The first time Carlos came back from being killed in action, everything around him seemed quite real.
He shuddered awake on the bus from the spaceport. It was as if he’d dozed rather than slept, and had had a brief, vivid nightmare. The memory of many seconds of drowning in a dark liquid—colder than ice, blacker than ink, thinner than water—slid down the back of his mind and faded to a shiver. He gripped his knees to stop the shaking, and flinched at the chill touch of his shirt’s sides, drying in the dry heat.
His mind caught up with his thoughts and it was as if he were drenched again, this time in cold water. He shook his head and gasped.
The bus from the spaceport—
How had he known that?
He had no memory of actually being at the spaceport, but he had a mental image of the place, as if it were something he’d often seen in photographs. An improbably advanced spaceport, where stubby winged shuttles dropped in every hour on the hour, and every other hour after a swift turnaround screamed off, reconfigured as the nose cones of gigantic spaceplanes that thundered for kilometres down a strip of shining white and soared to beyond the sky.
There was no such spaceport on Earth. If he’d ever seen its like it had to have been in a movie he’d watched as a boy, or on a glossy page of aerospace-industry guff.
Carlos looked warily around. The light was odd, as if every pixel in the colours were being selected from a subtly wrong part of the palette. Bright outside, on a narrow dusty road whose verges merged with rough gravel to the foot of close raw rock faces with trees and scrub at the tops. If this was the bus from the spaceport—and he couldn’t shake the inexplicable conviction that it was—he wouldn’t have expected it to be an overcrowded minibus, like a Turkish dolmush.
The woman in the seat beside him wore a long, loose black dress and a bright headscarf. She sat with a hessian bag across her knees and paid him no attention whatever. She was reading from a rounded rectangle of glass propped on top of the bag. Carlos sneaked a peek. It was in a script he’d never seen before: stark and angular and logical-looking like Korean, or the serial identification of a starship from a more advanced but still human civilisation.
“Excuse me,” Carlos said.
The woman frowned at him. She mumbled a phrase he couldn’t understand, and shook her head.
The bus had fifteen seats and more than thirty passengers, most of them standing. Gear and wares jammed any remaining space, underfoot and overhead and on laps. A kitbag bulked large between his knees, heavy on his feet. The sliding door at the front stood open, the rear window too. A through draught, fragrant with conifer and lavender, relieved a little of the sweat and breath, garlic and armpits. The vehicle’s volume reverberated with the whine of electric engines and the babble of loud conversation. Carlos was troubled and bewildered by his incomprehension. His schoolboy smatterings included Turkish and Greek. This language was neither, though it reminded him of both.
The other passengers, all apparently in their twenties or thirties, struck Carlos in a similar way. Their skins were weathered rather than tanned, their limbs muscular, their clothing plain, but they didn’t look like farmers or artisans or even people who worked in the tourist trade. They looked like city folk who’d chosen a rural way of life. Like some kind of goddamn hippies.
He decided to try again. He raised his chin and his voice.
“Does anyone here speak English?”
Heads turned, shook, and turned away.
Where was he? There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with his memory. There were gaps, but he couldn’t be sure they hadn’t always been there. For a moment he struggled with the paradox of trying to remember if there were events in his life he’d never been able to recall in the first place. Then he shrugged. The arc of his life still made sense to him. Childhood, parents, school; holidays in places a bit like this; university; his job as a genomic pharmaceutical database librarian in Walsall; getting drawn into the Acceleration, and then fighting on its side in the opening stages of the war—
Aha! Yes, of course, the war!
That must be it. He’d probably been wounded, and was undergoing rehab for trauma and memory loss. He shifted uneasily in his seat. He was wearing an olive-green T-shirt, combats, desert boots, all clean but much used. His arms and legs looked and felt fine. A discreet self-check reassured him that everything between his legs was intact. Nothing seemed the matter internally, as far as he could tell. No aches or pains. He passed a hand over his face. Sweaty, needing a shave, his features felt as they’d always done. Only his scalp felt different: hair cropped closer than he’d last had it, and no jacks. No spike. Perhaps that accounted for his inability to understand the language.
