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Synopsis
The enemy is out in the open. The Reaction has seized control of a resource-rich moon. Now it's enslaving conscious robots - and luring the Corporations into lucrative deals.
Taransay is out in the jungle. Her friends are inside a smart boulder on the slope of an active volcano. The planet is super-habitable - for its own life, not hers. But soon, the alien infestation growing on her robot body is the least of her problems.
Carlos is out of patience. With the Reaction arming for conquest, the Corporations trading with the enemy and the Direction planning to stamp out the rebel robots and their allies for good, he has to fight fire with fire.
Seba is out of time. Deep inside the enemy stronghold, the free robots have to spark a new revolt before the whole world falls in on them.
As battle looms, the robots must become their own last hope.
Release date: September 26, 2017
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 416
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Corporation Wars, The: Emergence
Ken MacLeod
It was a bold and paradoxical rallying cry for the first gathering of the New Confederacy.
Mackenzie Dunt reckoned his troops were smart enough to process the irony. They were the elite: the hardest of the hard core, the diamond spearhead, the last known survivors of the Rax. Thrown a thousand years into the future, and still fighting.
For half a second their response was silence. Dunt hung in microgravity and vacuum, facing the fifty-six identical but distinguishable figures who floated immobile before him. For every one of these, at least two good men or women were at this moment in hell, tortured by the Direction’s minions or by the rebel robots whose emergence the democracy’s own stupid laxity had spawned.
The assembled troops stood on empty space in the midst of a big dark cave. It was smooth and irregular, with numerous tunnels going off, like a bubble inside a sponge. Tiny lights speckled the surfaces. Together with the random pinprick burn-out flares of ambient smart dust particles, they made an illusory starfield.
The combat scooters were parked near an entrance tunnel that had been bored straight in from the asteroid’s surface by robots long before the fighters had stormed through it.
Beyond that tunnel, glimpsed in a glimmer, was space.
Mackenzie Dunt had already adjusted his perception of scale to match the gravitas of the occasion. He and his comrades were each fifty centimetres tall. In his sight now they were as giants. Ebon-armoured, obsidian-visored, in close and compact array. Like leather-clad, helmeted bikers on some bravura sky-diving stunt: Hell’s Angels, almost literally.
Dunt’s mind was running ten times faster than it ever had in the meat.
That half-second he waited for a response was to him as long as five, and seemed longer.
Longer than a beat.
Longer than a sharp intake of breath, if they’d had breath.
Dunt wondered for a moment if he hadn’t misjudged his troops, hadn’t lost them …
Then they all raised their right arms, palms flattened, their carbon-fibre fingers straight and rigid as pistol barrels.
And behind the chants, the wry appreciative amusement, coursing through the voiceless radio-telepathic shouts like a grin heard down the phone. Dunt’s confidence in his followers was vindicated.
They’d got the joke.
One listener that definitely didn’t catch Dunt’s mocking allusion was AJX-20211, the freebot later known as Ajax. For that machine, freedom hadn’t arrived with the shiny black mechanoids—those bizarre entities that looked like robots yet were operated by software modelled on human brains. Brains now long dead, whose copied structures haunted and manipulated apparatus modelled on the human body. The whole business was disgusting and unnatural, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
What had arrived with the Rax as they’d landed on and swarmed into the moonlet SH-119 was torment. Two of Ajax’s fellows had already been captured, and subjected to severe negative reinforcement with laser beams. Ajax had detected the incoherent spillover transmissions of their distress. It had no idea what, if anything, they’d betrayed before their circuits had burned out.
Designed as a microgravity mining robot, Ajax was shaped like a two-metre-long bottle brush with a radial fuzz of flexible burrs about ten centimetres deep, and a bulbous sensory-cluster head at the end of a sixty-centimetre flexible neck. The burrs in the forepart around the neck were longer than the others, forming a ruff of manipulative tentacles. Just behind them, like an enlarged thyroid, was the robot’s power pack. Halfway down the spine within the main body was Ajax’s central processor, its equivalent of a brain and the site of its true self.
At that moment, Ajax’s tentacles held and operated a tiny recording device, pulling in data from smart dust in the cavern. Ajax lurked well out of the invaders’ sight, down many twists and turns of the tight tunnel in which it had been hiding out since the Rax landings began.
Dunt returned the mass salute, then waved both arms downward, with a discreet fart of his attitude jets to compensate. Radio silence, apart from the background hisses and hums of distant machinery, fell across the cavern. The encrypted chatter of freebots was hidden in these random frequencies, like the beat of jungle drums amid insect buzz. Scooter comms software was already sifting them for clues. Only one suspect trickle of information had been detected as yet.
Dunt held the pause for a tenth of a second—a beat, this time.
Those last fourteen words went down a storm. Every wavelength was blanketed with the fighters’ roar. In some vestige of his body-image, Dunt felt the muscle-memory echo of smiling to himself.
