by Neal Asher
The Sadist had only left U-space for a moment when the ship's AI informed Cormac, "I've got a message for you! It's from your mother!"
Cormac, who at that point had been lying on his bed studying pictures of their new surroundings on his viewing screen and wishing Crean would come and join him, abruptly sat up and paid attention. He had half expected there to be no reply.
"What format is it?"
"I've got a video transmission along with another large file that looks like mem-code," Sadist informed him.
He sat up even straighter then. Mem-code was how memories were stored, its format dependent on the human brain it had been extracted from or destined for. Did this ship have the kind of equipment he would require? It was certainly possible now to implant such code—to allow people to live the memories—but it usually had to be done under very controlled circumstances. There were also augs out there that could do it, the Sensic range, which were not recommended, but which had not been made illegal since the AI view was that if you were stupid enough to use one then that was your look-out. Many people did use them. Many people were addicted to experiencing other people's memories. There was also an illegal trade in memories extracted from people as they were tortured and murdered, though how some became addicted to that, Cormac had no idea.
"Can you transmit both files to my aug?" he enquired.
"I can transmit the video message to you, but not the mem-code," Sadist replied. "The code file would be too large for the storage in your aug."
"Is there any way I can… load this code?"
"It is possible. The initial file would have to be divided into three at preset chapter marks. I can then load them each to your aug through an adapter, though after each you will need to take a rest."
"Why?"
"If these are, as I suspect, memories that have been edited from your mind, when you re-experience them the contradictions will give you an extreme headache," Sadist explained. "They will not mesh with your mind—you'll experience them as actuality, but afterwards will certainly have trouble integrating them."
"I see."
"It will also be necessary for you to seek permission from Agent Spencer and your unit commander, since the process may affect your performance."
"Perhaps the video first?"
"To your augmentation or on your screen?"
"Send a copy to my aug, but also play it on the screen for me."
The screen blinked on to show a frozen picture of his mother, Hannah. After a moment she jerked into motion, raising a hand to rub her forehead as if she had a headache. Then she looked up.
"Cormac," she said, then paused for a long moment. "I'm still not used to calling you that and wonder if, after being in ECS now for a while, you have retained the habit of insisting people call you by your surname. Doubtless you have, since I rather suspect the habit was more firmly established in your mind by the editing process."
Again a long pause.
"Yes, I did have your mind edited. It was perhaps a foolish thing to do, but I wasn't thinking straight back then anyhow. And once it was done there was no way of putting those memories back. Even now, it is not really possible to put them back, especially when a lengthy period of time has passed. This is because everything you are now is a structure built upon what went before, and by altering the shape of a building's foundations you risk toppling it."
She smiled tiredly, and Cormac wished this was a direct link so he could point out how dependent a building was on its foundations and how, if you screwed with them in the first place, the same building might not be stable anyway. But he rather suspected she knew that.
"I took you into the editing suite shortly after Dax departed to Cheyne III, when you were eight years old. I had received the news about your father… we had both received the news about your father, and at that time, the way I was, it was difficult enough for me to handle my own grief. On his second session in the suite even Dax had those memories deleted because he did not want to deal with them then. As for you, it just seemed easier to relieve you of that pain. There is nothing advantageous about suffering—"
Cormac, having picked up the remote control, paused the video at that point and thought long and hard about what she had just said. At the end of the war he had understood that his father would not be coming home. This fact had penetrated his growing mind by some form of osmosis during the three years between his eighth and eleventh birthdays. Would it have been better if he had known at the time that his father had been killed? He thought yes. Here he utterly disagreed with his mother's assessment. Life, if you really wanted to live it, could be sometimes wonderful and sometimes hard, and he felt you couldn't fully appreciate the good stuff without experiencing the bad. He also felt that to get on in life, you also needed to acquire a few emotional calluses. She had been selfish and overprotective, but then, throughout history that had always seemed a parental prerogative. He started the recording running again.
"— experiencing pain only hardens you, desensitizes you, was how I thought about it all back then. I now understand that I was just being selfish, like a parent giving an unruly child drugs to calm him down. Pain, whether physical or mental, always serves the purpose of teaching the recipient to avoid it, but more important than that, it can teach said recipient to empathise with the pain of others. We need pain to be human."
Abruptly his mother shot up in his estimation of her, and though he resented what she had done, he could only forgive her.
"Along with this message I have attached a memcording of the memories that were excised from your mind. It comprises three incidents. However, it was impossible to include all the small alterations that were made to your memories or the natural tendency of the mind to fit things into a logical order." Hannah grimaced, now gazing down at her clenched hands. "I am told this is rather like what happens the moment you wake up from REM sleep. Your mind has been processing masses of unrelated rubbish, yet when you wake these masses are aligned in a coherent order, which we call dreams." Now she looked up. "Experience these memories if you feel you must, but understand they are not the ending. I am not sure if there is an ending—the only way to find that out is from the horse's mouth… or to be more precise: the scorpion's mouth. You need to speak to Amistad."
