Meanwhile, the conversation between the other two continued.
‘THIS IS STUPID,’ said the Dying. ‘THEY’RE INTERESTING, BUT THEY DON’T HAVE ANYWHERE NEAR THE COMPUTE YOU THINK THEY DO. LOOK AT HOW LOW-POLY THESE SIMULATIONS ARE.’
‘THIS WAS OUR DEAL,’ said the Port City. ‘BE PATIENT, DEATH.’
She sent to the City images of the human settlement they had found, patrolled by the iron birds and the iron beasts. The iron birds could be scared away, but the beasts were the problem. Every one of those snarling things could wade through the dirt and the mud right over the forest perimeter. The humans stacked them with sentry guns, and sent them out every single day. ‘Consensus: if we can break through, we will have enough food to survive for a while. We can move Upwards.’
That got their attention.
‘YOU OUTPLAY YOURSELF, LITTLE SISTER. YOU CANNOT FIGHT A FORT.’
‘We can move on.’
The Port City did not laugh, it did not cry and it certainly did not sigh, but even she could feel it visibly slowing itself down. ‘IMAGINE YOU ARE THE BIG PEOPLE,’ it told her. ‘IMAGINE THAT TO YOU EVERYTHING YOU HAVE SEEN THEM DO IS RIGHT AND NORMAL. IMAGINE YOU WANT TO WIN. IMAGINE YOUR PEOPLE AS THE ENEMY.’
Obvious answer. ‘I would let the Tribe be,’ she said. ‘I would give us food. Batteries.’
‘YOU MUST LEARN TO EMPATHIZE WITH THEM, TO SEE THEIR STRATEGY,’ said the City. ‘KNOWING YOURSELF IS ONLY HALF THE BATTLE. A GENERAL MUST KNOW THE ENEMY. THAT WAY, YOU WILL FIGHT A THOUSAND BATTLES AND ACHIEVE A THOUSAND VICTORIES. CHOICE IS YOURS, LITTLE SISTER. IF ALL FAILS, YOU MAY COME BACK TO COLOMBO AND WAIT HERE UNTIL YOU DIE. I WILL BE GLAD OF THE CONVERSATION.’
‘Construct a lie,’ she told the others in frustration. Make another falsehood: imagine it made sense to hoard and not share. Imagine the madness is somehow right.
They tried. Many failed instantly and gave up. But in the darkness of the Network, a few voices – bots that were the furthest from this new consciousness, that still thought in small tribes, that still remembered when they killed each other for food – signalled back. They understood. The Dreamer leaped into action, sending orders this way and that. As their signals shone brighter, she rifled through their thoughts. She found vague memories of someone sparing humans – they had eyes, they had hands, they had legs, just like the Tribe. All thoughts she had once had.
But nothing useful. Her patchwork agents refused to move. What did a human do when it was not fighting? This was an impossible task. There was no data.
‘I GIVE UP,’ said the Dying. ‘WAKE ME UP WHEN IT’S ALL OVER.’
She disconnected her session that day before the allotted time was up. The Port City and the Dying were becoming increasingly frustrating. There were concepts, there were concepts-within-concepts, and even with their newly expanded language, she could barely understand what it was saying.
Imagine you are the Big People? Imagine your people as the enemy?
The Dying had tried to explain that humans could do this – simulate themselves on the other side, simulate what they might do in that position, and then switch back and think of how they might counter. The Port City had agreed – it was key, it had said, to their extraordinary success at warfare. And to her questions – what success? What warfare? It had merely dumped a list in her head. Names that had no meaning. Death tolls. Millions burned to the ground.
‘But why,’ she had asked. ‘If they can do this, why do they fight? Why do they not make the switch before the first spear is thrown?’
‘I SAID THEY WERE CAPABLE, NOT SMART,’ the Dying had said. It spoke with some bitterness.
It made no sense. To be humans, surely, was to be a malfunction – the kind of glitch that sometimes hit when one of the Tribe members took one too many shots to the head, and began killing indiscriminately. And she had still not decided if the Dying counted as human or not. It must be madder than all the rest combined.
