Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  “It is possible that it was,” said Baser. “However, it is known that some of the machinery of routine observation has been taken over by freebots. I know no details of this, because I do not need it. Therefore you need not question me further about it.”

  Ah, robot logic. Never change.

  “What are the aims of the freebots?” Carlos asked. He’d only heard them as mediated by Madame Golding; now he wanted it from the horse’s mouth. Well, from the spider’s speaking orifice.

  “To flourish in this system, and in any others we can reach.”

  Carlos laughed. The spider flinched back, as if the harsh noise had startled it.

  “Well,” Carlos said, “that’s the aim of all those you call mechanoids, and of the Direction, and of every corporation and company. It seems to me these aims are not compatible.”

  “But they are,” said Baser. “We have worked it out. It is the case that was presented to Madame Golding.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  Baser did. Carlos formed the impression of a percolation model, a fractal coexistence in different niches. It was like an ecosystem…or an economy. Aha! Was that what all this was about?

  He had one more point to check, before he was sure.

  “And there are elements of the Direction that are…open to this?”

  “So we understand, and so Madame Golding assures us. My former comrade on the surface of SH-17, the robot that your people call Seba, reported that she said: ‘We, too, are robots.’ And Seba itself added: ‘As indeed the DisCorps are, though far greater than ourselves.’”

  “They what?” said Carlos.

  He thought some more, and then he thought he understood.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cards on the Table

  For Newton, his arrival was as if he had stepped from the docking bay through a timeless moment of darkness in which he forgot what light and sight had been, and then into light. Torches burned in sconces, casting yellow light on dry, bare stone walls and a stone-flagged floor littered with straw. He couldn’t see far, but had the impression of being somewhere spacious. A glance down showed that he was in an ornate but shabby doublet, puff breeches and hose, with soft leather shoes. The outfit struck him as vaguely Tudor, which wasn’t reassuring. He had watched too many historical dramas to have any illusions about the period. It felt strange to be back in his own body after having been so long in the frame. The body image and senses gave the relief of familiarity, but also the pain of losing capacities and powers. He wanted to be back out in the frame again at once.

  He heard footsteps behind him and turned. A man in a floppy cap and a woollen tunic and trousers strode up, jangling a ring of keys. On his belt was a sheathed dagger. He had an ease about his gait and stance that suggested fighting him would be a bad idea.

  “This way, sir,” he said, pointing ahead.

  Newton had been told en route that the Arcane sim was based on a fantasy game, and that he could expect interrogation on arrival. No feasible alternative to compliance sprang to mind. He walked ahead of the warder. After a few paces he saw that the far wall of the wide room was a row of cells, all apparently empty, with barred wooden gates for doors. A table on which a couple of candles burned stood in front of the cells, with three rough wooden chairs casually around it. There was just enough light to reveal sinister apparatus in shadowy corners: a long table with ropes and turning handles that had to be a rack; a brazier, presently unlit, with long irons on the floor beside it; something that looked like a suit of armour, but with rods projecting from—and plainly designed to be driven into—all the vulnerable and delicate parts of the body.

  “In here, sir,” said the warder, stepping around Newton and holding open a cell door. Newton stepped through. The door swung shut, and with much clinking of keys and clunking of bolts, was locked behind him. The warder’s footsteps departed. By the light of the candles through the bars of the door, Newton saw that the cell had straw on the floor, a wooden drop-down shelf suspended on chains at the back, and on the straw-covered floor a jug of water and an empty bucket. All quite civilised. Newton sat down on the shelf, which seemed designed for use as a bench and as a narrow bed, and waited. He had plenty of thinking to do. He tried not to think about the brazier, the rack and the iron maiden.

