by Ken MacLeod
“And even if everything is as they say,” Jax went on, “we’re still against the Direction. We still want it all, Carlos! The Human Singularity! We could turn this system into a paradise for quadrillions of human-level minds, all living in the most fantastic and varied and stimulating sims at the same kind of speeds we are now. Or if we prefer, trillions of minds with greater power, godlike power! We’d be making good use of the mass, the energy and above all, the time—every year a millennium, every millennium a million years of advance and progress! Instead of bending all this effort to turn one fucking planet into a fucking zoo for a few billion boring biological humanoids, generation after generation, living on a terraformed world for the next few million years, all watched over by machines that aren’t even conscious themselves. What a fucking bovine existence. I can’t believe you would settle for that. What got into you? Oh, I know. You got into Nicole Pascal’s knickers, and she got into your head.”
Carlos had deliberately taken a bite of crisp brown crust, soft white bread, ham and salad and mustard mayo halfway through Jax’s tirade, and he made a point of chewing it as slowly and insultingly as he could until she’d finished. He swallowed, then he drained the dregs of his coffee. He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling his fingers run through his still unfamiliar long hair, and straightened out his spine.
“There’s a lot in that,” he said mildly. “Plenty to think about. One question, though. How exactly do we go about defeating the Direction? Oh yes, with the help of the freebots. That was the plan. And now they aren’t cooperating any more. Fine. So, first things first. We can argue about the Direction’s grand plan, which frankly I’m pretty sceptical about myself, and the great Accelerationist programme, which again…you know.” He upturned his hands and spread his fingers. “To tell you the truth, I find the project Jax has just expounded every bit as much of a bore as the Direction’s. And just as bovine! Quadrillions of happy minds living in paradisiac sims for subjective billions of years? Paradises? Gods? When exactly did we get religion? I want some smack, and salt, and steel, and fire in my future.”
He paused for a moment, shaken by how much he wanted it. “But—first things first. And the first thing we have to deal with is the Reaction, not the Direction. We’re going to have to find a way to work with the Direction, if we’re even going to be able to find out who the fuck else will have our back in a fight.”
He stood up. “So let’s go back down the hall and see if the Durward had got some sense out of the little blinkers, shall we?”
He shoved back the chair and walked out without waiting to see if they’d follow.
They did, as he’d known they would.
As he strode down the hallway towards the big front room, with his leathers squeaking and the outfits of Jax’s squad variously creaking, clanking, rustling or sweeping behind him, Carlos had a moment to come to terms with what he’d just done.
He’d made his choice and announced it, though it might take the comrades a little while to realise what it was. When he’d first arrived in the Locke Provisos sim, and got the talk from the lady, he’d been appalled by the paucity of the Direction’s aims. Populating extrasolar systems with an essentially unmodified humanity had seemed to him a waste of time and space. Further conversations with Nicole had done nothing to shift his low opinion of low horizons.
What had just struck him, with a force that was still making his breath shake a little, was an equivalent disdain of the Acceleration’s posthuman iteration and multiplication of the same tawdry objective. From now on what he did as an individual with the others would be whatever he had agreed to at the time, and the others could rely on him for that. But in terms of his wider hopes and loyalties, and his personal ambitions for his own postmortal life, his fundamental side wasn’t the Direction or the Acceleration. And it sure as hell wasn’t the Reaction. His side was that of those striving for a new thing, and carving a new place for themselves, in these new worlds.
He was on the side of the robots.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Party Time
Durward was back in his chair, looking up at the mirrors. He seemed a lot more relaxed than he had been when he sent the squad away. The mirrors had stopped flickering; as Carlos walked over to Durward he noticed with a start his own reflection keeping pace. Durward thumbed over his shoulder. Carlos stepped behind the chair, and the rest of the crew crowded around him. The mirror that Durward faced showed the interior of the big room, but instead of reflections of the people looking into it were two women sitting at a table, talking earnestly in between sips of tea. One woman wore a business suit, the other a black cape. The latter flourished a long cigarette holder, from which she took an occasional toke.
