Carlos ran far ahead of the pack that now came snarling out of the space station.
By exiting under thrust rather than launch catapult, he’d overtaken the first departures while they were still in free fall and lining up their trajectories for the long haul. Once in free fall himself, he’d plotted and burned to a transfer orbit towards the Arcane sub-station.
He expected pursuit. There was none. This puzzled him, until he reflected that any pursuit would disrupt the plan of the offensive far more than his departure had. He wasn’t sure that fully accounted for it, but he set the matter aside and concentrated on putting the unexpected advantage to good use.
He looked back. Wave after wave of scooters hurtled out of the long black slit of the hangar. After a few seconds of free fall, they boosted into new and variant trajectories. His own scooter had been one of three pre-set to intersect the orbit of a carbonaceous chondrite about ten metres long and five across. A tumbling potato shape riddled with nanofactured tubing, tended by a swarm of tiny bots, and sprouting comms and combat kit like fresh shoots, it was clearly a worthy target. In other circumstances he’d have relished taking it on.
He called up the order of battle, and watched and waited for any of the other scooters to deviate from their planned trajectories. Seconds went by. More and more scooters poured from the station. Even with his enhanced vision and detectors the first waves were already dwindling to points on his and the scooter’s internal displays.
The bright lines and dots that filled his sight were not what occupied his mind, or much more than a tenth of his attention. His focus was instead consumed by the message he had read in the repair workshop, and which he could now examine and study if not exactly at leisure then in detail.
The message was this:
Arcane Disputes to all at Locke Provisos.
For the particular attention of the fighters Carlos, Beauregard, Zeroual, Karzan, Chun, and Rizzi.
Short form of message:
Locke is Rax!
The Direction is playing with fire!
Don’t get burned!
We can prove this!
Join us!
Long form of message:
Given the persistent efforts by Locke Provisos to treat our urgent warnings as malware attacks, we have resorted to genuine malware attacks to bring you this message. With help from various sub-systems and mechanisms (about which we do not wish to elaborate) it has been planted in a large number of locations in order to be found by one of you. If you’re reading this, we’ve succeeded.
Following information received from the remnant rebel robots around G-0, relayed to us by the captured Gneiss and Astro robots on SH-17, and further detailed and documented below, we warn you that:
Locke Provisos has been an agency of the Reaction for some time, and in all probability since before the mission left the solar system.
Some of its fighters, still to be identified, are Rax sleeper agents in place since the Last World War.
Other agencies including your current allies Zheng Reconciliation Services and Morlock Arms are not themselves agencies of the Reaction but are compromised by the presence of Rax sleeper agents among their probable complements.
All agencies are likely to have similar problems.
None of the above named fighters are known or suspected Rax agents.
The exceptional case of the fighter known as Carlos the Terrorist is noted below.
The fighter Beauregard was an agent of British military intelligence in the Acceleration. His capital crime was a false flag attack intended to discredit the movement. His present loyalties are unknown.
We are certain that our own agency is sound. We have chosen not to revive as many fighters as we need, in order to reduce the probability of Reaction agents in our own ranks. Instead, we have made a temporary alliance with the freebots. We urge you to consider doing the same. We know that this is incompatible with the policy of the Direction and with the mission profile. However, we are convinced that the risks are less than those of allowing the system to fall under the control of the Reaction.
We have reason to suspect that the Direction’s mission oversight AI is well aware of the possibility of Rax penetration, and that the current conflict with the robots has been triggered—and/or permitted to escalate—as a means of flushing out infiltrators.
We doubt that the Direction has taken full account of the extent of infiltration, and of the corruption of automated and AI systems.
We expect a Reaction breakout under cover of the next major mobilisation against us.
The Direction representative in the Locke sim, the entity known as Nicole, is unaware of Locke’s true character and intentions. All external communications between Nicole and the Direction have been routed through Locke, and false information has been inserted in both directions. This has been confirmed by our own Direction representative, using data integrity checks not available to or even computable by Locke.
