by Ken MacLeod
With two arms, it was indeed much easier getting out of the slot. Night had fallen, but Taransay found the dim light from the moons and the infrared glow from the lava and the life-forms almost better than full daylight. She upped the gain in the visual spectrum nonetheless.
The volcano’s summit was clearly visible, a jagged tooth-line drooling lava that seemed to float just above the jungle a couple of kilometres away and a hundred and fifty metres higher than where she stood on a long gentle downward slope. On a heavy planet, it was a high cone. Deltas of cooling lava flowed from that prominence to finger out among the plants.
No animal movement, other than the slow flow of the mats. Danger could come from above, too—she hadn’t seen any flying things as yet, but such seemed likely. She looked up.
The sky was clear, blue-green with a few thin clouds. One of them anomalously didn’t move with the wind. Taransay zoomed her gaze, and the tattered wisp resolved itself into distant pinpricks, smelling faintly of carbon and iron: the dispersed space station.
Closer in and further out, a double handful of SH-0’s many moons hung across the ecliptic. Some were mere sparks, others discs or part discs, crescent or gibbous or full. Taransay picked out SH-17 with a pang close to nostalgia: that exomoon was, after all, the only other place in this system where she’d stood on real ground.
Enough. She was on real ground now. To work.
The salvaged right arm worked fine, but the join between it and the former stump was marked with a ring of native fuzz, like mould. How certain could she be that its earlier hacking into the frame’s systems had been repulsed?
Not at all, was the answer, whatever Locke or Zaretsky might say.
Warily, she walked around the side of the module, and found the knife growing within arm’s reach, a sharp artificial stalactite. It snapped off along a stress line scribed around the top of the handle, leaving a cavity in the module’s surface and a matching knob. The blade was like a leaf of black glass. Taransay looked at it dubiously. It was five centimetres long, and she had nowhere to stash it. She was going to have to use the knife to slash the leaves and stems from which to make a belt and sheath. For now, she kept it clutched in her right hand.
The aerial, as Beauregard had called it, hung from higher up on the module like a strand of cobweb, visibly growing. The loose end of it lay coiled on the ground, and new loops were added to the heap at a rate of about one every hundred seconds. Taransay scanned around, saw nothing threatening, and began to pay it out like a fishing line. She walked towards the lava flow, in the slight furrow the rolled module had left. When she’d gone far enough, she stuck the knife in the compacted ash soil and prepared to shape the thread into a spiral.
The thread had other ideas. It shaped itself, coiling and hardening, into a shallow metre-wide mesh dish that looked as if the wind would carry it away. A spike grew from the centre, thin as a pencil lead. Just as autonomously, the dish tilted this way and that. Taransay saw that this movement was caused by small expansions and contractions in the thread, but didn’t understand any more than that about how it worked. No surprise there, she told herself: this technology was centuries in advance of anything she remembered. Come to think of it, she didn’t understand how she was a fifty-centimetre-tall black glassy robot. She understood in principle, but the engineering details were at a level where the most strictly materialist explanation might as well be magic.
So it was with the self-assembling long-range receiver.
Stop worrying. Stop scratching your little round head.
Her little round head was, she found, attuned to what the aerial—and the God-knew-what processing behind it, in the module—was picking up. She saw it like a heads-up display, in three neat columns, and heard the accompanying sounds on parallel tracks all of which she could follow. There were advantages in being a robot.
Nevertheless, the input was confusing. The bulk of it, occupying the centre column, was spillover of rapid-fire AI chatter that scrolled in a blur. Routine business, probably, with a strand of Direction instructions to DisCorps. She gladly left unpicking all that to Locke and Remington. The human messages were by comparison marginal. Down the left-hand side, aptly enough, ran a threatening rant from the Arcane module: We’re coming for you, fascist scum! wasn’t actually said, but it was the gist. There was a side order of imprecations against the freebots and against those who’d defected to them. Taransay was pleased to hear the names of Carlos and Newton; she didn’t know who Blum and Rillieux were, but good for them in any case, even though the Arcane gang seemed to think their defection and departure was all some kind of Rax plot.
