The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (22 page)

“But I do know this. The Direction knows far more than I do, more than any of us do. The Direction back on Earth planned this mission, and laid out a development programme for millennia to come. The Direction module within the mission has so far executed that programme with astonishing precision and adaptation to new circumstances. The AIs that run this virtual world, and that command vast operations out there in real space, and that brought you all back from the dead, are a lot smarter than we are. I know that, and just by reflecting for a moment on your very presence here you must know that, too.

“So to be perfectly honest and completely blunt, any strategic thinking any of us may work out on the back of a cigarette packet”—she held hers up, just in case people didn’t understand what she was talking about—”is unlikely to be an improvement on what they’ve come up with. I don’t say I know what they’re doing, but I do say I know that
they
know what they’re doing.”

“If the Direction and the company AIs are so smart,” came the inevitable voice from the back, “how come there are any robots left from the revolt a year ago still around to make trouble? And how come these robots rebelled in the first place?”

Good question, Carlos thought. Nicole’s argument so far struck him as a bit like that of a theologian tackling the problem of evil, all the way from the inscrutability of the divine purpose to the embarrassing question of how the Adversary had been able to rebel at all, and just what it had rebelled against.

“Good questions,” said Nicole.

She lit another cigarette, and drew in, then sighed out.

“The answer is very simple: nature is infinitely bigger than the biggest AI. The AIs are smarter than any of us, but they can’t predict and control everything. It’s elementary chaos theory, or to give it its popular designation—Murphy’s Law. Random changes happen all the time. Mistakes accumulate. Correcting them brings further changes. As someone smarter than me once said, evolution is smarter than you. And that’s true even if ‘you’ are a mind so vast that the very word ‘you’ has no meaning. This entire system will one day be a garden of delight, for our descendants and inheritors and with luck for us, for each and every one of you.

“Yes, you! And you and you and you! So remember this—in even the best gardens, weeds spring up. Even the greatest gardener can’t stop them sprouting. But even the least of gardeners can do a bit of weeding. We’re the weedkiller, my friends.”

She tossed her cigarette end and vaulted to the deck and raised her glass.

“Let’s do a good job of it!”

It was awkward for the crowd to clap with drinks in their hands. Instead, they stomped and roared. Carlos grinned at Nicole as she rejoined them.

“That was great,” he said, not meaning it.

She hadn’t answered Beauregard’s question. She had merely quietened the doubts it had raised. As he swung an arm around her shoulders and inhaled her smoky hair, Carlos glanced behind him to see what Beauregard made of it. The sceptical sergeant had already slipped away.

Tourmaline in tow, Beauregard prowled the strip. There were more establishments than he remembered from their last shore leave. In every bar where even one fighter could be found, Beauregard drank one slow bottle of beer and listened. All the groups had been through much the same training as his own had—he could quibble over details, see things he’d have done differently, but a lot of that was just legacy style from different army or militia backgrounds: here a Russian, there a Nigerian. Unlike his lot, they’d all been told from the start that they would be part of a larger force, human and machine. Nobody was going to be a general, or be for that matter in any higher rank than Carlos or himself. The general staff work, the planning, the strategy, the logistics would all be handled by the company AIs—he found it hard to imagine the Locke entity posing as a field marshal or fleet admiral, but no doubt they’d come up with a more fitting avatar than the company logo if the AI had to manifest in that role.

And yet, as with his own squad, the grunts had been assured they were still essential, irreplaceable. In action the final decisions rested with each and every one of them. Fucking bizarre, but not wholly unfamiliar. It was like a baroque elaboration of the doctrine that soldiers should disobey illegal orders, and the more recent rulings on drone and robot warfare. The human in the loop. He’d always thought it impracticable crap that did more to ease conscience elsewhere than to apply it where it mattered.

