The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (4 page)

The first time Carlos came back from being killed in action, everything around him seemed quite real.

He shuddered awake on the bus from the spaceport. It was as if he’d dozed rather than slept, and had had a brief, vivid nightmare. The memory of many seconds of drowning in a dark liquid—colder than ice, blacker than ink, thinner than water—slid down the back of his mind and faded to a shiver. He gripped his knees to stop the shaking, and flinched at the chill touch of his shirt’s sides, drying in the dry heat.

His mind caught up with his thoughts and it was as if he were drenched again, this time in cold water. He shook his head and gasped.

The bus from the spaceport
—

How had he
known
that?

He had no memory of actually being at the spaceport, but he had a mental image of the place, as if it were something he’d often seen in photographs. An improbably advanced spaceport, where stubby winged shuttles dropped in every hour on the hour, and every other hour after a swift turnaround screamed off, reconfigured as the nose cones of gigantic spaceplanes that thundered for kilometres down a strip of shining white and soared to beyond the sky.

There was no such spaceport on Earth. If he’d ever seen its like it had to have been in a movie he’d watched as a boy, or on a glossy page of aerospace-industry guff.

Carlos looked warily around. The light was odd, as if every pixel in the colours were being selected from a subtly wrong part of the palette. Bright outside, on a narrow dusty road whose verges merged with rough gravel to the foot of close raw rock faces with trees and scrub at the tops. If this was the bus from the spaceport—and he couldn’t shake the inexplicable conviction that it was—he wouldn’t have expected it to be an overcrowded minibus, like a Turkish dolmush.

The woman in the seat beside him wore a long, loose black dress and a bright headscarf. She sat with a hessian bag across her knees and paid him no attention whatever. She was reading from a rounded rectangle of glass propped on top of the bag. Carlos sneaked a peek. It was in a script he’d never seen before: stark and angular and logical-looking like Korean, or the serial identification of a starship from a more advanced but still human civilisation.

“Excuse me,” Carlos said.

The woman frowned at him. She mumbled a phrase he couldn’t understand, and shook her head.

The bus had fifteen seats and more than thirty passengers, most of them standing. Gear and wares jammed any remaining space, underfoot and overhead and on laps. A kitbag bulked large between his knees, heavy on his feet. The sliding door at the front stood open, the rear window too. A through draught, fragrant with conifer and lavender, relieved a little of the sweat and breath, garlic and armpits. The vehicle’s volume reverberated with the whine of electric engines and the babble of loud conversation. Carlos was troubled and bewildered by his incomprehension. His schoolboy smatterings included Turkish and Greek. This language was neither, though it reminded him of both.

The other passengers, all apparently in their twenties or thirties, struck Carlos in a similar way. Their skins were weathered rather than tanned, their limbs muscular, their clothing plain, but they didn’t look like farmers or artisans or even people who worked in the tourist trade. They looked like city folk who’d chosen a rural way of life. Like some kind of goddamn hippies.

He decided to try again. He raised his chin and his voice.

“Does anyone here speak English?”

Heads turned, shook, and turned away.

Where was he? There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with his memory. There were gaps, but he couldn’t be sure they hadn’t always been there. For a moment he struggled with the paradox of trying to remember if there were events in his life he’d never been able to recall in the first place. Then he shrugged. The arc of his life still made sense to him. Childhood, parents, school; holidays in places a bit like this; university; his job as a genomic pharmaceutical database librarian in Walsall; getting drawn into the Acceleration, and then fighting on its side in the opening stages of the war—

Aha! Yes, of course, the war!

That must be it. He’d probably been wounded, and was undergoing rehab for trauma and memory loss. He shifted uneasily in his seat. He was wearing an olive-green T-shirt, combats, desert boots, all clean but much used. His arms and legs looked and felt fine. A discreet self-check reassured him that everything between his legs was intact. Nothing seemed the matter internally, as far as he could tell. No aches or pains. He passed a hand over his face. Sweaty, needing a shave, his features felt as they’d always done. Only his scalp felt different: hair cropped closer than he’d last had it, and no jacks. No spike. Perhaps that accounted for his inability to understand the language.

