Fractions (80 page)

‘There's no contact?'

‘Fucking Earth-Tenders, they're scared, they jam us – anything you've seen on our tapes was old or faked. No, we don't have any contact.' He turned abruptly, facing straight towards me. ‘Look, Wilde, I've got to go. You're free now, I've zapped your restraints.' He stood up, and leaned towards someone out of sight. I couldn't hear the exchange which followed. Then Reid turned back, looking up at me with unguarded guile.

‘Wilde?' he said. ‘Still there? Can you do something, right now? Go and check what's going on in the nearest macro. There's some problem –'

The screen greyed out.

‘Shit!' I said.

Meg stood in front of me, a worried wraith. ‘What do we do?'

I shrugged. ‘Do as Reid said, I guess. Can you think of anything else?'

She shook her head.

I stepped into the simulated simulation-frame, and Meg stepped in after me. The sense of over-lapping body-images was momentarily disorienting, and then we meshed smoothly with each other and with the machine. Meg became a voice behind my shoulder, a shadow in the corner of my eye.

I had full control of the robot now – Reid's zap must have disabled the run-file that separated me from its motor circuits outside of work periods and emergencies – and I jetted undisturbed through the structure towards a macro which I (now) could recognise as the one I'd been in contact with. Some of the other robots were doing desultory work, others drifted in their off-line mode or clung like roosting birds to girders. The Malley Mile glowed a faint blue in its rainbow ring: Cherenkov backwash from the probe.

I grasped a girder, inched closer to the macro's surface, and plunged my face into its bath of freezing fire.

All is analogy, interface; the self itself has windows, the sounds and pictures in our heads the icons on a screen over a machine, the mind. It's so in the natural body, and in the artificial, and many times so in the smart-matter world of the macro-organic.

Meg was stealing processing-power, time-sharing in greater minds. It was necessary for me, for us, to get a minimal, symbolic understanding of what was going on, but it took its toll. I was running slower than the fast folk, slower even than the slow. I walked as an invisible ghost, a momentary shiver in the dreams of the posthuman.

I found myself first on the big planet. On the slope where I'd first stood, I watched seasons – snow and spring, summer and fall – lap and retreat like waves on the shore. The environment was a guess at that on a planet they'd actually espied, some thirty light-years away. In a future day this picture might be updated and revised by the downlink from the passing of the probe.

They lost interest in it even as I watched. Consistent to the last, they deleted it from their memories by flaring off its sun. I walked through the engulfing nova, in the sleet of a false reality dissolving into binary code, and on into a vast hall. In the gloom of a Moloch's temple heavy-lidded giants sat, athletic marble gods awkward in the pose of Buddhas. Decay beyond decadence, a stasis of frenzy and fatigue. Indefatigable mechanisms, beneath and beyond the giants' conscious control, continued their relentless, pointless acceleration of processing speed. Second by second, Meg's operating system tracked the change.

Before the last echo of my footsteps had died from the hall the meditating giants were dust. Outside, in yet another virtual environment, cities were built and torn down in what to me were moments, against an ever-shifting backdrop of planetary landscapes. Eventually all human analogy and interest ceased. I drifted down endless corridors of geometric abstraction, the chopped logic of interminable arguments filling my mind, as if I were overhearing the trapped ghosts of theologians in a hell that only they could fully deserve.

Behind me, in those corridors, a plaintive female voice called after me. It grew stronger as time passed, but I ignored it, desperate to understand the terrible debate. I was learning – something vital. The voice cried after me. Eventually I turned. Meg's anguished face conveyed the strain of an operating system at the limits of its capacity.

‘Come
out
!' she said. ‘Come out of it now!'

I stared at her, puzzled. Everything felt slow, the corridors whiting-out like the Kazakh snow-drifts. With a sudden access of impatience Meg grabbed me and shoved me at the wall. It collapsed, and I was –

 

– out, and drifting away from the macro. At the same moment I fell back into the room, back into the mind of my own machine, and into the warm arms of my dear, sweet operating system, my succubus and surrogate soul-mate. Tears were in my eyes and an insistent ringing in my ears.

I recognised it as an alarm. Outside, out towards the Ring, a light flashed and a radio-beacon beckoned. The beacon was approaching, fast.

‘What's going on?'

Meg stared at me. ‘Oh, Jon Wilde,' she said. ‘You were in there for a fucking
year
, real time! The macros are all crazy or dying.'

A year. ‘What's happened?'

Meg caught my hand. ‘Later,' she said. ‘We gotta go. I'll take us out.'

