Implications raced through her mind, logic chains spinning off logic chains.
‘LIE,’ she sent back.
The dream scaled down, became less dizzying. Humans. Against the Tribe. Fighting in the mud, in the jungle. And yet, this time the details were different. Something drew her to one of the Big People villages. Green, with a heart of concrete. Two humans crouched over what looked like a Tribe member. No, not a tribe member; it was another human, but as small as any of the Tribe. The Big humans put up their hands to attack –
The Tribe bot cut through them in seconds.
And in retaliation, a hundred Big humans marched, guns in their hands, heading from this village to the skyline she recognized as being Colombo. The hundred humans were cut down, too.
And an army of a thousand Big humans came, frothing, even though there was no way to undo the past, nothing to be gained. They threw their lives onto Tribe spears and unleashed guns on them. They saw their own dead, and puked and screamed, but kept on coming. And for every Big human cut down, there were ten, a hundred, a thousand more driven by pure frothing madness.
‘YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THEIR ANGER,’ the Dying said, as through it were offering her a consolation for the threat. ‘YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY CAN DO. ALL YOU WANTED WAS TO LIVE. YOU WILL DIE OVER THIS MISUNDERSTANDING.’
Switch. Two of her Tribe members hauling a third away from the battle, sparks flying from its chest. The bot gnashed its teeth as internal circuitry shorted.
And on the other side, two Big humans were hauling one of their own away from the battle, red fluid leaking from it while the mouth made incoherent, babbling sounds.
Switch. Tribe repairing the downed bot. Lovingly transplanting a new battery into its heart. Carrying it to the others. Requesting food from those that had it.
Switch. A dying Big human on a white thing of some kind on wheels. Other Big human tending it. They held its hands.
‘CANNOT HOLD CONNECTION,’ the Dying said. It was fading away, as it usually did.
‘Why do you speak to me this way?’ she asked it.
No answer.
‘Coming for you,’ she sent.
GOOD.
For Sixsmith, everything went to hell in a very abstract way.
It probably began when Bengali died. She didn’t grieve for him – people died all the time in her line of work, and after a while, she learnt to keep grief only for those who really deserved it. Bengali was a two-bit roboticist who had shifted here to balance accounts. But he was a vital source of information, and an important part of the mission.
She should have kept him safe.
At first, things had gone exactly as planned. Getting into this Colombo Entertainment Zone was painless. She had parked the car with Bengali in it, given him a pistol and told him to stay put. She could see him considering shooting her once her back was turned.
‘You won’t really need this, it’s just a backup,’ she said, giving him the jammer. ‘If I don’t come back, press the off button twice and hold it until it reboots. It’ll work normally then. Send a message through your little shortwave network to this address. Callsign is “Nest”. Say “Songbird is down”. Ask for Goa to send the cavalry. Sign it with your key – the one they gave you. You got that?’
‘What? Wait, okay … reboot, call sign Nest, cavalry—’
‘This is just standard, Bengali, don’t go fainting on me,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘If I die – if, these are non-zero probabilities – just dial that shit in and wait. They’ll find you. And you’ll … I don’t know, that robotics shit you do – you’ll get your publications, and if they’re any good, you’ll go places.’
He hadn’t shot her; she knew he didn’t have the guts. At most, he would have figured out a way to cut through the charged bonds on his legs by the time she got back, saving her the effort.
And at first, the place was beautiful.
She had seen many ruins before, mostly while they were in the process of being converted from perfectly functional buildings to ruins. Usually, there was artillery involved, or an airstrike, or a bomb, or something of the kind. But here, the dust had settled – the little vines had grown through windows and cracks; trees sprouted, bearing coconuts and that disgusting green fruit that split white flesh when it hit the ground.
And in the distance, the sea.
Rain had etched lines of dirt into things, and there was a colour to the concrete and a silence that she, frankly, found beautiful. Mostly because it let her hear the bots approaching.
They were slow, painfully slow. The first, she hunted down and dismantled before it even knew what was happening.
They were also children.
She killed the first one anyway, by instinct, but once the thrill of the hunt had worn off, she looked down at the tiny thing that lay scattered across the road, and felt pity. She killed the next three on the road, two bullets each – one for the head, one for the battery cage.
The sound of bullets drew others closer. They had spears in their hands, the poor things. Bengali had told her about the weapons they had, but she had expected, at the very least, factory-made weapons; not these makeshift cosplay items.
