The Corporation Wars_Dissidence

by Ken MacLeod

  Up the slope of the side of the mountain she struggled. Bent over, almost on all fours now. A stone bounced and skipped past her right side. Another whizzed by on her left. She looked up.

  Shaw, the old man of the mountain, sat cross-legged a few metres further up the slope, and about ten centimetres above a patch of scree. He stopped reaching for a third stone and folded his arms.

  “You again,” he said.

  Taransay stood upright and rubbed the small of her back.

  “Hello to you, too,” she said.

  Shaw passed a weary hand across his eyes. “Do you see it?”

  “Yes,” said Taransay. “You’re sitting on air again.”

  “I am not,” said Shaw. “That’s an illusion. I meant that.” He flapped a hand at the sky.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Funny colour, innit?”

  Shaw scratched his head. “That’s a relief. Thought it was my eyes.”

  “And the wind and the weather?”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” he allowed. “Mind you, I’ve seen a lot of freak weather over the years.”

  Taransay stared at him. “Don’t all the colours look a bit wrong?”

  Shaw shrugged. “If you say so.”

  “You still think we’re in a physically real place?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary. All this could be some, I dunno, astronomical phenomenon? Subtle shift in the exosun’s output? That would account for the sky and the colours and maybe the wind.”

  “Ah, fuck it,” Taransay said. She slugged back the last of her water. “Leave that aside, OK? Let me tell you what else is going on.”

  She swayed, then sat down, feeling cold.

  “Hey,” said Shaw. For the first time in her acquaintance with the man, he showed some concern. “Let me get you something.”

  He scrambled up the scree-slope to the flat rock shelf and vanished up the cliff. After a while he returned, with a flask of savoury-smelling hot water and a hunk of cold meat. She didn’t question their provenance. When she’d finished eating and drinking, Shaw leaned backward on the air as if against a seat-back.

  “Right,” he said. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

  As she told him, which took some time and a lot of circumlocution to avoid getting into a pointless argument, the world changed again. The wind dropped, the sky became blue and the colours shifted to normal.

  “See?” Shaw said. “Whatever it was, it’s passed.”

  “Looks like it,” Taransay said. “Still, that doesn’t affect the problem of what we do about Beauregard.”

  “‘We’?” he mocked, then laughed. “Nah, you’re right, I can’t let some kind of mutiny pass. Fuck knows what that could do to my food supply and peace of mind.”

  “Any idea what to do?”

  “None whatsoever,” said Shaw. He stood up, and brushed the palms of his hands. “Just as well, too. Doesn’t do to rush into things. Can’t see any advantage in haring off down to the village. I reckon we should sleep on it.”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Doubt you can climb the cliff,” he said, “so—”

  “You think I can’t climb the cliff?” Taransay interrupted. “Just fucking watch me, mister.”

  Beauregard held court on the deck at the back of the Digital Touch, the night of the first day of the new order. For a change, he was the one sitting on the rail. He had a drink in his hand and a pistol on his hip. Nicole was at a table, her face one among the many now having to pay attention.

  Chun, Karzan and Zeroual sat nearby, likewise casually armed, with Chun’s boyfriend keeping him company. Den, the local paramour of the unreliable Rizzi, scowled from the back. In the crowd the regulars were outnumbered by a random congeries of residents. They’d all watched the mid-evening television news: the departure of the armada and the first confusing exchanges of fire. The situation, the announcer had gravely informed its notional global audience, was far off nominal.

  “Listen up,” Beauregard said. “It’s started, folks. The Reaction is going to break out, within hours from our point of view, maybe by tomorrow morning. The agency that employed me and my colleagues here has been to the best of our knowledge suborned by the Rax, as I guess most of you know by now. Here’s what we’re going to do. Nicole here, our good lady, the representative of the Direction, has very kindly agreed to use her, ah, emergency powers. She not only outranks Locke Provisos, she has the physical ability to shut that treacherous blinker down, and she’s already taken steps to do so this afternoon.”

