by Ken MacLeod
Rillieux looked interested. “We had a small virtual space on the tug up,” she said. “Lower res than here, of course, and we used it mostly for comms, but we could nip in and out. So it’s possible.”
“Great!” said Newton. “However we did it, and there’s no end of possibilities—heck, we could do both, and more—the point is we could enjoy the best that human bodies can do and experience, and all the best that we can see and feel and do in the frames. All at the same time. We could live in space and on the surfaces. We don’t need to wait for terraforming, or live in virtual worlds and risk going crazy with the meaninglessness of it all. We could make ourselves true natives of any body in this system.” He laughed briefly. “Except the exosun or the molten metal world, I guess! But just think what we could do if we put our minds to it and weren’t shackled by the Direction’s mission profile. And we needn’t lose our humanity in the process, at least not in any way we’d miss.”
Rillieux was now grinning back, caught up in his enthusiasm. Blum looked sceptical.
“Good luck with convincing everyone of that,” he said.
Rillieux’s smile faded. Newton was struck by the dogged persistence of the democratic ideology, through all the transformations its bearers had undergone. He held back from the outburst that sprang to mind. He just stood up, and leaned casually on the back of the chair.
“Who says I have to convince everyone?”
He could see Rillieux struggling with the concept, and then the lightbulb moment.
“Oh!” she said. “You mean we could just take—” She stopped, as if overcome by the enormity of the prospect.
Newton dropped his voice, to give the (futile but subconsciously inescapable) impression of privacy, and to make them both strain to listen.
“Yes,” he said. “We could just take. We could homestead.”
“That’s Rax talk,” said Blum.
“Sit down,” said Rillieux. She glanced at Blum, who after a moment nodded. “Let’s talk some more.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Keeping Things Real
Different people had told Carlos different things.
Shaw, the old man of the mountain who claimed to have been involved in that earlier round of fighting, had been so disillusioned by the inconclusiveness of the battles he’d been in that he’d come to his own conclusion: that the planet in the sim was physically real, and that all the conflict in space was virtual, a training exercise.
Nicole, just before an offensive that had ended badly, had assured her troops that matters were well in hand, and that the Direction knew what it was doing. Her conviction had been unshaken by the subsequent disaster. If she was still alive, her confidence in the Direction’s subtle wisdom was doubtless unshaken still.
Now, this captive freebot was confirming to him that at least some parts of the Direction were open to the freebots’ vision of a shared system.
He could now see what that vision was. Considered as a balance of forces, a political coexistence, it made no sense. It seemed utterly naïve. No balance of power could be stable in the long term, because all its rival components developed unevenly, and sooner or later the equilibrium would give way to conflict.
But that wasn’t what the freebots’ vision was of at all. It was of an economy, and a market economy at that. If the Direction were to confine itself to maintaining a rule of law, and let everything else unfold spontaneously, rather than micromanaging the development of the system towards the predetermined end of human settlement on a terraformed terrestrial planet, then of course this kind of coexistence of freebots, DisCorps, “human-mind-operated systems,” and perhaps in the future actual human beings, would be possible.
Nicole had told him, on his very first day here, that humanity had settled and solved all the conflicts that had fuelled the rise of the Acceleration and the Reaction. “They put capitalism in a box, and buried it.” Under the Direction the corporations now competed as DisCorps inside computer systems, and humanity had in effect settled down to its retirement, living off the proceeds of machine toil and treating business enterprise as an intellectual but enthralling sport, whose prizes could never outlast the generation that had won them. (“Birth shares are inalienable,” Nicole had told him, “and death duties are unavoidable.”) Anything else—science, art, physical sport, exploration, engineering—they could afford to treat as a couple of centuries’ worth of gap-year volunteer activities, or later in life as retirement hobbies or good works.