What the hell?
"I hope you can forgive me, then perhaps I can forgive myself."
The video feed froze.
Cormac sat staring at the screen for a moment, then rewound it and replayed the last bit again, then once more to be sure. No, he had no idea what she was talking about. The memories of when he first found out about his father's death had been edited from his mind. How could death be any more of an ending? And what had that drone got to do with it all? Now, Cormac immediately began reviewing the information he had obtained about that drone, information that had been sitting untouched in his aug since the AI back on Hagren had found it for him.
The drone Amistad was apparently constructed in the infamous factory station Room 101. Certainly the AIs had so named that station because its intended use had been to turn out some of the nastiest cybernetic fighters of the war. A lot of experimental work was done there and it was apparently where the first assassin drones were made. But most of the experimentation involved taking the minds of surviving drones, who in themselves had been quite nasty to have survived, and upgrading them with further traits useful in the fighting, like aggression, amorality and immorality. It might be apocryphal, but there were those who said that before it was destroyed by a Prador kamikaze—essentially a spaceship packed with CTDs and flown into the station by a Prador first-child—Room 101 was turning out the AI equivalent of psychopaths.
After his initiation in Room 101, twenty years before the end of the war, Amistad was sent to the front, where he was involved in numerous vicious conflicts. However, the information Cormac had been given to cover that period was mainly sections of net-retrieved text. After studying them for a while longer he realised they were sections of au
g text communications expanded to readability: Sparkind unit 243v23 with drone support sent to Horia Caves. Minimal resistance encountered and now area B is secured. Enemy casualties: one first-child and fifteen second-children. Nix relevant intelligence. Nix relevant tech for Reverse Engineering.
A further check of hyperlinks in the text gave him the names of those in the Sparkind unit, also revealing that "drone support" had been Amistad alone. There were numerous entries like this, which only confirmed what he already knew: Amistad was a war drone. Then Cormac had a moment of inspiration, and using the integral search engine in the aug, searched for his father's name. Just two entries appeared:
…I sent Sparkind units 243v20 through 243v28 to the Olston Peninsular sect. 104, with atmosphere gunship (Vlad and Rickshaw) support. They cleared sect. Enemy casualties: 3 first-children, 4000 second-children (est.). Own: 8 humans, 3 Golem (2 minds retrieved). After Prador counterattack: Lost: gunship Vlad with all personnel. Lost: all Sparkind units. Survivors: gunship Rickshaw, drone Amistad, SUC David Cormac. I tell you, it was a fucking nightmare…
… Specialists SUC Cormac & drone Amistad report Prador snatch squads working in the area. The attack in the Hessick desert will give time for runcible evacuation of 10 % population of Patience. South Hessick impossible. Advise clearance…
The Olston Peninsular, Cormac remembered, was one of those places Dax had been stationed. But was his memory of that conversation overheard between his mother and Dax true? It seemed that after the disaster there, Amistad and his father had been recruited to some specialist unit. He wondered what "Prador snatch squads" were, and immediately started a search. Nothing came up in his aug, but it offered him the option to link to "local server." He approved this and immediately got the bad news:
Prador snatch squads were those especially introduced by the Prador to capture humans alive for transportation back to the Second Kingdom, where they were used for entertainment or food. During the later years of the war, these same squads captured humans who were then transported to the planet Spatterjay where they were infected with the local viral fibres, which impart great physical toughness and durability. The purpose of so infecting these captives was to make them strong enough to physically survive Prador coring: a process whereby the brain and part of the spinal column is removed to be replaced by thrall technology.
Clear enough, he felt, and one of those horrifically grotesque things the Prador did that he still could not quite believe. Now, studying the rest of the entry he called up data about the Hessick Campaign, which was the last Polity action his father had been involved in, the one he had died in. Though the final battle for planetary dominion had taken place on the ground in a region called Hessick County, which terminated in the Olston Peninsular, the deciding factor had been out in space. The Polity, it seemed, had expected to lose, but were fighting a delaying action so as to evacuate as much of the population as possible. However, after six months into the fight, which had seen over a million humans dead (mostly civilian casualties) and an estimated two hundred thousand Prador, the tide turned with the assassination of two of the three Prador adults in charge on the ground. The remaining adult quickly retreated, heading for its dreadnought, which was hunting down Polity ships much further out in this Solar System, and while that adult was in transit from the planet to its distant ship, a new Polity dreadnought arrived and destroyed its shuttle, killing it. Further new Polity dreadnoughts arrived and began to get the upper hand. On the ground, the now headless armies of Prador, gradually fell into disarray, but it still took a further month for them to be defeated.
That was the summation of it all, but there was a lot more available to Cormac if he wanted it. He chose another search, this time for "South Hessick Clearance" and received an unexpected response: Access Restricted.
"Sadist," Cormac enquired, "why is access restricted to 'South Hessick Clearance'?"
There was a long pause before the AI replied. "It is restricted because it is restricted. If I tell you why, then I will be revealing what is restricted, won't I?"
