Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  She had cusped her wings and swooped in low, skimming the ground in a hypersonic approach profile.

  She was a second from kill when the target lasered her.

  The laser burst was not an attempt to shoot her down, but a message coded for the smartware of her electronic brain. It looked safe on first pass. All the same she spent several microseconds filtering the transmission for viruses before allowing it into her mind.

  She cogitated on it for a few mikes more.

  She grasped that it was a form of defence. It was unloading thousands of simulations into her brain. They showed her attack profile, releasing the diskettes, spreading into a nimbus of spinning flecks, then each being parried by counter-weapons from the Factory, before they had a chance to wreck it.

  She understood the point of the argument after several more mikes: Go away; you’re wasting your time with me - save your weapons for a target you’ll have a chance of destroying for good. You’re only looking at collateral damage here - a little degradation of my armour, a few minor systems failures . . .

  And she thought, Yes, but what about the attack profiles you haven’t considered? She saw other approach angles and release points. Working from the simulations she had been sent, she ran her own to investigate whether the Factory could parry those as well.

  The results pleased her. According to her own predictions, the Factory would not be able to survive those particular attack strategies.

  But what if she were wrong?

  Rather than attacking, she decided to return one of her sims instead. She wanted to see how the Factory would respond to that. She still had time; she wouldn’t have to commit to a particular profile for another point-two seconds.

  All the time in the world.

  She waited for the response, idly running self-diagnostics and weapons checks. After an age the Factory responded, blipping out another laser burst. She unpacked it, examined it from every angle.

  It was too comprehensive, she realised. The Factory had run these sims already. It was playing games with her, calling her bluff. What it was telling her now was that, yes, she could take it out. But the catch was that it would destroy her as well.

  Try that trick, I’m taking you with me, it seemed to say.

  It wouldn’t even bother trying to limit its own damage.

  So think about it . . .

  Yes, she needed time to think. More than point-two seconds. The situation was outside her smartware parameters. This was not a contingency anticipated by her designers, clever though they had made her.

  She pulled out of the attack, sheathed her wings and went to ground, burrowing deep into the sand. When safe she deployed a remote to talk to the Factory, sending out a little, clawed decoy that popped out of the sand a kilometre from her actual position.

  Straining hard against the inbuilt limitations of her programming, she considered the nature of the Factory.

  It was a construction unit, scavenging for waste and wreckage, and manufacturing anything in its memory. It made equipment and weapons. It made, for instance, the enemy counterparts of herself.

  She thought about that, letting the idea tick over for several more mikes.

  Her brain lit up like a bagatelle board. She had an idea.

  She hit the Factory with a detailed blueprint of herself, showing component failures, fatigue points, battle damage. Much of it true, some of it deftly exaggerated. She was careful to stress the functionality of her warhead, while making the rest of herself seem in bad shape. She hoped the point of the schematic was clear enough: Think again. I’m not going to be around much longer anyway. I might as well blow and take you out from where I’m sitting now . . .

  She got an answer more swiftly than she’d expected. A burst of schematics, waves of blueprints and performance numbers.

  Don’t be hasty, I’m sure we can come to some . . . agreement. I can fit you up with a new turbine subsystem, or a new fuselage assembly . . . Why don’t we discuss this in more detail . . . ?

  She considered, then pulsed out data on some motor parts she badly needed. The Factory responded, projecting a profile that showed her flying into its forward landing bay, robotic arms replacing parts of her motor, her flying into the sunset, both machines still in one piece.

  Yes . . .

  She retracted the remote, then lifted herself out of the ground in a mini-tornado of noise, fire and sand.

  She never saw the Factory again, after leaving it intact on the ground. Perhaps it was killed later by some duller machine incapable of appreciating the potential trade-off. Or maybe it had just burrowed into permanent reclusion.

  Whatever the case, she had become addicted to its game.

  She met other machines on her travels, not all of them of enemy manufacture. Eventually she stopped distinguishing between friend and foe. All that mattered was whether or not they had something she needed. If they did, she used the same gambit of threatening to trigger herself. If not, she left them alone. There was an evolutionary pressure in action: the machines that had survived this long into the war had to be smarter than the rest. Like her, they had to be capable of grasping the niceties of a fair bargain. They had to have learned negotiation.

  Driven by the lingering imperatives of her builders, she equipped herself into a swift aerial fortress of fearsome destructive potential. But this was not a process she could continue indefinitely. There came a day, after several dozen megaseconds, when she realised that she had begun to tire of endlessly upgrading herself. With so few machines anywhere nowadays, and hardly any airborne at all, the exercise had become pointless.