Among the threats of bombing and laser-blasting and nuking from orbit were urgent appeals to any surviving Acceleration cadres or Direction loyalists in the Locke sim, which the Arcane gang still seemed to think was under the iron heel of the Rax. Rise up! Overthrow the usurpers! Help is coming! From the way the message was repeated on a short loop and faded in and out it was obviously being beamed down to the surface on spec, over the wide area in which the module could theoretically have landed.
The other message, in the right-hand column, was likewise on a loop. It had much better production values and a far more conciliatory tone. It came from the Rax.
Taransay tugged the knife from the ground and clutched it in her fist. She paced carefully back to the module and turned her back to it. She didn’t need or want to rest against it, but it was good to have that solid mass behind her.
Taransay hunkered down. It was going to be a long night.
After a while she saw a light move in the sky, high up, and fade just as her gaze fixed on it. A little later, a light drifted closer and lower down, just above the treetops, and likewise faded as she focused. She logged the sightings but lacked the curiosity to investigate, content for the moment to classify them in her own mind as SH-0’s first UFOs.
“We await replies.”
The black ovoid that spoke like a man stopped talking. The image froze. A little curled arrow spun in the lower left corner, waiting for someone to request a repeat.
No one did.
“Well,” said Nicole. “Now we are in the picture.”
We fucking are, Beauregard thought. In the picture. In one of your pictures, to be precise. And don’t we all know it.
That’s the fucking trouble. That’s why we’re all so on edge.
In the sim, it was mid-afternoon. Beauregard felt sweat drying on his face. Nicole’s studio was airy, the window open to a view of sunlight and sea. The room wasn’t even crowded: Beauregard, Nicole, Shaw, Durward, Zaretsky; Tourmaline drifting in and out. The AIs were present only as still sketches on Nicole’s flip-pad.
And yet the room seemed too hot, and stuffy.
It must be the screens, Beauregard reckoned. There was the one with the transmissions, and then there were all the others. One showed what Rizzi saw. Others showed random fragments of the module’s surroundings, random night-vision false-colour images of lava or swaying plant trunks or crawling mats and one pure black star-spangled tatter of sky. Together they created an insuperable impression of being inside something small. The impression you got when you looked away was of being in the wide open spaces of a terraformed planet, but it was no longer strong enough to convince. It was wearing thin. You could see the pixels.
How long would people stand for this?
“I don’t believe that peaceful coexistence offer from the Rax,” Beauregard said, feeling his way. “Not in the long term, anyway. It’s a transparent ruse to buy time while they build up their forces. But—”
“Stop ri
ght there,” said Nicole. “There’s no ‘but’ after that.”
“Let me finish,” said Beauregard. “With respect, Nicole, there is. There always is. They’re going to have to do at least some genuine trading up front to make it convincing. They claim to have fusion drives for sale. We could certainly do with one. We could offer a wealth of information about SH-0—maybe not of much interest to the Rax, but they could easily trade it on to one or more of the DisCorps.”
“You want the Rax to carry out a landing here?” cried Nicole.
Beauregard stared her down. “They could just do a drop from orbit. Same as with any other company we might trade with.”
“I wouldn’t trust them,” said Nicole.
“What you’re forgetting—no, you can’t forget, can you?—what you’re eliding is that as far as they know, we’re Rax ourselves. It wouldn’t be too hard to convince them.” He grinned. “I can be the front man for that if you like. And we must have Rax sleepers among our returnees.”
The face of Locke moved on the page. Shaw noticed and pointed. Nicole glanced at the line of script along the foot.
“We do,” she said. “Locke has identified them from the courses their scooters took and what they did in the battle. It can give us a list.”