  He paused and laughed, as if to himself. “It’s been a long afternoon.”

  Nicole gave him a tight smile. Besides intervening against Locke, she’d spent the afternoon repairing some of the damage Beauregard had done, under the constant threat that he could without compunction do a lot more of that any time he liked. He’d called up Tourmaline, induced her to mobilise her cronies and arranged for all the still undamaged paintings to be taken to a location he was careful not to disclose.

  “Here’s how things stand at the moment,” he went on. “Carlos is gone, for good as far as we know. I don’t doubt he’s attempting to defect to Arcane. Good luck to him with that. Rizzi has fucked off to the hills, whether to meet the old man of the mountain or repeat his feat of walking around the world I don’t know. Again, good luck with that. You might think that just leaves me and Chun and Karzan and Zeroual here to mind the shop. It does, for the next few hours. But all the rest of the fighters who left earlier are still in their back-ups. And after the battle’s over, all those who’ve returned to base, and all those who’ve definitely been killed in battle, will start coming back on the buses. It’s all automated. Thanks to deep Direction programming that even the lady here can’t mess with, she can’t stop it, and we can’t bring back anyone who isn’t killed but hasn’t returned. So Carlos and any other defectors, whether they’ve gone to the Rax or to Arcane or whatever else, are gone for the foreseeable. But we have fighters, and they’re going to be hearing from me the minute they step off the bus. And I think they’re going to listen.”

  He scanned the faces, to make sure he didn’t need to spell it out to the locals. The fighters were going to be in charge around here.

  It looked to him like they got it.

  “Because here’s the thing. All of us fighters had a deal. Do as we’re told, fight the blinkers, die for the company as many times over as necessary, keep our noses clean, be nice to civilians. In return we’re promised a new life in the far future, in the real version of this very place. That was the deal.

  “It’s now quite evident that the deal is off. If the Rax is about to run wild, if it can control an agency like Locke, if another agency like Arcane can go over lock, stock and barrel to the fucking robots, then the war we’re in isn’t the war we were raised to fight. We can’t trust a damn thing we’ve been told. We can’t even be sure the terraforming of H-0 will happen at all. We don’t know if we’ll ever walk on this world for real.”

  Beauregard leaned forward, elbows on knees, drink in hand and, though still above their eye lines, no longer asserting dominance but engaging his audience on the level.

  “So it’s up to us,” he said. “Let’s cut our losses and cut and run. Let’s get out from under whatever cluster-fuck is about to engulf this mission. Fuck the mission, fuck the Direction, fuck the great five-million-year plan, fuck Earth and fuck all the empty promises of a new Earth. We have something better right here under our noses, a planet that’s not just habitable but super-habitable. SH-0.”

  “How the hell can we live there?” shouted Den, from the back. “It’s not suitable for human life.”

  “We aren’t going to be human life,” said Beauregard. He sat up straight and banged his chest. “We’re not human life now. We’re not even simulations of human life. We’re speculative simulations of humanoids as they might have evolved over billions of years out of the green slime and bacteria that right now is all the
life there is down on H-0, with a completely different physiology when you get down to the molecular details. Isn’t that true?”

  “That’s true,” said Nicole. She turned in her seat and craned her neck. “We’ve done it in the simulation here, and we can do it in the real. This module has the seeds of machines to build physical bodies for any life-bearing planet. We can do the hacks for building human-like bodies—or better bodies, if we want—out of whatever’s available down there on the super-hab, no question.”

  “There’s still the little matter of getting down in the first place,” said Den. “How the fuck can we do that?”

  Beauregard leaned forward again. He caught the eye of Tourmaline. As the most sympathetic, she gave him a baseline, a chance to fix a look of quiet confidence before he swept his gaze across the rest.

