Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [206]
Four of the city’s five arms are non-human domains. They look as if they were intended for human habitation, but nobody’s home, except machines. There’s a basic stratum, a sort of mechanical topsoil, where things are doing things to things. Simulacra of intelligence are going through the motions, bawling and toiling: empty automatic barges plough algae-clogged canals, servitor machines struggle to sweep dust from the floors of corridors whose walls are already thick with mould. In the streets it’s a creationist’s caricature of natural selection: half-formed mechanisms collide and combine and incorporate each other’s parts, producing unviable offspring which themselves propagate further grotesque transitional forms.
This mindless level is preyed upon by more sophisticated machinery, which lurks and pounces, gobbles and cannibalises for purposes of its own. Artificial intelligences – some obsessive and focused, others chaotic and relaxed, some even sane – haunt a fraction of these machines. It’s hard to identify the places where such minds reside. Lurching, unlikely structures may be steered by a sapient computer no bigger than a mouse, while some sleek and shining and, even, humanoid machine may well be moronic or mad.
The whole groaning junkyard is persistently pillaged by human beings, who risk everything from their fingertips to their souls in venturing into this jungle of iron and silicon. They have their mechanical allies, scouts and agents; but if machines, in general, have no loyalty to each other, they have even less to human friends or masters. It remains easier to reprogram a machine than to subvert a human.
And through it all, like germs, the minute molecular machinery of stray nanotechnology goes about its invisible and occasionally disastrous work. Immune systems have evolved, the equivalent of medicine is practised; public health measures are applied (they are not, exactly, enforced). But the smallest are the swiftest, and here evolution’s race is most ruthlessly run.
The fifth arm is the human quarter. The nets are its mind. In them we find its good intentions, its evil thoughts, its wet dreams and its dull routines. This is not how it should be finally judged. But still –
Underlying everything is the reproduction of daily life, and it provides a huge proportion of the net traffic. Nobody’s counting, but there are several hundred thousand human beings alive on New Mars, most of them in Ship City, the rest scattered in much smaller communities, fanning out across the planet. Every minute buzzes with thousands of conversations and personal communications. Business: orders, invoices, payments, transactions. Property rights – what people agree to let people do with things – have grown complex and differentiated, and the unbundling and repackaging and exchanging of these rights proceeds with card-sharp speed: time shares, organ mortgages, innovation futures, labour loans, birth benefits…it gets complicated. Hence conflicts, charges, settlements, crimes and torts.
Law and order lifts its eyes and teeth above the stream of business only occasionally, and the resulting cop-shows and courtroom dramas and camp comedies provide – in reality and in fiction – a staple of entertainment. Most of the torments and humiliations we see on the screens are – fortunately – just pornography. The trials by ordeal and combat are real.
Religion – some. The highest clerical dignitary is the bishop of New Mars. Reformed Orthodox Catholic, so while she has the odd qualm about exactly how the Succession passed to her, she knows she’ll pass it on to one or more of her kids. She’s friendly with the few Buddhists and the rabbi (like, you weren’t expecting Jews?) and stern but charitable towards the lunatic heretics; their delusion that New Mars is the afterlife or some post-apocalyptic staging