by Neal Asher
‘Such minds?’
Another package now.
‘Are you sure this Technician has a mind?’
‘That will be for you to ascertain.’
‘And the relevance of my present project?’
‘Events concerning Penny Royal’s demise have been a closely guarded secret. That black AI died because it tried to install the recorded mind of one of the Atheter into one of its animal descendants, a gabbleduck. Perhaps now you can start working things out for yourself?’
‘Yes, I think I’m beginning to see the pattern.’
‘Then I can leave this to you?’
‘You can, though it will take me at least three years to get to Masada.’
‘The situation is not critical – not yet.’
As Amistad pondered that ‘not yet’ he felt some chagrin. He had just been ‘volunteered’ to a task similar to Jerusalem’s, only in his case the long-dead race was the Atheter. He had just filled a position that had remained vacant ever since the Atheter were named, and it was just right, for it seemed that entire alien race had succumbed to a kind of mass insanity. It gave him some comfort that the vast intelligence named Jerusalem could get so much so right, for such an intelligence was needed precisely where it was, watching over that lethal technology out there. Then, eyeing the twitching of one tentacle tip, Amistad also felt a degree of satisfaction in knowing that Jerusalem could also get some things entirely wrong.
Masada (Solstan 2451 – 14 Years after the Rebellion)
Gravmotor rumbling in his guts, the scorpion war drone Amis-tad descended towards a building surrounded by swampy wilderness. His companion descended on a parallel course – just a ball of black spines three metres across.
From up here the building looked like a black sun surrounded by the white rays of plasticrete walkways spearing out into the surrounding flute grasses. Amistad settled lower, down towards one of the walkways, the black disc revealing itself as a domed roof constructed of photo-electric glass – a material often used in remote Polity buildings. This then, was the place. Having arrived on Masada only a few months previously, it had taken Amistad a little while to orient, and to really understand what was required of him. The Polity needed data, about Jeremiah Tombs, about the Technician, and about the entire Atheter race and what had driven it to self-extinction. This building housed an Atheter AI, though a rather reticent one, and here seemed a good a place to start as any.
Penny Royal landed seconds before him, gently on the rhizome mat and then rolling towards the building, spines shifting like a starfish’s feet. As Amistad finally settled on a walkway, he studied his companion pensively. They didn’t call them black AIs because of their colour; they called them that because they were the arch bogey men of the Polity around whom no one was safe. After extracting the bitter darkness from Penny Royal’s mind and putting the AI back together, Amistad had kept it with him because it might retain knowledge about the thing that had attacked it, and which seemed likely to have some bearing on events here. Having restored Penny Royal to apparent sanity, this entity had become Amistad’s responsibility too, and he could not deny a lingering fascination. However, he still wondered if he had made this complex and puzzling entity entirely safe. Keeping Penny Royal around was risky at least.
Amistad returned his attention to their destination, now seeing the supporting ring of pillars below the dome. The whole building looked like an old Greek temple long abandoned here. He stalked towards it, the walkway dipping under his weight, and considered how this thing had arrived on Masada.
The planet from which the artefact housed here originated had been named Shayden’s Find after the woman who discovered this thing, and who died there. It would be so easy, Amistad thought, to see what had happened on that world as part of a pattern, for the Jain-infected madman who had obliterated the Masadan Theocracy had gone there earlier, but to do so would be to lapse into the kind of conspiracy theory that Humans, who did not really understand statistics, tended to lapse into. It was coincidence, just that.
