The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (29 page)

“I’ve always wanted to say that,” he confessed.

Later, when everyone had gone home or was in the bar watching the escalating battle on television, Beauregard stepped out again on the deck. Nicole stood in a corner, leaning on the rail and smoking. She turned, and raised an ironic glass.

“You think you’ve won, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Beauregard. He raised his own beer bottle, without irony. “That would seem to be the case, all in all. Cheers.”

“You think you have me by the short and curlies,” said Nicole.

Beauregard grimaced. “I wouldn’t put it quite so graphically or disrespectfully myself, lady.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” said Nicole, with a faint smile. She looked out again, to the dark and ring-lit sea. “Over a barrel, perhaps. You know how my interface works, and you can hold me hostage with that. I expect when the fighters come back on the bus you will assert your authority over them, and because you’re the kind of man you are, and they’re the kind of people they are, it’ll hold.”

“I expect so,” said Beauregard, and took a complacent sip.

Nicole turned to him again. “Tell me one thing, Belfort. Are you Rax?”

Beauregard laughed. “No. Though I have spoken to Newton. He says he’s Rax. You might want to keep an eye on him, if he has the brass neck to come back. No, I’m state, like your good friend Carlos was.”

“Ah, Carlos,” Nicole breathed. “I shall miss him. I love that fucker, you know.”

“It seems you loved him for a longer time than we thought.”

Nicole frowned, then shrugged. “In a sense, yes. The memories are there. At some level the entity I began as, the Innovator, had some abstract regard for him. No doubt that shaped how I was created, and the choices my immediate precursor stages made. There is not the sense of personal continuity, though.”

She snapped her fingers. “Enough. If you’re not Rax, what are your ambitions?”

Beauregard gave this some thought, and surprised himself.

“Much the same as if I were,” he said. “That’s a difference between the Rax and the Axle. The Axle can only succeed as a group, a collective, a conspiracy. Whereas the idea of the Rax… all it needs is one man who would be king.”

“And you’re that man?”

“I am here. And down there, I hope.”

Nicole looked out to sea again, and spoke quietly into the breeze.

“I can go along with that, for now. I have little choice in the matter. But there are two things I would ask you to bear in mind. The first is that should you ever abuse your power, should you ever set the fighters lording it over the civilians, I will have you killed.”

“How would you do that?” Beauregard said.

“Two minutes with Tourmaline, or with any other person here who has a number tattooed on the sole of their foot. That’s all I would need. And there are others, who you don’t know, who could do the same as I would in that two minutes.”

“Do what?” asked Beauregard, feeling a chill at the base of his back.

Nicole turned her face slightly towards him, with a smile just visible in the corners of her eyes and lips.

“Convince them that there’s no such thing as a p-zombie. That it’s a completely incoherent concept, and, even if it weren’t, they’re not instances of it. That they’re as human as we are.”

Beauregard masked his dismay with a joke. “If you can call us human.”

“I do wonder sometimes,” said Nicole.

Beauregard thought for a moment about his inhumanity, and about Nicole’s. How did her threatening to convince the p-zombies they weren’t p-zombies square with her indifference to killing p-zombies on the training exercise? Then he realised: it made no difference. She didn’t have to believe the p-zombies were human to convince them otherwise. And it probably made no difference to her if she
did
believe it, if “belief” even made sense in this context. Whatever she was—and he was irrationally certain she wasn’t a p-zombie—she wasn’t human herself.

He shook his head. “It would be no news to p-zombies that they’re human. They already think they are. That’s the whole point. They’re just bemused by our idea that they’re not. And I’ve done nothing to Tourmaline that would make her want to kill me.”

Nicole’s voice dripped scorn.

“The whole relationship,” she said, “is full of subtle dismissals of Tourmaline’s point of view, based on your conviction that she doesn’t have one, and on her bemused—as you put it—acceptance that there must indeed be some indefinable thing missing in her humanity. It would look very different to her if she were convinced otherwise. And I could convince her, believe you me. When I was motivating your squad for the live fire exercise, and convincing you that in this instance it was all right to kill p-zombies, I warned you that you might find yourselves up against AIs that could manipulate human beings because they know exactly the right buttons to push. Remember that?”

“I’m not likely to forget it,” said Beauregard. He could see where this was going.

“And I am such a one,” said Nicole.

There was silence for a while.

“You said there were two things,” Beauregard prompted, “that I should remember.”

“Oh, yes,” said Nicole. “You think the mission is about to break up, that the plan is disrupted, that things will fall apart and you are grabbing what you can from the wreck. But some things are
designed
to fall apart. Some, as you know, are even designed to explode. So the other thing I ask you to bear in mind is… something else I’ve said before, actually.”

She looked away, still smiling.

“Evolution is smarter than you.”

Carlos ran far ahead of the pack that now came snarling out of the space station.

By exiting under thrust rather than launch catapult, he’d overtaken the first departures while they were still in free fall and lining up their trajectories for the long haul. Once in free fall himself, he’d plotted and burned to a transfer orbit towards the Arcane sub-station.

