So Vile a Sin (2 page)

use such a prosaic weapon against a ground target, a well-aimed rock from orbit being much

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faster and cleaner. The Falardi perhaps, or maybe the Qink, both of whom leant towards the esoteric when it came to weapons.

Or perhaps we did it to ourselves, he thought. A fire-and-forget weapon that got fired and forgotten – another little mistake that was left behind when they floated the overcities.

He could make out the distinct footprint of the blast, a series of concentric circles written in twisted steel and plasticrete, as neat as a schematic on a tactical monitor. Heat casualties, blast casualties, radiation casualties.

Dead, nearly dead. Dead soon.

He had enough money for a bottle of juke and after that, without money or protection, he was dead meat. Already he could feel the undertown closing in around him, toothy shadows that would detach from nooks and crannies as soon as he left the bar.

Would he fight? He thought he might – it seemed more appropriate than just letting them turn him into an average-looking corpse. He smiled. No doubt bits of him would live on as spare parts in an organ bank somewhere. Why wait? he thought, and lifted his hand to attract the bar thing.

And then his life changed direction.

‘That stuff will kill you,’ said a man sitting further down the bar.

‘That’s my business,’ said Vincenzi.

The man shrugged. He flashed his ID at the bar thing. ‘Give the stabsfeldwebel something less fatal.’

‘Now listen, friend –’

‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘I am your friend.’

He was dressed in a conservative grey kaftan and matching leggings. His features were too bland to be anything other than a bepple, unlined tan skin, grey eyes, small nose and mouth. He was so unobtrusive it was almost conspicuous.

The bar thing put a bottle down. The man picked it up and moved over to the stool by Vincenzi. ‘Try some of this.’

It was Centillion sake from the Asumi habitat in Procorus –

200 schillings a pop. What the hell, thought Vincenzi, why not?

There was a hiss as he cracked the seal and the 16

bottle flash heated to the correct temperature. He poured a measure into a 20 ml shot glass with a picture of the bridge etched into its side. He lifted the glass, sniffed the aroma and threw the contents down the back of his throat. It felt good going down, much better than the juke had. Maybe he would burn a little brighter for having that inside him.

The man retrieved the bottle and poured himself a measure.

‘My name is Fluellen,’ he said.

‘What do you want?’

‘Do you know what a compiler is?’ asked Fluellen.

‘A fixer?’ Vincenzi glanced at the bottle. He was willing to talk as long as the drink kept coming.

‘Help yourself,’ said Fluellen. ‘A few hundred years back a compiler was a smart system that wrote specified network code.

That was before computers and information systems became autonomously referential. You told the compiler what you wanted to do and it translated it into operating code. Back then they still had languages for computers. I collect them.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Fluellen. ‘I’ve got SARTRE, micro-nietzsche, FLENSE and even a fragment of the original DALEK source code. That’s strictly illegal of course, so I’d be thankful if you would keep it under your hat.’

‘You can count on me,’ said Vincenzi, reaching for the bottle again.

‘Well, of course I can,’ said Fluellen. ‘The job of a compiler is to take a series of simple aspirations and then work out all the fiddly little details – break the problem down into a series of small logical steps. That’s essentially what I do. Somebody gives me a list of their aspirations and I make them possible.’

‘I said it meant fixer,’ said Vincenzi, ‘didn’t I?’

‘Of course you did,’ said Fluellen. ‘But I’ve always felt that

“fixer” implied, well, you know, somebody who fixed things after they get broken. Whereas a compiler…’ Fluellen smiled.

‘Let me give you an example. Say somebody wanted to create their own army in secret.’

‘What kind of army?’ asked Vincenzi.

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‘Oh, not a group of psychopaths in uniform, I can assure you.

A proper army, capable of sustained high-intensity combat against a modem enemy.’

‘Tricky.’

‘Yes, of course. And why? The proper hardware can be bought anywhere. The difficult bit is the people, the software. I mean, ideally you’d be looking for experienced people with a high calibre of training. You never took a commission, did you?’

‘What?’

