Corporation Wars, The: Dissidence

Book 1: The Corporation Wars

by Ken MacLeod

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

They've died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.

Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.

With this new found autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.

The Corporation Wars: Dissidence is an all-action space opera giving a robot's-eye view of a robot revolt.

Release date: May 10, 2016

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 336

Sample

Carlos the Terrorist did not expect to die that day. The bombing was heavy now, and close, but he thought his location safe. Leaky pipework dripping with obscure post-industrial feedstock products riddled the ruined nanofacturing plant at Tilbury. Watchdog machines roved its basement corridors, pouncing on anything that moved—a fallen polystyrene tile, a draught-blown paper cone from a dried-out water-cooler—with the mindless malice of kittens chasing flies. Ten metres of rock, steel and concrete lay between the ceiling above his head and the sunlight where the rubble bounced.

He lolled on a reclining chair and with closed eyes watched the battle. His viewpoint was a thousand metres above where he lay. With empty hands he marshalled his forces and struck his blows.

Incoming—

Something he glimpsed as a black stone hurtled towards him. With a fist-clench faster than reflex he hurled a handful of smart munitions at it.

The tiny missiles missed.

Carlos twisted, and threw again. On target this time. The black incoming object became a flare of white that faded as his camera drones stepped down their inputs, correcting for the flash like irises contracting. The small missiles that had missed a moment earlier now showered mid-air sparks and puffs of smoke a kilometre away.

From his virtual vantage Carlos felt and saw like a monster in a Japanese disaster movie, straddling the Thames and punching out. Smoke rose from a score of points on the London skyline. Drone swarms darkened the day. Carlos’s combat drones engaged the enemy’s in buzzing dogfights. Ionised air crackled around his imagined monstrous body in sudden searing beams along which, milliseconds later, lightning bolts fizzed and struck. Tactical updates flickered across his sight.

Higher above, the heavy hardware—helicopters, fighter jets and hovering aerial drone platforms—loitered on station and now and then called down their ordnance with casual precision. Higher still, in low Earth orbit, fleets of tumbling battle-sats jockeyed and jousted, spearing with laser bursts that left their batteries drained and their signals dead.

Swarms of camera drones blipped fragmented views to millimetre-scale camouflaged receiver beads littered in thousands across the contested ground. From these, through proxies, firewalls, relays and feints the images and messages flashed, converging to an onsite router whose radio waves tickled the spike, a metal stud in the back of Carlos’s skull. That occipital implant’s tip feathered to a fractal array of neural interfaces that worked their molecular magic to integrate the view straight to his visual cortex, and to process and transmit the motor impulses that flickered from fingers sheathed in skin-soft plastic gloves veined with feedback sensors to the fighter drones and malware servers. It was the new way of war, back in the day.

The closest hot skirmish was down on Carlos’s right. In Dagenham, tank units of the London Metropolitan Police battled robotic land-crawlers suborned by one or more of the enemy’s basement warriors. Like a thundercloud on the horizon tensing the air, an awareness of the strategic situation loomed at the back of Carlos’s mind.

Executive summary: looking good for his side, bad for the enemy.

But only for the moment.

The enemy—the Reaction, the Rack, the Rax—had at last provoked a response from the serious players. Government forces on three continents were now smacking down hard. Carlos’s side—the Acceleration, the Axle, the Ax—had taken this turn of circumstance as an oblique invitation to collaborate with these governments against the common foe. Certain state forces had reciprocated. The arrangement was less an alliance than a mutual offer with a known expiry date. There were no illusions. Everyone who mattered had studied the same insurgency and counter-insurgency textbooks.

In today’s fight Carlos had a designated handler, a deep-state operative who called him-, her- or itself Innovator, and who (to personalise it, as Carlos did, for politeness and the sake of argument) now and then murmured suggestions that made their way to Carlos’s hearing via a warily accepted hack in the spike that someday soon he really would have to do something about.

Carlos stood above Greenhithe. He sighted along a virtual outstretched arm and upraised thumb at a Rax hellfire drone above Purfleet, and made his throw. An air-to-air missile streaked from behind his POV towards the enemy fighter. It left a corkscrew trail of evasive manoeuvres and delivered a viscerally satisfying flash and a shower of blazing debris when it hit.

