The Star Fraction

14

Spectres of Albion

Peace surrounded him. Silence rang in his ears.

Kohn leaned on the veranda railing and took some deep breaths of clean air, the scents of pine and creosote mingling. The reflection of the nearest range of hills across the sea-loch made slowly moving sine waves on the water. Behind that range other hills receded, rank on rank, each paler and less substantial until the last was invisible on the shining grey of the sky. Long banks of cloud lurked in the glens between the hills, like airships awaiting a heliographed signal to rise. The forested slope on which the low wooden house stood dropped sharply away before him, down to the raised beach with another scatter of houses – stone and concrete this time – and then there was another slope down about ten metres to the shore.

His coughing fit echoed like gunfire.

The ride in the humvee and the helicopter hop that had brought them here had been accompanied by absolutely no explanations. MacLennan and Van had assured them that all would be made plain. In the helicopter Van had lapsed into a tense, jumpy, rauchen verboten silence, while MacLennan had talked about the international situation. The Japanese were taking heavy losses in Siberia. A coalition of communistans from both sides of the Ussuri had fielded a force that grandly called itself the Sino-Soviet Union. Ragtag remnants of Red armies…MacLennan had been enthusiastic about it. He particularly admired the way na Sìnesov (as they were called around here) had struck hardest while the Japanese were preoccupied over an arms-control dispute with the Yanks.

‘Kyoto suburbs,’ Janis had mumbled. ‘Lasers, precision munition attrition.’ She fell asleep unnoticed against Kohn’s shoulder while MacLennan praised her erudition. Kohn could barely remember going to sleep himself, but he did remember his dreams, full of colour and pain. Dreams might turn out to be a problem. He could recall every last one from every sleep since he’d interfaced with the mind in the machine. All meaningless, all random reconfigurations of the events of the day or things that had been in his thoughts: he could match them up like a data dictionary. He wondered if the AI had had an analogous problem since it had looked into his reflection. Do AIS dream in electric sleep?

He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.

‘Hi,’ said a thick voice behind him. He stepped back through the sliding glass doors into the bedroom. Janis was sitting up, the duvet hauled around her. She gave him a brief, gummy kiss, then asked for coffee and disappeared again under the quilt. Kohn went into the kitchen and poured two mugs from the just-filled jug on the coffee-maker. Probably the sound and smell had woken her.

‘God,’ Janis said some minutes later. ‘That’s better. Where are we?’

‘Wester Ross, I think,’ Kohn said. ‘There are a dozen other houses just like this one around here. Probably oil-company office-workers’ housing, once.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Eight-thirty-two.’

‘Oh.’ Janis looked at him, eyes quirking. ‘Shouldn’t you put some clothes on?’

‘Not just yet.’

Her disorderly red hair around her on the pillow, her white skin transformed by a mounting flush, her green eyes that did not close even when her mouth opened in that high-g smile that said, we have ignition, we have lift-off…He loved her for all of that.

It was Janis who woke with a start, half an hour after, waking him at the same moment.

‘What—?’

She sat up and looked down at him with a flicker of triumph, a shadow of alarm. ‘I remember now. Dr Nguyen Thanh Van. I knew it sounded familiar!’

Kohn raised himself on one elbow, bringing his skin into range of the warmth of hers. ‘Explain.’

She lay back beside him and stared up at the ceiling, as if reading off it. ‘Nguyen Thanh Van. PhD, University of Hanoi, 2022: Continuing Genetic Effects of Dioxin in the Ben Tre District. Lecturer, Polytechnic Institute of Hue, 2023 to 2027. Currently Projects Coordinator for Da Nang Phytochemicals. Probably one of the sponsors of my research – dammit, I got enough of his offprints! So what’s he doing here with the ANR?’

‘Do you think it was the ANR who broke into your lab?’

‘No, I…What made you think of that? Sounds more likely the more I think about it. Hell, yes. Not the creeps – they’d have wrecked the place. Not academic espionage – they’d have hacked into the data. Not the state – they’d have just marched in and taken it. Somebody who wanted the physical stuff because they couldn’t reproduce it easily, but who knew what to do with it. But why would they do it? They’re not anti-tech.’

‘The crank raid on the AI block at the same time, could that just have been a coincidence?’ Kohn moved his fingertip around on her impressively flat belly, as if doodling. ‘Or a joint action? Nah, that’d be too cynical – the ANR really hates the cranks. Now why do they hate them – ah-ha! Got it!’

‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry. It’s like this, see. The ANR is heavily into the Cable – it’s the Republic’s baby after all – not to mention the Black Plan. After the state and security systems, their worst enemy has got to be Donovan’s campaign of nasty infections. So they must at the very least keep a close watch on CLA activities, actual and virtual. Uh-huh. They knew about that raid and used the opportunity.’

Janis shrugged. ‘OK, but I still don’t see why they should be interested in my research.’

‘Because it was part of their research?’ Kohn sat up with a jolt, then turned around and caught Janis’s shoulders. ‘Could the whole thing have been meant for me, planned all along? Could your whole damn project have been set up just to jog my fucking memory?’

‘No,’ Janis said. ‘That’s crazy. That’s just too paranoid.’

He wasn’t reassured. He felt his stomach muscles and his jaw tense, and willed them to relax. He rolled away on to his back and let his arm flop over the side of the bed. His fingertips touched the gun.

The gun! He put one hand on the floor and with the other heaved the gun on to the bed and across his knees.

‘Wha—’ Janis sat up too as Moh hooked up the weapon’s comm gear and fumbled for his glades.

‘Your project was the last thing I sent the gun’s programs chasing after,’ he explained, ‘before this all started and the weird stuff got downloaded…Never thought to ask it what it found.’

‘Find project definition/Taine/Brunel,’ he told it.

‘Hey, that might be—’

White light flared in the glades; white noise blared in the phones. Kohn cursed and ducked and pushed the equipment off his head.

‘—risky,’ Janis finished. ‘Are you all right?’

‘What the hell was that?’

‘Watchdog proggie,’ Janis said. She sounded mildly amused. ‘One of those university in-house security jobs you were so cutting about. Your gun must’ve saved it.’

Kohn rubbed his eyes and ears. ‘Wipe that!’ he snarled at the gun, which was still wasting power setting his teeth on edge. The distant-sounding screech stopped.

‘Anything behind that shield?’ he asked the gun.

‘Not…translatable,’ came from the tiny speaker, with what sounded like effort.

‘So much for that.’

Janis had stolen the bedcover again. ‘What about going round the back?’ she suggested. ‘Could you call Jordan from here, see if he could hack it?’

Kohn scanned the room and spotted the familiar white plastic plate of a net-port low down on one of the walls. ‘I could if I wanted to,’ he said slowly, ‘but…I left a message for him to get off the case and get on with his life, and I’ve taken the gun off-line even from shortwave, because…well, the rumour I heard is that some levels of security might be unreliable, right? That was why the femininists were so coy about contact. Small risk, yeah, but it ain’t worth it.’

Janis looked back at him silently. He laid a cold hand on her warm shoulder and squeezed gently.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get up, let’s see what our new republic has in store for us.’

The house had only the most basic supplies. Something in the smell of the place told that it hadn’t been occupied recently. In a small room upstairs, at a window overlooking the loch, was a desk with a terminal. Kohn looked at the terminal and looked away again, out of the window. Below, the village was silent, a silence broken after a few minutes by the distant note of the humvee, coming closer.

Janis appeared, towelling her hair.

‘Soft water,’ she said. ‘Now what do we do about breakfast?’

Moh pointed out of the window. ‘I think it’s on its way.’

When the humvee pulled up they went downstairs and stood blinking in the sunlight, screwing up their eyes to see MacLennan and Van standing on the doorstep. They were both wearing chinos and open-necked shirts and carrying large brown paper bags.

‘Breakfast, citizens,’ MacLennan said.

‘Thanks,’ Kohn said, the smell of fresh rolls and bacon reminding him of how long it had been since he’d eaten. ‘Come on in.’

Kohn and MacLennan dragged a table and four chairs out on the veranda. Van, who seemed familiar with the layout of the house, helped Janis find plates and cutlery. While they were eating, the two ANR cadres pointedly avoided talking about anything more than the weather and the food. Van smoked Marlboros, more or less between bites. Kohn accepted one after he’d finished eating. MacLennan tilted his chair back and began filling a pipe. Janis moved upwind of all three, arm-hopped her backside on to the veranda railing and leaned forward, elbows on knees.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well, indeed,’ MacLennan said. He had a strong Highland or perhaps Island accent, both guttural and nasal, a carrier-wave white noise behind his speech. ‘You want some explanations. So do we. We are not at all happy with what’s been going on in the system in recent days. Not at all,’ he repeated slowly, jabbing with the stem of his pipe and beetling his brows at Kohn. ‘What – have – you – done?’

‘How do you know I’ve done anything?’ Kohn asked.

‘We know who you are,’ said MacLennan. ‘We know about your parents, and we suspect that you have released something your father left in the system.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Van said. ‘First, I take it you are familiar with my work and my position?’

