The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (13 page)

When he padded back to the bedroom for his boots, he found the bed made, the wardrobe shut, the ashtray polished, the table righted and the chair mended. The only traces of all the night’s and half the morning’s joyous tumult were behind his eyes, and in his nostrils, and on his skin.

He left Nicole’s house and strolled the few hundred metres to his own, smiling.

The new arrival’s name was Pierre Zeroual. Slim and watchful, with a slender black line of moustache and an unexpected deep laugh. He had done something terrible with an ambulatory nanofacturing facility in the Nassara Strip. Having had years of regular military and chaotic militia experience, none of which he spoke about, he was up to speed with the squad after two days in the hills. Carlos, Beauregard and Karzan were unanimous down at the Touch: they had nothing to teach him. He sipped orange juice and smiled, then joined Karzan on the deck for a smoke.

On the third day, Nicole turned up at Ichthyoid Square on foot. Though they now spent their nights together, Carlos and Nicole had by unspoken agreement taken to departing separately for the morning rendezvous, arriving a few minutes apart. Carlos had always made a point of being there first.

“Are we running up to the hills today?”

“No. Moving up another level. You’ll see.”

The others arrived and formed their usual line.

“Well done, all of you, on basic training,” she said. “You’re now ready to move on to the advanced stuff. Like I said a couple of weeks ago, it’s a matter of getting your reflexes and intuition adapted to the machines you’ll be—well, the machines you’ll be! It’s the last practice you’ll get before the real thing, so make the most of it.”

With an expression hinting at an unshared joke, Nicole led them quick-step along the street, to halt at one of the arcade’s wilfully generic, faded frontages:
Amusements
.

Inside, through creaking double swing doors. Fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered on. In the sudden light half a dozen multi-limbed cleaning robots stopped wiping and polishing, as if caught in some illicit act, and scuttled to the edge of the floor. An overhead sign that by the look of it hadn’t been dusted in decades swung in the brief draught from the door’s opening, squeaking on a pair of rusty wires. Through the grime it advertised in flaring font:

SPACE ROBOT BATTLES!

Delaminating plastic surfaces exposed through cracks and gaps in their garish paintwork by the fresh cleaning, six crude-looking outsize humanoid armoured robot shapes stood in two rows of three. They were mounted at their centres of gravity on gimballed plinths that smelled and gleamed of oil. Each was enclosed in an elliptical hoop joining hands and feet, like a caricature of Leonardo’s Man. Behind them, at the back of the hall, a couple of fairground-style simulators in the shape of sawn-off space shuttles faced each other, nose cone to nose cone with about a metre of clearance.

“What the fuck,” said Carlos, under his breath. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Yes,” said Nicole. “And no. Form up.”

They all shuffled into line, Carlos at one end and Beauregard at the other. Nicole still looked as if she were suppressing a laugh.

“Welcome to simulator training,” she said. “Contrary to what you might think, these”—thumb-jerk over shoulder—”give a fairly useful impression of what it’s like to be a frame. And the shuttles really do emulate the armed scooters you may be riding on. Don’t worry too much, just get in the machines and play them hard, like most of you did as a kid. They all have excellent VR inside.”

“Excuse me,” said Zeroual.

“Yes?”

“If all around us is a simulation, why not give us this training in… another simulation? A direct one, of the experience of being in a frame?”

Nicole rubbed the back of her neck. For a moment Carlos was lost in the memory and fantasy of his hand on that nape, and then he clocked to the defensiveness the gesture betrayed.

“Two reasons,” she said. “First, it’s actually quite hard psychologically and in computational terms to move to and from an immersive simulation of the frames. Hence the transitions in the bus, to be quite honest. And second, it would compromise the integrity and credibility of this simulation. Whereas an amusement arcade fits right in.”

Carlos looked along the line. Zeroual seemed convinced, Rizzi downright sceptical. The others stared straight ahead.

Nicole clapped her hands. “The best answer is to climb into the machines and have some fun. Let me show you how it works, then I’ll leave you to it.”

