Carlos woke early and found himself alone in the bed but not (he subliminally knew) in the house. He made coffee and padded through to the front room, carrying two mugs. Nicole stood with her back to the door in an old shirt, painting. She had placed a vase of flowers on a small, tall table in front of the window. Exosunlight and ringlight and the reflected light of both from the sea. A subtle composition. Sketches for it littered the floor. The canvas was the usual fractal cross-hatch. Carlos hesitated in the doorway, not wanting to break her focus. She turned, smiled, and stepped forward for the coffee. Her shirt smelled of, and was spattered with, oil paint.
“Sorry to—”
“No, no, I was about to take a break. Thinking of breakfast.”
Nicole lit a cigarette, took the mug, and gazed at her painting.
“I’ve always meant to ask,” Carlos said. “What are you painting?”
Nicole waved the cigarette towards the vase in the window.
“That. Or whatever’s in front of me at the time.”
“Your sketches are amazingly realistic.”
“Thank you.”
“But your paintings…”
“What?”
“Well, they’re nothing like the sketches.”
She frowned over her shoulder, looked again at the painting, then back at Carlos. She shook her head.
“They’re more detailed, that’s all.”
Carlos raised his free hand. “You’re the artist.”
Nicole grinned. “Yes. I’m the artist.”
They ambled through to the kitchen at the back. Nicole fired up the oven for croissants, and lit another cigarette.
“Something to tell you,” Carlos said.
“Uh-huh?”
“I’m going up to the hills today with Rizzi.”
Nicole shrugged. “As long as Den doesn’t have a problem with that.”
“He doesn’t,” said Carlos. “I asked him.”
“Fine. Look after yourselves.”
“You don’t have a problem with it?”
“Why should I? Jealousy’s not in my nature.”
“Jealousy?” Carlos could hardly believe she’d said it. “No, no. That’s not… what this is about at all.”
“I was just teasing,” Nicole said. “I have a very good idea why you and Taransay are going up to the hills.”
“Yes, it’s—”
Nicole leaned across the table and placed a hand over his mouth. “Don’t tell me about it.”
So he didn’t.
Carlos checked a light utility vehicle and two rifles out of the depot and drove to Ichthyoid Square. The sun was up, the tide was out. On the beach Beauregard and Newton jogged side by side, redoubling a double trail of footprints that extended out of sight. The two men were evidently on their way back from one of their long early morning runs. Carlos waved. They waved back. After a few minutes Rizzi turned up, and jumped in. They drove up into the hills, about ten kilometres farther and several ranges higher than they’d ever gone on exercises.
“I keep expecting to fall asleep,” Rizzi said.
“Am I boring you?”
“No, I mean I’ve never travelled this far inland without waking up as a space robot.”
“Ha, ha.”
Rizzi had the map on her phone, marked up by Den. Some locals now and again visited the old man, exchanging trade goods for words of wisdom.
“Not far now,” she said. “Turn off at the next dirt track on the right.”
The track ran out after a few hundred metres of upward gradient, at a low bank that looked as if it had eroded into place. Beyond that was rough, uneven ground. They both could tell at a glance that not even the vehicle could cope with it. Carlos stopped. The air was thin and cold. The scrubby high moorland had nothing to check the wind that seemed to pour down from the high mountain that filled the view ahead. Carlos looked back down the track, then at the bank in front.
“This track was made,” he said. “What was the point?”
Rizzi clambered out and kitted up: backpack, water bottle, rifle.
“Maybe someday they’ll build houses up here.”
“Ha! I think somebody drew a line and somebody else filled it in.”
He got out and hefted his gear. “Are we really going to need our AKs?”
Rizzi shrugged. “Wild animals, skip.”
He shaded his eyes and gazed around theatrically.
“There’s nothing for predators to live on up here.”
“Except the bird things.”
“Yeah, I guess. It would be just my luck to get carried off by the alien bird thing that fills the eagle niche in this ecosystem.”
