The Star Fraction

5

Ship City

We take, first, a long view (longer than it looks) and catch the planet as it swings by from a hundred thousand kilometres out. It’s red – no surprises there – but it’s mottled with dark spills of blue and stains of green, and those spills and stains are beginning to be connected up by…channels, by…(and the thought is as fleeting as the glimpse) canali, so that New Mars really does look like the original Mars, really, didn’t. (But didn’t we wish.)

Flip the viewpoint to a thousand kilometres…up, now, not out…and we’re crawling past it at a satellite’s eye-level, taking in the whorled fingerprints of water-vapour, the planet’s curving faceplate of atmosphere steamed-up with breath, the scrawled marks of life and the ruled lines of intelligence: yes, canals.

Dropping now, to a structure as unmistakably artificial as it’s apparently organic: at first sight a black asterisk, like a capital city on a map, then (as the viewpoint hurtles in and the view reddens, bloodshot by the flames of air-braking) like a starfish stranded on the sand.

Cut, again, to a more leisurely airborne vantage, drifting above what is now clearly a city, its radial symmetry still its major feature but with its five arms visibly joined by the black threads of roads, streets, canals; and, at another level, invisible from the outside, by the cobweb cabling of the nets.

And we’re in. That old TCP/IP transaction protocol is still valid (from way back to the Mitochondrial Eve of all the systems) so we can hear, feel and see. But the big! numbers still count, so encryption hides much of the data in catacombs of dark. What we can access, on the open channels, is more than enough to show:

Four of the city’s five arms are non-human domains. They look as if they were intended for human habitation, but nobody’s home, except machines. There’s a basic stratum, a sort of mechanical topsoil, where things are doing things to things. Simulacra of intelligence are going through the motions, bawling and toiling: empty automatic barges plough algae-clogged canals, servitor machines struggle to sweep dust from the floors of corridors whose walls are already thick with mould. In the streets it’s a creationist’s caricature of natural selection: half-formed mechanisms collide and combine and incorporate each other’s parts, producing unviable offspring which themselves propagate further grotesque transitional forms.

This mindless level is preyed upon by more sophisticated machinery, which lurks and pounces, gobbles and cannibalises for purposes of its own. Artificial intelligences – some obsessive and focused, others chaotic and relaxed, some even sane – haunt a fraction of these machines. It’s hard to identify the places where such minds reside. Lurching, unlikely structures may be steered by a sapient computer no bigger than a mouse, while some sleek and shining and, even, humanoid machine may well be moronic or mad.

The whole groaning junkyard is persistently pillaged by human beings, who risk everything from their fingertips to their souls in venturing into this jungle of iron and silicon. They have their mechanical allies, scouts and agents; but if machines, in general, have no loyalty to each other, they have even less to human friends or masters. It remains easier to reprogram a machine than to subvert a human.

And through it all, like germs, the minute molecular machinery of stray nanotechnology goes about its invisible and occasionally disastrous work. Immune systems have evolved, the equivalent of medicine is practised; public health measures are applied (they are not, exactly, enforced). But the smallest are the swiftest, and here evolution’s race is most ruthlessly run.

The fifth arm is the human quarter. The nets are its mind. In them we find its good intentions, its evil thoughts, its wet dreams and its dull routines. This is not how it should be finally judged. But still –

Underlying everything is the reproduction of daily life, and it provides a huge proportion of the net traffic. Nobody’s counting, but there are several hundred thousand human beings alive on New Mars, most of them in Ship City, the rest scattered in much smaller communities, fanning out across the planet. Every minute buzzes with thousands of conversations and personal communications. Business: orders, invoices, payments, transactions. Property rights – what people agree to let people do with things – have grown complex and differentiated, and the unbundling and repackaging and exchanging of these rights proceeds with card-sharp speed: time shares, organ mortgages, innovation futures, labour loans, birth benefits…it gets complicated. Hence conflicts, charges, settlements, crimes and torts.

