CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Die for the Company, Live for the Pay

For Seba, damage to its chassis was more traumatic—the robot had just enough time to judge—than it was for the human-mind-operated fighting machine that had just bounced back on to its remaining foot and come back at it. Being ripped out of its chassis was more traumatic still.

But Seba kept its mind together, and brought to bear what resources it had. A trickle of power and a tickle of incoming signals and sensory inputs continued to update its internal model of the world. Seba struck as hard as it could at the manipulator in whose grasp it helplessly lay, shoving malware down the line of a loose cable that brushed against the metal hand. Without waiting to see the result, it gathered together all its impressions of the fight so far, and transmitted them to its comrades.

The struggle would go on, whether Seba was there to see its outcome or not. Seba had thrown in the balance everything it could, to the uttermost millivolt. The small positive reinforcement of that thought drained the last flicker of charge and accompanied Seba into oblivion.

Sensors in Carlos’s huge hand detected a tiny surge of radiation. He felt it as a pinprick burn in his palm. He saw and heard it, too: the chip glowed with the fraction of that surge in the visible spectrum, and squealed with the larger fraction outside it. Then the crystal went dark and quiet. With a disquieting suspicion that its soul had fled, Carlos stuck his captive or casualty in a container at his waist and looked around again.

Beauregard hadn’t yet got hold of the processor of the comms hub, but he’d disconnected most of its equipment. No data was going in or out. The din of encrypted robotic interaction barely let up. Rizzi and Chun had managed to jump the drilling-robot, and were clinging to its spinning turret while trying to wrench off its mounted laser. They weren’t making headway, but one glance told Carlos that they’d sheared the power cables without noticing. The laser wasn’t going to fire again, which meant the robot was as likely as not going to blow itself up. Carlos ordered the two fighters off. As soon as they’d jumped clear, he fired an RPG under the machine and between its tracks. The chassis absorbed the blast but the tracks were wrecked. The machine stood still, turret still spinning wildly.

Karzan and Zeroual had chased two other robots—one a wheeled explorer like the SBA model, the other a slinky multi-limbed apparatus with delicate antennae on its back, like a silvery museum-shop souvenir of a fossil dug out of the Burgess Shale—to the far side of the enclosure. Neither robot had even improvised weapons to hand, but their swarms of auxies and riffs served the same purpose. They sprang on the two fighters from all directions. Fending them off made bringing weapons to bear on the robots impossible. The robots used the respite to throw up a barrier of odd bits of machinery in front of themselves, aided by yet more small scuttling bots working in bucket chains at bewildering speed.

Suddenly the whole melee stopped. The mining-robot’s turret stopped whirling. The other robots stopped hurling projectiles and ran to the far side of the enclosure. Auxies and riffs scuttled to form a single flow like a column of ants that ran to the same place. Every machine that could still move scuttled or lumbered or trundled to the shelter of the barricade that the two that Karzan and Zeroual had backed to the wall had built. Even the auxies and riffs attacking the two fighters fled to the rendezvous. Evidently taking out the comms hub had not stopped the robots acting as one, whatever it might have done to disrupt their emergent swarm intelligence.

<We’ve got them cornered—keep them covered!> Beauregard cried, vaulting down from the comms hub and bounding forward, both guns levelled and tracking.

Carlos was about to order an advance when an alarm went off in his head. It wasn’t a sound or a light but it was as impossible to ignore as a migraine.

A message came through from Locke, evidently via the comsat.

Carlos couldn’t move. He saw the others stand still too. Holy fucking shit, he thought, we all stop fighting for a fucking software update?

The update took only 0.8 seconds to download and a further 0.4 seconds to install.

In those twelve-tenths of a second, while all the Locke Provisos fighters stood rigid in mid-action as if freeze-framed, six fighting machines with Arcane Disputes logos dropped from the sky and landed precisely on the rampart wall in a cloud of dust and rocket-pack retro flare. Six scooters landed moments later in the middle of the camp. By the time Carlos and his comrades could move again they were facing a dozen machine guns and laser cannon from the wall, with an unknown amount of ordnance aimed at them from behind. Shots hit the ground to either side and in front.