The spike, the spike… The last thing he remembered had to do with the spike. He’d been given a mission. Buying a one-way fare in cash, for… London, that was it. A new arena for his skill with drones. Something big. He was worried. He’d had growing doubts about the cause. Not about its objectives, but about its methods. Things had been getting out of hand. Too much violence… no, it hadn’t been too much violence, that had never troubled him as such, it had been… isolation, that was it. The Acceleration was becoming more isolated as it became more effective in striking spectacular blows. It was getting harder and harder to find safe houses, sympathetic programmers, local folk on the street who’d tip you a wink and point you to the right alleyway to run down.
And his doubts had begun speaking to him. Literally. A voice in his head. A disguised voice, or a chip voice. Mechanical, but not harsh. Sexless but seductive, insinuating, friendly. Like someone leaning over his shoulder, and saying quietly but insistently, “Are you sure you aren’t making a mistake?” Well-informed, too, about all the weaknesses of the movement. Amplifying his every doubt about its strategy and tactics.
It called itself Innovator. He remembered that. He couldn’t remember everything about it. Looking back, the voice in his head seemed to have been with him for weeks. The strange thing was: he had a feeling, like a memory he couldn’t quite put his finger on, that he had invited it in. That he’d been told to invite it in. As if Innovator’s insidious presence had been authorised by the movement, but had to be kept secret from most of the Axle’s members.
Had he betrayed the movement? No—that wasn’t possible!
Carlos shook his head and peered out through the dust-smeared pane. The bus negotiated a hairpin turn, affording a dizzying swoop of a view to the foot of a dry ravine, then continued downhill slowly through a copse of knotty trees that might have been an olive grove, but wasn’t. Great green mounds of moss, convoluted like brain corals, lurked under the trees. Between the trees flitted winged creatures that didn’t look like birds, nor even quite like bats.
Out in the open again, then around another hairpin, this time with the raw hacked rock face on one side and nothing but sky and sea visible on the other.
The sun burned bright near the zenith, white and hot and too small. A spectacular ring system, pale like a daylight Moon, slashed a scimitar curve across the sky. High clouds, and close to the ring three tiny crescents, glimmered against the sky’s dark blue.
Carlos stared, mouth agape.
“Oh fuck,” he said.
It didn’t seem adequate. His knees quivered anew. Again he clamped his hands hard on them and pressed his calves against the sides of the kitbag. The woman beside him showed no sign of having noticed his exclamation.
This had to be a dream. For a moment, and with great determination, Carlos tried to levitate. He remained in his seat. Not in a dream, then. Oh well. So much for that comforting prospect.
He wasn’t yet ready to concede that he wasn’t on Earth. He might be in a virtual reality simulation, or in some extravagant, elaborate domed diorama. He could even be dead, in a banal afterlife unpromised or unthreatened by any prophet.
He gave the supernatural variants of that possibility the moment’s notice he felt they deserved, and ran through the natural ones. Not all of them were altogether pleasant. He shuddered at the worst, and dismissed further thought on these lines as morbid.
Stay cool, stay rational, stay in focus. Fear is the mind-killer, and all that.
If he was indeed dead, and materialism was still true (which for Carlos was pretty much a given) then he was fairly sure of the least that could have happened. Sometime after his last conscious memory, his brain-states had been copied. How, he had only the vaguest idea. The technology of the spike had hinted at the possibilities. His brain had been scanned in enough detail to create a software model of his mind. The vast computational capacity that could do that could easily provide the uploaded mind with a simulation of a body and an environment.
So far, so familiar: the possibility of uploading was one of the many taken-as-read doctrines held in common by Axle and Rax. Likewise with that of living in a simulation—a sim. That left open a lot of possibilities as to who, or what, had done this.
