by Ken MacLeod
She was like a tiny, lovely doll. He had loved her once. Until he’d found out how her precursor AI had shafted him, back in the day.
Nicole shrugged.
said Nicole.
said Nicole.
said Carlos.
said Nicole. She cracked a smile.
Madame Golding raised a hand.
said Carlos.
This was it, Carlos realised. The freebots had won all they’d wanted. He wasn’t sure that he had, but he could live with that.
Nicole glared at him.
Carlos knew what was coming. He zapped an order to the lander to break orbit and descend. The rockets fired a brief burst.
He would lose every memory since he’d set forth on what was supposed to be the final offensive against the freebots. His knowledge of Nicole’s betrayal, his experiences in Arcane, his reunion with Jax, his times with Bobbie Rillieux and with Blum, his bold achievement of Carlos Inc.
A proximity alarm sounded. The lander lurched in violent evasive action. The missile countered, closing in.
<—goodbye.>
The missile was a tenth of a second away.
The light was the last thing he saw, in that life.
Ten days later, Taransay stood beside Den and Beauregard and Zaretsky among hundreds of evacuees under the trees around the module. The blank faces of visors, and here and there the beginnings of eyes, peered out between the tall plants. Already the most recent evacuees had become, like her, squashed sculptures of their former selves, which those who’d emerged later and still looked like frames regarded with varying degrees of distaste and dread.
Freebot fighters, with no human genetic information to be modified, were turning into things stranger still, like armoured apes. Most of them were busy attaching the module and all its surrounding nanotech kit to the high, rickety structure of the carrier, which had descended on a pillar of fusion fire a couple of days earlier. After burning the mat off the outside of the module, scores of half-changed 2GCMs had toiled to roll it to the carrier and up a ramp to the first level of the structure above the engine. Now they were lashing it in place.
Her thigh had healed, and she had begun to show those advanced in their transformation how to eat. Soon, she would show them how to hunt.
The freebots finished their task, and swung down the carrier’s girders to the ground. They bounded across the trampled dead mats and leaves and ash mud to join their fellows under the trees.
A warning sounded. Everyone turned and ran, bounded, or trudged a hundred metres deeper into the jungle.
The warning sounded again. The fusion torch lit. Taransay, like everyone else around her, clapped her hands to her face and closed her eyes to shield against the intolerable glare. Sound buffeted her and tore at leaves.
The carrier rose into the sky like a flaming sword. They watched it out of sight.
“Let’s move out,” said Beauregard.
Taransay led the way to the path she’d made towards the river. Behind her, hundreds trooped.
The world was all before them.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
&nbs
p; Coda (“End Program”)
The last time Carlos came back from being killed in action, everything around him seemed at first unreal. He jolted awake in the transfer shuttle as the re-entry warning chimed. The unexpected feeling of falling made him grab the arms of his seat. There were belts loose across his lap and chest, two more over his shoulders. His clothes were combat casuals and boots. The seat felt and smelled like leather.
Out of the porthole on his left he saw the curve of the planet, the blue skin of atmosphere, white clouds. Cheek pressed to the window, he looked for the ring. There it was! It glittered brighter than he’d expected, and looked less solid, condensed into discrete bright masses, still innumerable.
Why was he waking so much earlier in the transition? Had the sim been upgraded? The last thing he remembered was the crowded bus to the spaceport, as they rode out for the great offensive against the freebots. His frame must have been destroyed in that clash; no surprise there. But when you’d wrecked your frame you woke as from a nightmare. Now he didn’t have even fading dream-memories of drowning in terrible cold.
Maybe he’d fought with distinction, and this was his reward.
Might as well make the most of it.
Experimentally, warily, he pushed himself up within the restraints and floated. He’d never before experienced free fall other than in the frame. It didn’t last; as the first wisps of atmosphere snatched at the falling shuttle he slowly sank, then was firmly pressed, back in the seat.
He leaned sideways and looked up and down the aisle. Twenty seats on each side. He was near the middle. The seats behind him were empty, and he couldn’t tell if those in front were occupied. Above the cabin door a red light was flashing.
“Please do not lean out of your seats,” said a voice from everywhere.
Carlos returned his head to the seat back. All the seats tipped backward. The webbing around him tightened, as did the headrest. Weight pressed him down hard. The view blazed. The craft shuddered, then was buffeted violently.
This went on far too long.
The red-hot air faded. The sky went from black to blue. Weight became normal. After another bout of violent shaking a smooth gliding descent began.
The restraints loosened; the red light still flashed. The seats swung upright. Carlos looked down at ocean. As always with that fractal surface, it was hard to judge altitude. At first the sea seemed close, dotted with tiny boats. Then an island of wooded mountains established scale and the boats resolved into supertankers far below.
A coastline. Curves of black sand, then green hills and forests, then mountains, jagged and raw with snow from the peaks to halfway down. More turbulence. Rags of cloud whipped past, and then all the view was white. Suddenly the shuttle was below the clouds and flying over forested hills, improbably steep and conical. Carlos caught glimpses here and there of cultivation—a straight brown line through the green, a sweep of terraces, a kite of fields.
Tan desert, blue in the shadows of long dunes. A sparkle of karst.
The shuttle banked. A long grey runway swung in and out of view. The clunk of landing gear, a jolt, a screech and a more severe jolt. They raced through desert at hundreds of kilometres an hour. Straps tightened again as deceleration shoved from behind. The scream deepened to a roar, then a rumble. Then silence.
The red light stopped flashing. The seat belts retracted. The exit door thudded open.
