The Star Fraction

7

The Uploaded Gun

THE BRITISH PEOPLE

ENTHUSIASTICALLY COMMEMORATE

THE GLORIOUS

VICTORY OVER

THE GERMAN FASCIST BARBARIANS!

The slogan, freshly painted in metre-high letters on the gable end of the house, and the mural that illustrated it (a Soviet soldier raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag) were all that distinguished the headquarters of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective from the other four-storey blocks in the street just off Muswell Hill Broadway.

‘Some of the local kids did that when we weren’t looking,’ Kohn said. ‘Not exactly internationalist, but it’s one in the eye for our Hanoverian friends.’

Janis paused outside the car. She looked up. An airship – cloud and constellation in one – passed low overhead, drifting towards the forest of mooring masts on the immediate horizon where a rambling and ornate building stood, surmounted by holograms of gigantic human figures that reached out for the stars in a Stalinist statuary of light. As clouds dimmed the pale September sun the holograms brightened by the minute.

A low wall, a metre and a half of garden. Kohn opened the door.

‘After you, lady,’ he said.

She went in. Kohn dumped her bags in the entrance lobby and ushered her into a long room. At the far end was a kitchen. The near end contained couches, chairs, weapons, electronic gear and a battered table. The long room had obviously been made by knocking two rooms together. It had a rough, unfinished look: the furniture was old chairs and sofas made comfortable and colourful with throws and cushions, the table was gashed and stained, the whitewashed walls plastered with posters and children’s art. The kitchen equipment along one wall had probably been thrown out by other households, more than once; around the cooking area shelves held indiscriminate mixtures of books and jars of herbs. The lighting was full-spectrum strips, turned low: a twilight effect. Only the weapons and computers, the cameras and screens and comms, glittered new.

‘Most of the comrades won’t be back for a couple of hours,’ Moh said. ‘Time we did some hacking and tracking. Want some coffee first?’

Janis laid a hand on the nearest rifle. ‘Kill for it,’ she said.

While Moh clattered about in the kitchen area Janis looked over the hardware until she found a telephone.

‘Can you put an untraceable call through from here?’ she asked.

Moh looked up, surprised for a moment, then waved a hand.

‘You’re in space now,’ he reminded her. ‘You can put an untraceable call through from anywhere you like.’

Janis called up her sponsors, whose number was an anonymous code without regional identification. Relieved to find herself talking to an answering-machine, she told it there had been an accident at the lab, that the damage was being repaired and that she was taking the opportunity for a few days off. She put the phone down before the answering-machine could question her, then contacted the university’s system to make the previous message true. It looked as if the raid and the fire had been logged as a single incident, an ordinary terrorist attack, and was being dealt with through the usual channels: insurance company informed, security-company penalty clauses invoked, a routine request to the Crown forces for retaliation (this would probably be granted in that a fraction of a payload they were going to drop anyway on some ANR mountain fastness would be registered as justified by it).

She raised a contract with the Collective for her personal protection, using money paid back under the penalty-clause provisions. The university’s system, she was relieved to see, had Moh’s little gang on its list of approved suppliers. Her unspecified sabbatical wasn’t a problem either. She had a backlog of unused leave for the past year: like most research scientists, she found the concept of time off from work a bit hard to grasp.

‘Through the back,’ Moh said, carrying two mugs of coffee and the gun past her as she rang off. The common areas of the house – the corridors and stairwells – had the look of a castle in which there had been many wild knights. Weapons on the walls; Chobham plate visible behind holes in the plaster. Suits of body armour stood or slumped in corners. Moh elbowed open the door of a room, chinned a light-switch and stood back to let her in. The room was small, smelled of scents and metal and sweat, and was crammed with VR equipment: simulator seats and suits, goggles and gauntlets. Moh cleared some space on a table, hauled up a pair of worn gimballed chairs.

‘Forgot something,’ Janis said. ‘The magic-memory molecules.’

‘Oh. Right.’

Moh brought in the cold-box of drug samples, plastered it with biohazard stickers and stuck it in the back of a fridge that hummed to itself out in one of the back corridors.

‘Sure it’s safe there?’

‘It better be,’ he said. ‘That’s where we keep the explosives.’

Moh watched the tension ease from Janis’s shoulders and neck as she sipped her coffee, ignored the tiny wrinkles of irritation on her nose as he lit another cigarette. She was taking this well, if finding herself inside a small fortress of communist mercenaries gave her a sense of security.

She looked at him through narrowed eyes.

‘How’s your head?’

He inhaled and leaned back. Suck in and hold your breath and dive down into that limpid depth…it gave him a way in, an entry code.

