by Ken MacLeod
“Ah.” He returned to his conversation, problem solved, and the loss of colour in the world apparently forgotten.
Taransay gazed at the backs of the couple’s heads for a while. How could they be so incurious? And so selectively ignorant? Maybe they were just thick.
But, no, that couldn’t be it. They were future colonists, volunteers from distant Earth’s utopia for an adventurous extrasolar afterlife; the dead on leave from the most advanced society ever. And they didn’t sound stupid. They were chatting about selective breeding of crops, about recombinations and crosses and recessives, at a high level of abstraction that now and then got down to cases among their own plants and animals. They laughed at allusions she didn’t catch, at clannish in-jokes. They left together, with a friendly wave, and slogged off into the woods to a clearing where gracile robots toiled.
Alone, Taransay began to make sense of it. The system that ran the sim was saving on processing power to deal with the unusual situation, and now with the emergency. It was running in real time instead of a thousand times faster; it had earlier, in fast space skirmishes, once reduced the world to wire diagrams; now it had drained colour but kept shading.
As she’d long since figured out, most of the processing in the sim was devoted to creating consistent subjective experiences for the minds it emulated: the experience of a world, not a world itself. There was no out there, in here.
Now, for the minds of those denizens whose main role in the sim was to be background extras, to add verisimilitude and local colour, just one step above the p-zombies, who had no subjective experience at all, the system was skimping on thought.
When would it start doing that to her, and to the other fighters? Or even to the AIs, Locke and Remington?
She sweated through the rest of the ride.
Beauregard met Rizzi off the bus. She looked surprised and pleased to see him.
“Needed some fresh air,” he said. “After a whole morning stuck in a hot room with two AIs, two warlocks and Nicole, all tearing their hair out.”
Durward, a downloaded copy of the Direction’s rep in the Arcane Disputes sim, had found more of an affinity with Shaw than with Nicole, his local counterpart. Nicole’s pose, and to an extent her role, was of an artist. She interacted with the underlying software by drawing and painting. Durward, from a sim based on a fantasy game, did the same trick by magic. He got on like a house on fire with Shaw, a deserter from an earlier conflict who in a thousand subjective years of wandering the sim had picked up the knack of hacking its physics engine.
Remington, a likewise downloaded copy of the Arcane AI, had meanwhile come to some grudging mutual understanding with Locke. None of this had, over the past day and night, come easily.
“Your face looks drawn,” Taransay said.
Beauregard had to laugh. They walked along the front. In black and white the striped awnings and the shop fronts looked more tawdry than ever.
“Everything’s even weirder than when it was all outlines,” he said. “Sadder, too. Because you can see the shadows, but not the colours.”
“It’s like living in a photonovel,” Rizzi said. “You expect to see speech bubbles instead of hearing people speak.”
“Maybe that’ll be next. Text would take less processing than speech.”
“Fuck, don’t give them ideas.”
“Them?” He knew what she meant.
“The AIs, the … whatever runs this place.”
“You mean, whatever this place runs on. What we all run on, including Nicole.”
Rizzi shuddered. “Yeah, yeah. That’s new, too. The feeling of being … I dunno, watched from outside and inside, knowing it’s all a sim right in your bones. Plus, it’s different after being out and walking around on the ground and seeing this place”—she windmilled an arm—“as a big mossy boulder in a fucking acid-trip cubist jungle. I mean, when we were in space, it was kind of like we were astronauts and this really was a habitat module of a space station.”
“Just … bigger on the inside?”
Beauregard threw out an arm, expecting her to laugh. She did, but only politely.
“Lunch in the Touch?” she asked, hopefully.
“Sorry, no,” Beauregard said. “Straight back to the madness, I’m afraid.”
