Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [1]
The Star Fraction is haunted by this uncomfortable question. For me, it was acutely felt when I was writing the book in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a socialist, I had become interested in the libertarian critique of socialism. The fall of the bureaucratic regimes of the East found me neither surprised nor sorry.
No, what was—and remains—dreadful to contemplate was not the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism,’ but the catastrophic consequences of the attempt to introduce actually existing capitalism and the apparent inability of the millions who had brought down the bureaucratic dictatorships to assert and defend their own interests in the aftermath.
In this novel, these issues are seen through the eyes of characters who are flawed and often mistaken but sometimes heroic. The ideologies through which they try to make sense of it all range from British-style ‘industrial-grade Trotskyism’ to American-style ‘black helicopter’ libertarianism. The big questions about history and economics fuel the adventures of angry white guys (and angry black women) with guns, whose actions tip scales bigger than they know. Their world is one where the New World Order is coming to get you, with black helicopters and Men in Black and orbital gun-control lasers.
And then there’s all the stuff I made up, which begins on the next page.
1
Smoking Gunman
It was hot on the roof. Above, the sky was fast-forward: zeppelin fleets of cloud alternating with ragged anarchic flags of black. Bright stars, miland comsats, meteors, junk. Moh Kohn crouched behind the parapet and scanned the band of trees half a klick beyond the campus perimeter. Glades down, the dark was a different shade of day. He held the gun loose, swung it smoothly, moved around to keep cool. The building’s thermals gave him all the cover he could expect, enough to baffle glades or IR-eyes that far away.
‘Gaia, it’s hot,’ he muttered.
‘Thirty-one Celsius,’ said the gun.
He liked hearing the gun. It gave him a wired feeling. Only a screensight read-out, but he heard it with his eyes like Sign.
‘What’ll it be tonight? Cranks or creeps?’
‘Beginning search.’
‘Stop.’ He didn’t want it racking its memory for an educated guess; he wanted it looking. As he was, all the time, for the two major threats to his clients: those who considered anything smarter than a pocket calculator a threat to the human race, and those who considered anything with a central nervous system an honorary member of it.
He’d been scanning the concrete apron, the perimeter wall, the trees for three hours, since 21.00. Relief was due in two. And then he wouldn’t just be off-shift, he’d be off-active, with a whole week to recover. After seven nights of staring into the darkness, edgy with rumours, jumpy with hoaxes and false alarms, he needed it.
Music and laughter and noise eddied between the buildings behind him, sometimes loud when the speeding air above sent a blast down to ground-level, sometimes – as now, in the hot stillness – faint. He wanted to be at that party. If no attack came this watch…dammit, even if there did. All he had to do was not take incoming fire. Shelling it out was something else, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d dissolved the grey-ghostly nightfight memories and the false colours of cooling blood in drinking and dancing and especially in sex – the great specific, the antithesis and antidote for violence – to the same night’s end.
Something moved. Kohn chilled instantly, focusing on a point to his left, where he’d seen…There it was again, where the bushes fingered out from the trees. Advance cover. He keyed the weapon’s inertial memory and made a quick sweep, stepping the nightsight up ×3. Nothing else visible. Perhaps this was the main push. He turned back and