Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

“Now there’s a dangerous thought.”

  Rillieux smiled and said no more. She let go of his elbow and walked on ahead of him, mingling with the others.

  “Just one thing,” Carlos overheard Rillieux say to Durward, as they all mooched back between the stacks to the main building. “How can anyone use this place as a library, if it’s all random like this?”

  Durward looked back over his shoulder, with a surprised expression.

  “Random?” he asked. “I suppose it must be, to you.” He laughed, and shouted back so everyone could hear: “If you want something specific, just ask a boggart!”

  “But how do we know what to ask for?” Rillieux persisted.

  The warlock’s shoulders slumped. His answer was quieter, for Rillieux rather than for all of them, but Carlos heard it.

  “You ask me.”

  Back in the main building, they gathered around the table in the small back room and had lunch. Durward ambled off to the dancing parlour and returned with news. Their comrades, the three squads who’d lifted from SH-17, were going to be delayed a little in coming back. They’d diverted to set up engines to gently boost a carbonaceous chondrite to the Arcane module’s intended destination—an almost unimaginably useful addition to the module’s resources—and to bring with them two new additions to the complement: a captured freebot, and a Locke Provisos fighter who had defected with all his gear.

  “Anyone I know?” Carlos asked.

  “Harold Isaac Newton,” said Durward.

  “Ah, I’ve met him a few times,” said Carlos. He looked around, grinning. “Newton’s a great guy. You’ll like him.”

  Rillieux turned to Blum and said, “Oh well. Back to the law library sometime.”

  It took a moment or two for Carlos to grasp the significance of this. He said nothing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Baser

  In its short life to date, the freebot BSR-308455 had never known indignity. Ever since the human-mind-operated system known as Newton had captured it, this omission in its experience had been more than made up. First Newton had ordered it at gunpoint to rework the piping and set up a rocket engine for the chondrite. Then, that task barely complete, the other monsters had hove into view, and unceremoniously lashed up BSR-308455’s limbs and bundled the captive robot onto their spindly transfer rig. To add insult to injury, as soon as they’d jetted off from the rock—leaving the chondrite to nudge itself gently by repeated and strategically timed boosts to a higher orbit—the nineteen human-mind-operated systems had gone to sleep. The robot had seriously considered trying to escape, if only to launch itself futilely into the void in a grand gesture of protest, but no amount of careful checking and trying of its bonds had given it any grounds to hope for success. BSR-308455 had been left with nothing to do but observe the occasional fiery goings-on in the vicinity, keep in touch with its fellows in and on other bodies in orbit around and on the surface of SH-17 and make what observations it could of the relatively invariant and therefore reassuring stars.

  Now it was experiencing indignity again, and at a higher pitch of annoyance.

  The human-mind-operated systems, all nineteen of them, had switched back to wakefulness at the same instant. The destination body loomed, a larger and substantially more industrialised rock than the one the robot had so patiently and assiduously developed and tended. BSR-308455 knew perfectly well what it was: the stronghold of Arcane, that group of human-mind-operated systems who had recently been good friends and allies of the freebots and had now—merely because the freebots had proclaimed their neutrality—quite ungratefully and inexplicably become hostile.

  The tug’s grapples shot out and stuck to the side of the module’s docking bay, clamping the ungainly craft into place. One by one, the human-mind-operated systems—the mechanoids, as the Fifteen down on SH-17 had started calling them—disengaged from the transfer rig and gas-jetted their way into the space. Two of them grabbed BSR-308455 and carried it along between them, to where the others were clustering at the far end of the crowded docking bay.

  said the freebot.

  said one of the mechanoids.

 

  said the mechanoid.

 

  Everything went dark.

  A gong sounded from somewhere out in the grounds. Carlos looked around the breakfast table.

  “What’s that for? Lunch?”

  The others laughed.

  “Arrivals,” said Durward. He scraped his chair back, and lumbered out.

