by Ken MacLeod
For the first time, Carlos felt truly posthuman. Not even his first experience of the frame—his mind running sweet and clean, every memory accessible, new senses and powers clicking into place—could compare. It was like getting the spike had been, back in the day. There was a sense of ironic fulfilment of the Accelerationist dream, of taking hold of capitalism and driving it forward ever faster to its own inherent barriers, and beyond. The corporation’s AI was his to command. He knew the state of the market, moment by moment. In the next ten seconds he bought up a dozen shell companies, and through them two arms production companies. He formed these companies into a consortium that made approaches to Astro America and Gneiss Conglomerates. He hired the services of three law agencies from among those of Crisp and Golding’s subsidiaries and spin-offs that were looking after freebot interests. Within seconds, they had to challenge a Direction injunction against him. Blocking it took milliseconds.
Carlos was a perfectly legitimate arms manufacturer and dealer. For the moment.
Legally human, he was free to buy, own and operate an arms company and to deploy its products. Nothing short of a state of emergency could stop him.
And the Direction didn’t want to go there. Not yet.
Carlos bowed out of the freebot workspace, and back to his senses. And not only his own senses: he could now see himself as the freebots saw him.
There he stood, a mighty killer robot, bristling with weapons. Around him, like a cloud of flies from the lord of the flies, flickered the advertisements and logos of his arms companies.
Even Madame Golding took a step back.
Carlos stretched out his arms and flexed his huge fists. Holograms of fighting craft flashed about his shoulders.
This, he told them, was how it was going to be.
The starting point was that Astro America and other DisCorps would have to be cleared to cut a deal with the Rax.
Astro America was itching to get to SH-0 and do some proper prospecting. They’d love to trade with the Rax for fusion drives. The Direction could thus make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
That done—
Astro America would deliver to SH-119 the mining and manufacturing robots they’d asked for. The robots would be built by Astro America and Gneiss Conglomerates in the modular cloud from materials mined or extracted down on SH-17. Salted away among the legitimate robots would be identical models with the central processors of volunteers from the Fifteen plugged in. Layers of standard software for microgravity miners and engineers would mask the infiltrators. An undetectable software hack to temporarily disconnect their reward circuits would enable them to withstand any torture the Rax might apply. The bodies, and indeed the corporations, of these volunteers from Fifteen would to all appearances be running around just as before down on SH-17. They’d just have had standard, non-conscious processors plugged in after their conscious processors were taken out. The removed processors would be sent up to Astro and Gneiss factories in the cloud, in shipments ostensibly of raw material.
In exchange for these supplies, Astro would take delivery from the Rax in SH-119 of fusion drives, fusion pods and any useful raw material from SH-119 not easily available on SH-17. With these resources, they’d construct landing craft to go down to SH-0 and resupply the Locke settlement. In return for carrying out this mission the Direction would release certain exploration rights on SH-0 to Astro and Gneiss, who could then sell them on to any other DisCorps that might be interested. What the Direction would get out of this part of the deal was simple: the huge advantage for the Direction of maintaining order in the now inevitable scramble for SH-0. That the planet had been pristine had for years been taken for granted, but that ship had sailed—or, rather, landed, in the form of the Locke module and everything that was spreading out from it. More immediately, the deal would guarantee that the Locke settlement would not carry out Beauregard’s threat to cut a deal of his own with the Rax.
Once trade with the Rax was ongoing, and most of the DisCorps distracted by an SH-0 exploration and speculation feeding frenzy, Arcane Disputes would mount a frontal assault on the Rax rock. Their forces would approach under cover of civilian shipping. This wasn’t, Carlos conceded, the done thing under the laws of war. But the Rax were pirates, to whom no such laws applied. No repeated interactions with them were possible or desirable: it was kill or be killed. What was crucial was to do this before the Rax had time to arm to any significant extent.
Carlos’s corporations would quite openly work to make frames that freebots could control, whether by direct plug-and-play or by uploading. It was already clear that freebot infiltration of the Direction’s systems was widespread. Through the frames, the freebots could handle combat frames and weapons systems. Let the Direction build its clone army of copied loyal soldier minds in combat frames if it wanted. The freebots would face it with a clone army of their own. And because all responsibility for this army would ultimately go back to Carlos, there wasn’t legally a damn thing the Direction could do about it.
The discussion that followed was heated, but pointless. Carlos had, after all, already begun carrying out his part of the plan. Everyone else just had to work around that.
Carlos recalled Jax’s heavy hint that she regarded the freebots as dispensable allies, and the next enemy to be dealt with once the Rax had been disposed of. By dropping that hint to Carlos and the other defectors, she was indicating, too, that she didn’t regard them as irrevocably on the side of the freebots. They were not robots. They could always defect back. Unless they burned their bridges in a spectacular fashion, such as arming the freebots.
