Read The Corporation Wars: Dissidence for Free Online Page B

say.”
    Lunch was not quite fish, not exactly chips, and definitely a beer. It was served at a round rustic table of soft grey driftwood timber under a big umbrella on a concrete terrace where no one else sat. Music from the café up the steps sounded loud and the waiter bustled. Beyond the saltwater-pitted rusty rail, breakers sent hissing white foam a long way up the black beach. Carlos picked at pan-fried dark flesh in which a fan of thin yellow cartilaginous bones radiated from a stubby cylinder of hollow tubes around a pallid toothy ball which Carlos tried not to think of as the skull. He chowed down on sliced green tubers fried in oil and sprinkled with herbs. Nicole nibbled at boiled purple leaves and rubbery molluscs drenched in vinegar, and sipped water.
    He paused when he was no longer hungry and parched.
    “So,” he said. “Hit me with it.”
    She shoved her half-empty plate aside and fingered a small carton from her handbag. She flipped the top and flicked the base. A white paper tube poked out.
    “Smoke?” she offered.
    He’d seen it in movies. He shook his head.
    She used a gold lighter and drew sensuously. “Ah. That’s good.”
    “It isn’t.”
    She nodded. “Bad for your health. I know. And as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, you being Axle cadre and all, that’s kind of… irrelevant, here.”
    Axle cadre? She knew a lot about him. He kept his cool.
    “
Passé
, so to speak?”
    “Very much so.” She fixed him with her gaze as she drew hard on the cigarette, and sighed out the smoke. Looked away.
    “Go on,” he said. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
    A muscle twitched in her cheek. He could see her stretching the tic into a forced smile.
    “All right,” she said. “You’re dead.”
    “That’s a relief.”
    He wasn’t being flippant. One of the many dire possibilities he’d considered was that he was grievously injured yet alive, a hunk of charred meat and frazzled brain being fed consoling dreams until the technology improved enough to regenerate him. Or until the Rax—if they had won—decided on one of their ingeniously horrible ways to torture him. That was still possible, no matter what she told him. But that way madness lay. Better to take this as good news and at face value until he had reason to doubt it.
    And in that case… holy shit. So this is it, he thought. Immortality. Or at least a very long life. He might yet watch the last stars fade…
    “Tell me,” Nicole went on, as if still drawing things out, delaying the real bad news. “Where do
you
think you are?” She waved a hand around. “Like, what does all this look like to you?”
    Carlos looked down at the cooked organisms on his platter, then up at the mountains and the sky. The ring system still gave him a start when he momentarily forgot about it and then glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye.
    “All right,” he said. “What it
looks
like, OK? It looks like an extrasolar habitable terrestrial planet, probably terraformed, and settled or colonised by people—maybe genetically adapted so they can eat the local life—but otherwise not too culturally distant from my time, and therefore with an extraordinary lack of ambition and imagination.”
    Nicole guffawed. He got the full horseshoe of perfect teeth.
    “Spoken like a true Accelerationist!” she said. “And, yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. That’s what it’s
meant
to look like. Your classic bucolic colony planet. Which would imply faster-than-light starships, warp drives, the works. The full orchestral space opera and the fat lady singing. Yes?”
    “Too good to be true?” Carlos shrugged. “OK, I’d figured as much. We’re in a sim.”
    “Yes!” said Nicole, sounding relieved. “We’re in a sim. The good news is that it’s running on a machine in a space station orbiting a planet not a hundred million kilometres from the planet on which this sim is modelled.”
    Carlos closed his eyes and opened them. “You mean