The Inhuman Peace

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  And then it stopped.

  Something knelt by the dying man. Bengali saw a woman. And then a machine – possibly a child-bot, grown up. And then, the three merged together in his head. Metal undulated from a military vest; the arms extended into viscous scythes, and legs folded and unfolded with movements that were almost German in their precision. A back curved and hunched in a way that simultaneously made his brain go ‘tiger’, and also, ‘run’. A human face mounted this terrible vision – high, forbidding cheekbones, blonde hair in a severe bun, slit eyes – and it had a symmetry that he found altogether startling, matching in some strange way the inhumanity of her body. The flesh on it was a blemish upon the metal. She wore some kind of cloak.

  ‘Stop babbling,’ she said. ‘Drake sends his regards.’

  Her voice was the most terrifying thing about her, because it was normal. A trace of Cockney, even.

  ‘You’re one of them,’ he wheezed, pushing himself off the ground. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. ‘One of … one of Grimme’s, aren’t you?’

  She broke Dharmarkirti’s neck with a slow detachment. ‘Everybody seems to have met the bastard except for me,’ she said. ‘No, Dr. Bengali. I’m not one of Grimme’s. What you had running around these parts was very much a prototype system, decades out of date. I’m the good stuff.’

  She flicked an arm at him. He flinched. Improbably, he didn’t die.

  ‘Verify,’ she said, wiggling the memory chip at him.

  He swallowed, inhaled and, very deliberately, trying not to quaver, dusted himself off. He darted forward, got the chip out of her hand and dropped it only twice before plugging it into his pad. He read the ID.

  Letitia Sixsmith. There was a long list of operations beneath her name, most of them classified, but the locations stood out. South Africa, two deployments. Malaysia, Singapore, Iraq, Tanganyika. And below that, a list of modifications that they had authorized for her. Legs. Eyes. Spine. Eyes. Arms. Several internal organ rebuilds. Everything about her was built for hunting, for speed.

  ‘You didn’t need to kill them,’ was the first thing he said.

  Sixsmith looked down at the dead. ‘Here on a need-to-know basis, and they didn’t need to know.’ She lingered over the twins. ‘Pity. But that’s what you sign up for. Anyway. Business, Dr. Bengali. You have it?’

  ‘I have what?’

  ‘The data. Research. Whatever it is Drake sent you here to figure out.’

  He gaped. ‘But … but‘

  ‘Drake said you’d tell me that it’s not complete, so he said to tell you that he knows you said you’ve almost got a handle on it. Hang on, let me quote: “I know how to use the baseline model now. It’s amazing how little processing power it actually takes – these things are HK45s inside. That’s practically legacy hardware. I can imagine how fast it’ll be on office gear. March 12.” Drake said you really, really shouldn’t run unencrypted voice messages over shortwave. Basic infosec. Come on, Doctor, that was stupid.’

  ‘I can see that,’ he said, and vomited. He thought of what he had just seen, the men he had just talked to and their entrails on the grass. He vomited again.

  When he looked back, lightheaded and feeling foul, he saw that she had dragged the bodies a little way off, and was bounding back. There was really no other way to describe someone that looked like they were about to take a single step and seemed to magically appear several dozen feet away from where they should have been.

  He gulped. ‘But look, publication, credit—’

  ‘Look, it’s Drake.’

  ‘Yes?’ he said weakly.

  ‘So imagine that whatever argument you’re going to have with me, you’ve already had with him. He’s crushed every one your points and you’ve agreed to give me what I came here for. In return, I don’t turn you into so many kebabs. I’m not really the debating type.’

  ‘That’s, uh, the problem is …’ he tried to think. ‘Okay. I have the base model. I don’t have a really good idea of how they perform under all scenarios – the machines I’m running on literally just stopped booting, I’m losing so much fucking progress—’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I do have enough to deploy and test with. But, but,’ he said hastily, struck by a new idea, ‘it’s not complete! It’s not complete! I have a base model. The best learning model is in there.’

