Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  His captors slung him in a stone cell, sending him sprawling and staggering to collide painfully with a shelf pallet, covered with rotting straw, that hung on chains from a far wall sodden with slime-drenched moss. His hip slithered down the wall and he crashed, half turned around, on the seat. The chains creaked as he moved to sit facing outward. Above the cell’s heavy wooden door, half-open outward, a torch burned yellow in an embrasure. Carlos shielded his eyes from its glare until his sight adjusted. His captors flanked the doorway.

  One was a walking corpse, far decayed, half clad in rags, its limbs held together with strands of twine and operated by contraptions of pulleys and fishing line. Mucilage dangled and jiggled in its nasal cavity. Peeled-back lips exposed its black-rooted teeth. Twin sparks glowed in its empty eye sockets. Behind its ribs, lungs green with the sheen of bacteria on spoiled meat laboured like bellows.

  The other was a white-furred ape-man two metres tall, covered with patches of snow and crusted with spiky frost that showed no sign of melting. Fangs overhung the corners of its mouth. Its eyes were yellow, with black horizontal-slot pupils like a goat’s. Nice touch for the setting, though biologically implausible in a predator.

  “Carlos,” wheezed the rotting zombie, “when did you first decide to betray the cause?”

  Carlos shook his head. “I never betrayed the cause.”

  The frost monster roared. Its breath was as if a freezer door had opened. Carlos had no time to shiver. The monster took two strides forward and swiped a paw at the side of Carlos’s face, sending him sideways onto the stone floor. He managed to avoid cracking his head on the flags, but only by wrenching his shoulder and almost breaking his right arm. He curled up instantly, and it was his shins that took the kick. Just as the blow to the head had been, it was like being struck by so much frozen meat.

  Carlos huddled, in sheet-lightning flashes of pain and a deafening ringing in his head. He waited for another kick. It didn’t come. The monster’s steps thudded back to the doorway.

  “Rise up,” said the corpse.

  Carlos struggled to his feet. His body ached from head to foot. His face was scratched, his left cheekbone hurt like it might be broken, and his leathers were filthy.

  “Sit.”

  He sat, trying not to let his back touch the oozing wall.

  “Carlos,” the zombie said again, in a patient tone, “when did you first decide to betray the cause?”

  “I don’t—” Carlos began. His mouth tasted of blood.

  The ice monster lurched. Reels whirred and lines glistened as the rotting zombie raised one arm, and spread its finger bones.

  “No!” it gasped. “Wait. Let us hear him out.” Its neck creaked as its head swivelled and its eye sparks were brought to bear. “Carlos, if you don’t answer constructively, I’m not sure I can hold back my impulsive friend here.”

  Christ, the zombie was the one playing the good cop!

  “I remember having doubts about our strategy from quite early on,” Carlos said. “I also remember hearing the Innovator’s voice in my head. In my spike, you know? I must have invited it in at some point. But I don’t remember doing that, and I don’t remember if I was authorised by the leadership or internal security to do it. From later, I remember for sure that internal security knew, and the leadership knew. It was part of their new strategy.”

  “What new strategy?”

  Carlos tried to keep his gaze focused on the red pinpoints, and not to let it dwell on what else was going on in that rotting face. A long drip of phosphorescent slime in the nasal cavity was about to swing loose.

  “The new strategy was of coordinating action with state forces against the Rax. A common enemy. The enemy of my enemy, and all that.”

  “And how did you know about it? There was no mention of it in the movement’s communiqués.”

  “Of course not,” said Carlos. “It had to be deniable on both sides. I was told about it by my internal security contact.”

  “Whose name was?”

  “I knew him as Ahmed al-Londoni.” He smiled. “Ahmed the Londoner. It was obviously a code name. For one thing, he was Welsh.”

  “You poor fool,” sighed the zombie. The dangling drip flew out of the hole in the face and landed on the floor, where small things scurried to gobble at it.

  “What?”

  There was a whizzing of reels as the zombie’s arm rose in an imperious gesture.

  “Take him away,” it told the ice monster.

  The next room was worse. The ice monster shoved Carlos in and then stepped back outside and slammed the door. Carlos stumbled, arms windmilling, and found his balance. He pressed his back against the door. The floor and walls were terracotta-tiled. Candles burned in half a dozen niches, filling the room with a warm glow. Avatars of a man and a woman sat—he on Carlos’s left, she on the right—behind a wooden table in the middle of the room, staring at him with impassive intentness. They were of human size, but barely of human appearance. They looked as if they had been made from life-size versions of the figures in a plastic brick construction toy. Their heads were cylindrical, with solid plastic representations of hairdos stuck like hats on top. The man’s head was yellow, the woman’s light brown. Features had been drawn on as if with black marker, in clear bold strokes and dots.

