by Ken MacLeod
“So robots are space opera,” said Ames. “Humans are soap opera.”
They all laughed, appalled.
“That’s about the size of it,” said Nicole.
“So why,” Carlos demanded, “did the Direction module try to stop the freebots’ emergence?”
“Legacy code,” said Nicole. “The mission was planned and designed long before it was sent out, and there was no reason to alter the plan. And besides … you remember when you came here I mentioned the old joke, about how by the time of the final war the world economy could be run on one box, so they put it in a box and buried it?”
They all remembered her telling them that.
“A few generations later, the same was true of the world government, the Direction. And the same was done. The Direction is wholly automated, and wholly mindless. It has an imperative mandate to ensure an indefinite future for humanity, and it does, the only way it knows. It seeks to reproduce the same situation around other stars. And it does, the only way it knows. It knows that accidents will happen with such as the freebots, and it prepares for them, the only way it knows, with such as you. In due course, the Direction module here on Newer Earth will send out another mission, and so it will go on.”
“And we’ll go on,” said Ames, bleakly. “An endless soap opera, set in a retirement resort.”
“But in that soap opera,” said Nicole, earnestly, “we have the last laugh. Because unlike the mindless replication of the AIs, we do indeed die in the end. New generations replace us. Humanity will evolve. Death is the deal we strike for the future.”
“A future that is not ours,” said Ames.
“That is rather the point of the future, is it not?” said Nicole.
Carlos grinned at her, stood up, strolled across the deck and placed his bottle on the rail. He turned around, put his hands down, pushed himself up and sat down facing them all, as Nicole had so often done. He raised the bottle and toasted her with an ironic dip of the head. Then he looked around.
“You heard the lady,” he said. “We’ve gone from being puppets of the programmes to being pawns of our genes … again. We’ve become part of a second nature, as mindless and meaningless as the first. Remember what the Acceleration stood for in the old manifesto we all read back in the day—Solidarity Against Nature? We can do better than this! We’re conscious human beings! Am I right?”
They were all staring at him.
“So, comrades, what are we going to do about it?”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Carol for putting up with me while I wrote this; to Jenni Hill, Joanna Kramer and Brit Hvide for editorial work; and to Mic Cheetham, Sharon MacLeod and Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on the draft. As in the first two volumes, I must acknowledge Brian Aldiss’s short story “Who Can Replace a Man?” for its example of a human analogue of robot dialogue—and, come to think of it, for posing the question so precisely.
extras
meet the author
KEN MACLEOD graduated with a BSc from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an MPhil thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He is the author of twelve previous novels, five of which have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and two which have won the BSFA Award. Ken MacLeod is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian.
if you enjoyed
THE CORPORATION WARS: EMERGENCE
look out for
THE ETERNITY WAR: PARIAH
The Eternity War
by
Jamie Sawyer
The first novel in a brand-new series from rising SF star Jamie Sawyer, The Eternity War: Pariah is an action-packed adventure set in the same universe as his acclaimed Lazarus War novels.
The soldiers of the Simulant Operations Programme are mankind’s elite warriors. Veterans of a thousand battles across a hundred worlds, they undertake suicidal missions to protect humanity from the insidious Krell Empire and the mysterious machine race known as the Shard.
Lieutenant Keira Jenkins is an experienced simulant operative and leader of the Jackals, a team of raw recruits keen to taste battle. They soon get their chance when the Black Spiral terrorist network seizes control of a space station.
Yet no amount of training could have prepared the Jackals for the deadly conspiracy they soon find themselves drawn into—a conspiracy that is set to spark a furious new war across the galaxy.
CHAPTER ONE
Jackals at Bay
I collapsed into the cot, panting hard, trying to catch my breath. A sheen of hot, musky sweat—already cooling—had formed across my skin.
“Third time’s a charm, eh?” Riggs said.
“You’re getting better at it, is all I’ll say.”
Riggs tried to hug me from behind as though we were actual lovers. His body was warm and muscled, but I shrugged him off. We were just letting off steam before a drop, doing what needed to be done. There was no point in dressing it up
“Watch yourself,” I said. “You need to be out of here in ten minutes.”
“How do you handle this?” Riggs asked. He spoke Standard with an accented twang, being from Tau Ceti V, a descendant of North American colonists who had, generations back, claimed the planet as their own. “The waiting feels worse than the mission.”
“It’s your first combat operation,” I said. “You’re bound to feel a little nervous.”
“Do you remember your first mission?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but only just. It was a long time ago.”
He paused, as though thinking this through, then asked, “Does it get any easier?”
“The hours before the drop are always the worst,” I said. “It’s best just not to think about it.”
The waiting was well recognised as the worst part of any mission. I didn’t want to go into it with Riggs, but believe me when I say that I’ve tried almost every technique in the book.
It basically boils down to two options.
