The Corporation Wars_Dissidence

by Ken MacLeod

  Taransay sighed, and found her free hand had crept to the back of her head. Her middle finger probed the occipital ridge, to rediscover the absence of the nail-head nubbin of the spike’s access port. She swigged again and surveyed the scene.

  The place was heaving. Lots of locals had come in, fascinated with the new arrivals. As who wouldn’t be, to meet five folk from a thousand years ago? Less than a thousand years for them, but even so. Names of legend. Even hers. Knights of dark renown, she thought, and smiled.

  There on the far side of the dance floor stood Waggoner Ames, the big beardy Yank with the booming voice and the thousand-metre stare when he thought no one was looking. Taransay could hardly believe she was in the same room as the man. Legend, he was. It was like going down the pub and bumping into Merlin.

  Beauregard she hadn’t heard of, but seeing as he’d defected to the Axle from Brit military intelligence that was hardly surprising.

  Swaying at the centre and dodging Beauregard’s flailing dance moves was Chun Ho, tall and cool, smiling down at a local lad who looked ready to unzip him right there. She’d heard of Chun, and his exploits in the Pacific: a biomedical trick smuggled out of a lab in Taiwan, that had made possible a daring tactical move in the Battle of the Barrier Reef.

  Rolling a cigarette outside the open patio doors was Maryam Karzan, who’d been fighting the Caliphate as a girl decades before Taransay had even been born, and had in old age seen its shadow rise again in the Reaction, and stood up herself, an aged but still fierce warrior, to fight it a few months after Taransay herself had been killed in action.

  Quite bravely, too, she’d been told by the lady: live-testing a piece of nanotech that hadn’t had enough pre-production debugging. Which feat had, perversely, made her a heroine to some and a mass-murdering criminal to others.

  And the locals?

  As far as Taransay and the others were concerned, they were people from the future.

  The future she’d died for?

  Maybe not. Another slug of the rough red wine.

  The Acceleration… oh God, it was hard now to recapture the anger and excitement and hope her first encounter with it had brought, that sense of having seen through everything, a kind of intellectual equivalent of how the spike augmented your vision. Freedom, the Axle insisted, wasn’t being confronted with an infinity of choices you couldn’t make and didn’t want. It was something far simpler: freedom in the sense of a body moving freely, free development of the faculties and powers of body and mind (which were the same thing, the same physical self, thinking meat). At the fag-end of the twenty-first century, immortality was the only thing worth dying for. The only celebrity worth striving for was for the whole human race to become world famous. The only utopia worth dreaming of was for everyone in the world to have First World problems.

  And the only way to get there was to burn through capitalism, to get through that unavoidable stage as fast as possible. Let it rip, let it run wild until full automation created full unemployment and confronted everybody with the choice to get on with the real work, and off the treadmill of fake work and make-work to pay the debt to buy the goods to make the make-work feel worthwhile and the exhausted, empty time tagged as leisure pass painlessly enough…

  It had all seemed so obvious, so sensible, so simple.

  But it wasn’t, and as the Acceleration’s ideas had spread, another set of ideas had spread to counter it: the Reaction. The ultimate counter-revolution, to face down the threat of the ultimate revolution. It had drawn on a deep dark well of tradition and upgraded what it found, to modernise anti-modernity. There was plenty down there, from Plato and Han Fei and on up: through the first theorists of the divine right of kings, and the original Reactionary writers who’d railed against the French Revolution, to the fascist philosophers and scientific racists of the twentieth century and beyond.

  The Reaction had remixed them all into its own toxic brew, a lethal meme-complex that had come to possess a movement that could emerge from a million basements to rampage in a hundred thousand streets. Its solution to the crisis of late state capitalism was not to go forward beyond it, but to go back to an age before it, using the very weapons and tools capitalism had forged. The new technologies that made abundance possible were too dangerous to be in the hands of ordinary people, and they were at the same time capable of making some people extraordinary. With intelligence enhancement you could have an aristocracy, a monarchy, or for that matter a master race that really was superior to common folk. With universal connection and surveillance you could make its rule stick. Top-down control of society had at last become possible at the very moment in history when it became most necessary. To the Reaction that coincidence was almost providential. It proved that God was on their side whether they believed in him or not.

