The Inhuman Peace Read online

  ‘Good. You’ll have help. Here.’

  No paper this time, but a sleek datapad, completely unmarked. He thumbed it open. There were two names, highlighted: Eliott Grimme. A photo: a thin, pale man with feral, clearly artificial eyes dressed in military fatigues. Very little information. He’d never heard of Eliott Grimme, but then again he’d never heard of a lot of people that worked for the office. Perks of being on the outermost circles.

  The next name was Don Hewage. Again, very little: a photo of a short, old man with graying hair and a severe expression, staring away from the camera, and a short code that identified him as the Director of the Colombo Entertainment Zone Project, Ministry of Reconciliation, Kandy.

  ‘The only other set of documents you’ll get is the official request put in by Ceylon,’ said Drake. ‘That’ll happen … whenever. Bureaucracy. It’s not important.’

  Bengali looked out of the window again. The reflection of his face stared back.

  A lifetime of being Igor. But finally, a chance to be more.

  ‘Why bloody not,’ he said, almost to himself, and lit another cigarrete.

  Three days later, Jacob Bengali found himself on board an aircraft carrier headed for Ceylon. It was quite possibly the largest ship he had ever been on, one of such tremendous size that all merchant traffic ground to a halt and their captains signalled to each other in fear and doubt. It spat out a smaller craft, a military hydrofoil that whispered across at a deceptively brutal speed. Various harbour officers rushed to it as it drew closer, and were completely ignored by the faceless Indian sepoys that poured out. Unlike their commanding officers, they had not yet earned the privilege of taking off their masks. One or two wore turbans, but otherwise it was one stream of khaki fish that bore him down to the security terminals at the dock. He could see eyes widen as he went past, with people trying to figure out if he was some kind of international criminal. But which criminal warranted an entire aircraft carrier? Worse, was he some kind of VIP? Should they have paid more attention?

  He merely smiled and nodded, enjoying the moment while it lasted. Of course they hadn’t sent an aircraft carrier just to pick him up. This was a regular trick in Her Majesty’s deck – randomly sending in the military to remind the colonies that she was there, she was watching, ready to protect the Empire from all threats, foreign and domestic. The carrier was probably one of those that haunted international waters between Australia and Ceylon, a constant reminder to the Chinese not to stretch their legs too far. A few drones circled idly overhead. A professor he had studied under had worked on the algorithms that made the drone fleets align, cohere and separate. He squinted. The name leaped into focus: HMS CARADOC.

  As he drew close, he realized why the aircraft carrier hadn’t drawn closer to the harbour: it was old, this thing, scarred and rusted forward and astern, a clear clone of the even more ancient Russian Sakharov-class. Perhaps it could be an air superiority vehicle, capable of launching a support fleet of surveillance/refueling blimps and fighter drones, but nothing that could rock up to a colony and threaten to blast it into submission. Easier to let people imagine the threat than manifest it.

  The sepoys poked and prodded him into a dinghy, and from there to the ship itself. Bengali had hardly gotten used to the rocking before they pushed him up an automatic ladder onto the bow of the carrier. The rest was a blur. He watched a sky-camouflaged cargo zeppelin land with majestic pomp on the deck; it looked like a great carbon-fibre whale, the cross-like helicopter-swingarms looking like awkward bones sticking out of its belly. Sepoys loaded it. With what, he had no idea.

  The crew patted him down. Your room key. Your bridge pass. Keep this on you at all times. Then he was shown to the coxswain: a fellow with a long, hooked nose and an exceptionally lean and powerful body fitted very neatly into the white uniform of the Royal Navy in the tropics. A mechanical hound, large and exquisitely worked, lounged near his feet. Junior officers swarmed like ants around him.

  ‘Bengali,’ said the coxswain, with genuine pleasure. A Bangalore accent, hidden beneath the carefully cultivated mid-Atlantic voice that many Indians adopted in the service. A rough and calloused hand shook his own. ‘You’re looking thinner, old chap.’ The other hand came out with a datapad, field issue. ‘I’ve been instructed to give you this.’

  Bengali struggled to remember the last time he had seen this man. ‘Yadav,’ he recalled finally. ‘Burma, wasn’t it? I was on a training assignment.’

