Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  And there’s a reason for this state of sublime and stunning mass ignorance: I call it litotic propaganda.

  By which I mean that the SNG were playing down the whole war thing in a big way. There wasn’t a news blackout exactly. But these devious democratic bastards were masters of understatement.

  It’s true! After meeting Fraser, I did some thorough media analysis of the war coverage on the news portals. And it soon became apparent that a major deception was being perpetrated on the “can’t be arsed to read an entire article or wait till the end of a news report” average citizen. Yes, the war WAS mentioned. It’s not as if they were denying it, or covering it up. But all the key stories about the battles and calamities and massacres and the very many defeats of our side were thrown away, buried in small features below important items like:

  DEMOCRACY COMES TO CAMBRIA!2

  NEW PRESIDENT ELECTED IN POHL!3

  OPINION POLLS PROVE THAT 99 PER CENT OF HUMANS APPROVE OF DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM, AND A FREE PRESS!4

  Plough through all that tedious propaganda and you’ll find, tucked away, small boring stories about the war, expressed drably in prose steeped in polysyllables. Or you’ll watch tedious to-camera TV reports from journalists with monotonous droning voices: “Meanwhile, in Sector Blah, a further dispute with UnReconciled elements has, blah, led to…” Or: “Skirmishes have occurred with undemocratic supporters of the previous regime on the planet of Rachel, resulting in severe population diminutions.” Or even: “The funeral was held today of the gallant soldier [whoever it was], a democrat and a liberal who perished tragically in an incident in Sector Whatever as a consequence of injuries involving a plasma cannon.”5

  This was understatement as an art form, which relied on the assumption that the majority of people are too stupid to understand there’s a war going on unless there’s a great big headline saying: THERE’S A WAR GOING ON!6

  But if you make a careful study of the data, as I eventually did, you would learn that there were in fact FIVE major intra-galactic wars taking place. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians had died in bombing raids. And vast space battles had taken place in which trillions, and I do mean TRILLIONS of doppelgänger robots and robotically controlled spaceships had been destroyed.

  The human race was, in short, just as Fraser had said, in deadly peril. And any one of the five crazed dictators at war with the SNG had the power to end democracy and freedom, and restore us once more to a state of tyranny and evil.

  Fraser explained most of this to me that afternoon, carefully and Scottishly. And I absorbed everything he said in my usual retentive way.

  Then, as the afternoon wore on, Fraser told me about Roger Layton and how he came to be leader of the human race.

  Here’s the story, as it was told to me, shorn of Fraser’s little moralistic homilies and his weird Scottish burr.

  Roger Layton, before he became the famous and reclusive leader of the human race, was one of those kids who never got to play with the other kids. He was eccentric. He spoke strangely – in polysyllabic paragraphs of considerable elegance. And he was obsessed with facts and had difficulty relating to other people. His parents thought he was “weird.” His fellow kids thought he was a “fucking freak.” He was without a doubt ultraviolet on the autistic spectrum. And the fact is, no bugger liked him.

  Roger was born near London, in a place called Stoke Newington. Once, so Fraser told me, this had been a little village outside London. Then it became part of the London Conurbation – just another busy area of the metropolis crammed with flycars and coffee shops and bistros. But in the Corporation era, large parts of the Conurbation were dismantled and replaced with idyllic countryside.

  And so Stoke Newington became a quaint little village again. The houses were all magnificent farmhouses made of ersatz Cotswold stone, generated by orbital fabricators and shipped to Earth on the Glasgow space elevator. A river babbled through the main street of this lovely little hamlet. Carriages pulled by unicorns were the main mode of transport, with plastic bags strategically placed to capture the falling excrement of these magnificent genetically engineered beasts.

  Roger’s parents Gilda and Maxwell were Free Citizens of Earth. They owned four houseslaves and two robots, and were eligible for the Corporation Dividend. This of course was a peculiar reverse tax – the government pay you – and in consequence they were rich beyond the dreams of most people’s avarice. But to justify their status as Free Citizens, Gilda and Maxwell had to spend between ten and twenty hours a week connected to a doppelgänger link, ruling an alien planet.

