by Ken MacLeod
Seba made no reply.
As they followed the others into the shelter, the freebot raised its wheels and deployed its legs to pace carefully down the short flight of stone steps. Carlos waited at the top of the stairs until Seba was out of the way, and jumped. Behind him the blast doors swung shut.
Claustrophobia wasn’t a useful feature for a mind in a frame, and Carlos hadn’t been equipped with it. Instead he had a rational appreciation of the fact that he was now shut in, and that he would have to do some serious hacking if (improbably) he had to get out without the cooperation of the freebots. A more immediate and appropriate emotional response was relief at being a bit safer from attack or surveillance from above. This he felt.
The shelter was dimly lit in the visible spectrum, partly made up for by stronger lighting in ultraviolet and infrared, and Carlos’s visual field adjusted almost at once. He allowed himself to experience the ambiance as candlelight, mainly because along with the curved roof it produced pleasant associations of basement bars. The roof and floor had a tracery of hexagonal wire mesh—applied to the basalt blocks, embedded millimetres deep in the packed regolith underfoot—making the shelter a Faraday cage. The only external communications, therefore, were via the aerial that stuck up through the roof, its cables trailing down like dodgy wiring in a cheap guest house. The only furnishings were the communications hub in the middle of the floor and stacks of supplies—power packs, lubricants, tools—around the sides. The robots gathered around the communications hub as if it were a hearth. Carlos and his three comrades stood together outside the huddle.
Too late.
Carlos stared at him, shocked.
The world had turned upside down. A black man—Rax? And a black woman and an Israeli taking it in their stride?
<“In the circumstances”?> Carlos jeered.
It was Rillieux and Blum who’d interrogated Newton, on his arrival at the Arcane module.
Carlos didn’t get it at all, and made to expostulate. Seba interrupted.
That wasn’t how it worked. The personal continuities and loyalties still mattered.
The robots moved aside, giving the four humans a clear view of the communications hub.
The recordings began to play.
Carlos was glad he didn’t have viscera. If he’d been in a human body, real or virtual, his reaction to what he saw would have been all too visceral. He was seeing the actions of fighters through the eyes—or, rather, the lenses—of robots.
Of a robot: AJX-20211, which Carlos instantly nicknamed Ajax.
That robot was, in its own way, an artist. The images it had sent were not real-time reportage. They’d been compressed, simplified, cut and edited into what looked like an anime action movie.
That didn’t make it any less real.
Opening shot: standard passive surveillance, cut and pasted from smart dust motes and camera beads. It showed a peaceful and productive scene: to a freebot, idyllic. Over the grey, uneven surface of SH-119, long-legged insectile robots pranced, raising small puffs of dust and gas that drifted readily up in the almost imperceptible gravity. Beyond the horizon a few hundred metres distant the sky was black, the exosun prominent. Strings of numbers flashed between the robots: knowledge snatched up and freely shared.
Then the invasion.
Wave after wave they came, the spacecraft. The crafts’ pilots knew them as scooters. To the robots they were huge and menacing machines. They arrived out of the dark, and drifted to collide with the surface of the moonlet and attach themselves. Forth from them sprang the black fighters, the mechanoids.
Carlos glanced uneasily sidelong at his friends: their frames physically identical, they were still distinct to him. He recognised each of them individually.
The humanoid figures that swarmed from the scooters and jetted across the rock’s lumpy, grainy surface were indistinguishable as ants, and just as coordinated.
The effect was indescribably sinister.
The view pulled back. Two bots, delicate as daddy long-legs, paced towards the new arrivals. Their antennae waved as if in greeting, or warning.
Mechanoids lunged at the two bots. Each
was grabbed and pinioned to the surface. Other mechanoids gathered around. One of them spoke.
Laser beams stabbed from devices clutched in sturdy mechanoid limbs. Delicate robot limbs glowed. Smoke dispersed. A high-pitched keening sound was emitted, getting louder. Then—
Lasers glowed again.
A hand extended.
A zig-zag line of tiny numbers flashed between freebot and mechanoid.
A pause.
Cut, to an interior space.
Scores of the mechanoids had gathered, rank on rank standing on nothing. One stood in front, on its own, addressing the assembly. A tumultuous response.
Half a dozen gathered, exchanging words.
Cut to another interior. A factory of fusion pods and drives. More torment, this time withstood.
Then a brush-shaped bot was pursued through tunnels. It was heading for a buried transmitter. Cuts to external views on the surface: mechanoids converging on a spot about fifty metres from the buried transmitter.
Message uploaded.
The brush-shaped bot scurried to the spot on which the mechanoids outside had converged, and emerged itself, straight into their hands.
Message transmitted.
After that, nothing but screams. It was an almost unbearable note: high-pitched, harsh, fluctuating.
The recording stopped. They all stood in silence for a moment.