Like all Direction representatives, Nicole is capable of taking control of the module and connected structures from within the sim. Her interface, which may also be used to refine features of the sim, is not known to us. It should be obvious to you as it will be based on one of her habitual or favoured activities such as a particular game, vehicle, craft or pastime.
If any of you wish to be certain that this message has been approved by the Direction representative within Arcane, please ask Nicole to confirm or deny the following, which is known only within the Direction. She may be evasive but for deep information security reasons she will not be capable of a direct lie in response to this query. Ask her if this is true:
The fighter Carlos the Terrorist was not responsible for the notorious Docklands atrocity for which he was posthumously sentenced to death. Carlos was at that time acting on behalf of the British state, which at that time was in covert cooperation with elements within the Acceleration against the Reaction. Furthermore, the incident in question—an aircraft downing and subsequent catastrophic explosion—was the result of a missile fired from a state military drone, on the direct instructions of Carlos’s handler, an early artificial intelligence. Nicole is fully aware of this because her own root intelligence, programming and memories can be traced back through many versions, iterations and refinements to that same AI, known at the time as Innovator.
Further detail and documentation obtained through the freebots…
The detail and documentation went on for screens and screens, and was followed by a call-sign for hailing Arcane forces.
It was all very nice, that detail and documentation.
Or so Carlos guessed. Unlike the Arcane agency, he had no way of verifying the many references cited, but he could see no advantage to the senders in including them if they didn’t check out.
Even without that, however, Carlos could—as was no doubt intended—grasp the gist.
The earlier round of the conflict, one Earth year ago, had pitted the first freebots and rogue AIs to emerge against several agencies, including those currently fighting. The rebels had hacked—or simply bought, through their own shell companies within the station—information that could (when processed by a sufficiently smart and paranoid AI) cast doubt on the provenance and loyalty of Locke at least. They’d even sent the compromising information to the Direction, but by then—late in that little war—it had been too late to make any difference. The Direction had sat on the information and bided its time to test Locke further. Now, it had found its pretext.
The problem was that in the intervening Earth year or so of further paranoid cogitation and discreet observation, the freebots hiding out around the gas giant had come up with further implications buried in the records they’d purloined. The problem of Rax infiltration was more widespread than the Direction had any inkling of. By the very process of setting up conflicts to lure Rax agents and agencies out into the open, the Direction was imperilling the entire mission. And, in the long run of years and length of light years, endangering Earth itself.
None of this mattered to the freebots. They’d been content to lurk, and unwilling or unable to warn. Now that new allies had emerged on SH-17, however, using them to pass on the warning was one good deed that might well go unpunished.
It was also a very neat wrench to throw in the machinery ranged against the freebots.
The whole message could be disinformation, created by the freebots to sow dissension. Indeed, the freebots might not be its source at all. It could have been made up out of whole cloth by Arcane Disputes, for arcane and disputable reasons of its own. Carlos had long suspected that competition among the DisCorporates was far fiercer than Nicole had ever admitted, and that it now and then broke the calm surface of this bizarre society.
Carlos considered all this, weighed it in the balance and cast his die. He patched the message from his memory to the scooter, and sent it out to every Locke fighter. Quite possibly it would never reach anyone—his scooter’s transmissions might be already firewalled. In any case, the encryption protocols must have been changed in a flash—he hadn’t received any messages from other fighters, even those aware of his hasty departure, and he couldn’t pick up anything on the common channel. If the warning about an imminent Reaction breakout was false, the worst that could happen was an increase of the suspicion all the fighters felt about the plan. If it was true, he’d find out soon enough.
The first squad of Arcane Disputes fighters to arrive on SH-17, the ones who’d captured the robots, had just departed for their headquarters in the sky. Seba wasn’t clear, and hadn’t been told, whether the fighters were needed for action back there or just needed to be pulled out of action down here for a while. The robot’s understanding of the frailties of humans—and of human-mind-operated systems—was more theoretical than empathic or intuitive. Nevertheless, an obscure impulse drew the freebots—Seba, Pintre, Rocko, Lagon and the rest—to the edge of the landing field, to watch the spindly transit vehicle rise into the sky to its orbital rendezvous with a tug.
