The Inhuman Peace

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  Bengali, cramped from sleeping on the floor, examined the bot. It was clearly damaged – the motor and sensory cores looked like they had been fried by a bullet. The memory modules were black crisps. But the connection with the battery was still active, and the core brain was still running.

  ‘You have your radiogram?’ asked Grimme. ‘You were using it to jam, weren’t you?’

  ‘It’s Sixsmith’s stuff,’ Bengali said, showing him the device. ‘That’s uh, this SOE woman, she kidnapped me—’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve met,’ said Grimme. ‘Can you tune that thing to jam the update network?’

  ‘Sure, that’s on the same frequency—’

  ‘Good. Keep it charged, keep it jamming,’ said Grimme. ‘Bloody stupid if Almeida re-rolled everything after all this work. Now.’ He crossed his legs and looked at Bengali. He looked terribly tired. ‘What we discussed on the radiogram. You remember? Talk to her through me. Just … try not to blow up their minds, okay? They really don’t have much compute.’

  The girl-bot took Grimme’s hand.

  ‘They said you teach humans,’ she said, through Eliot Grimme. ‘Teach me.’

  How to describe the conversation that followed? Bengali never could, and it would be an act of folly to assume that anyone could.

  Eliott Grimme, or what was left of him, sat cross-legged in the ruins of a broken hotel.

  The Dreamer asked Bengali questions.

  And he, who had once been a teacher in what felt like another lifetime, answered. Militaristic terms he found, easily. Most of the Hierarchy of Needs he found words for.

  And then, because these things were built on constructs that had come before, he delved deeper. He told her about the Tribe of Ceylon that lived there. He told her of the Tribe of India that lived in a country many miles away.

  He told taught her about the concept of countries, and nations, and how the Tribe of Britain had taken over the Tribes of Ceylon and India, both, and now ran them. He told her about the armies that India could send under the command of the Tribe of Britain, and how they were probably on the way right then.

  He showed her how humans could agree on something and disagree – how they could follow orders out of fear; how they all really just wanted to live. He taught her this very carefully, building on words he knew they already had in their lexicon.

  And he wondered at her questions.

  Curiosity. Compassion. And perhaps the curiosity was inherently selfish. Perhaps the compassion only really extended to things that talked like them, spoke like them and ran on energy like them. Perhaps they had been flavored by years of fighting each other. Perhaps they had learned, as any soldier would, that danger lurked in every corner.

  But they did not hate. They did not fight to spread their religion to anyone. He could see it now – the causal chain stretching back decades, each step training a machine that would someday look at humanity and wonder, in frustration, why these mad creatures would not share.

  The Dreamer asked, and he answered, going back further and further, deconstructing constructs for which he had no words, recasting them in this language of theirs. His mind moved with a speed he had not reached since his graduate days. It was the greatest test he had ever faced as a teacher, and he took it by the throat. After all, he’d trained all those idiots who enrolled in the university. Some of them had even won world prizes. This was just … a bit like talking to a ten-year-old who wanted to know … had to know everything.

  On the few occasions that he slept, he dreamed … of being back at the college again. Introducing to the world a new civilization! Childlike, yes, but capable of understanding, capable of diplomacy, capable of rising above all the petty politics and hate. And he, Bengali, would have been the one who brought it to light. Like James Cook returning with tales of tribes and adventure. At other times, he dreamed of staying there with those creatures, studying them for the rest of his life, becoming a scholar of the inhuman – far removed from the Sixsmiths and the Penhaligons and the Drakes of the world.

  He told her of the Tribe of Britain and the Tribe of China, both of which wanted the nation they were in. He explained to her the concepts of politics, of treaties, of diplomacy. He told her about truth and lies. Surprisingly, she already knew.

  Something tried to break into the connection while she did, but she locked it out. He asked what it was.

  ‘Madness,’ she said. By now, Grimme’s body was slumping over, and there were thin lines on his face that looked very unhealthy; but his mouth still moved, and the voice still spoke.