“What’s going on?” Carlos asked.
Durward tilted back his head.
“That’s Madame Golding, avatar of Crisp and Golding, busy negotiating with Raya Remington, the avatar of the Arcane Disputes agency’s AI.”
“Isn’t Golding actually Remington’s…boss?” Carlos asked.
“Don’t be so fucking stupid,” said Durward. “Formally Arcane’s a subsidiary, sure, but after all that’s happened there’s no way Madame can pull rank on Remington.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Carlos. He didn’t trust this situation at all.
Jax put a hand on Durward’s shoulder. To Carlos’s surprise, and momentary disgust, the warlock rested his bearded cheek on Jax’s hand for a second or two. The unselfconscious intimacy of the gesture settled the question of just who in this sim had been set up to fall for the Direction’s rep. He’d thought Jax had better taste.
“So what’s the score?” Jax asked.
The warlock laughed, and sprang to his feet. He took a couple of steps forward and then turned around.
“We’ve won!” he said. Then he frowned, and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. “Well, we’ve won a diplomatic victory, let’s say. The freebots are staying neutral, but they’ve brought Madame Golding into play, and she has a direct line to the Direction. She’ll present the freebots’ case for some kind of fractal sharing of this solar system, and we’re happy to back them up on that for now. And she’ll fill us in on who is on-side and who isn’t—we’re not talking about agencies any more, it’s a matter of pulling together individual fighters. And we’re right here, the only stable force that the Direction can turn to to deal with the Reaction, and most immediately with the Rax complex. So they’re working out an actual military plan, as well as coming to terms.”
Carlos was staring past Durward at Golding and Remington. “Who’s flying this thing?” he asked. “If our AI is busy with diplomacy and all.”
Durward flicked a hand back towards the mirror. “What you see there is an avatar. And even that’s just there for our benefit.” He clapped his hands together, and rubbed them, cackling. “For your benefit, puny humans! I, with my mighty intellect and clairvoyant powers—”
“Oh, lay off,” said Jax. “Carlos, what our friend is trying to tell you in his own inimitable way is that the display in the mirror is a representation of negotiations going on at a level beyond human comprehension. So don’t worry about that. Durward, how long d’you think they’ll take?”
Durward shrugged expansively. “Tens of seconds, real time. Should have something to show us in the morning.”
“Oh good,” said Jax. “Time to kill.”
Durward stared at her, then grinned. “Why, so there is. And we have a new recruit to welcome. Jax, do your thing with the fingers.”
Jax whistled, sending echoes. A boggart poked its terracotta-coloured head around the door.
“Drink!” roared the warlock. “Fetch us the dustiest bottles of the finest vintages, the sweetest liqueurs and the fieriest spirits you can rummage from the cellars! Bring them in profuse quantity, and with the utmost dispatch.”
Over the next few minutes, a scurrying procession of boggarts bearing trays, glasses, plates, bottles, casks, nibbles and cigars did just that. The F
rench windows were flung open, to let in air as well as light. The scents of flowers, the chatter and hum of birds, and the laughter of flying monkeys came in with the warm afternoon breeze. The warlock snapped his fingers and all the mirrors became just mirrors. He seemed to notice his own reflection for the first time, and looked down at himself with a histrionic start. He took off his dressing gown, bundled it up and flung it at a passing boggart. Then he posed, showing off his muscles and tattoos, and turned as if reluctantly from the splendid reflection.
“Party time!” he cried.
Not since his student days had Carlos been at a party where everyone so gratuitously started getting drunk in daylight. On returns to the sim from combat missions, he and his squad had invariably headed straight for the Digital Touch to knock back the beers, but that had been a necessary winding down. This occasion had no such excuse. But, then, it didn’t need one. The machines were for the moment looking after the serious business of the unforgiving minute.