He found what he sought in Seeds of Change. The bar was much more of a dive than the Touch, all hologram floor show and thumping music and low-watt lasers slicing through herbal haze. Noticed Harry Newton, a Londoner. Checked him out with the grunts who knew him. Harold Isaac Newton, no less. Aspirational parents, vindicated. A POC but one of the good ones. Self-disciplined. Moved and sat still like a martial arts master. Beauregard approached Newton at the bar. As he caught his eye there was a moment of mutual recognition, not of each other as individuals but of the type.

Beauregard hauled up a stool, propped Tourmaline on his knee, ordered raksi and got talking. After they’d sunk half the bottle the two men went for a slash.

“Seen that serial about Turing?” Beauregard asked, eyes down on a soul-satisfying torrent of piss.

“The warrior queer thing? Yeah.”

“Queen,” Beauregard corrected, automatically. Shook, zipped. “This feels a bit like that.”

A look of mock shock. “You coming on to me?”

Beauregard laughed. “No. You know what I mean and I know you know I know you know.”

Newton stared straight ahead at his hands under the dryer.

“Morning,” he said. “Sunrise. Jog on the beach.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Beauregard.

They went back to the bar in silence and finished the bottle in conversation, raucous and innocuous.

The tide was well out past the end of the headland to the west of the beach, and wasn’t coming back in any time soon. Beauregard loped steadily along, leaving oozing footprints in the wet black sand. Newton jogged beside him with shorter and swifter strides. Their shadows stretched out in front of them, corrugated by the wave marks, complicated by ringlight, separating and converging as the two runners avoided weed-covered boulders and the many holes from which water bubbled and in which fierce fast molluscs lurked.

They rounded the headland, splashing through an ankle-deep channel. The resort passed out of view behind them. In front another beach stretched unbroken for kilometres, fringed by a saline variant of the common spiky trees. Unless they were being actively spied on, it was safe enough to speak.

“I’ll tell you what’s bugging me,” said Beauregard.

“Apart from the dodgy strategy?”

“Yeah, something that’s bugged me from the start.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m told I was a terrorist who brought down a mall in Luton. I don’t remember that, fair enough. You expect memories to be incomplete. They tell me some irate punter beheaded me and stuck my head in a vial of cryogenic glop and then stuck that in a shop freezer for his customers to have a laugh at. OK, you can see how that sort of thing might degrade recent memories…”

They both laughed.

“Trouble is,” Beauregard went on, “I don’t remember being in the Acceleration. I don’t remember having even the smallest sneaking regard for the bastards. All I remember is being a good British Army intel officer.”

Newton snorted, then panted a little to recover the lost breath. “I think you’ve answered your question, mate!”

“Oh, sure, if I was in the Axle I was most likely still on the army payroll. I know that, even if I don’t exactly advertise it.”

“Wise move,” Newton grunted. “So why you telling me?”

“Because I know about you.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“You’re in the same position.”

“Me? Ha-ha! You’re shitting me, man.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You know why.”

“Bit of an impasse, then, is it?”

Newton jogged on for a bit, then hawked and spat.

“Ach! Why mess around? What’s to lose, we’re all dead anyway.”

“Precisely,” said Beauregard. “Reverse Pascal’s wager.”

“What’s the lady got to do with it?”

“I meant—”

“Gotcha!”

Newton threw him a playful but still painful punch on the arm. Beauregard made a point of ignoring it. He’d had it coming.

“I don’t think you’re ignorant,” he said defensively.

“Fair dos,” said Newton. “But it’s true I’m not in the same position as you. You were state, all right. Not saying I remember you personally, but I knew your work. That Luton job had ‘false flag operation’ written all over it.” He glanced sideways, grinning. “Worked a treat, though. How’s that for sneaking regard for the bastards?”

“Bugger,” said Beauregard.

“Yeah, well, lie down with dogs and all that. Tell me about it. Difference with me, right, is I remember exactly what I was. I was in the Axle, but not… of it, if you catch my drift.”

“I do indeed,” said Beauregard. “D’you remember what agency you were working for?”

“Agency?” Newton laughed. “I weren’t no agent. I was Rax.”

Beauregard felt a strange and almost sexual thrill, along with the frisson of blasphemy. It was like that time in his teens when he’d first read De Sade. He’d never before met anyone who admitted they were in the Reaction. That Newton was the last person he’d expect this from made it all the more transgressive.