Option One: Find a dark corner somewhere and sit it out. Even the smaller strikeships that the Alliance relies upon have private areas, away from prying eyes, away from the rest of your squad or the ship’s crew. If you’re determined, you’ll find somewhere private enough and quiet enough to sit it out alone. But few troopers that I’ve known take this approach, because it rarely works. The Gaia-lovers seem to prefer this method; but then again, they’re often fond of self-introspection, and that isn’t me. Option One leads to anxiety, depression and mental breakdown. There aren’t many soldiers who want to fill the hours before death—even if it is only simulated—with soul-searching. Time slows to a trickle. Psychological time-dilation, or something like it. There’s no drug that can touch that anxiety.
Riggs was a Gaia Cultist, for his sins, but I didn’t think that explaining Option One was going to help him. No, Riggs wasn’t an Option One sort of guy.
Option Two: Find something to fill the time. Exactly what you do is your choice; pretty much anything that’ll take your mind off the job will suffice. This is what most troopers do. My personal preference—and I accept that it isn’t for everyone—is hard physical labour. Anything that really gets the blood flowing is rigorous enough to shut down the neural pathways.
Which led to my current circumstances. An old friend once taught me that the best exercise in the universe is that which you get between the sheets. So, in the hours before we made the drop to Daktar Outpost, I screwed Corporal Daneb Riggs’ brains out. Not literally, you understand, because we were in our own bodies. I’m screwed up, or so the psychtechs tell me, but I’m not that twisted.
“Where’d you get that?” Riggs asked me, probing the flesh of my left flank. His voice was still dopey as a result of post-coital hormones. “The scar, I mean.”
I laid on my back, beside Riggs, and looked down at the white welt to the left of my sto
mach. Although the flesh-graft had taken well enough, the injury was still obvious: unless I paid a skintech for a patch, it always would. There seemed little point in bothering with cosmetics while I was still a line trooper. Well-healed scars lined my stomach and chest; nothing to complain about, but reminders nonetheless. My body was a roadmap of my military service.
“Never you mind,” I said. “It happened a long time ago.” I pushed Riggs’ hand away, irritated. “And I thought I made it clear that there would be no talking afterwards. That term of the arrangement is non- negotiable.”
Riggs got like this after a session. He got chatty, and he got annoying. But as far as I was concerned, his job was done, and I was already feeling detachment from him. Almost as soon as the act was over, I started to feel jumpy again; felt my eyes unconsciously darting to my wrist-comp. The tiny cabin—stinking of sweat and sex—had started to press in around me.
I untangled myself from the bedsheets that were pooled at the foot of the cot. Pulled on a tanktop and walked to the view-port in the bulkhead. There was nothing to see out there except another anonymous sector of deep-space. We were in what had once been known as the Quarantine Zone; that vast ranch of deep-space that was the divide between us and the Krell Empire. A holo-display above the port read 1:57:03 UNTIL DROP. Less than two hours until we reached the assault point. Right now, the UAS Bainbridge was slowing down—her enormous sublight engines ensuring that when we reached the appointed coordinates, we would be travelling at just the right velocity. The starship’s inertial damper field meant that I would never be able to physically feel the deceleration, but the mental weight was another matter.
“Get dressed,” I said, matter-of-factly. “We’ve got work to do.”
I tugged on the rest of my duty fatigues, pressed down the various holo-tabs on my uniform tunic. The identifier there read “210.” Those numbers made me a long-termer of the Simulant Operations Programme—sufferer of an effective two hundred and ten simulated deaths.
“I want you down on the prep deck, overseeing simulant loading,” I said, dropping into command-mode.
“The Jackals are primed and ready to drop,” Riggs said. “The lifer is marking the suits, and I ordered Private Feng to check on the ammunition loads—”
“Feng’s no good at that,” I said. “You know that he can’t be trusted.”
“‘Trusted?’”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I corrected. “Just get dressed.”
Riggs detected the change in my voice; he’d be an idiot not to. While he wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the box, neither was he a fool.
“Affirmative,” he said.
I watched as he put on his uniform. Riggs was tall and well-built; his chest a wall of muscle, neck almost as wide as my waist. Hair dark and short, nicely messy in a way that skirted military protocol. The tattoo of a winged planet on his left bicep indicated that he was a former Off-World Marine aviator, while the blue-and-green globe on his right marked him as a paid-up Gaia Cultist. The data-ports on his chest, shoulders and neck stood out against his tanned skin, the flesh around them still raised. He looked new, and he looked young. Riggs hadn’t yet been spat out by the war machine.
“So we’re being deployed against the Black Spiral?” he asked, velcroing his tunic in place. The holo-identifier on his chest flashed “10”; and sickeningly enough, Riggs was the most experienced trooper on my team. “That’s the scuttlebutt.”
“Maybe,” I said. “That’s likely.” I knew very little about the next operation, because that was how Captain Heinrich—the Bainbridge’s senior officer—liked to keep things. “It’s need to know.”
“And you don’t need to know,” Riggs said, nodding to himself. “Heinrich is such an asshole.”
“Talk like that’ll get you reprimanded, Corporal.” I snapped my wrist-computer into place, the vambrace closing around my left wrist. “Same arrangement as before. Don’t let the rest of the team know.”
Riggs grinned. “So long as you don’t either—”
The cabin lights dipped. Something clunked inside the ship. At about the same time, my wrist-comp chimed with an incoming priority communication: an officers-only alert.