No doubt this worked fine back in the Solar system. Close, real-time feedback and control, with at most a few hours’ or days’ light-speed lag, was feasible there. And humanity itself, in all its billions or tens of billions or (for all he knew) hundreds of billions or even more, must be a massive physical presence in the Solar system, with control over enough brute-force dumb machines to make its presence felt. The Direction, the actual world state apparatus headquartered in New York, would have its AI reps inside every DisCorp reporting on a regular basis to their human controllers, who through them could keep the companies on a short leash, and bend their activities to the priorities of the Direction. Most probably, the corporate AIs did not so much as dream of asserting themselves against it. They had enough to do to compete with each other. Perhaps to them too, as to the human owners and entrepreneurs but from an almost diametrically opposite angle of view, business was a fascinating intellectual game, and its real-world physical consequences in cornucopian abundance an almost irrelevant by-product, the sweat from their sport.
Out here, twenty-four light years from home, they were in a different situation altogether. Here, it was the DisCorps who were out there, wresting resources from the real world, exploring and investigating and striving, and it was humanity that was in a box. The old familiar principal-agent problem came fully into its own; and with it the likewise familiar pattern of regulatory capture. Without human handlers to report back to and to check up on them, even the most conscientious Direction AI representative inside a company could easily go native. It would only take a few such deviations for the entire careful plan to begin to drift off course, and the consequences of that drift would require unplanned initiatives to cope with the knock-on effects, and these in turn…
If the logic was this obvious to him—and it had taken him, in all conscience, long enough to figure it out—the predictable course of events here in this distant exosolar system must have been far more obvious, blindingly obvious, to the Direction’s planners and mission designers back on Earth.
The emergence of DisCorp self-assertion in opposition to the officially proclaimed plan, to the sacred mission profile, must have been allowed for—planned for, even. Whether the same was true of the emergence of robot self-awareness, Carlos couldn’t be sure, but it seemed likely enough: it could hardly be an unprecedented problem, after all. As for the emergence of sleeper agents of the Reaction and fanatic partisans of the Acceleration—Shaw had believed that this too was foreseen, and planned for. The freebots evidently believed that, too, and passed the conclusion on to the Arcane fighters—who thought matters had gone well beyond what the Direction had planned for, had in fact got well out of hand, and that the local module of the Direction was playing with fire.
Was this last emergence, then, a contingency the Direction had not foreseen? Had the remnants of the Reaction and the hold-outs of the Acceleration—such as the group that had programmed the game underlying this sim, centuries ago—in this instance at least, outwitted the Direction?
Carlos thought back to what he knew of both movements, and smirked at the recollection. His comrades and his enemies, his friends and his foes…they had about as much chance of outwitting the Direction as a nest of ants might have in outwitting the entire profession of entomology. The ants could surprise the entomologists, and could be a nuisance to them, but they couldn’t actually outwit them. No, the Direction was playing multidimensional chess while they were playing checkers.
So what was its game?
Baser moved. It made a forward lurch and a downward pounce. Carlos’s hand went to the gun by reflex. Then he saw that the spider’s movement had been reflex as well: it had seized in its mandibles a small bird that had incautiously landed on the path in front of it.
Baser hunkered back. Crunching and sucking sounds came from its mouth parts. Blood dripped. Carlos tried not to look too closely. He eased his hand away from the stock of the weapon.
“Sorry,” he said.
Baser could talk with its mouth full, because it wasn’t talking with its mouth.
“This is new to me,” it said. “In my real self I draw power from batteries or from exosolar radiation. I find this action satisfying in the same way, but somewhat incompatible with my previous self-model.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Carlos said. “Don’t mind me.”
Carlos recalled Nicole’s firm conviction that the Direction knew what it was doing. Mind you, she had an equally unshakable conviction that the Direction’s plan for the development of this system was indeed the known and accepted mission profile: to terraform and settle the terrestrial planet H-0. To stay recognisably human, living in the physical world, not the virtual, because, she’d said: “We need the real to keep us honest.” She had certainly believed firmly enough in that!
But—on reflection, these were all separable propositions.
