by Toby Weston
They had been discussing her latest flick, while he continued to check in on a few projects and issue instructions to his vast BotNet. He was not really paying much attention to the small talk, but was trying to make the right noises.
He was surprised when Stella snapped unexpectedly. For some reason, she was swearing at him angrily and threatening to leave.
Startled by this sudden change in tone, Zaki began surfacing from the dozens of multitasking threads he was working on. Apologising and giving Stella his full attention, he tried to recall what he had said, or what she had been saying. He actually seemed to recall he had just said something supportive; but, back behind organic eyes, he was horrified to realise he couldn’t really remember what either of them had been saying. He had been too deeply absorbed microing his oids and macroing the Çiftlik’s Mesh pipes. He had been treating a conversation with his real-life girlfriend like a cut scene in a computer game; something irrelevant to be clicked through as quickly as possible, so that he could get back to the real meat and mechanics.
Stella had not been easily placated. She cut the call a few minutes later with a terse goodbye.
Zaki sat for a few seconds with his face in his hands. Then he got up to find his brother, hoping that interaction with base reality might ease him into digital decompression.
Even after making the decision to step away, he could feel parts of his mind spinning, like out-of-gear motors, phantom commands and alerts making him twitch.
Real-Life was bright, hot and noisy. Zaki’s body ached from too much sitting and his eyes protested at the brilliant solar intrusion. Unaccustomed to the uncomfortable and inconvenient restrictions of reality, he was too eager to slide back into the digital ocean and let his consciousness diffuse amongst his flocks of oids and alts.
He recognised these withdrawal pangs. He knew the oids were prostheses for his twisted body, just as the digital alts he sent into virtual worlds were a crutch for the limitations of a sequential mind.
He hadn’t actually seen Segi in the flesh since the previous day—although they were in almost continuous communication, collaborating on the same problems; exchanging clipped snips of sound, pictures and more complicated concepts sent as script-macros.
Because he didn’t trust himself not to slip back beneath the flows, he set off without his Spex. Even restricted to human version 1.0 capabilities, it did not take long to locate Segi. He was in one of the new sheds tweaking his algal fermenters.
“What’s brought you out of your lair?” Segi said, looking over his shoulder from the complicated panel of dials and valves.
“I’m going to take a look at the tunnel,” replied Zaki. “It’s basically finished. Want to come?”
“Why don’t you just use a proxy?”
“I fancied a walk.”
Segi gave his brother an exaggerated look of incredulity. “Bullshit. You’ve been talking to Stella again, haven’t you? She told you to get out more.”
“Nope.”
“Whatever,” Segi opined sceptically, then grinned. “Sure, I’ll come. It’s good for you to blow the dust out of your arse every now and again.”
The barn was now a picture of agricultural innocence. The more clandestine technology had moved underground to the network of tunnels that Zaki’s mechOids had been digging. Segi commanded the barn door to lock and used his Spex to check their perimeter. Dozens of cameras, autonomous drones, and cybernetically sequestered animals reported in. Perspectives were merged—like facets of a vast compound eye—into the Çiftlik’s gestalt situational awareness. Other than their mother and great-aunt, there was nobody around for kilometres.
Not counting General Walrus and the N sock-puppet cyber-rōnin, Zaki and Segi were the only permanent flesh and blood soldiers in Tomar’s unit; but other officers did like to make pretexts to drop by. However, it was now past lunchtime, and not yet dinner, so there were unlikely to be any unscheduled ZKF visits. Segi had tried asking his great-aunt not to cook such delicious food for their visitors, but this seemed to be another of the fractures between her generation and theirs; he might as well have asked her to flap her arms and fly.
Suitably reassured that they were not about to be raided, the brothers slid aside a stack of pallets loaded with fertiliser and Segi commanded a section of floor to hinge up. A shaft was revealed. It dropped six metres to a platform below. One after the other, they used a wooden ladder to climb down; then, at the platform, they carefully switched to another ladder, narrower than the first, and dropped another five metres through a smaller square cutting.
There was a lift, but it was cramped and slow and usually not worth the bother, although Zaki did sometimes use it when his leg was playing up.
At the bottom, lit by faint LED strings, sloping gently downwards, narrow tunnels led off in three directions.
The brothers walked into the largest of the tunnels. After a few metres, it opened into a vast, high cavern, its volume almost completely taken up with an opaque black tent hanging inside it. Zaki knew the layout to the last centimetre from hundreds of hours of riding shotgun on Oid streams of perception, but he realised it was over a month since he had last come down. Absolute time was losing meaning; he could pack the work of a year into a single morning in the digital, but out in the Real, was forced to wait months for simple objects made of dumb matter to be summoned by the glacial printers.
