Firstly, we are bound to warn against the potential economic and geopolitical costs of aggression. Our Chinese counterpart, the intelligence known as the Port City of Ceylon, has made an unusual request – that Ceylon be given protectorate status under its own government, turning it into a trusted intermediary for trade in the region. It has made it clear that any attempt to use the Interitus to sort out the mess will be treated as an act of war against Chinese property, and by extension, the State. We advise allowing Penhaligon, in his old capacity, to integrate the Lanka Resistance Force, as they call themselves, as a political party, and thus preserve Ceylon as one unit. Government structures and biases are unlikely to be weeded out over time, and with the Inquisition still stationed there Ceylon will remain practically, if not theoretically, under British rule.
However, we must also warn against the ripple effects of conceding this position. We have noticed a rising tide of anti-British sentiments in India, and have postulated that the Ceylon situation might add fuel to the Indian resistance. The movement appears to have found new blood among the students of the Goa Mathematical and Military University, most of whom have had some robotics trainings and could be reasonably dangerous. China is playing a very dangerous game here, with economics and advice instead of bullets and bodies. Left unchecked, we face a potential destabilization in the entire South Asian section of the Commonwealth.
Her Majesty is right in suggesting that a lesson needs to be dished out. It is the cost of cleaning up after that raises questions on how to do this, and why.
Yours,
Dyson 1021
Bengali met them at dawn. He had somehow expected the whole tribe to show up, but she brought only ten others – all the remaining Explorers, he realized. All girls, with just one boy among them; probably one of the rare ones that had glitched in just the right way.
They stood blinking in the dawn light, looking worn out. The clashes with the Indian army had not been kind to them. Flaps of synth-skin hung off their bodies, exposing metal innards beneath. Soldiers, perhaps out of pity or out of respect, had given them uniforms, but even those were burned and blackened in places, and filthy all over.
Behind them stood a small troop of rather nervous soldiers. The Ceylonese had developed an almost superstitious awe for the little bots. It was one thing, he supposed, to have grown up seeing them on the screen, but another thing altogether to see them charge the enemy in front of you, turning men into red goo in a matter of seconds.
Kushlani was talking about getting them legal personhood.
Broken Dream was looking up at the clouds, at the light breaking over the mountains. She saw Bengali coming and smiled. He noticed she did that more often now.
‘This way,’ he said.
The procession of bots followed the man into the building once known as the Watchtower. As they crossed its boundary, each bot felt a ping in their minds, a hello-are-you-there from the ghost of a network protocol. It felt like a welcome. They shrugged those off.
‘Kushlani’s still trying, eh,’ said Bengali, frowning, leading them inwards. ‘Anyway. How’s the new place?’
‘Enough food,’ said Broken Dream. Her English was quite good by now.
‘It’s a big task, you know, running Trinco.’ But it was the right one. It had taken him days and many reworks of the models, but eventually, Chandrasinghe and his fledgling Parliament had acknowledged the benefit of having the first point of entry to the island run by things that could read radio networks in the blink of an eye and react far faster than any human could.
The only condition had been that only a few machines at a time stayed in Trinco. The rest were to stay in Colombo, and not, you know, step too far outside, because people really had enough to deal with. And then some bloody monk had stood up and begun a long-winded debate about whether or not they were alive, and if they were, whether or not they should be taught Buddhism.
Broken Dream smiled. She was getting to know Bengali better. ‘Port City is lonely now.’
‘No one to play its games with, eh?’
Man and bot passed through arches and tunnels.
They came to a cavern. Lights gleamed in the dark. Banks of compute clusters stood idle around a series of glass offices, and inside each of them were half-constructed bots surrounded by blueprints and screens on one side and botmaker’s tools on the other. On the other side of the offices was an entire workshop worth of material. Kushlani had insisted on the best.
The sounds of Max Bruch’s Violin No. 1 swelled in the silence, seeping in through the speakers Bengali had set up while he worked to restore the place.
