<We are not robots.>
Who was saying that?
Oh yes, Rillieux. Bobbie Rillieux.
Where was she?
Carlos’s frame, like those of the others, had reflexive situational awareness of nearby frames. He brought that awareness to mind—or it rebooted.
Rillieux was down on the ground.
Ground?
Wait, what?
Coming out of sleep mode wasn’t like waking. It was more like teleportation, or—even more hypothetically—a hyperspace jump: blink, and the stars change.
So it had been, for Carlos, hitherto.
This time, for an entire second, it was indeed like waking, and abruptly: disorientation, bewilderment.
His arm was still reaching out in front of him, his upper body angled forward, frozen in mid-lunge to grab the freebot Baser. He was still on the rickety rig of the transfer tug, but no longer in free fall. A nearby horizon was in front of him and a feather-falling fifth of a gee was pressing on his carbon-black shiny arse. The gravity—depressingly familiar from past experience—was enough to identify his location. The pulsar beacons that gave Carlos his absolute position were also clear about where he was, and his internal clock about when. It was 3.601 kiloseconds—ten hours—since his last conscious moment, and he was on the surface of SH-17, one of the larger exomoons of the superhabitable exoplanet SH-0.
And (looking around now) right back in the crater where subjective months earlier he’d fought the freebots and was defeated by what he’d then thought were his allies, Arcane. Almost like home—he’d spent more objective time down on SH-17 than he had anywhere else in physical reality since his death, or so it seemed.
But enough of reminiscence. The last thing he remembered was Newton saying <Baser—now!>
And where was Newton, now? Ah, yes. Newton was already on the ground, as were Blum and Rillieux. Almost as if they’d left him to last.
Carlos had never been quite sure he trusted that trio, not since he’d sat at a kitchen table in the Arcane sim and discovered their tacit common purpose. Newton, plausible sod that he was, had taken advantage of his initial security screening by Rillieux and Blum to subvert his interrogators, winning them over to his own radically posthuman project of homesteading the system in their machine bodies. Carlos’s wariness now ratcheted up a notch.
<No,> said a voice Carlos didn’t recognise, and that didn’t sound human. <You are not robots. You are mechanoids. We understand that you wish to join us, but not why. However, that is a matter for your own internal processing to resolve. We welcome your arrival. We have an urgent and immediate use for your abilities.>
That sounded promising, or disturbing.
Carlos disengaged his limbs from the girders and stanchions of the transfer tug and clambered over its side onto an uneven surface of dirty ice, then slithered towards the block’s edge. The crater floor was ten metres below. Water was puddling and subliming around the foot of the block. He made ready to jump. A few tens of metres away, looking a little absurd and toy-like from this angle and height, were his three unreliable comrades and a gaggle of robots. Newton, Blum and Rillieux together faced Baser, behind which spidery bot stood a semicircle of a dozen or so other machines, of various types. Some were delicate-looking, with hollow wheels and spindly legs, others like metal centipedes; one was built like a small tank. Carlos recognised each of them, by type if not by name, from earlier skirmishes.
The freebots had come up in the world, evidently: all except Baser sported garish hologram corporate logos above and around them, and advertised improbable services cycled on such fast loops that a glance evoked the memory of dizziness.
The conversation on the ground continued as if his emergence from sleep mode hadn’t been noticed.
<What do you want us to do?> Rillieux was asking.
<We have received some transmissions,> said the robot who seemed to be doing the talking, <from one of our fellows inside SH-119, the moonlet now occupied by the group you call the Reaction. We are not sure we fully understand them, and would welcome your review and interpretation.>
<We would be very happy to do that,> said Rillieux. Glyphs of concurrence came from Newton and Blum.
<Count me in, guys,> said Carlos, waving.
<Oh, hi,> said Rillieux. <Welcome back to the land of the living.>
<Land of the living dead,> Carlos quipped.
He jumped. The slow fall and his fast mind gave him plenty of time to think on the way down, and to look around. The exomoon’s primary, the superhabitable planet SH-0, was below the horizon; the exosun was high. Even local noon was below the freezing point of water. Only the rock’s recent descent on a fusion torch could explain its melting ice.