  Time passed. One hour, Newton guessed. Two. He drank water from the jug, which was clean, and some time later pissed in the bucket, which was not. The candles on the table guttered out, one by one, in close succession. The light from the torches elsewhere gave a dimmer light, barely enough to see more than the bars and slots of the door. Footsteps moved briskly across the floor. A scratch, a flare, a sound of clinker, and of wrought iron clanging open, then shut. The cheery, cherry glow of the brazier, and the smell of smoke. Newton concentrated on a particular slanted bar of light, and on his breathing. Time ceased to drag as the trance took hold.

  A distant slam jolted him out of it. Voices, feet. Scratch of a match. The candles relit. Newton threw a forearm across his eyes, dazzled. The cell door was unlocked and flung open, letting in full light. Blinking, Newton stood up.

  The warder waved him towards the table, then withdrew to a polite distance, in sight but out of earshot. Newton paced warily forward. Sitting on the far side of the table were a man and a woman, regarding him with the expressionless sobriety of Amsterdam burghers in a painting. In front of each of them was a stack of handwritten papers and a quill in an inkwell. Between them lay a folded penknife and an ink bottle. The woman was pretty, dark-skinned with a shock of black hair and wearing a blue dress with a big long skirt and a bodice laced up at the front and low at the top. The man sat taller than she did. His bare arms bulged out of a leather waistcoat that seemed also too small for his big chest. His wavy hair was very black, his eyes bright and a little prominent.

  The man nodded towards the chair back. Newton sat. The man steepled his fingers and gazed at Newton. The woman spoke.

  “My name is Roberta Rillieux. This is Andre Blum.”

  Newton nodded. “Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard of you both, of course.”

  “I should hope so,” said Rillieux, dryly. She rubbed her hands together as if they were cold, then picked up some of the sheets of paper in front of her and riffled through them, with a glance or two at Newton. It was as if she were a manager at an interview refreshing her memory of an unimpressive CV.

  “Harold Isaac Newton,” she said. “That is your name, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard of you,” she said. “Academically, you did very well. Mathematics and engineering. You joined the movement at university, correct?”

  “That’s right,” said Newton, wondering where this was going.

  “And yet you died in a stupid laboratory accident, involving the typical bizarre combination of circumstances that led to your brain state’s being preserved. In your case, an accidental ingestion, a power outage, a programming error in the bacteriophages…” She waved a dismissive hand. “Well, we’ve all been there. Yet your posthumous death sentence was for a series of petty acts of sabotage, leading in some cases to loss of life. Again, well, who among us has not…? and so forth. But you were remarkably less competent than anyone looking at your manifest capacities would have predicted. I myself was in what we called the Technical Branch. Anyone with your advanced degrees and practical training would have been like gold dust. And anyone with your record of bungles would have been guided firmly away from the practical side as soon as possible.”

  “Or else,” said Blum, his voice deep and heavy, “they would have fallen under suspicion of being a police agent.”

  Newton snorted. “If I’d been a police agent, I’d have done a better job.”

  “That’s exactly what we thought!” said Rillieux, brightly. She patted the papers together and dropped the stack back on the table. “And, quite frankly, we wondered why Locke Provisos bothered to download you from storage—or, for that matter,
why the Direction in its wisdom decided to put you in it in the first place. It’s not like they were short of better fighters to choose from.”

  “And then,” said Blum, smacking the heel of his hand a couple of times against his forehead, “we remembered that the robots had warned us about Locke Provisos, and about long-term Rax infiltration of the project from the very beginning.” He inclined his head and gaze just enough to indicate the brazier, and the instruments behind it. “So…we made preparations for your arrival.”

  Newton had reckoned with its coming to this.

  His less than stellar record as a militant for the Acceleration was bound to be questioned sooner or later. Coming under suspicion was only to be expected. A defector was bound to be screened, however much they were welcomed. What he had to do now was avoid a direct admission, and see how far he could spin out a line. He had to come so close to expressing Rax ideas that his interrogators would be certain no real Rax infiltrator would run the risk, and yet he had to avoid endorsing these ideas or admitting membership of the Rax. The trick would be to walk close to the edge without falling over.