“Well, there you go,” said Beauregard. “We can bribe or threaten them to back me up.”
“‘We?’” said Zaretsky, raising a ring-pierced eyebrow.
“I think you’ll find,” said Beauregard, in as mild a tone as he could muster, “that throwing me the old ‘You and whose army?’ challenge would be most unwise.”
“And I warn you,” said Nicole, “that doing any such thing would have consequences. Very personal consequences.”
Ah, that standing threat. Time to face it down.
Beauregard held her gaze. “Everyone knows now that the p-zombies are different. Even they do.”
“You think I couldn’t convince them otherwise?”
“How?” Beauregard scoffed. “Tell them they all have superior eyesight, or something?”
Everyone else in the room was looking puzzled.
“What’s all this about?” Shaw demanded.
Beauregard paused, glanced sidelong, listened. Tourmaline wasn’t in earshot. He could hear her clattering about in Nicole’s kitchen. He stood up.
“The p-zombies,” he said. “Nicole has held a threat over me ever since I made my move. If I ever try to use the troops on my own account, she’ll have a word with all the p-zombies. Convince them there’s no such thing as a p-zombie. That they’ve all been misled and mistreated, somehow. Not that I’ve ever mistreated Tourmaline, I hasten to add.” He shrugged. “And anyway, since Locke and Nicole started monkeying with the sim, and you did your own monkeying about, it’s become obvious to everyone that there is a difference. The p-zombies haven’t noticed any of the changes, or their reversals. It’s all the same to them because they don’t have any inner experience in the first place. Colours to them are lines of code—Pantone numbers. These don’t change. And they’re well aware, so to speak, that everyone else does notice something changing. So Nicole’s threat doesn’t amount to anything, any more.”
Nicole lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew out a stream of smoke in as irritating a manner as possible.
“Is that a risk you’re willing to take?”
Beauregard glared at her. She glared back, unperturbed.
“Oh, fuck this,” said Shaw. “If we have any decisions to make, let’s make them rationally, by discussion. Not by bickering and power plays between you two.”
Perched on his drafting stool, he straightened his back and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, and smiled.
“Done,” he said.
The sunlight dimmed and flickered. Then it returned to normal. So did the resolution of the sim. No more coloured dots. Everything looked real and solid again.
“What’s done?” Nicole cried. “What have you done?”
Shaw looked smug. “No more p-zombies.”
Beauregard braced himself for a crash of crockery and a howl of fury from Tourmaline. None came.
Nicole drew savagely on the cigarette. The tip became a glowing cone. “What?”
She jumped up, stalked over to the flipchart and scribbled. The faces of Locke and Remington became animated, then agitated. Script raced along the foot of the page in a demented scribble, far too fast for Beauregard to read. Nicole read it until it stopped.
She turned to Shaw. “It seems you have,” she said. “And you’ve released a significant amount of processing power into the bargain. Well, well.”
She gave Beauregard a sad smile and a shake of the head. “Looks like I’ve lost my trump card.”
Beauregard was still tense, waiting for the penny, the other shoe and the crockery to drop.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Durward, Nicole and Shaw were all looking at him as if daunted by his stupidity.
“Zaretsky!” Nicole snapped. “Tell him. Make him understand.”
“It’s very simple,” said Zaretsky, eyes bright and arms waving. “The whole p-zombie business was a tour de force of programming. An incredible feat of puppetry. Emulating the actions and reactions of a conscious being without the avatar itself being a conscious being has the most fucking unbelievable AI brute force processing overhead. I mean, gigantic look-up tables aren’t the half of it. Not a hundredth of it. It turns out to be easier and simpler and a thousand times more economical just to give them conscious minds. Multiply that by the hundreds of p-zombies in the sim, and you get some idea of how much processing power Shaw’s latest hack saves.”
“But won’t they know?” Beauregard asked. “Won’t they notice?”
