by Ken MacLeod
Carlos assumed the question was rhetorical.
“A freebot uprising in the Rax rock,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” said Jax. She played with her hair, scratched an eyebrow. “Is that blinker behind you one of the conscious ones?”
“It’s Baser,” said Newton, stiffly.
“Of course. Sorry, Baser, I only knew you as a big hairy spider. Nice to meet you in the flesh, so to speak. And you’ll be relaying this conversation back to the rest of the Fifteen, yeah?”
Jax cocked her head, as if listening to something off camera. “Ah, right. Got it, Baser. Well, yes, as we were saying. A freebot uprising on the inside would be a huge help in a frontal assault, obviously. Tie down their forces, disrupt comms, and all that. But it would have to be very precisely coordinated with the attack. I mean, we wouldn’t want it to kick off prematurely and get smashed before we had time to breach the defences.” She rubbed the side of her nose. “Some kind of, ah, Warsaw Uprising scenario, if you catch my drift.”
Carlos caught her drift all right.
It was in some respects ambiguous. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 might be a byword for betrayal, but who had shafted whom had still been contentious even in Carlos’s day. In one respect, however, the allusion wasn’t ambiguous at all, but a heavy hint.
Jax was telling them out of the corner of her mouth that she wouldn’t be at all averse to the freebots in SH-119 getting clobbered—after they’d done as much damage as possible to the Rax in the uprising, obviously—and she wouldn’t be at all pleased if these freebots actually won with their own forces and had control of the rock before the Arcane forces arrived. For Jax, the freebots were just another enemy—merely one further down the stack than the Reaction. This was no secret—he’d held that view himself not long before.
The question was: why was she making it so obvious? Even the freebots would figure it out.
“No, we wouldn’t want anything like that to happen,” he said. “And communications with the freebots inside SH-119 are uncertain to say the least. That’s why the freebots here want to get inside the rock themselves.”
“Are they crazy?”
“Not entirely,” said Carlos. “Now, the only way they can do that is by deception. And it seems to me that the only way you can attack successfully is by complete surprise—unless you fancy your chances against scooters with fusion drives and missiles tipped with fusion bombs.”
“We’re bloody well aware of that, thank you very much!” Jax snapped. “And, yes, we have no intention of attacking without the element of surprise. And I have no intention of talking about it on this kind of channel. I’m sure you can see the elements of the strategic situation as well as we can. The forces in play. There’s no need to talk about them—I have a lot of trust in encryption, but not a lot in … well, walls have ears, and all that. I’m not talking strategy and tactics where I might be overheard. Even by fighters who’ve been through our, ah, rigorous selection process, not to mention those who haven’t. The Direction is doing a thorough re-check of personnel records, and we’re cooperating, if you see what I mean. Speaking of which, Remington has started sifting through all recent conversations in this sim. Sorry about the loss of privacy, guys and gals, but rest assured Remington won’t share anything that doesn’t have security implications. And she’s already come up with some interesting conversations in the hell cellars, not to mention in the cellar of this fucking castle. Harry, Baser, I’m looking at you. Anything to say for yourselves?”
Newton spread his hands. “I’ve already owned up to the others here that I was Rax. It’s a long story. I’m not, now, and in any case the New Confederacy won’t have me.”
“Why not?”
“They’re still racists.”
Jax sniggered. “Idiocy is the new black.”
“Looks like it,” said Newton.
“Well, on the bright side, that kind of stupidity and rigidity is a weakness. Something we might be able to exploit.”
“Yes,” said Newton. “So if it’s any reparation at all, I’m willing to put all I know about the Rax at the disposal of the fight against the New Confederacy.”
“Are you now?” Jax cocked her head. “Care to come back up here? Join the actual attack, when it comes?”
“I’m ready to join in as a fighter. Strictly real space. I’m not going back into your sim.”
Jax smiled. “Wise move, Harry. Very well. Share any inside knowledge you may have with Madame Golding—she’s a secure channel if anything is. Same with the rest of you. Don’t tell me now of any ideas you may have for the attack. I doubt they’ll be anything I haven’t heard, but I want to be sure no one else hears them. Capiche?”
“Got it,” said Carlos.
“OK, end transmission,” said Jax.
“Peace out, and all that,” said Durward. The warlock waved, and the magic mirror went black.
They shared an uneasy laugh.
He’d been told, initially by Nicole, that the AIs running the sims didn’t bother with eavesdropping on chit-chat between the lesser minds within, or spying on their sex lives. He believed it. It wasn’t like human surveillance. The AIs had no prurient interest, and too much raw power to worry about any ideas the human minds running on their hardware came up with. But that very power made it trivial for them to record and store all that went on. In case of necessity, these logs could be trawled.
He’d known all that, but knowing it had actually happened … if he’d had cheeks he’d have blushed.
