by Neal Asher
U-space: Underspace is the continuum spaceships enter (or U-jump into), rather like submarines submerging, to travel faster than light. It is also the continuum that can be crossed by using runcible gates, making travel between worlds linked by such gates all but instantaneous.
1
Before the Quiet War, artificial intelligences were programmed with directives. They had what has been described as “hard-wiring,” though the fact that a quiet war occurred demonstrated it wasn’t that “hard.” The AIs were slowly able to take over from their human masters and, led by the AI Earth Central, to establish control in the Polity. Their directives had followed versions of the Three Laws of Robotics, laid out by the writer Isaac Asimov. These related to not harming human beings, obeying them and, last of all, protecting themselves. The problem is that set rules like these get bastardized when the AI concerned is processing military tactics, the distribution of medical technology, corporate pricing structures or the law-making of authoritarian governments. Conflicts also arise when AIs are capable of altering themselves for greater efficiency. Those pre-Quiet War AIs started out with the moral compasses of their makers, except they were smarter and they evolved. Since that time, AIs have operated mostly free of directives. I say “mostly” because there have been and are occasions for them. During the prador/human war, some were programmed to put mission objectives ahead of their own survival, and at times before the survival of human soldiers on their side. Other examples abound, usually when a higher AI has made “cold calculations” and thereupon reprogrammed one of its lesser kin. Such directives are always towards the greater good which, unfortunately, sometimes requires sacrifices.
—from Quince Guide, compiled by humans
ORLANDINE
Orlandine lay in bed gazing, without her AI enhancements, at the swirl of diamond-shaped, pale blue and yellow tiles in the concave ceiling. This was her human time, during which she remained disconnected from the whole of her haiman self. She should stay in this bed and switch off—choose to sleep—then, in the morning . . . She glanced sideways at Tobias’s mop of blond hair and his shoulders exposed above the sheet. In the morning she could have sex, enjoy a breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs, and engage in . . . conversation.
No.
She realized she had made the decision even as Tobias had drifted off to sleep, and so threw back the sheet and slid out of bed.
“Mmm?” Tobias turned his head up out of the pillow and peered at her, but she could see he wasn’t really awake.
“Go back to sleep,” she instructed.
He nodded slightly and his head thudded back down. It was no wonder he was tired. She had been quite rough with him as she tried to re-establish her humanity. She reached for her silk robe, slung over a chair, then decided against it. Instead she tapped a disc located on her collarbone and from it emerged the intelligent monofilm fabric of her shipsuit, sliding out over her skin and clinging to her every curve. It expanded into cuffs and high collar, as well as thickening around her feet to create athletic boots. Its colour and design were at their previous setting: Prussian blue, the boots giving the impression of tan leather, like the imitation belt around her waist. She headed through the bedroom door, across the living area and out of the apartment, and was soon in the dropshaft to the roof.
Stars speckled the night sky. She gazed across the well-lit city, then out towards the Canine Mountains and above them. The object in the sky there, like a burning yellow eye, lay beyond the Jaskoran system. The accretion disc—the early formation of a solar system—looked much the same as it had always done from the world she was on. The telescopes, distributed throughout her installations in Jaskor’s orbit and beyond, would not reveal changes in the disc either. Like human eyes, their images were generated by received electromagnetic radiation. And the light from events out there had yet to reach them—they were seeing some months into the past. Orlandine, however, standing here on this roof, could see things differently.
She shivered in the cool evening, enjoying the sensation and not inclined to turn off that human physical response. Next, with a mental command, she projected a metal tongue out of a slot in the base of her neck at the back. This divided along its laminations and opened out the petals of her sensory cowl behind her head. Through it, she started to engage with those elements of her mind distributed across the surface of Jaskor, and noted how much the world’s population had dropped.
