by Neal Aher
“Enzymic acid,” I said.
It was in Bsorol’s work—an enzyme that slowly dissolved prador carapace to allow a new one to grow. The first-child hadn’t worked out how to stimulate the new growth and so abandoned the idea, instead working on a method to induce the shedding of old carapace. But the enzyme was still interesting. I called up an image of its molecular structure in my mind and examined it from every angle.
“Acid?” asked Reece. She was now standing up at the viewing window, holding her younger child, and had used the intercom.
“An enzyme is a catalyst of biochemical reactions.”
“I know what an enzyme is,” she replied. “I’m questioning the use of the word ‘acid.’”
“Enzyme acid is a catalytic acid. It doesn’t break down or combine with the molecular structures it is destroying. It can work very fast. I believe it was used as a weapon against the prador during the war.” I looked over to Riss, who, having followed us into the surgery had coiled on one of the side work surfaces and apparently gone to sleep.
“Various kinds were developed,” the snake drone replied, raising her head, “but seemed a pointless complication when hydrofluoric acid was available.” The drone’s black eye then opened. “This may be of interest.” The drone sent me a data package.
So, here was the part of the problem that needed solving. I studied complex formulae, molecular models, statistical breakdowns of performance and other data on four different kinds of enzyme. The difficulty, I immediately found, was that all four would be, to some degree, hostile to human tissue. I selected one of them and began redesigning it in my skull to make it a lot more specific and a lot less likely to kill a shellman outright. Walking over to an organo-molecular assembler, I turned it on, reeled out an optic from the side of the thing and plugged it into my aug. First, I had to test the thing out, so I set it to assembling the original enzyme without my modifications. I lost track of time during this task and, when I looked round, Trent was gone and the woman asleep in her chair. I replayed his earlier attempts to get through to me. The shell people were becoming more aggressive, and one of them had torn a hole through the wall of the building. Some out there, having forgone the treatments that maintained their condition when Taiken seized control of them, had collapsed.
“Many of them will still die,” said Riss.
“I know,” I said as I worked.
The assembler had already produced a batch of the first enzyme and opened a hatch in its side to reveal a bottle of the stuff. I walked over to the sleeping boy and used a simple chain-glass scalpel to cut out a piece of carapace and attached human skin. I cut a sliver of this and took it over to a nanoscope, placed it in the sample clamps then got the enzyme and dripped some on, setting the scope to take the sliver inside. The enzyme rapidly took apart prador tissue and more slowly dissolved human tissue.
The shell people’s exterior prador grafts would fall away. Inside them, everything that was of the prador would come apart. Along with all this, their chemically based prador instincts would die too. Many of them would die of blood poisoning, blood loss or one of a hundred other complications.
“I need those amniotic tanks,” I said into the void of Sverl’s computer system. “I need help.”
“Coming,” Bsectil replied.
My final altered enzyme, when the assembler produced it, neatly destroyed prador organic matter and left a sliver of human skin pristine. I felt no great accomplishment because Riss’s words about likely deaths still weighed heavily. Holding the two cold flasks containing the new enzyme, I studied them. I needed to find some way to get this stuff inside the shell people, but was aware that many of them would die from the effects. However, if they didn’t get their portion of this cure, they would continue attacking and killing each other. And they would die anyway from the lack of medical treatment to maintain their condition. I made my calculations from Taiken’s work and the predicted effect of this enzyme. I took up processing in Sverl’s computing as well as in my aug to do this, and on the scales of life and death knew I could save more lives than I would kill, but it wasn’t enough.
I needed some way of keeping these people alive as their grafts died. I felt sure that with the processing power open to me and all the equipment available, there had to be a way, but I just didn’t know enough. I walked over to a second assembler and stared at it. This device could assemble nano-machines and next to it rested a drug manufactory. Surely I could use something here?
Memory from Penny Royal’s spine arose in response to my need. A military doctor called Sykes gazed upon a similar collection of machines. Too many commandos were dying before or during transport from the battlefield to the hospital ship. It was tearing apart this gentle man who had trained as a peacetime doctor of civilian maladies. He called up data in his aug and there studied the parameters of the standard nanosuites most of these soldiers had received throughout their previous lives—the kind of packages he had always recommended. Here were the machines that boosted their immune systems, corrected congenital faults, attacked bacterial and viral infections, quickly closed up capillaries around wounds or swiftly wove clots in severed veins and arteries. They were very useful, these machines, but doctors like him had formatted the whole packages they ran for the general hazards of everyday existence, not for war.
Next, he called up data on the new military nano-package and studied it intently. This was less focused on infections, which were generally slow-moving, and more on traumatic injuries, including amputations, chemical poisoning, munitions shock, beam burns, projectile-killed muscle. It could close off bleeds very quickly and it could weave an impermeable non-reactive skin across open wounds. It could gather toxins and isolate them in bubbles of that same skin. It was a much more aggressive and dangerous package that would need constant reprogramming and tweaking. It could get out of control and inadvertently kill those it was supposed to preserve.
Sykes did not like the thing at all but in the fighting on the planet below it would save many more than it would kill. He used his aug to load its data to the nanobot assembler and set the thing running, feeling he had betrayed his principles . . .
