The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin G. Smith

‘And now is not the time for a treasonous subconscious.’

  ‘And what exactly would you like me to do about it?’

  ‘More drugs?’ he suggested. Again he sounded reasonable, but again his suggestion just irritated her. Like everyone in the Game, she was used to altering her mood with chemicals, whether to enhance sensation, as a less controllable alternative to immersion theatre, to enhance performance, or just to remain seemingly calm in the face of other players’ moves. But other than performance enhancers, which would eventually make her crash, she needed to be able to focus without distraction. Mood-changing drugs dulled her wits.

  Now she was wishing for a calming agent, a way to slow her racing brain as she strode rapidly towards her lab. Dracup was next to her, and they were flanked by two heavily armed human guards, four security satellites – S-sats, better-armed and larger versions of the P-sats that some of the more modern and gauche players favoured as familiars – and their two morlock retainers/assistants. The morlocks were frighteningly human-looking, Zabilla had to say. Dressed in what were apparently fabricated copies of pre-Loss servant finery, they looked like small pale people with skin where their eyes should be. Despite their blindness, they never seemed to have any problem finding their way or assisting with often quite delicate procedures.

  She was getting nowhere. The cocoon was resisting all but the most invasive means of investigation, and the most invasive means seemed to threaten some sort of self-destruct impulse or were simply so ruinous that they would harm it. What they were not doing was getting any closer to discovering the secret of bridging to Red Space.

  It didn’t help that an avatar was there daily. She could feel its hollow, empty eyes on her as she worked, somehow disapproving. Her reports went directly to the Absolute.

  They went through one security checkpoint after another, each more thorough and invasive than the last. Zabilla reflected that all her research was being conducted against a backdrop of one security breach after another. There had been a number of breaches – electronic, nano and, most worrying and the most effective so far, biotechnological. It was whispered that the Consortium almost certainly had people on the ground, and it seemed unlikely that the Church was not making some attempt to secure its bridge monopoly. The sophistication of the biotech attempts, however, pointed to the Living Cities on Pangea. The avatar had told her that more than one of the Monarchist systems’ Elites was within response distance if anything happened.

  Zabilla and Dracup walked through the final security and anti-infection field. They had to retract and lock down their nano-screens before they were allowed in and then were assigned S-sats designed to project a sterile field around them. The lab was as nanite-free as any place could be made.

  The airlock system to the lab opened. They cycled through and Zabilla once again found herself looking at the cocoon with the realisation that she was starting to hate the thing. The avatar was already there. If indeed it had ever left.

  ‘There was another security breach last night. An attempt was made to gain access to the genetic files kept on base personnel,’ the avatar neunonically ’faced to them both. Dracup looked up, interested.

  Zabilla wondered what possible interest security matters could have for her. Too late she realised that any conversation with an avatar was almost certainly monitored through its experiential ware by the Absolute. The automaton with the fixed face of beaten gold seemed to be staring at her. She should have said something loyal, explained her thoughts. Instead she was thinking that they should know that all she was interested in was solving the puzzle of the cocoon.

  She knew that it had come from some sort of recently functioning Seeder craft. She knew that it was made from an incredibly tough biological material that shared characteristics with both bone and enamel. Initially she had thought that the name cocoon was misleading and that what she was dealing with was a kind of biological computer laced through the incredibly strong material, but one of the more invasive scanning procedures had pointed to it having a cavity of some sort inside. That was before they had to shut the procedure down, as according to the more passive scans they seemed to be adversely affecting the cocoon.

  Brilliant, she congratulated herself. In more than a month of research, all she had managed to do was confirm that the cocoon was hollow. Though they also knew that it had some sort of internal power supply or store, again laced throughout the cocoon. If it was capable of drawing power from elsewhere then it was probably due to the complex entanglement effect that they had seen with other pieces of S-tech. If this was the case, then who knew what it was capable of?

