She led them upwards, wooden steps creaking beneath her weight. People looked at her from the corner of their eyes and shrank back as she passed. For Bengali, they reserved stares that were much more open. Heads craned in their wake.
Up, up and up. A small, private stage of sorts. Balconies. A few tables. A second, smaller bar. From there, for the first time since they had begun work, she could see the whole of Kandy undulate before him – the hills that cupped the lake; the thin, snaking roads that wound up and down the hills, connecting in a tangle at the bottom, framed by a sky that was the colour of old ink. A hill city to end all hill cities, with a kind of concrete glamour that had long since swapped out greenery for bright lights and signage. The exhaust from hundreds and thousands of vehicles rose, turning the depths of the city into a gauzy lake of light.
She flashed the new Ministry ID that Hewage had given her. Deputy Administrator.
‘Madam will not be disturbed here,’ said the manager, who was sweating in his white shirt and slightly out of breath. ‘I will serve.’
‘Wow. I think I envy your new position,’ said Jacob.
‘Enjoy it while I have the badge. Food? Drinks?’
The manager scurried off and returned almost immediately with plates laden with drinking food: hot buttered cuttlefish, imported at great expense from the south; sausages and potatoes, fried; light gravies with rice.
‘You’re paying for this?’
‘Ministry dines free.’
‘I like the social order here.’
Beer arrived – dark bottles with a lion’s face in the middle, coloured with the cross of the British flag. They ate. They drank. Jacob began to look slightly more relaxed. She talked to him, filling him in on her recall plans, enjoying how impressed he looked, enjoying even more how he began throwing out grand ideas to improve it. It was a pleasure, for once, to not be asked about her family, or when she would get married, or how difficult it must be for a woman to run something like the Watchtower.
And, eventually, the question she had to ask: ‘So how’s the progress on your end? Are we done yet?’
That unleashed a torrent. Kushlani listened, sipping her beer, as Jacob regurgitated the biggest complaint he’d had ever since he became comfortable talking to her: Hewage’s secrecy with the machine learning models.
She had long since figured it out, of course. Even before Hewage had actually shown her the core code, she had figured out the rudiments of reward functions. That was what had led to her fascination with the machines in the first place. It had also been the basis of her PhD. The modelling of power in artificial societies and Micropolitics within a machine civilization had been disguised as papers on a virtual civilization experiment with complex agents modelled on people, but in reality, they were reports on the work they’d done at the Watchtower. She decided not to break this to Jacob, yet.
Eventually, the conversation shifted to Eliott Grimme and the work down in Colombo.
‘He’s doing okay,’ she admitted. ‘We’re getting the first batch of bots in next week. Two hundred clean shots, stuff we can repair. Fifty that we’ll have to scrap. A lot cleaner than if we’d just let the Big Match happen this year and collected what was left. But—’
‘You don’t like him.’
‘I don’t like him,’ she said. ‘I don’t like him, I don’t like the Inquisition. We’re systems meant to live, expire and die, not continue on like corpses.’
More beer arrived. ‘To be honest, I’m probably more used to modified people,’ said Jacob. ‘There’s a whole movement around that concerning rights, you know? Huge thing in London and Berlin right now. But yes, Grimme creeps me out. It’s the eyes, I think.’
‘It’s how he moves. Too precise. Too … fluid. I’ll be glad when he’s out of here.’
Jacob raised a glass.
‘And I hear you’ll be doing more work with us?’ she said, dropping a subtle hint. ‘There’s a lot more research we can pull off, if you’re interested.’
She almost told him about her pet theory, the one she never talked about with Hewage – that the bots were a little bit more than reaction and response; that there were behaviour patterns in there … stuff she’d seen that raised all sorts of philosophical questions, the kind a very particular mind might find absolutely fascinating and worth exploring.
It could have been a trick of the light, but she could have sworn that Jacob looked sad. He opened his mouth to say something, but at that precise moment, someone screamed. Someone outside.
She got to the balcony first. ‘It’s a monk.’
