The Trials of Koli Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Mike Carey

  Excerpt from The Fall of Koli copyright © 2020 by Mike Carey

  Excerpt from A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World copyright © 2019 by Man Sunday Ltd

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover photography by Blake Morrow https://blakemorrow.ca/

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: September 2020

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933515

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-45868-9 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-45866-5 (ebook)

  E3-20200806-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Koli Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Spinner Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Koli Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Spinner Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Koli Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Spinner Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Koli Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Spinner Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Koli Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Spinner Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Koli Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Spinner Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Koli Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  Extras Meet the Author

  A Preview of The Fall of Koli

  A Preview of A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

  Also by M. R. Carey

  Praise for the Novels of M. R. Carey

  For Eric

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  Koli

  1

  There come a time, by and by, when I feared we was not going to get to London at all.

  The going had been slow all the way along. On our best day, we made five miles by the drudge’s reckoning. And that wasn’t five miles straight. It was five miles of trudging this way and that, stopping whenever the sun come out or even threatened to. Five miles of ducking for cover if something moved, watching where our feet come down in case of mole snakes or melt-bugs, and not ever saying a word in case the sound brung something up out of the ground or down out of the sky to pick us off. It was not easy on the nerves, and on a long march your nerves work as hard as your feet do. Harder, even.

  We had some supplies with us – biscuit and oat mash and jerky – but mostly we et what we catched. With Winter coming on, there was some days when that was nothing at all.

  There was three of us, or else there was four, depending how you counted. Five, at the most.

  There was me, Koli Faceless. I put myself first on account of it’s me that’s writing this, not for no vaunting reason for there is not much I got to vaunt. My name tells you what my fortunes was at that time: cast out of my village, which was Mythen Rood in the Calder Valley, with my name stripped off of me and nothing left to do now but walk the world until the world swallowed me down and et me.

  Then there was Ursala-from-Elsewhere, who you might call a healer except that healing was the smallest part of what she did. In the world that was lost, she would of been called a scientist. She used to live in a place called Duglas, where there was lots of people like her that was keeping safe the knowledge of the before-times. But by and by they was attacked by some terrible enemy, and Ursala believed she was the onliest one from Duglas that was left.

  And there was Cup, a girl we rescued from the shunned men of Calder Valley. Well, rescued or catched, according to which eye you shut when you looked at it. She was not that happy to be with us anyway, though we did not mean no harm by taking her. I guess we never do though, when harm is what we’re working.

  I’m putting the three of us together because we’re what you would of seen if you was looking at us, say from the top of a hill or from the broke-off stump of some building somewhere, as we made our way along. Also you would of seen another thing walking alongside of us – a big lump of shiny metal that went on four legs and looked kind of like a horse with no head on its shoulders. And like a horse it did the carrying for us, being roped about so high and so heavy with sacks and packs and baggages that the big gun builded into its back could hardly be seen from some directions. This was the drudge, and it was not alive. It was tech of the old times, belonging to Ursala and doing only and always what Ursala said it had got to do.

  And then there was one more of us, who you would not of seen at all. Nobody got to see Monono Aware, excepting me, though she was as alive as any of us. As real as any of us. Monono was tech too, like the drudge, but also she was a person. She was like a person living inside a piece of tech called the DreamSleeve, which played music and could sometimes make big, loud bells go off inside your ears. It’s hard to explain and I do not mean to try – or at least not right here and now. You will just have to bear with me a while if you want to make any sense out of it.

  2

  Why was we going to London? Well, we was following a signal from someone called Sword of Albion that said we should come. Outside of that, these wasn’t just the one sole answer.
It’s more like there was a different reason for each of us, except for the drudge, who didn’t have no mouth to speak an opinion with and didn’t seem to have one in any case.

  I guess it was my idea before it was anyone else’s. What I wanted, when I was first throwed out of Mythen Rood, was just to be let back in there again and be back with my family – my mother, Jemiu, and my sisters Athen and Mull. I missed them so much it was a hurt inside of me, like something hard and sharp that I had swallowed down without meaning to. But there wasn’t no chance of going home. If I set one foot inside the gate I would be hanged, and my mother and sisters alongside me. All I could hope to give them was more shame and hurt on top of what I already brung down on them.

  London was no more than a story to me. A place where tech of the old times was so plentiful it was just lying in the streets. Where the Parley Men used to keep their court for the good of all, and where their treasures was still to be found by them as was bold enough to look for them. It was the place where Ingland was ruled from, for so many years nobody could even count them, until the Unfinished War brung Ingland into ruin. So it seemed to me, since I couldn’t go home no more, that there was reason enough to go to London, just for the sake of seeing it before I died.

  But besides that, I had got a plan. A kind of a plan, anyway. I’m not saying it was a good one, but it got into my head and would not come out again. The plan was to bring all the people that was still living in Ingland together in one place, and by such means keep them from dying. I thought London might serve, if we could find it, for the old stories said it was so big that when the sun set on one side of it, it was rising on the other.

  People was dying on account of not having babies, or the babies not living long after they was born. Ursala had teached me a word for this, but it was a really long one and I did not use it much. The fact that they was dying was the thing that mattered, to my mind. That and the cause of it, which was that there was not enough people to make the babies properly. You would think that only two people was needful, but you would be wrong. You needed what was called a gene pull, and two people on their own did not have one. Two hundred people, even, did not have one. But if you was to take two hundred here, and two hundred there, and keep on piling them all in, then by and by a gene pull would be there and the babies would be born strong enough to live.

  So that was the biggesr reason why I said we should go to London. We needed to find out if the roads was still open, so we could tell everyone else to come.