  They had tried introducing other forms of S-tech in attempts to interface with it. They had tried uplifted races’ versions of technology derived from S-tech, ’sect derivatives of Seeder tech from the Hive Worlds being the most sophisticated, and actual S-tech itself from the small collection of working xeno-archaeological finds present on Game. Even the smallest S-tech find was enough to turn a planet into a conflict-resolution world. There were graveyards of ships in some sectors of space that had come about due to similar space-borne finds. It was all to no avail. Like most modern nano- and smart-matter-based technology, S-tech was designed to be adaptable and have more than one use, but for some reason what they had did not seem compatible. Perhaps, like the Church, the Seeders had wanted to limit bridge capability. That suggested that the cocoon, or whatever was inside it, was a highly specialised application of S-tech.

  Zabilla wished that she had a Church bridge-tech expert to torture but knew they were rarely allowed to leave the Cathedral, and when they did they were heavily protected. An Elite probably could have extracted one, but the Church had made it clear that any attempt to do so would lead to an immediate ban on the provision of bridge technology to the faction in question. There were rumours that one had escaped from the Cathedral but that its knowledge of bridge tech had been protected by some very dangerous and deeply implanted suicide routines. Any attempt to extract the information would result in the wiping of the tech’s mind followed by their death.

  In short, she was attempting to reverse engineer something from a position of near-total ignorance. In fact, the clearest thing about her research so far was that the ability to create nth-level perversions was not going to help her.

  The avatar was watching her again. She had been aware that Dracup and the avatar had been discussing the security of the facility over the secure ’face link. She had been standing there staring at the cocoon for ten minutes now.

  ‘Perhaps some kind of stimulus will help?’ the avatar suggested.

  ‘It would be a distraction,’ Zabilla answered in a more testy tone of voice than was generally considered wise when talking to a direct conduit to the Absolute.

  An idea was beginning to form, but as ever the problem would be interfacing the cocoon with other forms of technology. What she hoped was that the cocoon understood its own purpose and would act accordingly. It was tenuous, but there was precedent for it with S-tech applications, particularly with biotech. There was a degree of intelligence in the alien flesh. Most likely nothing would happen, but the worst-case scenarios for what she had planned were catastrophic.

  ‘I have an idea,’ she told the avatar. ‘We need a ship with a bridge drive.’

  Dracup turned to stare at her.

  ‘That is a bold request,’ the avatar said. ‘You are intending to try and interface a ship’s nav systems with the cocoon?’

  ‘If this cocoon holds the secret to bridge tech, then a nav computer is designed to interface with it.’

  ‘Except that ship nav systems have anti-tamper systems just like bridge drives.’ The Church provided both the nav systems and the drives. Both were intrinsic parts of the stranglehold the Church had on Red Space.

  ‘Yes, but if this is pure S-tech unmodified by the Church, then it shouldn’t have their countermeasures against tampering.’ Though it had remained pretty tamper-proof so far, she thought, but that could just be down t
o the nature of the forces it needed to survive to fulfil its purpose. ‘We won’t be tampering with the nav comp, just offering it another connection. The worst that can happen is we junk a bridge drive and a nav comp.’

  ‘No, the worst that can happen is that you succeed and open a bridge to Red Space, and the gravitational forces involved tear Pangea apart. Or perhaps you just decompress the entire planet and collapse the atmosphere.’

  Zabilla looked pained. She had to admit that opening a bridge was her greatest fear due to the unknown interplay between the gravitational forces at play when opening a wormhole, and how that would interact with Pangea’s own gravity. All bridge drives had a fail-safe against bridging too close to planets. This was also the reason bridge points were always so far from planetary and stellar bodies. The Church had always warned of the catastrophic results of planetary bridge points. The comment about decompressing the planet, however, was sheer ignorance. Sadly, she thought that before she realised the Absolute would be monitoring her.

  ‘Would it perhaps be better to do it in space?’ she suggested.