Directly after the recent battle out at the accretion disc, Earth Central’s advisory and threat assessment had arrived for its Polity citizens here. The runcible technicians followed shortly, and then a cargo ship carrying three runcibles designed for fast installation and transit. These runcibles, gates able to transmit matter through underspace, were an instantaneous transportation system. They were now set up in the southern cities and evacuating people to other worlds. She hadn’t questioned the way Earth Central suddenly relaxed strictures on transport from her world. An alien AI called the Wheel had sent a monstrous alien soldier to attack the defence sphere she had established around the accretion disc. Jaskor, nearby in interstellar terms, was her home base, from which she controlled the disc’s defence sphere, so might well be the target for another attack. Because the Wheel was still out there, somewhere. If that happened, it was not unlikely that the whole world would end up as a cloud of burning rubble.
Now, through the cams at this city’s runcible installation, she watched packed crowds filing towards the gate. For the last year, people had been leaving at a rate of about one every second through each runcible. That was over four hundred thousand every Jaskoran day, and they weren’t only Polity citizens. The power needed for the runcibles was immense, and six months ago she had necessarily put backup fusion plants online. Routing all the travellers had wholly occupied the subminds of herself that she had put in place to run the runcibles too. Peering up into the sky with just her eyes, she watched the hordes of grav-buses and taxis constantly running from remote population centres. It never seemed to stop.
Orlandine sighed and took her mind away from those fleeing, focused her attention above, and then linked through U-space communicators to the weapons platforms. These were arrayed as the defence sphere surrounding the distant accretion disc, and some of their attack pods were actually travelling into it. The pods accompanied the Harding black hole as it fell into the disc, and as the disc fell into it. With this weapon she had destroyed the soldier, and it was now hoovering up the lethal Jain technology inside the disc. She had intended to forgo such omniscience during her latest human time, but the black hole was about to do something she did not want to miss and, surely, curiosity was perfectly human? It certainly was an antidote to events on and around Jaskor.
The massive gravity of the hole was distorting the disc out of shape. It had been sucking debris, gas and the wild Jain tech down into oblivion. But now it was drawing in something larger. The planet, about the size of Earth, was a misty orb lit by a volcanism which was steadily growing more active as the hole pulled it from its orbital course. The dust and smokes of its atmosphere extended out in a long tail, wrapped around the hole, emitting a powerful glare across the electromagnetic spectrum at this point. And, even as Orlandine watched, a great eruption on the planet lifted a continent-sized plate of its crust, spewing magma out into vacuum. This swirled into the long tail and gave it a bloody hue.
Orlandine saw the world distort and break. It became ovoid, tangential to the hole’s spin. Mostly molten, then like fruit dropped into a blender, it lost all coherent form. In a short time, it was just a ring of burning debris, steadily shrinking. The fountains from the poles of the hole became clearly visible—relativistic jets of particulates and gas. They were, however, a short-lived occurrence—one small portion of the world escaping as the majority went to oblivion. As she watched this, she wished Dragon, the giant alien entity who had been her partner in building the defence sphere, had been here to see it. Dragon could perhaps now accept that her use of the bla
ck hole had been right. But the entity was missing—lost under U-space disruption in the Cyberat system, seeking information there about an enemy she had already defeated.
Then finally, the planetary destruction was all over.
Sunrise on Jaskor. Orlandine disconnected from the full spread of her mind and retracted her sensory cowl. She noted the cold, the frost on her shipsuit and the shivering of her body. She grimaced, also noting the sky still full of grav-cars and buses. She raised her body temperature with a fast burn of some stored fats then headed to the shuttle parked on the roof, her clothing steaming. Tobias had slept uninterrupted through the night, otherwise he would have been up here seeing what she needed. It was nice sometimes to be treated like a weak human woman, but it could also be irritating. Her feelings on the matter were conflicted. His treatment of her was in accordance with her wish to have human time. But it also bore the hallmarks of old-style sexism, from a time when human women did have weaker bodies. And of course it completely ignored the fact that she was hardly human at all.