A single rocky slab, a small tectonic plate adrift on a sea of magma, had been that planet’s only enduring feature. This object could not have survived on such a world but for one circumstance: the magma had accumulated and solidified around a large flat object unaffected by the heat. The woman Shayden went there to study this object, and found that some fragments of its incredibly tough and durable substance had broken away – enough to retrieve and study thoroughly. This substance, something like diamond, also bore certain similarities to memcrystal. Out of curiosity Shayden had attached an optic interface to one piece, and the reams of code feeding back through it astounded her. She had discovered something very important. It was an artefact, later confirmed as being too young to be a product of the Jain, and too old to be something the Csorians made. A product of the Atheter then. But a piece of memcrystal the size of the last joint of a man’s thumb could store a Human mind, so what did such a mass of crystal contain? The mind of a god? The stock-market transactions of an entire galactic civilization? Alien porn tapes and family albums? Atheter blogs?
Penny Royal reached the pillars first, folded itself flat and clattered through, expanded into a ball again and rolled on to settle at the centre, shape more oblate now, tentacles squirming out from between the spines. Reaching the pillars, Amistad had to turn himself sideways to squeeze through, finally clanging down on a floor of ceramal gratings. Peering down he saw that a layer of mud had collected below the gratings, perhaps trailed in by the local wildlife, maybe even by gabbleducks. In this mud, over the past twenty years, flute grasses had germinated and spread their rhizome mat. Only the stumps of grass stalks were visible however, the maintenance robot residing in one of the pillars here having cleared the area before Amistad’s arrival. The war drone moved over by his companion, reached down with one claw, closed its tips in one grating a couple of metres across, and flipped it aside, used the sharp inner edge of a claw to cut around the space exposed, then scraped up a mat of rhizome and mud and tossed that aside too. Beneath lay a flat surface of incredibly tough green crystal.
‘Here,’ said Amistad.
Penny Royal flipped one eye-stalk from its mass, blinked a hellish red eye and replied didactically, ‘Anywhere.’
Next the black AI extruded a single tentacle. This limb, ten centimetres thick, seemed to be made of liquid glass inside which things shifted and quivered like the internal workings of a diatom. The tentacle terminated in a tubeworm head, which Penny Royal opened out and pressed down against the crystal. The star of fronds the tentacle opened out into melded against the surface, then started to sink into it. Amistad took a wary pace back and as quietly as possible brought his internal weapons systems online.
A science vessel, the Hourne, was specially constructed to retrieve this artefact from Shayden’s Find, and it was duly retrieved. Next the AI of that vessel had made connections with it, to supply it with energy and look inside. What the artefact contained immediately came to life and seized control of both AI and vessel. Subsequent negotiations had resulted in it being deposited here. It had just wanted to be dumped, hadn’t requested anything else, not even power to keep it active. But the Polity AIs had decided otherwise, building this structure and ensuring a power supply, connecting up projectors, sensors and some defences.
Amistad now swung round to study the surrounding pillars with their inset consoles, a deeper sensor probe revealing other equipment inside the pillars. Though all this technology remained active in itself, for two decades it hadn’t received any instructions from the entity residing in the crystal below his metal feet.
‘Anything?’ Amistad enquired.
‘You know when I know.’
It seemed evident that the Atheter AI here had made a personal choice to cease communicating, that if it wished it could communicate once again. The Polity had respected that choice, even though the likely vast store of data it contained could be very useful. Generally, Polity AIs were prepare
d to play a waiting game. However, for a war drone, impatience was a programmed-in trait, whilst for something like Penny Royal there were few rules that could be applied.
‘Response,’ Penny Royal noted.
‘Good.’
If Amistad was to be the prime expert on all things Atheter, he wanted the information that could be obtained here. The planetary governor of Masada, an AI called Ergatis, had warned against doing anything like this and lodged its protest with Earth Central. To no effect, for Amistad had carte blanche.
‘Definitely – ’ began Penny Royal, then fell silent as another huge being joined them.
The massive pyramidal gabbleduck squatted off to one side, seemingly in deep shadow, though that was certainly some effect of the projection. Its forelimbs were folded across its belly and its bill rested down on its chest as if it were dozing. Its eyes were closed and a deep rumbling sound permeated the air. Was it snoring?
‘Keep doing whatever you’re doing,’ Amistad instructed, then addressing the gabbleduck, ‘What should I call you?’
