Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  Grimly determined, Newton hurtled on. There was no going back now. Nowhere to go back to, either. The only hope he had, paradoxically enough, was to continue to his squad’s original objective: a small and partly industrialised carbonaceous chondrite, of some strategic value to the freebots but right now of much greater value to him. With its resources of carbon compounds, kerogene, water ice and metals, and the machinery already in place and that of his scooter and himself, he could survive, replenish his fuel and, perhaps, build something for the longer term.

  There seemed no danger, now, in reading the message from Carlos. And he now had time in which to do it—and, more importantly, to check it first. The scooter’s onboard malware sniffers gave it a clean bill of health, likewise his own frame’s firewalls, which he experienced as a grinding, dragged-out moment of infinite tedium, as if he had to perform wearying calculations while waiting in a queue.

  Then, after all that, he read it. The message was long, but most of the length was footnotes. The gist was given in a few hundred words. He took it in in less than a second.

  Arcane Disputes to all at Locke Provisos.

  For the particular attention of the fighters Carlos, Beauregard, Zeroual, Karzan, Chun, and Rizzi.

  Short form of message:

  Locke is Rax!

  The Direction is playing with fire!

  Don’t get burned!

  We can prove this!

  Join us!

  […]

  Following information received from the remnant rebel robots around G-0, relayed to us by the captured Gneiss and Astro robots on SH-17, and further detailed and documented below, we warn you that:

  Locke Provisos has been an agency of the Reaction for some time, and in all probability since before the mission left the Solar system.

  Some of its fighters, still to be identified, are Rax sleeper agents in place since the Last World War.

  Other agencies including your current allies Zheng Reconciliation Services and Morlock Arms are not themselves agencies of the Reaction but are compromised by the presence of Rax sleeper agents among their probable complements.

  All agencies are likely to have similar problems.

  None of the above named fighters are known or suspected Rax agents.

  The exceptional case of the fighter known as Carlos the Terrorist is noted below.

  The fighter Beauregard was an agent of British military intelligence in the Acceleration. His capital crime was a false flag attack intended to discredit the movement. His present loyalties are unknown.

  […]

  Holy shit.

  Newton could have kicked himself. If only he’d not been so trusting of his command to not read the message! If he had, he might well have gone and got himself killed back there, in the full knowledge that a version of himself would live again. He could now be in a Rax-controlled sim, no doubt strutting around laying down the law with Beauregard, and dealing with the dangerous entity Nicole Pascal. They would have worked together for that; mutually suspicious though they were, he and Beauregard were friends, or at least friendly, and allies for now, though Newton had no illusion but that they’d be rivals in the long run. One of them would end up in a position to make the other his subordinate, or force him to take his chance in a fight to the death.

  Newton wondered how many of his team members would have read the message. Probably none, given how they’d all scrambled to get back. Unless they were rushing to help Nicole throw off the control of the Locke AI…yeah, that would figure. He could have been ready for them.

  Or would he? Would the Newton in the sim have been the same as him now in the frame, give or take a few minutes of intense memories?

  It was hard, now that he was out here on his own, to keep a wholly rational perspective on all this. Strange, that. For he’d never been more rational in his life.

  Here in the frame, he was superhuman. He was thinking more coolly and clearly than he ever had in life or in the simulated human life of the sim, and ten times faster than he ever had with a brain made of meat. His senses were preternatural and expanded. He could smell the elements in the spectrum of the exosun; he could hear the hiss of the cosmic microwave background like he’d once heard the sound of his mother’s television, on standby in an empty room. He could feel radar proximity like a presence on the back of his neck and in his shoulders.

  When you lived in the sim and trained there and ate and drank and fucked, and went for runs on the beach under the high ringlight and low sunlight of early morning, it was easy to feel that the version of yourself uploaded to the frame and sent out on a mission was expendable. That version was so much ammunition, matériel like the machine itself. If you got destroyed in action then all you lost was a few subjective hours of experience, like after a blow to the head. It was possible to think that the real you was the one who woke on “the bus from the spaceport” sweating and shaking from the nightmare the system’s implacable artificial intelligence imposed on you as a cost, or as a security measure, depending on how cynical you were about its motives. And if he’d been killed out here and recovered on the bus, he’d at least have some fun with his current local girlfriend to look forward to and ease his pain.

  But now…now that he’d survived a battle, and no longer had a mission…now he was beginning to feel that the present version of him, here in the frame, was the real man. The version that might have awakened on the bus wondering what the fuck had just happened was a naïve, trusting and ultimately already long since outgrown version, at a younger stage of his life, like oneself in an old photograph.

  All this went through his mind very quickly. And suddenly, it was so, irreversibly. He was centred on himself, here, now, this plucky little machine prone in a scooter socket, forging boldly into the void.

  A small humanoid figure, black and shiny as a jackboot, like a model robot made of obsidian.

