The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (28 page)

Without a word, Beauregard stepped forward and turned into the big front room: a studio, as he’d expected, white-walled, high-ceilinged, cluttered. Sketchbooks lay everywhere; abstract paintings, unframed, stood stacked dozens deep against every wall. The smell of oil paint and turpentine hung on the air. Nicole’s brush flicked fast on the canvas. She didn’t turn.

“Come in,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

She made a final brush stroke, stepped back and considered it for a moment.

“Ah,” she said. “Like that.”

Then she did turn around, still holding her brush. The old, oversized white shirt she wore was spattered with paint. Tiny dried-out droplets freckled her face and clogged hairs in her eyebrows. She didn’t look alarmed, or disconcerted. Perhaps vaguely puzzled at the sight of Beauregard facing her, with Karzan and Zeroual and Chun behind him, just inside the doorway. After a moment she frowned.

“Where’s Rizzi?”

“She didn’t want to come with us,” said Beauregard, truthfully enough. She hadn’t asked where Carlos was.

Nicole nodded.

“So,” she said, in a light, casual tone, “what brings you here?”

“You know about Carlos,” said Beauregard.

“Yes.” She gestured vaguely. “Locke called. Sorry you’ve been stood down, but I can see why.”

“Oh, so can we,” said Beauregard.

Zeroual and Karzan stepped to either side of him, and then took another step into the room. Chun remained in the doorway. Nicole’s eyes widened a fraction.

“Locke expected me to speak to you individually,” she said. “It would have been better, you know.”

“We’re here to speak to you collectively,” said Beauregard.

“Fine.” She shrugged. “Speak, then.”

“Locke is Rax,” said Beauregard. “And we’re not sure about you.”

She smiled. “Locke is Rax? Ridiculous. And how would you know?”

“A message got through from Arcane. Carlos read it and so did I.”

“So that’s why he did a runner?” She sounded surprised. “Interesting. Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I what?”

“Take off after him, if you believed that message. You could have jumped on a scooter too.”

Beauregard hadn’t expected to be asked this. He hadn’t considered it an option at the time. He improvised.

“Unlike Carlos,” he said, with a self-deprecating grin, “I have military discipline. It’s a habit.”

“Even when you believe your military, ah,
adviser
is suborned by the force you once died fighting?”

“Like I said, discipline,” said Beauregard. “One can’t go haring off on a mere suspicion.”

“But you can come haring here, seeking to intimidate me?”

Beauregard stepped back and raised his hands. “No, no. Not to intimidate. To inquire. To set our minds at rest.”

“Oh, that,” Nicole said, sounding amused. “Well, you can set your minds at rest. I’m not Rax.”

No such assurance about Locke. Interesting.

“I’m sorry,” said Beauregard. “But it’ll take more than your say-so to convince us.”

“What would it take?” Nicole asked.

“An audit trail,” said Chun, unexpectedly and unhelpfully, from behind Beauregard’s shoulder.

“If you want to inspect thirty trillion lines of code,” said Nicole, “be my guest.”

“Exactly,” said Beauregard. “To convince us, you don’t need to
tell
us anything. We’ve had enough of being
told
things. You need to
do
something.”

Beauregard nodded to Zeroual and Karzan. They sprang forward and grabbed Nicole by the arms. She didn’t struggle. The paintbrush dropped to the floor as Zeroual clasped her right wrist and squeezed. Nicole cast him a contemptuous glance and swept the look to a glare at Beauregard.

“Something I would not do willingly, I see. You think you can coerce me?” She laughed. “You have taken the wrong prisoner for that, soldier.”

Beauregard took a folding knife from his pocket and opened it.

Nicole’s paint-spattered eyebrows rose. “Torture? Yeah, that’ll work.”

“We know very well it won’t,” said Beauregard. “But this will.”

He went over to the stacked canvases, swept them over with a clatter to the floor, picked up the one that had been nearest the wall and slashed it.

“No!” howled Nicole.

She threw herself forward against the grip of the two fighters, who held on to her and hauled her back.

“Oh yes,” said Beauregard. “We know this’ll work because we know what you are.”

He tossed the painting into a corner and picked up and slashed another, and another, and another.

Nicole writhed. “Stop! You crazy son of a bitch! Stop!”