  Carlos looked back at the pair as levelly as he could. He guessed that unlike the monsters they were avatars of actual people. Only their heads and shoulders were visible above the stacks of paper that covered every square centimetre of the table top in front of them. A wooden chair was between him and the table. He wondered if he should pick it up and lay about the interrogators right now. It would all come to the same in the end.

  “Sit down, Carlos,” the woman said. Her drawn-on lips and eyebrows moved on the rounded surface of her face as she spoke, discrete as slugs on a pipe.

  Carlos sat. A large bottle of water stood on the floor beside the chair. The chair had a padded leather seat and an elegant ergonomic back. That was terrifying. They expected him to be here for a long time. No doubt their own seating was just as comfortable. He looked over the stacks of paper and reckoned there were at least ten thousand pages in front of him.

  The pair behind the table straightened up a little, with some scraping of chair legs on the floor. Carlos looked across the stack, at four eyes and two noses. The woman’s left hand reached up and took the first sheet. The hand was shaped as though it could only be clicked onto a round stick, but it handled the paper deftly enough.

  She cleared her throat, and began to read.

  “My name is Carlos. I have no certainty of reaching my destination…”

  To Carlos’s intense embarrassment, what she was reading out was what he had written by laser on the side of the scooter. He listened and wished he was dead.

  Wishing that the ground would swallow him seemed, in the circumstances, reckless.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Writing by Laser

  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.
>
  There was a television pane high on the wall of our living room. Sometimes my parents would let me watch programmes—stories, cartoons, fantasy tales, science documentaries—made for children. In the evenings they sent me out of the room, to go outdoors or to watch such programmes on my own tablet or to read or play games, while they watched programmes on the pane. They had control of the pane by subtle, rapid finger movements, which they refused to demonstrate to me. They’d laugh and hide their fingers when I asked.

  One day when I was about seven years old I found I could just reach the thin black band along the bottom of the pane. Some concealed manual control responded to the scrabbling fingers of my outstretched hand. I stepped back into the middle of the room to see what I had found. A man’s voice, low and deep, spoke steadily and solemnly in a language I didn’t know. I saw a vivid blue sea, a blue sky and a shore of sand: a wide but narrow beach, with dunes behind it. Beyond the skyline a brownish haze faded to yellow then green to merge with the blue above.

  The viewpoint camera approached the shore, skimming the wave tops, and stopped before a rounded white object sticking up from the sand. I thought at first it was the shell of some sea creature. I had seen such shells on a beach. Then the viewpoint swung around the object, and two black holes in the front seemed to stare at me, above a hollow triangle. It was a human skull—I think I recognised the shape from hazard labels, or perhaps from the fantasy tales I mentioned earlier.

  The camera tracked across the beach, from a viewpoint like my own childish one, a metre or so off the ground. It was of course a drone camera, though I didn’t recognise that at the time. Whitened skulls and other human bones—curved ribs, separated vertebrae, long femurs and humeri, lots of small scattered bones that I later understood were phalanges—lay everywhere. From the way the wind stirred the sand you could see some bones being covered, others exposed; they were as plentiful as shells on a beach. Some were large, others smaller, some smaller still with double rows of teeth inside the jaw. These puzzled me for a moment, until I deduced, with a thrill of horror, that they were the skulls of babies.

  The camera turned this way and that. Its view swept the long, deserted beach. The bones in the sand close by were clear and distinct, further off less so, until they became multiple glints of white that in the distance merged and shimmered. The entire beach was carpeted with bones. The camera moved on, through tussocks of tough tall grass into dunes, and the dunes too were littered with protruding bones at every turn. Then it rose, higher and higher, and by that same continuity from near to far, one could see that the sand went to the horizon, and the bones with it.

  The camera turned, and faced out to the blue sea and the waves that lapped the shore and stirred yet more bones tumbling back and forth in the surf.

  Even at that age, I understood that this fossil graveyard of humanity signified countless deaths, many of them at my own age or younger. But I might not have had the smallest inkling that this had some moral significance had not my mother silently entered the room, stood (I presume) for a moment of dawning horror, then stepped forward and smartly snapped the television off and given me a severe look.

  “You shouldn’t be watching that!” she said.

  I had a surge of guilty bewilderment.

  “Why not?”

  “The telly’s for grown-ups.”

  “Why are there all these skeletons?” I asked, in the tone of bright curiosity that my parents usually rewarded with patient explanation.

  “It was a bad thing,” she said.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “It happened a long time ago,” she said.

  I was old enough to know, very much from the inside, the tones of evasion and excuse. My mother’s cheeks reddened a little.

  “What happened?” I persisted.

  “I’ll tell you another time. Now go out the back, it’s a nice day.”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  I knew not to push it. I traipsed outside and repeatedly kicked a football against the wall of the house. My mother didn’t rush out to complain. I knew she must feel bad about something. I didn’t know what, but I felt implicated.

  So much for the influence of my mother. Let me tell you now of the influence of two other women in my life, whose effect was perhaps less benign: Jax Digby and Nicole Pascal.

