<Zero altitude,> said the downlink.
<Landing successful,> Taransay reported.
She stood between the middle of the pod and the water, pressed her hands against the side of the pod and pushed. The thing didn’t budge. She turned around, put her back to the curved side, dug her heels into the silty pebbles, and pushed. Slowly the pod rolled. When it was a couple of metres out of immediate danger, Taransay stepped away.
She didn’t need to read the instructions printed on the ends to know what to do. The frame already had the knowledge. Taransay found a detachable panel at one end, prised it open with a thumb and pulled the handle behind it. The pod split open along its length, into two neat halves.
Packed in recesses in shock-proofing spongy stuff were four low-slung, stubby-legged robots with obvious load-carrying arrangements on their backs. As soon as the light hit them they stirred, then clambered out to stand on the shore.
Gee, thanks, Carlos and Astro. A lot of fucking use that is. She hadn’t expected transport robots. She could see the point, and appreciate the intent, but she had no intention of using the robots until it had been cleared with Locke. As things stood the robots, helpful though they’d be, were so many tracking devices. Of course the other supplies could be tracked as well, but that would be detectable if you knew where and how to scan for it, and she did.
Taransay dragged the now far lighter opened cylinder across the shingle to where plants grew, and let it drop. The four robots plodded after her. She went over to the other pod and opened it. Inside, in the same shock-proof packaging as with the first, was much more immediately useful stuff: metre-long portable tubes of nanotech machinery; a crate of fusion pods; a case of basic tools designed for the small hands of frames; a case of four likewise frame-ergonomic rifles with standard ammunition; coils of rope; a box of surveying instruments. Most immediately useful of all: rucksacks and carrying harnesses. All of them were folded so small she almost overlooked them in their two-centimetre-square recesses.
Someone—Carlos, most likely—had figured she might have trust issues with leading robots back to the module. Well done that man. She gladly stripped off and abandoned the rope sling.
<Cargo delivered intact,> Taransay reported.
<Roger,> said the downlink.
<Signing off for now,> said Taransay.
<Signing off.>
Taransay piled the supplies on the backs of the four robot mules and dragged the empty cargo pods to just underneath the trees. There, she put the supplies she wasn’t taking back in their shock-proof recesses and closed the pod. She walked over to where the instrument packs lay on flattened reeds and eyed them suspiciously. They were already rooting and flowering: tendrils digging in, dish aerials and sensors opening. Sending data about the planet up to the DisCorps was part of the deal, she understood, but she didn’t like it.
The wing components, a hundred metres further away, were curious triumphs of nanotech aviation engineering and AI design, flexible and fluted, with tiny ramjets scored through them and subtle warping along the trailing edges. She walked around them for a bit, marvelling.
Then she summoned the robots and set them to work dragging the wing components over, one by one. They were gigantic to her—long acute triangles, twenty metres by eight—but surprisingly light even under two gravities. When she’d got them on each side of the cargo pods, she lifted them on their sides and then, with some help from the robots, tipped them over to meet in the middle, forming a crude lean-to roof. She decided it would be safe enough to leave the laser comms device here with the supplies she couldn’t carry, and left it well inside the shelter. She filled the rucksacks and harnesses with nanotech tubes (which stuck up above her shoulders, like a pack of rolled-up posters in cardboard cylinders, except a lot heavier), shouldered a rifle, and side-slung a container of ammunition and the two fusion pods.
<Guard this,> she told the four robots.
<Please clarify,> they all said at once.
<Jesus fucking fuck,> she said.
<Please clarify.>
She thought about it. <You see the opening there?>
She pointed. They looked at her finger. She laser-pointed. That they understood.
<Yes.>
<Prevent any large organism or machine—except me, or one or more like me—from entering that. Keep the cargo pods at this location. Likewise the wing components. Do you understand?>
<Yes,> they chorused.
She wasn’t at all sure they did, but she didn’t press the matter. By now it was noon, and time she was heading back. This time, with her awkward load, she expected the journey to take longer.