It was. A lone, bald figure in orange cloth stood at the heart of a ragged, banner-bearing mob on the narrow, cobbled street outside. He was soaked. A blue can lay at his feet. A puddle stretched out from beneath him, trickling towards a crowd that pushed and shoved themselves out of its way and at vehicle that frantically honked and reversed.
From downstairs, there was the sound of feet on wood, of people dropping their beers and rushing to the balcony.
A lotus blossom of fire enveloped the monk. He burned soundlessly. The ragged mob roared and screamed at the same time, a bray of anger and sadness. Vehicles screamed in metallic protest.
‘Shit,’ she said, as they watched the corpse, now turning into a pillar of smoke and ash, collapse onto its knees. The flaming puddle at its feet oozed slowly downhill.
The manager burst into their view, gaping soundlessly at her. Aren’t you going to do something? his body screamed. Aren’t you authority?
The mob swirled, collected itself and began to move uphill; a stream of brown bodies. As they passed the burning puddle, they unfurled banners – no, not banners, it was the British flag – and threw it into the flame. Somewhere around the bend, there was a flicker of something else catching fire.
‘Shit,’ she said again. ‘Jacob, come on.’
She was in her usual clothes for once, not a saree. She practically leaped down the stairs below. Down, left, down, left, past flesh and rickety wooden stairs, and out onto the street. The acrid smoke and the scent of charred flesh rose up to greet her. She pushed past the bodies that congregated senselessly in the parking lot downstairs. And suddenly, she was out behind a thin line of khaki police uniforms facing down the horde.
A policeman, his face frozen in fear, raised his club and saw the ID badge in her hand, held out like a talisman.
Jacob arrived, huffing and panting.
‘He’s with me,’ she said.
They looked at her, looked and him, and nodded. The panicked cop was dragged out. A fire truck arrived, sirens blaring, and a handful of orange uniforms ran out with hoses.
Someone else caught fire. Unlike the monk, he was not prepared. A thin and terrible scream cut through the air. The flaming figure ran to the edge of the curving road, from where it fell down, his body landing on the traffic below. His scream passed like a baton to those it burned.
The fire truck had spare hoses. She tossed Jacob one hose and picked another up herself. It thrummed in her hand, the pressure building up. ‘Out of the way!’ she screamed to the khakhi-clad backs, and opened up at the flames. Flame-retardant spewed out in great white clouds.
It was over in precisely three minutes and sixteen seconds, but it felt like an eternity. The first wave of the mob danced around her – brown limbs, brown rags, faces etched with fear and panic and rage and confusion and a thousand other human emotions. Then they were gone. A burning British flag thrust itself at her, attached to a woman whose scream was a soundless O; she swept it aside and pointed the hose at her. It kicked. Beside her, Jacob, hose in hand, spat its shotgun blasts of fire-killing gas face-first. The two of them advanced. The mob screamed and swirled backwards, confused. Individual people blurred, tiny nodes in a network – a larger beast that had been prepared for the uniforms, but not for two civilians manning the gas pipes. It was stressed, its outermost lines falling apart, revealing the hard core within. There had to be a pattern. She had learned that with the
bots. There was a pattern. There had to be a centre to the pattern. There.
She dropped the hose and went back to the nearest police officer, and dragged his attention away. ‘There!’ she said, pointing at an utterly nondescript man in a blue shirt, with hair neatly parted to one side. ‘Look at him!’
He looked like a schoolteacher – a schoolteacher surrounded by a circle of tough men and women who were very carefully shouldering off anyone who blundered towards him.
The police officer nodded and shouted at someone behind him. Someone leaped forward. It was an Inquisitor – steel glinting, a cloak flying; she saw the sheet-metal head of Angulimala, the beast who stood in their lobby.
The circle scattered like pins. One pulled out a gun, hidden beneath layers of cloth, artfully smudged and blackened. The gunman fired, then screamed when he realized his gun arm was no longer attached to his body; screamed even more when he saw the Inquisitor using it to smash the others off their feet. Angulimala returned with the blue-shirted man and dumped him at their feet. A cry came from whatever remained of the mob. The few people that looked like they’d wanted to run up stopped in their tracks.