The rear half of the robot-suit clicked shut to the front like a clamshell. Carlos fought a surge of claustrophobia. He relieved it by chinning a switch that Nicole had indicated. The suit sprang loose against his back. Just before he closed it again he heard other clicks and clunks—he wasn’t the only one making sure he could get out before settling in.

A steady flow of cool air in the padded helmet prevented a return of the panic. The visor showed black space and blazing pinpricks. Axial graticules like those of a spherical compass rolled around the glass as his head moved, giving him an elementary orientation to some arbitrary location. More detailed information scrolled on a heads-up display that apparently floated just in front of the scales. Resilient foam fitted snug to his torso and limbs. He waggled fingers, bent knees and elbows. The suit was more flexible than it looked. He tilted forward, then back, then from side to side. He couldn’t roll right over on his back—the plinth’s presence unavoidably prevented the full manoeuvre—but apart from that the attitude control was complete and convincing. Pressing a temple against the inside of the helmet rotated him in that direction. For a couple of times he spun too fast; the stars bright lines, the scales a blur, the sun a fleeting flare.

Then he stabilised, turning about slowly until he could see the others. All were within about twenty metres of him, in a jumble of attitudes and orientations. Confused involuntary sounds and muttered exclamations crowded the comms channels. Carlos guessed he’d been making some noises himself.

“OK, everyone, get yourselves facing the same way as I am!”

They took a minute or two to sort themselves out. As they did so, Carlos scanned the scrolling display. The scenario was that they were in orbit around a small asteroid with negligible gravity: the initial objective was to plant a mine on its surface and jet safely away before it exploded. Simple.

“Slowly now, 35 degrees left and 87 up.”

There it was, the rough rocky surface half a kilometre away. Spinning slowly. The target area climbed into view, then a minute later out. Thrust was simply a matter of pushing down with your foot, or feet, to fire the main jet. The hoop wasn’t part of the virtuality, except as a virtual image within it: it just registered the pressure from feet or hands when you pressed on it.

“OK, match velocities with the surface mark.”

Half the crew overshot. Carlos waited for them to return. They overshot on the way back.

“Gentle on the foot, Karzan!” Beauregard yelled.

Eventually they were all in formation, facing the rock, in geostationary orbit above the mark.

“OK, go,” Carlos said.

He thrust off, warily and lightly. The surface hurtled towards him. He pushed hard with his hands, to fire retros. Too late. The visor went black. Mocking green letters scrolled. GAME OVER.

A few seconds later, the screen came back on. Black space, bright stars, and everyone tumbling about again like kittens in a sack. Carlos found himself laughing. They all were. Nicole had been right. This was going to be fun.

A consequence of training on the simulators that Carlos hadn’t expected was that he finished each day mentally exhausted but shaking with surplus physical energy. It took him a day or two to identify the problem. Chun had solved it already: after the first session he’d gone next door to the swimwear shop, and then to the beach. They all laughed, then one by one over the next evenings did the same.

“Is it safe?” Carlos asked Nicole, the night before the day he took the plunge.

“Your friends are all coming back safely, aren’t they?”

“You know what I mean.”

“The bigger predatory ichthyoids don’t come close to shore,” she mused. “Except when there’s been a storm far out at sea, of course. As far as I know, there are no jellyfish equivalents or other nasty stingers in this ocean. Except… hmm. Nah. You’re safe enough as long as the tide isn’t running wild.”

“Which it does, with no pattern I can see.”

Nicole laughed. “You need a supercomputer to spot the patterns. Tough shit for any Galileo if this world had native intelligence.”

“Just as well we’re inside a supercomputer, then.”

“Oh, all right. I’ll get Iqbal to post warning signs on the beach if necessary.”

“What about tomorrow?”

She pondered. “Tomorrow’s fine.”

He didn’t ask how she knew, given what she’d said. Maybe she’d been here long enough for it to be intuitive.

