by Ken MacLeod
Not a good way to go.
He occupied his time with a careful scan of the rock.
Thousands of kilometres away from Newton, and heading in a different direction entirely, was the spacecraft that the freebot BSR-308455 had seen jet from the space station ahead of the rest.
A standard combat scooter like Newton’s, the vehicle was, on some scales, large: four metres from its blunt nacelle to the flared nozzles of its main thrust cluster. Open-framed, bracketed at the sides with fuel tanks and missile tubes, bristling with attitude jets and laser projectors, it resembled an unexpectedly and aggressively militarised sled. That resemblance was enhanced by the posture of its pilot: prone towards the prow in a recess that was more socket than cockpit. The pilot was about half a metre long, and looked like a humanoid robot sculpted in black glass.
The pilot’s right forearm lay, as if resting carelessly from a car window, on the side of the hull. A closer inspection would have shown that the hand was moving, leaving in its skittering wake a column of lines the unaided human eye might see as scored scratches, and that in their straightness and speed might have recalled printing.
My name is Carlos. I have no certainty of reaching my destination, or of surviving if I get there, or of being in any position to tell my story. I mistrust the very systems I depend on, not to mention my memories. I now inscribe my story on this metal plate rather than entrust it to an electronic record.
A quixotic gesture, I know. The most likely reader is some passing alien, millions or billions of years hence. By which time, of course, the sheer attrition of micrometeorites, of starlight and exosolar wind will long since have eroded these lines away.
Nevertheless.
My name, as I say, is Carlos. I have no memory of the name I was given. Carlos was a name I took. After my death I became known as Carlos the Terrorist. I was a militant of the Acceleration, a political movement of the late twenty-first century—which, I’ve been told, was over a thousand years ago. Given my situation, that lapse of time seems credible to me.
My situation. Yes. Well.
I don’t remember dying. Like most of us in my situation, my strange condition, I don’t remember anything in the final months of my life, and my memories of the rest of it—about twenty-seven years, I think—have as many gaps as a half-burned book. The memories that remain are more vivid than they ever seemed when I had human flesh. My childhood seemed to me normal. Even in retrospect I can see that my parents looked after me and loved me.
Yet one of my earliest memories is of something almost indescribably sinister.
I don’t know what has brought this to mind now. It’s possible that it helps to explain how I come to be here.
That must be it. Yes.
After a long time, the hand stopped moving on the hull. The arm was withdrawn, and moved to clutch a bar in front of the head of the prone robotic frame. A finger of the other hand, on the opposite side of the same bar, flicked. After that there was no movement inside the craft for some time.
Straight ahead of it might have been seen a pinprick of light, slightly brighter and certainly of a different spectrum than the other lights that speckled the void.
As hours passed, the dot became a spark, and continued to brighten.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Doubt
Coming out of sleep mode was nothing like waking. For Carlos it was as if he had blinked, and what had been a barely detectable point of light a thousand kilometres in front of him had bloomed to a looming object. He had only seconds to survey the satellite. An irregular aggregate about a hundred metres in its longest axis, the Arcane modular complex looked like a rugged moonlet with an industrial crust at one end. Closer visual inspection, radar scanning and spectrographic sniffing revealed that this was what it was: a small rock, with the module and its associated machinery clustered and arrayed on one face.
Little more than cometary clinker, with few traces of metal but plenty of water ice and organics, the rock was a valuable resource: precisely the sort of raw material, in fact, from which much of the space station modules’ structures had long ago been built. It was typical of the small bodies that the survivors of the first wave of rebel robots had covertly seized and seeded with nanofacturing equipment, but it didn’t seem to be one of them: all the visible work on it looked like it had been done by the Arcane module’s own external tools.
A big docking bay bulged from one side of the rock like a Nissen hut on an ice floe. The original Arcane Disputes module, and its associated fabrication machinery, had evidently acquired new raw material since its departure from the station—probably lofted its way by the renegade agency’s rebel robot allies.
The module itself, the literal hard core of the agency, was embedded in the cometary material and surrounded by assorted equipment like a jewel in the centre of a brooch. About four metres across, the module was a chunky, angular knob of black crystal, its surfaces a sooty fur of nanofacturing cilia overlain by a tracery of thin pipes and cables that threaded into the machinery all around.
Despite knowing better, Carlos could hardly believe that an entire virtual world, as well the agency’s AI systems and stored information of incalculable immensity, ran within this big black boulder. Now it was hailing him.
It wasn’t a sound, but like all such communications it had tone: in this case one that gave Carlos a mental picture of a thin, middle-aged, supremely confident woman with an attitude of amused disdain.
He let the scooter take care of the approach. With a few retro burns and sideways course corrections it brought him to the docking bay. The scooter passed through an opening about one and a half metres high and two wide, almost grazing the sides. The bay widened from there, but all four surfaces had scooters and fighting frames clamped to them, in an arrangement so economical it recalled tiling. The space was many times less roomy than the hangar he’d departed the space station from: he guessed this was because that facility was shared between law companies, and this one had only been built after Arcane had broken away. Small service robots scuttled spider-like amid the machines, or sprang from one side to another with the straight-line precision enabled by vacuum and microgravity.