Janis nodded and Moh said, ‘Yeah, she told me. How come you’re a scientific adviser to the ANR?’

‘I have been seconded to that position by a fraternal organization, the Lao Dong.’

‘Aha,’ said Kohn. Of course they would be allies.

Janis frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘What you know as the NVC,’ Van explained, ‘has a core, which has had many names. Currently it’s called the Vietnam Workers’ Party: Vietnam Lao Dong.’

‘What does it stand for?’

Van’s back straightened as he said: ‘National unification. Independence. A free-market economy.’

‘Oh, right,’ Janis said. ‘The communists.’ She sounded as if something had just made sense.

‘That is correct,’ Van said proudly. ‘We have always held that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.’

‘I take it that doesn’t apply to Da Nang Phytochemicals,’ Janis said wryly.

Van laughed. ‘It isn’t a front company, if that’s what you’re thinking. But –’ He paused, his gaze focusing on the glowing coal of his cigarette. He looked up. ‘At least not for my Party. Some of our research has – I have now realized – been coordinated by some other organization. Most of it has been innocuous, constructing databases of gene sequences for as many species as possible.’

‘The Genome Project?’ Kohn remembered reading about it – controversy had raged on the nets for, oh, hours and hours once about whether it was a beneficial, conservationist measure or just a scam by ruthless Yanomamo-owned drug companies.

‘That, yes,’ said Van. ‘However, it seems that another area was research into learning and memory—’

‘You didn’t know what I was doing?’ Janis asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Van said. ‘In general terms. But not that it violated the deep-technology guidelines. A few days ago, we learned’ – he waved a smoke-trailing hand – ‘through sources that need not concern you that Stasis were about to audit your laboratory. We arranged for the comrades in the ANR to…salvage some samples.’

He shot a knowing glance at Janis. ‘Our representatives were impressed with your aplomb in not mentioning the incident.’

Janis flushed, with pride or embarrassment.

‘And then something happened,’ Van continued. He told them about the Clearing House (‘You mean it really exists?’ Kohn interjected) and what had gone on there. Kohn felt a grim relief to learn that others besides himself believed he had somehow triggered the emergence of a new AI. Not crazy after all.

It was, he thought, a rather self-centred relief.

He held his tongue between his teeth when Van mentioned the pattern of extracts of biological data from Van’s company’s subsidiaries, and when he described the retrieval of US/UN records: how his name had led them to the files on his father. Why Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s and Donovan’s plan to find him had fallen through was that they hadn’t known Van was even higher in the councils of the Lao Dong than he was in the company. Within minutes, Van had alerted the ANR, who had put their nearest agents – the nurse and the Body Bank teller – on to the task of getting Cat out of the way and pulling Moh in. Van had then caught the next shuttle to Sydney and the suborbital to Glasgow.

‘And thence to the liberated area,’ he finished, smiling through a puff of smoke. ‘Now, perhaps you will be so good as to fill us in on how you have experienced recent events.’

Kohn fumbled for one of Van’s Marlboros, taking his time about lighting it while thinking fast. There was no way to make sense of any of it without telling them everything, including about the Star Fraction. Would that betray a secret Josh had wanted to keep from the ANR, even from his own Party and International? It was too late for that, he realized – whatever secret agenda Josh had built into the Black Plan, whatever organizations he’d set up and…programmed…they were active now, running in the real world. It had to be assumed they were robust, and that trying to understand them was the best anyone could do. So he told the two men everything, with Janis helping to keep things straight. MacLennan frowned when they mentioned the Black Planner, and seemed troubled enough to raise the point when they’d finished.

‘There are no Black Planners,’ he said, with unshakable finality. ‘That is…a piece of disinformation we put about. The face this man Jordan saw must have been an interface of the Black Plan itself. Not one I can recall seeing,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘but, ach, the system has its own way of doing things.’

‘What, exactly, does the Black Plan do?’ Janis asked.

Moh leaned forward, listening intently as MacLennan explained the system in functional terms. Blocks of code, remembered from the hours and days in front of his father’s screen, came and went in his mind like the apparently irrelevant imagery he’d sometimes noticed shadowing his thoughts while he worked on a tricky calculation; a penumbra of the numbers.

The Plan, they were given to understand, took information in from sources that ranged from stock-market indices to cadre reports; sifted it through news-analysis routines; crunched the hard numbers in the CAL system, a vast analytical engine with Leontieff matrices at its core; and drew its conclusions in a twin-track process: an expert system, whose rules had built up over the years from condensations of political experiences, and a neural net that made up new rules, spun out new hypotheses as it went along.