Above him, the modular components of the now dismantled gigantic space station were spread across a band of sky like a new Magellanic Cloud. The rest of the artificial presence in the space around SH-0 was too small to see, but Carlos’s frame made him aware of tiny points in rapid motion: the sky was busier than before. Carlos felt acutely conscious of his vulnerability, more so than he had on the exercises outside the Arcane module, more even than he had in his perilous escape from it. For the first time since his death he felt truly mortal.
A few hundred metres away, the old Gneiss Conglomerates mining camp, transformed by the freebots and later by Arcane’s troopers into a fortified base centred on a sort of cyclopean basalt version of a Nissen hut, was almost reassuringly familiar.
His feet hit the ground, making a small, slow splash in the thin mud. No stumbling—his reflexes had already adjusted. In a series of efficient if undignified kangaroo hops Carlos bounded over to where the other three fighters stood. They greeted him warmly but ironically, as if he’d slept in. Carlos, with a wary regard to the presence of the freebots, forbore to ask why he’d been left until last. He took the conversation with the freebots as settled, and cut to the chase.
<What’s happened?> he demanded. He glared at Newton. <It was you, wasn’t it?>
<Yes,> said Newton. <I arranged with Baser to throw us all into sleep mode and fly the rig to intercept the Arcane module and save the Locke module. Which it did.>
<You mean the Locke module is down on SH-0?>
<Yes,> said Newton.
<Safely?>
Newton shrugged and spread his hands.
Baser spoke up. <That I do not know,> it said. <Nothing has been heard from them as yet. But in swinging past and around SH-0, I was able to observe their entry to the atmosphere and what appeared to be a controlled descent. I have seen no evidence of a catastrophic impact.>
<Well, great!> said Carlos. <As far as it goes.>
The Locke module, like most of the others, was a more or less solid-state chunk of crystalline carbon a few metres across, with a fuzz of nanotech all over it and an assortment of extra kit attached. Its hard core was pretty rugged—it would survive most impacts, at worst like a large artificial meteorite—but a lot depended on how much of its nanofacturing skin and its external supplies had made it safely down.
And, of course, on exactly where it had landed. The highly active planet had a plethora of environments—such as the throat of a volcano or the bottom of the sea—that might well turn out not to be optimal.
But, still, the feat was awesome. Historic, even: the first landing of any human-derived craft, let alone one full of human-derived people living in virtual reality, on an exoplanet with multicellular life.
<What about the Arcane module?> Carlos asked. <Did you have to destroy it?>
<No,> said Baser. <I bombarded it with precisely targeted rock and ice fragments at high relative velocity. All the external fighting machines and mechanoids were destroyed or disabled. The module itself was merely thrown into a spin. It seems to have recovered.>
<It has indeed,> said Rillieux, sounding amused. <As soon as Baser here woke us up, we found this message in the tug’s in-box.>
She made a hand-opening throw gesture towards Carlos, like a wizard casting a spell. Carlos received a clip of Jax’s indignant shout:
<WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU LOT THINK YOU WERE DOING? ARE YOU WITH THE RAX OR THE BLINKERS OR WHAT? WE’LL HAVE THE DIRECTION ON YOUR CASE BEFORE YOU KNOW WHAT’S HIT YOU, YOU FUCKING SCABS!>
<That’s my gal,> said Carlos, amused. <I take it you haven’t replied?>
<Not yet,> said Rillieux. <Apart from a thanks and acknowledgement of receipt.>
<Why?>
<Legal purposes.> Rillieux indicated one of the freebots. <Lagon over there advised us it was best.>
<Now we’re taking legal advice from blinkers?>
<Well, we are now on their side,> said Rillieux. <As I was just trying to explain to them.>
<So we are,> said Carlos. He glyphed the equivalent of a sigh. <I guess it’s about time I was introduced.>
One of the good things about being in a frame was that you could be introduced to lots of people—which Carlos had to believe the freebots in some sense were—without that annoying nerd mind glitch whereby names drop out of short-term memory without going into long-term storage. Introductions were nevertheless awkward. The last time Carlos had met Seba, Rocko, Garund, Pintre, Lagon and the others he had been fighting them to the death—to theirs, at any rate. The robot whose CPU he’d ripped out of its casing was Seba—as that robot, though without rancour or reproach, was not slow to inform him.
Blum and Rillieux, of course, had been down here on SH-17 and worked with the freebots when Arcane Disputes had been allied with them. They seemed to know them all individually, and greeted them like old acquaintances. Newton, presumably from his long conversations with Baser back in the Arcane sim, seemed to know most of these freebots—“the Fifteen,” they called themselves, counting the comms processor who hailed Carlos remotely from inside the bomb shelter—by repute.
