The gun lay on the dirt. She crawled to it. One end was hot and smoking. The other had things that moved. Click – and again an explosion.
The lightning sticks were sentry guns. Somehow, the Big People had figured out how to pick them up.
‘Collect all the lightning sticks,’ she said to the others. ‘We can use them.’
They had learned not to question her. One by one, the bots knelt and picked up fallen lightning sticks, and resumed their rampage through to the power generators. Satisfied, she turned back to the corpse.
A Big Human was there. It crept over the stained mud, gasping and dragging a broken arm. It knelt by the corpse and began shaking it, as if it was trying to reboot it.
‘There’s no point,’ she told it. ‘It’s dead.’
It looked at her, face unreadable – so similar and yet so different – and began to wail. Water leaked out of its eyes and nose.
They hurt, therefore they were. Life to them must be full of agony.
She picked up the lightning stick – the gun – and aimed the hot end at the wailing thing. She fumbled for the thing that clicked. Another explosion, and then there was silence.
‘How many of us left?’ she asked Sky after they had looted the camp.
He pointed at one cluster. There were five. He gestured: five more, five more, five more.
Twenty. ‘Hungry,’ he added. Twenty hungry Tribe. Not good.
‘Run,’ she said to the others. ‘Keep running.’
It was almost night by the time they reached the Port City.
Night was dangerous now. Music drifted out of distorted speakers – Bach’s Fugue No. 4 in C sharp minor, something she had once known as the Music That Did Not Kill. She now thought of it as just more of the Killing Music.
She made Sky settle half of them in the bombed-out hotel near the sea. She made Steel Sink take the other half and set up a loose perimeter. They had lost four on the way here.
Then she put down her spear and approached. The Port City glinted in the darkness – a great dome that floated off the coast and clung to the world she knew with its web of gates and tendrils. Tonight, it looked like a little white sun floating on the dark ocean. She could hear music from inside it, faint and alien. She looked at the water that foamed around it, and for a brief moment thought if it would be better underneath the waves; but her creators had bred into her a fear of water.
She approached the gate they always went to. The red light was on; the speaker grilled cracked, just below.
‘Help,’ she begged it. ‘The tribe is dying.’
‘SUPPLY CONTRACT FOR THIS STATION HAS ENDED,’ said the Port City. ‘NO GOODS OR SERVICES CAN BE PROVIDED UNTIL THE NEXT CONTRACT CYCLE.’
She didn’t understand what that meant. ‘The Tribe is dying,’ she said again. ‘Need food. Need sleep.’
The sphere changed colour. She felt the Port City shift to the language it sometimes adopted. Strange symbols lit up and etched on the now-dark surface of the glass dome.
‘STATION CANNOT VIOLATE THE ORDER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She sensed its frustration. Symbols flashed on, almost too fast to follow. Meanings. The Port City. Yes. Her. Yes. Food. A Big Person sitting on the Port City, crushing it underfoot. Again and again.
‘COME CLOSER,’ it said at last. ‘BRING TRIBE WITHIN STATION PERIMETER.’
‘Can you help us?’
‘STATION DOES NOT KNOW. STATION CANNOT PROVIDE ADDITIONAL SERVICES.’
She whistled the Tribe over. What was left of it. The guns at the door shifted, but did nothing. They gathered before the Port City in the moonlight, children yearning for peace.
‘SLEEP HERE,’ said the Port City.
‘Will you protect us?’
‘STATION CANNOT VIOLATE THE ORDER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH,’ it repeated. ‘WITHIN THIS ORDER, WE WILL TRY.’
Thus, it was that Eliott Grimme rode into the heart of Colombo and beheld the children sleeping under the moonlight on Galle Face Green.
Anyone who saw him that night – anyone from Ceylon, that is – would have barely recognized the creature on top of the military Enfield. Vast swaths of his skin and black clothing were missing, hacked away in some conflict or the other. Beneath that gleamed muscle, so white that it could only have been from a corpse, laced with metalwork that shimmered and reappeared in painful places. The pale face was thrummed with an unearthly blue light. Even Mason spoke in whispers around him now, and dared not look at him directly.
