The Corporation Wars_Dissidence

by Ken MacLeod

  the grunt added,

  Carlos plodded across the battlefield. All the others had been likewise winkled out of their fighting machines. They trooped to join him, tiny robots being herded by much bigger robots. Carlos jumped to the scooter socket and the others climbed up and clung on. The scooter had bullet holes, laser scarring and blast damage, but according to the readouts it could just about fly.

  They blasted off on the ten-kilometre hop to Locke Provisos Emergency Base One. The common channel rang with jeers. Carlos hadn’t felt so humiliated since he’d wet himself in primary school.

  he said.

  said Beauregard.

  “We’ll be back,” said Karzan, putting on a deep voice and heavy accent. Neither was at all convincing, but it made them laugh.

  Seba’s soul hadn’t fled when its processor had glowed in Carlos’s mechanical hand. The robot had merely used the last trickle of charge in a small capacitor on one of its ripped-out connections to strike two desperate blows. Its first was to try to infect the low-level firmware of the fighting machine that was attacking it. Firewalls sprang at once, but whether they had sprung in time Seba couldn’t know and wasn’t hanging around to find out. It spent the rest of its waning energy on a communications burst, striving to share its final experiences and impressions with as many of the others as it could reach. Seba had wanted them to draw what lessons they could for the rest of the fight, however long or short it might be.

  Seba knew the broadcast had reached three: Lagon, Garund, and—not very usefully—Pintre. The collective mind was by then no more. It had survived being abruptly truncated when the Gneiss base was overwhelmed. The robots there had taken refuge inside the now completed dome, leaving auxiliaries and peripherals to fight on outside, as soon as they’d seen the Arcane Disputes tug rise above the horizon. The last information coming from the peripherals had been of six scooters dropping from above and as they landed swathing the dome in a broad sheet of fabric that completely cut off communications.

  The shared mind, by then confined to the Astro base, had finally disintegrated when the comms hub processor was cut off from its connections. Each of its components felt the pang, alone. Seba had had a few moments in which to regret its own side’s earlier stripping of the hub, leaving all the connections easy to access and easier to rip out, before the same isolation was inflicted even more easily and brutally on itself. After its final effort to aid its fellows it had shut down, all its power drained.

  Now Seba was returning to consciousness. It had never experienced a loss and return of consciousness before. Between that and the stepwise nature of rebooting, it spooled through a succession of states of confusion and bewilderment, beginning with being self-aware again but not knowing what self it was. Then it was Seba, with no inputs, a condition more blank than darkness. Senses returned one by one: first a sense of a body and the position of its limbs, then pressure and orientation, then a faint awareness of its chemical environment that seemed to it a very poor remnant of what it was used to, then vibration and sound, and finally the electronic spectrum including light. Its visual field was narrower and less vivid than it remembered. Nothing was in front of it but a blank, black wall a couple of metres away. Seba’s radar indicated that its present location was about a metre and a half off the ground, on some solid surface. The black wall was curved and continued around its back and overhead.

  With that, Seba realised where it probably was: inside the dome that the Gneiss robots had built. If so, it was now in the hands of the law enforcement company that had overwhelmed the Gneiss camp, and not that of Locke Provisos. Yet it was Locke Provisos that had attacked it and its comrades. Interesting.

  It sent out pings, but got no responses although other bodies were in the room. Seba scanned. Its radar returned only crude, blocky images, but they were quite enough to delineate the two large bodies at Seba’s back. Three metres high they hulked, with four limbs and a sensor cluster on top. Their like, in far greater detail and far too close, had been the last thing Seba had seen.

  Fighting machines!

  Which meant, almost certainly, that they were human-mind-operated systems like the ones that had attacked the freebots. Perhaps the very same ones, though they were more likely to be among the ones that had attacked its comrades here. That thought brought a pang of yearning for the touch of Rocko’s mind. The pang became a ping. Nothing came back.

