On the bus to the spaceport, Taransay Rizzi knew better than to try to stay awake.
She knew she’d fall asleep, just as she knew there was no spaceport; not even a simulation of a spaceport. The simulation of being in the minibus was bumpy, sweaty and solid. Two farmers with herbs to trade, at whatever off-world terminus featured in their reality, talked in their own language and ignored her. The sky with the black crescent across it and the too-bright sun, the mountains and the tall woody plants that looked like trees, were all as vivid as ever. But after having seen the real view outside, of the real planet outside the module, something fundamental in her mind had shifted. It was getting harder to sustain the conviction that everything around her was real.
She dozed, inevitably.
And then—wham—she was awake and in her frame.
She was a robot with a human mind on an alien world, with an AI named for a dead philosopher talking voicelessly in her head.
<Proceed with caution,> Locke told her.
Taransay didn’t move. Her right arm, shot away in the skirmish with the Arcane module hours earlier, was missing. Her entire frame was jammed in the download slot, and felt as if it were being pulled out. Everything smelled of soot and fire with a side order of sulphur. A background roar mingled with high, keening notes resolved into a gale of oxygen, nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide and sulfurous volcanic gasses. That wind also carried traces of complex long-chain organic molecules, their smells unearthly but earthy: local life.
Taransay flexed her waist and crooked her knees and ankles, elbow and wrist and fingers. Everything worked. She stretched out her remaining arm and with her left hand traced the fine grain of nanotech feed tubes inside the crevice. Motor and sensory functions nominal. The hand encountered something else in the slot. She swung her vision around as far as she could, and saw the cracked torso of a frame, much more severely damaged than hers. It was a surprise that her own frame had survived the entry and landing at all—when she’d downloaded, it had been only barely in the slot. Reflex, or automated survival behaviour, had made it crawl in and huddle.
She reached above her head to the bottom of the slot and pushed hard. With a grinding vibration that set off warning feedback in her trunk, she began to shift, then slip.
The fall, when it came, was sudden and heavy. Her frame’s reflexes had already automatically updated and adjusted for the local two gravities. Nevertheless, she hit the ground hard from about a metre and a half up. She landed, knees bending to absorb the shock, arm swinging out to hold her balance. She straightened up, her feet a centimetre deep in grey sand that felt sharp underfoot and smelled of silicates. Volcanic ash.
A crater left by the module was a dozen metres away, with a thick trail from its rim to the module’s present location. She guessed that the crater had been formed by the module’s impact rather than a shock wave; they hadn’t been descending faster than even the local speed of sound. A glassy patch in the crater’s centre was evidence of the module’s final retro-rocket burn. A tongue of lava had cooled about halfway down the far side of the crater. It seemed the module had been rolled out of the way just in time.
<I’m on the ground,> she reported back. <One small jump for a frame, one giant leap for posthuman kind.>
<Congratulations,> said Nicole. <This is indeed historic.>
<Thanks,> said Taransay.
She’d seen the module’s surroundings on the screens inside the sim, but actually being in the environment was thrilling and frightening. The river of lava was just beyond the crater, flowing faster than seemed right for the gentle slope. Beyond it, and up and down the slope, was what she mentally processed as jungle, tall and branching objects in a chaotic mass of colours: greens, vivid coppery reds, stark blues. The shapes were mostly rhomboid, all angles and straight edges. The only curved objects in that mass were the purple spheroids that hung like lanterns, or fruit, amid the black stems.
On the ground, numerous blue-green circular mats overlapped and moved swiftly as she watched. The smallest were like scattered coins, the largest great flowing things twenty metres across. Their shade changed all the time in response to their immediate environment, chameleon-style. When they moved between the stalks and stones their edges lifted like curled lips, cilia whirring without purchase.
She tilted her head back and scanned the sky. A greenish blue, yellowing away from the zenith and turning increasingly red-orange towards the skyline. The higher clouds were white, the nearer and lower grey, in an incongruous but reassuring touch of the terrestrial.
The strangest thing about the sky, though, was the absence of visible celestial objects. The ring she’d seen every day in the sim, and the massive bulk of SH-0 that had dominated most of the skies she’d recently seen in the real, were conspicuously not there.
The massive bulk of SH-0 was now underfoot, not above.
In that alien environment the module itself looked almost native: an erratic boulder of black crystalline basalt, perhaps, rather than an artificial meteor fresh-fallen from the sky. A faceted spheroid about four metres across, scorched, partially covered by the huge mat that had rolled it from the crater, it seemed anything but what it was: a chunk of computer circuitry powerful enough to sustain an entire virtual world and have more than enough processing power left over to deal with the real.
Too close for comfort, a geyser shot up to ten times her height. Steam plumed from it in the unsteady wind like spume from a storm-tossed crest. Fat, hot drops spattered in the thick air and heavy gravity. Where they splashed on the ash they left craters.
Taransay flinched, then steadied herself. Mud bubbled here and there, but the ground looked firm. She took a step forward, and then another, and then turned about to look up at the module. It loomed above her like a boulder covered in moss. The mat that had enveloped it and rolled it out of the way of the lava was still there, and looked set to stay. Its apparent rescue of the module immediately after the crash might have been a lucky accident, a reflex response, or a deliberate act. The mats and their observable behaviour had been debated, predictably and fruitlessly, since the landing. But Taransay couldn’t deny herself the excitement of speculating that the first motile, multicellular organism humanity had (to her knowledge, anyway) encountered was also the first intelligent life.
Unlikely though that seemed, statistically speaking.
Taransay peered closely and zoomed. The tough-looking cilia that fringed the mat and had seemed to propel it were also present across the entire outside surface, which had previously been the bottom. The cilia themselves had cilia, and these sub-cilia had fuzz that itself …
She couldn’t tell how far down the sub-divisions went. Those cilia she could see around the nearest part of the edge were now branching into rootlets and sub-rootlets (and so—fractally—on) that probed into the module’s nanofacture fuzz. At least, into those parts that weren’t hopelessly scorched.
