by Ken MacLeod
Her phone buzzed just as the bus was pulling in to the resort.
“Where are you, Rizzi?”
“Oh, hi, sarge,” she said. “Sorry, we saw a bus and jumped on. Got caught up in hearing about the battle and forgot to let you know.”
“I’ll see you later, Rizzi,” said Beauregard, with more threat than promise. He didn’t sound fooled for a moment.
Taransay hustled Shaw off the bus. He stood for a moment, scanning the tatty frontages of the strip.
“Amazing,” he said. “It hasn’t changed much in a thousand years.”
No way had this been here a thousand years, even in the sim. Taransay gave him a wry glance but didn’t comment. She caught his elbow and tried to urge him out of the crowd and towards Nicole’s house. The others on the bus jostled past. There to greet them were Maryam Karzan and Pierre Zeroual.
“Gather round, comrades!” Karzan shouted. The fighters off the bus were eager for news, some of them recognising Karzan or her companion, and held back on their probable thirst for the bars. Karzan broke out of the cluster and dashed in front of Taransay and Shaw.
“Welcome back,” said Karzan.
Taransay gave her a cold look. “Still in with the sarge?”
“We all are,” said Karzan. “Even Nicole is on board with the plan.”
“Right,” said Taransay. “Because Nicole urgently needs to meet this guy, and we’re on our way.”
Karzan’s glare flicked to Shaw. “Who is this?”
“The old man of the mountain,” said Nicole.
Karzan stared at him with curiosity. “So he’s real.”
Shaw stared back, his face impassive.
“Yeah,” said Taransay. “And he’s the one been messing with reality.”
That rocked Karzan back a little. “The colour coming back thing?”
“Yes. And the time thing. Speaking of which—”
She made to move on.
“Wait a fucking minute,” said Karzan. “I want to know what the sarge has to say.”
“He’s driving at the moment,” said Taransay.
“All the same,” said Karzan. She took out her phone.
“He’ll be here soon,” said Taransay. “You can talk to him then. He knows where we’re going.”
“In that case, you can wait.”
“No—for fuck’s sake, Maryam! It’s urgent! Nicole needs Shaw to help fly this thing. Haven’t you seen the news?”
Karzan shook her head. “I haven’t had time.”
Behind Taransay and Shaw, an altercation was beginning between Zeroual and some of the fighters just off the bus. Karzan’s attention drifted over Taransay’s shoulder.
“This your doing?”
“I hope so,” said Taransay. “Just giving my side of the story.”
“So you can wait here until they can hear the other.”
“There’s no time to wait. We’re going.”
Karzan barred her way with an arm. “You’re not going anywhere until the sarge gets back.”
“Excuse me,” said Shaw, stepping forward.
Karzan looked him up and down, wrinkling her nose. “What are you going to do? Turn me into a frog?”
Shaw’s brow creased slightly, as if he were considering the possibility.
“No,” he said, mildly.
He took another step forward, straight up against Karzan’s outstretched arm. Then he took another step, straight through it. Karzan yelped. Her hand went to her mouth. The arm was quite undamaged, as was Shaw, strolling away along the sidewalk. Taransay shared her comrade’s moment of nausea. The sheer unreality of the sight had given her that lift-shaft drop feeling in the pit of her stomach. She brushed past Karzan and hurried after Shaw, who looked over his shoulder as she caught up. Taransay glanced back, too. Karzan gazed after them, pale-faced.
“Ribbet! Ribbet!” Shaw croaked.
Karzan gave his jeering a defiant finger, and turned away.
To Taransay’s surprise, Shaw seemed to know the way to Nicole’s place. In fact he knew a short cut. He crossed the street, walked along a path between two of the houses low on the raised beach or moraine overlooking the resort’s main drag, then bounded up the rough grassy slope at a sharp diagonal that took them across the road from her sprawling, low-roofed bungalow. The front door stood half open. Television news yammered from within.
“Hello?” Taransay called.
“In here!” Nicole yelled back.
To the right of the hallway was another half-open door, from where the sound seemed to be coming. The air smelled of oil paint and ink volatiles. Taransay ventured in, Shaw a step behind. He almost collided with her as she stopped. The room was bright, with a wide patio window, white walls and a high ceiling. Taransay’s boot scuffed bare planks, paint-spattered. Nicole, in grubby shirt and jeans, stood at an easel in front of the window and scribbled with a marker pen on a white flip-pad. Every second or so she’d glance from the abstract, flowing design she inscribed at one of the five or six television screens hung on the walls to either side of her. Each was tuned to a different news channel and each babbled commentary. Taransay wanted to cover her ears. Drawings and paintings were stacked dozens deep, leaning against the walls. Taransay picked her way across the floor, avoiding stools, tall small tables with perilously poised vases, dropped paint-tubes, exhausted markers, discarded sheets of paper scribbled almost black, general clutter. In a far corner a cleaning robot stood, quivering in every limb, its cameras rotating like rolling eyes.
Nicole tore off and tossed the sheet she was working on, glowered at the televisions and started on a fresh A2 page with a bold slash of permanent black. A quick look over the shoulder, a twitch of smile.
