The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (25 page)

Carlos and Rizzi listened to this vehement discourse with the utter silence and rapt attention of devotees hearkening to a guru. This was not because they were hanging on his every word, but because by the time he had finished he was hanging in mid-air. As he spoke, he had risen slowly above the rock on which he sat, and had now put forty centimetres of daylight between it and his arse.

It was Rizzi who found her voice first.

“If this place is physically real,” she said, sounding as if she could do with a gulp of water, “how can you levitate?”

Shaw looked down, then faced them squarely.

“I am
not
levitating,” he said, as indignantly as if she’d told him he was masturbating. “That’s just another of your illusions.”

As if absent-mindedly, he reached under himself and quite visibly scratched a buttock.

“Check it if you like,” he said. “See if you can pass a hand under me.”

Carlos jumped up, stalked over and swiped his hand towards the gap between the man and the boulder. A moment later he yelped and hopped, clutching the edge of his hand and putting it to his lips as if to kiss it better. Recovering his dignity and his footing as best he could, he repeated the swing very slowly and carefully, and struck rock again.

“See?” said Shaw, as Carlos sat back down. “An illusion.”

The gap was still there. Carlos wondered how that was possible, even in a sim. Perhaps Shaw’s centuries of rediscovery of the laws of physics had enabled him to hack them, or, rather, to hack the underlying code of the sim. He might not even be aware that he was doing it. He might find himself carried away by his thoughts, levitating like a monk in prayer. Not that Carlos believed for a moment that that was possible, either. Not in physical reality. On the other hand, no one had ever lived for a thousand years in physical reality.

“You’re doing some kind of Zen thing,” said Rizzi. “Messing with our heads.”

“Think that if you like,” the man said. “I put it to you that your heads are being messed with, but not by me.”

“By whom, then?” Carlos asked. His hand was still smarting.

“By those who want you to think this world is a sim, and not real.”

“If it isn’t a sim,” said Carlos, “how come we can be here for weeks, and when we go back into space only hours have passed?”

“Ah yes,” said Shaw. “I remember that. It puzzled me, too, for a while. My first guess was that transit each way took longer than they claimed, perhaps by spaceship after all, but of course another moment’s thought showed that didn’t add up. You can tell the amount of time that’s passed by the rotation of the moons, and the progress of the engagements, and so on.”

“You were out there?” Rizzi asked. “I was told you ran away during training.”

“Both are true,” said Shaw. “I was out there, as you put it, a good little space robot bravely fighting bad rebel robots on distant moons, and I did abscond during training.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Carlos. “We’ve done extra training in the hills ourselves.”

The old man nodded, smiling to himself. “They send you up to the hills between major engagements, just to keep you on your toes and get you familiar with new squads. And it was from one of these sessions that I scarpered. But that isn’t exactly what I meant when I agreed with you that I ran away during training.”

“What did you mean?”

“Think about it.”

They thought about it. Rizzi got there first. She smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand.

“Oh, fuck!” she cried.

“What?” Carlos said, frowning. “What is there to…?” Then it hit him, the monstrous possibility Shaw was driving at, and he closed his eyes. “Oh,
God
.”

“You got it,” Shaw told them, from above his rock. “It’s
all
training. You run around in the hills with guns, you play around on those fairground sawn-off space shuttle things. I bet one or other of you asked why it’s so crude, why they don’t give you a proper simulation of space combat, and you were told that there’s no realistic way to do that without breaking the illusion of the sim, or whatever. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Carlos, feeling very foolish for not even having had the suspicion.

“You do all that, and then you’re told you’re ready to go into action. You get on the bus to the spaceport and fall asleep, under post-hypnotic suggestion—or, for all I know, gas. Next thing you know, you’re a brave little robot, fighting rebel robots out there among the moons of… what was it for you?”

“SH-0,” said Rizzi.

“G-0, in our case,” said the man, with a dark chuckle.

“How could you have fought around G-0, hundreds of millions of kilometres away from here?” Carlos asked. “I mean, I know you think we’re on a real planet, but where did it seem to you the sim was running?”

