Dunt let a quarter of a second drag out before he replied.
<We can, can we? You have a chart and a compass for this course?>
<In principle, yes,> said Whitten. <It was all worked out and war-gamed as far back as the twentieth century, and refined all through the twenty-first. By the time the final war came we were damn close to going for the burn. The hard singularity.>
<Jason, Jason,> said Dunt, in a friendly tone calculated to aggravate Whitten, <your enthusiasm does you credit, but come on! You know better than that. How can we upstart apes design the overman? Impossible! The Direction is right about that if nothing else—its mistake is to give up on the problem. So let them settle for being upstart apes forever!
<We have to terraform and populate H-0, yes—not to breed contented utopian sheep as the Direction intends, multiplying the mongrel rabble who lived on Earth and whose ghosts served us in the bars of the sims. No, we need a thousand years of experience and refinement and selection and spiritual growth before we are ready to truly transcend humanity. And when I say “we” I mean us, we six, and the best of the rest of us.
<Think of what we can become, after a thousand years of mastery over ourselves and others! Of experimenting with selection, with growing real-life p-zombies, with genetic engineering, with robotics! We’ll already be gods to the lower ranks and levels and races, each of us orders of magnitude greater than the greatest names of history.
<Then we’ll have the wisdom to step fully into our inheritance, and move on to the next level of evolution.>
<Jeez, Mac,> said Whitten, <you’re not addressing a public meeting.>
<No!> snapped Dunt. <I’m addressing a private meeting. And I want to hear your objections, not your snark.>
<My objections?> Whitten temporised.
<Yours and anyone else’s,> said Dunt, mildly.
Whitten shrugged. In a frame, the gesture was so mechanical it looked parodic.
<Time, as ever,> he said. <We won’t have a thousand years for our Reich. Once the real Direction, the one back in the Solar system—back in fucking New York, even—finds out what we’re up to, they’ll move against us. That gives us maybe a hundred years at most. Less if there are other colonies between us and Earth. Or further out, come to that. And in that time, we’ll have to fortify this system with superweapons. Which means mastering massive AI development well before we’ve bred the race that shall rule the sevagram.>
What the fuck was a sevagram? Dunt disdained to ask. The answer popped up in his internal dictionary anyway. Oh yes, a science fiction allusion. The trouble with Whitten, Dunt had often thought, was that he was a prick.
<If you seriously think,> Stroilova cut in, <that we can’t build better weapons in twenty-four years than that decadent miscegenated hippie shit-hole back there can do in a thousand, maybe you should check your premises.>
<Check your own,> Whitten retorted. <I for one am not assuming that what’s going on back there is anything like what we’ve been told. It’s too unstable. No world can teeter on the cusp of singularity for centuries. Especially not a multiracial democracy, not even with a white face at the top and Jewish or Asiatic brains behind the scenes. No, some very smart AIs are in charge back in the Solar system. And the only way to be ready for that is to be smarter AIs.>
<Or to have such at our command,> said Stroilova. <Which we can.>
<In decades?>
<If we have the will.>
They glared at each other, their featureless oval heads mutually reflecting.
<Enough,> said Dunt. <Your objection’s noted, Jason. If they’ve had the singularity already back there, it only reinforces my point. A premature singularity, even one brought on by us as we now are, could easily bring forth an abortion like the Direction or worse.
<Petra—that’s well-trodden ground. We could have that argument in our sleep. And as Lewis remarked, we have work to do and problems to solve.>
<Security and resources,> said Rexham, sounding judicious.
The others nodded solemnly. Sometimes Dunt wondered about his inner circle. Were they really this stupid, or were they just deferring to him?
<We can let the troops deal with roving freebots, and with prospecting,> Dunt said. <The first problem we have to solve is how to deal with the Direction.>
<Well, that depends on how fast we can secure the rock, and how much machinery the blinkers have managed to build,> said Rexham. <When we’ve done that we can make inventory and see how long it’ll take us to build up our forces.>
<Too long, is the answer,> said Whitten, with a chopping gesture of dismissal. <We don’t have that much time to lose. Right now we’re the only coherent military force in the system. The Axle are fighting each other. The Locke module’s on the ground and hors de combat whichever side it’s really on. The freebots are popping their heads up all over the place.