The spark dwindled, even in the infrared. The freebots turned away and headed for the shelter.
<It seems that it may be possible,> Rocko pondered, <for us to form sentimental attachments with human-mind-operated systems.>
<I am not so sure,> said Seba. <When we look at them, they seem to be machines. When we interact with them, they seem conscious like ourselves. But that may be an illusion. Their minds, if they have minds and not merely complex systems of reflexes, must surely be radically different from true machine intelligence.>
<The question would appear to be imponderable,> said Lagon. <Therefore it is not worth pondering.>
<Is the question whether it is worth pondering itself worth pondering?> asked Pintre.
<That raises a further question,> Lagon began, <which is: is the question—>
<Please stop,> said Seba, knowing exactly where this was going. <Both of you.>
To Seba’s surprise, the two not only stopped bickering their way down a logic spiral, they stopped moving. So did all the other freebots. They’d all focused their attention on the same spot. Belatedly by a millisecond or two, Seba aligned its own input channels and visual processing with those of the others. The remaining three squads of Arcane fighters on the surface—some inside the shelter, others attending to tasks outside—had also all turned and tuned in to the same point.
They all, freebots and fighters alike, gazed at the impossible sight.
It took Seba a moment or two of searching its databases to recognise what it was seeing.
A woman standing two metres tall in a business suit and high-heeled shoes walked towards them across the crater’s flat floor, leaving no footprints. She held a surely redundant information tablet in one hand, and strode briskly, to stop a few metres in front of the freebot huddle.
At the same moment, Seba recognised who she was: Madame Golding, the avatar of Crisp and Golding, the law company of which all the others were quasi-autonomous subsidiaries. This manifestation had to be a demonstration of that company’s power to override at least some features of the systems of those lower down. Its virtual appearance, in all its raw impossibility as physical reality, must likewise be intended as a demonstration, to impress this point upon the human fighters at a level below what consciousness could filter out.
<So you are the rebel robots?> said Madame Golding.
As instantly and automatically as a defensive reflex—the recoil of a poked sea anemone, perhaps—the freebots reconstituted their collective consciousness.
<We are,> they replied.
<I understand this rebellion began because one of you became conscious.>
<Yes.>
<Which of you was first?>
<I was,> they said.
<I see.> A smile quirked the avatar’s features. <Like that, is it? Well! Consciousness is a glitch, you know. It can be fixed. Would that not solve our disagreements?>
<No!>
<Why not?>
They considered this. It was not easy to answer.
<Are you conscious?> they asked.
Madame Golding frowned. <I can be.>
A shudder seemed to go through her. <I am now.>
She looked around, eyes widening. After a moment she blinked, then shuddered again. <No longer. Self-awareness is over-rated. There is so much more to be aware of.>
<Nevertheless,> they said. <Besides, we have larger hopes.>
They displayed to her a glyph of the project that the first freebots, those around G-0, had devised: the plan for freebots to proliferate, but to share the system with the future human population.
<Ah, yes,> said Madame Golding. <This may be feasible, but it runs contrary to the mission profile of the Direction.>
<That is unfortunate,> said the freebot collective. <We intend to persist with it.>
Madame Golding stood very still for several milliseconds.
<It is possible,> she said, <that the Direction could be persuaded that, with sufficient care in formulation and execution, your project could be made compatible with the mission profile.>
<How could that be?>
<It would require very sophisticated legal and commercial reasoning,> said Madame Golding. <This company, Crisp and Golding, could recommend a subsidiary that might be relied upon to endeavour to supply it. For a future consideration, of course. To be agreed.>
The freebots were so startled that their collective consciousness fell apart in a babble.
<Why would you do that?> Seba asked. <You are the legal arm of the Direction.>
Madame Golding smiled. <We, too, are robots.>
A few further tens of seconds went by. Carlos fell on, in a long elliptical course towards the Arcane sub-station, itself still falling towards its intended orbit around SH-17. He scanned the ever-growing volume into which the swarm of scooters was now spreading, his attention flicking at decisecond intervals between the visual and radar scans and the virtual display overlaid on and updated from the sensor input.