Law and order lifts its eyes and teeth above the stream of business only occasionally, and the resulting cop-shows and courtroom dramas and camp comedies provide – in reality and in fiction – a staple of entertainment. Most of the torments and humiliations we see on the screens are – fortunately – just pornography. The trials by ordeal and combat are real.

Religion – some. The highest clerical dignitary is the bishop of New Mars. Reformed Orthodox Catholic, so while she has the odd qualm about exactly how the Succession passed to her, she knows she’ll pass it on to one or more of her kids. She’s friendly with the few Buddhists and the rabbi (like, you weren’t expecting Jews?) and stern but charitable towards the lunatic heretics; their delusion that New Mars is the afterlife or some post-apocalyptic staging area is, in the circumstances, forgiveable.

Politics – none. It’s an anarchy, remember? But it’s an anarchy by default. There’s no state because nobody can be bothered to set one up. Too much hassle, man. Keep your nose clean, don’t stick your neck out, it’s always been this way and nothing will ever change, and anyway (and especially) what will the neighbours think? (They’ll never stand for it, is what. It’s against human nature.)

The outside of the city’s nervous system consists of its senses: cameras and microphones for news and surveillance, detectors of chemicals and stresses which monitor its health. Start at the top: on the highest and most central tower is a globe the size of a human head. It’s just an all-round viewing-camera, an amenity stuck there in a flourish of public spirit or private speculation. From there we can peer down the dizzying sweep of tower-tops that eventually planes out to low, flat roofs, and ends in domes, shacks and sheds at the city limits.

Like each of the city’s five radial arms, this one is an elongated kite-shape, first widening, then tapering. The buildings themselves are of two types: those that were grown, and those that were built. The shapes of the former can be analysed into intersecting polygons, regular or irregular: those of the latter, into rectangles. The layout and location of the latticed, cellular structures has the same quality of accidental inevitability as the boulders in a rock-fall or the pebbles in scree, and for the same reason: minimal occupation of available space. The constructed buildings obey a different principle of economy, and stick up or dig down as its unpredictable laws dictate.

Both types of buildings – both laws of location – follow the streets, and the streets follow the canals. The canals are a circulatory system: the Ring Canal encircles the central area, the Radial Canals bisect the arms, and each has innumerable tributaries and capillaries. Near the leftward edge of the arm we’re looking down is an anomalous, long canal that first comes into view just below us and extends beyond the horizon: the Stone Canal.

The man leans into the recess of the window, supporting some of his weight on his spread fingertips. The cement is rough under his fingertips. He stares out of the window, which is high on the city’s slope, looking along the Stone Canal. As he balances his weight on the balls of his feet and the tips of his fingers, the tensed muscles in his arms and shoulders show through the soft cloth of his jacket. The muscles flex and he straightens, turning around. His black hair flicks past his chin with the speed of his movement.

The other two men in the room are taller and bulkier than he is, but they both recoil slightly as he strides towards them. He stops a couple of metres away and glares at them.

‘You lost her,’ he says. ‘To the abolitionists.’ His speech has an accent not much heard in this city, something from the past, roughened and refined over a long time. It provides a rasping undertone to the modulation of his voice, which is likewise – consciously or not – a practised and accomplished instrument of his will. Accent and tone together are precisely gauged to convey his emotion: in this case, contempt.

‘She had an IBM franchise,’ one of the men says. He licks his lips, withdraws his tongue abruptly into his mouth as if he’s aware it’s gone out too far. He wipes his chin.

‘That,’ says the man, ‘is not an excuse. It’s a description of failure.’ He sighs, dusts his fingertips together. ‘All right. From the top.’

He stalks away to a big wooden desk, and half-sits on the edge of it.

‘OK, Reid,’ says the other man, and launches into an account. He’s spoken for a minute when Reid raises a hand.

‘A young man?’ he says. ‘And a robot? Describe them.’

He listens, narrow-eyed, for another minute before interrupting with a downward gesture of the hand.

‘You thought he recognised her, Stigler?’

Stigler’s lips are dry again.