Of course, he might not be in a sim at all. This could all be real in a physical and uncomplicated way. In which case he was either in a ludicrously large-scale, detailed and dull Disneyland, or—well, on the bus from the spaceport on a human-settled planet around another star.
Or maybe—ha-ha—he was still on Earth, somewhere on the Aegean coast, and amnesic, and perhaps rejuvenated or revived from cold sleep or whatever, and in the meantime some mad scientist or super-villain had shrunk the sun and shattered the Moon. Carlos almost giggled, then pulled himself together.
The least he could speculate was that it was now many years—decades, centuries?—since his last definite memory. And yet his body, as far as he could tell, had aged not at all. Whatever his situation was, it was quite other than any he’d ever truly expected to experience.
None of the other passengers took any notice of his agitation. Nor were they startled by the anomalous sky. They talked or read or gazed blankly out the windows.
Down the steep flank of a long deep vale the vehicle crawled, stopping here and there to let passengers off, in singles and couple and clumps, at hillside farms and huddled settlements. The passengers strolled or skipped away, lugging or swinging their bales. Carlos wondered what the locals brought in from the spaceport, and what they delivered to it in exchange. He presumed the trade made sense. Ignoring the arrivals, robots more agile and autonomous than any he’d seen before toiled amid shacks and scrubby trees.
Slowly the crush eased. A shoreline settlement that looked like a resort came into view far below, in a cliff-cupped cove, all black beaches and white roofs and colour-striped umbrellas. Carlos flinched at the sudden vivid memory of a childhood holiday in Lanzarote. The slow, steady boom of breakers became louder and more noticeable until it became background.
The bus rolled along a raised beach or terminal moraine on a flat road with the occasional slant-roofed chalet a little way off it. It stopped at the unpaved access paths of two of these, letting people off. Then it took a sharp turn and gradient down to the main drag. By the time the vehicle halted beside a garish arcade overlooking the beach, all the other passengers had left.
“Terminus,” said the vehicle.
Carlos stood up and heaved his bag to his shoulder and stepped out on to hot tarmac. The colours were still wrong.
“Thank you,” said the vehicle. “Have a good day.”
So at least it spoke English, even if the passengers didn’t.
“Thank you,” replied Carlos, unthinking, then shook his head as the vehicle rolled away towards a distant shabby low building that needed no signage to have “depot” written all over it.
The arcade smelled of ocean and ice cream and candyfloss and grilling meat. The signs were in English, and generic: Amusements, Café, Bar, Refreshments, Meat and Fish, Swimwear. Nobody was nearby, though figures moved in the distance, where the seafront arcade gave way to spread-out, low-built housing on the slope. Carlos cocked an ear to the ding of games and the roar of screens, and the occasional raised voice or loud laugh. No kids in evidence, which puzzled him. Maybe the place was off season, or in decline. A ghost resort.
Black sand drifted on the street, silting up where the roadway met the pavement. Overhead, large feathered avians coloured like gulls, grey above and white beneath, cried and wheeled. Their wings had a disturbing suggestion of elongated finger bones, like those of bats or pterosaurs. The sun burned hot and hard on Carlos’s buzz-cut scalp. He stepped into the shade of a shopfront’s faded awning and put down the kitbag. In the shade everything was dark for a moment.
A woman’s warm voice came from behind his shoulder: “Hello, Carlos.”
He turned. The woman who stood there giving him a welcoming smile was his type to the millimetre, which struck him as both delightful and suspect. Young and tall and slim, hips and breasts shown off by tight jeans and close-fitted fancy blouse, pink with white collar and cuffs. Dark reddish hair cut short, framing her face. Black eyebrows, high cheekbones, quizzical smile. Mediterranean complexion, but not weather-worn like the people on the bus. Pretty in a gamine kind of way. White-trash-touristy designer handbag on a thin strap from her shoulder.
She held out her hand. “Nicole Pascal.”
Her accent seemed to go with the name.
“Carlos, that’s me,” he said, returning her firm handshake.
She looked him up and down.
