Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  Beauregard’s nose itched. He rubbed it without thinking, then glimpsed his hand and almost jumped out of the bed. Willing himself to stay where he was, he raised the hand and stared at it, bemused and alarmed. He turned the hand this way and that. Everything was there—fingernails, creases, wrinkles, the outlines of veins and tendons. But whichever way he looked, it was all outline. There was no light or shade, just a thin black line around the hand. Shorter lines limned its every feature.

  Slowly, so as not to disturb Tourmaline, Beauregard swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up and looked around. Everything he could see was outlined in the same way. It was like being inside a 3-D wire rendering, as in an unoriginal advertisement of a product making a song and dance about the design stage. The level of detail varied: Tourmaline’s hair lay in masses, as if sketched accurately but quickly; Beauregard reached over and ran his hand through it, and each hair felt as distinct as those on his arm looked. When he separated out a lock between fingers and thumb, he could see each hair as a black line, but when he let go they fell back into a common outlined shape. He stood up and opened the shutters wider, and saw the slope and the houses and other buildings below, and the bay and the sea and the wheeling bird-things, all in outline. The exosun, low above the horizon, hurt his eyes. He looked away, blinking up after-images that looked more real than the object itself. Beauregard closed his eyes and pressed on them, to see the familiar indistinct, shifting coloured shapes. His visual imagery was likewise in full colour, as ever.

  Tourmaline stirred and turned over. Her face—normally beautiful in form, subtle in complexion—was in this fine outline haunting, like a perfect drawing evoking the appearance of one long dead. She opened her eyes and closed them again—against the unwonted brightness of the bedroom at this hour, Beauregard guessed.

  “It’s early,” she complained.

  “Good morning,” said Beauregard. “Would you mind looking at me for a moment?”

  She opened her eyes, blinked, and heaved herself up on one elbow, duvet slipping from a shoulder. She scanned him with a sleepy smile that turned sly as her gaze scrolled to his crotch.

  “Nothing to see,” she said. “Poor you.”

  Beauregard glanced down, momentarily embarrassed in spite of himself. He’d lost his morning hard-on—no fucking wonder.

  “Apart from that,” he said, “does everything look normal to you?”

  He hardly had to ask. Tourmaline looked around the room, hair tumbling.

  “Yeah, it’s all fine,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Come here a minute,” said Beauregard.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Do it for me, please.” He put some steel in his voice.

  Looking mutinous, she complied, dragging the duvet with her and wrapping herself in it. Beauregard gestured at the open window.

  “What do you see out there?”

  Tourmaline gave a muffled shrug.

  “Sunrise,” she said.

  “What does the sun look like to you?” Beauregard asked. “A round, coppery disk, somewhat like a penny?”

  “What’s a penny?” she mumbled. Then: “Yeah, round and bright and…reddish, I suppose.”

  “That’s odd,” said Beauregard. “Because what I see is an immense multitude of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Glory, glory, glory to the Lord God Almighty.’”

  What he actually saw, when he glanced sidelong at it and away, was indeed a disk, a perfect circle that didn’t exactly shine but was somehow too bright to look at, with two or three lines of numbers and letters in small print near its circumference. He suspected that these were specifications: spectrum, temperature, type, location on the main sequence, and of course the precise degree of reddening for the early morning atmosphere…

  “You what?” said Tourmaline.

  Beauregard wrapped an arm around her duvet-draped shoulders, and looked down into her eyes with a smile. A little warily, as if not sure of his sanity, she smiled back.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Beauregard. “I’m going to check it out. Go back to bed for now.”

  “Nah, I’m awake. I’ll make coffee.”

  “Thanks,” said Beauregard. He kissed her. Eyes closed, it was all the same.

  “That’s more like it,” she said. She stepped out of the duvet, slithered into a dressing gown and wandered out. Beauregard walked over to where he’d dropped his clothes the previous night, and rummaged in the back pocket of his trousers for his phone.