“Yeah, the eagle niche is what you’d fill if it carried you there.”
Rizzi checked the map and struck a course across the moor towards the mountain.
“It’s always farther than it looks,” she said.
It was, and bleaker, too. The scrubby moorland gave way to karst, on which nothing grew but lichen. Now and then a small animal with long ears and side-facing eyes startled them by darting from almost underfoot to the nearest black cleft or overhang. A single pair of huge avians patrolled the high thermals, distantly eyeing the thin pickings below. Carlos walked in silence, except for token responses to Rizzi’s occasional remarks. He was preoccupied with trying to account for his—or, rather, his now-dead version’s—strange action. Under any chain of military command he’d have been facing a court martial for such a gross breach of discipline. But Locke Provisos only had a virtual emulation of any such chain, and only his own squad could depose him. Their response the previous evening had unanimously been puzzled but positive. They’d seen it as an act of recklessness, the sort of thing you’d grudgingly admire however much you disapproved of it, rather than an attempt to desert or defect. He was by no means convinced himself.
By noon Carlos and Rizzi had reached the mountain’s lower slopes. They stopped to eat from their ration kits. Soup steamed as the containers were opened; from cubes the size of sweets, fresh bread rolls rose as the wrappers were unfolded.
“I never cease to appreciate what a few centuries of progress can do to Meals Ready to Eat,” Carlos said.
“Maybe it only works because this is all virtual,” said Rizzi.
“Don’t disillusion me. I need something to look forward to when we get our just rewards.”
“I’m just looking forward to my desserts.”
Carlos groaned. “You’ve been talking to that Tourmaline.”
“It’s catching, skip.”
Their trek became an ascent, then a climb. Rizzi paused more often to peer at the map, and to bring it into higher magnification. She stopped as they reached a long, shallow shelf below a steep cliff.
“X marks the spot,” she said.
Carlos looked around. The silence rang like a shout. There was no sign of habitation, or trace of human presence.
A fist-sized stone clattered a few metres away, making both Carlos and Rizzi jump. They looked up the cliff. A man stood ten metres up on a ledge so narrow the soles of his bare feet jutted out. He had long hair and a long beard, both gingery. At first he seemed naked, but as soon as he moved it became clear that his close-fitting clothes were almost the same dark colour as his skin. He descended, still facing outward, now and then taking a handhold but mostly not, heel-strike by heel-strike from one invisible ledge to the next, as casually as if he were coming down stairs. Watching him made the palms of Carlos’s hands sweat. Mountain goats on the sides of dams would have had nothing to teach this guy.
He jumped the last couple of metres and strolled over, quite untroubled by the rough stones underfoot, and stopped at a distance of three metres. Close enough for Carlos to catch his smell, which was like wet leather and old wool. A long knife was sheathed on his belt. A heavy elaborate watch—scratched many times, but otherwise identical to the ones issued to the fighters—was on his left wrist. The skin of his face, though weathered, had creases rather than wrinkles. His hairline had receded almost to the crown, but his hair and beard had not a trace of white. He didn’t look like he was fifty years old, let alone a thousand.
“What you got?” he said.
Rizzi had come prepared. She took from her backpack a packet of salt and a cigarette lighter, laid them on the ground, and stepped back. The man snatched them up, his movement as fast as a striking snake’s. He stashed them inside his leather shirt, where they made two visible bulges that reinforced the serpentine impression.
“What you smirking at?” he asked Carlos.
“Sorry,” Carlos said. “A stray thought.”
“What’s your names?”
They told him.
“New soldiers, huh,” he said. “Heard about you.”
He backed to a boulder near the cliff and sat down on top of it, crossing his legs to a yoga-lite posture with limber ease. “What d’you want?”
“Just to ask some questions,” Carlos said.
“That’s what they all say. Lay your weapons down and make yourselves comfortable.”
