Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [159]
Remember.
‘Civis Britannicus sum,’ she said. She spread her hands, keeping them in plain sight, relaxed except for the fingers that held her cigarette: she saw the small smoke-rings rise from their trembling. ‘You’re right, Wills, I don’t know what it was like all these years. I didn’t feel the Betrayal like some of you.’ She leaned back and drew again on her cigarette. ‘I remember a man who did.’ She smiled as she said it, shaking inside.
Wills nodded. ‘All right, Taine. Uncalled-for.’ She knew that for him this counted as a deep apology. He looked at her as if he knew what she was talking about. ‘All been there, what?’ He looked around the table. ‘Gens una sumus.’
Later somebody found a dusty guitar in a cupboard and carried it high into the canteen, and they sang songs from the war and the revolution, songs of their own Republic and of others, “Bandiera Rossa” and “Alba” and “The Men Behind the Wire” and “The Patriot Game”.
Janis sang along, holding the rifle across her lap like the man held the guitar. She looked at all the faces in the dim light, as if looking for another face, and thought she saw it.
That night she lay awake until fatigue overcame her rage and grief.
Several times over the next days she saw him again, and heard him: a yell of warning, a mutter of advice, a pattern of light and shadow under trees.
Sometimes clear, solid-looking, out in the open.
She did not believe this was happening. Not to her. She told herself, again and again, that it was the strain of the fighting. It was not her sanity that was strained, not her philosophy that was flawed. Only her perceptions were at fault, her eyes too accustomed to seeking out hidden shapes.
A day came when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, striding along beside her.
‘Go away,’ she said.
He went away. At the next resting-place she sat a few metres from the others and took the glades off to wipe her eyes. When she put them back on he was standing in front of her, looking down at her with concern.
‘Janis, let me talk to you.’
‘Oh, Moh!’ It was not fair to come back like that.
‘I’m not Moh,’ he said sadly.
‘Then who the hell are you?’
He smiled and got down beside her and lay on his side, facing her. She reached out and her hand went through him. She beat the grass and wept, and took the glades off. He was no longer there, but when she replaced them again he returned.
‘Aha,’ she said.
‘Don’t let anyone see you talking to yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll hear you just as well if you subvocalize.’
She turned and lay face-down on the grass, murmuring, sometimes glancing sideways to reassure herself that he was still with her. Her heart hammered with a wild hope.
‘You’re in the gun, aren’t you? Did you – did you upload into it?’
‘I’m in the gun,’ he said. ‘But I’m not Moh. I’m the AI in the gun. I…found myself…in the gun just after Moh died. I have memories of Moh, I have routines to imitate him perfectly – his voice, his appearance.’ He chuckled wickedly. ‘And in other ways, with the right equipment. The gun had a huge amount of stored information about Moh, and I can use it to project a – a persona. But don’t kid yourself, Janis, I’m not even his ghost.’
‘You’re his fetch.’
‘You could say that.’
She chewed a blade of grass and thought about how Moh had talked to the gun, how he had talked about the gun. The gun had sometimes acted independently, unpredictably. A mind of its own, awakening in the bolted-on hardware and pirated software, in conversation with a man, interacting with…
‘The Watchmaker!’ she said. ‘That’s where you got the awareness from.’ And in that case, indirectly, from Moh.
Moh’s image frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Perhaps it came from Moh himself.’ And in that case…
‘Oh, Janis, I know why you’re doing this, but please, don’t. Moh is dead.’
‘And you’re alive.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Son of a gun.’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘And you know more about him than I do. So