She reported this as she shared her vision with the screen the others would be watching in the sim.
<How much of it’s burned?> Beauregard asked.
<About three-quarters,> she said. <And at least half the rest has these tendril things growing into it.>
<Shit. Any remaining frames?>
She looked further up, at the slot from which she’d emerged. Just visible inside it were the remains of three frames—presumably those of the three fighters from the Arcane module who’d managed to download into the sim. One she’d already seen, headless and limbless; one had lost two legs, the other an arm and its head.
<Any other frames lying around?> Beauregard asked, with more hope than expectation.
<None nearby,> said Taransay. <And any that survived the descent and fell around might be a bit hard to find, and maybe not worth finding.>
<You could be right,> said Beauregard. <Keep a look out all the same. And see if anything can be salvaged.>
<Sure.>
Taransay looked up at the overhanging curve of the module, and scanned it for hand- and footholds. The training she’d had in the Locke sim seemed a long time ago. But at least she had a far better mental model and map of the cliff she now had to climb than she’d ever had then.
<Looks like all that scrambling up rocks you made us do was relevant after all,> she told Beauregard.
She hooked her one hand into a crack slippery with mat. The tendrils responded, squirming ticklishly. She ignored them, pressing down, letting her weight hang. Then she swung her body upward and sideways, and got both feet in places that let her switch her hand an inch sideways to grab another hold. Repeat, with variations. She climbed thus one-handed, with great care and difficulty to the download slot. She wedged her arm across the slot and with one foot reached inside it, and kicked and tugged out the damaged frames one by one. They each hit the ground with what seemed excessive force. Something else was still there. Some kind of box. Ah yes, the object from which Durward and Remington had been downloaded. She kicked it out too. Then she shoved away, jumping clear, and walked around the module to inspect it some more.
<Can’t see much of it, to be honest,> she said. <That fucking mat is everywhere. Most of the externals are gone and the long-range comms gear is completely wrecked.>
Experimentally, she pushed at the side of the module. It didn’t budge. It massed tons, and weighed double down here.
So how had the mat moved it? The cilia had to be far more powerful than they looked.
Moving around the side, she saw the flanges of the fusion drive. They had taken the landing hard and were bent out of shape. It would take more than nanotechnology to get them back. This module wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.
<What about the nanofacturing tube?> Beauregard asked.
Taransay walked around the module again, scanning it more carefully. A few lumps under the mat turned out to be fusion pods, and a two-metre-long swelling the nanofacturing cylinder.
<That’s a relief,> said Beauregard.
At the back of the module, on the other side from the download slot, the jungle pressed close. Black stems, the squarish things that might have been leaves whipping and flapping in the gale, and the ever-moving circular mats on the ground.
Amid the stems, upon the mats, something else moved.
Low and fast, long and cylindrical, with multiple stiff cilia flickering underneath, it snaked through the jungle straight towards Taransay.
She turned to the module and tried to jump. To her amazement, she succeeded, though her legs felt the strain acutely and the leap took her not nearly as high as she’d hoped. She hooked fingers over a ridge on the module’s side, and got one foot to a toehold. Frantically she thrust down and hauled herself up. The stump of her right arm twitched up, as the phantom limb stretched for another hold.
Not a lot of use, that.
She groped with the other foot and found a toehold. She heard the animal’s many feet whisper across the mats, and a rising frequency of clicks that made her think of scissors and jaws. Her mental image of the module’s side, saved from her upward glimpse from the ground, was inadequate but would have to do. Another handhold was twenty-seven centimetres to the right of her hand and ten centimetres up. She flexed her knees as she let go and grabbed. She swayed perilously outward, caught the handhold by a fingertip and consolidated her grip. From there she swung one leg sideways, and found another step, a little higher up.
Now she was over the hump, on a slope rather than an overhang. She took a quick look back down. The animal had paused a couple of metres from the bottom of the module. It looked like a giant millipede, though not visibly segmented, about two metres long and a quarter of a metre thick. It reared up, revealing multiple paired cilia that coalesced to harder mandibles at its mouth. From these the clicking came. It had a black, glassy band across the front of its forepart, like a visor. Taransay made a wild guess that this was its visual organ. Its head swayed from side to side. Behind the glassy band rapid back-and-forth motions took place, as if scanning.
Then it moved forward, until the legs of its reared-up length touched the mat. It began to ascend.
Taransay scrambled to the top of the module. She invoked the specs of the module, overlaid them on her eidetic memory of the battle, and made for where she’d left the gun. She couldn’t see it, but she could see the slot from which she’d fired it: her final trench. Into that trench she rolled, over the lip of mat at its edge.
To her immense relief, the machine gun was there, as if its bipod had walked it into the slot before the battle. Taransay grabbed its stock. The gun had been awkward enough with two hands. She crouched beneath it and swung it upward just as the animal peered over the top. For a moment, Taransay glimpsed her own black-visored reflection in its glassy face. The animal climbed further up, looming over her, then lurched closer towards her, its jaws clicking like pincers.
She fired. The creature exploded, showering her with bits of carapace and greenish gunk.
<Are you all right?> said Nicole.
<Yes, thanks for asking.>
<We all felt any communication would distract you,> said Locke.
<You were right about that,> Taransay allowed.
She felt dismayed at what she’d done. After the mat, the animal was only the second motile organism humanity had encountered on this new world, and had promptly and predictably blown to bits. For all she knew, the clicking jaws might have been an attempt to communicate, or a mode of echolocation. For all she knew, the animal might have simply been curious.
On the other hand, if life here was anything like life on Earth, such a fluffy, feel-good thought was not the way to bet.
