Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Enough of that. You don’t need to know what it’s like to be a sentient quantum computer. But trust me – I do know.

  So I dumped one of the dubbers out of his chair and sat down. Cassady wired me up. Dekon finally gave me access to the doppelgänger robot network. And then Cassady took a gun and aimed it at the door in case the DRs or dubbers came upon us.

  And then I became the doppelgänger robots. Not just the ones in the prison, those in the Home Hub itself. There were six hundred of them in all.

  I became six hundred Mes!

  That was far more Me than I could deal with. So I deactivated the four hundred and eleven DRs in the prison. The riot was now over; our side had won. Shalco and the others could proceed with the next stage in the plan, namely breaking out of the prison and escaping to the planet of Giger. All I had to do was drive the lunar buggies across to them remotely, and then open the doors of the prison dome.

  First, however, I closed the air-vents in the prison dome, and seeped an atmosphere back in. I didn’t want anyone asphyxiating if there was a delay.

  Then I accessed the control nexus that would let me open the prison doors and allow Shalco and her gangsters to escape.

  And finally, I took control of the doppelgänger lunar buggies; sixty in all, enough to take the entire escaping prison population and convey them to the Brightside space elevator.

  Then I hesitated.

  And I left the doors closed.

  And I left the armoured buggies parked.

  I betrayed, in other words, Shalco and all the other prisoners who had put their faith in me.

  What can I say? I do that sometimes.

  “All done,” said Cassady.

  “All done,” I said wearily. I always found this process tiring. Because I’m not a computer hacker, I’m an emulator. I emulate the peculiar state of existence of a quantum remote computer, in order to influence its functioning. It’s a bit like being an ant that thinks it’s a cloud. Or – whatever. I can’t explain.

  Cassady had by now switched on the wall screens and was reading the story of the prison break. The story was nothing. Nothing was happening.

  “What the fuck is happening?” she asked.

  “I can’t,” I said patiently, “let those bastards go.”

  Cassady looked at me in horror.

  “You have to!” she said angrily.

  “Sorry!”

  “Those are my friends!” she protested.

  Maybe so. But these guys were also, let’s face it, monsters. I couldn’t let them loose! I really couldn’t. I had no choice but to double-cross them.

  “I’m not going to let them escape. You got a problem with that?” I asked Cassady.

  She looked at me warily. Then she shook her head.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We stepped out into the corridor – and were greeted with dazzling sheets of plasma fire. The remaining dubbers were armoured up and ready for a prolonged siege. The walls behind us burned, fireballs danced in the air. We stepped hastily back into the doppelgänger room, tasting burned air in our lungs.

  “Shit,” said Cassady.

  “No worries,” I said lightly. And I reached back into Dekon and thence into the body of the nearest deactivated DR.

  And then I was back in the corridor, seeing through robot eyes, moving with a robot body.

  The body-armoured dubbers made their move. One of them had a grenade and he ran towards the door. I raised an arm and flame erupted from it and he went down.

  The dubbers turned and saw me and a fusillade of explosive bullets smashed into my robot chassis. I fired a hail of bullets then my shell collapsed and my circuits died.

  But I was alive six more times. I saw through six pairs of eyes, I walked on six pairs of legs. And I ran down the corridor and rained bullets and flame upon the dubber squad. They were faster than me – because I had six minds to control. But my firepower was formidable. I left their dead bodies in the corridor and Cassady and Artemis emerged from the doppelgänger suite and greeted us (all six of us) with whoops of joy.

  We escorted them; and I was escorted by them, as I ran behind the robots. For I was seven minds, all at the same time. Once I stumbled, and Cassady had to grab me and help me up.

  Dekon sent me a warning – another dubber squad was closing in on us. So I stopped dead, and hunched down on the floor. And I reactivated another dozen robot bodies in nearby corridors and store rooms. And a dozen more. And a dozen more still. And I fought, and I fought.