  He was himself, at last: Carver_BSNFH.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Motion Sickness

  It’s one thing to know you’re in a seamless immersive virtual reality. It’s another thing to see the hitherto invisible seams rip apart and then stitch themselves up again, right in front of your eyes. And another, again, to hear your local representative of humanity’s governance talk to two people at once on their phones, and hear her say that she was talking simultaneously to hundreds more. Taransay Rizzi ran and scrambled and stumbled down the slope. The world filled with colour in an ever-expanding circle around her, its edge racing away like an eclipse shadow in reverse. The sight messed with your head, and undermined your conviction of the reality of the world.

  Yet in certain respects, the sim was as real as the physical world, and she’d better not forget it. If she fell she’d get hurt, if she cracked her head she’d be dead. Dead as Waggoner Ames had been after he’d quite deliberately stepped off a cliff, not that far from here.

  Checking out like that was an option. But things would have to get a lot worse and a lot weirder before she’d consider it. Mind you, if Nicole was telling the truth, and Beauregard’s plan was to cut the entire module adrift and boost it to near-SH-0 orbit and then go down to the surface and fucking colonise that superhabitable world, and that that course of action was already underway, then—well! Things were going to get a lot weirder real soon now. Assuming they made it out of orbit at all.

  Beside her, or more usually downhill and in front, the old man Shaw capered down the perilous slope like a mountain goat. He was old only in the chronological sense—physically he seemed to be in his mid-thirties, and very fit with it. Preternatural agility was only the most manifest of his talents. Taransay had seen him levitate—or, at least, she had seen a strong visual illusion that Shaw was sitting a few centimetres off the ground. He hadn’t admitted responsibility for that, any more than he had for bringing back colour and reducing the clock speed of the sim to the same rate as the outside world, but he hadn’t denied it either. Taransay had seen the changes happen, and knew that the change h
ad started with him and spread outward. For a man who had once insisted to her face that a thousand years of living in the world of the sim had convinced him it was physically real, and that it was his combat experience outside that was all simulated, Shaw was taking the sudden overwhelming evidence to the contrary with commendable aplomb.

  They reached the bottom of the slope. For a moment or two they stood, catching their breath. A slither of scree they had displaced rattled down around them. Silence, broken only by the mutter of distant water and the shriek of a small herbivore as it met the claws of a flying carnivore.

  Taransay swigged from her water bottle and made to look at her map. Shaw shot her a contemptuous look and laugh, and set off across the moor at a steady jog. Taransay followed, fuming, but made no complaint at his rudeness. He was heading in the right direction anyway, towards the road. Nicole had told her on the phone that Beauregard was on his way.

  “We’ll just get to the road,” Taransay panted, catching up. “Then I’ll call Beauregard and tell him where to pick us up.”

  “Fuck Beauregard,” said Shaw. “If we run fast enough we can catch a bus.”

  “The bus from the spaceport?”

  Shaw laughed again, less unkindly. “You know there’s no spaceport.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  There was indeed no spaceport—the whole illusion that the fighters fell asleep on a bus to the spaceport, and woke again on a bus from it, was there to keep them sane, to maintain the consistency of the simulation.

  Shaw cackled. “But let me tell you, there’ll be plenty of buses from the spaceport today.”

  Nicole must have brought him up to speed about the battle. Well, the debacle.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Shaw ran faster, bounding over boulders and tussocks, leaping across bogs. Taransay strove to keep up.

  “What’s the rush for a bus?” she protested. “I’d just as soon get a lift from Beauregard if the lady says it’s okay.”

  Shaw glanced at her, and then determinedly ahead.

  “Beauregard will have his people meeting the buses, making his pitch to run this place,” he said. “Isn’t it worth it, even on one bus, to get a word for the lady in first?”

  Taransay thought about this.

  “Point,” she said.

  She ran on ahead, but from then on Shaw showed some mercy and let her set the pace.

  They reached the roadside in about forty minutes. Taransay recalled her hours of slog the previous day, from the road to Shaw’s lair. But this was a different stretch of road than the one she’d run from—the road had many a twist and turn through the hills and Shaw seemed to know its every metre. Breathing hard, Taransay stood on the verge amid tall plants that were not quite ferns, with her back to taller plants that were not quite trees. Bird-things twittered, exchanging messages. A few metres away, under the tree-things, a brain-shaped mound of green moss hissed to itself. Taransay still didn’t have a vocabulary for the sim’s weird wildlife.

  Shaw cocked his head. “Bus coming.”

  Taransay couldn’t hear a thing. After a minute she heard, faint in the distance, the whine of an electric engine. The familiar minibus rounded a corner a hundred metres uphill. Taransay sprang into the middle of the road and waved both hands above her head. The bus came to a stop a few paces in front of her. As soon as she stepped aside to get on, it began to move forward again. Stupid automation: smart enough to treat her as an obstacle, but not as a potential passenger. The dance that ensued was resolved by Shaw standing in front of the bus while Taransay banged on the door. She jammed the door open for Shaw when the vehicle condescended to let her on.

  All fifteen seats in the minibus were occupied, and about the same number of people were standing. All were fighters, and all had a question for her and a perplexed look for Shaw. With his shaggy hair and beard, and the close-fitting clothes he must have stitched from animal skins and woven from fibres, he could hardly pass for a fighter or a local. Taransay clung to a strap as the vehicle lurched back into motion. Shaw stood unaided in front of her, keeping his balance without apparent effort, swaying this way and that. Taransay sought familiar faces in the clamour, and spotted a man she’d trained with before the latest sortie: Jason Myles, one of Newton’s team.

