by Ken MacLeod
“Piece of piss,” said Beauregard.
He slid the margin of the map seaward, over the forest, and with a fingertip stabbed at one clearing after another and traced the paths between them.
“What do you see there?” he asked.
Carlos enlarged the satellite view of one clearing. “Homesteads.”
“Exactly,” said Beauregard. He looked around. “OK, everyone, back on the truck.”
“Hey!” said Nicole. “That’s not the idea of this exercise.”
“It’s my idea. If you have a better one, spit it out.”
Nicole folded her arms. “Like I said, I’m an observer.”
“Fine,” said Beauregard. “Observe from the back seat, or from here. Your choice.”
Nicole stayed, grim-faced.
Beauregard drove.
“When I slow down, Rizzi,” he shouted, “hop out, keep under cover and get in position to keep an eye on the target. Maximum zoom on your phone.”
“Got it, sarge.”
At a point where the road took them below the skyline of the target outcrop, Beauregard slowed the vehicle to walking pace. Rizzi vaulted out.
“Keep me updated,” Beauregard said. “Any moves.”
“Copy that.”
As they accelerated away, Carlos glanced back. Rizzi was on her belly, already halfway up the slope. In a minute or two they were back among the trees.
“Next left,” said Carlos, map-reading from the passenger seat.
Another couple of minutes, on a rutted unpaved road, took them to the first clearing. There was a wooden house with a garden that looked like a research station. Labels fluttered from reed poles among the varied crops. A gracile, eight-limbed robot danced along furrows. A woman in a black dress and a big straw hat stared at them from amid a square plot of knee-high grasses.
Beauregard stepped out of the vehicle, his AK-97 in one hand, and strolled to the gate. The woman turned and ran towards the house. Beauregard took her down with one short burst, and with another wrecked the expensive delicate machine. It skittered about giving off sparks, then flipped over and twitched its limbs in an uncoordinated manner.
Beauregard sauntered back to the vehicle.
“Got a lighter about your person, Karzan?”
She was the only one apart from Nicole who smoked.
“Yes, sarge.”
“Give the shack a good splash from the jerrican, then torch it.”
Karzan lugged a ten-litre tin of petrol up the garden path. After a minute inside she paused on the porch to toss a lit piece of twisted paper behind her, and hurried back.
“Good work,” said Beauregard, as the flames took hold. “Onward.”
At the next homestead they found a man around the back welding metal into strange shapes. Beauregard gave him enough time to get his phone out, then shot him mid-sentence. Karzan repeated the operation with the petrol. The smoke from her previous exploit was rising heavy and thick a few hundred metres away and a hundred metres in the air. Beauregard’s phone pinged. He listened, nodded, and relayed the message from Rizzi’s observation. The enemy were making an awkward and hurried descent from the pinnacle.
“Third time’s the charm,” said Beauregard, restarting the engine. “Expect trouble. Ames, Chun—eyes to the front and sides. Karzan, behind us.”
Carlos, uninstructed, looked around and upward. A slow hundred metres on into the forest, he noticed a treetop just ahead begin to sway anomalously.
“Floor it,” he told Beauregard.
The vehicle shot forward. The tree crashed across the road just behind them. Karzan opened fire with her AK.
“Got him!” she yelled. “I think.”
“Let’s hope,” muttered Beauregard, still driving fast. He slewed the vehicle to a halt at the edge of the next clearing.
“OK, everybody out. Full kit. Karzan, the petrol.”
The door of the house was locked, the windows shuttered. Karzan doused the porch and set it alight. The squad trampled across a backyard racked with marine aquaria, smashing glass as they went. Sea creatures flopped on grass, gill-covers opening and closing. Ames, Carlos noticed, stood on as many heads in passing as he could. Carlos wondered whether there was such a thing as a p-zombie fish and if so, what difference it made to the fish.
From among the trees behind them they heard crashing sounds and someone screaming. Beauregard cocked an ear.
“One adult,” he said, walking on. “No kids, as per usual. I suppose it’s a population thing. Pity, though, in a way. They have such a piercing scream.”