The madness, when Taransay stepped into Nicole’s studio, was invisible. When she’d last been there, the previous day, the studio, untidy to start with, looked as if it had been the site of a week-long student sit-in. Now the studio looked more like a well-run office. The torn-off A2 flipchart sheets, the food scraps and wrappings, the crumpled drinks cans, the overflowing ashtrays and unwashed coffee mugs were all gone. The floor had been swept, and only old and hardened paint stains marred its planks. The sketches and paintings were sorted and stacked, and beginning to be shelved on trolley racks. Even the cleaning robot looked happier: it wasn’t twitching uncontrollably.
Locals Taransay didn’t recognise came and went quietly, wheeling trolleys in and out, bearing refreshments and stationery supplies, taking away litter. Half a dozen fighters, in combat singlets and trousers, sat in front of the room’s wall-hung TV screens. They watched scrolling data and fragmentary external views, took notes and talked among themselves and on phones. The sim’s pretence at broadcast media, hitherto dedicated to soap operas and war news, was now turned to close study of the real environment outside, and to reports from inside the module’s software.
Shaw and Durward, both shaggy-haired and long-bearded, had been prevailed upon to shower and put on clean clothes, and no longer offended the senses. They both sat on high stools at a drafting table, on which Taransay could see the outline of a frame and an arm rotate slowly in a big flat screen.
Nicole stood poised by the flipchart, marker pen in hand, in the casual chic of loose top and trousers that looked silvery even in greyscale. Taransay had a mischievous thought that the garments had been picked out for that very reason.
The images of the AI avatars Locke and Remington—the man with his long hair, the woman with her steely bob—mouthed soundlessly on the paper. Lines of handwritten subscript flowed along the foot. Nicole glanced at the new arrivals, with a nod to Beauregard and a flicker of smile to Taransay, then turned back to the easel.
“Talk,” she told them.
“How are things going?” Beauregard asked.
“We’re holding the line,” Nicole said. “The mat is interfacing with our nanofacturing fuzz at a molecular level, and it seems to be reverse-engineering machine code to send probes into our software. Locke and Remington are pulling out all the stops to block it and hack back.”
“How is that even possible?” Taransay cried. “It’s natural life out there, and alien at that. It’d have a hard job infecting Earth life, let alone software.”
Nicole waved a hand behind her head. “Tell her, Zaretsky,” she said.
One of the fighters watching the screens stood up and ambled over, still with eye and thumb on his phone. He had very short hair, skinny features, facial piercings, and a plaited rat-tail of beard sticking down from his chin.
“Hi,” he said, looking up briefly, blinking. “Um. Well. Thanks to the mat and to all the splatter from your, uh, encounter, we have some samples in direct contact with the module’s external instruments, not to mention with your frame, which is busy reporting back via the download port.
“So … The local life is carbon-based and runs on DNA coding for proteins. Fair enough, there aren’t many other self-replicating long-chain molecules that could do the job. It seems to have a different genetic code to what we have. No surprise there either—code is arbitrary. But what is a surprise is that the code looks, well, optimised. It has more than four letters, we’ve identified up to twelve so far and that’s just the start. And the transcription mechanism to proteins is a lot more efficient than the RNA-mRNA kludge we have. Lots more amino acids—in that respect it’s more like synthetic biology than natural, from our parochial point of view.”
Taransay smiled wryly. “Like, intelligently designed?”
Zaretsky snorted. “Hell, no!” He paused and frowned. “It’s possible—for all we know there could be intelligent life or even a post-biological robot civilisation out there, or deep in the planet’s past, or whatever. But more likely, the story is just that natural selection here has been fiercer for longer. After all, that’s what ‘super-habitable’ implies. Life here has more diversity and complexity than anything back home. Our working hypothesis is that horizontal gene transfer is pretty much universal here, instead of peculiar to unicellular organisms. So the response when a beastie bumps into something new here is to plunder it for any useful genes, and to rummage through its genome for cool tricks. Maybe assimilation and reproduction—eating and sex—aren’t as distinct here.”