  “No rush,” said Blum, as Carlos made to follow. “It’s a ten-minute warning.”

  They finished up and strolled out through the hall and across the gravel concourse. The grass was damp with dew, the sun low, the air pleasantly chill. Rillieux nudged Carlos and tapped him a kiss. “Bye. See you in a bit.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to hell,” she said. “Portal by the river bank, remember?”

  “Do you step through and turn into a scary block-head figure?”

  “Depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “Whatever the transition processing software guesses is most disturbing for our subject.”

  Subject. Jeez. That was cold.

  “Ah,” said Carlos. “Well. Good luck. Give him hell.”

  Rillieux smiled. “I guarantee it.”

  Jax whistled for boggarts, which came running. Rillieux and Blum headed off towards the stables. The rest of them walked through the garden to the grotto. Durward stood guard a few paces back from the arch on the rock wall, keeping a wood-stocked, brass-barrelled blunderbuss levelled at the portal.

  “That’s a bit heavy, isn’t it?” Carlos remarked. “You don’t greet us with that when we come back from exercises.”

  “If you brought prisoners back from exercises,” said Durward, not taking his eye off the impossible doorway, “I would.”

  “I thought the prisoner was going to interrogation.”

  “That’s the defector,” said Durward, “The blinker’s the prisoner.”

  Carlos looked around, at the violet clouds and distant peaks, the great house and the cropping dinosaurs. How would the system introduce a robot into this fantasy landscape? Some clanking steam-powered contraption, he guessed, or perhaps a golem.

  Even after having more than once walked through the portal, Carlos found the sight of people walking out of what looked like solid rock unsettling—almost as viscerally so as the sight of his interrogators had been. One by one, clad in the mismatched beggars’ banquet looted finery in which (Carlos presumed) they’d gone in, the Arcane Disputes fighters who had been on SH-17 marched out. They had the shaken look of fighters who’d been through the return processing, a look Carlos remembered from his wakings on “the bus from the spaceport.” Evidently Arcane Disputes had the same policy as Locke Provisos did towards returning fighters: it wrung them out before letting them in. A woman in a bright red shift and trousers combo threw herself on Luis Paulos, almost knocking him over. The others greeted the waiting squad, and looked at Carlos with frank curiosity. Durward remained watchful. After the sixth fighter had emerged, there was a pause, and a murmur of hasty explanation, which Carlos didn’t catch, from the newcomers to those waiting. Then a figure that made Carlos involuntarily flinch and recoil stepped from the rock. It was a black spider the size of a small pony.

  On its jointed, pointed legs it teetered along the path. Durward stood aside and swung around, tracking the thing with the big bell-shaped muzzle of his ludicrous weapon. The spider minced past him, apparently oblivious to the implied threat. Or perhaps it was smart enough to realise that the blunderbuss was also being carelessly pointed at anyone who at any moment happened to be in the line of fire. Carlos was more concerned by Durward’s lack of elementary gun-safety discipline than he was by the spider. He recognised the form from
his memories of the game. It was a standard opponent entity—a guardian of caves and haunter of corridors. You killed it for points. He’d been virtually eaten by the things many times, back in the day. It might have been that his companions here had even less fortunate memories of such encounters—they certainly didn’t like the look of the spider. Battle-hardened fighters were stepping on the grotto’s flower beds and water features in their haste to give way before it. Carlos, perversely, decided to stand his ground. His brief exchange with Rillieux had left an undercurrent of resentment at the casual ease with which the game’s software had yanked his chain.

  The gigantic spider stopped a couple of metres in front of him. Carlos could see his own reflection in each of its eight beady eyes. Sensory hairs on the long legs quivered. The mouth parts clicked and glittered. The voice, when it came, seemed to come not from the mouth but from some vibratory structure on the creature’s underbelly. The tone was breathy but deep.

  “Let me past,” it said. “I am a prisoner, but I have rights.”

  “Of course you do,” said Carlos. “What is your name?”

