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.