by Ken MacLeod
After a careful scan of the vicinity, she clambered up to the download slot.
Another surreal nightmare, a full-on bad trip. Taransay sat shaking as the memories faded.
Back on the fucking bus.
Everything looked real again, but she didn’t feel it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Oderint Dum Metuant (“Go Tell the Stupid Machines”)
The advantage Dunt had over every other revived veteran, Axle or Rax, was that he hadn’t been surprised to find himself here. He had planned for the possibility. Unlike the others, he hadn’t died in the Last World War and been posthumously sentenced to death in the post-war United Nations Security Council reign of terror. He had seen that blood-red dawn of the Direction—the searches, the sweeps, the street executions—and the first global elections to the world assembly, the triumph of the mob. Unlike everyone else here, he’d actually lived under the Direction, if only for a few months. His last memories were of his own preparations for a last-ditch attack on a UNSC patrol.
The attack was suicidal, but that didn’t mean much. Dunt was on every UNSC death list, and on the run. His card was marked. Death was coming for him anyway. There was, he’d calculated, a small chance to turn even that to the advantage of the cause.
He had seen how fighters who’d died in ways that left their brain-states recoverable were being preserved for possible future revival, perhaps centuries hence, when the technology had improved. He’d known that some of those who were in the records as Axle were in fact Rax infiltrators. These dead comrades were being sent into the future. Dunt was not going to abandon them there. He had known how deeply embedded clandestine Rax cadre were, in the post-war states and the emerging world state. The world state’s world of peaceful sheep would some day meet its wolves. The Aryan fighting man would be called upon again. When that time came, Dunt would be ready.
With the help of dedicated followers and some of the clandestine cadre in the UNSC bureaucracy, he had laid his plans. He’d stolen the identity and biometric details of a dead Acceleration militant whose body and brain were beyond recovery. Dunt knew this because he’d put them there, with bullet and fire and acid. These biometric details he’d had replaced with his own. If Dunt ever ended up as a mangled cortex and brain stem in a flask of liquid nitrogen, those immortal remains would be filed as those of the dead Accelerationist, not Dunt’s.
That frozen structure would be the ultimate special snowflake, drifting through dark, cold skies of time to blizzards yet to come.
It was a small chance, vanishingly small, a Pascal’s Wager with the devil.
It had paid off beyond his wildest dreams. It had got him to his Valhalla. Not just the far future, but a distant star. Small wonder he felt blessed.
“We await replies.”
Dunt turned off the camera and let himself drift back. Nothing more to do now but, well, await replies. The die was cast.
He felt drained, although his power pack’s gauge was still in the orange. The effort of sustained simulated speech, perhaps—he’d got used to the easy default of radio telepathy. And before its delivery there had been all the dickering over its content. Shit. He could have done without that.
Crafting the message had put a strain on the inner circle. In principle, they all agreed on the urgency of a peace offer. But they’d quibbled over the details. Rexham, Stroilova and Blanc had angled for throwing down the gauntlet by putting the Reaction case more strongly, as a challenge calculated to appeal to potential recruits; Whitten and Schulz had urged a tone even more conciliatory than the one adopted.
Dunt had got his way in the end, as ever.
But it should never have been an issue. They were all irritable, that was what it was. It was like going without sleep, or that time he’d made a bunch of recruits quit smoking, back in the day. Tetchy as hell, they’d been.
Now everyone was like that, inner circle and lower ranks alike. It wasn’t as if you actually missed anything, got hungry or sleepy or horny. And you had far more stimulation in the frame than you ever did when you were—actually or virtually—human. But there it was. A growing, gnawing lust for something you couldn’t define, only there as a lack, but that you knew was a longing for the sim. Smells in your nose, air in your lungs, food and drink in your mouth and down your throat, spunk pulsing out or in. All touches on internal skin. The pleasures of the virtual flesh. He was certain this was an imposed desire, programmed in rather than intrinsic to the posthuman condition. A way to keep you hooked …
Dunt shoved himself away from the back of the floodlit niche set up for the broadcast, and out into the main cavern. Lights by the dozens floated in the near-vacuum like tiny suns. Troops darted here and there, setting things up for when traders arrived. Two squads moved the scooters one by one to the inner side of the cavity, deploying them to face the tunnel entrance, around which three were left ready for immediate launch. Others built handling facilities from machinery and material scavenged from robotic activity deeper within: a crane, a net, a battery of lasers and software probes.