He frowned down at the screen of his phone, swiped in an annoyed manner and tapped in a correction. “Bit of a bugger not having colour … So anyway—from the local point of view our module’s nanotech fuzz, or what’s left of it, is just a new genome in town, and the local life is all, ‘Well, hello, sailor!’ The mat is busy trying that on with our nanotech, and meanwhile some of the gunk from your beastie is busy sharing info with the mat and trawling through the mechanisms of your frame’s shoulder stump, and there we are.”
“Shit,” said Taransay. She looked around. “Somebody give me a beer.”
That afternoon, quite suddenly, colour came back. The resolution stayed low. If you looked closely, you could still see the dots. Everyone whooped and hollered, except the p-zombies, who didn’t notice any change. Locke and Remington reported that the worst of the infection was over, and that the mat was no longer making fresh probes into the module’s systems.
Taransay left Shaw, Durward and the scientists to fine-tune the attachment of the arm to the frame, a process they all found fascinating but that to her was like watching a plant grow without time-lapse.
She called her boyfriend Den, joined him at the Touch, dined out on her adventures, staggered back to Den’s and collapsed into bed.
In the morning Beauregard called her to Nicole’s. She made her way there through a pre-dawn that seemed a little more sparkly than usual, as if dew were on everything including the sea. She found Nicole, Beauregard and Zaretsky in Nicole’s kitchen.
“Progress,” Beauregard reported, handing her a mug of coffee. “We’ve reconnected the arm, and the frame works as well as we can test it in the slot.”
“You can remote-operate frames?” This sounded exciting.
Beauregard shrugged. “Seems so. But not from here, except in the slot.”
“It’s just testing and twitching,” said Zaretsky, who looked as if he’d been up all night. “We don’t have anything like the equipment for remote operation.”
“OK,” said Taransay. “But we could build it, surely?”
Nicole glanced at Zaretsky. He spread his hands. “Not for months—well, not local months, but you know what I mean. With the uncorrupted nanofacture stuff, or even with the stuff that’s been contaminated but is still usable, it would take far too long.”
“What’s the prospect for building other equipment?” Beauregard asked. “Entire new frames, for instance? Or kit to process local life and build up bodies that can live on the planet?”
That last had been the core of the original plan. Taransay had never exactly bought into it, but she’d had no choice but to go along with it, and it had seemed at the very least bold and inspiring. Now, so much equipment had had to be jettisoned in the fight with the Arcane module, and so much damage had been done on the way down, that it seemed impossible.
“To ask the question is to answer it,” said Nicole. “The loss of equipment might have been tolerable if we’d had enough nanotech to replace it, but now …”
“We don’t have only the surface fuzz,” Taransay said. “We still have one nanofacture tube. OK, it’s covered with mat, but we could still build stuff underneath it until the mat goes away or we build stuff that can cut its way out.”
Zaretsky laughed rudely. “Sorry,” he said, “but we’re not going to risk getting our last nanofacture tube contaminated too. And we’re not going to mess with the mat itself until we know what we’re doing.”
“But even so,” Taransay protested, “we can still bootstrap what we’ve got—use the remaining nanotech fuzz to build more nanotech, and so on. However long it takes. I mean, that’s how the whole mission has been built, hasn’t it? And if it seems boring to sit through, we could always slow down the sim to a crawl—hey, that would even release more processing power—and it would take as short a subjective time as we wanted.” She threw out her arms. “We could all be out there tomorrow!”
Beauregard gave her a look just on the safe side of scorn. “You’ve been out there, Rizzi! We’re sitting on a fucking volcano! The mat rolled us out of the way of the lava, but not because it wanted to rescue us. Not at all! It did it because we’re something new and tasty to eat or fuck or both. OK, we’ve fought off that, as far as we can tell, but we don’t know what other creature might happen along, or what other surprises the mat has in its fuzz.”
