The Corporation Wars: Emergence (Second Law Trilogy) by Ken MacLeod

Author:Ken MacLeod [MacLeod, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction / Science Fiction / Action & Adventure, Fiction / Science Fiction / Military, Fiction / Science Fiction / Space Opera
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Taransay was a couple of kilometres into the jungle, and the exosun about a quarter of the way down from its zenith, when she was stopped in her tracks by an unaccountable feeling that something wasn’t quite right. No rain, for the moment. The little buzzing spinning things flitted in the narrow slanted beams of light between the shadows cast by the efficient leaves. Somewhere, water gurgled and small stones shifted. Her nanotech stone-age knife glinted in her hand. Her feet slowly sank deeper in the squishy, slithery floor of living and dead mats.

Nothing was wrong. No voice in her head, no brightening of the blue glow around her upper right arm.

It took Taransay a moment to realise what was troubling her. Her walk had been too easy. She’d expected it to be difficult, what with the heavier and bulkier load, and the nanotech cylinders poking up high above her shoulders and more than doubling her effective height. Instead, she had made her way between trees and bushes and through and over streams, boulders, swathes of ash and sheets of cooled lava without so much as catching a cylinder against an overhanging branch. She was still following the same route, but she hadn’t had to hack at any vegetation, or found herself facing a branch or stalk she’d cut before.

She was no longer crashing and hacking her way through the jungle, like an explorer. She was slipping through it like a native. Well, not that she knew about such contrasts directly, or even reliably, but she’d watched enough well-meant rain forest eco-romantic adventure serials as a child to have the notion embedded.

Now that she’d noticed, of course, she got tangled in one of the long vine things on her next three steps, and put a foot in a hole a few steps after that.

Zen, that was what she had to strive for. Zen and the art of hiking. But you couldn’t strive for it. Like the millipede in the legend that was asked how it moved its legs, and suddenly couldn’t take another step. Millipedes, ah yes. She concentrated hard on recalling the millipede-like animals she’d seen, and thinking about whether any of the images she could recollect of it would betray the affinity with the mats that Zaretsky’s team had detected by genetic analysis.

Then she got to thinking about thinking. When she wanted to recall what the two fierce, fast creatures she’d noticed had been like, she could see in her mind clear and distinct images of them. It was exactly as if they were photo files being retrieved from an album. And she could turn them over in her mind’s eye, almost literally: she could rotate the images this way and that, zoom in on detail.

This was not, she remembered very clearly, what remembering very clearly was like. Here in the frame, she was still herself, still Taransay Rizzi from one of Partick’s lower-rent zip codes. But she was far more remote from her original self than she was even in the sim, where she was physically a little cloud of electron states in a big crystal.

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