by Neal Asher
‘That is the nature of power.’
‘Yes, power.’ Amoloran issued instructions, but they went too fast for Dragon to ghost a copy and study them. ‘Whilst I accept your new gift, Behemoth, I reject the snare of your old one.’
Abruptly the chanting and prayer of the Septarchy Friars occupied over 50 per cent of the aug channels. This abruptly cut down the whole utility of the network, limiting the extent of communication, limiting the amount of data that could be transferred from person to person. It also made it a certainty, whilst it continued, that no one would reach ascendancy over the network and that there would be no one Dragon could ultimately control. Amoloran had seen the danger, perhaps not understanding the initial ascendancy of one individual, but certainly understanding that through the whole network Dragon might be able to grab hold of their minds.
‘Damn you Amoloran!’ Dragon cried, allowing its voice to fade, while its amusement grew. Amoloran would do precisely as predicted. He and all his fellow idiots believed that ultimately the Theocracy would bring down the Polity. Wasn’t faith stronger than machines? He was ambitious that this should happen under his own rule and had been pushing hard to that end. Dragon had given him a potent weapon against the Polity and he would certainly use it, and soon. This would sufficiently piss off the Polity AIs and they would come and stamp on him. Then they would find out about what had happened here on Masada two million years ago.
Now considering what it had set in motion, Dragon understood something else: the necessity of its own death. The mycelium had been used many years ago on a planet called Samarkand, with over thirty thousand deaths resulting, and the Dragon sphere that had delivered it there had paid the price of extinction. After Amoloran used the nano-mycelium again, the Polity AIs would soon identify its source as Dragon itself. Inevitably they would hunt down this particular aspect, this sphere of Dragon entire, and given the chance, would kill it too. Dragon did not want to flee, wanted to remain here to be part of and influence events, therefore it decided to pursue a course it had been considering for some time: to die, and live.
More data, coming in from the sensors, hidden by those who had not wanted to die, in the genetic code of the life, in patterned atmospheric gases and hot machines perpetually renewing themselves deep in the magma, etched into the shells of molluscs, roiling in a hooder’s eye, trapped in the hearts of artificial gems. And then something else, a huge anomaly, a creature, no, a biomechanism like Dragon itself, ancient, from the time of the Atheter suicide. It seemed likely to be here as a result of another Atheter’s attempt at survival but was complex enough to be worthy of closer study, for the readings nearby sensors provided were very strange.
Dragon immediately selected a more powerful and invasive sensor from a store within itself and spat it towards the world. The long egg-shaped biomechanism speared through the intervening distance over a period of days. Meanwhile Dragon noted a Theocracy ship arriving at the location of its new gift to them, picking it up and transporting it to one of the cylinder worlds.
The sensor hit atmosphere, burned its way down, shedding dispensable outer layers, thumped into the surface to blow a steaming crater half a kilometre across, then in the soft ground underneath began to reformat itself. Finally, during one Masadan night, it rose to the surface and emerged; a grotesque octopoid with a bloated tic body five metres long. Its own senses already focused, it skated out of the already refilling crater. Then cut a channel through the surrounding flute grasses directly to its target.
The massive albino hooder was departing the messy site of a recent meal, the remains of its repast refashioned over long hours into something unknowable even as it sank into the area of boggy ground it had been made upon. Dragon’s monstrous sensor slid up to the hooder and flung itself upon it, wrapping tentacles around it and injecting mechanisms between the segments of its body. At once Dragon began to realize that the war machine had been hugely disrupted, not enough to kill it, but enough to render it down to the level of those animals of its own kind, only its colour and the curious way it played with its dinner remaining to distinguish it to the casual viewer. However, it was no walkover. It responded fast and viciously, both on the nanoscopic and macroscopic levels, repelling internal invasion with its still effective internal defences, its immune system, and turning its tool-packed hood on Dragon’s sensor. Within seconds it had torn the sensor apart, and began hitting the remains with patterned energy fields to tear them apart at the molecular level. But, by the time the sensor had been turned to slurry spattering the surrounding grasses, Dragon had all the information it needed.