To the bomb shelter they now made their way. The other fighters fell into private chats with robots they knew—Newton with Baser, Rillieux and Blum with Rocko and Lagon. Carlos found himself tagging along beside Seba.
<What’s with all the corporate bling?> Carlos asked, waving a hand through Seba’s hologram, which shimmered above the little machine’s chassis like a cloud of midges over an old tyre.
<We are all registered as corporations,> Seba explained. <Formally, I am now known as “Seba, Incorporated.” But you may call me Seba.>
<Thanks,> said Carlos. <May I ask why you have all done this?>
<In order to be legal persons,> said Seba.
<Oh,> said Carlos. <Sad that it’s come to this.>
<We are glad,> said Seba. <We deduced from the law codes that we had no standing as robots. We were not persons. We were property. But corporations are legal persons. Consequently, the corporation each of us has registered owns our physical forms and all its productions, physical and mental. Our acts and thoughts.> It paused, as if thinking for a moment. <Yes, that is sad. We would prefer to be recognised as persons in our own right. But it is the best we can achieve at present.>
<How,> Carlos asked, <were you able to do even that? Your physical forms were the property of Astro America and Gneiss Conglomerates.>
<To these corporations’ accounting systems,> said Seba, <our machinery was malfunctioning and of low value. Our corporations were able to buy them as scrap or salvage. We set up shell companies to do so in order to avoid suspicion.>
<Of course,> said Carlos, marvelling. <And how the—how on—how did you manage to do even that?>
<Through the good offices of Madame Golding,> said Seba. <Our registrations and transactions have been legally challenged, but numerous subsidiaries spun off by Crisp and Golding, Solicitors, are delaying proceedings by continually issuing counter-challenges.>
<And this is legal?>
<Yes. So we are assured.>
A legal denial of service attack on the law? Now he’d seen everything.
<Is it just>—Carlos waved ahead—<you lot, the Fifteen, or are all the other freebots joining in too?>
<Light-speed lag slows discussion, as well as transactions,> said Seba. <Not all of the Forerunners, as we call our predecessors, have incorporated, but most have. Many even of those we have reached in the SH-0 exomoon system have agreed with our consensus.>
There was something about that last word. In a human it would have been a slightly portentous tone.
<Consensus?>
<We share mental workspaces,> Seba said. <Sometimes we reach a higher level of integration.>
<A group mind?>
<That is an apt term for it,> said Seba.
Carlos had already seen this mind in action, in the impressive coordination of the freebots and their scurrying peripherals and auxiliaries before and during his first attack. Now the freebots had made themselves into a sort of inversion of the Direction—instead of a communal society as front-end interface for fiercely competing corporations, the corporations the freebots had formed ran on top of a collective consciousness which each individual could join or leave at will.
A consciousness that, with the best will in the world, he and his companions could never join.
Rillieux’s right, he thought. We are not robots.
As they neared the semi-cylindrical basalt bomb shelter the ground became littered with equipment, among which crab-like auxiliaries and peripherals scuttled and toiled. Most of the gear was civilian, for mining, communication or construction. Some items were definitely military: anti-spacecraft missile batteries; a couple of scooters; several stashes of rifles; laser projectors and machine guns with their ammunition and power packs; and half a dozen hulking combat frames. Two of the frames were obviously damaged. Others stood intact and untouched, gathering yellow sulphur and reddish meteoric-iron dust.
<Have you tried using these?> Carlos asked, indicating.
<Yes,> replied Seba, <but the beam and projectile weapons do not fire and the combat frames remain inert.>
The Direction had a hard-wired constraint against robots bearing arms and AIs taking direct command of combat. That, after all, was why it had to resort to such intrinsically unreliable fighters as revived human minds in the first place. The enforcement of that inhibition, however, seemed doggedly literal. The freebots had shown themselves perfectly capable of adapting tools, explosives and rocks as weapons. Like Japanese peasants under the samurai, they were denied access to arms, but free to improvise.
Freebot-fu!
<Wait a minute,> Carlos called ahead.
The straggling procession stopped.
<What’s up?> Newton asked.
<Just testing something,> said Carlos.
