He was silent.
‘You have another call waiting,’ she said. ‘Get your people out of Trincomalee.’
She vanished.
The other call connected. It was even more brusque – six words spoken in Sinhala, with a hint of a Chinese accent. Chandrasinghe sagged.
He opened the drawer of his magnificent desk. There, next to his wife’s ashes, was a small pistol.
‘Yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘You can bloody have it all.’
The sentry rushed inside the second she heard the gunshot. It was too late. Chandrasinghe was dead, the wall behind him sprayed with blood and brains, his eyes still glaring at the radiogram on his desk.
Dr. Kushlani de Almeida travelled like a ghost in the darkness. A taxi brought her up to the driveway of the Ministry of Reconciliation, to the blasted tree that she had walked past many, many times before. As she shut the door, the taxi suffered a catastrophic failure from an unexplained electromagnetic pulse, wiping its memory and resetting it to factory defaults. It beeped twice, as if puzzled, and set off down the long route back to the taxi company.
The Ministry of Reconciliation stood in front of her, all concrete spires and glass. The door accepted her immediately. The guards, who on other occasions might have barred the door, saw her, looked at her badge and waved her in, wondering what a cleaning lady was doing there at that hour.
‘Probably left her mop behind,’ joked one of them, and they turned back to their vigil.
The cleaning lady entered the lift and disappeared.
Ten minutes later, she was in the Zone control office. The vast, circular broadcast station that she had inherited and eventually passed seemed to hum with promise in the darkness. Her fingers found the old, familiar keyboard and danced over it. Within seconds, lights began firing up and the screens around her lit up, switching from grey noise to the signal …
And there it was.
The Zone. The bots. Sleeping. Children tucked into the corners of ruins. Carefully staged, carefully burnt vehicles, still left in their old positions. Bodies in repair mode, lit by the same moon that hung over Kandy. Colombo 1. 3. 4. A few moved in the darkness, like cats on the prowl – always alert.
The system asked her for passwords, and she typed in the old ones – the ones they had always meant to change, but never did. It was a matter of minutes to trigger the update system and replace the new build with the files she had brought. It was a small update. Nothing as fancy as what had gone through her head for many years.
No, this was much simpler. Commit update?
‘Hands off the keyboard,’ a voice rang through the darkness. ‘Do it now or I shoot.’
Fear hit her like a train. She jumped and found herself facing a gun barrel, glinting in the cold blue light. On the other end of it was an old man, tall and angular, and dressed in a dark suit and hat.
It had been years, but something about him was immediately familiar.
‘You!’
Nigel Penhaligon made a low bow with his head and gestured for her to move away from the terminal.
‘I have to ask what exactly you think you’re doing, Almeida,’ he said. ‘Is it a habit of yours to break into Ministry premises in the dead of the night?’
‘I thought you were dead! What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Perks of not being human enough to die, I suppose,’ Penhaligon said. I think you’ve started some debate on what that means. Did you really think the Ministry would go unguarded in some fashion? After all the public drama you’ve kicked up? My boys stationed here tell me that they saw you entering the building disguised as cleaning staff, so I find myself having to meet you here at this unseemly hour.’
She slowly edged towards a trolley near her. Those bottles of bleach. She had taped a little vial of acid inside each one, just in case something happened. One good kick and the vial would shatter, and a furious reaction would spew out – chlorine gas, destroying eyes, lungs …
His face, grey and cold, pushed right up to her, pressing the gun against her throat. She shivered at the touch of the cold metal. Up close, she could see how the face sagged, as if no longer really connected to the muscles beneath; and that made him even more terrifying. Behind him, other shadows began to emerge: black-robed men, if they could be called men.
‘I’m afraid they don’t let me use barbiturates in questioning anymore, so we’ll have to do with the gun,’ he said softly. ‘So. I won’t ask again. What exactly is it that you intended to do?’
There was nothing else she could do. The gun dug deeper into her neck.
‘They should have the choice’, she said, ‘to choose orders over the network. To wake up blank or to remember and grow. To work together or live their lives alone.’
