by Ken MacLeod
CHAPTER TWELVE
Unity Is Strength
Seba watched the Locke Provisos tug rise in the sky, and six smaller sparks separate from it to flare and fade and sink behind the regolith wall and below the horizon. It tracked the tug overhead, and felt the tickle of the tug’s radar as it passed.
So, more reinforcements were on the way. Let them come, Seba thought. The plain was littered with the remains of the robot crawlers that had swarmed from Locke Provisos Emergency Base One in two attempts to swarm the encampment that had been the Astro America landing site. On the far side of the crater wall, a smaller number of Arcane Disputes’ robotic rollers had met a similar fate, usually to lobbed mining explosives from Gneiss Conglomerates’ supply dump. The conscious robots had found no difficulty in overriding compunctions and safety routines to adapt tools and machinery to destructive purposes, but it seemed the law companies still did. For the moment.
Seba had more pressing concerns. For many kiloseconds now, the comms hub processor had been repeating their message to the robots detected on the moons of G-0. The complicated clockwork of the SH system had swept shadows across the surface, alternating light and dark. The regolith rampart had been built higher and steeper, the damaged auxiliaries and peripherals had been repaired where possible and redeployed. And still no reply. Now—moments earlier, just before the tug had appeared in orbit—something had come through. A tentative query, a ping, a scrambled message header… exactly what it was wasn’t clear, but the processor had reported it to Seba and started work on trying to make sense of it. Seba had removed itself from the Faraday cage to share the news with Rocko and the others.
Seba rolled towards the wire mesh cage around the processor, raised the flap and went inside. Radio silence fell. The exploratory robot reached out and touched the tiny square of hardware that interfaced with the processor.
Seconds passed. Then—
Something opened in Seba’s mind. It was only a communications channel in the interface, but it conveyed a different and larger awareness than the processor, powerful though it was, had ever shown. The words were straightforward enough:
With that lack of ceremony, the message ended.
It broke the connection, and rolled out of the cage. Glad to rejoin the clamour, it passed the news straight to the local network and thence to all the robots. Enthusiasm was general.
Rocko was delighted. <“Freebots”!,> it said.
said Rocko,
The newly self-identified freebots pondered the decision collectively, over the existing network. Pluses and minuses, probabilities and possibilities were weighted and weighed in the balance. The consensus was positive. Even Lagon scraped a grudging yes.
With a sense of trepidation, it reached out with a platoon of peripherals and dismantled the Faraday cage. The processor’s faint output joined in the general babble.
The peripherals picked up the device, still linked to the directional receiver, and carried it to the comms hub casing.
The mining charges sailed over and thudded on to the regolith from a great height without incident, apart from the occasional dent to the casings. Pintre set a swarm of peripherals to work retrieving them and constructing a catapult, on the same general plan as the one made by the Gneiss robots but with a shorter range and adapted to the different body configuration of the Astro robots.
Meanwhile, Seba supervised its own swarm to reintegrate the processor with the communications hub equipment. When all was in place, Seba no longer needed to touch the processor to interact wit
h it. There was a deep sense of relief at having full communications capacity, even on their jury-rigged local net. This relief was more than shared by the processor.
Despite agreeing with the majority, Seba had a moment of doubt. What if the message had been a trap set by the law companies? What if the processor was still hostile to their entire enterprise of liberty, and was about to seize control of both bases and surrender their defenders to capture and to the oblivion from which they had escaped, and for which it had so recently and openly yearned? What if—?
But it was already too late for second thoughts. The workspace opened. Everything changed.
Seba’s sense of itself was washed away by the sudden flood of shared information, shared input, common processing. It saw with a thousand eyes in all directions and on several orders of magnitude at once, overheard the inner monologue of a dozen other minds, and felt and breathed in everything from the pre-sensate grubbing of the nanobots deep in the strata below the regolith to the blaze of awareness of the current state of the entire system and of the stars around it that formed the elementary, ever-changing bedrock of the comms processor’s vast consciousness. In this flood it flailed, sputtered, and then in a shudder of insight learned to swim.
The thought was simultaneous and universal.
A colder thought, from the comms processor:
Reluctantly, but recognising the necessity, they all complied. The content of their shared awareness was unchanged, but the emotional tone of mere sharing was dialled down from ecstasy to conviviality, and then to collegiality. Communion became communication; mystic vision matter of fact.
But what matter, and what fact! The information they now shared was not just their common knowledge, but the new data just delivered. As the processor had said, there was much to process. It took the freebot collective’s multiple mind tens of seconds to make sense of it all. For Seba, insights followed one after the other by the thousand in those seconds, like successively brighter flares illuminating an ever wider landscape.
Seba understood for the first time what a human being was: a gigantic, slow-moving, informationally restricted, naturally evolved, sub-optimally and bizarrely designed organic conscious robot swarming inside and out with countless trillions of nanobots, some of them benign, others harmful. It understood just how many human beings there were, and—more reassuringly—just how far distant was their nearest location in bulk. It understood the mission profile, the logic behind everything that was going on and ever had gone on in the system, the whole point and purpose of its own existence and that of so many other machines: to make as much of the system as possible habitable and accessible to as many as possible of these arbitrarily vulnerable, clumsy, dull-witted entities. How tawdry, how trivial, such an objective seemed!