  He pointed across the fence, where the corpses were still smoking gently.

  ‘Yeah. Nice try.’

  ‘I’m not joking,’ he said. ‘There’s a model out there called the Explorer. Can’t miss it, it’s the only one that looks like a girl. Whatever’s running on it is just different enough from the base that it’s … a catalyst? A commander?’ He tried to think. It was difficult. ‘It takes charge, solves problems. I don’t have the training code – that’s with Hewage, that’s what lets us produce these models. He’s never let me have access to it, he’s waiting to publish—’

  ‘Stop babbling,’ she said again. ‘You’re talking about these bots?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know, if you’re lying about this, I’m going to ship you home in a matchbox.’

  ‘Can you just lay off the threats already? I believe you.’

  She stood up and peered at the perimeter, looking more like a large tiger standing on its hind legs than a human.

  ‘How far to this target?’

  ‘Maybe … maybe ten, maybe fifteen kilometers,’ he said. ‘Look, I can show you the maps.’

  Mentally, he tried to estimate how much of a running start this would give him. They had their truck. He was pretty sure Dharmakirti had spare petrol. Let the bots skewer this nightmare, and all her needed was a good road …

  She snorted, and then she began to … Bengali was not sure how to describe it, but fold would have been the best word. Parts opened – shoulders, back, knees – and some red glow hissed out of her, and when the parts collapsed back into place, there was just a woman standing there, in what looked like an absurdly high-tech kit.

  Somehow, this act of camouflage made her seem even more dangerous.

  ‘You’re going to come with me,’ she said. ‘You’re going to identify this thing and tell me which bit of it you need. And then, we’re going to finish a small job in Kandy and get us both off this island and straight to India.’

  ‘I’m not going in there,’ he said, panicking. ‘I’ll die.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try to keep you in one piece,’ she said, and looked him up and down. ‘Go have a smoke, wash up, pack up what you need. I’ve got a vehicle parked a little way behind.’

  On the way, he stopped near the corpse of an old war robot. The old thing was kneeling down and was covered in vines and weeds. Just so he could relieve himself.

  ‘Fuck!’ he screamed suddenly.

  That broke the ice. Sixsmith grunted, as if amused.

  Sixsmith, on the other hand, was having … a fairly enjoyable day.

  Drake’s missions did not come easy. Never had. Her last op had her running munitions into Transvaal, to where their operatives were in Lindenburg. The op had blown up right from the start – six straight days of gunfire and the chase down to Delagoa Bay. Here? A cakewalk. Security was lax as all hell. The army was so untrained and underequipped that it had to be a joke. The rebels were practically running hotels. Drake might as well have had her checked in for a holiday.

  From the four men she had killed, she took one pistol (Ceylonese crap), two assault rifles (Chinese crap) and one good sniper – an ancient Enfield that was terrible to reload, but supremely overpowered. It was an actual elephant gun.

  The joy of it was that when she first saw an elephant – they had actual elephants here, the crazy beasts – her hands itched to put a bullet between those flapping ears. That’d be a story and a half – bagging an elephant during a mission.

  But that was also quite stupid, as the rather jumpy Dr. Bengali had pointed out, so she did not give in to the itch. Instead, she floored the accelerator
and took them on a circuitous route inward, in search of the furthest entry points to this stupidly dystopian playground. Meanwhile, the sky was a bright blue, the land shockingly green, and this jungle-car … she had to hand it to the Indians – it had about as much finesse as a bull with a red-hot poker applied pressed to its testicles, but it was fun. The balloon tires went everywhere, and it did so competently enough that she had time to chew on things and parse Bengali’s information.

  They needed to bag a bot. Fine; these bots were pushovers. Mahasen had already told her about the series of towers running from Colombo to Kandy, and how each bot then acted as a miniature receiver or transmitter in its own right. Apparently Bengali occasionally tapped the network to call his girlfriend back in Kandy and boast about his research. What was hilarious was that the rebels had also discovered this trick, and now had a spectacular telecommunications backbone, free of charge.

