Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  Carlos stood up. The man stuck out a hand-clip. “Welcome aboard.”

  Carlos wasn’t at all sure he wanted to be on board with this lot, but he smiled and shook the curious manipulative implement. His cheekbone and shoulder still hurt.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Command Lines

  Beauregard barged into the hallway and stopped in the studio doorway. Everyone seemed frozen in the moment, a tableau: Rizzi looking guilty, as well she should; Nicole sparing a glance away from the easel; the rangy looking man with the wild hair giving him a quizzical scrutiny. And on the easel itself, the one face in the room that shouldn’t be moving, but was: the logo of Locke. A rolling caption of handwriting crept across the bottom of the big flip-pad page.

  “I thought you had that thing under control,” Beauregard said, going on the offensive without hesitation.

  “It’s fighting back,” said Nicole.

  “What’s it saying?” Beauregard asked.

  Nicole peered at the screen. “Legal boilerplate, for the moment.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  Nicole shook her head. “It’s bad that Locke’s doing this at all. It must have ways to work around some of the restraints I put on it yesterday. It may be invoking emergency provisions, both legal and software, that’ll let it work around more.”

  Invoking. Not a good word to hear when you’re in the same room as two unpredictable gods. Three, counting Locke. Beauregard tried to size up the situation. Nicole was by her own admission and plenty of evidence an AI. She had a deep connection with the design of the sim—not its creator, exactly, but something between a demiurge and a nature spirit. Her means of interacting with the sim and with the rest of the module’s machinery was through her painting and drawing—this being the means she had chosen herself, in the course of her creation. In what now seemed the far-off innocent days of basic orientation and training her artistic dabbling had looked like a harmless hobby, part of her role as the slightly distant lady of leisure who told the grunts what was what.

  Shaw was a different barrel of laughs entirely. A deserter from an earlier conflict with rebel robots, one Earth year ago in real time, one thousand years ago in sim time (as was), Shaw had survived on his own and by his wits, wandering the world. Along the way he had acquired a mental access to at least some of the controls of the sim. That, presumably, was how he’d brought the colour back, at the expense of clock speed. There was no way to tell how deliberate this was, but the change in clock speed threw a major wrench into Beauregard’s plans.

  Beauregard had hoped for several subjective years of training, preparation and design work before the module arrived in orbit around the superhabitable planet SH-0. These years would have been enabled by the clock speed of the sim’s being a thousand times faster than real time. The speed of reaction to outside events, from the point of view of the sim’s inhabitants, would have been that much faster as well.

  Now they had to do everything in real time, to be ready for orbital insertion in a matter of days, and they had an unfriendly AI arguing its way out of the box Nicole had put it in yesterday. The law company Locke Provisos was a corporation, a legal person, that consisted entirely of a hierarchy of AIs. A DisCorporate or DisCorp, as the slang of the Direction’s brave new worlds went. Locke was also—according to the message from its former competitor and now enemy, Arcane Disputes—a law company that had all along been a sleeper agent of the Reaction. What it would want to do, if it seized back control of the module, was entirely unpredictable in detail but would presumably involve taking the Reaction’s side on the ongoing skirmishes that were currently being yammered excitedly from the half-dozen news screens hung around the room.

  For a moment, Beauregard wondered whether the AI could be argued out of that. He doubted it, and he doubted that even Nicole could do it if it were. It wasn’t as if the AI had political opinions in the first place. It was a corporation, answering to the priorities that had been built into it and were no doubt now buried deep in its programming.

  How deep? Ah! That might be a short cut.

  “Nicole,” Beauregard asked, in a milder tone, “what’s the Locke AI’s utility function?”

  “Shareholder value,” she answered, as if it were obvious. “It’s just an off-the-shelf corporation, basically.”

  “How does fighting for the Rax maximise shareholder value?”

  She shot him a sharp look. “Presumably by increasing the number and intensity of disputes that it makes money out of solving.”

  “If that was the way to make money, all the law companies would be doing it. They aren’t. Why not?”