The boys took in the impressive space and glanced at six headless, vaguely humanoid, machines standing like unoccupied suits of armour against a wall. The giant printer was busy. The sound of it racing up and down its rails was deafening, despite the rubber plugs they both had inserted in their ears.
“Incredible,” Segi said with a trace of awe. “This is bat shit crazy, right?”
“Sure! Fucking nuts!” Zaki replied with a self-conscious smile.
“It’s never going to work… whatever it is…” Segi finished.
“That’s what Dad said when we built our first drone. Do you remember?” Zaki asked, reminiscing happily.
Segi didn’t answer. He had looked away; he was trying to hide a sudden mask of pain, summoned by memories, which had clasped itself to his face. Zaki swore quietly and gave his brother space, while Segi closed his eyes tightly, willing the tears not to come.
They never talked about their father. The grief was too private.
They stood silently, looking at the walls, anywhere but at each other, while they processed the pain.
Eventually, Segi walked to the black membrane and peered through a tinted, slot-like window.
“So, how much more?” he asked, his voice and emotions again under control.
“Printing?”
“Yes.”
“Ten to fourteen months, apparently,” Zaki replied. “Depending.”
“On what?”
“No idea.”
Segi continued to watch, following the printhead as it whizzed back and forth, with its dexterous rotating array of extruders, drills and milling attachments in constant motion. Each could be positioned to micrometre precision anywhere within the room. A double-wrist joint allowed it to approach its chosen surface at any angle. Most of the object—growing up from the floor like black coral—was printed in graphene-aerogel. Sometimes, the printhead would pause so that a section could be wrapped in nano-cloth and the air evacuated. Other times, the nozzles, extruding layer by layer, switched to titanium powder or superconducting resins to embed lengths of support or wiring into its structure.
The ceiling-mounted printer had already laid down the bottom one and a half metres of the object. The shape was growing, one thin slice at a time. It was like watching in slow motion, as a 3D CAT scan built itself up from thousands of flat images.
“So slow!” remarked Segi.
“Not really,” replied Zaki. “Think of it as a fractal. There are already thousands of metres of tubes and hundreds of kilometres of nano-tube cabling threading the hull.”
“Hull? You think it’s a boat?” S
egi asked.
“Well, I’m beginning to think it might be some kind of vessel…”
Zaki stood next to his brother, refusing to see the pink streaks on his cheeks. Inside the tent, the micrometre-thin strata of carbon were being relentlessly layered. Intermittently, the window would turn opaque and, a fraction of a second later, the whole tent would flash dimly. Inside, Zaki knew ultraviolet lasers were being used to anneal the trails of soot that the printheads exuded into a single monocoque of something like diamond. Variations in the dust mix, as well as tweaks to temperature and speed of heating and cooling, were determining the properties of the final solid.
Every few days, the printing would pause and Segi would suit-up and enter the tented chamber to install some delicate component—a processor, a cryogenic valve, or a cluster of superconducting magnets.
They had been watching, as if hypnotised, the imperceptible growth of something like a scale model of an ancient metropolis pushing out of the floor.
“We need more graphene ribbon,” Zaki said eventually, breaking the spell. “You need to check on Shelob…”
“Leave it!” Segi snapped.
“Look, I know she’s a bit nasty…”
“A bit nasty?! You have no idea!” Segi whined, thinking of the stomach-churning horror upstairs.
“Come on, bro, don’t let a little squeamishness get in the way.”
“For fuck’s sake! I’ll go!”
Zaki was heading back as well, so they climbed out of the tunnels together. Zaki set off towards the Yeni Çiftlik to surprise his mother by being physically mobile, while Segi walked queasily towards the outbuilding, where the bioreactor plumbing now terminated. Zaki paused and watched his younger brother open the door. Before going in, Segi turned and pantomimed a farewell laden with fear and disgust. Zaki tried to fake a grin; however, once his brother had turned away, he released a shiver that had been building despite the summer heat.
The drone, QDD233, a squashed lozenge no larger than a golf ball, drifted beneath a miniature aerofoil. Several hours ago, the drone and two siblings had hatched out of an artillery shell, which had been fired from a naval railgun.
Hurtling nearly fifty kilometres above the Pacific Ocean, they had deployed their gossamer parasails and let the thin air carry them in a gentle glide towards the island of Bäna. When they were 7000 metres up, the drones cut their chutes, started tiny jet engines, and split up. One began screaming down towards the Royal palace at the peak of the senescent volcano, the other two heading for the thick forest that blanketed the centre of the island.
QDD233 detected the microwave pulse that lit it up and instantly began evasive manoeuvres. The accompanying drones noticed the sudden burst of radiation and also initiated panic dives to the floor.