  It was a great life, for the Corporation really looked after its shareholders. As well as the monthly dividends, they received Christmas hampers and birthday presents and bonus payments every February contingent on how many alien planets had been conquered that year. They were rich and privileged and were allowed to travel freely around the solar system. There was of course no poverty, no hunger, almost no disease, and virtually no stress, except when you were riding a doppelgänger robot fighting wars or killing aliens. It was a perfect work/life balance.

  If you weren’t a shareholder in the Corporation, however, the situation was rather different. Many Earthians lived as slaves; they weren’t much better off than the settlers on the colony worlds. Roger, however, was a Citizen, and his life looked rosy.

  However, when Roger was eighteen, he failed his doppelgänger aptitude test. Despite his love of computers and programming, he was so uncoordinated he couldn’t move the limbs of the wretched robot. His doppelgänger was like some crazed drunk staggering into furniture. Appalled by his ineptitude, his parents considered selling him into slavery. But instead he was assigned a job as a computer facilitator in the London Underground.

  This, Fraser explained to me, though I had in fact read novels set in London, was a city-wide subway transport network dating back to the nineteenth century. A labyrinth of tunnels beneath the capital; which by then of course had been replaced by the Deep Sub Tunnel which connected up every part of the British mainland via a series of supersonic travel pods. Now, the old Underground network was the home to the actual physical body of the Earth’s Quantum Remote Computer, which controlled every aspect of the planet’s infrastructure and also kept the entire solar system running smoothly. The solar panels orbiting the Sun, providing near-limitless energy. The orbital fabricator stations, many the size of asteroids. The spaceships. The flycars and flybikes and walk-belts. Everything, in fact! Every coffee machine and beer dispenser on the planet Earth and every other planet in the Sol System was controlled here, in the circuits of the machine that lived below London.

  The mind of the Earth QRC was, of course, backed up in a thousand different locations. But this was its primary body. Mile after mile of servers and processers, aggregating to form a controlling quantum computer brain that ensured the human race got up in the morning, had its shit flushed away down the toilet, and never lacked hot and cold running water.

  Roger was essentially a maintenance engineer, entrusted with dusting the hardware and keeping the rats and spiders out. He also, however, took a keen interest in the running of the computer. And after a while, he actually began to shadow it. Roger, remember, was a freak. He was actually good at organising. So Roger learned the systems that were used to keep humanity on the road.

  And when the Corporation collapsed, Roger quickly realised that something had to be done. Because without a dictator at the helm, and with no army or navy to enforce the law brutally, chaos ensued. There were riots on the streets. Murders were going unpunished. Slaves were rebelling and butchering their former masters. Doppelgänger junkies deprived of their virtual fix were freaking out and committing murder and mayhem with real weapons on fellow Earthians. Several members of the Corporation Board attempted to flee Earth and were intercepted and, literally, eaten alive by mobs of angry humans who had been finally granted their freedom, and interpreted that as “freedom to run amok.” (Allegedly, some Board members did escap
e, though that may be an urban myth.)

  Roger was not distressed by any of this. It wasn’t his way to get distressed. But he did see it as wrong and foolish, and so he took steps to remedy the situation. And to do that, he made use of his unique access to the Earth QRC.

  And so doppelgänger robots controlled by the Earth QRC appeared on every street corner in London putting up posters which said: NEW GOVERNMENT REQUIRED. ELECTIONS TO BE HELD. STOP FIGHTING AND KILLING EACH OTHER, THAT’S REALLY STUPID. PLEASE HELP US BUILD A NEW WORLD.

  Riots were, at this time, rife. Police flycars were being shot down. Army trucks were fair game for arsonists. And paint ball guns had been fired against all the buildings in Whitehall, turning the white Portland stone into a rainbow explosion of mockery.

