by Neal Asher
"The Netcom 48," said Sylac, holding up that item.
Smaller than Sylac's own, the polished copper aug bore the same bean shape. It was probably better, but aug tech had yet to attain the stage where upgrading became a simple affair. It was not quite like replacing the crystal in your personal computer—brain surgery never was—so Moria understood why Sylac retained the one he wore.
"Yes, that's the one," Moria replied, as she finally stepped over the threshold.
"If you please." Sylac gestured with one surgically gloved hand towards the slab.
Moria stepped forwards reluctantly and groped around for ways to delay what must come. "I understand that self-installing augs are soon to be sanctioned."
Sylac grimaced. He glanced towards the autodoc, which drew back from the slab and hinged down, concealing all its glittering cutlery. Sylac had obviously instructed it to do this via his aug, perhaps to help put Moria at her ease.
"The early sensic augs were self-installing, until the first few deaths. Subsequently the investigating AI discovered that very few of the augs installed worked as they should—all failing to connect to all the requisite synapses. Some drove their owners into psychoses, others killed parts of their owners' brains."
"Is that what killed the ones who died?"
"In a sense. The nanofibre connections failed to untwine while being injected." Sylac shrugged. "Not much different from being stabbed through the head with a kebab skewer." Once again he gestured to the slab.
"And the improvement here?" Moria sat on the slab edge but was reluctant to lie down.
"Obviously I cannot guide every fibre to its synaptic connection. I guide trunks of fibres to the requisite areas of the brain and monitor the connection process, ready to intercede at any moment."
"Ah… that's good."
The nurse, who until then had been preoccupied at something on one of the side work surfaces, came over to grip her biceps and firmly but gently ease her back. Moria couldn't really resist. That would be ridiculous. Already she had DNA marked, and had approved all the documentation and paid over the required sum. She must go with this now. Lifting her legs up onto the table she lay back, her neck coming down into a V-shaped rest and her head overhanging the end of the table where various clamps were ready to be engaged. The nurse began tightening these clamps as the autodoc rose beside Moria and flicked out one of its many appendages. Something stung at the base of her skull and suddenly everything above her neck felt dosed with anaesthetic. Her face and scalp felt like a rubbery bag hanging loose on her skull. Vision became dark-framed and hearing distant, divorced from reality.
In the tradition of medical practitioners throughout history, when putting a patient in a situation like this, Sylac said, "Wonderful weather we've been having lately, don't you think?" as if he expected some reply.
Moria waved a hand in lieu of replying in the affirmative or nodding her head. She heard the sound of the autodoc humming as it moved on its pedestal behind her. In the dark corners of her vision she could see those shiny limbs moving. Something tugged at the side of her head behind her ear. She heard suction, then the high-speed whine of a drill.
"One of the problems with those self-installing augs was first getting through the skull," Sylac observed.
Now there came a crunch.
"There, the bone anchors are in."
Moria would have preferred to have been unconscious throughout this procedure, but installing an aug to an unconscious brain was not possible, not yet. Now a cold feeling invaded her skull, and an ache grew behind her ear then quickly faded.
"Of course the weather we've been having has had its usual untoward effect, don't you think?" Sylac asked.
Again a wave of her hand.
"Connecting to the chiasma and optic tracts. You should shortly be experiencing optic division, or instatement of the 'third eye' as it is sometimes called."
The weirdest sensation ensued. With her vision tunnelling she became more aware of the fact that she gazed through two eyes—the separation became more defined—but now it seemed a lid had just opened on a third eye. It lay nowhere she could precisely locate, and though aware of its existence, she saw nothing through it. Very odd.
"That went well enough and now we are connecting to the cranial nerve. Raise your fist when the status text appears. And hereafter I want you to make a fist for yes and a flat hand for no."
Almost immediately after Sylac spoke, blue text appeared in the vision of her third eye: STATUS > and blinked intermittently. Moria raised her fist. Sylac continued talking, mentioning "occipital pole, frontal pole, basal ganglia, pons" and the only word Moria recognised, "cerebellum."