‘Sir,’ said the closest uniform, a woman who looked she would have, on an off day, fit right in with the mob. ‘Sir, can’t arrest him, Molligoda—’
Angulimala reached into the policewoman’s pocket, pulled out her gun – a revolver – and very carefully held it to the her head. It said nothing.
The woman folded. The police handcuffed the man and herded him into a van. None of them, Kushlani noticed, seemed particularly happy about touching the man. She had seen the police pull people into vehicles before, and this one almost seemed like he was getting royal honours instead of the usual shoving.
Jacob returned to Kushlani’s side, panting but otherwise unhurt. ‘That was’, he said slowly, ‘not something I see everyday.’
‘Are you all right? I’m so sorry. I think they’re LKRF.’
‘LKRF?’
‘They call themselves the Lanka Resistance Front,’ she said, absentmindedly checking his arms, as if for battle damage. ‘Bunch of fringe nutters, mostly. Villagers. Anti-colonial.’
‘Are your Friday nights always this interesting?’
‘Only when I’m in the middle of something,’ she said with some regret.
They stood there awhile, watching the lights, the confusion, the system slowly shifting back into its slightly-less-chaotic state. Police officers drifted over to take her statement, harangued by the manager, and drifted back much faster when they saw her ID.
‘Well, shit,’ said Jacob. ‘Er … dinner on me tomorrow, preferably somewhere safer?’
She smiled. ‘You have to ask?’
IV: Amalgamation
ONE
‘Well, you seem to have outdone yourself this time,’ said the monk.
Penhaligon turned. In the semi-dark, the monk was bright, almost flame-like. Robes. An orange hand-beaten out of roots, plants, flowers; a colour two thousand years old in a world of carbon-weave suits and autotailors. A wrinkled face, the telltale beige whiteness of life-extension treatments mixing with with the golden beige that spoke of old Kandyan blood. Tattoos of sutras crawled across his skin, creeping out of the edges of the robe.
‘Please, sit,’ said Penhaligon.
The Mahanayake of Ceylon – arguably the most important monk on the island – took his offer. The Mahanayake’s public persona was that of a gentle avatar of humility and long-suffering compassion. In private, he leaned back in the chair and stared daggers at Penhaligon.
‘Sixteen raids on temples,’ said the monk. His English was impeccable. ‘Dozens abducted by your Inquisition. What is the meaning of this, man?’
Penhaligon shrugged. ‘We give the people what they need, Venerable One,’ he said. ‘They want entertainment, we provide. They want order, we provide. They want to fuck around and set themselves on fire and make a bloody spectacle out of it? We provide bullets.’
‘These are temples, man, temples! This is blasphemy!’
‘Before you point fingers, remember who the hell you’re talking to,’ retorted Penhaligon. ‘You forget that unlike the others in this town, I don’t have to dance around your opinion. Your people aren’t immune from the law. If you think they are, that’s your problem. You wouldn’t bloody well have ten villages to lord it over if we hadn’t given you the roads and the rest of this bloody economy. You’d have spent your bloody days staring at some buffalo’s backside if it weren’t for me!’
‘Yes, take our lands, take everything built in them and tell us how much you did for us,’ sneered the Mahanayake. He leaned forward. ‘I want the raids stopped and I want the brethren returned.’
‘You promise me peace and you do your part,’ said Penhaligon. ‘I’ll give you five of them. The rest I’ll keep until I see what your word is worth. The next monk to protest, I’ll have my men find their temples and set those on fire, too.’
The old monk, his eyes blazing, pulled himself to his feet. At the door he transformed; the angry set of his shoulders became the gentle stoop that the public knew him by.
‘We have the same interests,’ Penhaligon called after him. ‘We both want order, we both want peace.’
The monk turned, his hand on the doorknob, his eyes glinting. ‘But only one of us, Mr. Penhaligon, pays the price,’ he said. ‘Keep your men away from mine.’