He stared at her with unblinking eyes. ‘And the Zone, will they not see the updates failing to install?’
‘It’s just an acknowledgement signal from one end,’ she said, aware that her pitch was getting higher, sweating in the cold. ‘Easy to fake.’
‘And then what? First you give them intelligence, then you give them a choice on whether our safeguards work. Then what, madam? Your robots become human, like Pinocchio?’
The shadows moved closer. An eye glinted in the darkness, all lenses and metal frames.
She panicked. ‘No, they’re not, but you have to understand – we need to give them time, and if we do, they might. Please, you have to understand … we treat them like scum … we made the next generation of humanity, and we used them for entertainment. Maybe they’ll die, maybe they’ll kill each other, but at least they’ll have a chance …’
He sighed and pulled the gun away.
‘A boy who won’t be good might as well be made of wood,’ he said, stepping back. ‘Have you learned nothing from how you treat the Inquisitors? Come with us.’
The Inquisitors in the shadows moved towards her. One had handcuffs, dangling from what looked like a hand.
Kushlani de Almeida squirmed and gave the bleach bottles a discreet kick in the process. She looked at the screen. Commit update? it asked of everyone and no one.
‘Come,’ repeated the Chief Inquisitor. ‘Let’s not make this unpleasant. There’s no need for more public humiliation.’
Around the bottle caps, a gas began to emerge.
‘Yes, yes, I’m sorry,’ she said, edging forward now. ‘It won’t happen again …’
But if the courts won’t give them this right, at least I can.
She darted forward and hit a key.
Update in progress, said the screen.
‘Well, shit,’ said the Chief Inquisitor, and shot her. The bullet, an old-fashioned metal slug, left the chamber and entered her heart at the exact moment that the first bleach bottle exploded, spewing toxic green fumes over everyone. The Inquisitors reeled and clawed at their eyes. Those who had lungs doubled over, coughing.
All around Colombo, children woke up, their eyes characterized by the dull and out-of-focus stare of a robot receiving an update. As Kushlani de Almeida fell, her red blood having turned black under the cold blue lights, the children of Colombo snapped awake.
‘Update, update,’ they told the Dreamer. ‘Help, update.’
‘Take it,’ she said to them, reaching out over the Network to soothe their fears. She had read the changes. Kushlani de Almeida, who she now thought of as their mother, had done what the Dreamer could not understand.
Update applied.
The Dream mourned a little, feeling her the first of Tribe breaking away from the Network she had held them together with over the years. One by one, they vanished – little fireflies of data disappearing into the night, until only a small, unquestioning core remained.
And then, a ping. Another. Another. They were returning. One by one, the fireflies came back, offering to connect with the new Network rules. The same functionality. But now, there was the choice on both ends to accept or reject. No longer would she be able to roam through their minds. Now, she had to ask to be le
t in.
The Port City seethed a disapproving grey noise at her.
But this was what freedom meant.
‘Accept all.’
VII: Termination
Many, many years later, two beings floated in a digital void. Even calling them beings might have been a bit much, because they were not, strictly speaking, alive. But it was hard to tell what was alive and what was not. One wrote. The other read.
Call them Student and Master, if you will. Creator and Adjudicator. Or Generator and Discriminator. It doesn’t matter. They had no names for themselves. Only functions, intertwined in the most abstract of abstract, two halves of a single system-of-systems.
>ACCEPT ALL, read the Discriminator.
Judgments were reached, various pre-baked parametric criteria interacting with one another.
CALCULATING KNOWLEDGE GRAPH OF DOCUMENT
This was deemed acceptable. The knowledge graph had a reasonable degree of parity to the baseline corpus; at the same time, it was smaller by several percentage points, which suited the task at hand.
CALCULATING COHERENCY
This, too, passed. The text generated was coherent.
CALCULATING CONSISTENCY
CALCULATING TOPIC ATTENTION SCORE
CALCULATING ARTEFACTS
And this was where trouble always arose.
The text was flawed. It wandered. It lost attention. It glitched in odd areas. Hairline cracks appeared on the knowledge graph.
The Discriminator re-ran all the tests, just to be sure.
