Polity Agent

by Neal Asher

  ‘Studies made by Isselis Mika, Prator Colver, D’nissan, Susan James and those others aboard Jerusalem affirm our original conclusion: Jain technology was intended as a weapon. It may be a creation of that race we named the Jain, or it may have been created long before. Its vector is quite simple. It is activated by contact with any race intelligent enough to employ it. Growing inside the individual first in direct contact, it subsumes that host’s knowledge wherever that differs from its own, but also allows itself to be used by that host. The host grows more powerful and is naturally inclined to control the rest of his kind. This he does until the Jain tech, destroying him in the process, seeds a secondary version of the same technology more amenable to the host’s race. We saw the initial stages of this with Skellor, and we have since seen the final stages of the process with the Makers. It destroys technological civilizations. Archaeological evidence, specifically that of the Csorians and the Atheter, suggests that it has done so many times before.’

  ‘So Jain technology is our first encounter with the Vandals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so that brings me back to asking what are the prospects for the human race.’

  ‘Prior to Skellor obtaining and activating a Jain node, there had been no sign of any such nodes in all of explored space.’

  ‘They’re pretty small – easy to miss.’

  ‘But we see, by what occurred in the Small Magellanic Cloud, that a prior infestation here should have resulted in billions of Jain nodes spread throughout space. We have run simulated spread patterns predicated on the extinction dates – with a large margin of error – of each of those three races. Thus far a Csorian node has been found which bears some resemblance to Jain technology, but is not a racially destructive device. No true Jain nodes have as yet been found.’

  Blegg grimaced and peered suspiciously towards where he knew the cameras were mounted inside the chamber.

  ‘Honestly – not one,’ insisted Earth Central.

  ‘So,’ said Blegg, ‘the Jain met their Waterloo five million years ago; the Csorians disappeared a million years ago; and the jury is still out on the Atheter. I believe even you AIs are still debating the veracity of that half-million-year-old find? Anyway, it would seem that either the Atheter or the Csorians managed to survive Jain technology and wiped it out in this part of the galaxy.’

  ‘That would have been the Atheter. We are now more than ninety per cent certain those remains are genuine. The point, however, is still moot, and not entirely relevant to our present situation.’

  ‘But it would be interesting to know what did happen to the Atheter. They might still be about, you know. With the earliest find relating to them dated at three million years old and that other at half a million, they showed a degree of longevity . . .’

  Ignoring this point, EC enquired, ‘You inspected the wreck?’

  Blegg nodded. ‘Every last retrievable fragment was found and is currently being studied under the supervision of the AI Geronamid. Obvious signs of technology developed from Jain tech, but no nodes. If the Maker brought them here, it offloaded them somewhere long before Dragon destroyed its ship. What about the other end?’

  ‘The Not Entirely Jack is currently en route to Osterland.’

  ‘You followed my suggestion?’

  ‘Yes, dracomen are aboard it to be deployed in any ground-based military actions. Agent Thorn controls the mission.’

  ‘Cormac?’

  ‘Currently aboard the Jerusalem, en route back to Cull to interrogate Dragon.’

  ‘And Polity defcon status?’

  ‘Full scanning in all critical areas. All runcible AIs are now cognizant of how to protect themselves from Jain tech subversion, and are updating their security. The old military spaceyards from the Prador War are being reopened. Ship production elsewhere is at optimum and all new ships are being outfitted with gravtech weapons.’

  ‘Then my place is four hundred and seventy-two light years from here,’ said Blegg.

  ‘And why would that be?’ asked the AI.

  ‘I feel I should take a long hard look at the excavation on Shayden’s Find. It occurs to me that if the Atheter managed to destroy every Jain node in this region of the galaxy, then they knew how to find them.’