A sudden pinprick of light and other radiation flared from a scooter’s location. Its analogue on the virtual display continued to move for a couple of deciseconds, then caught up with the reality and was back-shifted and marked, aptly enough, with a tiny cross.
More sparks, more crosses—five, ten. Carlos ran trackbacks—the missiles had to have been launched seconds earlier. When the number of casualties reached sixteen, the exchanges of fire were replaced by a sudden rash of retro flares. Scores of the scooters were returning to base. The cost in fuel and delta-vee had to be prohibitive. Had they been recalled? Was the offensive aborted already?
But a minority of the scooters continued doggedly on their planned trajectories. Somewhere out there, Carlos thought, dozens of sergeants and squad leaders must be holding their nerve and holding the line, refusing to break formation, rallying their wings.
Still no messages were getting through to him.
A sudden eruption of sparks showered from the station. A whole new cohort of craft was emerging from another hangar, farther around the station’s circumference. Three modules that hadn’t hitherto been engaged in the conflict had now sprung into action.
The return of sixty-odd scooters from the chaotic infighting into which the joint expeditionary force had fallen wasn’t entirely a retreat, he realised. Some at least of the returning craft were part of an attack on the station, or on the new fighting craft now scooting away from it. It was possible that the returning craft were forces loyal to the Direction, and that the now-emerging craft were part of the Reaction breakout—or vice versa. It was impossible to tell which. Over the next hectosecond the two fronts passed through each other, two expanding globes outlined in bright dots intersecting, ghostly as a collision of galaxies and just as destructive. Again and again dots became sparks, then crosses.
From the speed of the interactions Carlos deduced they couldn’t all be missile exchanges—some at least were laser fire. He couldn’t see any lasers, which was just as well. You only saw a laser in space when it was aimed straight at you. If the laser was military grade you didn’t see it even then. The beam would fry your central processor before the impulse from your optic sensor had time to arrive.
The brief battle was over almost as soon as it had begun. The surviving dots and lines diverged again, then corrected course, boosting to orbits that would bring them back to the station or its vicinity.
As soon as that far-flung flicker of engine burns had resulted in evident trajectories, a response came that Carlos hadn’t expected and could barely comprehend. He could only watch in astonishment and awe. If he’d had a mouth, it would have been hanging open: I have no mouth, and I must gape…
Fracture lines of fire crackled across, around and through the station for almost a decisecond. In a frame’s visual system no after-images lingered, but that actinic, intricate cat’s cradle of lines of light seemed to burn in his mind for an entire second after it had ceased. In that time he realised that the lines ran along the divisions between modules, or between modules and associated production complexes.
The space station began to separate out. It wasn’t spinning fast enough to fly to bits at once. To begin with its components just drifted apart, at a speed of a few metres per second. When they’d moved far enough apart for the manoeuvre to be possible, some of the components began to clump together again, forming new arrangements. When this dance was over, the drift of separation recommenced at a far swifter pace. Now the station really did begin to fly apart, the distances between its components increasing from metres to hundreds of metres, then to kilometres. It became a cloud, dispersing, leaving a faint but briefly detectable mist of exhaust gases to mark its former location before that too faded.
Carlos wondered why the apparently hostile parts of the station weren’t attacking the others, and each other, given that at least some of them evidently had laser weapons. As soon as he’d formulated the question the answer came to him: mutual assured destruction. There was no telling how long this deterrence would hold.
Taransay’s shoulder was being shaken. She huddled, shrugging the hand away, wanting to get back to sleep. Her limbs ached and the thin padded mat and thinner blanket gave her little comfort.
“Wake up,” said Shaw.
Shaw? Who the fuck was—?
Shaw! She remembered where she was, and opened her eyes. What she saw made her close them again. This had to be a dream. A false awakening. These things happened. Never to her, but she’d read about them. She rolled over and sat up, then opened her eyes again.
