The Corporation Wars_Dissidence Read online

  “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.

  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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Worlds of the War

  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 emb
arrassment, 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.