by Ken MacLeod
said Simo,
And that they all set off to do.
CHAPTER FOUR
Terra Nullius (“Earth Is Nothing to Me”)
On the bus to the spaceport, Taransay Rizzi knew better than to try to stay awake.
She knew she’d fall asleep, just as she knew there was no spaceport; not even a simulation of a spaceport. The simulation of being in the minibus was bumpy, sweaty and solid. Two farmers with herbs to trade, at whatever off-world terminus featured in their reality, talked in their own language and ignored her. The sky with the black crescent across it and the too-bright sun, the mountains and the tall woody plants that looked like trees, were all as vivid as ever. But after having seen the real view outside, of the real planet outside the module, something fundamental in her mind had shifted. It was getting harder to sustain the conviction that everything around her was real.
She dozed, inevitably.
And then—wham—she was awake and in her frame.
She was a robot with a human mind on an alien world, with an AI named for a dead philosopher talking voicelessly in her head.
Taransay didn’t move. Her right arm, shot away in the skirmish with the Arcane module hours earlier, was missing. Her entire frame was jammed in the download slot, and felt as if it were being pulled out. Everything smelled of soot and fire with a side order of sulphur. A background roar mingled with high, keening notes resolved into a gale of oxygen, nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide and sulfurous volcanic gasses. That wind also carried traces of complex long-chain organic molecules, their smells unearthly but earthy: local life.
Taransay flexed her waist and crooked her knees and ankles, elbow and wrist and fingers. Everything worked. She stretched out her remaining arm and with her left hand traced the fine grain of nanotech feed tubes inside the crevice. Motor and sensory functions nominal. The hand encountered something else in the slot. She swung her vision around as far as she could, and saw the cracked torso of a frame, much more severely damaged than hers. It was a surprise that her own frame had survived the entry and landing at all—when she’d downloaded, it had been only barely in the slot. Reflex, or automated survival behaviour, had made it crawl in and huddle.
She reached above her head to the bottom of the slot and pushed hard. With a grinding vibration that set off warning feedback in her trunk, she began to shift, then slip.
The fall, when it came, was sudden and heavy. Her frame’s reflexes had already automatically updated and adjusted for the local two gravities. Nevertheless, she hit the ground hard from about a metre and a half up. She landed, knees bending to absorb the shock, arm swinging out to hold her balance. She straightened up, her feet a centimetre deep in grey sand that felt sharp underfoot and smelled of silicates. Volcanic ash.
A crater left by the module was a dozen metres away, with a thick trail from its rim to the module’s present location. She guessed that the crater had been formed by the module’s impact rather than a shock wave; they hadn’t been descending faster than even the local speed of sound. A glassy patch in the crater’s centre was evidence of the module’s final retro-rocket burn. A tongue of lava had cooled about halfway down the far side of the crater. It seemed the module had been rolled out of the way just in time.
She’d seen the module’s surroundings on the screens inside the sim, but actually being in the environment was thrilling and frightening. The river of lava was just beyond the crater, flowing faster than seemed right for the gentle slope. Beyond it, and up and down the slope, was what she mentally processed as jungle, tall and branching objects in a chaotic mass of colours: greens, vivid coppery reds, stark blues. The shapes were mostly rhomboid, all angles and straight edges. The only curved objects in that mass were the purple spheroids that hung like lanterns, or fruit, amid the black stems.
On the ground, numerous blue-green circular mats overlapped and moved swiftly as she watched. The smallest were like scattered coins, the largest great flowing things twenty metres across. Their shade changed all the time in response to their immediate environment, chameleon-style. When they moved between the stalks and stones their edges lifted like curled lips, cilia whirring without purchase.
She tilted her head back and scanned the sky. A greenish blue, yellowing away from the zenith and turning increasingly red-orange towards the skyline. The higher clouds were white, the nearer and lower grey, in an incongruous but reassuring touch of the terrestrial.
The strangest thing about the sky, though, was the absence of visible celestial objects. The ring she’d seen every day in the sim, and the massive bulk of SH-0 that had dominated most of the skies she’d recently seen in the real, were conspicuously not there.
The massive bulk of SH-0 was now underfoot, not above.
In that alien environment the module itself looked almost native: an erratic boulder of black crystalline basalt, perhaps, rather than an artificial meteor fresh-fallen from the sky. A faceted spheroid about four metres across, scorched, partially covered by the huge mat that had rolled it from the crater, it seemed anything but what it was: a chunk of computer circuitry powerful enough to sustain an entire virtual world and have more than enough processing power left over to deal with the real.