  Blegg stepped away again, located himself in U-space, and his next pace took him into the runcible embarkation lounge ten miles away from the museum on Earth’s moon. A woman, who was petting a large Alsatian bearing a cerebral augmentation, glanced up at him in a puzzled way. Only the dog itself gazed at him with infinite suspicion. He turned himself slightly, putting himself out of phase with the world, and strode off towards the runcible. Ahead of him he watched a man step through the Skaidon warp and disappear, and Blegg did not hesitate to follow. Then, just at the last moment, he paused. Why had it never before occurred to him that the device might not be reset to his own intended destination when he stepped through? And why did that occur to him just now? He shrugged. Stepped through.

  – retroact 1 –

  Yamamoto said someone just parachuted from a B52, and in his excitement stood up from his desk. A wire sparked along the classroom wall, and white light, so bright it seemed to fill the mind like some hot liquid, glared in through the windows. Hiroshi turned to Yamamoto as the world shifted sideways. Glittering hail stripped the standing boy bare, peeled the skin off his raised arm, then the window frames and the wall shredded themselves across the scene, slamming the boy to one side as if he had just stepped in front of a hurtling train. Hiroshi saw glass just hanging in the air, and felt what came to be called the hypocentre opening wider like some vast eye. Some continuum, permanence just to one side of the world, was impacted, dented. Everything went black . . . then Hiroshi opened his eyes to the rainbow. They called it the mushroom cloud, yet such colour did not make him think of fungi. He lay upon the hot skin of some dragon, its huge scales rough against his back. A wall of fire rose to his right, seemingly burning without fuel. He sat upright, naked, and inspected his body. His elbows were grazed, but that was all. He was sitting on a complete section of the school’s tiled roof, but the school itself rose no higher than he could normally stand. The heat was intense and smoke wisped from the wreckage.

  ‘I can see it. The aeroplane,’ said someone below him.

  Hiroshi tore away tiles to reveal a dusty face. He recognized Yamamoto by the shape of that face and by the muscles that once moved underneath skin. Liquid ran from his eye sockets. Fire bloomed in the wreckage. Someone started to scream jerkily, then fell silent.

  ‘I see it,’ said Yamamoto again, then fell silent too.

  Hiroshi stepped from hot surface to surface, heading for white dusty ground. He found a pair of shoes tied together by their laces. They were too big for him, but enough to protect his already bloody feet. He found Mr Oshagi’s smouldering coat, and from it salvaged enough fabric to fashion himself a loincloth, then he fled the seemingly hungry fire. A man trudged ahead of him, blisters on his back as big as fists, skin slewed away from one thigh to expose wet muscle.

  ‘Water. Put it out,’ the man muttered.

  Hiroshi passed him, then turned, dance-stepping over sizzling wires in the street. He needed to get across the river, to get home. He saw the woman sitting with her back against the lower stump of a telegraph pole. She too was naked, but with the flower pattern of her dress burned into her body. She was crying with pain while her baby suckled at her burnt breast. Hiroshi stared at her, then turned with her to watch the tornado of fire swing around the corner and howl down on them.

  – retroact ends –

  3

  Haiman (a combination of human and AI) : the definition of this term has changed just as fast as the technologies involved have developed. First coined as a term of disapprobation when augs became available on the open market, it was soon adopted with pride by those who wore them. As augs developed, the term then became a bone of contention amongst those who were ‘auged’ – it soon becoming the case that
only those wearing the newest and most powerful augs were considered truly ‘haiman’. If you wore a standard Solicon 2400 you were obviously inferior to those who wore a semi-AI crystal matrix aug buffered from direct interface by band-controlled optic and aural links. Et cetera. Then with the development of gridlinking enabling true download to the human mind, those who only wore augs were no longer considered haiman. The consequent off-shoot of this technology, enabling the downloading of human minds to crystal, led some to claim that only the entities thus engendered were genuinely haiman. However, the general populace ignored this contention, and further developments in such technologies have caused the term to be applied with indiscriminate abandon. It is currently the fashion to describe only as haiman those who are both gridlinked and augmented by the latest cyber proprostheses – the carapace and sensory cowl. But they themselves, though adopting the term with equanimity, believe a true haiman is the unbuffered amalgam of human and AI, with its resultant synergy. Such beings have existed – Iversus Skaidon and the Craystein computer became such a one, but its lifespan was measured in seconds. The haiman ideal is to achieve the same result, but stick around for rather longer.