‘He…thought he did.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ The word comes out like a rod cracked down on the desk. Reid drums his fingers for a moment.

‘And you, Collins, I don’t suppose your descriptive powers are in any better shape, no?’

‘I was giving cover, Reid,’ Collins says. ‘Looking everywhere else, know what I mean?’

‘OK, OK.’ Reid stands up and looks them over, speculatively. He might be considering profitable uses for their body-parts, and suitable methods of rendering. ‘You did the job we agreed, as well as you could. If I’d wanted to pull in a man on sus, I’d have needed a warrant. And that’s what I’m going to need, gentlemen, so I’m afraid that rules you out. Full payment, no bonus.’

Collins and Stigler look relieved and turn to go. At the door Collins scratches his neck, looks at Reid. Reid looks up from the screen he’s turned his attention to.

‘Yes?’

‘Uh, Reid, question. You don’t happen to know who owns that robot?’

Reid thinks about this. His smile lets the two men know they’re his good friends, and not a couple of greps who haven’t come back with the data.

‘Stay on the case,’ he tells them.

Wilde stood up and walked to the end of the quay, past the people and the intelligent apes and the machines that might have been intelligent. He stared across the Stone Canal, and then looked down into the water for a while. He found, perhaps, some answer in his reflection.

The robot, Jay-Dub, was still crouched at the edge of the quay, poised like a predatory water-bird. Patterns of liquid crystal shifted in its shadowed central band as Wilde returned. Wilde looked down at it.

‘We’re not in Kazakhstan any more,’ he said.

The machine made no reply.

‘What happened?’ Wilde asked. He looked around. ‘Is it safe to talk?’

‘Safe enough,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘I can pick up most attempts to overhear.’

‘All right,’ said Wilde. ‘Tell me this: where did I hide my pistol?’

‘In the shower.’

‘What was the last thing I said?’

‘“Love never dies.”’

Wilde frowned.

‘What was the last thing I decided?’

‘That I’d – that you’d never smoke again.’

Wilde leaned down and tapped the machine’s hull.

‘That’s right. That’s a promise I remember making, and you can go right on keeping.’

He took the coffee-glass to the breakfast-food stall and returned with the glass refilled and a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.

‘I don’t approve of this,’ Jay-Dub said as Wilde sat down beside it and lit up.

‘Fuck you,’ Wilde said. ‘I want your story, not your opinions.’

He leaned back against the shell of the machine, which shifted its weight on its legs to compensate.

‘It’s a long story. You have no idea how long.’

‘So make it short.’ Wilde’s eyes were closed.

‘“Yes, master,” said the robot,’ said the robot. ‘OK, whatever you say. Basically, I died just after being shot. My brain was immediately scanned with a prototype neural imaging system and the pattern recorded.’

‘Come on,’ Wilde said. ‘We don’t – didn’t have anything like that.’

‘Reid’s people did. They were more advanced than anyone suspected. And I was the first. The first human, anyway. I believe most of the enhanced apes around here originate with the early experiments of that period. However, it was many years later – though not, of course, subjectively – that I opened my eyes and found myself in an impossible spacecraft. Comfortable, one-gee, but no rotation or acceleration was apparent when I looked outside. Virtual reality, of course. What was outside the windows was what was outside in the real world.’

It paused. A minute passed. The man reached his hand back and knocked the machine’s side with his knuckles. Then he sucked his knuckles.

‘And what was outside was –?’

‘Ganymede, I think,’ the robot said. ‘What was left of it. The machine that I inhabited was not much bigger than the one you see now. It, and thousands like it, were engaged in constructing a platform. All around the rings of Jupiter, other machines were engaged in related tasks.’

Again its voice trailed off.

‘The rings of Jupiter?’ Wilde said. ‘Somebody had been busy.’

‘Guess who.’

‘Reid?’

‘And company.’

‘They’d done that? By when?’

‘2093.’

Wilde opened his eyes and gazed out over the canal.

‘I take it,’ he said, ‘that the humans and human-equivalent robots didn’t do all this on their own.’