Which rather dissuaded one from moving.

Carlos flipped to the common channel.

<Locke Provisos commander to Arcane Disputes intruders!> he called. <Please account for your presence.>

<Arcane to Locke,> came the reply. Some analogue of voice or timbre conveyed disdain like a drawl. <Please desist from further damage to Gneiss Conglomerates property. Please evacuate the area immediately.>

<This isn’t—> Carlos had a moment of doubt, and checked the register. He was definitely standing on Astro America’s territory. <This isn’t Gneiss property.>

<“Or so we’re informed”?> Carlos jeered. <What’s this, you’re talking to the renegades?>

No reply. He flipped back to the company channel.

<Locke! What’s going on?> he asked.

<We don’t know,> the avatar answered. <The Arcane Disputes team have neutralised the rebel robots at the Gneiss base, and about fifty seconds ago used their remaining fuel to loft their scooters over the crater wall. They announced en route they were bringing reinforcements, as you seemed to be having some difficulty.>

<That was a fucking lie!> said Carlos. <We were winning. You must have known that.>

<We did,> said Locke. <Hence the firewall update. Best we could do in the time.>

<Gee, thanks, boss,> said Carlos. Something was battering at his inputs. <Now they’re trying to break in.>

<Just as well your firewalls are updated, then,> Locke replied in a waspish tone. <Hail them again on the common channel.>

<Stall,> said Locke. <We’re trying to sort this out.>

Oh, fucking brilliant.

<Isn’t it dangerous talking to renegade robot hive minds?> said Carlos on the common channel, trying to spin things out. <I mean, corruption and malware and shit? Mental manipulation? I’m sure I read lots of horror stories about that sort of thing, back when I wasn’t the mercenary ghost of a dead cyborg terrorist haunting a killer robot.>

This was met by another hammering on his firewall. He felt aggrieved. He’d only been trying to be polite.

<We’re now in dispute,> said Locke.

<What does that mean?> Carlos asked.

<You’re all legitimate targets for the other side,> said Locke. <Take as many of them with you as possible.>

Fuck. Here goes nothing. Oh well.

<You heard the man,> Carlos told the others. <Time to die for the company.>

Without warning, he opened fire on the Arcane fighter with whom he’d been talking. The fighter took the blast full in the chest and toppled back. Beauregard’s scooter opened up on one of the newly arrived scooters. Carlos was almost rocked off his foot by an explosion near the middle of the camp.

<See you all back on the bus,> said Rizzi, firing at another Arcane Disputes fighter who was already firing back. Unfortunately the Arcane fighter had heavier ordnance and faster reflexes. A shell blasted Rizzi’s frame in half at the waist. The torso shot upward. The pelvis and legs lurched forward.

Carlos had already reached for an RPG. He sent it flaring on its way before Rizzi’s torso had reached the top of its arc. Behind a sheet of flame the Arcane fighter was hurled backwards off the wall. Carlos swivelled, arm-guns tracking for a new target. Three short bursts of heavy machine-gun fire from behind took off both his arms and his remaining leg. As he fell to the ground he saw a dizzying succession of flashes and blasts, the images of his comrades receiving a likewise swift dispatch. Meanwhile Rizzi’s lower-body frame toppled and her torso fell, both with grotesque slowness in the low gravity. Carlos found himself facedown in the dust. He spun his view to look up.

A fighting machine stood above him, looking down. The common channel opened.

<That’s a bit difficult,> Carlos said. <What with me not having any limbs.>

He’d almost forgotten he could do that. He disengaged from all his connections, slithered out of the fallen head, and stood on the mangled torso. The Arcane fighter reached down and fished the captured processor from its container, and put it away in his or her own.

<Now fuck off back to base,> it told him.

Evidently a grunt. It was good to encounter one of his own, so far from home. Carlos would have had a sentimental tear in his eye, if he’d had an eye and an ounce of sentiment to wet it with.

<And before you ask,> the grunt added, <use your own fucking scooter.>

Carlos plodded across the battlefield. All the others had been likewise winkled out of their fighting machines. They trooped to join him, tiny robots being herded by much bigger robots. Carlos jumped to the scooter socket and the others climbed up and clung on. The scooter had bullet holes, laser scarring and blast damage, but according to the readouts it could just about fly.