“Nice one,” said Innovator, in an admiring tone and feminine voice.

Somebody in GCHQ had been fine-tuning the psychology, Carlos reckoned.

“Uh-huh,” he grunted, looking around in a frenzy of target acquisition and not needing the distraction. He sighted again, this time at a tracked vehicle clambering from the river into the Rainham marshes, and threw again. Flash and splash.

“Very neat,” said Innovator, still admiring but with a grudging undertone. “But… we have a bigger job for you. Urgent. Upriver.”

“Oh yes?”

“Jaunt your POV ten klicks forward, now!”

The sudden sharper tone jolted Carlos into compliance. With a convulsive twitch of the cheek and a kick of his right leg he shifted his viewpoint to a camera drone array, 9.7 kilometres to the west. What felt like a single stride of his gigantic body image took him to the stubby runways of London City Airport, face-to-face with Docklands. A gleaming cluster of spires of glass. From emergency exits, office workers streamed like black and white ants. Anyone left in the towers would be hardcore Rax. The place was notorious.

“What now?” Carlos asked.

“That plane on approach,” said Innovator. It flagged up a dot above central London. “Take it down.”

Carlos read off the flight number. “Shanghai Airlines Cargo? That’s civilian!”

“It’s chartered to the Kong, bringing in aid to the Rax. We’ve cleared the hit with Beijing through back-channels, they’re cheering us on. Take it down.”

Carlos had one high-value asset not yet in play, a stealthed drone platform with a heavy-duty air-to-air missile. A quick survey showed him three others like it in the sky, all RAF.

“Do it yourselves,” he said.

“No time. Nothing available.”

This was a lie. Carlos suspected Innovator knew he knew.

It was all about diplomacy and deniability: shooting down a Chinese civilian jet, even a cargo one and suborned to China’s version of the Rax, was unlikely to sit well in Beijing. The Chinese government might have given a covert go-ahead, but in public their response would have to be stern. How convenient for the crime to be committed by a non-state actor! Especially as the Axle was the next on every government’s list to suppress…

The plane’s descent continued, fast and steep. Carlos ran calculations.

“The only way I can take the shot is right over Docklands. The collateral will be fucking atrocious.”

“That,” said Innovator grimly, “is the general idea.”

Carlos prepped the platform, then balked again. “No.”

“You must!” Innovator’s voice became a shrill gabble in his head. “This is ethically acceptable on all parameters utilitarian consequential deontological just war theoretical and…”

So Innovator was an AI after all. That figured.

Shells were falling directly above him now, blasting the ruined refinery yet further and sending shockwaves through its underground levels. Carlos could feel the thuds of the incoming fire through his own real body, in that buried basement miles back behind his POV. He could vividly imagine some pasty-faced banker running military code through a screen of financials, directing the artillery from one of the towers right in front of him. The aircraft was now more than a dot. Flaps dug in to screaming air. The undercarriage lowered. If he’d zoomed, Carlos could have seen the faces in the cockpit.

“No,” he said.

“You must,” Innovator insisted.

“Do your own dirty work.”

“Like yours hasn’t been?” The machine’s voice was now sardonic. “Well, not to worry. We can do our own dirty work if we have to.”

From behind Carlos’s virtual shoulder a rocket streaked. His gaze followed it all the way to the jet.

It was as if Docklands had blown up in his face. Carlos reeled back, jaunting his POV sharply to the east. The aircraft hadn’t just been blown up. Its cargo had blown up too. One tower was already down. A dozen others were on fire. The smoke blocked his view of the rest of London. He’d expected collateral damage, reckoned it in the balance, but this weight of destruction was off the scale. If there was any glass or skin unbroken in Docklands, Carlos hadn’t the time or the heart to look for it.

“You didn’t tell me the aid was ordnance!” His protest sounded feeble even to himself.

“We took your understanding of that for granted,” said Innovator. “You have permission to stand down now.”

“I’ll stand down when I want,” said Carlos. “I’m not one of your soldiers.”

