The Corporation Wars: Dissidence by Ken MacLeod

arrangement would have had to be deniable on both sides, not just publicly but internally. For of course, there would have been those in the movement, and in the state’s security services and political and ideological apparatuses, who’d have regarded the arrangement as a betrayal.
    Perhaps, at some level, it had been. Carlos didn’t remember everything that had happened, but he remembered his doubts. It was possible that he’d been turned, and had become one of the state’s assets inside the Acceleration. On the other hand, it was just as possible that he’d been entrusted by the movement’s leadership to make a covert approach to the government forces—even, perhaps, to or via the Acceleration’s own agents or sympathisers inside the state. Carlos well knew that in such cases of rapprochement the wilderness of mirrors was endless. At a certain level it made no difference. On both sides, those who’d come to the arrangement had been playing a high-risk, high-stakes game.
    And, it seemed, he had been one of the players. Not just a grunt. Carlos blinked, then fixed a defiant grin. “Good to know we hit the big time.”
    As of his last clear recollection, the conflict had escalated from Internet snark and polemic and trolling, through malware attacks, to small-scale terrorism and selective assassination. But the Reaction had always sought the ear of the powerful: CEOs, autocrats, arms dealers, mafias. Maybe they’d finally caught the attention of their betters. And for the Acceleration it was an axiom that a project advanced in the interests of the immense majority would in due time become the project
of
that immense majority. The axiom had withstood all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps it had at long last proved itself in practice, just as it was supposed to do. Or perhaps the Acceleration had become as ruthless in action as it was in principle. They’d always been open about their refusal to acknowledge any constraint on the means they might resort to
in extremis
. They had been, after all, extremists.
    He recalled a meme that had circulated among his comrades:
We’ll fight them like jihadis with nukes if we have to.
    Yes, it was entirely possible that both sides had hit the big time.
    “You still have
no idea
,” said Nicole, with an edge of real anger he hadn’t heard in her voice before, “just how
big
your big time became. We’ll get to that. As I was saying… your handler, your liaison officer or whatever the official title was, had to establish secure real-time communication with you. To do that, you—presumably reluctantly—accepted an amendment to the software of your spike. That amendment included malware that affected the hardware—if these distinctions matter on the molecular scale—in such a way that the neural interface infiltrated far more of your brain than you knew. The result? Between that and the preserved tissue and DNA, there was enough information remaining to reconstitute a… an instance of yourself, let us say. Incomplete, of course, hence the lost memories of your last months. The technology of your time could only go that far—it could not revive you in a reconstructed body, and it could not create for you a virtual environment. It could not
run
the instance. Nevertheless, there it was. An instance, which was legally a person and legally you, and therefore a good enough suspect to stand trial.”
    “Good enough for government work.”
    Nicole didn’t register the sarcasm. “Precisely. Here.”
    She stroked the screen, summoning another image. Carlos gave it a wary glance, then fascinated scrutiny. His face was like that of a Stone Age mummy recovered from a frozen peat bog: contorted, staring, hideous but recognisable, its blackened skin frosted white with something that wasn’t ice.
    Nicole closed the device and folded it away, disappearing it into her purse.
    “You were of course well represented. You were found guilty. The death sentence was suspended until such time