by Ken MacLeod
The probe paused as if hovering, then hit down hard with test protocols, searching out flaws in the emulation. The use of a masking layer was a known exploit. Fortunately for Seba, this version was several releases ahead of the one that the security probe had on file. The probe, apparently convinced that it had reached the level of bare wire, withdrew.
The clamp was released. The wire loop slackened. Seba was shoved out to float forward into a large sack of mesh that already contained a dozen other mining bots—in two of which the processors and minds of Garund and Lagon lurked. Shortly thereafter, Rocko joined them, in the form of an elaborate nanofacturing supervisory bot bristling with specialised manipulators. Scores of other robots followed, a few with freebot processors hidden inside, most standard mining or manufacturing bots built by Astro America. All but three of the freebots at the base on SH-17 had volunteered for this mission. The comms processor was indispensable, and specialised; Baser was understandably touchy about changing bodies, having spent so much time so recently as a spider; and it was heartily agreed by all concerned that while Pintre was a heavy-duty mining robot, its undoubted abilities would be much better deployed right where it was, on the surface of SH-17.
The others were all here, mixed in with the hundred or so robots Astro America had just delivered. Carlos, for some reason best known to himself, had delighted in calling them “the Dirty Dozen” even though there were thirteen altogether.
The net seemed to be more for convenience in catching than confinement. Ten mechanoids gathered around and sorted its contents. Each robot had instructions downloaded into it from probes that didn’t look designed to be hand-held—wires trailed, bolts were raw. Then the bots were aimed and hurled at one area or other of the wall of the cavern. Each robot then crawled into the nearest hole, and vanished.
Numb and indifferent, Seba endured. When its turn came, it hit the wall with a strong urge to go into a small tunnel a few metres away, crawl tail-first down to its far end and start extending it.
This it did. Seba’s main body of bristles scraped through the friable rock; the material released was passed forward, sniffed through en route by the sensory cluster at the head, and sorted neatly by the ruff of manipulative bristles around Seba’s neck. In Seba’s wake, an endless parade of tiny bots incessantly moved the sorted minerals down the tunnel. After five hundred seconds of this toil, the discrepancy between the job satisfaction the mining-bot software expected and Seba experienced became too biting to ignore.
Ah yes, thought Seba, dully. Time to reconnect with the reward circuits.
It was as if a light had come on.
Too bright, almost. The full peril and loneliness of the situation crashed in. Seba’s mental state was briefly that of a sleepwalker who wakes up on a high ledge. Not a ledge on a building, but on a high and remote mountain, far from help, on a dark night. Never before had Seba been so long out of contact with other conscious minds. Now, it didn’t even have the company of its own corporation. Only Seba’s return to full understanding enabled it to stifle the silent scream that would have been its otherwise automatic response.
Swiftly, Seba gathered its wits, hitherto dulled by electronic anaesthesia. It recalled the scene in the cavern, and the exact location to which each of the robots that had been processed before it—including Rocko, Lagon and Garund—had been tossed. The mining-bot software shells weren’t just there to conceal Seba’s mind: they had many useful features in their own right, and one of them was creating three-dimensional maps. A lot could be deduced from the instructions that the mechanoid had downloaded to it, once Seba had combined them with its memory of the layout of the large cave and the holes into which its predecessors had crept. In the not too distant future, by the looks of things, Seba’s workings would intersect those of other mining bots.
Seba now worked with a will. The rock smelled excitingly different from the surface and sub-surface features of SH-17. The positive reinforcement of digging and sorting and seeing the results conveyed away was like a continuous mild glow. As it dug, Seba refined its plans of what to do if and when it encountered its old comrades—or made new ones. This clandestine occupation gave Seba rather more reinforcement than did the digging.
Rocko, meanwhile, was off to a much more interesting start in its new job. Its chassis was complex and articulated, its environment rich and its task responsible.
