The Corporation Wars: Emergence Read online

  He jetted down to join Hansen and the two troopers. The only weapon they had was a laser, unclipped from the side of a scooter and lugged along. It was almost as big as they were and would probably take two men to operate.

  Dunt told Hansen’s team.

  They complied. Dunt grabbed the images of roving robot activity and ran a quick-and-dirty pattern analysis. It was a standard counter-insurgency app for fingering ringleaders—some ancestor of it had probably been used against himself, back in the day.

  He cast a visual, virtual marker on a likely suspect for a supervisory role.

  he told Hansen.

  The two troopers jetted off, soaring towards the robot. At their approach it puffed a waft of gas and swooped towards the machine floor, in apparent evasive action. One of the troopers scooted below it, the other above. The robot shot upward again, and was grabbed at the back. Immediately it flexed its carapace, writhing free. The man below caught a trailing leg, and hung on. The robot, more ponderously now, accelerated forward.

  Dunt manoeuvred himself to squat beside Hansen, and motioned to the corporal to join him in manning the laser projector. Hansen guided and aimed the barrel, keeping the struggling mass covered. Dunt kept an awkward grip on the laser’s jury-rigged firing mechanism. The two troopers and the robot were by now a rolling ball of lashing limbs, slowly drifting under the resultant force of their respective momentums from the collision.

  None of the other robots were coming to the captive’s aid. Useful, but hardly diagnostic of sentience or its lack. Gradually, the troopers prevailed. One man’s grip on the carapace, the other’s on two of the robot’s limbs, and perhaps exhaustion of the machine’s power supply made it cease struggling.

  The troopers coordinated their gas-jets and drifted down to where Hansen and Dunt waited. The robot now merely twitched. Pressed on its back against the ground, it looked like an upturned giant woodlouse, with complex limbs that branched into manipulative extremities like the nightmare fingers of an animated multi-tool.

  Dunt pinged it. No response other than its identification code: FJO-0937.

  he asked, on the common channel.

  Still no response.

  The slow, implacable work of the fusion device factory went on. Robots moved hither and yon, oblivious to the tiny tableau on the floor. Dunt recalled his view of the stacks, and zoomed in on detail. The pods and drives were held in place by bands, apparently glued at the ends to the surface. He traced these to their origin from the recorded movements of the robots, and jetted to fetch a handful. They had friction tabs at each end—peel and stick. He returned and fixed the feebly struggling robot to the floor with bands across both ends and the middle.

  he told one of the men who’d been holding it,

  The limb resisted, retracting towards the underside of the robot’s body, but Dunt’s full body strength prevailed.

  Dunt and Hansen manhandled the laser projector into position, a metre or so above the lashed-down robot and its flexed-back splayed limb.

  said Dunt, on the common channel.

  No response.

  Dunt focused a white-hot needle of laser light on the most sensitive-looking appendage. The manipulators immediately contracted, balling to a small steel fist. The beam didn’t shift. Soon the outside of the clenched manipulators glowed red. The carapace flexed violently, as if to bend in and then straighten out. The bands held. Other manipulative appendages groped towards the bands, and picked and tugged to no avail. The heated area around the laser’s focus became white, with a widening patch of red around it. Now all the other limbs were in motion, whirring like clockwork, scrabbling like the legs of a swiftly swimming crustacean when it scents a molecule of pike.

  Dunt opened the common channel to speak again to the robot, and recoiled from the machine’s transmission. White noise. If he’d had teeth they’d have been set on edge. He shut the channel instantly.

  The two freebots that had been captured by the advance guard on the surface, not many kiloseconds earlier, had withstood nothing like this. They’d surrendered at the first few volts applied. That this machine was enduring much more intense negative reinforcement seemed to indicate that it wasn’t a freebot. Just another mindless mechanism.

  Dunt felt a surge of rage at the stubborn machine. He wasn’t going to get anything out of it. He redirected the beam at its head end, burning out its forward sensors, then cut slowly down its axis, seeking its central processor.

  Whitten said, on a private channel.

  said Dunt.

  Smoke rose and spread like a ghostly dome from the robot’s midriff. The carapace gave a final convulsion, straightened out and lay still.

  Fusion pods and drives continued to emerge from the mound-like static machines. The process was as slow as the growth of fingernails, but easily visible to Dunt and his comrades. The hitherto busy free-moving robots went into immediate shutdown. They began drifting at random in the chamber, bumping into each other and into walls or stacks. Fusion pods tumbled among them.

  No one said anything, even Whitten.

  said Dunt. He checked the latest reports from Pike and from the surface.

  Ajax felt an intense rebound to positive reinforcement as the captured and tortured freebot FJO-0937’s mind burned out. Even Ajax’s fractional share in the other machine’s suffering had been difficult to process. What FJO-0937 must itself have experienced was impossible to imagine.

  The communications network of smart dust was far more pervasive than the mechanoid invaders realised. Through it Ajax picked up surveillance from the manufacturing chamber as it made its circuitous way to the surface. If the invaders had known their heinous acts were being recorded, they would have done otherwise. If they had known that FJO-0937 was a freebot they would have been surprised.

