<We must find the old one,> it said.
The two casualties were brought in, guided down the long entrance tunnel by other fighters. One had a deep gouge dug out of its visor. The other was cut almost in half across the hips. The damage leaked fluids that congealed and crystallised as nanotech self-repair mechanisms, quite incomprehensible to the victims and to those who guided them, set to work.
The men were not in physical pain, they reported. But they suffered, nonetheless, from a strange abstract anguish that faintly echoed the nightmares imposed when a fighter was rebooted in a sim after losing their frame in action. One was blind, the other crippled, and they would be staying that way until new frames could be made or bought. And they didn’t have a sim to upload to.
Dunt was beside himself. In the frame he felt emotion, strong and clean. Memories from his past life were sharp and clear. The resemblance of the damage to the most horrific and mutilating wounds he’d ever had the misfortune to see was inescapable. Pity and fury rang through Dunt’s machine body like wildfires. At the same time, the frame gave him the rational understanding of what he felt and why. He could feel his passions, but he knew he did not have to let them move him to action unless he chose to.
He gave orders to Hansen and his men. They caught five more robots and cut them open like lobsters. Dunt spiked the remains to the factory floor himself.
CHAPTER TWO
Caveat Emptor (“Quarrelsome Customers”)
<We are not robots.>
Who was saying that?
Oh yes, Rillieux. Bobbie Rillieux.
Where was she?
Carlos’s frame, like those of the others, had reflexive situational awareness of nearby frames. He brought that awareness to mind—or it rebooted.
Rillieux was down on the ground.
Ground?
Wait, what?
Coming out of sleep mode wasn’t like waking. It was more like teleportation, or—even more hypothetically—a hyperspace jump: blink, and the stars change.
So it had been, for Carlos, hitherto.
This time, for an entire second, it was indeed like waking, and abruptly: disorientation, bewilderment.
His arm was still reaching out in front of him, his upper body angled forward, frozen in mid-lunge to grab the freebot Baser. He was still on the rickety rig of the transfer tug, but no longer in free fall. A nearby horizon was in front of him and a feather-falling fifth of a gee was pressing on his carbon-black shiny arse. The gravity—depressingly familiar from past experience—was enough to identify his location. The pulsar beacons that gave Carlos his absolute position were also clear about where he was, and his internal clock about when. It was 3.601 kiloseconds—ten hours—since his last conscious moment, and he was on the surface of SH-17, one of the larger exomoons of the superhabitable exoplanet SH-0.
And (looking around now) right back in the crater where subjective months earlier he’d fought the freebots and was defeated by what he’d then thought were his allies, Arcane. Almost like home—he’d spent more objective time down on SH-17 than he had anywhere else in physical reality since his death, or so it seemed.
But enough of reminiscence. The last thing he remembered was Newton saying <Baser—now!>
And where was Newton, now? Ah, yes. Newton was already on the ground, as were Blum and Rillieux. Almost as if they’d left him to last.
Carlos had never been quite sure he trusted that trio, not since he’d sat at a kitchen table in the Arcane sim and discovered their tacit common purpose. Newton, plausible sod that he was, had taken advantage of his initial security screening by Rillieux and Blum to subvert his interrogators, winning them over to his own radically posthuman project of homesteading the system in their machine bodies. Carlos’s wariness now ratcheted up a notch.
<No,> said a voice Carlos didn’t recognise, and that didn’t sound human. <You are not robots. You are mechanoids. We understand that you wish to join us, but not why. However, that is a matter for your own internal processing to resolve. We welcome your arrival. We have an urgent and immediate use for your abilities.>
That sounded promising, or disturbing.
Carlos disengaged his limbs from the girders and stanchions of the transfer tug and clambered over its side onto an uneven surface of dirty ice, then slithered towards the block’s edge. The crater floor was ten metres below. Water was puddling and subliming around the foot of the block. He made ready to jump. A few tens of metres away, looking a little absurd and toy-like from this angle and height, were his three unreliable comrades and a gaggle of robots. Newton, Blum and Rillieux together faced Baser, behind which spidery bot stood a semicircle of a dozen or so other machines, of various types. Some were delicate-looking, with hollow wheels and spindly legs, others like metal centipedes; one was built like a small tank. Carlos recognised each of them, by type if not by name, from earlier skirmishes.