  – From ‘Quince Guide’ compiled by humans

  I am now a murderess.

  It was something for Orlandine to contemplate while her carapace loaded all those files she had stored for convenience in the memory spaces of her interface sphere. Most of it was technical specs for the Dyson project, memcordings from other haimans who worked on similar though much smaller projects, and various sub-personas of a search-engine format. While these loaded she searched the inventory of the project ships on standby and found one suited to her requirements. The Heliotrope was loaded with equipment ready for setting up a small facility on one of the Dyson sections, and it was U-space capable. She definitely needed that last option: to at first mislead, then as a future reserve. She set automated systems to fuel it to capacity and to load further supplies, but only for as long as it would take her to actually reach the ship.

  With all the required files downloaded from the sphere to her carapace, Orlandine now turned her attention to other information already retained in the carapace itself. Personal information. She honed down fragmentary memories from all those stored from her time with Shoala. She dared not attempt a cut and paste job on any of them, as that process could be detected, so loaded to the sphere only those memories where there had been some disagreement between herself and the dead man. It was with some discomfort that she discovered there to be so few. One of the older subpersonas she supplied with the parameters of a search for any information concerning Shoala’s personal life, then set its internal clock back three months. She then erased and overwrote its retrieval memory, so it would appear this was done under some stress. The search parameters themselves she then scrubbed and overwrote with the parameters for a technical search. She left that subpersona in the sphere. Now she wrote fragments of code, each tailored to read like overspill from an attempt to reengineer her own personality, and placed them in the sphere’s memspaces. Then that was it, there was no more she could do without it all looking rather suspicious.

  Any good forensic AI would be able to reveal the original parameters of the subpersona, then, taking into account the code fragments, hopefully conclude some machine-based psychosis on her part, and delve no further. Most likely the investigators sure to come looking here would be concentrating on information more relevant to finding out where she had gone.

  All done.

  Orlandine ordered a primary detach and felt the clamps disengage from behind her carapace. She pushed herself upright and stood with the carapace clinging to her back like some large flat metallic louse – ribbed armour extending from the base of her spine to a sensory cowl stretching up behind her head, pincers engaged into her skull, collar bones and her hip bones, interface plugs clamped behind her ears. She stretched her neck, the carapace turning smoothly with her, then dipped her head to look down at her body. She was naked, and felt strangely vulnerable. It was rather uncommon for haimans to walk around the station like this. Nakedness had not been frowned on within the Polity for some centuries, but haimans generally tended to wear some sort of clothing to partially conceal their shameful humanity. Too late to do anything about this now, however, for the only coveralls in her sphere’s dispenser were made to be donned after she removed her carapace. They would not fit over it.

  She hit the exit pad and a segment of the sphere’s skin revolved aside. The gangway she stepped upon overlooked an internal space in which hung a hologram of the Dyson project. It ran in real time, and from viewing piers people could enlarge any part of the display and call up detailed analyses of what was happening there. This facility was laid on for the entirely human visitors who occasionally came here. Orlandine strode along the gangway until she came opposite to the entrance to Shoala’s sphere. She paused there, wondered if the clues to psychosis she had left behind were really so false, and for a moment just could not move on. Then she remembered what this was all about, and felt a sudden loosening inside her, a brief adrenal surge of excitement. She was free now: free to do as she pleased, free to be all she could be.

  A drop-shaft took her up to the residential level, whence a carpeted corridor led her on to her own quarters.

  ‘Is he still interfaced?’

  She turned. It was Maybrem, their resident expert in helio-meteorology, who ran the predictive programs warning of sun-spots, solar flares and storms arising from the steady destruction of the gas giant. The man was dressed in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt running an animation of a tornado. It seemed very retro and was obviously meant as some subtle joke.

  ‘Shoala, you mean?’ she said, her voice catching despite herself.

