by Ken MacLeod
“Not exactly,” said Nicole. “It was a tactical disaster—the force attacking the Arcane module got wiped out by KE weapons from a completely unsuspected quarter. More goddamn freebots, infesting some moonlet. Must have laid down meteoroid orbits like mines for our force to run into. But you weren’t killed by mistake. You were shot down because you scooted off on your own to attack the surface base. Not that you’d have come back from that, even if you’d been left to get on with it. Suicide mission, by all accounts.”
“Jeez!” Carlos was shocked and bewildered. “Why would I do that?”
Nicole shrugged. “Well, that’s the big question. The obvious answer is that you were hacked. If so, it was after your last back-up, otherwise the inspection would have shown that up in your checksums. It didn’t, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Where would I be?”
“In hell a bit longer, for diagnostics, and then…” A fingertip across her throat. “Painless, but still.” She looked distressed again, just for a second. “I’d have missed you.”
He hugged her again.
“At least I died bravely,” he said, trying to make her laugh. “Even if I don’t know why.”
She held him by the shoulders at arm’s length.
“You have doubts, don’t you?”
He laughed. “What do you expect? Sometimes I’m a robot space warrior and sometimes I’m here in what seems much more real and everyone assures me is a sim. I have more doubts than fucking Descartes.”
“Don’t be flippant. You have doubts about the Direction’s strategy and the company’s competence.”
“Well… again, what do you expect? Seeing as I’m just back from another debacle.”
“You said once that you wondered if Arcane thought we were corrupted.”
“It’s always possible, I guess.”
“You guess wrong,” she told him. “But you weren’t thinking, before you left, that maybe we were? You weren’t thinking of defecting?”
“Defecting to Arcane?” He shook his head, incredulous she’d even think it. “Never. Even if I did think Locke Provisos was corrupted, which I don’t, I’d have no reason to think Arcane was any better. If they’re now run by freebots they could be a lot worse. Out of the frying pan into the fire.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Nicole. She looked at him quizzically. “So you’re just crazy brave, huh?”
“That would seem out of character,” Carlos said.
She punched his arm lightly. “Don’t do it again.”
“OK, OK.”
“I still have work to do.”
“I’ll find something to do.”
“No, you won’t,” Nicole told him. “I need my space. I’ll see you later at the Touch.”
He grinned and cocked his ear. “Touch, later?”
“Yes.” He could see she’d read him right. She kissed the tip of his nose. “Now clear off.”
Carlos found the bar of the Digital Touch half empty, with the usual handful of locals watching agog a slow-mo version of his heroic suicide dash, the only bright spot in the military setback. He acknowledged their murmurs of misinformed approbation and didn’t hang about for the denouement. Most of the noise in the place was coming from the outside. He strolled out on the deck at the back to be greeted with a slow hand-clap. His team and Newton’s crowded around. Beauregard leaned through the crush and clasped Carlos’s hand.
“Sorry I had to shoot you down, skip,” he said. “Nothing personal.”
“No offence, sarge,” Carlos said. “Agreeing with suggestions, as all of us must.”
“As ever,” said Beauregard. “I prefer taking orders. From you.”
“Speaking of your orders,” said Tourmaline, shouldering in, “here’s yours.” She pressed a bottle into his hand. Carlos nodded his thanks and drank.
“You were expecting me?”
“We saw you coming down the hill from the lady’s,” said the p-zombie.
“Ah.”
Carlos turned to Beauregard. “But, yes, well, speaking of orders. You didn’t have to disobey any of mine?”
“Hell, no,” said Beauregard. “You just fucked off on your own. Locke thought you might have been hacked.”
“Maybe, in the last seconds.”
“Or maybe, it came from yourself.”
Carlos looked down at the bottle in his hand. “I guess I owe you an explanation.”
“Yes?” Beauregard looked eager. Newton hovered at his shoulder.
Carlos shook his head. “Sorry. I have no idea what came over me. I’ll just have to owe you a drink.”