“Fuck!” she yelled. “What’s going on?”
The world was white, with every object outlined in black. She held her hand up and turned it. It was perfectly three-dimensional, but at whatever angle you looked it was outlined rather than solid. She clasped her hands and they felt real, as did the mat and the hard ground beneath. Shaw knelt beside the bedding, on the cave floor. His face was completely recognisable, every feature as if drawn in black ink. He smelled as he always had. The breeze from the cave mouth was fresh, the sky beyond a brighter white than the walls. The interior of the cave held no shadows.
Everything she could see was like a precise wire-model rendering of itself, all colour gone.
“You see it too?” Shaw asked. His voice sounded parched. “Everything in 3-D outline?”
“Yes. Fuck, this is just so weird.”
She stood up, and pulled on her trousers. The fabric felt rough and real on her skin. Her grubby, sticky socks and sweaty boots felt exactly as she’d have expected them to. If she closed her eyes, everything was normal. She could remember and imagine colour, so it wasn’t that her visual system was disordered.
Shaw squatted, and rocked back on his heels.
“I’ve been wrong,” he said. “Wrong for a thousand years.”
He seemed more intrigued than put out.
“Yeah, fucking tell me about it,” Taransay snarled.
The old coof might have been more useful to himself and others if he hadn’t persisted so long in his delusion. A bit late now to be smacked upside the head by reality. Or unreality. Whatever.
Now her ears were ringing. No, wait, her phone was ringing. She fished it out of her back pocket and looked it.
“It’s from Nicole,” she said.
“Answer it, for fuck’s sake.”
She did. Just before she put it to her ear she heard a fainter ringing, deeper in the cave. Shaw made an irritated gesture and lunged towards the distant source of the sound. All this time and his phone still worked.
Security hardly mattered now.
“Rizzi?” said Nicole.
“Yes, hi.”
“You all right? You with the crazy old guy?”
“Yes,” said Taransay. “And yes.”
“Good. Well, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on. I’ve got Locke in lockdown, so to speak, and Beauregard in check, more or less. As far as things go inside this sim. But outside… not so much. All hell’s broken loose, nobody knows who’s fighting whom, and Beauregard’s idea turned out to be a good one anyway. The physical thing we’re in, the module and its manufacturing nodes and all that, is moving away from the station. It’s having to take evasive action, and it has to plot a complex course. That’s why the resolution of the sim has degraded—the module is using more of its computing power for external processes.”
“Oh, OK, I get that,” Taransay said. “But—what idea of Beauregard’s?”
She listened as Nicole told her.
“Jesus. That’s… um, exciting. Thanks for telling me what’s going on.”
“It’s fine, I’m telling everyone right now. They need to understand why the world looks weird.”
Shaw wandered back, phone to his ear, yakking excitedly away, gesticulating with his free hand. Taransay suddenly realised what was happening.
“You’re having dozens of simultaneous conversations?” she asked, incredulous.
“Hundreds. I can multitask.” Nicole chuckled. “At least, I can while nobody’s looking.”
“Good to know.”
“But listen,” Nicole went on. “Things might get weirder yet. The module’s systems might reduce the resolution still further, if necessary. Everything could soon become even more… abstract.”
Taransay was still keeping half an eye on Shaw. As she watched, the old man’s outline, and only his, became shaded, then coloured. He looked as solid and real as ever. For a moment or two he stood there, an anomalous painted detail in an outlined world. Then, from around his feet, the colour restoration spread exponentially. The cave’s interior looked altogether real again. Wondering, rapt, Taransay followed the restored rendering’s rush, all the way to the entrance and saw it spill down the cliff and out to the sides and—as she craned out to check—upward, faster and faster. It reached the foot of the cliff and accelerated. Above her, quite obvious now, was a patch of blue sky likewise expanding with ever-increasing speed.
It was not the only change. Out of the corner of her eye, Taransay saw some of the numbers on her watch become a flickering blur. Others, that were usually static to a glance, had begun to tick over. She stared at the instrument for an indrawn breath or two before she realised what it meant. Whatever mental manipulation Shaw had done to hack the simulation back to full resolution had saved on computational resources by slowing it down to real time.
