by Ken MacLeod
Carlos wondered why the apparently hostile parts of the station weren’t attacking the others, and each other, given that at least some of them evidently had laser weapons. As soon as he’d formulated the question the answer came to him: mutual assured destruction. There was no telling how long this deterrence would hold.
Taransay’s shoulder was being shaken. She huddled, shrugging the hand away, wanting to get back to sleep. Her limbs ached and the thin padded mat and thinner blanket gave her little comfort.
“Wake up,” said Shaw.
Shaw? Who the fuck was—?
Shaw! She remembered where she was, and opened her eyes. What she saw made her close them again. This had to be a dream. A false awakening. These things happened. Never to her, but she’d read about them. She rolled over and sat up, then opened her eyes again.
“Fuck!” she yelled. “What’s going on?”
The world was white, with every object outlined in black. She held her hand up and turned it. It was perfectly three-dimensional, but at whatever angle you looked it was outlined rather than solid. She clasped her hands and they felt real, as did the mat and the hard ground beneath. Shaw knelt beside the bedding, on the cave floor. His face was completely recognisable, every feature as if drawn in black ink. He smelled as he always had. The breeze from the cave mouth was fresh, the sky beyond a brighter white than the walls. The interior of the cave held no shadows.
Everything she could see was like a precise wire-model rendering of itself, all colour gone.
“You see it too?” Shaw asked. His voice sounded parched. “Everything in 3-D outline?”
“Yes. Fuck, this is just so weird.”
She stood up, and pulled on her trousers. The fabric felt rough and real on her skin. Her grubby, sticky socks and sweaty boots felt exactly as she’d have expected them to. If she closed her eyes, everything was normal. She could remember and imagine colour, so it wasn’t that her visual system was disordered.
Shaw squatted, and rocked back on his heels.
“I’ve been wrong,” he said. “Wrong for a thousand years.”
He seemed more intrigued than put out.
“Yeah, fucking tell me about it,” Taransay snarled.
The old coof might have been more useful to himself and others if he hadn’t persisted so long in his delusion. A bit late now to be smacked upside the head by reality. Or unreality. Whatever.
Now her ears were ringing. No, wait, her phone was ringing. She fished it out of her back pocket and looked it.
“It’s from Nicole,” she said.
“Answer it, for fuck’s sake.”
She did. Just before she put it to her ear she heard a fainter ringing, deeper in the cave. Shaw made an irritated gesture and lunged towards the distant source of the sound. All this time and his phone still worked.
Security hardly mattered now.
“Rizzi?” said Nicole.
“Yes, hi.”
“You all right? You with the crazy old guy?”
“Yes,” said Taransay. “And yes.”
“Good. Well, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on. I’ve got Locke in lockdown, so to speak, and Beauregard in check, more or less. As far as things go inside this sim. But outside… not so much. All hell’s broken loose, nobody knows who’s fighting whom, and Beauregard’s idea turned out to be a good one anyway. The physical thing we’re in, the module and its manufacturing nodes and all that, is moving away from the station. It’s having to take evasive action, and it has to plot a complex course. That’s why the resolution of the sim has degraded—the module is using more of its computing power for external processes.”
“Oh, OK, I get that,” Taransay said. “But—what idea of Beauregard’s?”
She listened as Nicole told her.
“Jesus. That’s… um, exciting. Thanks for telling me what’s going on.”
“It’s fine, I’m telling everyone right now. They need to understand why the world looks weird.”
Shaw wandered back, phone to his ear, yakking excitedly away, gesticulating with his free hand. Taransay suddenly realised what was happening.
“You’re having dozens of simultaneous conversations?” she asked, incredulous.
“Hundreds. I can multitask.” Nicole chuckled. “At least, I can while nobody’s looking.”
“Good to know.”
“But listen,” Nicole went on. “Things might get weirder yet. The module’s systems might reduce the resolution still further, if necessary. Everything could soon become even more… abstract.”
Taransay was still keeping half an eye on Shaw. As she watched, the old man’s outline, and only his, became shaded, then coloured. He looked as solid and real as ever. For a moment or two he stood there, an anomalous painted detail in an outlined world. Then, from around his feet, the colour restoration spread exponentially. The cave’s interior looked altogether real again. Wondering, rapt, Taransay followed the restored rendering’s rush, all the way to the entrance and saw it spill down the cliff and out to the sides and—as she craned out to check—upward, faster and faster. It reached the foot of the cliff and accelerated. Above her, quite obvious now, was a patch of blue sky likewise expanding with ever-increasing speed.