"Now visualize the words 'search mode' and affirm when the words appear."
Doing as instructed, Moria felt something engage inside her head. She suddenly realised she could visualize those words as normal, or she could make another connection that threw those words up in her third eye:
SEARCH MODE >
Moria raised her fist.
"I want you to think of something, anything to seek information upon. Input the words, then affirm—you will know how."
SEARCH MODE > AUBRON SYLAC
To begin the search Moria mentally spoke the word go and sent it through the same channel as she sent the text.
NO NET CONNECTION. NO MEMSTORE.
"You have received two negatives for connection to the AI networks, and the internal storage of your aug?"
A fist.
"Good. Now we'll try something else. Try 'message mode."'
MESSAGE MODE >
RECIPIENT >
MESSAGE >
ATTACH >
"I am in your address book. Send me something."
RECIPIENT > AUBRON SYLAC
MESSAGE > IS IT ALL AS SIMPLE AS THIS?
ATTACH > NIL
Go, Moria told it, and the text blinked out.
SENT.
"No, in doing this we are testing the connections. This is simple text. When you have run through the tutorial and become accustomed to your aug you'll find you can send messages in any informational form—that form merely limited by your imagination. And of course, sending messages is the least of your augmentation's functions."
Feeling suddenly returned to her face and scalp, and the world expanded around her. Her world continued to expand throughout the ensuing tests Sylac conducted. She ran complex equations, analysed data sent to her by Sylac, created specific programs and tailored search engines, learnt how to speak mind to mind, designed a very basic virtuality, discovered that through her aug she could actually alter how her body operated for through it she could take over autonomic functions. If she wished, she could stop her own heart. It was only the beginning, she at once understood, and immediately asked herself, Why did I wait so long?
"You are not yet connected to the AI grid, nor to the standard networks run by the planetary servers. That connection will be made after you have run the tutorial. As you were told, prior to installation, you need to give yourself at least two weeks to run that tutorial and become acclimatized."
Moria gazed at herself in the mirror beside the door to Sylac's surgery. The polished copper aug nestled neatly behind her left ear, complementing the copper scarab in her right earlobe. She pushed back her short, black hair and smiled at herself. After shaking Sylac's still-gloved hand, she took her leave. Stairs led down to the street door and out from air-conditioned asepsis into a muggy Trajeen evening.
One of Trajeen's three moons, Vina, hurtled across the sky in one of the five transits it made throughout the night. A second moon, Sutra, sat just above the horizon and Abhid had yet to rise. Beside Sylac's surgery, Moria's hydrocar awaited, but she decided to walk for a while. She didn't think it would be a good idea driving, even though her car was linked to city control and would be shut down if she did anything stupid. She decided to stroll to the centre of Copranus City and there enjoy a glass or two of greenwine to celebrate—Sylac had not warned her not
to do anything like that.
On the street she noticed two examples of what Sylac had referred to as an untoward result of the clement weather they'd been experiencing. Two groundskate were hunching and flopping along the damp foam-stone, leaving slimy trails behind them. They were small examples—about a metre from wing tip to wing tip—but best avoided nonetheless. In themselves they weren't dangerous, but numerous people were injured each year after slipping on their trails, and sometimes if you got too close you ended up spattered with their slime.
Genfactored tulip trees lined the verges. They were in flower: yellow, blue and deep purple—the colours still evident in the fading light. In the street beyond Sylac's, jasmine hedges filled the air with a heavy, almost sickly perfume and, glancing beyond them, Moria observed microcosms of weird flora—genfactored and just plain alien. The houses behind these gardens were constructed of a local sandstone the colour of pine wood and similarly striated, their high-peaked roofs clad like lizard skin with shiny solar tiles. Bulbous chainglass windows occasionally revealed glimpses into luxurious homes, but then luxury was a standard in the Polity and people only lived impoverished lives as a matter of choice.