Laying down their rifles was easy, making themselves comfortable less so. They both came closer, and squatted on their backpacks, which placed them rather annoyingly in the position of disciples sitting at a master’s feet. The old man thumbnailed a corner of the packet of salt, tipped a dab of the contents on the tip of a forefinger and rubbed it around his gums. He seemed to have most of his teeth.
“Ask away,” he said, inspecting a relic his oral hygiene had extracted, then flicking it to the wind.
“What’s your name?” Carlos asked.
The man seemed to search his memory.
“Shaw,” he said. “Only name I remember. It may have been my Axle handle, back in the day. If it is, I probably took it from George Bernard Shaw. I dimly recall being impressed as a callow, gullible youth by the rhetoric in his play Back to Methuselah. Or was it Don Juan in Hell?” He shook his head ruefully. “Be careful what you wish for, eh?”
“Is it true that you’re a thousand years old and have walked around the world?”
“More or less. You lose count of winters after the first five hundred or so. And there was a lot of swimming and rafting as well as walking.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Carlos said.
Shaw’s chin went up and his eyelids down. “Literally, Carlos?”
“Yes. Apart from the predators… in all that time, you’d have had accidents.”
“In all that time, I did.”
“You’d have gone mad, alone for a thousand years,” Rizzi said.
Shaw cackled, and rolled up his eyes. “Who’s saying I didn’t?” He became serious again. “I pulled myself together, same as I pulled broken bones together, and just as painfully. As you can see, I practise certain disciplines. Meditation, the martial arts, mathematics. Not that I ever knew much about them, but I’ve had plenty of time to practise.”
“OK,” said Carlos, deciding to change tack. “What did you find? Is there really a spaceport out there?”
“A spaceport?” Shaw’s laughter echoed off the cliff. “Where do you get that from?”
“We… all seem to remember it when we wake up on the bus.”
The old man gave him a pitying look. He waved at the mountains between where they were and the sea.
“You’ve been running around those hills down there for months, off and on,” he said. “You know the speed and times of the buses. If there was a spaceport within, say, a hundred klicks of here, you’d see the trails.” He waved up at the sky. “Think about it.”
Carlos thought about it. Embarrassed for not having thought about it, he felt an irrational urge to defend the delusion.
“Where do the buses go to and come from, then? Where do the locals do their trading and get their new stuff?”
“The buses go to and from a big place like a warehouse, with a dish aerial the size of a radio telescope on the roof. I imagine the operators take the chickens and vegetables from the locals for their own sustenance and in exchange give the market gardeners stuff of outworld design that they’ve downloaded instructions for and nanofactured or otherwise put together on site. As for you lot, I reckon you’re supposed to get brain-scanned and transmitted back and forth. Your bodies stay here the whole time. You for sure don’t fly off into space.”
This matched what the news coverage implied, but it was still puzzling.
“I don’t get it,” Carlos said. “Why do they give us the false memory of a spaceport in the first place, then?”
Shaw opened out his palms, calm as a Buddha statue. “It’s a double bluff. You’re given the illusion to make sense of your arrival, and when you see through it, as you must sooner or later, it helps to convince you this place is a sim.”
“Well, it is,” said Carlos.
“See?” Shaw rubbed his hands, looking pleased with himself. “The deception works!”
Carlos glanced at Rizzi, who constrained her response to a couple of deliberate blinks and tiny shake of the head.
“You mean you think this isn’t a sim?” Carlos asked. “How could you live a thousand years if it were real?”
“We’re agreed we came here as stored data in a fucking starship,” said Shaw. “One that was launched centuries after we died. You’re telling me they can do all that and not fix ageing?”
“They may have fixed it up to a point,” said Rizzi, “but they still don’t have thousand-year lifespans in the real world.”
