The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (12 page)

“Nothing against p-zombies,” Beauregard was saying, in the Digital Touch that night. He put his arm around the bare shoulders of the woman beside him, and turned to her with a fond leer. “Love them, in fact. Love this one, anyway. Best fucking relationship I’ve ever had. None of that clingy needy stuff. Women are awful and queers are worse.”

Carlos flagged up a warning eyebrow. Chun and his boyfriend, Karzan and her current paramour, were in the same huddle of tables. Rizzi was also in earshot, nearby with her laddie Den.

“Only in that respect,” Beauregard hastened to add. “No offence, soldiers.”

“None taken, sarge,” Chun and Karzan chorused. The boyfriends looked amused.

“It’s a point of view, I suppose,” said Carlos.

“That’s the great thing about p-zombies,” Beauregard chortled. “They don’t
have
one!”

“How can you be sure?” said Carlos. “I mean that, uh, your good lady here doesn’t?”

“From the serial number tattooed on the sole of her foot,” said Beauregard.

They all stared at him, except the putative p-zombie, who was passing him a titbit.

“Is that true?” Carlos asked her. She had a tan and a gold chain and she looked about sixteen.

“Oh yes,” she said, snuggling closer. “I don’t see the difference myself, but it seems to make him happy.”

Carlos shook his head. “Jesus.”

“Try one yourself,” said Beauregard. “Better than wanking, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

“Ah, wanking,” said Carlos. “I remember that from a previous life.”

“Like, last month?” Beauregard jeered.

“More like last millennium.” Carlos sighed, remembering Jacqueline Digby and others he’d loved—or liked, anyway—and lost, and looked around the company. “Good times, good times.”

Everybody laughed. Drink had been taken. The evening had the mood of a wake for someone they’d barely met. Ames wouldn’t be coming back on tomorrow’s bus. Getting killed in training was bad luck, Nicole had told them, or a mistake that could be overlooked. Suicide was desertion. And it wouldn’t get Ames off the hook: his original copy was still on file, ready to be called to duty in the future, and with this version’s bad karma on top of its already long-as-your-arm charge-list of delicts.

At Ichthyoid Square after the other ranks had jogged off and the long shadow of the hills lengthened, Nicole had given Carlos an earful. Not for his complicity in killing p-zombie civilians—a cheat just within the letter—but for not having noticed any warning signs from Waggoner Ames. He’d been mouthing off about the deeper implications of simulated existence for two evenings in the Touch. Carlos should have been there, keeping an eye on things, watching for trouble. Nicole had impressed upon him, while he was still shaking from Ames’s suicide, that keeping tabs on gripes and grumbles and reporting them to her wasn’t any kind of betrayal of his comrades, it was part of his goddamn duty to them, as well as to the Direction. So, here he was.

“Of course by the time you get his or her shoes off,” Beauregard continued as if thinking aloud, “you’re almost there anyway, so it’s hit and miss. I suppose I got lucky.”

“You might say you
scored
,” said the p-zombie.

They all laughed politely. Carlos wondered whether verbal wit was beyond p-zombies. Probably not: he’d interacted in games with AIs that could banter like stand-up comedians off-stage and on cocaine. Iqbal the bartender was never lost for a wisecrack.

“Is that food ever going to arrive?” Beauregard grumbled.

Moments later, it did. Carlos had lost all qualms about native fauna and flora, at least when it was steaming hot. He devoured a few hungry forkfuls, sipped white wine and was about to say something when the television’s background noise changed and Karzan shushed him.

“
Researchers
is about to come on,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Earth vintage serial. Cult viewing here.” Forefinger across lips.

Everyone in the bar, staff included, was giving the big wall screen their rapt attention. A blare of music, a blaze of lighting, a whirling montage of belle époque images: airships, the Eiffel Tower, absinthe advertisements, feathered hats, velocipedes, top hats, dreadnoughts, art deco metro station entrances, trailing skirts, twirling parasols, cancan high-kicks, the discovery of radium. French dialogue, subtitles in English. Opening titles rolled:

“Researchers of the Lost Age!

Une série fondée sur le roman de Marcel Proust,

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Episode 139
”

It was the one where the submarine is attacked by a giant squid. Nicole breezed in while it was still running, drifted past the tables in a shrug of cashmere and a swing of sundress, glanced at Carlos and said, “Cognac on the rocks.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took two glasses out to the deck.