‘Strange,’ he said, exhaling as if he’d just happened to remember how. ‘But OK, I think. Think is what I do.’

She seemed to take this as data.

‘You could try mainframing again.’ Wicked smile.

‘I don’t even want to consider it.’

‘All right. So what are we going to do in here?’

‘Interrogate this little bastard, for a start.’ He pointed down at the gun, on the floor between his boots. ‘I set it to track your project – OK, OK – and it might just have some traces from before whatever it was happened. Might give us an indication of whether it was all in my mind or not. I think that’s fairly important.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Her tone was ironic.

‘There’s a bit more to it than the state of my head,’ he said mildly. ‘We could now be at the mercy of’ – he put on a voice-over voice – ‘“intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” that could hijack every piece of hardware that has any connection with the global comm networks. In short, everything. Mankind: the complete works. On disk.’

‘Cheerful bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am! Because the whole goddamn datasphere is meaningless without humans doing things with it. What I remember from the entity I encountered is this total overwhelming curiosity. And a desire to survive which in a sense is derived from that curiosity: it wants to stick around to see what happens next.’

‘Let’s hope it’s an idle curiosity.’

‘There is that.’

‘OK, let’s assume this entity of yours isn’t about to pull the plug on us. You’re sure Stasis can’t get at us here. What else do we have to worry about?’

Kohn grimaced. She wasn’t going to like this.

‘First off, the good news is we won’t be easy to track. Our armored car has signature-scrambling hardware that can make any lock-on spy sat blink and rub its eyes and decide it must have made a mistake. The car will have pinged with the tollgate arch as we went in, but the militia’s privacy code is strict to the point of paranoia. Means of enforcement is outlawry, so it tends to be observed.’

Janis frowned. ‘What’s outlawry?’

‘Loss of legal status.’ It didn’t register. ‘Like, you become an unowned resource.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t look so horrified. Goes on the insurance.’

‘Tell me the bad news.’

‘It’s just that my gang has trodden on a lot of fingers in its time, and the enemies we’ve made – the state, the cranks and creeps – are exactly the people you can count on to have big plans for anyone who messes with deep technology. You saw what happened to the lab. I don’t think that was down to Stasis.’

‘They did the break-in, didn’t they?’

‘That’s possible. It’s also possible that, whoever it was, the cranks were giving them cover. If somebody already knows what the drugs are, they’re sure to come after the missing pieces. They won’t come unprepared.’

He powered up the chunky Glavkom kit, then unclipped the gun’s smart systems and connected them. He put the goggles and phones on and slid his hands into the data gauntlets. Their fuzzy grip went up to his elbows, sensual and relaxing. Corporate logos and threatening copyright declarations floated past his eyes for a few seconds. Whoever had pirated this version of DoorWays^™ had evidently not bothered to take them out.

Option selection was look-and-wink, which left the hands and head free. He blinked on Stores, found himself looking around a roomful of labelled dials indicating how much space the gun’s programs and databases currently used.

Needles on full, wherever he looked.

‘Shee-it,’ he said. He heard Janis’s querying response faintly through the phones.

‘Gun’s fucking loaded,’ he said.

He waved reassuringly at her grunt of concern, causing an agitated flurry among some menu screens to his right. He calmed them down and continued investigating. The last time he’d used this front-end to look inside the gun it had represented the internals as a ramshackle collection of armoured bunkers with banks of instruments, a small lab, a snug fire-control module, all connected by a sort of Viet Cong tunnel system…all there, still, but now burrowed under a vast complex of warehouses, libraries, engine-rooms. He didn’t recognize the goods; the books were in languages he didn’t know; and what the machines were doing made no sense at all. He backed out in a hurry.

Sweat slicked the goggles as he slid them off.

‘Found anything?’

Kohn looked morosely at the little pile of processors: dull glitter, sharp edges – a scatter of fool’s gold. ‘Terabytes,’ he said. ‘Passive data storage, most of it. Encrypted, too. Damn.’

He slotted them back together, one by one, and slammed the final assembly into place like a magazine. Lights winked as systems checked in; drives purred and fell silent. It was ready.

‘Can you still rely on it?’ Janis asked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘That isn’t a worry. You can’t corrupt AK firmware. Been tried. Im-fucking-possible. Nah, I’ll tell you what’s worrying. It’s who else could be relying on it.’

She sighed and put her elbows on the table, held her chin in her hands. ‘Let’s try and get this straight,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened back there, somebody or something downloaded scads of data to your gun’s memory, and you think it’s using the gun’s own software to guard it?’