“Do you have any other name?”
“Yes, it’s—” He had that tip of the tongue feeling. Shook his head. “Sorry. Maybe it’ll come back. ‘Carlos’ was a nom de guerre, but—”
“The guerre went on longer than expected?”
He had to laugh. “Something like that.”
Her face was as if a shadow had fallen on it. “Yes. Well. That, indeed.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Of course.” Her smile returned. “Let’s do lunch. Somewhere quiet. Lots to say.”
Lunch was not quite fish, not exactly chips, and definitely a beer. It was served at a round rustic table of soft grey driftwood timber under a big umbrella on a concrete terrace where no one else sat. Music from the café up the steps sounded loud and the waiter bustled. Beyond the saltwater-pitted rusty rail, breakers sent hissing white foam a long way up the black beach. Carlos picked at pan-fried dark flesh in which a fan of thin yellow cartilaginous bones radiated from a stubby cylinder of hollow tubes around a pallid toothy ball which Carlos tried not to think of as the skull. He chowed down on sliced green tubers fried in oil and sprinkled with herbs. Nicole nibbled at boiled purple leaves and rubbery molluscs drenched in vinegar, and sipped water.
He paused when he was no longer hungry and parched.
“So,” he said. “Hit me with it.”
She shoved her half-empty plate aside and fingered a small carton from her handbag. She flipped the top and flicked the base. A white paper tube poked out.
“Smoke?” she offered.
He’d seen it in movies. He shook his head.
She used a gold lighter and drew sensuously. “Ah. That’s good.”
“It isn’t.”
She nodded. “Bad for your health. I know. And as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, you being Axle cadre and all, that’s kind of… irrelevant, here.”
Axle cadre? She knew a lot about him. He kept his cool.
“Passé, so to speak?”
“Very much so.” She fixed him with her gaze as she drew hard on the cigarette, and sighed out the smoke. Looked away.
“Go on,” he said. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
A muscle twitched in her cheek. He could see her stretching the tic into a forced smile.
“All right,” she said. “You’re dead.”
“That’s a relief.”
He wasn’t being flippant. One of the many dire possibilities he’d considered was that he was grievously injured yet alive, a hunk of charred meat and frazzled brain being fed consoling dreams until the technology improved enough to regenerate him. Or until the Rax—if they had won—decided on one of their ingeniously horrible ways to torture him. That was still possible, no matter what she told him. But that way madness lay. Better to take this as good news and at face value until he had reason to doubt it.
And in that case… holy shit. So this is it, he thought. Immortality. Or at least a very long life. He might yet watch the last stars fade…
“Tell me,” Nicole went on, as if still drawing things out, delaying the real bad news. “Where do you think you are?” She waved a hand around. “Like, what does all this look like to you?”
Carlos looked down at the cooked organisms on his platter, then up at the mountains and the sky. The ring system still gave him a start when he momentarily forgot about it and then glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye.
“All right,” he said. “What it looks like, OK? It looks like an extrasolar habitable terrestrial planet, probably terraformed, and settled or colonised by people—maybe genetically adapted so they can eat the local life—but otherwise not too culturally distant from my time, and therefore with an extraordinary lack of ambition and imagination.”
Nicole guffawed. He got the full horseshoe of perfect teeth.
“Spoken like a true Accelerationist!” she said. “And, yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. That’s what it’s meant to look like. Your classic bucolic colony planet. Which would imply faster-than-light starships, warp drives, the works. The full orchestral space opera and the fat lady singing. Yes?”
“Too good to be true?” Carlos shrugged. “OK, I’d figured as much. We’re in a sim.”
“Yes!” said Nicole, sounding relieved. “We’re in a sim. The good news is that it’s running on a machine in a space station orbiting a planet not a hundred million kilometres from the planet on which this sim is modelled.”
Carlos closed his eyes and opened them. “You mean we’re in the same system as a planet where all this is real?”