Beauregard held up a canvas by the wooden frame, and punched through it, by way of variety and to show that he could. He glanced at Chun.

“Anything noticeable yet?”

Chun peered around, then stalked over to the window, carefully edging around the tableau of Nicole, Karzan, Zeroual and the easel.

“Sky’s gone a funny colour,” he reported back. “Kind of… greyish white.”

Nicole winced, but stood firm.

Beauregard slashed another painting.

“Ah,” said Chun. “Now it’s the sea. The waves are definitely higher.”

Karzan and Zeroual were beginning to look scared. Nicole was staring straight at Beauregard, her lips a line. Still defiant.

“And, by the way,” he said, “Carlos knows what you are, too.”

Her lips twisted to a smile.

“It wouldn’t surprise him. He’s always thought I’m a goddess.”

Beauregard slashed again. A shade of yellow dropped out of the world’s palette. They could all see the difference, subtle though it was.

“Oh, he knows you better now,” said Beauregard. “He knows you very well, Innovator.”

At that she sagged and the fight went out of her.

“All right,” she said. “All right. Just tell me what you want me to do, and I will consider it.”

“Good,” said Beauregard. He closed the knife and put it away. “Now let’s sit down in the kitchen and have a civilised discussion. If you don’t mind?”

“Yes,” said Nicole.

Taransay had been walking for several kiloseconds when the sky abruptly changed colour. From one second to the next, it paled from blue to a silvery grey. It hadn’t become overcast; the sun, close to noon now, was as clear as ever. A few tens of seconds later, a wind swept up the slopes from the direction of the distant sea. Taransay closed her eyes and opened them again. The sky was unchanged. Resisting the inclination to veer away from the wind, she pressed on. Then she stopped, her vision altered again. This time it was more general, and harder to pin down. It was as if the light had changed. Every shade had shifted a little along the spectrum. Even the sun looked odd to her sidelong glance.

She wondered if this was a consequence of dehydration, or hunger, but a quick gulp of water made no difference. And she was far from starving yet! So what was it? Was it possible that what was changing wasn’t in her body, but in the world? This world that seemed so real it was easy to forget that it was a sim.

But it was a sim, of that at least she was sure, and it seemed someone was monkeying with the colour settings. And with something else, more fundamental perhaps, that accounted for the change in the air. Was that even possible?

Taransay had no idea. All the more urgent, then, to find Shaw.

The squad stalked through Nicole’s house. The curious hush of a kitchen, full of potential noise from taps and machines and crockery. Dishes and cutlery reflected light from the big back window, overlooking a yard a quarter of which was in the shade now, brown dry soil dotted and patched with an artificially irrigated green that looked all the more vivid now that some tones were arbitrarily missing. Another piece of rustic furniture, planed smooth on top, knobbly and gnarled everywhere else, dominated the room. They sat down. Zeroual made coffee. The robot prowled in, checked around and sauntered out, indifferent as a cat to its owner’s anguish.

The sun was high now. Beauregard glanced at his watch to confirm that the time was almost noon. He couldn’t be sure when they’d arrived back in the sim, but at least two if not three hours had passed. Eight, perhaps ten seconds out in the real world? Add the time when they’d been spoken to by Locke, between the departure of the last scooters and the black flooding of their minds. A good few seconds, if he remembered right, bearing in mind they were thinking ten times faster than they ever had in real life. Throw in however long the transition itself took—it had seemed like an eternity at the time, and minutes even in retrospect, but that meant nothing.

In any case, ten to fifteen seconds, minimum. Time enough for the fighters to get well clear of the station. Time enough, too, for Locke to start investigating, if not perhaps yet to discover what Carlos had found.

Still no time to lose.

He sighed and looked across the big table at Nicole, who sat staring straight at him and not seeing him, her hands wrapped around her coffee mug as if her fingers felt cold.

“What we want you to do,” he said, “is move us all out.”

She closed her eyes and opened them again.

“What? Move you out of the sim?”

She sounded almost relieved. There was a light note in her voice, as if she were about to add:
why didn’t you just ask nicely?

“No,” said Beauregard. “Move the module. The sim module and the nanofacturing and arms complex, the lot, just like Arcane did. Shift the entire fucking kit and caboodle. Now.”

Nicole looked startled, but still as if she thought this was more lenient than she’d expected.

“Move it where?”