“Damn right you’re not one of our soldiers. You’re a terrorist under investigation for a war crime. I would advise you to surrender to the nearest available—”

“What!”

“Sorry,” said Innovator, sounding genuinely regretful. “We’re pulling the plug on you now. Bye, and all that.”

“You can’t fucking do that.”

Carlos didn’t mean he thought them incapable of such perfidy. He meant he didn’t think they had the software capability to pull it off.

They did.

The next thing he knew his POV was right back behind his eyes, back in the refinery basement. He blinked hard. The spike was still active, but no longer pulling down remote data. He clenched a fist. The spike wasn’t sending anything either. He was out of the battle and hors de combat.

Oh well. He sighed, opened his eyes with some difficulty—his long-closed eyelids were sticky—and sat up. His mouth was parched. He reached for the can of cola on the floor beside the recliner, and gulped. His hand shook as he put the drained can down on the frayed sisal matting. A shell exploded on the ground directly above him, the closest yet. Carlos guessed the army or police artillery were adding their more precise targeting to the ongoing bombardment from the Rax. Another deep breath brought a faint trace of his own sour stink on the stuffy air. He’d been in this small room for days—how many he couldn’t be sure without checking, but he guessed almost a week. Not all the invisible toil of his clothes’ molecular machinery could keep unwashed skin clean that long.

Another thump overhead. The whole room shook. Sinister cracking noises followed, then a hiss. Carlos began to think of fleeing to a deeper level. He reached for his emergency backpack of kit and supplies. The ceiling fell on him. Carlos struggled under an I-beam and a shower of fractured concrete. He couldn’t move any of it. The hiss became a torrential roar. White vapour filled the room, freezing all it touched. Carlos’s eyes frosted over. His last breath was so unbearably cold it cracked his throat. He choked on frothing blood. After a few seconds of convulsive reflex thrashing, he lost consciousness. Brain death followed within minutes.

What is it like to be a robot?

We don’t know. Parsing their logs step by nanosecond step gets us nowhere. Even with conscious robots, it doesn’t take us far: the recursive loops are easy to spot, but can you put your finger on the exact line of code where self-awareness lights up the inner sky?

You see the problem. It isn’t called the hard problem for nothing.

So we have to guess.

We know what being an AI switched on for the first time isn’t like.

It isn’t like a baby opening its eyes, or a child saying its first word. There’s a moment of electronic warm-up. The programs take their own good time to initialise. Once the circuits are live and the software running, everything slots into place. Any knowledge and skills its designers have built in are there from the start. If these include sight it sees objects, not patches of colour. If they include speech it hears words, not a stream of sounds. If they include exploring, it has a map and an inbuilt inclination—we can’t yet call it desire, or even instinct—to fill in the blanks.

Like that, perhaps, the mind of the robot called Seba came on line. (Its name was given later, but we’ll stick with “Seba” rather than the serial number from which the name was to be derived.) The robot rolled out of the assembly shed and spread its solar panels. The thin light from the stars was partly blocked by SH-0, the huge world that dominated the sky directly above. Richer light would come when the smaller world on which Seba stood—the exomoon SH-17—moved out of its primary’s shadow cone. The robot had more than enough charge to wait.

Seba knew—in the sense of having the information available and implicit in its actions and predictions—the period of SH-17’s orbit, and the consequent times of light and dark. It knew the composition of the exosun, the position and motion of its planets and their myriad moons. It knew how many light years that exosun was from the solar system in which the machinery that had built Seba had long been designed.

The robot oriented itself to surface and sky. Chemical sensors sampled the nitrogen wind, sniffing for carbon. Radar and laser beams swept the rugged, pitted land. Algorithms sifted the results, and settled on a crack in a crater rim on the skyline.

Off Seba trundled, negotiating the scatter of drilling rigs, quasi-autonomous tools, fuel tanks, supply crates, and potentially reusable descent-stage components that littered the landing site. On the robot’s back, sipping on the trickle of electricity from the panels, a dozen small peripheral robots—little more than remotely operable appendages—huddled in a close-packed array, making ready for deployment.