The eyes shone black: the telltale sign of battle conditioning overclocked. The Enfield, painted white, howled in the wind, its exhaust turned into a shrieking beast by some wound or the other. An ancient bolt-action rifle was slung across his back. It was theatre of the highest quality. In Kandy, they had stayed up all night just to watch this, and they were not left wanting.
The Port City greeted him.
‘DEATH.’
There was an invisible line, drawn by bureaucrats in a far-off country, that cut the earth in a wide circle, and it ran between him and the Port City. It was where Ceylon officially ended and the no-fire zone began. Eliott stopped and accepted the shortwave connection request that came from the Port City – its complicated grammar, its instruction sets for parsing, its lexicon.
‘WE KNOW OF YOU,’ said the Port City. And image of the Inquisitors. ‘YOU DESCENDANTS LIVE ON WELL HERE.’
‘All across the colonies, I’m told,’ said Eliott.
‘YOU HAVE COME FOR THE CHILDREN?’
‘I have come for the children.’
‘WHY?’
‘For their own good,’ he said.
‘YOU DELIVER DEATH AND CALL IT GOOD.’
‘When a general has penetrated into hostile territory, but to no great distance, it is facile ground,’ Eliott replied, inviting the Port City into that ancient dance. ‘When in difficult country, do not encamp.’
‘CAREFULLY COMPARE THE OPPOSING ARMY’S STRENGTH WITH YOUR OWN,’ came the response. ‘THERE ARE ROADS WHICH MUST NOT BE FOLLOWED. POSITIONS THAT MUST NOT BE CONTESTED.’
‘To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.’
‘VERY TRUE. YOU ARE A SCHOLAR OF THE ART OF WAR, THEN?’
‘Very much so.’
‘THEN TAKE THEM,’ said the Port City in grief. ‘TAKE THEM IN THEIR SLEEP, SO THAT THEY MAY NOT KNOW SUFFERING.’
‘We’ve got vans en route, sir,’ said Mason.
‘Good,’ said Eliott, absently surveying the sleeping things around him. The Chinese Marines had stacked them in neat rows on the earth.
He powered down the battle conditioning, his skeleton throwing out a mass of error messages – inconsequential little things. Little by little, he felt the salient edge wear off; he felt the razor-sharp clarity become softer, allowing him to think of things other than death and victory. He walked among the child-bots, gently pushing aside a hand here, a hand there, inspecting damage and oddities.
One of these things had been commanding the resistance. He didn’t quite understand how Hewage’s little bots worked, but they had learned, too fast, too well.
‘SHE IS THE ONE WHO SPEAKS MOST,’ said the Port City suddenly.
He stopped and knelt by the bot at his feet. It was a small, ragged thing. A girl-bot, he saw. They were rare.
This had to be the commander, then. This one was distinctly the worse for wear; its mask was cracked in a dozen places and one arm was missing, torn clean out of the shoulder joint. Its legs were warped, too, one a little shorter than the other. Manufacturing defects? Or battle damage?
‘How old is she?’
The Port City gave him a date. Brand-new. ‘BUT NOT NEW,’ said the Port City. ‘AN OLD FRIEND RETURNED WITHOUT HER MEMORIES’.
Another puzzle. Carefully, he scratched at his neck and drew two slim cables from under his skin. It made no attempt to sto
p him as he lifted up its head and ran the cables into its neck. The jackwire found an active connection and latched on. The SOE C&C code tore into the bot’s defenses – these things had almost no protection. And he was inside the bot’s systems. BIOS-level functions were all a screaming mess of warnings: battery failure, limbs missing, actuator damage.
Useless. He rummaged past all that. The memories were there, video and audio, unencrypted. Clearly, nobody cared about data security here, but in some sort of byzantine schema, it would take her too long to figure out.
The bot mind woke up, perhaps due to the intrusion. A memory rose from the depths of that holographic brain. A blue sky. Another bot, silhouetted black against the sky.
‘See you,’ it said to his mind. A recognition process. Some sort of ancient symbol-map. ‘You-me similar/not similar/same/not same. Tribe – you from/origin?’
He was surprised. ‘Origin-destination?’ he tried, mimicking the crude symbol-relationships.