<And the Direction’s reeling. They have no reliable fighters, and they can’t raise more in less than, say, a hundred kiloseconds. Now that they know there are Rax sleepers in their storage stacks, they’re not going to make the same mistake again. The next time they raise fighters, they’ll screen them first in virtual hells to make sure they aren’t Rax, or Axle hardliners for that matter. They’ll torture and trash as many copies as necessary to make sure. Fresh copies of any who come through as sound will be revived in physical reality as fighters. That will be a formidable force, and we shouldn’t wait for it to be assembled.>
<What do you suggest we do instead?> Dunt asked.
<Consolidate a small defensible volume of the rock, search out only enough resources to restock, refuel and repair, and then go right out again and hit the Direction while it’s on the back foot.>
<It’s tempting,> Dunt said. <The trouble is, it’s do-or-die. The Direction might have terrible surprises in store—we don’t know, and I don’t want to bet the ranch. Right now, what we need most is processing power and software.>
<Why?> asked Rexham. <We can get as much processing power as we need by cannibalising freebots.>
<Not enough to run a sim,> said Dunt. <And we need time out in a sim to stay sane. I don’t know how long we can do without it, but I wouldn’t count on more than about a hundred kiloseconds.>
<The Direction reps told us we needed R&R in sims to stay sane,> said Whitten. <I don’t see why we should believe them. I feel fine as I am.>
<So do I,> said Dunt. <But sceptical as I am about the Direction’s avatars, I doubt they’d have bothered providing immersive sims if they weren’t needed. We’re all human minds running on robot hardware, and while we’re thinking faster and more clearly there may well be deep levels of the animal brain that can’t be optimised out. The safe bet is that we do need the sims. And who has the sims? The DisCorps. They have processing power to burn. And what do they need? Especially now that the Locke module has broken the embargo on landing on or prospecting SH-0? They need what the Direction doles out to them very sparingly indeed: raw material and reaction mass. Which is what we’ve got here, by the trillions of tons. Plus whatever the blinkers have been mining or making in this rock—it may be useful to us eventually. So what I propose to do is—offer them a deal.>
<The DisCorps won’t make a deal while the Direction is at war with us,> said Whitten.
<So we make peace with the Direction,> said Dunt. <Peaceful coexistence, mutually beneficial trade, etc. We’ll see who comes out at the end with the most advantage.>
Even the inner circle were taken aback. But in the end they came round, as they always did.
Whitten had put up a fiercer resistance at his last challenge, not many kiloseconds earlier. It had come up en route from the battle to the rock, over an issue that at first glance was of lesser moment than peace with the Direction: whether to accept the volunteering of a long-time veteran of the Rax, Harry Newton. True to his transhumanism, Whitten had argued that it made no difference that Newton, in his original life on Earth a thousand years earlier, had been black.
Fo
r Dunt there could be no compromise. Once he’d grasped that, Whitten had backed down. Ever since, Dunt had felt he had Whitten’s measure.
Now Whitten backed down again, but not without a final passive-aggressive plaint:
<What,> he demanded, <do we have to sell them?>
Dunt flung open his arms. <Look around you!> he cried. <We’re in a fucking Aladdin’s Cave! We’ll find something.>
Dunt had never underestimated the power of baseless confidence. It had got him where he was, and it would get him further. The Infinite Wisdom would see to that.
All the same, it was a pity about the groid.
After all their losses, the New Confederacy could ill afford to turn down even one recruit. Dunt had no reason to doubt that Harry Newton was brave and competent. But needs must. It was all very well saying that race and colour were irrelevant now that they were all little black robots with superhuman minds and abilities. Each such superhuman mind had been derived from a human brain, a product of evolution.
