Jitendra slipped his wrists into heavy medical cuffs attached to the frame of the chair. ‘They’d throw a fit in the Surveilled World. But of course, we’re not
‘I guess the Plexus sponsorship helps,’ Geoffrey said.
‘It’s not just advertising,’ June Wing said. ‘There is some actual R&D going on here. The robots have human drivers but they also have their own onboard battle minds, constantly trying to find a decisive strategy, a goal-winning solution they can offer to the pilot.’
‘OK, here it comes,’ Jitendra said, closing his eyes. ‘Slowdown’s beginning to take hold. Wish me . . .’ He stalled between words. ‘. . . luck.’
And then he was out, as lifelessly inert as the other drivers. Not unconscious, but decelerated into the awesomely slow sensorium of the robot, out in the arena.
‘He’s driving her now,’ Sunday said, pointing to the robot Jitendra was controlling. ‘You can just see the movement if you compare the ground shadow against the one from the support gantry.’
‘What do you do when you want some real excitement – race slugs against each other?’
‘Life moves pretty quickly if you are a slug,’ June Wing admonished. ‘It’s just a question of perceptual reference frames.’ She gestured to one of the vacant cockpits. ‘Geoffrey can spectate, if he wishes. I have a reserved slot, but I’ll pass for today.’
‘I’m carrying some fairly specialised aug hardware,’ Geoffrey said, meaning the equipment he needed to link to Matilda.
‘Nothing will be damaged, brother, I promise you,’ Sunday said.
‘And if it is, my own labs will soon put it right,’ June Wing said, with breezy indifference to his concerns. ‘So jump right in.’
Geoffrey was still wary, but another part of him wanted to get as much out of his Lunar experience as possible.
‘You need to take a leak?’ Sunday asked. ‘You’re going to be in that thing for at least six hours.’
Geoffrey consulted his bladder. ‘I’ll cope. I didn’t drink too much coffee this morning.’
Sunday helped him into the vacant cockpit. ‘The cuffs will be analysing your blood – any signs of stress, above and beyond normal competition levels, and the system will yank you out. Same for the transcranial stim. It’s read/write. There’s not much that can go wrong.’
‘Not much.’
Sunday cocked her head to one side, appearing to think for a moment. ‘Well, there was that one guy . . .’ She lowered the transcranial helmet, adjusting it carefully into position. ‘You were doing this at competition level, we’d cut back those curls to get the probe closer to your skin, but you’ll be fine for spectating.’
Aug status messages flashed into his visual field, informing him that an external agent was affecting his neural function. The implants offered to resist the intrusion. He voked them into acquiescence.
‘So what happened to that one guy?’
‘Nothing much,’ Sunday said breezily. ‘Just that being in the cockpit permanently reset his internal clock. Even after they withdrew the stim and the drugs, he was stuck on arena time.’
‘How’s he doing now?’
‘Thing is, he hasn’t got back to us on that one yet.’
The cuffs dropped their painless fangs into his skin. Two cold touches, neurochemicals sluicing in, and he felt himself sliding, tobogganing down an ever steepening slope. He made to grab onto the sides of the cockpit for support, but his arms, even his fingers, felt sheathed in granite.
Then the rushing sensation ebbed and he felt perfectly still, amniotically calm. Something had failed, he decided.
‘All right,’ Sunday said. ‘What you’re hearing now is me slowed down into your perceptual frame. You’ve already been in the cockpit for twenty minutes.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Make that twenty-one. June and I are off to the bar now; be back in a second or two. We’ll begin piping direct imagery into your head. Enjoy the show.’
He was almost ready not to believe her. But the digits in his tourist visa were whirring at superfast speed.
Geoffrey’s perceptions took a savage lurch and he was suddenly out there, disembodied, able to roam at will in the ching space of the arena. Jitendra’s robot wasn’t crawling now; it was propelling itself in convulsive jerks, tractor claws threshing, body sections pistoning back and forth like some heavy industrial mechanism that had escaped its shackles. Lunar soil, disturbed by the robot’s passage, collapsed back into itself as if composed of molten lead, under Jupiter’s immense gravity.
Around the arena’s perimeter, a frenzy of blurred motion attended the waiting machines. Elsewhere, dual combatants were locked in titanic wrestling matches, writhing and thrashing to the death.
Jitendra’s opponent crossed the graded soil like a demented iron maggot. It differed from Jitendra’s robot in its details but was of a comparable size, equipped with a broadly similar range of offensive devices. On its flanks, in luminous red, shone the Escher triangle logo of MetaPresence, Plexus’s main competitor in ching facilitation and proxy robotics. The nerve-node emblem on Jitendra’s machine was now similarly bright and unfaded, painted over the image by the aug. Accompanying these overlays were a host of statistics and technical readouts, speculating at the likely efficacies of armour, weapons and combat tactics.
The two robots halted at the laser-scribed circle of combat. Articulating two-thirds of the way down their bodies – they had been designed to steer during tunnel-boring operations – the robots reared up and bowed to each