Beauregard smiled, but his eyebrows rose a fraction.
“Seriously,” said Carlos. “I’ve been through all this already with the lady. I didn’t have any thought of defecting, or anything like that.”
“Never crossed my mind that you did, skip,” said Beauregard. “To be honest, if I thought you had I might have followed you all the way. I shot you down because Locke insisted you mustn’t fall into enemy hands.”
“Which I well might have. So I owe you thanks as well as a drink.”
“Glad you’re taking it that way, old chap.”
“Hey, man, I’m just glad you’re having me back.”
“I have your back,” said Beauregard with mock solemnity. “Even if I have to shoot you in it.”
“You know,” Carlos pondered aloud, “I think Tourmaline’s a bad influence on you.”
They all laughed, including Tourmaline.
“Anything unusual happen on the way out?” Carlos asked.
“Nah,” said Beauregard. “You were late turning up at the muster, that’s all.”
“How did that happen?”
“Your frame was still in the repair shop when you… arrived in it.”
“Aha! Maybe they should Turing-test the repair bots.”
Another laugh, which this time Tourmaline didn’t join in.
Beauregard shrugged. “I don’t think that’s something our AI masters would overlook.”
Zeroual snorted. “How could they tell?”
“Always the question,” said Tourmaline. This time, it was only she who laughed.
Carlos idly wondered whether she was aware of her condition, and what that question even meant. He recalled as a teenage nerd having brainstorming sessions about the theoretical possibility of philosophical zombies. Of course, if the concept was coherent, that was a discussion a p-zombie could take part in without the slightest difficulty, or the smallest indication that it was the topic, the subject of the conversation and the unfeeling object of the entire intellectual exercise. A difference that makes no difference is no difference… perhaps the identity of indiscernibles was the moral lesson he, like all the fighters, was supposed to be learning here before he was adjudged fit for human society.
He found himself doubting he’d get off that easily.
Newton spoke up, sounding diffident despite his equal rank.
“I have a possible explanation for your rash action, Carlos.”
Carlos glanced around his own team. They were all looking intently at Newton.
“I’d be delighted to hear it,” Carlos said.
“Anger,” said Newton. “Fury. I say that because I felt it myself. Bloody raging fury, to be exact.”
“Yeah,” said Rizzi. “Me, too. When we came out of sleep mode and the screen lit up with that fucking disaster, and then when we were told to pull out… shit, skip, if you’d only asked us all—!”
Carlos rocked back, making calming gestures. “Come on, chaps. I wouldn’t have done that, no matter what bizarre conclusion I’d come to. Trust me on this.”
“We do,” said Chun. “But if you’d asked us…” He grinned and raised his drink. The others, Newton’s team included, nodded and cheered.
“Thanks, guys.” Carlos looked around. “Any word how the other fighters are taking it? It must be a lot worse for them, after—”
“After going into action only to find themselves ba
ck on the bus?” said a new voice in the conversation. It was Nicole, from behind Carlos.
She raised her glass and nodded to everyone. “I can answer that. They’re drinking themselves stupid with relief in every bar on the strip, and raring to go out again.”
“Typical,” said Zeroual.
“Even suicide volunteers are like that when a mission’s called off,” said Karzan.
She got one or two dark, questioning looks.
“They were all atheists in our martyrdom units!” she protested.
“Well, it’s only human,” said Nicole, with an air of smoothing things over. “Anyway, it’s just as well they’re in that mood. Tomorrow is free, then you’re having a few days training again in the hills to give the bots time to assemble more scooters and frames, then you’re all straight back into action.”
Carlos broke an awkward silence. “What’s the great plan this time?”
Nicole grinned. “Go for the jugular. All the companies—well, nearly all, but c’est la vie—are cool about hitting moonlets. So it’s back to the front, mano a mano with the new lot of rebel robots. Cut the KE attacks at source.”
Another awkward silence.
