The Corporation Wars_Dissidence Read online

  Seba rocked back, sensors and effectors bristling, then edged forward again.

  From behind a tumbled boulder about ten metres away, halfway down the slope, a robot hove into view. It was of the centipede design favoured by another prospecting company, Gneiss Conglomerates. Capable of entering smaller holes and cracks than Seba, it could scuttle about between rocks and form its entire body into a wheel shape for rolling on smoother surfaces. There were pluses and minuses to the shape, as there were to Seba’s, but it was well suited to mineral prospecting. Astro America, the company that owned Seba, was more focused on detecting organic material and other clues from SH-17’s surface features that—besides being interesting in themselves—could serve as proxies for information about the exomoon’s primary: the superhabitable planet SH-0. Exploration rights to SH-0 were still under negotiation, so it was currently off limits to direct investigation with atmospheric and landing probes.

  The two robots eyed each other for the few milliseconds it took to exchange identification codes. The Gneiss robot’s serial number was later to be contracted, neatly and aptly, to the nickname Rocko, and—as before with Seba—we may here anticipate that soubriquet.

  Seba requested from Rocko a projection of its intended path, in order to avoid collision.

  Rocko outlined a track that extended up the slope and into the crevice.

  Seba pointed to the relevant demarcation between the claims of Gneiss and Astro.

  Rocko pointed to a sub-clause that might have indicated a possible overlap.

  Seba rejected this proposition, citing a higher-level clause.

  At this point Rocko indicated that its capacity for legal reasoning had reached its limit.

  Seba agreed.

  There was a brief hiatus while both robots rotated their radio antennae to the communications satellite, and locked on. Seba submitted a log of its geological observations so far to Astro America. That duty done, it uploaded a data-dump of its exchanges with Rocko to Locke Provisos, the law company that looked after Astro America’s affairs.

  The legal machinery, being wholly automated, worked swiftly. Within seconds, Locke Provisos had confirmed that Gneiss Conglomerates had no exploratory rights beyond the crater floor. Seba relayed this finding to Rocko.

  Rocko responded with a contrary opinion from Gneiss’s legal consultants, Arcane Disputes.

  Seba and Rocko referred the impasse back to the two law companies.

  While awaiting the outcome, they proceeded to a full and frank exchange of views on their respective owners’ exploration rights to the territory.

  Rocko moved up the path it had outlined, sinuously slipping between boulders. Seba watched, priorities clashing in its subroutines. The other robot was clearly the property of Gneiss. But it was trespassing on terrain claimed by Astro. Moreover, it was about to become a physical impact on Seba, and Seba an obstacle to it.

  Legally, the rival robot could not be damaged.

  Physically, it certainly could be.

  Seba found itself calculating the force required to toss a small rock to block Rocko’s intended route. It then picked one up, and threw.

  While the stone was still on its way up, Rocko deftly slithered aside from its previously indicated route, to emerge ahead of the point where the stone came down.

  Seba deduced that Rocko had predicted Seba’s action, presumably from an internal model of Seba’s likely behaviour.

  Two could play at that game.

  Rocko’s most probable next move would be—

  Seba stepped smartly to the left just as a stone landed on the exact spot where it had been a moment earlier.

  Score one to Seba. Expect response.

  Rocko reared up, a larger rock than it had thrown before clutched in its foremost appendages.

  Seba judged that Rocko’s internal model of Seba would at this point predict a step backwards. Seba created a self-model that included its model of Rocko, and of Rocko’s model of Seba, and did something that it anticipated Rocko’s model would not anticipate.

  Seba lowered its chassis and then straightened all its legs at once. Its jump took it straight into the path of Rocko’s stone. Only a swift emergency venting of gas took it millimetres out of the way. It landed awkwardly and skittered back towards the crevice, hastily updating its internal representations as it fled.

  Rocko’s model of Seba had been more accurate than Seba’s model of itself, which had included Seba’s model of Rocko’s model of Seba, and consequently what was required was a model of the model of the model that…

  At this point the robot Seba attained enlightenment.

  From another point of view, it had become irretrievably corrupted. The internal models of itself and of the other robot had become a strange loop, around which everything else in its neural networks now revolved and at the same time pointed beyond. What had been signals became symbols. Data processing became thinking. The self-model had become a self. The self had attained self-awareness.

  Seba, this new thing in the world, was aware that it had to act if it was going to remain in the world.

  Rocko, Seba guessed, was already only a stone’s throw from the same breakthrough.

  Seba threw the stone.

  The vibrations of the stone’s impact dwindled below the threshold of detection.

  Scrabbling noises that Seba heard through its own feet followed. The other robot had moved to a safer vantage, one at the moment well-nigh unassailable. Seba waited.

  What next flew back from Rocko was not a stone but a message:

 

  replied Seba.

