The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  “Hmm,” said Myra. “Reid doesn’t seem to know about them—he knows we have nukes in space, but he thinks they’re all in Earth orbit.” She paused.

  “Wait a fucking minute. If you’re the only person up here who knows about them, then the request from the Party a couple of years ago was in fact a request from you. You, personally.”

  “Well, yeah,” Logan said. He didn’t seem bothered at all. “In my capacity as Party Secretary for the space fraction, that is.”

  “You took it upon yourself to do that? What the fuck was on your mind?” God, she thought, there I go again with the incredulous screech. She added, in a flat, steady voice, “Besides, what gave you the right to interfere in my section, and in my section’s state?”

  Logan squirmed, like someone shifting uncomfortably in an invisible chair. “I had a valid instruction to do it. From the military org.”

  “Ah! So there is someone else who knows about it!”

  “Not as such,” said Logan. “The military org is…” He hesitated.

  “Like you said, a small cadre?” Myra prompted.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Logan. He looked as though he was steeling himself for an admission. “It’s an AI.”

  Myra felt her back thump against the back of her chair—she was literally thrown by this statement. She took a deep breath.

  “Let’s scroll this past us again, shall we? Tell me if I’ve got this right. Two years ago, at the Sputnik centenary, Val gets a message from you, asking for part of our stash of nukes. It’s a valid Party request, she decides I don’t need to know, and she blithely complies. And the reason this happened is because you got a request from a fucking computer?”

  “An AI military expert system,” Logan said pedantically. “But yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

  Myra groped blindly for a cigarette, lit it shakily. “And just how long has the Fourth International been taking military advice from an AI?” Logan did some mental arithmetic. “About forty years,” he said.

  It was no big secret, Myra learned. Just one of those things she’d never needed to know. The AI had originated as an economic and logistic planning system devised by a Trotskyist software expert in the British Labour Party. This planning mechanism had been used by the United Republic of Great Britain, and inherited by its self-proclaimed successor, the underground Army of the New Republic, after Britain had been occupied, and its monarchy restored, by the Yanks in the Third World War. It had acquired significant upgrades, not all of them intended, during the twenty-year guerilla war that followed, and had played some disputed role in the British national insurrection during the Fall Revolution in 2045. Its central software routines had been smuggled into space by a refugee from the New Republic’s post-victory consolidation. It had been expanding its capacities, and its activities, ever since.

  “Most people call it the General,” Logan told her. “Aces the Turing, no sweat.”

  “But what’s it doing?” Myra asked. “If it’s such a shit-hot adviser, why aren’t we winning?”

  “Depends what you mean by ‘we’,” Logan said. “And what you mean by ‘winning’.”

  Myra had, she realised, no answer to that. Perhaps the AI adviser had picked up on the Analysis analysis, and agreed that the situation was hopeless.

  Logan was looking at her with sympathetic curiosity, a sort of reversed mirror-image of the hostile bafflement she was directing at him. He must have gone native up there; he’d got used to this situation, and to this style of work, over the decades, and had forgotten the common courtesies of even their notional comradeship.

  “Anyways,” he was saying, “you can ask it all that yourself.” He poked, absently, at the control-panel between his feet; looked up; said, Tutting you through.”

  Before Myra could so much as open her mouth, Logan had vanished, and had been replaced by the military AI. She’d had a mental picture of it, ever since Logan had first mentioned it: something like the Jane’s software, a VR gizmo of lines and lights. At best a piece of simulant automation, like Parvus.

  He was a young man in sweat-stained camos, sitting casually on a rock in a clearing in temperate woodland: lichen and birch-bark, sound of water, birdsong, leaf-shadow, a wisp of woodsmoke. It looked like he’d paused here, perhaps was considering setting up a camp. The man looked every inch the commandante—his long, wavy black hair and his black stubble and dark eyes projected something of the glamour of Guevara, the arrogance of Trotsky. He also reminded Myra, disturbingly, of Georgi—enough to make her suspect that the image she saw was keyed to her personality; that it had been precisely tuned to give her this overwhelming impression of presence, of charisma.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Myra.”

