Divisions (25 page)
Authors: Ken MacLeod
‘Stop.’ I caught his arm. ‘Enough.’
The vast futility of my deepest and darkest, though not my most secret, motives for coming here made me feel cold and sick and dizzy. My hope against hope of meeting copies of my dead parents had been one, and I was racked by its simultaneous disappointment and relief. My desire for revenge on the entities who were incontestably the closest to the original Outwarders had just been exposed by Reid as equally, achingly empty. There would be no point in tormenting, no satisfaction in punishing, entities with which I didn’t even have enough empathy to take pleasure in their pain, if pain it was. It would be as futile as stamping on a recalcitrant machine.
There could only be one deterrence, one defence, one vengeance for me, and that was to send them to the same oblivion as they’d sent my parents and so many others: an eternal death without hope of resurrection. Nothing I said or did now could be allowed to imperil that.
I smiled at Reid. ‘You’re right, of course,’ I said. ‘It’s just one of those fantasies, isn’t it? When you spell it out, when you have the chance to act it out, you see how tawdry and childish it really is.’
‘Well, it’s understandable,’ he said. ‘I know how you must feel.’ He clasped my forearm. ‘Come on. We’ll have reporters buzzing about in a few minutes, and you’ll have to talk to them. When you’ve got that out of the way, you can all come and see the city.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m looking forward to that.’ My knees were shaking. Reid noticed, and guided me to a seat beside a patio table. He twitched his eyebrows at Talgarth and the two women, and they slipped back amongst everybody else, standing and talking. Reid sat down beside me and uncapped a silver hip flask and passed it to me. I sipped something fiery, and passed it back.
‘It’s not the same,’ Reid admitted regretfully. ‘I really hope you still know how to make single malt.’
I had to smile. The man had, despite his reputation for ruthlessness, a disarming ability to put one at one’s ease.
‘You’ll have to ask the people in Japan about that,’ I told him.
‘Oh, God,’ he said. He took another sip. ‘And you really do have a world without money? What do you use instead—computers?’
‘Yes,’ I said proudly. ‘We don’t do much planning, but for what we do, we use computers. The biggest in the world.’
Reid’s head rocked back, his laugh bayed at the sky, and he didn’t see my bleak moment of remembering just why our most important computers were built of brass and steel and looked like the very locomotives of history, incorruptible analytical engines that nothing could divert or deflect.
The year is 2098. Below me a city drifts past, its old towers of concrete and glass overshadowed by recent nano-built spires and surrounded by the shantytown sprawl that predates, and will outlast, the buildings which have grown above it like fungi on a damp, dark soil. Beyond even the shanties, the vivid green of the forest with its grey-brown scars of road; higher even than the towers, and rising still, and multiplying, the columns of oily smoke.
The smoke is rising from crashes. Here a tower is burning, upward from the twentieth floor where a helicopter is spattered on the side of the building like an insect on a windshield; there traffic is gridlocked by numberless collisions; elsewhere an airliner has fallen out of the sky, and set ablaze acres of wooden shacks.
I float in the station’s telemetry deck, and the unmanned cargo airship floats above Lagos, its scanning cameras showing me scenes I can do nothing whatsoever about. This was a successful city, until half a day ago. The West Africans, decimated again and again by the plagues of the twentieth century, are almost immune to the last great plague of the twenty-first. They have survived the Death, and have even accommodated the floods of European refugees which fill the shantytowns and swirl about the towers. They still have oil, they still have computer networks. Here civilization is still rising, not falling.
Until now.
The computers are crashing, and with them everything that depends on them: traffic control, air traffic control,
aircraft
controls, industrial processes, stock control, telecommunications, and electricity supply. With predictable prisoner’s-dilemma rationality, people are looting food from the suddenly dark and warming refrigerators before it spoils, raiding the shops before they’re stripped, arming themselves before they’re robbed, taking to the roads and heading for the villages before anybody else gets the same idea, and each discovering that everyone else is doing the same.
aircraft
controls, industrial processes, stock control, telecommunications, and electricity supply. With predictable prisoner’s-dilemma rationality, people are looting food from the suddenly dark and warming refrigerators before it spoils, raiding the shops before they’re stripped, arming themselves before they’re robbed, taking to the roads and heading for the villages before anybody else gets the same idea, and each discovering that everyone else is doing the same.