This was the crunch. The others weren’t expecting it. Beauregard was annoyed with himself to find he’d let the tip of his tongue flick across his lips.

“To the only place we can be safe and make a real life for ourselves. The surface of the primary. The superhabitable. SH-0.”

The others gasped. Beauregard could hear the objections begin to rise in their throats. He held up a hand above his shoulder, not looking at the others, only at Nicole. She was alarmed now, all right, and incredulous.

“You call that
safe
?”

Beauregard sat back.

“Compared to what’s about to break loose around this station,” he said, “yes.”

On a low rise, Taransay paused to check the map on her unfolded phone. A flurry of rain beaded the surface as she spread it out. She shook away the water, and felt the wind catch the paper-thin rectangle. For a moment as she struggled with the map, tired and frightened, she almost added her tears to the problem. Then she straightened the map and her back, and took a sighting. Only a couple of kilometres to go. Assuming the ancient fucker was still where she and Carlos had left him. Couldn’t be guaranteed. He could have gone off on a wander, or on a hunt, or was right now just freaking out. What was he making of the world just looking wrong all of a sudden?

As she folded the phone away she was tempted to use it to call Den. But what could she tell him? And might contacting him put him in danger, or make her easier to track, for whatever ridiculous value of easier applied in this bizarre situation?

Taransay sighed and slogged on across the upland moors, dread competing with fatigue for her willed, stoical inattention. The sky was still that eerie colour. The wind off the sea had become stronger, as had the wind rolling down from the mountains. The two air masses persistently collided around her, winds shifting unpredictably in direction, temperature and speed. Now and then sharp showers fell, or blasted rain into her face. At other times the sun seemed to burn stronger than seemed seasonal, or reasonable. Buffeted and stung, dogged along every contour she followed by the anomalous weather fronts, Taransay concentrated on keeping her footing and keeping watch for predators.

The rain clouds dispersed as quickly as they’d formed. New rivulets made the ground suddenly treacherous. Dips became long pools of unpredictable depth and frustrating length; patches of bare soil, bogs. Rising mist from the wet ground in the renewed heat blurred the view, then blew away. She reached the karst and found it slippery. Several times she slipped and fell, banging hip bone and shin, scratching elbow and hand. Lichen stained the skin of one palm a yellow that wasn’t quite as garish as she thought it should be.

Up the slope of the side of the mountain she struggled. Bent over, almost on all fours now. A stone bounced and skipped past her right side. Another whizzed by on her left. She looked up.

Shaw, the old man of the mountain, sat cross-legged a few metres further up the slope, and about ten centimetres above a patch of scree. He stopped reaching for a third stone and folded his arms.

“You again,” he said.

Taransay stood upright and rubbed the small of her back.

“Hello to you, too,” she said.

Shaw passed a weary hand across his eyes. “Do you see it?”

“Yes,” said Taransay. “You’re sitting on air again.”

“I am not,” said Shaw. “That’s an illusion. I meant
that
.” He flapped a hand at the sky.

“Yeah,” she said. “Funny colour, innit?”

Shaw scratched his head. “That’s a relief. Thought it was my eyes.”

“And the wind and the weather?”

“Yeah, there’s that,” he allowed. “Mind you, I’ve seen a lot of freak weather over the years.”

Taransay stared at him. “Don’t all the colours look a bit wrong?”

Shaw shrugged. “If you say so.”

“You still think we’re in a physically real place?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary. All this could be some, I dunno, astronomical phenomenon? Subtle shift in the exosun’s output? That would account for the sky and the colours and maybe the wind.”

“Ah, fuck it,” Taransay said. She slugged back the last of her water. “Leave that aside, OK? Let me tell you what else is going on.”

She swayed, then sat down, feeling cold.

“Hey,” said Shaw. For the first time in her acquaintance with the man, he showed some concern. “Let me get you something.”

He scrambled up the scree-slope to the flat rock shelf and vanished up the cliff. After a while he returned, with a flask of savoury-smelling hot water and a hunk of cold meat. She didn’t question their provenance. When she’d finished eating and drinking, Shaw leaned backward on the air as if against a seat-back.

“Right,” he said. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

As she told him, which took some time and a lot of circumlocution to avoid getting into a pointless argument, the world changed again. The wind dropped, the sky became blue and the colours shifted to normal.