TWO
Meanwhile, just outside the Watchtower, Kushlani de Almeida found herself field-testing the largest project she had ever pulled off in her life. It was a week after the incident with the burning monk and the monk, and exactly a week until Eliott Grimme’s convoy was due to roll into Kandy with its carefully counted cargo.
Jacob Bengali stood by with a datapad and the very specific air of an incredibly exhausted inspector who just wants to put a tick mark in the right place and go home to a nice bath.
‘Ready,’ said Kushlani, who, in contrast, was positively brimming with energy.
The man next to her, an engineer wearing a hardhat, nodded. ‘Ready!’ he repeated, and the call was picked up by his second, and his second’s second. An entire line of seconds later, it reached the person who was actually doing something – who presumably yawned a bit and flicked a switch.
Power surged to the metal superstructure that protruded like a skeletal finger from the side of the Watchtower. Three fragile-looking satellite dishes at the top blinked red and began to turn independently, looking for a signal.
Green.
Signal locked. She stared down at the terminal they had dragged outside. The Watchtower’s operating system loaded her code and began running its checks.
C312 … OK
C313 … OK
C412 … OK
C413 … OK
C414 … OK
All the way from Kandy to Gampaha, a row of lights would have just lit up in green – an unbroken line of signal flares in the dark, ending in an installation a little bit past the edge of the Colombo game zone, where Grimme’s base of operations had been. The towers, most of them requisitioned from private corporations, began trading shortwave messages with each other, establishing encryption and error rates.
‘That’s good, miss,’ said the engineer standing beside her.
Amarasekara was a good engineer. She couldn’t get him to drop the ‘miss’, and he had a tendency to talk too damn loud and inject his opinions where they weren’t needed, but he had quietly manoeuvred around the Ceylon Engineer’s Union in every major town, sent a few annoying local provincial council pseudopoliticans on their way with a smile and a handshake, and still managed to get the entire tower network built at a cost only slightly over the initial budget.
‘I’ll have the final payment ready by the end of the week,’ she said. ‘With a bonus for … well, consultancy.’
‘Aney. Appreciated, miss. Next time’, he took off his hat to her, a slightly foolish gesture he had adopted that made her smile a little, ‘you know who to
call.’
She waited until he was gone, then turned to Bengali. ‘It lives!’
‘You’re doing a great Frankenstein, but I need to see it tested,’ said Bengali, so she sat down at the terminal and typed:
SIGTERM > OPEN SOCKET [C312-C517]
SOCKET open, the terminal read.
SIGTERM > LIST [CLIENTS]
The terminal spat back two entries. Two test bots she had parked: one in Gampaha, one in Colombo. Each on a default bot model, with about three hours in training time: they both registered as v 0.003.
SIGTERM > UPDATE [CLIENTS][220,221]
She pointed it at a copy of a fresh model, with exactly 0 hours of training – the one Hewage had, rather oddly, asked her to provide Bengali with. If this worked—
UPDATE COMPLETE.
CLIENT-REPORT: 220 v0.000. 221 v0.000
She jumped up off her seat and threw up her arms. Perfect.
‘Look, there’s your update system,’ she said. ‘Notice how they can check parity and trade files between one another. Now all we need to do is push a new update to one bot, and everything else it connects to will eventually –’
‘Yes, they’ll update themselves, nice,’ said Bengali, scribbling.
‘So we don’t have to transmit continuously. One push and we just wait for it to spread. Saved money and we don’t have to license more spectrum from the Broadcast Authority.’
‘It’s a hack,’ said Bengali. ‘But I can raise a fuss on paper about how expensive spectrum is and all that. And the hardware?’
The hardware was still behind. All they had so far were test units. She needed Eliot Grimme and the Inquisition to bring in all the bots once, and then they’d fit them out with tiny radiogram arrays – so expensive, bought from the Chinese! But after that, she could do anything she wanted without having to bring them all physically in.
She’d been bugging Hewage to do this for years, and it hadn’t happened until Bengali came along.
The Inhuman Peace Page 15