That evening, when he staggered out of the surf, legs streaked with coppery wrack, hurting his feet on pebbles, he was almost certain that he was in a real reality and not a simulation. An hour later, over hot seafood in the Touch, Nicole told them all that they’d trained as far as they could in the simulators. It was time for the real thing: one training exercise in the frames, then combat. Tomorrow they would be robots in space.

The bus to the spaceport left two hours after dawn. Pick-up was from Ichthyoid Square. It felt strange to stand there in broad daylight. A handful of locals got on the bus ahead of the fighters. Apart from lovers—Chun and Rizzi’s boyfriends, Beauregard’s p-zombie lass—no one gave the fighters any kind of send-off. Karzan looked along the street, shook her head, shrugged and jumped on board with no sign of regret. Carlos was last on the bus. At the step Nicole gave him a kiss, and waved as the bus pulled out.

After their fast drives up into the hills, the bus journey seemed painfully slow. Only Zeroual looked out of the window with anything like attention. Carlos sat alone, staring out, determined to stay awake. At stop after stop, eager settlers climbed on, lugging bags. They talked quietly in the local language, or read from devices. Carlos tried to scare himself by looking over the precipitous drops on hairpin turns. His jolts of terror were real enough, but came to seem contrived: the driver of this bus would never doze at the wheel, or make a mistake, or suffer attention to wander.

As the bus trundled through a long, bare pass cut through the highest range, Carlos noticed that the others had one by one nodded off. He resolved not to. He wanted to see the spaceport. He revisited it in his imagination, from the implanted vivid impression he’d had on arrival. He thought of long runways and screaming spaceplanes. How exciting it would be to see them in reality!

He dreamed of spacecraft, and woke in space.

Carlos felt that he had spent his life being stupid.

The transition was an awakening that made all his past experience seem like fevered dreaming, and all his earlier actions like sleepwalking. He understood why. In the simulation his mind had been a faithful emulation of the workings of the mammalian brain. All the synaptic lags, all the poisons of fatigue, all the effects of depressants and stimulants, all the hormonal trickles and surges had been mathematically modelled to the last molecule.

Here in the frame, there was no need for that. Everything was optimised. He was thinking ten times faster than he ever had in the flesh. This was a hundred times slower than time in the sim, but it felt faster and far clearer. His thoughts had all of the lightning, and none of the grease. Emotion was still here: exultation rang through his iron nerves. He could even feel embarrassment, at how limited and clumsy he’d always been. He was still himself, indeed more so now that all his memories were equally and instantly accessible. For a moment it almost overwhelmed him that his life from earliest childhood suddenly made sense.

Self-knowledge was complete. He could read himself like a book. It was as if decades of stored photographs and clips, in album files to be flicked through with nostalgia and perplexity, had been stitched together, and edited into a continuous, panoramic narrative. There were still gaps: blank spaces as if some photos and clips had been damaged or deleted. He knew and accepted what this meant. The brain from which his mind had been rebooted had been damaged and incomplete. It would have been far more troubling if all the gaps had been filled. In that case some of the memories would have had to be false, casting doubt on all.

Enough introspection.

He hung in free fall in a wide, low hangar, open to space on one side. Through the gap he could see part of the day side of the surface of a planet. Mainly blue and white like Earth, it showed traces of red and brown and green and other colours that Carlos didn’t have a name for until he noticed he was seeing ultraviolet and infrared. In front of that varied surface, like a speck floating on an iris, was a small gibbous moon. He zoomed his sight until he could see landmass on the primary, and active craters on the moon. Their spectroscope smell was sulphuric even from here. Everything he saw came to him as if tagged and labelled. The primary was SH-0, the moon SH-17; the other exomoons, whether now notionally in view or occluded by the primary, were all alike present to his awareness. Each name hooked a long trawl of data, already in his mind but too much for his immediate attention. Knowledge of its availability sufficed.

He zoomed back, to further inspect his surroundings.

On the lip of the gap crouched six launch catapults each with a scooter racked and ready to go: skeletal, bristling, flanked with bulbous tanks. All five walls of the hangar were crusted with machinery and peppered with hatchways. Among the static machines other machines moved, some deploying robotic arms and tools. All the machines and apertures looked queasily quasi-biological: more evolved than designed, grown rather than manufactured. More movement—mostly repetitive—went on in those of the passageways down which he could see.