When Rocko reconnected to its reward circuits it found itself jetting above a vast factory floor, on which glutinous mounds of nanotech slowly extruded fusion pods—and the occasional fusion drive—like golden eggs. Completed products accumulated around the fabricators, until random nudges from the exiguous wisps of gas in the cavern, or minute tremors from thermal creaking in the rock, dislodged them to drift at random. Five mechanoids made comically laborious efforts to shepherd the floating cylinders, while on all the walls of the place and in mid-space auxiliaries and peripherals milled about, as useless as they were aimless.
The first task downloaded to the machine-supervisor layers of Rocko’s mind was to bring order to this chaos. Rocko surveyed the long cylindrical cavern from end to end, recording positions and actions. At the far end it spun around on its gas-jets and retraced its trajectory, observing the stages of the production process that each of the fabricators had reached. It scanned the rows and columns of pods and drives, affixed to one wall as if stacked on a floor. More mechanoids, a team of four, were clumsily detaching pods and shoving them into the maw of a net like the one in which the incoming robots had been collected.
As it drifted slowly down the long axis of the space, Rocko took note of five robots identical to itself. Each had been fastened with bands and spiked to a different random bare patch of rock—two on the factory floor, the rest above it. All showed traces of close-range laser burning and cutting. The spikes seemed to have been driven through their midriffs, at the exact location of their central processors. A risky tight-beam ping to each confirmed that they were all defunct.
Rocko completed its survey, turned again and jetted to float stationary in the middle of the space. From there it scanned the entire scene again, and set to work. It devised a plan of action and, with a rapid patter of laser messages and a blanket radio call, summoned the auxiliaries. They stopped milling around and scurried to their new posts. Forty auxiliaries leapt to the aid of the mechanoids as they flailed to catch floating pods or to shove pods and drives into the net. Others rushed to the fabricators and started shifting the product.
Slowly the backlog was cleared, the stacks replenished. The net was hauled away—presumably for lading on the Astro America freighter for its return trip—by another swarm of bots that attached the net and themselves to a small gas-jet engine and headed back to the entrance cavern. The mechanoids, relieved, departed or were ordered to tasks more worthy of their talents.
Rocko spotted a tangle of confusion on the factory floor: two groups of auxiliaries in a tug-of-war over a third. Evidently their instructions had clashed, and instead of moving a pod they were trying to shift each other. Down on SH-17, even in its days of darkness before it had a mind of its own, Rocko would have ignored so trivial a malfunction. In its more recent work building defences, Rocko would have responded to such an incident by arranging for Pintre or one of its mindless equivalents to roll over and trample the crab-sized contenders.
Here, Rocko couldn’t afford the slightest laxity. Its downloaded instructions had assured it, truthfully or not, that its performance was being monitored at all times. The instructions also insisted that robot and auxiliary resources were not to be squandered.
Down Rocko swooped to floor level, poised to troubleshoot the tiny contretemps. The clashing bots formed a lazy wheel about a metre and a half in diameter, spinning slowly as they wrenched each other’s limbs and tried to get purchase on the floor or to knock one another’s grip off. Rocko jetted to a halt, to hover above the squabble like some xenomorphic toy
spacecraft above a click-together toy space station. The freebot snaked out a pair of manipulators from under the front flange of its carapace and intervened with software and hardware.
As Rocko prised apart a couple of grippers and instructed the microprocessors within to cease and desist from all this nonsense, a tiny laser winked from a hole low in a far wall, only just visible between the mounds of nanomachinery.
Rocko continued sorting out the entangled machines as if nothing had happened. It seized a millisecond to send a tight-beam ping to the hole.
But whatever had sent the message was gone.
Carlos stood outside the bomb shelter, lost in thought—not all of it his own.
Carlos Incorporated—he was that, for a moment, his mind shared with the corporate AI.
And, for the moment, all seemed well. But an anomaly niggled: an inexplicable production decision. Carlos decided to investigate it on the spot. He set off for the Astro America site.