I reached out to the assembler, but before I could touch its controls, my aug had opened a radio link to the thing and was already searching its database. The military package was there and, as I set the machine to make it, I felt thousands of people peering over my shoulder, clamouring for attention, making their suggestions. On an almost unconscious level, I tuned out personalities and focused on data. In that moment, my knowledge became the sum of all theirs. Much of it was of no use, but the cryogenic suspension drug seemed a feasible addition. I allowed the projection of Giano Paulos full access.
He was a historian studying the First Diaspora from the Sol system. Cryo-technicians injected the passengers on the first cryoships with a drug that put their bodies into hibernation. Doctors had already been using this drug on accident victims, putting them into a state of hibernation similar to that of a bear in winter. Someone who might have died from his injuries in an hour would instead take ten hours to die.
Even as I linked to the drug manufactory and searched its database, I saw the problem. In slowing down the shell people’s physiology, I would also slow the spread of the enzyme that would destroy their prador grafts. Microspheres were the answer—the drug enclosed in a slow-dissolving collagen that would release it after the grafts died. That might have been my own knowledge—I was now finding it difficult to make the distinction.
What about the pain, the shock? The solution to that lay in the military nano-package. What about conflicts between these? I laid them out in my mind and explored that, feeling a sudden euphoria at the breadth of my knowledge and the skill available to me. It seemed so simple to make adjustments to the military package so that, after the required delay, it would isolate the enzyme acid. I then considered just tweaking that acid to make it deactivate itself after a certain number of catalytic events.
“You’re too deep,” someone told me, and I felt processing capacity shutting down.
I considered a three-way combination of drugs, nano-machines and adaptogens to stimulate regrowth of amputated limbs or excised organs.
“It’s enough,” said that someone, whom I now recognized as Sverl.
I snapped back into consciousness of my surroundings knowing that it was enough and that further delay would cost lives. Processing came back, but I no longer needed it. I sensed the horde of Penny Royal’s victims and their memories retreating like a fast tide and felt a painful regret at the loss of their additional knowledge. However, just a second later I realized that the retreating tide had left its flotsam and jetsam and that the secondhand knowledge I had used now remained with me. I was suddenly aware of the length of my existence as a fact, as if I had never spent a century locked in artificial ruby but had lived every moment of it. Some portion of those thousands in the spine remained with me, etched into my brain.
“Time to get to work, I reckon,” said Riss, now rising up from the floor beside me.
Her black eye was open, and I spotted other openings too. A series of holes had formed in her skin, revealing glittering internals, with spaces seemingly designed to take the flasks I held.
Of course, here was my delivery mechanism.
RISS
Riss felt gravid, loaded and ready for action as she threaded out through the narrow gap opened by the armoured door, but it just wasn’t the same. Admittedly the prador-eating enzyme she carried bore some similarity to the hydrofluoric acid she had used on occasion during the war, and the microspheres with their contained drug were a little like the parasite eggs she had once carried, but that was the extent of it. Riss wasn’t now heading out to strike terror into the hearts or similar organs of the prador. She wasn’t about to inject a hated enemy with a grotesque and hideous form of death. Riss was heading out to do good.
Perhaps this feeling of dissatisfaction was simply due to what Penny Royal had taken away. Perhaps even containing parasite eggs and going up against a hostile prador would never feel as it should. Perhaps nothing that filled up her internal tanks and caches could fill that other emptiness. Riss knew that she was feeling, and had felt for a long time, something akin to human depression. That is, as depression had been in the days before it could be rubbed out with a five-minute mental reformat—when nothing satisfied, nothing gave pleasure and everything looked bleak. In the same way as some humans had fought that feeling then, Riss tried to use action, business, doing stuff as an antidote. She wished that, as with humans, physical activity would generate endorphins to counter the malaise.
Ahead stood the woman she had spotted earlier. The woman had retained her human form but had grown a prador carapace. Now, because she had not maintained constant immune system reprogram-ming or kept up with antejects and other cocktails of drugs to maintain her condition, she was dying. Down on her knees with her head bowed, she offered an easy target, but Riss decided to study her first. Pus was leaking from the points where the plates of carapace shifted over each other. One such piece had fallen off the back of her hand to expose raw flesh, beaded with blood. Internally she was developing numerous abscesses—and where internal shell connected her immovable plates to underlying bone, the surrounding human flesh was dying. As Riss observed her, she raised her head and, even though her whole system was flooded with toxins and her brain swollen in its skull, she retained at least enough faculties to speak.
“Kill me,” she said, brown drool running out of the side of her mouth.
Riss flipped her ovipositor forwards and drove it into the woman’s chest, punching through carapace and straight into her heart. This was risky because such a wound might kill if the military nano-package didn’t quickly repair it, but Riss calculated that the benefit of faster distribution throughout her body of the load outweighed the risk.