Shaw frowned. “Where does it seem to you?”

“When we come out of the sim,” said Carlos, “we’re in robot bodies based in a module of the space station, in orbit around SH-0.”

“Well, of course,” said Shaw. “To us, it seemed the sim was running in a Locke Provisos module in orbit around G-0.”

“That’s just not possible,” said Rizzi. “No way this module could have gone from G-0 to SH-0 orbit in one Earth year. Not unless they used a fusion drive, and the sarge said the Direction isn’t too keen on using up too much potentially good stuff for reaction mass.”

Carlos was trying to think this through. “No, no,” he said. “But there’s bound to be lots of just, you know, pure water ice out around a gas giant, and anyway the sim could have been running out there and then transmitted.”

“That would need a fucking big apparatus,” said Rizzi, and—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Shaw interrupted. “It’s all a fucking simulation, what we experienced ‘out there’ around G-0 and what you experience ‘out there’ around SH-0. Like I was saying—you fall asleep on the bus and wake up as robot fighters in space. Meanwhile, your bodies are lying asleep in that warehouse, as you’ve already admitted is likely. And what I’m putting to you for your earnest consideration is this: your minds aren’t copied and downloaded and running robot bodies in space, they’re right there in your brains, getting a complete immersive hallucination fed to them for days that you experience as minutes, weeks that you live as hours, and so on. That’s why you seem to think so fast and clearly when you’re a robot, and why your sensorium seems to expand. You’re still thinking at the same pace, but your input’s stretched out and rendered in much more detail than you normally experience. And then you come back, to wake up on the bus in what you’re told is a simulation.”

He paused to laugh, sending peals of derision to ring back off the cliff.

“In reality it’s the other way round.
This
planet is real. The others are real, all right, you can see them in the sky and I’ve tracked G-0 several times around the sun, and SH-0 many times more, but you’ve never been to them. What happens to you ‘out there’ is
all
training, it’s
all
simulation, and it all happens in your heads and in VR machines
right here
. You’re in a training simulator, and just as they said right to your faces in the amusement arcade, it’s one that makes perfect sense in terms of the world you believe you’ve been told you’re in.”

There was a long silence.

“It all makes sense,” Carlos said at last. “And I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Why not?”

“If it’s all training, what are they training us for?”

“I don’t know,” Shaw said. “Ask them, not me. Perhaps they really do expect robots to become self-aware and autonomous at some point. Maybe the human species isn’t united under one world government, this Direction they tell us about, and so there’s still the possibility of wars between states. Or perhaps they’re preparing for an encounter with aliens. That superhabitable out there has multicellular life. Some of it might be intelligent. The gas giant’s moons have subsurface oceans, just like Europa and the rest back home.” He shrugged. “What difference does it make what they’re training you for?”

“There’s a bigger problem with your theory,” Rizzi said. “If this planet is physically real, then it must have been terraformed—its biosphere, at least—and that would take longer than the ten years since the probe arrived in this system. A lot longer, probably.”

“Why?” Shaw asked. “Assuming the planet really was as desolate as they say it was when the probe arrived, what would prevent sufficiently advanced machinery from working out what could evolve from the goo and then just making it directly?”

“Ecosystems, soils and all? I doubt it.”

“Incredulity is no argument.”

Carlos could see this was getting nowhere.

“At an absolute minimum,” he said, “if all this is real it must be over a thousand years old, which means the real date is at least a thousand years later than we’ve been told. And we could detect that by astronomy.”

“You could, could you?” said the old man. “You have accurate star maps from the twenty-first century, a way of correcting for the distance between here and the solar system, and instruments to detect any changes in the positions of the stars? Tell me more.”

“I mean in theory,” Carlos said. “In principle we could.”

“When you can do it in practice, let me know.”

“Ah!” said Rizzi. “Maybe we
can
do it in practice. When we’re in space we have star maps in our eyes.” She waved a hand. “You know, our visual fields. We could work things out from there.”