Most of the troops were still deep in the tunnels, but weren’t moving forward any more: they had set up blocks at their furthest limit of exploration, sealing them off with rocks and tripwire devices likewise scavenged and hacked from available machinery. On their way in they had set up a series of relays through each tunnel, so that radio and laser communications could flow without being blocked by rock. They’d left guards at main junctions, and the remainder of the troops were now working their way slowly back, herding bots of all sizes as they went.
In all, a volume of about six hundred metres radius from the entrance, with the fusion factory just inside it, could now be considered more or less consolidated. Within that rough hemisphere numerous workings and worksites had been found, some incomprehensible, but none as large or significant as the hall of the fusion pods. None of the robots captured after Dunt’s exemplary reprisal against five supervisory bots had confessed to being freebots, and all were being variously prodded or chivvied into doing something useful or at least staying in the mesh pens into which they’d been herded.
Situation nominal. Everything was going fine. Time to visit those for whom it wasn’t.
Dunt jetted to the far side of the cavern, near the entrance. Foyle, the trooper who’d been cut almost in half by the freebot miner, was held sitting against the rock by tape across his useless legs. He crouched over a micro-tool rig on the remains of his lap, making repairs and minute adjustments to damaged auxiliaries. The original plan had been that he’d thus repair his own frame, but the internal specs showed a far finer grain than anything the micro-rig could handle.
The man looked up. There was a flicker behind his visor, as his vision refocused.
Dunt clapped Foyle’s shoulder.
Feeling somewhat awkward, Dunt jetted off. He soared through the entrance tunn
el as if up a lift-shaft, slowed, and let himself drift to a halt just outside, feet on a level with the top of the angular open structure being built around the hole: the beginnings of a space jetty, with two fully armed scooters mounted on it already, poised to spring if any danger loomed.
The transition wasn’t so much from dark to light as from unspeakably cold to relatively hot. From about a hundred Celsius below to a hundred above, just like that! His frame handled it without a creak. He paused to look around, letting his whole frame rotate slowly. The exosun was high, SH-0 gibbous, the modular cloud a wisp across it: dots against the bright segment, lights against the dark. Eventually the slow spin of SH-119 would roll this side of the little moonlet into darkness and shadow. Odd that it wasn’t locked, one side always facing SH-0, but that was perhaps evidence of a recent collision.
Quite a lot of heavy metal in the rock, too; the composition was rather different from that of any moon he knew of in the Solar system, but if what little he knew of exosolar systems was anything to go by, each was unique. Every detail of their history was contingent. That of this system was mostly unknown but clearly turbulent: even the rocky planet H-0, slated for future habitation by the Direction’s spawn, had a ring to testify to that. There were times when he could see the point of the Direction module’s slow, patient approach to the mission profile: explore before exploiting. Measure six times before you cut, and all that.
There he was, thinking like a Jew tailor. It wouldn’t work, it wasn’t how things worked. Pioneers gonna pioneer, goddammit! Let later, softer generations loll in the luxury of shedding futile tears for what was lost. Or perhaps the future white man, the true man, would know better than to indulge such cheap sentimental pining. Evolution was selection was loss, as the coming race would know better than any, until it in turn gave way—gracefully or not, as the case might be—to the overman.
Dunt tumbled to horizontal and jetted gently towards the absurdly close horizon, at an altitude of a couple of metres on average above the uneven surface. The new structure at the entrance dipped below the horizon behind him. Ahead, another and much smaller construction loomed: a carbon-fibre stake sticking a couple of metres out from the rock, to which the other casualty was lightly tethered. He, too, was making himself useful. Dunt decelerated and swung his feet downward into contact with the rock. The soles weren’t magnetic, and wouldn’t have been any use here if they were—the rock was far from ferrous—but they nevertheless gripped stickily.
He took a step or two closer. The man on space-guard duty turned, revealing the brutal, smoothly scooped excision where most of his visor had been. Dunt had to remind himself that he wasn’t looking at the ruins of a face and head. His literally traumatic memories of medevacs and military hospitals screamed otherwise.
The damage had stopped leaking. Microscopic bots moved in it like bacteria—or nits, or maggots, depending on how close you cared to zoom.
Compassion, of a kind, mingled with curiosity:
The ghastly hole in Evans’s visor was turned to the modular cloud, its blind gaze fixed and concentrated like a locked-on radar dish.
You gotta be kidding, Dunt thought. No way could the spectroscopic sense be that precise.