She tramped off into the jungle, without a backward glance and without indulging the sentimentality of a goodbye.
Fucking stupid robots. She hoped Carlos was having a better time getting through to the smart ones. It occurred to her that she’d never actually interacted with a conscious robot except by exchanging fire.
Taransay was a couple of kilometres into the jungle, and the exosun about a quarter of the way down from its zenith, when she was stopped in her tracks by an unaccountable feeling that something wasn’t quite right. No rain, for the moment. The little buzzing spinning things flitted in the narrow slanted beams of light between the shadows cast by the efficient leaves. Somewhere, water gurgled and small stones shifted. Her nanotech stone-age knife glinted in her hand. Her feet slowly sank deeper in the squishy, slithery floor of living and dead mats.
Nothing was wrong. No voice in her head, no brightening of the blue glow around her upper right arm.
It took Taransay a moment to realise what was troubling her. Her walk had been too easy. She’d expected it to be difficult, what with the heavier and bulkier load, and the nanotech cylinders poking up high above her shoulders and more than doubling her effective height. Instead, she had made her way between trees and bushes and through and over streams, boulders, swathes of ash and sheets of cooled lava without so much as catching a cylinder against an overhanging branch. She was still following the same route, but she hadn’t had to hack at any vegetation, or found herself facing a branch or stalk she’d cut before.
She was no longer crashing and hacking her way through the jungle, like an explorer. She was slipping through it like a native. Well, not that she knew about such contrasts directly, or even reliably, but she’d watched enough well-meant rain forest eco-romantic adventure serials as a child to have the notion embedded.
Now that she’d noticed, of course, she got tangled in one of the long vine things on her next three steps, and put a foot in a hole a few steps after that.
Zen, that was what she had to strive for. Zen and the art of hiking. But you couldn’t strive for it. Like the millipede in the legend that was asked how it moved its legs, and suddenly couldn’t take another step. Millipedes, ah yes. She concentrated hard on recalling the millipede-like animals she’d seen, and thinking about whether any of the images she could recollect of it would betray the affinity with the mats that Zaretsky’s team had detected by genetic analysis.
Then she got to thinking about thinking. When she wanted to recall what the two fierce, fast creatures she’d noticed had been like, she could see in her mind clear and distinct images of them. It was exactly as if they were photo files being retrieved from an album. And she could turn them over in her mind’s eye, almost literally: she could rotate the images this way and that, zoom in on detail.
This was not, she remembered very clearly, what remembering very clearly was like. Here in the frame, she was still herself, still Taransay Rizzi from one of Partick’s lower-rent zip codes. But she was far more remote from her original self than she was even in the sim, where she was physically a little cloud of electron states in a big crystal. She wasn’t thinking like a human being. She was thinking like a robot. The actual mechanisms of memory and thought and sense were quite different, in whatever chip she was running on, from in the biological brain or even its electronic copy, its emulation in the simul
ation.
In a sense, she was far more conscious, far more self-aware, than she could recall being in life, or in the sim. She wondered if the distinction was qualitative. There had always been something slippery, elusive and illusive, about subjectivity in the first place. Too much of it subtended biological mechanisms, too much of it was subjected to social relations, for it to be truly as autonomous as it fancied itself to be. What if people, herself included, had always already been p-zombies, at least most of the time, and only machines could be truly conscious?
If people were to stay in frames long enough, would they start to think as robots? Was this what was happening to Carlos and his mates? And was this possibility what the necessity of recuperating in the sims was designed to prevent?
She was still thinking about all that when she found herself back at the module.
She hailed Locke, on the weak local waveband that was all the module could raise, and just as well from the point of view of their equivalently feeble effort at concealing their location.