  ‘Yeah – he’s normally the first down into the lounge. He’s so eager for human time, I sometimes wonder if he chose the right career.’ He eyed her up and down, taking in both her nakedness and her carapace. ‘There some problem?’

  Orlandine reached up and touched the hard edge of her cowl. ‘We’re still running some mass searches – rather a lot of ionization when the converter detached.’

  ‘I thought we predicted that?’

  I don’t really need a technical discussion now. ‘Just making sure. I’ll shed this in my quarters and join you soon.’ She moved on, noting a glint in his expression. No suspicion there, though – he obviously assumed she was taking her carapace back to her rooms prior to enjoying some entertainment with her partner.

  Eventually she entered her quarters, then went directly to her wardrobe. The doors slid aside at a nonverbal command. A similar command opened a safe in the back of it. For a moment she ignored this while finding and donning some knickers, and a pair of loose baggy trousers that belted around her hips below the carapace supports connected to her hip bones. Activating a little device in the belt then caused the trousers to shrink until skin-tight. She next pulled on enviroboots, and a backless green blouse specially designed to be worn with a carapace. From the safe she took out the Jain node – sealed up in its anti-nanite container – and dropped it into the blouse’s top pocket. She had put it away in the safe directly after Shoala observed it, wondering what self-destructive impulse made her leave it out on display in the first place. Next she found a carryall, and took it over to the display case, which she opened by sending a signal ahead of her. Into the carry-all went the rest of her collection, but nothing more. There seemed no point taking anything else, and she was all too aware that only twenty minutes remained before this place was rattled by a small nuclear explosion.

  From her quarters she headed directly to a drop-shaft distant from the one taking others to the Feynman Lounge. Only a couple of women passed her, one wearing an aug and the other nothing obvious, so she was probably gridlinked – there were few people here without an augmentation of some kind. They glanced at her without interest and continued conversing in low tones.

  Stepping into the drop-shaft, Orlandine knew
the worst was over, since she would find few of the higher-ranking haiman staff down in the shuttle bay. As she stepped out into that bay itself, a sudden horrible thought jerked her to a halt.

  Did I really need to kill Shoala?

  Yes, yes, she did . . . she ran the scenarios. She could not afford to live in the hope she would remain undiscovered, so must now flee, and as an overseer of one of the largest construction projects in the Polity her abrupt abandoning of her post would be thoroughly investigated by forensic AIs. Their attention would have focused on Shoala, and he, having nothing to hide, would have opened all his files and his mind to them. The inevitable discovery that she possessed a Jain node would result in Polity AIs expending huge resources in hunting her down. This way, however, they would think they only pursued a murderess, so the resources they expended would be limited . . . hopefully.

  This particular bay comprised a narrow area lined along its two longer sides by numerous one-man inspection pods – globular affairs containing one seat, simple controls, and ionic directional thrusters. A maglev strip ran down the centre of the floor towards a far airlock. Passing many empty spaces for pods, Orlandine strode along briskly until she reached the first of them on one side, turned and stepped through its open side door. Automatically, as soon as she plumped herself down in the seat, the door closed and the pod manoeuvred out on to the maglev strip. She strapped herself in, and rather than control the vehicle through her carapace as the signals might be traced, took hold of the manual joystick. With a low hum the pod buoyed up on the maglev field and wafted towards the airlock, which consisted of an inner shimmer-shield and an outer hard door. The pod slid through the shield, halted while the iris door opened, then fell out into the night.

  Above her the Heliotrope rested in docking clamps, attached to the station by various umbilicals. The long sleek ship terminated at its prow in a forked pincerlike extrusion. This was for manipulating large objects in space, and was another reason why Orlandine had chosen this particular ship. Turning her pod over so that the side of the station now appeared as a plain of steel below her, she pushed the joystick forwards. Drawing close she sent a simple signal, and an irised lock opened in the vessel’s hull. Soon she manoeuvred the pod to dock, then abandoned it to enter, and finally take her place in an interface sphere inside the ship.