Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘I appreciate that you are all somewhat uncomfortable,’ said a voice from everywhere. ‘Please be patient. The journey will not last long.’

Five hour later, the Hungry Dragon was parked unobtrusively, or so Lamont assured them, in the Solar System’s asteroid belt, and a Carlyle interplanetary transport was docking to take them all to New Polarity. Lamont stayed with the ship; and as the transport separated, Winter saw from its window an improbable silver-skinned figure on the side of the impossible ship, waving goodbye.

They were about twenty kilometres north of Crianlarich when Calder said, ‘Stop!’

Winter could see the annoyance on Lucinda’s swift sideways glance. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘This is the place,’ Calder said. ‘Where we went off the road.’

‘This no time for sightseeing,’ Lucinda said. ‘Maybe on the way back.’

‘Not even on the way back,’ said Winter.

The other two laughed. The moor across which the long articulated gravity sled was following the faint traces of a road was littered with the rusted hulks of war machines and fighting vehicles. Yellow splashes of mutated lichen were blazoned across the rockfaces and boulders, between which unpleasantly shaped small things, machine or animal, scurried. The sky flaunted a variety of interesting colours, none of them any shade of blue. The Rannoch battlefield was too polluted to plunder, its scrap too radioactive to recycle. The skirmish fought here had been between a force deploying relatively conventional defences—supersonic drones, autonomous armoured vehicles, Walker tanks, tactical nukes, and nanobot sprays—and attacking devices that had undergone—or, more likely, undertaken—several generations of technological upgrading in their hour-long flight across the Atlantic. All that had prevented it from being completely one-sided was that a significant fraction of the attacking devices had become so mentally sophisticated that they had questioned their own purpose. Their existential doubts had been terminated along with their existence within milliseconds, leaving the defending side to add ‘the too-smart-weapon problem’ to its strategic lexicon. The attacking side’s command headquarters had probably forgotten what the whole conflict was about before the swarm of proto-sentient ordnance they’d launched had passed the Azores.

In this location sitting in the cab of a gravity sled—an experience centuries out of his time—felt to Winter almost familiar, and certainly reassuring. It was like being in the cab of a big articulated truck, right down to the porn decals on the dash and the cigarette ash in the footwell. Only looking back in the rear-view patch on the forward screen at the five similar sleds toiling up the trail behind them destroyed the illusion. You had to narrow your eyes quite a bit to make the slow monsters look like trucks. Each of the six sleds contained a search engine and at least thirty soldiers. The force was made up of about equal numbers of Carlyle combat archaeologists, resurrected Returner veterans, and Ree’s DK dissidents, the Brezhnev Battalion.

Nonetheless it would, for an unsuspecting watcher, be a routine sight, one of the daily commercial columns serving the population of the Isle of Skye. Thanks to a coincidence of wind patterns and tactical decisions that some of its inhabitants would to this day attribute to Providence, the island had come through the war-singularity relatively unscathed. This was not true of most of the North of Scotland, nor of a great deal of the rest of it either. The Castle on the Clyde had turned out to be very much as its name suggested: a grimly functional and laughably obsolete fortification, damp and draughty, with bad drains. Though nominally the seat of the Carlyles, the clan was canny enough to leave it to the Old Don, as he was misleadingly known (he was an obsessive, almost abusive, user of rejuvenation and resurrection tech), and to his robot retinue. The actual administrative capital of the Carlyle empire was in the far more comfortable and capacious quarters of New Polarity, right next to the ruins of the old Mars colony and not far from the First Gate whose discovery had given the family its now-failing grip on the skein.

The column picked up pace on the downhill side of the moor, gliding through Glencoe with its verdant hanging foliage to swing northeast after Ballachulish, over the fused ruins of Fort William, along the (according to Lucinda) plesiosaur-infested lochs of the Great Glen; turning westward again past Cluanie and the Five Sisters whose dense rhododendron forests were (Lucinda claimed) haunted by relict homindae—it was a fact that an undocumented release of genetic weaponry had at some point inflicted a peculiar and distressing atavism on the entire area—to eventually pause at Dornie. From the shore of Loch Duich the stub of Eilean Donan Castle stood up like a rotted molar.

Winter and Calder got out to stretch their legs, as did everyone else lucky enough to be riding in the cabs. The soldiers had to stay put; comms silence was maintained; Lucinda conferred with Amelia, Ree, and the other commanders under cover of a rest stop and locally purchased refreshments. The low-tide seaweed lent a sour metallic tang to air already damp from a thin drizzle. Beyond the narrow mouth of Loch Long the ground was dead, poisoned by runoff from the rust desert to the north.

‘What a fucking dump,’ said Calder, squinting at the village through cigarette smoke. Winter, sipping the vilest coffee he’d tasted in decades from the thinnest cup, had to agree. Dornie was an arguably human settlement, a status precariously maintained and frequently contested, scrounging a living from the passing trade. Bulk transport in manufactured goods was a necessity in those parts of the world where, as here, the stray presence of malign nanotech made it dangerous to fire up a drexler. Some kid threw a stone; another offered, if Winter understood his fractured English aright, some dubious sexual service; a scrawny teenage girl touted, even more ludicrously, protection for the rest of the journey, shyly indicating an alleged sidearm that looked as if it had been chrome-plated after having failed in action quite lethally for its last user.

‘You know,’ said Winter, after chasing her off and cadging a cigarette from Calder—it was for him a minor and occasional vice, not, as it was for his partner, a full-time addiction—‘I’m beginning to have some doubts about this enterprise.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Calder. ‘What reason could you possibly have for doubting it? The vanishingly slender basis of the assumption that the war machines would go to the trouble of storing some semblance of the brain-states of their victims? The entirely exiguous evidence that such mind-files, if they ever existed, are still there and awaiting deliverance? The riotous improbability that their resurrection en masse into actual reality is even feasible, let alone an earnest of their future happiness in a universe so markedly different from and in many respects arguably less congenial than the one from which they were prematurely despatched? The—’

‘Oh, shut the fuck up,’ said Winter.

Calder had once surprised and dismayed him by downloading megabytes of nineteenth-century rationalist polemic, and assimilating them to his brain with less discrimination than he had to the hard drive of his handheld. He had felt a need to exorcise some disturbing traces of one of the less forgiving versions of Tibetan Buddhism fashionable in his parents’ youth and his childhood, and of a brief immersion in a Pentecostal Baptist sect (by way of reaction) in his teens. A born-once atheist himself, Winter had found the whole preoccupation perplexing and mildly distasteful. This had turned to almost murderous fury after his death and resurrection, when Calder had recast the arguments to fortify his rejection of the prospect of the Return. That these now sounded entirely plausible objections not only irritated Winter, but perversely strengthened his wavering resolve.