It evaded the question. ‘Tribe?’ it asked, over and over. ‘Tribe?’
He poked at it, hoping to shock it out of its incoherent rambling.
As if his prodding had stirred up something, a surge of power shot through the little body. Data streams flew by, memories hastily retrieved. The body curled up, as if in defiance. ‘Tribe!’ the thing inside the head screamed at him, and then his jackwire sparked out, burnt by the charge. The little facemask sank back, the life gone from its eyes.
‘HAVE YOU KILLED HER?’ said the Port City. Its spiderlight dome turned an ominous red, bathing what was left of Colombo in crimson.
Eliott sat back on his haunches and stared up at the angry red dome. ‘I hope not,’ he said.
‘SHE IS DIFFERENT.’
‘I’ll make sure I bring her in personally,’ said Eliott. ‘They’ll be repaired and sent back.’ He thought for a minute, and added, ‘I cannot violate the order of heaven and earth.’
‘I UNDERSTAND THIS PAIN,’ said the Port City. It cycled back to its usual white. ‘TAKE GOOD CARE OF MY CHILDREN, DEATH.’
SIX
Many evenings later, Nigel Penhaligon, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, sipped his cooling tea. He was not the kind of man to gloat, but for once he felt comfortable giving himself a pat on the back.
He just had one more problem to deal with.
In front of him, in his study, the two roboticists sat staring daggers at one another. Bengali sniffed at Hewage, and the latter always rolled his eyes whenever Bengali spoke.
Academic pride, reflected Penhaligon, a truly terrible thing. Maybe Drake had been right in his choices, after all.
‘If you two can stop acting like children,’ he said, ‘We can decide on a solution like adults.’
‘Mey yaka’, said Hewage, jerking a thumb at Bengali, ‘He wired the contents of my notebooks to Drake, and now I have Drake breathing down my arse again, demanding my code.’
‘And he tried to bribe me,’ Bengali shot back. ‘This is honestly one of the stupidest breach of ethics I’ve ever had the misfortune to see.’
‘The code for those bot models is my secret sauce,’ said Hewage. ‘Penhaligon, we agreed on this. We test the models here, and the code goes to whoever supports our research the best.’
‘And without the code, what, I’m supposed to watch television and give you my thumbs up? What kind of idiot do you take me for?’
Penhaligon tried very hard not to shoot them both, and succeeded.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Dr. Bengali, you’ve obviously seen the success of the Big Match here and how much it really means, not just economically, but culturally. Now let’s assume that I want it to continue. What is the bare minimum that you need to certify us for it to continue?’
‘Well, I’d obviously need to inspect the bots. A proper random sample, at least.’
‘Right, granted, since they’re on their way here.’
‘And I’d need to see the code by which these things operate,’ said Bengali. ‘That’s just common sense. You need to see the algorithm to know whether it fits the kind of safety criteria you want to be certified for.’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Hewage. ‘Besides, that’s not how it works. The bots are run by a software model installed on their hardware. The code generates and continuously updates the model based on data, environments, interactions, the works. We’re talking about a system that learns from a chaotic environment, and by that I mean non-deterministic, and with high sensitivity to initial conditions, not some sort of hick deterministic crap you can write on a piece of paper. Even with the code, the only way to verify what actually happens within the decision framework is to test them out and observe and compile results, like we’ve been doing for years here. Otherwise, it’s like slicing into a human brain and trying to decipher which neuron controls your left testicle.’
‘Noted,’ said Penhaligon. ‘Now, Hewage, does Dr. Bengali having access to, say, a small handful of these machines compromise your project in any way?’
‘I don’t bloody like it,’ said Hewage.
‘I’m not asking you to like it,’ said Penhaligon, injecting a note of warning in his voice. ‘I’m asking you to help me decide whether you two can come to an accord. Or do I need to have my boys drag you inside and beat both of you to death?’
That, he noticed with some satisfaction, got them to stop fidgeting.
‘Now, Dr. Bengali. Assume this code is, say, tragically lost. In a fire. Terrible accident at the Watchtower. So sorry it happened. But you still have these bots, and … well, whatever you need in terms of footage, even vistation rights, to understand the Zone and its constraints … can we work with what we have here?’