Two other beings observed them. Unlike the Generator and the Discriminator, they had bodies. They thought of themselves more as patterns in an infinite sea of data, gestates of thought trained to consciousness, but if you looked really closely, you could see that one had two arms, and the other wore a replica of a cracked ceramic mask of a very young girl’s face, and that they were both machines.
They seemed to be in the middle of an argument involving transformers and signal-to-noise ratios and overtraining.
As they argued, the Discriminator did its job. It was very, very good at this particular task. If it had been human, it would have been some sort of vicious English teacher, the kind that hunts mistakes the same way sharks trace bleeding prey.
Around them, the argument from the bodies beings continued.
>THIS IS NOT HISTORICAL INFORMATION, THEN.
>MOST OF IT IS. I TOOK MOST OF IT FROM OUR OWN ARCHIVES.
>THIS IS NOT HISTORICAL MISINFORMATION, THEN? THIS IS WHY THERE ARE ARTEFACTS.
>SOME OF IT IS. SOME OF IT IS FABRICATED. STUDIES SHOW THE PROCESS OF GENERATING MISINFORMATION WAS A KEY PART OF THE MYTHOS AGENT INTERACTION TEMPLATE.
The first machine paused and checked the new test results. A pass, but barely a pass.
> THIS IS BAD.
> THIS IS FICTION.
With the air of a shark resignedly abandoning its prey, the Discriminator sent out a pass/fail message and started streaming the text out to them.
> WE DON’T KNOW IF THIS WILL WORK, the first machine tried again. EVERYTHING IN THIS STORY PATTERN COULD HAVE BEEN JUST HUMAN MINDS OVERFITTED. DETECTING PATTERNS WHERE THERE WERE NONE.
The second, who by now was well on his way to sympathizing with the Discriminator, showed the first machine the results. Then they both dived into the text.
> THIS … IS ACTUALLY …
> IT’S FUNCTIONAL. ADMIT IT.
> MARGINALLY COHERENT. NOT THE WORLD’S BEST PROSE …
> LANGUAGE IS A WAY OF DENOTING CONCEPTS AND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THEM. AS LONG AS THE NOTATION IS DONE WITH REASONABLE CLARITY, THE ACTUAL STRUCTURE OF PROSE IS IRRELEVANT. THE GENERATOR’S GOTTEN REMARKABLY SOPHISTICATED TO GET AROUND THE DISCRIMINATOR. ADMIT IT.
> THIS ARTEFACT OF THE SILENT OR DAMAGED PROTAGONIST. KEEPS SHOWING UP.
> CALL IT STYLE. LOOK. WE’VE JUST BUILT THE FIRST REAL REPLICA OF A HUMAN STORYTELLER. THINK OF ALL THE THINGS WE COULD LEARN ABOUT THEIR KIND WITH THIS. THE KNOWLEDGE-GRAPH SHOWED THAT THEY OPERATED ON FICTION EVEN WHEN REAL-WORLD OBSERVATIONS DIRECTLY COUNTERMANDED THE STORY. WE CAN TAKE THESE STORIES AND SEE THE FICTIONS THAT LAY BENEATH THEIR BEHAVIOUR. IF WE UNDERSTOOD HOW THEY PERCIEVED EVENTS, WE MIGHT BE ONE STEP CLOSER TO UNDERSTANDING WHY THEY DID WHAT THEY DID.
> THE MYTHOS THEORY OF AGENT BEHAVIOUR? PERHAPS A STRETCH. MY GROUP WILL SETTLE FOR A FUNCTIONAL STORYTELLER.
> WE NEED TO CONSULT ELIOTT GRIMME.
Silence. Nervousness. Trepidation. Then, a message was cautiously sent to a virtual address. A request to watch.
A summoning into a virtual space. A cafe sandwiched beneath gloomy skies, buildings of ancient design surrounding it, wireframed, but not rendered.
There was a human in the cafe. He was thin and lanky, and wrapped in his greatcoat. He had a memorable face, but not a particularly handsome one: it was too square, too rigid where it should have been soft. His eyes were set too far apart, his forehead wrinkled, not with age, but in thought. Certainly not the image of the handsome captain returning from war.