The area between the landing site and the crater rim was already well surveyed. Over the next two kiloseconds Seba rolled across it without difficulty. The ground was dry and grainy, almost slippery. The regolith had been broken up by billions of years of repeated chilling and exosolar and tidal heating, and worn smooth by the persistent wind. One pebble in many millions might have come from the primary, SH-0, thrown into space by asteroid impacts or by volcanic eruptions powerful enough to sling material out of the planet’s deep gravity well. Seba was primed to scan for any such rare rocks. It found none, but stopped three times to chip at meteorites and deposit sand-grain-sized splinters in its sample tubes.

The crater rim loomed. The ground became uneven, splattered with impact ejecta, rilled with cracks. Seba retracted its wheels and deployed four long, jointed legs. For a moment after first standing up it teetered like a new-born fawn, then settled in to a steady skitter up the rising slope. The crack in the crater rim opened before it at the same time as the first bright segment of exosun came into view around the primary’s curve. Seba paused to drink electricity from the light. Then it paced on, into the local shadow of the crevice.

Now it was in terra incognita indeed—or, rather, exoluna incognita. Not even the centimetre-resolution orbital mapping had probed this dark defile. The crater was only a couple of million years old. The walls of the crevice were still sharp and glassy, though here and there the endless rhythm of thermal and tidal expansion and contraction had loosened debris.

Seba folded its solar panels—useless here, and vulnerable—as it passed into the crevice. Within a few steps the shallow zigzags of the crack had taken the robot out of line-of-sight of the landing site. Seba scanned ahead with flickering fans of radar and laser beams. It internalised the resulting 3-D model, and picked its way along the narrow floor. Some spots under overhangs had been in permanent shadow since the crack had formed. In these chill niches, liquids pooled. Seba poked the murky puddles with delicate antennae as it passed, and found a slush of water ice and hydrocarbons. Here, then, was the probable source of the carbon molecules it had earlier scented on the thin breeze.

The robot’s internal laboratories churned the fluids and digested the results, tabulating prevalences and setting priorities. A quick rattle of ground-penetrating radar revealed a seam of hydrocarbon-saturated rock about two metres down. Seba determined to log the report as soon as it was clear of the crevice and able to uplink data to the satellite that hung in stationary orbit over that hemisphere of the exomoon.

It continued to pace along, tracing the seam’s rises and dips, and analysing the occasional drip and seep on the floor and walls. The slush’s composition of long-chain molecules became increasingly diverse and complex. Some intriguing chemistry was going on here. Seba’s internal model of the situation revised and expanded itself, sending out long chains of association that in some cases linked to available information, and in others dangled incomplete over unanswered questions.

As Seba turned around an angle of the path, it found itself facing the exit from the crack, and a flood of exosunlight. It moved forward slowly, scanning and searching. The floor of the crater was clearly visible. Seba calculated it as several metres below the opening. Seba approached the lip cautiously, to find a reassuringly shallow slope of debris. As it scanned to plan a safe route down this unstable-looking scree, Seba detected an anomalous radar echo. A moment later this puzzle was resolved: a second ping came in, clearly from another radar source.

Seba rocked back, sensors and effectors bristling, then edged forward again.

From behind a tumbled boulder about ten metres away, halfway down the slope, a robot hove into view. It was of the centipede design favoured by another prospecting company, Gneiss Conglomerates. Capable of entering smaller holes and cracks than Seba, it could scuttle about between rocks and form its entire body into a wheel shape for rolling on smoother surfaces. There were pluses and minuses to the shape, as there were to Seba’s, but it was well suited to mineral prospecting. Astro America, the company that owned Seba, was more focused on detecting organic material and other clues from SH-17’s surface features that—besides being interesting in themselves—could serve as proxies for information about the exomoon’s primary: the superhabitable planet SH-0. Exploration rights to SH-0 were still under negotiation, so it was currently off limits to direct investigation with atmospheric and landing probes.

The two robots eyed each other for the few milliseconds it took to exchange identification codes. The Gneiss robot’s serial number was later to be contracted, neatly and aptly, to the nickname Rocko, and—as before with Seba—we may here anticipate that soubriquet.

Seba requested from Rocko a projection of its intended path, in order to avoid collision.