  When it was over, I got up and Cassady and I walked down the corridors, past and over the bodies of the dubbers, to the spaceport bay.

  Cassady was looking anxious. She didn’t understand the necessity for my double-cross. Nor did she fathom why the DRs were helping us, or why I was acting so weirdly. She didn’t understand anything really. I’d lied to her right from the start. She was just a pawn in my game. But at least she was safe now.

  “Wait ten minutes,” I told Cassady, “no longer.” She gave me an even more baffled look.

  “Go, sweetheart,” I insisted.

  She looked again. The kind of look that demands a kiss. But I did not yield to her.

  “We stay together—” she began to say, but I interrupted her:

  “Fucking go!” I said.

  We separated.

  I knew that Cassady could get away from Giger’s Moon without me. She knew exactly what she had to do. And I now had a job to finish.

  So I walked back down the corridors, past the dead bodies of the prison officers, and knocked on the door of the Governor’s office. No reply. I tried the door – locked. I ordered Dekon to open the lock and she wouldn’t. So I blasted the door down. Then I stepped inside.

  I found the room in turmoil. Governor Robbie Ferguson was in the middle of the room, alone apart from three now-deactivated DRs. He appeared to be screaming at himself – in fact, of course, he was just too angry to subvocalise. He was barking orders via his MI down the beaconband to the authorities on Giger, apparently trying to call up a missile strike on the penitentiary.

  He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice me for a few priceless moments. So I stood there, and I watched him. Those bulging eyes, that brawny neck, the vein that pulsed in his temples when he was enraged. It brought back, oh, so many memories.

  Then he realised there was someone in the room and he dropped the phone and reached for his gun.

  I fired my plasma gun at the wall behind him. The wall hissed, and the pastel paint was burned away, leaving behind charred blackness. Ferguson was frozen in mid-draw. He decided instead to bargain, let go of the gun, and raised his hands.

  “Remember me?” I asked Ferguson.

  “Of course I do,” he said, as his brain chip gave him my name, “Danielle.”

  “Try again,” I snarled.

  He tried again. He stared at me. And stared even more.

  I no longer in any way looked like the girl I once was. But there was something that he recognised, from his days as Chief of Police on a Clan planet. And the look of eventual recognition on his face was my reward for all the years of preparation.

  “Fuck,” he said, feebly.

  “Give yourself,” I suggested, “a second stab at your last words?”

  “Maybe we can do a deal?” he wheedled.

  “Okay,” I lied, but I clearly wasn’t very convincing, because at that moment he drew his gun. He was fast.

  Not fast enough. I rolled to dodge his plasma blast, and from a crouching position, shot his gun out of his hand.

  Then I shot him in the jaw. Once, making a gaping roar out of his angry scowl. Then I shot him in the body. Once, twice, thrice, about a hundred times in all. He wasn’t wearing face armour, I could have shot him in the forehead and killed him outright. But that would have defeated the object of the exercise.

  Eventually his armour cracked and a bullet went through and exploded. He convulsed. He spat blood from his bloody lips. And he fell to the ground an
d he died.

  I was breathing heavily by now. It’s a long slow business shooting someone to death when they are wearing body armour. But in fairness, he had it coming.

  Then I changed the gun to laser setting and I hunched down next to the body.

  The next part was grisly. I cut his skull open, and I gouged a path into the frontal lobe of his brain with a knife. And I took out his brain chip and pocketed it.

  I had no real grudge against Robbie Ferguson. He’d taken liberties, but he’d never hurt me, not seriously anyway. His only major sin was that of omission. He had been a Chief of Police who did not care about law or justice.43

  But in his brain chip was all the data I needed to kill my real enemy: Daxox.

  I fired a delayed-action projectile bullet into Ferguson’s head.44

  Where it would explode in thirty seconds’ time. The point of this of course was to blur the cause of death, and hence conceal my theft of the brain chip.

  And then I left the room, counting in my head (four, two, one, BOOM).

  And the explosion behind me followed my count.