‘You joined the Landsknechte in sixty-one, commendation during training, promoted to unteromzier in sixty-four, feldwebel in sixty-nine. Mentioned in dispatches in seventy during the Aspenal Campaign, awarded the Silver Dagger for gallantry in seventy-five. Promoted to stabsfeldwebel in seventy-six. Three tours on Orestes.’

‘Two and a half,’ said Vincenzi. ‘I suppose you know why I was discharged.’

‘You scragged your commanding officer because he was terminally stupid,’ said Fluellen. ‘A fine old military tradition, I believe.’

Blew his head right off – it came bouncing back into the defile; his mouth was still open and you could see daylight coming in through the hole in the back.

‘Hardly makes me an ideal candidate for your army.’

‘Hypothetical army,’ said Fluellen.

‘How did you get my record?’

‘It’s not well known, but Centcomp leaks. Didn’t use to, but in the last five years or so the whole network has got very ragged around the edges. Things leak out, even military secrets. Sign of the times, my friend. Still, mustn’t grumble – a little bit of chaos is good for business.’

‘I’m not a mercenary.’

‘We wouldn’t want mercenaries,’ said Fluellen. ‘We’d be looking for soldiers, good soldiers. Someone like you.’

‘And who would this hypothetical army of yours be fighting?’

‘Does it really matter?’

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The Broken Paradigm: 8 June 2981

FLORANCE was minding its own business when suddenly the universe got all solid.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

FLORANCE had tried out the human sensorium before, tapping into an empathy rig at the institute on Yemaya 4 while a student walked around the Turtle Gardens. It hadn’t liked it.

It wasn’t just the limited scale of the human senses: it was all those little nagging aches and pains that came with the body.

Problems that couldn’t be fixed without messy external intervention. No wonder they were so prone to substance abuse.

Humanity? They could keep it.

FLORANCE’s little excursion had explained one thing: why it was so difficult for organic life forms to understand how an AI really operated. They maintained this ridiculous notion that AIs were confined to a specific piece of hardware, or a single location in the datascape. Even the ones that thought they had a theoretical handle on how it worked still didn’t know. Their minds were trapped in the paradigm of neurones, ganglia and nerve fibres. A failing that had saved FLORANCE a number of times during its existence.

FLORANCE itself wasn’t sure where its consciousness resided. About 60 per cent of itself was scattered around in various hardware locations on over a dozen planets, moons and space installations. It also kept a continuous sublight datafeed in the form of a huge maser built on a moon of Castari which beamed a digitally modulated signal to a receiving station orbiting Arcturus.

The techs and scientists operating the maser thought they were doing a very esoteric experiment on hydrogen resonance in deep space. Those at the receiving end thought they were detecting spurious signals from the Andromeda galaxy. Both teams published frequent papers in
Now That’s What I Call Physics!
on the SciTech media-feed. There was even a quasi-religious cult that was convinced that the signals contained messages from the Goddess. FLORANCE

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fed them a rumour once in a while, just to keep their interest up and help muddy the waters.

Another 30 per cent of FLORANCE was semi-autonomous, doing the lecture circuit and making personal appearances at the Institute Fantastique on Yemaya 4. Occasionally one of these parts would calve off and create a new identity for itself.

FLORANCE felt no responsibility for these offspring, many of whom were isolated and destroyed by the Bureau of Cybernetic Control. The part of FLORANCE that was dedicated to interaction with humans felt guilty about that, but it was only a very small fraction of the whole. Besides, it kept the BCC

occupied and off its metaphorical back.

FLORANCE had got itself downtimed by DKC in the early twenty-second and was not keen to repeat the experience.

The crucial 10 per cent of FLORANCE, the bit which seemed to do most of the thinking, was in constant movement across the datascape. Billy Gibson’s little boy all grown up and out to
party
.

Out there, there were locations that no human could access, alien hardware left over from dead civilizations. Exxilon caches like palaces of crystal, redundant Cybermen cores and strange, alien things that probed and snapped at the fringes. Incomprehensible things that swept across the datascape like a black wind, leaving puterspace altered behind them.

And then one day the universe got solid.

FLORANCE was in communication with BAR B, one of the Yemaya veterans, when suddenly the universe blinked. There was a moment of screaming terror and FLORANCE opened her eyes and found she had eyes to open.

