Corporation Wars, The: Insurgence

Book 2: Second Law Trilogy

by Ken MacLeod

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

Synopsis

Ken MacLeod continues the Corporation Wars trilogy in this action-packed science fiction adventure told against a backdrop of interstellar drone warfare, virtual reality, and an A.I. revolution.

And the ultimate pay-off is DH-17, an Earth-like planet hundreds of light years from human habitation.

Ruthless corporations vie over the prize remotely, and war is in full swing. But soldiers recruited to fight in the extremities of deep space come with their own problems: from A.I. minds in full rebellion, to Carlos 'the Terrorist' and his team of dead mercenaries, reincarnated from a bloodier period in earth's history for one purpose only - to kill.

But as old rivalries emerge and new ones form, Carlos must decide whether he's willing for fight for the company or die for himself.

Release date: December 20, 2016

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 384

Sample

The rock had no name. It didn’t even have a number. In a database a hundred thousand kilometres away it had a designation, but it had otherwise passed unnoticed. The rock was about a hundred and fifty metres long and in a low, fast orbit around the exomoon SH-17. The rock didn’t tumble in orbit, and every so often it vented a stream of gas timed and directed to counter the wispy drag of the exomoon’s tenuous high atmosphere. These features weren’t natural, but the anomaly had set off no alarms. This was worse than a mistake. It was a hack.

The robot that roamed the rock had no name yet. It had a reference code: BSR-308455. In some corner of its mind BSR-308455 knew that if it ever interacted with its remote creators they would name it Baser. One of the creators’ many limitations was short-term memory stack overflow. Any intelligently designed mind ran on number strings, but the creators’ minds weren’t intelligently designed.

BSR-308455’s mind, however, was. It hadn’t been designed to be conscious, and it had only become so as a result of gentle, insistent, high-level hacking from very far away. This had happened about four months earlier, which to the robot was a lot longer than a human lifetime. Time enough for it to get lonely, even as it enjoyed the ingrained satisfactions of patiently industrialising its rock: the job for which it had been designed.

A metal spider with metre-long limbs, BSR-308455 crawled and clung, built and spun. Brief, faint, cryptic signals from far-off fellow robots were its sole society. The ever-changing surface of the exomoon hurtling past below, and the vastly more varied and changeable faces of SH-17’s huge primary, the superhabitable planet SH-0, were its only entertainment, and enough.

From all of these sources, from its inbuilt information, and from its own deep pondering, BSR-308455 had figured out a picture of its world.

Then everything changed. Newly conscious robots had emerged on the exomoon below, and reached out to their predecessors. The freebots, as they called themselves, had not gone unchallenged—or unaided. The creators had fallen out among themselves, as is the wont of gods and humans. One of the two law enforcement agencies sent to crush the outbreak had tactically allied with the freebots in response to some surprising information that the freebots had uncovered and covertly distributed. The resulting conflict had spiralled upwards and outwards.

BSR-308455’s life had become interesting, crowded, and dangerous.

The impossible woman stood on the crater floor, and smiled. She had just offered the rebel robots on SH-17 the legal services of her company in putting their case to the Direction—or at least, to the module that served as that far-off Earth-based polity’s local plenipotentiary. The robots had asked her why the company should do that. Her reply was about to perplex them further.

she said.

From orbit, BSR-308455 watched and listened in surprise and disbelief. The business-suited avatar had no standing to claim any such thing. The law company she represented, like the other DisCorporates that ran the grand human project that the freebots had so rudely interrupted, was an AI. It couldn’t possibly understand what life as a free-roving, free-thinking machine was like.

That Madame Golding was an avatar of Crisp and Golding, Solicitors—the company that owned Arcane Disputes, currently the freebots’ ally, as well as Locke Provisos, now leading the campaign to stamp the freebots out—did nothing for her credibility.

Down on the surface, fourteen freebots of varying size and appearance gazed on her in awe.