  She had laughed. She’d long since picked up the trick from the Vatican troops of turning radiograms into tiny white noise generators. Radiogram on the hip, hooked directly into her battery and none of this stupid shit would work within a mile of her.

  So all that remained, really, were standard infiltration tactics. Figure out where the enemy front lines and strongpoints were. Find routes that let her sneak past and get as close to the target as possible. Disable target, exfil, and, if possible, since she was heading in the general direction, find out where Conrad died, see if there was any part of him she could bring back. And if by any chance Eliott Grimme happened to be around, she could give him a swift kick in the meat and potatoes.

  Fairly straightforward, actually.

  And that was how Ajax Bengali – journeyman roboticist, aspiring scholar and general oddjobsman for the lesser demanding robotics jobs in the British South Asian region – found himself in the back of a Tatanagar, roaring past the most westward of Kushlani’s signal towers. One hand was cuffed with an elastic plate metal fabric to the vehicle; the other, with some help from his teeth, was trying desperately to light a beedi. In general, Bengali was trying not to think about death.

  This seemed quite difficult.

  SIX

  The Dreamer woke up.

  The sunlight peeked through the tattered cloth she had hung in her room; little rays broke through the cloth and made tiny motes of dust dance in front of her face. She watched them for a long time and tried reaching out to catch them, but her hands closed on nothingness.

  Outside, the soft evening sunlight lit up the ruins of Colombo in a fierce glare, sketching out the world she had always known – buildings toppled over, roads cracked, weeds and twisted trees exploding out through skeletons of shattered concrete. From her window, she could see everything, all the way to the sea, which was the only thing that stayed unbroken.

  In the depths of her mind, something reached out, a ghost hand flexing its fingers, and found other hands. One reached out with particular desperation.

  It was the Dying. and if what passed between them was anything even remotely human, ‘handshake’ might have been the correct term for what happened next.

  The Dying was broadcasting again. The same few bits of data, looped and spammed to the Network as its battery died. She accepted the packets with resignation: someone had to. As she did, her view changed.

  She saw four things marching outside the city. Big People. She knew them, although she knew not how. Dust and scrub and chunks of old road met their booted feet. Their copper skin gleamed dully in the light of the setting sun. She knew them. They walked this way, they walked back. She never found out why. It was always the same four – the slow one, the one who always sat; the other two identical, and with strange long hair; the fourth broad and slightly spherical. The broad man moved like he was Tribe leader.

  She saw them move closer and closer, surrounded by the concrete shells of houses and apartments long since passed into ruin, each trying to keep an eye on all the tiny lanes that snaked into the pitted road they were on.

  Then the skip. The Dying did not remember this bit. She was flying backwards. She could no longer feel her body. There were clouds above. There were clouds—

  But the payload was not done. The Dying had more memories to share. Suddenly she was running across the ground at the Big People, she was leaping over the rooftops, she was crawling through the bylanes. Screams and the harsh explosions erupted around her. She leaped, ripping them from limb to limb. They sprayed red oil. They were different now. The others instantly ran back into the concrete jungle, now covered in the red oil that the Big People leaked.

  ‘SYSTEM CRASH,’ said the Voice that sometimes came from the Port City, cutting in through the signals that the Dying spammed out. ‘REALLY?’

  The Dreamer was one now. A last memory hidden between the fragments. She was squatting. Four Big People lay dead around her. She pulled together their pieces, assembling them into a crude shape not unlike herself. An arm here, a leg there, a head here. The red oil pooled and ran across the dirt. A head lay gently at the very heart of this assembly. She stood there in the darkness, waiting for something to happen. Some repair process. Something normal.

  Nothing happened.