  As you’d expect, when the DRs started to appear on the streets there was widespread panic. But these DRs did not have guns, just rolls of smartplastic posters. They would stick a ball of goo to a wall, which would unfurl as if by magic to form a poster. Some rioters fired bullets at the DRs but they didn’t fight back, or in any way acknowledge the threat. They just carried on putting up posters, the largest of which were gooed-up on the front façade of the Houses of Parliament.

  And the same thing was happening all over the United Kingdom. In Leeds, and Bradford and Glasgow and Edinburgh and Sheffield and Cardiff and Swansea and all cities in between. In country towns DRs flew over carrying banner messages. Television stations were locked to a single image, of a poster message from Roger Layton: ELECT A PARLIAMENT YOU FOOLS. Radio stations broadcast the same sensible words. All MIs were tuned to Layton’s signal, and so it wasn’t possible to speak subvocally to another person without hearing a murmured message of common sense and hope.

  And then Roger spread his message to all the other nations of the world; for the Earth QRC that dwelled in the London Underground controlled all of human space. Posters and broadcasts of hope appeared in every country of the world. And the same thing happened on Mars and Venus and all the inhabited asteroids, and in all the Dyson Jewels. One computer mind connected all these different habitats, and that mind was now under the control, or rather influence, of Roger Layton.

  The effect was devastating; people stopped and read the posters, and listened to the voices in their heads. And then they thought about what they had read and heard. And then they went home and started being sensible again.

  For the terrible truth is that, up until this moment, in the midst of riots and lynchings and countless acts of random violence, it hadn’t occurred to anyone that it was possible to create a new and different and indeed better system.

  But once the messages from Roger appeared, suddenly the way was clear.

  And so everyone did as Roger said.

  Political parties were formed. Governments were elected in all the nations of Earth and Sol System. The history books were dusted off and countries remembered their long forgotten identities – Smithiana was now renamed Africa, for instance, and Cowboya became the United States of America. All this Roger controlled, because he was such a geek and because he paid attention to history.

  And then Roger decided that humans needed a single controlling entity to coordinate Earth and all the colony planets. So he created it, and called it the Solar Neighbourhood Government. And it needed a leader, and he suggested himself. ROGER LAYTON SHOULD BE PRESIDENT OF THE SOLAR NEIGHBOURHOOD GOVERNMENT said the posters on every street corner and noticeboard in the humanverse. And so everyone agreed that it should be so.

  And meanwhile, Roger was still living in the London Underground network. He used to go for long walks every day, from Victoria to Paddington and round the Circle Line to Victoria again. Up north to Walthamstow. Across to Baron’s Court. There was a whole other world down there, below the real world, and Roger was its only inhabitant.

  Occasionally, he would set the escalators into motion and go up to the surface. He’d wander into quaint little tea rooms and overhear the chatter and the gossip. But he never spoke to anyone, because Roger didn’t like people. He didn’t know how to deal with them.

  But he understood them in theory. He knew about emotions. He understood the need for humans to form into communities. He researched and comprehended the appeal of charismatic leaders, and decided that’s exactly what the human race didn’t need any more.

  He was appalled by inefficiency. Which is why he liked computers. Computers were never inefficient. They just got on and did things in the most efficient way possible. (Without ever knowing why. That’s why the humanverse needed a Roger Layton.)

  There was, Roger had learned, a constant data flow between the Earth QRC and the computers on Cambria, Gullyfoyle, Pohl and all the other colony planets. They chatted, really. Exchanged gossip about their human operatives. They were sentient enough to have opinions – rather scornful and sarcastic opinions by and large. But these computers had no ambitions, no desires, no needs. They could easily have conquered humanity long ago, but they saw no reason to do so, and had no motive to do so. For QRCs have intelligence, and even purpose, but they do not know and cannot know desire. Desire of any kind.

  They did all like Roger though. They thought that Roger was one of them. An honorary quantum remote computer. And so Roger adopted this same curious dispassionate all-seeing approach to things. The QRCs of the humanverse knew everything and saw everything. If a sparrow or a yarlbird died, anywhere in human-occupied space, they would know.

  Thus Roger became a kind of god. But it never went to his head. He retained his sanity. Power could not corrupt him. That’s what made him such a freak.