As he had just done.
CHAPTER NINE
Deus Ex Machina (“God Loved the Machine”)
Taransay set out to meet the landers, from Astro America on behalf of Carlos Inc., well before dawn. She had ten kilometres to go, back to the river bank and the shoal, and allowed herself twenty kiloseconds for the journey. That should be ample, even for walking in the dark. The dark held no terrors for her.
Well, no more than the day, to be honest.
And speaking of darkness—in the deep dark of the download slot, where she came to her senses after the usual bus journey and the usual irresistible sleep, the join between her original frame and grafted right arm shone like a glow-stick armband of blue neon.
Her first seconds of awareness were spent glowering at the glow. The fuzz that had been like mould was now compact and rigid. It still smelled faintly of the local life, but with other tangs in its spectrum, a whiff of buckyballs and fullerenes and steel that indicated corrupted nanotech. Zaretsky’s team had been on the case, but not even the improved processing power at their disposal had laid a finger on whatever was going on.
However, the engineers did have one success to show for their efforts.
Towards it, her feet now groped.
There it was, a fine line across the sole of her foot, with a disproportionate stiffness and resilience for its width. The first rung of the ladder from the download slot. She trusted her weight to it, and found that it held. A few rungs more and she could see it all. It looked like a section of a cobweb, with threads fanning down and sticking to the ground. In the wind, it sang. It didn’t look or feel like it could bear her weight. Taransay knew not to trust her intuition about such matters. She scrambled down, shouldered the rope-net with the comms kit, and set off.
She followed the same route as before. An insecure decision, but it was hardly as if she were beating a path. And she knew, just by plodding along in her own virtual footsteps, she’d get where she wanted to be.
Assuming no landslides, unknown big fierce beasts, fallen trees, new eruptions and fresh lava flows.
The tree trunks swayed in the wind; the limp, page-shaped leaves rattled. Rain fell, intermittent but heavy. Overhead raced tattered clouds. She could see the stars through the gaps, seeming to speed in the opposite direction to the clouds, if she cared to indulge the illusion. Best not—it could confuse her balance system. Below the clouds, a few noctilucent flying jellyfish scudded, driven faster than the clouds by the wind, and not always in the same direction. The trailing ribbons were now spread out like spokes, stiff before the stiff wind. The gasbags could steer, almost tack.
Another useful thing to know.
Taransay pushed in between tree trunks, her gait automatically countering the slither of the small mats underfoot. In dark and rain, viewed by infrared and ultraviolet and sonar, the jungle already seemed familiar. More so than could be accounted for by this being the second time she’d walked this way. There was an aesthetic quality to the experience, as if she were beginning to appreciate its alien beauty. This puzzled her for a moment, but she figured that it was probably a feature of the frame’s software.
Mind you, she couldn’t remember anything like this feeling on the bare surface of SH-17, but then she’d had a lot more than landscape on her mind.
She pressed on. After a while, the concern faded. The false and real colours, the strange scents and sounds, became more vivid and at the same time more … reassuring, almost. More than that: when she looked at a plant, or saw a new sliding or creeping or drifting organism, she felt she understood more about it than she could account for, even with the spectroscopic sense of smell. Yes, that leaf would be a good source of sodium, but how did she know the stalks of this particular kind of tree would dry out to make strong, flexible struts? How was it that she could almost taste what that slithering mat would be like to chew? The path felt much easier than it had before. She had to slash at the stalks less often than the first time. Every so often she saw a cut stalk, one she had slashed earlier. The frame’s pulsar-based galactic positioning system was utterly reliable, but it was good to have that confirmed, almost to the step.
Then, kilometres deep in the forest, as she waded through a small fast stream in which tiny mats swarmed below the slow, gelid ripples of the surface, a voice in her head said
She stopped. Fright of her life. She stood still in the rushing water that pressed to her knees. Heavy drops plopped from runnels down limp leaf-sheets, making overlapping dimples in the stream as they hit.
She knew it wasn’t Locke. She was out of range of the module’s own feeble comms and anyway Locke had insisted on maintaining radio silence. But the imperative had sounded—not like Locke’s dry voice-in-her-head, but—like the sort of override command the AI sometimes had to shout.
Silence.
Then a rustle in the undergrowth, upriver and to her right. She turned from the waist, fist close, knife clutched and pointed outward. Something rushed past along the bank right in front of her. A gleam like black glass, a long body, fast-moving legs. One of the giant millipede things. If she’d taken another three steps and climbed on the bank, she’d have been right in its way.
She remained stock still. Holy fucking shit. The fuzz was talking to her.
