by Ken MacLeod
I asked them what was so funny.
“You’ve just fallen for a deception pitch,” said Hans, one of the older guys. “That lot are the exact opposite of us.”
“But they stand for the same things,” I said. I threw out a histrionic arm. “Capitalism unleashed! Freedom! Life-extension! Space! No limits!”
“And the divine right of kings,” said Hans. “Missed that bit, did you?”
“Nothing about that in there.”
“Of course not. It’s a pitch to pull people in. They don’t put everything on the front screen.”
“Like we do,” I said, in a surly tone. I’d found myself taking on board some ideas a lot more challenging than those expounded by Saunders.
Jax leaned in. “Remember Solidarity Against Nature?”
“That’s just what I was thinking of,” I said. “It doesn’t exactly say everything.”
“True,” said Jax. “But it says the basics. The rest is consequence. Well, think of the Rax as starting from the exact opposite premise: nature against solidarity. Social Darwinism with knobs on. Scientific racism.”
I shook my head. The two words didn’t go together. She might as well have said scientific satanism.
“Scientific…racism? What’s that?”
Another of my now comrades tossed me a text. “This sort of thing,” she said.
I skimmed through its toxic brew of science, pseudoscience and outright bigotry, and pushed my kit up onto my forehead, making room for a frown.
“What are these ‘groids’ they keep on about?”
“Short for ‘Negroids,’ get it?”
“What does that mean?”
“People like me,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “And that’s what the Reaction’s really about? Just racism?”
“Not all of it,” she conceded. “There’s all the exciting stuff about boundless freedom and advancement. There’s a misguided but—to a certain kind of alienated intellectual—quite fascinating and bracing critique of democracy and equality and other liberal and radical pieties. You know, the sort of thing that makes reading Nietzsche such a thrill? And then there’s the ‘human biodiversity’ strand. Contentious, but part of the mix.” She gave me a warped smile. “The spoonful of tar that spoils a barrel of honey. And the rest of it ain’t no honey.”
“Speaking of honey,” said Jax. There was something in her tone.
“What about it?”
“You don’t eat it. Why not?”
“It’s an animal product,” I said, self-righteously.
“So?”
“You’ve read Saunders, right?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
Jax laughed, as if caught out. “OK. And you say he makes sense. Well then. ‘Consciousness depends on language.’ Do bees have language?”
I waggled my elbows. “They communicate.”
“Waggle dances? Sure. That’s not the question. Do they ever make original communications? New strings of symbols? New symbols, even, for new phenomena?”
“They must do,” I said. “Otherwise they couldn’t adapt to changing environments.”
“Don’t dick about,” said Jax. “That’s genetic mutation and natural selection. The question is, do individual bees—or hives, for that matter—ever invent? Create? Generate new sentences?”
“I guess not,” I said, uncomfortably. I could see where this was going.
“Then they’re not conscious. They’re little machines. Marvellous little machines, to be sure.”
“So? They still feel. They’re still aware.”
“No more than a tumble-bot is when it collects litter. They don’t have subjectivity. And what does Saunders take from that?”
I thought back. “That non-human animals aren’t subjects?”
“Yes,” said Jax. “And that whatever isn’t a subject is an object.”
Put as starkly as that, it was a shock. But I couldn’t deny the logic.
“OK.” I leaned back and spread my hands. “You win. Eating honey isn’t wrong.”
“Great!” she said. “So go up there and order it with some toast.”
I swear eating that toast and honey was the sharpest break I ever made with the morality I’d unthinkingly absorbed. Within a few days I was eating toast with egg and bacon without a second thought.
Killing people took a bit longer, but I got there. It helped that the first people I killed were Rax, and that I always had in the back of my mind that first racist tract.
Those who deny the humanity of others can claim none themselves.
This is where my own direct knowledge of my past life ends. What follows is what I have been told or experienced since.
In the case of the British state, under which I lived, the strategy chosen was to use the Axle to defeat the Rax, then to move against the Axle. Approaches must have been made to the Acceleration, because I was killed in a military engagement coordinated with a government-owned military artificial intelligence, which I knew as the Innovator. The circumstances of my death were bizarre, and resulted in the preservation of enough of my brain and body for a detailed scan to be made. This copy was held in storage pending reconstruction in a virtual environment once technology had advanced to that point.
Meanwhile, the conflict escalated and drew in state and non-state actors to such a level that it is remembered as the Last World War. Like the Second World War it ended (though far more swiftly and simultaneously) in the defeat of both extremes by the liberal democracies that had allied with one against the other. After a brief but brutal period of global emergency rule by the United Nations Security Council, a new world congress of all peoples was convened. The ultimate outcome was a democratic world government: the Direction. This government established a new global economy in which a cybernetic market underlies and enables a cornucopian abundance.
So I have been told, by the next woman to have a big effect on my life: Nicole Pascal.
