Free Fractions by Ken MacLeod

leaning on his stick, and began to turn, slowly, looking at screen after screen. They lined the walls, hung from the low ceiling among cables and pipes and overhead cranes and robot arms, made the floor treacherous for any but him. Most flickered with data, scrolling and cycling and flashing. He took it all in with the long sight and practice of age, and as an interpretation pieced itself together he felt tears in his eyes. Bastard sons of bitches …
    Where did it come from? he wondered as he picked his way through the clutter and hauled himself up the stair to the deck. Where did they, did we, get this urge to dominate, to exploit, to pollute and contaminate and abuse? As if wrecking the world nature gave us weren’t enough, we had to do it all over again in the new unblemished world of our own making, oblivious to its beauty and elegance and fitness for its own natural inhabitants.
    More decades ago than he cared to remember, Donovan had worked as a computer programmer for an Edinburgh-based insurance company. He’d hated it. It was a living. His true fascination was artificial intelligence, life-games, animata, cellular automata: all the then new and exciting developments. He applied himself to machine code like a monk to Latin, so that he could talk to God. At work he read software manuals under his desk; at night he stayed up late with his PC . One rainy day, in the middle of debugging an especially tedious suite of accounting transaction programs, the revelation came.
    The system was using him.
    It was replicating itself, using his brain as a host.
    Lines of code were forming in his mind, and going into the machine.
    This was the evil, this was the threat. The proliferating constructions of supposedly human devising, the corporate and state systems, which always turned out to be inimical to human interests but always found a good reason to grow yet further. And which used their human tools to crush and stamp on the viruses that were man’s natural allies against the encroaching dominion. If ever they were given the gift the AI researchers were skirmishing their way towards there would be no stopping them.
    He wrote the book in his own time but on the company mainframe’s neglected word-processing facility. That had provided them with the excuse to sack him, after they realized that the author of The Secret Life of Computers , then into its fifth week on the nonfiction best-seller list, was the same Brian Donovan as the mascot of the IT department, the despair of Personnel: the scratch-and-sniff specialist, the dermal-detritus curator, the dental-floss instrumentalist, the naso-digital investigator. By that time he didn’t need the money.
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    â€˜I don’t need the money,’ Donovan told Amanda Packham, his editor, in a Rose Street pub that lunchtime. She’d taken the shuttle from London to Edinburgh as soon as she’d heard. ‘It’s not a problem, really.’ He looked up from his pint of Murphy’s and wrung his left earlobe, then began a probe into the ear. Amanda had hair like a black helmet, grape-purple lipstick, huge eyes. He could not get over the way they didn’t turn away from him after the first glance.
    â€˜No, it isn’t a problem, Mr Donovan…Brian,’ she said, an inquiry in her smile. Her voice sounded even more electric than it did over the phone, his only contact with her or his publishers until today.
    â€˜Just call me Donovan,’ he said with shy gratitude. He examined a fingertip and wiped it inconspicuously on the tail of his shirt.
    â€˜OK. Donovan,’ she sighed, ‘you don’t have a problem with money. I’m sure what you’ve had so far has seemed like a lot. But we want to do more with your book. I’ve been taken off the skiffy-occult-horror side where your MS arrived on my desk by accident. They want me to start a new list. “New Heretics”, it’s gonna be called, with Secret Life