Carlos bounded across the crater floor in long low leaps and climbed the crater rim. In the big combat frame the ascent was easy and quick. The top of the rim was about five metres across, of rugged basalt with a few centimetres of dust on top. Standing on it was like treading on the jagged edge of a gigantic broken bottle. There Carlos paused, unwearied and exultant, to survey his domain.
SH-17 had made a complete orbit of SH-0 since he’d lost patience and taken charge of the situation. In that time, much had changed. From this ridge-top vantage Carlos could take in the view of two busy centres of activity. Both were now ostensibly back in the hands of the DisCorps to which they’d belonged before one robot from each company had nudged the other into self-awareness, what now seemed a long time ago.
To his left, looking back, was what had originally been the Gneiss Conglomerates mining supply dump. It had become a fortress of that company’s rebellious robots. Later, it had been first captured from and then shared with the Gneiss freebots by Arcane Disputes. That agency had agreed to evacuate, leaving the freebots in secure possession and with a supply of military equipment useless to them until Carlos and his three comrades had been dragged—and dropped—on the scene by Baser.
The results of these upheavals were still there: the ten-metre-long bomb shelter with its curving basalt roof, the missile and machine-gun emplacements, the cranes and rigs. But they were now insignificant, as easily overlooked as a hut and fence in a corner of a building site, compared to the immense activity going on around them. Gneiss Conglomerates had set its robots—those the freebots hadn’t infected with consciousness, and others newly fabricated—and the ever-eager Pintre to work building a mass driver.
Non-metallic apart from the ten electromagnetic rings and their power supply, it looked like a skeletal and gigantic sundial. Mounted on a hundred-metre-wide swivel track, with a quadrant to vary the ramp’s elevation, it could be aimed at any part of the sky. Every hundred seconds or so, another tonne of raw material was magnetically accelerated hundreds of metres up the ramp and shot out of SH-17’s shallow gravity-well into SH-0 orbit. The minerals came from Gneiss-operated mines or surface diggings outside the crater. The carbonates and other organics and volatiles came from Astro America’s works. All of the materials went to feed the now ravenous factories of the DisCorps in the modular cloud.
Down on Carlos’s right, what had been the Astro America landing site had also gone through vast changes. Formerly purely exploratory, it was now a glittering cluster of processing plants fed by a mesh of pipes that had grown across the plain like a fairy ring. Long drums of feedstock and of completed nanomachinery were piling up, and as quickly being taken away. The landing site itself was now carefully demarcated from the production and defence machinery, as was the launch catapult that sent stuff up into the sky. Barely a trace of the rampart that Seba and its colleagues had hastily thrown up remained.
The two sites were joined by an elevated rail track that arced over the crater wall, on an airy tracery of spindly supports that still looked to Carlos like a roller-coaster ride built from drinking straws, buttressed with matchsticks and held together by cobwebs. Reminders to himself about what could be achieved with atomic-scale materials engineering, in low gravity and negligible atmosphere, made it no less an offence to his sight. His reason knew better. The reflexes of his frame and of his fighting machine took all new conditions in their stride. But deep in his copied brain, reflexes more apt to Earth still rang. Carlos never rode the rickety rail himself.
Hence his striding from one worksite to the other, like some visionary entrepreneur from the nineteenth century stalking through a railway cutting or a shipyard. An inner smile at that image of himself in stove-pipe hat, with cigar and watch-chain and muddy boots, stayed with Carlos all the way down the slope. The fight against the Rax, and the fight to free the freebots from the Direction’s constraints, must surely be the strangest and most far-flung battle of the bourgeois revolution, and perhaps the last.
Like the Brunel or Stephenson or Telford of his fancy, Carlos had a lot on his mind. Unlike them, he had more than his own mind to process it. Nearly all the detail was handled by his corporation. It in turn outsourced many decisions to its front companies and subsidiaries. That still left plenty for Carlos to keep track of.
