Free Divisions by Ken MacLeod

the blue, and told me they were from space defence. Said they were checking out rumours that I was dabbling in AI work. Total bollocks, of course. I just teach the local farm boys basic electronics. Any bright sparks that turn up, I throw a bit of Feynman and Hawking at them.’ His eyes flashed conspiratorially. ‘And a bit of Malley. The few who make any sense of it invariably fuck off and join the Union, no matter what I say.’ He unzipped a leather pouch and began filling the bowl, hands working automatically as he gazed sadly out of the window. ‘You could say I’ve been lowering the average intelligence in these parts—a crime in my book, but not, I guess, in yours.’
    He snorted a laugh. I smiled encouragingly; not that I quite understood what he was saying word for word, but I got his drift.
    ‘So,’ he went on, lighting up his mixture with an antique Zippo, ‘it was a bit of a surprise to be leaned on by two of your heavies, leaving me with subtle warnings about dire consequences. The words “outbreak” and, I think, “red-hot smoking crater” happened to crop up in the conversation. Just like the good old days under the Yanks. No black suits with bulges at the shoulder, but otherwise, plus ça change .’
    This, I have to say, gave me pause. There was no law against dabbling with artificial intelligence (or against anything else, for that matter). There was not even a Union rule against it. For anything not covered by Union rules (just about everything) we’d settled on the iron rule: ‘Do What You Can Get Away With.’ But touching off an outbreak—of artificial intelligence, disease, nano-assemblers, or any other kind of replicator—was something you couldn’t get away with. Your neighbours would ostracize you, or boycott you, and if one
of the essential amenities they chose not to supply turned out to be, e.g., your next breath, why then that was something that—when the matter reached the agenda of a neighbourhood moot— they would get away with.
    And at worst, if an outbreak actually began to spread, the Inner System’s own space defence forces would apply the orbital zap. I had never heard of them coming down and threatening people before the fact. It seemed rather illiberal.
    ‘Excess of zeal,’ I said, partly thinking aloud, partly bluffing. ‘I’ll have it looked into. But I assure you the Division has nothing to do with it. We have a rather different proposition to put to you.’
    ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘I’m sure you do. Hard-cop, soft-cop, and all that.’
    Could it be? The thought that someone else in the Division, or in the wider Solar Defence apparatus, might be playing games with my mission was so enraging that for a moment, fortunately, I was speechless. After a second or two I gathered my thoughts, and calmed down: I might be out of practice at conspiracy, but not at self-control. I shrugged.
    ‘I know nothing of that,’ I said.
    ‘So what do you want me to do?’
    ‘Dr Malley,’ I said, smiling, ‘do you know what the people on the other side of the wormhole, the people Wilde told us about, call it? They call it the Malley Mile.’
    ‘I’ve seen the tapes,’ Malley said dryly. ‘Flattering, isn’t it?’
    I had hoped so. Time to lay on some more.
    ‘We find ourselves,’ I said carefully, ‘in a position where we urgently need to understand the wormhole. And on our own, we can’t. There’s only one person who can help us, and that is you. Would you like to come with me to Jupiter, and do some real physics?’
    Malley was taking a sip of whisky as I said this, and he snorted so hard it went up the back of his nose. He spluttered, coughed, then leaned back and laughed.
    ‘So it’s come to this! Thirty billion people in your utopia, and you have to come to me! You people really disappoint!’
    I smiled. ‘I know what you mean, Dr Malley. And I think what we want to do may change all that, in the long run. The Division is not the Union. That’s all I want