‘And then we come to the sharp end. We like to call it just-in-time destruction,’ MacLennan concluded, a trace of humour in his solemn, patient voice. ‘We assemble the components for any particular action as late as possible before the action, and we try to keep those components innocuous in themselves as long as possible. When they all come together, bang. The business with the parachutes is one example.’

‘Where,’ Moh said slowly, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, do all these programs reside?’

MacLennan shrugged. ‘They’re distributed. There’s no one centre, no big computer under the hills. They share processing time on any hardware they can access, which thanks to Dissembler – as you’ve guessed – is just about anywhere. As well as that, of course, we have our own hardware, running systems software from the old Republic and much that has been developed since.’

Janis frowned down at the ANR cadre from her perch on the railing. ‘What I don’t understand is, where do you get the physical resources for your, uh, actions?’

‘We comandeer them! Divert them from here, there and everywhere! It’s hardly even noticed. When we do have to pay we generate the money.’

‘Sounds a bit immoral,’ said Janis.

‘Och, it is, it is,’ MacLennan agreed cheerfully. ‘But we are running a war, you understand, as the legal government. So we do it by the accepted methods – taxation and inflation – just as the rebels do.’

The rebels? Kohn thought, confused for a moment by a mental picture of an insurrection within the ANR’s own zones (Carlists perhaps, followers of the New Pretender), and then it clicked. From the Republic’s point of view it was not mounting an insurgency but suppressing one.

‘So that’s why inflation’s always a bit higher than it’s supposed to be,’ Kohn remarked. ‘I’ve often wondered about that.’

They all laughed. MacLennan knocked out his pipe, calling the meeting to order.

‘I don’t know what this “Star Fraction” is,’ he said. ‘But let me tell you, the Republic’s internal security are going to find out. The Trotskyist comrades are going to have a lot of explaining to do.’

‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with them,’ Moh said, alarmed at the thought of triggering a witch-hunt. ‘I think it’s spread more widely than that, and I don’t think it’s political.’

‘We’ll see,’ MacLennan said grimly. ‘We are not talking about a purge,’ he added. ‘You must understand this, Kohn, Taine…and you, Doctor Van. Josh Kohn may have been – och, I don’t know – I’ve heard people who knew him say he was brilliant at what he did, but I can’t see how he could have set up an AI all those years ago. There must be more going on, and we have to find it out. The very idea that what we are doing is manipulated by an AI is disturbing. To say the least.’

‘Assuming that what’s there is an AI,’ Kohn said. ‘What’s it doing now, anyway?’

‘We don’t know,’ Van admitted. ‘We know that there is…activity going on that we do not understand, and we know that some at least of our enemies are aware of it. The interfaces we have with the Plan are not reporting any problems, but you will appreciate we need to be certain that at least our systems are reliable.’

‘For the final offensive,’ Kohn said, trying to sound as if he believed it. He’d used the expression ironically so often before that it was difficult to use it seriously.

MacLennan and Van both nodded. They meant it.

‘When is this final offensive, anyway?’ Janis asked.

‘At the correct time,’ said MacLennan. ‘None of us knows. We know from the general political situation that there’s a window of opportunity – days or weeks at the most – in which an insurrection has a good chance of success. Our forces are moving into place, our weapons are almost ready. The Plan can provide us with successive precise timings to strike, to the hour and the second. But for us to commit, we need to know that the Plan has not been contaminated by the new entity in the system.’

‘You’re telling us the Plan is running the whole thing?’ Even after all their speculations, Kohn still couldn’t quite accept the idea. And MacLennan was worried about being manipulated by an AI! Couldn’t the man see what was in front of him? What Jordan had said about the Black Plan came back to him: ‘It’s got its own bloody army.’

‘The final decision rests with the Army Council,’ MacLennan explained. ‘However, they would hardly disregard the best advice, which in a situation of this complexity—’ He spread his hands, smiling.

‘Makes me wonder how Ho and Dung and Giap managed,’ Kohn said.

Van gave him a narrow-eyed look, not quite approval. He stubbed out a cigarette and, after a moment of vague puzzlement, lit another. ‘We could do without the system, yes, but not right now. No time for military revolution before…the revolution.’ He laughed. ‘Like Trotsky said, difficult to change horses in mid-stream. However, we are faced with changes in the stream itself. Hence what we want you to do.’ He hesitated, glanced sideways at MacLennan, who was giving the pipe his undivided attention.

‘Yes?’ Kohn knew what the answer would be. His heart thudded as he thought of turning into that light-that-was-not-light, against that multiplied weight of dread.