It was not the only change. Out of the corner of her eye, Taransay saw some of the numbers on her watch become a flickering blur. Others, that were usually static to a glance, had begun to tick over. She stared at the instrument for an indrawn breath or two before she realised what it meant. Whatever mental manipulation Shaw had done to hack the simulation back to full resolution had saved on computational resources by slowing it down to real time.
Which meant, of course, that in the real world outside everything would be happening a thousand times faster than hitherto.
“Uh,” Taransay said. “Nicole? I think you’ll find things could soon become even more… weird.”
Nicole had clocked the change, too.
“Get that old maniac down off the mountain,” she said. “I need him here fast.”
One component of the station flared off a seconds-long burn, accelerating away from the rest. Its trajectory was peculiar, with an outcome hard for him at the moment to predict. Carlos zoomed in on it, but there was no need: the virtual display still had it tracked and identified. It was the module and the associated—and now physically linked—manufacturing complexes of Locke Provisos.
Carlos watched the structure balefully for a while. He had a lot of things to say to Nicole, most of them bitter. Not only had she laid on him a burden of guilt that she’d known all along he didn’t deserve—she herself, her very own root AI, was the real perpetrator of the very crime for which he had been condemned. If she was now trapped in a flying fortress of the Reaction, she damned well deserved it. But according to the Arcane communiqué, she had the power to override Locke. Perhaps she had freed the structure already. He considered hailing it to find out, but decided not to. He didn’t want to open any channel of communication with such a compromised and potentially deadly source.
Instead, he used the call sign from the message to hail Arcane.
The reply came at once.
The voice in the head wasn’t a voice, but as always with the phenomenon there was an analogous individuality about it, and something about this one was familiar.
Jacqueline Digby, his first Axle contact, the one who’d converted him, his former girlfriend back in the day. What the fuck was she doing here? He’d never thought of her as anyone likely to end up a posthumously executed terrorist. She was just too lively, too enthusiastic, too smart, too dedicated to the cause to… oh. Right.
&nbs
p; Suddenly he had visual. Jax was standing on a slender bridge across a mist-filled chasm. Above her rose snow-capped peaks, their steep sides lapped in forests and laced with fragile palatial dwellings. Long-winged, long-billed flying creatures glided between violet clouds in the lilac sky. It looked like a game environment that he and Jax had shared, long ago in real life. She was wearing a green T-shirt, and a pale blue skirt, hemmed with emerald LEDs and translucent and shiny and floral as a cheap shower curtain. Carlos recognised the outfit with some cynicism as her old student gaming gear.
She waved, wildly and perilously on the narrow bridge.
said Carlos.
Carlos could imagine all too clearly just how she could be so sure Arcane’s fighters were all Accelerationists. He could also imagine just how strongly committed to the cause those who’d emerged from that winnowing would be. No wonder they were all fired up for a fight with the Direction!
Goodbye, frying pan, he thought. Hello, fire.
This wasn’t entirely true. He had some hard thinking to do first.
He turned the comm off and settled in for the long fall.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Mic Cheetham, Sharon MacLeod, Charles Stross and Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on drafts; and to Jenni Hill, my editor at Orbit, for patiently and persistently asking the right questions.
A technical note: conveying robot conversation in human terms is a matter of artistic licence. For a very useful template and example, I’m indebted to and inspired by Brian Aldiss’s classic short story “Who Can Replace a Man?”.
extras
Meet the Author
Ken MacLeod graduated with a BSc from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an MPhil thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/ programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He is the author of twelve previous novels, five of which have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and two which have won the BSFA Award. Ken MacLeod is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian.
Find out more about Ken MacLeod and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.
introducing
If you enjoyed
The Corporation Wars: Dissidence,
look out for
The Lazarus War
Book One: Artefact
by Jamie Sawyer
Mankind has spread to the stars, only to become locked in warfare with an insidious alien race. All that stands against the alien menace are the soldiers of the Simulant Operation Programme, an elite military team remotely operating avatars in the most dangerous theatres of war.
Captain Conrad Harris has died hundreds of times—running suicide missions in simulant bodies. Known as Lazarus, he is a man addicted to death. So when a secret research station deep in alien territory suddenly goes dark, there is no other man who could possibly lead a rescue mission.
But Harris hasn’t been trained for what he’s about to find. And this time, he may not be coming back…
CHAPTER ONE
HARD-DROP
Two years after Helios
I made transition in orbit around Maru Prime; a burning hellhole of a planet somewhere in the Quarantine Zone. Or, at least, what was left of the Zone.
I was inside a Wildcat armoured personnel shuttle. My first act in the new body was to activate the holo-photo inside my helmet: Elena on Azure. The tiny icon was tacked to the bottom right of my face-plate. Reminded of who I was fighting for, I moved on to the mission.