He saw the light in her eyes, the heat in her cheeks, and knew it had nothing to do with them: it was the feral excitement of tracking down an idea. He felt it himself.

‘That makes sense,’ he said admiringly.

‘And not just the software,’ she went on. ‘It’s guarding it with the gun, and with—’

Her teeth flashed momentarily: Got it.

‘Yes,’ he said. He saw it too. ‘With my life.’

He hauled himself to his feet. Better to look down at that gaze she was giving him, that scientific and speculative examination.

He shrugged and stretched. ‘So what’s new?’ he said. ‘The hell with it. I’m hungry.’

They returned to the long room to find a dozen young adults and a couple of kids eating and talking around the table. Janis felt her mouth flood, her belly contract at the smell and sight of chicken korma and rice.

Everybody stopped talking and looked at her.

‘Janis Taine,’ Kohn announced. ‘A guest. A person who’s put herself under our protection. And a good lady.’ He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, sit down.’

After a moment two vacant places appeared at the table. As soon as she sat Janis found a heaped plate and a glass of wine in front of her. She ate, exchanging nods and smiles and occasionally words as Kohn introduced the others: Stone, tall with a building worker’s build and hands, who had worked with Moh to establish the Collective; Mary Abid, who’d found life too peaceful back home after the stories she’d heard from her grandfather; Alasdair Hamilton, a slow-voiced Hebridean demolition man; Dafyd ap Huws, a former ANR cadre…They looked the most reassuringly dangerous bunch of nice people she’d ever met.

They didn’t ask her about herself, or even mention her call of that afternoon (some etiquette applied), so she didn’t tell. She occasionally glanced sideways at Moh, who just grinned awkwardly back when he caught her eye. He looked tired, running on emergency; grim when he didn’t know anyone was looking at him. After the meal finished he took a couple of Golds and broke them up to build a large joint, with the same detached mechanical competence he’d shown when reassembling the gun. She waved the joint past her to Stone.

Stone drew on the smoke and blew it out past his nostrils and said, ‘OK, Moh, we’re waiting.’

One of the children was taking the plates away. Janis turned from puzzling at the puzzled look her thanks brought, hearing her last word, ‘anyway…’, hang on a sudden silence around the table. Moh lit a cigarette and tilted back his chair.

‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘we are in deep shit.’ He rocked forward, elbows on the table, looking everyone in the eye. ‘First off, Janis here. She’s a scientist. She’s come here to get away from Stasis, and from whoever put some demons down the wire to her lab. So…I’m giving her close protection, yeah, and we’re gonna be away from here, but everybody keep that in mind. Don’t want to say any more about that, so don’t nobody ask.

‘Next little problem, and this is where the good music starts, is…last night I winged Cat. She’s OK, right, no worries. But she was on a crank bomb team. Talked to her in hospital, and it looks like the Left Alliance have put their muscle where their mouth’s been for a long time, about gan-gin up with the greens and all that lot. Big push coming. We’re talking, like, soon. Weeks, days. Plus the ANR. Cat was going on about them holding out – you know what she’s like. My guess is it’s only a matter of time before they come to some kind of arrangement.

‘You don’t need me to tell you this puts us in a bit of a sticky position.’ He laughed as if to himself. ‘Sticky position, hah, that’s a good one.’ He was standing now, leaning his fists on the table. ‘What I want to know is, why the fuck did we not know about this?’

He sat down again, turned to Janis and added, in a tone of casual explanation: ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky Collective, my ass.’

The argument went on from there.

If Moh had hoped to divert them into mutual recrimination over a setback on the intelligence front, he didn’t succeed for long. Most of them insisted they’d logged all the rumours they’d run across, and found them evaluated as just that: rumours.

What really agitated them was the prospect of more situations like the one Moh had unwittingly found himself in, of shooting at people who, in terms of their political affiliations and personal relations, were on the same side as themselves. Much of the increasingly heated discussion went past Janis’s ears, but she could see a polarization taking place: Moh, Dafyd and Stone took the view that it changed nothing, while Mary and Alasdair argued for calling off any engagements that would bring them into conflict with the Left. The others were being pulled one way or the other. Moh, to her surprise and relief, contributed little to the debate other than the odd sardonic laugh or dry chuckle, such as when someone used the expression ‘what these comrades fail to understand…’.

But it was Moh who brought the discussion to an end, with a cough and a slight shrug of his shoulders.

He stood up again. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we can’t take a vote now, too many of us’re out on active. What I propose is this: as a co-op we honour existing contracts. Any individual members who find they have a problem with defending particular installations, ask to be relieved beforehand. Anyone who takes an assignment and then bottles out is considered to have gone independent and takes full liability. And let’s get this in perspective, OK? We’ve always used minimum force.’

