The Inhuman Peace Read online

  ‘Well, this is interesting,’ said Bengali, over a forkful of egg. She could see that he wasn’t quite buying Hewage’s pitch. ‘Of course, I’ll have to examine the bot code … you know, certify it to make sure out-of-bounds behaviour, like the stuff you experienced, is truly rare.’

  ‘Surely observational evidence is enough? Watch the bots in the field, log their behaviour, look at the outliers -’

  ‘Well. Drake did ask me to vet your code, Dr. Hewage.’

  Hewage’s legendary secrecy kicked in. ‘Without the right documentation in place, you’ll be staring at it for decades without being able to make head or tail of it. It’s not even written in a language you’re familiar with, Bengali. Observation will tell you more.’

  This clearly displeased Bengali. He tried to steer the conversation to safer waters. ‘So tell me what you do, Dr. Almeida.’

  ‘Kushlani.’

  ‘Then I must be Jacob to you.’

  ‘The plan was simple,’ she said, taking back the credit. ‘The Big Match happens. That’s when, traditionally, we’ve got the most number of bots in one place, so it’s easier to monitor a large population of them collectively. We look for behaviour we don’t want, regardless of whether a bot survives or not. We bring those back to the Hub.’

  ‘Local Inquisitions are helping with that,’ added Hewage. ‘The others we repair and send back out. Maybe with some kind of system that lets us reset to a baseline model.’

  ‘And maybe we add in some code to make sure certain behaviours are off bounds?’ Bengali looked at Hewage.

  Hewage evaded the question. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘Coffee? We’re talking about monitoring ten thousand of those little bastards, you know. It’s a pretty big job, though you’re going to be here without much to do until the Big Match is over.’

  Bengali murmured something about Crofton coffers running deep and raised his coffee to a toast. She swiped a pastry, excused herself and retired to the balcony outside, feeling lost. She had the impression of wheels in motion – too many, too soon. All her carefully laid plans had, it seemed, prematurely begun.

  The balcony outside was marble and mostly uninhabited. It looked out over a steep drop, and you could see the railroad that snaked from the far distance and stopped right at the border of Kandy city, before dissolving into a network of roads – like a guest too polite to enter without taking off his shoes, she thought. The sun, now high in the sky, made the steelwork shimmer and flash. Traffic hummed around the tracks and grunted its way around the lake at the centre of Kandy, like animals around a watering hole.

  Somewhere out there, past that horizon, were the bots. She thought of the girl she had dissected, such as the Explorer – the one that had lived long and hard, and learned enough to be almost human in her own mind.

  Were there others like her? She had thought of those fantastic little learning engines, initially a hack solution, but one that had genuinely become something special over time; something different.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Hewage, appearing suddenly in the doorway.

  ‘Just thinking,’ she said. ‘You didn’t tell him about the learning stuff, did you?’

  ‘He knows,’ said Hewage, darkly. ‘Or he suspects, the bastard. Drake wouldn’t have sent him without some background. We’ll figure something out.’

  ‘How’d you get the Inquisition on board?’

  He walked over and lit a cigarette. ‘Penhaligon insisted. I don’t have the political clout to refuse them. I think they want to keep and eye on everything, make sure we don’t do something stupid. You and I are going to spend the entire bloody month pimping the Big Match and then we’ll try to sort this bloody mess out.’

  ‘Wife get back to you?’

  ‘People aren’t machines, Number Two,’ he said, taking a long, slow drag from the cigarette.

  ‘Sure they are. Same principles. Incentive. Reward.’

  ‘Some things can’t be fixed’, he shook his head. ‘Bloody mess … seeing that young pup remind me I’ve done enough work for ten PhDs here.’

  ‘The bots?’

  ‘The bots,’ he said. ‘You interested in my job?’

  She suddenly felt overwhelmed, but with excitement, bordering on some kind of fear. ‘That implies you’re moving on,’ she said.