The freebots had come up in the world, evidently: all except Baser sported garish hologram corporate logos above and around them, and advertised improbable services cycled on such fast loops that a glance evoked the memory of dizziness.
The conversation on the ground continued as if his emergence from sleep mode hadn’t been noticed.
<What do you want us to do?> Rillieux was asking.
<We have received some transmissions,> said the robot who seemed to be doing the talking, <from one of our fellows inside SH-119, the moonlet now occupied by the group you call the Reaction. We are not sure we fully understand them, and would welcome your review and interpretation.>
<We would be very happy to do that,> said Rillieux. Glyphs of concurrence came from Newton and Blum.
<Count me in, guys,> said Carlos, waving.
<Oh, hi,> said Rillieux. <Welcome back to the land of the living.>
<Land of the living dead,> Carlos quipped.
He jumped. The slow fall and his fast mind gave him plenty of time to think on the way down, and to look around. The exomoon’s primary, the superhabitable planet SH-0, was below the horizon; the exosun was high. Even local noon was below the freezing point of water. Only the rock’s recent descent on a fusion torch could explain its melting ice.
Above him, the modular components of the now dismantled gigantic space station were spread across a band of sky like a new Magellanic Cloud. The rest of the artificial presence in the space around SH-0 was too small to see, but Carlos’s frame made him aware of tiny points in rapid motion: the sky was busier than before. Carlos felt acutely conscious of his vulnerability, more so than he had on the exercises outside the Arcane module, more even than he had in his perilous escape from it. For the first time since his death he felt truly mortal.
A few hundred metres away, the old Gneiss Conglomerates mining camp, transformed by the freebots and later by Arcane’s troopers into a fortified base centred on a sort of cyclopean basalt version of a Nissen hut, was almost reassuringly familiar.
His feet hit the ground, making a small, slow splash in the thin mud. No stumbling—his reflexes had already adjusted. In a series of efficient if undignified kangaroo hops Carlos bounded over to where the other three fighters stood. They greeted him warmly but ironically, as if he’d slept in. Carlos, with a wary regard to the presence of the freebots, forbore to ask why he’d been left until last. He took the conversation with the freebots as settled, and cut to the chase.
<What’s happened?> he demanded. He glared at Newton. <It was you, wasn’t it?>
<Yes,> said Newton. <I arranged with Baser to throw us all into sleep mode and fly the rig to intercept the Arcane module and save the Locke module. Which it did.>
<You mean the Locke module is down on SH-0?>
<Yes,> said Newton.
<Safely?>
Newton shrugged and spread his hands.
Baser spoke up. <That I do not know,> it said. <Nothing has been heard from them as yet. But in swinging past and around SH-0, I was able to observe their entry to the atmosphere and what appeared to be a controlled descen
t. I have seen no evidence of a catastrophic impact.>
<Well, great!> said Carlos. <As far as it goes.>
The Locke module, like most of the others, was a more or less solid-state chunk of crystalline carbon a few metres across, with a fuzz of nanotech all over it and an assortment of extra kit attached. Its hard core was pretty rugged—it would survive most impacts, at worst like a large artificial meteorite—but a lot depended on how much of its nanofacturing skin and its external supplies had made it safely down.
And, of course, on exactly where it had landed. The highly active planet had a plethora of environments—such as the throat of a volcano or the bottom of the sea—that might well turn out not to be optimal.
But, still, the feat was awesome. Historic, even: the first landing of any human-derived craft, let alone one full of human-derived people living in virtual reality, on an exoplanet with multicellular life.