Rillieux stood up and clambered across the rig towards Newton.
Newton stood up to meet her. Their hands clasped, and they both froze.
Blum and Carlos looked at each other.
Blum laughed. he said.
Twenty seconds of real time, twenty thousand seconds of sim time. About six hours.
Hot sun, blue sky, white concrete, and conspicuous luxury consumption of water. Carlos walked up a flagstone pathway past trimmed lawns and flowerbeds dotted with sprinklers and rainbow-flagged with spray. The garden was on several levels, linked with and decorated by water features: rippling pebbled channels, a curtain of falling water in front of a copper-covered wall, swirling pools. In front of the big, low house a pod of plastic-imitation marble dolphins sent water ten metres into air so dry and hot that much of it evaporated before it splashed the path. All around, similar houses were generously spaced out across low hills, the cluster ending in a haze and shimmer that didn’t quite screen out an indistinct vista of sand dunes and mountains beyo
nd. An airliner rose from out of view, cleaving the blue diagonally with a white contrail as it climbed. A faint, distant buzz of drones rose and fell. Other than that, no robots here: half a dozen young men in jeans, shirtless and barefoot, pruned and weeded under the high sun.
In the Arcane sim, Blum had every so often taken his leave to some unspoken destination in the nearest small town. It was generally assumed that he went to a brothel. It wasn’t, in real life, the sort of thing he would do or even approve of. But apart from the fighters and the AIs, the characters in the Arcane sim were p-zombies at best. The ethics of the situation were obscure, and the politics irrelevant.
Carlos climbed the steps to a wide veranda of welcome shade and paced warily between wide-flung doors. The hall was airy and cool, slabbed in synthetic marble, walled in pale veneer. A helix of wooden steps spiralled in an atrium. Tall vases with tall plants from the garden, their heavy flowers nodding; pervasive and varied scents carried on air-con breezes. At the far end of the long hallway a woman with straight blonde hair snipped centimetres from flower stems, building an arrangement in one of the vases. She wore a loose greenish silk sleeveless top and a long white tiered skirt.
“Hello?” Carlos called. “I’m looking for Andre Blum.”
The woman turned and walked over. She had a slight figure; small breasts jigged and made the silk top shake. Her toes, in jewelled sandals, peeped alternately from under flounced hems as her heels ticked on the black marble. Her face, just on the pretty side of ordinary, looked sunburned rather than tanned. She smelled of sweat and flowers and furniture polish.
She stopped a couple of metres away and looked at him quizzically.
“Hi, Carlos,” she said. “Let me fix you a drink.”
He followed her into a chill reception room with sofa seats and a self-service bar. She waved a hand at condensation-beaded beer bottles, spirit optics.
“I’ll have a beer, thanks.”
She passed him a bottle and took one herself. He used the opener. So did she. Hiss. Clink. Sip. Ah.
“Uh, and your name is …?”
He felt very stupid. He was almost sure of what was going on, but …
“I’m Andre,” she said. “You can call me Andrea, if it makes things easier.”
“Not really,” said Carlos, with an apologetic smile. He couldn’t equate this slender young woman with the stocky, barrel-chested Blum.
She shrugged, glanced outside, eye-indicated a passing gardener. “The issue hasn’t come up, before.”
“I guess not,” said Carlos.
“I know what you’re going to ask,” said Blum. “Don’t bother. Yes, I could have done this when I was alive. I could have rebuilt myself from the chromosomes out. To the figure and the features, even. It wouldn’t have been cheap, but I could have done it. And in the main sim it would have been—” She snapped her fingers. “We default, obviously, but Durward could have set me up in any body I liked. As you know.”
Carlos recalled the first time he’d met Blum, in the form of a snap-together building-block toy figure, life-size, in the hell cellars. It was a reminder he could have done without.
“So why not?” he said.
Blum shrugged, and sat down at one end of a fake leather sofa.
“I don’t know,” she said. She patted the sofa. Carlos perched on the edge of the seat at the other end. Blum swirled the bottle, and took a long draught from it. “It was never about gender.” She laughed, and swept her free hand down her body. “This started by chance. I picked a female avatar on impulse in some game when I was a kid. Maybe there was something deeper behind that choice, I don’t know. Who cares?”
“Fair enough,” said Carlos. “So what did you do on your excursions in the sim, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Oh, I just went down to a low tavern, borrowed the garb of a stout serving wench, and got banged by puzzled but enthusiastic farmhands. I got no complaints. They may have found me an improvement on the livestock.”
“You’re too modest,” said Carlos.
“It’s my only feminine trait,” said Blum, in a tone of ironic gloom.
“I’m sure you have others,” said Carlos. He put the now empty beer bottle on the floor beside the sofa. “Let’s find out.”
Matters developed from there to their mutual satisfaction.
