Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  “How did you find it?”

  Rillieux waved a hand vaguely to one side. “There’s a whole case of indexes. And then there’s a catalogue to the indexes, written on cards. It’s all arranged like files, but on paper.”

  She frowned and made more vertical chopping hand gestures, cuffs aflutter. Her look for the day was fop.

  “OK,” Carlos said, not really comprehending and in no hurry to dig deeper. He tilted his head back, and ran his gaze from side to side. “And this is all law?”

  “Yes,” chorused Blum and Rillieux.

  “Is there more to the library than law stuff?” Carlos asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Rillieux, pointing ahead grandly. “Eastward ho!”

  They made their way in single file down one of the canyons, to a door between the shelves and mirrors at the far end. The two boggarts opened it for them, and they trooped through. The other four boggarts had gone ahead, as if anticipating the humans’ whim, and were rushing around lighting candles and lanterns. The scattered glows made little difference in the cavernous space, apparently made by removing most of the ceiling to leave a railed gallery about two metres deep all around, with walkways crossing at the centre. The walls of this room, and of the equal-sized one above, were lined with nothing but shelf upon shelf of books. The bookcases were in proportion—twice as high as those in the law library. They weren’t as closely packed, but this was to leave room for the ladders that gave perilous access to the topmost shelves and the zigzag flights of four sets of stairs that joined the upper and lower rooms.

  It must be this gigantic room that was the source of the fusty, musty smell that pervaded the wing. There was no polished leather here to counter it. The squad all stood near the doorway for a moment, catching their breath, coughing, fanning hands under nostrils. After a minute or so the miasma stopped attacking the back of your throat. Rillieux passed around an elegant porcelain snuff-box; some partook, and there was a small but intense epidemic of sneezing, followed by red-eyed looks of relief.

  Carlos wasn’t tempted.

  “What I’d like us all to do,” he said, when the sneezes and splutters had given way to inquiring looks, “is split up—”

  “Woo-ooh, are you…sure?” asked Salter, in a deep, quavering spooky voice, to laughter.

  “The boggarts will look after us,” Carlos said, impatient with the interruption. “We split up and just browse for maybe an hour or so, and reconvene at the far end.”

  Blum headed upstairs, the others vanished between the stacks.

  Carlos peered at the nearest shelf, and saw books jammed side by side, with others piled higgledy-piggledy on top. Spines were cracked, notched and knocked head and foot, sometimes missing altogether. The faded colours and faint, barely legible lettering had no uniformity. He picked a volume at random and opened it, gingerly so that the boards didn’t fall off. The print looked like it came from the seventeenth century, heavy on the serifs and curlicues, but the text was of a retired general’s war memoir, dated 2137 and published in New Delhi. Carlos flipped through the damp-defiled pages, trying not to inhale the dust. The book’s profuse illustrations of tanks, aircraft, spacecraft, submarines, drones and other war machines were of technologies slick and terrifying. They were quaintly rendered in steel engraving, with a dash of informality added by the occasional woodcut to illustrate local colour—a market, a grove, a cliff-face—or a blocky map of troop movements.

  He shoved the book back, and picked up the next. An exobiology textbook, covering the Lunar crater varnish, the microbes of Mars and the peculiar and disputable organisms of Europa; it had been published in Cape Town in 2082, and thus predated the strange and perplexing results from the Ceres drilling project, which Carlos remembered from the last months before he’d been caught up in the war. No doubt the question had long since been settled: another chemical process analogous to life, or not. Whoop-de-doo. The print and font and pictures were as archaic, and the pages as distressed, as the previous book. Next came what seemed to be a novel, set in and around a tertiary education plant in Nevada, and written like the others in what looked like English. Carlos couldn’t make sense of at least one word in five of the dialogue, and maybe one in ten of the narrative.