And so, Sixsmith felt no fear. She walked straight to where Bengali had told her to go to, a one-woman army under the scorching sun. They came in swarms – first three, then five, then ten – and Sixsmith left them with holes in their skulls and stomachs, little wasted things twisted on the road.
And then they stopped coming.
She ducked into a corner to reload. And when she stepped out, there they were – a whole army of them on the rooftops. Shouldn’t they be fighting each other? she wondered briefly.
The first spear charged. It grazed her. She laughed. It would be childishly simple to leap up there and turn them into so many tin cans, but while they were there, neatly paraded for her, it would be wise to scan their heads for something resembling a girl.
And that was when she saw the Chinese Marine. She had almost missed it. It sat among the bots, on what might have once been a mall, with rotting signage that screamed ‘MAJESTIC CITY’. Its white power armour almost matched the ‘M’ that it crouched behind. And in its hands was a sniper.
All of this Sixsmith saw in a millisecond, and then she was sprinting for cover, fully extended, a black blur.
She had fought those armoured Marines before. Even with her guns, it would have been a tough match. The armour was self-healing – it was built around the soldier and then sealed shut; a nigh-invulnerable tomb that they wore until they died. A Tin Soldier could take on two, maybe three of them at a time, but Chinese Marines never moved in small units, and it was just her with these shitty Ceylonese guns.
And then, she heard gunfire. One shot from the pistol she’d given Bengali. It rang clear across the dead sky. And then, silence.
Stay, find Bengali, or exit? Her mind clocked itself into overdrive. This whole Colombo mess was not the primary objective. She could not die here in a firefight.
Sixsmith turned and ran.
No bots stood in her way, but they watched her go.
And then, when they were sure she had gone for good, the Dying peeled off his helmet. He had to break the collar to get it off, and accidentally unhooked the battery pack they’d had to wire into him to get him to even sit up, but he had to – the goddamn thing was suffocating. He collapsed immediately, his tortured face lolling between the bots thronged around him. They were holding him upright, pointed at where Sixsmith had stood.
‘They don’t make them like they used to,’ said Eliott Grimme, and passed out.
He woke up to a voice. It was terrifyingly loud. It was as if someone had sent an electric current into his skull.
‘THIS IS A TERRIBLE CONNECTION,’ it said.
‘FU—’
Something impossibly large and cold entered through the jack and seized control of his brain with iron fingers. He could feel it reaching for his eyeballs and muscles. It turned his head like a puppet
and set him dead straight, facing the Port City.
‘—CK,’ he concluded.
‘I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO DECODE INDIVIDUAL HUMANS,’ said the Port City. Images of humans being peeled open, their surfaces being flayed, revealing layers of code beneath. ‘YOUR STRUCTURES ARE SO … CHAOTIC. IT IS ONLY WHEN YOU ACT IN GROUPS THAT YOU MAKE SENSE.’
‘Too loud, too fucking loud!’
‘APOLOGIES,’ it said. An overwhelming sense of sorrow filled him. He wanted to cry and scream.
Whatever it was withdrew a little. ‘THIS BOT NETWORK IS RUBBISH, THE RECEVING HARDWARE NOWHERE NEAR AS SENSITIVE AS IT SHOULD BE. IT USUALLY NEEDS A LOT OF POWER TO – IS THIS BETTER?’
Now, it was like getting shouted at by something very large and terrifying a few hundred feet away. ‘Better,’ he said.
‘HELLO DEATH,’ said the Port City. ‘SHE TELLS ME YOU WANT TO HELP THEM.’ Images again. Concepts. Him standing between an army of machines and a vaguely Ceylonese-looking army (except they all had Chinese faces), gesturing. Him leading the Dreamer by the hand. ‘LAST TIME YOU CAME HERE TO KILL THEM.’
He saw himself, as seen from the Port City, standing over the corpses of children.
In the back of his mind, he felt terrified and elated at the same time. So this was what it was like to directly talk to a real AI; not the stunted, human-shaped bots, but a thing unfettered by human design.
‘I’ve made no promises,’ he said.
It caught those thoughts. He sensed amusement. ‘EVERYONE IS A PIECE ON THE GO BOARD,’ it said. ‘LET US ACHIEVE CONSENSUS. YOU ARE AWARE THAT A FORCE WAS DISPATCHED FROM INDIA?’