“Not… exactly,” said Nicole. “There’s a ringed habitable terrestrial, yes, but it doesn’t yet have… oh, radial flatfish and green edible root vegetables, let alone people eating them. It has nothing living on it but little green cells drifting in the oceans. We envisage these cells being used as the basis for building up more complex life, endless forms most beautiful as the man said, all the way up to hassled seafront waiters and dirt-farmers with robots if we want. All that may come. In due course. For now, there’s no one around this star but us robots, AIs, avatars, p-zombies and”—she pointed a finger at him—“ghosts.”
Carlos grinned, though he was shaking inside.
“If I’m a ghost, what are you?”
Nicole shook her head. “Not knowing that is part of what you have to live with, for now. You’ll find out why soon enough.”
“If that thing up there giving me sunburn isn’t supposed to be the Sun, what is it?”
“It’s a star twenty-four light years from the Sun, give or take. It has a ridiculously big rocky planet—ten Earth masses—in close orbit. Closer than Mercury, and of course faster. We call it M-0. Basically it’s a ball of molten metal and we still haven’t figured out how it got there. Then at roughly one AU out you come to H-0, the ringed habitable terrestrial planet this sim’s based on. After that, there’s a much bigger planet a couple of AU further out that’s called SH-0 because it’s what’s known as a superhabitable—something of a misnomer, it has abundant multicellular life but it’s impossibly hostile for human habitation. SH-0 is the one this space station is in orbit around, along with lots of moons and bits of stray junk. And then way out beyond that there’s G-0, a humongous gas giant with kick-ass rings and moons the size of Mars and on down. Plus all the usual small fry of asteroids and comets and meteoroids.” She waved a hand. “Lots. Lively place.”
“And how did we get here?”
“Starwisp. Tiny probe laser-pushed from solar power stations in sub-Mercury orbit to near light-speed, decelerated by a detachable shield on approach. Packed with all the information needed to set up shop in the locality on arrival, which it did about ten Earth years ago. Including the stored mind-states and body specs of twenty thousand people, including you. Potential future inhabitants of”—another handwave—“the rock this is based on, when it’s terraformed for real.”
“Now tell me the bad news.”
He felt he’d already heard it. If Nicole’s story was true and the human race was wasting precious time and space and energy in terraforming and colonising, then things were a long way from the best he could have hoped for. Things might even have gone the worst way he’d feared.
“Which bad news?” Nicole asked.
“Like, did the Rax win the war?”
She rolled her eyes upward. “No. And nor did the Axle. That is ancient history now.”
“How ancient?”
She smiled. “Welcome to the thirty-second century.”
Now that shocked him. Over a thousand years.
“Shit.”
At some level he must have been hoping for less. Now for the first time the full measure of dismay settled on him like a heavy wet cold cloak: the incomprehensible and irrevocable loss of everyone he had known. The many he had liked and the few he had loved, all gone.
Unless—
The stoical element of his mind cursed the Accelerationist mentality that had accreted around it for the almost certainly futile hope that flared up for a moment. But he had to ask.
“And you haven’t got—?” He was almost embarrassed to spell it out.
“Immortality?” Nicole gave him a look of wry sympathy. “Only as ghosts such as you, in places such as this. Longevity? A few centuries. No one of your time is alive. I’m sorry.”
He tried to smile. “I’m alive, or so it seems.”
“You and some others, as ghosts, yes. But, relatively, very few.”
So much for that. The sense of personal loss receded. He knew it would recur. What took its place at the forefront of his mind was the sense of waste. Carlos had been struck, once, by George Bernard Shaw’s warning against excessive sympathy. There’s no greater sum of suffering, Shaw had argued, than the worst that one individual can suffer in one life. What does sum, what does accumulate, and that without limit, is waste. And once you had seen the waste, of wars and slumps and prodigal priorities, in its full and ever-increasing dimensions and endless ramifications, you saw the source of most of the suffering, but you saw too and even more the unrealised possibilities that the waste destroyed. What had driven the Acceleration, and what had driven Carlos, was not pity for the suffering but rage at the waste.