She stepped into the frame. As I watched, slack-jawed and in no fit state to handle so much as an exercise-bike, she kicked us off towards the beacon.

I saw what the beacon marked.

Coming out of the Ring towards us was the most disgraceful contraption that ever passed for a spacecraft, a bolted and kludged conglomeration of space-stations and habitats at least two kilometres long and half a kilometre across its widest diameter. If a Mir-Shuttle lash-up from the early decades had been given a million generations to breed for size and against elegance, it might have produced this. It spun dizzyingly on its axis and it steered a perilous course alongside the continuing lethal ravenous jet – the ultimate live wire – of the supply-line to the probe.

All the robots were scooting towards the ship. As soon as each tiny machine arrived it grabbed on to whichever of the many protruding bits of junk it had reached. The macros, too, were moving, but not as before. Frozen now, skeletal, they drifted and stirred as the huge craft crashed with brutal majesty through the structure on which we'd toiled.

The craft's surface rushed at the window. I almost closed my eyes. But Meg brought us to a matched velocity. I saw the robot's arms and grippers reach out. The instant they had found a handhold, Meg flipped the viewpoint, and then stepped out of the frame.

She sat down on the bed beside me and we clung to each other as frantically as our machine did to the craft. The sky rolled over, and over, and over. The white line of the fuel-jet lashed past, closer and closer.

‘I'll try to patch,' Meg said. She stared, and as if by an effort of her will the view suddenly became a stabilised scene from somewhere up towards the front. The rainbow ring almost filled it, its blue backwash flaring as stray, shattered girders tumbled in. Off to the side, I saw macros thrust away by the ship's attitude jets. By accident or by design, they were falling towards the surface of Jupiter. The planet, already visibly altered by their activities, the Great Red Spot repeated like a rash across its face, would receive those snowflake structures, and perhaps warm them to a renewed and unimaginable life.

In my last minutes in the Solar System, I felt my initial reaction vindicated. The minds in the macros had fallen into a trap of their own devising, a gamble they may have consciously – how other? – embraced. For as the speed of their thoughts had increased, so had their subjective time – and therefore, so had space. Even interplanetary distances had yawned into gulfs, with journey-times which would have been to them what interstellar journeys – without the wormhole – would have been to us. Their own virtual realities had become more absorbing – in every sense – than the fast-receding universe of actuality.

The time-span of their great project was greater than their attention span, longer than any human civilisation had ever lasted. They had taken with them our weaknesses as well as our strengths, and multiplied and accelerated both. Humanity, better adapted to space by virtue of its very inferiority, would outlive them.

As had I. In a more literal sense than I'd ever intended, I had made it to the ships.

The Cherenkov radiation rose to an intolerable blue glare as the forward part of the ship we clung to passed into the wormhole gate.

They spent the night in the tunnel, with the respectful robots. From shortwave communication with others of their kind, the robots had learned of the nuclear destruction of Jay-Dub's land-crawler. They discussed it solemnly as the humans struggled to sleep. The last thing Dee saw, before she dozed off in a relatively dry niche with her arms around Ax, was the glow in the eyes of the robots as they adopted as an article of their faith the proposition that Jay-Dub was not dead.

In the first light of morning the humans rose and kitted themselves out in the robot disguises. Their main purpose was to fool observers in the sky; on the ground, up close, they'd deceive nobody.

‘How do you
know
we've got to do all this?' Ax grumbled. He was peeved at having to wear an even more ludicrous robot-shell than the others, because of his small size. He looked like a litter-bin with legs.

‘Jay-Dub told me what to do,' Dee said, her voice deep and strange through the speaker-grille of her headpiece.

‘When?'

She gave a clanking shrug. ‘When we were in his VR together,' she said. ‘And just before I left the truck, I jacked in again. He told me exactly what to do, if he didn't make it.'

‘And you're not going to tell us?' demanded Tamara, trying to find a suitable place on the robot body to stow her pistol. (‘Worse than pockets in a skirt,' she'd muttered.)

‘No,' said Dee firmly. ‘If I don't make it, you can't do anything. And if any of you don't, it's better you don't know.'

‘Nothing like dying happy,' said Wilde.

The robot who'd done most of the talking bade them farewell, assured them they'd always be welcome in the camps of the Metal People, and gave them some advice as to how to behave if confronted. Its bass voice trailed off as it looked at Dee.

‘You are a machine too,' it said. ‘You will know.'

‘Thank you,' said Dee, her voice sounding even stranger as she tried not to laugh. ‘But my human friend here is more familiar with the wild machines.'

‘Avoid them,' the robot told her. ‘They are not like us.'