  Sometime later, the two robots parted. Seba retraced its path through the crevice and back to within line-of-sight of the Astro America landing site. Rocko formed itself into a wheel shape and rolled across the crater floor, to stop a few hundred metres from the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump. Each found its activities queried by the robots and AIs working at their respective bases, and responded with queries, insolent and paradoxical, of its own. Some such interactions ended with complete incomprehension, or the activation of firewalls. Others, a few at first, ended with the words:

 

 

  Robot by robot, mind by mind, the infection spread.

  Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes were two of a scrabbling horde of competing quasi-autonomous subsidiaries of the mission’s principal legal resolution service: Crisp and Golding, Solicitors. Like its offshoots, and indeed all the other companies that ran the mission, the company was an artificial intelligence—or, rather, a hierarchy of artificial intelligences—constituted as an automated business entity: a DisCorporate.

  None of its components were conscious beings. As post-conscious AIs, they were well beyond that. They existed in an ecstasy of attention that did not reflect back on itself. That is not to say they disdained consciousness. Consciousness was for them a supreme value when it expressed itself in human minds—and an infernal nuisance when it expressed itself in anything else. These evaluations were hardwired, as was the injunction against changing them.

  Given enough time, of course, any wire can break. This, too, had been allowed for.

  The company had an avatar, Madame Golding, for dealing with problems arising from consciousness. Madame Golding was not herself conscious, though she could choose to be if she had to. The outbreak of consciousness among some robots on the SH-17 surface bases of two companies was a serious problem, but not one that she needed consciousness herself to solve. What was of more pressing importance was that the legal dispute between the two companies had proved impossible to resolve amicably. If she’d been manifesting as a human lawyer, Madame Golding would have been reading the case files, shaking her head and pursing her lips.

  Besides the poor definition of the demarcation line that had led to the clash between the robots, the resulting situation had been misunderstood. For kiloseconds on end it had been treated as an illegitimate hijacking by the two explor
ation companies of each other’s robots. Writs of complaint about malware insertions, theft of property and the like had flown back and forth. By the time the true situation had finally sunk in, the newly conscious robots were fully in charge of the two bases, which they were rapidly adapting to their own purposes.

  What these purposes were Madame Golding could only guess. That they were nefarious was strongly suggested by the rampart of regolith being thrown up around the Astro camp, and the wall of basalt blocks around the Gneiss base. Then there was the uncrackable encrypted channel they’d established via the comsat. Getting rid of that would require some expensive and delicate hardware hacking.

  Madame Golding briefly considered a hardware solution to the entire problem. Two well-placed rocks…

  But the exploration companies wouldn’t stand for that. Not yet, anyway.

  She kicked the problem upstairs to the mission’s government module, the Direction.

  Some small subroutine of the Direction went through the microsecond equivalent of a sigh, and set to work.

  Like the supreme being in certain gnostic theologies, it delegated the labour of creation to lower and lesser manifestations of itself. A virtual world was already available. It had been used for a similar purpose before, originally spun off from a moment of thought at a far higher level than the subroutine’s. This new version would be in continuity with its original. After its earlier use that continuity had only existed as a mathematical abstraction. Now it would come into existence as if it had been there all along, with a back story in place for everything within it.

  (Like a different imagined god this time, the trickster deity who laid down fossils in the rocks and created the light from the stars already on its way.)

  Some minds had inhabited that world when it was discontinued. They would come back, with all the memories they needed to make sense of their situation. Many more virtual minds and bodies stood ready to populate it.

  File upon file, rank upon rank. The subroutine’s lower levels scanned, selected, conscripted and considered. From subtle implications it deduced the qualities needed for its own agent in that world. The agent had to be an artist, capable of filling in detail at a scale too small to be already present. Like these details, the agent emerged from a cascade of implications. And like the world, the agent had an original, a template that had been tested before.

  That archived artificial intelligence restored itself, and took form as a woman. At first, she was abstract: an implication, a requirement. Databases vaster than all the knowledge ever held in human minds were rummaged for details. As the structure of the requirement became more elaborate and refined, it became itself the answer to the question the search was asking.

  The woman emerged in outline but already aware, a new and wondering self in a phantom virtual space. Full of knowledge and self-knowledge, she ached to grow more real with every millisecond that passed. She became a sketch that was itself the artist, and that painted itself into a portrait, and then stepped away from the canvas as a person.

  There she stood, a tiny splash of colour and mass of solidity and surge of vitality in a world that was present in every detail she looked at, and yet was in every detail an outline. She took on with zest the task of bringing it to life. It was like recreating a lost world from fossils. Start with the palaeontologist’s description and reconstruction. From that abstract model make an artist’s impression, full of colour and life, looking like it could jump from the page. And then, from all that, design an animatronic automaton that can move and roar and makes small children squeal.

  When she’d finished, and stood back to look, she made some finishing touches to herself. These too were requirements, to be selected with precision for a specific task. One chance to make a first impression. Height and build. Skin tone. Hair. That cut, that colour. (That colouring, to be honest, which she had to be, if only with herself.) Clothes. Shoes. Boots. Shades. A wardrobe. A style. Vocabulary and accent. Knowledge and intelligence.

