Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [115]
An image began to assemble itself in his mind, a chauvinistic map of the world where the island of Britain loomed largest while the other countries and concerns were only black boxes, inputs and outputs. As an economic model it was unsound, but as a strategic picture it had the enormous advantage of focus, of resolution.
And then it was all perfectly clear. It was not a map but a place, a wooded island, a forest through which he ran with a dog bounding at his side. The island was the shape of Britain and it was also the shape of Albion, an outstretched gigantic man, waking. Others moved through the shadows of the trees around him and he recognized them, the old comrades, the dead on leave: John Ball in his rough robe, Winstanley building a hut in a clearing, Tom Paine slipping him a wink as he and Blake stepped over the sleeping Bunyan; Harvey and Jones, Eleanor Marx and Morris and Connolly and MacLean; the Old Man himself, sauntering along with a shotgun in the crook of his arm, Grant and Cliff arguing furiously as they hurried after him; and his own parents Josh and Marcia, more obviously dead than the others, sketched in leaves and shadows, echoed in wind and stream – just ghosts, but urging him on.
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