by Neal Asher
‘War machine?’ said Shree breathlessly.
‘Maybe an original,’ Grant replied, then swallowed to try and relieve the tightness in his throat.
The hardfield blinked out and the Technician slammed to the ground, then accelerated off to the left leaving in its wake a long cloud of broken flute-grass stems. Was it running? No, it curved round, continuing to build up speed. Penny Royal now began to re-form, first flattening out, all its spines directed upwards, then this mass peeling off the ground on a thick plait of tentacles and cupping like a radar dish towards the now approaching hooder, stalked red eyes folding out on either side for triangulation. Grant saw the inner spines of that cup fold in, connect, and from them a distortion, like a ball of glass worms, writhed into being before the cup, then shot towards the Technician.
‘What the hell is that?’ Shree hissed.
‘Beats me,’ Grant replied.
‘It is hardfield energy formatted to induce a viral attack within the Technician’s systems,’ Tombs stated.
They both turned to gaze at him. He was up on one knee now, his hands on his raised knee and his chin resting on them.
‘How the fuck do you know that?’ Grant asked.
Tombs stared at the soldier, the alien back in his face. ‘It is obvious,’ he stated.
The worm-thing unravelled to strike the forefront of the hooder’s cowl, turning into a wave of energy travelling the length of its body. The creature nosed into the ground, peeling up a mountain of debris before it. Even from where they hid they felt the impact, the ground shuddering underneath them. But then the creature rose again, skated over that mountain, came down with its body arcing like a caterpillar, then snapping straight. Glass worms in the air again, issuing from between the Technician’s segments and corkscrewing along the length of its body, then on towards Penny Royal. As they struck, the black AI just lost coherence, came apart like a flower losing its petals, turned into a cloud of spines loosely connected by a cage of tentacles.
‘Fuck,’ said Shree, and took a moment to check the action of her thin-gun. Grant glanced at her, certain now that she wouldn’t be using that weapon first on herself. He abruptly knew her thoughts. Maybe if she wounded Tombs and even Grant himself, she would be able to get away while the hooder fed.
Penny Royal began to reform, components slotting back into place. From this mass a proton beam speared out, struck the Technician’s cowl, but only half a second before that cowl slammed straight into the AI. The entire hooder shuddered to an abrupt halt, and for half a kilometre behind the AI the ground rippled, split, and ejected fumaroles of mud. The immense sound bludgeoned the ears, as if from some massive building coming down. The very air seemed to strain and something, some very cord of existence, seemed to snap. The Technician backed away and Penny Royal hung off the ground for a moment, shivering, then just started to fall apart, steam rising from where its components landed in churned mud.
‘Now we die,’ said Grant as the Technician’s cowl swung towards them.
‘Where’re your damned Polity satellite weapons?’ Shree asked viciously.
‘They won’t use them, not against this.’ Yes, Tombs was valuable because of what his mind contained, but the Polity AIs wouldn’t destroy its original source to save him, or them. Grant turned towards her, but she wasn’t looking at him, but peering past him at Tombs. Grant glanced round. Tombs had stepped down from the islet of dry rhizome and begun walking out to meet his nemesis.
‘Get back here!’ Grant yelled, struggling forward then tumbling down from the little islet, regaining his feet and going after Tombs. Was the man trying to sacrifice himself to save them? What the hell was he doing?
The Technician rose, its cowl up and flaring, opening out in a way Grant had never seen before, from any hooder. The movement of its feeding apparatus seemed odd, as if it were trying to form patterns like data maps. Its eyes, Grant noticed, weren’t red, but a dull yellow. Tombs came to a halt.
‘It is all right,’ he said, but whether he was addressing Grant or the monster before them Grant didn’t know.
Abruptly the hooder bowed, nosed closer along the ground, its massive cowl slowly drawing to a halt, its rim just a metre from Tombs’s chest. The man just stood there, arms akimbo, head tilted to one side. Then he reached out and that cowl eased closer. He rested his hand on it for a moment, before abruptly turning away. Crazy smile there, utterly weird. Behind him the Technician once again set itself in motion, swinging away and propelling itself off across the plain. Tombs dipped his head, pulled the string to which he had attached a penny mollusc shell up over it, then tossed this to Grant, who fumbled it and had to stoop to pick it up.
‘Your AIs want answers, don’t they?’ Tombs enquired.
‘Yeah, sure they do.’
‘Well I have one for them.’ He gestured to the shell Grant held. ‘Not all the Atheter chose to destroy their civilization, and some tried to save things by encoding them in the life of this world.’
Grant gazed at the pattern on the shell.
‘It means oblivion,’ Tombs told him. ‘But only one state of oblivion, one nuance of it.’
13
Taxonomic and genetic research bases, or Tagrebs, look like giant iron tulip flowers when stored in the vast holds of the research vessels that deliver them. Launched, a Tagreb maintains this shape during entry into a planetary atmosphere while its AI comes online. The AI then slows the Tagreb in lower atmosphere with fusion thrusters before finally descending to a chosen location using gravmotors. Upon landing the flower opens, folds four petals down to the ground. From this five plasmel domes inflate – one at the centre and one over each petal. Their internal structures – floors, ceilings, walls and stairs – are inflated at the same time. The AI then decides how best to continue.