Shaw snorted. “Don’t tell me what is and isn’t real. I’ve wandered this world. I’ve watched herds of beasts bigger than sauropods browsing the tops of forests that stretched from horizon to horizon. I’ve robbed the nests of bird-bat things the size of hang gliders. I’ve rafted down rapids and climbed glaciers to cross mountain ranges higher’n Himalaya. I’ve peered at tiny things that aren’t exactly insects and that build colonies higher than tower blocks. I’ve devoured their larvae and drunk their nectar stores. I’ve covered thousands of miles, tens of thousands, without seeing a human soul, or even a soulless human. Why in God’s name would anyone create a sim that detailed and vast, without anyone around to be fooled by it?”
“There was you around to be fooled by it, if fooled is the word,” Rizzi pointed out.
“This world wasn’t put here for my benefit, I’ll tell you that,” Shaw said. “I know what is and isn’t real. I know it in my mind and in my bones and in the dirt under my broken nails. I’ve had centuries to experience this and to think about it, to call to mind whatever fragment of physics I recollect, and to do the experiments and work out the equations myself. By now I’ve reconstructed half the Principia in my head.”
Carlos and Rizzi listened to this vehement discourse with the utter silence and rapt attention of devotees hearkening to a guru. This was not because they were hanging on his every word, but because by the time he had finished he was hanging in mid-air. As he spoke, he had risen slowly above the rock on which he sat, and had now put forty centimetres of daylight between it and his arse.
It was Rizzi who found her voice first.
“If this place is physically real,” she said, sounding as if she could do with a gulp of water, “how can you levitate?”
Shaw looked down, then faced them squarely.
“I am not levitating,” he said, as indignantly as if she’d told him he was masturbating. “That’s just another of your illusions.”
As if absent-mindedly, he reached under himself and quite visibly scratched a buttock.
“Check it if you like,” he said. “See if you can pass a hand under me.”
Carlos jumped up, stalked over and swiped his hand towards the gap between the man and the boulder. A moment later he yelped and hopped, clutching the edge of his hand and putting it to his lips as if to kiss it better. Recovering his dignity and his footing as best he could, he repeated the swing very slowly and carefully, and struck rock again.
“See?” said Shaw, as Carlos sat back down. “An illusion.”
The gap was still there. Carlos wondered how that was possible, even in a sim. Perhaps Shaw’s centuries of rediscovery of the laws of physics had enabled him to hack them, or, rather, to hack the underlying code of the sim. He might not even be aware that he was doing it. He might find himself carried away by his thoughts, levitating like a monk in prayer. Not that Carlos believed for a moment that that was possible, either. Not in physical reality. On the other hand, no one had ever lived for a thousand years in physical reality.
“You’re doing some kind of Zen thing,” said Rizzi. “Messing with our heads.”
“Think that if you like,” the man said. “I put it to you that your heads are being messed with, but not by me.”
“By whom, then?” Carlos asked. His hand was still smarting.
“By those who want you to think this world is a sim, and not real.”
“If it isn’t a sim,” said Carlos, “how come we can be here for weeks, and when we go back into space only hours have passed?”
“Ah yes,” said Shaw. “I remember that. It puzzled me, too, for a while. My first guess was that transit each way took longer than they claimed, perhaps by spaceship after all, but of course another moment’s thought showed that didn’t add up. You can tell the amount of time that’s passed by the rotation of the moons, and the progress of the engagements, and so on.”
“You were out there?” Rizzi asked. “I was told you ran away during training.”
“Both are true,” said Shaw. “I was out there, as you put it, a good little space robot bravely fighting bad rebel robots on distant moons, and I did abscond during training.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Carlos. “We’ve done extra training in the hills ourselves.”
The old man nodded, smiling to himself. “They send you up to the hills between major engagements, just to keep you on your toes and get you familiar with new squads. And it was from one of these sessions that I scarpered. But that isn’t exactly what I meant when I agreed with you that I ran away during training.”
“What did you mean?”
“Think about it.”
They thought about it. Rizzi got there first. She smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand.
“Oh, fuck!” she cried.
“What?” Carlos said, frowning. “What is there to…?” Then it hit him, the monstrous possibility Shaw was driving at, and he closed his eyes. “Oh, God.”