  Hewage snorted. ‘That was the plan. Looks like Drake’s just put his foot down on the pedal, now,’ he said, throwing the cigarette butt over the railing, and it fell smoking into the undergrowth. ‘Never mind. Forget it. Let’s get this stupid thing over with.’

  SEVEN

  Exactly one day and thirteen hours after Kushlani de Almeida met Jacob Bengali, the contents of a very suspicious shuttlecraft were delivered to a secret place in Kandy.

  Eliott Grimme woke up. Unlike Bengali, he had a rather unpleasant time doing so. It was cold, so cold. Every muscle screamed in agony, and he felt like a plank of wood with a thousand carpenters hammering nails into him. He knew this waking, as well as the pain that would come next. His eyes burned as the frozen retina-optics woke up. His skeleton rebooted, screaming and vomiting error messages. He curled into a foetal ball, twitching against the agony that had once been familiar.

  He tried to move and found that he couldn’t, except for his neck. There were time-limited blocks on every limb that apologized and told him to wait for the surgery to be complete.

  How long had it been? Seconds or centuries?

  Parts of him activated in a flash of bright, searing neural agony.

  A distant voice said his name. The voice sounded wrong somehow – too many cadences and frequencies folded into one, like three voices overlapping through a bad speaker. He opened his eyes. Darkness and gloom, and in the darkness, a shape with glowing red eyes. It reached out with long hands and unfolded him, pulling him to his feet. For a brief moment, he thought about fighting back – a thrust to that actuator joint on the shoulder; a brief twist of the neck. But what would be the point?

  The voices resolved. First: a whip-cord-thin runt whose skin shone with lines of copper and silver, and a fat, perspiring man with red lenses for eyes. Inquisitors, definitely from the colonies: good manners did not permit such open modification in England. He had arrived, then.

  ‘Reassembly shipping’, Eliott said to them, ‘is shit.’

  They smiled, faded. And then came the man himself.

  He dressed like a British fop – tailored suit, hat, gloves to hide his inhumanity. A face that was mostly hard angles and leathery skin. Neither particularly handsome nor particularly ugly, but striking in a very powerful way. There was silver on his temples, but otherwise he looked exactly like he had when Eliott had first met him face to face, all those years ago. Grimme nodded at the man who had once hounded him over two continents, earning him his immortality and the terrible weight of being one of Her Majesty’s select.

  ‘Grimme.’

  ‘Penhaligon,’ said Grimme.

  ‘Cold in here, isn’t it? Temperature, boys.’

  It became less cold.

  Eliott rotated his view and turned – white wall, spider. The image froze.

  No, not spider. Doctorbot. Black, menacing arms – dead, dormant. Glass screen – Penhaligon. The image froze again, shattered, dissolved into noise.

  Error. Rerouting.

  When it reformed, the Chief Inquisitor was sitting in a chair next to him. And Penhaligon suddenly looked old, like a corpse that had crawled out of its grave and put on fake skin. He produced a cigarette and lit it. Interesting.

  ‘You didn’t use to smoke,’ Eliott said.

  ‘Spare me the lecture,’ said Penhaligon. ‘Not all of us run on electricity. How do you feel, Grimme?’

  Eliott consulted himself. Everything was functioning. Full system diagnostic, he ordered.

  Error. Rerouting.

  ‘We had to freeze your motor functions, sir,’ said a voice behind him.

  Helpless, he turned his head back to Penhaligon. ‘I’m getting too old for this bus
iness. I want a chartered plane next time. Where the hell are we?’

  ‘Kandy. Capital of Ceylon. I’m sorry about the discomfort, but we wanted you here as soon as possible. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of this place as soon as the setup’s complete. The weather’s a huge step up from Ireland, let me tell you that.’

  ‘You’ve been good since the reconditioning, I take it? You did a really good job of Dublin.’

  As good as could be once your entire neural structure has been remapped. ‘How long has it been, Penhaligon?’

  ‘Twenty years, give or take? I don’t quite keep track of time anymore.’

  It was a lifetime ago.