  ‘Too much of a security risk. We would make ourselves vulnerable to attack by Consortium Elite.’

  ‘Seeder tech tends to be intuitive. I don’t think it would allow catastrophe.’

  ‘It is a lot to gamble on a guess.’

  ‘There’s some evidential basis for my guess, but I’ll be honest with you, I’m out of ideas. If you don’t want to do this then you may as well get Gilbert Scoular down here – perhaps he can make the cocoon look prettier.’ Assuming that Scoular had been cloned since I killed him, that is, Zabilla thought.

  The avatar stared at her. Dracup did a good job of hiding his concern.

  ‘Very well,’ the avatar finally said. ‘The Absolute says that you play this Game well.’

  Zabilla nodded. She didn’t even feel relief. If anything, she was more worried than she had been before. It was a desperate move to stay in the Game rather than anything approaching scientific method. She tried to suppress the feeling at the back of her mind that this was a searing indictment of just how irresponsible the Absolute was. It was willing to risk everything, all its people, the Game and itself on some pretty wild speculation.

  The security was mostly human, as interlopers had hacked the heads in the past. They were some elite unit of the Absolute’s Toy Soldiers and there were a lot of them. Not to mention S-sats, though Zabilla could not understand why they would be any more secure than the heads. Perhaps they were on some kind of isolated control ’face. They were in the large open space where the G-car had first landed, a hangar made of poured reinforced concrete. The reinforcement in the concrete was a nano-process that bonded the individual molecules more tightly together. They were also protected or watched by the bunker’s automated weapon systems: turret-mounted strobe guns, smart munitions batteries, infrasonics, attack nano-swarms and virals. Zabilla didn’t see any Elite but assumed they could be there quickly if anything went wrong. It felt like overkill, but Zabilla was aware, intellectually anyway, that it was not.

  She had watched the craft come down on the elevator platform. It was an old Rapier-class, three-person, long-range strike craft. The fighter/bomber was a decommissioned antique from the Art Wars that had been in the collection of one of the more successful players, though the truly great players frowned upon interests outside the Game. Zabilla thought the three nacelle-mounted Real Space engines made the craft look a little like the tridents she’d seen used by gladiators in the murder arcades. The Rapier fighter/bomber was one of the smallest classes of craft that had a bridge drive.

  The cocoon was brought in on small AG motors and guided over towards the craft. Zabilla, with Dracup’s aid, had been using the full extent of her S-tech knowledge to repurpose and reprogram some of the Absolute’s S-tech collection. She also had a length of tendril-like biotech cable, the best money could buy, grown in a ’sect Hive habitat, to act as a connection. The avatar, who was there watching, did not want the cocoon going inside or even getting too close to the ship.

  In theory, it was as simple as attaching the nav comp to the cabling, to the S-tech interface and then to the cocoon. That was the easy bit. Then they had to somehow make the nav comp give them diagnostic information on the cocoon. By this point Zabilla wasn’t even sure where this ridiculous plan had come from. She must have been desperate when she thought of it, though she was struggling to remember the genesis of the idea. It was now apparent that it was pointless. It wouldn’t work. She’d been clutching at straws.

  The avatar turned to look at her.

  ‘Self-doubt is not an attractive quality, let alone in a player of your calibre.’

  ‘I… I’m… sorry,’ she said. Images were coming to the fore in her mind. Not images, memories that had been hidden from her. They had worn some sort of camo suits. The grotesques had seemingly come from nowhere. At first she had thought they were morlock-rights activists or even losers. She saw the needle and knew she was about to be wiped.

  ‘This is tremendous waste of resources, not to mention a security risk,’ the avatar continued.

  ‘There’s something wrong…’ Zabilla started.

  Dracup turned to look at her. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Too soon.’