Later, Carlos could recall only a few of the incidents and conversations of that afternoon and evening.
“How did you train?” he asked Blum, early on.
“Swordfights in enchanted armour,” said the physicist.
“Of course,” said Carlos. “And what about for the scooters? I don’t remember arcade rides in this game.”
Blum laughed. “Trapezes and swings and elastic ropes. Later, hang-gliders.”
“Jeez.”
“Yes.” Blum swirled his wine thoughtfully. “Concentrates the mind, especially when you’re sharing the sky with pterodactyls.”
Jax and Durward waltzed, with stately grace, amid rolling bottles and broken crockery that their feet skipped lightly between. A boggart quartet was providing the music, slow and sensual and somewhat absurd coming from players barely large enough to hold a violin. As Carlos watched, he realised he had not even residual jealousy, not even the irrational kind that had a short while earlier manifested itself as disappointment in Jax’s taste in men. They fitted, he with his bare, hairy tattooed chest and she in her green gown, gliding beneath or twirling at the end of his outstretched arm.
Like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, Carlos thought suddenly, and then almost choked on the gulp of wine going down that met a strangled yelp of a laugh on the way up.
Some time after that, Carlos cornered the warlock alone.
“Tell me,” he said, jabbing a wavy finger, swigging some smooth and subtle red vintage at a sinful rate, necking it straight from the cobwebbed bottle, “one thing. One thing that’s been bugging me since I fell into the hell. Why this game?”
“Starborn Quest? Ah.” Durward swivelled a fingertip in an ear-hole, then wiped the wax on the side of his already dirty jeans. He scratched his head, hand almost vanishing into his hair to the wrist. “Well. It’s simple really. The game was a big success in its day.”
“That was my day,” said Carlos. “I remember.”
“Made a fortune for its designers. They were early adopter Axle geeks, but secretly. They gave a lot of money to the movement, and in return the movement promoted the game.”
“So how,” demanded Carlos, “did it get on the ship?”
“The ship?” said Durward, sounding baffled.
“You know.” Carlos hand-waved perilously. “The starwisp.”
“What you’re really asking,” said Durward, “is how did Arcane come to be an Axle agency? And how did I turn out to be an Acceleration plant?”
Carlos tossed the empty bottle to a nearby boggart, making the creature leap to catch it, very amusingly. He then reached out his hand until another bottle was placed in it. He could get used to this sort of service. In the meantime he gave Durward’s question some thought.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am.”
“There it gets more complicated,” said Durward. He scratched his head again. “Arcane Disputes was off-the-peg law company software. A lot of the mission’s pre-loaded sims were taken from existing fantasy environments, and the mission always intended to make use of Axle criminals, so it was reasonable to include a sim based on a game that many Axle cadre liked. The game’s financial connection with the movement had come to light, of course. The game’s designers were no doubt duly shot in the postwar terror. The game itself wasn’t suspect. It should have been. It had some neat code buried in its physics engine.”
“What did it do?” Carlos asked.
“That I can’t tell you, because…” The warlock hesitated, then went on. “You know how your Direction rep was derived from an old AI that had some connection with you?”
“Yes,” said Carlos, dryly.
“Well, the warlock is a standard character in the game, and by the nature of his powers and so forth he has a deep connection to the physics engine. I’m derived from the physics engine, and at some point in my…formation, I suppose you could call it…I was able to access the AI of the agency—Remington. As the Direction rep, I have legitimate overrides, and I used them even before I was complete. I suspect the buried code I mentioned earlier was part of the process, because I came into being as a conscious agent of the Acceleration, and so did Remington. So the game took over the agency, rather than the other way round.” He shrugged. “I only know this because our freebot friends dug the evidence out of the archives they’ve been rummaging through. These blinkers out there around G-0 have a better understanding of this mission than the Direction itself.”
Jax, drunk and vehement, later: “Why are you so bloody sure the Direction is what it’s told us it is?”