The humans walked along the tunnel towards the arch of distant light. When they reached it and turned for a backward glance, their own vision had adapted, and the paired pinhole glints of the robots' eyes had vanished in the dark.

 

Tamara sneezed. It made a mess inside her headpiece, and she surreptitiously lifted it off to wipe away the snot and spittle.

‘Great,' said Ax, from behind her. ‘That'll look real convincing, a robot pulling its own head off.'

‘Not to mention sneezing,' said Dee. ‘What's the matter, anyway? That's your…seventeenth sneeze in thirty-five minutes.'

‘Fallout.' Tamara sniffed aggressively. ‘It fucking gets up my nose, OK?'

They were walking in single file along a back street at the northern edge of the Fifth Quarter, the side opposite to the one that faced the human quarter. Their objective, Dee had told them, was to continue along that course, past the tip of the Quarter where it tapered into the sand, and on until they intersected the Stone Canal. The only activity they'd encountered was that of small biomechs, hopping or crawling across their path, heading into the wind that was bringing the radioactive dust in off the desert. Eventually, Tamara had explained, whole flocks of them would congregate at the blast-site, to feast on the rich unstable isotopes.

‘Kind of ecological,' she'd added. ‘Keeps it out of the carbon-life food-chain, see?'

They walked on. The sun got higher in the sky, and the suits became increasingly uncomfortable. Dee, with more conscious control of her pain-tolerance than the others, allowed her impatience to goad them on.

‘The sooner we get there,' she said, ‘the sooner we can get this clutter off.'

‘Those of us who get there,' Ax protested. ‘Bury me in something else, that's all I ask.'

‘Try a bin-liner,' Wilde called back callously.

Dee urged them all to be quiet. Badinage wasn't a feature of the humanoid robots. The shadow of a swooping aircraft emphasised her point, and, fortunately, none of them looked up.

Eventually the Fifth Quarter petered out, the street running into the sand. The canal gleamed in the distance. They approached it across desert and, later, fields. Tamara guided them carefully around those fields whose owners were unlikely to tolerate robots clumping across their crops. In some of the fields the crops were difficult to distinguish from the irrigation-systems. There was a kind of modified cane that could be harvested as jointed plastic pipes, and these fields they walked through, parting the tall synthetic stalks.

They reached the bank of the Stone Canal. The pathway along which Wilde and Jay-Dub had entered the city, four days earlier, was on the opposite bank. The canal itself had no traffic in sight.

Dee had led them to the exact spot where the boat, in which Jay-Dub had rescued her and Ax, waited for them. Jay-Dub had recalled it from its mooring, many kilometres farther up the canal, by a coded transmission shortly before entering the tunnel. Spy and Soldier between them had had no problem in identifying the co-ordinates, accurate to the nearest metre, which had been among the last pieces of information Jay-Dub had passed to Dee's mind.

Beside the boat, another robot waited – a patroller. It was smaller and squatter than Jay-Dub had been, but of a similar shape. On first glimpsing it Tamara had given an excited cry, then she fell silent as the robot extended its legs and peered at them.

‘This boat matches the identification of one used to impede an investigation,' it informed them as they walked up. ‘Do you know anything about it?' The question was repeated on several microwave channels and in several codes, but only Dee was aware of that. The initial aural query had been a mere courtesy.

Wilde walked on past the patroller, ignoring it. Tamara and Ax, after a moment of hesitation, followed. Dee walked a few steps behind them, her unsteady gait barely a pretence. The patroller's hull swayed as it tracked backwards and forwards after the marching metal figures. As Dee passed it, she lurched sideways against one of its legs. The robot toppled into the water and sank without trace.

And that was that. They all piled into the boat, cast off, and headed up the canal. As soon as they got inside the cabin, they stripped off their armour. Ax made to heave his hated disguise over the side, but Dee stopped him.

‘We're going to need the steel,' she told him.

 

The sun had long since set when they reached their destination, the limit and source of the canal. There was a small jetty at one bank, and steps cut into the rock up the same side of that steep, barren glen in the Madreporite Mountains. Dee moored the boat and they all stepped out, and stood looking at the hundred-metre-high concrete dam that blocked the valley before them.

‘The Sieve Plates,' said Dee.

‘You mean there are more?' asked Wilde, staring up.

‘Oh yes,' said Tamara. ‘Another five, I think.'

‘Jesus.' Wilde peeled the cellophane from his final pack of cigarettes and lit one. He couldn't stop looking up. ‘Who built this? Martians?'

‘Robots,' Dee said, a trace of pride in her voice. ‘Now come on. There's no time to waste.'

