The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (8 page)

“Says the man who’s living inside a fucking computer. You know better, Waggoner Ames. You are still human minds, whatever hardware you’re running on.”

Ames snorted. “Obviously better hardware than evolution provided. I’d rather be a superhuman mind, while I’m about it.”

“No such thing,” said Nicole. “There is a kind of Roche Limit for consciousness—it can’t get above a certain size without breaking up. Humanity has evolved naturally to that limit, and then only statistically—hence mental breakdowns of various kinds. There are indeed AIs far more powerful than human minds, but they are not conscious as we understand it.”

“I’d like to see the workings on that Roche Limit business,” said Ames.

Nicole shrugged. “I can show you where to look it up if you must. Later.”

“Speaking of later,” said Carlos. “If you’ve got a robot revolt on your hands, how much time do we have for all this training? Sounds to me like you’re talking about weeks. Do you have weeks?”

Everyone stared at him. Someone laughed. Nicole smacked her forehead.

“Did I forget to tell you—oh yes, so I did, you had different stupid questions from everybody else—that this sim is running a thousand times faster than real time?”

“Fuck,” said Carlos, brazening it out. “That all?” He looked around. “Best crack on, then.”

He got the laugh, but he felt he’d shown himself up.

“Any more questions? Don’t worry, I have all day.”

“Once we’re trained and out in space and all that,” Rizzi asked, “is that it? Is that us? Space robots forever?”

Rizzi sounded worried. Ames snorted. “Bring it on.” Nicole gave him a sharp look, and Rizzi a reassuring smile.

“Not at all. That’s part of the point of this simulation. As robots you won’t get physically tired, you won’t need sleep, but to maintain your sanity and give you an incentive to cooperate you’ll get plenty of time off back here. Oh, and don’t even
think
of topping yourselves to get out of serving your sentences. You’ll just be brought back in some future emergency, maybe a worse one than this, and with the crime of desertion added to your docket. On the bright side, you needn’t worry about dying in battle. You’ll be backed up in your sleep on”—again with the air quotes—”‘the bus to the spaceport.’ If your frame is destroyed in action, you’ll just find yourself waking up on the bus
back
from the spaceport. You’re strongly recommended not to let that happen. Remember what that was like when you came here?”

Carlos recalled the dream of a dark drowning, and shuddered with the rest.

“Imagine that, but much worse. Avoid it if you can. The normal return from duty is considerably gentler, I assure you.” She looked around, eyebrows raised. “Any more?”

“If you have all these hardwired constraints on armed AI,” Chun asked, “how do you get robots going rogue and having to be fought in the first place?”

For all her poise, Nicole’s hand went to the back of her head. Carlos noticed this defensive reflex with interest.

“Ah,” she said. “Well. Some of the robots have become conscious in their own right, and, ah, they either did not have the constraint built in—there was no need to, at that level—or they found a way to override it. They adapt various tools and machines for military, or at least for hostile, purposes. Hostile to the mission’s goals, at least. And so—”

“Hold on a minute!” Ames cried. “You’ve somehow spawned conscious robots, and you want us to
fight
them?”

“Yes,” said Nicole. “As I said. You will be well armed and well capable of defeating them.”

“That wasn’t exactly my point,” Ames said, looking around for support. “I’m questioning the ethics of this thing.”

“Ethics!” Nicole looked scornful. “Don’t talk to me about ethics, Ames. Let me tell you about ethics. This is what you will get out of doing what I tell you—and what the company that employs you and the Direction that I represent tell you directly.”

She wedged her beer bottle between her knees, and put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. One of the bar staff, a young man with the weather-beaten look Carlos had noticed on all the locals, sauntered out.

“Yes?” he said.

Carlos hadn’t known any of the locals spoke English. Maybe the ones on the bus had all been deliberately unhelpful.

“Would you mind introducing yourself?” Nicole said.

The young man straightened up a little. “My name is Iqbal,” he said. “I was born on Malta, I worked as an agricultural technician in North Africa, and I died at the age of two hundred and ten. I chose to be scanned for uploading. I’ve worked at the Digital Touch for some years.”