Carlos steadied himself on a table and took a sip of brandy to clear his head. This seemed to work, for the moment. The boggart quartet had reconvened as a folk-rock group. They stood atop the piano they had rolled into the room earlier, fiddling and tooting away like demented leprechauns. Hilarious. His head was already thumping in time. It was odd to have music you couldn’t switch off, or adjust the volume, or select, just by thinking about it. He missed the spike.
Why did he trust the Direction? Why had he ever? He tried to remember. Part of it had been the charisma of Nicole, but now that was gone.
“There’s the locals,” he said. “The people who died back on Earth and volunteered for the mission, and for testing the sim. Their life stories are consistent.”
“So are those of the p-zombies,” Jax pointed out. “They could all be p-zombies, for all we know.”
She was right. The very first local Carlos had been introduced to in the Locke sim, Iqbal the bartender, had recalled a good life on Earth, and he was a p-zombie. Carlos thought further, about the bar where Iqbal worked, the Digital Touch. That was it.
“Television,” he proclaimed.
“What?” She swayed a little, or he did.
“You can’t always trust a society’s facts,” Carlos said. “But you can trust its fiction.”
He told her about the soap operas set in Lunar corridors; the adventure series based on the work of Marcel Proust; the exploits of Alan Turing, the gay, dashing secret agent with a licence to kill. Carlos sang, badly, what snatches he recalled of the songs of distant Earth.
“No fundamentally nasty society,” he concluded, “could produce rubbish like that.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” said Jax. “But it could be faked by a sufficiently smart AI.”
“Oh, come on—”
A futile argument about that ended with Jax saying:
“And anyway, we don’t have television.”
Of course they didn’t. They didn’t have electricity. Boggarts were by now going around lighting candles.
“So you have no sources of information about culture back on Earth?”
Jax frowned. “There’s books, I suppose.”
“How would you read them?” Carlos asked. “Call them up in the magic mirrors, or what?”
Jax outlined rectangular shapes with her hands. “You know—books. Legacy text. Like in the university library.”
Carlos remembered the university library,
though he’d never had occasion to enter that closely guarded edifice. He’d vaguely thought of it as a disaster recovery storage facility. It had seemed perverse to have it on site. How much more perverse to have hard-copy books inside a simulation!
“So you’ve seen books here?”
“Oh yes.” Jax waved a hand. “There’s a library in the east wing.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve only looked in at the door. Smells musty.”
“Remind me to brave it sometime,” Carlos said. Something was bugging him.
“When I was being interrogated,” he went on, “the woman—Bobbie, yeah?—told me the evidence against me came from volume three hundred and something of trial transcripts in the Arcane Disputes agency’s law library. So where did that come from?”
“The library, of course.”
Carlos stared. He’d pictured a small dusty room, with the kind of books you’d expect to find in a pseudo-medieval mansion. Hunting, shooting and fishing; a few volumes of popular theology; discourses on witch-finding, portents and abnormal births; family memoirs, battles long ago…
“It’s that big?”
“Oh yes,” said Jax. “It’s in the east wing.”
“You mean the east wing is the library?”
Jax frowned. “Yes. Like I said.”
Later still he found himself sitting out in front of the open windows under the violet streaks of sunset, gazing entranced at a small round table on which his full brandy glass was being sipped from by a hovering long-beaked bird not much bigger than a bee. Bobbie Rillieux drifted out of the big room and floated over, her clouds of faded fabric further swathed in a swirl of cigar smoke. She dragged up a wooden folding chair, sat down in a fizz of champagne-coloured net, drew on her cigar and puffed a thin stream of smoke at the hummingbird. It darted off in a flash of azure wings.
“Aw,” said Carlos. He blinked at her blearily. “A bit unkind.”
“No,” said Rillieux. “Liquor’s not good for them. They love the alcohol and sugars, but it’s too much for them, and they crash.”