By starlight and comet-glow they ascended the stair. It zigzagged up and up, until they were above the top of the dam and could see the dark lake of cometary water and, two kilometres farther up the glen, another and higher dam.

‘Martians,' Wilde said. ‘Gotta be.'

‘New Martians,' Tamara panted. The air was noticeably thinner, although oddly enough Wilde seemed to cope with it better.

‘Machines,' Dee insisted.

‘Fuck who built it,' said Ax. ‘When does this goddamn stair stop?'

Five minutes later he had an answer, as they turned around a buttress of rock and found themselves in the mouth of an artificial cavern. The cave was about three metres high and two across, with a fused-rock floor. Ahead, around several bends, was a faint glow. Dee led them confidently towards it.

The light brightened, the cavern widened, and they turned the final corner and stepped into a far greater cave, a warehouse cut from the rock. A good thirty metres high by fifty wide, it was stacked with crates and machinery and lit by arc-lights hung from the roof. It was hard to tell how far back it went.

‘Who the fuck built this?' Ax asked.

Tamara wrinkled her nose. ‘Somebody with nuclear blasting-equipment,' she said. She glanced up at the lights. ‘And nuclear power to burn.'

‘It was built by Jay-Dub,' Dee said.

‘All by himself?' Wilde sounded amused.

From behind the nearby stacks of machinery and crates came the unmistakable sounds of firearms being readied to fire.

‘Not quite by himself,' said David Reid, as he stepped into view. He waved a casual hand. ‘And you are not by yourselves, either, in case that isn't clear.'

They all stood stock still.

‘It's clear,' said Tamara.

Reid gave her a wry smile, Ax a polite one, and Wilde a cold glance. Then he looked Dee straight in the eye.

‘Well hello, Jon,' he said. ‘Not like you to hide behind a woman's skirts.'

Behind him, several armed men in black jumpsuits moved into view, and then surrounded the group. Reid checked to see that everyone was well covered. They were. He leaned forward with a slight bow, and offered Dee a cigarette.

‘Mind you,' he went on, after he'd lit it for her, ‘it's not like you to die heroically, either. I must say I was quite impressed that you did, even in the knowledge that you had a copy.'

Dee regarded him silently for a moment.

‘I'll talk to you later,' she said.

Her expression and stance altered slightly.

‘Hello, Dave,' her voice said. ‘I should've known you knew me better than that.'

‘Shit,' said Wilde. ‘You bastard.'

Reid laughed at the comprehension on Wilde's face, the bewilderment on Ax's and Tamara's.

‘Wilde, or Jay-Dub if you like, downloaded into her computer,' Reid explained, as if it should have been obvious.

‘And Meg,' said Dee's voice. ‘It's not even crowded.'

Reid sighed and turned to Ax and Tamara.

‘What makes you people go along with this?' he asked. ‘What did this machine, or that –' he indicated Wilde, who was very slowly and carefully pulling his pack of fags from his pocket ‘– tell you? That information wants to be free?' He laughed. ‘If that's what you want, go back to Ship City right now – the whole place is in an uproar, with arguments turning into fist-fights, if not yet firefights. Just what you've always wanted – anarchy in the streets! Or did it tell you it could raise the dead? What could be worth the risk of replacing humanity with…flatlines?'

‘So what're flatlines?' Wilde asked. He'd managed to get his cigarettes out, under the guards' watchful eyes, and he lit one and absently offered the pack around. Reid watched this performance with an air of being quite unimpressed.

‘You should know,' he said. ‘Automata that mimic conscious action, but have none themselves. No subjectivity. No…souls.'

Dee's mouth opened, but Wilde spoke first.

‘Ach, come off it Dave,' he said. ‘We can argue about that sort of thing till the whisky runs out, like we used to. What you should worry about now is non-human minds, all right, but it's not any you see standing around here. It's the ones that'll come for us all any time now, when they reach the other side of the Malley Mile. That's when you'll see what a flatline universe looks like. From the inside.'

The suspicion on Reid's face was like a relenting of his earlier contempt.

Dee spoke again. ‘That's why we need to run the fast folk,' her voice said. ‘To find the way back.'

‘But you do know the way back,' said Reid, facing Dee but speaking to someone else. ‘That's what I sent you into the macro to find out, so we could set it all up.'

‘What I know, what I found out back there, is the way
here.
' Her voice was uncharacteristically harsh, straining the deeper registers of her vocal chords. Then it shifted up again. ‘But the way here and the way back are not the same thing, and we have to go back. Through the daughter wormhole.'