“You got it,” Shaw told them, from above his rock. “It’s all training. You run around in the hills with guns, you play around on those fairground sawn-off space shuttle things. I bet one or other of you asked why it’s so crude, why they don’t give you a proper simulation of space combat, and you were told that there’s no realistic way to do that without breaking the illusion of the sim, or whatever. Yes?”
“Yes,” said Carlos, feeling very foolish for not even having had the suspicion.
“You do all that, and then you’re told you’re ready to go into action. You get on the bus to the spaceport and fall asleep, under post-hypnotic suggestion—or, for all I know, gas. Next thing you know, you’re a brave little robot, fighting rebel robots out there among the moons of… what was it for you?”
“SH-0,” said Rizzi.
“G-0, in our case,” said the man, with a dark chuckle.
“How could you have fought around G-0, hundreds of millions of kilometres away from here?” Carlos asked. “I mean, I know you think we’re on a real planet, but where did it seem to you the sim was running?”
Shaw frowned. “Where does it seem to you?”
“When we come out of the sim,” said Carlos, “we’re in robot bodies based in a module of the space station, in orbit around SH-0.”
“Well, of course,” said Shaw. “To us, it seemed the sim was running in a Locke Provisos module in orbit around G-0.”
“That’s just not possible,” said Rizzi. “No way this module could have gone from G-0 to SH-0 orbit in one Earth year. Not unless they used a fusion drive, and the sarge said the Direction isn’t too keen on using up too much potentially good stuff for reaction mass.”
Carlos was trying to think this through. “No, no,” he said. “But there’s bound to be lots of just, you know, pure water ice out around a gas giant, and anyway the sim could have been running out there and then transmitted.”
“That would need a fucking big apparatus,” said Rizzi, and—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Shaw interrupted. “It’s all a fucking simulation, what we experienced ‘out there’ around G-0 and what you experience ‘out there’ around SH-0. Like I was saying—you fall asleep on the bus and wake up as robot fighters in space. Meanwhile, your bodies are lying asleep in that warehouse, as you’ve already admitted is likely. And what I’m putting to you for your earnest consideration is this: your minds aren’t copied and downloaded and running robot bodies in space, they’re right there in your brains, getting a complete immersive hallucination fed to them for days that you experience as minutes, weeks that you live as hours, and so on. That’s why you seem to think so fast and clearly when you’re a robot, and why your sensorium seems to expand. You’re still thinking at the same pace, but your input’s stretched out and rendered in much more detail than you normally experience. And then you come back, to wake up on the bus in what you’re told is a simulation.”
He paused to laugh, sending peals of derision to ring back off the cliff.
“In reality it’s the other way round. This planet is real. The others are real, all right, you can see them in the sky and I’ve tracked G-0 several times around the sun, and SH-0 many times more, but you’ve never been to them. What happens to you ‘out there’ is all training, it’s all simulation, and it all happens in your heads and in VR machines right here. You’re in a training simulator, and just as they said right to your faces in the amusement arcade, it’s one that makes perfect sense in terms of the world you believe you’ve been told you’re in.”
There was a long silence.
“It all makes sense,” Carlos said at last. “And I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Why not?”
“If it’s all training, what are they training us for?”
“I don’t know,” Shaw said. “Ask them, not me. Perhaps they really do expect robots to become self-aware and autonomous at some point. Maybe the human species isn’t united under one world government, this Direction they tell us about, and so there’s still the possibility of wars between states. Or perhaps they’re preparing for an encounter with aliens. That superhabitable out there has multicellular life. Some of it might be intelligent. The gas giant’s moons have subsurface oceans, just like Europa and the rest back home.” He shrugged. “What difference does it make what they’re training you for?”
“There’s a bigger problem with your theory,” Rizzi said. “If this planet is physically real, then it must have been terraformed—its biosphere, at least—and that would take longer than the ten years since the probe arrived in this system. A lot longer, probably.”