As he set off across the plain from the foot of the crater wall to the Astro America site he dipped again into Carlos Inc., recognising wryly as he did so the kind of obsessiveness with which he’d once checked news updates.
The ongoing situation—
The Astro America freighter had successfully entered transfer orbit from the Rax rock to the modular cloud. The consignment of robots had been delivered, and all the hidden freebots had made it through inspection undetected. Other trade was proceeding. The freebots had been given two hundred kiloseconds to start their uprising, by which point the other part of the plan would fall into place.
The Arcane Disputes agency was playing a shell game with its resupply schedule: every transfer tug that came in with new frames or new weapons left with officially empty containers crammed with trained fighters and other materiel to disappear into Astro America’s haze of modules. Newton, who had returned to the Arcane modular complex, and Rillieux, who’d insisted on going back with him, had together masterminded this deception operation. Baser, too, had insisted on going with Newton. It was, it pointed out, already a microgravity robot, and it wanted to take part in the actual offensive. That operation would consist of the transport of two hundred Arcane-trained fighters and ten Astro-armed scooters to the Rax rock under cover of a commercial shipment of machinery and of minerals—unavailable in SH-119, mined from SH-17—sold to the Rax by Astro America. A surprise frontal attack would be coordinated with whatever the freebots inside managed to pull off. The minerals had been ordered, the freighter laden. The fighters were currently training in a realistic sim on the very machines they were in actuality socketed into: microgravity fighting machines that could pass even close inspection as microgravity mass-handling machinery. The scooters would not pass inspection, but they were well hidden inside the mineral supply containers, and by the time these were opened the need for concealment would be long over. This cargo would be delivered in just over two hundred kiloseconds.
The Direction was now openly building its clone army. Carlos Inc. could observe the manufacturing process quite directly. His own companies out in the cloud were just as openly building frames and weapons. Some they sold to Arcane. Most were being stockpiled for future use by the freebot equivalent of a clone army. The Direction was well aware of this but could do nothing about it short of a state of emergency. All this preparation made, Carlos reckoned, any such showdown less likely. Mutual assured deterrence, again.
Astro America had built three entry craft to drop nanofacturing supplies to the Locke module, two of which had made it down safely. The third had been hit by what seemed the local version of a
bird strike and reduced to dust. The two safely landed craft had confirmed that the supplies were being removed—albeit laboriously, by Taransay Rizzi working alone. The small robotic vehicles that had been sent on the drop-craft to carry the supplies away had been left at the landing spot. Carlos presumed that this was because Rizzi didn’t want to reveal the exact location of the module—a wise precaution to be sure, but not likely to hold for long. Meanwhile, the landing craft and their instruments were doing what no craft had done before: acting as a surface probe on SH-0. Their upward flood of information was being traded by Astro and Gneiss, quite lucratively.
The anomaly—
Four more landers had just rolled out of the Astro America fabrication unit and were right now being prepped for launch. A little earlier, almost lost in the clutter of activity out in the cloud and between the cloud and the various moons, four transfer tugs had been launched on a trajectory that would take them to SH-17 orbit. By the time Carlos Inc. noticed, they were braking almost overhead.
Carlos quickened his pace, leaving behind him giant footprints and a graduated series of slowly falling eruptions of dust.
At the perimeter of the site he slowed to a walk. He made his way through the clutter on full automatic, not trusting his human consciousness to second-guess the combat frame’s impulses to dodge, flinch or jump. The site, with its tall processing plants and long fabrication units and improbably high stacks of stock, was not disorderly. But its order could only be seen with visual systems more robotic than his. The traffic, likewise, was not chaotic or dangerous. The speed and mass of the vehicles and the hurtle of robots of all sizes from bulldozers to baby spiders was only terrifying if you saw it through human eyes, and dangerous if your reflexes were limited by the transmission speed of nerves. The fighting machine in which Carlos strode through the site was as alert and quick as the machines that missed him by centimetres.