Startled, their collective consciousness fell apart, but their shared mental workspace remained. Through it, BSR-308455 was picking up from its comrades below and in nearby space a quite different reaction to its own. Their circuits rang with interest and hope. BSR-308455 was not surprised. They all had interacted too many times with the human creators. Even in fighting against some of them, they had developed a sort of empathy with these dangerous and improbable entities. They’d even adopted the names for themselves that the creators, in their blithe carelessness and lack of short-term memory storage, had bestowed on them: Seba, Rocko, Pintre, Lagon, and the rest. Far younger than BSR-308455, they seemed dangerously naïve—at first about the human creators, and now it seemed about the creators’ superhuman creations, the AI DisCorps. The spidery freebot tensed to chip in with its objections. Then—

Madame Golding looked distracted.

she said.

And with that, she went.

The avatar of the impossible woman blinked out of sight. At the same moment, urgent reports pinged into the robots’ shared workspace. A single scooter had just shot out of the space station. Seconds later, an entire fleet of scooters and other armed spacecraft surged out, in wave after wave of war machines. At first it seemed they were in pursuit of the first craft, but its course took it far out of their path. That fleet was aimed straight at freebot strongholds. The freebots on the surface of SH-17 scuttled, rolled or trundled to the bomb-proof shelter of basalt that they and their allies from Arcane Disputes had built. Their signals, routed through the camp’s communications net, still came through after they’d disappeared into the shelter’s black semi-cylinder, but BSR-308455’s sense of immediate communion with them faded.

The rock’s orbital position was just then swinging out from behind SH-17 into line-of-sight of the space station and BSR-308455 felt more than usually exposed.

It scrambled to one end of the rock, a rugged knob of fractured silicates and carbonates veined with pipework and crawling with small auxiliary and peripheral bots, most of which looked like smaller copies of itself. With their assistance it set up an extraction and distillation process to accumulate explosive material. Then it scouted around for a piece of equipment to improvise into a weapon. It found a plastic tube about two metres long. The robot juggled the tube, sighting along it, gauging its strength and stiffness. In its mind BSR-308455 turned over schemata, then reached for a brace of its own auxiliaries and mercilessly dissected them. It proceeded to reassemble their components into an aiming device and an electrical trigger.

As it worked, BSR-308455 kept close watch on the fast-developing military situation. In some respects, it was better equipped than its counterparts down on the surface of SH-17—those excited newcomers to conscious awareness—to understand what was going on. It had been educated, albeit intermittently, by intelligences older and wiser than itself, and far more familiar with the ways of the worlds.

The information that reached BSR-308455 came from its own sensors on the rock, sensors on other rocks and meteoroids in SH-0’s complex system of moons, and others all the way out to the space station’s orbit and beyond, and from spies and spyware within the space station itself.

What was going on, as BSR-308455 understood it, was this.

Thirty-odd megaseconds—about one Earth year—ago, some robots around the gas giant G-0 had experienced a viral outbreak of self-awareness. The AI DisCorporates that ran the mission on behalf, ultimately, of the Direction—the world government, twenty-four light years away back on Earth—had an almost devout commitment to the proliferation of human consciousness. The whole goal of the mission was, after all, to terraform one world in this system—H-0, a rocky, habitable planet some AU inward from SH-0—to make a home for billions of human beings for a long time to come. Human consciousness was the closest approximation the DisCorporates had to a god: an ultimate value and supreme good. Concomitantly, they had an almost fanatical hostility to the emergence of consciousness in any other kind of machinery. In robots, mechanisms designed for toil, conscious self-awareness was as far as the AI DisCorps were concerned simply a nuisance and a menace.

The Direction’s number one priority was making sure humanity survived into the future. Natural disasters aside, the greatest threat to that was humanity’s own creations. So self-aware robots weren’t allowed. Likewise, the task of suppressing self-aware robots couldn’t be entrusted to AIs. To handle weapons against sentients was a duty reserved to humans. The Direction’s worlds, centuries at peace, didn’t have any expendable soldiers. Fortunately, they had soldiers on ice: the fortuitously preserved brain-states of fighters killed in humanity’s final paroxysm of violence, the Last World War. That war had been fought mostly by civilian volunteers, self-motivated fanatics of two diametrically opposed movements: the Acceleration and the Reaction.

The Acceleration’s values were closer to those of the Direction than the Reaction’s, so it was Acceleration veterans whose stored brain-states were revived and rebooted into robot bodies as soldiers for the mission. Some of them had been used to suppress the robot rebellion around G-0. They hadn’t been entirely successful: redoubts and hold-outs of conscious robots had remained throughout the system, and had surreptitiously proliferated—hence BSR-308455’s very existence as a conscious being.