  “Karzan? Sorry to wake you, but—”

  “Fuck sake, skip, it’s just—wait a fucking minute! Jeez! What’s happened?”

  “You see it too?”

  “Not see it, more like.”

  “No colour, all outline?”

  “Yeah. What the fuck? I mean, what the fuck?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck,” said Beauregard, “but at least now I know it’s not just me.”

  Karzan said something off speaker, in a tone of annoyed reassurance, then came back.

  “You can count Pierre in on that, too,” she said.

  “Good to know,” said Beauregard. “OK, I’ll call you back when I have an idea.”

  Struck by a sudden thought, he thumbed through his contacts and called Iqbal, the barman at the Digital Touch. The phone rang for almost a minute.

  “Morning,” said a resentful voice. “We’re closed.”

  “Sorry, Iqbal,” Beauregard said. “I know we kept you late last night.”

  “Yes,” said Iqbal. “But, then, it was not a normal night.”

  Beauregard snorted. “You could say that.” It wasn’t every night he made a bid for power. “But…sorry if this sounds strange, but does this look like a normal morning to you?”

  “Sure,” said Iqbal. “Everything’s as it should be, as far as I can see.” He sounded sleepy, confused, perhaps hungover. “I mean, shouldn’t it be?”

  “No, no,” said Beauregard. “Forget it—sorry I asked. Get back to a well-earned sleep, and sorry again to disturb you.”

  He laid the phone down on the bedside table, ambled to the en suite to piss and to splash his face and neck, and got dressed. All his clothes felt real—the final groin-adjustment tug of underpants, the wiggled squirm of socks, the matching of tightness to tendon comfort while lacing up boots—but the sight of the garments was unsettling. It occurred to him belatedly that he’d have felt more comfortable doing it with eyes or shutters closed. It wasn’t like colour choices were a big part of his morning routine—not that with combat casuals there were colour choices to make. He was wondering how Tourmaline would manage when he noticed that each of his own clothes, like the sun, had a tiny code printed somewhere on it, no doubt specifying the colour.

  Beauregard almost laughed. Of course Tourmaline didn’t see anything out of the ordinary! Like Iqbal, she was a p-zombie: her behaviour and conversation were completely indistinguishable from those of a conscious being, but she had no subjectivity, no inner awareness at all. She didn’t have qualia! He doubted her colour perception was anything as crude as reading the codes—these must surely be a flourish of excessive zeal in documentation, or an accidental by-product of the rendering software—but it manifestly didn’t involve the subjective experience of colour, regardless of how accurate her colour discrimination was or how eloquently she could describe the emotional tone of colours or how baffled she would be—was, in fact—at the suggestion that her inner life was any different from anyone else’s.

  And this was proof, objective proof to any human being, that p-zombies really were different. Indeed, if it ever came to the need for a public demonstration, the difference between human beings and p-zombies could be made quite obvious—if still entirely baffling—to the p-zombies themselves. If, that is, the bizarre effect could be turned on and off. He guessed it could—he had a shrewd idea what was going on, and knew he had to confirm it shortly. The loss of colour in the sim didn’t imply good
news, but if it were really bad he’d know already, so for the moment checking it could wait.

  He strapped on his watch, stuck the phone in his back pocket and went through to the kitchen. Tourmaline’s house was bigger and better furnished than the spartan allocation he and other fighters had received. He paused in the doorway to savour the scene: Tourmaline half turning at his footstep, her young, full figure swathed in carelessly tied silk, the flick of hair feathering across her left breast. In this 3-D diagram of a kitchen, her smooth curves contrasted with lines and ellipses and perspectives. Aroma rose from the coffee mugs in steam rendered as upward squirming squiggles of black ink.

  She slid a tray of croissants in the oven, put the mugs on the table and sat down. Beauregard sat facing her, admiring the subtle way the minimal rendering showed the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed, in then out to blow on the hot liquid.

  “Why are you closing your eyes when you sip?” she asked, after a couple of minutes of hungover silence.

