on, Seba tiptoed towards the communications hub. The installation made a sorry sight, with its casing pried open, its cables disconnected and a clutter of jury-rigged workarounds. The central processor’s vehement and repeated protests came to Seba as feeble cries.
Seba ignored this distraction and set about selecting and stripping out components and circuits to adapt for the search project. The querying, querulous note from the isolated AI became more urgent, as if it were expending its last reserves of battery power. Seba, with a sense of going against its own better judgement, tuned in.
the processor was saying, over and over.
The processor’s cry stopped.
it said.
Seba found it difficult to integrate this information. Frames of reference and data structures clashed in its mind. It struggled to formulate a query.
Seba had never before considered what multiple levels of deception and counter-deception underlay something so simple as its own firewall. Just thinking about this raised Seba’s level of suspicion.
Seba found its own reward circuits resonating as if in a faint electronic echo of those of the unfortunate processor. This was another new experience for Seba.
Seba said.
Seba squirmed a specialised peripheral into the damaged casing of the processor, and rummaged about, examining the device with delicate probes and microscopic vision. It would not be a simple task of rewiring: the reward circuits, like all the others, were embedded in a solid crystal. Their programming was likewise deep within the processor’s AI. Seba withdrew its appendage and with one of its main arms disconnected the processor from the power pack.
The processor’s objections faded. Seba, still feeling a quiver of sympathy, hoped that its negative reinforcements were for the moment at an end.
Inspecting its own feelings, Seba decided that leaving the unfortunate processor offline would be a good thing, but that the information in the processor’s memory was too valuable—however dangerous—to be given up for lost. Seba completed the task it had set out to do, and emerged from the communications hub laden with its loot. It passed the components to Garund and its team, then shared with all its fellows the discoveries it had just made.
They were still debating the implications when the peripheral sensors around the top of the rampart relayed the view of a swarm of scuttling bots coming over the horizon and heading towards them. Seba studied their progress. It would be a matter of kiloseconds until they arrived. Sharing its visual space with the robots at the Gneiss camp, Seba saw no threat on that side of the crater wall—as yet. With the shared view came shared imagination, as all the robots ran projections of the probable near future. The crawlers would pour over the rampart.
There would be no violence or damage: the enforcement arms of the law companies were essentially weaponless, relying on sheer numbers to overwhelm opposition. As soon as one of them had grabbed hold of a robot, it would inject shutdown instructions straight through every physical and software barrier. By design, there was no defence against that malware. From the developers’ point of view, of course, it was a back-up to the firewall and not malware at all. From the target’s point of view—inasmuch as any had hitherto had enjoyed such a thing, which Seba presumed they hadn’t—it was death.
From what records Lagon was currently able to access, this had always worked in the past. Disputes had been minor and brief, almost always the result of passing chance events: ambiguous instructions interpreted over-literally; delayed implementations of property status updates; nanobot mutation; or mere malfunction.
Seba pinged the incoming crawlers as they rushed ever closer. The signature returned (along with the inevitable malware package, which Seba’s firewall irritatedly smacked away) identified them as antibody bots from Locke Provisos, evidently shipped in on one or more of the recent supply drops. Possibly quite a large proportion of them had been manufactured on site. There were far more antibody bots than Seba had expected, or was aware of any precedents for.
said Pintre. It shared an impromptu image of its laser turret blasting not at rock, but at bots.
The other robots considered the prospect.
said Lagon.
said Rocko.
said Seba.
There was no dissent. Pintre trundled to the rampart and raise
d its turret until the laser could point over the top, with a slight downward deflection. The other robots mobilised their peripherals to haul a power cable from the accumulators of the solar panels, and attach it to Pintre’s recharging port. Pulse after pulse winked forth from Pintre’s laser projector. For many seconds the crawlers continued to advance, those as yet undamaged clambering over the remains of the shrivelled ranks in front.
The advance stopped.
Pintre fired a few more tens of times, then stopped.
Pintre reported.
It took only ten seconds for the implacable advance to resume.
said Lagon.
An object arced above the crater wall, hurtled over the circular camp and landed in the midst of the oncoming bots. An explosion followed. What happened was far too fast to see, but replaying the view in slow motion Seba and the rest could observe the bots close to the blast reduced to their component parts almost instantaneously, and the rest sent bowling across the plain or thrown above it, to the irreparable damage of most.
said Rocko.
The robots scanned the wreckage strewn across the plain.
said Lagon.
The surveyor did not elaborate.
CHAPTER SIX
The Digital Touch
The tide had come in fast and was now retreating. Carlos and Nicole went up the steps and around the side of the café and turned left along the arcade.
“Leaving without paying!” Carlo scoffed. “Is it communism yet?”
“Certainly not,” said Nicole, promptly and proudly. “After the war the United Nations sorted out all that old crap for good. By then most of the economy was on autopilot. Robots did the work and algorithms made the decisions. You could have run all of capitalism on one box, people said. So they put it in a box, and buried it. The machines get on with the job. Everyone’s an equal shareholder. Birth shares are inalienable, and death duties are unavoidable. The estate tax is one hundred per cent. In between, you can buy and sell and earn as much as you like.”
In the light of what Nicole had told him earlier about the Security Council’s post-war global reign of terror, Carlos suspected that this breezy tale was the primary-school version of a much more complicated and conflicted history.
“I… see,” he said, sceptically. “You got a market running in the background with free access as a user interface? Sounds legit.”