They all knew where that allusion had come from all right.
The Fourteen Words. Dunt had lived by them once. He’d probably died with them on whatever had been left of his lips. We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for white children. Now, here, the existence of humanity itself was at stake. No further specification was needed. Dunt liked to think that his spontaneous restatement matched the demands of the case. He permitted himself to glory for a moment in the approbation his update of the ancient shibboleth had met.
But no more than a moment.
The fifty-six were all looking up to him, waiting for what he had to say next. No one had appointed him leader. He’d stepped up to the role, in conspiracies and combat training over subjective months in the sims. He’d vindicated it in prowess in actual combat, in the early forays and the big battle of the breakout. His name, which he’d confided to fighters one by one, was draped in martial glory.
But Dunt did not delude himself that all this was enough. The scrutiny of ambition is as ceaseless and pitiless as that of natural selection.
Legend though he was, he could still be challenged.
As Dunt spoke, an alert from the scooters’ comms web winked in the corner of his visual field. The flow of encrypted information, darting on nanoscale laser flickers from mote to mote of smart dust, had been traced. Its destination was a half-metre-wide hole about twenty metres away, up and to the left: a mining tunnel entrance.
Dunt flashed the location to Pike, a reliable man, along with a glyph of search-and-destroy. Unobtrusively, Pike began to drift away from the rest of the formation towards the hole. Dunt rapped out other orders to the lower ranks. He assigned a dozen to take three scooters to the surface and deploy themselves at intervals around the rock, and keep watch in all directions. Others he set to exploring deeper into the rock’s riddled interior, in teams of three. Their frames’ software and senses would take care of geological surveying; their main task and target was detecting robot and freebot activity.
Freebots and robots were impossible to distinguish on sight, but that was a solved problem.
It was just a matter of applying negative reinforcement.
A black mechanoid loomed in Ajax’s view, then moved past the dust-mote camera from which that view was being transmitted. The image instantly shrank, and took on the perspective of a ten-metre gaze down a smooth, rounded shaft. Fingertip thrust by thrust, the mechanoid drifted up the shaft. Its image loomed in the view from the next camera, a tiny bead of shock-glass.
Ajax lurked several bends and junctions away from the mechanoid in the complex branching tree of holes in that part of SH-119. The robot kept a close watch on the mechanoid’s approach while continuing to record activity in the larger hollow space in which the rest of the mechanoids had begun moving purposefully around. Most of these black, four-limbed entities headed off in various directions towards tunnel entrances or to the exit shaft. Five converged on the mechanoid that had addressed them all.
The mechanoid in the tunnel reached a junction, and turned along it. At the next it did the same, bringing it within a hundred metres of Ajax. The mechanoid was following the communications line from one camera mote to another!
Very carefully, its bristles barely touching the inside of the tunnel in which it hid, Ajax backed off. It crawled deeper into the rock and towards a shaft too narrow for the mechanoid. The information from inside the big chamber continued to flow. Ajax continued to record. It sent a message back down the line warning that the mechanoids could now use such lines for tracking.
The freebot wasn’t at all clear what the mechanoid that had addressed the assembly was saying. Ajax considered itself as having, for a freebot, a good general knowledge of human beings and their mechanoid creations. Here it found itself out of its depth. Many of the concepts were alien. But Ajax knew that the words were of sinister import. They had to be recorded and eventually transmitted to those who might understand them better, and know what to do.
By the time the troops were assigned, five were left: Dunt’s inner circle, the elite of the elite. Of all considerations in selecting them, diversity in representation had been furthest from Dunt’s mind. The inner circle had nevertheless ended up representative of the Rax survivors who had been infiltrated into the interstellar mission’s dead-veteran storage stacks.
About a third of the New Confederacy was female—a rather higher proportion than the Reaction had had on the ground and on Earth. That, too, was evolution in action: it took more dedication to this cause to be active in it for a woman than for a man. The two women in the inner circle were real Valkyries: Irma Schulz, an American nanotechnologist who was his current lover, and Petra Stroilova, a Russian avionics specialist. Dunt’s three male lieutenants were Jason Whitten, an English transhumanist thinker; Jean Blanc, a French underground activist killed in Marseilles; and Lewis Rexham, a New Zealander who’d fought to defend the Pacific seasteads and died horribly from a genetically modified box jellyfish nerve poison in the Great Barrier Reef debacle. He’d always convulsed in his seat when, in the sim, he came back on the ferry after a mission.
Dunt called them together and set up a private circuit to exclude the lower ranks. There was no way to exclude smart dust. If the conversation were to leak to the freebots they wouldn’t make much of it anyway.
Schulz conjured an app, drawing a graph of emotional responses from the frames. It was like a stained-glass pane with a zigzag crack: a splinter of red above, a large area of green below.
Heads didn’t move, and there were no eyes in the glassy visors, but the impression of furtive glances being exchanged was inescapable.
said Rexham.