  The Absolute actually shifted in its nutrient bath. More then fifty feet long and around ten feet thick, the Absolute resembled something between a slug made of human flesh and a giant phallus. What passed for its mind and its nerve endings were laced throughout the organism’s entire form. Once human, it had redesigned itself to take signals from hundreds of thousands of experiential broadcasts at any one time – the ultimate receptor of sensation. A creature designed specifically as a sensualist. It now realised that something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

  It could feel its avatar neunonically give instructions to the AG motors suspending the cocoon to return it to the secure lab, to the automated defences to open fire and to the S-sats to do the same. All of them were ignored.

  The Absolute itself tried to take control of Zabilla and Dracup if for no other reason than to find out what was happening. Even if they had been meat-hacked it would make an example of them. Instead it found that the experiential link was simply missing.

  The Absolute squirmed and splashed around in its tank. This was exciting but it couldn’t be allowed to lose. It wasn’t what the Game was about. It was about pleasuring itself. The Absolute used the experiential link to take control of ten thousand of the best electronic security and warfare specialists on Game and in orbit. It opened the most secure computer system on the planet to all of them and had them move in unison to retake control of the bunker’s automated systems.

  All the while it was playing back one of Dracup’s hidden memories before the experiential link had been severed. It saw Dracup programming diagnostic routines into the lab’s equipment. Even deep in his subconscious Dracup hadn’t been aware of writing the code after he had examined the bunker’s electronic security, also subconsciously. The sophisticated security hack had been laced throughout the new diagnostic routines that Dracup had been developing consciously.

  It was a shame they hadn’t been players, the Absolute thought. They played well. Just as long as they didn’t win. It had to win. That was the only rule of the Game.

  Dracup took control of the automated weapon systems and the S-sats. The avatar became a prism of light as every strobe gun targeted it. The rotating barrels of the fast-cycling lasers filled the air with lines of red and threatened to overwhelm the avatar’s energy dissipation grid. Then every AG-driven smart munition hit the avatar. The powerful automaton ceased to exist and was replaced with a sizeable crater.

  The force of the explosion knocked Dracup and Zabilla to the ground. It only staggered the nearby armoured and augmented Toy Soldiers.

  The Absolute felt the excitement rising. This was the most alive it had felt in centuries. There was a genuine threat here to something it wanted, but it was going to
win. It took control of every Toy Soldier in the bunker complex. All of them were now rushing towards the hangar area with the purpose of killing Dracup and Zabilla and securing the cocoon.

  As one, the remaining Toy Soldiers turned to look at the prone forms of Zabilla and Dracup. The strobe guns and anti-personnel weapons from the S-sats were cutting swathes through them, but all the smart munitions had been used on the avatar. They would be vaccinated against the virals, their own nano-screens would be programmed to fend off the nano-swarms, and the infrasonic would do him and Zabilla more harm than good, Dracup thought.

  It was sickening. What remained of Zabilla was only just starting to realise what she’d done, even as her personality started to recede, screaming in this new and alien mind. The Zabilla fragment remembered releasing the program into the system bit by bit. The intelligent program had been developed by the Living Cities from code sold to them by Pythia by way of the Consortium’s intelligence agencies. The idea was that it was nearly undetectable. Released in discrete parts, it then formed briefly to find and record information. It had been partially detected and part of it destroyed, but not before it had managed to record the genetic files of every person serving in the bunker. Zabilla had retrieved the information in a set of results from one of her apparently failed diagnostics. She had put it together in her deep subconscious. The information had then gone to the implanted targeted viral factory that ran through her small intestine.

  Dracup grabbed one of the Toy Soldiers, its ornate armour giving him lot of purchase. He rammed the bone knife into the top of the soldier’s neck just below his jaw line. Neurotoxins flooded the soldier’s system. They probably wouldn’t be enough to kill an augmented soldier, but they wouldn’t help. He backed away, still holding on to the knife and the soldier, using him as a shield as the others all started firing at once. Dracup threw himself back over the cocoon as the Soldier he’d been using as a shield exploded into chunks of steaming superheated meat.