Ichthyoid Square was a draughty plaza at the far end of the arcade, sloping diagonally to the slipway on to a long jetty that jutted over the beach. A green bronze sculpture of the eponymous sea creature on a plinth in the middle lent it a touch of municipal posh. In the Resort’s better days the plaza might have been a car park. It might yet become one, for all Carlos knew.
He squatted on the pediment of the plinth in pre-dawn cold and a glimmer of ringlight, backpack between his feet, and checked over the rifle across his knees. The good old standard-issue AK-97 had been in his kitbag, disassembled and stashed in a moulded case with a brace of ammo clips. The design was optimised for the electronic battlefield by having no electronic components whatsoever. He could put the weapon together in his sleep, but he preferred to make sure when he was awake. Handling the solid metal and plastic, he found it hard to believe the reality around him was virtual. The irony was that his reflexive familiarity with the rifle came from playing hyper-realistic first-person shooters in his misspent youth. He’d never touched a real firearm in his life.
His real life. Slotting the stock into place, Carlos nipped a pinch of thumb-tip. Grunted and sucked away the pain. This was real life, for now. Nothing to do but accept it. Or not.
Also in the kitbag had been a chunky watch. He glanced at it and saw the time as 15.48, on one reading. The concentric dials were hard to figure out: the 24-hour clock of Earth, perpetually out of synch with the local time; the longer day of the planet evenly divided into periods, minims and moments (all of which struck him as pointless, like a flashy feature of an executive toy); and a relentless metric march of real elapsed time outside, in which milliseconds that felt like seconds clocked up via hundredths and tenths to seconds, with kiloseconds on a calendar-type scale and a mission date given as 315-and-a-bit megaseconds. Starting, he presumed, from the starwisp’s arrival in the system or the probe’s awakening, about ten Earth years ago. He reckoned metric time would be the best bet for coordinating training exercises, and live actions, too.
The previous evening, he’d given up on specifying a time to meet by anyone’s watch. He and Beauregard—who had indeed been in the British Army, in some intel capacity about which he was still reticent, until reading and disillusion had turned him to the Axle—had settled on “Dawn at the harbour.” Carlos doubted that they’d all turn up—by the time he’d left for the house he’d been assigned (the key, with a handwritten cardboard address tag, was in the kitbag) the group was well into getting drunk. A loud gaggle of young-looking English-speaking locals, obviously already familiar with the recent arrivals, had tumbled out on the terrace around sundown and joined in the fun. They weren’t really young—like the barman Iqbal they were old people reborn, and they combined the sophistication of age with the energy of youth. Part of the bar and most of the patio had become an impromptu dance floor. Carlos had watched the escalating antics with growing abhorrence.
Not that he’d had a good night himself. The house, up on the slope, was well-appointed enough, though impersonal, like a three-star self-catering apartment. A frail-looking, faintly comical contrivance of metallic limbs ambled around the place, tidying up and cleaning behind him with an air of absent-minded obsessiveness. The lack of communications devices other than a wall-fixed emergency phone and a wall-mounted flat screen had left him at a loss and at a loose end. He’d woken repeatedly from confused dreams, sweating under a thin sheet, tormented by the dizzying, dismaying realisation that everyone he’d ever known was dead.
His adult life had been one of slingshot encounters: attractions and flings, followed by widening separation. The faces and bodies remained in memory like fly-by photos, to be interpreted later in depth, sometimes bringing delayed surprises. His only stable orbit, elliptical and repetitive, had been around Jacqueline Digby. Her friends called her Jax. A computer science student at Leeds University, her smile had lured him into the Axle milieu, then incipient: an online reading group, a cafeteria clique, a cat’s cradle of ever-shifting relationships, of fallings for and fallings out. After a couple of years, his and Jacqueline’s deepening involvement in and commitment to the Acceleration had stretched and strained any they had to each other. The last he remembered they hadn’t met for eighteen months, yet there was always the possibility that their paths would cross again. Now they never would. He felt this loss more keenly than he might have expected. Other losses, too: he hoped his parents and brother had survived the war and not been too ashamed by his ignominious end. This seemed unlikely.