She tried to brush the muck off her. <Fuck,> she said. <What do I do now?>
<Descend again to the ground,> said Locke. <Recover an arm from one of the damaged frames—I can instruct you on the procedure for detaching a limb. Then hook the arm around your neck and ascend to the download slot. Before you download, place the arm adjacent to your stump. I can then instruct the nanobots in the slot to reconstruct a connection.>
<Is that all?>
<No,> said Locke, impervious to sarcasm. <While you’re doing that, remain alert for any other animal life in the vicinity.>
<Thanks for the reminder,> said Taransay, picking herself up and wiping ichor from her visor, leaving smears. <I wouldn’t have thought of that myself.>
The task was as long and tedious as it sounded. By the time Taransay lay inside the download slot and shifted herself so that the stump and the disconnected arm were in contact, the exosun was sinking in the sky and she felt as drained as her power pack nearly was. The stump had fuzz from the mat and slime from the splattered animal’s innards all over it like mould.
She welcomed the oblivion of downloading as if it were sleep.
At first, when she woke on the bus from the spaceport, her surroundings seemed a continuation of the surreal dreams of the transition. The dreams hadn’t been as bad as a routine download, let alone the brain-stem memories of her actual death that had accompanied her return when the team had been under suspicion.
They were, however, more bizarre. The dandelion-clock men, the burning origami dragons, the sandpaper whales and the college of impossible angles faded rapidly and mercifully.
The change in her vision remained. Everything was greyscale, rendered in black stipple, like some 3-D version of archive newsprint photographs.
Two locals, a man and a woman, sat up front. They turned to each other, then to her, with puzzled looks.
“What’s going on?” the woman asked. “We seem to have lost colour.”
Not a p-zombie, then. Taransay had heard about this from Iqbal, the bartender in the Touch. He hadn’t noticed any changes when the sim had been reduced to outlines, nor later when the colours had come back.
“Search me,” said Taransay. “I guess it’s like when everything became outlines, a wee while back. Extra demand on the processing. I’ll check.”
“How?” the man asked. “I don’t understand. What processing?”
Taransay stared at them. They might not be p-zombies, but was it possible that they still didn’t know they were in a sim? Did they still think they had just come back from a spaceport with exotic products of other colony worlds? Didn’t they even watch the news? Perhaps they hadn’t had time. Or maybe they just didn’t have television out in the sticks.
She took her phone out of her back pocket and called Beauregard. The two passengers watched as if this were witchcraft.
“What’s going on?” Taransay asked.
“We’ve got a virus,” said Beauregard. “Well, some kind of software infestation. Shaw and Nicole and Locke and Remington are up to their elbows trying to deal with it.”
“A virus? Where the fuck’s that coming from? The Direction? The Rax?”
“We think it’s coming from the mat,” said Beauregard. “At least, we can see the mat’s interfacing with the module’s nanotech fuzz.”
Taransay gave an uneasy laugh. “That’s impossible. You need compatibility to get infection. Operating system, genetic code, all that.”
“Well, there it is,” said Beauregard. “The AIs have been studying what they can see of the local life, and it seems adaptable at a deeper level than any life we know. That bandersnatch thing you killed? It’s a rolled-up mat, and maybe not just in a phylogenetic sense. Phenotypically, as well.”
“Jeez.”
“Anyway, good to have you back. Well done out there. But I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment, so …”
“OK, Belfort, catch you later.”
She rang off and put the phone away.
“What is that thing?” the man asked.
Taransay looked at him solemnly. “It’s a new invention from the outer colonies,” she said.
“Ah.” He returned to his conversation, problem solved, and the loss of colour in the world apparently forgotten.
Taransay gazed at the backs of the couple’s heads for a while. How could they be so incurious? And so selectively ignorant? Maybe they were just thick.
But, no, that couldn’t be it. They were future colonists, volunteers from distant Earth’s utopia for an adventurous extrasolar afterlife; the dead on leave from the most advanced society ever. And they didn’t sound stupid. They were chatting about selective breeding of crops, about recombinations and crosses and recessives, at a high level of abstraction that now and then got down to cases among their own plants and animals. They laughed at allusions she didn’t catch, at clannish in-jokes. They left together, with a friendly wave, and slogged off into the woods to a clearing where gracile robots toiled.
Alone, Taransay began to make sense of it. The system that ran the sim was saving on processing power to deal with the unusual situation, and now with the emergency. It was running in real time instead of a thousand times faster; it had earlier, in fast space skirmishes, once reduced the world to wire diagrams; now it had drained colour but kept shading.
As she’d long since figured out, most of the processing in the sim was devoted to creating consistent subjective experiences for the minds it emulated: the experience of a world, not a world itself. There was no out there, in here.
Now, for the minds of those denizens whose main role in the sim was to be background extras, to add verisimilitude and local colour, just one step above the p-zombies, who had no subjective experience at all, the system was skimping on thought.
When would it start doing that to her, and to the other fighters? Or even to the AIs, Locke and Remington?
She sweated through the rest of the ride.
Beauregard met Rizzi off the bus. She looked surprised and pleased to see him.
“Needed some fresh air,” he said. “After a whole morning stuck in a hot room with two AIs, two warlocks and Nicole, all tearing their hair out.”
Durward, a downloaded copy of the Direction’s rep in the Arcane Disputes sim, had found more of an affinity with Shaw than with Nicole, his local counterpart. Nicole’s pose, and to an extent her role, was of an artist. She interacted with the underlying software by drawing and painting. Durward, from a sim based on a fantasy game, did the same trick by magic. He got on like a house on fire with Shaw, a deserter from an earlier conflict who in a thousand subjective years of wandering the sim had picked up the knack of hacking its physics engine.
Remington, a likewise downloaded copy of the Arcane AI, had meanwhile come to some grudging mutual understanding with Locke. None of this had, over the past day and night, come easily.
“Your face looks drawn,” Taransay said.