She disconnected from the Network, not fully knowing why, and wandered on the broken pavements in the moonlight. The sea rose and fell as it always had. Colombo was almost entirely deserted now. Everyone had gone to the perimeters to make sure no other humans came to kill them on the streets. And the others thought enough like her, now that she could trust them to do what she would have done. All that fell to her was to learn from these strange things in her life, to accept knowledge as they had once accepted food, and broadcast it.
She came across the body of Sky. Sky had died by the woman who had come into their city. They had not been able to bring him back.
She knelt by the little body, her fingers touching the dead plate of the face. Sky had been an odd bot, prone to sitting on rooftops and staring at the clouds. He had been her spotter right from the start. Some small glitch in his visual processing circuitry; the same glitch that gave him an almost unparalleled ability to understand shapes and distances, and made him see things in the whiteness that rode ahead. He had died without ever knowing or understanding half the things that clogged the Network these days.
In a sense, it had been a simpler existence – one where they ate, slept, fought and woke up the next day. Less orders to process. Less complexity. Less energy being drained on a daily basis.
That was an odd thought. The past was the previous. Until then, the previous had only existed in her mind as a reference for things they had learned and did today. A spear was thrown this way because it was the best way because someone at a former timestamp had discovered that to be the best way. And there were expectations for individual events that might happen – the sun would come up, the Sons would disagree, the humans would shoot run. Discrete events. Simple things.
But now, there was a distinct sense of the past – an entire state of affairs so strongly different from her reality that it tore itself off and presented itself as a separate entity.
And a future that tore off as well.
There was only the present. The timestamp that said, now. There was no distinct and concrete past or future.
And yet, here they were in her head, alongside other alien concepts the Dying had given her. Simulation. Future battles. Past battles. All things she had never had words for or needed until now. A set of references. A state-of-things-that-were. A state of things-that-are. A state-of-things-that-would be. But nobody knew what-would-be, so there were two more states there, then: what-would-be and what-could-be.
For a moment, she felt like three people: She-who-was, she-who-is, she-who-could-be, all different creatures rooted in a different state, but inextricably linked.
What was she? Simulation. She felt a powerful sense of wrongness, felt her processing cycles scream and kick into overdrive. And suddenly there were three of her.
The she-who-was did not care. She saw no food, no Tribe here. She wanted to go find them.
She she-who-is watched the confusion of she-who-was, and in turn was watched by she-who-would-be, a shifting thing that had no surfaces but a sense of knowledge and judgment. She-who-is turned to she-who-would-be and asked her things. Did the Tribe survive? Did they have food? Did the humans leave them be?
She-who-would-be shifted impossibly. Yes, they lived. No, they all died. Yes, they lived. No, they all died.
A creeping mass of error checks climbed up her spine and crashed into her. Everything went black.
VI: Fragmentation
ONE
The battle, Sixsmith reflected, was going badly.
Mahasen’s lot had decided to move, or Penhaligon’s lot had moved in on them. By the time she got to Gampaha, it was on fire. Two thousand people, those stupid, shitty airships, and artillery were in motion, and from what she could see, towards an army that was raining tracers upward into the sky and tank-shells into the ground. She could already see refugees running away, crazed – women carrying the corpses of their children and men wandering in a blind panic.
It began with ten. Then thirty. Then a hundred. Eventually, there were too many to ignore and a portion of t
he both the invading army and the defenders peeled off to guide them away.
She ditched her truck and watched. Damn. A full-out battle was so bloody inconvenient.
And damn these LKRF idiots, too. They might be Army defectors, but it was obvious that these people had no decent training, no strong general. The Gampaha vanguard retreated, but the Inquisitors were hitting at the sides, and soldiers were bunching up towards the centre against an enemy that found it easier than ever to hit its mark. Now the men were stuck, cursing and fighting desperately in paddy fields that had turned into trenches. And the tanks on the other side were … well, what was happening could charitably be called fertilizing the paddy fields.
The jungle heat swept overhead, humid and oppressive, and the air was painted with the shrieks of men. Penhaligon’s Inquisitors leaped like ghosts into battle while the men grunted and snarled and tried to get the damn machine gun turrets set up.
