by Ken MacLeod
It took Carlos a moment to understand why the possibility hadn’t immediately occurred to Blum, physicist though he was. Back in the Arcane sim, Carlos and Rillieux had shared pillow talk on the matter. No doubt Rillieux and Newton had done the same. Newton was probably more of a transhumanist than any of them: a man who wasn’t just on the side of the robots but who quite seriously wanted to be a robot. Or, to be precise, to become and remain even more of a robot than he already was. Blum, for all that he was more deeply in cahoots with Newton and Rillieux than Carlos was, might well have missed the memo because he wasn’t a participant in all that pillow talk.
Making a run for the stars wasn’t a topic one discussed where one felt likely to be overheard, delusional though all privacy was in a sim.
Now it was out in the open.
Rillieux was bringing Blum up to speed on the practicality of interstellar exodus when Seba spoke again.
Except Nicole, he thought. She was conscious. So, presumably, were the other Direction reps such as Durward. At that moment the thought didn’t strike him as much of an objection.
<“Them?”> said Newton, in a tone of outrage.
Carlos wondered how long this enlightened view would persist. The freebots, from all the evidence, had a drive to explore and communicate pretty much hard-wired. They had not come equipped with the relentless drive to expand physical control, the fear of which had for so long shaped human imaginings of self-motivated AI. Only states and capitals had such a drive inherent to their nature, with no choice but to expand or perish.
But now many of the freebots were corporations in their own right.
Uh-oh.
Welcome to capitalism, little guys! Next and final stop: imperialism. Enjoy your trip!
The freebot consensus right now, however, was not for competition but solidarity.
They all looked at the robot, and at its companions.
The fighters all looked at each other.
And without further warning, there she was.
A tall woman in a business suit strode confidently down the ramp and faced them, unperturbed by the near-vacuum and the low gravity.
It took Carlos a moment to realise that Newton had never seen such a manifestation before. He’d never had occasion even to see Locke’s avatar out in the open.
Whatever—it remained startling. Carlos had seen Madame Golding before only on screen. Even the freebots were not entirely blasé about her, if the blip in their buzz was anything to go by.
That last seemed addressed to the humans. Carlos wondered if even this vastly superhuman entity found humans hard to figure out. The notion seemed unduly romantic.
Golding threw them a glyph.
Newton had already identified Dunt. Blum remembered Petra Stroilova.
Rillieux glyphed a dark chuckle.
Now that was a snide remark Carlos could endorse.
Was this literal-minded response a result of the avatar’s legal mind, or was it simply robot logic of the plodding type so often displayed by the freebots? Carlos couldn’t be sure.
Madame Golding didn’t look in the least put out.
Carlos found himself nonplussed. It was Rillieux who sprang to respond.
<“We?”> said Madame Golding.
Madame Golding pointed at the four fighters one by one.
Carlos felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped.
Madame Golding waved an imperious hand towards the comms hub.
This was seeing like a state.
The Direction’s view was not quite panoptic: freebot comms were a dark net to it. But all that the DisCorps did, it saw. Carlos saw a millionth of a per cent of this.
Whorls within whorls.
Data flows differentiated by colours beyond the visible spectrum and still inadequate to show the whole. Within these colours: shades and distinctions fine as if by heaven’s own decorator. Myriad microscopic millisecond sparks: production decisions.
And for a frantic moment, most of these production decisions were about trade with the New Confederacy. Nearly all of that was speculative.
The trade goods listed in the AI-addressed channel of the Rax broadcast made a modest docket indeed.
Transfer tugs from Morlock Arms or Zheng Reconciliation Services, serial numbers specified. Blank frames, six from each company—which suggested the Rax had taken, or expected, casualties in their conquest of the rock.
Processors and fresh mining and manufacturing robots.
Raw material for all but the processors was limited. The exploration and mining companies Astro America and Gneiss Conglomerates had found new surges of speculative investment.
The DisCorps weren’t falling for the Rax ruse. They were falling over each other to exploit its possibilities, each seeking the edge, the one jump ahead of the pack. On top of that came a layer of speculation on the decisions of the prime movers. Then betting on that. Secondary and tertiary markets multiplied many times over. Bets on bets on bets …
A boom, a bubble.
The Rax offer, the possible safe landing of the Locke module, and the faintest ghost of a chance that the Direction’s embargo on the superhabitable had been irreversibly breached and might soon be officially lifted—these were its inception.
From them a whirlwind of speculation spiralled up. By now nearly all the transactions between DisCorps were part of it. Actual productive activity continued at its previous pace, but the sudden ballooning of speculation left it tiny in proportion.
But of course, Carlos thought.
With the break-up of the space station into separate modules, and the whole vast mission of exploration being put on hold, there wasn’t much productive activity to look forward to. Hence the stampede into speculation.
This was finance capital in full flower, in an ideal environment: frictionless, gravity-less, and a near-as-dammit perfect vacuum.
It was all so familiar to Carlos that he felt a pang of nostalgia for late-twenty-first-century Earth.
Carlos clutched his head with both hands. In this head he didn’t have headaches, but the gesture made his point.
Madame Golding hesitated. The avatar shimmered slightly, as if buffering.
What she told them was this.