Just a slight twitch from the hologram, nothing more. Amis-tad waited, then turned to inspect Penny Royal as the black AI made a strange hissing sound, its spines rubbing together like dry reeds.
‘Oblivion,’ said a deep sonorous voice.
The gabbleduck’s head was up now, and all its eyes gleaming emerald. A shriek abruptly issued from Penny Royal as it rose from the floor, light glaring from its internal workings. Something snapped then cracked, and a spine shot away, its base a tetrahedral box from which a tentacle trailed – the one attached to the green crystal below. The spine tumbled through the air, stretching the tentacle straight at the limit of its flight, then slammed down against the gratings. The gabbleduck hologram shimmered, winked out, then abruptly clouds of steam began issuing from the gratings.
‘Out of here,’ Amistad instructed.
Penny Royal shot through between the pillars first, rolling across rhizome, spines jabbing deep and sizzling as it used the damp soil to cool itself. Behind, the steam issuing from within the building turned to boiling smoke which, when it occasionally cleared, revealed the AI below glowing a hot orange. But the thing had withstood temperatures much higher than this, so would not be damaged, unless it was deliberately damaging itself.
‘What did you get?’ Amistad asked when Penny Royal ceased to roll and sizzle.
‘Instruction,’ the black AI replied.
‘Like what?’
‘Euphemistically, to go away.’
‘It doesn’t want to talk.’
‘Very definitely.’
Heretic’s Isle
‘His legs didn’t stop working back at Triada Compound fourteen years ago,’ said Sanders. ‘He came out of it aboard the troop transport as we brought him here, just after I’d cleaned him up and changed his clothing.’
‘Diagnostics?’ enquired the huge scorpion drone.
She glanced at the big machine. She would have to get used to its blunt and sometimes patronizing manner, since it was now apparently her boss. She’d received her orders directly from Earth Central and though she could question them, that was the limit of it. Anyway, it seemed things were changing. At first she’d felt herself rebelling, until she understood that feeling stemmed from a complacency that had grown in her over the last decade and a half. Here she had used her self-proclaimed duty of looking after her charge as a cover so she could hide herself away from the world and pursue lengthy academic studies of Polity medical science, Masadan history and the biology of the Worry Island chain. Now she understood that, she was impatient for change. Hence her recent radical pursuit of change in herself.
‘Yes, his medical implants told the tale, as did the readings from his prosthetic,’ she replied.
As they strolled along the beach Sanders shut down the shimmer-shield of her Polity breather mask and tentatively took a breath. The air smelled just like it would on a beach on Earth but, prior to the nanosurgery she had undergone, after a few breaths she should have been feeling the lack of oxygen. However, the lungs in her chest, the blood in her veins and her muscle matter were substantially different after her three-week sojourn in a somnolence tank, being taken apart and put back together again by the AI surgeon. Alveoli density in her lungs was now three times what it had been, and the extra formed of a semi-organic film much more efficient than the remaining original – a film that actually cracked CO2. Her haemoglobin levels were double what they were before, complemented by oxygen-gathering nanomachines that operated from the artificial portions of her lungs and that also collected excess carbon for excretion through her kidneys. Her muscles burned oxygen more efficiently than before – much of the dross created by parasitic DNA had been removed.
‘And that tale is?’ enquired the drone.
Of course this creature had no need of air, just water, which it processed through its internal fusion reactor. And, since this creature was a battle spec drone, it probably also had methods of generating power from every other source available. It probably could breath oxygen, just didn’t need to.
‘He can walk – all that part of him is functional – he just won’t walk.’ Sanders paused to gaze up towards the sanatorium perched at the top of the slope ahead. The Theocracy had used it as an interrogation camp, and though the internees had been moved to City Hospital before she arrived, she shuddered on remembering some of the equipment she had found there when setting the place up as a hospital for badly injured survivors of the Brotherhood. Of course, they were all gone now; cured of their ills and coming under the Polity Intervention Amnesty. Only Jeremiah Tombs remained.