“Were children ever a thing?” Karzan asked. “They might be false memories. Women popping out little animals and turning them into persons by babbling at them? How does that work, again?”
“They back you up, your mum and dad,” said Beauregard.
They pressed on through the woods, uphill. What breeze there was came from the direction of the sea. Smoke drifted overhead, its scent tickling their nostrils. Beauregard’s phone pinged again.
“Rizzi, yes… Good, good… Copy that. Keep the line open.”
He glanced down at the phone, then waved the other three forward.
“Twenty metres to the edge of the trees,” he said. “Get down before you reach it, then forward low until you get a clear view of the hillside. The enemy are coming down pell-mell. Wait till you’re sure of a hit. Whites of their eyes, and all that.”
Carlos ran, then crawled, forward to a position behind the bole of a large tree. Hundreds of metres away and a bit to his left, six people were running downhill. Squiggling little shapes, but hard to think of as p-zombies. He waited, tracking the laggard of them through his sights.
“Fire at will,” said Beauregard.
Carlos breathed out, and fired a single shot. The running shape fell over. The fusillade that followed took down the rest before they’d had time to throw themselves to the ground.
Beauregard stood up and scanned with his screen.
“No movement,” he reported. “OK, let’s take the castle.” On the phone he added, “Rizzi, keep watching the objective.”
As they approached the outcrop Beauregard improvised a method of trap-detecting. He and Carlos spread out their screens and magnified the view, scanning the ground immediately in front of them as they went. Karzan followed close behind Carlos. Chun and Ames walked behind Beauregard. All three kept a watch on the side and top of the outcrop in case anyone was still there. It wasn’t hard to spot the route by which the defenders had scrambled down. Beauregard and Carlos scanned it carefully nonetheless, after checking with Rizzi that there was no sign of any remaining resistance. This side of the outcrop was steep, but at least it sloped away from them rather than towards them, and there were plenty of ledges and shelves where the strata had split.
They climbed to the top without incident. Carlos walked out of the clump of wind-bent trees and shrubbery that clung to the summit. He paced warily to the edge of the overhang, and zoomed his screen. He saw Nicole doing likewise, standing on the lip of the defile they’d originally stopped in. He waved; she waved back.
“Mission accomplished, I guess,” said Ames, from beside him.
“Yeah,” said Carlos. “I’m curious as to what the lady will have to say about how we accomplished it.”
“I’m not,” said Ames, and stepped off the edge.
Carlos lurched back. “Fuck!”
“Indeed,” said Beauregard. He motioned everyone back, then approached the edge and leaned over, peering through his screen. He returned shaking his head.
“Forty-two metres on to rocks,” he said. “Not a chance. Pavement pizza.”
Chun retched in the bushes.
CHAPTER TEN
Coming Attractions
“Nothing against p-zombies,” Beauregard was saying, in the Digital Touch that night. He put his arm around the bare shoulders of the woman beside him, and turned to her with a fond leer. “Love them, in fact. Love this one, anyway. Best fucking relation
ship I’ve ever had. None of that clingy needy stuff. Women are awful and queers are worse.”
Carlos flagged up a warning eyebrow. Chun and his boyfriend, Karzan and her current paramour, were in the same huddle of tables. Rizzi was also in earshot, nearby with her laddie Den.
“Only in that respect,” Beauregard hastened to add. “No offence, soldiers.”
“None taken, sarge,” Chun and Karzan chorused. The boyfriends looked amused.
“It’s a point of view, I suppose,” said Carlos.
“That’s the great thing about p-zombies,” Beauregard chortled. “They don’t have one!”
“How can you be sure?” said Carlos. “I mean that, uh, your good lady here doesn’t?”
“From the serial number tattooed on the sole of her foot,” said Beauregard.
They all stared at him, except the putative p-zombie, who was passing him a titbit.
“Is that true?” Carlos asked her. She had a tan and a gold chain and she looked about sixteen.