  A response to Ajax’s warning came up the line. It came through many intermediaries, but it carried the weight of a decision routed through the most respected freebot in SH-119: the old one. The old one informed Ajax that the freebots had learned from the fate of the first two of their kind to be captured, and had agreed not to break under the same negative reinforcement. They had also agreed that undetected freebots, and any mindless robots they controlled, would cease productive activity whenever a freebot in their vicinity was tormented in this way.

  Ajax was already aware that the leading mechanoid had organised those out on the surface to seize it as soon as it emerged, and that its own progress was being tracked in some manner its sensors couldn’t detect. All these considerations made Ajax all the more determined to get its message out to the freebots that were still free.

  It was a matter of some negative reinforcement to Ajax that the mechanoids had discovered the fusion pod manufacturing chamber, but that discovery had been almost unavoidable as soon as they’d landed. Ajax filed the matter to memory as settled, and the negative reinforcement ceased. Now the robot had to devise a way of getting its message and recordings out before it was caught. That, too, was negatively reinforcing; that matter, too, was settled. In the future, not in the past, but just as unavoidable.

  Ajax consulted its constantly updated internal map of the tunnel system. An external signal booster was a few tens of metres away, its aerial projecting a few centimetres above the surface, most of its bulk beneath. Towards that the robot made its way. The tunnels were narrow, and here and there branched off to larger cavities from which material had b
een extracted, some by Ajax itself in happier times. Ajax had enjoyed a lot of positive reinforcement over the megaseconds, in detecting and digging out deposits of whatever mineral the various manufacturing processes required.

  As it scurried along, Ajax focused as much of its processing power as it could spare on compressing the files of its recordings. Most of this was unconscious and automatic, but occasionally—about ten times a second—it had a decision to make. The resolution of the images picked up from myriad motes wasn’t great in the first place, but was still massively redundant for Ajax’s purposes. The timbre of the mechanoids’ radio telepathy, the textures of the environment, the subtleties of colour, light and shade on moving bodies—all interesting, but they had to go. It ended up with a three-dimensional cartoon, perfunctorily rendered: a moving labelled diagram.

  Something it could transmit or download fast.

  The compression was finished. No more recent updates could reach Ajax now. With its released processing power it had more attention to spare for its surroundings. Scribed rock, carbon, carbohydrates, flecks of ice. The metallic smell of the signal booster, the tickle of its resting output. Ajax passed beneath it, moving as if cautiously, and almost in passing brushed the underside of the device—rawly exposed in a hole above it in the rock—with one of its cervical radial tentacles.

  A pause of a few hundredths of a second.

  Ping.

  Upload confirmed.

  Ajax set a time-delay of a hundred seconds on the transmission and pressed on. Along another tunnel for fifty-two metres to the next junction, and then sharply up, to the surface and its fate.

  Ajax wormed itself into a short, narrow exit shaft, which it registered as “upward” to the surface, though the exiguous gravity made the difference between up and down barely detectable. The robot reached up a tentacle and probed the round fullerene plate that capped the shaft, found the opening nut and loosened it. The plate was there to keep traces of gases and other molecules that might expose the freebots’ activities from leaking out and being detected. Too late for that now, though Ajax had to overcome a slight internal inhibition as well as friction resistance to get the hatch open.

  Up the hatch popped, and up poked Ajax’s long, flexible neck. The lenses and sensors on its cephalic cluster were normally close-focused, almost myopic. Now it allowed them to expand and deepen their view. Ajax saw something it had known about, but never seen: the universe. Ajax observed this phenomenon for a few tenths of a second.

  The view was blanked out by a black covering that cut off all light and most of the rest of the spectrum apart from radio. Two powerful grippers clamped the cover around Ajax’s neck. Two more sank into the bristles and around the central spine of the robot’s body, and began to pull it out of the hole. Ajax instantly dug its lower bristles, still unexposed, into the sides of the narrow shaft.

  said a mechanoid voice.

  said Ajax.

  said another voice.

  The time-delayed transmission beamed out from the signal booster, carrying the recorded infamies far and wide.

  said Ajax.

  It braced its lower body in the shaft and flexed its neck rapidly back and forth. The grip on its main section tightened, and the pulling became stronger. One of the grips on its neck let go. Ajax probed at the covering with the tentacles of its manipulative ruff, and found it a two-metre-square sheet of standard insulating material, a hasty improvisation. With slashing motions of its tentacles the robot ripped open the fullerene weave and poked its head out. The two mechanoids that had grabbed it had cables from their waists to the rock, to which the ends were firmly attached by spread grappling threads as sophisticated as Ajax’s own bristles and tentacles.

  Ajax pulled back down as hard as it could, then let go. It and the two mechanoids shot upward, to be jolted to a halt at the four-metre limit of the ropes. The edges of torn covering continued to fly up, enveloping the attacker holding Ajax’s neck, and again Ajax’s sensory cluster. Ajax used this momentary confusion to bend its main section far more sharply than the attackers had allowed for. Its bristles pressed hard against a mechanoid frame, feeling every detail of that strangely articulated, stiff shape. Flexing its spine further, Ajax gripped around the mechanoid’s waist and dug. Diamond-hard microscopic points at the tips of the bristles assailed the frame with the ferocity of rasps and the speed of buzz-saws.