  He strolled on, and repeated the process, several times. He climbed a ladder to a high shelf, and took a book down; a boggart appeared out of nowhere to hold the ladder as he descended. A twenty-fifth-century book of recipes, in an evolution of French, with a running commentary in flowing Arabic. Again, illustrated, and in some detail; Carlos didn’t recognise a single vegetable or animal part shown, or any clear way of making the distinction. Synthetic biology cuisine, he guessed. Carlos tossed the cookbook to the boggart and climbed again. The book adjacent to the gap his earlier removal had left was from 2298. It was slender, and about philosophy. The text was plain, simple prose laid out like mathematics, or poetry. Carlos sighed, and stuck it back.

  He plucked from another shelf a book on number theory, another on erotic arts, a third on gardening, all adjacent. Moving on, he found an explanation for children of how the Direction worked. Next to it was a work from a series about ethics: a polemic against veganism. He smiled, remembering toast and honey, and the smell of bacon, in that café with Jax so long ago. There were two thrillers for young readers about improbable conspiracies in which fighters of the Reaction had in the dark years after the final war been uploaded into computers, and emerged to wreak havoc before the plucky heroine or hero saved the day. He picked up now and then historical works. No matter what their date of publication, their narrative ended about the middle of the twenty-second century. After the establishment of the Direction, there was no history.

  At least, not history as he understood it, and had lived it: wars, social conflicts, ideological struggles. There was nothing left to fight over. Humanity had, after so many false starts—or, rather, false endings—at last reached the end of history.

  There were of course chronicles, and accounts of later events: an engineering feat here, a discovery there, a challenging life, a change in the environment from one decade or century to the next. There were records of political disputation, even drama: a brilliant or frustrated career, a reforming ministry, an idealist or an administrator or an entrepreneur. The issues were incomprehensible: what, for instance, was a synaptic tax, and why was its repeal so significant? But in none of them was the fundamental order of society in question. Humanity had reached its final destination, at least in its own complacent estimation. History, in that sense, had come to a full stop.

  There was almost a nostalgia for history, in that historical fiction seemed popular. Carlos discovered historical novels set in his own time or earlier, riddled with amusing anachronisms. At least, he thought they were. He’d be the first to admit he didn’t know just who had been in the European Council of Ministers in 1999, or which (if any) of these worthies had saved the City of London from the Millennium Bug, but he was fairly certain that the Millennium Bug wasn’t a nanobot plague, and that City financiers of the year 2000 had not challenged each other to duels, worn cloth caps or smoked clay pipes.

  Carlos turned a corner and ducked around a stepladder into another aisle, and almost bumped into Bobbie Rillieux. Her hair—wrenched into an approximation of a Georgian gentleman’s pony-tailed wig—now trailed cobwebs; her green brocade jacket and knee-breeches had handprints of dust. Her eyes were streaming.

  “What’s the matter?” Carlos asked. He couldn’t have accounted for why he whispered.

  Rillieux shook her head, and sniffed hard. “Addergies.”

  She tugged from a side pocket a crumpled, lace-edged handkerchief, blew her nose on it and looked at the brown extrusion with disgust. “Ugh! What they don’t tell you about snuff is it makes your snot look like shit.”

  She took another pinch anyway. Carlos declined, again.

  “This place,” she murmured, “is the library of Akkad.”

  “Akkad?”

  “The city n
ext to Babel.” She smiled. “Smaller and less famous.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Ah.” Rillieux sidled along, then pivoted about and picked a book from a shelf opposite to and higher than the one she’d been scanning. “Monsignor Jaime Matiasz, on the Apocalypse. Lisbon, 2074. My, my.” She stuck it back in another location, on its side, and turned to Carlos. “You ever read the story by Borges? ‘The Library of Babel’?”

  Carlos shook his head.

  “Uh-huh,” nodded Rillieux, as if a dark suspicion had been confirmed. “It’s an inconceivably vast library of physically uniform books, all filled with genuinely random text. Here and there, of course, you find fragments of sense. A recognisable word, even a phrase. But they’re very rare. And yet because you know the library contains every possible five hundred-page arrangement of letters, you know it must contain every possible book. The secret of life! The story of yours! The history of the future! All at every conceivable length, across however many volumes.”