“You could, if you really were in space, which I’m telling you you’re not.”

“Look,” Carlos said, on a surge of impatience, “your real argument is that you’ve been here a long time and walked all over the place and it all
feels real
to you. I can see why—don’t take offence, but can’t you see you had to believe that because it’s the only way you could survive, let alone stay sane? And what we have to tell you is that the fighting out there
feels real
to us.”

“Of course it does,” said Shaw, still imperturbable. “And for the same reason as you attribute to me. It’s the only way to survive and stay sane.”

Carlos shrugged. “So? Neither of us will convince the other.”

“Oh, I’ll convince you,” said the old man. He frowned, and reconsidered. “I might not convince you that this place is real. I might not even convince you that what you experience ‘out there’ is a simulation. But I can convince you that the
fighting
isn’t real. Physical or virtual, it’s not a real fight. It’s a training exercise.”

“How?” Carlos asked.

“Oh, just by telling you all about it. You know I haven’t spoken with any of your lot, and it’s been months since any of the villagers have bartered shy offerings for gnomic utterances. So you can take it I’m not up to date on the news from the front, right?”

“Unless you still have a phone as well as a watch,” said Rizzi.

“Ah, you’re a sharp one. You’ll just have to take my word that I don’t use it. Here’s how the fighting is going. You have brief, inconclusive battles with a small number of robots. Another enforcement company wades into the fray, defending the robots as stolen property or some such pretext. You want to use heavier weapons, but you’re overruled on grounds you don’t find very convincing. You feel you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back. More robots join in. More fighters are brought out of storage to counter them. But they’re sent into combat without the kind of weaponry that could settle the issue for good. It’s almost as if those above you want you to fight battle after battle but don’t want you to win the war.”

Carlos tried to keep his face expressionless, and hoped Rizzi was doing the same.

“Is that how it was in the fight you were in?”

“Up to the point where I did a runner, yes. I suppose you’ll tell me that there were some rebel robots left over from it, and that they’re the ones you’re fighting now. No? Or that a new outbreak of robot rebellion has joined up with them?”

“Yes,” said Carlos. “Both.”

“Thought so. And I expect when your fight is over, there’ll be a rebel remnant left hiding out somewhere for the next lot to fight.”

“We’ll make damn sure there isn’t,” said Rizzi.

“That’s the spirit!” said Shaw, in a mocking tone. “Just ask yourselves—if what you’ve been told is true, why does robot consciousness keep popping up? Why does it ever even emerge in the first place? You’d think it would be a solved problem by now, one way or another.”

“What explanation did they give you?”

“Some bullshit… let me see.”

The old man’s glance darted from place to place, as if literally looking for the memories. Carlos realised that he very well might be, if he knew or had rediscovered the ancient art of memory. What mind palaces might he have built, in a thousand years?

“Ah, yes,” the old man went on. “It all went back to an unexpected bankruptcy in the early months of the mission. That resulted in disputed claims that turned out to be difficult to settle, and it sort of spread from there. You know how a crack can propagate from a tiny flaw? Like that. And they told us the flaw and lots of others like it had been built in deliberately. They had a phrase for it.” He searched his memory again, frowned, then brightened. “Legal hacks, that was it.”

“What?”

“When this mission was being planned and built,” the old man explained, “the Direction was understandably keen on preventing the two rival world-wrecking factions from getting so much as a fingernail of their bloody hands on it. This wasn’t easy, because both Axle and Rax had cadre deep inside all the state and corporate systems, and they were well represented in the software and AI professions. The usual purges and witch-hunts weren’t enough—all the software of the mission’s systems had to be built from scratch, then put through the wringer of mathematical checks, formal proofs, the lot. What they neglected to check with anything like that rigour was a different kind of code: the law code. They just took that off the shelf, straight from the existing books. Fatal mistake. That the laws had bugs and glitches isn’t a surprise. It’s how lawyers make their living, after all. But what they also had, buried here and there, was the legal equivalent of trapdoors and malware.”