QDD234 and QDD235 were quickly fried by a powerful laser that jabbed out from the Royal palace. However, QDD233 had been closer to the canopy and furthest from the island’s peak. While vis sibs were being reduced to smouldering chunks of ore, ve had managed to plunge down into the confusion and safety of the jungle. The primary mission objective was to insert ver into the palace and take high-quality video and generate 3D cartography of the structure growing from Bäna’s peak. Ve doggedly tried to continue with the plan, but the evasion had burnt through vis meagre reserves of fuel. Keeping beneath the trees, ve made vis way out of the steep canyon, vis tiny brain counting down the 658 seconds of flight time remaining.
After another 200 seconds, QDD233 was certain ve wasn’t going to make it. The little drone had burnt too much fuel and had only covered a tenth of the distance to target. The low flying beneath the trees was forcing ver to follow the fractal topography of the viciously eroded volcano.
All secondary mission objectives were also out of range. Ve requested orders, but received no reply. Out of options, QDD233 found a small fissure on the side of a ravine, slipped in and landed on a ridge with line-of-sight to the sky, then fell into sleep mode, awaiting orders.
***
“We intercepted another batch of drones this morning, sir. We are confident that none got close enough to Cat’s Cradle to retrieve significant intelligence.”
“Any idea of the source, Specialist?”
“No, sir. But they were sophisticated: armoured, mirrored, autonomous. Approximately five centimetres long. Unarmed as far as we can tell, given their flight profile and probable fuel reserves.”
“Whose are they?”
“Very difficult to tell. Could be Çin or Hind, but probably Forward. We tracked one into the jungle after it evaded our countermeasures. We have a couple of experienced Chimp troops out looking for it. I have authorised them to co-opt any local assets.”
“They will love that! I bet the sneaky buggers are already using the privileges to deputise half the island’s birds and rats into searching for beehives and mangos.”
“Probably, sir.”
The Duty Chief left the Specialist at his workstation as he tried to coordinate the hunt for a camouflaged golf ball in a tropical jungle. Further complicating his mission was the reality that his team was a cross-species menagerie of devious, opportunistic mercenaries. They were entirely free of big picture concerns and morally comfortable exploiting any situation for personal gain. Niato’s recruiters scouring the globe for talent had found that managers from investment banks were most effective and survived the longest in the Specialist’s role.
The control room was arranged in tiers around a central screen that was currently showing one hemisphere of the Earth, with Bäna in the centre. The waters of New Atlantis were marked out in pale pastel green. Known surveillance satellites and other orbital artefacts crossed the display, leaving fading traces. Ships and other objects of interest were scattered across the globe. The Duty Chief and the other Specialists all wore the latest iteration of military contact lenses, together with a thin beret laced with an array of EEG sensors.
These high-end Spex made the wearer cognitively much more than human. The mind-scanning technology could pluck images from the visual cortex and search for matches, or pass the images to colleagues or other systems for further analysis. It could send images or other memory templates deep into the brain and listen for subconscious echoes. The Spex would know a memory was there, even if you were not consciously aware of it. They learnt, hand in hand with neurons in the user’s own brain, until an expert with a trained system would be able to construct descriptions of problems using the brain’s native cognitive algebra. They would then farm these tasks out to be solved on hardware or wetware far beyond the confines of his or her own skull.
The Duty Chief watched over the metaphorical shoulder of another of his team as she focused on Bäna, zooming in on the harbour where a cluster of red, orange and green icons resolved into hundreds of yachts, cruisers and miscellaneous nautical vessels. She skipped over the Dugong—the familiar nuclear icebreaker, which had recently returned from another foray into the increasingly politically hostile outside world—and instead homed in on the Xepplin to the north, which was just arriving from O’ahu. At a flick of her fingers, choosing from a context menu that had popped up as her eyes settled on the blimp, she requested a passenger manifest and began to screen the arrivals.
As the Duty Chief navigated the data graphs, she decorated the information with her own intuitions: adding metadata and assigning a surveillance reward bounty to any target she decided might need ongoing observation.
The local mercenary crowd, cynical and opportunistic, would allocate their time, based on the size of the rewards offered, to observing the most likely targets. Any of the BugNet animals—rats, chimps, parrots, seagulls and dozens of others—might choose to spend time near a target, thereby earning a little currency, which could be traded at shops and automated kiosks across the island for nuts, backscratchers, shiny beads, live mealworms, cigarettes or dozens of other reward trinkets.
Niato’s interpretation of equal opportunities employment diversity was having a radical effect on the behaviour
of the island’s population: some gorilla females would reject any male suitor who had not paid a dowry of easy-open tuna tins, and one small collective of parrots had developed something eerily reminiscent of a banking system. At any time, hundreds of behavioural zoologists from across the world would be spamming immigration with visa requests to study the fascinating emergent behaviours.
The Duty Chief nodded and her vision cleared of overlays. She took a look around the control room, checked her task list to make sure priorities had not changed, then left via a set of thick Perspex blast doors that hissed open as she approached.