The other five fighters hung in space alongside him. He was aware of their precise locations even before he turned his head towards them. It was an odd sensation, like the subliminal sonic cues supposedly perceptible to the blind. He guessed it had to be radar. The others looked as he presumed he did himself: humanoid, featureless, black; lithe robots each exactly fifty centimetres tall and with a mass of ten kilograms. There was nothing to distinguish one from the other—no markings, not even nameplates on foreheads—but by, he presumed, some trick of the frames’ software below conscious awareness, Carlos could tell his companions apart as readily as if they had faces.

Now that he thought about faces…

He had a moment of panic at the absence of any hint of mouth or nostrils in the blank, black, glassy faceplates. It was the same claustrophobia that had overcome him the first time the space robot simulator’s shell had clicked shut. Relief came as quickly as it had then, and more smoothly. He discovered no impulse to breathe—rather, he felt as if he’d just taken a deep breath of oxygen-rich air and had no need to breathe out. That recognition came with another. He could smell the background tang of hydrogen, the organic whiff of carbon composites, the sharp scent of steel: spectroscopy experienced as odour.

Like the others, he looked down at himself, rolling in microgravity, bending his torso, flexing his limbs and digits. His arms and hands in front of him looked as if made of obsidian. His body image hadn’t changed except for his size, which at that moment didn’t trouble him. The somatic sensation was of being inside a close-fitting, comfortable spacesuit. The simulator robot-suit had come to feel like an extension of himself as he’d got used to it, by a well-understood illusion already familiar to him from his drone-operating days. This was the same, but real. Pressing a finger of one hand to the palm of another, he felt the touch but saw no dent in the skin.

Now another new sense came into play, again experienced as a familiar, unreliable sensation: the feeling of being watched. Something or someone was pinging him. Carlos concentrated. The feeling faded. A message like a fragment of inner monologue took its place:

He tried to sub-vocalise. Carlos Carlos Carlos. Fuck, how do I do this? No, mean oh ?

He found himself responding:

To which a reply came:

Carlos replied:

Then he felt as if he’d blinked, and shaken his head.

How the fuck had he
done
that?

A cable spooled from a hatchway next to the launch catapults towards the floating fighters. One by one they grabbed it. When the last had done so they were reeled in.

Carlos swung his feet to the floor, and his companions followed suit. Magnetic soles clicked to the deck. Standing upright brought relief and orientation. They all stood, swaying slightly. The catapults were a metre high, the scooters mounted on them four metres long, and loomed huge.

“Everyone OK?” he said. It was just like speaking over the radio inside a helmet. He knew it wasn’t. He could feel his own lips, tongue and teeth, and the movement of his jaw, but no breath.

Mumbles came back, some querulous, others euphoric.

“That’s not good enough,” Carlos said. “Report in one by one: Beauregard!”

“Here!”

“Karzan!”

“Here!”

“Chun!”

“Here!”

“Rizzi!”

“Here, skip.”

“Zeroual!”

“Here!”

The voices were distinct and recognisable. Good. About to ask if anyone was freaking out, he decided not to tempt fate. Better to reassure, and keep things positive.

“OK,” he said. “We’re undoubtedly in a bizarre situation, but we’ve all been told to expect it, we’ve all prepared for it and we’ve all trained for it. We’ll get used to it. Now, I’m going to repeat the roll-call in that radio thing, and see if we can all handle that. OK?”

“Sorry, skip,” said Chun. “What radio thing?”

They all responded, with more or less hesitation. Carlos repeated the roll-call until they were fluent.

“This is how whoever or whatever is in charge here communicates with us,” he said. “OK?”

“I think they’ve all got it, skip,” said Beauregard.

