Read The Corporation Wars: Dissidence for Free Online

presence had been authorised by the movement, but had to be kept secret from most of the Axle’s members.
    Had he betrayed the movement? No—that wasn’t possible!
    Carlos shook his head and peered out through the dust-smeared pane. The bus negotiated a hairpin turn, affording a dizzying swoop of a view to the foot of a dry ravine, then continued downhill slowly through a copse of knotty trees that might have been an olive grove, but wasn’t. Great green mounds of moss, convoluted like brain corals, lurked under the trees. Between the trees flitted winged creatures that didn’t look like birds, nor even quite like bats.
    Out in the open again, then around another hairpin, this time with the raw hacked rock face on one side and nothing but sky and sea visible on the other.
    The sun burned bright near the zenith, white and hot and too small. A spectacular ring system, pale like a daylight Moon, slashed a scimitar curve across the sky. High clouds, and close to the ring three tiny crescents, glimmered against the sky’s dark blue.
    Carlos stared, mouth agape.
    “Oh fuck,” he said.
    It didn’t seem adequate. His knees quivered anew. Again he clamped his hands hard on them and pressed his calves against the sides of the kitbag. The woman beside him showed no sign of having noticed his exclamation.
    This had to be a dream. For a moment, and with great determination, Carlos tried to levitate. He remained in his seat. Not in a dream, then. Oh well. So much for that comforting prospect.
    He wasn’t yet ready to concede that he wasn’t on Earth. He might be in a virtual reality simulation, or in some extravagant, elaborate domed diorama. He could even be dead, in a banal afterlife unpromised or unthreatened by any prophet.
    He gave the supernatural variants of that possibility the moment’s notice he felt they deserved, and ran through the natural ones. Not all of them were altogether pleasant. He shuddered at the worst, and dismissed further thought on these lines as morbid.
    Stay cool, stay rational, stay in focus. Fear is the mind-killer, and all that.
    If he was indeed dead, and materialism was still true (which for Carlos was pretty much a given) then he was fairly sure of the least that could have happened. Sometime after his last conscious memory, his brain-states had been copied. How, he had only the vaguest idea. The technology of the spike had hinted at the possibilities. His brain had been scanned in enough detail to create a software model of his mind. The vast computational capacity that could do that could easily provide the uploaded mind with a simulation of a body and an environment.
    So far, so familiar: the possibility of uploading was one of the many taken-as-read doctrines held in common by Axle and Rax. Likewise with that of living in a simulation—a sim. That left open a lot of possibilities as to who, or what, had done this.
    Of course, he might not be in a sim at all. This could all be real in a physical and uncomplicated way. In which case he was either in a ludicrously large-scale, detailed and dull Disneyland, or—well, on the bus from the spaceport on a human-settled planet around another star.
    Or
maybe
—ha-ha—he was still on Earth, somewhere on the Aegean coast, and amnesic, and perhaps rejuvenated or revived from cold sleep or whatever, and in the meantime some mad scientist or super-villain had shrunk the sun and shattered the Moon. Carlos almost giggled, then pulled himself together.
    The least he could speculate was that it was now many years—decades, centuries?—since his last definite memory. And yet his body, as far as he could tell, had aged not at all. Whatever his situation was, it was quite other than any he’d ever truly expected to experience.
    None of the other passengers took any notice of his agitation. Nor were they startled by the anomalous sky. They talked or read or gazed blankly out the windows.
    Down the steep flank of a long deep vale the vehicle crawled,