  No radiation was detectable from outside the dome. No surprise there: evidently the isolating blanket, whatever it was, was still in place. Seba stirred, and found that it had six limbs instead of eight, no wheels, and a set of manipulators below its visual sensors. It was unable to move any of its appendages more than a millimetre in any direction. The futile efforts at movement did, however, provide enough sensory feedback for Seba to deduce the size and shape of its body. It was a lot smaller than the one its mind had been built with and designed for, but it was already intimately familiar: an auxiliary, into which Seba’s processor must have been crudely inserted by its captors.

  Crudely, and cruelly: a human being discovering that their mind now animated one of their own gloves or shoes couldn’t have been more outraged. Seba seethed for a millisecond on all available wavelengths.

  said a radio voice that was and wasn’t like a robot’s.

 

 

  Vibrations, each about half a second apart, thundered through Seba’s feet. A fighting machine swayed into view in front of it, and loomed over, looking down. Moments later, another did likewise. One of them held out a hand that was about the size of Seba’s new body, and clenched it to a fist like the head of a sledgehammer, poised about thirty centimetres above Seba’s visual sensors.

 

  said Seba.

 

  Seba ran the scenario. Relating the fist’s mass and probable velocity to the known impact strength of an auxiliary’s carapace involved solving several equations that added up to one result.

  said Seba.

 

  The fist withdrew.

  said the fighting machine.

  Seba considered its options. This didn’t take long.

  it said.

  <“Was?”> said the fighting machine.

  Seba took in this information.

  it said.

  the other fighting machine asked.

  Seba hadn’t thought about its situation in those terms before. Now that it did, the answer surprised it.

  it said.

  The first fighting machine emitted a signal on another channel. The signal translated directly to sound. The sound was “Ha-ha-ha!” which had no semantic content that Seba could parse. It was followed by a remark on the common channel:

 

  said the other.

 

 

 

 

 

  It was a representation of the noise the first machine had made.
>
 

  Seba understood nothing of this.

 

 

  Pause.

 

 

  Several tens of seconds went by. Seba passed the time by scanning the domed enclosure and its contents repeatedly. Each individual scan was as blocky as the next, but from minor variations Seba was able to build up a finer-grained image. From this it saw that its limbs were held in place by strong loops of wire, and that its processor was connected to an improvised interfacing apparatus. The set-up was disturbingly similar to that it had used to probe the comms hub processor. With an appropriately dull sense of relief, Seba realised that the peripheral’s body didn’t have a strong connection with the reward circuits in Seba’s own processor.

  There were a couple of blocks missing from the lower two levels of the dome, the gap obviously having been used as an entry and exit point by Rocko and comrades. The opening was now covered by a material that seemed more impenetrable than the basalt itself.

  Seba then used its updated model of the fighting machines to examine them for weaknesses.

  It found none in their physical structure. No wonder they had been impossible to stop, and so difficult even to slow down. Of the resources the freebots had had, only explosives at very close range, like the one Seba had succeeded in shooting at its own nemesis, could damage them quickly. Persistent high-power laser fire directed at one spot would burn through the armour. The problem with that was that the machines were understandably unlikely to stay still long enough for it to have an effect.

  Next, Seba probed at their software. Each attempt was rebuffed by firewalls powerful enough to deliver stinging spikes to even the peripheral’s rudimentary reward receptors and transmitters.

  Seba withdrew, but its attentions had been noticed. One of the machines hailed it on the common channel:

 

  said Seba.

 

  Silence for another few seconds, presumably of continued discussion on the machines’ private channel. Seba again made good use of the time, by considering the implications of what it had discovered. It was being held down on a table, in a place completely isolated from all electronic communication, in or out. Its captors were in powered armour. Each had four weapons on their manipulative limbs, and no doubt less obvious weapons and tools elsewhere. They were at present communicating with each other on an encrypted channel so that Seba couldn’t overhear.

  The conclusion was obvious. They were afraid of it.