“Oh yes,” she said, snuggling closer. “I don’t see the difference myself, but it seems to make him happy.”
Carlos shook his head. “Jesus.”
“Try one yourself,” said Beauregard. “Better than wanking, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
“Ah, wanking,” said Carlos. “I remember that from a previous life.”
“Like, last month?” Beauregard jeered.
“More like last millennium.” Carlos sighed, remembering Jacqueline Digby and others he’d loved—or liked, anyway—and lost, and looked around the company. “Good times, good times.”
Everybody laughed. Drink had been taken. The evening had the mood of a wake for someone they’d barely met. Ames wouldn’t be coming back on tomorrow’s bus. Getting killed in training was bad luck, Nicole had told them, or a mistake that could be overlooked. Suicide was desertion. And it wouldn’t get Ames off the hook: his original copy was still on file, ready to be called to duty in the future, and with this version’s bad karma on top of its already long-as-your-arm charge-list of delicts.
At Ichthyoid Square after the other ranks had jogged off and the long shadow of the hills lengthened, Nicole had given Carlos an earful. Not for his complicity in killing p-zombie civilians—a cheat just within the letter—but for not having noticed any warning signs from Waggoner Ames. He’d been mouthing off about the deeper implications of simulated existence for two evenings in the Touch. Carlos should have been there, keeping an eye on things, watching for trouble. Nicole had impressed upon him, while he was still shaking from Ames’s suicide, that keeping tabs on gripes and grumbles and reporting them to her wasn’t any kind of betrayal of his comrades, it was part of his goddamn duty to them, as well as to the Direction. So, here he was.
“Of course by the time you get his or her shoes off,” Beauregard continued as if thinking aloud, “you’re almost there anyway, so it’s hit and miss. I suppose I got lucky.”
“You might say you scored,” said the p-zombie.
They all laughed politely. Carlos wondered whether verbal wit was beyond p-zombies. Probably not: he’d interacted in games with AIs that could banter like stand-up comedians off-stage and on cocaine. Iqbal the bartender was never lost for a wisecrack.
“Is that food ever going to arrive?” Beauregard grumbled.
Moments later, it did. Carlos had lost all qualms about native fauna and flora, at least when it was steaming hot. He devoured a few hungry forkfuls, sipped white wine and was about to say something when the television’s background noise changed and Karzan shushed him.
“Researchers is about to come on,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Earth vintage serial. Cult viewing here.” Forefinger across lips.
Everyone in the bar, staff included, was giving the big wall screen their rapt attention. A blare of music, a blaze of lighting, a whirling montage of belle époque images: airships, the Eiffel Tower, absinthe advertisements, feathered hats, velocipedes, top hats, dreadnoughts, art deco metro station entrances, trailing skirts, twirling parasols, cancan high-kicks, the discovery of radium. French dialogue, subtitles in English. Opening titles rolled:
“Researchers of the Lost Age!
Une série fondée sur le roman de Marcel Proust,
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Episode 139”
It was the one where the submarine is attacked by a giant squid. Nicole breezed in while it was still running, drifted past the tables in a shrug of cashmere and a swing of sundress, glanced at Carlos and said, “Cognac on the rocks.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took two glasses out to the deck.
The chaotic tide had brought breakers to the rocky foot of the Touch. Salt-spray tang mingled with tobacco smoke. Nicole sat in the near corner, curled up in cool cotton and warm wool.
“Your good health,” Carlos said.
“Cheers.” Clink of glass and ice.
Nicole made her cigarette tip glow for three seconds. “So, what’s the buzz?”
Straight to the point.
“Rizzi’s spreading a rumour that there’s a thousand-year-old deserter up in the hills. Beauregard claims p-zombies have a serial number tattooed on the sole of their foot.”
“Both true, as it happens.”
“Huh!”
She flicked the butt in a fizzing red arc over the rail. “It’s a joke. Serial numbers on their souls, get it? But it’s true.”
“And the old man?”
“Oh yes, that happened. Don’t go near him. Feral.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“No grief over Ames?”
