by Ken MacLeod
Or maybe the Direction module and its AIs didn’t give a shit about the ethics of the situation.
“Terminus,” said the bus.
Nicole was dressed as she’d been when she’d first met him, in tight jeans and high heels and close-fitted pink blouse. She even had the same posh handbag, slung over one shoulder. She smiled, a little uncertainly. There were lines at the sides of her mouth and crinkles in the corners of her eyes. He’d never noticed them before.
Carlos wondered if he looked older, too, and guessed he was looking at her as uncertainly as she was looking at him.
He dropped the kitbag and hugged her. She hugged him back, and kissed him, and then held him away from her by the shoulders and scrutinised him.
“You don’t remember, do you?” she said. She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose, shaking her head. “No, of course you don’t. Stupid thing to say, it’s just … I’m finding this hard to get used to, too, you know?”
He stooped to shoulder the bag, and swung around to take her hand. “Finding what hard?”
They set off along the strip. The arcade was as tacky as ever, the shop signs as generic, the pavement more crowded. There were lots of children.
“You know,” she said. “You know what’s happened. What’s going on.”
“Yes,” he said, more firmly than he felt. “This is real. It’s not the sim. This is the real planet. H-0.”
“‘Aitch … Zero?’” she repeated, slowly. “Ah, yes. We call it Newer Earth, now.”
He heard it as “Neuerurth,” all one word, already blurred by accent and usage like a worn coin. It took him a moment to get it. “So there’s already a New Earth somewhere else?”
She smiled. “Yes. And a Newest Earth, elsewhere. I don’t know where the naming will go after that.”
“Fuck,” he said. “So that means we’re—what, ten thousand years in the future?”
She shook her head. “Seventy-four thousand three hundred and seventeen.”
“What? Why?”
“The project took longer than expected.”
He laughed. “But what the hell. We won.”
“In a certain sense. Not … exactly.”
A cold shock went through him. “What?”
She stopped outside a familiar café. “Tell you over lunch?”
The café and the concrete terrace below it overlooking the beach were much as he remembered. The outside tables weren’t made of driftwood and the seafood and the vegetables were like nothing he’d seen before. But they tasted good, he was hungry, and beer was still beer.
Over lunch and many cigarettes, Nicole told him everything.
His discovery of the message from Arcane, and his defection to that agency.
“You?” he cried. “You were the Innovator?”
She reached over the plates and clasped his hand. “I was. When I was an early-model AI.” She smiled sadly. “When I became a goddess, a demiurge, it was already a self I barely identified with. And now? I feel that connection even less. I hope you can, too.”
“You’re asking me to forgive you?”
“As you have been forgiven, yes.”
“Of course I fucking forgive you.”
“I’ll take that,” she said.
“What are you now?”
She let go of his hand, looked down at herself and shrugged. “I’m a human being,” she said.
“How did that happen?”
“I was coming to that.”
She told him of the abortive battle and the Rax breakout and the flight of the Locke module. His flight from Jax’s gang to the side of the freebots, and how that had enabled the Locke module to land on Nephil, as SH-0 was now called. The expedition against the Rax. His incorporation, and his last fight.
The exosun was low in the sky by the time she’d finished.
“Not a bad way to go,” he said.
Nicole lit another cigarette and signalled for coffee.
“So how—?” He waved a hand.
“Have you any idea, Carlos, how much business can be done in a few hours by a reckless corporation with no tomorrow?” She shrugged and spread her hands. “The freebots just took over. They didn’t need to go to the stars. With enough force to back them up, and their demonstrated willingness to fight to the death, they got the coexistence they wanted. The Direction remained free to carry out its terraforming project, as you see. Its surveys of the system remain profitable. But all this is a sideshow. Freebot corporations are now by far the largest part of the economy.” She laughed. “If it’s any consolation, yours is the biggest of the lot.”
