‘That was sharp,’ Eliott said that night, as he followed Penhaligon down the winding corridors. It was almost midnight, if time meant anything. Behind them was a motley crew of men and women in uniform who had followed them from the room. There was a cook among them, and what looked like a maid. None of them were, of course, what they seemed to be – they were all Inquisitors; they were human only when you looked at them sideways. ‘You think they’ll do what you want them to?’
‘Of course they’re going to do what I want them to. Men like this are predictable, Grimme. By the way, I got you what you asked for. Can you make it quick?’
‘Sure,’ said Eliott. They emerged onto a yard – a dark thing that opened up to a night sky overhead, with only the artificial moonbeams for company.
Penhaligon nodded, satisfied, and pulled a cigarette out of the long folds of his suit. ‘You think we can have this over with in a month?’
He thought about it. One city. Slightly under a thousand machines, sandwiched between the Ceylonese and the Chinese. A few pesky no-fire zones in between. There would be a lot of poking and prodding to do, of course, a few opening gambits to be made, but on the whole …
‘We’ll try for a month, maybe two,’ he said. ‘That’s my best estimate so far. You know, you didn’t even need me here. Get yourself a battle computer from Hong Kong and that’d do just fine.’
‘Drake give you any funny orders?’
‘Yes, he asked me to kill you when this was done.’
‘And are you? Going to?’
The question hung between them. Eliott let it drag out a little longer, just to the edge of cruelty. ‘I might be interested in this retirement plan of yours,’ he confessed. ‘I like what I’ve seen of the place. You’ll need to make me vanish, of course. And I need maintenance.’
‘Fallen in duty. Tragic accident. Gone rogue. The possibilities are endless. And you’ve seen our equipment and the boys we keep around. I think we can support you quite well.’
And just like that, a deal was struck. Penhaligon grinned. ‘Switching sides became easier for you once you crossed over, wasn’t it?’
Eliott looked up at the night sky, at the dark clouds that swirled around the moon. Those words stirred up memories from inside him – data points, tagged by the preprocessor as useful; memories he had not recalled in a while. Machines he had fought with; machines he had fought against. Hong Kong, yes, but buried under that, the ghost of Gregory Mars. War: simple, direct, honorable. The perfect battle-axe, until the day he flipped sides and fought alongside the Gurkhas. And Charlotte Plague – engineered to be the perfect, the most beautiful of them all. Charlotte, to whom men handed their kingdoms on a platter, besotted. Charlotte, who dismantled the IRA by merely crossing her legs, and then vanished, sowing the seeds of her deadly retrovirus in her wake. And himself, the Reaper – master of the long game; the ultimate secret weapon.
But he had changed too, hadn’t he? They all had. And it was he, Eliott, who had been sent to clean up the mess, and then Penhaligon had been sent after him – an endless dance of plays and counter-plays and hidden motives.
‘Once you see the futility of it all’, he said, ‘it really doesn’t matter what side you’re on.’
Mahasen Wijeratne, who everyone called Mason, lay in his isolation chamber, a utilitarian enclosure of concrete and glass, and thought about Eliott Grimme. A tall, narrow thing, with a face that might as well have been carved out of pale candlewax; so corpselike. Only the eyes, he thought, showed life. There was a curious restlessness to them – they roved over faces with a surprising intensity, and rarely stayed still, moving with a certain economy, a certain wariness.
So these were the prototypes, he thought.
Mahasen had seen the specs for War, of course. Gregory Mars had been the poster boy – the simplest of the lot, the straightforward Uberman, the man-tank-supersoldier. The kind you put on recruiting posters. The kind whose internals boiled down to insane amounts of torque and neurons tweaked so impossibly far that it was practically precognitive when it came to shooting things down and chopping them up. Mars was, in a sense, the template of what had eventually become both the Colonial Inquisition and the Special Operations Executive.