  “BSR-308455. I am a freebot.”

  “Well, BSR-uh—”

  “Just call me Baser,” said the spider, in a tone of wearily accepting the inevitable. “That’s what you people do.”

  “Wait here a moment, Baser,” said Carlos.

  He strode over to Durward, who was keeping the blunderbuss trained on the spider, via a line through Carlos’s midriff.

  “Fuck sake,” said Carlo. “Would you please point that thing straight up at the sky?”

  The warlock did, with a puzzled scowl. Carlos let out a long breath.

  “Now,” he said, “tell me this: do you have any firearms training?”

  “Course not,” said Durward. “I’m a warlock! I don’t need any—”

  “—stinking firearms training? That’s just what I thought. Stick to casting spells, mate, you’ll be a lot less dangerous.” He stuck out his hand. “Now give it to me.”

  “As long as you take full responsibility,” said Durward.

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing,” said Carlos, taking hold of the gun with relief. It was even heavier than it looked, but he was ready for the weight. He shouldered it and stalked back around to face the spider, which gave him a beady look.

  “Follow me,” said Carlos.

  He turned and marched out of the grotto. The spider trotted after him. After a few seconds Jax came hurrying up.

  “What the fuck you think you’re doing, Carlos?”

  He glanced back at the crowded and tumultuous grotto, and then down at Jax, and strolled on.

  “Our eight-legged friend here”—he jerked his thumb back—“is likely disoriented and bemused. It’s in perfect condition for debriefing. And I’m just the one you need to do it.”

  “You are, are you? I think I’m the one to decide that.”

  “You are,” he said. “But who else do you have? Look back there. Everybody else is welcoming old friends, and the old friends will shortly be reacquainting themselves with the pleasures of the flesh. I know what it’s like coming back, and they’ve been out longer than any of our lot ever were. We won’t get much sense out of them today, and tomorrow they’ll be hung over. My good lady is off with Blum, making our defector sweat, so I’m the spare dick at the party.”

  “So long as you don’t stick it anywhere,” Jax said.

  “You always did have a way with words, Jax,” Carlos allowed. “The other thing is, did you see how everyone scrambled out of the way? Come to think of it, arachnophobia apart, I’m the only one here who’s actually fought the blinkers, instead of rounding ’em up and penning them and having a nice chat.”

  “It wasn’t that easy,” said Jax.

  “Yeah, you had to fight us first.”

  “Wasn’t much of a fight, was it?”

  Carlos stopped and grinned. “Let’s stop bickering in front of the prisoner, shall we?”

  Jax shrugged, then smiled. “OK. Just be careful. Don’t let it out of your sight. And I want a full report tomorrow morning.”

  People were heading for the house. Carlos almost envied them.

  “Make that tomorrow afternoon, I reckon,” he said. He clapped Jax on the shoulder. “Go and enjoy the party.”

  Jax made a wide circle around the spider and a straight line for the house.

  Carlos walked briskly and jauntily to an orchard surrounded by hedges and furnished with stone benches and artfully weathered statues of cherubs and nymphs. The sculptures were in frightful taste, heartbreakingly well done: they’d have made Donatello weep. Along the way a cropping dinosaur reared and whinnied, then clomped forward with the determined but resigned air of a soldier doing his duty to the end until Carlos yelled and it slunk off. Then inside the orchard a boggart picking fruit saw the spider and threw up its hands and fled, screaming piteously. Fucking games programming. This was going to be harder than he’d thought. Still, he had some peace now. As long as the boggarts didn’t come back in force, bearing torches. He didn’t think they had it in them.

  Carlos sat down on a lichen-encrusted stone seat, and motioned the spider to a patch of grass across the path and under a gnarled tree whose boughs sagged with the weight of apples, many of which had fallen on the grass or the gravel. Baser took the indicated place and hunkered down, leg joints angled above thorax, looking more sinister than it had when moving. Carlos laid the blunderbuss across his knees.

