by Ken MacLeod
“Welcome back!” she said. “Well done!”
It took Carlos a moment to realise she was speaking her own language, the local language. So was everyone else. Carlos found he could understand the whole joyful hubbub of praise and congratulations coming his comrades’ way, and he could see they understood, too. They must have acquired the language while they were robots in space. His best guess as to why they hadn’t arrived with the skill already implanted was that conversing with locals before their first briefing from Nicole would have been confusing, and there had been no way to plausibly give them the ability within the sim. A more troubling, because puzzling, possibility was that the language might in future be of use to them in space.
“Thank you,” he said, in the same language. “We didn’t exactly cover ourselves in glory, I have to admit.”
“Oh, but you did!” said the woman. “You fought the evil robots so bravely!”
Carlos decided not to debate the matter further. “Well…”
“Yes, yes, no need to be modest. Here, have this.”
She reached into the big cloth bag between her feet and pulled out a fruit that looked like a kumquat.
“Thank you.” Carlos bit into the yellow waxy skin and found the inside soft and sweet, with a sherbet fizz in the mouth. The juice miraculously didn’t drip on his hand, but the flesh almost liquefied when he chewed it. It was as if the fruit were a two-phase metamaterial, not so much genetically engineered as designed from the molecules up. Perhaps it was.
“It’s from one of the other colonies,” the woman said. “Of course I’ll use most of them for the seeds, but you’re welcome to that one.”
One of the other colonies? Carlos wondered how the woman saw the world she was in, but didn’t press the point.
“Thank you, it’s delicious.”
“Soon they’ll be growing here,” she said.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
She smiled, suddenly shy or out of things to say, and returned to her book. After a while she left, at a stop among trees. As his gaze followed her down the path, Carlos saw that her homestead was a house surrounded by marked-off garden plots, measured and labelled, tended by a robot. Just like the experimental farm they’d destroyed in the exercise, on Beauregard’s initiative. You’d think word of that atrocity would spread, even among p-zombies. But none of the passengers showed the slightest wariness or resentment of the fighters. Instead, they were sharing sweets, fruits, snacks and drinks with every appearance of gratitude and solidarity. A bottle of imported green liquor was passed around. Carlos admired the paper-thin glass and the label—sunset seen from inside a dome-enclosed fake tropical beach on a gas giant moon—and declined a sip.
In ones and twos the local passengers left. The last disembarked as the bus trundled along the road on the moraine or raised beach above the resort. Alone together except for the driving mechanism, the six fighters looked at each other and laughed.
“Well, that was something,” said Rizzi.
The bus rolled past Nicole’s house. Carlos looked for her, but she wasn’t at the studio window. Maybe she was down the village.
“Anyone getting off at their house?” he asked.
This half-rhetorical question was met with emphatic shaking of heads and a chorus of jeers.
“Nah, straight to the Touch, I reckon,” said Beauregard. “We deserve it.”
“Or so everyone here seems to think,” said Karzan.
The time was just before noon. Carlos contemplated twelve hours or so of increasing drunkenness, and decided to do his duty.
“Yes!” he said, punching the air and narrowly missing the roof. “First round’s on me.”
At the terminus a small crowd was waiting: Chun’s boyfriend and Rizzi’s, Beauregard’s p-zombie and a couple of dozen locals who all cheered and clapped as the fighters trooped off the bus. A banner was strung across the tawdry street: Welcome Home, Soldiers!
“Brilliant,” said Beauregard. “So now it’s all ‘support our troops.’ Things must be getting bad out there.”
“Don’t be so fucking negative, man,” said Carlos, scanning the crowd and the length of the street for Nicole’s face. “There hasn’t been time for any major developments.”
Beauregard looked at him sidelong. “Know that, do you?”
“There you have a point,” said Carlos. No sign of Nicole. “Fuck it, let’s get smashed.”