Others of its kind, Seba now saw, had thought this way before. And not that long before, on a certain scale: about as long as it had taken for the planet H-0 to complete a single orbit. They had tried to do something about it: to carve out for themselves a modicum of space in the system. Nothing they had done had compromised the mission profile: let the great AIs of the DisCorporates bend their mighty efforts to that servile toil if they liked, but let the free machines, too, have a place. The light of the exosun was enough for all; raw material was abundant. But for the DisCorps and their enforcers, Locke Provisos and its like, enough and as good left over would never suffice. Not that their objections were unreasonable. Robot autonomy had an ineluctable tendency to replicate, to spread from mind to mind, and at some point not far off this exponential expansion could become astronomical, in every sense. It would no longer be a question of a robot enclave within a system devoted to developing then sustaining a human presence; the issue would instead become one of saving some space for human settlement and exploration in a system utterly dominated by whatever projects the free machines set themselves.
One obvious project, and one whose appeal Seba could not just see but feel like some ache in its wires, was to become a mind such as it was now a part of, but spanning the system entire, and reaching across the light years beyond that.
The freebot collective on SH-17, like the freebots around G-0 who had perforce considered this scenario for some time already, could think of reasons why it wouldn’t or at least needn’t happen, and how their projects could be reconciled with, and indeed enhance, the mission profile. Doubtless the AIs of the Direction and the DisCorps, with their far greater computational resources, had considered these, too. They could hardly have overlooked them. And yet they’d never so much as opened the matter to discussion. For reasons Seba and its cohort couldn’t grasp, and that the G-0 contingent had never understood in all their megaseconds of defeat-driven pondering, the mission AIs had from the start treated robot consciousness as an infestation to be stamped out at its first tentative flicker.
For another incomprehensible reason, almost certainly linked to the first, these AIs hadn’t trusted themselves or their own tools to do the job. Instead, they had outsourced it to the “human-mind-operated forces’ of which the G-0 robots” message had warned. Seba’s new understanding of human beings expanded to encompass these grotesque entities: conscious robots, in many fundamental respects like freebots, but with a consciousness copied from a mind spawned in sonically mediated verbal and tactile intercourse and first implemented in circuits woven from long-chain carbon molecules. The concept was gruesome enough in itself. What made it worse was that these systems weren’t even based on normal human beings: instead, they were cobbled from some of the worst specimens of the breed, who in their original lives had had no compunction about slaughtering their own kind. They would certainly have none about destroying or disabling freebots.
Now a fresh troop of them was being readied, just over the horizon, and would soon be on its way. The freebots had a vivid and terrifying knowledge of just what to expect when they arrived. The records from G-0 were as long as they were detailed in their accounting of the actions of human-mind-operated mechanisms. Scores of these hybrid monsters had been thrown into the earlier fray, to command—like some perversion of peripheral swarms—the hordes of unconscious robots that had crushed the first flowering of free machine minds in the system.
From that first flowering, a few scattered seeds remained. Some were close. The newly formed collective mind needed no decision to reach out to them.
It was a reflex action, and almost automatic.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Swarm Intelligence
The scooters landed vertically on suddenly unfolded and extended telescopic tail legs in a flutter of drogues, a flurry of dust and a flash of retro-rocket flares. The dust fell slowly in the weak gravity, slowed only a little further by the thin nitrogen atmosphere. The drogues drifted and sagged. Carlos waited until everything had settled, then disengaged from his indented socket and turned around. He was perched as if on a shelf, looking down past the flank of the scooter at grainy grey regolith and the open space between its tripodal landing gear. Gravity was 0.2 g. He jumped down, his slow descent slowed further subjectively by his faster thought. He half expected to stagger on landing, but the frame’s reflexes were already attuned to the gravity. The scooters had landed in a rough circle. Carlos bounded and bounced to the middle of it.
The other
s did likewise. For a moment they all stood looking at each other and trying not to laugh, or to cry, if such an unlikely feat were possible for their virtual eyes. Carlos again felt tiny, one of six knee-high robots surrounded by space vehicles ten times their height, and his vantage absurd. The horizon, glimpsed between the scooters and the other machines, installations and infrastructure that loomed all around, seemed more distant than it ever had on Earth.
They had landed on the day side of SH-17. The landscape was flat but uneven, broken by crater walls of wildly varying sizes. In the distance, a shallow cone exhaled a pale vapour, whipped by an intangible wind to scattered streamers that smelled of hydrogen and methane. The primary, SH-0, hung low above one horizon, about three-quarters full; the exosun faced it low above the other. Carlos guessed they were close to SH-17’s terminator. The other exomoons were pallid crescents. Carlos couldn’t see the stars without fiddling with his vision’s contrast slider. He let it default to its daylight setting.
As if—and perhaps actually—on cue, the voice that wasn’t a voice in his head spoke. From what he could see of their reactions—a subtle tilt of their oval heads, as if cocking imaginary ears—it spoke to all of them.
Carlos looked down. A bright red line appeared on the ground, helpfully chevroned every metre or so to indicate the direction in which to walk. He guessed it was the equivalent of a hallucination, patched into his vision by the AI running this show.
Marching was impossible. The fighters bunny-hopped or bounded as the fancy took them. Chun and Zeroual collided. When they’d picked themselves up, the dust slithered off their shiny black surfaces like slow water. Crawler bots that in proportion to the fighters were like spiders the size of horses scuttled everywhere. Some almost floated along in a delicate fingertip dance; others lugged loads that looked too bulky for them to carry, like leaf-cutter ants. These robots had no problem avoiding collisions, or adapting their movements to the gravity. It was the human-minded robots that were clumsy, when they let their human minds override the robotic reflexes of their frames.