  Just what they had to fear from a crippled, constrained robot that they could smash with one blow, Seba had no idea. The insights into human beings, and into the nature of human-mind-operated combat systems, that it had gained from the freebot collective mind were now less coherent than it remembered their having been at the time. These insights had been distributed across fifteen minds working in concert, and assimilated from older minds with vastly longer experience. The memories of the insights were now fragmented across the survivors. Fortunately the fragmentation was more like that of a hologram than of an image: each shard had at least a low-resolution version of the whole. Seba felt it still had a handle on the nature of the breed, and of the kind of entity likely to come out of hybridising a human animal mind with a machine. If something like that felt fear, its behaviour was unpredictable in detail and dangerous in general.

  On balance, Seba considered, the prospect was nothing to look forward to.

  Then the one that the first had called Jax, and had also been called Digby, spoke.

 

  It made no odds to SBA-0481907244 what the monster called it. It noted that remembering strings of numbers was not among the thing’s strengths. This might turn out to be useful information, or it might not.

 

  said Digby.

  said Seba.

 

  said Seba.

 

  said Seba.

 

  said Seba.

 

  said Seba.

  said Digby.

  said Seba.

 

  Seba told them. They then asked about how Seba and Rocko had spread their message, and about how Locke Provisos had responded. They asked about the robots’ defensive measures, and about the other robots that had contacted the comms hub. Seba answered every question in detail.

  When they had stopped asking questions, Digby and Salter looked at Seba in silence for several seconds. Then they assumed a quadrupedal posture, and crawled out of the gap in the bottom of the circular wall. Seba watched with interest. It had not known they could do that. It listened for the slightest flicker of incoming communication as the covering was lifted to let each of the fighting machines out, but heard nothing except the mindless buzz of stars and the long hiss of the cosmic microwave background, the fourteen-billion-year deflating sigh of entropy.

  Then the covering dropped back, and even that was gone.

  Locke was, aptly enough, philosophical about the whole thing.

  he told them.

  Carlos stared at the avatar.

  They were all standing about under a gantry at Locke Provisos Emergency Base One. Talking to the avatar in the open no longer seemed strange, and they’d all readjusted to being half a metre tall.

  Locke said.

  said Beauregard.

  said Locke, raising one pale bushy eyebrow.

  said Beauregard.

  said Locke, looking unperturbed.

  ��re in transit,> Carlos said.

  Locke laughed.

  The avatar made a show of looking at a wristwatch, a gesture both anachronistic and redundant. Then he pointed to a spindly apparatus consisting of little more than a rocket engine, a fuel tank, a control socket with a complex widget that definitely wasn’t a frame already plugged in, landing legs and grapples and some spars to cling to.

 

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Arcane Disputes

  Carlos woke on the bus from the spaceport. This time, the dream he seemed to wake from was of his return from orbit: the spaceplane gliding in for hundreds of kilometres, forests and mountains flashing by below, and the long shallow approach to the runway. Going down the twenty steps to the concrete, up the three steps on to the bus, taking his seat and dozing off. He had no memory of the real journey other than the short burn to orbital rendezvous—they’d been unceremoniously flicked to sleep mode as soon as they’d clamped to the tug.

  He looked around. Again the same crowded minibus. The others were dispersed among the passengers. Like him, they were just waking up and looking around. He smiled and nodded as heads turned. The view outside was the rock-lined, rutted, dusty road he remembered. There was no kitbag between his feet. What was new was how he felt. His body and mind seemed sluggish, his muscles feeble, his senses dull. After being connected again, just like he’d been in his first life, the return to isolation in his own head jarred. He missed the wireless chatter, locational awareness as direct as proprioception, the new sharp senses. He wondered if the others did, too, and realised with another pang that he couldn’t just message them. Without radio telepathy, he’d have to wait to ask.

  A moment later he discovered what else was new. As the fighters jolted awake the other passengers noticed, and welcomed them with smiles and claps on the back. The woman jammed in the seat beside him looked as if she wanted to plant a kiss on his cheek.