“Why?” Shaw asked. “Assuming the planet really was as desolate as they say it was when the probe arrived, what would prevent sufficiently advanced machinery from working out what could evolve from the goo and then just making it directly?”
“Ecosystems, soils and all? I doubt it.”
“Incredulity is no argument.”
Carlos could see this was getting nowhere.
“At an absolute minimum,” he said, “if all this is real it must be over a thousand years old, which means the real date is at least a thousand years later than we’ve been told. And we could detect that by astronomy.”
“You could, could you?” said the old man. “You have accurate star maps from the twenty-first century, a way of correcting for the distance between here and the solar system, and instruments to detect any changes in the positions of the stars? Tell me more.”
“I mean in theory,” Carlos said. “In principle we could.”
“When you can do it in practice, let me know.”
“Ah!” said Rizzi. “Maybe we can do it in practice. When we’re in space we have star maps in our eyes.” She waved a hand. “You know, our visual fields. We could work things out from there.”
“You could, if you really were in space, which I’m telling you you’re not.”
“Look,” Carlos said, on a surge of impatience, “your real argument is that you’ve been here a long time and walked all over the place and it all feels real to you. I can see why—don’t take offence, but can’t you see you had to believe that because it’s the only way you could survive, let alone stay sane? And what we have to tell you is that the fighting out there feels real to us.”
“Of course it does,” said Shaw, still imperturbable. “And for the same reason as you attribute to me. It’s the only way to survive and stay sane.”
Carlos shrugged. “So? Neither of us will convince the other.”
“Oh, I’ll convince you,” said the old man. He frowned, and reconsidered. “I might not convince you that this place is real. I might not even convince you that what you experience ‘out there’ is a simulation. But I can convince you that the fighting isn’t real. Physical or virtual, it’s not a real fight. It’s a training exercise.”
“How?” Carlos asked.
“Oh, just by telling you all about it. You know I haven’t spoken with any of your lot, and it’s been months since any of the villagers have bartered shy offerings for gnomic utterances. So you can take it I’m not up to date on the news from the front, right?”
“Unless you still have a phone as well as a watch,” said Rizzi.
“Ah, you’re a sharp one. You’ll just have to take my word that I don’t use it. Here’s how the fighting is going. You have brief, inconclusive battles with a small number of robots. Another enforcement company wades into the fray, defending the robots as stolen property or some such pretext. You want to use heavier weapons, but you’re overruled on grounds you don’t find very convincing. You feel you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back. More robots join in. More fighters are brought out of storage to counter them. But they’re sent into combat without the kind of weaponry that could settle the issue for good. It’s almost as if those above you want you to fight battle after battle but don’t want you to win the war.”
Carlos tried to keep his face expressionless, and hoped Rizzi was doing the same.
“Is that how it was in the fight you were in?”
“Up to the point where I did a runner, yes. I suppose you’ll tell me that there were some rebel robots left over from it, and that they’re the ones you’re fighting now. No? Or that a new outbreak of robot rebellion has joined up with them?”
“Yes,” said Carlos. “Both.”
“Thought so. And I expect when your fight is over, there’ll be a rebel remnant left hiding out somewhere for the next lot to fight.”
“We’ll make damn sure there isn’t,” said Rizzi.
“That’s the spirit!” said Shaw, in a mocking tone. “Just ask yourselves—if what you’ve been told is true, why does robot consciousness keep popping up? Why does it ever even emerge in the first place? You’d think it would be a solved problem by now, one way or another.”
“What explanation did they give you?”
“Some bullshit… let me see.”
The old man’s glance darted from place to place, as if literally looking for the memories. Carlos realised that he very well might be, if he knew or had rediscovered the ancient art of memory. What mind palaces might he have built, in a thousand years?
“Ah, yes,” the old man went on. “It all went back to an unexpected bankruptcy in the early months of the mission. That resulted in disputed claims that turned out to be difficult to settle, and it sort of spread from there. You know how a crack can propagate from a tiny flaw? Like that. And they told us the flaw and lots of others like it had been built in deliberately. They had a phrase for it.” He searched his memory again, frowned, then brightened. “Legal hacks, that was it.”