  Then I walked back to the shuttle bay. Cassady was waiting for me there.

  “You killed someone?” she asked, quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “It matters,” she said sadly. But I ignored her subtext. And I tried, for many years afterwards, not to recall that sorrowful look in her eyes.

  We clambered inside the shuttle.

  “Can you fly this thing?”

  I asked Dekon how to fly an XL45345 planet-to-planet shuttle craft. The instructions were, fuck me, terrifying. I particularly flinched at:

  Care should be taken when activating the anti-inertial drive in a vacuum, since an imprecise calibration can lead to terminal g-forces. Please refer to section 433i para 4 subsection xiv.

  I had no time to refer to section whateverthefuck. I decided to chance it.

  “Piece of piss,” I said, insouciantly. And I activated the anti-inertial drive, fired up the engines and – again through my link with Dekon – opened up the roof of the bay. And we flew off at speed into the darkness of space. Three years later I was in Cúchulainn. (Say it like this: Kuh-HOO-lin.)

  And there the terror really began.

  Chapter 2

  Meanwhile in Debatable Space

  Those are the bare bones of what happened on Giger’s Moon.

  I’ve missed out, I must confess, some bits that aren’t essential to the core narrative of my mission of revenge.1 Mainly, everything to do with the love story, and my growing passion for Cassady.

  I mean, who cares about all that shit? Hmm?

  So let’s just skip over all the muddly soul-searching hearts-in-torment stuff. And let me tell you, instead, about what happened in Debatable Space, at around about the same time that Cassady and I were fleeing Giger’s Moon. Let me speak of glorious space battles, awesome terror, and a terrifying and imminent threat to humanity. All far more interesting than me talking about

  How I seduced and fucked Cassady Penfold.

  So I am now – any moment now – going to pass swiftly over that part. The stuff about how I targeted this beautiful yet complex woman. How I flattered her. Got her into my bed. And made her fall in love with me. (Or was it the other way around?)

  It was, let me tell you, a skilfully orchestrated seduction. A magnificent example of the master thief at work. For I did, indeed, steal her heart!

  But in all honesty, the memories of that seduction – the tenderness she showed me, the love she clearly felt – all that still disturbs me terribly.

  And I don’t know why that should be so. After all, I didn’t betray Cassady. I promised I’d get her out of the Giger Penitentiary, and that’s exactly what I did. And a few months later, I dropped her off at a planet that was on the way to my destination – it was New Earth VI, a nicely fertile paradise with great cocktail bars – and left her to carry on with the rest of her life.2

  So okay, I admit – because I’m not an idiot you know! – that she was pretty distressed at the moment of our final farewell. Tears, choking noises, a lost look that spoke of agonising pain – all that, and more. She never actually reproached me. But the final glance she gave me, before I walked away from her for the last time – rewind, delete!

  I really don’t need that particular fucking memory.

  But even so, it comes to me in my dreams every night.

  I guess she’d imagined more of a “happy ever after” scenario! But that had never been my plan, or my style.

  Poor sweet gullible Cassady.

  Except, she was never truly gullible. No, in fact, now I come to think about it, not gullible at all.

  She could, I realise, read me like a book. Which is apt, because she was such a lover of books. She – forget it. Don’t go down that road.

  Years later I learned she’d been on the final leg of her sentence.3 A year more and she’d have been out. But even so she risked everything for me.

  Why?

  Well, obviously, because I’m a master seducer. And I had used all my guile and charisma to make her love me. You know the drill: play hard to get; find out your lover’s secrets and use them manipulatively; never be nice unless you really have to; be really good in bed. It works, 99 times out of a hundred; and I know that for a fact. I remember.4

  But sometimes I think, and I wonder, and I ask – did it really happen that way? Or was it – no, stop! It wasn’t that way at all. I know that now, and I knew it then too.