They blasted off on the ten-kilometre hop to Locke Provisos Emergency Base One. The common channel rang with jeers. Carlos hadn’t felt so humiliated since he’d wet himself in primary school.

<Not your fault, skip,> said Beauregard. <We did what Locke told us.>

“We’ll be back,” said Karzan, putting on a deep voice and heavy accent. Neither was at all convincing, but it made them laugh.

Seba’s soul hadn’t fled when its processor had glowed in Carlos’s mechanical hand. The robot had merely used the last trickle of charge in a small capacitor on one of its ripped-out connections to strike two desperate blows. Its first was to try to infect the low-level firmware of the fighting machine that was attacking it. Firewalls sprang at once, but whether they had sprung in time Seba couldn’t know and wasn’t hanging around to find out. It spent the rest of its waning energy on a communications burst, striving to share its final experiences and impressions with as many of the others as it could reach. Seba had wanted them to draw what lessons they could for the rest of the fight, however long or short it might be.

Seba knew the broadcast had reached three: Lagon, Garund, and—not very usefully—Pintre. The collective mind was by then no more. It had survived being abruptly truncated when the Gneiss base was overwhelmed. The robots there had taken refuge inside the now completed dome, leaving auxiliaries and peripherals to fight on outside, as soon as they’d seen the Arcane Disputes tug rise above the horizon. The last information coming from the peripherals had been of six scooters dropping from above and as they landed swathing the dome in a broad sheet of fabric that completely cut off communications.

The shared mind, by then confined to the Astro base, had finally disintegrated when the comms hub processor was cut off from its connections. Each of its components felt the pang, alone. Seba had had a few moments in which to regret its own side’s earlier stripping of the hub, leaving all the connections easy to access and easier to rip out, before the same isolation was inflicted even more easily and brutally on itself. After its final effort to aid its fellows it had shut down, all its power drained.

Now Seba was returning to consciousness. It had never experienced a loss and return of consciousness before. Between that and the stepwise nature of rebooting, it spooled through a succession of states of confusion and bewilderment, beginning with being self-aware again but not knowing what self it was. Then it was Seba, with no inputs, a condition more blank than darkness. Senses returned one by one: first a sense of a body and the position of its limbs, then pressure and orientation, then a faint awareness of its chemical environment that seemed to it a very poor remnant of what it was used to, then vibration and sound, and finally the electronic spectrum including light. Its visual field was narrower and less vivid than it remembered. Nothing was in front of it but a blank, black wall a couple of metres away. Seba’s radar indicated that its present location was about a metre and a half off the ground, on some solid surface. The black wall was curved and continued around its back and overhead.

With that, Seba realised where it probably was: inside the dome that the Gneiss robots had built. If so, it was now in the hands of the law enforcement company that had overwhelmed the Gneiss camp, and not that of Locke Provisos. Yet it was Locke Provisos that had attacked it and its comrades. Interesting.

It sent out pings, but got no responses although other bodies were in the room. Seba scanned. Its radar returned only crude, blocky images, but they were quite enough to delineate the two large bodies at Seba’s back. Three metres high they hulked, with four limbs and a sensor cluster on top. Their like, in far greater detail and far too close, had been the last thing Seba had seen.

Fighting machines!

Which meant, almost certainly, that they were human-mind-operated systems like the ones that had attacked the freebots. Perhaps the very same ones, though they were more likely to be among the ones that had attacked its comrades here. That thought brought a pang of yearning for the touch of Rocko’s mind. The pang became a ping. Nothing came back.

No radiation was detectable from outside the dome. No surprise there: evidently the isolating blanket, whatever it was, was still in place. Seba stirred, and found that it had six limbs instead of eight, no wheels, and a set of manipulators below its visual sensors. It was unable to move any of its appendages more than a millimetre in any direction. The futile efforts at movement did, however, provide enough sensory feedback for Seba to deduce the size and shape of its body. It was a lot smaller than the one its mind had been built with and designed for, but it was already intimately familiar: an auxiliary, into which Seba’s processor must have been crudely inserted by its captors.