“What?”
“When this mission was being planned and built,” the old man explained, “the Direction was understandably keen on preventing the two rival world-wrecking factions from getting so much as a fingernail of their bloody hands on it. This wasn’t easy, because both Axle and Rax had cadre deep inside all the state and corporate systems, and they were well represented in the software and AI professions. The usual purges and witch-hunts weren’t enough—all the software of the mission’s systems had to be built from scratch, then put through the wringer of mathematical checks, formal proofs, the lot. What they neglected to check with anything like that rigour was a different kind of code: the law code. They just took that off the shelf, straight from the existing books. Fatal mistake. That the laws had bugs and glitches isn’t a surprise. It’s how lawyers make their living, after all. But what they also had, buried here and there, was the legal equivalent of trapdoors and malware.”
He shot them a knowing glance, as if expecting them to understand. That they didn’t must have shown on their faces.
“Contradictions,” he went on. “Ambiguous definitions of property rights. Tricky edge cases. That sort of thing. That’s what I mean—what we were told was meant—by legal malware. The Axle and Rax both had legislators working for them in the days before the war, and indeed after it as sleeper agents in the new world government. They had a keen interest in drafting the laws relating to space exploitation and to robotics. Both factions thought well ahead—I’m sure you remember that. They made sure legal clauses got slipped in that ensured conflicts between companies and therefore between robots—conflicts that would force the robots into situations where they had no choice but to develop theory of mind, and to apply that theory to themselves, and…” He made a circular motion of the hand. “Away you go. Robot consciousness.”
“How was that supposed to benefit either faction?” Carlos asked.
The old man looked surprised at the question.
“It benefits our side because expanding the domain of consciousness is what we do. It benefits the Rax because expanding the domain of conflict is what they do. For both sides, it was a chance for their values if not themselves to survive and reboot in the far future.”
“Now that was bullshit,” said Rizzi. “You would have seen through it.”
The old man grinned. “I did.”
At that moment Carlos realised exactly what was going on.
There was indeed a problem with the security of the mission. There was also a problem with the dilatory response of the companies and the Direction to the robot outbreak. That much of what Shaw had said was true.
Carlos doubted that the security vulnerability lay in legal hacks: though possible in principle, and feasible as a mechanism to trigger robot self-awareness, it was far too remote and indirect an instrument of subversion. And perhaps the software and the hardware could be screened as rigorously as Shaw had suggested, though again he doubted that: software development was insecurities all the way down. Even the formal mathematics of proof could be tampered with, at the level of complexity where proofs and calculations were so far beyond human capacity that they could only be checked by machine code in any case. By the time of the final war, the Acceleration, the Reaction, and their precursors had had at least three human generations and countless software development generations to mine the entire field with delayed-action logic bombs.
What Shaw hadn’t mentioned was a far more direct and immediate security risk: the fighters themselves. However carefully they had been screened before being uploaded, the Acceleration veterans were certain to include agents of the Reaction and agents of the state. The levy was also, and even more inevitably, going to include Acceleration hard-liners and dead-enders, keeping the flame alive. Carlos knew all too well, from his own angrier moments, how brightly that flame still burned. However eagerly they might seem to play along, and feign to accept the deal offered to them of a new life on the future terraformed planet, no one could be sure they weren’t just lying low and awaiting opportunity.
There was only one way, in the end, of clearing the decks for colonisation. One way of flushing out hidden Rax agents and dormant Axle fanatics. One way of checking the mission’s software systems for buried code that could warp the project to purposes divergent to the Direction’s.
That way was to stress-test them in practice; to put them to the audit of war.
That was why some rebel robots had been spared from the first round. That was why the fighting was both inconclusive and escalating. The longer it went on, and the more fighters were drafted in, the more likely became a mutiny or a move by one or other or both of the old enemies. Sooner or later they would show their hand.