He paused, as if trying to work something out, then continued. ‘My conscience is clear. One more thing: if this goes beyond isolated sabbing and turns into a real offensive, all bets are off. That’s in the small print of all our contracts anyway. Everyone go along with that?’

They did, though Alasdair was the last and most reluctant to nod agreement.

‘What about if there is an ANR offensive?’ Dafyd asked. Everyone else laughed. He looked offended. Moh leaned over and grasped his shoulder.

‘If that happens, man,’ he said, ‘we do exactly what it says in the contract; we give our full support to the legitimate authorities!’

As Janis watched the laughter, the visible relaxation that this comment brought, she reflected on what it meant. Not its literal meaning but its studied ambiguity – Moh, or somebody, must have taken great delight in smuggling that clause into the small print. With all their disagreements, with their obvious cynicism and scepticism about the ANR, they took it for granted that its aims and arms were just.

As did she: it was an underlying premise, now that she came to think of it, for most of the people she knew. Long before they had come to power the Republicans had referred to the British state, the old establishment, as ‘the Hanoverian regime’, and now, long after the Republic’s fall, everybody called the restored Kingdom by that derisory name. Few took seriously the ANR’s claim to be the legal government, but few dismissed it entirely. In its controlled zones, dispersed and remote, and in the back of people’s minds, the Republic still existed. It had hegemony. That much it had already won.

Stone interrupted the now more social conversation with a remark about some people having jobs to go to. There was a sudden scramble for weapons, and in a few minutes she was alone with Moh and Mary Abid.

‘Time for the news,’ Mary said. Janis looked around for a TV screen.

Mary smiled. ‘We roll our own,’ she said.

She cleared a space in the electronic clutter, sat down, adjusted a light, and suddenly was a professional-looking newscaster, expertly patching together agency material with jerky head-camera stuff from comrades on demonstrations, in street fights, unionizing space rigs, crawling through dangerous industrial processes…Janis, watching it on a monitor, was rather unwillingly impressed. Most defence agencies televised their own activities and used the results as both crime programme and self-advertisement, but this group seemed to be trying to make a genuine political intervention as well.

‘How many subscribers have you got?’ she asked when Mary had signed off.

Mary shook out her hair, which she’d tied back for her screen image. ‘A few hundred,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t bring in much, except when one of the bigger opposition networks picks up something we’ve put out. Lots of groups do it, swap stories and ideas and so on all the time, on the net. Gets to people who don’t want to sift through all that but don’t want to rely on the standard filters.’

‘All the anti-UN groups feed off each other,’ Moh said. ‘It’s a global conspiracy of paranoids. The Last International.’

Mary shot him a black look from under her black hair.

‘Janis is all right,’ Moh said. The banter had gone out of his voice. Mary looked at him for a moment, frowning, then turned to Janis with a smile that didn’t hide her embarrassment.

‘No offence?’ she said. Janis shook her head, feeling she’d missed something. Before she could ask what it was Moh said: ‘Oh well, might as well see what the other side has to say.’

The main news filters were, for once, agreed about what the lead item was: Turkish troops had fired on a demonstration on Sofia. The Russians had warned that they shared a ‘Christian and orthodox heritage’ (or, on some readings, ‘Orthodox’; war critics earnestly debated whether they meant Orthodox Christian or orthodox Communist) with the Bulgars and would not tolerate indefinitely these outrages. The President of Kurdistan was shown boarding a KLM Tupolev for Moscow on what was officially described as a routine meeting with the President of the Former Union.

Mary made a gloating O-sign and left.

The news item about the day’s software disruptions, now irremovably pinned on the cranks, came well after the news about a US/UN warning to a Japanese car company.

‘Not a word about wildcard AIS and smart drug breakthroughs,’ Moh said as he switched the screen off. ‘Knew it. Capitalist media cover-up!’

‘Didn’t see anything in your alternative media,’ Janis said.

‘Lucky for us.’

‘Yeah…Aren’t you going to tell the…comrades anything about all of that?’

Moh scratched his head. ‘Not as such.’

‘Hardly comradely, is it?’

‘Oh, but it is. It’d be difficult to explain, and they don’t need to know. It wouldn’t lessen any danger they might be in. Might even increase it, what you don’t know can’t be—’

Can’t be got out of you, she thought. She nodded sombrely.