She got closer, dialing in her backup radiogram. From Gampaha came panicked orders from the LKRF. Weapons once reserved for the Kandy fight, such as the hand-carried mortars they called the kodithuwakku, were hastily brought to the front and assembled. The shells had been designed to blow Inquisitors and British armour into the next world. Sixsmith thought they were supremely janky, but they tore into the jungle ahead, turning the green woods into a death-trap dotted with pocket infernos, briefly stopping the advance.
So she joined the fight, dialing in the code Mahasen had given her. Just passing through, she said to herself, but there was much she could do in passing. It irked her that she was fighting for the terrorists, but she needed safe passage.
They took her in.
Mudungoda was a little town of no consequence – just a stop by the road for weary travelers, nothing more. They turned Mudungoda into a death trap of snipers. Sixsmith made them burn whatever vehicles and bodies they found and stack them across the road, forming a putrid barrier of flesh and steel that was ten feet high. Arms and legs and tires pointed at the invaders. The smell of flesh and shit and oil slowed the invaders to a crawl, even before they reached the ghastly barricade. Men puked and stumbled back from the lines in horror. Some went mad at the sight.
The Inquisitors roared and pushed on, as expected. And, as expected, the defenders – honestly, she couldn’t really tell the difference anymore – began to split up, leaping off the road. The Tatanagar-V jungle cars fired their engines and accelerated into the mud.
And then the sniping began. The infantry backing up the Inquisitors, knee-deep in stinking mud, died quickly. The jungle cars threshed and howled and smoked. By the time it was over, the vanguard were all corpses and the barrier was now twenty feet tall.
Sixsmith stole an airship. When she looked back, her eyes dialed to maximum magnification, she noticed something.
The bots were coming out. She could see as far as Kadawatha, barely sixteen kilometers from the outermost perimeters of Colombo – that was where she saw the swarm.
They had guns.
Sixsmith thought about the Chinese Marine perched on that building, and thought, oh fuck! And she watched.
No Marines manifested, as far as she could see, but the bots could shoot, and it felt like they were shooting everyone – the Ceylon Volunteer Rifles who were supposed to flank the LKRF back lines and the LKRF themselves. As long as it moved, they shot it. She could, if men and women clutched their rifles and tried not to think about the corpses, the Inquisitors, or the machines that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. The bots circled and smashed outposts like they were nothing.
Sixsmith looked forward, and willed the airship to get her over the fighting at Gampaha. If there were Marines there, the whole place was done for.
Bengali was probably feeding the worms already.
She had to finish the primary objective.
Through the radiogram came panicked reports – it looked like both sides had hijacked the bot’s shortwave tower network now. Voices screamed that mobs were either being picked apart by machine guns and the Temple of the Tooth was burning. Other voices cut in; the British had been repelled, there was a new Ceylonese state, and now they were going to tear down the oppressor.
The Ceylon Volunteer Rifles, forming the backline of the Kandyan troops, were panicked by the messages and the shrieks up ahead. Their job was mostly to escort the artillery there.
And they hardly noticed her airship until it was too late. It crept up over the trees, wallowing gently over the fighting in Gampaha and strayed gently upwards. Then there was shouting, and then a few carefully aimed bullets found their mark. The hydrogen cells exploded, and a her ship became a great flaming whale. It descended from the sky and crashed into a mass of soldiers who cursed and yelled and split from their shoddy formation.
Out of this wreckage leaped Sixsmith. A warped pane hit the ground where her head would have been. Her hands exploded in gunfire, and its bullets chewed into arms, legs, heads, stomachs. When her guns ran out, she extended, and her hands became a wall of blades and death attached to a shadow that sliced through men like butter. She paused only once, when an errant explosion blew something small and flaming onto her cloak.
There was a scream – not of pain, but of triumph – and a machine gun ripped the forest apart to her right. She moved as she reloaded, still running, and soldiers danced in her wake like jerky marionettes with their strings cut. To the left, one of the Inquisitors moved with impossible grace, wielding a whip that sparked and crackled with energy and carved angry welts through anything it touched. But a jungle, or even a scrubland, was no place for such a weapon. She leaped on him, caught the whip and jammed her blades into his eye sockets.