  The truth is, she realised I was playing her. And she allowed me to. She knew – how could she not know? – that I was a treacherous bastard stone cold killer. But she made – at some point she must have made – a decision that she’d rather be with me, for all my sins and flaws and treacherous nature, than not.

  The final outcome of Cassady’s story was tragic, though I didn’t know about it for a long time. Just two years after the prison break, Cassady was killed in a bar brawl. She was, apparently, by that point, an alcoholic and a drug abuser and a notorious violent troublemaker.5 That shocks me.

  But it wasn’t my fault, was it? It’s not as if she felt to pieces, because I left her!

  Or did she?

  I often wonder about the “what might have been.” I mean, if I’d stayed with Cassady. Been her girl. Settled down. What kind of life would I have had? Baking cakes? Adopting children? Can you really see that? ME?

  And besides, can cakes actually be baked, or do they only ever come out of a fabricator? I mean—

  Stop, Artemis, stop. Make your brain stop whirring.

  The simple truth is: I’ll never know. The path not taken, was not taken. No point wondering.

  So, back to Debatable Space then.

  Debatable Space! The outlaws! The pitched gun-battles! The anti-matter bomb that “accidentally” went off! The desperate jeopardy that ensues when a billion quintillion deadly aliens6 are freed from their confining cage! All this, and, yes, more!

  But bear with me here for a moment. Just a moment. Please?

  Because, before I recount all that exciting universe-jeopardising stuff, I want to tell you about how I first met Cassady.

  She was a trusty working in the prison library, as well as at the hospital. Every morning she walked the Spoke handing out downloads, advising the prisoners on what they might and might not enjoy. A thankless task, but she persevered. And every afternoon she sat in the wards and kept the dying prisoners company.

  Cassady liked to keep busy. That’s what you need to know about Cassady. Busy. Smiled a lot. Full of heart. Actually gave a shit about people.

  She came to my cell and asked me what I liked to read. I answered her at length. She was somewhat stunned.

  That’s because, as a reader, I am both voracious and eclectic. Which means I like to read everything and anything. Novels, yes. Poetry, certainly. Biography, yes of course. But most of all, history. I have read
an historical textbook on every period of history since the Cro-Magnons mated with the Neanderthals. It’s my passion. I’ve read about the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the Faith Wars, I know about the growth of the World Government and the “reign” of that windbag Xabar, I know about the history of the Galactic Corporation from its early years to its far from inevitable downfall. I know it all; and I relish every fact.

  This, you see, is the other thing that is truly cool about me. Ignore all those wanky superficial attributes – my looks, my superpowers, and my ability to look good in almost anything.7 No what’s cool about me is that deep down, in my heart of hearts, I am an utter book nerd. And of this I am proud.

  “Most inmates,” Cassady advised me, having recovered from her initial stupefaction, “like to read porn.”

  “I don’t see the point,” I said. “I mean, why read about sex?”

  “Porn,” she conceded, “with pictures.”

  “No words?”

  “The minimum. Usually, just the naked person’s name, and what tends to make them horny.”

  “For a custodian of the prison library,” I told her, “that must be soul destroying.”

  She smiled, beautifully, and for quite some time.

  It was the smile that got to me.

  We became friends.

  That’s all it was at first. We were friends for many months, before we actually became lovers.

  But for me it was everything. I’d never actually had a friend you see, not since I’d become a grown up. Not a real, sharing-everything, love-of-my-life friend. My “friends” were all just casual acquaintances, or work-mates, or lovers, mainly of the one- or two-night stand variety.

  And okay, sometimes after I’d fucked a guy, we’d linger naked on the bed and talk, and share secrets, and stuff. But a week later, I wouldn’t even remember his name.

  But Cassady and I were such great friends. We talked every day! I woke up and ideas or opinions would drift into my head, and then I would think, “Must tell Cassady this!” We argued about which meal in the canteen was the vilest. We argued about which book to read next. We argued about who was the best detective of all time (we both loved crime novels).8 We argued about – we argued about everything, except we never truly argued at all. We just let words flow between us.