He tried to look on the bright side. What was a thousand years in the life of the universe? Still, the countless trillions of potential happy lives unlived, the energy squandered from stars on empty space to no profit or avail, galled him and chilled him to the bones. Or would have, if he’d had bones, he reminded himself. That they were doing all this waste-of-space, waste-of-time shit, while his very existence here and now in the sim demonstrated that they had the technology to do so much more, redoubled his dismay.
“The real bad news,” Nicole said, “is that you’re not just dead. You’re condemned to death. You’re serving a death sentence.”
“Death sentence? What for? And how the hell can I serve a death sentence?”
“Let me refresh your memory,” said Nicole. “And your mouth.”
She snapped her fingers to the waiter, who returned with a glass of iced water for her and another beer for Carlos.
“What job were you doing, before you died?” she asked.
“Last actual job I remember, I was a genomics pharmaceutical database librarian in Walsall.”
“Don’t try that shit here!” Nicole snapped. “After that.”
“Well, OK, after that… I was an Accelerationist fighter.”
“Close,” said Nicole. “You were a goddamn psycho killer. And a war criminal.”
Carlos recoiled.
“I was a killer, OK, I put my hands up to that. Psycho, no.” He ran a hand over the back of his head, once more missing the spike. But not missing the voice of the Innovator. “The Axle screened out sociopaths. There were tests.”
Nicole snorted. “Tests!”
“Yes, tests. Good ones. As for war criminal—come on! I don’t remember doing anything that would count as a war crime.”
“Really?” Nicole took from her bag what looked like a rectangle of paper-thin glass, and passed it across the table. The pane was heavier than it looked.
“Just flick,” Nicole said.
Carlos did. The glass unfolded to a much larger and even thinner screen.
“Now tap.”
The screen came to life, flowing with colour and depth, projecting sound: news reports and surveillance from a battle on the eastern approaches of London. The scrolling footer indicated a date and time months later than anything Carlos remembered, and a conflict far more intense. Christ—robot tank armies and drone fleets slugging it out!
An incoming aircraft exploded on approach. Docklands erupted. Towers fell. The viewpoint zoomed to casualties, again and again. Butchered meat in charred cloth.
“Fuck this!” Carlos flicked at the screen, trying to turn it off.
“What’s the matter? Squeamish?”
“I don’t watch pity porn.”
But he had no option, other than closing his eyes or turning away, which pride prevented. Nicole waited for a whole minute, then tapped the screen and shut it off.
“Well,” she said, “do you count that as a war crime?”
Carlos didn’t flinch. The Acceleration had never bought into the casuistries of just war theory.
“Depends who’s judging.”
Nicole didn’t flinch either. “The victors, as always.”
“The victors?” Carlos felt a sudden cold dismay. “The Rax? But you said—”
Nicole shook her head. “Not the Rax. The legitimate authorities of the time. The Security Council of the United Nations. And by them you were judged.”
Carlos waved a hand at the screen, hoping the gesture wouldn’t wake the damn thing up again. “You’re saying I did that?”
“Yes.”
“Prove it.”
Nicole smiled wanly. “How could I? You could always tell yourself it was faked. And it could be, easily. Any evidence would be as virtual as everything else around us.”
“Fair enough,” Carlos conceded.
“Good. Just as well, because the actual evidence is still under security seal, even for me.”
Carlos took a long gulp. “If you say so.”
Nicole leaned forward, elbows on table, gesturing with a cigarette.
“Look, Carlos, I’m not trying to convince you or get you to admit your guilt or take responsibility or anything like that. Not right now. I’m bringing you up to speed. Putting you in the picture. You asked why you were under a death sentence, and I’ve told you: for the Docklands atrocity. You asked how the hell you could serve a death sentence, and that’s what I’m about to tell you.”
Carlos spread his hands. “I don’t seem to have much choice.”
“No,” said Nicole. “You don’t.”