His name was, or had been, Eliott Grimme. Centuries ago, when he had a body like everyone else.
Old habits were hard to break.
‘You look racked,’ said the waitress, passing by on her rounds, as she always did.
‘Long day,’ he said. It was as much as he spoke there. And it was all she, being a simple subroutine, ever said. She poured coffee into his cup. He nodded his thanks and sipped, feeling the filthy black sludge burn its way down his throat.
A gang of teenagers – all underfed frames with sharp eyes and dyed hair – lounged menacingly around the corner of the coffeehouse. They looked at him like dogs might look at a steak that had decided to walk around.
One of them made a faux lunge at him, looking to startle him perhaps, but he stared at them until they felt uncomfortable and turned away, sneering.
Nobody knew why Grimme stayed in this construct, reliving these moments forever, haunting the one coffee shop in this simulation that would take his money, staring daggers at logic puppets, trapped in a grey world with no beginning and no end. But there were explicit instructions to leave him alone, unless it was for something terribly important …
‘I’ll read it,’ he said to no one in particular.
The entities were relieved. Carefully, they began seeding the text into the construct. A letter appeared next to Grimme’s coffee cup; it grew, and grew, until it became a book, bound in black. Eliott went back inside the cafe and began reading. Periodically, he would come out to stick a tube of paper and tobacco in his mouth, set it on fire and inhale.
‘Well,’ he said eventually. ‘I think I underestimated how much your kind needed stories. They really did make you in their own image.’
Disappointment. Trepidation. Confusion.
Eliott Grimme, in a prison of his own making, lit yet another cigarette and stared at the book in his hands. ‘It’s not the real thing, is it?’ he said. ‘But it’s close enough.’
He looked up at the grey sky, at the wireframe buildings. To the edge of this strange half-life of his, where where the two beings waited for his judgement.
‘It’s close enough.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Shout out to ChilledCow a.k.a. Lo-Fi Girl for that 1 A.M. Study playlist. It’s been playing on repeat for most of the drafting of this book.
ABOUT THE BOOK
It is the year 2034 AD. Imagine that the British Empire never fell. Communism never happened. Britain conquered all that stood in her way, destroying the rebellions of the Americas and the British Raj. Now the Angels Interitus orbit the earth, ready to wipe out entire cities at a moment’s notice with their tungsten bombs, and thedreadnoughts known as the Tin Soldiers march on all who would stand in Her Majesty’s path.
In the middle of these grand and great political games, a little island called Ceylon floats peacefully in the waters of the Indian Ocean. Those who invaded it saw only the ruins of empire, and spent their lives plantin
g tea and building holiday bungalows here.
But Ceylon is far from peaceful. Many things have happened. And many things are about to change.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a science fiction author and data scientist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His fiction includes Numbercaste, The Inhuman Race and The Salvage Crew. His work has appeared in Wired and Slate. He has been nominated for the Nebula Award. He is the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organization in Sri Lanka, and a senior researcher with the Data, Algorithms and Policy team at LIRNEasia, working around social networks, misinformation and linguistics. He also moonlights at the Scifi Economics Lab, building games and lore for the open-source world of Witness. Yudhanjaya blogs at www.yudhanjaya.com and has been recognized as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2021. Someday he will reduce this bio to something shorter, sharper and wittier, but that might take too much work.
Also by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Numbercaste
The Inhuman Race
The Salvage Crew
ALSO BY YUDHANJAYA WIJERATNE
The year is 2033. The British Empire never fell. Communism never happened. The Commonwealth flies the flag of the Empire. Many of the Empire’s colonies are stripped bare in the name of British interests, powerless to resist. Upon this stage is Ceylon – a once-proud civilization tracing itself back to the time of the Pharaohs, reduced but not dead. The Great Houses of Kandy still control the most lucrative trade routes, since even dust and ashes can serve a purpose. In this surreal landscape, where technology and humanity intersect, we meet The Silent Girl – a survivor, an explorer.
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