An empty bay, just barely large enough to hold the scooter, drifted into view. A tentacle-like grapple snaked out from the wall to Carlos’s left and hauled the spacecraft in. Other grapples closed like carbon-fibre fingers around the machine, fixing it in place. Carlos disengaged from the socket and pushed himself out to float slowly across the docking bay.
He boosted his frame’s compressed-gas-jets and drifted to the far wall, where he grabbed onto a suitably placed grip and swung his feet to a rung half a metre below.
That was polite. At the hangar in the station he and his comrades had just blanked out without warning, to wake on the bus.
There was a moment when he was conscious, but could see nothing. The void was not even black.
Then he found himself standing on a narrow ledge with his back to a cliff, facing a narrow rock spur projecting out over a fog-filled abyss under a lilac sky. Beyond about ten metres the spur vanished into the mist. Carlos looked around, and guessed that the sim here was based on the environment for the VR game Starborn Quest, an old favourite of his and for some reason a big hit with Accelerationists. Jax had used a version of it in her communication with him after he’d fled the station. A pterodactyl soared overhead, as if to confirm his hypothesis. Even by comparison to the best top-of-the range virtuality Carlos could remember, the level of detail and reality of the place was astonishing. Water droplets prickled on his face. He could hear a river running and rapids splashing far beneath at the bottom of the chasm, and see the flying reptile’s glossy eye and feathery fuzz. He found t
he rendering oddly more impressive than that of the rather quotidian sim in the Locke Provisos module, based on an imagined far-future terraforming though that was.
A gust cleared the mist from the rock spur, revealing it as a bridge. On the far side, about twenty metres away, the span ended at the top of another cliff, and led to a gently stepped path that rose to the open gates of a walled garden. The walls, overhung by creepers and overlooked by gnarled ancient trees, stretched out of sight on either hand.
In the middle of the bridge stood Jax Digby. Unlike the avatar of her he’d seen earlier, she wasn’t in the clothes she’d worn as a student playing the game. Instead, she was here as a fine lady within it, in a flowing green gown and jewelled coiffure.
“Carlos!” she called. She smiled and beckoned.
Carlos looked down, glad that the mist below hid most of the drop. He himself was in the sort of forester’s gear of leather jerkin and trousers he’d always favoured for the quest. The only piece of kit missing from the game was his gun. His feet were in thin-soled, close-fitted boots, laced up to the ankle. His hair was long, as his long-ago game avatar’s had been, and damp with mist and spray. He flicked an annoying lock sideways, and peered around. He wiggled his toes, feeling the hard slippery rock underfoot, and fixed his attention on the rock bridge. The surface was uneven and wet, and less than half a metre across.
Carlos had a good idea what to expect. Before they accepted him into their midst, Jax and her comrades would want to give him a defector’s debriefing. They’d also want to clear up the little matter of his collaboration with the Innovator, back in the day, with some special reference to his renewed relationship with that AI in its current instance: Nicole. This was unlikely to be pleasant.
He might as well get it over with.
Placing one foot carefully in front of another, he stepped out on the bridge. He checked that there were no obvious trip hazards between him and Jax—still smiling, still beckoning—then fixed his gaze on her face as he paced slowly out.
He put a foot down for a fifth wary step when the bridge gave way beneath him. An entire chunk of rock, extending a metre in front of him and no doubt a metre behind, dropped like a lift falling down a shaft.
Carlos fell into fog, and then into darkness, and then into a net.
As he crashed painfully into the web of rough ropes, rebounded, crashed again and rolled, Carlos didn’t wonder what had become of the rock. He’d wasted far too many hours playing Starborn Quest to expect consistent physics in any of its many trapdoors to hell.
The net tipped towards the cliff. Carlos, knowing what was coming, grabbed at the rope mesh. He clutched like death and stuck his feet in, pressing their soles into nodes. He didn’t expect this effort to do him much good, and he was right. The ropes became suddenly frictionless. Something wrapped around his shins and hauled. He slid helplessly backwards and down, and found himself dragged painfully face-down along a rough stone floor. His legs were released. Winded, ribs and knees aching, his face and hands scratched and bleeding, he lay still for a few seconds.
He stood up warily, groping around. The cave was just wide enough for him to touch the sides and roof with outstretched hands. A few steps back the way he had come brought him up against the net, now fixed across the cave entrance. The rush of the river was louder now, its steady roar punctuated by drips all around him.
The cave mouth brightened, until he could dimly make out the mesh of the net. The cable that had dragged him down lay coiled like a snake at his feet. Turning his back on the entrance, he faced into the cave. Over the next couple of minutes his eyes adjusted, or the light increased—he couldn’t be sure. Here and there, further into the cave, phosphorescent patches glowed just enough to indicate the irregular shape of the cave walls.
