Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [174]
THE MACHINERY OF FREEDOM
1
Human Equivalent
He woke, and remembered dying.
His eyes and mouth opened and he drew in a long harsh gasp of thin air. His legs kicked and his fingers rasped the sand. Then his limbs sprawled and he lay still. Each breath came quickly, as if he suspected that the next would be his last. His fingers hooked the soil as he stared upwards at a deep-blue, fathomless sky.
He rolled over and clambered to his feet and looked around. He was standing on the lower slope of a low knoll above a canal. The canal was about twenty metres wide. For a few hundred metres on either side of it, the ground was sparsely covered with grass and shrubs. Beyond that the ground was a reddish colour.
The man looked back and forth along the canal. It ran from horizon to horizon, a line of blue along the middle of a band of green, bisecting the great circle of red beneath a dome of blue. Near the top of the sky a sun shone bright and small; the man looked up at it, then raised his arm with his thumb up as if in a greeting. He moved his fist with the extended thumb back and forth, sighting along his arm with one eye. He smiled and nodded.
A few metres up-slope from where he stood, the hillside was broken, exposing the rock beneath the thin layer of soil and roots. Among the tumbled, jagged boulders lay an ellipsoid pod a metre long, half a metre across and twenty-five centimetres deep. Its upper and lower halves were identical, and reflective; between them was a sort of equatorial band where duller, hinged or jointed surfaces could be seen. The man stepped up and examined it with a wary look. Then he stooped closer, in an intent inspection, and abruptly turned away.
He ran down to the edge of the canal and stood gazing into it for some minutes. He took off his clothes – boots and socks, a padded jacket and trousers, tee-shift and shorts – and began moving his hands all over his body, as if washing himself without water. Then he put his clothes back on and walked up the slope to the pod.
He put his hands on his hips and frowned down at it. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked around and shrugged.
‘My name is Jon Wilde,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’ He didn’t look or sound as if he expected an answer.
‘I’m a human-equivalent machine,’ said the pod, in an attempt at a pleasant, conversational voice. The man jumped slightly.
‘I’m about to stand up,’ the human-equivalent machine added. ‘Please don’t be alarmed.’
Jon Wilde took a couple of steps back, his boots dislodging grit and pebbles on the slope. Clicking, grating noises came from the machine as four metal limbs unfolded from its central portion. They looked identical, with clawed digits, wrists or ankles, elbows or knees. Two of the limbs swivelled and swung downwards, the jointed extensions at their ends clamping to the ground. The machine straightened its limbs and rocked to its feet – if such they could be called. It stood at about half the man’s height, its posture and proportions vaguely suggestive of a man running in a combative crouch, head down.
Wilde gazed down at it.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘On New Mars,’ the machine answered.
‘How did I get here?’
There was a silence of perhaps a minute. Wilde frowned, looked around, leaned forward just as the machine spoke again:
‘I made you.’
The machine turned and strode away.
Wilde scrambled after it.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Ship City,’ said the machine. ‘The nearest human habitation.’ It paused for a moment. ‘I’d come along, if I were you.’
The human-equivalent machine and the man it claimed to have made walked together along the bank of the canal. Every so often the man turned his head to look at the machine. Once or twice he got as far as opening his mouth, but he always turned away again as if the question or remark