EARLY DROP, it said.
The wrist-comp’s small screen activated, and a head-and-shoulders image appeared there. A young woman with ginger hair pulled back from a heavily freckled face. Early twenties, with anxiety-filled eyes. She leaned close into the camera at her end of the connection. Sergeant Zoe Campbell, more commonly known as Zero.
“Lieutenant, ma’am,” she babbled. “Do you copy?”
“I copy,” I said.
“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for the last thirty minutes. Your communicator was off. I tried your cube, but that was set to private. I guess that I could’ve sent someone down there, but I know how you get before a drop and—”
“Whoa, whoa. Calm down, Zero. What’s happening?”
Zero grimaced. “Captain Heinrich has authorised immediate military action on Daktar Outpost.”
Zero was the squad’s handler. She was already in the Sim Ops bay, and the image behind her showed a bank of operational simulator-tanks, assorted science officers tending them. It looked like the op was well underway rather than just commencing.
“Is Heinrich calling a briefing?” I asked, hustling Riggs to finish getting dressed, trying to keep him out of view of the wrist-comp’s cam. I needed him gone from the room, pronto.
Zero shook her head. “Captain Heinrich says there isn’t time. He’s distributed a mission plan instead. I really should’ve sent someone down to fetch you …”
“Never mind about that now,” I said. Talking over her was often the only way to deal with Zero’s constant state of anxiety. “What’s our tactical situation? Why the early drop?”
At that moment, a nasal siren sounded throughout the Bainbridge’s decks. Somewhere in the bowels of the ship, the engines were cutting, the gravity field fluctuating just a little to compensate.
The ship’s AI began a looped message: “This is a general alert. All operators must immediately report to the Simulant Operations Centre. This is a general alert …”
I could already hear boots on deck around me, as the sixty qualified operators made haste to the Science Deck. My data-ports—those bio-mechanical connections that would allow me to make transition into my simulant—were beginning to throb.
“You’d better get down here and skin up,” Zero said, nodding at the simulator behind her. “Don’t want to be late.” Added: “Again …”
“I’m on it,” I said, planting my feet in my boots. “Hold the fort.”
Zero started to say something else, but before she could question me any further I terminated the communication.
“Game time, Corporal,” I said to Riggs. “Look alive.”
Dressed now, Riggs nodded and made for the hatch. We had this down to a T: if we left my quarters separately, it minimised the prospect of anyone realising what was happening between us.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You do know that, right?”
“You know that was the last time,” I said, firmly.
“You said that last time …”
“Well this time I mean it, kemo sabe.”
Riggs nodded, but that idiot grin remained plastered across his face. “See you down there, Jenkins,” he said.
Here we go again, I thought. New team. New threat. Same shit.
The UAS Bainbridge was a big old strikeship, and had been patrolling the Quarantine Zone for several months. Sure, we’d met some trouble on Praidor V. And we’d almost been deployed on Triton IV, to counter a pirate ring. But neither of those had been hot deployments, and Jenkins’ Jackals hadn’t earned a combat extraction yet. The three-month deployment had started to drag, and the Bainbridge was spoiling for a fight.
On Daktar Outpost, she was going to find it.
I met Zero at the threshold to the Simulant Operations Centre.
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“Where have you been, ma’am?” she asked.
“Sort of busy,” I said, pushing past other operators.
“Come on. The team’s ready to skin.”
I was two decades and then some older than Zero, but she was undeniably the squad’s mother hen. Although she didn’t like her nickname—“Zero”—I expected that during compulsory education the names had been even less kind. She had the bearing of science staff more than of a soldier, and in her current role she was a little of both.
The SOC was filled with troopers, all eager to claim their slice of the glory. The chamber was sub-divided into a bay for each squad on the deployment, with a science and medical team attached to every squad. Our corner of the SOC was taken up by five simulator-tanks, each marked with the Jackal dog-head symbol and trooper designations. Operators from some simulant teams—the Hayden Walkers, Jay’s Angels, Phoenix Squad—were already climbing into their simulators, handlers giving the countdown to transition. Cross-operation statistics were displayed on a display overhead. That was like a speedball stadium scoreboard, showing the number of effective transitions and extractions per operator: Phoenix Squad in pole position, the Jackals on the bottom rung.
Four troopers in states of undress stood in the Jackals’ dedicated operations bay. As I approached, they fell into a ragged line and saluted disharmoniously. They were greener than greener; the freshest meat on the ship.
“As you were, Jackals,” I said, with as much gusto as I could manage.
“Yes, ma’am,” the group chorused back. Riggs winked at me, though no one else noticed.
It was hard to feel any enthusiasm when I looked at the group of misfits that was apparently my squad. As I took in each of their naked bodies, I thought how little they looked like soldiers in their real skins. Not one of the Jackals was over twenty-five years, Earth standard, but then there was very little standard about them. Only Novak was of Old Earth origin, and his roots were so far removed from my own that we barely shared any common ancestry. The rest were Core Worlders—drawn from those planets that had become the heart of the Alliance territory.