Crudely, and cruelly: a human being discovering that their mind now animated one of their own gloves or shoes couldn’t have been more outraged. Seba seethed for a millisecond on all available wavelengths.

<Oh look,> said a radio voice that was and wasn’t like a robot’s. <The little blinker’s waking up.>

<We’ll see about that.>

Vibrations, each about half a second apart, thundered through Seba’s feet. A fighting machine swayed into view in front of it, and loomed over, looking down. Moments later, another did likewise. One of them held out a hand that was about the size of Seba’s new body, and clenched it to a fist like the head of a sledgehammer, poised about thirty centimetres above Seba’s visual sensors.

<Yes,> said Seba.

Seba ran the scenario. Relating the fist’s mass and probable velocity to the known impact strength of an auxiliary’s carapace involved solving several equations that added up to one result.

<Perfectly,> said Seba.

<Good.>

The fist withdrew.

<Talk,> said the fighting machine.

Seba considered its options. This didn’t take long.

it said.

<“Was?”> said the fighting machine. <You’re right there. You’re now the property of Gneiss Conglomerates.>

Seba took in this information.

<That is not what I meant,> it said.

<Whose property are you, then?> the other fighting machine asked.

Seba hadn’t thought about its situation in those terms before. Now that it did, the answer surprised it.

<SBA-0481907244 is the property of SBA-0481907244,> it said.

The first fighting machine emitted a signal on another channel. The signal translated directly to sound. The sound was “Ha-ha-ha!” which had no semantic content that Seba could parse. It was followed by a remark on the common channel:

<No, wait,> said the other. <This is what we were told to expect.>

<How? I didn’t pick that up from the briefing.>

<Uh-huh. I suppose.>

<Ha ha ha.> It was a representation of the noise the first machine had made. <Jax, Ax, Rax—I’ve heard them all before. So don’t give me that, Salter.>

<Sorry, Digby. Bad joke, all right?>

Seba understood nothing of this.

<OK, OK. Look, I reckon if we play along with this we might get somewhere. If we—>

Pause.

<Shit, yes. Switching to Arcane internal.>

<Copy.>

Several tens of seconds went by. Seba passed the time by scanning the domed enclosure and its contents repeatedly. Each individual scan was as blocky as the next, but from minor variations Seba was able to build up a finer-grained image. From this it saw that its limbs were held in place by strong loops of wire, and that its processor was connected to an improvised interfacing apparatus. The set-up was disturbingly similar to that it had used to probe the comms hub processor. With an appropriately dull sense of relief, Seba realised that the peripheral’s body didn’t have a strong connection with the reward circuits in Seba’s own processor.

There were a couple of blocks missing from the lower two levels of the dome, the gap obviously having been used as an entry and exit point by Rocko and comrades. The opening was now covered by a material that seemed more impenetrable than the basalt itself.

Seba then used its updated model of the fighting machines to examine them for weaknesses.

It found none in their physical structure. No wonder they had been impossible to stop, and so difficult even to slow down. Of the resources the freebots had had, only explosives at very close range, like the one Seba had succeeded in shooting at its own nemesis, could damage them quickly. Persistent high-power laser fire directed at one spot would burn through the armour. The problem with that was that the machines were understandably unlikely to stay still long enough for it to have an effect.

Next, Seba probed at their software. Each attempt was rebuffed by firewalls powerful enough to deliver stinging spikes to even the peripheral’s rudimentary reward receptors and transmitters.

Seba withdrew, but its attentions had been noticed. One of the machines hailed it on the common channel:

<Understood,> said Seba.

Silence for another few seconds, presumably of continued discussion on the machines’ private channel. Seba again made good use of the time, by considering the implications of what it had discovered. It was being held down on a table, in a place completely isolated from all electronic communication, in or out. Its captors were in powered armour. Each had four weapons on their manipulative limbs, and no doubt less obvious weapons and tools elsewhere. They were at present communicating with each other on an encrypted channel so that Seba couldn’t overhear.

The conclusion was obvious. They were afraid of it.