NET CONNECTION MADE
TUTORIAL LOADED >
Moria surveyed her surroundings, walked further until she came to a small park area in which a fountain cut cursive lines through the air above a wide pool containing giant lilies with flowers like purple claws, and shoals of small, blue flatfish in pellucid depths. All around her the scented air filled with the chirruping and occasional flutter of flying frogs. Finding a stone bench Moria seated herself and told her aug, Go.
VIRTUALITIES SELECT >
FANTASY REALMS
MODELLING REALITY
PREDICTION
EXPERIMENTAL
MANUFACTURING
The list scrolled endlessly down, but the tutorial chose the second on the list. Immediately, Moria found herself gazing into a blank white realm of infinite depth.
SELECT YOUR PLANETARY SYSTEM USING VOICE scrolled across her vision. In her head spoke the words: Trajeen planetary system—present moment.
Starlit space filled the void, with the Trajeen system truncated to fit within her perception. She observed the planet she stood upon and the relative positions of the three moons around it—Vina being the only one visibly moving. The sun seemed close and she could see the arch of a solar flare. A quarter-orbit round and twice the distance from Trajeen as that planet was from the sun, the gas giant Boh lay tilted and swirled through with bands of blue, orange and yellow, seven of its eight moons hanging like steel ball bearings around it and the much larger moon, Tangie, with its internal living ocean packed full of exotic seaweeds, was a jade sphere coiled with pearly cloud.
SELECT CONSOLE AND CHOOSE CURSOR.
Console and square expandable cursor.
Numerous icons and virtuality controls sprang into being, framing her present view. The square that appeared at the centre of her vision moved with the motion of her third eye, though the view itself remained fixed. She brought it over to one of the icons and a text box appeared: THIS CONTROL ALTERS YOUR POV IN THE SYSTEM. Of course, when Moria began to try out the icon, with the prompting and frequent intercession of the tutorial program, she discovered it was nowhere near that simple. She could call up a three-dee map and place her point of view on that, she could input coordinates, she could whip through the planetary system as if aboard some craft travelling at any speed she chose, she could also select the time of this POV, moving back into recorded images—when available—or into modelling mode in both the past and future. Moving on to try out the endless layered icons and controls she realised there seemed nothing she could not do, she just needed to find out how. She could place objects in the system, track and alter vectors, play "what if" by moving a planet, moving anything, changing, reformatting, adding or taking away. She could work out how to bring about certain events and track back to reality to see the many scenarios that could bring them about. It was endless.
"Aug trance," someone said.
Briefly she surfaced into the real world and saw a woman stabbing a thumb at her as she and a man strolled past. Both of them wore augs themselves and the man grinned at her knowingly.
The tutorial took her on to explore applied mathematics, chemistry, though she sidelined the vast potential in organic chemistry with its programs for modelling genfactored life forms. Two hours later, with her neck stiff and the sky purple-black and flecked with stars above her, she paused the tutorial.
SUBCONSCIOUS LEARNING? > the tutorial program suggested. Finding out what that was about took her a further ten minutes. The tutorial could cycle at a level just below consciousness, almost like sleep-teaching. She chose that and stood. Walking then in a strange fugue in which she could interact with the real world around her while the tutorial played just at the edge of perception, she went to find those glasses of greenwine. In a bar in the city centre she chatted with two runcible technicians who recognised her from the Trajeen runcible project. When they headed off she found herself a niche and called up images of the two cargo runcible gates, one tracking a slow orbit about Trajeen itself and the other lying in orbit about Boh, the gas giant.
Thus far it had only been possible to transmit small objects through runcibles—nothing larger than a twenty-person shuttle—and mostly they were planet based and used to transport humans. Now over Trajeen and Boh they had built gates which, in theory, should be able to expand their Skaidon warps like the meniscus of a bubble. It should be possible to send through large spaceships, even asteroids should their ore value be worth the effort. The project received much criticism: Why transport large ships through a gate when such vessels could use their own underspace drives to enter that continuum anywhere? Why transport ore asteroids when they can be refined in situ and the product from them transported? Moria's answer to those who asked her such questions was always, why not?
