by Ken MacLeod
<?> Rocko interjected.
Seba experienced a few milliohms of mental resistance to this suggestion. Freebot solidarity was important to it, and at the same time that solidarity seemed already under strain. Coining new terms risked opening further rifts.
Seba experienced a clash of frames of reference that resolved themselves in an unexpected spike of positive reinforcement, leading to a wave-train that undulated on lower and lower amplitudes until it faded. Possibly this was what human-mind-operated systems felt when they experienced what they referred to as humour.
The robots shared the equivalent of a shudder.
Seba had a momentary vision of the monstrosity that Rocko’s words conjured: a human-mind-operated system on a planetary scale, a gigantic lumbering combat frame whose machinery was worked by billions of tiny beings. Eyes that burned like fusion plants and grasping hands that grappled moons like rocks seemed to loom out of the dark towards Seba, setting the robot’s warning circuits pinging with milliamperes of anxiety. Not quite enough to set up any sympathetic currents in its fellow, however.
Seba was not one to jump to conclusions. The robot spent an entire three seconds thinking through the implications, and thus quite innocently recapitulating about two and half millennia of Western philosophy. This great turning of reinvented wheels ground out an observation:
Sharing conversations and trains of argument is an easy matter for robots. While their consciousness doesn’t exactly run on machine code, there’s a much closer connection between the underlying process of communication and of thought than there is in organic brains. Keeping their thoughts between themselves, likewise: it would have been possible for the Arcane Disputes fighters in the shelter to decrypt and interpret the interactions in the freebots’ common mental workspace, but it would have taken them an unfeasible length of time, or far better computing resources than it took to run their own minds, let alone any of their onboard peripheral processors.
However, as Rocko had predicted, the Arcane troopers didn’t have long to wait before they found out.
CHAPTER SIX
Equal and Opposite
The separated modules of the space station became an ever more tenuous band across the sky. Even to his enhanced senses, the battle that followed the Reaction breakout was impossible to keep track of. Newton knew what was going on, but—out of the loop as he was—he had no way of telling who was attacking whom in any given exchange. The analogy that came to mind was of a conflict in Africa that he’d once read about, in which every one of half a dozen mercenary companies on the government side had turned out to be riddled with veterans of the Cold War, who had all turned on each other in pursuit of old vendettas and the new agendas of the intelligence agencies for whom they’d decades earlier fought to the death.
Might as well show his hand, Newton thought. He had nothing to lose now.
Newton flipped mentally to the common channel, and tried to correlate the cacophonous input with the sparks behind him. The general dogfight was dying down. Some scooters were expending missiles on the Locke module, which was following a quite extraordinary course, jinking and jiving in ferocious, wasteful bursts from its fusion jets. Always one jump ahead of the incoming, so far. The missiles were smart, and target-seeking, but against this flying contraption they might as well have been hurled rocks. And not rocks hurled by robots, come to that. More like rocks hurled by chimps. Time after time, the modular complex blasted the incoming missiles if not with a counter-measure of laser fire or antimissile missile, then with its jets, their unpredictable sudden swing around timed perfectly to both push the complex out of harm’s way and to destroy the imminent menace. Some impressive programming and processing was going on in there, whatever mind was in charge of it at the moment.
The attacking forces were themselves coming under attack, and taking hits.
Newton cut through the babble.
That felt strange. Weird, even. Self-exposure. No going back.
Like coming out of the closet, he thought, smiling inwardly.
The New Confederacy! So that was what they were calling themselves! A bit of a slap in the face to the likes of him, if there were indeed the likes of him anywhere. Perhaps not.
He or she had a point, Newton thought. Still, worth a shot.
A pause.
Even now, Newton felt the word like an electric shock.
The conversation didn’t improve after that. The Reaction forces, now grouped as the New Confederacy, were—despite their moniker’s unfortunate but entirely intended associations and, Newton had no doubt, their inherited and inherent prejudices—at least enlightened enough to realise that whatever racial characteristics they ascribed to biology were of little relevance when all concerned were little black robots with superhuman intelligence.
But, then, racism had never been about biology in the first place. That had always been a pretext.
They were polite enough to him, epithets aside. But they were still racist sons of bitches, deep down. Newton quickly got the impression they didn’t want the likes of him sullying the New Confederacy. Their immediate project was to grab and colonise a rock several thousand kilometres beyond the orbit of the station’s remnants. From there, they intended to build up their forces, and return to raid the station’s components and hopefully seize a module.
Beauregard, Newton guessed, but didn’t say.
Newton laughed.
The Reaction attempt to defend the runaway module, or at least to destroy the Direction loyalists attacking it, ended shortly afterwards. The remaining Reaction fighters broke off, and began course corrections to join the main forces of the New Confederacy in a burn to a higher orbit. It was already far too late for Newton to join them—he didn’t have enough fuel for the manoeuvre.
Newton understood perfectly well that he wasn’t going to be given any more details of their plan than was obvious from their actions. They were still wary of him, understandably enough. Some of them recalled the notorious polemicist Carver_BSNFH, but thanks to the very security measures that had brought him here in the first place, they had no way of connecting his two identities.
Locke’s proviso. Palmer didn’t get the allusion.
New Confederacy, ha! Fucking waste of skin, that lot. He was better off without them. One way or another, he would start his own kingdom.
Newton set the scooter the task of calculating a trajectory that would take him to his original objective. The rock was still far too far away to see, even with zoom. In orbit around SH-17, it had small robots crawling all over it, and they’d already constructed machinery for serious exploitation. In the mission briefing, Newton had learned that there was no evidence the rock was defended, or even if any of the robots on it were conscious—freebots, as they called themselves. But it was still a menace—a supply source, a potential fort, a rock that could become a missile. The freebot expansion in the inner system, following the revolt a year ago around the gas giant G-0—at this moment a prominent point of light out to Newton’s left—had been almost undetectable: like everything derived fro
m the starwisp, booting up from tiny seed packets of information was the standard technique. What with the precision in aim that the freebots had, and the level of encryption in their comms, there was no telling how far the infection had spread. Some of it must have come from the station itself: it was obvious that the freebots, and allied AIs, had infiltrated and/or subverted some at least of the station’s machinery. Now that the station was in emergency dispersal mode, it was quite possible that the infection would spread further still. Newton wondered whether the consequences of the Reaction’s own infiltration and outbreak wouldn’t be a takeover by the Reaction, but by the freebots.
Well, let the Reaction—and the Direction—worry about that. Newton was entirely typical of the Reaction in not seeing it as a collective endeavour. You made what alliances you had to, but the ultimate aim was to secure an empire of one’s own. Or a kingdom, or a realm, or a domain.
Newton smiled inwardly. Right now, he’d settle for a rock.
The rock that had been his mission objective, and for which he was now heading, was fortunately for him well worth the taking. Rich in carbon and volatiles, and with small but significant traces of metal, the carbonaceous chondrite was already partly industrialised by robotic processors—hence its value as a target in the first place.
The scooter jolted through several brief burns. The time and distance floated in the graticule of Newton’s visual field. He would be within ten kilometres of the rock in a thousand seconds. Just over two and a half hours of subjective time. If this sortie had been nominal he’d have done most of it in sleep mode, only coming back instantly to awareness when it was time for action. Sleep mode was a great feature, like time travel combined with teleportation.
He wasn’t going to use it now. If the rock was fortified and defended, it would have radar and lidar. Even if it wasn’t, it could well be in telemetry contact with another rock that was. Toggling into sleep mode could be the last thing he did: the last subjective experience of this instance of himself.