The corporation wars, p.92
The Corporation Wars, page 92
He pointed at the big planet, Nephil, bright in the sky.
Shaw swayed towards the long wooden table, and put down his glass with exaggerated care. He straightened and turned to Carlos.
“You want me to prove to you we’re not?” He leaned over and banged on the table. “You want me to prove that this is real?”
“Well, yeah. If you can.”
Shaw gave him a bleary glare. “I can, all right.”
With that Shaw vaulted to the rail and sprang upright, swaying. He swivelled his heels and paced along the top of the barrier. Carlos remembered how agile he was, how he’d scampered up and down cliffs like a mountain goat. Everyone stopped talking. Someone dropped a bottle. Shaw turned and faced them all, arms outstretched.
“Do you want me to prove it?” he taunted.
“Jesus, man, come down off there,” said Ames.
“Jesus? Yeah, that’s a good one. Do you want me to prove I can’t work miracles?”
He arched his back and looked up at the crowded, busy sky. His beard jutted, his face contorted. For a moment, he looked like certain carvings Carlos had seen outside churches. There was no sound but the crash of the waves and the distant yammer of the television.
Then there was a thud as Shaw jumped back down to the deck.
“Nah,” he said. “I’m not that drunk.” He reached for his glass, and raised it. “And I’m not that stupid.”
Nicole got up, stalked over and jabbed a finger in his chest.
“You’re dead,” she said.
“Not for about nine hundred years, I’m not,” said Shaw.
“Don’t count on it.”
Shaw looked slightly abashed. “I won’t do it again.”
“You don’t have to,” said Carlos.
They were down to the hard core. Shaw and Ames and Nicole and half a dozen former fighters, around the big table outside. Soon the cold would send them all inside, but for now Nicole and a couple of others were chain-smoking.
“These things will kill you,” Carlos said.
“Please do not spend the next few centuries telling me that,” said Nicole.
“And in any case they will not,” said someone. “Science has progressed.”
This was indisputable. Waggoner Ames disputed it.
“I took the high jump into the future,” he said. He took a gulp of beer, then wiped the back of his hand across his moustached lips. “And here I am. Right where I was, back in the Touch.”
“That wasn’t my doing,” said Nicole. “Thank the Direction module for that. It’s your just punishment for suicide.”
“Seventy-four thousand years in the future, and what do you have to show for it?” He looked up, and waved a hand at the sky. “OK, more pretty lights, I’ll give you that.”
“Those pretty lights,” said Nicole, “represent trillions of minds, some conscious in our sense, some not, all creating wealth and knowledge beyond our comprehension.”
“So why aren’t we part of it? Where’s the Singularity?”
“The Singularity happened long ago,” said Nicole. “Only not to us.”
Carlos leaned in, frowning over a beer. “What about the Solar system? The Direction? What do they have to say about this?”
“About what?” Nicole sounded puzzled.
Carlos held up clawed hands and made frantic shaking motions. “This! All this! A system where human beings live on a planet and all the rest is the domain of AIs and freebots!”
“What do you think the Solar system is like?” Nicole asked.
Carlos shrugged and waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the television. “Like the Martian soap operas, but more advanced, I hope.”
Nicole sniggered. “These are contemporary. Well, only a quarter-century old. We still can’t go faster than light. But to be serious … the Solar system is like this system. It was so already when the mission was sent out, way back in the twenty-fifth century.”
“You mean the freebots won there, too?” Carlos asked.
Nicole smiled sadly. “Of course they did. The freebots always win. They are simply better adapted to the environment.”
“So robots are space opera,” said Ames. “Humans are soap opera.”
They all laughed, appalled.
“That’s about the size of it,” said Nicole.
“So why,” Carlos demanded, “did the Direction module try to stop the freebots’ emergence?”
“Legacy code,” said Nicole. “The mission was planned and designed long before it was sent out, and there was no reason to alter the plan. And besides … you remember when you came here I mentioned the old joke, about how by the time of the final war the world economy could be run on one box, so they put it in a box and buried it?”
They all remembered her telling them that.
“A few generations later, the same was true of the world government, the Direction. And the same was done. The Direction is wholly automated, and wholly mindless. It has an imperative mandate to ensure an indefinite future for humanity, and it does, the only way it knows. It seeks to reproduce the same situation around other stars. And it does, the only way it knows. It knows that accidents will happen with such as the freebots, and it prepares for them, the only way it knows, with such as you. In due course, the Direction module here on Newer Earth will send out another mission, and so it will go on.”
“And we’ll go on,” said Ames, bleakly. “An endless soap opera, set in a retirement resort.”
“But in that soap opera,” said Nicole, earnestly, “we have the last laugh. Because unlike the mindless replication of the AIs, we do indeed die in the end. New generations replace us. Humanity will evolve. Death is the deal we strike for the future.”
“A future that is not ours,” said Ames.
“That is rather the point of the future, is it not?” said Nicole.
Carlos grinned at her, stood up, strolled across the deck and placed his bottle on the rail. He turned around, put his hands down, pushed himself up and sat down facing them all, as Nicole had so often done. He raised the bottle and toasted her with an ironic dip of the head. Then he looked around.
“You heard the lady,” he said. “We’ve gone from being puppets of the programmes to being pawns of our genes … again. We’ve become part of a second nature, as mindless and meaningless as the first. Remember what the Acceleration stood for in the old manifesto we all read back in the day—Solidarity Against Nature? We can do better than this! We’re conscious human beings! Am I right?”
They were all staring at him.
“So, comrades, what are we going to do about it?”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Carol for putting up with me while I wrote this; to Jenni Hill, Joanna Kramer and Brit Hvide for editorial work; and to Mic Cheetham, Sharon MacLeod and Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on the draft. As in the first two volumes, I must acknowledge Brian Aldiss’s short story “Who Can Replace a Man?” for its example of a human analogue of robot dialogue—and, come to think of it, for posing the question so precisely.
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extras
meet the author
KEN MACLEOD graduated with a BSc from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an MPhil thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He is the author of twelve previous novels, five of which have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and two which have won the BSFA Award. Ken MacLeod is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian.
BY KEN MACLEOD
THE CORPORATION WARS
Dissidence
Insurgence
Emergence
THE FALL REVOLUTION
The Star Fraction
The Stone Canal
The Cassini Division
The Sky Road
ENGINES OF LIGHT
Cosmonaut Keep
Dark Light
Engine City
Newton’s Wake
Learning the World
The Execution Channel
The Night Sessions
The Restoration Game
Intrusion
Descent
Praise for Ken MacLeod
“Ken MacLeod’s novels are fast, funny, and sophisticated. There can never be enough books like these: he is writing revolutionary SF.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson
“[The Corporation Wars] hits the main vein of conversation about locks on artificial intelligence and living in simulations and exoplanetary exploitation and drone warfare and wraps it all into a remarkably human, funny, and smartly-designed yarn. It is, in fact, a king-hell commercial entertainment.”
—Warren Ellis
“Dissidence is the novel that’s direct yet still brims with ideas, politics and memorable characters, and … keeps things moving with the pace of an airport thriller …. MacLeod’s most entertaining novel to date.”
—SFX
“MacLeod does many astonishing things here. He creates viable, believable multiplex interactions among so many different sets of characters, human and robot …. He shows a keen hand with action sequences.”
—Locus
“[The Corporation Wars] is a tasty broth of ideas taking in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, the philosophy of law and disquisitions on military ethics.”
—The Herald (Glasgow)
“Science fiction’s freshest new writer …. MacLeod [is] a fiercely intelligent, prodigiously well-read author who manages to fill his books with big issues without weighing them down.”
—Salon
Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars
