The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “The ship AI there, Box, is loading every Jain study, every relevant piece of information. It might help.”

  “Is that it?” Chapra was beginning to feel a vague disappointment.

  “They moved suns, Chapra. There are those who theorise that here we are in the backwoods of a civilization that still exists. I guess my message is: for all our sakes, don’t fuck up. Ciao.” Alexion flickered out of existence.

  Chapra turned to Abaron. “This changes nothing,” she said.

  Abaron nodded, but he looked scared again.

  * * * *

  The Jain—this was how both Abaron and Chapra referred to it now, it was better than “the creature”—took the containers from the jetty to its machine. Chapra smiled to herself. Perhaps they might never be able to speak to each other, but they understood each other. When she and Judd had collected them the containers held samples of what the Jain wanted in quantity. One of them contained a sample of only a few atoms inside a small vacuum sphere of glass. The Jain’s requirements had stretched from the prosaic to the exotic. It had wanted iron, it had wanted tantalum, and it had wanted a metallic element only theorised until then. Making a few ounces of the stuff had stretched the main onboard laboratory and required five Golem to come out of stasis to assist.

  “You note it only requires elements,” said Chapra.

  “Confirmation that it can build all the molecules it wants, so long as it has the atoms,” said Abaron. He was being very correct and very logical, very in control.

  “I wonder though…”

  “What?”

  “That metal, the Jainite, and the niobium…I’ve checked. There was nothing like that in the isolation chamber, nor in the tanks.”

  “They could have been present in the escape pod.”

  “No. I had Box check back on every scan. We were thorough.”

  “What are you saying then?”

  “We missed something, or with that machine the Jain is able to synthesise atoms, even if in minute quantities.”

  “It’s Jain,” said Abaron, as if that was all the answer required. Some hours later the Jain manufactured something else.

  “The device is a scanner,” said Box. “It scanned the entire ship with some kind of neutron burst.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Abaron.

  “It’s Jain,” said Chapra, relishing the moment.

  The device the Jain had built was about the size of a human head and looked like the bastard offspring of a whelk and the insides of an old valve radio. After using it the Jain saved one small component then fed the rest of it back into its bigger machine, its creation machine. Afterwards it fed in one of the large crustaceans. Then it came to the jetty and left something squatting there.

  “This I have to see,” said Chapra, hurrying on her way. She glimpsed Abaron licking his dry lips as he reluctantly followed her. In minutes both of them were in hotsuits and walking out on the jetty. Judd strode behind them.

  “It’s the crustacean. It’s been altered,” said Abaron, then he stepped rapidly back when the beast lifted its armoured belly up off the jetty and, walking on four armoured limbs, began to come towards them bull terrier fashion. After a moment Chapra moved back as well. The beast squatted down a couple of metres in front of them, waiting.

  “Look at its back,” said Abaron.

  Chapra did so and there saw a triangle of ridged and pocked flesh. It was the negative of the end of the Jain’s tentacles, she saw this at once.

  Judd said, “This was one of the crustaceans. It has been stripped of its digestive system and now has a small organic power cell. Its sensorium has been upgraded to eighty per cent of received spectra and there are additions to its primitive brain. Its blood is heated by metallic heating elements.”

  “It’s a probe,” said Chapra. “I bet the additions to its brain are memory.”

  “Cannot be determined,” said Judd.

  “All right, I bet there are direct links between those additions and that triangle on its back.” After a pause Judd said, “There are.”

  Chapra turned to Abaron and tried not to notice that he had pressed himself up against the door.

  “I’ll bet the intention is for it to wander around the ship then come back here. Once back here the Jain probably plugs in and reads off all the information it has gathered.”

  “That seems likely,” said Abaron, a quaver in his voice.

  “Okay, let’s see,” said Chapra, and she hit the door control. The beast got up again, advanced to the door, and through. They followed it into the lock, opened the next door into the ship. Beyond this door awaited the Golem named Rhys, who in appearance was an Australian aborigine.

  “Rhys will accompany our little guest on its tour around the ship,” said Box. The beast moved off down the corridor, clicks and buzzes coming from a sensorium that was a mass of complex spikes, facets, brushes, and dimpled plates, all shifting and swivelling.

  “Is this a good idea?” said Abaron, and Chapra wondered how he had restrained himself for so long.

  “I think everything is under control, and won’t be allowed to get out of control…what is that on your belt, Rhys?”

  Rhys glanced back and tapped a hand on the gun holstered at his hip. In appearance it was a Luger made out of chrome, but with a few strange additions.

  “It is a singun,” said Rhys, his usually happy demeanour at once very serious.

  “You see?” said Chapra to Abaron.

  “But…I didn’t think such things existed.”

  “They do. One shot from that will have the effect of turning our friend inside out through a pin hole in space.” She observed Abaron’s confused expression and explained. “For about a second it generates a singularity in its target. Our friend there would be reduced to sludge.”

  “Wouldn’t an energy weapon have been better?” asked Abaron.

  Judd said, “There is a high probability that the creature can generate defences against energy weapons. We have no known defence against the singun.”

  Chapra decided not to point out to Abaron that use of ‘we’.

