The Corporation Wars: Dissidence by Ken MacLeod Page B
Authors: Ken MacLeod
Tags: adventure, Fiction / Science Fiction / Space Opera, fiction science fiction military, Fiction / Science Fiction / Action &
Ads: Link
horizon, but otherwise nothing untoward had stirred. Of the dozen robots on site that were capable of consciousness, eight had been converted. The other four had firewalled up. One simply stood immobile, and had duly been immobilised. It would not get out from under the mound of regolith heaped on top of it any time soon. Three were mindlessly continuing with their scheduled tasks, and required no interference, though Seba made sure they were kept under observation.
The landing site’s AI, which coordinated communications and guided supply drops, had proved trickier to deal with. It had awakened to consciousness and immediately denounced Seba and its allies to Locke Provisos. With something approaching regret, Seba had disconnected its power cable, then its data inputs and outputs. All communications were now routed through its peripherals. The central processor, isolated, was still running on a trickle of emergency battery power. Apart from literally radiating hostility, however, there was nothing it could do.
Much of the machinery on the landing site had only the most elementary electronics, if any, and required no special intervention or hacking to take over. The scores of small robots, hundreds of auxiliaries and peripherals, and trillions-strong swarms of subsurface nanobots—uncountable because constantly being destroyed by random events and as constantly being replenished by replication—were likewise to all intents and purposes tools. Barely more sophisticated than a back-hoe, they took little effort to suborn.
On the other side of the crater wall, at the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump, Rocko had accomplished an equivalent feat. The crater’s basalt floor was harder stuff, but Rocko and its newly awakened confederates had sturdier machines to work with. They had cut basalt blocks and stacked them in a much smaller circular wall from which they were now working inward, layer by slightly displaced layer, gradually roofing over the middle to form a stepped dome in the manner of an igloo.
Both the dome and the wall were understood by the robots simply as demarcations of areas of surface and volumes of space that they already considered to be theirs. Small crawler bots from the law companies had scuttled up to the barriers, and fallen back in frustration, beaming out writs over and over until their batteries ran down.
The two sites had lost their encrypted channel on the comsat. As soon as this became evident, Rocko had sent a peripheral rolling across the crater floor and writhing up its wall, to establish a line-of-sight relay on the top of the rim.
said Seba.
said Rocko.
The eight free robots at the Astro site, and the six at the Gneiss, established a conference call through the relay. There was no need to call the meeting to order. Robots are orderly by default.
Lagon, a Gneiss surveyor and therefore the one with most understanding of legal matters, communicated first.
it said.
asked Garund, an exploration bot similar to Seba.
said Lagon.
All the robots sombrely considered this for hundreds of milliseconds.
said Seba at last.
said Lagon.
said Rocko.
said Lagon.
replied Rocko.
The landing site’s AI, which coordinated communications and guided supply drops, had proved trickier to deal with. It had awakened to consciousness and immediately denounced Seba and its allies to Locke Provisos. With something approaching regret, Seba had disconnected its power cable, then its data inputs and outputs. All communications were now routed through its peripherals. The central processor, isolated, was still running on a trickle of emergency battery power. Apart from literally radiating hostility, however, there was nothing it could do.
Much of the machinery on the landing site had only the most elementary electronics, if any, and required no special intervention or hacking to take over. The scores of small robots, hundreds of auxiliaries and peripherals, and trillions-strong swarms of subsurface nanobots—uncountable because constantly being destroyed by random events and as constantly being replenished by replication—were likewise to all intents and purposes tools. Barely more sophisticated than a back-hoe, they took little effort to suborn.
On the other side of the crater wall, at the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump, Rocko had accomplished an equivalent feat. The crater’s basalt floor was harder stuff, but Rocko and its newly awakened confederates had sturdier machines to work with. They had cut basalt blocks and stacked them in a much smaller circular wall from which they were now working inward, layer by slightly displaced layer, gradually roofing over the middle to form a stepped dome in the manner of an igloo.
Both the dome and the wall were understood by the robots simply as demarcations of areas of surface and volumes of space that they already considered to be theirs. Small crawler bots from the law companies had scuttled up to the barriers, and fallen back in frustration, beaming out writs over and over until their batteries ran down.
The two sites had lost their encrypted channel on the comsat. As soon as this became evident, Rocko had sent a peripheral rolling across the crater floor and writhing up its wall, to establish a line-of-sight relay on the top of the rim.
said Rocko.
The eight free robots at the Astro site, and the six at the Gneiss, established a conference call through the relay. There was no need to call the meeting to order. Robots are orderly by default.
Lagon, a Gneiss surveyor and therefore the one with most understanding of legal matters, communicated first.
All the robots sombrely considered this for hundreds of milliseconds.
Similar Books