Beauregard had to laugh. They walked along the front. In black and white the striped awnings and the shop fronts looked more tawdry than ever.
“Everything’s even weirder than when it was all outlines,” he said. “Sadder, too. Because you can see the shadows, but not the colours.”
“It’s like living in a photonovel,” Rizzi said. “You expect to see speech bubbles instead of hearing people speak.”
“Maybe that’ll be next. Text would take less processing than speech.”
“Fuck, don’t give them ideas.”
“Them?” He knew what she meant.
“The AIs, the … whatever runs this place.”
“You mean, whatever this place runs on. What we all run on, including Nicole.”
Rizzi shuddered. “Yeah, yeah. That’s new, too. The feeling of being … I dunno, watched from outside and inside, knowing it’s all a sim right in your bones. Plus, it’s different after being out and walking around on the ground and seeing this place”—she windmilled an arm—“as a big mossy boulder in a fucking acid-trip cubist jungle. I mean, when we were in space, it was kind of like we were astronauts and this really was a habitat module of a space station.”
“Just … bigger on the inside?”
Beauregard threw out an arm, expecting her to laugh. She did, but only politely.
“Lunch in the Touch?” she asked, hopefully.
“Sorry, no,” Beauregard said. “Straight back to the madness, I’m afraid.”
The madness, when Taransay stepped into Nicole’s studio, was invisible. When she’d last been there, the previous day, the studio, untidy to start with, looked as if it had been the site of a week-long student sit-in. Now the studio looked more like a well-run office. The torn-off A2 flipchart sheets, the food scraps and wrappings, the crumpled drinks cans, the overflowing ashtrays and unwashed coffee mugs were all gone. The floor had been swept, and only old and hardened paint stains marred its planks. The sketches and paintings were sorted and stacked, and beginning to be shelved on trolley racks. Even the cleaning robot looked happier: it wasn’t twitching uncontrollably.
Locals Taransay didn’t recognise came and went quietly, wheeling trolleys in and out, bearing refreshments and stationery supplies, taking away litter. Half a dozen fighters, in combat singlets and trousers, sat in front of the room’s wall-hung TV screens. They watched scrolling data and fragmentary external views, took notes and talked among themselves and on phones. The sim’s pretence at broadcast media, hitherto dedicated to soap operas and war news, was now turned to close study of the real environment outside, and to reports from inside the module’s software.
Shaw and Durward, both shaggy-haired and long-bearded, had been prevailed upon to shower and put on clean clothes, and no longer offended the senses. They both sat on high stools at a drafting table, on which Taransay could see the outline of a frame and an arm rotate slowly in a big flat screen.
Nicole stood poised by the flipchart, marker pen in hand, in the casual chic of loose top and trousers that looked silvery even in greyscale. Taransay had a mischievous thought that the garments had been picked out for that very reason.
The images of the AI avatars Locke and Remington—the man with his long hair, the woman with her steely bob—mouthed soundlessly on the paper. Lines of handwritten subscript flowed along the foot. Nicole glanced at the new arrivals, with a nod to Beauregard and a flicker of smile to Taransay, then turned back to the easel.
“Talk,” she told them.
“How are things going?” Beauregard asked.
“We’re holding the line,” Nicole said. “The mat is interfacing with our nanofacturing fuzz at a molecular level, and it seems to be reverse-engineering machine code to send probes into our software. Locke and Remington are pulling out all the stops to block it and hack back.”
“How is that even possible?” Taransay cried. “It’s natural life out there, and alien at that. It’d have a hard job infecting Earth life, let alone software.”
Nicole waved a hand behind her head. “Tell her, Zaretsky,” she said.
One of the fighters watching the screens stood up and ambled over, still with eye and thumb on his phone. He had very short hair, skinny features, facial piercings, and a plaited rat-tail of beard sticking down from his chin.
“Hi,” he said, looking up briefly, blinking. “Um. Well. Thanks to the mat and to all the splatter from your, uh, encounter, we have some samples in direct contact with the module’s external instruments, not to mention with your frame, which is busy reporting back via the download port.
“So … The local life is carbon-based and runs on DNA coding for proteins. Fair enough, there aren’t many other self-replicating long-chain molecules that could do the job. It seems to have a different genetic code to what we have. No surprise there either—code is arbitrary. But what is a surprise is that the code looks, well, optimised. It has more than four letters, we’ve identified up to twelve so far and that’s just the start. And the transcription mechanism to proteins is a lot more efficient than the RNA-mRNA kludge we have. Lots more amino acids—in that respect it’s more like synthetic biology than natural, from our parochial point of view.”
Taransay smiled wryly. “Like, intelligently designed?”
Zaretsky snorted. “Hell, no!” He paused and frowned. “It’s possible—for all we know there could be intelligent life or even a post-biological robot civilisation out there, or deep in the planet’s past, or whatever. But more likely, the story is just that natural selection here has been fiercer for longer. After all, that’s what ‘super-habitable’ implies. Life here has more diversity and complexity than anything back home. Our working hypothesis is that horizontal gene transfer is pretty much universal here, instead of peculiar to unicellular organisms. So the response when a beastie bumps into something new here is to plunder it for any useful genes, and to rummage through its genome for cool tricks. Maybe assimilation and reproduction—eating and sex—aren’t as distinct here.”
He frowned down at the screen of his phone, swiped in an annoyed manner and tapped in a correction. “Bit of a bugger not having colour … So anyway—from the local point of view our module’s nanotech fuzz, or what’s left of it, is just a new genome in town, and the local life is all, ‘Well, hello, sailor!’ The mat is busy trying that on with our nanotech, and meanwhile some of the gunk from your beastie is busy sharing info with the mat and trawling through the mechanisms of your frame’s shoulder stump, and there we are.”
“Shit,” said Taransay. She looked around. “Somebody give me a beer.”