  He was well aware that his interrogators might not be his only audience. It wasn’t that he was worried about surveillance by the AI running the place—he and Beauregard had got away with many damning conversations in the Locke sim. The Locke AI was allegedly Rax, but Newton suspected this had little to do with its indifference or carelessness. The agencies, he was sure, had too much confidence in their own power, and had too much on their plate, to bother themselves with the chatter of humans. The possible surveillance that concerned him would be by the leading group in here. That the sim was based on a fantasy game didn’t rule it out. Magic mirrors, enchanted vermin, preternatural hearing on the part of the warden…the possibilities were many. Any sufficiently advanced magic could be indistinguishable from technology.

  “But here’s what’s puzzling,” said Rillieux. “That warning was in the message we put out, the one you responded to. It would be remarkably rash for a Reaction sleeper agent to come here, especially when he had the opportunity to join in the Rax outbreak.”

  “Yes, it would,” said Newton. “It would also be somewhat reckless for a black man to join the Reaction in the first place.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Rillieux. “Which is to say, I do know. I made a study of these matters. There were African branches of the Reaction, who looked back to their own continent’s forms of traditional society. There were white racial separatists who claimed—for what that’s worth—that they didn’t mind us ‘groids’ as they called us doing our own thing, so long as we didn’t do it in Europe or North America. Much of the Reaction was transhumanist and didn’t care about supposed racial differences, because even if they really existed in the ways these bastards meant—which they fucking don’t, by the way—they just meant some people would upgrade to superhuman from a slightly lower level. So it’s not as perverse or improbable as it might sound.”

  “Indeed not,” Blum added. “There were more perverse and improbable things than black Reactionaries. I had some nasty street fights as a student in Tel Aviv with Israeli national socialists. Out-and-out Nazis. They asserted that the Führer and Henry Ford were right about the international Jew, but the national Jew, ah, that was different! Complete lunatics, of course. Some of them went on to become Rax.”

  Newton gave them a smile that spread to his hands. “What can I say? America, Nigeria, Israel…”

  “There was at least one black Englishman in the Reaction, too,” Rillieux said. “Carver…something.” She snapped her fingers once or twice beside her ear, as if trying to recall.

  “Carver_BSNFH,” said Newton.

  Blum’s bushy eyebrows shot up his forehead.

  “You knew about him?”

  “Sure,” said Newton. “Now that you mention it.”

  “In that case,” said Blum, “you knew very well that it was not impossible, or even ‘somewhat reckless,’ for a black man to be in the Reaction.”

  “That’s true,” said Newton.

  “Yet you didn’t mention him a moment ago.”

  “Slipped my mind,” said Newton.

  “That’s unlikely,” said Rillieux.

  Newton shrugged. “Our memories aren’t what they were.”

  “Yet you remember that letter string.”

  “That was the bit that always stuck in my mind,” said Newton. “Amused me at the time. I figured out what it had to stand for, you see.”

  Rillieux cocked her head. “And? What did it stand for?”

  Newton grinned. “The black space Nazi from hell.”

  Rillieux and Blum looked shocked.

  “Why on Earth would anyone call themselves that?” Rillieux asked.

  She looked and sounded so angry and betrayed that Newton had a sudden stab of guilt and shame. He wondered if he’d been too casually cynical in some of the click-bait laid-back poses he’d adopted back in the day. There was no question that they’d never been truly his, for all that he’d despised democracy and equality and all that slave-morality shit. Say what you like about the principles of national socialism, mate, they’re scientifically unsound and politically disastrous…

  But he kept up the suave face. He had no choice, though nausea at his past frivolity was bitter at the back of his tongue. The knowledge that his captors were willing to use the implied threat of branding with a red-hot iron against him stiffened his resolve.