RUNCIBLE TECHNOLOGY? > the tutorial suggested, and Moria lost herself for a further two hours. When she finally went to find her hydrocar and instructed it to take her home on automatic, she understood why it was necessary for her to take time off. Two more weeks of this, and by then she would have acquired the basics, the very basics.
* * * * *
The area beyond the armoured wall had been smashed by explosions and scoured by fire. The walls, floor and ceiling were torn apart, insulation bulged like moss from the rents, and power cables and fried optics hung sizzling. Some of the jags of metal protruding nearby still glowed red and kicked out oven heat, and smoke hung thick and acrid in the air. This all became more disorientating because no grav-plates were functioning here, and Jebel lost any perception of up and down. Urbanus paused for a moment, then abruptly stooped and flung Jebel over his shoulder. Jebel closed his eyes as the Golem began negotiating his way, fast, through the lethal chaotic jungle of hot metal and smoking plastic. At some point pain and blood loss impinged, and Jebel lost consciousness.
Hiatus.
"They just had to find out… is that what you're saying?" said a woman.
"Yes, I think it must be," replied Urbanus.
Jebel opened his eyes and immediately felt a surge of nausea. He tried to keep it under control but spied a kidney dish containing a few pieces of bloody bone and a rind of flesh he realised must be his own. He leant over and puked, only then realising he lay on a surgical table. Glancing at his arm stump he saw that Urbanus had removed the biceps armour section and covered the raw end with an interface joint. But he felt better now, probably as a result of the contents of those empty synthetic-blood bags scattered on the floor, and whatever drugs Urbanus had pumped inside him. Now he focused on his companions.
"You survived," he managed.
Lindy Glick sat on the other surgical table in this small medbay. She had lost her translator gear and two of her front teeth, and a blue wound-dressing formed itself to the side of her skull. Jebel rather suspected that whatever mishap tore aw
ay the translator and damaged her mouth, had also torn her aug from the side of her head.
"Yeah, no thanks to our fucking AIs."
Jebel glanced at Urbanus. The Golem had lost syntheflesh all down his left-hand side. The metal of his upper arm, shoulder, side of his body, hip and upper leg lay exposed. He shrugged. "Don't look at me. I may be AI but I wasn't in charge of this shit-storm."
'"Sacrificial goat' I think is the old term." Lindy turned and spat out some blood. "They just had to put some people out there to find out how hostile these fuckers are." Now a boom echoed through the station, and Jebel surmised that the distant chattering clattering sounds he heard were from weapons fire. "I think they found out, don't you?" she added.
Jebel sat upright and swung his legs over the side of the table, watched for a moment while Urbanus placed some instrument against Lindy's upper mandible. He tried to aug into the station network but received only NO NET CONNECTION, and guessed that was due to some local security protocol. He cued a message for Cirrella to contact him the moment she could, since he guessed he would not be on time for dinner. Again he studied his arm stump. He was thinking his armour had not really served him very well until he turned his attention to the rest of his body.
His businesswear hung in tatters with one leg of his trousers burnt away. The composite armour underneath was scorched in many places and lumps of ceramal shrapnel were imbedded in his chest plate. Bearing in mind that he wore no head protection or gloves he considered himself lucky to have lost only an arm.
After a couple of sucking clicks, Urbanus extracted the instrument from Lindy's mouth, and stepped aside.
"How do they look?" she asked, exposing her two new teeth at Jebel.
"Lighter than your own, but better than the gap." He held up his stump. "I wouldn't mind the same."
Urbanus picked up a case, clicked it open and showed him the contents. "We don't really have the time to grow you a new one. This area has already been evacuated and we've been here too long. I'll fit it for you later. Now we must leave."