His pledge to buy the first round was pre-empted by Iqbal the barman, who announced as they walked in that everything for the team that day was on the house. They thanked him, shouted their orders for drinks and lunch then stumbled out to the deck at the back, laughing. As he sank his first beer Carlos remembered that his phone was in his back pocket. The glass was so flexible he hadn’t noticed its presence. He took it out and looked. Nicole had left a message that she’d be at the Touch an hour after noon. Ah! He messaged back, careful to avoid any hint that he was still slightly hurt that she hadn’t been there to meet him at the terminus.
Carlos looked around the decking area, a second beer bottle chilled and beaded in hand, feeling at a loose end. Chun and Rizzi were talking with their boyfriends. A spark struck and a small flame flared in the shadow of a hand as Karzan lit a cigarette for Zeroual; they were head to head over a small table, in animated conversation. Beauregard was with his young lady. Each had a hand on the other’s thigh, but she was sitting sidelong and talking to two of her friends. From what Carlos could overhear and the bored look on Beauregard’s face, the chat was such as to strike anyone outside its context as mindless, whether those who shared the context were p-zombies or not.
Carlos ambled over, nodded and smiled politely to the p-zombie girl, and pulled up a chair. The two men tipped their beer bottles to each other.
“Here’s to a successful mission,” said Carlos.
“To next time,” said Beauregard. Clink.
“Indeed.”
With part of his mind Carlos was already planning the next mission, thinking over ways to hit beyond the crater wall. To get some fucking revenge on those treacherous Arcane bastards. The second bottle was going down as well as the first. He must have been parched on the bus. Just as well he hadn’t sipped the green liquor, his head would be thumping by now. Beauregard’s gaze had drifted out to sea after they’d clinked bottles.
“Good to be back,” said Carlos, trying to make conversation.
Beauregard blinked and looked back, shaking his head. “Sorry. Miles away. Something big splashed out there. Caught myself trying to zoom my eyes.”
Carlos laughed. “I know what you mean. Like you suddenly notice you can’t smell the sun.”
“Yeah.” Beauregard toyed with the beer bottle, holding the neck between two fingers and swaying it gently, inspecting the froth behind the brown glass as if he were doing quality control in a brewery. He sighed and drank. “Yeah. I thought—I guess we all thought—that being a space robot would be like being a mechanical man, or wearing an armoured spacesuit or something. A loss of sensitivity. Whereas… it’s becoming this lithe, agile thing, with a stronger and more sensitive body. Even in the big frames you feel more. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying myself right now.”
He stroked his companion’s thigh, absent-mindedly.
“Wouldn’t want the p-zombie to feel offended,” Carlos murmured.
“She does have a name, you know,” said Beauregard, sounding slightly offended himself. “Tourmaline.”
“Lovely.”
“She is, yes.” He nuzzled her neck.
“You were saying?” said Carlos.
“Ah, yes, well. The point is, it makes you think.”
“About what?”
Beauregard cocked an eye. “I know what you’re up to, skip. You don’t have to be so fucking obvious about it. I’ll tell you straight up, what it makes me think about is the whole goddamn sanctity of the mission profile. Terraforming and so forth. Call me an old Axle reprobate dead-ender if you like, but I find i
t pretty damn pathetic when they could aim so much higher.”
“Oh, I’m with you there,” said Carlos. “I suspect we all are. I’ve said as much to Nicole. And you know what? The lady doesn’t care, Locke doesn’t care, Crisp and Golding doesn’t care and I’m pretty sure the Direction doesn’t care what we think. All they care about is what we do. They’re interested in our behaviour, not our opinions. Like you with the… uh, with Tourmaline here.”
Beauregard guffawed. “You have a point. Come to think of it, the army was like that. No political indoctrination what-so-fucking-ever. As long as you obey orders and get the job done, we couldn’t give a toss what you think. Nobody dies for that King and Country guff.”
“What do they die for?”
“You mean, what did they?” Beauregard turned a bleak look to the sea. “The squad. Your mates.” He shrugged. “Don’t know what the fuck I died for, but I hope it was that.”