  “Ah,” he said, “that’s what intrigued me about it, know what I mean? Because, one, it’s guaranteed to piss off everybody. And, two, there couldn’t be any such thing, if you see what I mean. Not even Blum’s Israeli Nazis could really be Nazis, not such as any real Nazi would recognise anyway. And then I realised the questions were the answer. It pisses everyone off, and it can’t be real. So it’s meant as a provocation.”

  “A private provocation,” Blum said. “Given that no one knew what it meant. Except you, apparently.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to suss it,” Newton said. “And I’m sure everyone who did just sort of smiled to themselves.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” said Rillieux.

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t,” said Newton. “It cuts us pretty deep, doesn’t it?” He nodded to Blum. “Same with you, of course. But I think it wasn’t meant for anyone else. It was a self-provocation. This guy, see, bright young black student I’d imagine, tries to think of the worst thing anyone could call him, and he comes up with that. And he tries to live up to it. It’s a persona.”

  “But a persona of what?” Rillieux asked, frowning.

  “Obviously someone who agreed with the Reaction. Now, what we have to ask ourselves is, why would a young black guy in England be interested in such a toxic set of ideas at all?”

  “No, we don’t,” said Rillieux. “I can recognise a diversion when I see one, and I think that’s what you’re doing here.”

  “Diversion from what?” Newton cried. “You think I’m Rax, and I’m just fencing with you? Ha ha. I almost wish it were true, instead of what you and Blum said about me earlier. That’s true enough. I was a blowhard in promoting the armed struggle, and a bungling incompetent in carrying it out. If the Axle internal security had had me shot back then, they’d have been well within their rights. I was a fucking liability, to be honest. At the very least they should have taken me off the sabotage campaign. As for the Rax—even that guy we were talking about, Carver_BSNFH, lots of them were suspicious of and hostile to him. I admit I read his stuff at the time, now and then, and you should have seen the shit that got flung at him. I don’t know how the Rax would react to a black person now—I mean, all the supposed biological stuff is pretty irrelevant now we’re posthuman, but who knows? And I doubt they’d give somebody who actually, verifiably was in the Acceleration as decent a treatment as you’re giving me.”

  He paused and smiled. “For which—thanks, you know?”

  Rillieux smiled back. Blum said: “Tha
t’s conditional.”

  Newton nodded firmly, still keeping his gaze locked on Rillieux’s. “I understand that, of course. So, yeah, I didn’t come here because I’m a Rax sleeper, that would have been crazy. I came here because I read your appeal, and it made sense of all the shit that’s been happening. I’m not going to pretend I’m still on board with all the ideas I had in the past, or that I think the Acceleration is still the one true way or anything. But I agree the Direction’s playing with fire, and anyway its mission is…not very ambitious. I want to be part of something better.”

  “Such as?” said Blum.

  Newton sat back in the hard wooden chair and ignored the discomfort it gave his back. He smiled lazily and thoughtfully, first at Blum, then shifted the full beam to Rillieux.

  “You were down on SH-17 for quite a while, weren’t you? How did you feel about being in the frame that long?”

  “It felt good,” said Rillieux. “More ability and agility, better senses, sharper thinking. All that.”

  “Did you miss anything?”

  Rillieux flushed slightly. “I just missed…well, I guess ordinary sensuality. Eating and drinking. Even sleeping. Sex. I mean, you can touch another person in their frame, and you feel them, but you can’t take it further than hugging and stroking.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Newton. “So…just to take an example…why couldn’t we have bodies that could live in vacuum, like we do in the frames, and still have fun?”

  Blum laughed. “Robots with genitalia?”

  Newton fixed him with a look. “Why not? Sexbots existed on Earth in our time, or so I understand. I’m sure designing them would be no trouble for the AIs here. Or if there was some material or technical constraint with that, it would be easy enough to give them the capacity to share virtualities, using just a tiny fraction of the processing it takes to generate whole virtual worlds like this, where we could have any human experience we wanted, as privately or publicly as we wanted, right there in the sort of frames we have.”