Cormac contained his annoyance. It seemed he had gone as far as he could for the moment. His next option must be accessing his edited-out memories. He opened a familiar channel direct to Gorman's aug.
"Gorman," he said, "I need your permission—"
"You have fifteen hours," Gorman interrupted. "If Sadist estimates that you can recover within that time, then you can load one chapter of your excised memories. If there's any doubt of your performance coming up to scratch, then no chance."
The channel closed.
11
Cormac and his mother, Hannah, were on their way back from the Fossil Gene Project excavation when she abruptly turned their gravcar, so it tilted over, swinging round in a wide circle, and peered past him towards the ground. He looked in the same direction and saw something down there, perambulating across the green. It looked big, its metal back segmented. As they flew above this object, it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky—and was now clearly revealed as a giant iron scorpion.
"What's that?" he asked, supposing it some exotically shaped excavating machine controlled by the AI running the Fossil Gene Project.
With a frown his mother replied, "War drone," then abruptly used grav-braking to halt the gravcar in mid-air above the drone. Cormac tried to stand and peer down at it, but his mother grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down.
"Behave yourself or I'll put the child safeties back on."
A war drone!
Ian Cormac tried to behave himself, but just could not keep still in his seat as his mother now brought the car down towards the ground. They landed, kicking up a cloud of dust and a scattering of dead leaves. Hannah shut down the car and peered through the cloud towards the drone's location. Shortly it became visible, approaching like some nightmare monster emerging from a sinister fog.
"You stay here," she said, hauling herself up on the passenger cage and, without opening the door, clambering out.
"Aww," Cormac whined.
She walked round to his side of the car, towards where the drone was approaching, and stabbed a finger at him, "You stay there—these things might be fighting for us but some of them can be damned dangerous," then headed towards the drone.
Thirty feet out from the car the drone and his mother drew face-to-face, and Cormac felt a sudden rush of fear as the mechanical monster rose up above her, exposing its ribbed underside and forward legs. It reached towards the sky with its claws, as if again trying to catch hold of something invisible. She looked small and vulnerable before it, and he thought it was about to fall on her. Then she just gestured with her flat hand, waving it towards the ground, and the drone dropped down again. Cormac had a feeling she had just told it off, but he could not hear what she was saying.
The two stood talking for a short while, Hannah occasionally gesturing or the drone waving a claw in the air, but they were just far enough away for their conversation to be an indistinct noise with no single word clearly audible. Cormac fidgeted in his seat and wondered if he might be able to get away with climbing out and creeping up behind her.
"No!" his mother yelled, and abruptly collapsed to one knee as if her legs could no longer support her. The drone was still speaking, moving and snipping one claw to emphasise each point.
"Mother!"
Cormac scrambled from the gravcar and began moving hesitantly towards her. The drone dipped its nightmare head, antennae waving above Hannah, and said something further. Hannah immediately heaved herself to her feet and whirled round.
"Get back in the car!"
He had never seen her so angry, and he could now see she was crying. He still hesitated.
"I won't tell you again!"
Cormac returned to the car, his stomach tightening and tears behind his eyes. As he climbed in he saw his mother turn once more to the drone, say something brief, then head back to the car. Th
e drone sat utterly motionless for a moment, then abruptly came after her. Upon reaching the car, Hannah turned on it.
"There's nothing else to be said," she told it, almost choking as she spoke.
Cormac, tears abruptly forgotten, stared in fascination at the machine's peridot eyes, its slowly grating mandibles and what looked like missile and beam ports below its mouth.
"The boy should be told," it intoned, its voice sonorous but with a hint of steel.
Hannah walked around the car, grabbed a passenger cage bar and heaved herself in. "That is my decision." She scrubbed away tears on her sleeve, reached out and engaged power, then grasped the joystick, lifting the car from the ground.
The drone surged forwards, its claw coming down with a crash right beside Cormac and closing on the top of the door. The car made a whining sound and tilted as it struggled to rise.
"I think I know more about what is best for my son than you," said Hannah. "As I understand it, with the one-oh-one classification you have, you shouldn't even have been allowed to come here. Release us. Now."
The drone abruptly obeyed, and the car soared into the air.
"What should I be told?" asked Cormac.
Hannah slammed the joystick forwards, but her shaking hand imparted its motion to the vehicle, which swayed from side to side through the air. Abruptly the safeties cut in, a single tongue of plastic folding out of the seat beside Cormac and closing around his waist, then a voice issued from the console.
"Are you experiencing difficulties, Hannah Lagrange?"
"I am," she replied. "Can you take us on automatic back to our house?"
"Done." The car abruptly stabilized, now controlled by some remote AI, but Hannah kept her hand on the joystick.
"What was the drone talking about?" Cormac persisted.
"Be quiet," she said mildly, reaching into her top pocket to take out her sunglasses and place them over her reddened eyes.
The campsite beside the lake soon came into view and Hannah said to the traffic-control AI, "Okay, I can take it from here."