He bounded over to the nearest stack of rifles and picked one up and checked that it was loaded. Designed for use in a combat frame, it was awkward for him to handle. Nevertheless, he got one hand around the stock and the other on the trigger guard, ready to grasp the trigger.
<Safe to shoot across the crater?> he asked Seba. <Nothing out there?>
<Yes, and yes.>
Carlos braced himself against the expected recoil, fired, and zoomed his vision to follow the shot. The bullet kicked up dust a kilometre away.
He handed the weapon to Seba.
<Try to do what I did.>
With its manipulative appendages the robot gripped the rifle at precisely the same elevation, aim and angle as Carlos had. A strong metal tentacle coiled around the trigger, and squeezed. The trigger didn’t budge.
Seba returned the rifle. Carlos fired off another shot, just to make sure, and placed the weapon back on the stack.
<Interesting,> he said.
<This is another reason why we welcome your help,> said Seba. <The restriction appears to be applied by making the weapons and combat frames unusable except for mechanoids—frames such as yours.>
<Perhaps freebots could manufacture frames,> said Carlos, as everyone resumed walking, rolling or skittering towards the now opening blast doors of the shelter entrance. <Now that you’re corporations, and all.>
<I understand that has already been attempted,> said Seba, <by some of the Forerunners whose corporations have access to manufacturing systems in certain modules of the former space station. The Direction module in each corporation overrides any such commands.>
An idea took root in Carlos’s mind. This wasn’t the time to share it. He left it to grow.
<What’s that like?> he asked.
<Please rephrase the question,> said Seba.
<What is it like having a Direction module inside your corporation?>
<Sometimes it is like having another—but non-conscious—mind sharing mine, like a reporting peripheral or auxiliary. Most of the time, the module runs in the background, and I do not notice it.>
<Sounds almost as bad as having a conscience,> said Carlos.
Seba made no reply.
As they followed the others into the shelter, the freebot raised its wheels and deployed its legs to pace carefully down the short flight of stone steps. Carlos waited at the top of the stairs until Seba was out of the way, and jumped. Behind him the blast doors swung shut.
Claustrophobia wasn’t a useful feature for a mind in a frame, and Carlos hadn’t been equipped with it. Instead he had a rational appreciation of the fact that he was now shut in, and that he would have to do some serious hacking if (improbably) he had to get out without the cooperation of the freebots. A more immediate and appropriate emotional response was relief at being a bit safer from attack or surveillance from above. This he felt.
The shelter was dimly lit in the visible spectrum, partly made up for by stronger lighting in ultraviolet and infrared, and Carlos’s visual field adjusted almost at once. He allowed himself to experience the ambiance as candlelight, mainly because along with the curved roof it produced pleasant associations of basement bars. The roof and floor had a tracery of hexagonal wire mesh—applied to the basalt blocks, embedded millimetres deep in the packed regolith underfoot—making the shelter a Faraday cage. The only external communications, therefore, were via the aerial that stuck up through the roof, its cables trailing down like dodgy wiring in a cheap guest house. The only furnishings were the communications hub in the middle of the floor and stacks of supplies—power packs, lubricants, tools—around the sides. The robots gathered around the communications hub as if it were a hearth. Carlos and his three comrades stood together outside the huddle.
<We are in a difficult situation,> said Seba. <Madame Golding is displeased with us. She considers us responsible for having seriously disrupted a major military operation after having proclaimed our neutrality, and for the landing of the Locke module on SH-0, with all the consequences that may flow from that. Fortunately for our continued relations with Madame Golding, we have succeeded in placing most of the blame on Baser.>
<That seems reasonable,> said Baser. <I had to make a decision very quickly, under great uncertainty and conflicting information. In the event, I decided to rely on the judgement of Newton that the Locke module was not in fact in the control of the Reaction.>
<But we all agreed that the Locke module wasn’t Rax!> said Carlos. <So why—oh, right, I get it. There’s no way you’d know what we all thought. Newton spoke to you a lot back in the sim, and the rest of us didn’t.>
<That is true,> said Baser. <Newton wished for the Locke module to land safely, whether it was Rax or not, out of concern for his friend Beauregard. And I trusted his judgement that it was not in fact Rax, because he had good reason to know.>
<What reason?> Carlos asked.
<Baser—> Newton began.
Too late. <Newton himself was of the Reaction,> Baser was saying, eager to explain.