  ‘But I didn’t know you were in the university now,’ said Yadav. ‘And Ceylon next? Glamorous. So you finally got to travel without joining the forces, eh?’

  Bengali shrugged modestly. ‘I’m technically part of the Home Office.’

  ‘Good, good. Always good to see one of us getting out there without having to scrub floors and wear stupid uniforms. Come, let’s go introduce you to the captain.’

  ‘I’d rather not trouble him, honestly—’

  ‘No, come on, he gets bored down there.’

  They fell into an easy rhythm, Yadav crossing the deck with an easy grace and Bengali following, thankful that the ship was big enough for him to keep in step without having to think twice about where he put his feet.

  ‘I’m thinking of retiring to the Americas myself when my contract’s up. Plenty of land in the Free States,’ Yadav called over his shoulder. ‘Watch the railing. You ever thought about it?’

  He had. Several hundred times, in fact. But while the Americas might have had land, they already had their economists, mostly Austrian, and their roboticists, mostly home-grown, and thus their own ladders to climb. It was fine for Yadav, who being a Navy man could fit in almost anywhere, and had no aversion to hard labour. For Bengali, however, it would mean starting right at the bottom as a sub-sub assistant to some decrepit professor or military contractor, and the thought galled him.

  The railings and decks gave way to closed corridors far away from the open air. Uniforms changed from the tropical whites to the ominous black of the Inquisition, and salutes to Yadav grew less frequent, replaced by nods and stares from visored helmets. A thump-thump-thump built up, slow at first, turning into a great metal heartbeat that shivered the walls around them; Bengali shuddered in sync.

  At last they came to the brains of the ship; that great dome where once navigators would have stood and captains barked out orders from. Yadav keyed in a complex combination into a set of blast doors, and knocked gently on the final one.

  ‘Come in,’ said a rich baritone that echoed around them. The door unlocked itself with a series of ugly clanks.

  If Bengali had to choose one word to describe the space inside, it would be ‘captainly’, almost to the point of it being a stereotype: a beautiful wooden cabin, lined with dark, polished wood, lit by inset lights on every surface; an exceptionally beautiful desk, which looked as if it could have been stolen from a university professor’s study. A portrait of Tin Lizzie hung at the back, as well as an almost life-size rendition of the Queen back when she had fair hair and white skin; before she had gone under the knife and emerged with that sculpted metal face that so terrified both subject and enemy alike. A man sat in front of the portrait in a large swivel chair. He had grey hair, swept back, and a strong lined face with hints of a beard, and a crisp white uniform. He was smoking a pipe.

  Then the hologram flickered and Bengali saw the room he was actually in: a nightmare of metal and screens and rubberised cabling. At the heart of it, crucified in a glowing tank, was the captain. His face a wasted white, the skin pierced and shredded by the control interfaces that plunged into it, and his eyes were open, blank and blind. In front of it, an Inquisitor, helmless: a pale face set with lenses, and more arms than Bengali wanted to see. No doubt tasked with maintaining its once-human kindred.

  ‘Excuse the visuals,’ came the voice again. ‘It’s been a while since we maintained our more trivial systems.’ The wooden floors reappeared and the man in the captain’s uniform swiveled, smiling, instead of the dead thing
in the tank. The Inquisitor became the table.

  ‘Sir,’ said Bengali awkwardly.

  ‘We met Dr. Bengali in Burma, sir,’ prompted Yadav.

  The man in the chair blinked and smiled. ‘Aye, the roboticist. We were having a spot of trouble with the Shan. Tough chaps.’

  ‘Tough, sir,’ echoed Yadav.

  ‘Will you sit down?’

  Bengali sat. The chair felt reassuringly real. ‘You can call me the Caradoc,’ said the captain. ‘I’d give you my Christian name, of course, but that doesn’t matter, does it?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Bengali. Captains were bonded to their ships for life, and very rarely moved.

  ‘You’re excused, Mr. Yadav.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Yadav, who saluted and was then gone. The hologram captain leaned back in his chair.

  The Caradoc sighed and leaned back.

  ‘I take it you’re one of Drake’s men,’ said that rich voice.