“Good morning,” she said, her voice unnaturally calm and bright. “Shaw, get your ass over here now and take a look.”
Shaw deftly bypassed Taransay and skipped to behind Nicole’s shoulder. He peered at the paper and the emerging sketch, frowning and stroking his beard like a critical art tutor.
“Not bad,” he admitted, his tone judicious but grudging. “Not bad, but—” His darting glances at the televisions outpaced even Nicole’s. A jab of his forefinger, nail like a claw: “There!”
Nicole dabbed a dot.
“Bigger,” said Shaw. “Give it some speed.”
Taransay saw something bright flash across one of the screens.
“Jeez,” said Nicole. “Close.”
“Looks clear for the moment,” said Shaw.
He stepped back from the easel. “Not bad, not bad at all.”
Nicole raked fingers backwards through her hair, not to its improvement as a style. Her shoulders relaxed a little. She flipped the page over and turned to Taransay.
“I hate to ask this,” she said, “but could you please get me some coffee?”
Taransay did, and made some for herself and Shaw. On her return to the studio, clutching hot mugs, Shaw and Nicole were standing side by side engrossed in the television news. Shaw blew on his coffee and inhaled, then sipped and grimaced.
“Christ,” he said. “I’d forgotten what it tastes like.”
Taransay stood to one side, trying to see what Nicole and Shaw were picking up from the screens. It was all war news, bitty and brash, presented as if from the bridge or the gun turrets of a hurtling spacecraft. The backdrop of stars yawed and swayed. The sight made her dizzy and faintly nauseous, all the more so when she looked out of the window for relief and saw the view over the bay. The sea was calm in the bright sunlight and faint ringlight of mid-morning. The contrast was giving her motion sickness. She knew intellectually that the news screens showed scenes from outside, in the real world, however mediated by the virtual media and their talking heads. It was no more rational to expect the sea to surge back and forth as the module jinked and jived its corkscrew course through space than it would be to expect the vase in that pencil drawing propped against the wall to spill when you tipped the paper sideways.
And yet…
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Nicole waved a hand at the screens. “The module’s dodging incoming. Seems to be fine at the moment, but I’ll no doubt need to make adjustments again any minute now.”
“No, I meant—”
“Oh! The drawing and painting? They’re an interface.”
“An interface with the module? With the control systems? You control it?”
“Insofar as I can,” said Nicole, not looking away from the screens, “yes.”
Taransay looked around the cluttered studio, bewildered. Surely all these photo-realistic sketches and abstract paintings weren’t from the present emergency.
“Is that something you can do as…the Direction’s representative, or what?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Nicole spared her a sidelong smile. “I am the artist. I didn’t design this world, but I give it its…finishing touches, you might say.”
Taransay almost dropped her mug. For a couple of hours now, she’d known Nicole wasn’t just another normal person. If you could casually talk to hundreds at once, you couldn’t be just another virtual girl, living in a virtual world. You had to be a fucking AI of some kind. But this! Nicole? All that power? All this time? The fighters called her “the lady.” Fucking goddess, more like.
Nicole was still watching the screens. She didn’t see the drawing take shape, seemingly by itself, on the blank page open on the easel: an ink sketch of a thin-featured, long-nosed man with wavy white hair, whose lips moved as print scrolled across the foot of the page.
“Nicole!” Taransay yelled, pointing. “It’s Locke!”
Nicole whirled around, her attention wrenched from the screens, and faced the apparition forming on the easel. From outside came a growl of diesel engine and a screech of brakes, followed by a thump and a rush of booted feet.
“And Beauregard,” Taransay added, belatedly and redundantly, as the outside door banged out of the intruder’s way and his boots thundered in the hall.
CHAPTER FIVE
Neutral Powers
Seba trundled up the ramp out of the Arcane Disputes shelter and rolled across the crater floor for a few tens of metres. There it stopped and surveyed its surroundings. Once this place had been a supply dump for exploratory mining by the corporation Gneiss Conglomerates. Around Seba and towering above its low-slung wheeled frame were the construction machines, missile pods and comms dishes of the camp, centred on the ten-metre-long curving roof of the bomb shelter. Between these devices lay a random looking, but doubtless optimally arrayed, clutter of supplies and lesser machines and tools, many of them left over or pressed into service from the camp’s original purpose. Among everything, spider-like auxiliaries and peripherals, most about the size of a human hand and rather less autonomous, scuttled about their mundane tasks.
Beyond the camp, the dusty basalt plain from which the trench and blocks of the shelter had been cut stretched to a wide arc of the horizon in the far distance, and to a smaller arc of the crater wall closer by. The exosun was below the horizon; SH-0, the primary, was a bright hemisphere high and prominent in the sky. The temperature had dropped far enough to precipitate water, and in the darker shadows lighter volatiles, from the atmosphere as frost. An active volcano glowed beyond the skyline, its plume of sulphurous cloud making a ragged trail across the sky in the thin nitrogen wind.