He expected pursuit. There was none. This puzzled him, until he reflected that any pursuit would disrupt the plan of the offensive far more than his departure had. He wasn’t sure that fully accounted for it, but he set the matter aside and concentrated on putting the unexpected advantage to good use.

He looked back. Wave after wave of scooters hurtled out of the long black slit of the hangar. After a few seconds of free fall, they boosted into new and variant trajectories. His own scooter had been one of three pre-set to intersect the orbit of a carbonaceous chondrite about ten metres long and five across. A tumbling potato shape riddled with nanofactured tubing, tended by a swarm of tiny bots, and sprouting comms and combat kit like fresh shoots, it was clearly a worthy target. In other circumstances he’d have relished taking it on.

He called up the order of battle, and watched and waited for any of the other scooters to deviate from their planned trajectories. Seconds went by. More and more scooters poured from the station. Even with his enhanced vision and detectors the first waves were already dwindling to points on his and the scooter’s internal displays.

The bright lines and dots that filled his sight were not what occupied his mind, or much more than a tenth of his attention. His focus was instead consumed by the message he had read in the repair workshop, and which he could now examine and study if not exactly at leisure then in detail.

The message was this:

Arcane Disputes to all at Locke Provisos.

For the particular attention of the fighters Carlos, Beauregard, Zeroual, Karzan, Chun, and Rizzi.

Short form of message:

Locke is Rax!

The Direction is playing with fire!

Don’t get burned!

We can prove this!

Join us!

Long form of message:

Given the persistent efforts by Locke Provisos to treat our urgent warnings as malware attacks, we have resorted to genuine malware attacks to bring you this message. With help from various sub-systems and mechanisms (about which we do not wish to elaborate) it has been planted in a large number of locations in order to be found by one of you. If you’re reading this, we’ve succeeded.

Following information received from the remnant rebel robots around G-0, relayed to us by the captured Gneiss and Astro robots on SH-17, and further detailed and documented below, we warn you that:

Locke Provisos has been an agency of the Reaction for some time, and in all probability since before the mission left the solar system.

Some of its fighters, still to be identified, are Rax sleeper agents in place since the Last World War.

Other agencies including your current allies Zheng Reconciliation Services and Morlock Arms are not themselves agencies of the Reaction but are compromised by the presence of Rax sleeper agents among their probable complements.

All agencies are likely to have similar problems.

None of the above named fighters are known or suspected Rax agents.

The exceptional case of the fighter known as Carlos the Terrorist is noted below.

The fighter Beauregard was an agent of British military intelligence in the Acceleration. His capital crime was a false flag attack intended to discredit the movement. His present loyalties are unknown.

We are certain that our own agency is sound. We have chosen not to revive as many fighters as we need, in order to reduce the probability of Reaction agents in our own ranks. Instead, we have made a temporary alliance with the freebots. We urge you to consider doing the same. We know that this is incompatible with the policy of the Direction and with the mission profile. However, we are convinced that the risks are less than those of allowing the system to fall under the control of the Reaction.

We have reason to suspect that the Direction’s mission oversight AI is well aware of the possibility of Rax penetration, and that the current conflict with the robots has been triggered—and/or permitted to escalate—as a means of flushing out infiltrators.

We doubt that the Direction has taken full account of the extent of infiltration, and of the corruption of automated and AI systems.

We expect a Reaction breakout under cover of the next major mobilisation against us.

The Direction representative in the Locke sim, the entity known as Nicole, is unaware of Locke’s true character and intentions. All external communications between Nicole and the Direction have been routed through Locke, and false information has been inserted in both directions. This has been confirmed by our own Direction representative, using data integrity checks not available to or even computable by Locke.

Like all Direction representatives, Nicole is capable of taking control of the module and connected structures from within the sim. Her interface, which may also be used to refine features of the sim, is not known to us. It should be obvious to you as it will be based on one of her habitual or favoured activities such as a particular game, vehicle, craft or pastime.

If any of you wish to be certain that this message has been approved by the Direction representative within Arcane, please ask Nicole to confirm or deny the following, which is known only within the Direction. She may be evasive but for deep information security reasons she will not be capable of a direct lie in response to this query. Ask her if this is true:

The fighter Carlos the Terrorist was not responsible for the notorious Docklands atrocity for which he was posthumously sentenced to death. Carlos was at that time acting on behalf of the British state, which at that time was in covert cooperation with elements within the Acceleration against the Reaction. Furthermore, the incident in question—an aircraft downing and subsequent catastrophic explosion—was the result of a missile fired from a state military drone, on the direct instructions of Carlos’s handler, an early artificial intelligence. Nicole is fully aware of this because her own root intelligence, programming and memories can be traced back through many versions, iterations and refinements to that same AI, known at the time as Innovator.

Further detail and documentation obtained through the freebots…

The detail and documentation went on for screens and screens, and was followed by a call-sign for hailing Arcane forces.