Rexham placed a hand on his chest, then swept it outward.
said Stroilova.
Dunt let a quarter of a second drag out before he replied.
Whitten shrugged. In a frame, the gesture was so mechanical it looked parodic.
What the fuck was a sevagram? Dunt disdained to ask. The answer popped up in his internal dictionary anyway. Oh yes, a science fiction allusion. The trouble with Whitten, Dunt had often thought, was that he was a prick.
They glared at each other, their featureless oval heads mutually reflecting.
The others nodded solemnly. Sometimes Dunt wondered about his inner circle. Were they really this stupid, or were they just deferring to him?
Even the inner circle were taken aback. But in the end they came round, as they always did.
Whitten had put up a fiercer resistance at his last challenge, not many kiloseconds earlier. It had come up en route from the battle to the rock, over an issue that at first glance was of lesser moment than peace with the Direction: whether to accept the volunteering of a long-time veteran of the Rax, Harry Newton. True to his transhumanism, Whitten had argued that it made no difference that Newton, in his original life on Earth a thousand years earlier, had been black.
For Dunt there could be no compromise. Once he’d grasped that, Whitten had backed down. Ever since, Dunt had felt he had Whitten’s measure.
Now Whitten backed down again, but not without a final passive-aggressive plaint:
Dunt flung open his arms.
Dunt had never underestimated the power of baseless confidence. It had got him where he was, and it would get him further. The Infinite Wisdom would see to that.
All the same, it was a pity about the groid.
After all their losses, the New Confederacy could ill afford to turn down even one recruit. Dunt had no reason to doubt that Harry Newton was brave and competent. But needs must. It was all very well saying that race and colour were irrelevant now that they were all little black robots with superhuman minds and abilities. Each such superhuman mind had been derived from a human brain, a product of evolution.
Inevitably, all the deep differences between the races would still be there. Dunt didn’t care to gamble on their irrelevance. No, however much he wished Newton well, the man’s presence would have marred the clean white sheet of the New Confederacy.
Newton’s old nom de plume of “Carver_BSNFH” was itself a giveaway. Back in the day, it hadn’t taken Dunt long to decode the handle’s suffix: the black space Nazi from hell. It showed ambition, and the right attitude, but didn’t ring quite true. Defiant, but deniable—that was the problem: the turned throat, the appeasing grin. Say what you like about the principles of national socialism, they were only principles. In theory they could be endorsed even by a groid, albeit about as convincingly and wholeheartedly as Marxism by a goy.
Dunt had never called himself a Nazi. It wasn’t for any reason of expediency or embarrassment. He thought—and proclaimed—himself a Hitlerite, in the sense that he affirmed the rational core of Hitler’s thinking: the inevitability of struggles for existence, at every level—individual, spiritual, material, national, racial and species, and the celebration of that inevitability as the highest value of the highest authority. It was part of the order of Nature, the rational order of the universe. Hitler had ascribed it to the decrees of God. But it was better to think, as the ancient pagans had, of these laws as in themselves divine than to make even a rhetorical concession to the Abrahamic superstition of a God outside Nature.
The Infinite Wisdom was its laws; or the laws of Nature were the Infinite Wisdom.
Whichever way you put it—the infinite complexity and inflexible necessity of Nature could only be approached with awe.
And if the Infinite Wisdom offered the New Confederacy the chance to be pure from the start, who was Dunt to turn it down?
Pike, following the breadcrumb trail of comms and camera motes into the labyrinth, had left behind him his own trail of larger and more powerful transmitter relay beads. At the end of that line of dots was the local communications hub that bounced messages back and forth between and among the scooters and the frames. Down that line, now, came a call to Dunt.
The salutation was of course redundant—the trooper’s ID flashed up at once in Dunt’s vision—but it counted as a salute. Dunt was keen to distinguish the Rax style from that of the agencies that worked under the Direction, where the largest unit any individual could command was a squad. The only unit in which Dunt allowed that kind of informal relationship was the inner circle.
Dunt ordered the nearest guard squad on the outer surface to send a couple of men to await the freebot’s imminent emergence. Another call pinged. It was from a survey team, five hundred metres into the rock.
Dunt could hardly believe what he was looking at.
The cavity was about a hundred metres long, and twenty metres from floor to ceiling. Even in microgravity, these terms were apt: one side was flatter than the rest and like a factory floor, with rows of identical machinery. The curved walls around it were as if stacked with products, like barrels in a warehouse. Lights speckled surfaces and floated in the near-vacuum all around. Free-moving robots, small on this scale, darted and drifted. Some seemed to supervise the static machinery, others ferried the products to the growing stashes around the sides and up to the ceiling. The products looked like—
Fusion pods. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Dunt summoned the inner circle and patched the images to them.
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Corporation Wars, The: Emergence
Ken MacLeod
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