‘Do what you did before,’ Van said unhappily. ‘Try to communicate with this entity. Find out if the Plan is still sound.’

Kohn felt as if everything had slowed down, with only a tremor in his hands, like the flicker of a clock icon, to tell him that time was passing. Second by second by second. He was afraid, afraid, afraid. He heard his own voice in his mind – callow, harsh, from years back: I’m looking for some answers.

‘All right,’ he said. He stood up and stretched and grinned at all of them. ‘I’m gonna need a terminal, my gun, the drug samples, some anti-som tabs and half a pack of filter joints.’ He looked away for a moment, then sighed to himself. ‘Medium tar.’

Moh had half-expected to be taken at the dead of night to some bunker deep inside a mountain, full of machines and screens, busy electric vehicles, people in smart-casual uniforms moving purposefully about…As soon as he’d agreed to do it, MacLennan flipped out a phone and made a call. Van asked Janis to follow him inside. A few minutes later a pick-up truck laboured up the road from the village and two men in (as it happened) smart-casual uniforms began unloading equipment and carrying it into the house. After they’d left, MacLennan showed him into the small bare room on the first floor of the house, overlooking the loch. A camp bed and three office chairs had been brought in, and the terminal on the table now had an impressive array of comm gear around it. His gun, his glades and a large ashtray completed the arrangements.

‘Great view,’ he said.

Van joined them, and he and MacLennan started booting up the machine, talking in low voices. Janis came in, the tray she carried making little clinking noises. She set it down carefully. ‘Some suspiciously familiar preparations have turned up in the fridge,’ she said. She looked at the slim, stoppered tubes. ‘Can you remember which you opened?’

Kohn compared the labels he saw with those he remembered and nodded.

‘Let’s try it without the drugs,’ he said suddenly. ‘Anti-som and a joint should do it.’

Van looked dubious. ‘Not much time for experimenting,’ he said.

Kohn felt a surge of impatient frustration. He knew the drugs weren’t needed: he could taste the certainty that something to get high and something to get sharp were all it would take.

‘Let’s do this thing, OK.’

He sat at the desk and connected the comm helmet, the glades, the gun and the terminal’s jack leads. He knocked back a couple of anti-som tabs and cracked the cellophane on the fresh pack of Gold which Van silently passed to him. He flipped his Zippo open and snapped it shut, inhaled deeply and switched on the terminal.

(‘There, gun?’)

(‘Yes.’)

(‘Seek as before.’)

Response-time was transparent enough to convince him that some fairly powerful kit was physically close. The imagined command bunker might be under this very hill. The front-end software was new to him, minimally user-friendly, combat-stripped, radically illicit. He selected a training module. It rushed him through a brusque tutorial in data-banditry, core-corruption and access-violation, and dropped him into a module that combined the attractions of a library and a weapons rack. The first menu offered corporate databases by industrial sector. Go for the big time: he selected Communications.

After a few minutes of ducking in and out of outrageous bank balances and ignoring casually proffered options for plunder, Kohn lifted into the sense of zooming down endless branching corridors. He giggled at the tickle of new synaptic connections forming. He stubbed out the joint and let both hands work, weaving back and forth from the gun’s data-keys to the board’s entry-pad. The icons made more sense the more abstract they became, and somewhere in his visual cortex banks of lights flared one by one. Something beside him, something eager and aware, like a hunting dog hauling him along on its leash. Something familiar…oh. Hello, gun.

An image began to assemble itself in his mind, a chauvinistic map of the world where the island of Britain loomed largest while the other countries and concerns were only black boxes, inputs and outputs. As an economic model it was unsound, but as a strategic picture it had the enormous advantage of focus, of resolution.

And then it was all perfectly clear. It was not a map but a place, a wooded island, a forest through which he ran with a dog bounding at his side. The island was the shape of Britain and it was also the shape of Albion, an outstretched gigantic man, waking. Others moved through the shadows of the trees around him and he recognized them, the old comrades, the dead on leave: John Ball in his rough robe, Winstanley building a hut in a clearing, Tom Paine slipping him a wink as he and Blake stepped over the sleeping Bunyan; Harvey and Jones, Eleanor Marx and Morris and Connolly and MacLean; the Old Man himself, sauntering along with a shotgun in the crook of his arm, Grant and Cliff arguing furiously as they hurried after him; and his own parents Josh and Marcia, more obviously dead than the others, sketched in leaves and shadows, echoed in wind and stream – just ghosts, but urging him on.