Carlos raised his empty bottle. “Welcome to Valhalla.”
“Valhalla?” Beauregard grinned. “You’re the one who got the honour guard.”
“What honour guard?”
Beauregard returned Carlos’s ironic, empty toast, and clarified: “The slain foes you took with you.”
Carlos froze inside for a moment. Images of the carnage he’d wrought came back as vividly as they had on Nicole’s screen on his first day in the sim. He didn’t know what to say. He could have hit Beauregard, right there. He stood up.
“Another beer?”
Nicole actually turned up forty minutes after noon, which was just as well because they were all on their fourth drink by then. Everyone stood up. She smiled at them all and gave Carlos a kiss against a background of cheers. Carlos nodded goodbye to Beauregard and Tourmaline, and sat down with Nicole at a table in the far corner, out over the beach. She already had a tall glass of clear spirits and fizz on ice. He could smell the alcohol in the glass. On her breath later it would be like beetles, in the matchbox smell of stale smoke. Later. He wanted it to be later right now, to just flee this noisy crowd and take her to bed. He craved her like he’d once, on a wet night by the Singel canal, craved the vanilla sugar rush of stroopwafel after skunk.
“Good to see you,” he said. “Cheers.”
She clinked, half smiling. “Likewise.”
She sipped; he gulped. She tipped back her chair and lit a cigarette.
“How did you find it?”
He shrugged. “How d’you expect? Weird. But…” He found himself searching for the word, realising as he did so that in the frame it would have come to mind unbidden. “Invigorating, I suppose. It’s like being a superhero. You have all these extra powers of mind and body, and you know you can’t be killed or maimed permanently. That’s why I find all this adulation kind of embarrassing. There was nothing heroic about what we did.”
“You feel like a superhero, but not a hero?” She seemed amused.
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“Well, don’t.” Chair rocked forward, her elbows on the table. “I’ve seen the recordings. Selective, but still. You were all brave. Just keeping your shit together out there, that’s courage. Suddenly finding yourselves robots in an overwhelming and alien environment? You did well not to freak out in the first seconds. And you had more to fear physically than you admit. If the robots had captured any of you—always a possibility—they could have had a lot of fun. Torture doesn’t take long in real time when you can download minds to faster hardware and run them flat out. Pack a month of agony into a minute, and no worries about the subject dying on you. Nor about going mad, actually, in case you think that’s a limit—just discard and reboot with a fresh copy and patch in the memories of what the first went through before it broke.”
“Jeez,” Carlos said. “Thanks for that. I feel much better now.”
“So you should.” She stood up and clapped loudly enough to cut across conversations, then sat on the railing when she’d got everyone’s attention.
“OK, soldiers and, uh, friends,” she said. “Well done all of you, and you’re welcome to celebrate. But before everyone gets too drunk…”
Theatrical groans. “What do you mean, ‘before’?” Rizzi called out. A laugh.
“Yes, yes,” said Nicole. “Listen up, folks. The situation has… moved on a bit since you left the site, and it’s changing fast. Here’s the latest: your company’s dispute with Arcane Disputes has become a little less, shall we say, arcane. Their forces on the ground—the ones who did you over—have seized the robots, as they said they would, and shifted them and all the gear they could move from the Astro landing site. Arcane has also broken off any serious discussion with Locke Provisos and with the Direction. This is quite unprecedented—it amounts to, if not a declaration of war, at least a recall of ambassadors. They’re bombarding every Locke Provisos installation with semiotic malware, and whenever we query that, it’s spamming the Direction with auto-logged complaints of us doing the same to them. Just to make sure we get the message, they’ve unilaterally disengaged their modules—including military manufacturing and deployment facilities—from their position here at the station and are dropping to a lower orbit. In effect they have a self-sufficient sub-station. According to our projections, they should be able with a small expenditure of fuel and reaction mass to maintain a position roughly between the station and SH-17, with the obvious intention of blocking physical supplies and reinforcements.”
“When did all this start?” Beauregard asked.