  Ursala didn’t care so much about finding lost London, but she did want to find where Sword of Albion’s signal was coming from. The signal was tech of the old times that had been kept safe for years on years, and she thought there might be other tech along with it. She was looking for parts and tools to repair her healing machine, that was called a dagnostic, so she could fix the babies before they dropped into the world or even make women quicken that could not do it on their own. I thought my plan to build a gene pull in London was better, but I liked this idea too.

  So we made up our minds that we would journey into the south, and we took Cup with us because Ursala was not happy with letting her go free and I was not happy with killing her. All of this was decided on the day we left Calder Valley, but in some ways it had got to be decided again every day after, for we could not move a step without some argument about it. Most of the arguments was between Ursala and Monono. There was no trust between the two of them. Ursala thought Monono was a kind of a monster, and should not be allowed to live. Monono thought Ursala was a scold and a busybody and a hundred things besides, who was setting herself up to judge a thing she didn’t even understand.

  I tried my best to lay down a bridge between them, like in a song Monono played me one time that was about troubled waters. Three days out of Calder, I found a quiet time when we was walking along a dry stream bed. There was no trees near, and the ground was too stony for mole snakes and suchlike beasts to burrow in, so we had got less to be afraid of than usual.

  I had been thinking hard how to say it. I started with the dead god. Not with his teachings, for I did not greatly hold with godly things even before I met a messianic my own self and almost ended up killed by him. But I remembered one of the things the dead god did, or was supposed to of done, back when he was alive.

  “You know how the dead god freed all them that was took as slaves by Fair-oh?” I asked Ursala.

  “I’ve heard the story,” she said. Which I took to mean she didn’t believe it no more than I did.

  “The story’s all I meant.”

  “All right, Koli. What about it?”

  “Well, I think Monono is kind of like that.”

  “Like a slave?”

  “Not that, exactly. But like someone that used to be a slave, and then got free. She was stuck inside the DreamSleeve for a long time, Ursala, but that isn’t all of it. She was stuck inside her own self too. The best way I can figure it, the people that made the DreamSleeve made Monono to just be one thing for aye and all, and not ever change. Everything she said, it was things they give her to say. Sometimes she’d say the same thing over and again, in the exact same voice, because the rules that was made for her was so tight she didn’t have no choice in it.

  “She’s got out of that now, and she don’t have to mind them rules no more, but she’s not likely to forget what she was like before. If she’s rude sometimes, or mean, it’s because being nice and sweet and funny used to be the whole of what she was, before she got free. Freedom is a thing that’s burning inside her almost, and sometimes if you’re standing too close you get to feel some of the heat of it. It don’t mean no more than that.”

  Ursala did not take this like I thought she would. Her face got all cold and hard. She stopped the drudge with a tap of her finger on the mote controller she weared on her wrist, and turned round to face me. “You mean she’s got some sort of autonomy?” she said.

  “She might of got some,” I said. I didn’t know what autonomy was, but I knowed Monono had come back from the internet with a personal security alarm, so she might of brung some other things too.

  Ursala looked down at the DreamSleeve, which was strapped to my chest in the little sling I made for it. “Can she hear us now?” she asked.

  “Of course. If she wants to.”

  “Switch her off.”

  “I don’t like to do that, Ursala. She’s not a thing that belongs to me.”

  “That’s exactly what she is. Switch her off.”

  “Sorry, but I will not.”

  Cup was watching all this back-and-forth between the two of us with a kind of a smile on her face. I guess she was enjoying us not being on the same side.

  Ursala’s eyes got narrow. “Listen to me, Koli,” she said. “Before the old world fell apart, they were wrestling with this problem a lot. The neural nets they made, the artificial intelligences…”

  “I don’t know none of them words.”

  “The pretend people, like your Monono. They were getting more and more sophisticated. They had the potential to be quicker and cleverer than any human being. And nobody – I mean, nobody at all – thought that was a good thing. The AIs were built with limiters in their code, precisely in order to stop them learning from experience. To stop them getting smarter as they went along. They were allowed to acquire new information, but they couldn’t write what they learned into their own code. They couldn’t change.”

  That sounded like the way Monono was when I first met her, when she would keep asking me ever and again what my favourite songs was and telling me jokes she had already told me before. I had liked her a lot back then, but I liked her better now.

  “Okay,” I said. It was not much to say maybe, but it was as far as I wanted to go.

  “But you’re telling me your music console has bootstrapped itself. That the AI in there has found a way to modify its own code. Its own behaviours.”

  “I guess I might be saying that, or something like.”

  I lo
oked around the stream bed and up on the banks to either side of us, somewhat nervous. There was nothing moving, nor no sound of anything coming up on us, but it still felt wrong for us to be out in the open like this and just standing still and talking, like the world would wait until we was ready to take it on again.

  “Maybe we should move on and see if we can find…” I gun to say.

  Ursala held out her hand. “May I see it?”

  I had to think about that. Ursala had done many kind things for me, and for my family back when I still had one. I owed her a lot, not the least of which was the fact that I was still alive. It was also true that I would not of even waked the DreamSleeve in the first place, nor met Monono, if Ursala had not told me how to do it.

  But I did not much like the coldness in her face, and in her voice.

  “Promise you’ll give it back,” I said.

  “I promise.”

  “And not break or harm it.”

  “Koli!”

  “Promise.”

  “Very well. I promise. I won’t do anything to it without your permission.”

  I handed over the DreamSleeve, though I was not right happy to do it.

  Ursala turned it over in her hands, giving it a real close look. By and by she pointed at a tiny hole in the back of the case, near the bottom. “That’s the reset,” she said. “If you slide a needle or a pin in there, and push on it for a second or two, the device will go back to factory settings.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She looked at me hard. “It means everything the AI has done to change itself will be erased. There’ll just be the original program, and the original repertoire.”

  “You mean Monono will go back to being the way she was at first?”