‘Fuck, no.’ Jitendra stared at Geoffrey as if he’d lost his mind. ‘For a start, these things are
‘I suppose it would be,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So – when does it all start?’
Jitendra looked at him askance. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I mean, when does the fighting begin?’
‘It already has, brother,’ Sunday said. ‘They’re fighting now. Out there. At this very moment.’
When the rover docked, they took him up into one of the private viewing pods. It contained a bar and a semicircle of normal seats, grouped around eight cockpits: partially enclosed chairs, big and bulky as ejector seats, their pale-green frames plastered with advertising decals and peeling warning stickers. Five people were already strapped in, with transcranial stimulation helmets lowered over their skulls.
‘Geoffrey,’ Sunday said, ‘I’d like you to meet June Wing. June – this is my brother, up from Africa.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Geoffrey.’
June Wing was a demure Chinese woman in a floor-length black skirt and maroon business jacket over a pearl blouse, with a silver clasp at the neck. Her grey-white hair was neatly combed and pinned, her expression grave. The look, Geoffrey concluded, was too disciplinarian to be unintentional. She wanted to project authoritarian firmness.
They shook hands. Her flesh was cold and rubbery. Another golem, then, although whether it was fixed form or claybot was impossible to determine.
‘We sponsor Jitendra’s team,’ June said. ‘I can’t normally find time to make it to the tournaments, but today’s an exception. I see you’re here in the flesh – how’s your trip been so far?’
‘Very enjoyable,’ Geoffrey said, which was not entirely a lie.
‘Sunday told me you’re working on elephant cognition. What are your objectives?’
Geoffrey blinked at the directness of June Wing’s interrogation. ‘Well, there are a number of different avenues.’
‘The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, or towards some practical goal?’
‘Both, I hope.’
‘I’ve just pulled up your pubs list. Considering you work alone, in what might be considered a less than fashionable area, you have a reasonable impact factor.’
Reasonable. Geoffrey thought it was a lot better than reasonable.
‘Perhaps you should come and work for Plexus,’ June Wing said.
‘Well, I—’
‘You have obligations back home.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re very interested in minds, Geoffrey. Not just in the studying of mental processes, but in the deeper mysteries. What does another mind think? What does it feel? When I think of the colour red, does my perception tally with yours? When we claim to be feeling happy or sad, are we really experiencing the same emotions?’
‘The qualia problem.’
‘We think it’s tractable. Direct mind-to-mind process correlation. A cognitive gate. Wouldn’t that be something?’
‘It would,’ he admitted. June Wing clearly had more than a passing understanding of his work, or had deduced the thrust of it from a cursory review of his publications list. He was inclined to believe the latter, but with that came an unsettling implication.
He must be talking to one of the cleverest people he’d ever met.
How would it feel to be in the same room as her, not just a robot copy?
‘Well, you know how to reach me if you ever decide to broaden your horizons. First time at Robot Wars?’
‘Yes. Doesn’t seem to be much going on, though. Is it always like this?’ He felt even more certain of this now. Across the arena, the pairs of machines hadn’t moved to any obvious degree since he had seen them from the rover.
‘Only one of the operators is actually driving a robot right now,’ June Wing said. ‘The other four are spectating, or helping with the power-up tests on one of the backup machines. The rival operators – our competitors – are in the other viewing pods.’
‘But nothing’s happening.’
‘They’re tunnel-boring machines,’ Jitendra said. ‘They’re built to gnaw through lunar bedrock, not set land- speed records.’
Even as he spoke, Jitendra was lowering himself into one of the vacant cockpits. He reached up and tugged the transcranial stimulator down, nestling it onto his skull.
‘We can’t speed up the ’bots,’ he went on, ‘but we can slow ourselves down. Even your best civilian implants don’t mess with the brain at a level deep enough to upset the perception of time, so we need some extra assistance. Hence, direct stimulation of the basal cortex. That and some slightly naughty deep-level neurochemical intervention—’
‘As always, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ June Wing said.