We’re in a bad way ourselves, running everything on manual or back-up or emergency. Our computer programs have been reduced to gibberish, the viruses have shorted systems, wiped memory cores, crippled machinery … but our basic systems are robust, they’ve been jerry-built and jury-rigged and worked around so often that nothing short of physical force can disable them. We still have air and food.
The people down below are in a worse circumstance. They’re paradoxically far more reliant on a network of artificial organization than we are. Lagos’s biggest export is financial services, pulling in even more than its dwindling oil. All that is gone now.
The people I helplessly watch struggling in the streets are worse off even than they know. There’s no help coming from anywhere, because everywhere is in the same plight. With an eerie, awful certainty, I know that a very high percentage of those people are already dead, as dead as if they were walking around—as, elsewhere, in other cities, not a few at this moment are—in the elliptical downwind teardrop zones of fallout from burning reactors.
The airship crumples into the side of a nano tower, and the picture dies.
The door of the helicopter opened again and reporters swarmed out and began hovering and buzzing about, just as Reid had said. I’d thought he’d spoken figuratively, but he hadn’t. The ‘reporters’ were tiny helicopters, carrying microphones and cameras and loudspeakers; some of them had the
ability to project a hologram of a human figure which lip-synched along with the questions from the speaker.
ability to project a hologram of a human figure which lip-synched along with the questions from the speaker.
‘They’ll look quite solid when you’ve tuned your contacts,’ Reid assured me.
‘I’m not sure I want them to,’ I said.
I gathered the team again into a group and we all faced the cameras and mikes together. Boris and Jaime, I guessed, must have satiated the requests for basic information about us: most of the questions I was asked (and it was I who was asked, the local media having appointed me the spokesman of the expedition) felt like the reporters here were just mopping up.
‘You seemed surprised at the sight of us, Miss Ngwethu,’ said a spectral youth a few feet away. ‘Don’t you have fetches and ‘motes back in the Solar System?’
‘Of course we do,’ I said. ‘But as I’m sure you’ve heard, we have problems with our electronic communications, thanks to our local versions of the fast folk. In any case, even if we didn’t, I doubt if we’d use them for … what do you call it, news gathering? We do make limited use of them, for exploring or monitoring dangerous environments and so on.’
‘So what do you use for news gathering? Do reporters have to go around in person?’
‘We don’t actually
have
reporters, as such,’ I said. ‘I mean, some people run newsletters and pump newsfeed pipes, but nobody has to pay them much attention.’
have
reporters, as such,’ I said. ‘I mean, some people run newsletters and pump newsfeed pipes, but nobody has to pay them much attention.’
‘So how—’ The reporter paused, baffled. ‘How does anyone know what’s going on?’
‘Oh! That. Well, everybody in the Union can report anything to anybody, and attend or listen in to any meeting of the social administration and say anything they like about it. Or at it, come to that, unless they start wasting everybody’s time and get thrown out.’
‘So your Central Committee, this Solar Council, could have hundreds of thousands of people turning up at its meetings, and all shouting at once?’
‘Of course not,’ I said indignantly. ‘I suppose in theory, yes, but who would want to? Apart from the Solar Council delegates, that is, and some of them practically have to be pushed. It’s all very practical, and frankly a bit
dull
. Local meetings are far more interesting because they have more to do.’
dull
. Local meetings are far more interesting because they have more to do.’
‘Does that apply to your organization, the Cassini Division?’ asked the hologram.
I thought about this. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Fighting is different. Sometimes we need to keep secrets, but not for long.’
The reporter hesitated for a second, and another seized the opportunity.