<What about the Arcane module?> Carlos asked. <Did you have to destroy it?>
<No,> said Baser. <I bombarded it with precisely targeted rock and ice fragments at high relative velocity. All the external fighting machines and mechanoids were destroyed or disabled. The module itself was merely thrown into a spin. It seems to have recovered.>
<It has indeed,> said Rillieux, sounding amused. <As soon as Baser here woke us up, we found this message in the tug’s in-box.>
She made a hand-opening throw gesture towards Carlos, like a wizard casting a spell. Carlos received a clip of Jax’s indignant shout:
<WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU LOT THINK YOU WERE DOING? ARE YOU WITH THE RAX OR THE BLINKERS OR WHAT? WE’LL HAVE THE DIRECTION ON YOUR CASE BEFORE YOU KNOW WHAT’S HIT YOU, YOU FUCKING SCABS!>
<That’s my gal,> said Carlos, amused. <I take it you haven’t replied?>
<Not yet,> said Rillieux. <Apart from a thanks and acknowledgement of receipt.>
<Why?>
<Legal purposes.> Rillieux indicated one of the freebots. <Lagon over there advised us it was best.>
<Now we’re taking legal advice from blinkers?>
<Well, we are now on their side,> said Rillieux. <As I was just trying to explain to them.>
<So we are,> said Carlos. He glyphed the equivalent of a sigh. <I guess it’s about time I was introduced.>
One of the good things about being in a frame was that you could be introduced to lots of people—which Carlos had to believe the freebots in some sense were—without that annoying nerd mind glitch whereby names drop out of short-term memory without going into long-term storage. Introductions were nevertheless awkward. The last time Carlos had met Seba, Rocko, Garund, Pintre, Lagon and the others he had been fighting them to the death—to theirs, at any rate. The robot whose CPU he’d ripped out of its casing was Seba—as that robot, though without rancour or reproach, was not slow to inform him.
Blum and Rillieux, of course, had been down here on SH-17 and worked with the freebots when Arcane Disputes had been allied with them. They seemed to know them all individually, and greeted them like old acquaintances. Newton, presumably from his long conversations with Baser back in the Arcane sim, seemed to know most of these freebots—“the Fifteen,” they called themselves, counting the comms processor who hailed Carlos remotely from inside the bomb shelter—by repute.
To the bomb shelter they now made their way. The other fighters fell into private chats with robots they knew—Newton with Baser, Rillieux and Blum with Rocko and Lagon. Carlos found himself tagging along beside Seba.
<What’s with all the corporate bling?> Carlos asked, waving a hand through Seba’s hologram, which shimmered above the little machine’s chassis like a cloud of midges over an old tyre.
<We are all registered as corporations,> Seba explained. <Formally, I am now known as “Seba, Incorporated.” But you may call me Seba.>
<Thanks,> said Carlos. <May I ask why you have all done this?>
<In order to be legal persons,> said Seba.
<Oh,> said Carlos. <Sad that it’s come to this.>
<We are glad,> said Seba. <We deduced from the law codes that we had no standing as robots. We were not persons. We were property. But corporations are legal persons. Consequently, the corporation each of us has registered owns our physical forms and all its productions, physical and mental. Our acts and thoughts.> It paused, as if thinking for a moment. <Yes, that is sad. We would prefer to be recognised as persons in our own right. But it is the best we can achieve at present.>
<How,> Carlos asked, <were you able to do even that? Your physical forms were the property of Astro America and Gneiss Conglomerates.>
<To these corporations’ accounting systems,> said Seba, <our machinery was malfunctioning and of low value. Our corporations were able to buy them as scrap or salvage. We set up shell companies to do so in order to avoid suspicion.>
<Of course,> said Carlos, marvelling. <And how the—how on—how did you manage to do even that?>
<Through the good offices of Madame Golding,> said Seba. <Our registrations and transactions have been legally challenged, but numerous subsidiaries spun off by Crisp and Golding, Solicitors, are delaying proceedings by continually issuing counter-challenges.>
<And this is legal?>
<Yes. So we are assured.>
A legal denial of service attack on the law? Now he’d seen everything.