“Well, no,” said Zaretsky, as if it were obvious. “They now have conscious minds—with all the memories and thoughts and emotions their emulation implied. Including, you see, the memory of being self-aware all along. Thus neatly accounting for why they also remember being puzzled when anyone asked if they were conscious, or told them they weren’t.”
Footsteps outside, a quick tick of high heels in the hall. Tourmaline walked in, bearing coffee. She set the tray down.
“Why’s everybody looking at me like that?” she asked.
“It’s all right,” said Beauregard. “We’re all just dying for a coffee. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, still sounding suspicious. “Well, see you later.”
“Yeah,” said Beauregard. “See you later, honey.”
She blew him a kiss and went out.
“I have a better idea than talking to the Rax,” said Nicole, pressing down the plunger of the cafetière.
“I’m listening,” said Beauregard. He felt off balance, but he wasn’t going to show it.
“What’s the only force out there that has already actually helped us?” Nicole said. “The freebots. They saved our ass. And Carlos and Newton were involved, which as far as I’m concerned puts the lid on any notion that they’re Rax. You told me Newton is Rax, or was, but Carlos would never get mixed up in any Rax ploy. He’s too much the old Axle terrorist for that. And the other two?” She looked at Durward. “You knew them in Arcane.”
The warlock chuckled. “Bobbie Rillieux and Andre Blum? No, I think it’s safe to say they aren’t Rax. I think what happened back there is that the freebots, bless their blinking lights, have a somewhat eccentric idea of what neutrality means. The freebot we captured—the one called Baser—wasn’t the brightest bulb in the circuit, if you see what I mean.”
“Here’s what I suggest,” said Nicole. “We contact the freebots on SH-17, tell them our situation and ask for their help.”
“What help can they give us?” Beauregard scoffed.
Nicole gave him a look. “They have at least one fusion drive, on the transfer tug Baser hijacked. And they have access to more—they have contacts with other freebots all across the system. Going by what the Rax have found inside SH-119 the
blinkers have been clandestinely very busy for the past year or so. Far busier than the Direction suspected, as far as I know. So they may well have resources even we have no idea of.”
Beauregard thought about his. He still reckoned the Rax settlement in SH-119, the New Confederacy—ha!—might have more potential as a trading partner. But this was a good time not to bring that up again. He kept his own counsel on the matter.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s give it a go.”
“In practical terms,” said Zaretsky, “that means Rizzi will have to trek some distance away, and make a transmission. Probably by laser. This will take some time to set up, with the limits of our nanofacture.”
“Yes, yes,” said Beauregard, impatiently. “Big job. Seems only fair to give her some R&R first. Bring her in.”
Taransay looked down at the knife in her hand and wondered what to do with it. Leaving it outside seemed careless and wasteful—and besides, who knew what inspiration it might provide to some local organism, whether a mat or some beastie she hadn’t met yet? But she didn’t fancy another one-handed ascent to the download slot. If she’d had teeth she could have held the blade between them, but she didn’t have teeth. One of the downsides of being a robot.
She walked behind the module to the edge of the jungle. The peculiar geometry of the local life now struck her overwhelmingly as alien. Small circular mats carpeted the ground like fallen leaves, but leaves that slithered over each other in a disquieting continuous flow. The actual leaves of the plants were also deeply uneasy on the eye: stark quadrilaterals with none of the veining and striations and other repeated irregularities that made leaves beautiful. They hung limp under the night sky.
She reached up and plucked one from its stiff horizontal stem, laid the knife at her feet and tore the sheet into strips. Liquid oozed from the ragged edges, smelling of water and sweet, sticky carbohydrates. Some animal, surely, must eat this. Fortunately, no herbivore was prowling the night. The strips tore neatly enough, and she knotted half a dozen of them with swift robotic precision. She tied one end to the knob of the knife handle, tied the other to form a loop and slung the string around her neck. A black leaf-shaped pectoral pendant on a small black frame.