“Jugular, eh?” said Rizzi. “More like the fucking capillary.”
Nicole said nothing. She pressed in against Carlos’s back and discreetly and expertly groped him.
“Touch, later,” she whispered, and stepped away to chat with people in Newton’s squad.
Carlos didn’t mind. Before food, before more drinks, before leaving, before the thought of that later touch consumed his mind, he wanted a quiet word with Rizzi.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Old Man of the Mountain
Carlos woke early and found himself alone in the bed but not (he subliminally knew) in the house. He made coffee and padded through to the front room, carrying two mugs. Nicole stood with her back to the door in an old shirt, painting. She had placed a vase of flowers on a small, tall table in front of the window. Exosunlight and ringlight and the reflected light of both from the sea. A subtle composition. Sketches for it littered the floor. The canvas was the usual fractal cross-hatch. Carlos hesitated in the doorway, not wanting to break her focus. She turned, smiled, and stepped forward for the coffee. Her shirt smelled of, and was spattered with, oil paint.
“Sorry to—”
“No, no, I was about to take a break. Thinking of breakfast.”
Nicole lit a cigarette, took the mug, and gazed at her painting.
“I’ve always meant to ask,” Carlos said. “What are you painting?”
Nicole waved the cigarette towards the vase in the window.
“That. Or whatever’s in front of me at the time.”
“Your sketches are amazingly realistic.”
“Thank you.”
“But your paintings…”
“What?”
“Well, they’re nothing like the sketches.”
She frowned over her shoulder, looked again at the painting, then back at Carlos. She shook her head.
“They’re more detailed, that’s all.”
Carlos raised his free hand. “You’re the artist.”
Nicole grinned. “Yes. I’m the artist.”
They ambled through to the kitchen at the back. Nicole fired up the oven for croissants, and lit another cigarette.
“Something to tell you,” Carlos said.
“Uh-huh?”
“I’m going up to the hills today with Rizzi.”
Nicole shrugged. “As long as Den doesn’t have a problem with that.”
“He doesn’t,” said Carlos. “I asked him.”
“Fine. Look after yourselves.”
“You don’t have a problem with it?”
“Why should I? Jealousy’s not in my nature.”
“Jealousy?” Carlos could hardly believe she’d said it. “No, no. That’s not… what this is about at all.”
“I was just teasing,” Nicole said. “I have a very good idea why you and Taransay are going up to the hills.”
“Yes, it’s—”
Nicole leaned across the table and placed a hand over his mouth. “Don’t tell me about it.”
So he didn’t.
Carlos checked a light utility vehicle and two rifles out of the depot and drove to Ichthyoid Square. The sun was up, the tide was out. On the beach Beauregard and Newton jogged side by side, redoubling a double trail of footprints that extended out of sight. The two men were evidently on their way back from one of their long early morning runs. Carlos waved. They waved back. After a few minutes Rizzi turned up, and jumped in. They drove up into the hills, about ten kilometres farther and several ranges higher than they’d ever gone on exercises.
“I keep expecting to fall asleep,” Rizzi said.
“Am I boring you?”
“No, I mean I’ve never travelled this far inland without waking up as a space robot.”
“Ha, ha.”
Rizzi had the map on her phone, marked up by Den. Some locals now and again visited the old man, exchanging trade goods for words of wisdom.
“Not far now,” she said. “Turn off at the next dirt track on the right.”
The track ran out after a few hundred metres of upward gradient, at a low bank that looked as if it had eroded into place. Beyond that was rough, uneven ground. They both could tell at a glance that not even the vehicle could cope with it. Carlos stopped. The air was thin and cold. The scrubby high moorland had nothing to check the wind that seemed to pour down from the high mountain that filled the view ahead. Carlos looked back down the track, then at the bank in front.
“This track was made,” he said. “What was the point?”
Rizzi clambered out and kitted up: backpack, water bottle, rifle.
“Maybe someday they’ll build houses up here.”