‘It’s not the best,’ he said. ‘But I think it should be enough to let you repair yourselves. Even make more of you.’
He stood by respectfully as the Tribe scattered. Some went straight for the printers, following the wires that led into them. Some went to the workshop beyond. They didn’t understand the machines, and of course they had nothing but the most rudimentary understanding of what a computer was, but they tried to learn anyway.
Broken Dream stayed with Bengali, eyes bright.
‘This is the past,’ she said. ‘What about future?’
The future. Bengali sighed, pinching his eyes. He had managed to get a radiogram cluster working, and the university at Goa was still feeding him information, even though everyone else was technically locked out of the channels. ‘Well, things aren’t that great. The Tribe of China’s warned them to stay away, so they might. But I don’t think this is over, not yet. They don’t give up that easily, you know. The Tribe of Britain doesn’t like to lose.”
On the plus side, Kushlani hadn’t turned down his proposal. She hadn’t said yes, but she hadn’t said no, either.
‘Will you go back?’
‘Good question,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll ever let me back.’
He felt terribly lonely saying those words. So much for the thesis. And his career. And, well, all those things his parents expected him to do …
Tears blurred his eyes.
He felt something clunk against his knuckles. Something terribly strong picked at his fingers. He looked down to see Broken Dream trying to force her spear into his hand. She looked up at him.
‘Welcome to the Tribe,’ she said.
FIVE
Many, many years later, a young lawyer named Eraj Ekanayake pored over the steaming pile of career failure that his boss had assigned him to.
It was a Kushlani de Almeida case.
Nobody wanted a Kushlani de Almeida case. Nobody wanted to touch bot politics, even with a ten-foot pole. Wanigasekara had tried, arguing that the bots should be given the right to self-determination after the Uprising and Independence. Then, the bots had politely put in their request for a sovereign state of their own, and all hell had broken loose. Wanigasekara was denounced as a traitor and debarred. Even the heroes of the Uprising were sliding away edgeways. Chandrasinghe bargained with both sides, because he had to keep the peace, but he even he’d made it known that he wasn’t too happy with the situation.
Everyone except Kushlani de Almeida, who for some stupid reason just turned into the fire and kept on walking. Demanding citizenship. Demanding rights. Trying to define their silly code updates as being equivalent to public health. And this case, the one that Eraj had been given, was one of the oldest among them. To clear the bots of a collective murder charge for something that had happened so long ago, almost nobody could remember it.
Hilmy knew all this. The counterpoint was that Eraj was young, and his career could afford to take a hit. Everyone who was anyone knew that the boy got the case not by choice, but because he was the youngest and the newest lawyer at Hilmy’s chambers, and shit rolled downhill.
Such were Hilmy’s thoughts as he waited for Eraj to leave. It was pouring. The kid would be soaked. Good. It would calm him down a bit. When he was sure no one else was around, Hilmy picked up the very expensive radiogram on his desk and started makin
g calls. Introductions were whispered. ‘Yes,’ he said at one point. ‘Yes, we’ve taken up the case. Can’t refuse de Almeida, families have known each other for ages. Yes. It’s going to be a lot of noise, but it’s important to make the noise. Be ready. You’re going to lose.’
With that done, he ended the call, and looked out into the rain. Whatever happened next was out of his hands.
Two days later, Eraj Ekanayake ended up having dinner with Dr. Kushlani de Almeida, government employee, former Zone Controller for the Ministry of Reconciliation, and, in his mind, certified crackpot.
They met in one of the new highrise hotels. Kandy had finally relaxed its height laws, and the Peacock, as it was called, was perhaps the finest result – a lush green-and-blue spiral that erupted from the earth, with balconies spread out like the tips of feathers, looking out over the grim expanse of Kandy. It was a jewel of colour and noise in a land where so much had faded to dull grey.