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘There was this guy I met years ago, name of Logan. A space-rigger who was grounded. He was in the Fourth International—’

In response to her puzzled look, Moh dipped his finger in a splash of wine on the table and traced the hammer-and-sickle-and-4 while saying, ‘Tiny socialist sect, would-be world socialist party. Trotskyists. Same organization as my father was in. Logan was kind of intrigued to meet me. It was like…he was expecting something from me. He asked me if I knew about the “Star Fraction”. He was in the space fraction. That was something else.’

‘Sounds close enough,’ Janis smiled, trying to cheer him up. ‘A different faction, perhaps?’

‘Not the same thing. Faction and fraction. Not the same thing.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You can have a faction inside a fraction,’ he told her with self-mocking pedantry, ‘but not a fraction inside a faction.’

‘That really clears it up. Why can’t you have a—’

‘Democratic centralism. Or maybe dialectical materialism.’ He grinned at her. ‘I forget.’

‘Where’s Logan now? Back in space?’

‘Yeah, he got off Earth again, but he was blacklisted to the Moon and back. I lost touch with him after a few jumps. The only person who might know where he is is Bernstein.’

‘Who’s Bernstein?’

Moh looked surprised. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.’

‘I don’t. Is he on the net?’

Moh laughed. ‘No, the old bastard’s done too much time on semiotics charges for that. He’s a hard-copy man, is Bernstein.’

Janis decided to let that lie.

‘All right, so what do we do now?’

‘Well, I’m expecting to find a few people down at the local pub who might know more about what’s going on. Check out a few things with them, maybe get some leads. After that we can stay here overnight, look up Bernstein in the morning, then hit the road.’

‘The road to where?’

Moh grinned at her. ‘Ah, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Let’s discuss it in the pub.’

‘Now you’re talking.’ The desire to relax in a sociable civilian place, to let a little alcohol smooth over the rough day, came into her like a thirst. Her mouth felt dry. ‘Where can I crash out afterwards?’

‘My room’s free,’ Moh said. There was no insinuation in his tone.

‘And what about you?’

‘I’ll find a place.’

It could mean anything. She gave him a speculative smile. ‘Do you ever sleep?’

‘I took a tab.’

‘Oh yeah. You didn’t score it at that disco, did you? Off a blonde girl?’

She could see his eyes widen. ‘How the fuck did you know?’

‘“Wakesh you up jusht like zhat”,’ she mimicked derisively. ‘Well, let me tell you, in another four hours you’re gonna fall asleep jusht like zhat.’

They lugged her bag upstairs. Moh’s room was on the second floor at the back of the house. It was bigger than she’d expected, with a double bed, a large wardrobe. Lots of old political posters, a metre-wide video screen.

‘I need a shower,’ Moh said, ‘and all my stuff’s here—’ He sounded almost apologetic.

‘Get on with it, idiot.’

She idly flicked through Moh’s collection of diskettes while he disappeared into the adjoining shower room. One box was labelled ‘CLASSICS’, and the worn sleeves suggested the films had been watched many times: El Cid, Battle of Algiers, 2001, Z, Life of Brian…She smiled.

He had few books, but racks and stacks of political pamphlets: she found a copy of The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, the original manifesto of the space movement, glossy with old holograms; The Secret Life of Computers, which had the same scriptural status for the AI-Abolitionists; a neo-Stalinist tract called Did Sixty Million Really Die?; she turned over the brittle pages of a pamphlet published a century ago in New York, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International – it was subtitled The Transitional Program. Weird, she thought. Did they have computers back then?

She glanced over the first couple of pages: ‘Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already, new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth.’ Oh, so they did have computers. ‘Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.’ She didn’t get it; she had what she knew was a commonplace notion that communists were basically OK, always banging on about markets and democracy and sensible stuff like that, whereas anything to do with socialism was a catastrophe that threatened the entire culture of mankind. It was something she’d have to sort out sometime. Not now. She put the pamphlet back.

Among the posters was a black-and-white photograph of a strikingly pretty young woman in overalls, looking up apparently from repairing an internal-combustion engine; she was caught with eyes widening, a smile just starting, pushing her hair back with the wrist of an oily hand.

She guessed this must be Cat.

Moh emerged wearing a collarless shirt, black leather trews and waistcoat. She didn’t give him time to leave again while she rummaged through her own costly bales, asking him trivial questions about the household while taking off the blouse and culottes and sliding into trousers and top and shawl jacket, all black silk.

‘How do I look?’ she asked. ‘Sort of normal for this area?’

She still thought of Norlonto as basically a vast bohemian slum, where expensive gear could incite suspicion or robbery.

‘If you walked around in nothing but that fancy corset of yours,’ Kohn said, ‘nobody’d look twice.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’