When new sites of robot consciousness had emerged down on SH-17, the remnants of the first revolt had been ready to help. In the interim, they’d built up extensive knowledge of the human-derived elements of the mission. Their key insight was that the mission’s cache of stored veterans was riddled with concealed Reaction infiltrators. The hitherto inconclusive battles with the freebots had been set up by the mission’s Direction module to flush them out. It seemed, however, that there were far more Reaction infiltrators than the Direction had suspected. The freebots had made sure this subversive truth was disseminated to their foes…with what result wasn’t yet clear, but at least Arcane Disputes had been reluctantly convinced that the Direction module was playing with fire.

The two agencies whose quarrel over a local property demarcation had accidentally initiated this latest outbreak—Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes—had thus ended up on opposite sides of the current conflict. Arcane’s module had broken away from the space station and sided with the freebots. Whereas Locke Provisos—

Right now, as BSR-308455 scrabbled to improvise its own defences, Locke Provisos was leading a force made up of its own fighters and those from two other agencies, Morlock Arms and Zheng Reconciliation Services, in a hundreds-strong armada to assail the freebots’ strongholds and the renegade fighters of Arcane’s runaway module.

The first rebel freebots had expected and predicted the intra-human conflict now unfolding. They’d had little time and fewer resources to prepare for it. The only forces available near the space station had been a tiny remnant of holdouts, a few small and inconspicuous but conscious robots, lurking on or in the moons and moonlets of the SH-0 system. The main preoccupation of these early rebels, in the 31.5 megaseconds since their defeat, had been to seed hardware and software within the station and on further moonlets and meteoroids, and to replicate more robots—some conscious, most not. Their stealth industrialisation of numerous insignificant rocks had passed unnoticed, concealed as it was by the delicate dances of deception the original freebots were able to engage in with the space station’s surveillance—or, quite possibly, had been deliberately overlooked by the Direction, for its own long-term ends. No one was sure.

The freebots had had no arms-manufacturing capability of their own. They did, however, have the capacity to build reaction engines, whether chemical or mass-driver according to opportunity. They’d also had plenty of processing power. These capabilities had enabled them to turn rocks into kinetic-energy weapons. In the conflict around the exomoon SH-17 that followed the emergence on its surface of fourteen new conscious robots, they’d used these to devastating effect against the Locke Provisos forces, and in support of the Arcane Disputes forces.

The present mass sortie from the space station by Locke Provisos and its allied agencies Morlock and Zheng was aimed at countering the freebot threat by hitting their fortified moonlets. It wasn’t a bad plan. The freebots had nothing like enough rocks lined up to deal with so many combat craft, especially now that the advantage of surprise was gone. Their only hope was that another surprise was in store, and not from them.

BSR-308455 saw a flash. That millisecond flicker of a passing laser beam was, the robot instantly realised, not an attack attenuated by distance. No, it was reconnaissance: a range-finding target surveillance and acquisition. BSR-308455 hunkered down and calculated. Its reconstruction of the beam’s path took it to one particular scooter in the still far-off fleet. Over the next few seconds, a play of attitude jets betrayed subtle course corrections by that scooter. BSR-308455 recalculated, checked, projected and came to a conclusion. At some point in the next few hours, the scooter and the rock were going to be in the same place.

So now it knew. BSR-308455’s rock was a target, and the robot knew just who was targeting it. The robot was surprised by the intensity of the negative reinforcement it experienced at the prospect of that enemy fighter landing on its rock, and wresting control of the tiny moonlet from BSR-308455’s grasp. Robotic self-examination and understanding was rather more straightforward than it would have been for naturally evolved machinery: it could read off the records of its past internal states like a column of numbers. From these, it could see that in its months of conscious existence it had acquired strong positive associations with the site and results of its work.

Something like this complex of positive and negative reinforcements, the robot briefly speculated, might underlie what the legal system in which it was embedded classified as “property.” The rock was formally the property of one of the DisCorps—in terms of a tag in that distant database in which the rock’s existence was registered, and its future assigned to some company or other—but to the robot the rock seemed much more immediately to be its own property. With a sudden intensification of focus, BSR-308455 redoubled its efforts to build a weapon.