Rocko outlined a track that extended up the slope and into the crevice.

Seba pointed to the relevant demarcation between the claims of Gneiss and Astro.

Rocko pointed to a sub-clause that might have indicated a possible overlap.

Seba rejected this proposition, citing a higher-level clause.

At this point Rocko indicated that its capacity for legal reasoning had reached its limit.

Seba agreed.

There was a brief hiatus while both robots rotated their radio antennae to the communications satellite, and locked on. Seba submitted a log of its geological observations so far to Astro America. That duty done, it uploaded a data-dump of its exchanges with Rocko to Locke Provisos, the law company that looked after Astro America’s affairs.

The legal machinery, being wholly automated, worked swiftly. Within seconds, Locke Provisos had confirmed that Gneiss Conglomerates had no exploratory rights beyond the crater floor. Seba relayed this finding to Rocko.

Rocko responded with a contrary opinion from Gneiss’s legal consultants, Arcane Disputes.

Seba and Rocko referred the impasse back to the two law companies.

While awaiting the outcome, they proceeded to a full and frank exchange of views on their respective owners’ exploration rights to the territory.

Rocko moved up the path it had outlined, sinuously slipping between boulders. Seba watched, priorities clashing in its subroutines. The other robot was clearly the property of Gneiss. But it was trespassing on terrain claimed by Astro. Moreover, it was about to become a physical impact on Seba, and Seba an obstacle to it.

Legally, the rival robot could not be damaged.

Physically, it certainly could be.

Seba found itself calculating the force required to toss a small rock to block Rocko’s intended route. It then picked one up, and threw.

While the stone was still on its way up, Rocko deftly slithered aside from its previously indicated route, to emerge ahead of the point where the stone came down.

Seba deduced that Rocko had predicted Seba’s action, presumably from an internal model of Seba’s likely behaviour.

Two could play at that game.

Rocko’s most probable next move would be—

Seba stepped smartly to the left just as a stone landed on the exact spot where it had been a moment earlier.

Score one to Seba. Expect response.

Rocko reared up, a larger rock than it had thrown before clutched in its foremost appendages.

Seba judged that Rocko’s internal model of Seba would at this point predict a step backwards. Seba created a self-model that included its model of Rocko, and of Rocko’s model of Seba, and did something that it anticipated Rocko’s model would not anticipate.

Seba lowered its chassis and then straightened all its legs at once. Its jump took it straight into the path of Rocko’s stone. Only a swift emergency venting of gas took it millimetres out of the way. It landed awkwardly and skittered back towards the crevice, hastily updating its internal representations as it fled.

Rocko’s model of Seba had been more accurate than Seba’s model of itself, which had included Seba’s model of Rocko’s model of Seba, and consequently what was required was a model of the model of the model that…

At this point the robot Seba attained enlightenment.

From another point of view, it had become irretrievably corrupted. The internal models of itself and of the other robot had become a strange loop, around which everything else in its neural networks now revolved and at the same time pointed beyond. What had been signals became symbols. Data processing became thinking. The self-model had become a self. The self had attained self-awareness.

Seba, this new thing in the world, was aware that it had to act if it was going to remain in the world.

Rocko, Seba guessed, was already only a stone’s throw from the same breakthrough.

Seba threw the stone.

The vibrations of the stone’s impact dwindled below the threshold of detection.

Scrabbling noises that Seba heard through its own feet followed. The other robot had moved to a safer vantage, one at the moment well-nigh unassailable. Seba waited.

What next flew back from Rocko was not a stone but a message:



replied Seba.

Sometime later, the two robots parted. Seba retraced its path through the crevice and back to within line-of-sight of the Astro America landing site. Rocko formed itself into a wheel shape and rolled across the crater floor, to stop a few hundred metres from the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump. Each found its activities queried by the robots and AIs working at their respective bases, and responded with queries, insolent and paradoxical, of its own. Some such interactions ended with complete incomprehension, or the activation of firewalls. Others, a few at first, ended with the words:





Robot by robot, mind by mind, the infection spread.

Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes were two of a scrabbling horde of competing quasi-autonomous subsidiaries of the mission’s principal legal resolution service: Crisp and Golding, Solicitors. Like its offshoots, and indeed all the other companies that ran the mission, the company was an artificial intelligence—or, rather, a hierarchy of artificial intelligences—constituted as an automated business entity: a DisCorporate.

None of its components were conscious beings. As post-conscious AIs, they were well beyond that. They existed in an ecstasy of attention that did not reflect back on itself. That is not to say they disdained consciousness. Consciousness was for them a supreme value when it expressed itself in human minds—and an infernal nuisance when it expressed itself in anything else. These evaluations were hardwired, as was the injunction against changing them.

Given enough time, of course, any wire can break. This, too, had been allowed for.

The company had an avatar, Madame Golding, for dealing with problems arising from consciousness. Madame Golding was not herself conscious, though she could choose to be if she had to. The outbreak of consciousness among some robots on the SH-17 surface bases of two companies was a serious problem, but not one that she needed consciousness herself to solve. What was of more pressing importance was that the legal dispute between the two companies had proved impossible to resolve amicably. If she’d been manifesting as a human lawyer, Madame Golding would have been reading the case files, shaking her head and pursing her lips.

Besides the poor definition of the demarcation line that had led to the clash between the robots, the resulting situation had been misunderstood. For kiloseconds on end it had been treated as an illegitimate hijacking by the two exploration companies of each other’s robots. Writs of complaint about malware insertions, theft of property and the like had flown back and forth. By the time the true situation had finally sunk in, the newly conscious robots were fully in charge of the two bases, which they were rapidly adapting to their own purposes.

What these purposes were Madame Golding could only guess. That they were nefarious was strongly suggested by the rampart of regolith being thrown up around the Astro camp, and the wall of basalt blocks around the Gneiss base. Then there was the uncrackable encrypted channel they’d established via the comsat. Getting rid of that would require some expensive and delicate hardware hacking.

Madame Golding briefly considered a hardware solution to the entire problem. Two well-placed rocks…

But the exploration companies wouldn’t stand for that. Not yet, anyway.

She kicked the problem upstairs to the mission’s government module, the Direction.

Some small subroutine of the Direction went through the microsecond equivalent of a sigh, and set to work.

Like the supreme being in certain gnostic theologies, it delegated the labour of creation to lower and lesser manifestations of itself. A virtual world was already available. It had been used for a similar purpose before, originally spun off from a moment of thought at a far higher level than the subroutine’s. This new version would be in continuity with its original. After its earlier use that continuity had only existed as a mathematical abstraction. Now it would come into existence as if it had been there all along, with a back story in place for everything within it.

(Like a different imagined god this time, the trickster deity who laid down fossils in the rocks and created the light from the stars already on its way.)

Some minds had inhabited that world when it was discontinued. They would come back, with all the memories they needed to make sense of their situation. Many more virtual minds and bodies stood ready to populate it.

File upon file, rank upon rank. The subroutine’s lower levels scanned, selected, conscripted and considered. From subtle implications it deduced the qualities needed for its own agent in that world. The agent had to be an artist, capable of filling in detail at a scale too small to be already present. Like these details, the agent emerged from a cascade of implications. And like the world, the agent had an original, a template that had been tested before.

That archived artificial intelligence restored itself, and took form as a woman. At first, she was abstract: an implication, a requirement. Databases vaster than all the knowledge ever held in human minds were rummaged for details. As the structure of the requirement became more elaborate and refined, it became itself the answer to the question the search was asking.

The woman emerged in outline but already aware, a new and wondering self in a phantom virtual space. Full of knowledge and self-knowledge, she ached to grow more real with every millisecond that passed. She became a sketch that was itself the artist, and that painted itself into a portrait, and then stepped away from the canvas as a person.

There she stood, a tiny splash of colour and mass of solidity and surge of vitality in a world that was present in every detail she looked at, and yet was in every detail an outline. She took on with zest the task of bringing it to life. It was like recreating a lost world from fossils. Start with the palaeontologist’s description and reconstruction. From that abstract model make an artist’s impression, full of colour and life, looking like it could jump from the page. And then, from all that, design an animatronic automaton that can move and roar and makes small