The spike, the spike… The last thing he remembered had to do with the spike. He’d been given a mission. Buying a one-way fare in cash, for… London, that was it. A new arena for his skill with drones. Something big. He was worried. He’d had growing doubts about the cause. Not about its objectives, but about its methods. Things had been getting out of hand. Too much violence… no, it hadn’t been too much violence, that had never troubled him as such, it had been… isolation, that was it. The Acceleration was becoming more isolated as it became more effective in striking spectacular blows. It was getting harder and harder to find safe houses, sympathetic programmers, local folk on the street who’d tip you a wink and point you to the right alleyway to run down.

And his doubts had begun speaking to him. Literally. A voice in his head. A disguised voice, or a chip voice. Mechanical, but not harsh. Sexless but seductive, insinuating, friendly. Like someone leaning over his shoulder, and saying quietly but insistently, “Are you sure you aren’t making a mistake?” Well-informed, too, about all the weaknesses of the movement. Amplifying his every doubt about its strategy and tactics.

It called itself Innovator. He remembered that. He couldn’t remember everything about it. Looking back, the voice in his head seemed to have been with him for weeks. The strange thing was: he had a feeling, like a memory he couldn’t quite put his finger on, that he had invited it in. That he’d been
told
to invite it in. As if Innovator’s insidious presence had been authorised by the movement, but had to be kept secret from most of the Axle’s members.

Had he betrayed the movement? No—that wasn’t possible!

Carlos shook his head and peered out through the dust-smeared pane. The bus negotiated a hairpin turn, affording a dizzying swoop of a view to the foot of a dry ravine, then continued downhill slowly through a copse of knotty trees that might have been an olive grove, but wasn’t. Great green mounds of moss, convoluted like brain corals, lurked under the trees. Between the trees flitted winged creatures that didn’t look like birds, nor even quite like bats.

Out in the open again, then around another hairpin, this time with the raw hacked rock face on one side and nothing but sky and sea visible on the other.

The sun burned bright near the zenith, white and hot and too small. A spectacular ring system, pale like a daylight Moon, slashed a scimitar curve across the sky. High clouds, and close to the ring three tiny crescents, glimmered against the sky’s dark blue.

Carlos stared, mouth agape.

“Oh fuck,” he said.

It didn’t seem adequate. His knees quivered anew. Again he clamped his hands hard on them and pressed his calves against the sides of the kitbag. The woman beside him showed no sign of having noticed his exclamation.

This had to be a dream. For a moment, and with great determination, Carlos tried to levitate. He remained in his seat. Not in a dream, then. Oh well. So much for that comforting prospect.

He wasn’t yet ready to concede that he wasn’t on Earth. He might be in a virtual reality simulation, or in some extravagant, elaborate domed diorama. He could even be dead, in a banal afterlife unpromised or unthreatened by any prophet.

He gave the supernatural variants of that possibility the moment’s notice he felt they deserved, and ran through the natural ones. Not all of them were altogether pleasant. He shuddered at the worst, and dismissed further thought on these lines as morbid.

Stay cool, stay rational, stay in focus. Fear is the mind-killer, and all that.

If he was indeed dead, and materialism was still true (which for Carlos was pretty much a given) then he was fairly sure of the least that could have happened. Sometime after his last conscious memory, his brain-states had been copied. How, he had only the vaguest idea. The technology of the spike had hinted at the possibilities. His brain had been scanned in enough detail to create a software model of his mind. The vast computational capacity that could do that could easily provide the uploaded mind with a simulation of a body and an environment.

So far, so familiar: the possibility of uploading was one of the many taken-as-read doctrines held in common by Axle and Rax. Likewise with that of living in a simulation—a sim. That left open a lot of possibilities as to who, or what, had done this.

Of course, he might not be in a sim at all. This could all be real in a physical and uncomplicated way. In which case he was either in a ludicrously large-scale, detailed and dull Disneyland, or—well, on the bus from the spaceport on a human-settled planet around another star.