He’d also been caught up in futile questions. As the alien sun peered over the shoulder of the headland to his right and feathered pterosaurs squabbled raucous on the black sand, the questions bugged him still.
The most troubling feature of his environment was its sheer physicality. This niggle was not supposed to happen. As the philosopher Bostrom had long ago pointed out, everyday reality was running on top of bizarre quantum mechanical goings-on when you got down to it, quarks and bosons and all kinds of incomprehensible physics shit, so learning that the version of it you were in was running on information processing shouldn’t be too hard to take. The possibility of living in fully realised, painstakingly rendered simulations had been a default assumption of Acceleration and Reaction both, and uncontroversial to the point of cliché in the mainstream. His teenage wargaming had given him a foretaste. The spike had come close to the full virtual experience, albeit with real rather than virtual sensory input. There was no reason why the same technology couldn’t have been developed further within years or even months of the last real time he remembered. It probably had been, while his attention had been focused on the struggle rather than the latest news from the science front. He could still be on Earth after all, much as he’d tried to dismiss the thought earlier. Perhaps he’d never been killed and sentenced to death. Perhaps he was in a coma, or in prison, and this whole situation was a test, or even a rehabilitation programme.
Again his mind swirled to the conclusion that this kind of thinking led nowhere. None of the evidence to hand could settle it one way or the other. It was best to suspend judgement until such evidence showed up, if it ever did.
And yet, and yet—paranoid though that last speculation was, it involved fewer assumptions than the story Nicole had told him: his body preserved for centuries, his brain scanned and uploaded, starships and superhuman AI and renegade robots running amok… and a simulation of an entire planet!
But Occam’s Razor cut both ways. Maybe what seemed physically real was physically real, and he was on an actual exoplanet. Which meant, as far as he could see, that the real date was thousands if not millions of years later than the thirty-first century. Assuming, that is, that the planet had indeed been terraformed all the way up from green slime, and that it hadn’t been multicellular and human-compatible and so on all along… More possible lies, more paranoia.
And yet the possibility that he was being lied to, principally by Nicole but with the collusion of the locals and even some (or all?) of his purported comrades was in a way the most hopeful and sanity sustaining of all.
Because in the long run, all lies could be found out. Whether that would bring him any closer to the truth was another matter. He stared for a while at the brightest light in the sky, low in the dawn, brighter than Venus. This must be the planet Nicole had told him was called M-0: the hot heavy world closest to the alien sun. It looked very real. Far out to sea, a huge black shape shot from the water and splashed back. Carlos glimpsed the sight sidelong, and saw only the falling plume. He guessed an ichthyoid and kept watching, but it didn’t show again.
A petrol engine kicked into life at the near end of the village, somewhere up above him. Carlos saw headlights moving along the raised beach, stopping now and then like the bus, and turning down the steep slope. He followed their progress along the arcade street. As the sun came fully up, a crowded, low-slung military light utility vehicle with overhead roll bars turned into the square and came to a halt beside him.
“Good morning!” said Nicole, from the driver’s seat. She was dressed as if for a day in the country: headscarf and sunglasses, windcheater and slacks and sensible shoes. “Hop in!”
The front passenger seat was vacant, the back seats occupied by the squad. Kitted out for combat training, they looked business-like but predictably bleary. Ames had already nodded off, resting his head on his close-hugged backpack and slicking a swatch of his beard with saliva from the corner of his mouth as he snored.
“We’re all a bit hungover,” Taransay explained unnecessarily as Carlos slung his gear in the foot-well and clambered in. “Sorry, skip.”
“At least you’re all here and on time,” Carlos said over his shoulder. “Carry on, chaps.”
Nicole grinned, and gunned the engine. The vehicle moved slowly out of the square and back along the street.
