The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (9 page)

Christ, what a shower. Two of them POC: Chun and Karzan. Long-term civilised POC, but still. Neither were from the friendliest of long-term civilisations. And Chun queer to boot. Not that the whites were any better. Usual story. Ames was dyed in the wool Axle, no question, true believer. Smart, but only programmer smart. In terms of political and military thinking he was plainly a dullard. The American long tail phenomenon. Like what had happened to the Rax. America: where good ideas go when they die. Rizzi was that mix of Celtic and Mediterranean types that made for… what? A fervour easily turned to fanaticism. Hot blood, cold, small mind. The Scottish flaw. And Carlos? White to be sure, English even, but that name was a dead give-away. Even if he’d had second thoughts, it betrayed his original attitude. Guilt-tripped guerrilla envy. A little Third World in the head. Soul squalid as a shanty town.

One thing Beauregard was sure of was that he knew how to turn this little rabble into a squad. That was something to look forward to, even in hell. For him, anyway. Only Karzan had any notion of what real training was like. The rest of them didn’t have a clue what they were in for.

Karzan… oh, fuck. Karzan was weeping, all of a sudden. She stared across the table at him, her fierce face crumpled.

“Everyone’s dead,” she cried. She sobbed and sniffed, and looked around wildly. “All dead!”

The others looked at her, sombre if not sober. Survivor guilt. Dangerous.

Beauregard put down his drink and steadied his resolve. He leaned across and took one of her hands between both of his.

“Yes, Maryam,” he said. “Most of the people we knew and loved and cared about are dead. Not all, but… no. No false hopes. But the thing is… we’re dead, too. Dead and gone. We’ve suffered whatever they did. They mourned us and we mourn them. That’s all right, that’s natural. Yes?”

She nodded, doubtfully.

“We’ve walked the dark valley,” Beauregard went on. “Just as they did. And if the lady is right, we’ll walk it again. And again.” He shook his head, slowly, never looking away from the dead peshmerga’s eyes. “We’re still dead, like them. We’re with them, and we always will be.”

Karzan blinked and took a deep breath. Her hand gripped his, hard.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Thanks, sarge.”

She let go of his hand, and raised her glass.

“Absent friends!” Her voice still shook.

“And present company,” said Beauregard.

Ichthyoid Square was a draughty plaza at the far end of the arcade, sloping diagonally to the slipway on to a long jetty that jutted over the beach. A green bronze sculpture of the eponymous sea creature on a plinth in the middle lent it a touch of municipal posh. In the Resort’s better days the plaza might have been a car park. It might yet become one, for all Carlos knew.

He squatted on the pediment of the plinth in pre-dawn cold and a glimmer of ringlight, backpack between his feet, and checked over the rifle across his knees. The good old standard-issue AK-97 had been in his kitbag, disassembled and stashed in a moulded case with a brace of ammo clips. The design was optimised for the electronic battlefield by having no electronic components whatsoever. He could put the weapon together in his sleep, but he preferred to make sure when he was awake. Handling the solid metal and plastic, he found it hard to believe the reality around him was virtual. The irony was that his reflexive familiarity with the rifle came from playing hyper-realistic first-person shooters in his misspent youth. He’d never touched a real firearm in his life.

His real life. Slotting the stock into place, Carlos nipped a pinch of thumb-tip. Grunted and sucked away the pain. This was real life, for now. Nothing to do but accept it. Or not.

Also in the kitbag had been a chunky watch. He glanced at it and saw the time as 15.48, on one reading. The concentric dials were hard to figure out: the 24-hour clock of Earth, perpetually out of synch with the local time; the longer day of the planet evenly divided into periods, minims and moments (all of which struck him as pointless, like a flashy feature of an executive toy); and a relentless metric march of real elapsed time outside, in which milliseconds that felt like seconds clocked up via hundredths and tenths to seconds, with kiloseconds on a calendar-type scale and a mission date given as 315-and-a-bit megaseconds. Starting, he presumed, from the starwisp’s arrival in the system or the probe’s awakening, about ten Earth years ago. He reckoned metric time would be the best bet for coordinating training exercises, and live actions, too.

The previous evening, he’d given up on specifying a time to meet by anyone’s watch. He and Beauregard—who had indeed been in the British Army, in some intel capacity about which he was still reticent, until reading and disillusion had turned him to the Axle—had settled on “Dawn at the harbour.” Carlos doubted that they’d all turn up—by the time he’d left for the house he’d been assigned (the key, with a handwritten cardboard address tag, was in the kitbag) the group was well into getting drunk. A loud gaggle of young-looking English-speaking locals, obviously already familiar with the recent arrivals, had tumbled out on the terrace around sundown and joined in the fun. They weren’t really young—like the barman Iqbal they were old people reborn, and they combined the sophistication of age with the energy of youth. Part of the bar and most of the patio had become an impromptu dance floor. Carlos had watched the escalating antics with growing abhorrence.