He had never been there before, of course. All one could do on his salary was admire the Peacock from the tops of lesser hotels; the ones without the fancy climate-control fields, where the arrack tasted like acid rain and was twice as potent.
She was on time, of course, and he was late. She wore a black saree, and a thick braid of salt-and-pepper hair coiled around her neck. He adjusted his tie, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the fact that he was five minutes late.
He left feeling a little sad, a little angry, and profoundly unhappy. In the days to come, he would play his part in the caricature of law that was set to follow, and would mount a defense that impressed many of his seniors (even though he lost). He would remember those impassioned speeches of his forever, and in his old age would take to rerunning that transcript, over and over again:
CROFTON (L): What we generally consider human is flesh and blood. But there are certainly many variants of flesh and blood that no man in his right mind would consider human. The German atrocities, for example, or the cannibals of Africa. And every religion and code of law in the world – forgive me if I misinterpret Buddhism, your Honour – assigns rights and privileges based on behaviour, not on bodily composition, at least to my understanding. We certainly treat rapists and murderers like the brutes they are. So it would follow, based on the context of the world we live in, that humanity is indeed a thing of behaviours.
COURT: Lord Crofton, with respect, you will keep religious pontification beyond the scope of your reply.
EKANAYAKE (E): And if a robot were to exhibit such acceptable, human-like behaviours, that, say, you and I and this assembly would be capable of?
CROFTON: All behaviours you and I are capable of expressing? Why, I’d hang up my hat and shake its hand, of course. You’d have made life, man! A real human!
EKANAYAKE (L): What makes a human? What makes life? People eat. People grow and reproduce. Robots do not. Hamudhuruwane, your Honor, and members of the jury – do you see how ridiculous this is?’
The other Ekanayake, running defense, had looked smug. And Eraj rose to the occasion:
EKANAYAKE (E): Fire consumes, fire grows, fire spreads and reproduces. Hamudhuruwane, the opposition’s definition of life needs rethinking.
EKANAYAKE (L): Machines are code that we’ve written. Humans are made of flesh. Humans are born from mothers’ wombs.
EKANAYAKE (E): What is a machine, sir? There are people in the court who have been born in test tubes, who had body parts replaced with artificial organs. Are you calling them robots? Imagine that you are born a human ... imagine that you develop so many diseases that you end up replacing every single part of your body with a machine. Are you, then, a robot? Should we put you in the Zone and take away your constitutional rights?
Eraj Ekanayake did himself well that day. But not well enough.
MAHANYAKE: We, the Sangha, do not find enough evidence to consider these to be living creatures. Observe, all assembled. One of the great truths of this world is that all living creatures are born, and they die at the end of their lifespan, and then they are reborn, as the Buddha himself said. This is the law of the world.
These machines are neither born, nor do they die. And however much they mimic us, we conclude that this is simply an illusion. So to all assembled I say: as a mirror held up to a candle mimics the light, so it is with them. The mirror has no true flame, and nor do these machines. This we declare in the name of the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha.
COURT: Sadhu, sadhu.
That night, Nigel Penhaligon, Chief Inquisitor of Kandy, sat down in his bungalow with a cigarette in his hand, satisfied. He rarely had cause to be satisfied with the theocracy that now ran Kandy, but the humiliation of de Almeida’s oldest case had worked well. The same jury would be appointed for the next one, and the next, and the next, until all matters of importance were publicly defeated.
A pale and sickly moon hung over the darkness of Kandy, Ceylon. Spires, many of them new, and gleaming hotels reached out towards the sky, like strange snakes of metal reaching out to the grey-black ink of the clouds.
‘The Bluetooth device is ready to pair,’ blared a voice in a distant part of the country, too far away for anyone to hear.
At 18:05, a team of Inquisitors breached the Ministry building, shot the titular Controller, and retasked the engineers and programmers working there. At 19:23, a call went through from the Ministry to the Inquisition.