“Rax?
You?
”

“Keep your voice down,” Newton said mildly. “Even here.”

“OK,” said Beauregard. “I thought the Rax were racists. Hence my surprise.”

“Oh, they were,” said Newton. “Stone racist. Racist to the fucking bone. Most of them, anyway.”

Beauregard couldn’t suppress a half-laugh. “I take it you weren’t.”

“You take it wrong,” said Newton. “Going by some of the names I’ve been called. But I’ve always thought intellectual acceptance of an argument based on statistics and evolution is no excuse for crude hatreds and vulgar prejudices.” He cast Beauregard a challenging look. “Right?”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said Beauregard. “Take each man as you find him, whatever you may think about the average of his race.”

Beauregard had never regarded his racial opinions as racist, for all that he had to keep them to himself. He couldn’t be a racist because he didn’t think much of the White race either.

“Yeah,” said Newton. “Like, say, the average Chinese is sharper than the average White, but your mate Chun is thick as a brick.”

They shared a laugh.

“You can say that again.”

“And then there’s the shining exceptions,” Newton went on. “The born leaders. Like you and me.”

“Uh-huh.” Beauregard wasn’t entirely comfortable with where Newton might be going with this, but decided to let it lie. They could sort out later who the born leader here was.

“And, anyway, there’s no reason why it should only be Whites who think democracy and equality are false gods. We Africans had our own kings and chiefs before the Europeans and the Arabs turned up. The Arabs brought us the slave trade and the Europeans left us democracy. Hard to say which fucked up Africa more.”

“You may have a point there,” said Beauregard. “Then again, in all fairness to Africa, what happened in between the Arabs’ arrival and the Europeans’ departure might have had something to do with it.”

“Sure, but I wasn’t interested in allocating blame. Water over the dam now, innit? Whereas democracy, now, there’s something you can actually do something about because it’s not in the past, it’s right here in your face. An inky finger poking you in the eye, forever. Besides, the questions of race and genetics and all that were kind of moot even back then, when we’d already got genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. And all the more so here, now we’re all a bunch of fucking digits, am I right?”

“Now that you mention it…”

They both laughed so much they had to stop running. For a moment or two they stood breathing hard, hands on knees.

“So,” said Newton, after taking a gulp from his water bottle, “you in?”

“In what?”

“The Rax.”

Beauregard stared. “What can the Rax do here?”

“Found our own kingdoms and fuck the Direction.”

This struck Beauregard as such a good plan, such a prefect condensation of every inchoate discontent he’d felt since he’d arrived, and struggled to express to himself for his entire afterlife, that it was as if the sun had come up all over again.

They bumped fists ironically, shook hands sincerely and ran back to the resort.

“We must do this again,” said Beauregard.

“Tomorrow’s all training,” said Newton. “And the day after. Come to think of it, my diary’s kind of full for a week.”

“Funny you should say that. So’s mine.”

“We’ll keep in touch.”

The other fourteen squads were already up to the same standard as Carlos’s had been before they’d gone into combat. They’d trained in the hills, in the simulators, and in scooters and frames around the station. After a week of joint sessions in the hills and on the beach, mainly to get the squads used to working together, Locke Provisos decided they were ready to go into action.

The plan was to assault the fast-departing runaway Arcane Disputes modular complex, now thousands of kilometres from the station, before it could establish a position between the orbits of the station and the exomoon SH-17. That position had been well chosen. Because of the complicated gravitational resonances of the system, there was a volume of a few cubic kilometres in which the rogue complex would be in a more or less stable position relative to the station and the exomoon—in fact, there were several, but it was the nearest one that was of concern, and that was Arcane’s evident destination. The complex was on a Hohmann transfer orbit, saving on fuel and (more importantly, given that the module had fusion plants to power its thrusters) reaction mass.