“Do you enjoy it? Do you find it fulfilling?”

Iqbal pondered. “Yes,” he said. “It’s interesting to meet people, the scenery is spectacular, the work isn’t too hard, I save money. I prefer it to farming, of which I had quite enough in my first life. Fulfilling? Perhaps not. In my spare time I swim, I read, I study, I go out and have some fun. Someday I may wish to do something else, perhaps further my education. And of course I look forward to living on this planet in the real world. But for now I’d say I’m content, thank you.”

“Do you ever find yourself hesitating when you’re asked an unexpected question?” Nicole asked.

Iqbal hesitated, then laughed. “As you see, yes!”

“Thank you, Iqbal,” said Nicole. “That’s all for now. I’ll be in for another half-dozen drinks shortly.”

“You’re welcome, Mademoiselle Pascal.” He waved vaguely to all of them and went back inside.

“What was all that about?” Ames demanded.

Nicole slid down from her perch and sat back at the table. She leaned in and spoke quietly, drawing them all into a huddle.

“I’ve told you all that some people in this sim are ghosts like you—that is, they are of flesh and blood human origin like yourselves. Future colonists, basically, who unlike you are here in the sim as volunteers. What they volunteered for, well in advance and before their actual deaths, is live testing of the sim. Understandably, perhaps, there aren’t many volunteers for that, but we have a way of making up the numbers. That’s where the others here come in. They’re p-zombies—philosophical zombies. So called because philosophers once disputed whether you could have a human-like entity that displayed human behaviour in every detail, but without having human—or any—conscious awareness. Well, now we know, because we’ve made them. Walking thought experiments, so to speak. Iqbal is one of them. They can mimic consciousness, but they have no inner life, though they can answer any relevant question about it and about their ‘past lives’ on Earth as confidently and convincingly as Iqbal did just now. The point is, you have no way of telling the difference.”

“Did we ever?” Beauregard said. He looked around. “I’ve met loads of people who were a few enigmas short of the full Turing.”

That got a laugh. Nicole wasn’t impressed.

“That is precisely the attitude,” she said, “that got each of you posthumously executed centuries ago. Callous and instrumental. Borderline sociopathic. What you have to prove, here, is that you are capable of treating people as people, not as p-zombies. If you do, you’ll have a chance to rejoin human society—in our future colony, or back in the solar system if you prefer.”

“How could any of us get back to the solar system?” Carlos scoffed.

“You’re information now,” Nicole pointed out. “Information can be transmitted.”

“When you’ve built powerful enough lasers?”

“Yes.” Nicole shrugged. “And, yes, that will not be for a long time. But it would be no time, for you, if you were in storage. Your choice.”

“What happens,” Maryam Karzan asked, “if we win your fight but don’t pass your test?”

Nicole drew a fingernail across her throat. “Back in the box with you.”

“And if we lose the fight?” Ames taunted.

Nicole leaned back and lowered her eyelids. “Of course, you might lose. Consider what you would lose to. Imagine conscious entities with no natural selection behind them—no social instincts, no restraints, no notion of ethics beyond necessity and law. Imagine being at the mercy of minds without compassion, and with curiosity: endless, insatiable curiosity.”

She let that sink in for a bit.

“It strikes me,” Ames said, “that we already are.”

“What d’you mean?” Nicole snapped.

“I mean,” Ames said, “that we’re right now
completely
at the mercy of—heck, we’re
living inside
—intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic as all get-out.”

Nicole looked irritated. “As I said, you are not. The AIs running the mission and sustaining the simulation have constraints. The rebel robots do not. The difference is hardwired. It may not seem like much of a difference to you, but take it from me, it’s the difference you live in. For now.”

She stood up and leaned over the table, glaring at them one by one.

“I would advise you not to lose.”

Belfort Beauregard sat in a bar.

It sounded like the beginning of a joke, to which he couldn’t remember the punchline. It kept going through Beauregard’s head, as he sat in the bar, or outside it on the deck back of the Touch. He’d had four days to adjust to his situation, and he still hadn’t. Every so often he thought he had, then the obsessive thought would come back, in one of its two guises.