Afterwards they sat on bar stools, elbows on the counter, and talked. Blum mixed increasingly vile and potent cocktails. Hangover-free drunkenness was almost as great a boon of sims as consequence-free sex. Carlos made this observation more than once. Something about the situation was vaguely troubling him. Oh yes. He waved a hand around.
“Is this a real place?”
“No,” said Blum. “It’s a sim. You can’t be that drunk.”
“No, what I mean is … it’s so fake, it has to be based on someplace real.” He tapped the bar counter. It looked like oak and rang like tin. “Everything’s gimcrack. The only really costly luxury is the garden.”
“All that water! Well, what else would one use it for?” Blum laughed, and twirled and tinkled her cocktail glass. “Oh yes, ice.”
“Come on,” said Carlos. He knew an evasion when he heard one. “We’ve just had each other six ways from Sunday. Bit late to be coy.”
“OK, it’s true,” said Blum, gazing around. “It’s all 3-D printed or mass-nanofacture. Affordable sophistication for the masses.”
“3-D printed?” Carlos mused aloud. “That rings a bell.” Then he remembered. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“This is fucking Kazakhstan, isn’t it?”
Blum, for the first time, looked embarrassed. “Uh, yes. Security force living quarters. Officer grade, of course.”
“Jesus,” said Carlos. “And you had the gardens and the water features and the gardeners, too?”
“Oh yes,” said Blum, looking into the distance.
“While outside, on the steppe …”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” said Blum, her eyes snapping back into focus. “The areas of special settlement had every facility. They had online trade, within the obvious security restrictions. They thrived, when they weren’t trying to kill us or each other. Factionalism was rife, you know. Sectarianism, too. You know how it was.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Carlos. He laughed uneasily. “Well, actually, I don’t. The … uh, you know … it was one of those topics no one ever wanted to talk about.”
“I sometimes wonder,” said Blum, “why we didn’t make more of an issue of it.”
“We?”
Blum thumbed her sternum. “Us. The Axle. We could’ve … I don’t know.”
“Yeah, exactly,” said Carlos. “I don’t know either. We … I mean, I never bought the excuse that the, uh … measure we don’t talk about was for the, uh, affected population’s own protection, but we couldn’t have gone back to …”
“No,” sighed Blum. “Not to that, no.” She mixed another drink, and refilled the glasses.
Carlos sipped. He felt a strange mixture of deep shame at having even brought up the shameful memory of that massive collective failure—of intellect, of empathy, of humanity—and relief that the subject had been smoothed over. But still something nagged. What was it? Something about real …
“Oh yes!” he said. He jabbed a finger forward, and steadied himself on the stool. “Is she real?”
Blum made a show of looking over her shoulder. “Seeing double already?”
“Ha ha. You know what I mean. Your avatar here is based on a real woman.”
“Yes,” said Blum. She shook her head, lank hair flying out. “She was just … a girl in Tel Aviv. Worked in my parents’ house when I was a student. I hardly knew her. I wasn’t even very attracted to her, but I became … obsessed with her. It was before my military service, and before I joined the Axle.”
“What did she do?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t keep in touch.”
There was evasive, and there was deliberately ob
tuse.
“What did she do in your parents’ house?”
“Oh! A bit of cleaning and tidying up.”
“Like you were doing when I came in? Flower arranging, light dusting, that sort of thing?”
Blum shrugged. “More or less. We had a robot for the heavy stuff.”
Carlos knew he was getting woozy. But he thought he was on to something, that Blum had been right: this wasn’t about gender at all, this was about some deep, kinked connection of guilt and privilege and class. No chromosomal correction could break it. He blinked hard and shook his head and took a deep breath.
“You,” he told Blum, “are a right fucking perv.”
Blum smiled. “Now that,” she said, “is the nicest thing you’ve said all day.”
She drained her glass and looked at her watch, a delicate gold strap.
“Time to go back,” she said.
They high-fived. Blum said something under her breath. They were robots again.
The four fighters jumped down from the tug. Baser launched itself into a more graceful leap, and sailed to a pinpoint-precise landing that didn’t so much as kick up dust. It was as if the robot had retained some reflexes from its time as a giant spider inside the Arcane module’s fantasy-world sim.
Carlos walked slowly and carefully, letting his gait adjust to the gravity. The vicinity of the weapons stacks wasn’t a good place for bounding around. The others followed suit.
The anti-spacecraft missile batteries checked out as in good order, as did the two scooters. Newton stood looking at a rack of rifles, and then attempted to shift the laser projectors and machine guns into readiness. This was a struggle.
Two of these big fighting machines were damaged—Carlos had put missiles through them what felt like months ago to him. That left four still usable. Each stood three metres high, looming like robot war memorials welded from scrap metal. They were made of nothing of the kind, but that was how they looked.