Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

Tell
me if I’ve got this right. Two years ago, at the Sputnik
centenary, Val gets a message from you, asking for part of our
stash of nukes. It’s a valid Party request, she decides I
don’t need to know, and she blithely complies. And the
reason this happened is because you got a request from a
fucking computer?’
    ‘An AI military expert system,’ Logan said
pedantically. ‘But yeah, that’s about the size of
it.’
    Myra groped blindly for a cigarette, lit it shakily.
‘And just how long has the Fourth International been taking
military advice from an AI?’ Logan did some mental
arithmetic. ‘About forty years,’ he said.
     
    It was no big secret, Myra learned. Just one of those things
she’d never needed to know. The AI had originated as an
economic and logistic planning system devised by a Trotskyist
software expert in the British Labour Party. This planning
mechanism had been used by the United Republic of Great Britain,
and inherited by its self-proclaimed successor, the underground
Army of the New Republic, after Britain had been occupied, and
its monarchy restored, by the Yanks in the Third World War. It
had acquired significant upgrades, not all of them intended,
during the twenty-year guerilla war that followed, and had played
some disputed role in the British national insurrection during
the Fall Revolution in 2045. Its central software routines had
been smuggled into space by a refugee from the New
Republic’s post-victory consolidation. It had been
expanding its capacities, and its activities, ever since.
    ‘Most people call it the General,’ Logan told her.
‘Aces the Turing, no sweat.’
    ‘But what’s it doing?’ Myra asked. ‘If
it’s such a shit-hot adviser, why aren’t we
winning?’
    ‘Depends what you mean by „we“,’ Logan
said. ‘And what you mean by
„winning“.’
    Myra had, she realised, no answer to that. Perhaps the AI
adviser had picked up on the Analysis analysis, and agreed
that the situation was hopeless.
    Logan was looking at her with sympathetic curiosity, a sort of
reversed mirror-image of the hostilebafflement she was directing
at him. He must have gone native up there; he’d got used to
this situation, and to this style of work, over the decades, and
had forgotten the common courtesies of even their notional
comradeship.
    ‘Anyways,’ he was saying, ‘you can ask it
all that yourself.’ He poked, absently, at the
control-panel between his feet; looked up; said, Tutting you
through.’
     
    Before Myra could so much as open her mouth, Logan had
vanished, and had been replaced by the military AI. She’d
had a mental picture of it, ever since Logan had first mentioned
it: something like the Jane’s software, a VR gizmo
of lines and lights. At best a piece of simulant automation, like
Parvus.
    He was a young man in sweat-stained camos, sitting casually on
a rock in a clearing in temperate woodland: lichen and
birch-bark, sound of water, birdsong, leaf-shadow, a wisp of
woodsmoke. It looked like he’d paused here, perhaps was
considering setting up a camp. The man looked every inch the
commandante – his long, wavy black hair and his black
stubble and dark eyes projected something of the glamour of
Guevara, the arrogance of Trotsky. He also reminded Myra,
disturbingly, of Georgi -enough to make her suspect that the
image she saw was keyed to her personality; that it had been
precisely tuned to give her this overwhelming impression of
presence, of charisma.
    ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’ve wanted to meet
you for a long time, Myra.’
    She opened her hands. You could have called.’
    ‘No doubt I would have done, quite soon.’ The
entity smiled. ‘I prefer that people come to me. It avoids
subsequent misunderstandings. Anyway – I understand you
have two concerns: the nukes at La-grange, and the space-movement
coup. Regarding the first – the nukes are still under your
control. Your Defence Minister still has the access codes. I
requested that the weapons themselves be moved here for
security.’ He shrugged, and smiled again.
‘They’re all yours. So are the weapons in Earth orbit
– which are, of course, more immediately accessible, and
usable. This brings me to your other concern – the coup. It
is imminent.’
    ‘How imminent?’
    ‘In the next few days. They’ll ram through the
vote on reorganisation of the ReUN, and the new Security Council
will issue orders