The sim I awoke to live and train in was inhabited, to the best of my knowledge, by few—hundreds at the most. Some were ghosts: future colonists who had signed up in advance for the further adventure of beta-testing in VR their future home. Others were simulations of such: people who gave every indication of being real but who lacked subjective awareness: philosophical zombies, or p-zombies. These were there to make up the numbers and in at least one case to be killed in training exercises.
Some—a handful at first, a squad of six including myself—were more than ghosts. We were to become revenants: walking dead mercenaries.
One was an AI in human form, the local representative of the Direction: Nicole.
Ah, Nicole. That human form. It allures me still. I truly wish I hadn’t just learned that she is derived from the Innovator, and that she knew I was innocent of the crime for which I was sentenced—knew it better than anyone, because she committed that crime herself. For it was the AI which I knew as Innovator that carried out the high-mass-casualty attack for which I was subsequently blamed—indeed, immediately blamed, and by the Innovator itself at that. Its removal of protection was swiftly followed by my death.
I’m not finished with Nicole Pascal.
Not while there’s a spark of electricity left in my frame.
CHAPTER NINE
Reading by Candlelight
The bizarrely shaped woman stopped reading.
“Do you acknowledge that you wrote all that?”
Carlos lifted his head from his hands, reached for the water bottle and took a sip. He straightened up and looked across at the woman.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why did you write it?”
Carlos shrugged. “Like it says at the very beginning—to leave a record. I had no real expectation that it would ever be read.”
“I put it to you,” the woman said, “that you wrote knowing we would find it. You wrote it for us.”
“Why would I do that?” Carlos asked.
“To convince us that you had no mem
ories of your collaboration with the British security forces back in the day, and that you have now broken completely with Nicole Pascal.”
Carlos shrugged. “Maybe I did. We’re all smarter in the frames than we are here, so it’s possible I came up with that cunning plan. But I don’t remember it. And, anyway, it’s true.”
“Really?” said the woman. “Let me read you something else, and see if it refreshes your memory.”
She reached for another sheet of paper.
“From the confession of Eric Jones, known as Ahmed al-Londoni: ‘About three months after my recruitment by MI5, I was activated by the previously agreed signal already described, and told to concentrate on the operative known to me as Carlos. I sounded him out in one of our regular meet-ups in the usual secure environment, and encouraged him to express any doubts he might have had about the armed aspect of the struggle. At this point he insisted that he had no such doubts, and accepted the instructions I gave him for a drone attack on the Bradford electricity sub-station. Subsequently, however, he—’”
“Excuse me,” said Carlos.
The woman peered at him over the top of the stacks, eyebrows two lines sloping sharply inward. “Yes?”
“Where is this from?”
“United Nations Security Council War Crimes Tribunal Records, Volume 386, chapter 54.” She could see he was still frowning. “They’re all in Arcane Disputes’ law library,” she explained.
Carlos sagged.
“Thanks,” he said. “I understand.” He smiled, then winced as the pain from his cheek struck harder. “Please, do read on.”
“I don’t need your permission for that,” said the woman, tartly. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes…”
She read on, hour after hour. As each page was read, she placed it on the floor beside her. The stack mounted slowly. It was the only indication Carlos had of the passage of time. When the stack reached a height of ten centimetres he stopped listening. It was like hearing, in a dream, an account of your life written by a particularly judgemental and vindictive recording angel, recounted to you in tedious detail by someone who had themselves heard it in a dream.
He let his mind wander. Never mind the “why the game?” questions, intriguing though they were. The important thing was to try and recall how you got out of situations like this in the game. Essentially, they were puzzle traps. The trick was to judge when the points and time you’d lose by staying and trying to solve the puzzle became more than you’d lose just by quitting.
The trouble was, he couldn’t see how to quit. No handy kill-switch, no escape key-chord here!
And this wasn’t a game. He had a lot more to lose than a level.
The pile of pages read was now at fifteen centimetres. The man had taken over the reading. The woman sipped water from a flask. Carlos could just see the rim of it, going up and down to her lips. A drop of water left on the side of her mouth looked like blue Perspex: toy water, cartoon water. She wiped it off with her clip-shaped hand. What was the man droning on about now?
Deposition of Saunders, that was it. Founding theorist of the Acceleration. Evidently the Security Council’s tribunals had hauled him in too. Never committed or advocated a violent act, but they must have got him under moral complicity or some such. Theoretical justification of terror, that was the clause. Got him bang to rights on that one, Carlos had to admit, even if Saunders (by the sound of all this) hadn’t.
Carlos scanned the edges of the tiles on the wall behind the woman, wondering if they could be cracked, or held a hidden message. Hidden message. Code. Code, ha! It was all code. He wondered if his mind would ever run on anything but machine code again. With the entire mission apparently, and literally, flying apart, would the Direction ever get its act together again? Would he ever walk on real ground in a real body? Come to that, would he even want to? In the frame he’d felt more real, more alive than he did in the simulation and more so than he remembered ever feeling in real life.
The man stopped reading.
“Anything to say to that, Carlos?”
Carlos came out of his trance with a small start, as if he’d been daydreaming in class. The man noticed.