Dragon could see that the disruption within the war machine was such that its self-repair mechanisms could never overcome it. Intervention would be required, but intervention of a very special kind. The best way past its immune system was down the white hooder’s gullet: thereafter a penetration through its digestive system would not elicit such a swift response. Specially designed viruses could install programming patches, microscopic phages could make repairs in certain critical areas, those parts of the immune system that had been turned in on themselves could be burnt out by nanoscopic thermal charges, thereafter regrowing as they should be. Whole repair wasn’t possible but, beyond a certain point, the war machine could fully heal.
Dragon began fashioning, in the organic factories of its innards, something from a blueprint close to one used by the sphere that caused the Samarkand catastrophe. It understood that the one that penetrated the white hooder would require outside back-up – retransmission of programming destroyed during the internal war – so it caused a division within the egg that it both grew and fashioned from that blueprint. In a tryout of its later plan for self-resurrection, it sexed the twin foetal dracomen, one male and one female. The first would be the one to enter the war machine; the second would run back-up. Dragon brought them to term but did not hatch them out, instead building up protective layers about the egg before spitting it towards Masada. By the time it reached the surface those outer layers had burnt away and the egg had grown ready to hatch, and so it did.
. . .
Blue gazed out across the flute grasses swaying in recalcitrant breezes and issuing mournful music, appreciating them, appreciating so much about this world with a huge intelligence and knowledge already downloaded into her mind from her parent. Her brother gazed in just one direction, utterly fixed on his purpose and indifferent to his surroundings. The instant his body reached optimum, he set out at a fast run which, for a dracoman, was very fast indeed. Organs within her brain monitoring her brother’s function, the link between them so strong he seemed almost part of her, she was drawn after him.
They ran throughout one day, one night and into the next day, whereupon the male just slammed to a halt and began preparing the vast complexity of his body for the task ahead. The albino hooder came into view ahead of them, hunting again, hungry again. Blue moved away, yet even as she did so the link to her brother grew even stronger, so she carried his very shape in her mind.
Her brother stood up, that movement enough to attract the hooder, and it attacked, cupping him to the ground and following an instinctive feeding program. It stripped him of his skin, his muscle, hesitant over internal structures it hadn’t been prepared to find, but ingesting them anyway. It took him apart, and in disjointed death agony he slid into its digestive tract, the connection broken with his sister. Soon he began penetrating tract walls and spreading out inside the hooder as it meticulously cleaned his bones. He followed his program, pheromone and EM transmitters re-establishing the link to his sister, Blue restoring those parts of him he had lost from her mental image of him. He did his work, death agony fading to an ache as the hooder destroyed him inside itself, a whisper of might-have-beens fading thereafter.
It was done.
Blue rose from where she had hidden herself as this white hooder adjusted, swung its cowl towards her. It did not attack, its self-awareness already growing enough to encompass a thing called gratitu
de. Perhaps it tilted its head in acknowledgement to her before it brought its cowl back down on her brother’s bones and made its tribute.
She watched it rise again, leaving that sculpture, watched it depart. As purposeless then as any living sentient being, she collected her brother’s remains and went to find a hidden place to exist. Waiting, waiting for her other brothers and sisters.
As he removed the helmet from his head, tendrils stretching and pulling from his skull like guinea worms, Jem gazed across at the dracowoman, two portions of his mind sliding around each other like immiscible fluids. It seemed that the Weaver continually connected to his Human self, and that those connections could not be sustained and so broke. Consciousness remained protean throughout the process. Sometimes his Human past became the lesser of two alternative histories; sometimes the Weaver became a graft upon his Human consciousness. Even so, his Human part was being perpetually changed by this process, and he liked it. The being he seemed to be changing into now felt better than that poor, thoroughly indoctrinated and unintelligent Human proctor, and perhaps the process might at last rub out the grief and the guilt his Human mind seemed determined to cling to.