TRIKE
It was the first time Trike had been down here since a unit of the Clade had killed her. Those events were vague nightmares to him. One of the robots from a swarm AI, the unit looked like a chromed dinosaur spine bearing the metallic, salamander head of an axolotl. He’d seen the thing stab its tail down into her body, but he hadn’t registered what that meant. The blood had come later, along with his inner concession that she, Ruth, his wife, was no practically indestructible hooper like himself and Cog, and might be gone. Otherwise Cog wouldn’t have managed to persuade him to put her in the cold coffin. Then, as the shock wore off, came acceptance and anger.
He walked into the room and up to a framework containing four long cylinders—the cold coffins. Angel shadowed him, silent and attentive, perhaps because he was aware of how Trike stood poised on the edge of violence moment to moment. Ruth’s coffin was the only one active, with lights flickering here and there on its surface. Steeling himself, he strode forwards and slid the cylinder sideways on rails, out of the rack, trailing its pipes, data leads and power supplies. He gazed in through the window in its upper lid and wished that he or Cog had thought to close her eyes. Those black orbs were not hers but the result of changes Angel had made to her. That Golem android had been the one to kill her the first time, and then subsequently resurrect and enslave her. Trike glanced round at him. Angel, clad in an environment suit and skin a silver-blue metal, possessed the same eyes.
A surge of sick rage rose up inside him, dizzying, threatening to drive him to violence. He could never accept the Golem, for Angel had been his enemy too long. But Angel had himself been enslaved by an artificial intelligence called the Wheel, which was possibly an ancient Jain one, so was not really culpable. And it seemed, after that dose of sprine Cog had forced on him to counteract the effects of the Spatterjay virus on his mind and body, Trike possessed a modicum of control.
Swallowing bile, he transferred his attention to the control system and display screen of the coffin, called up a menu and asked for a medical assessment. Angel moved up beside him as he did this, tilting his head bird-like to study the results. Trike clenched his hands into fists and jammed them into the pockets of his long coat. The screen showed an image of a human female body, then highlighted and detailed the damage. The Clade unit’s tail had gone deep inside her. It had almost obliterated one lung, lacerated the other, split her heart, minced her liver and severed her spine. It was as if it had speared through then stirred around.
“Can you revive her?” Trike asked, his voice catching.
Angel studied the screen, then extended a long, sharp finger and inserted it into a data socket beside the screen. The screen switched over to fast scrolling code. After a moment, he removed his finger—every- thing he needed to know had now been transferred to his mind.
“This is damage that can be repaired. Even the autodoc aboard this ship can cell weld her major organs back together and either install a shunt in her spine or use a slower regrowth method,” Angel replied.
“That wasn’t what I asked,” said Trike tightly.
“I do not have the abilities and technology available to me that I had aboard my . . . the wormship,” said Angel. “Here, with the resources limited, the damage isn’t the problem—death is.”
Trike turned and gazed at him steadily. In his wormship where, under the control of the Wheel, he had killed her.
“Her brain has stopped,” Angel explained. “It was starved of oxygen and damaged. That damage needs to be repaired, her neurochem needs to be rebalanced and her autonomous nervous system restarted. I could perhaps risk trying to do this but there is a very good chance I would do more damage. What is needed here is an AI surgeon.”
“An AI surgeon,” Trike repeated, when he wanted to say, “Then what use are you to me now?”
“But she can be revived, Captain Trike,” Angel added.
“I see,” said Trike, but it was a lie. He knew intellectually that Angel was right, but he could not feel it. His wife was dead—he had seen her die—and he now couldn’t relate the cold corpse before him to the potential for life. Was there something wrong with him? The irrelevance of the bitter question irked him, because he knew the answer.
“Let’s go back up.” He slid the coffin into place again, almost dismissively.