  “What happened?” she yelled at him.

  Everyone started yelling back. Most of them looked pale and pinched, as if they’d had a succession of shocks they were just coming round from.

  “What—?”

  She couldn’t make herself heard.

  “SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!” Shaw boomed.

  Taransay winced. It was more like someone using a megaphone than a shout. The clamour ceased.

  “All right,” said Shaw, into the ear-split silence. “First things first. Has the lady been on the phone to any of you?”

  They all nodded, and looked as if they were all about to start shouting again. Shaw gestured for silence.

  “OK,” he said. “So you’re all up to speed on what’s going on here.” He glanced back at Taransay. “You were saying?”

  “Hi, my name’s Taransay Rizzi. I was on Carlos’s squad—the one that got stood down. I was just going to ask Myles—what happened out there?”

  “I got killed,” said Myles. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the woman behind him. “Irina Sholokhova. She was there, she got back.”

  Sholokhova, a tall woman with blonde hair that lay as if it had once been long and then carelessly or furiously hacked off at earlobe level, leaned forward.

  “I was on Newton’s squad,” she said. “After about forty seconds, Jason here was taken out by a shot from another squad—from Zheng Reconciliation Services. We were of course surprised and indignant, not to say alarmed. I was for immediate retaliation, but Newton insisted we hold formation and continue. Almost immediately, we saw similar incidents across the entire front. Then behind us other modules began sending out fighters, on trajectories that intersected ours. Then some of the scooters ahead of us turned back and a general dogfight ensued. Newton himself continued on the designated course, as far as I could see, but I was too busy exchanging fire and dodging incoming to track him. I saw at least two scooters each from Zheng and Morlock Arms make suicide collision attacks on the unknown scooters. The station then began to break up, and shortly afterwards we saw this module break away. Al-Khalid called the sauve qui peut. I used all my fuel to match velocities with it, and returned to the hangar.”

  Sholokhova shrugged and spread her hands. “And now here I am. Ten of us here are back without memory of the battle, hence killed in action. The rest of us have stories like mine.”

  A dark-featured man raised a hand. “I’m al-Khalid,” he said. “This was all news to me when I came round and found myself here. I must have been destroyed after I’d ordered sauve qui peut.” He shook his head. “And of course my return was painful.”

  Taransay nodded in sympathy, recalling her own soul-harrowing return the previous day. For her, it had felt like being eaten alive from the inside. All those whose frames had been destroyed in action would have gone through something like that. No wonder so many looked severely shaken. She and her comrades had been in just such a state yesterday morning.

  “Anyone here who didn’t leave from the Locke module?” she asked.

  No strays or stragglers from other agencies, and therefore none who might have been attackers. Unless of course some from her own agency were, which didn’t seem likely. Good as far as it went.

  “Can everyone vouch for everyone here?”

  They looked at each other, then back at her. Some laughed.

  “I tell you, Rizzi,” said al-Khalid, “if any had been among our attackers and had got through the return process, we’d have torn them to pieces as soon as we woke up.”

  Taransay shuddered, but tried not to show it.

  “Right,” she said. “Listen up. I know the lady has told you what’s going on. Fine. As I heard it, our sergeant Beauregard—who was casting su
spicions on the lady shortly after our squad leader Carlos fucked off into the big black yonder—has concluded that the whole mission is fucked and everything we were promised is no longer on the table. So we have to strike out for ourselves, and colonise SH-0—”

  “We know that,” said Sholokhova. “He has a point.”

  “Maybe he has,” Taransay said. “But I’m not convinced, and I’m not ready to give up on the mission, the lady, or on the Direction—”

  “To hell with the Direction!” shouted al-Khalid. “We are its prisoners. We owe it nothing.”

  Taransay made a sweeping gesture. “It seems to have made a good world back on Earth, and given us a good enough world to live in here!”

  “Nothing like as good as the world we fought for!”

  Taransay stared at him. Good old Axle cadre, unshaken, still holding out for a world beyond capitalism and beyond the ills that flesh is heir to, while he’s living in a fucking sim run by AIs in a project to establish a lasting human community around another star. No satisfying some people.

  “‘The world we fought for,’” she repeated, as if wondering aloud, giving herself time. Thinking on her feet here, literally. “That was a thousand years ago. If what the Acceleration wanted was possible, it would have been done by now. The Direction is at least trying to spread humanity to the stars. That seems good enough to me. And now Beauregard wants to drag us all into a dangerous adventure. The only kind of world we could build down there would be harsh and primitive for generations at least. Sounds more like the Reaction to me! Regardless of that, he’s a man who wants power—and anyone who wants to take power is the last person we should trust with it! We should all stand by the lady.”

  Nobody said anything, but Taransay recognised the expression on most of their faces: says you, it said.

  She turned away and looked out of the front window, as the bus swung around another long bend. An open-top light utility vehicle was speeding up the hill. She couldn’t be sure Beauregard was driving, but she turned her face away until the jeep had passed the bus and vanished around the bend.