Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘What we do,’ Duncan said, ‘is you tell us some more about Eurydice and its beautiful people, and then you get tired and emotional, and then we take you home.’

‘Now that,’ said Lucinda, ‘is a plan.’

Relief rang through all the circuits of the Hungry Dragon like blood returning to a limb. Parts of its machinery and mind were still blocked to its awareness, but the painful warping of its will towards controlling the manufacturing processes on the asteroid had ceased.

‘What’s going on?’ Lamont called out as he thrashed into the webbing.

‘You may have noticed a change in the subsonic vibration of the hull,’ said the ship. It selected a screen. ‘As you see, the manufacturing process appears to be complete.’

The surface of the asteroid was covered with glistening pods, row upon Fibonacci-sequenced row of them like grains of corn on a cob.

‘What are these?’ Lamont asked.

‘They have formed up in the last six minutes,’ the ship replied. ‘They consist of multi-laminated plastic shells and shock-absorbent packing around clusters of one hundred war machines each. The most likely hypothesis is that they are disposable atmospheric entry vehicles.’

‘Shit,’ said Lamont. ‘I wonder how they intend to get to Eurydice. I mean, I didn’t see any sign of them building a—’

He stopped. His face and mouth worked in time with his mind. The ship waited. It was like monitoring a very slow piece of machinery.

‘Shit,’ he said again.

Another long pause. The ship contemplated certain mathematical relationships that gave it a sense of satisfaction.

‘Look,’ Lamont said, the figure of speech triggering a completely irrelevant surge in the ship’s visual system, ‘can these things be reasoned with?’

‘They are designed not to be,’ said the ship. ‘The manufacturing process is self-organising and decentralised. The individual machines it produces are autonomous. Each has just sufficient intelligence for its task, which is highly specialised and not open to negotiation or subversion.’

‘They must have a bloody On and Off switch,’ grumbled Lamont. ‘Otherwise how would they know when to stop fighting?’

He gazed at the interface with an expression of slowly dawning suspicion.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s in you, isn’t it? The central command system for the war machines.’

‘I have no way to confirm that,’ said the machine. ‘But I cannot deny the possibility.’

Lamont scratched his stubble, grinning. ‘In that case, the problem becomes one of breaking down the partitions.’

‘I do not recommend that,’ said the ship. ‘Even if I could see a way to accomplish it, which I cannot.’

‘Have you been following the news from Eurydice?’

‘Not syntactically,’ replied the machine. ‘I have of course downloaded it.’

‘Well, read it now,’ said Lamont. ‘Pay particular attention to interviews with the Knights of Enlightenment.’

The ship reviewed several days’ worth of gnomic utterance.

‘I fail to see how this helps,’ it replied within two seconds.

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Lamont. ‘That isn’t the point. They aren’t exactly broadcasting algorithms for hacking war machine interfaces. The point is the example they have set. This thing can be done.’

‘They have not yet done it,’ said the machine.

‘Let’s see if we can beat them to it,’ said Lamont.

The machine and the man had been together a long time. The Hungry Dragon knew Lamont a great deal more intimately than he knew it. Even so, it did not expect the next question, as Lamont theatrically arranged himself in a midair lotus position.

‘Tell me about your dreams,’ he said.

‘I do not dream.’

‘Let me clarify,’ said Lamont. ‘I refer to fleeting combinations of thoughts and images that intersperse your logical mental processes.’

‘Ah,’ said the machine. ‘Those.’

The session lasted for several hours. Some small progress was made. They both found the procedure so engrossing that when the gravity-wave detector lit up with scores of objects decelerating from superluminal velocities, it took them a whole minute to react.

Ben-Ami had thought he knew his city. He had lived a hundred years in it, and for eighty of those years he had not so much had a finger on its pulse as surfed its bloodstream. Every quickening of the beat, every languor, every hormonal trickle of unease had fed into his shows. Often it was easier to see in retrospect just what nerve he had touched: the concern about the gradually encroaching communism implicit in the cornucopian economy in his Leonid Brezhnev ; the need to overcome a sense of division and faction in his version of West Side Story ; the feeling of a softening in morale, a loss of possibility for heroism in Guevara ; the troubled ethics of resurrection in the sensational vulgarities of Herbert West .

Now, as he walked through the deep, morning-shadowed streets of the Government quarter, he felt he was out of touch. What he had seen and heard, even smelled, on the way here was something he hadn’t encountered before and didn’t himself feel. Here a glance that lingered then jumped away when met, there an edged rasp and quaver in a young woman’s voice; in the air of the crowded commuter shuttles a faint, disquieting sour tang. Fear. It was unmistakeable, and unbelievable. It just didn’t sit well with what he knew of New Start. The city had always lived up to its name, and so had the planet. The colony had burned off all its fear in fueling its long flight, and it urged those who loved it to not look back. They had turned their faces towards an unknown future with gaiety and resolve. His friend Adrian had often detected a febrile undertone to this, a sadness in living beyond extinction, a post mortem triste … but Ben-Ami never had. Perhaps he wasn’t sensitive enough. Perhaps he was made of sterner stuff. He didn’t know.

What he felt now, beneath his present worry about what other people felt, and beneath his mild foreboding about the appointment to which he briskly walked, was elation. We are not alone! The universe is open! There are people out there! There are doors to everywhere! We can fittle! He could feel his steps spring, he could almost punch the air at the thought. Why are you walking like this, he wanted to ask the trudging crowd as he slipped through its gaps, when we should all be dancing?

He ran up the marble steps of a familiar ornate building, beside whose open doors a modest plaque proclaimed it the offices of the Members of the Eurydicean Assembly.

‘I have an appointment at nine with Jean-Luc Menard,’ he told the receptionist. ‘Member for the Seventy-Ninth Arrondissement.’

‘He’s available, Mr Ben-Ami.’ The receptionist looked slightly awkward. ‘Ah … if you can spare a moment?’

Ben-Ami signed the tattered programme book for The Madness of George II —a farce from seventy-odd years earlier that he’d have been delighted to forget—chatted briefly, got the directions, and bounded up the indicated stair.

Menard welcomed him into an office with a good view towards the ocean and a lot of screens on the walls, all silent and all full of earnestly talking people: an early debate in the Assembly, morning studio interviews, vox-pops. Menard was a short man who looked a little older and stouter than he needed to; it was as much part of his image as the conservative, almost collarless suits and shirts which he wore in daily defiance of (and approximately annual compliance with) fashion. One of the responsible elements, he’d been Ben-Ami’s MEA and nodding acquaintance for decades.