There were no announcements. Carlos stood up and looked around. He was indeed alone on the shuttle. Outside, something rolled up. A vague memory tugged him to open the overhead locker. Inside was an olive-green kitbag, just as he’d found between his feet on his first arrival. About time he’d got some new clothes. He unzipped it and found at the top a water bottle, a squashed bush hat and shades.
He was grateful for them the moment he stooped outside. The glare was blinding, the heat fierce. The spaceport was exactly as he’d half remembered it from previous awakenings: the low white buildings, intolerably bright; the distant pommelled hilt of the tower.
An odd sharp after-smell of heated plastics above the salt-flat tang on the breeze; behind him a tick of cooling ceramics. Halfway down the thirty steps to the ground he almost stumbled as a spaceplane screamed past. Its front end was another shuttle, the rest of its fuselage all streamlined fuel tanks and flaring engine. He paused on the steps to watch it take off. The jet nozzles turned red, the noise rolled over him, the now small dart soared. He looked for the ring, but even with shades on it was hard to make out against the shimmering glare.
He trudged a couple of hundred metres to the terminus. Along the way he noticed two parked helicopters. Three light aircraft came in to land on another, much shorter runway. This puzzled him—one of the striking absences from the sim had been any sign of aviation.
Glass doors opened before him. There were no checks. Inside it was all glass and tile and air-con. People hurried from place to place and paid him no attention. The clothes of some were different from any he’d seen before, creatively customised robes and pyjamas in light fabrics and vivid colours. It didn’t look so much a change of fashion as of culture. Most people in the sparse crowd, however, still dressed like peasants or tourists or hippies.
As he stood in the concourse his back pocket vibrated. He pulled out the flat flexible phone and found a message from Nicole:
“I’ll meet you off the bus.”
He smiled to himself and went off to find the bus.
In the vast and almost empty car park the bus to the resort was easy to find. It was the only minibus—the other vehicles were coaches or trucks, and not many of either. Five passengers, all locals, looked at him incuriously as he boarded, and went back to talking about crops and gossipping about neighbours. All had heavy bags on adjacent seats and between their feet. Carlos nodded, settled in, and waited. The bus pulled out. After a few turns and roundabouts it pulled onto a wide motorway, along which it bombed at a speed Carlos found alarming even though the driving was automated and the traffic light.
On either side, desert. Ahead, a mountain range.
Carlos dozed, and woke as the bus started climbing. The route was a steep succession of hairpins until it levelled out. The road snaked through a pass between peaks and then began a long and winding descent. The landscape became familiar: around here, he guessed, he’d hitherto woken up. Aspects and details looked odd in ways it was hard for him to put his finger on. The tall woody plants looked a little less like trees. There were no green mossy mounds on the ground between them. The feathered, web-winged avians seemed more various in colouring and size.
But how would he know? How much note had he taken before? Perhaps he was just becoming better at observing, or his attention livelier.
The bus swung around a corner and past a raw rock face and on the other side a steep drop open to the sea and sky. He could have sworn it was the very stretch from which he’d first seen the ring. Now he saw it again. It looked different, as different as it had from the shuttle. Carlos stared, astonished. The illusion of solidity was gone. It was still a ring, but a ring of bright, discrete sparks, like a swathe of stars.
The bus stopped at the end of a short track that led to a robot-tended garden and a small house in a clearing. A man got off, lugging his bale of wares, and went around the front of the bus and up the path. The door of the house banged open and two small children darted out. The man dropped his pack and squatted as the children pelted down the path to his outspread arms.
The minibus pulled away. Carlos leaned back in his seat, smiling at the hurtled-on hug.
What he’d just seen sank in. He sat bolt upright.
Children!
There never had been children in the sim. No explanation had ever been asked or offered, but the fighters had always been told that everyone here apart from themselves and the p-zombies was an adult volunteer, beta-testing life on the future terraformed terrestrial planet H-0. To bring children to birth in a sim might strike some as unethical even if it were possible.
Perhaps these, too, were ghosts: surely children still died, even in the Direction’s utopia.
A few turns more down the road, on the side of a cleared and farmed valley that he for sure didn’t remember, two more passengers got off and were mobbed at the gate by a dozen children, from toddlers to teenagers.
Carlos gawped. The remaining two passengers merely glanced and smiled indulgently before returning to their conversation.
One obvious explanation made sense of the presence of children, and of aircraft, and all the other changes both subtle and blatant. It was so vast in its implications, and so appealing, that he hardly dared think it.
But he had to think it. The thought made him shake and want to shout.
What if this wasn’t yet another return to the sim? What if this wasn’t the sim at all, but the real far-future terraformed H-0?
What if the war was won, and he was no longer dead, but alive and gone to his reward?
The resort was almost as he remembered it. Almost. Still the low houses, the sea-front strip, the depot, the bright-coloured sunshades on the black beach. But the beach was crowded, and even from the first long hairpin it was clear that many who frolicked in the surf were children.
There were some new houses along the moraine, and others quite unchanged, including his own and Nicole’s. At the last but one stop he was tempted to get off, to run to his house, to pry in Nicole’s. It occurred to him that he could have phoned the other fighters, and wondered why he hadn’t. He must have assumed that if he was alone on the bus, the others were still out there. Out in the real world, in real space, as human minds in robot bodies fighting robots with minds of their own.
At some level, he realised, he must still be sure he was in the sim. The sim had been upgraded before. Like that time they’d come back and found the resort expanded, as if entire rows of houses had been dragged and dropped into place, and hundreds more fighters strolling around. Maybe the systems that ran the sims did have to field-test raising children. Maybe the kids would have a real new life. Or they might even be p-zombies, as might their parents.