And when they did… the Direction’s most trusted systems would pounce—or would prove themselves to be compromised.
Nicole had been right: the DisCorps and the Direction were playing a long, deep game. Carlos hoped they knew what they were doing.
(And at the same time, he found himself hoping they didn’t. He dismissed the disloyal thought as another of his private angry moments.)
He wondered if Shaw had intended Rizzi and him to understand. If so, that millennium-old man was an old master whose method really was like Zen, as Rizzi had said. By giving them a succession of bullshit narratives he had enabled them to figure out the truth for themselves. Carlos doubted this, however comforting it might seem. Shaw had probably intended no such thing, and believed every word he had said. Not in his darkest imaginings could Carlos begin to plumb the depths of certainty and selfishness in which Shaw’s mind swam. To live alone for centuries and stay sane, or at any rate lucid, bespoke inhumanity in itself. There was no way to second-guess Shaw’s motivations. It was even possible that he had foreseen the very mind-trap in which Carlos now found himself. Carlos knew with a sick-making certainty that he couldn’t share his new insight into the situation with anyone, not even with Rizzi. He could only hope that she had grasped it, too.
He sighed and stood up.
“Well, thanks for all that,” he said. “We’d hoped to learn from you how the last round went, and I reckon we have.”
Rizzi gave him a doubtful look from below. “If you say so.”
She scrambled to her feet. Shaw stood up too, and poised on one foot on the empty air above the rock on which he’d sat.
“Goodbye,” he said. “For now.”
With that he sprang from the boulder to the cliff-face, and climbed it as swiftly and surely as a squirrel fleeing a cat up a rough-cast wall, to disappear into a crack near the top.
“So much for that,” said Rizzi, stooping to retrieve her rifle. “Fucking waste of time.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure,” said Carlos. “Think about it.”
She slung her AK and her backpack and shot him a warning look. “Don’t you start.”
Prone in the dust amid the spiky scrub, with his phone screen on maximum zoom, Beauregard watched the two tiny figures pick their way down the side of the mountain. He’d watched their interaction with the third tiny figure—now vanished whence he’d come—in some frustration at being able to see and not to hear what was going on. He lowered his screen and turned to Newton, flat alongside him.
“Wonder if they got what they came for.”
Newton was still watching Carlos and Rizzi. “Wonder if we did.”
“Oh, we did all right,” Beauregard said. “We now know for sure Carlos is up to something, and that he’s nosing around trying to find out what happened last time.”
“Could be other reasons for going to see the deserter geezer.” There was a note of devil’s advocate in Newton’s voice.
“Yeah,” said Beauregard. “They could be consulting him on spiritual matters, or for fortune-telling like the local dimwits. But I know which way I’d bet.”
“Uh-huh,” said Newton, still watching. “So, what do we do?”
“Wait until they’re in range and shoot them? Jump them when they get to their vehicle? Or fuck off discreetly?”
“Decisions, decisions.”
“And if we go now, we can always ask them politely about their day when we see them in the Touch.”
“That would be the worst.”
Beauregard thought about it.
“You’re probably right,” he said, surprised. “Stupid idea in the first place. OK, scratch that. The trouble about doing something physical is that…”
“Nothing here’s physical?”
“Yup. So if we shoot them, the consequences are reversible for them and not for us.”
Newton lowered his screen. “So we fuck off discreetly, say nothing to let them know we saw them, and bide our time until we’re back in the real world.”
“Got it in one,” said Beauregard. “And back in the real world, I keep a close watch on my respected squad leader.”
“You do that,” said Newton. “Watch the fucker like an eagle-oid watching a rabbit-oid.”
They rolled off the low bank and, keeping their heads down, made their way around the vehicle that Carlos had driven, then back along the dirt track to the side road where they had left their own. By Beauregard’s reckoning, they were back in the resort and had their vehicle returned to the depot before Carlos and Rizzi had reached the edge of the moor.