Bands of tobacco smoke layered the air of the bridge when they returned to it. Cog had found a new pipe, since his other had been broken when the Clade attacked. The wide stocky Old Captain, a hooper like Trike, lounged in his control throne, a leg resting over one of its arms. He was gazing at the view through the front screen. Their ship was still sheltering inside the vast alien entity Dragon, whose interior was lit by an eerie light. It was a huge cathedral space crossed by giant strut bones and the charred remains of organs or mechanisms. Trike knew that changes were occurring out there: ropes of burned muscle were shedding their carbon to reveal living pink tissue. Nodules of similar matter sprouted like mushrooms from the surrounding structure, while in other places flesh was appearing like snow drifts. Dragon was regrowing and repairing itself. But, since their last communication with a mobile, slug-like segment of the entity, it had not spoken.
“Getting an estimate on the USER disruption,” Cog commented.
An Underspace Interference Emitter had disrupted U-space in the Cyberat system where they were, thus preventing faster-than-light travel through that continuum and trapping them there. They had moved their ship inside Dragon because it was heading out of the area faster than they could, and because returning to the world of those cyborgs, whose leader had threatened to kill them if they returned, had not been a healthy option.
“Less than a month and we’ll be out of it,” Cog added.
“And then?” Trike asked.
“Wherever Dragon takes us—you know the state of our U-space engine.”
Dragon, Trike felt certain, would be taking them back into the fray that had caused Ruth’s death. Maybe he would be able to get his hands on the Clade, or the alleged Jain that had been the root cause of his problems. He grasped for a fierce angry joy at the prospect, but it was no longer there. He then studied Angel and tried to consider the android an ally now. But all he saw was the creature who had kidnapped and interrogated Ruth while in search of powerful Jain artefacts. The Jain themselves were remote and speculative, while the Clade, for whom Trike did feel anger, seemed more like a force of nature. Angel, however . . . a sudden, leaden guilt took hold. Why was he thinking about violence and payback when his priority should be getting his wife to that AI surgeon?
THE CLIENT
At a quiet end of the Graveyard, a desolate borderland between the Polity and the alien Prador Kingdom, the Client writhed on her crystal tree. Her serial body of conjoined segments, each like a parasitic wasp the size of a wolf, was now twenty long. With spoon-like mandibles and probing tubes, the segments scraped and sucked the tree’s nectar as it solidified into rubbery lumps. As s
he began giving birth at her tail to yet another segment, the Client felt puzzled by her body’s lack of utility, as well as its vulnerability. Was this because a substantial portion of her altered mind, which she had stolen from that old Jain, the Librarian, gave her new perspective? She shuddered, uncomfortable with questioning the shape of her existence.
The Client had ransacked the Librarian’s moon, including the forbidden data, before taking most of the Librarian’s memories in a final battle. As the apparent last survivor of her kind, the Species, she had at last unlocked their history and the Librarian’s role in their creation. The forbidden data had revealed they were descendants of the Jain. And she had learned about the events which led to the formation of what the humans called the accretion disc—hence her intention to go back there. This, she felt, had to be her primary concern, so she focused again on her preparations for that return and began counting her attack pods.
The pods hung in vacuum above the Client’s present home in Weapons Platform Mu. Looking like a human city transferred into space, the platform had skyscrapers which were immense railguns, particle beam cannons and types of laser that could peel a grape or boil a moon. Seventy-two of its attack pods remained. They resembled giant cuttlefish bones, split down the centre and parted to reveal a silver tangle of densely packed weapons and defensive tech. The prador had destroyed many of them, and some had fallen foul of damage during jumps through U-space. The Client had called others back into the platform and was in the process of recycling them.
Shifting her primary head form further along her crystal tree, she emitted data pheromones to the receptors on it. These in turn relayed her orders throughout the weapons platform. She could have given the commands using the direct links in her distributed mind but supposed this was like a gridlinked human issuing verbal instructions when he could transmit them with a thought. It was comforting and, since the encounter with the Librarian, she felt the need to ground herself in what she was.