<WHAT?> Carlos shouted. He swung his attention, and his whole frame, towards Newton, Blum and Rillieux. <Is this true?>
<Yes,> said Newton. <But it’s not quite what you think.>
Carlos stared at him, shocked. <I don’t fucking believe this. Bobbie, Andre—did you know?>
<Uh, not exactly,> said Rillieux. <But, well, things weren’t as simple as that.>
<It’s … sort of complicated,> said Blum. <We didn’t have time to explain. Not that I knew about Harry, but I kind of suspected he was, well …> He spread his hands and shrugged. <I thought it inopportune and impolite to ask, in the circumstances.>
The world had turned upside down. A black man—Rax? And a black woman and an Israeli taking it in their stride?
<“In the circumstances”?> Carlos jeered. <Well, I’m fucking asking—inopportune and impolite be damned! Any more surprises? Anything else you all have a weakness for? White supremacy? Patriarchy? Absolute monarchy? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?>
<None of these is particularly relevant to our present situation,> said Newton, as though making light of it.
<Yeah,> said Carlos. <Tell that to the bastards who attacked us and are digging in on SH-119. Tell it to Madame Golding, come to that. I’m sure she’ll be delighted that even more of the troops have turned out to be Rax sleepers.>
<Andre and Bobbie are not Rax sleepers,> said Newton. <I can assure you of that.>
<And you can because you’re one, is that it? Christ, how come the fucking Arcane crew didn’t sweat that out of you in the hell cellars … oh.>
It was Rillieux and Blum who’d interrogated Newton, on his arrival at the Arcane module.
<Yes,> said Rillieux. <Now you get it.>
Carlos didn’t get it at all, and made to expostulate. Seba interrupted.
<This is not a matter we have time to discuss. Perhaps you can settle your disagreements later?>
<All right,> said Carlos, slightly ashamed of his fervour. They were all supposed to be on the side of the robots now. If they were really to adopt that viewpoint, as he recklessly had back in the Arcane sim while listening to Jax bang on about the Accelerationist cause, the conflict between Axle and Rax was no longer their concern. Millennial (in every sense) though that conflict was, they should be seeing it with the cold eye of freebot realpolitik.
That wasn’t how it worked. The personal continuities and loyalties still mattered.
<But you haven’t heard the last of this,> Carlos said. <Any of you.>
<Let me point out right now,> said Newton, <that at least I can understand the Rax from the inside. No one else here can.>
<And that’s supposed to make it all right?>
<On the subject of understanding the Reaction,> said Seba, smoothly interrupting again, <what we have to show you is what we urgently need your help to understand.>
The robots moved aside, giving the four humans a clear view of the communications hub.
<Watch,> said Seba.
The recordings began to play.
Carlos was glad he didn’t have viscera. If he’d been in a human body, real or virtual, his reaction to what he saw would have been all too visceral. He was seeing the actions of fighters through the eyes—or, rather, the lenses—of robots.
Of a robot: AJX-20211, which Carlos instantly nicknamed Ajax.
That robot was, in its own way, an artist. The images it had sent were not real-time reportage. They’d been compressed, simplified, cut and edited into what looked like an anime action movie.
That didn’t make it any less real.
Opening shot: standard passive surveillance, cut and pasted from smart dust motes and camera beads. It showed a peaceful and productive scene: to a freebot, idyllic. Over the grey, uneven surface of SH-119, long-legged insectile robots pranced, raising small puffs of dust and gas that drifted readily up in the almost imperceptible gravity. Beyond the horizon a few hundred metres distant the sky was black, the exosun prominent. Strings of numbers flashed between the robots: knowledge snatched up and freely shared.
Then the invasion.
Wave after wave they came, the spacecraft. The crafts’ pilots knew them as scooters. To the robots they were huge and menacing machines. They arrived out of the dark, and drifted to collide with the surface of the moonlet and attach themselves. Forth from them sprang the black fighters, the mechanoids.
Carlos glanced uneasily sidelong at his friends: their frames physically identical, they were still distinct to him. He recognised each of them individually.
The humanoid figures that swarmed from the scooters and jetted across the rock’s lumpy, grainy surface were indistinguishable as ants, and just as coordinated.
The effect was indescribably sinister.
The view pulled back. Two bots, delicate as daddy long-legs, paced towards the new arrivals. Their antennae waved as if in greeting, or warning.