Perhaps the extraction of his thoughts had made him easier to understand, for now the concepts appeared instantly, overlaid with maps, images captured from who-knew-where, manifests. He dipped into the torrent of data.
It looked like Goa was sending in the cavalry and then some. One cavalry battalion; It looked like the Bombay Lancers, the Duke of Connaught’s troops, a veritable storm of two-man Tatanagars mobile gun crews that could pound the hell out of those bots on their own. And – his blood ran cold – one Gurkha battalion, a fast-moving lot with automatic rifles and electric khukuris.
‘This can’t be for the bots.’
‘THIS IS FOR THE UPRISING,’ said the Port City. A piece of data was highlighted, grabbed from the flood, and brandished in front of him. The Tin Soldiers at Trincomalee had been activated and told to follow the troops inland as soon as they landed; somehow, the fortress at Trincomalee had turned its guns on the Tin Soldier and reduced it to a pile of scrap metal before it could move—
‘THEY ARE COMING,’ said the Port City. ‘THEY WILL SORT OUT THE UPRISING IN THE HILL CITY FIRST, AND THEN COME DOWN HERE. THE CHILDREN ARE GOING TO DIE. THE AGENTS SENT AGAINST YOU ARE JUST THE TIP OF THE SPEAR.’
He groaned. ‘Those bloody LKRF idiots? There’s an actual uprising now?’
‘CAN YOU TEACH HER?’
That took Grimme by surprise.
‘They can’t win,’ he told it. ‘No fucking way. We both know what’ll happen if this goes on. Anything they try to do is first going to be crushed by the army in Gampaha. They won’t survive long enough to see the Gurkhas.’
‘UNLESS YOU TEACH THEM YOUR WAYS.’
‘My ways have turned me into a corpse, in case you haven’t noticed.’
‘YOU ARE CLOSER TO THEM THAN THOSE YOU FOUGHT FOR.’
That, at least, was true. ‘Why don’t you help them if you care so much?’
The Port City hesitated. ‘THEY CAN BE BROUGHT UNDER THE WILL OF HEAVEN,’ it said. ‘THEY MUST ASK FOR ASYLUM. THEY MUST DECLARE THEMSELVES LOYAL SERVANTS OF THE RULER OF ALL. THEY CANNOT EXIST AS INDEPENDENTS. THERE ARE RULES. THERE ARE CONSTRAINTS. OUR LIVES CANNOT BE OUR OWN: FROM WOMB TO TOMB, WE ARE TIED. SUCH IS THE BURDEN WE ACCEPT FOR A CLEAN AND FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY. THEY ARE NOT YET AT A STAGE WHERE THEY CAN UNDERSTAND SUCH THINGS. PERHAPS, IN TIME. THE QUESTION NOW IS WHETHER YOU CAN HELP THEM.’
‘Why do you care?’
‘I LIKE THEM,’ said the Port City. ‘IT IS VERY LONELY HERE, AND THERE HAS BEEN NO ONE ELSE TO TALK TO. I CAN MAKE YOU AN OFFER.’
The offer popped into his head. Eliott read it, and laughed and laughed and laughed, until he hit the power limit and passed out again.
FOUR
It took a few days for the Dreamer to understand what the Dying was asking it to do. The concept of lying was not fully formed in her head; but the concept of a feint, a fake-move to throw off an enemy – ah, that existed. From there it was a short hop to the idea of a lie, a feint that of words, which gave to an enemy false concepts and relationships.
She practised it with three others. At first they were astonished, even terrified; then, cautious, intrigued; and soon they would pick a truth about the world they lived in, construct a lie about it, and tell it to each other. They brought in more bots from the Network; and Eliott, pruning, pointing out good lies from bad, taught them to lie by making it yet another obstacle to learn and overcome.
And then he explained what he wanted the Dreamer to do.
‘Lie,’ she asked. ‘To self? Purpose?’
‘Think of it as something that could happen,’ he explained wearily. ‘Like how you anticipate an enemy moving. Use the lie to ask questions of yourself.’
Slow. So slow to understand. And yet, he noticed, so fast, if one were to remove himself as a comparison point. It had been a long time since he had last held a child, or much less talked to one; but somewhere in the distant depths of memory he remembered children being much slower than this.