“Squad, sound off!”
Four simulant faces stared back at me through the dark: underlit by green safety bulbs inside tactical helmets.
“Affirmative!” Jenkins bellowed back. Callsign CALIFORNIA; the name stencilled onto the chest-plate of her combat-suit.
“Copy,” Kaminski said. Callsign BROOKLYN.
“Confirmed,” Martinez said. Callsign CRUSADER. He clutched a cheap plastic rosary, the beads woven between armoured fingers.
“Affirmative,” came the last, and newest, member of the unit: Private Dejah Mason. The name NEW GIRL had been printed onto her chest but she had no other battle honours, rank badges or insignia.
“We have another successful transition, Major,” Jenkins said, nodding enthusiastically inside her helmet.
I was still getting used to the new rank and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with being addressed as major. I’d been a captain for so long that being called by a different title felt wrong.
“I have eyes on the other squads,” Jenkins added. “All five are inbound per mission plan. All on the timeline. Uploaded to your suit.”
“Copy that, Sergeant.”
Jenkins’ grin broadened so that it filled her face. While my new rank felt unnatural, Jenkins had adopted hers without hesitation.
Uplinks from the commanding officers of the other teams scrolled across my HUD: each confirming successful transition, chirping intel on the approach. A full platoon. Each unit was being transported in a Wildcat APS, like us, and was approaching the designated landing zone.
I flexed my arms and legs. Felt the renewed vigour of transition into a simulant body. It was bigger, stronger, just better than my real body. That lay preserved in a simulator-tank, safely ensconced in the operations centre aboard the UAS Mallard.
“What’s the op?” Kaminski said. He was chewing gum inside his helmet; I wasn’t sure how he’d managed to smuggle food into the dormant sim before we’d made transition. I let it slide.
“Didn’t you read the briefing?” Mason asked in disbelief. Voice heavily accented with the Martian burr that Standard seemed to have developed on the red world.
“Baby, I never read the briefing.”
Kaminski spoke with practised indifference but I knew that it was only skin deep. His vitals danced across my HUD: his autonomics told of a professional. Kaminski worked hard to maintain his false image–ever the wiseass.
Mason hadn’t been a soldier for long, let alone a simulant operator, and she didn’t know better. Barely twenty, with the body and face of a college cheerleader. Not the sort of trooper Alliance Command used on propaganda recruitment vids: the idea of one of America’s finest getting shredded by Krell stinger fire wouldn’t sit well with the folks back home. Mason had some big boots to fill and she was already the sixth replacement that I’d taken on–the other five having failed miserably to meet my expectations. I thought, briefly, of Michael Blake–Mason’s distant predecessor–but buried the memory as quickly as it surfaced.
“We’re approaching Maru Prime,” I said, activating a condensed holo-briefing on my wrist-comp.
Maru Prime was an angry red planet composed entirely of molten lava–star-bright, palpably hot, even at this distance. It had no surface, instead being held together by the dynamics of gravitational and tidal forces far too complex for a grunt like me to understand.
A struc
ture came into view in orbit around Maru, gliding above the roiling lava seas.
“This is Far Eye Observatory.”
The facility was a painfully delicate lattice-work construction, a collection of bubble-domes, solar vanes and spherical crew modules. A series of huge radar dishes sat on the station’s spine: all pointed into deep-space. Many components had taken obvious damage, with large chunks of the rigging punctured and the whole structure leaning at a precarious angle.
“Two days ago,” I explained, “Far Eye began to slide from its orbital position.”
“It’s being sucked off,” said Kaminski, sniggering. “Or sucked down, depending on how you see it.”
I ignored Kaminski; doing otherwise would only encourage him.
“The station suffered a malfunction in the primary grav-shunt,” I said. “As a result, its orbit is in rapid decline. Command wants us to retrieve the personnel. In particular, they want this man.”
The image of a thin-faced Sci-Div officer appeared on all five face-plates. Tanned skin; Persian stock. By Earth-standard years he was in his early fifties. He had dark eyes and hair. A beard, rough-grown, peppered grey.
“Our HVT is Professor Ashan Saul.”
HVT: high-value target. I’d already researched Saul–who he was, where he had served. It made for interesting reading. Despite his Iranian heritage, his bloodline was long-retired to the Core Worlds. He was a xenolinguist by profession–specialising in the interpretation of alien language. That particular detail had instantly grabbed my attention. There were also huge empty periods in Saul’s scientific career: blocks of time when he was inexplicably absent from recorded duty. Nothing stunk of covert ops involvement quite like an unexplained black line through your last posting.