“See?” Shaw said. “Whatever it was, it’s passed.”

“Looks like it,” Taransay said. “Still, that doesn’t affect the problem of what we do about Beauregard.”

“‘We’?” he mocked, then laughed. “Nah, you’re right, I can’t let some kind of mutiny pass. Fuck knows what that could do to my food supply and peace of mind.”

“Any idea what to do?”

“None whatsoever,” said Shaw. He stood up, and brushed the palms of his hands. “Just as well, too. Doesn’t do to rush into things. Can’t see any advantage in haring off down to the village. I reckon we should sleep on it.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

“Doubt you can climb the cliff,” he said, “so—”

“You think I can’t climb the cliff?” Taransay interrupted. “Just fucking watch me, mister.”

Beauregard held court on the deck at the back of the Digital Touch, the night of the first day of the new order. For a change, he was the one sitting on the rail. He had a drink in his hand and a pistol on his hip. Nicole was at a table, her face one among the many now having to pay attention.

Chun, Karzan and Zeroual sat nearby, likewise casually armed, with Chun’s boyfriend keeping him company. Den, the local paramour of the unreliable Rizzi, scowled from the back. In the crowd the regulars were outnumbered by a random congeries of residents. They’d all watched the mid-evening television news: the departure of the armada and the first confusing exchanges of fire. The situation, the announcer had gravely informed its notional global audience, was far off nominal.

“Listen up,” Beauregard said. “It’s started, folks. The Reaction is going to break out, within hours from our point of view, maybe by tomorrow morning. The agency that employed me and my colleagues here has been to the best of our knowledge suborned by the Rax, as I guess most of you know by now. Here’s what we’re going to do. Nicole here, our good lady, the representative of the Direction, has very kindly agreed to use her, ah, emergency powers. She not only outranks Locke Provisos, she has the physical ability to shut that treacherous blinker down, and she’s already taken steps to do so this afternoon.”

He paused and laughed, as if to himself. “It’s been a long afternoon.”

Nicole gave him a tight smile. Besides intervening against Locke, she’d spent the afternoon repairing some of the damage Beauregard had done, under the constant threat that he could without compunction do a lot more of that any time he liked. He’d called up Tourmaline, induced her to mobilise her cronies and arranged for all the still undamaged paintings to be taken to a location he was careful not to disclose.

“Here’s how things stand at the moment,” he went on. “Carlos is gone, for good as far as we know. I don’t doubt he’s attempting to defect to Arcane. Good luck to him with that. Rizzi has fucked off to the hills, whether to meet the old man of the mountain or repeat his feat of walking around the world I don’t know. Again, good luck with that. You might think that just leaves me and Chun and Karzan and Zeroual here to mind the shop. It does, for the next few hours. But all the rest of the fighters who left earlier are still in their back-ups. And after the battle’s over, all those who’ve returned to base, and all those who’ve definitely been killed in battle, will start coming back on the buses. It’s all automated. Thanks to deep Direction programming that even the lady here can’t mess with, she can’t stop it, and we can’t bring back anyone who isn’t killed but hasn’t returned. So Carlos and any other defectors, whether they’ve gone to the Rax or to Arcane or whatever else, are gone for the foreseeable. But we have fighters, and they’re going to be hearing from me the minute they step off the bus. And I think they’re going to listen.”

He scanned the faces, to make sure he didn’t need to spell it out to the locals. The fighters were going to be in charge around here.

It looked to him like they got it.

“Because here’s the thing. All of us fighters had a deal. Do as we’re told, fight the blinkers, die for the company as many times over as necessary, keep our noses clean, be nice to civilians. In return we’re promised a new life in the far future, in the real version of this very place. That was the deal.

“It’s now quite evident that the deal is off. If the Rax is about to run wild, if it can control an agency like Locke, if another agency like Arcane can go over lock, stock and barrel to the fucking robots, then the war we’re in isn’t the war we were raised to fight. We can’t trust a damn thing we’ve been told. We can’t even be sure the terraforming of H-0 will happen at all. We don’t know if we’ll ever walk on this world for real.”

Beauregard leaned forward, elbows on knees, drink in hand and, though still above their eye lines, no longer asserting dominance but engaging his audience on the level.