  “It’s all rather moot,” she said. “The Jain has shown no signs of hostility.”

  “The Jain has placed a container upon the jetty,” said Box.

  “Let’s go see what it wants now,” said Chapra, and they trooped back into the lock. Soon they were out on the jetty. The container was at the furthest end.

  “What the hell is that?” wondered Chapra as she strode towards the container. Showing great fortitude, Abaron strode at her side. Inside the container was a coil of something fleshy. They halted at the container and stood over it.

  “It looks like something alive,” said Abaron, crushing the dread in him under the cool analytic scientist.

  “It certainly—”

  The coil snapped straight out of the container, cobra fast. It hit Abaron’s arm, hung there for a moment as it recoiled, then snapped out into the water. Abaron yelled, staggered back, and sat down.

  “Oh,” he said, then looked down at his shoulder where blood was spreading between the layers of his environment suit. “It bit me.” In a moment Judd lifted him up and all but carried him to the door. Chapra followed. In the lock Abaron’s legs gave way and he looked more bewildered than scared.

  “It’s just shock,” Chapra told him, but she could not put from her mind visions of an ancient celluloid film she had in her collection; of the contents of an egg shooting out and attaching to a man’s face, and the consequences of that.

  * * * *

  Box looked upon the world with all its superbly precise senses and analysed it with a mind that made the mind of any god humans had imagined appear that of an infant throwing a tantrum, and it found the world beautiful. The eye of the beholder. Box could find beauty in anything because it could look at things in so many thousands of different ways. Many philosophers in the human polity now posited that humans were not created by gods, that in fact the complete reverse applie
d.

  At the poles of the world the temperature was the same as at Earth’s equator, but at two atmospheres pressure. At its equator the environment was about as inviting to a human as the inside of a pressure cooker. The place swarmed with life much like that in the isolation chamber, but with one important exception. There were great and complex ecosystems here, but no outpost of any star-spanning civilization, and no discernible remnants, but then little might survive five million years in such hostile conditions. There were no Jain, not a trace.

  * * * *

  Very cool and very factual, Abaron said, “There are no toxins in me, there is no disgusting alien embryo waiting to burst out of my stomach in a messy spray. There is, in fact, nothing alien to my body inside me barring the two doughnuts I ate half an hour ago and the cup of coffee I washed them down with.” Chapra smiled. The attack, rather than feeding his fear, had destroyed it. Irrational fear could never long survive harsh realities.

  “What happened then?”

  “This.” Abaron peeled back the dressing on his arm to show the wound. A perfect circle of skin a centimetre wide and few millimetres deep had been excised from his biceps.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think the Jain took a sample. It is as curious about us as we are about it. Only its curiosity must have a greater urgency because it is entirely dependent on us and has no idea what we might want of it.”

  “What do you think it might learn?”

  “Everything it is possible to learn from my DNA. Being able to build and alter DNA to the extent it does it must be able to decode it down to the atomic level.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Chapra. She thought a lot else but wasn’t going to spoil his moment.

  “Box,” said Abaron. “What happened after the…worm…bit me?”

  “It swam very fast to the inside of the Jain’s machine. The Jain is now wrapped around its machine. There is much nanomechanical activity.”

  “There,” said Abaron to Chapra.

  Just then the door to the medlab hissed open and in walked the Jain’s probe beast, closely followed by Rhys.

  Box said, “There was an ultrasound communication between this probe and the Jain six minutes after the sample was taken from your arm.”

  The beast squatted on the floor, facing towards Abaron, who sat on the edge of the examination couch.

  “It is scanning you,” said Box, then, “Your graft is ready.”

  “Perhaps it has come to see this,” said Abaron as he lay back on the couch. The doctor, which was a close relation to the PSR but deliberately less threatening in appearance, gripped Abaron’s arm above and below his biceps. What might be described as its head came down against the muscle. It quickly gobbled up the dressing. In a glare of sterilizing ultraviolet it pressed a circle of skin into place with a flattened white egg on the end of one many jointed arm. The egg had the words ‘Cell Weld Inc.’ printed on it. It hummed mildly. The probe beast got up, turned, and left the room.

  “It’s satisfied you’re all right,” said Chapra.

  When Abaron had nothing to say to that Box said, “You may be interested to know that prior to coming here the probe beast, as you call it, was in an observation blister, looking at the stars, and seeing our arrival at system DF678.98 and the world with the name Haden. It is now returning to the isolation chamber.”

  “We have to see this,” said Abaron. He inspected his arm as the doctor took the cell welder from his arm. There was no sign of a wound.

  “The world?” asked Chapra.

  “No, what the Jain does with its probe beast.”

  When the doctor released him Abaron headed quickly for the door. Chapra followed calmly after, faintly smiling. She let Abaron get ahead of her; out of hearing.

  “Where’s the xenophobe?” she asked.

  “There is nothing more fearful than fear itself,” said Box.

  “Yet you would have thought the opposite effect.”

  “Human psychology. Go figure,” said Box.