On Masada the Tagreb AI, Rodol, first injected a thick layer of a resin matrix into the boggy ground below to protect the base from tricone depredations, before injecting the same substance into the hollow walls and floors of the structure itself. Next the AI woke its telefactors, which immediately took the requisite materials outside the base to construct an electrified perimeter fence and four gun towers. Unusually, these towers were supplied in this case with proton cannons capable of punching holes through thick armour, for some of the natives were anything but friendly. After three days the base was ready for the next stage. Automated landers descended inside the fence and the telefactors began bringing in supplies: food, bedding, nanoscopes, full-immersion VR suites, soaps and gels, nano, micro and submacro assembler rigs, an aspidistra in a pot, autodocs, autofactories, holocams, coffee makers . . . Every item was slotted into its place or plugged in.
On day six Rodol brought the fusion reactor fully online, supplying power to the multitude of sockets throughout the base. Lights, embedded in the ceilings, were ready to come on. Sanitary facilities were ready to recycle waste. Rodol stabbed filter heads down into the ground to suck up water, which was first cracked for its oxygen to bring the internal atmosphere to requirements, and thereafter pumped into holding tanks. The Humans, haimans and Golem arrived shortly afterwards; disembarking from shuttles with massive hover trunks gliding along behind them. Only a few days after was it discovered that the five gravplatforms were not nearly enough for those who wanted to do field work. Grudgingly, Rodol cleared Polity funds to pay the local population for twenty aerofans and five fat-tyred, all-terrain vehicles. Then the research began . . .
– From THE MASADAN CHRONICLE
‘Penny Royal?’ Amistad enquired.
‘Fzzzt,’ came the reply, but along with that an image feed of the three Humans now out of concealment, and the Technician off in the distance, still moving away.
The albino hooder wasn’t tracking the death hormone like the other hooders, which further confirmed Penny Royal’s analysis of Tombs’s earlier statement: the Technician was once again fully functional, and had aims beyond the usual drives of a hooder. Doubtless it had brought itself to this state
through its twenty years of napping. It was also damned dangerous; catching, copying and reformatting Penny Royal’s patterned hardfield attack was something Amistad doubted he himself could have done before his recent upgrade. Also the proton beam hit had caused little damage, somehow refracted through another design of hardfield. Amistad knew of few Polity war drones that could take Penny Royal apart so quickly.
Unable to keep still, the big scorpion drone moved to the edge of the viewing platform as he further considered what had been learned. Tombs’s initial reaction indicated that the man had known the Technician wasn’t there to kill them, though his subsequent reaction and him hiding himself with the others indicated a mind in a perpetual state of flux. Penny Royal had already recorded this cerebral activity; occasional increases in function, neural activity ramped up to levels the Human brain could not sustain for long, a side-effect being the kind of physical muscular integration only found in those who had either loaded martial arts programs or had trained for years. Knowledge, whose source could not be the original Tombs, was also surfacing in the man’s mind.
Tombs had known precisely the nature of Penny Royal’s defence against the Technician. It was the kind of knowledge possessed only by those once involved or still involved in high-tech warfare, and Tombs’s experience only extended to Theocracy rail-guns, chemically propelled projectiles and the usual bottom-end energy weapons.
Other comments were of note. Tombs opined that not all the Atheter had wanted to destroy themselves – a conjecture Amistad had already considered because the likelihood of every member of a high-tech civilization agreeing on such a matter must be positively minuscule. The man had stated that this was why the tricones ‘ground so fine’, which perfectly fitted current knowledge. The tricones chewed solid objects down to a size of no more than just over three millimetres and, now having applied this measure to what it knew about Atheter memstorage, Amistad had ascertained that pieces of an Atheter memstore of this size were not large enough to retain fully identifiable mental structures and would chemically degrade within a few centuries, wiping out anything else remaining in them. The purpose of the tricones was to grind up the remnants of the Atheter civilization but, more importantly, it was to destroy those Atheter who had tried to save themselves by storing their minds.
Then, of course, Tombs’s brief exchange with Grant.
Oblivion.
‘How did you miss that?’ Amistad routed his enquiry to the distant Tagreb.
Rodol took its time replying. ‘I’ve transmitted the information to our foremost expert on the Gabble – Shardelle Garadon – along with all the penny mollusc shell patterns we have on file.’
‘I’m looking at them now,’ said the drone, those patterns visible to him in a virtual mental space. ‘And you still haven’t answered my question.’
‘The Atheter themselves missed it,’ Rodol grumped.
‘You know as well as I,’ said Amistad, ‘that those Atheter who did not choose oblivion probably stored the shell patterns as alleles within the penny mollusc genome, set and ready for some later mutation or unravelling telomere to release them.’
‘Yeah, probably.’
That the Tagreb AI had missed the glyphs of the Atheter language incised into the shells of those molluscs perfectly demonstrated the necessity of the AI approach of feeding different minds different sets of ‘facts’. Knowledge blindness was equally endemic amidst all intelligences, whether their minds ran in crystal or grey watery fat.