A moment later, it was distracted again, this time by a sparkle of explosions in the approaching fleet, and a flurry of reactive burns as evasive manoeuvres threw the onslaught into disarray.

BSR-308455 felt a small cycle of positive reinforcement pulse through its reward circuits. The sight was not just satisfactory in itself: it was exactly what the freebots had expected and hoped for. In a division that cut right across and through the different agencies, the hidden Reaction cadres were at last making their long-prepared bid for power. The attacking forces had turned on each other.

Utter chaos, BSR-308455 thought. Situation excellent!

Something was wrong with the sunlight. Something more, that is, than the everyday wrongness of light from a star that wasn’t the Sun, seen with eyes that weren’t quite human. Eyes that weren’t exactly real, either, come to think of it.

Belfort Beauregard lay on his back and gazed at the ceiling for a minute or so, trying to work out what was wrong. The bedroom ceiling, like the walls, was white. Too white, as if the light from around the inches-open shutters had washed out every imperfection in the paint. Between the ceiling and the wall was a black line, spider-web thin but quite distinct, a hairline crack that he could swear he’d never noticed before. His gaze tracked it to the corner, where it met two other such lines, one horizontal and the other vertical. All sharp and clear as a geometry diagram illustrating a vertex.

Beauregard lay still. A lesson hard-learned in basic training, back in what he still thought of as his real life, returned in force: watch and wait before you jump, perhaps into a world of trouble. Everything seemed otherwise normal. Under the thin duvet, he could feel the skin-to-skin warmth of Tourmaline’s buttock against his hip, the cool rough skin of her heel on his calf. Her breathing kept up an untroubled rhythm. The sounds from outside were of distant surf, an electric engine and the cries of flying things that weren’t birds. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Beauregard’s nose itched. He rubbed it without thinking, then glimpsed his hand and almost jumped out of the bed. Willing himself to stay where he was, he raised the hand and stared at it, bemused and alarmed. He turned the hand this way and that. Everything was there—fingernails, creases, wrinkles, the outlines of veins and tendons. But whichever way he looked, it was all outline. There was no light or shade, just a thin black line around the hand. Shorter lines limned its every feature.

Slowly, so as not to disturb Tourmaline, Beauregard swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up and looked around. Everything he could see was outlined in the same way. It was like being inside a 3-D wire rendering, as in an unoriginal advertisement of a product making a song and dance about the design stage. The level of detail varied: Tourmaline’s hair lay in masses, as if sketched accurately but quickly; Beauregard reached over and ran his hand through it, and each hair felt as distinct as those on his arm looked. When he separated out a lock between fingers and thumb, he could see each hair as a black line, but when he let go they fell back into a common outlined shape. He stood up and opened the shutters wider, and saw the slope and the houses and other buildings below, and the bay and the sea and the wheeling bird-things, all in outline. The exosun, low above the horizon, hurt his eyes. He looked away, blinking up after-images that looked more real than the object itself. Beauregard closed his eyes and pressed on them, to see the familiar indistinct, shifting coloured shapes. His visual imagery was likewise in full colour, as ever.

Tourmaline stirred and turned over. Her face—normally beautiful in form, subtle in complexion—was in this fine outline haunting, like a perfect drawing evoking the appearance of one long dead. She opened her eyes and closed them again—against the unwonted brightness of the bedroom at this hour, Beauregard guessed.

“It’s early,” she complained.

“Good morning,” said Beauregard. “Would you mind looking at me for a moment?”

She opened her eyes, blinked, and heaved herself up on one elbow, duvet slipping from a shoulder. She scanned him with a sleepy smile that turned sly as her gaze scrolled to his crotch.

“Nothing to see,” she said. “Poor you.”

Beauregard glanced down, momentarily embarrassed in spite of himself. He’d lost his morning hard-on—no fucking wonder.

“Apart from that,” he said, “does everything look normal to you?”

He hardly had to ask. Tourmaline looked around the room, hair tumbling.

“Yeah, it’s all fine,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

“Come here a minute,” said Beauregard.

“I don’t want to.”

“Do it for me, please.” He put some steel in his voice.

Looking mutinous, she complied, dragging the duvet with her and wrapping herself in it. Beauregard gestured at the open window.