  He was surprised when the preliminaries came back positive. Muscle status: relatively weak, but primed. Conductive fluid status: not just fine, but completely refreshed – some compound he’d never had in him before. Feedback in the skeleton. The pain vanished. A small glitch in the neural interface calibration – there, fixed. Now he could see better.

  There was a sign that said ‘AVOID CONTACT WITH THE NEWLY DECANTED’.

  Error. Rerouting.

  Penhaligon peered down at Eliott. A grimace in the darkness. ‘Hang on,’ said Penhaligon. ‘We need to take these blocks off. We’ve pumped your system with Lace.’

  ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘After your time, I suppose. Came out of Nippon. High-grade machine fluid. Some of the best around, supports custom commands. One of my clones in Hong Kong got it for me, ironically enough. I’ve had your system completely flushed and set up with it. Hold still.’

  The doctorbot hissed, pulling out cables, undoing restraints, scurrying over his body. Ice ran through his skeleton. The neural blocks dissolved. Eliott’s skeleton, designed to keep the body moving even under complete loss of muscle and neural connectivity, popped off its own diagnostics. The doctorbot scuttled over him, making some last-minute love taps. Eliott fought the split-second urge to smash it, and instead brushed the various spines and cutting instruments out of the way.

  ‘I’m surprised I’m on this job,’ he said.

  ‘It was a predictable choice,’ said Penhaligon meditatively, watching him. ‘Drake thinks we hate each other, you know.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Getting a bit annoying, our dear former employer.’

  The irony. ‘Queen’s favour not doing you much good?’

  ‘People are people,’ Penhaligon said, simply. ‘You do your part, retire to a nice place like this, make sure the Chinese are happy and trading with us … and then that arsehole realizes the political value of the posting.’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Can you walk?’

  He could. Penhaligon gave him a robe and stood back as he balanced himself onto his newly reassembled feet, letting the neural agony fade. The darkness lifted slowly, showing him the cold and sterile room he was in.

  Penhaligon had opened the door. Eliott limped out after the Inquisitor. Cold hospital tiles turned into wood, wood turned into something like stone and the light went from dim white to sunlight. A squad of dark-skinned Ceylonese guards saluted Penhaligon and Eliott, flattened themselves out of their way, and marched back into the building. They did not break step, and had the look of men who had just walked out of a minefield.

  A gentle breeze began to register on his skin.

  They emerged onto a balcony of some sort. The sunlight turned the Inquisitor into a younger man, giving some colour to those bloodless cheeks and a dull metal shine to the few parts that peeked out from the black clothes. It turned the black rose on his chest a deep red.

  Eliott looked up at the sky – an infinite thing of red that stretched on into the sunset. ‘If this was what you were after’, he said, ‘you should have come with me to Ireland.’

  ‘It’s better in the mornings.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  Something crept into Eliott’s mind. Error. Rerouting. An annoying little glitch that wouldn’t go away, that came with a ghost of memory, creeping past the neural blocks. The pounding of his feet on sand … gravel? Through the Gurkha valleys and ghost towns and cities thronged with people and holograms, and always the man with the hat following him. Penhaligon, younger, chasing him across continents – an impossible predator chasing impossible prey. Penhaligon, sitting through years and decades and centuries, watching Eliott in a cage, his mind split into a million fragments.

  Unbidden memories of Hong Kong. Of an enemy that played an n-dimensional game of chess with the lives of men and machines; not too powerful to be modelled and predicted, but good enough that all Rassilikov logic chains were exhausted, the standard tactics database had gone out the window, and all that was left was Eliott and a few thousand men too afraid of him to refuse orders.

  And at the end, that exhaustion and relief of a game well played; that empathy for an enemy that had done its best; the arrest –

  ‘Obviously, I know Drake’s paying you the good stuff,’ Penhaligon was saying. ‘But I’ll make you an offer worth considering. You work for me, full benefits … you’ll be treated like a king, and you’ll retire here. The people are good. You’ll spend your last years a legend instead of being sent out like a lapdog.’