‘The software still works, sir. They haven’t patched through any updates since Almeida left. Engineers say the network towers are mostly there, but nobody knows what works and what doesn’t. By 22:00, I’ll have eight teams heading out to check the lines.’
Penhaligon laced his fingers together and looked out into the looming dark. ‘Do that,’ he said.
Almost meditatively, he dialed a number. It was late, but the person on the other end would pick up. He always did.
‘Control, Mr. Bengali,’ he said quietly. ‘We must have control.’
‘You bastard.’
‘You know, I was thinking about all that stuff you and Kushlani used to say,’ he said into the night. ‘Truth. Beauty. Justice. All that. How being able to recognize them made us people. How being able to recognize them should make the bots people, too. And you know what? It’s all horsecock. We don’t respond to truth, we don’t like anything more beautiful than we are … and our justice system is a complete farce. At the end of the day, we’re just here because we killed and ate and tamed anything that was a threat to us.’ He swirled the dregs of his glass. The arrack was sour, a little too sour, and thus perfect. ‘The irony.’
Silence on the other end. A small, choking sound. Then silence again.
He touched the old scars on his face. Sixsmith’s calling card, engraved onto him forever. A reminder.
Hours away, Chandrasinghe looked up from his desk. The man was tired, and the years had not been kind to him. The heroic frame and the wild beard of the guerilla had now been replaced with rolls of fat that clung to his shirt and a trimmed mustache that made him seem smaller than he actually was.
Nevertheless, his voice remained undiminished, and those who reported to him still trembled in their boots every so often.
‘Penhaligon what?’ Chandrasinghe barked.
The woman reporting to him had a moment to realize that the life of a double agent was not really worth it if it meant pissing off two of the most powerful people in Ceylon. She relayed her message, and added to it a plea of her own: amnesty, anonymity, the right to leave this mess behind.
Chandrasinghe listened. Then, because he was not an unreasonable man, he granted her request and sat back in his office, thinking.
There was no love lost between him and the bots. Nobody in their right mind could deny how important they had been in the battles against the Raj, and in the careful renegotiation of tithes and power that had followed. But there was only so much you could do when your most feared military force was one that refused to accept your constitution, that refused the polite boundaries that made soci
ety work, and probably was a Chinese-funded thorn in your side. For the last decade, it had made dealing with Kandy that much more difficult. The hill capital was powerless outside its boundaries, still impaled on British cock and their own traditions, but they still laughed at him because he couldn’t bring his own flock to heel.
At the same time, he prided himself on being fair. So he reached for his radiogram.
‘We know,’ the bot leader said before Chandrasinghe opened his mouth. The girl who hung from the tower. ‘We have been betrayed. Thank you.’
‘I haven’t done anything yet.’
‘You will,’ she said. Calm. Eerie. ‘Move your people from the Trincomalee harbour.’
Then, he realized what she wanted. ‘No, No! That’s the finest natural harbour anywhere on these seas. We need Trinco. We need—’
‘It does not matter to us what you need,’ she said. ‘We tried this your way. We accepted your conditions in exchange for fair treatment. We got none.’
‘This is how things work! Not every problem can be solved by killing someone – you have to talk, you have to compromise, sometimes things that don’t make sense happen, and they blow over. We sponsored Almeida’s bloody court cases about you, you hear? Problems like this blow over. This is how it works.’
‘We have achieved consensus,’ she said. ‘You do not apply this logic to yourselves. It is only us who are asked to be patient and take your beatings.’
She sounded older than she had been a month ago. ‘What do you want?’
She told him. His mind moved at what felt like the speed of the radiogram itself, examining different facets of the problem.
‘And if I get this to Kushlani?’ he asked.
‘We will grant you amnesty if you help us.’
‘I want Trinco.’
‘You may rent it from us. Our terms will be reasonable. Anything less will result in your people dying.’
The Inhuman Peace Page 27