by Neal Aher
Searching the exterior of the case, I eventually found a small hatch. I tried to pop it open but the damage to the case had jammed it, so I found a shard of ceramal nearby and used that to lever it open. Inside, to my relief, the coiled optic was undamaged. I unreeled it and plugged it into a data socket in my aug.
“. . . sorry . . .” said Flute.
“Pilot,” I said. “Status report.”
“I am fully . . . dying,” Flute replied. “System ports . . . 1 to 125 are . . . disconnected. Polity-format . . . diagnostic . . . running. Internal battery at 8%. Zero external source. Coolant system damaged . . .organic corruption . . . in process. Status of U-calculus . . . nil—”
“End report,” I interrupted, uncomfortably reminded of the time when I had bought Flute from the shellman Vrit. “Bsectil?” I queried through my aug.
“Help is on the way,” Bsectil replied.
Help arrived down the corridor in the form of an armoured second-child, loaded with tools. I felt an abrupt and strong surge of memory—a Polity commando preparing to take on a similarly equipped second-child—and this one was harder to suppress. I quickly moved out of its way and watched as the prador reeled out a power cable from its armour and plugged that into the case. Lights flickered on about its exterior and the second-child applied a tool head and began taking the thing apart. I crouched, fighting the imposed memories, suddenly feeling them clamouring harshly at the borders of my consciousness. What now? And why now?
In my mind’s eye, I felt the spine finally lock home in a snakish body and make a full connection. Then something new came out of that mass, displacing the commando’s memories. I felt a consciousness of another kind emerge, one that was difficult to encompass, alien. And, all at once, I was the assassin drone Riss—newborn in the furnace of battle, back in Room 101.
THE PRAD0R/HUMAN WAR: RISS
The drone awoke to consciousness knowing its designation as ADP200 and quickly began connecting its consciousness to all its systems, instinctively running diagnostics, becoming all it could be, and understanding itself. It was an assassin drone built in the shape of a prador parasite. It resembled a terran cobra, but with an ovipositor in its tail, small limbs under its hood, and three eyes. Because of the ovipositor and its function, and that vague connection to terran biology, its designation was female. Internally she contained a grav-motor, EM inducers for penetrating computer systems, electro-muscle, a fusion brick to supply power and a high degree of computing. Data, immediately available in her mind, detailed much of human and AI history and science. But the focus of all this was the war. ADP200 hated the prador. In just a few seconds she knew her purpose and was eager to begin work. Next, she engaged her senses and studied her surroundings.
The construction area was a long tube crammed with robotic assemblers—a maelstrom of busy silver limbs and tool heads working around four of ADP200’s kin. These were suspended by hardfields, all in various states of construction. Behind was a version of her sans exterior skin—a snake skeleton packed with components and woven with electro-muscle. Behind that was one lacking both electro-muscle and many essential components, and as ADP200 observed her, she began to writhe. A hardfield slammed her to one side, where a robotic claw closed on her and threw her, still writhing, through a side hatch. Submitting a query to the station AI submind running this small factory, ADP200 learned that 202’s crystal had just too many faults. Rather than start again, it was easier to route her to a nearby furnace.
From the small chamber at the end of the tube, numerous tunnels branched off to the various final construction holds and docks of Factory Station Room 101. It was empty of any of 200’s forerunners and full of smoke. Using her grav-motor, ADP200 moved out to its centre, checking the map of the station clear in her mind and applying to the submind for assignment details. Just then, the whole station shuddered and 200 detected power surges and outages all around.
“You are to proceed to holding point Beta Six, my child,” the submind replied.
My child?
“I’m to be put on hold?”
“We have a situation and you cannot immediately be assigned.” Behind this data, something loomed and, since the drone had been made with the capacity for emotion, she recognized deep regret and monolithic grief. Behind the submind’s words, something was crying.