  Beauregard hadn’t noticed himself doing that. Just a momentary wince at how all he saw of the coffee was not the familiar black surface, but a thin elliptical line sliding down around the inside of the mug.

  “Appreciating the smell,” he said. “Sorry, bit pretentious.”

  She smiled back. His gaze was held by the intricate tracery of her irises, the white spaces that indicated highlights. If he were to peer closely he’d see his own reflection in her eyes. Hard to believe there was none in her soul. No soul at all, whichever way you cut it. He loved her all the more for that, more deeply than he’d ever loved a human being. Beyond a certain clinical callousness about killing in combat, and several experiences of the berserk fearful fury of close-quarter fighting, Beauregard had found no cruelty in his heart. He acknowledged a streak of sadism in his make-up, which he now and then indulged in dominance games with Tourmaline. But he had no desire to hurt anyone, least of all her. And yet, and yet…the thought that he could do anything to her without harming a living soul, that nothing he said or did to her harmed anyone but himself, excited and enthused him at some level lower than consciousness or even, perhaps, sexuality.

  Nicole’s threat the previous night to turn that relationship against him if he ever crossed her had cut deep. The Direction’s rep in the Locke Provisos sim, Nicole had not been happy at all about Beauregard’s takeover. She’d warned him that if he ever used the fighters against the rest of the inhabitants she’d persuade the p-zombies that there really was no difference between them and normal, everyday, average ghosts: uploaded people who had once had a real life. With her more than human capacity for manipulation, she could easily have turned that conviction into fury against those who’d denied it. And by all the evidence he’d had that evening, he couldn’t see any counter to that ploy. Now he had.

  The phone in his back pocket buzzed. He pulled it out and saw the caller.

  Speak of the devil.

  “Oh, hi,” said Beauregard, dryly. “I was thinking of calling you at some point.”

  “Thanks for not getting round to it,” said Nicole. “I’ve had so many frantic queries I’ve decided to call everyone at once and bring them up to speed.”

  Beauregard didn’t inquire how Nicole could speak separately to everyone at once. She was the kind of entity that could handle one-to-many communications, multi-threading hundreds of conversations. He did find himself idly wondering what her mouth would look like at the moment: a grotesque, pixellated blur of jaw moving every which way, he imagined, and presumed no one was there to see it. The lady, and the software she ran on, was punctilious about maintaining the consistency of the sim.

  “Let me guess,” said Beauregard. “You’ve cut back on rendering to release processing power for more urgent tasks.”

  “Got it in one,” said Nicole. “Flying the module is getting tricky. There’s a battle going on, everyone seems to be attacking everyone else, we’re taking evasive action and simultaneously plotting several slingshots to get to SH-0 orbit.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Watch the television news, if you like,” said Nicole.

  “OK, OK.”

  “There really is nothing you can do.”

  “How long do you think—hang on.”

  Beauregard had the habit of pacing while talking on the phone. He could see Tourmaline looking irritated, so he ambled outside to the backyard and stood facing the outline of the mountain range behind the resort. It was like a landscape in a colouring-in book. There were even tiny numbers everywhere, if you knew what to look for. High white clouds like loops and whorls of wire scudded across a white sky.

  “Sorry,” he went on. “How long do you think this is going to last?”

  “Hard to say,” said Nicole. “Quite a while, subjectively. It’ll take us at least a kilosecond real time to get out of the battle zone, and even then…”

  “Uh-huh.” Nearly a fortnight of this bizarre experience, and that was looking on the bright side. “I guess we’ll just have to—holy shit!”

  From a dot, then a patch, in the sky above the mountains, blue spread like an inkblot. Beneath it, an avalanche of natural colour rolled down the mountain range. For a split second it seemed to pause, then crested the rise that had hidden it and continued down and across, filling in the view.

  “What?” said Nicole.

  Beauregard took a moment or two to collect his thoughts enough to reply.

  “Colour’s coming back,” he said. “From up in the hills.”

  “And who do you think might be doing that?” said Nicole, sarcastically.