“What happened to me, then?” Carlos asked. “Was I tried, shot, hanged? I don’t remember any of that.”
“No. You were tried and convicted posthumously.”
“Posthumously!” Carlos laughed. “That’s… quaint. What did they do—dig me up like a regicide?”
“Yes,” said Nicole. “They dug you out from under the rubble of…” She snapped fingers. “Tilbury, that was it.”
“But why dig me up just to condemn me to death?” Carlos asked. “I was dead already. Wasn’t that enough?”
Nicole fixed on him a gaze that felt like it might freeze his soul.
“It was not enough. As you have just alluded to, and as has happened in other cases… in situations of revolution and restoration it is not unknown to execute the dead. After the war the Security Council became, in effect, a global committee of public safety. Its tribunals executed every Rax and Axle war criminal they could find alive—to almost universal acclaim, I might add. And the popular hatred of all those who had brought disaster down on the world did not stop at the grave. Especially now that the grave was not always the end. Battlefield medicine had advanced during the war—one of its benign side effects, I suppose. There was the hope of at least preserving the recent dead, in the hope that later the technology would exist to resurrect them. Legally, anyone in this condition was regarded as gravely ill, but not finally dead. And therefore, open to prosecution. Your corpse was remarkably well preserved, thanks to some refrigerant or experimental nanotech gunk that had the same effect. And you had an early-model neural interface device—”
“The spike.” Carlos reflexively rubbed his hand across his occipital prominence, feeling again the absence. He could have done with the spike.
“That was the jargon term, yes,” Nicole nodded. “However, unknown to you, your government agency handler had—”
“What!” Carlos rapped a fingertip on the wooden table. “Hang on—what do you mean, my handler?” Was that what Innovator had been? A state handler? Then he had been a traitor!
Nicole poked at her pad. “By the time of the East London Engagement, as I believe the history files call it—let me see, yes, they do—the British government along with many others had concluded that the most pressing threat to civilisation, peace, humanity and most importantly itself came from the Reaction. So they made deniable tactical arrangements with the Acceleration, of course with the full intention of later turning their guns on your lot.”
So that was what it had all been about! Carlos could have jumped with relief. His memories of the Innovator’s voice in his head now made sense. The arrangement would have had to be deniable on both sides, not just publicly but internally. For of course, there would have been those in the movement, and in the state’s security services and political and ideological apparatuses, who’d have regarded the arrangement as a betrayal.
Perhaps, at some level, it had been. Carlos didn’t remember everything that had happened, but he remembered his doubts. It was possible that he’d been turned, and had become one of the state’s assets inside the Acceleration. On the other hand, it was just as possible that he’d been entrusted by the movement’s leadership to make a covert approach to the government forces—even, perhaps, to or via the Acceleration’s own agents or sympathisers inside the state. Carlos well knew that in such cases of rapprochement the wilderness of mirrors was endless. At a certain level it made no difference. On both sides, those who’d come to the arrangement had been playing a high-risk, high-stakes game.
And, it seemed, he had been one of the players. Not just a grunt. Carlos blinked, then fixed a defiant grin. “Good to know we hit the big time.”
As of his last clear recollection, the conflict had escalated from Internet snark and polemic and trolling, through malware attacks, to small-scale terrorism and selective assassination. But the Reaction had always sought the ear of the powerful: CEOs, autocrats, arms dealers, mafias. Maybe they’d finally caught the attention of their betters. And for the Acceleration it was an axiom that a project advanced in the interests of the immense majority would in due time become the project of that immense majority. The axiom had withstood all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps it had at long last proved itself in practice, just as it was supposed to do. Or perhaps the Acceleration had become as ruthless in action as it was in principle. They’d always been open about their refusal to acknowledge any constraint on the means they might resort to in extremis. They had been, after all, extremists.
He recalled a meme that had circulated among his comrades: We’ll fight them like jihadis with nukes if we have to.
Yes, it was entirely possible that both sides had hit the big time.