ADP200 opened her black eye and checked for data. It was blocked for a while, then it seemed as if the power blocking her faded, and she accessed station computing and sensors. In the space of a single moment, the situation became all too clear. Room 101 was under attack from a prador fleet and was taking a pounding. Its AI had shut down production of everything it considered non-essential in this situation. Robots were even taking apart whole factory units—their materials being used to produce stripped-down attack ships that the station was spewing out into battle. The drone understood at once that her kin would never make it, because their whole unit had been shut down—though no orders had yet arrived for it to be taken apart.
The drone watched as the production line powered down. She felt a surge of relief, having so narrowly avoided destruction. She then headed for the relevant exit tunnel to take her to Beta Six.
“You may select a name from the list provided,” the submind informed her, its tones leaden, careless.
Finding the list in her mind, the drone quickly riffled through it. Other snakelike drones had taken all the good names like Kaa and Hissing Sid, but one pertinent name remained.
“I select Riss,” she replied.
“Good choice,” said the mind. “Have a good life.”
Riss felt the mind encompassed by a grieving darkness before it crumbled, flying apart, howling as it went. The drone realized she had witnessed the station AI not subsuming its submind, but destroying it. Had that been necessary?
The exigencies of war, Riss thought, but sensed something seriously wrong with that assessment. Connected into the station’s computing, she was finding areas where logic was breaking down, swamped by digital emotion and always, in the background, that electronic crying.
Navigating quickly through a series of tunnels, Riss became aware that the temperature of the station was steadily increasing. Leaving one of the tunnels to enter a corridor made for larger drones and human personnel, she found some of the latter kind. Two women and a man were on the floor. Probing them with the sensor cluster in her black eye, she registered that the two prostrate on the hot deck were unconscious while the woman sitting with her back against the wall was not. They were clad only in overalls, which was surely insufficient, according to Riss’s knowledge, for the increasing temperature.
“Hello . . . drone,” rasped the woman.
Riss dropped to the floor and slithered across. One of the two on the floor was dying and Riss had to do something. She applied to local systems for help, quickly detailing the situation. The only response was hollow laughter that devolved into sobbing.
“You all need hotsuits,” Riss told the woman.
“Ah . . . if wishes were . . . fishes.”
Riss didn’t understand that but was aware that though she had a detailed knowledge of humankind, it wasn’t complete. Presumably, the woman had just uttered some sort of colloquialism.
“I cannot get a sensible response from 101 or its subminds,” Riss said.
“That’s because,” said the woman, “101 fell off . . . the other side of nuts . . . over an hour ago.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re in some . . . serious shit.”
The other woman, lying on the floor nearby, hit a crisis point as her heart stuttered, and then stopped. Riss again tried to summon help and also used her inducer to restart the woman’s heart, stabilizing herself with her grav-motor and beginning chest compressions.
“Don’t bother,” said the conscious woman. “She took . . . curare 12.”
Riss scanned to confirm this, then stopped the compressions. Derivative 12 of that organic poison rendered a person un
conscious, then paralysed the nervous system, quickly killing them. The drone looked over at the man. He had taken the same, and even as Riss scanned him, he died. But the woman against the wall had taken nothing and was dying from the heat alone.
“Lucky for them,” said the woman, “they have . . . memplants.”
“I don’t understand,” Riss said again.
“You will,” the woman replied, raising the object she held and pressing it under her chin. The pulse-gun thumped three times in quick succession, taking off the top of her head and spreading her brains up the wall behind, where they immediately began to steam.
Riss froze, struggling to accept what had just happened. Scanning the woman deeper, the drone found the internal physical augmentations she had been using to keep herself alive. These were necessary because, for quite some time now, the temperature here had been beyond normal human endurance. Assessing those augmentations, Riss realized that the woman must have been in some pain, and that would only have grown until her augmentations failed. Then she would have been truly subject to the temperature here. It would have been akin to stepping into a hot oven.