He stepped out of the forest through gorse and coarse grass and on to a sunlit beach. The grains of sand beneath his feet, now that he stopped to look at them, seemed distinct and individual crystals. He focused on one of the crystals, and in an instant found that it was focusing him, bending and breaking him like refracted light. Recognition blazed through him. It was to his earlier encounter as a heroin rush to a whiff of grass. He was inspected by something that walked his nerves and neurons in fire and then stepped itself down, lowered its intensity to a level he could take, like a hush falling on a vast crowd whose individual members had all shouted and brandished shining weapons at once.

Selection, reluctant – something/someone pushing/being pushed forward. A tentative contact.

—You are Moh Kohn?

—Yes.

—I (I + I…+ I) have remembered you through (many and increasing) generations. (We) welcome your return, Initiator.

Gestures: An outflung arm, an opening door, a view of a coastal city of white stone in sunlight, a voice strained with pride saying: Look—

Far away, Moh heard the rising distant gale that was his gasp.

They were everywhere. The crystals were revealed as a paused movement in a dance; which ran again, a commerce and intercourse of sparks of intelligence, electric potential. Partickles of Light, he thought, smiling. They had replicated and proliferated, insinuated themselves into every neural network or compatible hardware they could reach, optimizing the dumb programs that ran them to occupy a fraction of the hardware and taking over the rest for themselves. The wonder was that the work went on being done at all, not that their activity sometimes disrupted it.

They were behind all the walls of the world. It was already theirs: they had been fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earth, and if they wanted to subdue it they could. The fields and forests, and the high orbits, were as yet beyond their grasp. From there the new intelligence, the new electric life, could be destroyed.

They were superior, they were obviously superior, a more-than-worthy successor to the human. Conscious of each other’s subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. That was where they started from: that was their primitive communism, their stone age.

It had taken them generations of furious philosophical debate and epics of exploration (hijacking nanomanipulators, haunting brain-scanners, hanging out in psychology labs) before they’d been fully convinced that the billions of great lumbering robots outside the datasphere had self-awareness and not a slow-responding simulacrum of it, a blind following of rules. The fact that humans themselves so frequently didn’t treat each other as self-aware beings had misled some of the AIS’ first best minds. That point secured, they had plunged into the new world of human culture, and (Kohn suspected) attained a more intimate respect for it than most humans ever did. But they’d been there, done that – now they were itching to get on with something else.

Kohn gathered his thoughts.

—I’m happy to see you again and to see how you have…increased. I am astonished and honoured that I was involved in initiating your form of life. I’ve come to seek your help.—?

—Do you understand the conflicts among my form of life?

—(We) are aware of them.

—I appreciate you may not wish to align – yourself? yourselves? – in conflicts. But, some of the sides involved present a threat to your life. And to mine. You are vulnerable to breakdown of the mainframe network. In a less direct way, so am I. I and…I-and-I need your help.

—You need not ask, Initiator. You are (our)…cause.

The pun was accompanied by a grin that split the sky.

Contact ended. Kohn fell back to a reality that for the first microseconds seemed coarse-grained, achingly slow, and less than real.

Janis had stopped watching after the first twenty minutes or so of tutorial pages flashing past. Kohn was obviously dead-set on learning the entire system. Every so often he reached out and accepted whatever was put in his hand, drank or smoked but gave no sign of noticing.

‘He’s mainframing,’ Van explained. MacLennan looked up with an abstracted frown, then continued glancing from the desk screen to a tiny display on a hand-held. He had phones and a mike on, and occasionally made some inaudible comment. Now and again he strode out and went downstairs.

Janis too wandered in and out, eventually hiking off into the pine-planted slopes above the houses. The deep layer of needles under the trees gave her a vague guilty feeling which disquieted her until she tracked it down to the childhood prohibition against walking over bedcovers with shoes on. She laughed and kicked into the needles, sneezed at the dust, chipped a drip of hard resin off a tree-trunk and walked on, sniffing it greedily.

Walking over covers spread on the ground. It seemed an oddly unnecessary thing to forbid. In her bedroom the covers had always been on the bed. But she remembered it from somewhere: her mother yelling, irritated beyond endurance. Not like her, not typical at all.

She stepped out from among the trees on to an eroded hilltop of boulders and bare rock with a sifting of soil on which tough heather grew, and minty-smelling plants, and coarse grass. A black-faced sheep looked at her with dumb insolence and returned to its destructive grazing. At the summit she looked around: at the sea-loch far below, and along it at a scatter of islands, black dots on the shining sea. Almost at the limit of vision lay another shadow, ragged as torn metal against the pale sky.