That afternoon, quite suddenly, colour came back. The resolution stayed low. If you looked closely, you could still see the dots. Everyone whooped and hollered, except the p-zombies, who didn’t notice any change. Locke and Remington reported that the worst of the infection was over, and that the mat was no longer making fresh probes into the module’s systems.
Taransay left Shaw, Durward and the scientists to fine-tune the attachment of the arm to the frame, a process they all found fascinating but that to her was like watching a plant grow without time-lapse.
She called her boyfriend Den, joined him at the Touch, dined out on her adventures, staggered back to Den’s and collapsed into bed.
In the morning Beauregard called her to Nicole’s. She made her way there through a pre-dawn that seemed a little more sparkly than usual, as if dew were on everything including the sea. She found Nicole, Beauregard and Zaretsky in Nicole’s kitchen.
“Progress,” Beauregard reported, handing her a mug of coffee. “We’ve reconnected the arm, and the frame works as well as we can test it in the slot.”
“You can remote-operate frames?” This sounded exciting.
Beauregard shrugged. “Seems so. But not from here, except in the slot.”
“It’s just testing and twitching,” said Zaretsky, who looked as if he’d been up all night. “We don’t have anything like the equipment for remote operation.”
“OK,” said Taransay. “But we could build it, surely?”
Nicole glanced at Zaretsky. He spread his hands. “Not for months—well, not local months, but you know what I mean. With the uncorrupted nanofacture stuff, or even with the stuff that’s been contaminated but is still usable, it would take far too long.”
“What’s the prospect for building other equipment?” Beauregard asked. “Entire new frames, for instance? Or kit to process local life and build up bodies that can live on the planet?”
That last had been the core of the original plan. Taransay had never exactly bought into it, but she’d had no choice but to go along with it, and it had seemed at the very least bold and inspiring. Now, so much equipment had had to be jettisoned in the fight with the Arcane module, and so much damage had been done on the way down, that it seemed impossible.
“To ask the question is to answer it,” said Nicole. “The loss of equipment might have been tolerable if we’d had enough nanotech to replace it, but now …”
“We don’t have only the surface fuzz,” Taransay said. “We still have one nanofacture tube. OK, it’s covered with mat, but we could still build stuff underneath it until the mat goes away or we build stuff that can cut its way out.”
Zaretsky laughed rudely. “Sorry,” he said, “but we’re not going to risk getting our last nanofacture tube contaminated too. And we’re not going to mess with the mat itself until we know what we’re doing.”
“But even so,” Taransay protested, “we can still bootstrap what we’ve got—use the remaining nanotech fuzz to build more nanotech, and so on. However long it takes. I mean, that’s how the whole mission has been built, hasn’t it? And if it seems boring to sit through, we could always slow down the sim to a crawl—hey, that would even release more processing power—and it would take as short a subjective time as we wanted.” She threw out her arms. “We could all be out there tomorrow!”
Beauregard gave her a look just on the safe side of scorn. “You’ve been out there, Rizzi! We’re sitting on a fucking volcano! The mat rolled us out of the way of the lava, but not because it wanted to rescue us. Not at all! It did it because we’re something new and tasty to eat or fuck or both. OK, we’ve fought off that, as far as we can tell, but we don’t know what other creature might happen along, or what other surprises the mat has in its fuzz.”
He sighed, and sipped at his coffee. “You know—actually we could take that risk, if we don’t mind dying. Or, let’s say, running a very high chance of death or irrelevance. We could do as Rizzi suggests, let the AIs ride herd on the nanotech to eke out the resources to make more and more nanotech until it can build, oh I dunno, itsy-bitsy spider bots to gather up raw material to build more bots to build machinery and tools and so on, and basically recreate what we had and more. However long it takes, as she says. Yeah, we can do that. Party on in here, yeah. It’s a good life if you don’t weaken. Live it forever in the fucking sim. The trouble with that is the real environment. The volcano could turn us into an interesting piece of anomalous geology at any moment. The mats and the scuttling things and God knows what else that may be out there could come up with new ways to eat us. Not just the fuzz, but to hack into the module itself. So—”
“Maybe being eaten is the way to go,” said Zaretsky, his pale, mild eyes gazing out of the window at Nicole’s backyard, perhaps at his reflection.
“Fascinating,” said Beauregard, with heavy sarcasm. “Tell us more.”
Zaretsky jutted his rat-tail beard. “We wrack our brains about how to build new bodies to survive out there. The life already out there works by incorporating new genes and new information. Why not give it copies of ourselves—memories, genetic info, the lot—to assimilate?”
“You first,” said Beauregard.
“I would,” said Zaretsky. “Or at least, a copy of me would.”
Beauregard looked as unimpressed by this vicarious bravado as Taransay felt.
Nicole leaned forward. “It may come to that,” she said, to Taransay’s surprise. “However, let us try something less drastic first! Belfort, you were about to suggest …?”
Beauregard’s shoulders slumped, then he straightened his back.
“No,” he said. “I have to admit it. We’re fucked. I won people over to the plan when we had enough kit to make a go of it and the time to build more. We thought we’d have the module in orbit and build landers, remember that? Hell, if we hadn’t been attacked by Arcane we could still have made it to the surface with plenty to build with. I can’t ask the fighters and the locals to rally to anything less. So we have to re-establish contact with the rest of the system, find out what the fuck’s going on out there, and appeal for aid, trade, and if all else fails—rescue.”
“Even if it means going back to the Direction with our tails between our legs?” Taransay asked.
Beauregard looked around the table.
“Does anyone here still trust the Direction?”
In an uncomfortable silence, Nicole raised a hand. “I do, in the sense that I remain confident it knows what it’s doing.”
“Precisely,” said Beauregard. “It knows what it’s doing. And if it were to offer a rescue and then destroy us, for the greater good of the mission, it would still know what it was doing. No thanks. I’d rather be rescued, if it came to that, by almost anyone else.”
