Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

and
the mad-scientist mannerisms of another, whose standard speech
she’d once sat through, long ago in the Student Union in
Glasgow.
    ‘Give me the big picture.’
    Parvus nodded. He ran his fingers through his mop of white
hair, furrowed his brow, grinned maniacally.
    ‘Jane’s, I think.’ He flicked an inch
of ash, conjured a screen. Her gaze fixed on an option; she
blinked, and the room vanished from her sight; again, and Earth
fell away.
     
    Her first virtual view, spun in orbit, was from Jane’s Market Forces – a publicly available,
but prohibitively expensive, real-time survey of military
deployments around the world. She was running the next-but-one
release, currently in beta test. It had cost the republic’s
frugal defence budget nothing more than the stipend to place a
patriotic Kazakh postgrad in the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute’s equally cash-starved IT department.
(That, and an untraceable credit line to his comms account.)
Myra, long familiar with the conventional symbols and ideographs,
took it all in at an abstract level: colour-coded, vectored
graphs in a 3-D space, with other dimensions implied by subtle
shadings and the timing of pulsations. That photic filigree hung
like a complicated cloud-system over the relatively static
histograms depicting the hardware and the warm bodies. The
physical locations and quantities of personnel and materiel could provide only a basement-level understanding
of the world military balance, just as the location of physical
plant was only a rough cut of the state of the world market.
Second by second, market and military forces shifted
unpredictably, their mutual interpenetration more complex than
any ideology had ever foreseen. With most of the world’s
official armies revolutionary or mercenary or both, and most of
the conflicts settled in unarguable simulation before they
started, everyone from the bankers down through the generals to
the grunts on the ground would shrug and accept the virtual
verdict, and change sides, reinforce or retreat in step with
their software shadows – all except the Greens, and the
Reds. They fought
for real, and played for keeps.
    It was like the old Civilization game, Myra sometimes thought,
with a new twist: Barbarism II. Nobody was going to wipe the
board, nobody was going to Alpha Centauri. They were all going
down together, into the dark… Just as soon as enough major
players decided to contest the incontestable, and put the
simulations to the audit of war.
    But, for the moment, the dark was full of twisting light. And
in the real world, blinked up as backdrop, one front was more
than virtual, and closer than she’d like. Beyond the
northern border of Kazakhstan, itself hundreds of kilometres
north of the ISTWR, the Sino-Soviet Union’s ragged
front-line advanced in flickers of real fire: guerilla skirmishes
and sabotage on one side, half-hearted long-range shelling and
futile carpet-bombing on the other.
    The Sheenisov – the name was subtly derogatory, like
Vietcong for NLF and Yank for United Nations – were the
century’s first authentic communist
threat, who really believed in their updated version
of the ideology which communistans like the ISTWR
parodied in post-futurist pastiche. Based in the god
forsaken back-country of recusant collective farmsand
worker-occupied factories, stubbornly surviving decades of
counter-revolution and war, armed by partisan detachments of
deserters (self-styled, inevitably, ‘loyalists’) from
the ex-Soviet Eastern and ex-PRC Northern armies, they’d
held most of Mongolia and Siberia and even parts of north-west
China since the Fall Revolution back in 2045, and in the years
since then they’d spread across the steppe like lichen.
Myra detested and admired them in equal measure.
    Of more immediate, and frustrating, concern: the Sheenisov
were outside the virtual world, a torn black hole in the net.
Their computers were permanently offline; their cadres
didn’t trade combat futures; they refused all simulated
confrontation or negotiation; like the Green marginals in the
West and the Khmer Vertes in the South, the Reds in the East put
all to the test of practice, the critique of arms. Even Jane’s could only guess at their current
disposition.
    But their serrated south-western edge was clear enough, and as
usual it was cutting closer to her domain than it had been the
last time she’d