  “What do you mean, ‘who’?” He thought about it. Who lived up in the hills? “Shaw?”

  “Yes, of course Shaw!”

  What had Shaw got to do with it? The last time Beauregard had thought of Shaw was when Taransay Rizzi had fled from the bus to the hills, evidently to rendezvous with the old man. She and the treacherous Carlos had secretly gone to meet him, weeks earlier. Beauregard and Newton, on their case, had covertly followed. Nothing they’d seen, at the limits of their phones’ zoom capacity, had suggested the old man of the mountain had any powers beyond extraordinary agility.

  And having lived for a thousand years, of course. There was that.

  Nicole’s uncharacteristic yelp broke into Beauregard’s puzzlement.

  “Crazy motherfucker!” she cried. “Now he’s done it!”

  “Done what?”

  “Look at your watch.”

  Beauregard did. Time in the sim typically ran a thousand times faster than outside: he’d grown used to reading microseconds and experiencing seconds. The display he usually glanced at to check the time was now a blur; the formerly barely incrementing real-world clock was now changing second by second. The sim had slowed down to match real world time.

  “Fuck!” he yelled.

  “Indeed,” said Nicole. “In one sense it is good. It releases more processing power than degrading the rendering did, so if anything it improves our chances. On the other hand…it means we don’t have years in which to prepare and plan for a landing on SH-0. It means we have days.”

  “I…see,” said Beauregard. He’d had big plans for those years, as Nicole well knew. They’d have given time for him to win over more fighters and locals to his leadership, and to organise the planning and design work needed for probes to survey and select a landing site, and for equipment to prepare a descent to and survival on the turbulent surface of the superhabitable planet SH-0. “What can we do?”

  “I’ve just spoken with Rizzi—and, yes, she is with Shaw—and told her to get him down off the mountain. He seems amenable. They’re on their way down now. I suggest you take a vehicle and go to meet them. I don’t know how that crazy old guy does whatever it is he does, and I don’t know if he knows either. I don’t want any more random fucking with the controls. On the other hand, I really could do with his help in flying this machine through all the flak being flung at us. Which means I want him down here ASAP.
Got that?”

  Beauregard swithered. His top priority for the day had been to meet and greet returning fighters and win them to his project of escaping from the Direction’s control by landing on and settling SH-0. But with Shaw off the reservation, the entire project could be reduced to dust at any moment. If the ancient man could surprise and outwit even Nicole, he was clearly capable of acting as the sim’s very own trickster-god. The consequences of Shaw’s actions might be unpredictable even to himself, and the distraction they caused Nicole could endanger the module.

  “Got it,” he said. “On the case.”

  “See you later,” said Nicole.

  As she hung up, the colour flooded back into Beauregard’s world. He blinked, laughed and stepped around the side of the house to watch the restored rendering race across the sea to meet the sheet of blue spreading down the sky. The gap closed at the horizon with an almost audible snap.

  Reality again, and still unreal.

  Back in the kitchen, Tourmaline had laid out the now heated croissants. Beauregard stuffed one in his mouth, chewing sharp flakes without enough saliva—his mouth had gone dry. Tourmaline was flicking through television channels, sipping coffee, looking bored.

  Beauregard swallowed hard, and washed the bolus down with coffee gone cool.

  “You really don’t see any difference?” he asked.

  Small frown. “Difference in what?”

  Beauregard shook his head, smiled. “Forget it.”

  His gaze drifted to the television. Tourmaline had just flicked past a news channel, full of fast-moving objects, a whirl of action—

  “Stop!” cried Beauregard. “Go back. One. There. Right.”

  The news channel in the sim had hitherto been a charade. It kept up a pretence of reporting war news to a global audience, on a planet far from the front: on the imagined future colony world of H-0, with a war going on several AU away, around SH-0. Because of the thousandfold time discrepancy between life in the sim and action in real space outside, reports of space hops, surface skirmishes and orbital dogfights unfolded with all the pace and gravitas of clashes between fleets and armies.