  So the two opposed sides had fought, in a conflict that had escalated beyond even the horrors Taransay remembered. The Last World War, the lady had called it. And because nanotech and biotech and all the rest really were horrendously dangerous, the collateral damage had been immense.

  Including, Taransay thought wryly, to herself.

  Oh well. You only live once.

  Or not, as the case may be.

  She didn’t feel like dancing, though she could understand why the people who’d arrived here in the past few days were bopping like there was no tomorrow, which in a sense there wasn’t. They were at the end of all tomorrows, and trying to forget the yesterday that was gone forever. Just as she was. She put the now empty wine bottle down, and turned to order another.

  And saw the lady standing beside her. Very unfairly chic, neat as a new pin, shining in a bar full of guys and gals in combats. Taransay realised belatedly that she’d just said something along those lines, and mumbled and gestured what she intended as an apology.

  Nicole, warm and composed, smiling: “You’re drunk, soldier.”

  “Aye, I am that. And I’m off duty, am I no?”

  Nicole chuckled. “You could say that.”

  Taransay waved, nearly knocking over the empty bottle. “See us, we’re all dead. Dancing in the death dive.”

  “It’s understandable.” Another smile. “And understood.”

  “When do we find out what this is all in aid of?”

  Nicole’s brow creased as she searched her memory for the usage, then her eyes widened.

  “Ah! Yes, of course. You’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “Why tomorrow?”

  “That’s when the final member of your team comes off the bus.”

  “Anyone I’ve heard of?”

  “Oh, I think so,” Nicole said. “Carlos.”

  “Carlos? The Carlos? Carlos the Terrorist?”

  “That’s the one,” said Nicole.

  “Hey!” said Taransay. “That bears repeating.”

  She stuck fingers in her mouth and whistled, a practised, piercing note that cut through the music and the babble from the screen above the bar and the shouted conversations above it all. Heads turned.

  “Hey, guys!” Taransay yelled. “Listen up! Know who’s coming to join us tomorrow? Carlos, that’s who! Carlos the Terrorist!”

  The place erupted.

  Nicole gestured down the music and the television’s roar. Everyone quietened in response.

  “I could take that as a vote by acclamation,” she said. “But I need to be sure. I want to hear it from you sober, before I meet Carlos off the bus.” She grinned around at the five fighters. “See you all here in twelve hours.”

  She snapped her fingers. The sound systems came on again. She waved and left.

  Twelve hours, fuck. Not a lot of time. Taransay ordered another drink, eyed up the local talent and made her choice. Tousled black hair, bright dark eyes, slender and lithe, in grubby jeans and flashy shirt. Lounging with his back and one elbow to the bar counter and watching the dance floor with lidded amusement. Looked like he was in his twenties. Mind you, all the locals did.

  Taransay sidled up.

/>   “You dancing?” she asked him.

  “You asking?” he said.

  He danced a lot better than Beauregard. His name was Den. He operated a flotilla of robot fishing submersibles out of the harbour.

  Later, lolling on his shoulder, she kicked under the table at the kitbag she’d found at her feet on the bus, and pointed to the labelled, numbered key tied with sisal to its throat.

  “Come to bed,” she said.

  “You are too drunk,” said Den. “You might not mean this.”

  “Course I mean it, you daft coof! What kind of a man are you, eh?”

  Den smiled, and tilted her head back with a thumb under her chin.

  “A man who was once a hundred and ninety-seven years old,” he said. “I know such things.”

  “Fuck me,” she said.

  Not that night, he didn’t.

  She woke naked and alone in her bed, the new sun too hot and too bright in her eyes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Ghost Resort

  The first time Carlos came back from being killed in action, everything around him seemed quite real.

