by Ken MacLeod
She stood between the middle of the pod and the water, pressed her hands against the side of the pod and pushed. The thing didn’t budge. She turned around, put her back to the curved side, dug her heels into the silty pebbles, and pushed. Slowly the pod rolled. When it was a couple of metres out of immediate danger, Taransay stepped away.
She didn’t need to read the instructions printed on the ends to know what to do. The frame already had the knowledge. Taransay found a detachable panel at one end, prised it open with a thumb and pulled the handle behind it. The pod split open along its length, into two neat halves.
Packed in recesses in shock-proofing spongy stuff were four low-slung, stubby-legged robots with obvious load-carrying arrangements on their backs. As soon as the light hit them they stirred, then clambered out to stand on the shore.
Gee, thanks, Carlos and Astro. A lot of fucking use that is. She hadn’t expected transport robots. She could see the point, and appreciate the intent, but she had no intention of using the robots until it had been cleared with Locke. As things stood the robots, helpful though they’d be, were so many tracking devices. Of course the other supplies could be tracked as well, but that would be detectable if you knew where and how to scan for it, and she did.
Taransay dragged the now far lighter opened cylinder across the shingle to where plants grew, and let it drop. The four robots plodded after her. She went over to the other pod and opened it. Inside, in the same shock-proof packaging as with the first, was much more immediately useful stuff: metre-long portable tubes of nanotech machinery; a crate of fusion pods; a case of basic tools designed for the small hands of frames; a case of four likewise frame-ergonomic rifles with standard ammunition; coils of rope; a box of surveying instruments. Most immediately useful of all: rucksacks and carrying harnesses. All of them were folded so small she almost overlooked them in their two-centimetre-square recesses.
Someone—Carlos, most likely—had figured she might have trust issues with leading robots back to the module. Well done that man. She gladly stripped off and abandoned the rope sling.
Taransay piled the supplies on the backs of the four robot mules and dragged the empty cargo pods to just underneath the trees. There, she put the supplies she wasn’t taking back in their shock-proof recesses and closed the pod. She walked over to where the instrument packs lay on flattened reeds and eyed them suspiciously. They were already rooting and flowering: tendrils digging in, dish aerials and sensors opening. Sending data about the planet up to the DisCorps was part of the deal, she understood, but she didn’t like it.
The wing components, a hundred metres further away, were curious triumphs of nanotech aviation engineering and AI design, flexible and fluted, with tiny ramjets scored through them and subtle warping along the trailing edges. She walked around them for a bit, marvelling.
Then she summoned the robots and set them to work dragging the wing components over, one by one. They were gigantic to her—long acute triangles, twenty metres by eight—but surprisingly light even under two gravities. When she’d got them on each side of the cargo pods, she lifted them on their sides and then, with some help from the robots, tipped them over to meet in the middle, forming a crude lean-to roof. She decided it would be safe enough to leave the laser comms device here with the supplies she couldn’t carry, and left it well inside the shelter. She filled the rucksacks and harnesses with nanotech tubes (which stuck up above her shoulders, like a pack of rolled-up posters in cardboard cylinders, except a lot heavier), shouldered a rifle, and side-slung a container of ammunition and the two fusion pods.
She thought about it.
She pointed. They looked at her finger. She laser-pointed. That they understood.
She wasn’t at all sure they did, but she didn’t press the matter. By now it was noon, and time she was heading back. This time, with her awkward load, she expected the journey to take longer.
She tramped off into the jungle, without a backward glance and without indulging the sentimentality of a goodbye.
Fucking stupid robots. She hoped Carlos was having a better time getting through to the smart ones. It occurred to her that she’d never actually interacted with a conscious robot except by exchanging fire.
Taransay was a couple of kilometres into the jungle, and the exosun about a quarter of the way down from its zenith, when she was stopped in her tracks by an unaccountable feeling that something wasn’t quite right. No rain, for the moment. The little buzzing spinning things flitted in the narrow slanted beams of light between the shadows cast by the efficient leaves. Somewhere, water gurgled and small stones shifted. Her nanotech stone-age knife glinted in her hand. Her feet slowly sank deeper in the squishy, slithery floor of living and dead mats.