  As I grew up I learned why so many had died, decades before I was born, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Africa was being ravaged by climate change and war. Millions had fled north. Europe kept them out, blockading the coast with drones and warships. There was nowhere for these people to go, and on that fatal shore they died in droves. It was not the worst catastrophe of the recent past, or even of the present. I remained troubled by such things, and by my inadvertent but nonetheless culpable complicity in them.

  Thus as a student I became drawn to the ideas of the Acceleration, under the influence of one of their cadre, a young woman named Jacqueline “Jax” Digby. This is how we met.

  Perhaps she was waiting for me, or looking out for me. Certainly she was looking out for such as me. Alert, she must have been, every waking, walking minute for a momentary flicker of disgusted dissent, for a brief hot spark of fury and shame in averted eyes. She saw that in mine the day I was walking across the campus under the usual heavy rain and I happened to glance at one of the big public screens that were a thing that year, or that month: a community-building initiative, I think they were called at the time. On screen, in swift succession:

  An evacuation ship from Bangladesh, holed below the waterline and sinking fast.

  An advertisement for sunscreen.

  A Japanese naval hydrofoil, its plumes a rainbow sheen.

  An advertisement for life insurance.

  A sea of red.

  Rags and clumps of hair.

  An advertisement for shampoo.

  At that point I tugged my hood around my face, the rain drumming on the oilcloth, and looked away and down and—

  —up—

  —to lock eyes with a woman with black curly hair walking the other way, in a transparent plastic rain cape over a green T-shirt and a translucent blue skirt with LEDs around the hem, and big black Doc Martens that went squelch when she walked. She stopped.

  “It’s shit, innit?” she said.

  “Fuck’n’ right,” I said. “But what can we do about it?”

  “Come with me and we’ll kick around some ideas,” she said.

  “Where you going?” I said.

  “Games hall,” she said.

  We found a concrete archway. I picked up two cups from a coffee stall along the way. We sat under the arch and shook off our rainwear. She gave my abs an appreciative look.

  “Gene-splice,” I admitted.

  “Still,” she said.

  The rain battered the plaza. Steam rose. We sipped.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  I tossed my paper cup into the path of a roving tumble-bot. “Ready.”

  “Pinball?”

  I shrugged my eyebrows. “If you like.”

  We each took out our kit and draped it over our eyes and noses. Flipped the code. Instantly we were in a loud, sweaty, strobe-lit shared space. We stood side by side at the pinball machines, heads down, thumbs busy, and talked.

  “Here’s one answer,” she said. “Let them in. All of them.”

  I said something about jobs and houses.

  “So give them jobs building houses.”

  “They can’t all do that.”

  “Those who can’t can work at other things.”

  “But there’s no jobs!”

  Sidelong look. “You mean there’s nothing left to do that’s worth paying people to do?”

  “Just very highly skilled jobs. Which is why we’re here, right?”

  “Wouldn’t count on it.” Ding. “Genomics database librarian?” She must have read my profile. “Ha! A robot’s after that too.”

  “So we’re back to—what can we d
o about it?”

  “Let them do it,” she said. “The robots. Everything.”

  “But then there’d be no jobs!”

  Christ, I was thick. But she got through to me in the end.

  “Read this,” she said. She slid a text to my kit. “See me tomorrow. Same place, same time.”

  That evening I read the pamphlet: Solidarity Against Nature, by Eugene Saunders.

  The following day the sun was hot on the plaza. I wore a bush hat and shorts. Jax wore Yemeni-derived steampunk. We retreated to the concrete arch again, this time for shade.

  “What did you think?” she asked.

  “It seemed to make sense.”

  She grinned. “Welcome to the Acceleration.”

  “The Acceleration?” I must have sounded horrified. “They’re crazy.”

  “You’ve just agreed with everything we stand for.”

  “We?”

  “I’m in,” she said. “And now you are, whether you know it or not.”

  Needless to say, that wasn’t the end of it. But it was the beginning.

  Jax and I became friends, comrades, occasional lovers. The Acceleration (colloquially “Axle” or “Ax”) was a global network of activists that sought to bring about the most rapid possible development of capitalism in order, as they saw it, for society to pass beyond it to a new system, and for humanity to pass beyond its own limitations. In the escalating economic, environmental, military, existential and other crises of the time the ideas of the Acceleration gained increasing traction.

  Sometimes the ideas seemed to have spread further than they really had.

  “Who’re these guys?” I asked Jax, flicking the text to her kit. “They sound like us.”

  She took about a minute to scan the document.

  “Not us,” she said. “The fucking Rax.”

  “The what?”

  “The Reaction.” She waved a hand, dismissing me and the text. It flew around the table to the eyes of our half-dozen companions, who read and chortled. We were in the cafeteria, with a handful of like-minded students. They were all far more politically savvy than I was.