Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

everything since was worse. To the
Kazakhs socialism means „the tragedy“ of the 1930s:
the forced settlement, the famine. It means the nuclear tests,
the cancers, the birth defects. They don’t want to be the
subjects of any more experiments. And if you want to point to the
ISTWR as a counterexample – that was a special case. A
self-selected minuscule minority. Our socialism was always a
joke, more black humour than Red. Trotskyism in one country
– what a laugh!’
    What a laugh she gave. She frightened herself. One of the
scampering children playing around them stopped, put his thumb in
his mouth and ran away.
    ‘We ran a benign state capitalism, nothing more,’
she went on. ‘In your case, my friend, it was not even
that. God, I feel disgusted with myself that we did it, that we
ever allowed ourselves to be compradors for Reid’s goddamn
private gulags.’
    Nok-Yung stared at the sky for a moment. T don’t know
what to say, Myra,’ he said at last. ‘Your regret
over the Mutual Protection camps is… well taken. But about
the other matters – you must surely know that none of what
you have been talking about, theUSSR and so on, is socialism as
we understand it, and as you understood it. So stop confusing the
issue.’
    ‘Oh, I’m well aware that you are different. That
you may well be the genuine article: Marx and En-gels,
Proprietors. And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t
want it, for myself or for anyone.’
    ‘Why not?’ Nok-Yung sounded more puzzled than
offended.
    Myra pointed across the river to the insectile shape of a
fighting-machine, patrolling the water’s edge with
heron-like steps.
    ‘Because of those damn things,’ she said.
‘And the calculating-machines.’
    ‘What!’ Nok-Yung’s eyes creased up in
amusement. ‘Luddism is not your true ideology, Myra. I
cannot believe this. These machines are one of the most
marvellous achievements of the Sheenisov – a whole
alternative nanotechnology, worked out quite independently of the
West. You know how the machines scale down, all the way to the
molecular scale, and are all mechanical and chemical and optical,
with no need for electronic interfaces? That’s their
– our – secret weapon, an open secret. A computer
system that the enemy cannot penetrate, but that everyone can
understand and access. I’ve just begun to use it, and I
tell you, it has the most intuitive interface I’ve ever
come across. The capitalists would kill for it. Or rather, they
would kill to be able to monopolise it. But it’s free, so
they can’t.’
    ‘I know about your strange machines,’ Myra said.
‘The CIA told me all about them.’ She tapped her
temple, smiling ironically. ‘ „I have detailed
files.“ ‘
    Nok-Yung caught the allusion. ‘It is not The
Terminator, you know! Not – what was it in the films?
-Skynet. It is not… inimical.’
    ‘Not now, perhaps. But what will it do, when it -or
you-have covered the world, like a banyan tree?’
    Nok-Yung spat a puff of air and smoke. ‘More Luddism!
The machines will form a benign human environment, a second
nature, within which human nature can flourish, truly, for the
first time.’ He leaned forward, speaking confidentially.
‘Let me tell you what we have done, something that no other
system would have dared to do. We have nanofac-tured a virally
distributed, genetically fixable version of the anti-ageing
treatment. It spreads before our migrations like a benign plague.
You may be already infected, yourself. A gift.’
    ‘God, that is so irresponsible!’ Myra jolted
rigid. ‘Viruses mutate, dammit, in case you
hadn’t heard!’
    Nok-Yung made a planing motion with his hand. ‘Not this
one. It has self-repair built in. It has tested stable through a
million virtual generations.’
    ‘ Virtual generations, yes! Man, you did enough
design work in the camp to know what that’s worth in
the real world!’
    ‘Different system, different design philosophy,’
he said, with infuriating complacency. ‘Our testing kits
are themselves part of the real world. It’s like the
difference between a working scale model and a simulation. There
is simply no comparison. And the computing resources are vast,
vaster even than anything the spacers have yet built.’
    Myra felt her gaze sinking into the bottomless pool of his
self-confidence. It was truly terrifying; it was, she realised,
what she most feared for herself