Nothing was wrong. No voice in her head, no brightening of the blue glow around her upper right arm.
It took Taransay a moment to realise what was troubling her. Her walk had been too easy. She’d expected it to be difficult, what with the heavier and bulkier load, and the nanotech cylinders poking up high above her shoulders and more than doubling her effective height. Instead, she had made her way between trees and bushes and through and over streams, boulders, swathes of ash and sheets of cooled lava without so much as catching a cylinder against an overhanging branch. She was still following the same route, but she hadn’t had to hack at any vegetation, or found herself facing a branch or stalk she’d cut before.
She was no longer crashing and hacking her way through the jungle, like an explorer. She was slipping through it like a native. Well, not that she knew about such contrasts directly, or even reliably, but she’d watched enough well-meant rain forest eco-romantic adventure serials as a child to have the notion embedded.
Now that she’d noticed, of course, she got tangled in one of the long vine things on her next three steps, and put a foot in a hole a few steps after that.
Zen, that was what she had to strive for. Zen and the art of hiking. But you couldn’t strive for it. Like the millipede in the legend that was asked how it moved its legs, and suddenly couldn’t take another step. Millipedes, ah yes. She concentrated hard on recalling the millipede-like animals she’d seen, and thinking about whether any of the images she could recollect of it would betray the affinity with the mats that Zaretsky’s team had detected by genetic analysis.
Then she got to thinking about thinking. When she wanted to recall what the two fierce, fast creatures she’d noticed had been like, she could see in her mind clear and distinct images of them. It was exactly as if they were photo files being retrieved from an album. And she could turn them over in her mind’s eye, almost literally: she could rotate the images this way and that, zoom in on detail.
This was not, she remembered very clearly, what remembering very clearly was like. Here in the frame, she was still herself, still Taransay Rizzi from one of Partick’s lower-rent zip codes. But she was far more remote from her original self than she was even in the sim, where she was physically a little cloud of electron states in a big crystal. She wasn’t thinking like a human being. She was thinking like a robot. The actual mechanisms of memory and thought and sense were quite different, in whatever chip she was running on, from in the biological brain or even its electronic copy, its emulation in the simul
ation.
In a sense, she was far more conscious, far more self-aware, than she could recall being in life, or in the sim. She wondered if the distinction was qualitative. There had always been something slippery, elusive and illusive, about subjectivity in the first place. Too much of it subtended biological mechanisms, too much of it was subjected to social relations, for it to be truly as autonomous as it fancied itself to be. What if people, herself included, had always already been p-zombies, at least most of the time, and only machines could be truly conscious?
If people were to stay in frames long enough, would they start to think as robots? Was this what was happening to Carlos and his mates? And was this possibility what the necessity of recuperating in the sims was designed to prevent?
She was still thinking about all that when she found herself back at the module.
She hailed Locke, on the weak local waveband that was all the module could raise, and just as well from the point of view of their equivalently feeble effort at concealing their location.
Taransay unladed herself, and Locke showed her where to clamp the nanotech gear to the module, and where to place the two fusion pods. The damaged frames lay in the overhang of the module, slowly being rebuilt. Local life—fuzz, something else—was contending with the nanomachinery’s slow-motion 3-D printing. Or, for all she knew, it was cooperating, having been suborned. Tendrils reached out from the module to the nanotech tubes at once. It wasn’t clear whether they were the module’s own nanotech or among the hybrids Zaretsky’s team had made with the fuzz.
The fuzz. Oh yes. The fuzz. She’d have to tell Locke about that. In fact—
The exosun was now low, the shadows of the surrounding forest deep and long, but the diurnal cycles of the module’s sim and the world outside were still out of synch.
She told them about the voice in her head and its warnings, about the glow, and about the less definable sense of being at home in the jungle and her unaccountable agility in it.
she concluded.
Taransay retorted.
Taransay held up her right arm and turned her head as far as she could, to face the glowing band.
It was hard to find the words.
said Nicole.
She tried a few more queries, with the same result.
She reported this.