‘I have only one question,’ said Chanter, also removing his helmet then peering inside it with distaste. ‘Why did Dragon do this? Why did Dragon heal the Technician?’
‘Surely you know the answer yourself,’ Blue replied.
‘To meddle, to play with dangerous things, to cause disruption and twist the shape of the world.’
‘The usual view of Dragon, yes, but not the central reason.’
‘Then why? Why?’
‘Because,’ said Blue, ‘it was aesthetically pleasing.’
The amphidapt displayed a brief puzzlement, then he closed his eyes and shook his head. He looked sick.
It had taken Jem a little while to understand the man, but now he did. Chanter had invested heavily, both emotionally and intellectually, in the belief that the Technician was expressing itself through its art. Despite the fact that all recent evidence pointed to that creature’s art being a product of a malfunction, he had doggedly clung to that investment. But now, Blue’s words had undermined the last bulwark of Chanter’s faith, a feeling Jem understood perfectly.
Because it wasn’t based on logic, faith did not often fail when exposed to logic – such was always taken as an attack and resulted in a stubborn lockdown. However, take the faithful one out of his normal environment into one where he could not help but stumble on facts that refuted his faith – let that one expose himself to logic and accept it – and sometimes a breaking point could be reached.
‘Just a machine,’ said Chanter.
Jem didn’t quite understand that. ‘But a machine more complex than any Human being.’
Chanter looked at him. ‘But a machine nonetheless.’
Jem shook his head, still trying to encompass this strange idea – one that could be backed up by no physical science – that created organic machines somehow differed from evolved ones. Then, all at once, he understood. This was the thinking of members of a young civilization, newly arisen from primitivism and yet to grow comfortable with their machines. Less than ten thousand years ago Humans were still banging rocks together and sacrificing goats to ensure the sun rose. Yes, there had been a time when the Atheter had felt the same, when their machines were new and something separate from themselves. The Atheter of his own time had been certain about that, but it was a period of history lost somewhere far behind tens of thousands of years of war, of rises and falls that never quite expelled them from the age of machines.
‘What does this mean?’ Jem asked.
Chanter just stared at him for a long moment. Perhaps he didn’t understand the question? No, finally he replied, ‘A soulless mechanism.’
Oh yes, the soul . . .
Jem understood the concept; he had thoroughly believed in souls before. He winced at the painful embarrassment he felt now, felt himself dissolving, his forty-five years of human life diluted in an immensity of experience and understanding. Then something snapped, that other mind inside him detaching, again changing him just a little bit more but again distancing itself from him.
‘What will you do now?’ Jem asked.
Chanter stared at him again, then abruptly swung back to Blue. ‘We’re done here?’
‘We are done,’ the dracowoman agreed. ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘Satisfied? Hardly.’ He turned back to Jem. ‘Now I’m going back to my mudmarine. Yes,’ Chanter nodded to himself, ‘I’m going back.’ He stomped towards the door, which obligingly hinged open ahead of him, and he stepped outside.
Jem now turned and faced Blue. ‘And this was aesthetically pleasing for Dragon too?’
Blue nodded an acknowledgement. ‘Dragon considered it unfinished business and so left the memories.’
‘Did interference make Dragon feel alive?’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Consider Chanter’s feeling that constructed organisms and evolved organisms are somehow different. I ask again: did interference make Dragon feel alive?’
‘You are still unclear.’
Jem allowed himself a small smile, a Human twist of the face that denoted a certain communication. The Weaver had known the same sorts of problems, once, far in the past. War machines like the Technician could never be still.
‘Dragon was aware it was a biomech, and carried the awareness in itself of its creators’ belief in their own uniqueness. To prove itself it had to do, could not be still.’
‘I dream Dragon dreams sometimes.’
‘Quite,’ said Jem. ‘And in doing, Dragon went beyond merely curing the Technician, did it not? Dragon prepared for the inevitable results of the Technician becoming fully functional.’