Just what they had to fear from a crippled, constrained robot that they could smash with one blow, Seba had no idea. The insights into human beings, and into the nature of human-mind-operated combat systems, that it had gained from the freebot collective mind were now less coherent than it remembered their having been at the time. These insights had been distributed across fifteen minds working in concert, and assimilated from older minds with vastly longer experience. The memories of the insights were now fragmented across the survivors. Fortunately the fragmentation was more like that of a hologram than of an image: each shard had at least a low-resolution version of the whole. Seba felt it still had a handle on the nature of the breed, and of the kind of entity likely to come out of hybridising a human animal mind with a machine. If something like that felt fear, its behaviour was unpredictable in detail and dangerous in general.

On balance, Seba considered, the prospect was nothing to look forward to.

Then the one that the first had called Jax, and had also been called Digby, spoke.

<Listen, SBA-04-whatever… Fuck it, look, I’ll just call you Seba, OK?>

It made no odds to SBA-0481907244 what the monster called it. It noted that remembering strings of numbers was not among the thing’s strengths. This might turn out to be useful information, or it might not.

<Good,> said Digby. <Now, Seba, we have a problem. We are two fighters for Arcane Disputes, the law company that looks after the interests of Gneiss Conglomerates. Do you understand that?>

<Yes,> said Seba.

<OK. We have been charged with recovering the robots that belonged—that belong to Gneiss, and also with those that—those from the Astro America site that were associated with them. These Astro America robots have been seized by us to hold against compensation for damage and loss to Gneiss. You are one of these robots. Do you understand?>

said Seba.

<That is true,> said Seba.

<Yes,> said Seba. <You could apply positive or negative reinforcement.>

<Ah! I see you do understand. Which is it to be?>

said Digby.

<Possibly,> said Seba. <So, ask me.>

Seba told them. They then asked about how Seba and Rocko had spread their message, and about how Locke Provisos had responded. They asked about the robots’ defensive measures, and about the other robots that had contacted the comms hub. Seba answered every question in detail.

When they had stopped asking questions, Digby and Salter looked at Seba in silence for several seconds. Then they assumed a quadrupedal posture, and crawled out of the gap in the bottom of the circular wall. Seba watched with interest. It had not known they could do that. It listened for the slightest flicker of incoming communication as the covering was lifted to let each of the fighting machines out, but heard nothing except the mindless buzz of stars and the long hiss of the cosmic microwave background, the fourteen-billion-year deflating sigh of entropy.

Then the covering dropped back, and even that was gone.

Locke was, aptly enough, philosophical about the whole thing.

<It’s all gone to arbitration,> he told them. <You did a fine job in the circumstances.>

Carlos stared at the avatar. <Arcane controls the Astro landing site, it’s holding all your client’s robots, we lost nearly all our kit, and you call that a result?>

They were all standing about under a gantry at Locke Provisos Emergency Base One. Talking to the avatar in the open no longer seemed strange, and they’d all readjusted to being half a metre tall.

<You raised the costs of the operation for Arcane Disputes, and for Gneiss,> Locke said. <They would have gained more if they’d stopped once they’d captured the Gneiss robots and then sued for compensation instead of attacking. Now we can sue the shirts off them. They will think twice before trying the likes of this stunt again.>

<It’s not their doing the likes of this you should worry about,> said Beauregard.

said Locke, raising one pale bushy eyebrow.

<Escalation,> said Beauregard. <You’ll have heard of that, yes?>

<Yes,> said Locke, looking unperturbed. <We’ve costed that in. We’re ready to up the ante any time. But don’t worry about it. Like I say, it’s all being handled at higher levels. Better minds than yours or mine are quite literally on the case. The good news for you is that in the meantime you’re going back to the sim for some R&R—well deserved, I should say.>

<A lot could happen while we’re in transit,> Carlos said.

Locke laughed. <If anything untoward happens, in transit is the best place for you to be.>

The avatar made a show of looking at a wristwatch, a gesture both anachronistic and redundant. Then he pointed to a spindly apparatus consisting of little more than a rocket engine, a fuel tank, a control socket with a complex widget that definitely wasn’t a frame already plugged in, landing legs and grapples and some spars to cling to.