“So it’s up to us,” he said. “Let’s cut our losses and cut and run. Let’s get out from under whatever cluster-fuck is about to engulf this mission. Fuck the mission, fuck the Direction, fuck the great five-million-year plan, fuck Earth and fuck all the empty promises of a new Earth. We have something better right here under our noses, a planet that’s not just habitable but
super-habitable
. SH-0.”

“How the hell can we live there?” shouted Den, from the back. “It’s not suitable for human life.”

“We aren’t
going
to be human life,” said Beauregard. He sat up straight and banged his chest. “We’re not human life now. We’re not even
simulations
of human life. We’re speculative simulations of humanoids as they might have evolved over billions of years out of the green slime and bacteria that right now is all the life there is down on H-0, with a completely different physiology when you get down to the molecular details. Isn’t that true?”

“That’s true,” said Nicole. She turned in her seat and craned her neck. “We’ve done it in the simulation here, and we can do it in the real. This module has the seeds of machines to build physical bodies for any life-bearing planet. We can do the hacks for building human-like bodies—or better bodies, if we want—out of whatever’s available down there on the super-hab, no question.”

“There’s still the little matter of getting down in the first place,” said Den. “How the fuck can we do that?”

Beauregard leaned forward again. He caught the eye of Tourmaline. As the most sympathetic, she gave him a baseline, a chance to fix a look of quiet confidence before he swept his gaze across the rest.

“What I’ve proposed to Nicole, and what she’s agreed is feasible, is that we detach from the station with everything we can grab, and fire off in a slingshot trajectory around SH-38 and SH-19 and on to SH-0, where we swing into orbit. It’ll take a couple of Earth days, real time, and seven or so years’ sim time, to make low-SH-0 orbit. And we can take as much as time in orbit as we need before we go down. Years and years more, if necessary. Plenty of time to build entry and landing gear and fine-tune the descent.”

Nicole stood up now, and looked around.

“We don’t even have to take the whole contraption down at once,” she said. “We can build probes to get data, then descent modules to take us down. We have the manufacturing capacity—it just needs to be rejigged from scooters to other spacecraft.”

Den and other locals were shaking their heads. Even the fighters looked dubious. They looked at each other, and eventually one of them spoke up.

“If you don’t mind me saying so, sarge,” said Chun, “that’s like a best-case scenario, isn’t it? We might not
have
all this time in orbit, if as you say all hell’s about to break loose around here. We could get zapped on the way there, or have to leave orbit sooner than we want. The Direction’s going to be furious. The exploration rights to SH-0 haven’t even been assigned yet. None of the companies are going to be happy to see us going down to the surface and stealing a march on them. Arcane thinks we’re Rax, and by now God knows how many other companies agree. They’re not going to let the Rax take the super-hab and turn it into some fucking hornets’ nest. They’ll be shooting at us, and their robot allies will be throwing rocks at us all the way. And if we do get down—well! Our troubles are just beginning. The atmosphere’s violent, the plate tectonics are fierce, the geology’s unstable and the local life has to be as brutal as it takes to survive in a place like that.”

Nods and frowns all round.

“You’re absolutely right, Chun,” said Beauregard. “It is all of that.”

He placed his glass on the railing, then in one smooth motion spun around and vaulted on to the railing and stood up. It was a neat trick.

“We’ve got enough firepower to give as good as we get, but, yeah, there’s a lot can go wrong on the way. That’s in the lap of the gods and the hands of the good lady here. The real question is, are
we
brutal enough to survive down there?”

Karzan jumped to her feet. “I am, sarge,” she said.

Zeroual rose, more slowly, after her. “Me too, sarge.”

Chun shrugged from his seat. “Count me in, I guess.”

Some of the locals were beginning to look tentatively enthusiastic. Here and there some were rising, too, or if already standing were raising glasses or clenched fists.

“It’s still crazy dangerous!” Den shouted, from the back.

Beauregard drew his pistol and held it high above his head.

“Damn right it’s crazy dangerous!”

He fired the pistol in the air. Some of those watching him flinched.

“What’s the matter with you churls?” Beauregard shouted. “Do you want to live
forever
?”

There was an uneasy laugh, which grew and spread. Beauregard kept up a challenging grin until the laughter was general. Then he laughed himself and jumped straight down to the deck. He grabbed his glass and took a swig and looked around.