Too close for comfort, a geyser shot up to ten times her height. Steam plumed from it in the unsteady wind like spume from a storm-tossed crest. Fat, hot drops spattered in the thick air and heavy gravity. Where they splashed on the ash they left craters.
Taransay flinched, then steadied herself. Mud bubbled here and there, but the ground looked firm. She took a step forward, and then another, and then turned about to look up at the module. It loomed above her like a boulder covered in moss. The mat that had enveloped it and rolled it out of the way of the lava was still there, and looked set to stay. Its apparent rescue of the module immediately after the crash might have been a lucky accident, a reflex response, or a deliberate act. The mats and their observable behaviour had been debated, predictably and fruitlessly, since the landing. But Taransay couldn’t deny herself the excitement of speculating that the first motile, multicellular organism humanity had (to her knowledge, anyway) encountered was also the first intelligent life.
Unlikely though that seemed, statistically speaking.
Taransay peered closely and zoomed. The tough-looking cilia that fringed the mat and had seemed to propel it were also present across the entire outside surface, which had previously been the bottom. The cilia themselves had cilia, and these sub-cilia had fuzz that itself …
She couldn’t tell how far down the sub-divisions went. Those cilia she could see around the nearest part of the edge were now branching into rootlets and sub-rootlets (and so—fractally—on) that probed into the module’s nanofacture fuzz. At least, into those parts that weren’t hopelessly scorched.
She reported this as she shared her vision with the screen the others would be watching in the sim.
She looked further up, at the slot from which she’d emerged. Just visible inside it were the remains of three frames—presumably those of the three fighters from the Arcane module who’d managed to download into the sim. One she’d already seen, headless and limbless; one had lost two legs, the other an arm and its head.
Taransay looked up at the overhanging curve of the module, and scanned it for hand- and footholds. The training she’d had in the Locke sim seemed a long time ago. But at least she had a far better mental model and map of the cliff she now had to climb than she’d ever had then.
She hooked her one hand into a crack slippery with mat. The tendrils responded, squirming ticklishly. She ignored them, pressing down, letting her weight hang. Then she swung her body upward and sideways, and got both feet in places that let her switch her hand an inch sideways to grab another hold. Repeat, with variations. She climbed thus one-handed, with great care and difficulty to the download slot. She wedged her arm across the slot and with one foot reached inside it, and kicked and tugged out the damaged frames one by one. They each hit the ground with what seemed excessive force. Something else was still there. Some kind of box. Ah yes, the object from which Durward and Remington had been downloaded. She kicked it out too. Then she shoved away, jumping clear, and walked around the module to inspect it some more.
Experimentally, she pushed at the side of the module. It didn’t budge. It massed tons, and weighed double down here.
So how had the mat moved it? The cilia had to be far more powerful than they looked.
Moving around the side, she saw the flanges of the fusion drive. They had taken the landing hard and were bent out of shape. It would take more than nanotechnology to get them back. This module wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Taransay walked around the module again, scanning it more carefully. A few lumps under the mat turned out to be fusion pods, and a two-metre-long swelling the nanofacturing cylinder.
At the back of the module, on the other side from the download slot, the jungle pressed close. Black stems, the squarish things that might have been leaves whipping and flapping in the gale, and the ever-moving circular mats on the ground.
Amid the stems, upon the mats, something else moved.
Low and fast, long and cylindrical, with multiple stiff cilia flickering underneath, it snaked through the jungle straight towards Taransay.
She turned to the module and tried to jump. To her amazement, she succeeded, though her legs felt the strain acutely and the leap took her not nearly as high as she’d hoped. She hooked fingers over a ridge on the module’s side, and got one foot to a toehold. Frantically she thrust down and hauled herself up. The stump of her right arm twitched up, as the phantom limb stretched for another hold.
Not a lot of use, that.
She groped with the other foot and found a toehold. She heard the animal’s many feet whisper across the mats, and a rising frequency of clicks that made her think of scissors and jaws. Her mental image of the module’s side, saved from her upward glimpse from the ground, was inadequate but would have to do. Another handhold was twenty-seven centimetres to the right of her hand and ten centimetres up. She flexed her knees as she let go and grabbed. She swayed perilously outward, caught the handhold by a fingertip and consolidated her grip. From there she swung one leg sideways, and found another step, a little higher up.