‘Indeed not. Among the struts of the platform were huge entities that we called macros. They were made of nanomachines, and they were the hardware platform for millions of uploaded minds. People here, now, call them “the fast folk”. They were by then well beyond the human, and they were building a wormhole – the one our ship came through to get here.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Ah,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘A good question. The ones around Jupiter lost interest, shall we say, in the external world. The templates from which they developed, the source-code if you like, we brought with us, as we brought the stored minds and coded bodies of the dead.’

‘Including me?’

‘Well, yes. Your actual body wasn’t coded, as far as I know. There was a tissue-sample, from which you were later – from which I cloned you. Your mind was coded, as I said.’

‘Separately from yours?’ Wilde sounded puzzled.

‘My mind and yours were copied from the same original,’ Jay-Dub said. ‘I woke up in that machine in exactly the same frame of mind as you woke up yesterday, and with exactly the same memories. And in less auspicious circumstances.’

‘My heart,’ said Wilde, ‘absolutely fucking bleeds.’

‘My enormously sophisticated software detects a degree of hostility.’ The machine’s voice was attempting irony, something outside its familiar range.

‘I hope it does,’ said Wilde. ‘You’ve just admitted that clones are a separate issue from stored minds. So the presence of anybody here who looks like somebody I used to know, is no indication what-so-fucking-ever that that person is actually here, am I right?’

‘In principle, yes, but –’

‘So your remark about the clone being some reason to hope that Annette was, as you put it, among the dead was a complete lie?’

‘No,’ said the machine. ‘It does mean there’s a chance.’

Wilde shook his head.

‘The more I think about it,’ he said, ‘the more I doubt it. She never believed in cryonics or uploading or any of that shit. If she believed in anything, she believed in the general resurrection at the end of time. The Omega Point.’

‘And all that shit,’ said Jay-Dub.

Wilde laughed. ‘You still think so? Well, I’ll bow to your greater experience.’

The machine shifted slightly. ‘The end of time may be closer than you think, and worse than you can imagine.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’d rather you worked it out for yourself,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘Anything I tell you about it would only put further strain on your credulity. But it does add a degree of urgency to our task.’

‘Our task?’ Wilde almost shouted. ‘What do you mean, “our”? The way I see it, I’m not Jon Wilde. I have his memories, and my body is like his was at twenty.’ He lit and drew on another cigarette; smiled through a cough. ‘At twenty, we all feel immortal. But if anyone has a claim to be Wilde, it’s you. You can keep his promises, fight his battles. I’m sure you remember one of those drunken discussions with Reid about cloning bodies and copying personalities; and the conclusion you came to: a copy is not the original, therefore…Reid had some quaintly theological way of putting it, you may recall.’

‘“The resurrected dead on the Day of Judgement are new creations, as innocent as Adam in the Garden.”’

‘Exactly,’ said Wilde. ‘That’s what I am: a new creation. A new man.’ He sent his cigarette-end spinning into the canal and jumped to his feet, stretching his arms wide and looking up at the sky. ‘A New Martian!’

‘You’re Wilde all right,’ said the machine. ‘That’s exactly how he would have reacted.’

The man laughed. ‘You don’t catch me that easily. Similarity, no matter how exact, is not identity. Continuity is.’

‘That may be,’ said the machine. ‘But everything about New Mars is a logical consequence of assuming the opposite.’

Wilde closed his eyes for a moment, then squatted down beside the robot and scratched lines in the dirt and gravel of the quay with a fishbone. He gazed at the resulting doodle as if it were an equation he was struggling to solve.

‘Ah,’ he said. He thought about it some more. ‘Everything?’

‘Everything that matters,’ said the machine.

‘But that’s insane. It’s worse than wrong – it’s mistaken.’

‘I expected you to think that,’ said Jay-Dub, a note of complacency in its tone. ‘That way, whether you identify yourself with the original Jonathan Wilde or not, you’ll probably want to do what I want you to do.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You said Reid killed you – me, us, whatever. At the very least he was responsible. Sue the bastard for murder.’