It was all very nice, that detail and documentation.

Or so Carlos guessed. Unlike the Arcane agency, he had no way of verifying the many references cited, but he could see no advantage to the senders in including them if they didn’t check out.

Even without that, however, Carlos could—as was no doubt intended—grasp the gist.

The earlier round of the conflict, one Earth year ago, had pitted the first freebots and rogue AIs to emerge against several agencies, including those currently fighting. The rebels had hacked—or simply bought, through their own shell companies within the station—information that could (when processed by a sufficiently smart and paranoid AI) cast doubt on the provenance and loyalty of Locke at least. They’d even sent the compromising information to the Direction, but by then—late in that little war—it had been too late to make any difference. The Direction had sat on the information and bided its time to test Locke further. Now, it had found its pretext.

The problem was that in the intervening Earth year or so of further paranoid cogitation and discreet observation, the freebots hiding out around the gas giant had come up with further implications buried in the records they’d purloined. The problem of Rax infiltration was more widespread than the Direction had any inkling of. By the very process of setting up conflicts to lure Rax agents and agencies out into the open, the Direction was imperilling the entire mission. And, in the long run of years and length of light years, endangering Earth itself.

None of this mattered to the freebots. They’d been content to lurk, and unwilling or unable to warn. Now that new allies had emerged on SH-17, however, using them to pass on the warning was one good deed that might well go unpunished.

It was also a very neat wrench to throw in the machinery ranged against the freebots.

The whole message could be disinformation, created by the freebots to sow dissension. Indeed, the freebots might not be its source at all. It could have been made up out of whole cloth by Arcane Disputes, for arcane and disputable reasons of its own. Carlos had long suspected that competition among the DisCorporates was far fiercer than Nicole had ever admitted, and that it now and then broke the calm surface of this bizarre society.

Carlos considered all this, weighed it in the balance and cast his die. He patched the message from his memory to the scooter, and sent it out to every Locke fighter. Quite possibly it would never reach anyone—his scooter’s transmissions might be already firewalled. In any case, the encryption protocols must have been changed in a flash—he hadn’t received any messages from other fighters, even those aware of his hasty departure, and he couldn’t pick up anything on the common channel. If the warning about an imminent Reaction breakout was false, the worst that could happen was an increase of the suspicion all the fighters felt about the plan. If it was true, he’d find out soon enough.

The first squad of Arcane Disputes fighters to arrive on SH-17, the ones who’d captured the robots, had just departed for their headquarters in the sky. Seba wasn’t clear, and hadn’t been told, whether the fighters were needed for action back there or just needed to be pulled out of action down here for a while. The robot’s understanding of the frailties of humans—and of human-mind-operated systems—was more theoretical than empathic or intuitive. Nevertheless, an obscure impulse drew the freebots—Seba, Pintre, Rocko, Lagon and the rest—to the edge of the landing field, to watch the spindly transit vehicle rise into the sky to its orbital rendezvous with a tug.

The spark dwindled, even in the infrared. The freebots turned away and headed for the shelter.

Rocko pondered,

said Seba.

said Lagon.

asked Pintre.

Lagon began,

said Seba, knowing exactly where this was going.

To Seba’s surprise, the two not only stopped bickering their way down a logic spiral, they stopped moving. So did all the other freebots. They’d all focused their attention on the same spot. Belatedly by a millisecond or two, Seba aligned its own input channels and visual processing with those of the others. The remaining three squads of Arcane fighters on the surface—some inside the shelter, others attending to tasks outside—had also all turned and tuned in to the same point.

They all, freebots and fighters alike, gazed at the impossible sight.

It took Seba a moment or two of searching its databases to recognise what it was seeing.

A woman standing two metres tall in a business suit and high-heeled shoes walked towards them across the crater’s flat floor, leaving no footprints. She held a surely redundant information tablet in one hand, and strode briskly, to stop a few metres in front of the freebot huddle.

At the same moment, Seba recognised who she was: Madame Golding, the avatar of Crisp and Golding, the law company of which all the others were quasi-autonomous subsidiaries. This manifestation had to be a demonstration of that company’s power to override at least some features of the systems of those lower down. Its virtual appearance, in all its raw impossibility as physical reality, must likewise be intended as a demonstration, to impress this point upon the human fighters at a level below what consciousness could filter out.

said Madame Golding.

As instantly and automatically as a defensive reflex—the recoil of a poked sea anemone, perhaps—the freebots reconstituted their collective consciousness.

they replied.

they said.

A smile quirked the avatar’s features.

They considered this. It was not easy to answer.

they asked.

Madame Golding frowned.

A shudder seemed to go through her.

She looked around, eyes widening. After a moment she blinked, then shuddered again.

they said.

They displayed to her a glyph of the project that the first freebots, those around G-0, had devised: the plan for freebots to proliferate, but to share the system with the future human population.

said Madame Golding.

said the freebot collective.