  “I get it,” said Carlos. “It’s about randomness. In theory you can find any book in it, and in practice you can’t find any book at all.”

  “Got it,” said Rillieux. “That’s what this is like.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Carlos protested. “It’s not remotely that bad. The text isn’t random. Just the arrangement.”

  “Don’t you see?” cried Rillieux, breaking the quiet. Hushed again, she went on: “It makes this place completely useless as a library!”

  “No, that’s not the point.”

  On an impulse, perhaps to show off, Carlos clambered up shelves, careless of damage to books and danger to himself. At three metres he grabbed a book and dropped it with a thud that displaced dust and made Rillieux jump and then sneeze.

  Carlos scrambled down and picked up the book. A twenty-fifth-century English dictionary. A good fifth of the words didn’t look like any English Carlos knew.

  “This could actually be useful,” he said, showing her.

  Rillieux shook her head sadly. “It’s six hundred years out of date.”

  Lit by candles, attended by boggarts who stood around and stared impassively like a circle of Easter Island statues, the fighters and Durward converged at the foot of the rickety stairs at the far end of the great library. Blum, the last to arrive, had just clattered down, bearing dusty tomes with an air of triumph.

  “All right, Carlos,” said Jax. “You’ve made your point.”

  Voronov laughed. “And his point was?”

  “The Direction is real,” said Jax. “It is what it claims to be.”

  The words sounded wrung from her.

  Salter looked puzzled, and sounded stubborn. “I don’t see how this proves it.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Blum. His eyes were bright. “Astonishing stuff here. Fundamental breakthroughs in theory. I mean, the Standard Model just—” He flicked his fingers. “Gone. Like that.”

  “Still no FTL, though?” Rillieux taunted.

  “Sadly, no,” said Blum. “Which is at least consistent with how we got here: the starwisp.”

  “OK,” Salter persisted, “but any kind of regime could make advances in theoretical physics.”

  “I know, I know,” said Blum. “Heisenberg. Kapitsa. Oppenheimer. Feynman.” He shrugged. “I feel it in the mathematics.”

  “You can feel democracy in mathematics?” said Salter, incredulously.

  “Yes,” said Blum. “And I can feel freedom.”

  The two stared at each other, as if waiting for the first to blink.

  What Carlos was feeling was that he was out of his depth.

  He cleared his throat, not entirely as a gesture after all that dust and mildew.

  “Forget mathematics,” he croaked. He coughed again. “Culture. Half a fucking millennium of it, right? Has anyone found anything that suggests the Direction is some kind of refinement of the Reaction? No? Or even anything that suggests it has more in common with the Reaction than it has with us?”

  Heads shook all round. Jax was frowning, tight-lipped.

  “Well then,” said Carlos.

  “Well what?” said Salter. She windmilled her arms. “Do you think an AI that could generate an entire world couldn’t generate a library of an imagined culture?”

  “Actually, I do,” said Carlos. “But that aside—what would be the fucking point? If the Direction was actually a new incarnation of Reaction values, it would simply reincarnate Reaction fighters, or—more likely, and more to the point—it would have plenty of its own soldiers ready to hand in the first place. The very fact that the Direction needs to raise old fighters like us shows it doesn’t have new ones. So one thing we can be sure of, the Direction back on Earth and in the Solar system isn’t a militaristic society.”

  “‘Ain’t a-gonna study war no more, no more,’” Salter crooned, sweetly and sarcastically. “You’re saying that’s how it is back there?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Carlos.

  Now Salter was staring at him as if waiting for him to blink. But it was she who blinked, and it was tears she blinked back.

  “I’d love to believe that,” she said. “And that’s a good point about them not having soldiers. But it could be peaceful and still be sinister. If the whole world was one big empire it wouldn’t have wars. If its control was total enough it might not even need armed repression. So all this cultural stuff could still be faked.”