  ‘I work for him, yes.’

  A cigar appeared, lit, and Bengali watched, fascinated, as the hologram took several puffs from it.

  ‘I have an old friend in Ceylon. Nigel Penhaligon. Ever heard of him?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘He runs the Inquisition there. You’ll make his acquaintance, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He told me about an experiment in Ceylon. Training little machines of war, eh? No doubt that’s what you’re there for.’

  ‘I’ve been asked to do some design work, yes, sir. Mostly safety features.’

  ‘And you believe a machine will take the place of a human brain and a human heart?’

  Not really, no. ‘Well … I have my doubts, sir.’

  ‘Children,’ hissed the Caradoc, the beautifully textured voice giving way to a harsh metallic growl. ‘Those bastards designed them to look and act like children.’

  The hologram flickered again. Metal paneling replaced the illusion of wood, and Bengali was left staring at the wasted figure in the tank, its hands splayed as if to reach him and dead eyes open and staring. The wires trailing from its back and sides twitched, as if caught in the grip of a powerful emotion.

  ‘Yes, flinch, stare, grovel,’ it said. ‘You see us as abominations, but we made sacrifices for honour, Dr. Bengali, for the Queen and for the country. Drake and his goons would see us all replaced by these mockeries, these toy soldiers.’

  Bengali gulped. Something seemed to be expected of him. ‘I’ve just been asked to make them safer, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m completely on your side, sir.’

  ‘Make them safer, you say,’ said the Caradoc.

  ‘That was the request.’

  The wires twitched again. ‘Drake hasn’t trained you very well,’ said the Caradoc. ‘Never try to lie to one of us, Dr. Bengali. You baselines just aren’t built for it.’

  ‘I’m just a consultant with the office, sir. You should really take this up with Mr. Drake—’

  The Caradoc sneered. ‘Just a consultant,’ it said. ‘Of course. Well, Dr. Bengali, go with God, and do whatever it is your superiors told you to do. I’ll make my displeasure known to those authorized to receive it.’

  That night, Bengali tossed and turned in his bunk. The data pad glowed in his face; he thumbed through its contents with the kind of restless boredom that prevents sleep.

  ‘Runway twelve cleared for landing,’ crackled a not-quite-British-not-quite-South-Indian accent.

  On the Value of Ceylon to the Empire, read the pad. Whoever had prepared the document had carefully circled ‘thorium’, ‘graphene’ and ‘titanium’. For entire chapters they harped on about the importance of trading with China. There was production value, trade routes, impact on industry, key political players. Links spiraled out like a confused spider web, from every paragraph to more extensive articles on the factories of Ceylon and its history of rebellion.

  It was practically a bloody tourist brochure. Bengali skipped it and went to the video section. These he put in a playlist, skipping through them rapidly. He saw China, extending tendrils from Australia. A fleet of Chinese Marines in power armor, disembarking in a city that looked like it was in the throes of growing up. A reflex shot fired by a British soldier. Both sides slugging it out. Towers crumbling under gunfire. A satellite marked with the wings of an angel spun with careful precision and fired a tungsten shell – a single warning shot that leveled the entire fledgling city.

  ‘You fired one of the Angels?’ a reporter was saying.

  ‘Her Majesty’s orders, I’m afraid,’ said a shadowy voice. ‘Show the Chinese we’re not playing silly buggers. She’s been a bit touchy these last fifty years. Still …’

  Deals, news radiograms, photos – the videos flitted through past in a high-speed blur, flick flick flick flick. The Chinese bowed and asked to build a port in Colombo. A nexus of trade between Her Majesty’s Empire and the subjects of the Song Emperor. Agreements. Ships dredging up sand from the waters. An island-city rising next to the ashes of the ruined city.

  And, somewhere down the line and not recorded on these videos, the Crofton Institute had looked around at the ruins and decided it would make the next generation of weapons and disguise it as hyper-violent gladiator drama. And here he was, decades down the line, being sent in for what was essentially industrial espionage.

  No sleep tonight, he thought. And on the heels of that: this better be worth it.

  Outside, the sea stretched out under the moonlight, black and endless, and took him and the Caradoc to Ceylon.