“How did you know we were meeting here?” Carlos asked, buckling up.
“They all came back to mine,” Nicole shouted. “I was a bit disappointed you didn’t.”
“Give me a break,” he called back. “I’m just getting used to being dead.”
She shot him a sidelong look, smirked, then concentrated on driving. Carlos concentrated on ignoring being driven. He hadn’t been in a human-operated vehicle since childhood; in a petrol-fuelled one, never. Where were fossil fuels supposed to come from, on a terraformed planet that had presumably never had a Carboniferous Era? Carlos spared himself the asking. He imagined Nicole’s answer, true or false, would be plausible—genetically modified micro-organisms or nanobots making the petrol straight from leaf litter, or some such. In much the same way, she’d accounted for all the material goods in the resort. If they weren’t imported on the notional regular spacecraft, they were built in a nanofactory under the depot. More likely, Carlos reckoned, they were cut and pasted into the simulation.
Nicole drove them up the bus route into the wooded foothills of the bare mountains, then off on a dirt track through the forest. Now that he could see them up close, and in their variety, the plants didn’t look quite like trees, or even like cycads or giant ferns. Their branching followed a different fractal formula, their leaves a variant geometry. Like the feathered, fingered flying things that weren’t quite birds or bats, the tall, tough, trunked plants were in a clade of their own.
He waved a hand at them. “What are these called?”
Nicole kept her eyes fixed on the uneven track. “Trees!”
She stopped in a clearing small enough to be in shade. The engine noise faded from Carlos’s ears. A musical chatter from the treetops replaced it. Everyone piled out, except Nicole. As the fighters stood about stretching their limbs and easing their abused backbones, Nicole handed Carlos a sheaf of thin black glass devices like the one on which she’d shown him his crimes.
“Comms and maps,” she said. “Don’t lose them, and don’t get lost.”
Then she untied her headscarf, shook out her hair, shoved her sunglasses up on her forehead, tilted her seat back and closed her eyes.
“What do you want us to do?” Carlos asked, keeping his voice down.
Nicole kept her eyes closed.
“Jog off, spread out, keep in contact with and without comms, try to come back together at an agreed point.” She waved a hand. “Run up and down hills. Do press-ups. That sort of thing. Just do it out of my hearing.”
“What are you going to do?”
She hauled a small wicker hamper from under her seat.
“I’m going to have a picnic,” she said, “listen to some music, and later do a little serious sketching. See you in thirty seconds.”
He must have looked confused.
“Real time,” Nicole added. “Call it nine hours.”
Carlos slung on his kit, fanned out the comms like a hand of cards and gave all but one to Beauregard, then looked at fighters still waggling their shoulders, yawning and stretching, rubbing their eyebrows, clutching their backs. What a shower.
“Um,” he said. “Do you know what to do now?”
Beauregard clapped Carlos’s upper arm, then as if thinking better of the gesture snatched his hand back into a clenched fist salute.
“Leave it to me,” he said. “Sir.”
“None of that,” said Carlos.
“Very well, skip.”
Beauregard turned to the others: Rizzi, Ames, Chun, Karzan.
“Right!” he bawled. “You miserable fucking wankers! Don’t stand about here like spare pricks at a porn shoot! Pick up your packs and rifles! Get yourselves after me and the skip—down that path, now!”
Nicole winced.
Carlos hesitated a moment, then ran. As long as he kept out in front of Beauregard, he figured, and as long as the others fell in behind Beauregard, everything would be fine.
So it proved. Day after day followed the same pattern. Nicole drove them up into the mountains and told Carlos what to do in general terms. Carlos asked Beauregard what this meant in specific terms. Beauregard told the team what to do in no uncertain terms. They ran through forests and up mountainsides and scrambled up and down cliff-faces. They learned how to track each other through trees and across open country and to keep a skirmish line. Their virtual bodies, healthy by default and fresh out of the box, became leaner and fitter. They all learned to shoot accurately and to strip down and clean and reassemble the AK. They stalked the large herbivores that browsed the uplands, killed one for meat and took the carcase back in triumph to the resort’s butcher, and once or twice fended off with well-aimed missed shots one of the quasi-reptilian predators that haunted the upper forest and that they belatedly noticed stalking them.