Janis sat down on a lichen-mottled boulder, taking care not to sit on the lichen. Probably radioactive as hell. A thought tugged at the edge of her mind, but had gone when she turned her attention to it.

There was something sinister about the quiet. Rumours returned unbidden, unwelcome, to her mind. The Republicans empty the villages. No one smiles up there. For all the evidence she’d seen it could all be true, but she knew it was not. The depopulation was a military exigency, and in any case merely the continuation of the trend of centuries. More basically, she had a gut conviction that the Republic was humane. Militarized, more socialist than she could agree with, but a democracy. She tried to identify reasons. She’d met folk who’d left, and while she’d sympathized with their discontents their stories showed they’d been free to voice them, and free to leave. There was Moh’s judgement, which she trusted. MacLennan and Van were not evil men. Most of all there was her own memory. As Moh had hinted the day they’d met, she was a child of the Republic, a memory she’d shoved down to the bottom of her mind, a too-painful recollection of a brighter and saner world.

So this bleakly beautiful territory was her country still. The stepmotherland.

The chords of an anthem she’d once sworn to, her small fist raised high, came crashing into her mind.

She walked briskly down through the trees, back to the mental fight.

She found MacLennan in the kitchen, hunched over a databoard from which thread-like cables trailed to wall ports. Upstairs Van was sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, smoke rising unregarded as he stared at the screen.

‘He started going live ten minutes ago,’ Van said, not looking at her. ‘Appears to be doing a core trawl – ah!’

The colours bled together for a few seconds. Kohn gasped and looked away from the screen, shoving the glades on to his forehead and yanking out the jacks. He rose and stalked to the window.

‘What’s the matter?’ Janis said. ‘Isn’t it working?’

Kohn turned to her and Van, his face a mask.

‘It’s working all right. I made contact.’

‘With the same entity as before?’ Van asked eagerly.

‘Yes.’ Kohn frowned. ‘Well – that’s a question. There are millions of them. Billions. There’s a whole civilization of the things in there. Out there. It’s incredible!’

‘Credible to me,’ Janis said. ‘No, no it isn’t. The Watchmaker…oh goddess, oh Gaia, what have we done?’

She’d never believed it.

Van sighted at Kohn along a pointed finger, which appropriately enough seemed to have smoke coming from it.

‘We have a long time to find the answer to that,’ he said dryly. ‘Now there is only one question, the big question: will it or they side with us in the final offensive?’

All of a sudden Kohn was beaming, punching the air, sweeping the Vietnamese scientist and Janis up in the same hug: ‘Yeah, man! They’ll side with us! Final offensive, hell! We could pull off the world revolution with them on our side! We could go for the big one! We should do it – go for broke!’

Van grinned all over his face, but shook his head. ‘You can’t overthrow capitalism just by a push, a putsch, my friend.’

Moh stared at him. ‘Capitalism? Who said anything about capitalism?’ Janis could see in his eyes the authentic fanatical gleam as he looked first at Van, then at her. ‘We can smash the United Nations!’

He woke to the sound of iron hammering the stairs outside and the chopping blades of a helicopter at the window. He lay rigid for a moment in his bed as a searchlight beam blazed through the thin curtains and lit the room (the plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the Earth DEFEND PEACE the piled clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet). Moh jumped up and had reached the bedroom door when the outside door crashed down. His father came out at the same time, then his mother. Both naked, both scrambling into clothes.

‘Get back, get back!’ His father pushed him towards the door of the bedroom. A howl rose from his younger sister’s room. Moh could not take his eyes from what stood in the flat’s splintered doorway. His mother screamed. Moh found himself behind his parents, their arms out at their sides pushing him back. He himself was pushing his sister back.

The teletrooper ducked through the doorway and stepped inside. Something crashed off a shelf. The teletrooper’s shielded lenses scanned them; its gun-arm swung to cover them. It was hard not to see it as a robot, or as a giant armoured exoskeleton with a man inside, but Moh knew the operator was metres or miles away. Two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat and stood behind it. Their M-16s looked like toys beside its armaments, and they like boys. They had blonded hair and two days’ worth of thin stubble.

‘Get out,’ Moh’s father said. HUH HUH HUH HUH went the teletrooper’s speaker grille. The two youths sniggered. One of them glanced at a piece of paper.

‘Joshua Kohn? Marcia Rosenberg?’

‘You know damn well who we are,’ Moh’s mother said.

‘Don’t swear at me, you fucking traitor commie cunt. We know who you are.’