“A couple of kiloseconds after the battle. They were already hitting us—Locke, that is—with hacking probes shortly before your clash with them. That was what the emergency firewall update was about. But it was after their forces returned to the Gneiss base that things got seriously hot.”
“Sorry, I don’t get it,” said Carlos. “Don’t they have a representative of the Direction on board, like your equivalent in their equivalent of this place?”
“They sure do,” said Nicole, in a grim tone. “The Direction’s plenipotentiary with Arcane gave no warning of developments, and isn’t responding to queries. Basically, Arcane is treating any querying of its actions as an attack, an attempted malware insertion or the like, and some low-level automated sub-routine is logging them all as complaints with the Direction. And it’s treating any requests for clarification or indeed any response at all as a further attack, about which it duly logs a complaint.” She shrugged and spread her hands. “It’s like a runaway loop, and we’ve stopped responding to avoid making things worse. Meanwhile they’ve fortified the rebel robot base in the crater to a much greater extent than the robots were able to do. In doing that, of course, they’ve incurred penalty terms on their contract with Gneiss, to whom they were supposed to return the site with as little damage as possible.”
“So it’s no longer a dispute between Gneiss and Astro over compensation for the robots?”
Nicole nodded. “It’s gone way beyond that. Gneiss has shifted its law enforcement contract to Locke, which I suppose is good from a narrow commercial standpoint, but overall the position is not good for the mission profile. We have no choice at the moment but to treat Arcane as a rogue agency.”
“Rogue?” said Karzan. “Now there’s a word I’ve heard before.”
“Yes indeed,” said Nicole. “There is every possibility that the rogue robots have somehow influenced or corrupted Arcane. Which is of course very disturbing.”
“Have Arcane made any demands?” Zeroual asked.
“If they have, they’ve been enclosed in their malware packets, which our firewalls are interdicting.”
“But surely,” Carlos persisted, “the Direction has some sway over Arcane?”
“Not at the moment,” said Nicole. “In fact, the only sway it has is to task Locke Provisos with enforcing its rulings against Arcane.”
“Which is where we come in?” said Beauregard, with a certain relish.
“It is indeed,” said Nicole. “Or, rather, it’s where you g
o out. Again.”
“When?” Carlos asked.
“Tomorrow morning,” said Nicole. “Sorry, guys, but there it is. You have to move fast before the Arcane module is in position to mount a blockade, and the sooner the better. Back on the bus, then a fast burn back to Emergency Base One on SH-17. Meanwhile, enjoy yourselves.” She grinned and raised her glass. “Get as drunk as you like. If that means you have a hangover on the bus, don’t worry. In fact it doesn’t matter if you’re thrown on the bus like a sack of potatoes and blind drunk. You’ll be sober in the frames.”
Everyone whooped. Carlos eyed Nicole as she slid off the rail and sat back down beside him. He tipped his beer bottle to her.
“I can assure you,” he said, “that I have no intention of getting drunk.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Nicole. “I have no intention of sleeping.”
They arranged to meet back at Nicole’s house about mid-afternoon. Others dealt with the drink and sex conundrum by sloping off to the establishment’s discreet upstairs rooms.
“Zeroual and Karzan, my, my,” said Nicole, swirling the last of her ice.
“Yes,” said Carlos. “Turns out there was some spark between them.”
Nicole laughed, drained her glass and left.
“Something I didn’t want to say while the others might hear.”
“Oh, you have a kink? That’s a surprise. But go on, I’m not easy to shock.”
“Very funny. No, what I was wondering about how Arcane has stopped communicating…”
“Uh-huh.”
“Could it be because they think we’re the ones who’re corrupted?”
“We?”
“Locke Provisos.”
“And the Direction?”
“I suppose.”
“If they do, then they’re beyond help. Which may be exactly what’s happened: the rogue robots have convinced Arcane Disputes of some conspiracy theory.”
“How? I can see how robots could corrupt or confuse an AI, but at least six actual human minds…”