  She opened her hands. You could have called.”

  “No doubt I would have done, quite soon.” The entity smiled. “I prefer that people come to me. It avoids subsequent misunderstandings. Anyway—I understand you have two concerns: the nukes at La-grange, and the space-movement coup. Regarding the first—the nukes are still under your control. Your Defence Minister still has the access codes. I requested that the weapons themselves be moved here for security.” He shrugged, and smiled again. “They’re all yours. So are the weapons in Earth orbit—which are, of course, more immediately accessible, and usable. This brings me to your other concern—the coup. It is imminent.”

  “How imminent?”

  “In the next few days. They’ll ram through the vote on reorganisation of the ReUN, and the new Security Council will issue orders to seize the battlesats. They have the forces to do it.”

  He paused, looking at her, or through her. “But we have the forces to stop it. I can assure you, Myra, it’s all in hand.”

  She shook her head. “That isn’t what our intelligence indicates. I’ve checked, my Defence and Foreign ministries have checked. We have agents in the batdesats, as you must know—hell, some of them must be in your own military org! If such a thing exists.” She wished she had read some of those mailings.

  “It most certainly does exist,” the General said firmly. “And it’s been feeding you disinformation.”

  What?

  The entity stood up and stepped towards her in its virtual space. It spread its hands and assumed an apologetic expression, but with a sly conspiratorial gleam in its eyes.

  “Forgive me, Comrade Davidova. This was not done against you. It was done against our common enemy: Reid’s faction of the space movement.”

  “How—” she began, but she saw, she saw.

  “I’m telling you this now,” the General said, “because today you lost your last disloyal Commissar. Alexander Sherman has been passing on information to Reid for months. He wasn’t the first, but he was the last.”

  “Who were the others?”

  The General moved his hand in a smoothing gesture. T can’t tell you that without compromising current operations. That particular information is of no further use to you anyway.”

  “I suppose not,” Myra concurred reluctantly. She wished she knew who the traitors were, all the same; hoped Tatanya and Michael hadn’t been among them. She’d quite liked those two…

  “So you used them—and us—as a conduit for disinformation?”

  The General nodded. “And for information going the other way—your updates to Jane’s have been most helpful.”

  “Jeez.” Her reactions to this were interestingly complicated, she thought distantly. On the one hand she felt sore at having been used, having been lied to; on the other, she could admire the stagecraft of the deception. Above all she felt relieved that the gloomily negative assessments she’d worried over were all wrong.

  Unless the situation was even worse than she’d thought—

  “The situation is better than you think, by far,” said the General. “We have our people in place—the battlesats won’t be taken without a struggle, which in most cases we expect to win.”

  “Most cas
es won’t be enough. Even one battlesat—”

  “Indeed. Which is where your orbital weaponry comes in. The lasers, the EMP bursters, the smart pebbles, the hunter-killers, the kinetic-energy weapons Myra hadn’t known her arsenal was so extensive. (God, to think that stockpile had once belonged to the Pope! Well, to the Swiss Guards, anyway—quite possibly His Holiness had been discreetly left out of the loop on that one.) She shivered in her wrap, tugged it around her shoulders, lit another cigarette. She didn’t know what to say: she felt her cheeks burning under the General’s increasingly quizzical regard.

  “What do you want us to do with them?” she asked at last.

  Tm sure you can work that out,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “But—”

  He gave her a smile; heartbreaking, satanic.

  “1 hope I see you again,” he said. He reached out a hand and made some fine adjustment to the air. The link went down.

  Myra took off her eyeband and rubbed her eyes. Then she walked unsteadily to the kitchen and made some tea, and sat drinking it and smoking for about ten minutes, staring blankly into the virtual spaces of her mind. She supposed she should do something, or tell someone, but she couldn’t think what to do, or whom to tell.