Not that he’d had a good night himself. The house, up on the slope, was well-appointed enough, though impersonal, like a three-star self-catering apartment. A frail-looking, faintly comical contrivance of metallic limbs ambled around the place, tidying up and cleaning behind him with an air of absent-minded obsessiveness. The lack of communications devices other than a wall-fixed emergency phone and a wall-mounted flat screen had left him at a loss and at a loose end. He’d woken repeatedly from confused dreams, sweating under a thin sheet, tormented by the dizzying, dismaying realisation that everyone he’d ever known was dead.

His adult life had been one of slingshot encounters: attractions and flings, followed by widening separation. The faces and bodies remained in memory like fly-by photos, to be interpreted later in depth, sometimes bringing delayed surprises. His only stable orbit, elliptical and repetitive, had been around Jacqueline Digby. Her friends called her Jax. A computer science student at Leeds University, her smile had lured him into the Axle milieu, then incipient: an online reading group, a cafeteria clique, a cat’s cradle of ever-shifting relationships, of fallings for and fallings out. After a couple of years, his and Jacqueline’s deepening involvement in and commitment to the Acceleration had stretched and strained any they had to each other. The last he remembered they hadn’t met for eighteen months, yet there was always the possibility that their paths would cross again. Now they never would. He felt this loss more keenly than he might have expected. Other losses, too: he hoped his parents and brother had survived the war and not been too ashamed by his ignominious end. This seemed unlikely.

He’d also been caught up in futile questions. As the alien sun peered over the shoulder of the headland to his right and feathered pterosaurs squabbled raucous on the black sand, the questions bugged him still.

The most troubling feature of his environment was its sheer physicality. This niggle was not supposed to happen. As the philosopher Bostrom had long ago pointed out, everyday reality was running on top of bizarre quantum mechanical goings-on when you got down to it, quarks and bosons and all kinds of incomprehensible physics shit, so learning that the version of it you were in was running on information processing shouldn’t be too hard to take. The possibility of living in fully realised, painstakingly rendered simulations had been a default assumption of Acceleration and Reaction both, and uncontroversial to the point of cliché in the mainstream. His teenage wargaming had given him a foretaste. The spike had come close to the full virtual experience, albeit with real rather than virtual sensory input. There was no reason why the same technology couldn’t have been developed further within years or even months of the last real time he remembered. It probably had been, while his attention had been focused on the struggle rather than the latest news from the science front. He could still be on Earth after all, much as he’d tried to dismiss the thought earlier. Perhaps he’d never been killed and sentenced to death. Perhaps he was in a coma, or in prison, and this whole situation was a test, or even a rehabilitation programme.

Again his mind swirled to the conclusion that this kind of thinking led nowhere. None of the evidence to hand could settle it one way or the other. It was best to suspend judgement until such evidence showed up, if it ever did.

And yet, and yet—paranoid though that last speculation was, it involved fewer assumptions than the story Nicole had told him: his body preserved for centuries, his brain scanned and uploaded, starships and superhuman AI and renegade robots running amok… and a simulation of an entire planet!

But Occam’s Razor cut both ways. Maybe what
seemed
physically real
was
physically real, and he was on an actual exoplanet. Which meant, as far as he could see, that the real date was thousands if not millions of years later than the thirty-first century. Assuming, that is, that the planet had indeed been terraformed all the way up from green slime, and that it hadn’t been multicellular and human-compatible and so on all along… More possible lies, more paranoia.

And yet the possibility that he was being lied to, principally by Nicole but with the collusion of the locals and even some (or all?) of his purported comrades was in a way the most hopeful and sanity sustaining of all.

Because in the long run, all lies could be found out. Whether that would bring him any closer to the truth was another matter. He stared for a while at the brightest light in the sky, low in the dawn, brighter than Venus. This must be the planet Nicole had told him was called M-0: the hot heavy world closest to the alien sun. It looked very real. Far out to sea, a huge black shape shot from the water and splashed back. Carlos glimpsed the sight sidelong, and saw only the falling plume. He guessed an ichthyoid and kept watching, but it didn’t show again.

A petrol engine kicked into life at the near end of the village, somewhere up above him. Carlos saw headlights moving along the raised beach, stopping now and then like the bus, and turning down the steep slope. He followed their progress along the arcade street. As the sun came fully up, a crowded, low-slung military light utility vehicle with overhead roll bars turned into the square and came to a halt beside him.

“Good morning!” said Nicole, from the driver’s seat. She was dressed as if for a day in the country: headscarf and sunglasses, windcheater and slacks and sensible shoes. “Hop in!”

The front passenger seat was vacant, the back seats occupied by the squad. Kitted out for combat training, they looked business-like but predictably bleary. Ames had already nodded off, resting his head on his close-hugged backpack and slicking a swatch of his beard with saliva from the corner of his mouth as he snored.