Carlos recognised the place from the game. If his memories were accurate, this was a Level 3 Interrogation Maze. He could walk in to whatever was in store for him, or he could wait here to be dragged to it. He’d already decided he might as well face it. The sooner he got it over with the better.
He walked into the cave as quickly as he dared, hands out in front of him. As he moved deeper, the fresh, damp air at the entrance was replaced by an increasingly sulphurous stench, with overtones of mould and a whiff of decay. After blundering against the side wall which was soggy with slime and fungoid growth a couple of times, he realised that the trick was not to look at the glowing patches, but instead at the spaces between them which they barely illuminated. The sound of the river faded; the dripping became relentless. At any moment, a demon was going to leap out, thump him and drag him away for questioning. Knowing what to expect wouldn’t make the shock any less when it came. The situation was designed to recall scary childhood moments of creeping along dark corridors and knowing someone was going to jump out at you.
Carlos stopped. It was as abrupt a halt as if he’d bumped into a wall. He’d just tripped over a question.
How did he know where he was and what to expect?
Because of the game, of course.
But why this game?
He was surprised he hadn’t thought of the question before. But, then, he’d had a lot on his mind. Seeing Jax when he’d first hailed Arcane, soon after his escape from the station, had been a surprise. Learning that she and her comrades in the Arcane module were Accelerationists so fervent that they regarded the Directorate as little better than the Reaction had been disturbing. Figuring out how they must have achieved this unanimity was more troubling still. And all the time, he’d taken for granted what should have surprised him: that the sim in the Arcane module was based on the Starborn Quest game in the first place. It had seemed at first to make sense that he and Jax would meet in a virtual environment like the one which, in their real-life younger days, they’d shared so often and had so much fun in.
But this sim couldn’t have been devised by Jax, or by any of her comrades. It must have been set up by the AI of Arcane Disputes. Why should it do that? OK, basing your training ground on a first-person shooter was reasonable enough, and a rest-and-recreation environment based on the parks and palaces of Starborn Quest would lack nothing in sybaritic luxury, but still…
There was a logic to the sim he’d lived in before, in the Locke module: it was based on what the habitable terrestrial planet H-0 might be like, after centuries of terraforming in real time (and gigayears of virtual evolution) had generated an Earth-like ecosystem and human-like people from its existing primitive biota, a sheen of green slime. Even the purpose of such a process made sense: it guaranteed that the bodies the mission’s stored future settlers would one day download into would be biologically compatible with the other organisms on the planet.
It likewise made sense that the mission’s AIs would run simulations of this process over and over—they’d have to, to get it right. A by-product of all this inconceivably deep and vast conceptual modelling would be virtual environments in which revived veterans like himself, the walking dead casualties of an ancient war, could have a virtual life in the intervals between combat missions in robot frames.
But there was no obvious mission-related logic to developing a sim based on such a trivial irrelevance as a computer game. Unless the reason was that the game had been a popular playground for Accelerationists, back in the day—
That thought brought him up short, too. Once again he found himself tripping up in his mind, having stubbed his toe on the same question he’d asked himself before: why this game? Out of the whole plethora of immersive multi-player action games available, why was this one in particular such a big hit with Axle cadre?
Not for any ideological reason, that was for sure. Starborn Quest was a bog-standard cod-medieval fantasy online role-playing game, set on a likewise cookie-cutter lost-colony planet whose only touch of originality was its vast surface area, low density and consequent relative lack of ferrous metals—making ceramics, hardwoods, paper, and brew-and-bake plastics its common materials of everyday use. Magic of a kind worked
here, duly given some bullshit rationale about remnant technology. The object of the quest was to find the colony’s wrecked starship—which could be continents and oceans away from your starting point—recover its secrets and return to space. Along the way you, with any companions you had managed to muster, had to negotiate or fight your way through a fractal patchwork of petty kingdoms, realms, domains, duchies, merchant-republic city-states, barbarian equestrian whirlwind empires, ruined cities, deserts dotted with booby-trapped alien artifacts of power, and so on and on. The whole ambiance was far more resonant of the Reaction than the Acceleration.
So why had he and so many others enjoyed it so much? And why should a law company’s AI indulge their long-gone youthful folly?
Carlos, still pondering the question, took another few wary steps forward. In front of him, something unseen snuffled horribly. Its exhalation was a blast of fetid breath. Carlos reeled back, gagging. Immense, frost-crusted hands grabbed his upper arms from behind and wrenched him off balance. He was dragged backward, kicking and struggling. The thing that had been in front of him shuffled after, wheezing miasmas in his face. The thing behind sighed arctic blasts on the back of his neck. That he could still see neither of his attackers made him struggle all the more.
Predictably, resistance was futile.
Carlos knew better than to expect a torture chamber. The original game had had places for physical torment, but this wasn’t one of them. What a Level 3 Interrogation Maze gave you instead was nightmare. The horror and disgust were just to make your stomach heave at hideous sights and smells. The nightmare was of repetition, of futility, of being trapped on a treadmill or in a maze and knowing that somewhere in your mind was the information that could get you off and out. The urge to blurt it could become irresistible, however many points it cost you.