  “What I’ve proposed to Nicole, and what she’s agreed is feasible, is that we detach from the station with everything we can grab, and fire off in a slingshot trajectory around SH-38 and SH-19 and on to SH-0, where we swing into orbit. It’ll take a couple of Earth days, real time, and seven or so years’ sim time, to make low-SH-0 orbit. And we can take as much as time in orbit as we need before we go down. Years and years more, if necessary. Plenty of time to build entry and landing gear and fine-tune the descent.”

  Nicole stood up now, and looked around.

  “We don’t even have to take the whole contraption down at once,” she said. “We can build probes to get data, then descent modules to take us down. We have the manufacturing capacity—it just needs to be rejigged from scooters to other spacecraft.”

  Den and other locals were shaking their heads. Even the fighters looked dubious. They looked at each other, and eventually one of them spoke up.

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, sarge,” said Chun, “that’s like a best-case scenario, isn’t it? We might not have all this time in orbit, if as you say all hell’s about to break loose around here. We could get zapped on the way there, or have to leave orbit sooner than we want. The Direction’s going to be furious. The exploration rights to SH-0 haven’t even been assigned yet. None of the companies are going to be happy to see us going down to the surface and stealing a march on them. Arcane thinks we’re Rax, and by now God knows how many other companies agree. They’re not going to let the Rax take the super-hab and turn it into some fucking hornets’ nest. They’ll be shooting at us, and their robot allies will be throwing rocks at us all the way. And if we do get down—well! Our troubles are just beginning. The atmosphere’s violent, the plate tectonics are fierce, the geology’s unstable and the local life has to be as brutal as it takes to survive in a place like that.”

  Nods and frowns all round.

  “You’re absolutely right, Chun,” said Beauregard. “It is all of that.”

  He placed his glass on the railing, then in one smooth motion spun around and vaulted on to the railing and stood up. It was a neat trick.

  “We’ve got enough firepower to give as good as we get, but, yeah, there’s a lot can go wrong on the way. That’s in the lap of the gods and the hands of the good lady here. The real question is, are we brutal enough to survive down there?”

  Karzan jumped to her feet. “I am, sarge,” she said.

  Zeroual rose, more slowly, after her. “Me too, sarge.”

  Chun shrugged from his seat. “Count me in, I guess.”

  Some of the locals were beginning to look tentatively enthusiastic. Here and there some were rising, too, or if already standing were raising glasses or clenched fists.

  “It’s still crazy dangerous!” Den shouted, from the back.

  Beauregard drew his pistol and held it high above his head.

  “Damn right it’s crazy dangerous!”

  He fired the pistol in the air. Some of those watching him flinched.

  “What’s the matter with you churls?” Beauregard shouted. “Do you want to live forever?”

  There was an uneasy laugh, which grew and spread. Beauregard kept up a challenging grin until the laughter was general. Then he laughed himself and jumped straight down to the deck. He grabbed his glass and took a swig and looked around.

  “I’ve always wanted to say that,” he confessed.

  Later, when everyone had gone home or was in the bar watching the escalating battle on television, Beauregard stepped out again on the deck. Nicole stood in a corner, leaning on the rail and smoking. She turned, and raised an ironic glass.

  “You think you’ve won, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Beauregard. He raised his own beer bottle, without irony. “That would seem to be the case, all in all. Cheers.”

  “You think you have me by the short and curlies,” said Nicole.

  Beauregard grimaced. “I wouldn’t put it quite so graphically or disrespectfully myself, lady.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t,” said Nicole, with a faint smile. She looked out again, to the dark and ring-lit sea. “Over a barrel, perhaps. You know how my interface works, and you can hold me hostage with that. I expect when the fighters come back on the bus you will assert your authority over them, and because you’re the kind of man you are, and they’re the kind of people they are, it’ll hold.”

  “I expect so,” said Beauregard, and took a complacent sip.

  Nicole turned to him again. “Tell me one thing, Belfort. Are you Rax?”

  Beauregard laughed. “No. Though I have spoken to Newton. He says he’s Rax. You might want to keep an eye on him, if he has the brass neck to come back. No, I’m state, like your good friend Carlos was.”