“We’re all a bit hungover,” Taransay explained unnecessarily as Carlos slung his gear in the foot-well and clambered in. “Sorry, skip.”

“At least you’re all here and on time,” Carlos said over his shoulder. “Carry on, chaps.”

Nicole grinned, and gunned the engine. The vehicle moved slowly out of the square and back along the street.

“How did you know we were meeting here?” Carlos asked, buckling up.

“They all came back to mine,” Nicole shouted. “I was a bit disappointed you didn’t.”

“Give me a break,” he called back. “I’m just getting used to being dead.”

She shot him a sidelong look, smirked, then concentrated on driving. Carlos concentrated on ignoring being driven. He hadn’t been in a human-operated vehicle since childhood; in a petrol-fuelled one, never. Where were fossil fuels supposed to come from, on a terraformed planet that had presumably never had a Carboniferous Era? Carlos spared himself the asking. He imagined Nicole’s answer, true or false, would be plausible—genetically modified micro-organisms or nanobots making the petrol straight from leaf litter, or some such. In much the same way, she’d accounted for all the material goods in the resort. If they weren’t imported on the notional regular spacecraft, they were built in a nanofactory under the depot. More likely, Carlos reckoned, they were cut and pasted into the simulation.

Nicole drove them up the bus route into the wooded foothills of the bare mountains, then off on a dirt track through the forest. Now that he could see them up close, and in their variety, the plants didn’t look quite like trees, or even like cycads or giant ferns. Their branching followed a different fractal formula, their leaves a variant geometry. Like the feathered, fingered flying things that weren’t quite birds or bats, the tall, tough, trunked plants were in a clade of their own.

He waved a hand at them. “What are these called?”

Nicole kept her eyes fixed on the uneven track. “Trees!”

She stopped in a clearing small enough to be in shade. The engine noise faded from Carlos’s ears. A musical chatter from the treetops replaced it. Everyone piled out, except Nicole. As the fighters stood about stretching their limbs and easing their abused backbones, Nicole handed Carlos a sheaf of thin black glass devices like the one on which she’d shown him his crimes.

“Comms and maps,” she said. “Don’t lose them, and don’t get lost.”

Then she untied her headscarf, shook out her hair, shoved her sunglasses up on her forehead, tilted her seat back and closed her eyes.

“What do you want us to do?” Carlos asked, keeping his voice down.

Nicole kept her eyes closed.

“Jog off, spread out, keep in contact with and without comms, try to come back together at an agreed point.” She waved a hand. “Run up and down hills. Do press-ups. That sort of thing. Just do it out of my hearing.”

“What are you going to do?”

She hauled a small wicker hamper from under her seat.

“I’m going to have a picnic,” she said, “listen to some music, and later do a little serious sketching. See you in thirty seconds.”

He must have looked confused.

“Real time,” Nicole added. “Call it nine hours.”

Carlos slung on his kit, fanned out the comms like a hand of cards and gave all but one to Beauregard, then looked at fighters still waggling their shoulders, yawning and stretching, rubbing their eyebrows, clutching their backs. What a shower.

“Um,” he said. “Do you know what to do now?”

Beauregard clapped Carlos’s upper arm, then as if thinking better of the gesture snatched his hand back into a clenched fist salute.

“Leave it to me,” he said. “Sir.”

“None of that,” said Carlos.

“Very well, skip.”

Beauregard turned to the others: Rizzi, Ames, Chun, Karzan.

“Right!” he bawled. “You miserable fucking wankers! Don’t stand about here like spare pricks at a porn shoot! Pick up your packs and rifles! Get yourselves after me and the skip—down that path, now!”

Nicole winced.

Carlos hesitated a moment, then ran. As long as he kept out in front of Beauregard, he figured, and as long as the others fell in behind Beauregard, everything would be fine.

So it proved. Day after day followed the same pattern. Nicole drove them up into the mountains and told Carlos what to do in general terms. Carlos asked Beauregard what this meant in specific terms. Beauregard told the team what to do in no uncertain terms. They ran through forests and up mountainsides and scrambled up and down cliff-faces. They learned how to track each other through trees and across open country and to keep a skirmish line. Their virtual bodies, healthy by default and fresh out of the box, became leaner and fitter. They all learned to shoot accurately and to strip down and clean and reassemble the AK. They stalked the large herbivores that browsed the uplands, killed one for meat and took the carcase back in triumph to the resort’s butcher, and once or twice fended off with well-aimed missed shots one of the quasi-reptilian predators that haunted the upper forest and that they belatedly noticed stalking them.

In the evenings they all ended up at the Digital Touch, except Carlos, who found himself so knackered it was all he could do to shove his day’s grubby clothes in the laundry machine, shower, heat a dinner and stare at incomprehensible soap operas and documentaries (most in languages he didn’t know, helpfully subtitled in the local language and script, which he feared he was beginning to find purely pareidolic sense in) until he stumbled to his bed.