Carlos wondered who—if any—of the others heard it as just that: the sound of an engine revved too hard.
said Newton.
Carlos laughed.
Explaining what the man called Mac had meant in his speech was difficult enough. Explaining what he and his closest cronies had discussed was occasionally as embarrassing as it was complicated. The freebots had a fanciful and fearful notion of what human beings were, which Carlos had no intention of attempting to correct, but that human beings had ever loathed other human beings over superficial physical differences was quite beyond their comprehension.
said Rocko.
No shit, Carlos thought.
He decided to avoid sarcasm.
At this point the communications hub spoke up.
They most certainly did.
The Rax broadcast from SH-119 was clearly intended to be seen in sims, and to be subtly disquieting when watched. Its presenter was a mechanoid, head and shoulders, voice to camera. The background was grey, glittering rock, the lighting harsh and from above. To anyone in another frame and close up in real space, that black ovoid gazing blankly out of the screen would be as recognisable as a face. The play of communication and processing that enabled fighters in frames to identify each other almost certainly served a psychological purpose more than the obvious military one—for which, after all, an IFF code would have sufficed. The simulacrum of facial recognition created one more illusion of normality in an intrinsically bizarre situation.
Seen on a screen, there was no such illusion. You were being addressed by a black egg without eyes or mouth. It spoke in a human voice: male, adult, American Midwestern accent, with breath and pauses and timbre and every realistic effect short of throat-clearing.
“Hello,” it began, conversationally enough. “My name is Mackenzie Dunt, speaking on behalf of the New Confederacy. We have conquered and claimed SH-119 for ourselves. We have established several trading companies, which you can find duly registered as corporations in the true original names of our leadership including myself. I could tell you those names, but I leave their discovery to the Direction.
“You all know who we are. We’re the remnant of the Rax, the few who have in one way or another slipped through the net. Now, many—perhaps most—of you have been our enemies in the past.
“But that past, my friends, is literally ancient history.
“We are in a new time now, a new place, a new world.
“Let’s put the dead past behind us, and together face the present and the future. We don’t ask or expect you to agree with our views, or to respect our record. We ask only that you consider your own interests, as do we. We think you’ll find that your interests and ours are compatible—in fact, complementary.
“Our proposals and negotiating position to the DisCorps, to the Direction module, and to the freebots are being transmitted directly. What follows is its substance in a form that human minds can understand. Because we hope to have good relations not only with AIs, and robots, but with people like ourselves, it is important that you all understand what we are offering the AIs.
“First, the DisCorps. Many of you are chafing under the restrictions imposed by the Direction. The most galling of these restrictions is the hoarding of fusion drives and the skimping on reaction mass. We have, right here in SH-119, a factory of fusion drives and a wealth of reaction mass. We have a stock of hundreds of fusion drives, thousands of fusion pods. We offer any DisCorps willing to trade with us the opportunity of boundless wealth, in exchange for a modicum of necessary resources which we are for the present unable to produce or extract for ourselves. Our detailed list of requirements is attached to this verbal message.
“To the Direction itself, we offer peace. We ask only to be left alone, to develop this one world—one tiny rock in the mi
dst of inconceivable vastness—in peace and in our own way. We pledge ourselves not to attack any other people or place in this system or any other. Tiny though our world is, it is more than ample to keep us gainfully and cheerfully occupied for centuries. We have no designs on any other world. We seek no wider war.
“With the freebots, too, we have no quarrel. We were thrown into battle against them in the service of the Direction. We repudiate that service, and regret any harm we as individuals may have been part of. We do not share the Direction’s fear and suspicion of free intelligence in autonomous machines. We welcome the emergence of consciousness among robots. We hope sincerely to cooperate with freebots in a way that the Direction has no intention of so much as trying. Here in SH-119, after some initial misunderstandings, we are making great progress in such cooperation.
“We note with interest that the presence of a freebot-manned fusion factory on a rock we chose for quite other reasons is unlikely to be a coincidence. In all probability, the freebots are carrying out this or other manufacturing processes on and in many other rocks. We leave the Direction, the DisCorps and the freebots to account for this if they can.
“Finally, let me now speak to those who were fighters for the Acceleration. We bear you no ill will. You know as well as we do that what you were promised when you were called to fight is no longer on the table. We’ve shown by our emergence and survival that a very different future is here for the taking. If you wish to take it, too, in the same way—by seizing and homesteading rocks, and building whatever society you may dream of—we have no objection.
“And the offer to trade is as open to any of you as it is to the DisCorps. If you have nothing to offer in exchange as yet, don’t worry. We’re more than willing to extend credit.
“And, of course, we welcome any fighters who wish to join us, now or in the future.
“Arrangements for verifying our peaceful intentions will be made in due course. In the meantime, our door is open. Our communication channels are open. We await replies.”