Another ping, then:

Carlos responded. Then, to the squad:

Lurching, they picked their way across the deck to flimsy- looking ladders at the foot of the catapults. As he plodded stickily towards the rim of space, Carlos saw directly before him the scale of the planet and his distance from it, and had a momentary feeling of absurdity. Here he was, a robot less than twenty inches tall. His new clarity of mind cut in with a wry question: facing that enormity and complexity in front of him, and the infinity in all directions around him, would standing four times taller make him feel any more significant?

Irrationally, he knew, it would.

Carlos placed one foot on the first rung, tugged the other foot off the floor and used his hands on the subsequent rungs. He rolled at the top and moved hand over hand along a guideline to a recess in the midsection, about his own size and shape, that was more socket than cockpit. He eased his frame prone into the tobogganing position that the arrangement of grips, footrests, and headrest implicitly invited.

The posture was already familiar from the amusement hall scooter simulator. What happened next was not. He was plugged in, literally. He had a feeling of power, literally. Everything clicked into place, metaphorically. Carlos could feel the connections between his frame and the machine, switches closing one by one, power surges, system checks, instrument readings becoming sense impressions, gas jets or rocket firings muscle impulses, maths intuitive. He hadn’t felt this engaged with a machine since he’d had the spike in his head.

The catapults shot them all into space like spat pips.

They fell away from the station, too fascinated by what was in front of them to look back. The superhabitable exoplanet SH-0 hung before them in full view, three-quarters in cloud-turbulent day, a quarter in volcano-pricked night. The exoplanet weighed in at four Earth masses. In gaps between the clouds on the visual spectrum, and through them in other wavelengths, Carlos saw a fractured jigsaw of minor and major continents strewn across a ragged lace of oceans and seas, gulfs and sounds. Each landmass had its own signature combination of desert and forest, plain and range. A deeper gaze brought out the underlying crazy paving of numerous continental plates. Their regions of collision and separation, and the zones of subduction and spreading, glowed on the far infrared like a complex, twisted mesh of hot wires.

It was a view Carlos felt he could fall into. On his present trajectory, he would. With a convulsive wrench of attention and a brief burn of the jets, he brought himself to a halt relative to the station. The others had the same response, with a few tenths-of-a-second’s delay.

Forward thrust was still like a downward press, retro still a forward shove, attitude still twists and turns of the head and torso. After days riding the simulators the manoeuvres were all reflex to the fighters. With a deft dance of jets, they countered their outward motion and turned around 180 degrees to take up close formation a thousand metres from the station. Looking back at it now for the first time, Carlos found it almost as fascinating a sight as the planet had been a moment earlier.

The station was, as far as he knew, the centre, the focus and origin of all the human-derived machinery in the system. Somewhere in it, or perhaps distributed throughout, must be the Direction’s AI: the local relay of Earth’s government. With no meaningful communication possible across twenty-five light years, it had to be autonomous, implementing decisions made centuries earlier by or on behalf of some representative assembly of humanity, gathered on the shore of Manhattan island. Despite all wary doubt, the thought struck awe.

Not quite as awe-inspiring, but almost as remarkable, was the extent to which the Direction’s functions were outsourced. The station was a city in its own right, a Manhattan without people but buzzing with commerce.

In a stable orbital position around SH-0, the structure was a rough torus about a thousand metres in diameter, sprouting offshoots in all directions. Irregular, jointed, modular, bristling with aerials and sensors and solar panels, it looked like a something a monstrous bird had woven from twisted thorny twigs, interlaced with bits of broken branches, and decorated with shiny scraps of foil and chips of broken glass.

Which probably wasn’t far from the truth. From what Carlos (flawlessly, now) recalled from discussions and speculations about starwisp interstellar settlement mission profiles, the first steps on arrival were to snuggle close to any suitably rich array of resources, and cannibalise what was left of the probe and its shields into swarms of smaller machines all the way down to nanobots. These would bootstrap asteroid and cometary material into construction machines to extract and deliver resources to larger constructions such as this. The whole process could be done without awakening or evoking any intelligence more advanced than an ants’ nest. That the outcome looked instinctual seemed apt. Around the torus and on it, likewise insectile-small spacecraft—some moving, others tethered—hung or clung as if drawn to its warmth.