In the evenings they all ended up at the Digital Touch, except Carlos, who found himself so knackered it was all he could do to shove his day’s grubby clothes in the laundry machine, shower, heat a dinner and stare at incomprehensible soap operas and documentaries (most in languages he didn’t know, helpfully subtitled in the local language and script, which he feared he was beginning to find purely pareidolic sense in) until he stumbled to his bed.
The point of it all was obscure to Carlos, though not to Beauregard and to Karzan, each of whom had been a soldier in an actual military force, as distinct from being a node on a network of irregulars. From them the understanding trickled down to Chun, Ames and Rizzi. Carlos, above the outfall and disdaining to ask Nicole, missed the memo.
Taransay had never felt so fucking disillusioned in her puff.
Bad enough that Carlos, hero and poster boy of the Acceleration, was seemingly so aloof that he never even came to the Touch after the day’s training.
Did he think he was better than the rest of them?
Well, OK, he was in a sense, but…
Or was he just exhausted and too embarrassed to admit it?
Either way, not cool. Needed working on.
But the person she was outright scunnered with was Waggoner Ames. On her first encounter with the Axle’s legendary software wizard, she’d thought it was like meeting Merlin in the pub. Now, it was like finding that after a few pints Merlin was a self-pitying blowhard and maudlin drunk.
“It’s not good enough,” Ames was saying, beard jutting, eyes glaring, hands clasped around a beer bottle. “We came from an age of miracles, and we’re thrown a millennium into the future and we find it’s a place like this.”
He waved around, disdainfully taking in the interior and the exterior, the bartender Iqbal and the incomprehensible television drama he was watching agog, and the ring-lit impossible sea.
“What’s wrong with this?” Beauregard demanded. “It’s pleasant enough. I’ve no complaints.”
“We can’t do anything! We don’t even have the spike. Look at that, a flat-screen television! Television! I ask you. By now, interfaces far more powerful than we ever had must be absolutely standard, people probably have them genetically engineered and use them from birth. Meanwhile we’re stuck in a virtual reality without virtual reality. It’s boring.”
The Touch wasn’t jumping tonight, no sirree. The fighters were all slumped in their seats, elbows on tables, chins propped. Bellies full, but they’d spent the day burning off calories, and it just seemed to soak up the drink like a fucking sponge behind your belt.
At least she was drinking the rough red wine from a glass and not straight from the bottle. And she had a squeeze, a lad, a hot hunk of her own sitting right beside her. Den didn’t ask questions and didn’t invite any, maybe because he was so much more fucking ancient than he looked that she feared asking.
Chun had likewise pulled. Taransay allowed herself an inward snigger at the word her wandering mind had touched on. Pulled, aye, pulled and sucked and humped or been humped, not that it was any of her fucking business, so to speak. But the big glaikit Ozzie was clearly smitten. Beauregard and Tourmaline were carrying on like love-struck teenagers, but with the hint of an odd self-conscious irony from both of them. Carlos, Maryam Karzan and Waggoner Ames had to all appearances remained aloof from entanglements.
In Maryam’s case, Taransay guessed, it was a matter of a canny caution, and perhaps of mourning a longer, maybe even lifelong attachment. Unlike the rest of them, she’d died old. Not that having died young made the loss any easier. Taransay had, in the twenty-six years she remembered, lived through the deaths of one school friend, several mostly elderly relatives and a larger number of comrades who’d been killed in action. What had always struck her hardest was the irrevocability of death, the sudden crushing certainty that you would never see or hear again that person still so alive in your mind. The books were closed. Any unfinished business would now be left forever undone. Whatever you had been was how you would now forever be.