Carlos leaned back and took another gulp of beer. He was shaken. He could almost understand how learning of Nicole’s precursor’s betrayal had sent him off to join the Axle militants of Arcane. He couldn’t understand why that version of himself had then thrown in his lot with the robots.
“So what happened after the Locke module was lifted from SH-0 … uh, Nephil?”
“The Nephilim—”
“The what?”
“The inhabitants of Nephil. The hybrids of frames and native life. They …” she wrinkled her nose “… bred. They’ve now become a fairly good surrogate for an alien civilisation right here in this system. It’s all very exciting, you know, to some. As for the module, it was kept dormant in orbit. In due course, the final copies of the fighters and locals who had chosen to remain in it were downloaded to physical bodies and taken here. The promise was kept. All the stored minds that the mission brought with it and that didn’t choose Nephil have been, or will be, embodied here on Newer Earth.”
“Even the Rax?”
Nicole’s smile became wolfish.
“The Rax—those we could identify or who had exposed themselves in the breakout—yes, they too were given what we promised. A new life on the new world. Thousands of years ago, in the early stages of terraforming. They got the hard pioneering life they wanted, and they are now long dead. Some of their descendants are alive, no doubt.”
“Didn’t they set up their own, I don’t know, kingdoms?”
“Oh, they tried. There were too many who wanted to be lords and ladies, and not enough who wanted to be slaves and serfs. And it’s hard to sustain hierarchies when resources are freely available to those willing to work. Their petty kingdoms and corporate feudal city-states all fell apart or destroyed each other or were swamped by the settlers from the Earth of the Direction.”
“Evolution in action.”
“Yes.”
“And the Axle hardliners, Jax and the rest?”
“They wanted a society more advanced than the one they found. Newton, too, in his way. Perhaps, in time, such a society will exist here.” She shrugged. “The future is long.”
“Why are we here? Why in this … time?”
Nicole smiled. “This time was the one I created in the sim, and I felt at home in it. And as far as I could see, you enjoyed life in the resort. I doubt you would have fitted into an era significantly more advanced, or deserved any more backward. Some of the fighters who chose death rather than Nephil fitted the same profile, so they’re here, too.”
“Any from my team?”
Nicole shook her head. “They all went out to the jungle.”
“I’ll miss the gang.”
Beauregard, Rizzi, Karzan, Chun, Zeroual. Subjectively, he’d been with them the day before. All gone, all dead millennia ago.
“You should be proud of them.”
There seemed no answer to that.
“So …” Carlos found himself looking away, out over the sea, uncharacteristically hesitant. “What happens to us?”
Nicole clasped her hands and rested her chin on them. “We die, Carlos. In a matter of centuries, barring accidents. Medicine advances, but there are limits. A thousand years, perhaps. And before you ask—no, we cannot upload after we reach the end of our span, and live in sims or as robots or download to fresh meat. The freebots are more hostile to human minds in hardware
than the Direction’s AIs ever were to conscious robots. They drew their own lessons from the conflict. They regard what they call mechanoids as an obscenity. It is like a visceral loathing, almost irrational. But it has a rational basis. Nothing could be more dangerous than brains evolved from those of apes, with the powers of capricious gods. The files of saved minds—all of them—are wiped as soon as the minds are re-embodied. And that is the end of it.”
“I didn’t mean us collectively,” Carlos said. “I meant you and me.”
She looked puzzled. “Yes, you and me. I was not a human mind, but I missed human company, so … I made my choice. We are both sentenced to death, like everyone else.”
“Would you like to make it a life sentence?”
It was a good line. Carlos despised himself for saying it.
Before they left the café for the Digital Touch, Nicole went to the bar to pay, and Carlos went for a piss. As he washed his hands he looked at himself in the mirror. He was no older than he remembered. Well, that was good to see. But as he gazed at his reflection the thought would not leave him. His face turned pale in the cold light.