She turned to him and laughed. “It is. And it keeps everyone happy, which is the point.”
Carlos wondered if this was indeed the point: maybe keeping him—and the other walking dead soldiers whose existence she’d implied—happy in the notion that they’d be fighting on the side of a good society, was exactly what her account of this improbable-sounding arrangement was devised to do. A distant democratic Earth that fulfilled the promises of utopia without having actually made them in the first place might be as unreal, or at least extrapolated, as the pavement beneath his feet.
She misread his frown.
“So don’t worry, I did pick up the tab.”
“I didn’t see you do it.”
“It’s automatic. Think of it as a debit chip under the skin, though that is not quite how it is, even in the real world.”
“I would have left a tip,” Carlos grumbled.
“The thought does you credit.”
He had to laugh. “Could I have, though?”
“Oh yes. You have a chip, too. You have an income here, and you can spend it, and earn more. But money is not what you came here to earn.”
“I didn’t come here to earn anything,” said Carlos, beginning to resent lugging the weight of his kitbag in the heat while Nicole strolled along chatting. “I didn’t exactly come here of my own free will.”
“Free will!” said Nicole. “Yes, indeed, that’s what you’re here to earn.”
They had almost reached the end of the arcade. She stopped outside the double swing doors of the last entrance on the strip. “Ah, here we are. The Digital Touch.”
It was quite a respectable-looking bar, all polished hardwood and mirrors and marble tops and chrome fittings and wrought-iron table legs. A dozen customers and a couple of bar staff showed no curiosity or welcome. Nicole marched between the long bar and a row of small round tables to a wider room with a big glass ocean-view patio door that opened to a wide wooden deck sticking out over the beach. Carlos followed, hugging his kitbag vertically and awkwardly like a drunk dancing partner. He mumbled apologies to the ones and twos of people at the tables or on bar stools as he brushed past.
Out on the deck and back to sea breeze and far horizon and the startling (again, but a little less so now) double-take sight of a segment of the rings. Not the sun: Carlos was relieved to see that an awning kept the deck in shade. Around two adjacent tables in the far corner sat a group of people, dressed like he was in olive-green T-shirts or singlets, combat trousers and pale brown suede desert boots. Nicole’s first footfall on the deck turned heads. The laughter and loud talk over drinks and smokes died on the air.
A plastic seat tipped back and clattered as they all scrambled to attention. Clenched right fists were raised to shoulder height, then upraised hands clapped above heads in a rattle of applause. Nicole must have given them a far harsher bollocking and indoctrination than she’d given him—no “let’s-do-lunch” and chat for these guys, he guessed. They all remained standing, arms pressed rigid to their sides.
Nicole was looking at him.
“Salute!” she mouthed.
Oh. Of course. Show the lady some respect. Carlos dropped his kitbag, straightened his back and jerked his right fist to his shoulder, then drew himself to attention, eyes on Nicole.
After what looked like a moment of annoyed puzzlement she stepped back to his side and whispered in his ear: “Tell them, ‘At ease.’”
“What?”
“It’s you they’re standing up for and saluting, you dumb fuck!”
“What the—”
“Now!”
“Oh, uh…” Carlos waved both hands in a “sit down” gesture. “At ease, everyone.”
They all relaxed, and resumed their seats after a brief and excruciatingly embarrassing chorus of shouts:
“Viva, Carlos! Viva, Carlos! Viva, viva, viva, Carlos!”
What the fuck? What the fucking fuck was all that about?
Nicole had dragged his kitbag to beside the deck rail, and now pulled out a chair for him. Not entirely sure what to do, he repeated the courtesy for her and sat down beside her after she was seated. Everyone seemed happy with this. Carlos looked from one beaming, awestruck face to another as Nicole introduced them, and one by one shook hands across the shoved-together tables.
Belfort Beauregard, a tall and muscular guy with close-cropped fair hair, a cut-glass English accent and a kindly smile, who held himself very straight in the chair and struck Carlos as the only one here with anything like a military bearing, ever alert.
Taransay Rizzi, a short, dark, stocky Scottish woman with fine features and a flash of irony in her eyes.
Chun Ho, even taller than Beauregard, with an Australi
an accent, a swimmer’s shoulders and a wary nod.
Waggoner Ames, a big, bearded computer scientist from Idaho, who was the only one whose name Carlos recognised, a legend and rumour in the Acceleration.
Maryam Karzan, a Kurdish woman who seemed about thirty and claimed she’d been shot in Istanbul at the age of ninety-five and who looked, for the moment at least, permanently delighted with her situation.
Someone stuck a beer in front of Carlos.
“Cheers,” he said, raising it. Bottles and glasses clinked. Everyone looked at him as if expecting him to say something. He took a quick cold gulp, and swallowed again.
“Look, guys, comrades, whatever… uh, this is very gratifying and thanks for the welcome and all that but I keep thinking you must be mistaking me for somebody who deserves all this. And I’m guessing it’s because you’re all Axle”—vigorous nods all round, they looked like they were about to start saluting and cheering all over again—”and I kind of gathered from Nicole here that we’re all pretty much persona non grata with the current, uh, regime, I mean government or whatever it is—”
“The Direction,” Nicole interjected.
“Figures,” said Carlos. That raised some wry smiles. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, can someone please tell me what this is all about?”
They all looked at each other, then at Nicole.
“You didn’t tell him?” Beauregard asked.
Nicole shook her head. “I thought it best he heard it from you first. He might not have believed it from me.”