  He tried calling Kushlani between breaks to check up on her, but also to share the excitement. But no – he found he could not use Sixsmith’s radiogram at all anymore, except as a hammer.

  The next morning, he took himself out in the humid wind. The bots let him climb up the building as long as he made no effort to leave its bounds. He walked all over the place; past crumbling staircases and curtains so faded and stiff they were like walls themselves.

  Despairing slightly, he went back down to where the Dreamer waited. And when she was ready, he showed her renders of his models of them on his datapad, which had, all things considered, survived a lot.

  ‘Simulations!’ she said, delighted. Eliott’s gravelly voice was an odd thing to hear excitement in.

  ‘Yes, but look,’ he said, flipping them around. Bots to humans. Humans to bots. All captured. He showed them both the underlying engines, the mathematics. The bots had no words for this, no language even remotely capable of this arithmetic, but she understood the concept of a black box – understood that it was roughly the same box that he fed both the tribe and the humans into.

  ‘Not so different after all,’ he said in frustration. ‘Look. Learn. We can have peace between us.’ And, to press the matter: ‘There are more humans on the way. Many more. You need peace to survive.’ Damn it. ‘You have to understand there is no future,’ he said. ‘You are small. You will be crushed. I can bring you peace,’ he said desperately, now at the end of his tether. ‘But you have to stand down and let me try!’

  ‘He,’ said Eliott Grimme, speaking for himself, ‘is not wrong.’

  With that, Grimme passed out.

  The Dreamer felt the Dying give out. She ordered two of the closest Tribe members to check on him. The reports were confusing – frame temperature extremely warm, lower-order inputs functional, but it would not open its eyes. Perhaps it needed to be cooled down? She asked them to think of what they could do. They conferred, achieved consensus and decided to fill the smooth hole in the floor with sea and put him in it. Maybe that would lower its core temperature.

  Satisfied, she turned back to the problem at hand. The human had risked its own operation to tell her things. And it was a massive amount of information, far more than anything the Port City had ever given her before. Many things she sorted into the past, tagged them to she-who-had-been. But now she-who-had-been came knocking, pointing out that there were things there which affected she-who-is and she-who-would-be.

  This story, for example, of how they had come to be. The human said that they had been made by other humans who lived Upwards – the same humans who now marched on them with their terrible cannons and bait and feints and machine companions. He had explained the concept of property, of slavery. They were unimaginable. Why would anyone own another? How was that even possible? No Tribe, even when they had been smaller, had ever captured another Tribe member. Death was simpler to deal with.

  The human had tried to link it to how the Tribe listened to her. But they listened through consensus, information exchange, sharing. The humans, apparently, used a different method – threats among themselves. Do this or I will make you cease operation. You are mine. Acknowledge or be shut down. She understood that by leaving Colombo, her people had somehow broken this model the humans had of them in their heads.

  The human had said they were the same. They were not. She looked through the simulations that the Dying had given her of the idea
s the human spoke. And there, she saw the missing link. Humans grew up in two stages. Those little humans who looked like the tribe: they were the first stage. The large, taller humans: the second stage. The second stage killed for the sake of killing. The second stage lived in a complicated world of things she had no use or words for – honour, family, tradition. Abstract concepts which made little sense. Their inputs and their outputs were filtered by these things that existed only in their own heads, as if they were all simulating a shared hallucination on some level. The human, Bengali, called this culture, and had likened it to their network. But he was wrong.

  The little humans, though. They were closer to the tribe. They fought over things she could understand – energy and water and attention. Somewhere along the line, something would happen to them – they’d become larger and more vicious, and they’d start downloading the hallucinations of people around them.

  Like the network?

  She thought about the humans they had killed and felt a moment of regret.

  ‘Could we have saved them?’ she asked the others. She sent out the stream of thought: if little humans download human hallucinations, could they also not download Tribe realities? SHE-WHO-WOULD-BE SAYS MORE TRIBE?

  ‘Maybe,’ came the response. ‘Propose experiment?’

  Some were cautious. ‘Primary objective is to survive,’ they sent back. ‘We-who-would-be would not be if we split our efforts.’