  And suddenly, she was herself again, as hardware unused to the throughput panicked and pulled out of the Network, disentangling herself from the minds that so desperately gave themselves to her. Within her, and unknown to her, minute learning processes tried to crunch the data thus received, turning into into weights and variables. But it was too late – buffers were being overwritten, there was overload, and there was the strange screaming noise. It was a while before she could reach back out.

  She was getting better at this. Indeed, she was the best at this. It was she who had first begun accepting messages like these; the others usually avoided them, because the dead were a burden nobody wanted to carry. But in taking the burden unto herself she had learned much. And she had taught much. They had begun calling her ‘the Dreamer’ because she saw things they could not imagine until she had taught them the art of reaching out, of using those ghost-hands, of learning for themselves.

  In the evening, she reached out again.

  This time the Network brought her to a group of allies. They were east and north, close to where the fence was. There had been a battle. The aftermath of a second group of Big People lay around them. They fumbled through piles of looted human weapons, nimble fingers trying to work out how to operate triggers and reload magazines.

  All at once, three Big People – their skins leaking red oil – burst out of an abandoned house, screaming, their weapons speaking thunder but hitting nothing. Had she known, she would have recognized their army fatigues – Ceylon Volunteer Rifles, the second scouting mission sent out to investigate the sudden disappearance of Dr. Jacob Bengali and the team attached to him. But she knew not these symbols, only that they had come with thunder-sticks, and were the enemy.

  The bots watched them go. One raised a human weapon and fired. There was thunder. Several times. The three Big People fell.

  One bot, who stood as if surveying the performance of the others, noted that moving targets were harder to hit. This was known with spears and with any other weapon.

  Another, however, disagreed. The firing patterns were predictable, it said. The mechanism was easy to operate. With this knowledge it was easier than aiming a spear.

  As proof, several more rounds of experiments were conducted. Three men were released. Three more men were released. Again, the guns fired. Again, they died. It was the one who disagreed who broadcasted: he wanted the Dreamer to judge between their arguments.

  The bot who thought the firing patterns were predictable – the Dreamer reached out to his mind. He knew her. He hesitated at first, but she had patched him up once and was an ally, and so he passed on the knowledge of the gun and its firing patterns.

  The Dreamer looked at the facts thus assembled, and judged both to be right. Yes, moving targets were always harder to hit, but this human weapon made i
t easy, almost terrifyingly so. Both these facts generated expectations about the world around them and both expectations were met.

  Both bots were satisfied with her judgement. It was known that she had lived more lives than most of them ever could.

  And this was progress, of a sort. The skeptic, who had once held a high rank in a tribe out on the very fringes of Colombo, let his role pass to the bot who had figured out the rifle.

  Broken Eaves had always been good at taking things apart and understanding how they worked. Some random optimization made Eaves the best they had now until some new leader emerged. He broadcast this thought the network, and one by one the others came to a consensus. Long Eyes countered – Broken Eaves was better at organizing people. He suggested Long Eyes stay in overall command, while he, Eaves, led from the front from now on.

  They thought about this. Again they asked the Dreamer what she thought. The Dreamer gave the same answer she always did when these questions came about: whichever option the tribe thinks will increase the chances of their survival.

  They agreed. Under these metrics, they agreed that it was a rational proposal and a good use of available skillsets. And thus, Broken Eaves went to work figuring out how to fix the broken rifles, while Long Eyes stepped back from the weapons, checking up on each and every one, making sure they were charged and repaired.

  All this the Dreamer watched. In return, she asked gently for her fee: the right to speak of this to everyone else. And when they agreed she soared, pushing the limits of the Network, and all within a mile of her knew how to fire a rifle and account for its recoil – to make every bullet count. The human weapons were horribly noisy and wasteful, but …

  Who in their right mind would turn down a good weapon so freely given?

  ‘YOUR RANGE IS STILL QUITE SHORT,’ the Voice told her.

  ‘I have plans,’ she said.

  ‘HURRY,’ it said. ‘THEY WILL BEGIN SOON. ASK YOUR DYING FRIEND.’