“Ha! I think somebody drew a line and somebody else filled it in.”
He got out and hefted his gear. “Are we really going to need our AKs?”
Rizzi shrugged. “Wild animals, skip.”
He shaded his eyes and gazed around theatrically.
“There’s nothing for predators to live on up here.”
“Except the bird things.”
“Yeah, I guess. It would be just my luck to get carried off by the alien bird thing that fills the eagle niche in this ecosystem.”
“Yeah, the eagle niche is what you’d fill if it carried you there.”
Rizzi checked the map and struck a course across the moor towards the mountain.
“It’s always farther than it looks,” she said.
It was, and bleaker, too. The scrubby moorland gave way to karst, on which nothing grew but lichen. Now and then a small animal with long ears and side-facing eyes startled them by darting from almost underfoot to the nearest black cleft or overhang. A single pair of huge avians patrolled the high thermals, distantly eyeing the thin pickings below. Carlos walked in silence, except for token responses to Rizzi’s occasional remarks. He was preoccupied with trying to account for his—or, rather, his now-dead version’s—strange action. Under any chain of military command he’d have been facing a court martial for such a gross breach of discipline. But Locke Provisos only had a virtual emulation of any such chain, and only his own squad could depose him. Their response the previous evening had unanimously been puzzled but positive. They’d seen it as an act of recklessness, the sort of thing you’d grudgingly admire however much you disapproved of it, rather than an attempt to desert or defect. He was by no means convinced himself.
By noon Carlos and Rizzi had reached the mountain’s lower slopes. They stopped to eat from their ration kits. Soup steamed as the containers were opened; from cubes the size of sweets, fresh bread rolls rose as the wrappers were unfolded.
“I never cease to appreciate what a few centuries of progress can do to Meals Ready to Eat,” Carlos said.
“Maybe it only works because this is all virtual,” said Rizzi.
“Don’t disi
llusion me. I need something to look forward to when we get our just rewards.”
“I’m just looking forward to my desserts.”
Carlos groaned. “You’ve been talking to that Tourmaline.”
“It’s catching, skip.”
Their trek became an ascent, then a climb. Rizzi paused more often to peer at the map, and to bring it into higher magnification. She stopped as they reached a long, shallow shelf below a steep cliff.
“X marks the spot,” she said.
Carlos looked around. The silence rang like a shout. There was no sign of habitation, or trace of human presence.
A fist-sized stone clattered a few metres away, making both Carlos and Rizzi jump. They looked up the cliff. A man stood ten metres up on a ledge so narrow the soles of his bare feet jutted out. He had long hair and a long beard, both gingery. At first he seemed naked, but as soon as he moved it became clear that his close-fitting clothes were almost the same dark colour as his skin. He descended, still facing outward, now and then taking a handhold but mostly not, heel-strike by heel-strike from one invisible ledge to the next, as casually as if he were coming down stairs. Watching him made the palms of Carlos’s hands sweat. Mountain goats on the sides of dams would have had nothing to teach this guy.
He jumped the last couple of metres and strolled over, quite untroubled by the rough stones underfoot, and stopped at a distance of three metres. Close enough for Carlos to catch his smell, which was like wet leather and old wool. A long knife was sheathed on his belt. A heavy elaborate watch—scratched many times, but otherwise identical to the ones issued to the fighters—was on his left wrist. The skin of his face, though weathered, had creases rather than wrinkles. His hairline had receded almost to the crown, but his hair and beard had not a trace of white. He didn’t look like he was fifty years old, let alone a thousand.
“What you got?” he said.
Rizzi had come prepared. She took from her backpack a packet of salt and a cigarette lighter, laid them on the ground, and stepped back. The man snatched them up, his movement as fast as a striking snake’s. He stashed them inside his leather shirt, where they made two visible bulges that reinforced the serpentine impression.
“What you smirking at?” he asked Carlos.
“Sorry,” Carlos said. “A stray thought.”