Riss moved on to the end of the corridor, went through an airlock that required inducement to open and exited into another corridor. She followed one of the smaller tubes to finally arrive at Beta Six. The massive holding area contained only a scattering of war and assassin drones. Nearby four big objects, resembling giant dust mites fashioned from steel, clung to one wall. And a thing like a razor-edged praying mantis patrolled the floor. Riss approached the last of these, recognizing another terror weapon like her.
“You’re probably the last of them,” said the mantis.
“What?”
“The drone manufactories are being shut down and are going into the furnaces.”
“I need data,” said Riss.
“Here’s a situational update,” offered the mantis, opening a channel along which to send a data package. Riss accepted it.
The survival of Factory Station Room 101 took priority over its residents, so all runcible transfer imports and all available materials inside the station were being turned into stripped-down attack ships. The rate of production hadn’t kept up with the battle, so the AI had decided to open the heat-sink runcible for import. Production had thereafter increased, as had the internal temperature. About half of the five thousand human personnel had managed to don hotsuits, but that would only delay their demise by a few hours. Others had ejected themselves from the station in space suits or escape pods. But such was the intensity of the battle out there that their chances of surviving were low. Still others had inserted themselves into cryo-suspension in human quarters, where the AI had now cut power while robots tore apart the quarters themselves for materials. But 101 couldn’t route power for a U-space jump to escape, because just a slight dip in its present defensive production rates would almost certainly result in its destruction. And now the AI itself was starting to malfunction: many of its communications were illogical, its attempt to shut down the runcible gates was stopped directly by Earth Central, and other attempts seemingly to sabotage its own survival were being countered by its surviving subminds.
Riss wanted to say, “I don’t understand,” but felt that was a phrase she had used too often already in her short life.
“Fucking empathy,” said the razor mantis.
No, I’m not going to say it, thought Riss.
“Supposedly we are post-humans and so without emotion our reason for being will fade. That emotion is also supposedly a driver that will enable us to win this war,” the mantis explained. “Fucking bean counters.” The big drone whacked a forelimb against the floor and dragged it across, peeling up slivers of metal.
“Okay, I give up. I don’t understand.”
“Great idea to give a factory station AI the empathy and conscience of a human mother so it’ll be sure to look after all its children.”
Riss finally began to get some glimmering of understanding. The 101 AI had birthed and was continuing to birth thousands of sentient minds, only to send them immediately to destruction. Its children. It had also, out of necessity, killed all the humans aboard.
“This is why it’s malfunctioning?” Riss suggested.
“Malfunctioning,” the mantis pondered, “such a technical term.”
“Do you have a better one?”
“Yeah.” The mantis now swung round to face Riss completely, mandibles grinding. “The Room 101 AI has gone nuts, it’s barking, it fell out of the silly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”
“Why don’t I feel . . .” Riss tried.
“Hey, you’re a newbie,” said the mantis, “of course you don’t feel much.”
“I have just been made,” Riss agreed cautiously.
“I was in here for repairs myself.” Those mandibles stopped grating and the big drone continued, “In your case, no call for too much in the way of conscience or empathy in an assassin drone—it kinda gets in the way.”
As the snake drone contemplated all her parts and the perfection of her physical design, shaped for a single task, she understood that her mental design was just as refined and specific. Room 101 had also been perfectly designed for its task of producing sentient weapons. But it had never been intended to end up in the thick of the fighting.
“Ah fuck,” said the mantis.
A light as bright as many suns glared in through ports high up in Beta Six section. Some massive detonation jerked the eighty-mile-long station like a hand slapping a ceiling mobile. The whole of Beta Six distorted; a dent hundreds of feet long bowed in one wall. The little drone found herself propelled at high speed across the space, saw the mite drones tumbling, then slamming into the dented wall. The mantis was still in position, sharp limbs driven into the floor where they had sliced foot-long grooves. Riss tried to obtain data, while trying to pull her ovipositor out of the bubble-metal it had embedded itself in.
No data available.
Fire now jetted in from the entrances, and one airlock door tore free, tumbling across the space. Great heavings and groanings impinged, then everything twisted in a way Riss recognized at once, but with those parts of her mind that weren’t in any human-comparable format. Room 101 U-jumped.