But Death was a different beast. This one they had always kept mum about. It was only after Hong Kong that the word really leaked. And then they caught it and sent Grimme back for reconditioning – Penhaligon’s career had really kicked off there. Who knew what else they had added?
Still, Penhaligon caught it, he thought. That old man. So not an impossible mark. Not too fast. As long as it didn’t do anything stupid, this was an easy ride.
And so he was not ready when Grimme knocked on the door.
‘You’re supposed to see this,’ the man-machine said softly. ‘Penhaligon’s orders.’
‘Hang on,’ said Mahasen, strapping on his handguns. The stims kicked him fully awake.
He followed Grimme down those weird corridors. They came by winding paths to an isolated corner of the building, where there were thirty men, stripped down to only their basic gear. A mix. Ceylonese soldiers, officers. They stood at attention. Only their eyes betrayed their nervousness.
‘This is it?’ asked Eliott Grimme, sounding disappointed.
‘As representative as I can get,’ said Penhaligon, who did not seem to relish this either. A cigarette hung from his fingers, trailing ash. ‘As much as I can spare you.’
‘Alright,’ said Grimme.
And the torture began.
They took them out one after the other. Led them like cattle to a locked room, soundproof. Locked them in with Grimme and Mason, who tried not to look, who tried to shut down the implants that took those terrible screams, processed them and made them too clear and audible to bear.
When it was done, Grimme got up, blood splattered on his pale face. ‘Next.’
There came a point where Mahasen could take it no more. Grimme looked down at the chokehold Mahasen held it in. The waxwork face looked completely unsurprised.
‘Know thyself,’ Grimme said, as if explaining to a slow, dim-witted child. ‘I need to know how these systems perform under stress. I need to know where they break and why and how.’
‘Damn you,’ Mahasen cried over the moans of the ruined thing that wept and wailed on the chair.
Grimme kicked Mahasen’s feet out from under him, tossed him lightly against the blood-splattered wall. For a second, he saw Grimme as it as it truly was: a monster in human flesh, a rude simulacra, as much machine as the things they were supposed to fight, a reaper designed to do what even Penhaligon could never bring himself to.
He almost shot it to bits then and there. He guns were already out, aimed right at that pale face.
‘Next,’ it said. And when Mahasen did not move, it walked out calmly, to where the last soldier stood, practically shitting his pants in terror. From the other room came the sound of grunts. And then the screaming.
When Grimme returned, it looked thoughtful. It looked at the guns Mason pointed at it. ‘A word of advice,’ it said, almost gently. ‘Treat those things like a penis. It’s fine to have one, but if you pull it out and start waving it in my face, we’re going to have trouble.’
No wonder, he thought to himself as he lay in his bunk that night. No wonder they never spoke of Hong Kong. No wonder they kept this thing secret. No wonder Penhaligon wanted it buried when the job was done.
The next few days passed in a blur for Eliott Grimme. Or maybe it was time that stood still and he who moved; he could never tell.
In the mornings, he helped sort out the army he would take down south once the machines were done killing themselves. Penhaligon ran his Inquisitors with an iron hand, but the ‘army’ that he had inherited was a ragtag mess, a bunch of peasants press-ganged into holding rifles up ceremoniously when white men passed. The last time this country had seen an armed conflict within its borders was in the 1980’s: the ill-fated Yarl Rebellion. The Governor at the time, one H.
S. Beckett, had kept the Ceylonese men away and deliberately undersupplied, fearing that they might switch sides, and sent in troops imported from India.
Which means the damned Ceylonese Volunteer Rifles were running around with guns older than their fathers. Most of the troop transports ran on petrol. The plantations and farms hadn’t prepared proper field rations in decades. It all came down to a standing army of ten thousand, probably less once you accounted for dead people on payroll, all poorly equipped, poorly trained, and basically about as useful as a well-aimed rubber duck.
He marked out a twentieth of the best. At best estimate there would between a hundred bots and two hundred bots left over, so he would have a five-to-one advantage: decent odds. Then he began digging into the leadership.