Then he saw a twinkle of engine burns.
The distant sparks winked out as the spacecraft settled into free fall, outward to SH-119.
A moment later, an excited call came in from Stroilova.
He passed on the good news to Evans.
Even before Dunt made it back to the entrance hole, Zheng Reconciliation Services followed Morlock’s lead. Another transfer tug, another squad’s worth of blank frames. Then reports came in that a couple of other companies, too, had made deals: tiny supply craft, laden with enough processing power and software to build luxury sims for thousands, were on their way.
Dunt felt elated, and vindicated. His predictions had been borne out, his confidence justified. Like most of his comrades, he despised capitalists as individuals as devoutly as he believed in capitalism as a system. And capitalists the DisCorps were, at least in an abstract sense. Those AI business executives and fund managers could be relied on to follow their virtual noses to money, if the profits dangled before them were high enough. It amused Dunt deeply that not even the dictatorial Direction module could keep all the DisCorps on the leash.
Of course, letting the DisCorps trade with the Rax might be a cunning manoeuvre by the Direction. But thanks to blockchains and checksums, whatever devilry it was up to couldn’t be hidden in the software or the hardware en route. And any covert incoming physics packages would be detected by the scooters distributed around the surface, watching every cubic quadrant of the sky. As for some grander scheme … Dunt was confident he and at least some of the inner circle would have its measure.
For behind the Direction module was the Direction, and behind that was, if not a democracy, then a convincing simulacrum of one. Dunt hadn’t been exaggerating his own views in the slightest when he’d described that tyranny to the troops as having weaknesses. Democracy, or any thinking derived from it, was fundamentally at odds with reality. That made it stupid. That stupidity, that wilful blindness to the way the real world worked, was at the root of what conservatives—with their usual superficiality—decried as hypocrisy. Hypocrisy was an epithet too good for the mental and moral deformities of democracy. Its vices were too deep to pay tribute to virtue. Dunt respected the power of the cold monster, but he had not the slightest doubt that it was evil, and that his side was right.
The Reaction might have trolled its clueless foes with the insignia and memorabilia of fascism. Its shock-troops might have flaunted their racial consciousness and overt yearning for dictatorship. The democrats had acted suitably shocked. Meanwhile, their very own precious liberal democracies had, before Dunt had even been born, let millions die on the Mediterranean’s southern shore. Refugees from a continent ravaged by climate change and war, denied entry to Europe. Dunt would have been the first to admit that he had no warm place in his heart for people of African descent, but he couldn’t—even with the lucid self-insight the frame’s copy of his mind endowed—find in himself the sort of callous indifference if not genocidal hatred that had built that beach of bones.
Then, back when Dunt was alive, the same democracies had kept tens of millions of Muslims in t
he biggest concentration camp ever devised, having driven them to the steppes of Kazakhstan by pogroms that would have made the Black Hundreds blanch, and processed the survivors with a bureaucratic machinery of deportation and enforced exile that Beria would have dismissed out of hand as impracticable and inhumane. Not that Dunt disapproved of the policy, but he relished every opportunity to point out that it showed up the vaunted moral superiority of the liberals as a sham.
No, Dunt had not the slightest doubt that his cause was just, and that it would prevail—whatever tricks the Direction tried to pull.
Dunt’s good mood lasted until just after he dropped down the entrance shaft.
Bedlam.
From two separate tunnels, one of which led to the fusion factory, fighters tumbled pell-mell. With them came a rabble of robots. Some robots scrabbled helplessly in open space, others gas-jetted off at all angles and promptly vanished down other tunnels. Each squad included a gravely damaged fighter, boosted along by others. From what Dunt could see, the casualties looked as if they’d walked into buzz-saws or propellers. Some fighters in the cavity jumped or jetted across to help or to guard the rear, adding to the general confusion.
Urgent messages scrolled down his heads-up. A babble of radio telepathy. Voices.
Dunt stayed right where he was, poised on the floor at the foot of the shaft. He willed himself to calm, and sent out a sharp general command:
The babble stopped.
Jeez. This was elementary. The Rax cadre had been spoiled by the agencies’ and AIs’ casual ways. He was going to have to organise drills, exercises … but right now there was an emergency to deal with. Dunt sifted the messages—text, voice, radio telepathy—in his buffer. The last man in each of the two squads had been attacked by a mining bot that had suddenly broken through the tunnel wall just in front of him. The attacks had been only seconds apart.