Inevitably, all the deep differences between the races would still be there. Dunt didn’t care to gamble on their irrelevance. No, however much he wished Newton well, the man’s presence would have marred the clean white sheet of the New Confederacy.
Newton’s old nom de plume of “Carver_BSNFH” was itself a giveaway. Back in the day, it hadn’t taken Dunt long to decode the handle’s suffix: the black space Nazi from hell. It showed ambition, and the right attitude, but didn’t ring quite true. Defiant, but deniable—that was the problem: the turned throat, the appeasing grin. Say what you like about the principles of national socialism, they were only principles. In theory they could be endorsed even by a groid, albeit about as convincingly and wholeheartedly as Marxism by a goy.
Dunt had never called himself a Nazi. It wasn’t for any reason of expediency or embarrassment. He thought—and proclaimed—himself a Hitlerite, in the sense that he affirmed the rational core of Hitler’s thinking: the inevitability of struggles for existence, at every level—individual, spiritual, material, national, racial and species, and the celebration of that inevitability as the highest value of the highest authority. It was part of the order of Nature, the rational order of the universe. Hitler had ascribed it to the decrees of God. But it was better to think, as the ancient pagans had, of these laws as in themselves divine than to make even a rhetorical concession to the Abrahamic superstition of a God outside Nature.
The Infinite Wisdom was its laws; or the laws of Nature were the Infinite Wisdom.
Whichever way you put it—the infinite complexity and inflexible necessity of Nature could only be approached with awe.
And if the Infinite Wisdom offered the New Confederacy the chance to be pure from the start, who was Dunt to turn it down?
Pike, following the breadcrumb trail of comms and camera motes into the labyrinth, had left behind him his own trail of larger and more powerful transmitter relay beads. At the end of that line of dots was the local communications hub that bounced messages back and forth between and among the scooters and the frames. Down that line, now, came a call to Dunt.
<Sergeant Pike reporting, sir.>
The salutation was of course redundant—the trooper’s ID flashed up at once in Dunt’s vision—but it counted as a salute. Dunt was keen to distinguish the Rax style from that of the agencies that worked under the Direction, where the largest unit any individual could command was a squad. The only unit in which Dunt allowed that kind of informal relationship was the inner circle.
<Receiving you, Pike.>
<The blinker’s a freebot all right, sir. It’s aware I’m following it, it can see me in its cameras, and it’s retreated into narrower holes than I can get down. But it’s a mining machine—it doesn’t seem to have any counter-measures, and it doesn’t realise I can see through the rock with my radar. It’s heading for the surface.>
<Excellent work, Pike. Keep tracking it as long as you can, and send any estimates of the location it’s headed for up to the surface teams.>
<Very good, sir.>
Dunt ordered the nearest guard squad on the outer surface to send a couple of men to await the freebot’s imminent emergence. Another call pinged. It was from a survey team, five hundred metres into the rock.
<Corporal Hansen here, sir. Urgent. We’ve found a big cave, bigger than they one we just had the meeting in. There are a lot of robots active in it.>
<Freebots?>
<Can’t be sure, sir. They seem to be ignoring us or unaware of us. And they’re … ah, perhaps you’d better take a look, sir.>
<Fine, patch me through.>
Dunt could hardly believe what he was looking at.
The cavity was about a hundred metres long, and twenty metres from floor to ceiling. Even in microgravity, these terms were apt: one side was flatter than the rest and like a factory floor, with rows of identical machinery. The curved walls around it were as if stacked with products, like barrels in a warehouse. Lights speckled surfaces and floated in the near-vacuum all around. Free-moving robots, small on this scale, darted and drifted. Some seemed to supervise the static machinery, others ferried the products to the growing stashes around the sides and up to the ceiling. The products looked like—
Fusion pods. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
<Stay alert, Hansen. Your team, too. I’ll be right there.>
<Yes, sir!>
Dunt summoned the inner circle and patched the images to them.
<Looks like it,> said Dunt. <Time to find out.>
<Do you want us to come with you?> Blanc asked.