Seba scanned the sky, now and then picking up a flicker of encrypted chatter, spillover from the remaining skirmishes of the brief and indecisive battle that it had just watched. A few modules of the dispersing space station were rising above the horizon on diametrically opposite sides. From Seba’s point of view, the heat of the battle and the bulk of the space station’s components were—as the intact station had been—beneath its wheels, with thousands of kilometres of rock and tens of thousands of kilometres of space between the robot and the action. A faint surge of positive reinforcement made a tentative cycle of Seba’s circuits, to be damped by a dash of cold logic pointing out that this reassurance was as irrational as it was unwarranted.
Still, the tremor was nothing to the internal conflict that Seba had experienced watching the debacle unfold. The clashing surges of positive and negative reinforcement had only been intensified by Seba’s participation in its fellow freebots’ shared mental workspace. Exultation had fought with dismay, time and again, and were both further intensified and confused by incoming responses from other freebots in space. That many of these responses were delayed by transmission lag and therefore out of synch with what was happening had only made matters worse.
There had come a moment when Seba could endure no more. The prospector robot had sometimes thought itself more intelligent and more sensitive than all but one of its fellows. This was hardly vanity: the machine had an adequate idea of its own capacities. At that moment, though, there could be no doubt as to its sensitivity. Its reward circuits had almost overheated with surges of positive and negative reinforcement, and its cognitive capacity was struggling to integrate these reactions with what it could see going on. Meanwhile, a dozen machines of like or lesser processing power were—in a quite literal sense—keeping their cool amid all the fierce excitement of the fray.
The scene that Seba had in the last few kiloseconds shared with thirteen other robots, and that was—at several removes and in limited respects—also visible to eighteen Arcane Disputes fighters, was of destruction on a scale none of the robots in the shelter had seen or envisaged, shown with an objectivity and clarity made possible by integrating scores of viewpoints.
Hanging like a backdrop, a counterweight to all the small-scale frenzy in its sky, was the planet: SH-0, the superhabitable. That was a human term, Seba knew, but one with a non-human application. It didn’t mean that this big world was welcoming for humans, or hospitable or even suitable for human life. Almost the reverse: SH-0 was a violent place. Rapid plate tectonics shoved up high mountains that the turbulent weather eroded in geological moments. Active volcanoes, many landmasses, even more seas and gulfs and oceans made for a high-stress, fast-changing environment where the spur, the lash and the cull of natural selection struck often and hard. Life could thrive there in greater profusion and variety than it could even on Earth itself.
Around SH-0, in complex dances of orbital resonance, spun thirty-odd substantial moons and an uncountable litter of moonlets. SH-17, the exomoon on which Seba and its varied colleagues and comrades huddled, was one of the larger, and the seventeenth in order of discovery—a matter of millisecond distinctions in the mind of the starwisp as it decelerated into the system, but the convention had been followed.
Out beyond the orbit of SH-17 there had until very recently been another body orbiting around SH-0: the space station that the starwisp had bootstrapped into being from orbital rubble. Over a kilometre in diameter, with a mass of millions of tonnes, it was the focus of human-derived activity in the system. Around it the main battle had raged. An armada of small armed spacecraft had surged from the station, aimed at freebot strongholds in the clutter of tiny exomoons between the station and SH-17. Soon afterwards, many of these craft had turned on each other. Some returned to fight a second wave of craft that had emerged from the station. Others had apparently continued in their original mission, and were now attacking Seba’s allies in orbit.
In a long-prepared and almost reflex response to such a disaster, the station had broken apart. To scatter like this increased the survival chances of each of its parts, all of which could—at some cost in time, of course—reconstruct the whole. Now the station’s numerous modules had separated out, to form an arc of small bodies spread across hundreds—and soon to be thousands—of kilometres. If this were to continue, the erstwhile material of the station would become a new and very tenuous ring around SH-0, tugged this way and that by the gravity of the moons inside and outside its orbit.
When Seba disengaged from the shared mental workspace and rolled up the ramp to the exit,
it had looked back and seen the interior of the shelter as it appeared in visible light. Away from the communicative tumult, it was an oddly static scene. Around the central plinth on which stood the comms processor—a sentient AI in its own right, if initially a reluctant one—just over a dozen robots of diverse shapes and sizes stood. One, Garund, was like Seba a small vehicle with a choice of wheels and legs, and a thicket of sensory clusters, manipulative appendages and solar panels on its top and overhanging its sides. Lagon was a more specialised prospector, with ground-penetrating radar and sonic equipment making up the bulk of its features. Pintre was more specialised still, a mining robot with caterpillar treads and a laser turret. In stronger contrast were the elegant forms of Rocko and its like, a different model of prospecting machine: segmented, with multiple legs, and an upper surface bristling with flexible antennae and manipulators. Among these and other variants stood eighteen identical humanoid shapes, each about half a metre tall, black and glassy and—to any external view—indistinguishable as pawns.
Another robot emerged from the shelter and rolled up beside Seba. As it slowed to a halt it straightened from its wheel configuration into its more usual one of a mechanical centipede, and scuttled the last few metres.
Rocko began to back away.