  He shuddered awake on the bus from the spaceport. It was as if he’d dozed rather than slept, and had had a brief, vivid nightmare. The memory of many seconds of drowning in a dark liquid—colder than ice, blacker than ink, thinner than water—slid down the back of his mind and faded to a shiver. He gripped his knees to stop the shaking, and flinched at the chill touch of his shirt’s sides, drying in the dry heat.

  His mind caught up with his thoughts and it was as if he were drenched again, this time in cold water. He shook his head and gasped.

  The bus from the spaceport—

  How had he known that?

  He had no memory of actually being at the spaceport, but he had a mental image of the place, as if it were something he’d often seen in photographs. An improbably advanced spaceport, where stubby winged shuttles dropped in every hour on the hour, and every other hour after a swift turnaround screamed off, reconfigured as the nose cones of gigantic spaceplanes that thundered for kilometres down a strip of shining white and soared to beyond the sky.

  There was no such spaceport on Earth. If he’d ever seen its like it had to have been in a movie he’d watched as a boy, or on a glossy page of aerospace-industry guff.

  Carlos looked warily around. The light was odd, as if every pixel in the colours were being selected from a subtly wrong part of the palette. Bright outside, on a narrow dusty road whose verges merged with rough gravel to the foot of close raw rock faces with trees and scrub at the tops. If this was the bus from the spaceport—and he couldn’t shake the inexplicable conviction that it was—he wouldn’t have expected it to be an overcrowded minibus, like a Turkish dolmush.

  The woman in the seat beside him wore a long, loose black dress and a bright headscarf. She sat with a hessian bag across her knees and paid him no attention whatever. She was reading from a rounded rectangle of glass propped on top of the bag. Carlos sneaked a peek. It was in a script he’d never seen before: stark and angular and logical-looking like Korean, or the serial identification of a starship from a more advanced but still human civilisation.

  “Excuse me,” Carlos said.

  The woman frowned at him. She mumbled a phrase he couldn’t understand, and shook her head.

  The bus had fifteen seats and more than thirty passengers, most of them standing. Gear and wares jammed any remaining space, underfoot and overhead and on laps. A kitbag bulked large between his knees, heavy on his feet. The sliding door at the front stood open, the rear window too. A through draught, fragrant with conifer and lavender, relieved a little of the sweat and breath, garlic and armpits. The vehicle’s volume reverberated with the whine of electric engines and the babble of loud conversation. Carlos was troubled and bewildered by his incomprehension. His schoolboy smatterings included Turkish and Greek. This language was neither, though it reminded him of both.

  The other passengers, all apparently in their twenties or thirties, struck Carlos in a similar way. Their skins were weathered rather than tanned, their limbs muscular, their clothing plain, but they didn’t look like farmers or artisans or even people who worked in the tourist trade. They looked like city folk who’d chosen a rural way of life. Like some kind of goddamn hippies.

  He decided to try again. He raised his chin and his voice.

  “Does anyone here speak English?”

  Heads turned, shook, and turned away.

  Where was he? There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with his memory. There were gaps, but he couldn’t be sure they hadn’t always been there. For a moment he struggled with the paradox of trying to remember if there were events in his life he’d never been able to recall in the first place. Then he shrugged. The arc of his life still made sense to him. Childhood, parents, school; holidays in places a bit like this; university; his job as a genomic pharmaceutical database librarian in Walsall; getting drawn into the Acceleration, and then fighting on its side in the opening stages of the war—

  Aha! Yes, of course, the war!

  That must be it. He’d probably been wounded, and was undergoing rehab for trauma and memory loss. He shifted uneasily in his seat. He was wearing an olive-green T-shirt, combats, desert boots, all clean but much used. His arms and legs looked and felt fine. A discreet self-check reassured him that everything between his legs was intact. Nothing seemed the matter internally, as far as he could tell. No aches or pains. He passed a hand over his face. Sweaty, needing a shave, his features felt as they’d always done. Only his scalp felt different: hair cropped closer than he’d last had it, and no jacks. No spike. Perhaps that accounted for his inability to understand the language.