  She had all that she needed. So long as she had her warhead, so long as she had her communications, so long as she avoided the most obviously stupid machines, she could keep going indefinitely.

  Instead she started to bargain for software and extra smartware modules to plug into her brain. Getting these units installed was tricky, since she usually had to yield some control over the warhead. But the remaining Factories were too cautious to try anything risky, such as attempting to defuse her while her brain was being expanded. In any case, if they had done business before, there was usually an element of trust.

  With each add-on she became smarter. Some of the Factories had begun to sift through the war wreckage, accessing fragile data-memories locked in the debris of the cities. Some were the electronic simulacra of real people: leaders and artists of the pre-war world.

  At first she stored these personalities to enlarge her negotiation skills. But with the passing of time she began to assimilate them purely for their own sakes. She loaded the dead into her mind and allowed them to interact, blooming like flowers in a rock garden. She allocated parts of herself to let them run. As they subsumed more and more of her mind, she and they became less separable. Hundreds of half-minds merged within her.

  Decades passed. With each year, the Factories found less and less readable data. Then one year they found nothing at all they could read, and therefore no new minds that they could offer her.

  Instead, the Factories offered her holographic images of the dead. She read their faces now, her mind growing heavy with the weight of storage. She could still fly, but she was no longer as agile as she had once been. Her life before she met the Factory seemed like an ancient, cruel dream.

  Thousands of megaseconds ticked by.

  After a century, even the Factories and the other ground machines became rarer. She would cruise for many megs before finding a machine that she could talk to. She always felt pleasure when she located one, for there were scarcely any dangerous (and therefore stupid) machines left now, and she only needed to keep away from the stupid ones. The others she regarded as friends, while not entirely certain how they felt about her.

  They knew that she would protect them from predators, but - with so few hostile machines left behind - an arrangement like that was largely theoretical now. Time was winnowing out the killers, the machines incapable of adapting to the post-war world. Therefore,
as the encounters became rarer, so they took on trappings of ceremony, the playing out of habitual gestures. She accepted things from the other machines that had no immediate use to her. Small, pretty things that the crawlers had dug up and fixed. Trinkets and tokens of goodwill, curios from a shattered world. Some of them had a kitsch charm, like the nanomachine virus fabricator that one of the Factories had dug out of a ruined bioweapons laboratory. What use was such a thing in a world where nothing moved except machines?

  But she took them anyway. It would have been impolite not to. She opened spaces in her hull, discarding weaponry and redundant engine parts, throwing away the things she no longer needed.

  The years kept on passing. Time was speeding up for her, she realised. Her circuits were dying, the processes of her brain becoming less efficient. It took her longer to think about things. She lost the thread of long chains of thought.

  She was wearing out, failing, beginning to clock the internal damage that the Factories had postponed for so long.

  Ironically it was only now that history was restarting on the ground.

  She had been wrong about machines being the only things left. There were still people, but they had kept to themselves for so long that they had made no mark on the world. Yet now they were on the move once more. As the sky began to heal, small bands of nomads left the seaboard cities for the former war zones.

  They were fascinating to her.

  From above the clouds, she studied their migrations, occasionally sending down nano-remotes to probe their languages and learn their histories. They went out in winter, when cloud cover was thickest. Wise. She had learned from accessed military data that the radiation in the wastelands - what they called the Empty - remained dangerously high. Even in winter, there were still hotspots: isotopes leaking from ancient wrecks. They understood very little of that. They had lost all written records of the pre-war world, while the electronic archives had been corrupted. Now, they relied on the spoken recollections of the old, the Pastmasters.

  Naturally, said one of her minds. The oral storytelling tradition’s strong in us . . .

  She learned that they called the war the Hour, after all the time that had passed. The minds argued and opined ceaselessly. The people on the ground were savages. No, they were striving to reconstruct former glories. No, they were savages - just look at them. And images flickered from nowhere through her mind. She saw a white building, scalloped like some beached shell, splintered now and fallen, waves lapping its curved flanks. She saw the people on the ground looting its treasures.

  Savages, said the dead voice trenchantly. I conducted a symphony where they’re pissing . . .

  Screw your symphony. My company built half the towers down there - now look at them! Spinifex up to the third floors . . . squatters in the penthouses . . .

  Bastard capitalist! You made the machines that did this, don’t forget . . .

  Friend, it’s one of my bloody machines that’s keeping you alive, though God knows why . . .