The first was that he was literally in hell. Not the traditional conception, of course, but why expect hell to follow the vengeful fantasies of ancient sectaries and sex-starved medieval monks? The defining element of hell was eternal conscious suffering. Here he was, potentially eternally alive, and by God suffering. The whole place seemed set up to torment him in a very particular, very personal way.

For the past couple of nights he hadn’t repeatedly woken in a cold sweat—the girl had seen to that. Where was she, by the way? Out with her friends, no doubt having some mindless fun. Mindless fun, that’s a good one, must remember it. Christ, he could do with mindless fun. But unlike her he had a mind, not just a theory of mind. Ha. He was getting drunk. Have to watch that. Seen good men go bad that way. Here’s to their memory. Cheers.

Everyone laughing.

Which brought on the second variant: that it was all a joke. Like an April Fool’s prank, or a surprise party, or a you’ve-been-had reality show. At any moment the curtain would be whipped aside, the blindfold would come off, the truth dawn, the presenter step forward smirking, an audience of millions in stitches.

Maybe the horror of these two paranoid possibilities was his mind’s way of nudging him towards sanity, by making the reality—the virtual reality, let’s not forget, though the glass in his hand felt solid enough—less appalling and unacceptable by contrast.

After he’d been given the talk by the lady, and shown what he’d done and how he’d died, he nodded and mumbled an assent that hid bafflement. Not only had he no memory of having been with the Acceleration, his last memories of his life in the British Army betrayed no fundamental discontent. He’d enjoyed his work, he’d believed in what he was doing. The partisans in the Caucasus were a ruthless lot, deeply embedded in extended families and remote communities. Coordinating drone strikes on them had been a pleasure of the mind as much as of the gut.

He’d been aware of the Acceleration—who hadn’t?—and had dismissed it as the same old same old. Terror for utopia? Heard that one before, sunshine. The Reaction likewise, a tireder joke in worse taste. And now it turned out the joke had been on him. This world, the one that appeared around him that he’d been assured wasn’t real, and the wider world outside that he’d only been told about but he’d been assured was real—it all added up to a world where the Acceleration had won, or might as well have done, and endured for a thousand years. Well, if that was true then there must have been something in the whole democracy and equality thing, all that liberal claptrap he’d never bought into. A thousand-year-old democratic world government would for sure cast doubt on the Reaction’s strongest point: that the only societies that had endured for centuries had been traditional ones. It would likewise undermine their most plausible explanation for that, which was that there was something deeply hierarchical in human nature; that inequalities of class, race and sex had arisen from real differences in temperament and ability; and that all the troubles of the modern world flowed from denial of that reality. Beauregard could relate to that, he could follow the logic of it, but perhaps because (he’d sometimes thought in a way that seemed smug even to him) he was so naturally superior himself, he’d always disdained the rabble who rallied to the Reaction’s banner. Poor white trash quoting de Maistre and Carlyle and fancying themselves elite while they scrabbled to survive in a world where they were outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones.

Nevertheless, contemptible though the Rax were, they at least had something sound at the foundation of their thought, whereas the Axle had nothing but age-old millenarian frenzy and the dodgy equations in the third volume of
Capital
.

He looked around the people he had now to regard as comrades, and at the man they’d chosen as their leader. The poor sap sometimes looked as bewildered and dismayed as Beauregard felt. And one wary, calculating look, caught sidelong when Carlos had thought no one could see it, had given him away and given Beauregard a perfect explanation of how he himself had come to be in the Acceleration, and therefore of how he came to be here.

State.

State: that was the term conspirators used, for government agents in their midst, under deep cover. Carlos was state. He was good, or had been. There was nothing to give him away, except something in the body language that you could only recognise if you’d been there yourself.

He wondered if Carlos had the same suspicion of him. Probably not. And certainly none of the others did. Beauregard turned a smile to all of them again, and offered to buy another round. He carried the drinks back in one go, with an expert deployment of fingers and elbows learned while working his way through university.

“Here’s to us!” he said.