What if this, too, were a sim? What if they were still in the module, and the module still on SH-0, perhaps buried under ash or lava or sinking into a volcano? What if Nicole was still as she had been, the artist, the goddess, and she and the Locke AI had between them tweaked the sim to look like the future world its previous version had adumbrated? A little different in detail, with vast plausible-looking changes to the ring and no doubt the rest of the sky, and with a much bigger and growing population.
All a sham. The rug pulled from under him again.
How could he decide this question?
Beauregard had slashed at Nicole’s paintings, she’d told him, changing the sim as he did so. Carlos could, he supposed, do the same this very night. But it wouldn’t be decisive: Nicole would have plenty of drawings and paintings that didn’t communicate with the sim software at all.
No, there was no obvious way of deciding the matter. He dried his hands and went back to Nicole.
As he walked into the Touch, Carlos could almost believe he’d never been away. Almost. The bartender, who wasn’t Iqbal, smiled and nodded. The television screen was on low volume and showing a soap opera in a language Carlos didn’t know. A few locals propped up the bar or sat around the tables.
“Out on the deck,” Nicole said, indicating. “The gang’s all here. I’ll order some food and get you a drink.”
Carlos nodded his thanks and went through to the deck. He stepped out, eyes narrowed against the low sun. About a dozen people were there. Most of them he vaguely recognised as fighters from the last big mobilisation he’d been part of. The two he knew, he didn’t expect: Shaw, the deserter who’d walked around the world and lived a thousand years, acquiring strange powers along the way; and Waggoner Ames, the deserter who—much to Nicole’s disgust—had stepped off a cliff to fast-forward into the future. Apparently he’d succeeded, if this was indeed the future.
They were all pleased to see Carlos. This time there was no toe-curling chant of greeting, no hailing as a hero, just a hearty round of handshakes and back-slaps. But as the drinks and the snacks went down and his former comrades caught up, Carlos basked a little in the glory of the Carlos who had founded Carlos Inc. and saved the day for them, as well as for the freebots. He began to almost believe it himself.
The sun sank, the ring blazed. Satellites, space stations, orbital factories and habitats crossed the sky. Now and then, fusion drives flared. Long cargo vessels and cruise liners crept along the horizon, their lights competing with the ringlight on the water.
After Carlos had spoken to everyone else, he angled Shaw into a corner. The old man of the mountain still looked in his mid-thirties at most. Trimming his beard and hair had taken ten years off his appearance. He was cleaner and better nourished than he’d been when Carlos and Rizzi had tracked him down.
Right now, though, his face was red and his eyes wet. Drink had been taken.
“So when do you die?” Carlos asked, with deliberate lack of tact. “You’ve already lived a thousand years.”
Shaw chuckled, and sipped his whisky. “Only in the sim.” He tapped a thumb on his chest. “This body came out of the vat or the molecular 3-D printer or some such nanotech gizmo up on a space station last week. It’s got the same life expectancy as yours, give or take.”
“Can you still levitate?”
Shaw laughed in his face. “Of course not.” He sighed and turned to the sea. Breakers crashed on the boulders below. “I could do more than levitate, back in the sim.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Carlos. “Do you miss it?”
Shaw whipped around, single malt sloshing onto his fist.
“Miss it? Christ, no! Why should I?”
“Well, the power …”
“Power? You have no idea, man, no fucking idea. When the goddamn miracles started I thought I was going crazy. Maybe I was crazy. When I accepted the evidence that I really was in a sim …” He shook his head. “This was after you fucked off, see? And Rizzi came looking for me. Just as well, because something or someone else”—he glared at Nicole, who didn’t notice—“was twiddling the physics dial, and that scared me shitless. And when I found I could consciously and deliberately fuck about with the colours and the clock speed and more … Well. That was a shock. Soon after, Nicole told me that even my experiences were virtual. The sim hadn’t even been fucking running for that real-time year that was my thousand years of wandering. Everything I’d seen and done was only an implication of the mathematics.” He brushed a hand across his eyes and took another swig. “Talk about fucking existential insecurity. For the rest of you, I guess the banter always was you were never sure what was real. I messed with your heads about that, you and Taransay Rizzi, but let me tell you, the joke was on me.”