Nobody expected to actually board the module, or even to significantly damage it. The purpose of the attack was to tie up Arcane’s scooters and other spacecraft in defending the complex and prevent the departure of any further supply tugs, while a smaller force spent fuel and mass recklessly to cut straight to near-SH-17 orbit, from which harassing drops and strikes on the Arcane surface base in the crater on SH-17 could be mounted at will. This would be followed up by landing a force on the exomoon’s surface, to establish a fortified base out of range of Arcane’s available rocketry, and from there prepare a ground and aerospace assault.

Seven squads were chosen for the first mission. Carlos’s squad was one of two assigned to SH-17, the other being the squad led by a man called Newton. The remaining six were tasked with the attack on the module. The eight squads kept in reserve would be mobilised for the follow-up surface landings and attack.

“Don’t worry about surviving,” Nicole told the squad leaders, in the empty amusement hall the night before. “Most of you won’t. Well, maybe Carlos and Beauregard’s crew, they’ve been down before. A lot of the rest of you will doze off on the bus tomorrow morning and the next thing you know, you’ll be on the bus coming back. Sorry about the bad awakening. If you’re worried about it, do try not to get killed.” She paused. “But most of you will be. Can’t be helped.”

This cheerful prediction was relayed to the squad rank and file later in the evening, in the dives and bars of the resort. Carlos listened as fighters grimly considered the likely consequences. He made sure anyone he spoke to understood that a temporary death was far preferable—however unpleasant one’s demise, not to mention one’s resurrection, might be—to capture followed by possible torture in whatever little local hells the rebel robots might contrive to cook up.

The following morning four minibuses left Ichthyoid Square, shortly after the routine daily one had gone ahead to pick up the local passengers. Each bus had fifteen seats. Carlos’s squad was sharing with Newton’s, plus three from another squad. The new fighters were excited, and talked about the coming battles. Beauregard exchanged laconic comments and tactical tips with Newton. The rest of Carlos’s squad didn’t even wait for the inevitable hypnotic effect—whatever it was—to take hold before falling asleep. Carlos himself dozed off before they’d reached the top of the first hill.

Beauregard woke floating in free fall in the station’s launch hangar. It seemed wider than he remembered. The number of launch catapults had trebled, rather like the bars on the strip—with his renewed preternatural lucidity Beauregard suspected that some similar copy-and-paste procedure had been unobtrusively and seamlessly applied in both milieus, virtual and physical. The other six squads lined up alongside theirs, each huddled together like clumps of low-hanging fruit, mirrored the impression of repetition.

In the same scan he noticed something awry.

The other four returned the blank-faced equivalent of blank looks. Then—

Carlos said.

Carlos had disdained the chronometric slang the new fighters had invented—sec, dec, hec, kleck—but it seemed he’d picked it up nonetheless.

Beauregard shot back.

said Rizzi, derisively.

Carlos joined them—more than a minute later, but within the promised hectosecond.

Beauregard asked.

said Carlos.

said Beauregard.

said Locke’s dry voice in their heads.

They waited their turn as the six squads aimed at the Arcane module boarded their scooters, launched and vanished into the dark. The flares of the tugs followed, giving chase. Then Newton’s squad moved forward. Beauregard gave the leader a wave as he passed. Carlos, after a moment’s delay, did the same. That squad’s tug’s engine flared, vanished into the dark, then flared again in continuing thrust until it had passed out of sight.

They climbed to their scooters and slotted themselves in. The catapults shot them out. Their own tug swept them up from behind and clamped them to its spindly frame. Beauregard felt the acceleration judder through his feet. It was far stronger, and lasted far longer, than the burn that had sent them into their first traverse to SH-17. Only when they were in free fall did the tug toggle them to sleep mode.

The next thing Beauregard knew, they were in a high, slow orbit around SH-17. The tug released them from its clamps, but they remained closely clustered to it, awaiting any deployment call. Beauregard checked the situation updates that crowded his visual field. Newton’s squad was already on station in the same orbit, about ten kilometres ahead of them. The comms relay satellites, in their own much higher orbit, were still in place and working perfectly.

This added up to all that was going well.