She had straight blonde hair and looked about twelve years old. ‘Why have you come here?’ she asked.
She had straight blonde hair and looked about twelve years old. ‘Why have you come here?’ she asked.
I gave her my best smile. ‘We’re very interested in finding out what has happened to the only other human community, and in establishing friendly relations with you. And of course we have a scientific interest in the wormhole—the Malley Mile.’
She gave me her best ‘I wasn’t born yesterday’ look; rather funny, considering her age and mine. ‘Apart from that.’
‘Isn’t that enough? Why else would we want to come here?’
‘To impose your system on us, perhaps?’
This idea had genuinely not occurred to me. Our intention of wiping out the local fast folk, or destroying what Reid had called the templates, was secret and sinister enough for me to worry about anyone’s guessing it. But not this. I just laughed.
‘You seem to be doing fine as you are,’ I said diplomatically. ‘And you can’t have socialism unless most people understand it and want it and are willing to do something to get it. From what I know of New Mars, this is not the case—yet.’
This raised an appreciative laugh all round, and Talgarth stepped forward with his hand raised. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said to the phantom figures and their rotary haloes, ‘I’m sure our visitors will have a great deal to tell you all very soon. Meanwhile, I’d like to give them some hospitality and privacy.’
We’d been having plenty of both until Talgarth and the other leading citizens and their accompanying swarm of inquisitive remotes turned up, but I was not complaining. We said goodbye to Abigail and Andrew, and were escorted to the big helicopter. I found myself in a window seat beside Tamara. As the machine lifted off I waved to Powell and his wife, who waved back. The last thing I saw of them before we turned out of sight was Andrew Powell setting off across his field with a swarm of remotes beside him, heading for the ship. I knew he would have the sense not to go too close to it, but I rather suspected that this was not true of the remotes.
I leaned back with a smile, already enjoying the flight.
Tamara and I got chatting about life on New Mars and on Earth, laughing at each other’s misconceptions, and about our pasts. I was gratified and embarrassed by Tamara’s awe about mine, and encouraged her to talk about her own.
She said she’d been an Abolitionist.
‘What’s that?’
Abigail and Dee had mentioned the Abolition, but I hadn’t yet followed up what this meant.
‘We used to be a small group of anarchists—some social, some more into the lifestyle thing—who believed that using conscious machines as tools was wrong, you know, like slavery. But five years ago, all that changed.’
‘You don’t believe it any more?’
Tamara looked at me, visibly decided I was joking, and laughed more at the oddity of my supposed humour than at its content. ‘No, we changed people’s minds! It all came out of a complicated string of court cases involving Wilde, the copy of Wilde in the machine, Dave Reid’s ownership of Dee, and of course the fast folk. After that a lot of owned sapients took to claiming self-ownership, and some people sided with them, and the new people from the dead couldn’t see how anybody could treat robots like that—they didn’t have the prejudices that the first humans here had.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Wilde told us about that. He said things were getting pretty hot just as he left.’
‘They sure were! Closest we’ve ever come to a revolution, everybody outside in the streets arguing.’
‘What happened about the fast folk?’ I asked lightly.
Tamara’s expression darkened. ‘Well, after Reid and Wilde used them to start the resurrection—it’s still going on, we’re bringing back dead people from the smart-matter storage all the time, about a million over the past five years, which is why the city’s grown so much and all the new settlements are springing up—they wiped out the copies of the fast folk they’d revived, and Reid’s still sitting on the stored originals. Still scared of another bad Singularity. ’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘But now that your Jovians have started acting reasonable and aren’t going mad or anything, maybe that’ll change too.’
‘I’m sure it will,’ I said, ‘Reid won’t be worrying about a bad Singularity for much longer, not if I have anything to do with it.’
Tamara’s pleased look in response to this true but ambiguous statement shamed me a little. I turned to the window and looked down at the city below and before us, three of its five arms foreshortened, their long streets with their radial canals joined by the ring canal, a glowing starfish in the night.
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