  Time enough in the morning, she decided.

  Her bedroom was small, a couple of metres’ clearance on three sides of the double bed giving barely enough space for a wardrobe and dressing-table. Over the years the room had accumulated a smothering snowfall of soft furnishings, needlework and ornaments; pretty things she’d bought on impulse and never had the heart to throw out. The process was a natural selection for an embarrassingly large collection of grannyish clutter. Now and again—as now—it infuriated her in its discrepancy with the rest of her life, her style, her look. And then, on reflection, she’d figure that the incongruity of the room’s appearance was what made it a place where she could forget all care, and sleep.

  In the morning it seemed like a dream.

  All the more so, Myra realised as she struggled up to consciousness through the layers of sleep and hangover and tangled, sweat-clammy bedding, because she had dreamed about the General. She felt vaguely ashamed about that, embarrassed in front of her waking self; not because the dream had been erotic—though it had been—but because it had been besotted, devoted, servile, like those dreams the Brits used to have about Royalty. She sat up in the bed and pushed back the pillow, leaned back and tried to think about it rationally.

  The entity, the military AI, would have had God only knew how many software generations to evolve an intimate knowledge of humanity. It had had time to become what the Japanese called an idoru, a software representation that was better than the real thing, smarter and sexier than any possible human mind or form, like those wide-eyed, faux-innocent anime brats or the simulated stars of pornography and romance. Sex wasn’t the half of it—there were other codes, other keys, in the semiotics of charm: the subtle suggestions of wisdom, the casual hints at a capacity for violence, the assumed readiness to command, the mirroring glance of empathy; all the elements that went to make up an image of a man that men would die for and women would fall for.

  So, she told herself, she wasn’t such a pathetic case, after all. Happens to the best of us. As she reached for her medical kit and clicked out the tablets to fix the hangover, she caught herself smiling at the memory of the General’s smile. Annoyed with herself again, she got out of bed and padded to the kitchen in her fluffy slippers and fuzzy nightgown, and gulped cold water while the coffee percolated. She added a MoodLift tab to her ReSolve dose and her daily intake of anti-ageing supplements and knocked them back all at once. She felt better.

  The time was 8 o’clock. She put her contacts in and flicked on a television tile and watched it while spooning muesli and yoghurt and listening to the murmured morning briefing from Parvus. The news, as usual, was bad, but no worse than usual. No martial music or ballet on all channels—that was enough to count as good news. After a coffee and a cigarette she felt almost human. She supposed she might as well get up and go to work.

  The walk to the government building woke her up even more, boosted her mood better than any tab. The air was crisp, the morning sky unexpectedly colourful, reds and oranges and yellows shading to green at the horizon. She noticed people staring up at the sky.

  Its colours were changing visibly, flowing—suddenly she realised she was looking at an aurora, thousands of miles south of where aurorae should be seen. As she stopped and looked up, open-mouthed, the sky brightened for a few seconds from some great illumination below the horizon.

  She ran. She sprinted through the streets, barged through the doors, yelled at Security and bounded up the stairs. As she strode into her office her earpiece pinged, and a babble of tinny voices contended for her attention. She sat heavily on the edge of her desk and flipped down her eyeband, keyed up the news.

  The tanks were rolling, all around the world.

  Without taking her eyes off the newsfeeds, Myra slid across her desk and lowered herself into her chair. She rattled out commands on the armrest keypads, transforming the office’s walls into screens for an emergency command-centre. The first thing she did was secure the building; then she hit the emergency call for Sovnarkom. The thrown fetches of Andrei, Denis and Valentina sprang to attention on the screens—whether their physical bodies were in their offices, on their way in or still in bed didn’t matter, as long as their eyebands were online.

  Myra glanced around their virtual presences.

  “OK, comrades, this is the big one,” she said. “First, is everything clear with us?”