“Even the Rax?” Taransay queried.
Beauregard looked her right in the eye.
“Yes. With … appropriate safeguards, put it that way. But like I say, last resort. We have other options. We do have something to offer—we’ve made a landing, we’ve broken the embargo, we have by now terabytes of knowledge of the local life. Maybe some of the DisCorps might be interested. All we need is supplies.”
“There’s a problem with that,” said Taransay. “Right now, I doubt anyone knows exactly where we are. We appeal for help, we give away our position. Anyone who can drop supplies can drop fighters—or bombs.”
“That’s where you come in,” said Beauregard. He looked at Nicole, who nodded. “We want you to go out again. Now that the frame has two arms, it should be a hell of a lot easier and safer than it was the first time. It’s taken the AIs running the nanotech all night to build two simple tools: a very basic directional aerial, and a knife.”
“A knife?” cried Taransay.
Beauregard grimaced. “It isn’t much, but according to analysis of the thing you shot and of the mat, the knife should be able to cut through the outer integument of anything likely to come at you.”
“Great.” A thought struck her. “Can it cut through the mat?”
“Yes,” said Zaretsky, looking up from his phone. “But like I said, we don’t want any messing with the mat until we know it won’t do more harm than good. For the moment, the knife is just for self-defence.”
“I don’t have a great deal of confidence in its efficacy in that respect,” said Taransay.
Nobody looked like they were backing down.
“If it comes to that,” said Beauregard, “don’t forget there’s still some ammo left in the machine gun.”
Taransay stood up. Her coffee had cooled, and she knocked it back.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”
With two arms, it was indeed much easier getting out of the slot. Night had fallen, but Taransay found the dim light from the moons and the infrared glow from the lava and the life-forms almost better than full daylight. She upped the gain in the visual spectrum nonetheless.
The volcano’s summit was clearly visible, a jagged tooth-line drooling lava that seemed to float just above the jungle a couple of kilometres away and a hundred and fifty metres higher than where she stood on a long gentle downward slope. On a heavy planet, it was a high cone. Deltas of cooling lava flowed from that prominence to finger out among the plants.
No animal movement, other than the slow flow of the mats. Danger could come from above, too—she hadn’t seen any flying things as yet, but such seemed likely. She looked up.
The sky was clear, blue-green with a few thin clouds. One of them anomalously didn’t move with the wind. Taransay zoomed her gaze, and the tattered wisp resolved itself into distant pinpricks, smelling faintly of carbon and iron: the dispersed space station.
Closer in and further out, a double handful of SH-0’s many moons hung across the ecliptic. Some were mere sparks, others discs or part discs, crescent or gibbous or full. Taransay picked out SH-17 with a pang close to nostalgia: that exomoon was, after all, the only other place in this system where she’d stood on real ground.
Enough. She was on real ground now. To work.
The salvaged right arm worked fine, but the join between it and the former stump was marked with a ring of native fuzz, like mould. How certain could she be that its earlier hacking into the frame’s systems had been repulsed?
Not at all, was the answer, whatever Locke or Zaretsky might say.
Warily, she walked around the side of the module, and found the knife growing within arm’s reach, a sharp artificial stalactite. It snapped off along a stress line scribed around the top of the handle, leaving a cavity in the module’s surface and a matching knob. The blade was like a leaf of black glass. Taransay looked at it dubiously. It was five centimetres long, and she had nowhere to stash it. She was going to have to use the knife to slash the leaves and stems from which to make a belt and sheath. For now, she kept it clutched in her right hand.
The aerial, as Beauregard had called it, hung from higher up on the module like a strand of cobweb, visibly growing. The loose end of it lay coiled on the ground, and new loops were added to the heap at a rate of about one every hundred seconds. Taransay scanned around, saw nothing threatening, and began to pay it out like a fishing line. She walked towards the lava flow, in the slight furrow the rolled module had left. When she’d gone far enough, she stuck the knife in the compacted ash soil and prepared to shape the thread into a spiral.
The thread had other ideas. It shaped itself, coiling and hardening, into a shallow metre-wide mesh dish that looked as if the wind would carry it away. A spike grew from the centre, thin as a pencil lead. Just as autonomously, the dish tilted this way and that. Taransay saw that this movement was caused by small expansions and contractions in the thread, but didn’t understand any more than that about how it worked. No surprise there, she told herself: this technology was centuries in advance of anything she remembered. Come to think of it, she didn’t understand how she was a fifty-centimetre-tall black glassy robot. She understood in principle, but the engineering details were at a level where the most strictly materialist explanation might as well be magic.
So it was with the self-assembling long-range receiver.
Stop worrying. Stop scratching your little round head.
Her little round head was, she found, attuned to what the aerial—and the God-knew-what processing behind it, in the module—was picking up. She saw it like a heads-up display, in three neat columns, and heard the accompanying sounds on parallel tracks all of which she could follow. There were advantages in being a robot.
Nevertheless, the input was confusing. The bulk of it, occupying the centre column, was spillover of rapid-fire AI chatter that scrolled in a blur. Routine business, probably, with a strand of Direction instructions to DisCorps. She gladly left unpicking all that to Locke and Remington. The human messages were by comparison marginal. Down the left-hand side, aptly enough, ran a threatening rant from the Arcane module: We’re coming for you, fascist scum! wasn’t actually said, but it was the gist. There was a side order of imprecations against the freebots and against those who’d defected to them. Taransay was pleased to hear the names of Carlos and Newton; she didn’t know who Blum and Rillieux were, but good for them in any case, even though the Arcane gang seemed to think their defection and departure was all some kind of Rax plot.
Among the threats of bombing and laser-blasting and nuking from orbit were urgent appeals to any surviving Acceleration cadres or Direction loyalists in the Locke sim, which the Arcane gang still seemed to think was under the iron heel of the Rax. Rise up! Overthrow the usurpers! Help is coming! From the way the message was repeated on a short loop and faded in and out it was obviously being beamed down to the surface on spec, over the wide area in which the module could theoretically have landed.