  * * * *

  Rhys opened the lock doors for the probe creature. It walked out along the jetty and dropped into the water. Chapra cleared the projection of surface refractivity and they watched the beast walk across the bottom to its creator. The Jain, still clinging around its machine, turned its strange head, then after a moment let go. It coiled out a triangular-section tentacle and plugged into the probe beast’s back.

  “It’s down-loading it, reading it,” said Abaron.

  Chapra was glad to hear fascination in his voice rather than the suppressed horror she had heard before. They sat watching. Chapra expected nothing more than the tentacle to detach in a few minutes, perhaps in a few hours. She did not expect what happened next. The Jain convulsed, its tentacle cracking like a whip. It broke the probe beast on the chamber floor and let it go. Leaking green blood and fizzing like sherbet the beast floated to the surface. The Jain convulsed again and coiled hedgehog fashion, all its tentacles, its head, its arm, and its tail hidden away. Nothing but a crescent of ribbed body, sinking to the bottom.

  “Hell, what happened?” wondered Chapra, her hands blurring over her touch console. Abaron just studied the projection, his hands folded in his lap. “It just discovered how long it was in stasis I reckon.”

  Chapra gaped at him. That had not even occurred to her.

  * * * *

  The Jain remained coiled for twenty hours and when it finally uncoiled it swam around aimlessly for another eight hours. Chapra and Abaron used the time profitably, putting a probe down into the seas of Haden and discovering many of the same plants and creatures that now flourished in the isolation chamber.

  “This certainly could be the Jain home world,” said Chapra.

  “Any world could be the Jain home world,” said Abaron.

  Chapra waited for an explanation.

  “Our Jain has ably demonstrated how it can re-engineer any life form, and how it can build life forms from component atoms. How much has it re-engineered itself? Haven’t we done the same? There are humans with gills and fins, humans with compound eyes and exoskeletons, humans who can live in ten gees.”

  “Very true,” said Chapra. “We might even be Jain.”

  That shut Abaron up for a long time. When he finally spoke again it was to say, “We have to learn to speak to it now. We have to learn its language.”

  Chapra was in thorough agreement, but even she was not sure where to start. The Jain might speak using ultrasound, pheromones, molecular messages, and it might not speak at all. Its language might have billions of words, no words, ten words, or it might ignore them because it felt depressed. Scan of its wide neural structure showed a hugely complex organ in its skull, a spinal column almost as wide as that skull, and from which branched nerve channels as thick as a human arm, leading to sub-brains in the torso that were easily as complex as human brains, then leading to each of its eight tentacles, eight interfaces.

  “It’s back at its machine,” observed Abaron. “Will it even listen when it’s there?” They watched it at work, tentacles moving here and there across the surface of its machine.

  “The ends of those tentacles are interfaces and they are crammed with microscopic manipulators,” said Chapra. “There must be mating plugs and microscopic controls all over the surface of that thing.”

  “The entire surface is perhaps one control system,” said Abaron.

  “The machine is expanding,” Box abruptly told them. Chapra reached for her touch controls then realised she did not have to bother; they could see it now. The mouths of the tubes had been approximately forty centimetres wide and the entire structure two metres across. It was visibly growing now, in pulses.

  “The machine is drawing in and circulating water,” said Box. No need to confirm. They could see the movement. They watched as it drew in shrimps and water plants. Only water came out.

  “It’s making something quite big now,” said Abaron.

  “Oh really,” said Chapr
a, her hands rattling over her console. She swore under her breath when she realised Box was still not allowing her to scan the machine, then she abruptly folded her arms and sat back.

  The machine expanded until it was four metres across, the top of it out of the water, the mouths of the tubes three quarters of a metre across. In a couple of the tubes they could see flickers of light as from an undersea welder. It drew in some of the bigger crustaceans. They did not come out again.

  “Looks like it’s getting there,” said Abaron.

  The Jain reached inside one of the tubes, pulled out something bulky, a soft mollusc from its shell. It towed this object to the jetty, and with much effort heaved it up out of the water.

  “Oh my God,” said Abaron.

  On the jetty lay a female human child of perhaps five years. At the base of her back, etched in the purples and reds of a birth mark, was the triangular interface. As they watched the child vomited water then slowly stood up. Her skin was very red.

  “The heat,” said Chapra.

  The door to the lock opened and Judd strode into the chamber.

  * * * *

  The Jubilan communications satellite was a confetti of bright metal wrapped around a silver ovoid half a kilometre across. Geostationary above Jubal it glittered like some huge Christmas decoration. Around it, like a swarm of silver bees, glinted shuttle craft and loaders. The dark wedge of the Samurai was in harsh contrast as it slid into realspace trailing streamers of red fire. From this wedge of night sped four hardly visible specks at slow relativistic speeds. Two fell on the satellite. One wavered, then was gone in a galaxy-shaped explosion. The other struck home and the bright satellite cracked open, jetting flame and human and mechanical debris. The satellite came apart in the horrible silence of vacuum. The only screams heard were over radio links, and brief.

  Kellor watched the destruction with no visible sign of emotion, but he had reservations: there were always extras. He had expected no less. But this was a Polity world. The extra payment of five million was all that had swayed him. He turned his attention to the display showing the other two missiles dropping towards the planet.

  “What did they use?” he asked Jurens.