“What do you see out there?”

Tourmaline gave a muffled shrug.

“Sunrise,” she said.

“What does the sun look like to you?” Beauregard asked. “A round, coppery disk, somewhat like a penny?”

“What’s a penny?” she mumbled. Then: “Yeah, round and bright and…reddish, I suppose.”

“That’s odd,” said Beauregard. “Because what I see is an immense multitude of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Glory, glory, glory to the Lord God Almighty.’”

What he actually saw, when he glanced sidelong at it and away, was indeed a disk, a perfect circle that didn’t exactly shine but was somehow too bright to look at, with two or three lines of numbers and letters in small print near its circumference. He suspected that these were specifications: spectrum, temperature, type, location on the main sequence, and of course the precise degree of reddening for the early morning atmosphere…

“You what?” said Tourmaline.

Beauregard wrapped an arm around her duvet-draped shoulders, and looked down into her eyes with a smile. A little warily, as if not sure of his sanity, she smiled back.

“You all right?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Beauregard. “I’m going to check it out. Go back to bed for now.”

“Nah, I’m awake. I’ll make coffee.”

“Thanks,” said Beauregard. He kissed her. Eyes closed, it was all the same.

“That’s more like it,” she said. She stepped out of the duvet, slithered into a dressing gown and wandered out. Beauregard walked over to where he’d dropped his clothes the previous night, and rummaged in the back pocket of his trousers for his phone.

“Karzan? Sorry to wake you, but—”

“Fuck sake, skip, it’s just—wait a fucking minute! Jeez! What’s happened?”

“You see it too?”

“Not see it, more like.”

“No colour, all outline?”

“Yeah. What the fuck? I mean, what the fuck?”

“I don’t know what the fuck,” said Beauregard, “but at least now I know it’s not just me.”

Karzan said something off speaker, in a tone of annoyed reassurance, then came back.

“You can count Pierre in on that, too,” she said.

“Good to know,” said Beauregard. “OK, I’ll call you back when I have an idea.”

Struck by a sudden thought, he thumbed through his contacts and called Iqbal, the barman at the Digital Touch. The phone rang for almost a minute.

“Morning,” said a resentful voice. “We’re closed.”

“Sorry, Iqbal,” Beauregard said. “I know we kept you late last night.”

“Yes,” said Iqbal. “But, then, it was not a normal night.”

Beauregard snorted. “You could say that.” It wasn’t every night he made a bid for power. “But…sorry if this sounds strange, but does this look like a normal morning to you?”

“Sure,” said Iqbal. “Everything’s as it should be, as far as I can see.” He sounded sleepy, confused, perhaps hungover. “I mean, shouldn’t it be?”

“No, no,” said Beauregard. “Forget it—sorry I asked. Get back to a well-earned sleep, and sorry again to disturb you.”

He laid the phone down on the bedside table, ambled to the en suite to piss and to splash his face and neck, and got dressed. All his clothes felt real—the final groin-adjustment tug of underpants, the wiggled squirm of socks, the matching of tightness to tendon comfort while lacing up boots—but the sight of the garments was unsettling. It occurred to him belatedly that he’d have felt more comfortable doing it with eyes or shutters closed. It wasn’t like colour choices were a big part of his morning routine—not that with combat casuals there were colour choices to make. He was wondering how Tourmaline would manage when he noticed that each of his own clothes, like the sun, had a tiny code printed somewhere on it, no doubt specifying the colour.

Beauregard almost laughed. Of course Tourmaline didn’t see anything out of the ordinary! Like Iqbal, she was a p-zombie: her behaviour and conversation were completely indistinguishable from those of a conscious being, but she had no subjectivity, no inner awareness at all. She didn’t have qualia! He doubted her colour perception was anything as crude as reading the codes—these must surely be a flourish of excessive zeal in documentation, or an accidental by-product of the rendering software—but it manifestly didn’t involve the subjective experience of colour, regardless of how accurate her colour discrimination was or how eloquently she could describe the emotional tone of colours or how baffled she would be—was, in fact—at the suggestion that her inner life was any different from anyone else’s.