The other message, in the right-hand column, was likewise on a loop. It had much better production values and a far more conciliatory tone. It came from the Rax.
<Are you getting all this?> Taransay asked.
<Loud and clear,> replied Locke. <Please keep guard on the aerial while we process the data.>
<Thanks,> said Taransay. <If I’m attacked, I’ll let you know.>
<Please do,> said Locke, immune as ever to sarcasm.
Taransay tugged the knife from the ground and clutched it in her fist. She paced carefully back to the module and turned her back to it. She didn’t need or want to rest against it, but it was good to have that solid mass behind her.
<Keep me in the loop, guys,> she said.
<Will do,> said Beauregard.
Taransay hunkered down. It was going to be a long night.
After a while she saw a light move in the sky, high up, and fade just as her gaze fixed on it. A little later, a light drifted closer and lower down, just above the treetops, and likewise faded as she focused. She logged the sightings but lacked the curiosity to investigate, content for the moment to classify them in her own mind as SH-0’s first UFOs.
“We await replies.”
The black ovoid that spoke like a man stopped talking. The image froze. A little curled arrow spun in the lower left corner, waiting for someone to request a repeat.
No one did.
“Well,” said Nicole. “Now we are in the picture.”
We fucking are, Beauregard thought. In the picture. In one of your pictures, to be precise. And don’t we all know it.
That’s the fucking trouble. That’s why we’re all so on edge.
In the sim, it was mid-afternoon. Beauregard felt sweat drying on his face. Nicole’s studio was airy, the window open to a view of sunlight and sea. The room wasn’t even crowded: Beauregard, Nicole, Shaw, Durward, Zaretsky; Tourmaline drifting in and out. The AIs were present only as still sketches on Nicole’s flip-pad.
And yet the room seemed too hot, and stuffy.
It must be the screens, Beauregard reckoned. There was the one with the transmissions, and then there were all the others. One showed what Rizzi saw. Others showed random fragments of the module’s surroundings, random night-vision false-colour images of lava or swaying plant trunks or crawling mats and one pure black star-spangled tatter of sky. Together they created an insuperable impression of being inside something small. The impression you got when you looked away was of being in the wide open spaces of a terraformed planet, but it was no longer strong enough to convince. It was wearing thin. You could see the pixels.
How long would people stand for this?
“I don’t believe that peaceful coexistence offer from the Rax,” Beauregard said, feeling his way. “Not in the long term, anyway. It’s a transparent ruse to buy time while they build up their forces. But—”
“Stop right there,” said Nicole. “There’s no ‘but’ after that.”
“Let me finish,” said Beauregard. “With respect, Nicole, there is. There always is. They’re going to have to do at least some genuine trading up front to make it convincing. They claim to have fusion drives for sale. We could certainly do with one. We could offer a wealth of information about SH-0—maybe not of much interest to the Rax, but they could easily trade it on to one or more of the DisCorps.”
“You want the Rax to carry out a landing here?” cried Nicole.
Beauregard stared her down. “They could just do a drop from orbit. Same as with any other company we might trade with.”
“I wouldn’t trust them,” said Nicole.
“What you’re forgetting—no, you can’t forget, can you?—what you’re eliding is that as far as they know, we’re Rax ourselves. It wouldn’t be too hard to convince them.” He grinned. “I can be the front man for that if you like. And we must have Rax sleepers among our returnees.”
The face of Locke moved on the page. Shaw noticed and pointed. Nicole glanced at the line of script along the foot.
“We do,” she said. “Locke has identified them from the courses their scooters took and what they did in the battle. It can give us a list.”
“Well, there you go,” said Beauregard. “We can bribe or threaten them to back me up.”
“‘We?’” said Zaretsky, raising a ring-pierced eyebrow.
“I think you’ll find,” said Beauregard, in as mild a tone as he could muster, “that throwing me the old ‘You and whose army?’ challenge would be most unwise.”
“And I warn you,” said Nicole, “that doing any such thing would have consequences. Very personal consequences.”
Ah, that standing threat. Time to face it down.
Beauregard held her gaze. “Everyone knows now that the p-zombies are different. Even they do.”
“You think I couldn’t convince them otherwise?”
“How?” Beauregard scoffed. “Tell them they all have superior eyesight, or something?”
Everyone else in the room was looking puzzled.
“What’s all this about?” Shaw demanded.
Beauregard paused, glanced sidelong, listened. Tourmaline wasn’t in earshot. He could hear her clattering about in Nicole’s kitchen. He stood up.
“The p-zombies,” he said. “Nicole has held a threat over me ever since I made my move. If I ever try to use the troops on my own account, she’ll have a word with all the p-zombies. Convince them there’s no such thing as a p-zombie. That they’ve all been misled and mistreated, somehow. Not that I’ve ever mistreated Tourmaline, I hasten to add.” He shrugged. “And anyway, since Locke and Nicole started monkeying with the sim, and you did your own monkeying about, it’s become obvious to everyone that there is a difference. The p-zombies haven’t noticed any of the changes, or their reversals. It’s all the same to them because they don’t have any inner experience in the first place. Colours to them are lines of code—Pantone numbers. These don’t change. And they’re well aware, so to speak, that everyone else does notice something changing. So Nicole’s threat doesn’t amount to anything, any more.”
Nicole lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew out a stream of smoke in as irritating a manner as possible.
“Is that a risk you’re willing to take?”
Beauregard glared at her. She glared back, unperturbed.
“Oh, fuck this,” said Shaw. “If we have any decisions to make, let’s make them rationally, by discussion. Not by bickering and power plays between you two.”
Perched on his drafting stool, he straightened his back and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, and smiled.
“Done,” he said.