Wilde laughed. ‘Sue, not charge? You have that too?’ It sounded like his interest in his own case had been diverted by curiosity about the law.

‘That too,’ Jay-Dub said heavily. ‘Polycentric legal system, we got.’

‘Whatever the legal system,’ Wilde said, ‘for a living man to stand up in court and claim he was murdered is, well, pushing it.’

‘Exactly,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘And I want to push it till it falls.’

Wilde scratched in the dust some more.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Very neat. All the answers are wrong. Like a koan.’

He looked up.

‘Why,’ he added, ‘couldn’t you sue Reid on your own account?’

Jay-Dub stood up, straightening and extending its legs. ‘Look around you,’ it said, flailing its arms about at the busy quay. ‘Every jumped-up monkey here has rights that a court will recognise. I don’t. I’m instrumentum vocale: a tool that talks.’

‘So what about this distinction you make so much of, between human equivalent and just a fucking machine?’

‘“Human equivalent”,’ the robot said with some bitterness, ‘is a marketing term. It has no legal standing whatsoever, except with the abolitionists, and nobody gives a fuck about them.’

‘Oh?’ Wilde looked interested. ‘That’s the people the…gynoid went off with?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to talk to them. They sound like my kind of people.’

‘I assure you they’re not,’ the robot said. ‘They’re the kind of moralistic, dogmatic, self-righteous purists that you despised all your life.’

‘Fine,’ the man said. ‘I said my kind of people, not Wilde’s.’

He got to his feet. ‘I’m going to see them.’

‘That would be a mistake.’

Wilde set off briskly along the quay. ‘It’s the kind of mistake,’ he said, as Jay-Dub rose and followed, ‘that I died not making. Not many people get the chance to learn from that.’

Reid’s office is large. The walls are curved, made from a plain grey cement that gives an unexpected atmosphere of warmth. The window’s view adds a good percentage to the room’s price. The morning sunlight slants through it. On the desk, of solid wood polished so that it looks almost like plastic, there’s a standard keyboard and screen. Reid has contacts, which he seldom uses, on his eyes.

He’s sitting on the desk, leaning across it, paging through a search. The search is fast, and the scenes flash by in reverse order. Days of recorded phone-calls jabber and gesticulate backwards.

He stops, slows, pages forward. Freezes the scene.

He looks up. ‘C’mere,’ he says.

Collins and Stigler step over and peer at the screen. It shows the interior of the cab of some big powerful haulage vehicle. The details are quaint: a dangling mike, a peeling motto, padded polyethylene seats. A man with a lined, leathery face is looking into the camera. Beside him is a young woman with very dark eyes, very black hair, a tight tee-shirt and cropped denim shorts. She has the look of an intelligent and wary slut.

Reid fingers a key and the picture moves. There’s a flicker of interference that makes all three men blink and shake their heads slightly. As they open their eyes the screen clears.

‘Forget it,’ the man’s saying. ‘Wrong number.’

His hand moves out of frame and the screen blanks. Another recorded call begins. Reid stops and scrolls back. He pauses at the interference, runs it past again slowly.

‘Oh, shit,’ he says.

He clicks on another screen icon and pulls in some analysis software. The flicker suddenly becomes a page of symbols. Reid clicks again. The symbols expand into screens and screens of text. Reid runs his finger down the monitor, his frown deepening.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he says, sitting back.

Stigler is twitching. ‘That guy,’ he says excitedly. ‘With the skin thing, he’s –’

Reid looks at him. ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

He calls up the picture again and runs another program, which smooths and softens the man’s features.

‘Hey!’ says Collins.

Reid points at the screen. ‘Get him,’ he says.

‘Wait a minute,’ says Stigler. ‘You said we’d need a warrant, and I can’t see no court giving –’

Reid claps him on the back. ‘Don’t you worry about it,’ he grins. ‘That man is dead.’

He stalks away and leans once more on the sill, looking out through the window at the city, and smiles into the sunlight.