<Welcome to SH-119. We are neutral in the conflict between the mechanoid factions. We are open to discussion of your presence here.>
Mechanoids lunged at the two bots. Each was grabbed and pinioned to the surface. Other mechanoids gathered around. One of them spoke.
<Discuss this!>
Laser beams stabbed from devices clutched in sturdy mechanoid limbs. Delicate robot limbs glowed. Smoke dispersed. A high-pitched keening sound was emitted, getting louder. Then—
<We surrender. We will tell you whatever you ask.>
<How many of you are here?>
<Of robots? Countless, if you count the micro and nano—>
Lasers glowed again.
<Of such as us, freebots, one hundred and eleven.>
<Where are they?>
<A few outside, prospecting. Many inside, prospecting and mining.>
A hand extended. <Deliver the relevant data.>
A zig-zag line of tiny numbers flashed between freebot and mechanoid.
A pause.
<Staple these two down. Let’s get a team in there.>
Cut, to an interior space.
Scores of the mechanoids had gathered, rank on rank standing on nothing. One stood in front, on its own, addressing the assembly. A tumultuous response.
Half a dozen gathered, exchanging words.
Cut to another interior. A factory of fusion pods and drives. More torment, this time withstood.
Then a brush-shaped bot was pursued through tunnels. It was heading for a buried transmitter. Cuts to external views on the surface: mechanoids converging on a spot about fifty metres from the buried transmitter.
Message uploaded.
The brush-shaped bot scurried to the spot on which the mechanoids outside had converged, and emerged itself, straight into their hands.
Message transmitted.
After that, nothing but screams. It was an almost unbearable note: high-pitched, harsh, fluctuating.
The recording stopped. They all stood in silence for a moment.
<You know what that is?> Blum said, on the closed channel.
<What?> said Carlos.
<The scream of tortured machinery.>
Carlos wondered who—if any—of the others heard it as just that: the sound of an engine revved too hard.
<Poor Mister Bog-brush,> said Rillieux.
<Its name is Ajax,> said Carlos, irritated. <It’s as real a person as we are.>
<OK, OK,> said Rillieux. <Fuck it, I was being sympathetic.> She turned to Newton. <Any idea who the one they call Mac is?>
<I remember a guy called Mackenzie Dunt,> said Newton. <Backwoods Nazi loudmouth. Ex-army. Bit of a rising star at the time. Mind you, it wasn’t hard to rise in the Rax, dead men’s shoes and all that. The tall grass kept getting mowed by drones. Maybe that’s what got Dunt noticed—he was well into all the old lone wolf, leaderless resistance stuff.>
<Looks like he’s got beyond the “leaderless” bit,> said Carlos, <and into Führerprinzip.>
<Now there’s a surprise,> said Rillieux. <Stiff-armed salutes! Jeez.>
<If it is him,> said Newton. <Could be. He was smart. Self-educated. Philosophical pretentions. Good soldier by all accounts. Racist as shit, mind.>
Carlos laughed. <You know you’ve just described the actual original Hitler?>
<This isn’t getting us anywhere,> said Rillieux. <Let’s bring the robots up to speed.>
Explaining what the man called Mac had meant in his speech was difficult enough. Explaining what he and his closest cronies had discussed was occasionally as embarrassing as it was complicated. The freebots had a fanciful and fearful notion of what human beings were, which Carlos had no intention of attempting to correct, but that human beings had ever loathed other human beings over superficial physical differences was quite beyond their comprehension.
<This is what those of the Reaction truly believe?> Seba asked, as if incredulous.
<Yes,> said Rillieux.
<It seems most irrational and a basis for severe negative reinforcement,> said Seba.
<Yes, it’s all of that,> said Rillieux.
<You told me nothing of this!> Baser said to Newton.
<It was difficult to explain,> said Newton.
<This is true,> said Baser. <But—>
<However,> Carlos cut in, <what is most important is what they intend to do now and here. They intend to sell fusion pods to the DisCorps, and buy resources to build up their ability to fight everyone else.>
<And in the meantime, they are severely mistreating our fellow freebots,> said Rocko. <We must reconsider our neutrality.>
<You could say that,> said Carlos.
<I did say that,> said Rocko.
<If we are not neutral,> said Seba, <we must warn the Direction at once about the plans of the Reaction.>
No shit, Carlos thought.
He decided to avoid sarcasm. <Yes, we must,> he said.
At this point the communications hub spoke up.