“They’re all a bit cut up,” Carlos said. “Shit, I miss him myself. He was the only one of us who had the science of this place in his bones.”
Nicole lit another, not taking her eyes off him. “Yes. He thought he could jump into a better future.”
“Poor sod.”
“Don’t feel sorry for him. Bastard convinced himself of all that simulation crap back in the real. Raised malware storm attacks that blew stuff up all over the world. Blithely killed thousands thinking he was sending them to a better future.”
“He wouldn’t be the first.”
“He sure wasn’t the last. Anything else?”
Carlos thought about it. “Oh, and Karzan’s toying with the notion that all our memories are false.”
“Yeah,” said Nicole, swirling ice cubes. She knocked back the now watery remainder. “There never was an Earth. That thought does come up. It’s really quite dangerous. Makes people nihilistic.”
Carlos laughed. “More than we are?”
“You are all monsters,” Nicole said. “What you did today…”
“I thought you were OK with that.” Carlos felt hurt.
“It was not the killing and burning. It was… I don’t know. How you all came to a place in your minds to make it possible.” She wafted smoke at ringlight and moons. “This world, it is real and so to say familiar and much trouble is taken to maintain the consistency, and still you come up with such ideas.”
Carlos shrugged. “It’s inevitable.”
“Which means you too have one? Your own little pet heresy?”
“It’s not like that,” he said, shifting in his seat. “It’s more of a question.”
“Get me another cognac, straight this time, and tell me.”
Warmth and light and noise. The television had moved on from the Proust adaptation to Turing: Warrior Queen, a British Second World War drama. Alan had arranged a tryst with W. H. Auden in the Muscular Arms, a straight pub in Bletchley. Cryptically, behind their hands and in Esperanto, the secret slang of homosexuals, they discussed the bombing of Hamburg.
“It’s a dead bona do, me old cove,” said Alan.
“Don’t be so naff,” said Auden. “Nix the palaver. It’s tre cod.”
At the bar Rizzi saw Carlos take the two cognacs and nudged his side. “Jump to the lady, huh?”
“Way it goes,” said Carlos.
“Way to go,” she said.
Outside, Nicole smoked and sipped, in her cashmere cocoon. “So tell me your question.”
“It’s Axle talk,” he warned, with a nerdy half-laugh that he suddenly hated himself for.
“So? Have you been told of a law against that?”
“All right,” he said. “It’s kind of the opposite of, uh, all the not-believing-it ideas. My question is, why don’t you just decant all your stored colonists right here? Why bother with terraforming the real planet? You could run millions of years of civilisation just in the time it’ll take to bring the real planet up to spec.”
“We could,” said Nicole. “And because the storage is massively redundant, we could do so many times over. And then what? They evolve into something beyond human.”
“Exactly!” cried Carlos. “That’s the whole point. Leave the shit behind.”
“You will have noticed,” she said, “that we have taken care here not to have left the shit behind. It still comes out behind us, to be crude about it. But in the metaphorical sense, there is no way to leave the shit behind.”
“Now who’s nihilistic?”
“Oh, we are,” she said. “The trouble with you people is not that that you were nihilistic. You weren’t nihilistic enough. God is dead, yes. But so is Nietzsche. Humanity emerged by chance in an uncaring universe! Very good—give the boy a gold star. Humanity can—and therefore must—transcend its evolved limitations and build its own caring universe inside simulations?” She mimed a smack upside the head. “Go to the back of the class. Do your homework. Chaos theory? Sensitive dependence on initial conditions? Positive feedback? Strange attractors? Darwinian logic? Orgel’s rules? Remember these?”
“Yes, but we had—”
“Get real. The number of ways for such projects to go horribly wrong may not be infinite, but it is vast. We are not a bridge between the ape and the overman. We are not here to transform the universe into thinking machines. We are not here for anything. We are simply here.”
“Speak for yourselves.”
“Indeed! That is exactly what I am doing. I am telling you what humanity has decided, and the Direction has enforced.”