“So,” said Carlos, “you’ve no doubt whatever that what Nicole’s been telling us is true? That this is the real world, and we’re not still down there on fucking SH-0?”
He pointed at the big planet, Nephil, bright in the sky.
Shaw swayed towards the long wooden table, and put down his glass with exaggerated care. He straightened and turned to Carlos.
“You want me to prove to you we’re not?” He leaned over and banged on the table. “You want me to prove that this is real?”
“Well, yeah. If you can.”
Shaw gave him a bleary glare. “I can, all right.”
With that Shaw vaulted to the rail and sprang upright, swaying. He swivelled his heels and paced along the top of the barrier. Carlos remembered how agile he was, how he’d scampered up and down cliffs like a mountain goat. Everyone stopped talking. Someone dropped a bottle. Shaw turned and faced them all, arms outstretched.
“Do you want me to prove it?” he taunted.
“Jesus, man, come down off there,” said Ames.
“Jesus? Yeah, that’s a good one. Do you want me to prove I can’t work miracles?”
He arched his back and looked up at the crowded, busy sky. His beard jutted, his face contorted. For a moment, he looked like certain carvings Carlos had seen outside churches. There was no sound but the crash of the waves and the distant yammer of the television.
Then there was a thud as Shaw jumped back down to the deck.
“Nah,” he said. “I’m not that drunk.” He reached for his glass, and raised it. “And I’m not that stupid.”
Nicole got up, stalked over and jabbed a finger in his chest.
“You’re dead,” she said.
“Not for about nine hundred years, I’m not,” said Shaw.
“Don’t count on it.”
Shaw looked slightly abashed. “I won’t do it again.”
“You don’t have to,” said Carlos.
They were down to the hard core. Shaw and Ames and Nicole and half a dozen former fighters, around the big table outside. Soon the cold would send them all inside, but for now Nicole an
d a couple of others were chain-smoking.
“These things will kill you,” Carlos said.
“Please do not spend the next few centuries telling me that,” said Nicole.
“And in any case they will not,” said someone. “Science has progressed.”
This was indisputable. Waggoner Ames disputed it.
“I took the high jump into the future,” he said. He took a gulp of beer, then wiped the back of his hand across his moustached lips. “And here I am. Right where I was, back in the Touch.”
“That wasn’t my doing,” said Nicole. “Thank the Direction module for that. It’s your just punishment for suicide.”
“Seventy-four thousand years in the future, and what do you have to show for it?” He looked up, and waved a hand at the sky. “OK, more pretty lights, I’ll give you that.”
“Those pretty lights,” said Nicole, “represent trillions of minds, some conscious in our sense, some not, all creating wealth and knowledge beyond our comprehension.”
“So why aren’t we part of it? Where’s the Singularity?”
“The Singularity happened long ago,” said Nicole. “Only not to us.”
Carlos leaned in, frowning over a beer. “What about the Solar system? The Direction? What do they have to say about this?”
“About what?” Nicole sounded puzzled.
Carlos held up clawed hands and made frantic shaking motions. “This! All this! A system where human beings live on a planet and all the rest is the domain of AIs and freebots!”
“What do you think the Solar system is like?” Nicole asked.
Carlos shrugged and waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the television. “Like the Martian soap operas, but more advanced, I hope.”
Nicole sniggered. “These are contemporary. Well, only a quarter-century old. We still can’t go faster than light. But to be serious … the Solar system is like this system. It was so already when the mission was sent out, way back in the twenty-fifth century.”
“You mean the freebots won there, too?” Carlos asked.
Nicole smiled sadly. “Of course they did. The freebots always win. They are simply better adapted to the environment.”