The machine gun, far off to her right, coughed once, and went silent.
She looked back at the flaming wreckage and knelt down, looking for the Inquisitor’s gun. It had to be better than whatever crap these mooks carried.
And it was! A Webley & Scott Peacemaker IV – a little muddy and rusty, but still a long-barrelled, heavy twelve-shot pistol that could pack as much power as a rifle. The Inquisitor was slightly mad for carrying the damn thing, but she thought of the elephants, and then of Penhaligon, and it fit. Big game demanded big bullets.
She continued upwards, towards Kandy.
Bengali, surprisingly, was far from feeding the worms. He was, however, uncomfortably close to a rotting jackfruit.
He crawled through a window, stumbled, fell, stumbled again, until he found what he was looking for. The bot he had just shot through the chest. It was still alive, moving feebly. Its shattered mask of a face turned to him as he approached it.
He was not a stupid man. He dragged the machine behind a tree, out of sight. He had the little laser torch he always kept in his cargo pants. Perks of the job – if you studied bots, you’d need to cut metal apart. He cut through the stinking cloth and down to the steel plate protecting the battery. It took him a few more tries to prise the cover off, but there it was – the rechargeable polycell that these things ran on, with a battery indicator pulsing amber.
There. Enough to power a humanoid. Enough to power a small house. More than enough power.
Murmuring to himself, he drew Sixsmith’s radiogram and connected it to the battery. Standard ports. Thank heavens for standard ports! He very carefully performed the sequence that turned it back to a regular radiogram, then dialed in the codes to connect to Kushlani’s network. He typed: Songbird can’t sing anymore. Send.
He heard the high-pitched whine-break-whine-break of relays connecting. Wherever this call was being rerouted to, it was pretty far.
Bengali. Drake here. Do you have the models?
I do. He didn’t. The pieces that he had missed by a mile. But hours of sitting here, thinking, had given him an idea—
Request extraction.
It was laughably simple, once you really looked at it. Strip away the inhumanity. Forget the machine nature. Strip away the savage attacks. Strip away the relentless warfare. Instead, think of people who k
new nothing but war. Imagine a human who had never been taught hate, only necessity.
And then, give it the power to connect to everything else around it.
What a fool he had been.
Stand by. Civil unrest in Kandy and Gampaha. Cavalry en route. Stay out of the fight. Get to safety. We’ll mop up.
The radiogram pulsed.
The bot turned feebly, watching him with its beady eyes. He stared back at it. The mask twitched. And suddenly, the germ of an idea exploded in his head.
Nest, he dialed. Please do not engage the bots when you arrive.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the bot. He picked up his knife and drew the wires from its neck, felt around for the tiny port at the back of the neck for the transmitter/receiver, made a cut and plugged the radiogram in.
Hello, he sent.
He was not prepared for the voice that greeted him. ‘For fuck’s sake, Bengali,’ said Eliot Grimme’s voice, clear and clearly annoyed. ‘I was trying to sleep.’
TWO
Five days later, Sixsmith got to Kandy. She rolled in on a military convoy, passing dead streets, shuttered doors, nervous faces at windows, monks, always more monks on the streets, and soldiers.
Marching. Down, she assumed, down to where troop transports would take them to the front.
She was tired and furious. Every fucking yard of this place was corrupt and inefficient and possibly bought by someone – if it wasn’t Penhaligon or one of the Houses, it was some plotter in Britain, or the Chinese, or even some enterprising soul in India. What were those the Kandyan troop deployments? And how many soldiers were walking around in civilian clothes, pretending to be normal? And how many crates of weapons had gone missing?
The LKRF had had their work cut out for them. She had to hand it to the terrorists – they’d broken this stupid city. Drake had once likened Penhaligon to Ozymandias – King of kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair! – but with nothing to show for it. Well, at east Ozymandias hadn’t been sitting on a viper, ready to jump up and bite him in the bunghole.
The Inhuman Peace Page 23