It was strange to be thinking like this when you were dead yourself and the beneficiary, if that was the word, of a technological fix for that very same hitherto intractable aspect of the human condition. In the larger world outside…
(Outside, that was a good one, here they were ghosts in the machine, living inside a fucking computer itself physically inside a fucking space station twenty-five light years from Earth…)
In that world, or worlds, on Earth and other planets and habitats, most forms of death must be as curable as cancer, as preventable as polio. Perhaps the folk of today thought about death differently.
But how it felt, when Taransay let herself think about it and sometimes when she woke up from dreaming about people she’d known, who in some cases had been with her what still felt like only days earlier, wasn’t that she was dead and lucky to be given a second chance. It felt like everyone else was dead, and now lost to her forever.
Which must be how it had suddenly struck Karzan, the evening after Carlos had arrived. Christ, that had been a close one. Taransay had nearly started bawling herself. Could have set them all off, even the tough ones. But Beauregard had moved firmly and gently to comfort Karzan. First good thing she’d seen him do, but by God not the last. He might be a bit of a coof with a posh accent and a good conceit of himself but he could pick the right moments to be tactful and kind, or severe and exacting.
Or, as now, to be relaxed and affable.
“I think you are rather missing the point,” Beauregard told Ames. “We’re prisoners. We can hardly expect the equivalent of Internet access. Our best bet is to make the most of our opportunity.” He chuckled darkly. “I mean, the chance to live again is something most people who ever lived would have killed for.”
“Many did,” said Karzan. “And died for it, too.”
“Oh, they all got it,” said Ames. “Even if they didn’t get what they expected. Everyone who’s ever died has lived again somewhere. Or will, in a farther future than this.”
Taransay blinked and shook her head. “What? Sorry, how can you be sure?”
Ames fixed a bleary eye on her. He rubbed the side of his nose, and raked fingers through his beard.
“We’re living in a sim, OK? I take it you’re clear about that?”
“Yes,” said Taransay.
“Given that we’re in a simulation right now,” Ames explained, as if to a small child, “the chances become overwhelming that we always were in a sim.”
“I don’t think that follows at all,” Taransay said.
“Missed that update, did you?” Ames asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m well aware of the classic simulation argument, thank you very much. I just think it’s bollocks, like I’ve always thought it was.”
“More fool you,” said Ames. “I’m not going to argue the toss.”
“Please yourself,” said Taransay.
“Come now,” said Beauregard. “That’s no way for comrades to talk to each other.”
“Ya think?” said Ames. “Hey, were you ever actually in the movement?”
That got them all laughing. But Taransay happened to have been looking at Beauregard when Ames made his quip, and saw a momentary flicker of alarm cross his face. If she’d looked away for a second she’d have missed it, as everyone else had. The mood lightened. Beauregard rose to get in another round. Karzan slipped out for a smoke and returned with a local guy she’d met on the deck. The two of them sat down together and kept talking and kept going out for another cigarette until finally they stopped bothering to come in again. For some reason this cheered up Taransay immensely. The universe might be more bizarre than she’d ever expected but her own wee world made a bit more sense. Beauregard had something to hide; Karzan had found someone to cop off with; Ames was a prick when he was drunk; and as for Carlos, she was sure Carlos could be argued with.
It just was a matter of picking the right moment.
Carlos was trying to work his fingertips into a crack in a lichen-crusted rock to haul himself a step farther up when he finally asked the question that had been bugging him. The sun felt like a burning-glass focus at the back of his neck. His right boot sole was worn smooth at the tip and was giving him what purchase he had. If his singlet had been wrung out it would have dripped.
“Why the fuck—”
Ah, here it was, a centimetre-deeper hands-breadth of the crack. Grip and haul.
“—are we doing all this for—”
Now reach for that bonsai trunk sticking out and curving up…
“—when back in the day I was running drone squadrons—”
Lip of a larger ledge. No, that was the top.
“—and you’d think that would be better practice for being a fucking—”
Up and over.