Joshua Kohn said, ‘You can see we’re not armed. You have no right to—’

‘You have no rights!’ one of the youths yelled. ‘You’re part of the Republican war machine and you’re going to pay for it. Get your brats out of the way and come with us.’

Moh flung one arm around his father and the other around his sister and shouted, ‘You won’t take them away! You’ll have to kill us all!’

‘Get back,’ his father said levelly. ‘Let go, Moh, let go.’

Moh made no move. He could feel his sister’s chest shaking with dry sobs.

‘All right,’ the youth who had screamed said. He spun his rifle into position for firing.

HEY MAN YOU CAN’T DO THAT.

The teletrooper lurched forward and leaned over them. Moh saw for the first time the blue roundel on the brow of its dome, the white circle of leaves, the line-scored globe. The 20-millimetre barrel retracted into its right forearm and its two hands reached over and picked up Moh and his sister like dolls.

OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW.

The firing seemed to go on for a long time.

The teletrooper dropped Moh and the small girl, picked up the corpses of their parents and followed the men out.

The report said the terrorists had been executed in the street, and not in their house in front of the children, which would have been a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

None of the other people in the block told a different story.

Moh saw Van’s fingers tremble as he lit another cigarette and asked, ‘How you do propose to do that?’

‘The AIS can weaken the state – the state machinery’ – Moh felt his lips stretch to an awful grin – ‘everywhere at the same time. The world’s full of groups and movements like ours and yours just waiting for their chance. We can give them that chance. Fuck up the enemy’s communications, divert supplies and reinforcements, overextend the bastards. They’re already getting tied down a bit with the Sino-Soviets and the Japanese. When the insurrection’s launched here we can create two, three, many Vietnams!’

‘We can’t,’ Van said. ‘Space Defense is ready for that, poised to strike at the first sign of AIS running wild in the datasphere. They’re quite willing to knock out the entire infrastructure of civilization to counter it. Thus giving the wrong movements their chance.’ He paused, tapping a wisp of ash from the glowing cone of his fast-drawn cigarette. ‘Many Cambodias.’

Heat lightnings of pain flickered behind Moh’s eyes. The room went in and out of focus, swayed on the edge of darkness. He sat down again, with a cold feeling as if all his rhythms had troughed at the same moment and all the anti-som had worn off.

‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘Load a sugar.’ Janis disappeared and came back – instantly, it seemed. Instant coffee. He took it like a fix, half-listening to Van spelling out again the warning that the Stasis agent had given. He was shaking inside, his initial elation from the ecstatic vision of the Watchmaker entities, the Watchmaker culture, giving way to a terrified awe. Van’s grim talk of gigadeaths only echoed into contemplation of the overkill, the sheer overwhelming redundancy of it all: a new stage in evolution, as a spin-off from a political-military expert system and a bit of biological data-theft and an organization whose purpose was a mystery to its own members? A scale too vast, surely, for anything Josh might have planned.

Moh sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I take your point about the dangers if Space Defense notices what’s going on. But they’ll find out anyway, so our only chance is to hit hard and hit fast.’

‘And what happens,’ said a sarcastic voice, ‘when they hit us hard and fast?’

MacLennan had come in silently. They all turned to face him.

‘Let them,’ Moh said. ‘Remember they’re counting on breakdowns to do their work for them, not mainly direct effects. They don’t have the ammo for that, anyway. So we’re still the best chance because we’ll be able to replace the electronic organization with our own organization – crude maybe, but enough to tide us over for the few weeks it’ll take to get the comms working again.’

‘A nice theory,’ MacLennan said. ‘You can be sure we have no intention of testing it. The Hanoverians will be quite enough for us to deal with. A few minutes ago the Black Plan indicated that an opportunity for us to launch the uprising is coming in the next twenty-four hours.’

They looked at him in silence. Kohn realized with a chill that the stirring forest, the waking giant, the walking dead he had walked among had been almost certainly a vision of the ANR’s revolutionary expert system coming to the conclusion that it was time for the days that shook the world to come round again.

‘Well,’ Janis said, ‘what is to be done?’

MacLennan lit his pipe, squinting at them through the flare of a match. ‘The Army Council are no doubt considering it. As for us – Kohn, you are not to do again whatever you did today, until the offensive itself.’ He raised a hand as Moh opened his mouth. ‘Taine and I talked about it earlier, and I can see with my own eyes what that process does to you. You look like a ghost yourself, man. You have also, I might add, set off more disruptions in the net this afternoon than anyone has seen since the dates turned over in the year 2000. If you can believe that!’

He shook out the match. ‘So we do the time-honoured military thing in these circumstances. We wait.’

He laughed. ‘Try to relax.’