‘Won’t walk?’
‘I’ve tried everything,’ she said. ‘It’s why I had him put in a wheelchair rather than an exoskeletal suit – I want his imagined debility to inconvenience him more, in the hope it will drive him to lose it. But that doesn’t seem to be working.’ Understatement of the hour, since Tombs had remained in that chair for fourteen years. She glanced at the drone, but there was no point trying to read an expression there. ‘The problem lies inside his skull – that area I was specifically ordered to avoid. If I’d been allowed just a little more freedom to act I could have replaced that damned head prosthetic of his – regrown all those burnt-out nerves and filled in all those little holes bored through the bone.’
‘It is necessary,’ said the drone. ‘However, it’s interesting that he has retained the use of everything above his waist. Does he do anything with his hands?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, perhaps, make sculptures?’
‘He draws,’ she replied.
Once it became apparent just three years ago that Jem wanted to draw, when he started scribing pictures on the floor of his special bathroom with his own excrement, she provided him with the required materials. Fortunately he took to them well and stopped his experiments with the previous medium.
‘What does he draw?’
‘Molluscs,’ she replied.
It had taken her some time to figure out what his drawings depicted – all those geometric shapes in intricate and specific patterns that he laboured over for so long, before enclosing them in a circle and then consigning them to the floor. Only one day when she was walking out here and had seen penny molluscs clinging to the shady side of a boulder did she realize what he was drawing. Perhaps the time it had taken her to realize this, despite her studies of island biology, was a good indicator of how far she had disappeared into her own head.
‘Interesting,’ said the drone, but that was all.
‘When are we going to put his mind back together?’ Sanders asked.
It pleased Jem that the terrace was so wide, but he wished it was wider, so he could get further away from that thing. Why it came here to conduct these nonsensical conversations with Sanders he didn’t know. He just wished it would go away and never come back. Raising his head again he peered across at it. The machine had been fashioned in the shape of a creature from Earth. From
his computer he had learned it bore the shape of an arachnid called a scorpion, though that might not necessarily be the truth, since the information they allowed him was woven with their lies.
‘You know the answer to that,’ the scorpion drone replied, shifting about on tiles the colour of a drowned man’s skin.
Jem felt the terrace vibrate underneath his chair. He shuddered and dropped his gaze back to his sketch pad, set his pencil to erase and obliterated the shape there, returned the pencil to draw mode and began again.
‘Yes, when you have the answers you require.’
Sanders reclined in a comfortable sun chair, a drink on the stone table beside her, its ice glinting rainbows. She now wore a skin-tight bodysuit that terminated just above her breasts and at the top of her thighs. Jem wished she would dress more appropriately. Women should not expose so much of themselves to a man’s gaze, much less to the gaze of one of these godless machines.
She continued, ‘It occurs to me, Amistad, that you’ve more interest in the state of his mind as it is than in any answers it might provide.’
‘You are absolutely right,’ the drone replied, and Sanders sat forward with sudden interest. ‘But it’s only when I obtain those answers will I fully understand what has been done to him and thus satisfy that interest. And we are much closer now.’
‘Closer?’
‘It is,’ said the drone, ‘a Human survival trait, this ability to forget pain.’
‘No one forgets pain.’
‘You misunderstand me.’ The drone gestured to Jem with one claw, and he concentrated on his drawing, pretending he wasn’t listening. ‘The AI experience of memory is utterly direct. When an AI recalls, it re-experiences the entire event memorized in every detail, including all sensation. When a Human recalls an event it is a mere tracery in the mind, a dull copy with those sensations that might adversely effect the survival of the organism either erased or filtered. You do remember pain, but you never directly experience the memory of it.’
Sanders grunted in amusement. ‘If women of the far past had directly remembered the pain of childbirth the Human race would be extinct.’