  Carlos closed his eyes and sighed, then willed himself to calm. He’d known he’d meet this kind of objection. Paranoid-style thinking was inevitable, this far down the rabbit hole. He smiled at Salter and turned to Durward, who was skulking at the back of the circle.

  “You told me,” said Carlos, “about this place. How the game it was based on was an Axle project from the beginning, and how the game…what? Took over? Created?…Whatever. How it made you what you are, and you made Remington what she or it is. Axle through and through, you said. Yes?”

  “Yeah,” said Durward, grudgingly.

  “So this library was chosen, you reckon, under the control of code generated by something that was Axle through and through?”

  “Can’t see how not,” Durward allowed.

  “And it was put here knowing we’d have access to it, yes?”

  “Of course.” Durward laughed harshly. “Not that anyone’s shown any interest, before.”

  Carlos glared around his companions. “So I think we can take it as fucking read, right, that the library wasn’t chosen or even created to give a false impression of society back home?”

  No one demurred, though Jax was still visibly pondering. Carlos smacked fist on palm.

  “Right!” he said. “So we’re agreed. All this Axle hardliner stuff about the Direction being like the Reaction is just nonsense.”

  He faced down a clamour of protest until it ran out of breath.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I still think the Direction is boring, that it’s a travesty of what we wanted, that it’s in a very literal sense a waste of space. But it’s basically what I was told it was. It’s a decent enough world for the people in it. It’s not the world we died for, I’ll give you that. But don’t forget this: for most people in the world we died in, it would look like a fucking paradise.”

  They agreed gloomily and reluctantly, but they agreed.

  “But that’s not important,” said Jax, rallying suddenly from her introspection. “What’s important is what isn’t here.”

  “And what’s that?” Carlos demanded.

  “Anything that explains what hasn’t happened. And we all know what hasn’t happened: the Singularity, the runaway increase of machine intelligence.” She clenched her fists at the sides of her head and mimicked tearing at her hair. “Look! We’re inside a fucking machine intelligence! We’re in a world running in a box! Built by robots! Around another star! And all this is the work of human beings like us, biologically enhanced maybe, long-lived, but basically just like us. Take your ‘locals’ in the Lock
e sim, Carlos—they’re uploads of people who grew up and lived and died in the world this library is part of and evidence of, right? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Carlos, warily. “We all know this about the Direction, we’ve known it from the start.”

  “So what’s missing from all this”—Jax waved a hand around—“is any explanation, any account, any argument even, over how things are kept that way. The Singularity should have happened. The world back there, the world this mission launched from, more than halfway through the Third Millennium, should have been posthuman all the way through. Humanity should have been left behind in the dust. We should all have been gods. The very fact that we’re here, living in a fucking sim and fighting in fucking robot frames, shows it’s possible. It’s been possible for a long time. For centuries! The only reason it’s not happened is because it’s being stopped. And we’ve found nothing, nothing at all, not a hint or a rumour or an allusion, about how it’s being stopped.”

  She paused, glared around and took a deep breath. “That’s what’s sinister about this library. Something is going on back there, must be going on, that it contains not one page about. Now you might not call whatever it is the Reaction—hell, even the Reaction was as transhumanist as we were, in their own twisted way!—but is reactionary, and it is secret, and it is covered up. Now I find that sinister, and I find that a damn good reason to remain what Carlos calls a hardliner.”

  She folded her arms and grinned at him.

  Carlos shrugged and spread his hands. “Touché,” he said.

  He couldn’t say anything else. She had shut him up.

  But as they turned away, Rillieux caught his elbow and walked close, speaking quietly.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We should be with the robots. We should be robots. All this Axle stuff is getting right on my nerves.”

  “Grinding, is it?”

  She laughed, then sighed. “But there’s no chance of persuading anyone else here of that. Not while Jax is the queen bee in this little hive.”