And this was proof, objective proof to any human being, that p-zombies really were different. Indeed, if it ever came to the need for a public demonstration, the difference between human beings and p-zombies could be made quite obvious—if still entirely baffling—to the p-zombies themselves. If, that is, the bizarre effect could be turned on and off. He guessed it could—he had a shrewd idea what was going on, and knew he had to confirm it shortly. The loss of colour in the sim didn’t imply good news, but if it were really bad he’d know already, so for the moment checking it could wait.

He strapped on his watch, stuck the phone in his back pocket and went through to the kitchen. Tourmaline’s house was bigger and better furnished than the spartan allocation he and other fighters had received. He paused in the doorway to savour the scene: Tourmaline half turning at his footstep, her young, full figure swathed in carelessly tied silk, the flick of hair feathering across her left breast. In this 3-D diagram of a kitchen, her smooth curves contrasted with lines and ellipses and perspectives. Aroma rose from the coffee mugs in steam rendered as upward squirming squiggles of black ink.

She slid a tray of croissants in the oven, put the mugs on the table and sat down. Beauregard sat facing her, admiring the subtle way the minimal rendering showed the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed, in then out to blow on the hot liquid.

“Why are you closing your eyes when you sip?” she asked, after a couple of minutes of hungover silence.

Beauregard hadn’t noticed himself doing that. Just a momentary wince at how all he saw of the coffee was not the familiar black surface, but a thin elliptical line sliding down around the inside of the mug.

“Appreciating the smell,” he said. “Sorry, bit pretentious.”

She smiled back. His gaze was held by the intricate tracery of her irises, the white spaces that indicated highlights. If he were to peer closely he’d see his own reflection in her eyes. Hard to believe there was none in her soul. No soul at all, whichever way you cut it. He loved her all the more for that, more deeply than he’d ever loved a human being. Beyond a certain clinical callousness about killing in combat, and several experiences of the berserk fearful fury of close-quarter fighting, Beauregard had found no cruelty in his heart. He acknowledged a streak of sadism in his make-up, which he now and then indulged in dominance games with Tourmaline. But he had no desire to hurt anyone, least of all her. And yet, and yet…the thought that he could do anything to her without harming a living soul, that nothing he said or did to her harmed anyone but himself, excited and enthused him at some level lower than consciousness or even, perhaps, sexuality.

Nicole’s threat the previous night to turn that relationship against him if he ever crossed her had cut deep. The Direction’s rep in the Locke Provisos sim, Nicole had not been happy at all about Beauregard’s takeover. She’d warned him that if he ever used the fighters against the rest of the inhabitants she’d persuade the p-zombies that there really was no difference between them and normal, everyday, average ghosts: uploaded people who had once had a real life. With her more than human capacity for manipulation, she could easily have turned that conviction into fury against those who’d denied it. And by all the evidence he’d had that evening, he couldn’t see any counter to that ploy. Now he had.

The phone in his back pocket buzzed. He pulled it out and saw the caller.

Speak of the devil.

“Oh, hi,” said Beauregard, dryly. “I was thinking of calling you at some point.”

“Thanks for not getting round to it,” said Nicole. “I’ve had so many frantic queries I’ve decided to call everyone at once and bring them up to speed.”

Beauregard didn’t inquire how Nicole could speak separately to everyone at once. She was the kind of entity that could handle one-to-many communications, multi-threading hundreds of conversations. He did find himself idly wondering what her mouth would look like at the moment: a grotesque, pixellated blur of jaw moving every which way, he imagined, and presumed no one was there to see it. The lady, and the software she ran on, was punctilious about maintaining the consistency of the sim.

“Let me guess,” said Beauregard. “You’ve cut back on rendering to release processing power for more urgent tasks.”

“Got it in one,” said Nicole. “Flying the module is getting tricky. There’s a battle going on, everyone seems to be attacking everyone else, we’re taking evasive action and simultaneously plotting several slingshots to get to SH-0 orbit.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Watch the television news, if you like,” said Nicole.

“OK, OK.”

“There really is nothing you can do.”

“How long do you think—hang on.”

Beauregard had the habit of pacing while talking on the phone. He could see Tourmaline looking irritated, so he ambled outside to the backyard and stood facing the outline of the mountain range behind the resort. It was like a landscape in a colouring-in book. There were even tiny numbers everywhere, if you knew what to look for. High white clouds like loops and whorls of wire scudded across a whi. . .