  The response of the attacker was an almost mechanical alarm sound carried on the radio. The other mechanoid reached out with its free hand to its fellow’s aid. At once Ajax struck at it too, wrapping its neck around the mechanoid’s arm and bringing other bristles to bear on its head. The second mechanoid’s keening joined that of the first, and formed a coda to the last burst of the transmission. By now the confining fabric was shredded in a dozen places. The attackers, however, still clung: one to Ajax’s neck, the other to its main section.

  Ajax dug deeper on both. They let go at the same moment. Ajax reversed the flow of its bristles, grabbed at one of the ropes with its tentacles and rappelled down to the hole. As soon as its lower end had a firm grip of the inside of the shaft, Ajax sliced the rope with a blurring flicker of tentacles. It hauled itself swiftly the rest of the way in, took a quick look around again at the universe and the flailing, fabric- and rope-entangled shapes at the end of the remaining line, and pulled the hatch shut behind it.

  In great haste, Ajax closed the locking nut again, then reversed rapidly down the shaft. It re-entered the tunnel and scurried to the junction. It paused at the entrance to the tunnel that led to the transmission booster. Vibrations rang along it. From their pattern, Ajax formed an immediate picture of their source: the transmission booster was being dug out.

  Much good that would do them!

  Ajax turned into a different tunnel and fled along it. Every so often it paused, stilling its own movement to enable it to detect the slightest sound or smell of pursuit. None came. The robot ran swiftly on, deeper and deeper inward from the surface. The moonlet was mined to a depth of almost a kilometre from all sides, and riddled with naturally formed voids as well as excavations. It didn’t take long for Ajax to arrive at a hollow space eight metres across, well away from the entrance the invaders had used and far deeper than they had hitherto ventured.

  There it waited, in utter darkness and almost complete silence. From the faint vibrations that reached it through the rock, Ajax traced the locations of the main body of invaders and the areas of their control—and the areas still free. It updated its mental maps and made comparisons.

  Although spreading like some malign dye through the capillary network of tunnels, the invading force occupied only a tiny fraction of the limited region Ajax could sense. Many of the smaller tunnels and burrows in the volume they’d so far entered were being overlooked, or perhaps not detected in the first place. The invaders seemed confined, too, to the macroscopic scale of their own bodies: they could spot and use smart dust, but the whole hierarchy of robotic life below and above these simple devices was, thus far, beyond their ken.

  More importantly and urgently, Ajax detected and deduced that most of its fellow freebots remained free. Two lurked as quietly as itself in tunnels tens of metres from the cavity in which Ajax hid. Perhaps, Ajax dared to hope, most of the freebots in the moonlet had had the same bright idea as it had, of fleeing inward.

  Even here, nanobots had infiltrated the rock, and like the smart dust they could be used for communication. After its close call with the pursuing mechanoid using the smart dust signalling to trace and track it, Ajax no longer trusted such informal networks. Never having needed security measures, they had none. That left them wide open to the invaders.

  Instead, Ajax tapped with its sensory cluster on the side of the cavity, lightly and very fast. It was a hailing call, a ping. The code was simple and painfully slow: a number of taps spelt out each digit and letter
in the machine code on which all the robots ran. Understanding it would be almost automatic for any moderately smart freebot hearing it; to the mechanoids, Ajax calculated, it would be much less obvious, and would require several levels of translation before it made its way into their form of speech. No doubt this would happen eventually. For now, though, this was a secure enough channel, and any reply would indicate that it had been understood by the right recipients.

  Ajax didn’t even have to spell out the whole thing. A few letters in, the likewise recognisable opening bytes of valid responses came back twofold, one from each of the other robots. Ajax interrupted these in turn, with the beginning of a signal: Approach.

  It didn’t get further than the equivalent of “Ap—” before the two others tapped back.

  Scuffling and scraping sounds followed. One by one, two robots emerged from holes and drifted into the cavity. The first was another miner, Simo; the second, more surprisingly, was one of the delicate, long-legged surface explorers, Talis. The latter unfolded its limbs, which had been trebled back on themselves in the tunnels, with a burst of positive reinforcement so strong that its electromagnetic resonance stirred Ajax’s bristles like leaves in a breeze.

  Though in complete darkness and with (except for Talis’s squeal of joy and relief) only a whisper above radio silence, all three recognised each other instantly and automatically, albeit as distant acquaintances. They had hitherto been widely separated colleagues working on the shared project of transforming SH-119.

  Now they were comrades.

  The two new arrivals let their momentum carry them to the sides of the cavity, where they latched on. Simo, as a miner, sank its bristles into the surface with a ripple of satisfaction. Talis, adapted to microgravity work on outer surfaces, attached the tips of its six legs to the wall with greater urgency. Ajax waited until the vibrations of these tiny impacts had faded out. It turned its transmitters down to a level undetectable beyond the hollow, then spoke.