Stab, inject and away, now moving fast towards a shellman lying sideways on the floor—a man trying to pull off his prador legs. Riss didn’t hesitate: she stabbed and injected again. But no orgasmic release ensued. She had no feeling of satisfaction at having performed her function. Riss moved on, now accelerating and not pausing to inspect—rather as she had done when inside the prador ship and victims had been all around. Some of the shell people were technically dead, like the one Riss found lying next to two normal human corpses in a prison cage. However, that was only under an old definition of death that cited a stopped heart and gradual synaptic decay. With the packages and drugs inside them, with that hibernation drug working and nanobots repairing damage, they still had a chance. Death for a human, after all, was now defined as an unrecoverable state, and these days the human mind and body were only unrecoverable after total annihilation.
“So what the hell are you?” asked a voice as Riss finished injecting the shellman in the prison cage. Another man had stepped out of hiding from behind a glass vessel full of squirming Spatterjay leeches.
“I’m Riss,” the drone replied and moved on—a normal human like that was of little interest to her.
Shell person after person felt the stab of Riss’s ovipositor, but she began to feel that just inoculating them as she came upon them wasn’t efficient. She paused to map her surroundings and locate every one. Then, checking the rate at which she was using up her loads, she chose the best course. But, as she set upon this course and found herself chasing a shell-woman who seemed much more able than her fellows, Riss recalculated. Analyses of body temperature, heart rate and other signifiers of general health were called for. Riss paused and redrew the map, selecting those who seemed nearest to death first. The basis of this wasn’t great, but it was the best she could manage in limited time.
Hundreds of inoculations later, Riss headed back for further supplies that Spear should have prepared by now. On the way, she came upon the shellman who had been trying to pull off his own legs. Riss found him prostrate a couple of yards away from his prador additions. Here now lay a naked man, legs severed at the hips, his arms ending in stumps at the forearms and his jaw missing. Silvery white skin covered the point of division at his hips, it lay around his exposed gullet and covered his arms to his shoulders. He had obviously managed to drag himself a short distance from the collection of prador legs and carapaces before the hibernation drug took effect, dropping his mandibles on the way. From those prador parts Riss could hear a steady hissing and saw steam rising. Even as the drone watched, they collapsed a little. The enzyme acid was dissolving them violently and turning them into a slowly spreading pool of sticky fluid.
Amazing.
Riss felt a momentary surge of something other than her usual moroseness, other than her perpetual dark mood . . . something like excitement. So unusual, so unexpected was the feeling that she immediately came to a decision. Spear was making enough of this stuff to deal with the shell people and would probably make no more. However, he had made a test batch of the original enzyme acid—the one that also destroyed human tissue—which he hadn’t destroyed. Instead he had inserted it into a drug safe in Taiken’s surgery-cum-laboratory. Spear had locked the thing with a chip key, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a drone capable of penetrating prador ships and bases. Riss would take it and keep it inside, close, ready to use.
The woman the drone had first inoculated was down on her back, large chunks of her outer shell having fallen away. Instead of displaying bleeding raw flesh underneath, more silvery white skin was visible. The regular human Riss had seen earlier was standing over her, a look of fascinated horror on his face. She was in hibernation, like the previous shellman—one beat of her heart detected as Riss approached. But no further overt signs of life were evident as Riss entered the building, the man following closely.
“How many have you done?” Spear asked when Riss came back to him.
“Eight hundred and forty-two,” Riss replied. “Another seven hundred and sixty to do.”
“The effects?” Spear asked.
Riss route
d recordings made of what she had seen outside to the man’s aug. Spear turned introspective for a moment, then smiled.
“It’s working,” he said.
Riss opened up her body for reloading, ridding herself of empty flasks like a gun ejecting spent ammunition. “Of course it’s working, but still there are those who might die while you’re congratulating yourself.”
Spear harrumphed and picked up more flasks from the nearby work surface. While he inserted these into her body, she studied him on other levels, black eye firmly open. Her scanning went deeper than her examination of the shell people outside. The entanglement it had taken her so long to detect and map was still there, now more active than before, and firmly connected to that object up in Sverl’s sanctum. Large data exchanges were perpetual, and Riss wondered if Spear had any conception of what he had become. He wasn’t just a man now. He seemed to be some synergistic sum of the essence of Penny Royal’s victims, a multifaceted being with the kind of mental resources usually only available to an AI.
As the last flask went into place, the drone experienced a moment of confusion, seeing an entanglement echo in U-space and feeling something like an amplifier feedback whine reverberating through her snake body. She snapped the holes in her body closed and abruptly leapt away from Spear to land on the floor some yards away, ovipositor poised to strike.
“You okay?” he asked.
Riss hadn’t been okay for a long time, but hadn’t often been frightened.
“Nothing,” said Riss. “No problem.”
She circumvented Spear widely to get to the door, through it and out. Keeping such a physical distance in the real from the man was a futile exercise. It didn’t change the fact that Riss now seemed to be quantum entangled, via the spine, to him. What did this mean? She now knew that the spine contained recordings of all Penny Royal’s dead victims. But did this now mean it also maintained a connection with all the AI’s live ones? The sheer computing power, the ability, the godlike intelligence involved in such a bonding suggested Penny Royal might be a magnitude above even the kind of Polity AIs that gave Riss the shivers. It also suggested, consequently, that Spear ranked higher too.