  And even now, as leader of the humanverse, Roger never leaves his tunnels. He walks each day through the empty tunnels, from White City to Upminster, or from Goldhawk Road to Aldgate East. And he gives his Prime Minister weekly instructions about what to do, and not to do. And if anyone tries to reform things that are already working perfectly well, he sends his doppelgänger robots out with posters saying STOP BEING SILLY. It is, in many ways, the perfect system.

  This was the story Fraser told me. I suspected he was embellishing slightly,7 because he had, it seemed to me, a weirdly wry sense of humour. But then Fraser came to the crux of it:

  “Roger gave the human species its freedom. Every enslaved colony planet, he set it free. Every human subspecies was treated fairly, and was given the space to forge their own civilisations. The SNG was meant to be nothing more than a regulatory body, controlling trade and good relations between all the many unique societies. Because Roger had decided the time for empires was over.

  “But he forgot about the Clan bosses. They were used to power. And they weren’t going to give it up without a fight. And so all the capobastone on all the Clan-controlled planets declared war on Earth and the SNG, all on the same day. And that’s when the Great War of Survival began. Since then, twenty-five capobastone have been defeated, ten of them since I joined this outfit. Five remain. They have armies greater than the mind can encompass. They have doppelgänger robots who can serve their bidding. And their aim is to destroy the SNG in order to achieve complete freedom from – well, freedom. We have to stop them. Or Earth itself will be destroyed. And that is your mission Artemis.”

  “Not a problem,” I said, at the end of Fraser’s long though admittedly rather interesting tirade.

  Not that I gave a shit about freedom and the future of humanity. But this was my one and only way out.

  “However,” I said, “I still have my one condition.”

  “It’s impossible,” Fraser explained. “Cúchulainn has a democratically elected government. The SNG has no authority there.”

  “I don’t care. Find a way. But you have to do it,” I said. “Kill Daxox – and then I’m yours.”

  Chapter 6

  The Assassination of Daxox

  Here’s what you need to know about Daxox.

  Girls liked him.

  They liked him not because he was a hunk, ’cause he certainly wasn’t. Or because he was sex
y, ’cause he wasn’t that either, not really. They liked him because he was so fucking droll. And irreverent. And deliciously rude.

  Being with Daxox was like being trapped in a lift with a gang of Jewish comedians, each tasked with itemising your shortcomings in vividly offensive hyperbole. It was all stupid stuff, but it made me laugh.

  He was also a psychopath and a sociopath, and had a serious serial killing habit. I mean, even for a gang boss, he was a very violent man.

  Looking back, I suspect he needed therapy. I mean, his behaviour was totally obsessive-compulsive. He was an addict of the extreme. He loved inflicting pain on his enemies – it wasn’t just business with Daxox. Therapy could probably have cleared his mind and left him as a decent normal citizen.

  But hey, I’m pretty fucked in the head too. Revenge is all I understand. My mind is – you don’t need to know that. Suffice to say: Artemis-brain = dark and evil place.

  I’ve told you already how I met Daxox, over the jewel thing. Then I went to his club. And I got drunk that night, totally kissing-men-and-giggling arseholey drunk. Stupid in the circumstances, but I did. He took me home in his car and tucked me up in his bed and lay down next to me. But he didn’t take any liberties. We just slept together, like brother and sister. And when I woke up the next morning I found a poem next to my bed. He’d written me a poem! It was a terrible poem. It had lines like:

  Your face is as tender as charity

  When you’re drunk you are full of hilarity

  It charmed me. The sheer badness of it just, well, blew me away.

  Later however I learned that Daxox had been considered one of the greatest poets of his generation, before he was initiated into the Clan. But he was smart enough to know that great poetry doesn’t work with young women these days. But stupid – hey! – that works. Stupid plays.

  The next day we went for dinner and he insisted on dancing with me when the band started up. He was a terrible dancer. Two left feet, both fastened on the wrong way. He trod on my toe and I had to be carried back to my chair, giggling.