The chaotic tide had brought breakers to the rocky foot of the Touch. Salt-spray tang mingled with tobacco smoke. Nicole sat in the near corner, curled up in cool cotton and warm wool.

“Your good health,” Carlos said.

“Cheers.” Clink of glass and ice.

Nicole made her cigarette tip glow for three seconds. “So, what’s the buzz?”

Straight to the point.

“Rizzi’s spreading a rumour that there’s a thousand-year-old deserter up in the hills. Beauregard claims p-zombies have a serial number tattooed on the sole of their foot.”

“Both true, as it happens.”

“Huh!”

She flicked the butt in a fizzing red arc over the rail. “It’s a joke. Serial numbers on their souls, get it? But it’s true.”

“And the old man?”

“Oh yes, that happened. Don’t go near him. Feral.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“No grief over Ames?”

“They’re all a bit cut up,” Carlos said. “Shit, I miss him myself. He was the only one of us who had the science of this place in his bones.”

Nicole lit another, not taking her eyes off him. “Yes. He thought he could jump into a better future.”

“Poor sod.”

“Don’t feel sorry for him. Bastard convinced himself of all that simulation crap back in the real. Raised malware storm attacks that blew stuff up all over the world. Blithely killed thousands thinking he was sending them to a better future.”

“He wouldn’t be the first.”

“He sure wasn’t the last. Anything else?”

Carlos thought about it. “Oh, and Karzan’s toying with the notion that all our memories are false.”

“Yeah,” said Nicole, swirling ice cubes. She knocked back the now watery remainder. “There never was an Earth. That thought does come up. It’s really quite dangerous. Makes people nihilistic.”

Carlos laughed. “More than we are?”

“You are all monsters,” Nicole said. “What you did today…”

“I thought you were OK with that.” Carlos felt hurt.

“It was not the killing and burning. It was… I don’t know. How you all came to a place in your minds to make it possible.” She wafted smoke at ringlight and moons. “This world, it is real and so to say familiar and much trouble is taken to maintain the consistency, and still you come up with such ideas.”

Carlos shrugged. “It’s inevitable.”

“Which means you too have one? Your own little pet heresy?”

“It’s not like that,” he said, shifting in his seat. “It’s more of a question.”

“Get me another cognac, straight this time, and tell me.”

Warmth and light and noise. The television had moved on from the Proust adaptation to
Turing: Warrior Queen
, a British Second World War drama. Alan had arranged a tryst with W. H. Auden in the Muscular Arms, a straight pub in Bletchley. Cryptically, behind their hands and in Esperanto, the secret slang of homosexuals, they discussed the bombing of Hamburg.

“It’s a dead bona do, me old cove,” said Alan.

“Don’t be so naff,” said Auden. “Nix the palaver. It’s tre cod.”

At the bar Rizzi saw Carlos take the two cognacs and nudged his side. “Jump to the lady, huh?”

“Way it goes,” said Carlos.

“Way to go,” she said.

Outside, Nicole smoked and sipped, in her cashmere cocoon. “So tell me your question.”

“It’s Axle talk,” he warned, with a nerdy half-laugh that he suddenly hated himself for.

“So? Have you been told of a law against that?”

“All right,” he said. “It’s kind of the opposite of, uh, all the not-believing-it ideas. My question is, why don’t you just decant all your stored colonists
right here
? Why bother with terraforming the real planet? You could run millions of years of civilisation just in the time it’ll take to bring the real planet up to spec.”

“We could,” said Nicole. “And because the storage is massively redundant, we could do so many times over. And then what? They evolve into something beyond human.”

“Exactly!” cried Carlos. “That’s the whole point. Leave the shit behind.”

“You will have noticed,” she said, “that we have taken care here not to have left the shit behind. It still comes out behind us, to be crude about it. But in the metaphorical sense, there is no way to leave the shit behind.”

“Now who’s nihilistic?”