He sighed, and sipped at his coffee. “You know—actually we could take that risk, if we don’t mind dying. Or, let’s say, running a very high chance of death or irrelevance. We could do as Rizzi suggests, let the AIs ride herd on the nanotech to eke out the resources to make more and more nanotech until it can build, oh I dunno, itsy-bitsy spider bots to gather up raw material to build more bots to build machinery and tools and so on, and basically recreate what we had and more. However long it takes, as she says. Yeah, we can do that. Party on in here, yeah. It’s a good life if you don’t weaken. Live it forever in the fucking sim. The trouble with that is the real environment. The volcano could turn us into an interesting piece of anomalous geology at any moment. The mats and the scuttling things and God knows what else that may be out there could come up with new ways to eat us. Not just the fuzz, but to hack into the module itself. So—”
“Maybe being eaten is the way to go,” said Zaretsky, his pale, mild eyes gazing out of the window at Nicole’s backyard, perhaps at his reflection.
“Fascinating,” said Beauregard, with heavy sarcasm. “Tell us more.”
Zaretsky jutted his rat-tail beard. “We wrack our brains about how to build new bodies to survive out there. The life already out there works by incorporating new genes and new information. Why not give it copies of ourselves—memories, genetic info, the lot—to assimilate?”
“You first,” said Beauregard.
“I would,” said Zaretsky. “Or at least, a copy of me would.”
Beauregard looked as unimpressed by this vicarious bravado as Taransay felt.
Nicole leaned forward. “It may come to that,” she said, to Taransay’s surprise. “However, let us try something less drastic first! Belfort, you were about to suggest …?”
Beauregard’s shoulders slumped, then he straightened his back.
“No,” he said. “I have to admit it. We’re fucked. I won people over to the plan when we had enough kit to make a go of it and the time to build more. We thought we’d have the module in orbit and build landers, remember that? Hell, if we hadn’t been attacked by Arcane we could still have made it to the surface with plenty to build with. I can’t ask the fighters and the locals to rally to anything less. So we have to re-establish contact with the rest of the system, find out what the fuck’s going on out there, and appeal for aid, trade, and if all else fails—rescue.”
“Even if it means going back to the Direction with our tails between our legs?” Taransay asked.
Beauregard looked around the table.
“Does anyone here still trust the Direction?”
In an uncomfortable silence, Nicole raised a hand. “I do, in the sense that I remain confident it knows what it’s doing.”
“Precisely,” said Beauregard. “It knows what it’s doing. And if it were to offer a rescue and then destroy
us, for the greater good of the mission, it would still know what it was doing. No thanks. I’d rather be rescued, if it came to that, by almost anyone else.”
“Even the Rax?” Taransay queried.
Beauregard looked her right in the eye.
“Yes. With … appropriate safeguards, put it that way. But like I say, last resort. We have other options. We do have something to offer—we’ve made a landing, we’ve broken the embargo, we have by now terabytes of knowledge of the local life. Maybe some of the DisCorps might be interested. All we need is supplies.”
“There’s a problem with that,” said Taransay. “Right now, I doubt anyone knows exactly where we are. We appeal for help, we give away our position. Anyone who can drop supplies can drop fighters—or bombs.”
“That’s where you come in,” said Beauregard. He looked at Nicole, who nodded. “We want you to go out again. Now that the frame has two arms, it should be a hell of a lot easier and safer than it was the first time. It’s taken the AIs running the nanotech all night to build two simple tools: a very basic directional aerial, and a knife.”
“A knife?” cried Taransay.
Beauregard grimaced. “It isn’t much, but according to analysis of the thing you shot and of the mat, the knife should be able to cut through the outer integument of anything likely to come at you.”
“Great.” A thought struck her. “Can it cut through the mat?”
“Yes,” said Zaretsky, looking up from his phone. “But like I said, we don’t want any messing with the mat until we know it won’t do more harm than good. For the moment, the knife is just for self-defence.”
“I don’t have a great deal of confidence in its efficacy in that respect,” said Taransay.
Nobody looked like they were backing down.
“If it comes to that,” said Beauregard, “don’t forget there’s still some ammo left in the machine gun.”
Taransay stood up. Her coffee had cooled, and she knocked it back.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”