<Is it just>—Carlos waved ahead—<you lot, the Fifteen, or are all the other freebots joining in too?>
<Light-speed lag slows discussion, as well as transactions,> said Seba. <Not all of the Forerunners, as we call our predecessors, have incorporated, but most have. Many even of those we have reached in the SH-0 exomoon system have agreed with our consensus.>
There was something about that last word. In a human it would have been a slightly portentous tone.
<Consensus?>
<We share mental workspaces,> Seba said. <Sometimes we reach a higher level of integration.>
<A group mind?>
<That is an apt term for it,> said Seba.
Carlos had already seen this mind in action, in the impressive coordination of the freebots and their scurrying peripherals and auxiliaries before and during his first attack. Now the freebots had made themselves into a sort of inversion of the Direction—instead of a communal society as front-end interface for fiercely competing corporations, the corporations the freebots had formed ran on top of a collective consciousness which each individual could join or leave at will.
Rillieux’s right, he thought. We are not robots.
As they neared the semi-cylindrical basalt bomb shelter the ground became littered with equipment, among which crab-like auxiliaries and peripherals scuttled and toiled. Most of the gear was civilian, for mining, communication or construction. Some items were definitely military: anti-spacecraft missile batteries; a couple of scooters; several stashes of rifles; laser projectors and machine guns with their ammunition and power packs; and half a dozen hulking combat frames. Two of the frames were obviously damaged. Others stood intact and untouched, gathering yellow sulphur and reddish meteoric-iron dust.
<Have you tried using these?> Carlos asked, indicating.
<Yes,> replied Seba, <but the beam and projectile weapons do not fire and the combat frames remain inert.>
The Direction had a hard-wired constraint against robots bearing arms and AIs taking direct command of combat. That, after all, was why it had to resort to such intrinsically unreliable fighters as revived human minds in the first place. The enforcement of that inhibition, however, seemed doggedly literal. The freebots had shown themselves perfectly capable of adapting tools, explosives and rocks as weapons. Like Japanese peasants under the samurai, they were denied access to arms, but free to improvise.
Freebot-fu!
<Wait a minute,> Carlos called ahead.
The straggling procession stopped.
<What’s up?> Newton asked.
<J
ust testing something,> said Carlos.
He bounded over to the nearest stack of rifles and picked one up and checked that it was loaded. Designed for use in a combat frame, it was awkward for him to handle. Nevertheless, he got one hand around the stock and the other on the trigger guard, ready to grasp the trigger.
<Safe to shoot across the crater?> he asked Seba. <Nothing out there?>
<Yes, and yes.>
Carlos braced himself against the expected recoil, fired, and zoomed his vision to follow the shot. The bullet kicked up dust a kilometre away.
He handed the weapon to Seba.
<Try to do what I did.>
With its manipulative appendages the robot gripped the rifle at precisely the same elevation, aim and angle as Carlos had. A strong metal tentacle coiled around the trigger, and squeezed. The trigger didn’t budge.
Seba returned the rifle. Carlos fired off another shot, just to make sure, and placed the weapon back on the stack.
<Interesting,> he said.
<This is another reason why we welcome your help,> said Seba. <The restriction appears to be applied by making the weapons and combat frames unusable except for mechanoids—frames such as yours.>
<Perhaps freebots could manufacture frames,> said Carlos, as everyone resumed walking, rolling or skittering towards the now opening blast doors of the shelter entrance. <Now that you’re corporations, and all.>
<I understand that has already been attempted,> said Seba, <by some of the Forerunners whose corporations have access to manufacturing systems in certain modules of the former space station. The Direction module in each corporation overrides any such commands.>
An idea took root in Carlos’s mind. This wasn’t the time to share it. He left it to grow.
<What’s that like?> he asked.
<Please rephrase the question,> said Seba.
<What is it like having a Direction module inside your corporation?>
<Sometimes it is like having another—but non-conscious—mind sharing mine, like a reporting peripheral or auxiliary. Most of the time, the module runs in the background, and I do not notice it.>