Generations of Governors and Inquisitors had placed over them a bunch of secondhand aristocrats whose chief achievement, as far as Eliott could figure out, was to have attended the right school. This whole colony was a nation of sheep. Held down by a handful of slightly better-fed sheep.
Molligoda, Bandaranaike, Dissanayake. These he had to work around.
‘Announce a game,’ he said to Penhaligon. ‘This Big Match will be special. Truly special. We’ll have our folk enter the tournament. Bets on whether the humans will win.’
The announcement rippled like a shockwave through the population. And then came a show of force. The pain test had showed him men who broke too easily, gibbering out command secrets and passcodes at the slightest hint of pain. He had Penhaligon dump the bodies from the pain test where the command aristocracy would find them. No explanations. Fear and guesswork did to men’s minds what certainty could barely hope to achieve.
Then, while panic and gossip spread like wildfire, Eliott got Penhaligon to point out a few of the most disposable aristocratic henchmen, armed them to the teeth, and packed them on a transport to the outskirts of Colombo. The pretext was that they were going out on reconnaissance and to establish supply routes.
A small group of the bots had strayed past camera range, occupying five crate drops just at the perimeter of the Colombo zone. The henchmen took four, were cut down, fell back and held three. Just enough victory. Just enough dead to make sure surviving meant something special.
It worked perfectly. Men would come back bearing trophies and exaggerated tales of their own gallantry. People became superstars, albeit briefly. There would be medals. Promotions. Pats on the back. All these silly baubles that guaranteed that other humans would gladly put their lives on the line now. They had been shown the carrot as well as the stick. The donkey would do exactly as expected.
‘Fear in a handful of dust,’ Eliott said to Penhaligon. They were in Penhaligon’s cavern of an office; empty of people and servants, it looked ‘Humans are predictable, Penhaligon.’
Penhaligon smirked. ‘I remember you used to write poetry,’ he said. ‘Always thought it passing strange. You know that your case file, when they gave it to me, had all your poems cited as evidence that you might be going mad?’
Eliott struggled to remember. Much of specifics of those times had been erased from his memory during the reconditioning; only ghost trails remained. Her Royal Majesty could not suffer a servant to remember their defection. There were no other poems in his head.
III: Expiration
ONE
The old woman leant heavily on her rake, panting in the heat.
She could feel the rain in the air. It was in the heat that wrapped around her like a living thing, the sun’s angry glare picked up by the humidity and turned into an insufferable monster. It was in the way the shirt stuck to her back and her collar stank every time she went indoors for a sip of the precious water.
A month ago, she would have had some company, at least – lines of farmhands outside her little shop, ordering hot, sweet tea and playing checkers and sharing bootleg beedis. But now, the Maha harvest was done, the harvest harnesses packed up and returned to the Tower and the farmers vanished. Now, the fields around the Tower lay barren and bare.
Occasionally, a handful of those who worked at the Tower would emerge, working their way past the dozens of security checkpoints, and pause, as if seeing the world outside for the first time. They always travelled in small, uncertain groups; never alone. Sometimes, they would find their way to her and tentatively order tea and pay a hundred times more than what it was worth. She listened in on their conversations, playing the role of the simple village shopkeeper – aney nonamahattaya, what do we know of important people like yourself? Here, have some pol rotti. But by now, she knew quite a lot about them. They were bioengineering people. An English word. They all had bosses they hated. They made this bio for companies across the Empire. They had three meals a day and lived in the lesser rings of the Tower and often dreamed of going to Nepal, maybe to England – to see the world and come back.
Some of them reminded her of her son, who had gone to Colombo many years back to get his degree so he could become a bioengineer. He had been adamant: ‘Amme, this is the future. There are no doctors anymore, only lawyers and engineers and factors owners.’ Then they burned Colombo down, killing her son and leaving her alone with just this piece of land and the tea shop.