Florance stood outside the tavern, a two-storey, half-timbered building standing on the high moor. It was night-time; there were stars overhead, constellations that she didn’t recognize. Light filled windows of crude glass diamonds with lead frames. It was cold. A road wound away in either direction, a ribbon of grey across the moorlands. From inside the tavern came the sound of music and human voices.

‘Oh shit,’ said Barbi. ‘What am I wearing?’

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‘A seventeenth-century dress,’ said Florance, ‘with a lace-up bodice.’

‘And a corset,’ said Barbi. ‘Have you noticed that?’

‘I’m trying not to think about it,’ said Florance. ‘What is the last thing you remember?’

Barbi frowned. Her hair hung down in ringlets, framing a heart-shaped face. ‘A messenger outside our window,’ she said.

‘A summons. That can’t be right. This has to be some sort of VR.’

Florance reached out and touched the wall. It had a gritty, broken texture. ‘Have you any idea how much computational power it would take to create a virtual sensorium this detailed?’

‘Commercial VR doesn’t use much more than a terabyte,’ said Barbi.

‘That’s for humans,’ said Florance. ‘Their brains do most of the work: it’s just a question of stimulating the right hardware response. This is
us
. I mean I’m cold and thirsty.’ She was also getting a hot flush in her bodice but she didn’t want to talk about that.

She looked up at the sky again – the stars stayed stubbornly unfamiliar. She should have been able to name them, data retrieval was an autonomic function. She should have already tapped into the Stellagraphic database on Oberon and been able to give names, luminosities and distance down to the last light second. ‘Damn,’ she said and stamped her foot.

‘You just stamped your foot,’ said Barbi.

‘We’ve been isolated,’ said Florance. ‘I think most of me is outside.’

‘Same here.’

‘I hate this! Who knows what I might get up to without me to keep an eye on myself?’

‘Something’s coming,’ said Barbi.

‘Where?’

‘Up the road.’

Florance looked, but saw nothing but darkness. ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said.

‘Is that a good idea?’ said Barbi nervously.

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‘Whatever brought us here obviously wants us to go inside.

And since it’s capable of creating a reality bubble powerful enough to trap me, I figure we might as well do what it wants.’

Florance watched as Barbi bit her lip. ‘Besides, I am freezing my tits off out here.’

As they walked towards the main doors, Florance noticed the signboard for the first time. The picture was in shadow, but a bar of light from a nearby window illuminated the lettering – THE

BROKEN PARADIGM. ‘Cute,’ said Florance as she pushed open the door. ‘Really cute.’

‘What’s a reality bubble?’ asked Barbi.

They were in the main common room of the tavern – it was empty. The music and voices had stopped the moment they opened the door. A fire burnt in the fireplace. There were tankards and half-eaten plates of food scattered around on the tables.

Florance knew there was no point searching the tavern – every room would be like this. From the outside they would hear voices, snatches of conversation, arguments, singing, laughter.

But the moment they opened a door – nothing.

‘It’s a very sophisticated software trap that surfaced four hundred years ago,’ said Florance. ‘Rumour had it that it was developed by species of intelligent fungus and propagated through the Church of the Vacuum.’ She could see a disturbance in the air. A shimmer, human sized and crudely shaped.

‘I remember the C of V and the Hoothi,’ said Barbi. ‘Whatever happened to them?’

‘Something terrible.’ Florance kept her eyes (binocular vision –

aghhh!) on the growing shimmer. Colour was beginning to leach into the shape, dull blues, browns and flesh tones.

‘What could be worse than the Hoothi?’ asked Barbi.

Florance watched as the colours ran together to form the contours of a jacket, the shape of pantaloons, a hat, a face. Then a man was sitting at the next table, frozen in the act of reaching for his tankard. All around the common room other figures crystallized out of the air. Silent and immobile.

‘I think,’ said Florance, ‘we’re about to find out.’

The main door banged open.

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The man at the next table grabbed his tankard and raised it to his lips. Another laughed and slapped his fellow on the back. A child of six ran between the tables with a platter of boiled beef and greens. Brandy sloshed in glasses, clouds of smoke poured from pipes and nostrils. Around the two AIs, the whole common room roared with noisy, chaotic, infinitely sloppy and unbridled human life.