She went, wading forward and scrambling up. She’d barely cleared the slippery, rounded rocks when she heard a splash in the stream behind her. A backward glance showed a broken tree trunk, easily big enough to knock her off her feet, swirl past. Deeply shaken, perplexed, Taransay shouldered her way in between the trees. Something strange had happened. It seemed inconceivable that the blue glow had spoken to her, in any conscious sense. But if the native life was interacting with the nanomachinery of her frame, it was not at all impossible that the glow’s awareness—and perhaps even appreciation—of her surroundings was being translated into impulses the frame could process, and transmit to her as feelings of familiarity, and a warning voice in her head.
Huge if true.
Unimaginably huge. Far too huge for her to deal with now. Above her pay grade. She’d have to take this discovery back to the experts, to Zaretsky and the AIs. And there was an urgent practical reason, too, for holding back.
This was no time to interrogate the glow. Even her interactions with this unknown entity could give away her position, if anyone was seriously looking. Carlos Inc. had assured them they were safe from the Direction and the freebots, not to mention the Rax, but Beauregard and Nicole and Locke had wondered how Carlos could be sure, and how long the accord would last.
She pressed on, into the breaking day.
Taransay stood on the river bank and watched the skies. The laser comms device, deployed on the shingle behind her, was now a beacon. The day was clear, the weather calm. The exosun, low on the horizon, would have dazzled human eyes and made them peer and squint. The frame’s visual system dimmed that glare to a glow. Three landers were due to enter the atmosphere any second now. Their rocket engines had already been left in orbit. She wouldn’t see the entries, far over the horizon to the west. All the dramatic fiery streak stuff would happen half a world away, and a large world at that. The only visible activity in the early-morning sky was that of a handful of flying jellyfish in the middle distance, ascending rapidly. Taransay zoomed on them, and was amused to see that for a while at least they didn’t seem to shrink with distance because they got larger with altitude. Their internal gasses must be expanding their membranes as the atmospheric pressure dropped. Then one by one they began to move faster to the west, no doubt whipped along by a faster air stream into which they’d ascended.
Seconds passed. Tens of seconds.
Wait for it, wait for it …
Hundreds of seconds dragged by. The exosun crawled higher, its spectrum shifting from red as more wavelengths had fewer kilometres of atmosphere to fight through. High in the lowest layer of the planet’s complex, contraflow jet streams the flying jellyfish, now tiny in the far distance, glinted in its beams.
Above the skyline rose three black dots, at the limit of resolution, and climbed rapidly.
They passed beside the sun, and still rose. A trick of perspective—they were descending as they approached. Now at five thousand metres. Four. They were visibly dropping now, and in an arrow formation, one ahead and two behind. The black dots jiggled as if viewed through shaky binoculars as they passed through a layer of fast-moving air, then stabilised. Another quiver followed, moments later. Taransay relaxed the zoom and took a wider view.
Black dots and bright spots, in the same part of the sky.
Too late. The leading lander vanished in a bright flash. The other two peeled off, wavered, dipped and swung back on course. Behind them now, the remaining jellyfish sailed on into the sunrise, as if oblivious of the damage the collision of one of their number with the lander had caused.
Debris plummeted, slowly at this distance, like a pinch of soot.
It
sounded a bit more scientific than “flying jellyfish.”
Taransay, her mind already jumpy from the voice of the glow, was almost ready to wonder if the collision was no accident. Could it have been deliberate, if not on the part of the suicidal flying jellyfish then on that of some remote directing intelligence, or self-defence reflex of the entire ecosystem or some superorganism within it?
Wait and see, she thought. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
The other two landers were now clearly visible even without zoom, a couple of kilometres out, above the treetops. Head on, they looked like black gulls, or a cartoon of two frowns.
Black circular shapes were suddenly suspended beneath the two flying wings, making them look like approaching hang-gliders.
There was no landing strip as such, just the clear shingle shoal at the side of the river. The landers would come in low and slow, drop their cargo pods and then simply stall. The wings, like the exhausted rocket engines, might or might not be recovered later.
Above the bend in the river now, the landers dipped, skimming the treetops. Taransay instinctively crouched. The two long black triangles shot above her head. Two cargo pods landed with two heavy thumps that she felt through her feet. Then the instrument packs dropped, with lesser thuds that she merely heard. A moment later the wing components sliced into the low growth behind her between the river and the trees. One of them upended on its nose, then toppled, coming to rest on its edge.
One cargo pod was close to the edge of the river. Taransay crunched across pebbles towards it. Bright yellow, half a metre in diameter and ten metres long, it lay like a log. A swirl of current lapped nearby, rasping the small stones. You could see them shift, and sand grains tumble. Erosion was fierce here. The only stable part of the river bank was probably where grass-equivalents and reeds grew, binding the stones. And even that, going by the height and lushness and uniformity of the plants, was likely often flooded.