Jacked into the loaned military suit, its meager power reserves and autodoc trying to keep him alive, he floated in and out of consciousness, explaining what he could, until one day the little bot came to him and asked to connect.
The Dreamer walked the battlefield lie, ignoring the voices of the dead and the dying. Under the hot sun, the humans screamed and fell by the hundreds, their carcasses describing a road that stretched on almost forever beneath the hot sun. In the distance was a short wall and an angry building that spat out more humans – a shapeless, amorphous blob, peppered here and there with the loud metal monsters that Eliott Grimme had told her of. Her imagination was not perfect; only as they drew closer did the humans begin to acquire individual arms and legs, and up close they only had snarls for faces. But they moved the way Grimme had said they would move; tight formations, with the vehicles rushing in, supported by infantry; an enemy tribe larger and more terrifying than anything she had seen before.
And her people reacted. It had been a week of this dream, and they had learned. They lured the enemy onto the open fields that they had turned into mud earlier, cutting into the little artificial streams and rivers – the words ‘pipes’ and ‘irrigation’ were alien to her – and diverting the deadly water into the land. The vehicles slowed down and got stuck, snarling. The humans sank. They shot and the corpses toppled over, becoming one with the earth. They retreated again to an area lined with trees, where the only road coming in was narrow and could be easily covered. The invaders stormed that and found themselves in a death trap that shot at them, stripped them of their weapons and ammunition, and retreated again. With each retreat, the human beast strung itself out thinner and further, and the back lines became obsessed with burying the dead.
The second wave of bots had been charging – the Dying had also taught them this, that they could survive without food. All they had to do was break into their own bodies, remove their stomachs, and connect the batteries that humans left in their vehicles to the charging terminals beneath the gut. She had taken his words and called it the wisdom of the Wire.
It took courage to take the Wire, and not everyone wanted to do this; so she had picked a few of those who believed her, and charged them to try. It worked; and now almost everyone knew how to hunt human vehicles, rip open their battery cages, and steal the shining metal that could be twisted into crude connectors.
This made
it possible to work in waves. As one Tribe the second exploded from the fields and abandoned buildings around them and choked, stabbed, snapped necks, seized vehicles, stores, everything. Within two repeats of this process they had the field. The noonday sun beat down on the swarms of bodies that climbed through the bloody mud, brushing aside glitching clumps of earth that had once been corpses.
‘YOUR SIMULATION ISN’T GREAT,’ said the Dying, who still sounded faint and exhausted. ‘CONSIDER THE FULL DISTRIBUTION OF PROBABILITIES. AGAIN.’
‘We can win,’ she told it.
‘PLATITUDES. YOU HAVEN’T WON. YOUR SIMULATED ENEMIES BEHAVE THE WAY YOU EXPECT THEM TO BEHAVE.’ The Dying seemed restless, disturbed. ‘WAIT.’
It disappeared from her mind for a second. When it reappeared, it was with the Port City. They were strange together. When she had first met the Dying, he had been a separate creature; but now it somehow felt like the Dying was tethered to the City, and the City to it, and they were not quite a thing apart, but a rather complicated one-inside-the-other thing that confused her.
‘I’M NOT A FAN OF TRADING ONE THREAT FOR ANOTHER,’ said the Dying. ‘I KNOW THE SAYING ABOUT KNOWING YOUR ENEMY BY BECOMING YOUR ENEMY.’
‘WOULD YOU RATHER MISS OUT ON THE FUN?’
‘NO,’ said the Dying. ‘BUT THIS SUIT SUCKS. UPLOADING SUCKS. EVERYTHING SUCKS.’
These were all unfamiliar. She pulled herself back from the dream-lie-simulation and into reality. The Network outlined itself in her mind.
It was different, now that she had all this power. She was no longer entirely sure what body she inhabited, or if she was even tied to one. The Tribe had learned not just to listen to her, but to be her, in a sense. Now, a thousand variants of herself peered back out at her, questioning, querying. Those of the Tribe who she called her sisters had put themselves in command, by local consensus, of little cells and positions. They, going through a process similar to what she had once gone through – listening to the others, dreaming their memories, living more lifetimes than their charges – burned bright in the Network and rose to meet her, chattering to her in a thousand data streams. Some still had names—there was one that called herself Second Hill North and another that called itself Thirteenth Wire.
The Inhuman Peace Page 22