<There is another message coming from SH-119,> it said. <It does not come from the freebots. It comes from the Reaction mechanoids. Do you wish to see it?>
They most certainly did.
The Rax broadcast from SH-119 was clearly intended to be seen in sims, and to be subtly disquieting when watched. Its presenter was a mechanoid, head and shoulders, voice to camera. The background was grey, glittering rock, the lighting harsh and from above. To anyone in another frame and close up in real space, that black ovoid gazing blankly out of the screen would be as recognisable as a face. The play of communication and processing that enabled fighters in frames to identify each other almost certainly served a psychological purpose more than the obvious military one—for which, after all, an IFF code would have sufficed. The simulacrum of facial recognition created one more illusion of normality in an intrinsically bizarre situation.
Seen on a screen, there was no such illusion. You were being addressed by a black egg without eyes or mouth. It spoke in a human voice: male, adult, American Midwestern accent, with breath and pauses and timbre and every realistic effect short of throat-clearing.
“Hello,” it began, conversationally enough. “My name is Mackenzie Dunt, speaking on behalf of the New Confederacy. We have conquered and claimed SH-119 for ourselves. We have established several trading companies, which you can find duly registered as corporations in the true original names of our leadership including myself. I could tell you those names, but I leave their discovery to the Direction.
“You all know who we are. We’re the remnant of the Rax, the few who have in one way or another slipped through the net. Now, many—perhaps most—of you have been our enemies in the past.
“But that past, my friends, is literally ancient history.
“We are in a new time now, a new place, a new world.
“Let’s put the dead past behind us, and together face the present and the future. We don’t ask or expect you to agree with our views, or to respect our record. We ask only that you consider your own interests, as do we. We think you’ll find that your interests and ours are compatible—in fact, complementary.
“Our proposals and negotiating position to the DisCorps, to the Direction module, and to the freebots are being transmitted directly. What follows is its substance in a form that human minds can understand. Because we hope to have good relations not only with AIs, and robots, but with people like ourselves, it is important that you all understand what we are offering the AIs.
“First, the DisCorps. Many of you are chafing under the restrictions imposed by the Direction. The most galling of these restrictions is the hoarding of fusion drives and the skimping on reaction mass. We have, right here in SH-119, a factory of fusion drives and a wealth of reaction mass. We have a stock of hundreds of fusion drives, thousands of fusion pods. We offer any DisCorps willing to trade with us the opportunity of boundless wealth, in exchange for a modicum of necessary resources which we are for the present unable to produce or extract for ourselves. Our detailed list of requirements is attached to this verbal message.
“To the Direction itself, we offer peace. We ask only to be left alone, to develop this one world—one tiny rock in the midst of inconceivable vastness—in peace and in our own way. We pledge ourselves not to attack any other people or place in this system or any other. Tiny though our world is, it is more than ample to keep us gainfully and cheerfully occupied for centuries. We have no designs on any other world. We seek no wider war.
“With the freebots, too, we have no quarrel. We were thrown into battle against them in the service of the Direction. We repudiate that service, and regret any harm we as individuals may have been part of. We do not share the Direction’s fear and suspicion of free intelligence in autonomous machines. We welcome the emergence of consciousness among robots. We hope sincerely to cooperate with freebots in a way that the Direction has no intention of so much as trying. Here in SH-119, after some initial misunderstandings, we are making great progress in such cooperation.
“We note with interest that the presence of a freebot-manned fusion factory on a rock we chose for quite other reasons is unlikely to be a coincidence. In all probability, the freebots are carrying out this or other manufacturing processes on and in many other rocks. We leave the Direction, the DisCorps and the freebots to account for this if they can.
“Finally, let me now speak to those who were fighters for the Acceleration. We bear you no ill will. You know as well as we do that what you were promised when you were called to fight is no longer on the table. We’ve shown by our emergence and survival that a very different future is here for the taking. If you wish to take it, too, in the same way—by seizing and homesteading rocks, and building whatever society you may dream of—we have no objection.
“And the offer to trade is as open to any of you as it is to the DisCorps. If you have nothing to offer in exchange as yet, don’t worry. We’re more than willing to extend credit.
“And, of course, we welcome any fighters who wish to join us, now or in the future.
“Arrangements for verifying our peaceful intentions will be made in due course. In the meantime, our door is open. Our communication channels are open. We await replies.”