“—space robot commander or whatever the fuck they have planned for us?”
Collapse at the top, on springy and spiky low brush that smelled vaguely of turpentine. Small eight-legged arthropods were doing their hopping or crawling thing among the stems. Others, of the winged varieties, were settling on Carlos’s forearms. He brushed them off as best he could.
Taransay Rizzi, already at the top and lying face down with her rifle stock to her shoulder:
“Discipline and teamwork, asshole! I mean, skip. That’s got to be useful whatever the platform.”
“Yeah, and jumping to whatever Belfort says.”
“You don’t jump to the sarge!” Rizzi said. “He jumps to you.”
“No, I jump for the lady. Then I come up with suggestions, Belfort turns them into orders, you all carry them out and I follow from the front.”
“That too, skip. Now if you’ll just reset your sights and bring your rifle slowly to bear on that tree-thing…”
Beauregard’s order to fire came through. The tree toppled, making it hard to tell whose shot had hit. Carlos and Rizzi high-fived each other. The next part of the plan was to walk to where the cliff gave way to a steep slope, then rendezvous with the others in the woods below.
Carlos glanced at the jagged skyline.
“I wonder what would happen,” he said, “if we just lit out. I mean, with the skills we’ve learned we could live off the land here. Suppose we found a pass through the mountains, or even just followed the road the bus came along. Would we ever reach the spaceport? Or find anything at all? Maybe there’s cities out there. Or maybe the sim just stops on the other side of the skyline.”
“Funny thing,” said Rizzi. “Den, that’s the guy down the village who I, uh—”
“Drink with?”
“Yes, skip.” She grinned lewdly at him.
“I don’t know where you find the energy.”
“Body fat, skip. Anyway, the other night he told me about a rumour—”
“You’re passing on a rumour about a rumour?”
“Pretty much, aye. But for what it’s worth. They say in the village somebody did that once. We’re not the first fighters to be cracked out of the armoury, there was another robot outbreak about a year ago, and it was dealt with the same way. Anyway, one of the fighters on a training exercise like this ran off up a hill and kept going.”
“So what did the lady or her equivalent do? Chase him with dogs? Drones?”
Rizzi slithered down a scree-slope with some grace and turned at the bottom as Carlos followed, step by wary step. Any hour now the sole of his boot would be flapping loose.
“No, nothing like that,” said Rizzi. “Just let him go. And a while ago, he came back. He walked around the world.”
“In a year?”
Rizzi looked at him as he joined her, flailing to keep his balance, at the foot of the scree-slope.
“Think about it. That robot rebellion was a year ago outside here, right? Inside, he was off on his own for a thousand years.”
“I don’t believe it. How do the locals even know that?”
Rizzi jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “He’s still up there, in the mountains. Folks say they know where he is.”
Carlos laughed. “‘Folks say’ sounds like folklore to me. Like Bigfoot or the Yeti.”
“Yeah, yeah. You can scoff.”
They set off downhill, at a smarter stride.
“Anyway,” said Carlos, “you couldn’t walk around the world.”
“Oh, you’ve seen a map?”
Carlos hadn’t. Those on the comms devices were all large-scale and local. “All the same. What about the oceans?”
“There’s two supercontinents, joined by chains of wee islands, and between them they stretch all the way round.”
Now that made sense: no realistically simulated terraforming could speed up plate tectonics.
“And you know this how?”
Rizzi shrugged. “That’s what folks say.”
“Are they all a thousand years old too?”
She gave this some thought. “Nah. Or if they are, they sure don’t act it.”
“Really? Sounds fascinating.”
“Oh, it is. You should come to the Touch after work, skip.”
Carlos shook his head.
“Nah. Too knackered. And besides…”
“What?” Taransay sounded alert and curious.
“I think you’d all find me a bit of a downer.”
Taransay guffawed. “That’s why you need a drink!”
He wasn’t persuaded. This turned out to be a mistake.