The corporation wars, p.4
The Corporation Wars, page 4
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 couples 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?”
“Of course.” Her smile returned. “Let’s do lunch. Somewhere quiet. Lots to say.”
Lunch was not quite fish, not exactly chips, and definitely a beer. It was served at a round rustic table of soft grey driftwood timber under a big umbrella on a concrete terrace where no one else sat. Music from the café up the steps sounded loud and the waiter bustled. Beyond the saltwater-pitted rusty rail, breakers sent hissing white foam a long way up the black beach. Carlos picked at pan-fried dark flesh in which a fan of thin yellow cartilaginous bones radiated from a stubby cylinder of hollow tubes around a pallid toothy ball which Carlos tried not to think of as the skull. He chowed down on sliced green tubers fried in oil and sprinkled with herbs. Nicole nibbled at boiled purple leaves and rubbery molluscs drenched in vinegar, and sipped water.
He paused when he was no longer hungry and parched.
“So,” he said. “Hit me with it.”
She shoved her half-empty plate aside and fingered a small carton from her handbag. She flipped the top and flicked the base. A white paper tube poked out.
“Smoke?” she offered.
He’d seen it in movies. He shook his head.
She used a gold lighter and drew sensuously. “Ah. That’s good.”
“It isn’t.”
She nodded. “Bad for your health. I know. And as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, you being Axle cadre and all, that’s kind of … irrelevant, here.”
Axle cadre? She knew a lot about him. He kept his cool.
“Passé, so to speak?”
“Very much so.” She fixed him with her gaze as she drew hard on the cigarette, and sighed out the smoke. Looked away.
“Go on,” he said. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
A muscle twitched in her cheek. He could see her stretching the tic into a forced smile.
“All right,” she said. “You’re dead.”
“That’s a relief.”
He wasn’t being flippant. One of the many dire possibilities he’d considered was that he was grievously injured yet alive, a hunk of charred meat and frazzled brain being fed consoling dreams until the technology improved enough to regenerate him. Or until the Rax—if they had won—decided on one of their ingeniously horrible ways to torture him. That was still possible, no matter what she told him. But that way madness lay. Better to take this as good news and at face value until he had reason to doubt it.
And in that case … holy shit. So this is it, he thought. Immortality. Or at least a very long life. He might yet watch the last stars fade …
“Tell me,” Nicole went on, as if still drawing things out, delaying the real bad news. “Where do you think you are?” She waved a hand around. “Like, what does all this look like to you?”
Carlos looked down at the cooked organisms on his platter, then up at the mountains and the sky. The ring system still gave him a start when he momentarily forgot about it and then glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye.
“All right,” he said. “What it looks like, OK? It looks like an extrasolar habitable terrestrial planet, probably terraformed, and settled or colonised by people—maybe genetically adapted so they can eat the local life—but otherwise not too culturally distant from my time, and therefore with an extraordinary lack of ambition and imagination.”
Nicole guffawed. He got the full horseshoe of perfect teeth.
“Spoken like a true Accelerationist!” she said. “And, yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. That’s what it’s meant to look like. Your classic bucolic colony planet. Which would imply faster-than-light starships, warp drives, the works. The full orchestral space opera and the fat lady singing. Yes?”
“Too good to be true?” Carlos shrugged. “OK, I’d figured as much. We’re in a sim.”
“Yes!” said Nicole, sounding relieved. “We’re in a sim. The good news is that it’s running on a machine in a space station orbiting a planet not a hundred million kilometres from the planet on which this sim is modelled.”
Carlos closed his eyes and opened them. “You mean we’re in the same system as a planet where all this is real?”
“Not … exactly,” said Nicole. “There’s a ringed habitable terrestrial, yes, but it doesn’t yet have … oh, radial flatfish and green edible root vegetables, let alone people eating them. It has nothing living on it but little green cells drifting in the oceans. We envisage these cells being used as the basis for building up more complex life, endless forms most beautiful as the man said, all the way up to hassled seafront waiters and dirt-farmers with robots if we want. All that may come. In due course. For now, there’s no one around this star but us robots, AIs, avatars, p-zombies and”—she pointed a finger at him—“ghosts.”
Carlos grinned, though he was shaking inside.
“If I’m a ghost, what are you?”
Nicole shook her head. “Not knowing that is part of what you have to live with, for now. You’ll find out why soon enough.”
“If that thing up there giving me sunburn isn’t supposed to be the Sun, what is it?”
“It’s a star twenty-four light years from the Sun, give or take. It has a ridiculously big rocky planet—ten Earth masses—in close orbit. Closer than Mercury, and of course faster. We call it M-0. Basically it’s a ball of molten metal and we still haven’t figured out how it got there. Then at roughly one AU out you come to H-0, the ringed habitable terrestrial planet this sim’s based on. After that, there’s a much bigger planet a couple of AU further out that’s called SH-0 because it’s what’s known as a superhabitable—something of a misnomer, it has abundant multicellular life but it’s impossibly hostile for human habitation. SH-0 is the one this space station is in orbit around, along with lots of moons and bits of stray junk. And then way out beyond that there’s G-0, a humongous gas giant with kick-ass rings and moons the size of Mars and on down. Plus all the usual small fry of asteroids and comets and meteoroids.” She waved a hand. “Lots. Lively place.”
“And how did we get here?”
“Starwisp. Tiny probe laser-pushed from solar power stations in sub-Mercury orbit to near light-speed, decelerated by a detachable shield on approach. Packed with all the information needed to set up shop in the locality on arrival, which it did about ten Earth years ago. Including the stored mind-states and body specs of twenty thousand people, including you. Potential future inhabitants of”—another handwave—“the rock this is based on, when it’s terraformed for real.”
“Now tell me the bad news.”
He felt he’d already heard it. If Nicole’s story was true and the human race was wasting precious time and space and energy in terraforming and colonising, then things were a long way from the best he could have hoped for. Things might even have gone the worst way he’d feared.
“Which bad news?” Nicole asked.
“Like, did the Rax win the war?”
She rolled her eyes upward. “No. And nor did the Axle. That is ancient history now.”
“How ancient?”
She smiled. “Welcome to the thirty-second century.”
Now that shocked him. Over a thousand years.
“Shit.”
At some level he must have been hoping for less. Now for the first time the full measure of dismay settled on him like a heavy wet cold cloak: the incomprehensible and irrevocable loss of everyone he had known. The many he had liked and the few he had loved, all gone.
Unless—
The stoical element of his mind cursed the Accelerationist mentality that had accreted around it for the almost certainly futile hope that flared up for a moment. But he had to ask.
“And you haven’t got—?” He was almost embarrassed to spell it out.
“Immortality?” Nicole gave him a look of wry sympathy. “Only as ghosts such as you, in places such as this. Longevity? A few centuries. No one of your time is alive. I’m sorry.”
He tried to smile. “I’m alive, or so it seems.”