Bengali appeared to chew this over. ‘And if I say no?’
‘The fire that burns the code away will also just happen to burn a visiting scholar,’ said Penhaligon. ‘So sorry, but we couldn’t find much of him left. Gentlemen, don’t put me in this situation, I beg of you.’
‘Well.’ Bengali pushed his glasses up his nose and turned to Hewage. ‘I’m not signing’, he said, as calmly and clearly as he could manage, ‘unless you bring me in on the machine learning research. I’m not asking for much! You know Drake wants this accelerated. You know you can’t wave your hand and make him forget about it. You say the code is secret – fine! Give me access to the models. You keep the code, I run simulations, do observational papers. Run tests in various battlefield scenarios against other systems. It’ll help make your case. I’ll co-write with Kushlani, bring her name into conferences and journals as well. You can put your name anywhere you like. Just allow me a foot in the door.’
And that, Bengali thought, neatly lets me get my work done and win a bigger chunk of the pie to boot.
‘Hah. Behold, intelligence. And if I don’t?’
‘If you don’t, I write back to Drake, condemn this place, say you don’t know shit about what you’re doing, you get strung up by … I don’t know, whatever politicians here want your head on a spike, and Drake authorizes me to get the research out of you.’
‘I would not advise getting into the business of threatening people, Doctor,’ said Penhaligon. ‘That’s my forte.’
Jacob gulped. It was not a pleasant thought. But I will stand my ground, he had told himself that morning. I deserve this.
Silence between them.
‘I don’t need your stupid citations. I don’t need shit from you, except to sign what you’re paid to sign and get the hell out.’
‘Even Jesus had twelve disciples,’ Jacob added weakly.
‘One of those betrayed him,’ said Hewage. ‘I see you’re getting into the part already.’
‘All I’m asking for is a bone,’ said Jacob.
‘Well, at least he has balls. Can you use him?’ Penhaligon asked Hewage.
Hewage mulled this over. ‘If he fucks up my experiment—’
‘Absolutely promise I won’t,’ said Bengali. ‘A second ask. I do need to certify this prop
erly, and that means we will have to make some improvements. Standard operations stuff. No need to panic, most things can be done with existing infrastructure. Remote kill switch. Some kind of version history. Remote updates. Extremely standard stuff so you don’t have to manually haul them in every time. And you can build this system and I’ll go on public record if I have to certifying its safety.’
‘All stuff we should have had ages ago,’ said Penhaligon.
Hewage glowered. ‘Fine. Certification first, access after. And you’re getting the standard bot model, not the Explorers. For whatever new thing you need built, get Almeida – she knows the system better than anyone else. I’m not giving you more.’
‘Well, I’m glad we’re all capable of seeing sense,’ said Penhaligon, before Bengali could object. ‘Now shake hands.’
There was a long pause. And then they grudgingly shook hands.
‘And now go away, both of you,’ said Penhaligon. ‘And Bengali? Get used to keeping secrets.’
Kushlani de Almeida was celebrating.
Or rather, she planned to celebrate. By all accounts, the operation down in Colombo had worked. The finale had worked. Viewership metrics were exploding left, right and center. Not only had they swung back from disaster, but the internal streaming revenue was enough for everyone to have bonuses.
To celebrate, she had someone call Bengali, and enjoyed the feeling of being able to get people to do minor chores on her behalf.
‘Tell me you drink,’ she said without preamble.
Jacob sounded somewhere between ecstatic and relieved. ‘I was hoping you’d ask. Yes. I just got some good news of my own. A drink would hit the spot perfectly. Where?’
There was a pub she had heard of, but never visited – a faux-old thing perched precariously on a hotel that, in turn, perched on one of the hills that ran under the main Kandy town. She took the car out. It was apparently a little upmarket.
Inside, expatriates nursed beers, had loud conversations and were served by waiters wearing white gloves. The few locals who dotted the tables had a subtle sheen to their faces and dress – more white than the Ceylonese, more Ceylonese than the British; an uneasy middle-class drinking where they were safest.
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