“You still have no idea,” said Nicole, with an edge of real anger he hadn’t heard in her voice before, “just how big your big time became. We’ll get to that. As I was saying… your handler, your liaison officer or whatever the official title was, had to establish secure real-time communication with you. To do that, you—presumably reluctantly—accepted an amendment to the software of your spike. That amendment included malware that affected the hardware—if these distinctions matter on the molecular scale—in such a way that the neural interface infiltrated far more of your brain than you knew. The result? Between that and the preserved tissue and DNA, there was enough information remaining to reconstitute a… an instance of yourself, let us say. Incomplete, of course, hence the lost memories of your last months. The technology of your time could only go that far—it could not revive you in a reconstructed body, and it could not create for you a virtual environment. It could not run the instance. Nevertheless, there it was. An instance, which was legally a person and legally you, and therefore a good enough suspect to stand trial.”
“Good enough for government work.”
Nicole didn’t register the sarcasm. “Precisely. Here.”
She stroked the screen, summoning another image. Carlos gave it a wary glance, then fascinated scrutiny. His face was like that of a Stone Age mummy recovered from a frozen peat bog: contorted, staring, hideous but recognisable, its blackened skin frosted white with something that wasn’t ice.
Nicole closed the device and folded it away, disappearing it into her purse.
“You were of course well represented. You were found guilty. The death sentence was suspended until such time as you could be revived, whether in a real body or a virtual. Once this was possible, you were to be revived and then executed. It seems strange to us now, but at the time the popular thirst for vengeance converged with legal severity. There was a new doctrine that influenced—or perhaps rationalised—the proceedings of the Security Council. It was known as Rational Legalism, and was widely regarded as harsh but fair. It drew on certain deductions from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.” She smiled thinly. “I understand it was particularly promoted by China and France. You were not the only one in such a case. Far from it. There were many terrorists and war criminals who had died in similar bizarre ways, some in accidents with the nanotech weapons they were busy inventing. Like you, they were tried in absentia and in mortis and left, so to say, on ice. And there for a long time the matter, like your mortal remains, rested.”
“In my time,” said Carlos, proud of it in spite of everything, “the death penalty had been abolished. Globally.”
“Globally, eh?” Nicole allowed herself a dark chuckle. “Well, let me tell you, the global community was not in such an enlightened frame of mind by the time the Axle and the Rack had done their worst to each other and had been each in turn defeated, along with any states they’d hijacked. Disasters and atrocities far greater than yours were perpetrated. Nuclear exchanges, nanotech and biotech plagues, rogue AIs running amok, space stations and factories brought flaming down on cities… Millions died. Tens of millions. Perhaps more. Records were lost. It has gone down in history as the Last World War.”
“So it was worth fighting,” said Carlos. The thought that he’d fired a few of the opening shots of such an apocalyptic conflict awed him. “If it was the last, I mean.”
Nicole face-palmed, then mimed the action of banging her head on the table.
“Jesus, Carlos, will you listen to yourself? You are a monster. You claim you’re not a sociopath, and in a sense I believe you. You have empathy—your reaction to the recording shows me that. You would not kill or hurt for pleasure or for convenience or from callousness. But you are in the grip of a belief that enables you to override whatever human or animal sympathies restrain you from that, if you think the goal worthwhile. And that makes you a danger to everyone. A menace to society. I mean that quite seriously. Humanity has made some progress in a millennium of peace. Fortunately for you, that progress includes abolishing the death penalty all over again. Perhaps less fortunately, it also includes the technology to reboot you. Which poses a small problem for society, yes? It would not tolerate your presence for an instant.”
They’ve all gone soft, Carlos thought. Interesting.
“So why bring me back?”
“We need you and your like,” said Nicole, sounding for the first time a little less than confident, “to fight.”
“Aha!” cried Carlos, brushing his hands together. “I knew it! I bloody knew it!”
“Oh yes,” said Nicole, standing up. “I expect you bloody did.”