  “Ah, Carlos,” Nicole breathed. “I shall miss him. I love that fucker, you know.”

  “It seems you loved him for a longer time than we thought.”

  Nicole frowned, then shrugged. “In a sense, yes. The memories are there. At some level the entity I began as, the Innovator, had some abstract regard for him. No doubt that shaped how I was created, and the choices my immediate precursor stages made. There is not the sense of personal continuity, though.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Enough. If you’re not Rax, what are your ambitions?”

  Beauregard gave this some thought, and surprised himself.

  “Much the same as if I were,” he said. “That’s a difference between the Rax and the Axle. The Axle can only succeed as a group, a collective, a conspiracy. Whereas the idea of the Rax… all it needs is one man who would be king.”

  “And you’re that man?”

  “I am here. And down there, I hope.”

  Nicole looked out to sea again, and spoke quietly into the breeze.

  “I can go along with that, for now. I have little choice in the matter. But there are two things I would ask you to bear in mind. The first is that should you ever abuse your power, should you ever set the fighters lording it over the civilians, I will have you killed.”

  “How would you do that?” Beauregard said.

  “Two minutes with Tourmaline, or with any other person here who has a number tattooed on the sole of their foot. That’s all I would need. And there are others, who you don’t know, who could do the same as I would in that two minutes.”

  “Do what?” asked Beauregard, feeling a chill at the base of his back.

  Nicole turned her face slightly towards him, with a smile just visible in the corners of her eyes and lips.

  “Convince them that there’s no such thing as a p-zombie. That it’s a completely incoherent concept, and, even if it weren’t, they’re not instances of it. That they’re as human as we are.”

  Beauregard masked his dismay with a joke. “If you can call us human.”

  “I do wonder sometimes,” said Nicole.

  Beauregard thought for a moment about his inhumanity, and about Nicole’s. How did her threatening to convince the p-zombies they weren’t p-zombies square with her indifference to killing p-zombies on the training exercise? Then he realised: it made no difference. She didn’t have to believe the p-zombies were human to convince them otherwi
se. And it probably made no difference to her if she did believe it, if “belief” even made sense in this context. Whatever she was—and he was irrationally certain she wasn’t a p-zombie—she wasn’t human herself.

  He shook his head. “It would be no news to p-zombies that they’re human. They already think they are. That’s the whole point. They’re just bemused by our idea that they’re not. And I’ve done nothing to Tourmaline that would make her want to kill me.”

  Nicole’s voice dripped scorn.

  “The whole relationship,” she said, “is full of subtle dismissals of Tourmaline’s point of view, based on your conviction that she doesn’t have one, and on her bemused—as you put it—acceptance that there must indeed be some indefinable thing missing in her humanity. It would look very different to her if she were convinced otherwise. And I could convince her, believe you me. When I was motivating your squad for the live fire exercise, and convincing you that in this instance it was all right to kill p-zombies, I warned you that you might find yourselves up against AIs that could manipulate human beings because they know exactly the right buttons to push. Remember that?”

  “I’m not likely to forget it,” said Beauregard. He could see where this was going.

  “And I am such a one,” said Nicole.

  There was silence for a while.

  “You said there were two things,” Beauregard prompted, “that I should remember.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Nicole. “You think the mission is about to break up, that the plan is disrupted, that things will fall apart and you are grabbing what you can from the wreck. But some things are designed to fall apart. Some, as you know, are even designed to explode. So the other thing I ask you to bear in mind is… something else I’ve said before, actually.”

  She looked away, still smiling.

  “Evolution is smarter than you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Slingshot Orbits

  Carlos ran far ahead of the pack that now came snarling out of the space station.

  By exiting under thrust rather than launch catapult, he’d overtaken the first departures while they were still in free fall and lining up their trajectories for the long haul. Once in free fall himself, he’d plotted and burned to a transfer orbit towards the Arcane sub-station.