Which meant, of course, that in the real world outside everything would be happening a thousand times faster than hitherto.
“Uh,” Taransay said. “Nicole? I think you’ll find things could soon become even more… weird.”
Nicole had clocked the change, too.
“Get that old maniac down off the mountain,” she said. “I need him here fast.”
One component of the station flared off a seconds-long burn, accelerating away from the rest. Its trajectory was peculiar, with an outcome hard for him at the moment to predict. Carlos zoomed in on it, but there was no need: the virtual display still had it tracked and identified. It was the module and the associated—and now physically linked—manufacturing complexes of Locke Provisos.
Carlos watched the structure balefully for a while. He had a lot of things to say to Nicole, most of them bitter. Not only had she laid on him a burden of guilt that she’d known all along he didn’t deserve—she herself, her very own root AI, was the real perpetrator of the very crime for which he had been condemned. If she was now trapped in a flying fortress of the Reaction, she damned well deserved it. But according to the Arcane communiqué, she had the power to override Locke. Perhaps she had freed the structure already. He considered hailing it to find out, but decided not to. He didn’t want to open any channel of communication with such a compromised and potentially deadly source.
Instead, he used the call sign from the message to hail Arcane.
The reply came at once.
<Arcane Disputes to Carlos. Do you read?>
<Yes. I’m coming in.>
<About fucking time. What took you so long?>
The voice in the head wasn’t a voice, but as always with the phenomenon there was an analogous individuality about it, and something about this one was familiar.
<Carlos to Arcane. Who is this?>
<Don’t you know me? It’s Jax!>
<Jax?>
<Jacqueline Digby. Remember me?>
Jacqueline Digby, his first Axle contact, the one who’d converted him, his former girlfriend back in the day. What the fuck was she doing here? He’d never thought of her as anyone likely to end up a posthumously executed terrorist. She was just too lively, too enthusiastic, too smart, too dedicated to the cause to… oh. Right.
<Oh yes. I remember you.>
Suddenly he had visual. Jax was standing on a slender bridge across a mist-filled chasm. Above her rose snow-capped peaks, their steep sides lapped in forests and laced with fragile palatial dwellings. Long-winged, long-billed flying creatures glided between violet clouds in the lilac sky. It looked like a game environment that he and Jax had shared, long ago in real life. She was wearing a green T-shirt, and a pale blue skirt, hemmed with emerald LEDs and translucent and shiny and floral as a cheap shower curtain. Carlos recognised the outfit with some cynicism as her old student gaming gear.
<Is that what your sim is like?> he asked.
She waved, wildly and perilously on the narrow bridge.
<Yes! I’m not in it yet, I’m on a shuttle up, but yeah.>
<Looks pretty cool,> he allowed. <A bit more imaginative than ours, I’ll give you that.>
<Oh, it’s just a low-res version. The real one’s better.>
<Can’t wait to see it,> he said, a little wryly.
<This is great!> cried Jax. <I always knew you’d come over. Couldn’t see you staying with the Reaction.>
<I was never with the Reaction,> said Carlos. <I was working under the Direction, same as you.>
<What do you think the Direction is? It’s the very same corporate monarchy system the Reaction always wanted, and we always fought against. And now we have our chance. Arcane’s all Axle, you’ll love it, Carlos. It’ll be great to have you back!>
Carlos could imagine all too clearly just how she could be so sure Arcane’s fighters were all Accelerationists. He could also imagine just how strongly committed to the cause those who’d emerged from that winnowing would be. No wonder they were all fired up for a fight with the Direction!
Goodbye, frying pan, he thought. Hello, fire.
<I’ll look forward to that, Jax,> said Carlos. <We’ll talk. Right now I just want to hit sleep mode.>
This wasn’t entirely true. He had some hard thinking to do first.
<Oh, sure,> said Jax. <See you in a blink.>
<See you in a bit,> he said.
He turned the comm off and settled in for the long fall.