  “Good question,” said Nicole. “Obviously, law companies make money from resolving disputes. You might think this gives them an incentive for fomenting disputes, but that is not generally the case. There is never a lack of disputes. Disputes arise out of normal business activity, even with the best will in the world. A law company builds its business and reputation by resolving them to the satisfaction of its clients. Recklessly multiplying and inflaming disputes would damage its reputation more than it would gain in business, because it would have no guarantee that it would be the law company that was hired to resolve the disputes, so it could just end up trashing its reputation while sending business to its competitors.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Beauregard, impatiently. “Spare me the lecture—I’ve been to university. The Locke corporation has been active in this system for ten years of real time, and in that time it must have handled God knows how many transactions in the virtual markets. So it can’t have been acting rogue before all this started—I’m guessing it was the robot revolt on SH-17 that triggered it.”

  “It was pulling the same tricks a year ago, during the last robot uprising,” Shaw interjected. “Just not so blatant.”

  “There wasn’t a full-on Reaction breakout back then,” said Beauregard. He waved a hand. “Anyway…my point right now is that there may be some trigger, some switch that gets flipped, one basic decision point that flips the corporation into what would otherwise be irrational activity—trouble-making, essentially—and makes it seem rational in terms of its own utility function: maximising shareholder value.”

  “There might be,” said Nicole, frowning. “An advantage of AI corporations is that they take the long view, far more than human-based organisations. So perhaps a simple adjustment to Locke’s time preferences and its discount rate would make it act in this way.”

  “There must be more to it than that,” said Shaw. “From what Rizzi and Carlos told me, and what I experienced myself in the previous conflict, Locke has been thinking strategically about ways to—”

  “—extend and escalate the conflict?” Nicole interrupted. “Yes, that is precisely the point, and what one would expect from a basic change in its underlying valuations. But the code tweak would be hard to find, and harder still to change.”

  Beauregard sighed. “Oh, well. Worth a try, I suppose.”

  “Why don’t we offer it more conflict?” Rizzi asked.

  Beauregard snorted. The lassie was evidently out of her depth. He pointed at the screens. “More than it’s got right now? How do we do that?”

  Rizzi looked from him to Nicole, and back.

  “I once had a cat,” she said. “When he was a little kitten, he couldn’t help pouncing on his own shadow, again and again. When he was all grown up, he would watch me eating. He could easily have pushed his face onto my plate, but he could always be distracted if I threw him a scrap. The cat couldn’t help himself, you see. He was a machine. An intelligent and affectionate machine, but still.”

  Nicole was looking as puzzled as Beauregard felt.

  “What’s this got to do with anything?”

  “Have you actually told Locke,” Rizzi asked, “what your plans are?”

  “Of course not!” said Beauregard. “Why would I? The damn thing is opposed enough to us as it is.”

  But even as he said the words, he realised he’d been
mistaken. He looked at Rizzi with new, if grudging, respect.

  “Wait a sec,” he said. “Rizzi, you might be onto something there. Well done you.”

  “Am I missing something?” Nicole asked.

  Beauregard grinned at Rizzi and with a slight bow of his head extended an open hand, palm up. “Tell her.”

  “Look,” said Taransay, “your plan is to land on SH-0 and start settling it, right? And the planet’s still on the market. The corporations are still bidding and selling futures in the rights to it and all that shit, and in the meantime it’s embargoed to exploration. I mean, the Direction’s space station’s flown apart but I doubt the Direction has. The companies aren’t yet in some kind of every man for himself mode, are they?”

  “Not yet,” said Nicole.

  “Well,” Taransay went on, “that means all the deals and bids and so on are still in play. And even if they’re not, in fact especially if the mission’s all gone to pieces and we’re in a resource scramble, none of the companies are going to take kindly to us just going down there and grabbing a piece of the action. Just us landing and trying to make a living is going to cause untold changes down there to the ecosystems. Which means lots of other companies will be gunning for us, literally as well as legally. I mean, quite independently of the Rax–Axle–Direction dust-up that’s going on right now.”