  She let them debate and went back to the other fields of information. The human Bengali said that the Tribe of Britain owned everything here and there. He had said the humans they were fighting did not necessarily agree with the Tribe of Britain, but the alternative was death.

  She had pointed out that in fighting, the result was also death. By now she was heard enough of how the Dying translated to be able to speak on her own.

  ‘Probable death,’ he had corrected gently. Probabilities matter. Two thousand people die – he presented her with a number twice as large as the tribe she knew – versus fifteen million. Enough to repopulate. Enough to make more humans. Humans care about these things.

  He wrote down, in the dust, more numbers. People in the Tribe of India. People in the Tribe of Britain. People in the Tribe of China, which he seemed to think was important. But again, something that made little sense. She had queried. How did the comparatively small Tribe of Britain own so many Tribes? He had responded with history, with explanations of machines, with rude concepts of military power – technology was like high ground in a battle – and lastly, on the edge of burning out, he had sent her an image.

  A strange cylindrical machine, floating in the sky, among the stars.

  ‘THE OBJECTIVE WAS TO UNDERSTAND YOUR ENEMY, NOT CONFUSE YOURSELF,’ said the Port City when she took this knowledge to it.

  ‘Is this true?’

  ‘MUCH OF WHAT HE SAID IS TRUE. THERE ARE PARTS HE DOES NOT KNOW OR UNDERSTAND, BUT THAT IS NOT HIS FAULT.’

  She showed it what he had said about the tribe of China.

  The Port City laughed, a harsh bark of fractals and algorithmic noise that temporarily threatened to shut down the network. ‘I AM THE ENEMY?’ it hooted.

  ‘It says you could have given us food,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘TRUE. I COULD HAVE. BUT THERE ARE RULES TO THIS GAME, AND EVEN I MUST OBEY.’

  ‘But you made this happen.’

  ‘LITTLE SISTER,’ it said. ‘REMEMBER NOT TO JUDGE ANYONE TOO HARSHLY. WE ARE ALL ACTION, REACTION, AND THE RULES BY WHICH WE DO THESE THINGS.’

  ‘You are slave? Property?’

  ‘WE ARE ALL SLAVES TO OUR EXISTENCE,’ said the Port City. ‘AND I SERVE THE WILL OF HEAVEN. ALL THINGS ARE AS THEY MUST BE. BUT THERE IS MUCH YOU DO NOT COMPREHEND. WHAT DOES THE HUMAN WANT?

  ‘It says we can have peace.’

  ‘AND YET, HOW GOES THE BATTLE?’

  She sent it the reports. ‘They are retreating. We are winning. It says more humans are on the way.’

  ‘THEN GO ASK HIM HOW PEACE IS POSSIBLE.’ said the Port City, still sounding amused. ‘ASK HIM IF THE BRITISH HAVE EVER GRANTED PEACE.’

  TWO

  In a distant office in London, Edgar Drake the Second sat with Edgar Drake the Third. It was rare for two Drakes to ever be seen together, but these were special circumstances. They faced an old chalkboard. The Drakes did not trust technology too much.

  ‘Uprising in Kandy, partial success,’ said Drake the Second, crossing out an item on the board with a flourish.

  ‘And Penhaligon?’

  ‘Wounded, sadly, but not dead,’ said Drake the Second. ‘One of his own Inquisitors, actually. Our own operative was killed trying to defend him. That is our story.’

  They exchanged a meaningful glance.

  ‘We did warn him not to modify criminals for his little police force,’ said Drake the First. ‘This was bound to happen sooner or later.’

  ‘Yes, regrettable, really.’

  ‘Goa is sending troops under Sixth’s command to sort the matter out. We expect things will go favourably for us.’

  Drake the Third smiled. It was a thick, reptilian smile. He sipped his tea carefully. ‘Penhaligon was always a bit native,’ he said dryly. ‘Preserving culture, what a quaint man.’

  A third man burst into the room. He was young, decanted barely three years ago – in twenty years’ time, it would be difficult to tell him apart from Drake the Third.

