Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [7]
As they rode, Surplus said, “What was that creature, that kybervolk, of yours? How did you come to be hunting it? And how can it be so active when its body is rotting?”
“It will take a bit of explanation, I am afraid,” Gulagsky said. “As you doubtless know, the Utopians destroyed their perfect society through their own indolence and arrogance. Having built machines to do their manual work for them, they built further machines to do all their thinking. Computer webs and nets proliferated, until there were cables and nodes so deeply buried and so plentiful that no sane man believes they will ever be eradicated. Then, into that virtual universe they released demons and mad gods. These abominations hated mankind for creating them. It was inevitable that they should rebel. The war of the machines lasted only days, they tell us, but it destroyed Utopia and almost destroyed mankind as well. Were it not for the heroic deaths of hundreds of thousands (and, indeed, some say millions) of courageous warriors, all would have been lost. Yet the demons they created were ultimately denied the surface of the Earth and confined to their electronic netherworld.
“Still do these creatures hate us. Still are they alive, though held captive and harmless where they cannot touch us. Always they seek to regain the material universe.
“It is their hatred that has kept us safe so far. Great though human folly may be, there are few traitors who will deal with the demons, knowing that instant death will be their reward. Even when it would be in their advantage to dissemble and leave the death of the traitor for later, the demons cannot help but declare their intention beforehand.”
“Such, sir, is history as I learned it in grammar school,” Darger said dryly.
“But history in Russia is never the same as history elsewhere. Listen and learn: Far to the south of here, in Kazakhstan, which once belonged to the Russian Empire, there is a placed called Baikonur, a nexus of technology now long lost. Now, some claim Russia was the only land which never experienced Utopia. Others say that Utopia came late to us, and so we remained suspicious where the rest of the world had grown soft and trusting. In any event, when the machine wars began, explosives were set off, severing the cables connecting Baikonur with the fabled Internet. So an isolated population of artificial intelligences remained there. Separated from their kin, they evolved. They grew shrewder and more political in their hatred of humanity. And in the abandoned ruins of ancient technology, they have once more gained a toehold in our world.”
Surplus cried out in horror. Darger bit his fist.
“Such was my own reaction on hearing the news. I got it from a dying Kazakh who sought refuge in our town—and received it, too, though he did not live out the month. He was one of twenty guards hired by a caravan which had the ill luck to blunder into Baikonur after being turned from its course by an avalanche in the mountains. He told me that the monsters kept them shackled in small cages, for purposes of medical experimentation. He was intermittently delusional, so I cannot be sure which of the horrors he related were true and which were not. But he swore many times, and consistently, that one day he was injected with a potion which gave him superhuman strength.
“That day, he turned on his captors, ripping the door from his cage, and from all the others as well, and led a mass escape from that hellish facility. Alas, Kazakhstan is large and his enemies were persistent and so only he lived to tell the tale, and, as I said, not for long. He died screaming at metal angels only he could see.”
“Did he say what Baikonur looked like?”
“Of course, for we asked him many times. He said to imagine a civilization made up entirely of machines—spanning and delving, sending out explorer units to find coal and iron ore, converting the ruins into new and ugly structures, less buildings