  FOUR

  Many thousands of miles away, a man received a package. Unlike Bengali’s, it was hand-delivered by a messenger who quaked with fear and promptly forgot that he had ever delivered such a message. It was a single sheet of digital paper, on was a short, brief scrawl: ‘TRUST THIS IS SUITABLE.’

  The man reading this letter sat in a cafe under gloomy North Irish skies, thinking. He was thin and lanky, and wrapped in his greatcoat. He had a memorable face, but not a particularly handsome one: it was too square, too rigid where it should have been soft. His eyes were set too far apart, his forehead wrinkled, not with age, but in thought. Certainly not the image of the handsome captain returning from war. His name was Eliott Grimme.

  ‘You look racked,’ said the waitress, passing by on her rounds.

  ‘Long day,’ he said. It was as much as he spoke here.

  She didn’t say anything else, but poured into his cup. He nodded his thanks and sipped, feeling the filthy black sludge burn its way down his throat. As he sipped, he decrypted the text; the scrawl vanished, and the paper began to fill up with details.

  It was indeed a strange case. You are no doubt aware of the safeguards commonly put in place by the Royal Society of Roboticists and the Crofton Institute to ensure that no machine shall approximate life in a blasphemous manner, it began, and went on to detail the laws and codexes of advanced machinery; these he skipped, scanning for the salient bits.

  There.

  Ten years prior, the Crown had authorized the Ceylonese to run a novel form of entertainment: cheap humanoid bots set loose in a ceaseless sort of battle royale within the ruined city of Colombo. Most novel of all had been the realism exhibited by the bots: there had been talk of great profits, and possibly taking this format out into the rest of the world. The papers were filled with reports and financials.

  He skipped them. Alright, someone figured out there was money to be made. Circle of life. It was what came next that was interesting. A profile of a roboticist called Don Hewage. A list of academic papers. Dynamic risk profiling using n-ward Bayesian inference. Mutating random decision trees in the application of intelligence. A computational method for feedback control optimization. There were repeated uses of the phrase ‘machine learning’ highlighted.

  Interesting indeed.

  Last year, the first incident. One bot had escaped the game area and made it almost to the command centre, slaughtering a few civilians in the process. There were cryptic reports from the lo
cal Inquisition chapter. The locals had gunned it down and raised a hue and cry.

  Obviously, someone had screwed up. He could read between the lines well enough. There was a number at the bottom of the text. He asked for the bar’s radiogram and called it.

  ‘Might be bit of a hog, even by your standards,’ said Drake without preamble. ‘It’s all in there, but the long and the short of it is that we seem to have a robot colony running around in the old city of Colombo.’

  ‘Like Hong Kong.’

  ‘Not like Hong Kong. These things can learn.’

  Eliott processed this, tracking carefully over the map while tuning Drake out. He checked his instructions thrice, very carefully.

  He knew the logic for this kind of thing. It was easier to send a man than a regiment; easier to deny one soldier than a submarine.

  ‘And how are you doing, Grimme?’ Drake asked.

  ‘I haven’t drunk much in a while,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of beer every now and then.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Three pints of Guinness a week, on average. Always the same bar. Very machine-like of you.’

  It wasn’t the first time he wondered how much the Drakes knew, and how.

  ‘Alright, then,’ said Drake, back to business. ‘We’re sending you with another fellow for assessment. His job is to figure out who the most interesting beasties are. Your job is to find and capture them, and make sure the mess is contained. Make a parade out of it every time you take down something. Let the public know we’re doing a good job. Nigel Penhaligon will be your point man for the job. You’ll be using his men.’

  Interesting indeed. He folded everything up very carefully, finished his coffee and stepped outside. The wind was cold, the cobbles matter missing and sky grey. His British greatcoat was painfully obvious in its navy-blue wrapping. A half-rotted board on the pub across the street said: God created whiskey to keep the Irish from conquering the world.

  No, he thought. God created the Lewis gun for that.

  A gang of teenagers – all underfed frames with sharp eyes and dyed hair – lounged menacingly around the corner of the coffeehouse. They looked at him like dogs might look at a steak that had decided to walk around.