Dunt thought about it. <No,> he said. <Stay at your posts. We don’t know what else the survey teams may stumble across, and the guards up top have at least one distraction to deal with already. I’ll keep you all in the loop.>
He jetted towards the relevant hole and then propelled himself by toe- and fingertip along the passage. It was like going down a pipe, the inner surface of which was scribed in fine spiral grooves with a pitch of about a centimetre. The rock smelled of carbonates, nickel-iron and silicates, with traces of water and metals. Light came in from the ends of the long tube—a dwindling dot behind, an expanding circle in front. Radar, infrared detection and micrometre laser scanning cohered to vision just as radio did to speech and spectroscopy did to smell.
Unlike going down a mineshaft on a planet, the temperature dropped the further inward he went. SH-119 was too small to have any internal heat, and the rock insulated its interior from the exosolar heating at the surface. Any tidal heating was too small to notice.
Dunt soared into the chamber of the machines and let himself rise to its midst, then stabilised. A risk, but a small one, and well calculated to impress. Hansen and his two companions lurked watchfully behind one of the machines near the hole.
Around Dunt, scores of robots jetted or moved in straight lines within the space. With segmented carapaces, beady lenses and many and varied limbs, they looked like creatures from the Burgess Shale, floating in a Cambrian sea above the oozing and fizzing stromatolites of the machine floor. Mounds about two metres in diameter and a metre deep, these rugged glutinous nanotech devices didn’t stamp out their products: they extruded them. Close up: a fractal complexity of tiny machinery, busy as a mitochondrion. Slowly but persistently the mounds brought forth cylindrical, convex, flat-ended yellow objects that ranged in size from coffee mug to oil drum. About a tenth of the objects being formed or already stacked were about three metres long, and elaborately flanged: fusion drives. There was something chillingly mindless about it all, like insect activity—or that classic thought experiment of runaway AI, the paper-clip catastrophe.
But fusion pods and drives were more useful than paper clips.
It was still hard to believe. Dunt jetted to the stacks, and scanned the cylinders in front of him. Sure enough, the fine print in many languages that encircled their ends identified the devices as fusion
pods, specified their capacities and warned of their hazards. He got the impression that any poking around would result in a dark matter explosion showering cosmic string like polystyrene strands from a party popper.
No user-serviceable parts inside, all right. Dunt didn’t understand fusion pods, and didn’t expect to: they were engineering implementations of bizarre physics from centuries ahead of his time on Earth.
He shared what he saw with the inner circle.
<Jeez,> said Whitten. <That’s impressive.>
They all agreed that it was.
<Hang on a minute,> said Rexham. <There must be far more pods and drives here than we’ve seen in action so far.>
<There are pods powering the modules,> said Stroilova, <and hundreds of modules, so perhaps … But drives, certainly more. If we’d known there were that many available—!>
The Direction was very sparing in its use of fusion drives, allegedly because the value of the resources used as reaction mass was potentially too great for the stuff to be squandered. Every odd bit of rock might contain priceless scientific information. Blasting it as hot gas out of the back of a spacecraft might turn out like burning a library to heat the baths. Dunt had never believed this. He suspected the Direction module used this constraint to keep the DisCorps on a short leash.
<Do you think the Direction is stockpiling these for when it lifts the restriction?> Schulz asked.
<If it ever does,> said Dunt. <In any case, we have it now. And we have something to sell to the DisCorps, just as I told you.>
The others acknowledged his foresight.
<There’s no indication in the register,> Whitten said, <of any industry on this rock. A few exploratory bots, that’s all. That’s partly why we picked it, of course. We didn’t know the freebots were here already, and I doubt the Direction does either.>
<They probably got here by corrupting the legitimate blinkers,> said Rexham. <That’s how they spread the virus. Then they crank up their reproduction. It’s like a fucking plague.>
<If these are freebots,> Dunt mused. They weren’t reacting to his presence and that of Hansen’s team. His overwhelming impression was of a mindless automatic process. <One way to find out, I suppose.>