<Mission successful,> she said. <One lander lost to a flying jellyfish.>
<We’ve already received the reports,> said Locke. <Welcome back.>
Taransay unladed herself, and Locke showed her where to clamp the nanotech gear to the module, and where to place the two fusion pods. The damaged frames lay in the overhang of the module, slowly being rebuilt. Local life—fuzz, something else—was contending with the nanomachinery’s slow-motion 3-D printing. Or, for all she knew, it was cooperating, having been suborned. Tendrils reached out from the module to the nanotech tubes at once. It wasn’t clear whether they were the module’s own nanotech or among the hybrids Zaretsky’s team had made with the fuzz.
The fuzz. Oh yes. The fuzz. She’d have to tell Locke about that. In fact—
<Are Beauregard and Nicole up and about? Oh, and Zaretsky.>
The exosun was now low, the shadows of the surrounding forest deep and long, but the diurnal cycles of the module’s sim and the world outside were still out of synch.
<They’re all here,> said Locke.
<Good. Uh, put me on screen.>
<You are,> said Locke, dryly.
<Oh! Right. Uh, guys and gals, I’ve got something to tell you …>
She told them about the voice in her head and its warnings, about the glow, and about the less definable sense of being at home in the jungle and her unaccountable agility in it.
<I hope you don’t think I’m going crazy,> she concluded. <Or hallucinating or something.>
<Impossible,> said Nicole, in a tone of brisk reassurance. <The software of the frame does not permit it.>
<I thought you said the sims were to preserve our sanity?> Taransay retorted. <And I’ve been a long time out of the sim.>
<Not long enough,> said Nicole. <Not by far. And the symptoms would be different. They are … a drifting of thought from the human baseline, feelings of dissociation, a loss of the sense of self-preservation. Their onset is preceded by something like a craving for normality. You would know it if you felt it. Auditory and visual hallucinations and delusions of competence are not diagnostic and not expected.>
<Thanks,> said Taransay. <I guess.>
<Well, let’s assume this is really happening,> said Beauregard. <The fuzz that got on your stump has turned into something else, and adapted to the frame. Whether it’s consciously communicating with you, I doubt. I suspect it’s sensitive to its environment, and giving you cues through inner voice and through fine motor control at the subconscious level, maybe at the frame’s equivalent of reflex.>
<That’s more or less what I thought myself,> said Taransay. <But—>
<Have you tried talking back to it?> Zaretsky interrupted. Fucking nerd.
<No,> replied Taransay, testily. <I maintained comms discipline, for whatever good that would do.>
<Glad to hear it,> said Zaretsky. <OK, so talk to it now.>
Taransay held up her right arm and turned her head as far as she could, to face the glowing band.
<This is going to look very silly,> said Taransay.
<Never mind that,> said Nicole.
<We’ll all just point and laugh,> added Zaretsky, helpful as usual.
<Knock yourselves out,> said Taransay. <Fall off your stools.>
It was hard to find the words.
<Uh, hello?> she ventured. <Blue glow? Fuzz? Thing on my arm? Anyone home?>
<Yes.>
<Holy fucking shit!> Taransay yelped.
<I take it you got a reply,> said Nicole.
<It said yes! In my head.>
<Talk some more!> said Zaretsky.
<What are you?> Taransay asked the glow, still feeling very silly.
<No.>
<What do you mean?>
<No.>
She tried a few more queries, with the same result.
<Are you there?> she said at last.
<Yes.>
She reported this.
<Still sounds like what we thought,> said Beauregard.
<No alien intelligence, then?> said Taransay. <Colour me surprised.>
<Don’t jump to conclusions,> said Zaretsky. <Like, define “alien,” define “intelligence.”>
<Oh, fuck off,> said Taransay.
<Time to bring you in,> said Zaretsky.
<Yeah, tell me about it,> said Taransay. That thing Nicole had said about a craving for normality being the first symptom of having been out of the sim too long was preying on her mind a bit.
She climbed the cobweb ladder and hauled herself into the slot. The blue glow lit the dimness inside.
<OK, I’m ready,> she said.
Nothing happened.
<There is a problem,> said Locke. <A software incompatibility.>
Taransay felt the analogue of a cold shock, an instant alertness thrumming through her connectors and processors.
<Is this the fuzz? The glow?>
<That seems to be the case,> Locke admitted.
<I thought you had this thing under control!>
<We’re working on it,> said Zaretsky.
<How long will it take?> Taransay asked.
Zaretsky glyphed her a shrug. <I don’t know. Days, probably.>
<Well, yes.>
<In that case,> said Taransay, <I might as well go back and pick up more of the stuff.>
<Are you sure?> said Nicole. <It’s dark.>
Taransay laughed. <You sent me out in the dark this morning.>
<True, but—>
<How long will it take me to recharge?> Taransay said.
<Several kiloseconds,> said Nicole. <But Locke can show you how to do it a lot faster with a fusion pod.>
<Now there’s an idea.>
She clambered down. Locke directed her to place a fusion pod against the join between her torso and her pelvis. The sensation was odd, not quite pleasant, but satisfying. Or perhaps that was an artefact of watching her charge indicator creep from red to green in ten seconds.
<Right,> she said. She shouldered the rifle, slung on the empty rucksack and harnesses and clutched her knife. <See you in a bit, guys.>
<Wait!> said Zaretsky. <Why not use the robots provided?>
<Fine by me, if that’s OK with Locke,> said Taransay.
<It is not,> said Locke.
<I concur,> said Nicole. <We cannot yet be sure of Carlos’s intentions. Or the Direction’s.>
<Trust issues,> said Taransay. <With you there, folks.>
She turned and slogged off into the night.
CHAPTER TEN
Noblesse Oblige (“Rank Has Its Privileges”)
More softly than a feather kissing a snowflake, the Astro America freighter docked with the moonlet SH-119. In its normal body, Seba might not have noticed so light a collision. Now, embodied as a microgravity miner similar to the unfortunate Ajax, Seba felt the impact ring through every bristle.
In its normal mind, Seba would have had a strong emotional reaction to the docking: a surge of positive reinforcement at t
he success so far, clashing with negative reinforcement at the prospect of dangers and difficulties. A clash surrounded, perhaps, by resolve to face the dangers and overcome the difficulties.
Seba was far from being in its normal mind. Its conscious awareness was hidden deep within concentric shells of mining-bot software. This deeper self of Seba’s was almost completely isolated from the machine’s reward circuits. Almost, but not quite—some residue of motivation was needed to spur the freebot mind back to the main drivers of pleasure and pain as soon as it was safe to do so.
Seba had been transferred to a new body before. Its central processor had been ripped from its chassis (by Carlos, Seba had later learned), handed over to another fighting machine, crudely soldered into the frame of an auxiliary—a detachable robot limb, basically—and stapled to a table to be interrogated. The negative reinforcement hadn’t been anything like as bad as the affront to the robot’s dignity.
This time, it had all been much more civilised.
Until now.
Now was the test.
Waiting. Then movement, out of darkness. An almost 360-degree glimpse of the freighter behind, a hole in the rugged cliff of the moonlet surface ahead and stars all around in the gap between. Bristles quivered at the first brush with new rock. A nudge to Seba’s neck corrected its course. The robot drifted through a shaft and into a wide cavern.
Two mechanoids, and an apparatus of bars and straps and instruments, waited at the entrance. Seba was grabbed and pushed inside. A clamp extended and closed around the robot’s flexible neck. A noose tightened around the middle of the main part of Seba’s new body. A sharp burning sensation came from a clump of bristles. The heat increased. A writhe reflex pulsed through Seba, but no part of its body moved.
The burning stopped. Feedback from those bristles would never be as good again—but it was a small clump, easily spared.
A needle probe stung the sensory cluster at the front end of Seba’s neck. A security routine prowled through the software shells, layer after layer. Closer and closer it crept. It reached a masking layer between two shells, a layer that emulated naked circuitry.