“Oh, we are,” she said. “The trouble with you people is not that that you were nihilistic. You weren’t nihilistic enough. God is dead, yes. But so is Nietzsche. Humanity emerged by chance in an uncaring universe! Very good—give the boy a gold star. Humanity can—and therefore must—transcend its evolved limitations and build its own caring universe inside simulations?” She mimed a smack upside the head. “Go to the back of the class. Do your homework. Chaos theory? Sensitive dependence on initial conditions? Positive feedback? Strange attractors? Darwinian logic? Orgel’s rules? Remember these?”

“Yes, but we had—”

“Get real. The number of ways for such projects to go horribly wrong may not be infinite, but it is vast. We are not a bridge between the ape and the overman. We are not here to transform the universe into thinking machines. We are not here
for
anything. We are simply here.”

“Speak for yourselves.”

“Indeed! That is exactly what I am doing. I am telling you what humanity has decided, and the Direction has enforced.”

“That’s a bit of a mantra with you.”

“It is.” She leaned back, resting her head against the peeling paint of the sea-facing wall of the building. “You know, Carlos, it is said that the Axle was not as bad as the Rack. There is some truth in that, which is why we use Axle war criminals and not Rax to do our dirty work. You gave us Dresdens, not Belsens. You wanted to advance a culture that we shared already, not roll it back to some monarchic past that could only have become a new dark age. But still. Nevertheless. For that very reason, you wounded us more deeply than the Rax ever did. After hundreds of years, we have not forgiven you. And with every century that passes we become more determined to survive as ourselves—modified certainly, but still recognisable as humanity. If we are to survive in the long term we must spread to other stars and live on real planets and real habitats in real space and real time.”

“Why?” Carlos was genuinely bewildered.

“We need the real to keep us honest. And to keep us human.”

“You want humanity to
stop
evolving? To survive for tens of millions of years unchanged, like the fucking cockroach?”

“Oh, we’re slightly more ambitious than that,” Nicole said. “Cockroaches? Pfft! They crawled out of the Cretaceous. Stromatolites have been around since the Archean.”

“Strikes me,” said Carlos, “that this multi-billion-year plan is just the kind of project you were talking about, and open to exactly the same objections about chaos and evolution and all that.”

“Oh, it is,” said Nicole. “If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be needed. We’re one of the project’s error correction mechanisms.”

“But even that—”

Nicole raised a hand. “There is no objection that has not been foreseen. Believe me, Carlos—I have had this argument so many times with myself that I have no wish for it to become a quarrel with you.”

Carlos watched her smoke another cigarette. She tossed it in the boiling sea and stood up, pulling her shawl closer around her shoulders.

“Take me home,” she said.

They made their way through the bar.

“Tomorrow’s exercise is cancelled,” she told the squad, over her shoulder on the way out. Carlos held open the door for her, and closed it on their laughter.

Jump to the lady.

“Still think I’m a monster?”

“Yes, but a hopeful monster.”

“Why me, and not…”

“Beauregard, say?” Smoke ring, from supine on the floor, up to the ceiling. “Belfort’s a
useful
monster.”

Her breath smelled like beetles in matchboxes.

Idly: “Can they see us?”

“They?”

“The AIs running this place.”

“Of course, if they want to. I doubt we’re of interest to them right now.”

“Can they read our thoughts?”

Laughing: “No. That’s not how it works. Thoughts can’t be read, because they’re not written.”

“Oh good.”

“In general, yes.”

“In particular, because what I’m thinking is—”

“Oh yes. Yes.”

“I don’t think you’re a p-zombie. I think you’re a person like me.”

“Oh no!” Turning over, looking into his eyes. “I’m not
a person like you
.”

At noon she went out to meet and greet the new recruit off the bus. Carlos mooched around her house. It had more rooms than his, with a studio overlooking the bay. An easel stood in front of the window. An intricate cross-hatch of black lines amid blocks of colour bore no resemblance to the view. Leaning at the foot of all the walls were presumably completed canvases, all different but all equally abstract. Flipping over pages of the sketch pads—cartridge paper, spiral bound—scattered on the floor and stacked on seats and tables, Carlos found endless charcoal and graphite drawings of landscapes, buildings, people, animals and plants, all rendered with obsessive and almost unnatural realism. The household robot scuttled in and waited. Without moving, it gave the impression of stoically restraining itself from tapping one of its feet and drumming its many fingers. When Carlos backed out, keeping a wary eye, the machine hastened to return the room’s contents to precisely their previous disorder.