The sunlight dimmed and flickered. Then it returned to normal. So did the resolution of the sim. No more coloured dots. Everything looked real and solid again.
“What’s done?” Nicole cried. “What have you done?”
Shaw looked smug. “No more p-zombies.”
Beauregard braced himself for a crash of crockery and a howl of fury from Tourmaline. None came.
Nicole drew savagely on the cigarette. The tip became a glowing cone. “What?”
She jumped up, stalked over to the flipchart and scribbled. The faces of Locke and Remington became animated, then agitated. Script raced along the foot of the page in a demented scribble, far too fast for Beauregard to read. Nicole read it until it stopped.
She turned to Shaw. “It seems you have,” she said. “And you’ve released a significant amount of processing power into the bargain. Well, well.”
She gave Beauregard a sad smile and a shake of the head. “Looks like I’ve lost my trump card.”
Beauregard was still tense, waiting for the penny, the other shoe and the crockery to drop.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Durward, Nicole and Shaw were all looking at him as if daunted by his stupidity.
“Zaretsky!” Nicole snapped. “Tell him. Make him understand.”
“It’s very simple,” said Zaretsky, eyes bright and arms waving. “The whole p-zombie business was a tour de force of programming. An incredible feat of puppetry. Emulating the actions and reactions of a conscious being without the avatar itself being a conscious being has the most fucking unbelievable AI brute force processing overhead. I mean, gigantic look-up tables aren’t the half of it. Not a hundredth of it. It turns out to be easier and simpler and a thousand times more economical just to give them conscious minds. Multiply that by the hundreds of p-zombies in the sim, and you get some idea of how much processing power Shaw’s latest hack saves.”
“But won’t they know?” Beauregard asked. “Won’t they notice?”
“Well, no,” said Zaretsky, as if it were obvious. “They now have conscious minds—with all the memories and thoughts and emotions their emulation implied. Including, you see, the memory of being self-aware all along. Thus neatly accounting for why they also remember being puzzled when anyone asked if they were conscious, or told them they weren’t.”
Footsteps outside, a quick tick of high heels in the hall. Tourmaline walked in, bearing coffee. She set the tray down.
“Why’s everybody looking at me like that?” she asked.
“It’s all right,” said Beauregard. “We’re all just dying for a coffee. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, still sounding suspicious. “Well, see you later.”
“Yeah,” said Beauregard. “See you later, honey.”
She blew him a kiss and went out.
“I have a better idea than talking to the Rax,” said Nicole, pressing down the plunger of the cafetière.
“I’m listening,” said Beauregard. He felt off balance, but he wasn’t going to show it.
“What’s the only force out there that has already actually helped us?” Nicole said. “The freebots. They saved our ass. And Carlos and Newton were involved, which as far as I’m concerned puts the lid on any notion that they’re Rax. You told me Newton is Rax, or was, but Carlos would never get mixed up in any Rax ploy. He’s too much the old Axle terrorist for that. And the other two?” She looked at Durward. “You knew them in Arcane.”
The warlock chuckled. “Bobbie Rillieux and Andre Blum? No, I think it’s safe to say they aren’t Rax. I think what happened back there is that the freebots, bless their blinking lights, have a somewhat eccentric idea of what neutrality means. The freebot we captured—the one called Baser—wasn’t the brightest bulb in the circuit, if you see what I mean.”
“Here’s what I suggest,” said Nicole. “We contact the freebots on SH-17, tell them our situation and ask for their help.”
“What help can they give us?” Beauregard scoffed.
Nicole gave him a look. “They have at least one fusion drive, on the transfer tug Baser hijacked. And they have access to more—they have contacts with other freebots all across the system. Going by what the Rax have found inside SH-119 the blinkers have been clandestinely very busy for the past year or so. Far busier than the Direction suspected, as far as I know. So they may well have resources even we have no idea of.”
Beauregard thought about his. He still reckoned the Rax settlement in SH-119, the New Confederacy—ha!—might have more potential as a trading partner. But this was a good time not to bring that up again. He kept his own counsel on the matter.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s give it a go.”
“In practical terms,” said Zaretsky, “that means Rizzi will have to trek some distance away, and make a transmission. Probably by laser. This will take some time to set up, with the limits of our nanofacture.”
“Yes, yes,” said Beauregard, impatiently. “Big job. Seems only fair to give her some R&R first. Bring her in.”
<Come back in,> said Locke.
Taransay looked down at the knife in her hand and wondered what to do with it. Leaving it outside seemed careless and wasteful—and besides, who knew what inspiration it might provide to some local organism, whether a mat or some beastie she hadn’t met yet? But she didn’t fancy another one-handed ascent to the download slot. If she’d had teeth she could have held the blade between them, but she didn’t have teeth. One of the downsides of being a robot.
She walked behind the module to the edge of the jungle. The peculiar geometry of the local life now struck her overwhelmingly as alien. Small circular mats carpeted the ground like fallen leaves, but leaves that slithered over each other in a disquieting continuous flow. The actual leaves of the plants were also deeply uneasy on the eye: stark quadrilaterals with none of the veining and striations and other repeated irregularities that made leaves beautiful. They hung limp under the night sky.
She reached up and plucked one from its stiff horizontal stem, laid the knife at her feet and tore the sheet into strips. Liquid oozed from the ragged edges, smelling of water and sweet, sticky carbohydrates. Some animal, surely, must eat this. Fortunately, no herbivore was prowling the night. The strips tore neatly enough, and she knotted half a dozen of them with swift robotic precision. She tied one end to the knob of the knife handle, tied the other to form a loop and slung the string around her neck. A black leaf-shaped pectoral pendant on a small black frame.
After a careful scan of the vicinity, she clambered up to the download slot.
<Take me in,> she said.
Another surreal nightmare, a full-on bad trip. Taransay sat shaking as the memories faded.
Back on the fucking bus.
Everything looked real again, but she didn’t feel it.