  The spike, the spike… The last thing he remembered had to do with the spike. He’d been given a mission. Buying a one-way fare in cash, for… London, that was it. A new arena for his skill with drones. Something big. He was worried. He’d had growing doubts about the cause. Not about its objectives, but about its methods. Things had been getting out of hand. Too much violence… no, it hadn’t been too much violence, that had never troubled him as such, it had been… isolation, that was it. The Acceleration was becoming more isolated as it became more effective in striking spectacular blows. It was getting harder and harder to find safe houses, sympathetic programmers, local folk on the street who’d tip you a wink and point you to the right alleyway to run down.

  And his doubts had begun speaking to him. Literally. A voice in his head. A disguised voice, or a chip voice. Mechanical, but not harsh. Sexless but seductive, insinuating, friendly. Like someone leaning over his shoulder, and saying quietly but insistently, “Are you sure you aren’t making a mistake?” Well-informed, too, about all the weaknesses of the movement. Amplifying his every doubt about its strategy and tactics.

  It called itself Innovator. He remembered that. He couldn’t remember everything about it. Looking back, the voice in his head seemed to have been with him for weeks. The strange thing was: he had a feeling, like a memory he couldn’t quite put his finger on, that he had invited it in. That he’d been told to invite it in. As if Innovator’s insidious presence had been authorised by the movement, but had to be kept secret from most of the Axle’s members.

  Had he betrayed the movement? No—that wasn’t possible!

  Carlos shook his head and peered out through the dust-smeared pane. The bus negotiated a hairpin turn, affording a dizzying swoop of a view to the foot of a dry ravine, then continued downhill slowly through a copse of knotty trees that might have been an olive grove, but wasn’t. Great green mounds of moss, convoluted like brain corals, lurked under the trees. Between the trees flitted winged creatures that didn’t look like birds, nor even quite like bats.

  Out in the open again, then around another hairpin, this time with the raw hacked rock face on one side and nothing but sky and sea visible on the other.

  The sun burned bright near the zenith, white and hot and too small. A spectacular r
ing system, pale like a daylight Moon, slashed a scimitar curve across the sky. High clouds, and close to the ring three tiny crescents, glimmered against the sky’s dark blue.

  Carlos stared, mouth agape.

  “Oh fuck,” he said.

  It didn’t seem adequate. His knees quivered anew. Again he clamped his hands hard on them and pressed his calves against the sides of the kitbag. The woman beside him showed no sign of having noticed his exclamation.

  This had to be a dream. For a moment, and with great determination, Carlos tried to levitate. He remained in his seat. Not in a dream, then. Oh well. So much for that comforting prospect.

  He wasn’t yet ready to concede that he wasn’t on Earth. He might be in a virtual reality simulation, or in some extravagant, elaborate domed diorama. He could even be dead, in a banal afterlife unpromised or unthreatened by any prophet.

  He gave the supernatural variants of that possibility the moment’s notice he felt they deserved, and ran through the natural ones. Not all of them were altogether pleasant. He shuddered at the worst, and dismissed further thought on these lines as morbid.

  Stay cool, stay rational, stay in focus. Fear is the mind-killer, and all that.

  If he was indeed dead, and materialism was still true (which for Carlos was pretty much a given) then he was fairly sure of the least that could have happened. Sometime after his last conscious memory, his brain-states had been copied. How, he had only the vaguest idea. The technology of the spike had hinted at the possibilities. His brain had been scanned in enough detail to create a software model of his mind. The vast computational capacity that could do that could easily provide the uploaded mind with a simulation of a body and an environment.

  So far, so familiar: the possibility of uploading was one of the many taken-as-read doctrines held in common by Axle and Rax. Likewise with that of living in a simulation—a sim. That left open a lot of possibilities as to who, or what, had done this.