  Full system diagnostic again. A few small blocks popped; nothing he couldn’t ignore. Nothing the shrinks would have flagged as ‘below operational standards’.

  It was good to be somewhere, anywhere, out of that dreary place. ‘What’s the first job?’

  Penhaligon smiled for the first time. It was a face unused to smiling. ‘Just like old times.’

  The sun, setting through that grim sky, painted it in rose and gold, and the city in shadow-light, making Kandy look like some great, inverted bloodshot eye.

  II: Emergence

  ONE

  Broken Arm woke up.

  The sunlight peeked through the tattered cloth she had hung in her room. Little rays broke through and made tiny motes of dust dance in front of her face. She tried to catch them, but her hands closed on nothingness. She thought of them as her friends.

  Outside, the soft evening sunlight lit up the ruins of Colombo in a fierce glare, sketching out the world she had always known – buildings toppled over, roads cracked, weeds and twisted trees exploding out through skeletons of shattered concrete. From her window, she could see everything, all the way to the sea, which was the only thing that stayed unbroken.

  A few birds – mutated monsters that bred fast, lived large and left behind horribly bloated corpses – saw her face emerge from her building, screamed, and flapped away.

  The forager party had already gathered outside. They hung back, as awkward as the birds. At a nod from her, they entered the building, single file, crawling over beams and girders and horizontal staircases and the smashed-up ruins of diagonal floors to get to her nest. They left their weapons at her door as a gesture of respect and huddled around her.

  Broken Arm had learned a way to be useful long ago. Her left arm, which had always dangled awkwardly, had been cut off by a fast spear many years ago. She had learned to make weapons. She had learned to listen to the others and put together their stories, fragment by fragment, and thus know more than everyone else. The others, in turn, kept her alive and came to her when things outside their ken happened.

  ‘Cinnamon,’ whispered Sky. He was called Sky because he spent hours looking up at the great blue dome and the white clouds beneath.

  The story was that four bots from the Place Beyond had walked Inward. No, not bots: Big People. She was not quite sure how she knew this, only that she recognized the similarity in Sky’s description.

  This was odd. There was nothing in the Beyond but the barrier that could not be climbed, the one that hummed with terrible lightning. These newcomers had somehow made it through the barrier.

  Sky, curious, had gone with three others to meet them, waving their spears high and openly, so as to show themselves coming from afar.

  The newcomers had see
n them, and attacked. Nobody was quite sure how. Something had struck Cloud straight in the chest, where the power cells were. She had detonated instantly, a death of a kind they had never seen before. Sky had lined up the newcomers and thrown his spear well, with such force that it stapled two of the enemies to the ground. Road charged the others. The newcomers had retreated, but not before attacking again. They had spears in their hands that spoke lightning and could kill from afar.

  Sky showed his hands to Broken Arm. The tips were badly bent, because he had used them to batter one to death.

  Moonlight, Road and Water?

  ‘Dead,’ said Sky. ‘Dead, dead, dead.’

  But now the real question: ‘Did you find food?’

  Sky shook his head.

  ‘Port City?’

  Again, nothing.

  If Broken Arm worried, it was with reason. Just six moons ago, they had brought metal to the Port City that lay just outside their home; and out had come Big People, lots of them, making her and the others form queues, taking their metal in exchange for that dark nourishment that they so craved. They knew not the origins of this arrangement, but merely that this was as it was, as it should be.

  But as of late, the Port City kept its gates shut, mute to their entreaties. The mountain of scrap metal piled outside by starving tribes went by ignored.

  She did not know, of course, that this was due to a longstanding agreement – the opening moves of a Big Match, repeated from time immemorial, happening with clockwork precision by order of a man named Hewage in a city far beyond the one they knew. The first move was to starve them, with the Port City witholding the cakes of fuel they burned for energy. At first, the bots would line up, dumbly disappointed, but then they would begin to forage wider, becoming more desperate, and the first clashes and deaths would begin. Supplies were sometimes airdropped, based on viewer polls, at specific locations where the terrain and the camera setups were particularly good.