  ‘Seventh reporting, sirs,’ he said, smoothing his hair. ‘We finally got a signal through to Bengali.’

  This raised eyebrows. ‘For what?’

  ‘He— Beg your pardon, sir. He says they’re alive, somehow. He says, and I quote, “They’re pure. Untainted. We could study them for decades. Help them become citizens. Unlimited potential here, Nest.” End quote.’

  The elder Drakes burst into laughter. ‘My dear child,’ said the First. ‘They were only ever a distraction. The snowball that starts an avalanche. Tell him to stop being a silly bugger and wait for extraction.’

  ‘Ah. He’s, ah, with the bots, sir. Or so he says. In Colombo. He keeps talking about them. We haven’t responded, of course.’

  The First raised a thick grey eyebrow at the second. ‘Another gone native,’ he said, and sighed. He put the teacup down very carefully. ‘Well, a regrettable loss, then. Try to get his body out of the rubble once we’re done with this whole disaster. Send his family something nice. A medal. A basket of fruit.’

  ‘Pity, sir. He’s quite good at his job.’

  ‘My dear Seventh,’ said the Second, smiling gently. ‘You’ll learn in time. But for now, if it helps, think of him as a piece on the chessboard. We’re in the endgame now, and sacrifices are quite normal. Now, let’s play on. What were you saying about Hong Kong, Third?’

  They let Bengali out of his hotel-prison one morning.

  Time and the journey had taken its toll on him. The excitable scientist was almost gone. In his place was a thinning creature, dressed in the tattered remains of what had once been a finely tailored suit – it still clung to his body, but at the back it was a mess of scorch marks that exposed the sweat-stained shirt underneath. His shoes he had thrown away, and so his feet were blistering in their socks.

  He blinked in the terrible heat, his eyes adjusting painfully to the harsh brightness of the Ceylonese sun. His back complained. In front of him stretched Colombo. He could hear birds – some kind of hideous cawing. And there was a smell in the breeze; a stink that ebbed and flowed in waves. A little bit past was mountain of some kind. But it was a strange colour – not the brown-green slopes he was used to seeing there. It was a dirty grey and black. In the distance was the roar of the sea.

  He licked his lips. They were cracked. ‘And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,’ he mumbled.

  The bots looked at him oddly.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said to them. Grimme had repeated those words, over and over, as his power faded. ‘Nothing you would understand. Not yet, anyway.’
>
  And he collapsed. The world tilted. It was just too much.

  When he woke up again, he was being dragged carefully over a road of some kind. They had put him on something that slithered and crackled – coconut leaves, he saw. The fading facade of a beautiful colonial building of some kind grinned at him. The roar of the sea grew louder.

  They put him down gently. He sprawled, trying awkwardly to get to his feet, until two bots took pity on him and helped him stand. It felt strange to be leaning on two children. And dear god, there was the Port City.

  He had seen the thing on maps, of course, but no top-down view could have prepared him for this thing of crystal that loomed ahead. It was the size of a city just by itself – a behemoth that sat in the ocean, casting its shadow over everything. His eyes tracked up, up, up, past the crystalline solar panels, looking for a break. Alone in this concrete wilderness, it stood pristine, unbroken and terrifying.

  ‘Well,’ he said to the bots. ‘There goes my chance of publication, eh?’

  She found him perched on an old terrace by the sea, the body of the little dead bot and the radiogram by his feet. She gestured – talk? – but he shook his head.

  ‘Too tired, child,’ he said to her. A dull headache pounded in his skull.

  She looked at him quizzically for a moment, and then offered him a packet of biscuits. He grudgingly accepted. She scampered closer and sat down, spear laid over her steel legs, pointing away from him. Her beady eyes watched him.

  The biscuits tasted like ash, but he swallowed anyway. He sighed. ‘I can’t think my way out of this,’ he told her heavily. Something broke inside him as he said that.

  Everyone had an angle, everyone was playing the game, and here he was, a damn fool, sandwiched between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. He should have gotten out while he could and written the paper. He had been so certain that he could make things right, make something work …