  While Taransay was still speaking, Nicole had started scribbling. The portrait of Locke on the paper stopped moving until Nicole had stopped writing. Then its lips moved again and the ticker-tape crawl of handwriting along the foot of the page recommenced. Nicole flipped over to a new page. The face reappeared, and the bizarre dialogue continued below it. This happened several times: scribble, read, scribble, flip…

  At length Nicole stood back. The face of Locke smiled, and then became just a drawing. A static portrait of a satanic smile.

  “Well,” said Nicole, “that’s that settled.”

  Beauregard was looking nonplussed. “What’s settled?”

  “I’ve sold it on Rizzi’s idea,” said Nicole. “It’s now on-side.”

  “On our side?” Beauregard sounded dubious.

  “In so far as it’s willing to cooperate with us in getting through the flak and getting down, yes. It’s positively—well, virtually—lusting for the lawsuits that’ll come after us.”

  “Yay!” cried Taransay. She wanted to high-five all round, but felt it might be inappropriate. Then she found herself wondering why she felt that.

  “Yay, indeed,” said Nicole.

  Beauregard snorted. Nicole looked at him sharply. “What seems to be the problem?”

  Beauregard scowled. “Rizzi,” he said, grimly. “She tried to pull a fast one on me. Left me cruising the back roads like some pillock, while she tried to agitate the troops on the bus. But, as it seems there’s no harm done…”

  He favoured Taransay with a tight smile. Don’t push it, girl, it seemed to say. Taransay flared inside. She swallowed hard, trying to moderate her anger.

  “Excuse me, Belfort,” she said. “I’ll put my hands up to playing a trick on you, and that wasn’t a polite thing to do to anyone, let alone a comrade. But I’m not sure you are a comrade, and for sure you’re not the sarge any more. Not as far as I’m concerned. Our squad leader was Carlos, and he did a runner. I still don’t know why. I do know you mutinied yesterday when you tried to turn the squad against Nicole, and as far as I understand it we’re all no longer working for Locke, or for Crisp and Golding, or for the Direction. We’re working for ourselves, according to you. We’re all mutineers and pirates and fugitives now, isn’t that right? So I don’t take orders from you. The only person I trust here is the lady.”

  Beauregard glowered, about to say something. Nicole laughed.

  “What?” asked Beauregard, in a tone of bellicose irritation.

  Nicole raised a finger. “One moment, if you please.”

  She scribbled on the big easel-mounted pad again.

  A moment passed, then the page filled with—not handwriting, but—print. Taransay stared, open-mouthed. This whole phenomenon was so fucking weird. It was like automatic writing, or a Ouija board, except that you really were communicating with a disembodied intelligence. And yet, and yet—there was nothing miraculous about it, uncanny though it seemed. It was precisely the equivalent of text appearing on a screen, or for that matter on a scroll, inside a computer game. It was less weird, when you came to think of it, than the manifestation she’d earlier seen of Locke, as a man modelled on the standard portrait of the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, walking and talking in the thin atmosphere of the exomoon SH-17 as if he were strolling under the apple boughs in Isaac Newton’s own garden.

  “This,” said Nicole, stepping aside for Taransay to take a look, “is the message from Arcane that robots wrote, that Carlos found, and that Beauregard also read. He told you of it on the bus, I know. But he did not tell you all. Read it.”

  Taransay read it. Locke is Rax, the tactics are designed to escalate the conflict, Reaction outbreak imminent, yadda yadda. Beauregard had told them most of this on the bus, just before she’d fled. What he’d left out was more significant: that the Direction knew all this and was using it to flush out the Rax, and that Arcane thought this stratagem of the Direction was insanely dangerous; Arcane’s passionate call for all comrades to join them; that Nicole in her earliest incarnation, way back on Earth, had actually been responsible for the spectacular attack for which Carlos had been condemned and that had made his name a legend to the Accelerationists; and…that Beauregard had been a British military intelligence agent inside the movement.

  Yes, she could see why he’d left all that out. Bastard.

  “Is this true?”

  Beauregard bristled, then shrugged. “It’s true. So, like I said, I can’t order you. And yes, you can forget all that ‘comrade’ business. I’ve always said I was in British Army intel. I have no memory of being in the Acceleration, but I evidently was.” He spread his hands. “You figure it out.”