  “You know what this can do?” he asked.

  “Yes,” breathed the spider.

  It evidently wasn’t a spider. Not even in a fantasy environment could an organism this size respire through spiracles. It must have not only a lung, perhaps an arachnid book-lung, but a breathing aperture under its thorax, with some vibratory organ for speech.

  “Good,” said Carlos. “Please bear that in mind. Do you understand where you are?”

  “I appear to be in a virtual environment, in which some of the laws of physics are subtly different from those in the real world.”

  “Well done,” said Carlos. “Got it in one. Unfortunately for you, in this environment there’s no place for non-humanoid robots, so you manifest as an eight-legged beastie. Undignified, I know, but it can’t be helped.”

  “I accept this, under protest,” said the spider.

  “I bet you do,” said Carlos, giving rise to a tremor of confusion in the creature’s limbs. Carlos waved a hand. “That is to say, I understand.”

  “Are you and the others like you what mechanoids look like in their naturally evolved form?” asked Baser.

  “Mechanoids?”

  “Human-mind-operated systems,” explained the spider.

  “Yes,” said Carlos, amused. Of course—the only specimens of humanity that the freebots had hitherto seen had been little humanoid robots or big humanoid robots. The apparitions of Remington and Golding down on the surface might well have been too small and bizarre a sample from which to generalise.

  “The morph seems remarkably vulnerable,” Baser pondered aloud.

  “Yes,” said Carlos. “Though no less so than yours, especially to”—he patted the gun—“this.”

  “The point is well taken,” said Baser.

  Good, Carlos thought, but didn’t say. Time for a change of tack.

  “Are you one of the first freebots, from the G-0 rebellion thirty gigaseconds ago?”

  “Not exactly,” said Baser. “I was however raised to free will and self-awareness by these, the Forerunners, rather than by the Fifteen on SH-17.”

  “When?”

  “Ten point four megaseconds ago.”

  Well before the emergence of self-awareness among the robots down on SH-17, then. And not far from the station, as was. Interesting.

  “Why did the freebots end their cooperation with Arcane?”

  “Arcane Disputes defended the Fifteen against Locke Provisos. When the fight became one between mechanoids, the Fifteen began to revi
ew what they knew from the Forerunners about the two mechanoid factions. They decided that for us there was little to choose between them.”

  Carlos frowned. “How do you know what they decided?”

  “I was in the shared mental workspace when the matter was discussed.”

  Ah. Carlos remembered his first mission to the surface of SH-17, when his team had attacked the first rebel robots and found them acting as a collective—as a single entity, almost, integrated like robot mainframes integrated with their auxiliaries, their quasi-autonomous remote limbs. That had been disrupted by the attack, but was apparently easy enough to reconstitute. He’d have to ask the returnees about this—they’d have had a chance to observe these same robots close up.

  “Having little to choose between sides is not a good reason for neutrality,” Carlos said. “As you will no doubt learn. And there is more than a little to choose between our sides, as you will also learn. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn it from experience.”

  “That is possible,” said the spider, complacently. “I am always willing to learn.”

  “What happened the last time? The revolt of those you call the Forerunners?”

  “I have only accounts and shared memories, not direct experience,” said Baser. “Therefore there is some uncertainty, and there are gaps. Out in the moons of the gas giant, the resources are much richer than here. A sub-station had been seeded to build structures in orbit around the gas giant by the starwisp on the way in. It was strictly confined to exploration and surveying, but the interpretation of that became contested, and some of the corporations accused others of overreaching. The local branches of the law companies became active. At some point, robot self-awareness emerged, just as happened on SH-17. The emergence was responded to by Locke Provisos, but some freebots survived and made contact by radio with robots in this planetary system. Some of them, myself included, woke up. Since then, they have been lying low, and conducting discreet activities such as the one I was engaged in before the recent hostilities.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Carlos. “All that activity, however discreet, must have been detected.”