The terraforming was a long-term process: hundreds of years, at the very least. The eventual human population would find itself in a system already utterly transformed by the activities of the DisCorps and other intelligences, including the freebots and the fighters, or what became of the fighters. And these intelligences too needed the real to keep them honest: to stop them wandering off into virtual dream-worlds, or eliminate them if they did. Only true competition and genuine conflict could do that. The only imperative that Carlos could believe would be hard-wired, and almost impossible to work around, was the one against the AIs and DisCorps and indeed the Direction module itself having direct access to weapons and direct military command. And yet, if only to enforce the law or protect their property, they’d all need fighters. The freebots had shown they could fight for themselves, but they weren’t reliable as fighters for anyone else.
All of which made sense of the Direction’s planning for the emergence of mutually hostile armed groups. The Direction module would need fighters with real conviction…and so would the rival corporations. It struck Carlos that the Acceleration fighters would be ideal enforcers for the Direction—and the Reaction fighters would be solid muscle for the DisCorps. And the two groups could be relied on to hate each other only if they saw each other as genuine threats…which, given that each was smart, they could only do if they really were.
The Direction was indeed playing with fire. But the very fire itself had been part of the plan, from the very beginning. And it was playing with more than that. It was keeping things real for itself, by putting its plans to the audit of war, and betting on its own values winning out in the long run.
And it was a genuine gamble. The distant planners of the mission knew that they couldn’t program machines to create a clone of Solar civilisation; and that such a clone would be a sickly thing, even if it were possible to keep such a project on course for the millennia it would take to complete. All they could do was take Orgel’s rule—“Evolution is smarter than you”—and roll with it. It was entirely possible that the result would be a monstrosity: in the worst case, a ravening horde of runaway machines; next worst, an expanding empire that would at some point threaten the Solar system. But a lifeless imitation of the Direction’s home worlds would threaten it, too, in a longer run but just as surely—and more deeply, by wounding its spirit. Nothing could do more to demoralise Solar humanity than surrounding it by feeble mimicries of itself. The Direction wasn’t planning for millennia: it was planning for megayears, even gigayears! Humanity’s spirit had to be at least as sustainable as its material environment.
So the Darwinian dice had to roll. The stakes had to be real. It was impossible to create a better outcome without risking the worst.
“You have been silent for some time,” said Baser. “Have you been processing?”
“Yes,” said Carlos. “Thank you for your input.”
“Do you require any further input?”
Carlos thought about this. “No,” he said. “But I have to find a place to keep you, I’m sorry to say.”
Baser’s mandibles opened. Feathers drifted and bones dropped.
“I have been given the appearance and instincts of a spider,” it said, in a tone of dignified disgust. “How hard can it be?”
But it did turn out to be hard. Carlos led Baser to the house, and in through the French window to the big parlour. The party was already wild. Boggarts scurried with bottles. The usual quartet was bashing out dance music. Among the new arrivals, couples were quite indiscreetly entangled. Paulos and (Carlos assumed) Claudia Singer were sharing a chair, face to face. Those less preoccupied noticed Carlos and the spider and backed away. The boggarts, perhaps alerted by the surge, noticed too. They threw up their hands in cartoonish unison, and rushed for the exit. Bottles fell to the floor and rolled, spilling wine. The dance beat was replaced by shrieks and the diminuendo thunder of fleeing feet.
In the silence that followed, someone’s oblivious shuddering moan seemed loud.
Jax stalked over.
“Fuck sake, Carlos!” she said, sounding well aware that it was the second time she’d had to swear at him that morning. “Why the fuck d’you bring that thing in here?”
“It’s completely harmless,” Carlos protested. He turned to indicate it, and saw Baser standing innocently enough by the French window, blood all over its mandibles. “And I forgot about the boggarts,” he added, sounding feeble even to himself.
“Just get it the fuck away,” Jax ordered.
“Where?” Carlos asked.
“That’s your problem.”