Now she was over the hump, on a slope rather than an overhang. She took a quick look back down. The animal had paused a couple of metres from the bottom of the module. It looked like a giant millipede, though not visibly segmented, about two metres long and a quarter of a metre thick. It reared up, revealing multiple paired cilia that coalesced to harder mandibles at its mouth. From these the clicking came. It had a black, glassy band across the front of its forepart, like a visor. Taransay made a wild guess that this was its visual organ. Its head swayed from side to side. Behind the glassy band rapid back-and-forth motions took place, as if scanning.
Then it moved forward, until the legs of its reared-up length touched the mat. It began to ascend.
Taransay scrambled to the top of the module. She invoked the specs of the module, overlaid them on her eidetic memory of the battle, and made for where she’d left the gun. She couldn’t see it, but she could see the slot from which she’d fired it: her final trench. Into that trench she rolled, over the lip of mat at its edge.
To her immense relief, the machine gun was there, as if its bipod had walked it into the slot before the battle. Taransay grabbed its stock. The gun had been awkward enough with two hands. She crouched beneath it and swung it upward just as the animal peered over the top. For a moment, Taransay glimpsed her own black-visored reflection in its glassy face. The animal climbed further up, looming over her, then lurched closer towards her, its jaws clicking like pincers.
She fired. The creature exploded, showering her with bits of carapace and greenish gunk.
She felt dismayed at what she’d done. After the mat, the animal was only the second motile organism humanity had encountered on this new world, and had promptly and predictably blown to bits. For all she knew, the clicking jaws might have been an attempt to communicate, or a mode of echolocation. For all she knew, the animal might have simply been curious.
On the other hand, if life here was anything like life on Earth, such a fluffy, feel-good thought was not the way to bet.
She tried to brush the muck off her.
The task was as long and tedious as it sounded. By the time Taransay lay inside the download slot and shifted herself so that the stump and the disconnected arm were in contact, the exosun was sinking in the sky and she felt as drained as her power pack nearly was. The stump had fuzz from the mat and slime from the splattered animal’s innards all over it like mould.
She welcomed the oblivion of downloading as if it were sleep.
At first, when she woke on the bus from the spaceport, her surroundings seemed a continuation of the surreal dreams of the transition. The dreams hadn’t been as bad as a routine download, let alone the brain-stem memories of her actual death that had accompanied her return when the team had been under suspicion.
They were, however, more bizarre. The dandelion-clock men, the burning origami dragons, the sandpaper whales and the college of impossible angles faded rapidly and mercifully.
The change in her vision remained. Everything was greyscale, rendered in black stipple, like some 3-D version of archive newsprint photographs.
Two locals, a man and a woman, sat up front. They turned to each other, then to her, with puzzled looks.
“What’s going on?” the woman asked. “We seem to have lost colour.”
Not a p-zombie, then. Taransay had heard about this from Iqbal, the bartender in the Touch. He hadn’t noticed a
ny changes when the sim had been reduced to outlines, nor later when the colours had come back.
“Search me,” said Taransay. “I guess it’s like when everything became outlines, a wee while back. Extra demand on the processing. I’ll check.”
“How?” the man asked. “I don’t understand. What processing?”
Taransay stared at them. They might not be p-zombies, but was it possible that they still didn’t know they were in a sim? Did they still think they had just come back from a spaceport with exotic products of other colony worlds? Didn’t they even watch the news? Perhaps they hadn’t had time. Or maybe they just didn’t have television out in the sticks.
She took her phone out of her back pocket and called Beauregard. The two passengers watched as if this were witchcraft.
“What’s going on?” Taransay asked.
“We’ve got a virus,” said Beauregard. “Well, some kind of software infestation. Shaw and Nicole and Locke and Remington are up to their elbows trying to deal with it.”
“A virus? Where the fuck’s that coming from? The Direction? The Rax?”
“We think it’s coming from the mat,” said Beauregard. “At least, we can see the mat’s interfacing with the module’s nanotech fuzz.”
Taransay gave an uneasy laugh. “That’s impossible. You need compatibility to get infection. Operating system, genetic code, all that.”
“Well, there it is,” said Beauregard. “The AIs have been studying what they can see of the local life, and it seems adaptable at a deeper level than any life we know. That bandersnatch thing you killed? It’s a rolled-up mat, and maybe not just in a phylogenetic sense. Phenotypically, as well.”
“Jeez.”
“Anyway, good to have you back. Well done out there. But I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment, so …”
“OK, Belfort, catch you later.”
She rang off and put the phone away.
“What is that thing?” the man asked.
Taransay looked at him solemnly. “It’s a new invention from the outer colonies,” she said.