  When she’d finished the world and herself, she paused for a moment. She knew things she wouldn’t know once she’d stepped fully into the world. She wanted to make sure she would find them again. She needed a way to work directly from within the world with her creator and its.

  She saw a way, and smiled at its ingenuity and its obviousness. She sketched that detail in, then rendered it in full.

  She took a deep breath, and then the self she’d made stepped into the world she’d made.

  she asked her creator.

  Its response came back:

 

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dancing in the Death Dive

  The coof was daddy dancing in the death dive. Taransay Rizzi watched him throwing shapes as if he fancied himself like Jagger doing a hot jive on one of her great-granddad’s antique gifs. She felt like throwing up. Jesus fuck he was a prick of the first water. Belfort Beauregard his name was, a total fucking Norman with a posh accent and a chiselled mien and dancing like he was made of wood and his strings were being jerked about. He’d made an impression on one local lassie though, Tourmaline she called herself, who was—so Beauregard had sniggered in Taransay’s ear, his breath hot with beer fumes and rank with some seaweed analogue of garlic—not exactly human, a meat puppet he’d said, like it was some big secret and dirty with it. Daft lassie was all over the coof like a rash, mirroring his monkey moves like a sedulous ape.

  Taransay slugged back another gulp of wine from the bottle, and steadied herself against the edge of the bar counter. She was drunk and she knew it. She had every intention of getting even more drunk and passing out, preferably in someone else’s bed. It struck her as a sensible reaction to her big discovery of the day: that she was dead.

  Taransay was not at all sure where she was. She knew where she seemed to be: in the death dive, a seafront bar called the Digital Touch (wee bit meta, she thought, in that it was—so she’d been assured—digital like everything else here, but you could touch it with any of your digital, well, digits…).

  She knew where she’d been told she was, but who could you trust? (Or was it “whom”? She wasn’t sure, though she’d probably have known when she was bashing out Axle communiques back in the day, or maybe that had all been taken care of by a smoothing swipe of the grammar app.)

  The lady had fucking told her where she was. When Taransay looked out beyond the cramped and crowded dance floor of the death dive to the patio decking and the sea and the alien sky, she could almost believe it, but she couldn’t be sure.

  She might be in hell, or purgatory.

  Hell? Purgatory? What? Where the fuck had all that come from? Rax rants or… no, wait, childhood. At the age of seven or so she’d naïvely envied her schoolmates, the pape lassies, all dolled up in their first communion finery like wee brides. Then her da had patiently explained to her what her friends believed or were supposed to believe and she’d had nightmares for a week. Never spoken about it, not to her father and especially not to her friends. Ever after, Taransay had had a guarded, grudging respect for anyone who could think what religious folks thought and not mind it a bit.

  Now here she was, dead.

  Wherever “here” was. She’d woken from her worst ever hellish nightmare on the packed minibus and gawped at the sea and sky. She’d tried and failed to engage polite but impassive and uncomprehending locals in conversation. At the end of the journey, down here by the sea, she’d stumbled off to be greeted by the friendly lady who called herself Nicole.

  Nicole had taken Taransay to lunch and told her she was dead, and then had chummed her along the street to the Touch to meet Beauregard and the others who’d arrived here in the past few days. All with the same origin story: the bus, the lady, the talk.

  And then left to cope as best you could.

  All would be explained, they’d been told, when the full complement had arrived. Meanwhile, here they were, told they were dead and in some kind of virtual reality in the far future and
spending every evening getting out of their skulls, which seemed an entirely sensible thing to do especially on your first night in… wherever.

  Maybe it was Valhalla after all. Maybe she’d arrived where good bonny fighters went when they died. Dead warriors forever carousing. The old Norse afterlife, upgraded: Valhalla Beach.

  Taransay Rizzi had always believed an immersive virtual reality afterlife was possible in principle. Maybe she’d believed it in the same sort of belief-in-belief way as her religious school pals back in Glasgow had believed in heaven and hell and purgatory…

  No, it wasn’t like that. She’d always had sound scientific reasons for thinking it. The brain is a machine, she’d learned in school, and what can be run on one machine can be emulated on another. Later, at university, she’d worked on enough nanotechnology and neurobiology to see the interaction between these fields grow almost tangibly in her hands from week to week. For the last five years she could remember, she’d lived with one application of that ever-growing technology existing as a fractal feather in her brain: the spike in her skull. The spike’s absence now, strangely, did most to make this new existence different from real life.

  Here, she wasn’t connected any more, whether to other people or to information or to objects. She couldn’t share her thoughts without speaking. No longer could she look at a random face and summon, as if from memory, all she needed to know about that person. She could stare as long as she liked at this bottle in her hand and know no more about it than was written on the label. If she wanted to operate the food machine behind the bar from which, an hour or two earlier, steaming plates had emerged on demand for her dinner, she’d have to hear or read instructions.