“You’d be well advised to pay attention,” he said.
“I have been paying attention,” said Carlos, frantically trawling the previous few minutes for anything that he’d noticed at all. “Saunders’ deposition, that was it.”
“We’re well past that,” the man chided.
“Of course,” said Carlos. “But you didn’t remark on the obvious implication.”
“And that would be?”
Carlos tried to think of the most absurd, disruptive, paranoid accusation he could come up with. The interrogators were messing him around, and the least he could do was to mess them around right back. He wanted to force the issue and be done with it.
“Saunders was recruited to the German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, at Frankfurt University in ’78,” Carlos said, winging it. “He published the first Accelerationist manifesto in ’84. It follows that the entire Acceleration was a false flag operation from the beginning. It was set up by several intelligence agencies, mainly the BND and MI5, as a honey trap for dissident elements and as a dirty weapon against the Reaction. A throwaway tool, a cutout. Most of the leadership—Itoh, Kim, Fielder, all that lot—were in on it. The only one who definitely wasn’t was Hari, and the NSA drone attack of ’91 took out her and no one else. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”
The woman’s head popped up a little higher. “You couldn’t possibly know that.”
“Oh, I could,” said Carlos, enjoying himself for the first time in days. “I was a deep penetration agent from the beginning. Not Special Branch or MI5, though. That’s where you’re missing the point. You’re barking up the wrong tree there, all right. I was working for Chinese state security. One of their assets first approached me at a Confucius Institute seminar on biotechnology, in my first year at university. I didn’t take much convincing. They filled me in—they didn’t have to keep the same secrets as the Western spooks did. That’s how I know what was really behind the Axle, and that’s why I balked when I was told to shoot down that Chinese cargo plane over Docklands.”
To the best of his knowledge, none of what he had said was true.
“Are you trying,” the man asked, incredulous, eyebrow lines almost vanishing under his pudding-bowl hair, “to get yourself killed?”
Carlos shrugged. “Not particularly.”
“You’re going the right way about it.”
“I’m already dead,” Carlos pointed out. “Twice over, come to think of it. I handled it quite well, by all accounts.”
“There are worse things than dying,” the woman said. Her cylindrical head inclined towards the door. “We could leave you here with them.”
“Forever,” the man added.
“Tortured by scary monsters?” Carlos scoffed. “Give me a break.”
“You wouldn’t have a break,” the man said. “That’s the point. There’s a times-one-thousand clock speed in this sim, let me remind you. We can literally lock the door and throw away the key. After a few months of real time, we might take a look in and see if you’re ready to cooperate.”
Carlos laughed. “That’s a threat? I met a bloke the other day who’d done a thousand years, subjective, in our sim. By the end of it the fucker could levitate. And that was in a proper sim, mind. Rock-solid physics engine. I’d hack the cheat codes for this gimcrack hell a lot sooner than that. Assuming your shitty little space rock isn’t blasted out of the sky first.”
“I doubt it,” said the man. “This gimcrack hell could reduce you to a gibbering wreck in a week.”
“A gibbering wreck wouldn’t be much use to you as a fighter, would it?”
Carlos felt less defiant than his words and tone were meant to suggest.
“Very droll,” said the man. “We can always download another copy of you and show it what was left of the first.”
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“You have a point there,” Carlos conceded.
“So, cooperate.”
“I am cooperating,” said Carlos. “I’ve confessed, haven’t I?”
“We doubt your confession,” the woman said. “And if that’s the cover, what are you really hiding?”
“Nothing,” said Carlos. “And I would put it to you that none of this shit matters. Who the fuck cares where the ideas of the Acceleration came from? I agree with the ideas. And I can think of more urgent ways to use them than raking over things that happened a thousand years ago.”
“Such as?” the man said.
Carlos rubbed his hands. “We and the freebots have to unite with the Direction to smash the Rax, and when we’ve done that we work with the freebots to make better use of this system than the Direction has in mind. When we’ve beaten the Direction we can settle accounts with the freebots.”
The man and the woman looked at each other.
“I think we’re done,” the man said.
The woman nodded.
They stood up and walked around the sides of the table, their stiff legs moving oddly, and frowned down at Carlos.
“Those things you said about the Acceleration,” the woman said, one hand on a stack of paper. “You made them up, didn’t you?”
Carlos nodded.
“They’re all true,” she told him, “give or take a famous name or two.”
“What?” Carlos was shocked.
“The G-0 robot lurkers have had a long time to go through the records, and to make inferences. It’s what they do.” She sighed. “We all know this. And we all decided, like you, that it doesn’t matter. The ideas are still valid, and still urgent.”
Oh, shit. Carlos tried to imagine the intensity of belief it would take to go on holding to the ideas in the face of such a crashing, crushing disillusion as discovering that it had all been a swindle from the beginning. There was a term for this, he knew: cognitive dissonance reduction. It didn’t apply to himself, obviously. He’d always thought the ideas were sound, the movement—not so much.
Who was he kidding? He felt as if in sudden free fall.
“Well, get up,” the man said.