  Taransay found herself less shocked than she’d been at first, and less than she might have expected. She’d known from the beginning that the sarge had a secret. But—if only she’d known this when she was arguing with the fighters on the bus!

  “You were state?” she asked, just to make sure she’d got it right.

  “Seems like I was,” said Beauregard. “I’m not, any more. Obviously. The state I served is gone. And so is the Acceleration.”

  “There’s still the Direction,” said Taransay. She looked for support to Nicole, but the lady merely gave an enigmatic smile.

  “The Direction is up to some scheme of its own,” said Beauregard. “One that has no guarantees we’ll ever get downloaded and decanted onto a terraformed planet, or any other reward they might promise us. What we have to do is adjust to the situation we’re in. That’s all I’m trying to do. I’ve convinced most of the squad and a crowd of locals. If I can’t convince you, please yourself.”

  Taransay didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Well, I’ll talk to the others,” she said. “See what they think.”

  Beauregard smiled cynically. “I think they’ll agree with me that it makes no difference now.”

  He turned to Shaw, who was watching the screens again.

  “Can you do anything to get the clock speed back up?” he asked. “Even if we lose colour again.”

  Shaw shook his head, still watching the screens.

  “I don’t know how I do these things,” he said. He shot Taransay a small smile. “Even the levitating, not to mention walking right through somebody’s arm. I can see what the lady is doing, and I can help her with that, but it’s like…” He scratched his head. “It’s all subconscious. Like Zen or something.” He reached for a now cold coffee, and sipped. “I was wrong, see. For a thousand years I thought we were really on the planet we seem to be on, the Earth-like one, H-0. And I had all the time in the world to think, so I thought ab
out physics. For centuries, off and on. Maybe that gave some part of my mind a kind of gearing into the sim? But I can’t control it because I had no idea that was what I was doing?” He half turned, and appealed to Nicole. “Is that it?”

  Nicole seemed unsure of herself. Taransay had only ever seen her with this awkward look on her face a couple of times, and it was usually when she wanted to skate past some too probing question about the nature of their shared reality. Some query Ames had raised in their first collective briefing, and that time with the p-zombies on the training exercise, and then again when she’d tried to justify training for space on these amusement-arcade simulators…

  Nicole pointed to a chair, and nodded to Taransay. Taransay picked her way across the floor and brought the chair over.

  “Thanks,” said Nicole. “Shaw, sit down.”

  Shaw glanced away from the screens, took the chair, and sat. Nicole stepped to one side of him, where she could see his face and keep an eye on the screens at the same time.

  “You were of course wrong about the physical reality,” she said. “But you were more wrong than you realised. This sim didn’t exist until a few months ago, shortly before Beauregard and Taransay here and the others arrived.”

  Shaw shook his head. “I was in it a thousand years ago, and I’ve been in it ever since.”

  “In a sense, yes,” said Nicole. “But the sim you were in was located out among the moons of the gas giant G-0, many AU away. That was a year ago in real time, yes? Physically, the module it ran in was out there too.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Shaw. “I’m not stupid. I get that. So how did it get back here?”

  “By fusion drive, of course. The Direction accepted the necessity. But while this is physically the same module, this place where we are is not really—so to speak—the same sim.”

  Shaw frowned. “What? You’re saying the whole sim was transmitted here, and then—?”

  “No,” said Nicole. “After the robot revolt whose suppression you deserted from was defeated, that sim was discontinued. There was no need for it to keep running, after all. The fighters went back in storage—except for you, of course, you were out in the wilds somewhere. The civilian volunteers and p-zombies went back into storage, too. The sim was shut down. The data files for the sim were stored. It was available when Locke Provisos needed a sim for the current batch of fighters, and restarted. But it was restarted in a consistent manner, which meant—as if a thousand years had passed, just as a year had passed outside. A thousand years of geology, a thousand years of history, and a thousand years of the memories of the only person who was still in the sim when it went into storage. A thousand years of you. Not just memories, of course, but the physical traces of everything you would have done in all that time. Ashes of fires you would have set, stones you would have chipped and discarded, bones of the animals you would have killed to make the clothes you wear, and so on.”