And it was. The prisoner had to be accommodated somewhere—he couldn’t have it wandering around startling the boggarts (which had an unfortunate ingrained impulse, carried over from the original game, to flee screaming at the sight of it) and frightening the dinosaurs (which had a likewise unfortunate and ingrained legacy impulse to stomp it). But it was—if not exactly a prisoner of war—a freebot detainee, and therefore a bargaining chip. However disputable and irrelevant its rights were, it was protected by the sheer self-interest imposed on the fighters by the possibility that one or more of their number might at some future date be captured by the freebots. Eventually, and by mutual agreement, Baser was locked in the disused cellars under the west wing, where—it assured Carlos—it was happy to lurk in the dark and hunt rats.
Carlos locked the cellar door and spent half an hour reassuring boggarts, then went back to the party to find everyone too drunk for their conversation to make much sense to anyone sober. Well, he thought, there was a well-established solution to that problem, and he reached for it with a sense of resignation.
Later, in an interval of mutual lucidity, he broached his new theory to Jax.
“Bollocks!” she yelled, loud enough to disturb the warlock, snoring on the floor at her feet. “Sorry, dear.” She rubbed a foot on Durward’s back, then returned a bleary gaze to Carlos. “What?”
“The plan,” he began again, “is in fact—”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember. Absolute fucking bollocks.” She gazed off into the distance, then laughed. “You’ve just rehashed the old China gamble.”
“I what?”
“Bet on the home market to fulfil the plan, then bet again on the world market to make the plan go global.” She gave him a quizzical smile. “Sure you really were winding us up when you told Bobbie and Andre you were a Chinese agent?”
“I was winding you up,” said Carlos. He closed his eyes for a moment. “At least, I think so. Anyway, if the Direction is real, and we’re kind of agreed it is, then maybe the theory worked!”
&nbs
p; “Doesn’t matter, in terms of your explanation,” said Jax. “And you know why? Because it’s unfalsifiable. Anything that happens can be accounted for as another twist of the plan. It’s like God, or the cunning of Reason, or the irony of History. All fucking literary flourishes when all’s said and done.”
“So what do you think is really happening? Do you think they didn’t expect all this?”
“Yes, I do,” said Jax. She steadied her swaying in the chair. “And you know why? Because people are fucking stupid, and the machines they build—whether it’s bureaucracies or corporations or AIs—have the same old fucking stupidity built in right at the base, and then they add new stupidities of their own. Nah, we have to fight this one like it’s real because it is real.”
“But that’s exactly—”
She laid a finger across his lips. “Don’t. Just don’t.”
So he didn’t. He wandered off and got more drunk until he passed out on the floor.
The robot’s arachnid avatar got its revenge that night. The sinister, thunderous scuttling, scraping noises and the squeals of vivisected vermin went on for hours until Durward rose up in wrath and banged on the cellar door demanding quiet.
Newton arrived two days later. After breakfast—the influx had forced a movement of the meal from the cosy back room to the formal front, at a long table the boggarts laid and cleared—Durward told Jax he’d had a message in his mirror from Blum and Rillieux. She set off in a dinosaur-drawn four-seater trap, and returned an hour later with Newton and one of his interrogators. Carlos was out on the overgrown grass in front of the house, duelling in enchanted armour with Luis Paulos. The enchanted armour felt like it wasn’t there, and yet it protected against the hardest blows a non-enchanted weapon could deliver. The only effect a normal weapon could have was the simple physical impact of its kinetic energy, so they fought with shields and sledgehammers. At the same time the armour was vulnerable to enchanted darts, which each combatant could shoot from a hand-held, pistol-gripped crossbow. When you got hit by an enchanted dart you fell right over and the armour wouldn’t move until the dart had been tugged out. The trick was to dodge the darts, or make good use of your shield. It was fun, and supposedly analogous to the experience of fighting in a combat frame: you were agile and almost invulnerable, but one hit from the right kind of weapon—a seriously heavy munition or a military-grade laser—could finish you in an instant.