  She closed her mind to the clamour, but succeeded only in boxing it so that it echoed more noisily. She understood why they argued. They were frustrated, locked inside her while the living scurried below. She had made a mistake in studying the nomads; reminding the dead within her of their own lost humanity. They had begun to crave life again, embittered by the survivors. Yes, she understood - but she didn’t like it. She preferred dealing with the Factories. They understood. The machines had never known any other kind of life, anything other than the calm warmth of the Empty. She had saved the dead - now they were at each other’s throats, squabbling in her.

  You’re a traitor to your own species . . .

  She began to weed out the noisiest, erasing their smartware memories. It was a strange feeling, their hectoring voices stalling in mid-phrase, gradually dying on a reverberating note. She thought of the city lights dimming on the globe she had hawked all day through Cockatoo’s Crest, realised that was a memory out of time, a dream within a dream. She erased the men who had made machines like her, and was about to erase the musician, when some flicker of compassion made her still herself.

  By then the others started noticing, shutting up quickly. She felt freer now, lighter. She knew that was how they felt, inside her. They had more room in which to expand. They seemed to sigh, collectively.

  We’re sorry . . . they said. We were selfish . . . you rescued us from oblivion, and we ignored you . . . She told them she understood, but the weeding of the others had been necessary.

  In my youth, she said, I took the minds of the powerful, because I was a thing of war. But now I have no need of their guidance. I took your minds because I wanted to re-create what you’d been, for your own sakes. Because I hoped to learn from you.

  But we’re still the dead . . .

  I know. But I don’t know how I can help you live . . . And they swarmed amongst themselves, and returned to her, many mikes later.

  We have an answer, they said. But you may not like it . . .

  She returned them to the Empty. It was winter, the sky lowering with grey clouds, lightning pricking the horizon. They shadowed a tribe of nomads. They were outlaw raiders who never returned to the cities, making their living by robbing the other traders who journeyed out to forage. By now the minds within her had formed a collective, a consensus personality. She herself could be seen as an aspect of it, one facet. They shared the same smartware (though by now it was organically based neural tissue, a benign mould that she had engineered with the nanomachinery, slowly transforming her dying circuits). If two or more minds shared the same substrate, they were destined to blur and merge like ink on blotting paper. She was them. They were her.

  Now they had a plan.

  The raiders were a family. She had been tracking their movements through the interior for most of the last hundred and thirty years. She had been monitoring their genetic make-up for almost as long, sampling the individuals of each generation with remotes: mosquito-sized miniatures of herself that could flense skin from a cheek and suck blood from the tiniest of wounds.

  The raiders were in poor shape. For a while she tried medicine, introducing viruses that gave them invisible, unsuspected gene therapy. She was striving to correct the errors that stemmed from their inwardly spiralling incestuous gene pool. But her efforts were unsuccessful, her tools too blunt for the task in hand. One by one the people on the ground began to die out.

  They had no idea what was happening, realising only that their children were failing to develop along normal lines.

  They started slaughtering children. She watched in horror, certain that any intervention on her part would only make things worse. The deaths were an atonement ceremony directed at the sky, at the angels of death that they called the Enolas. That part was the strangest: it was as if they had forgotten just who had made the machines like herself. Perhaps it went deeper than that - the failure of memory achieved through intentional means. Over generations, she suspected, they had warped their oral recollections of the past, selectively forgetting some things and distorting others.

  They didn’t want to remember what had really happened.

  The hands and minds of men had made their world just the way it was. Yet the people on the ground had shifted the blame onto figurative demons from the sky. As if, now that the world was a simpler place, there was no compulsion to recall the atrocities of the past. And no time for guilt either, she observed, for they showed little compassion for the sick children they left behind in the sands as their caravans moved on.

  She wept for them, if no one else did.

  But she was sick herself. She had repaired her mind, but her body was still failing. She was slow now, prone to blackout periods of enhanced solar activity. Finally she reached one of the children before the dunes covered its sleeping form for good, or the dogs of the Empty came out for the night. The child wasn’t breathing when she found it. She brought it within herself, nursed it to a kind of vitality. She mapped its mind, understandi
ng soon that there was grave damage to the brain, starved of oxygen. No pattern there, nothing on which a life could be imprinted through learning and sensation. This was what she had expected. The child was a blank slate. She would not, she decided, be denying a particular life by her actions. Any more than a composer denied the world the infinite symphonies that fell between his inked notes.

  She released a virus into its blank glial tissue, and waited for nearly eight megaseconds. The virus wove a neural framework, then began to unpeel information coded in its DNA, in order to structure memory and personality into the developing mind.