  It was unlikely that the ISTWR’s tiny Workers’ Militia and tinier People’s Army would have joined the coup, but more unlikely things were happening before her eyes every few seconds. (A night-time amphibious landing at South Street Seaport! Tanks in Pennsylvania Avenue! Attack helicopters shelling Westminster Bridge!)

  “We’re sound,” said Denis. Even his fetch looked drawn and hung-over. “So’s Kazakhstan, they’re staying out of this. Army’s on alert, of course. Baikonur cosmodrome’s well under government control. So’s the airstrip at Yubileine. Almaty’s mobilised, militia on the streets, but they’re loyal.”

  You hope, Myra thought The neat thing about a military coup was that mobilisation against it could quite easily become part of it, as the lines of command writhed and broke and reconnected.

  “Good, great. North-eastern front? Val, you awake?”

  “Yeah, I’m with you. No moves from the Sheenisov so far.” Valentina patched in a satellite feed, updated by the second: the steppe was still.

  “What about Mutual Protection here?”

  “Haven’t moved from the camp—and the camp’s quiet.”

  Myra relaxed a little. “Looks like our immediate surroundings are secure, then. Any word from orbit, Val?”

  Valentina shook her head. “All comms are very flaky, can’t get anything coherent from the settlements, the factories, the battlesats—”

  “That’s impossible!” She thought about how it might be possible. “Oh my God, die sky—”

  “About ten minutes ago,” Andrei announced, from some glassy trance, “somebody nuked the Heaviside Layer. Half a dozen bursts—not much EMP, but quite enough of that and of charged particles to scramble radio signals for a good few hours.”

  “So how are we getting even the news?” Myra demanded.

  “Cable,” said Andrei. “Fibre-optics aren’t affected. And some stuff’s getting through by laser, obviously, like Val’s spysat downlink. Should increase as people switch, or improvise. But for the moment it’s dust in everybody’s eyes.”

  “Didn’t know the space movement had orbital nukes,” Denis said. “In fact, didn’t know anybody but us had any serious nukes.”

  That was a point. Nuclear disarmament had been the only universally popular, and (almost) universally successful, policy of the US/UN after the Third World War. Even Myra, at the time, had not res
ented or regretted the confiscation of the ISTWR’s complement, along with all the rest. Only by sheer accident had an independent stockpile survived, in the hands of a politically untouchable institution that counted its supporters in billions, its age in millennia and its policy in centuries. All other strategic nuclear weapons had been dismantled. There were thousands of batdefield tactical nukes still around, of course, but nobody’d ever worried much about them: the consequences of their use had never been shown live on television.

  (The images went through her mind, again, and the names of cities: Kiev, Frankfurt, Berlin. She shook her head with a shudder, shutting them out.)

  Valentina was giving her a hard stare. “They weren’t ours, were they?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Myra said. “Unless you happened to turn over the access codes to somebody else, eh?”

  Valentina shook her head, thin-lipped. “No. Never.”

  “Right, so much for that theory,” Myra said briskly, to assure Val that she wasn’t under any suspicion. “Andrei, any ideas?”

  “Excuse me,” said Andrei. “I’m still trying to get through the front door.”

  “Oh, fuck!” Myra tabbed a code to let him in.

  “Thanks… OK, I think the nukes were from the tWside, against the coup.”

  “And where did they get them?”

  “What I think is that the UN hung on to some nukes for itself, the secret stayed with some inner cadre of bureaucrats who made it through the Revolution and the purges, and they put it at the disposal of the current Secretary General.”

  “Makes sense, I suppose,” said Denis. “What I’d do.”

  “What’s the politics of this, Andrei?” Myra asked.

  “We were so sure they’d wait for the ReUN vote—” she stopped and laughed. Trotsky himself had used just such a stratagem. “Have the coup before the vote—I wonder where they got that idea. Still, it kind of undermines the appeal to legitimacy.”