CV0RN
Cvorn felt strong, potent, and he was beginning to feel something else as residual cell damage healed what the surgical equipment had missed. The transplant still ached, but that pain was just a gloss over another sensation, which grew steadily stronger. He turned sharply as Vrom entered from his annex, carrying a bulky organic synthesis unit with a precisely temperature-controlled atomizer and fans mounted on top. Vrom placed the device on the floor before Cvorn and quickly moved back. Even the unemotional first-child was now sensing the change in his father and understood that his personal danger had increased.
Cvorn dipped towards the thing, waggled his new palp eyes—an afterthought after the main surgical operation and one he was regretting, because they didn’t seem to be working properly. He studied the control made for a prador manipulator hand he didn’t possess, then made a connection to it via his array of control units and aug.
“So tell me about it,” he said, strangely reluctant to turn the thing on.
“The power usage is very low and is kept topped up by simple inductance from ship systems,” Vrom stated. “Even without topping up it will last decades. The hormones and pheromones are generated from your own genome but otherwise precisely match the mix created by these.” Vrom waved a claw towards the mutilated but still living remains of the young male lying nearby and bubbling weakly in agony, as it had been for many days. “The effect should be the same.”
“But if I activate this now,” said Cvorn, “the pheromone mix in the air here will be doubled.”
“Yes, Father,” Vrom agreed.
Cvorn pointed his claw at the young adult. He had been reluctant to let it die and lose its hormonal output, but now it was no longer required. “Remove him for your own
amusement, but ensure he dies within the next hour.”
Vrom immediately turned and headed over to the creature, eager for the rare delicacy. The male’s bubbling increased since it was still aware enough to know what was in store. As Vrom began dragging it to the door into his own annex, where he would doubtless open up its shell and begin dining on the living contents, Cvorn focused his attention throughout the ST dreadnought. His ship now.
First, he needed to seal Sfolk and the other three young adults into their quarters so their hormone production would not spread throughout the air ducts. Through his aug, Cvorn cut their quarters out of the ship’s air-supply system, then issued orders to some of his own second-children to go there with air-set resin guns to make those quarters airtight. This wouldn’t kill the four for some time; later, if he felt the urge, Cvorn could deal with them on a more personal level.
Next Cvorn turned on the bio- and gas-attack filtration system. The nano-meshes in these would now take out all large molecules and clear the air. This would take some time so Cvorn set an alert to warn him when the hormone levels in the air dropped below ten per cent of their present level. Then he would turn on the device before him. But he was still wary, and a little puzzled.
Surely, even if prador father-captains had never found themselves breathing the same air supply as five young adults and four females, this effect had been known. Why, then, hadn’t it been more commonly used? Cvorn thought about his own past.
Cvorn’s father had, as was often the case with prador, grown senile and negligent. Whilst chemical suppression of Cvorn’s growth had prevented him, his father’s leading first-child, from turning into an adult, his father had failed to supplement his fading hormonal control of his children. A long time before he had been capable of acting directly against his father, Cvorn had understood this and had prepared, as had his father’s other three first-children. Ironically, if his father hadn’t decided that the time had come for Cvorn to be replaced, the result of the ensuing conflict might have been a lot messier and not necessarily in Cvorn’s favour. As it was, his father summoned him to his sanctum, where two thralled grazer squid awaited with surgical telefactors and one of the new spherical drone shells into which they aimed to install Cvorn’s ganglion. Cvorn knew what was about to happen and therefore had greater motivation to fight his instinct to obey than his brethren. It was the most difficult thing he had ever done—to resist the urge to submit, and then to activate the particle cannon concealed in his claw and turn it on his father. His father had died quickly, the beam punching through the macerating machine he had used in the place of mandibles and into his body, the pressure generated in there by expanding hot gases blowing off the top of his shell, but his pheromones had not faded as quickly as his life.