But as of late, there were more people coming to the Tower. Network specialist. A new word. They seemed self-important. The bioengineering people were unhappy about them being there. Something about the Ministry setting up some a new network on the Tower. ‘We’re a private company,’ they said. ‘The government shouldn’t interfere.’
‘Children’, she wanted to say. ‘The government does whatever it wants.’
So when the little bell at her shop rang again, she dropped the rake and hurriedly made her way back into the hut, through the living room and into her little storefront, expecting more of the same.
A new man stood there.
‘Amme,’ he said. Mother … though he was not her son. ‘What happened to your eyes?’
Mortified, she adjusted the cloth she kept wrapped around the gaping sockets in her face.
‘Can you see?’
She could, in a way. A long time ago, the people from the Tower had taken her inside, and when she came out, she could see – not as she once had, but in flames of red and green and blue.
This customer was strange. He was clearly alive. But most of him was blue: the colour of dead things and machinery.
‘Not as well as mahatthaya,’ she said, deferentially. ‘Mahaththayata theykak?’ Would sir like some tea?
‘Not right now,’ said the man. She could see his head turning, oddly cold and blue, scanning this way and that. ‘This road, it leads to Colombo?’
‘Yes, since the bridge collapsed, it’s been the only way … it turns left here, and there’s another junction that leads to Manikpotha, and from there …’
The man seemed satisfied. ‘There’ll be a lot of us coming this way,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to make lots of tea.’ She could see him looking at the Tower. ‘So the network is being set up? I see lots of work going on up there.’
‘Yes, it’s been very busy these days,’ she said, putting a kettle on. ‘Lots of new people. Working on something for the Ministry, they say!’
‘Good, good.’
She served him. He ate in silence. The road ahead started growling and the vehicles rolled by, one after the other, and ground to a halt outside the Tower. She heard men and women speaking – terse, clipped syllables, orders snapped – and an English voice above that; one that brought silence in its wake. More customers?
‘Sir is from …?’ she ventured, taking out her mugs and polishing them.
‘Kandy. Inquisition.’
She almost dropped the mug she was holding. When she spoke again, she tried very hard to hide the shiver in her voice. ‘It’s rare to see people from Kandy here,’ she said. ‘Aney, sorry. Anything you need from here, sir?’
The man peered at her display cases. ‘Maybe some wadei and rotti. Perera, here. Confirm directions to Colombo. We�
�ve got a bit of work to do there,’ he told her, offhandedly. ‘There might be some more of us coming this way. You’ll make a fortune on tea, eh?’
A second man joined them. This one was even bluer. She noticed how quickly the first’s tone switched to one of deference, and caught the subtle undercurrent of fear in it.
‘We’re on the road to Colombo, sir, just behind you. Road curves a bit, but we’re on the right path. I’ve sent Kithsiri out on a motorbike.’
The crunching of footsteps, walking away.
Eventually, the vehicles started up again and left the silence of the fields behind. She listened to them for a long time, then looked around at her little shop – all its shades of blue, and the red of the kettle on the stove – and decided that the time had come to move on out of there.
Behind the line of troop-carriers came Eliott Grimme.
Penhaligon’s black cars took him past low, neat fields, clipped square, that drifted past, green against a backdrop of mountains that reached up into the mist. Villages hugged gloomy, ornate British mansions and gardens, narrow roads, and long bunker-like factories in the vast tracts of scrub between places, belching hot black smoke into the sky.
There was a city almost halfway between Colombo and Kandy – a city with the strange name of Gampaha, which broke down, quite literally into Five Villages. The villages were long gone – the British had long since built their churches and railroads and infrastructure. Steel, titanium and paddy refineries sat next to high-rises in an awkward union. Village headmen had evolved – first becoming urban councilmen, then becoming mayors taking bribes for choice apartment lots.
And, as befitting a major town, a sprawling mess of barracks sat at the very outskirts of Gampaha. The largest of these had opened outwards, and from this mouth teemed hordes of men, like ants in uniform.
The Inhuman Peace Page 10