Or
maybe
—ha-ha—he was still on Earth, somewhere on the Aegean coast, and amnesic, and perhaps rejuvenated or revived from cold sleep or whatever, and in the meantime some mad scientist or super-villain had shrunk the sun and shattered the Moon. Carlos almost giggled, then pulled himself together.

The least he could speculate was that it was now many years—decades, centuries?—since his last definite memory. And yet his body, as far as he could tell, had aged not at all. Whatever his situation was, it was quite other than any he’d ever truly expected to experience.

None of the other passengers took any notice of his agitation. Nor were they startled by the anomalous sky. They talked or read or gazed blankly out the windows.

Down the steep flank of a long deep vale the vehicle crawled, stopping here and there to let passengers off, in singles and couple and clumps, at hillside farms and huddled settlements. The passengers strolled or skipped away, lugging or swinging their bales. Carlos wondered what the locals brought in from the spaceport, and what they delivered to it in exchange. He presumed the trade made sense. Ignoring the arrivals, robots more agile and autonomous than any he’d seen before toiled amid shacks and scrubby trees.

Slowly the crush eased. A shoreline settlement that looked like a resort came into view far below, in a cliff-cupped cove, all black beaches and white roofs and colour-striped umbrellas. Carlos flinched at the sudden vivid memory of a childhood holiday in Lanzarote. The slow, steady boom of breakers became louder and more noticeable until it became background.

The bus rolled along a raised beach or terminal moraine on a flat road with the occasional slant-roofed chalet a little way off it. It stopped at the unpaved access paths of two of these, letting people off. Then it took a sharp turn and gradient down to the main drag. By the time the vehicle halted beside a garish arcade overlooking the beach, all the other passengers had left.

“Terminus,” said the vehicle.

Carlos stood up and heaved his bag to his shoulder and stepped out on to hot tarmac. The colours were still wrong.

“Thank you,” said the vehicle. “Have a good day.”

So at least it spoke English, even if the passengers didn’t.

“Thank you,” replied Carlos, unthinking, then shook his head as the vehicle rolled away towards a distant shabby low building that needed no signage to have “depot” written all over it.

The arcade smelled of ocean and ice cream and candyfloss and grilling meat. The signs were in English, and generic: Amusements, Café, Bar, Refreshments, Meat and Fish, Swimwear. Nobody was nearby, though figures moved in the distance, where the seafront arcade gave way to spread-out, low-built housing on the slope. Carlos cocked an ear to the ding of games and the roar of screens, and the occasional raised voice or loud laugh. No kids in evidence, which puzzled him. Maybe the place was off season, or in decline. A ghost resort.

Black sand drifted on the street, silting up where the roadway met the pavement. Overhead, large feathered avians coloured like gulls, grey above and white beneath, cried and wheeled. Their wings had a disturbing suggestion of elongated finger bones, like those of bats or pterosaurs. The sun burned hot and hard on Carlos’s buzz-cut scalp. He stepped into the shade of a shopfront’s faded awning and put down the kitbag. In the shade everything was dark for a moment.

A woman’s warm voice came from behind his shoulder: “Hello, Carlos.”

He turned. The woman who stood there giving him a welcoming smile was his type to the millimetre, which struck him as both delightful and suspect. Young and tall and slim, hips and breasts shown off by tight jeans and close-fitted fancy blouse, pink with white collar and cuffs. Dark reddish hair cut short, framing her face. Black eyebrows, high cheekbones, quizzical smile. Mediterranean complexion, but not weather-worn like the people on the bus. Pretty in a gamine kind of way. White-trash-touristy designer handbag on a thin strap from her shoulder.

She held out her hand. “Nicole Pascal.”

Her accent seemed to go with the name.

“Carlos, that’s me,” he said, returning her firm handshake.

She looked him up and down.

“Do you have any other name?”

“Yes, it’s—” He had that tip of the tongue feeling. Shook his head. “Sorry. Maybe it’ll come back. ‘Carlos’ was a
nom de guerre
, but—”

“The
guerre
went on longer than expected?”

He had to laugh. “Something like that.”

Her face was as if a shadow had fallen on it. “Yes. Well. That, indeed.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”