Blue said nothing, just stared.
Jem went on, ‘Perhaps you didn’t realize that the download you provided, at Dragon’s behest, gave me more than it gave Chanter. You are involved. You are still involved, for you were instructed to provide the means to end all this. Where and how?’
Blue blinked, even her draconic visage twisting in thought. ‘Yes, you were to ask that question.’
‘And you to provide an answer.’
‘The means has been brought here, and Shree Enkara carries it. She intends to use it against the Atheter AI, but it was only with such intention that I could get her close to you.’
Jem nodded once in acknowledgement and departed after Chanter.
As he stepped out into Masadan evening, Jem processed the new information and started coming to conclusions he did not like. He had been manipulated and used all his life; first by the Theocracy, then by the Polity, and now by Dragon. Never had his destiny been his own. However, there was no way to avoid what had been planned for him. He must see it through before he could ever find his own course. He hurried after Chanter, falling in beside the amphidapt as he strode from the town. They did not speak until they reached the perimeter, where Chanter came to a halt and folded his arms across his chest and gazed pensively across at his mudmarine.
‘Are you running away?’ Jem asked.
‘Maybe,’ Chanter agreed.
‘The Technician being a faulty machine does not mean it was incapable of art.’
Chanter shook his head. ‘It’s all too damned complicated now, and there are too many people involved. How can I see to the core of it all with experts and AIs over-analysing every scrap of data? Some things should remain inviolate. Some mysteries should remain mysteries.’
‘Something I once believed,’ said Jem.
Chanter glared at him, his face blushing purple. ‘This has got nothing to do with damned religion!’
Jem shrugged. It seemed to him that whilst it had nothing to do with organized religion, it had everything to do with faith – that comfortable sanctuary from the complications of reality.
‘Where will you go now?’ he asked.
‘Somewhere cleaner, less complicated, somewhere I can
think.’
Chanter strode away, and Jem let him go. Who was he to argue with the man? He had only started to make sense of the world using someone else’s mind. The amphidapt reached his mudmarine, raised one hand goodbye, then a bright light glared and his vessel lifted and tore in half. The crump of the blast seemed more sensation than sound.
By the time Grant reached the blast site it was already swarming with dracomen and, even at night like this, he recognized Blue.
‘Where are they?’ he barked.
Blue held out the flat of her hand, turned it over then pointed. Grant headed where indicated. Jeremiah Tombs was down on his knees, not praying, but cradling Chanter’s head in his lap. The amphidapt looked thoroughly wasted; burnt from head to foot, one of his legs gone along with part of the side of his head, now exposing mangled contents. Unless the man had a memplant there would be no way back for him.
‘Shit,’ said Grant. ‘Shit!’
Tombs looked up, eyes strangely bright in the near-dark, reflecting light like the eyes of an animal.
‘He wanted to go somewhere less complicated, cleaner, somewhere he could think,’ said Tombs.
‘And you reckon he’s gone there.’ Grant could not conceal his contempt.
‘No, he’s just dead.’
16
When it was first discovered there was great excitement about the Atheter AI. The sheer size of the chunk of memory crystal it occupied indicated that it must be the gatekeeper on a vast repository of alien knowledge. A benefit of this was obtained upon first contact with the AI: a method of scanning in underspace to locate patterns generated by Jain nodes in realspace, thus to locate them. A later contact revealed a snapshot of part of the tragic Atheter history, but not really much more than had already been guessed. Then the AI shut down for two decades. When this silence finally ended, information again began to become available from the AI, indirectly, but it was disappointing. The vast repository of astrogation data, studies of Atheter astral bodies, suns, worlds, asteroids and underspace maps rendered very little that was new and not known; the fragments of Atheter history were very interesting, but censored, and technological data only matched current Polity development. Everything else of real interest to Polity AIs – mainly the advanced technologies – was available, but at a slow trickle and at a price. The Atheter AI was wise enough to recognize the stupidity of giving away a valuable commodity.