‘Why didn’t we pick up on this stuff from the Atheter AI?’ Amistad asked.
‘Because all its communications have been in a Human format, and before it effectively shut down it was parsimonious with its knowledge and about as Delphic in its communications as Dragon.’ Rodol paused. ‘You are up to date on current knowledge, Amistad – now you are a prime, nothing is being kept from you.’
Amistad had been wondering if he himself had been fed a ‘different set of facts’ that excluded stuff from the Atheter AI. Rodol’s claim that this wasn’t so did nothing to reassure the drone.
‘So what else have we missed?’
‘We are reviewing data files, and are now looking for hidden knowledge,’ said Rodol. ‘And already some anomalies are coming to light – some unusual redundancies.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like it seems that the Atheter art department was overrun with subversives.’
‘What?’
‘Thus far it appears that beyond saving the Atheter written language for posterity, the penny mollusc shell pattern serves no other function. It neither camouflages nor is it one of those preposterous developments related to mating.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Amistad. ‘I do hope you haven’t passed this on to Chanter yet.’
‘Perhaps best to let him find out about it later.’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘So tell me about redundancy.’
‘Further assessment of the studies of the photoactive amoebae in a hooder’s eyes reveal that producing light does not serve to increase the survivability of either the amoebae or their host, and that the amoebae contain apparently redundant and extremely complex mechanisms to modulate the frequency, direction and colour of that light, all across the spectrum from 350 ultraviolet to 780 infrared, which we know is the precise spectrum covered by a gabbleduck’s vision.’
‘Go on.’
‘Also of note is that it is the differences in this modulation that led us to classifying over four thousand separate genera of photoactive amoebae – there is very little else to distinguish each genus.’
‘And this means?’
‘Image files.’
Had some Atheter, facing extinction, stored its family snapshots in the amoeba genome?
‘Do you have any clear yet?’
‘Yes, we do have some fragments.’
The image file arrived in an instant. It showed a complicated tangle of tubes interlinking a variety of globular shapes. Holes were punched into the interiors of these objects, and in the darkness of some of these glinted things suspiciously like eyes. Amistad chose one hole and took magnification up to its pixel limit to reveal the head of a gabbleduck, no, an Atheter, something metallic woven across the top of its bill. Next swinging perspective to one side, Amistad saw that the whole structure seemed to be made of a basket weave of flute-grass stems.
‘Their cities sang,’ Rodol noted.
‘An appropriate moment for me to butt in,’ some other abruptly interjected.
As Rodol tumbled away, the one interjecting leapfrogging from the Tagreb AI and occupying all the bandwidth of the communication, Amistad felt a momentary anger at the interruption, suppressed at once when he realized its source.
‘Appropriate in what way?’
This new intelligence reached out and touched Amistad’s mind, replaying something that had come direct from Penny Royal. The drone saw Tombs telling Grant, ‘Its weaver did not choose oblivion, soldier. So many did not, which is why the tricones grind so fine.’
‘They wove their cities,’ said Amistad.
‘Their whole technology was based on the weaving process,’ replied the Earth Central AI, ruler of the Polity. ‘It indicates that Masada was truly their Homeworld and that flute grasses are a natural product of evolution, and not part of an engineered ecology, though that is beside the point. The point, rather, is this.’
An image file arrived, digital recording, Polity format, data packet accompanying it. Amistad gazed upon a massive horn-shaped object poised over a green gas giant, sucking substance from that Jovian world like some monstrous leech – a woven horn-shaped object with high-scale density and evidently alien technology packing its interior. Running the timeline forward Amistad watched the thing complete its feeding, ignite a nuclear blast behind it and hurtle out from the giant, to then suddenly stretch, down to nothing, spearing away into the dark.
‘Its rather novel U-jumps are limited to ten light years at a time,’ Earth Central explaine
d. ‘We suspect both its method of U-jumping and their limited distance are not usual, but due to an imbalance in its U-space engine.’
‘The Atheter device,’ Amistad stated.
‘Yes, and coming your way.’
Checking projections in the data package, the drone saw that, at its current rate of travel, this thing would arrive over Masada within five days.
‘And what am I supposed to do about this?’ Amistad asked.
‘You’ll deal with it, of course,’ Earth Central replied succinctly, then cut the connection.
Chanter used his cutter on the curtain of rhizome, stepped out of his mudmarine, stomped across the fallen vegetable matter then stood with his arms folded and a chunk of anger rolling in his gut. He certainly was interested in this product of the Technician, but rather resented Amistad co-opting him from chasing after that entity and employing him as a damned taxi driver. He tapped one webbed foot against the damp ground, making wet platting sounds, and peered at the three approaching.
The woman, apparently, worked for that brothel keeper of media whoredom, Earthnet, so he dismissed her from his consideration. The soldier was more interesting, since he had been there when the Technician did what it did and had then, although Tombs was a proctor, saved the man’s life. To Chanter this meant that despite his martial background, Grant might possess some understanding of the Technician and its work, might have seen something beyond prosaic reality, and might know art. Tombs himself was of greatest interest, and the amphidapt studied him closely.