Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘It’s where the asteroid below us came from,’ he replied. ‘Think of it: millions of asteroids and what were previously thought of as asteroids but have turned out to be loose accumulations of rubble, dust, fragments – all barely stable after billions of years – then we come in and snatch the Argus asteroid away, meanwhile sending the remains of the Traveller VI tumbling into the belt. That destabilized the immediate area, and the disruption spread, so that now nearly two million kilometres of the belt is a mess.’

  ‘The objects in the belt are still very far apart, so we should be fine,’ said Hannah, further annoyed with herself the moment she said it, because she considered herself quite capable of admitting to her own errors.

  ‘Maybe, but Argus station presents one hell of a big profile.’

  ‘Best you take it up with him, then,’ Hannah replied, then quickly left Tech Central.

  For over a month Saul just lay there, apparently with rigor mortis set in, but for the fact his heart kept beating and he kept breathing. He was still healing, though, the brain tissue she had used steadily growing and making connections; the organic net from his bio-interface unwaveringly repairing itself and reinstating connections. As he lay there, she’d tried to guide the process, to make it adhere to the maps she had of his mind as it was before, but had only been partially successful. The problem was that it grew with reference to the two masses of other brain tissue sitting in two one-metre-square boxes in her clean-room, and also seemed to be making partial connections to certain parts of his brain that he seemed to have partitioned off in some way. Yes, he was healing, but would he ever wake up and, if so, would what then woke up even be defined as a person?

  Connections from his brain also remained open into the entire Argus computer system, and it seemed that, through that system, windows opened into his dreaming mind. She’d heard complaints from technical staff about strange strings of code propagating in their computers, like worms, then just transferring away, also disturbing images appeared in screensavers and visual coms, and nonsensical messages and spine-crawling sounds issued from speakers. The whole station seemed to have turned into a haunted house. People spoke in whispers, jerked nervously at unexpected sounds, and checked the shadows in the corridors. All this created an air of gloom, as well as a fear difficult to nail down.

  There were ways she could force things with Saul, but she was in entirely uncharted territory here and might do irreparable damage. She had so far ascertained that he had allowed himself to sleep but without putting in place the processes that would wake him up. He was in a coma, and it seemed she had stepped a hundred years into the past with him, to a time when people woke up from comas for no real discernible reason, or woke not at all.

  ‘Le Roque called me up to Tech Central again,’ said James, her lab assistant.

  He had only just returned with some downloads obtained directly from a construction robot, all of which type were still working on the station enclosure – in fact getting near to completing it. Saul remained connected to them, too, via some of those mental partitions, and she hoped to get some data on what was happening with him. James’s approach to a spidergun for the same reason had been unsuccessful – they wouldn’t let anyone near.

  ‘What does he want now?’ she asked.

  ‘He wants to talk to you personally, and he wants to know why you’re not answering your fone.’

  Hannah checked her visual-cortex menu and noted eight unanswered calls from Le Roque, twenty from Langstrom, five from Rhine and a recent one from Brigitta.

  ‘Tell him that I’ll speak to him when I’ve got something to report,’ she said, then opened up the channel to the last of these. ‘Brigitta?’

  ‘How is he now?’ asked the more talkative Saberhagen twin.

  ‘Healing, slowly, but still not conscious,’ she said. Then, with some irritation, ‘I said I’d let you know.’

  ‘That’s not really why I called. I need your input.’

  ‘On what?’ Didn’t Brigitta realize just how bad things could get? Hannah couldn’t leave Saul now while he was so vulnerable. How long before either Le Roque or Langstrom decided to take full charge of the station? How long after that before they decided that maybe they would like to stay in control, and that maybe it was time for Saul’s coma to end, permanently?

  ‘I’m in HUD with Angela . . . you need to come and see this.’

  ‘I do have my own problems here,’ Hannah replied.

  ‘This may be related . . . we’re getting the same data-exchange processes here that you’re seeing between Saul and the robots. We think he’s loaded something to them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘The androids.’

  Hannah felt a chill. She turned to gaze at the body lying in her clean surgery, almost lost among the feeding tubes, optics and wires she’d plugged into him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she whispered to him, and stood up. ‘Keep an eye on things here,’ she instructed James. ‘No one is to have access unless I say so, understood?’

  He nodded. ‘I doubt anyone will try.’ He pointed towards the laboratory door.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ she replied, heading that way.

  Stepping outside, she turned to study the spidergun still installed outside her laboratory. The constant presence of machines like this was probably why both Le Roque and Langstrom weren’t being as demanding as she might have expected. Neither of them was entirely sure what the situation was with Saul; and neither of them wanted to become the focus of his attention by doing anything . . . hasty.

  It took her a few minutes to reach Humanoid Unit Development, during which time she ignored a call each from Langstrom and Le Roque. The Saberhagen twins were waiting for her outside the door leading into the unit. The two were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes – a new affectation among some on the station since a patch of mature tobacco plants had been found growing in the Arboretum. The smoke would be unlikely to have caused any problems in HUD, so it looked to Hannah as if they had come outside for a break, for an escape from whatever seemed to be stressing them out. Even they were not unaffected by the present odd atmosphere aboard the station.

  ‘So, what’s this about?’ Hannah asked.

  Brigitta drew on her cigarette, then ground it out in a little hinged box she was holding, snapping it shut before she reached to palm the door lock. ‘Come and see,’ she said, pushing the door open and entering.

  Hannah followed her, glancing at Angela, who remained leaning back against the wall, smoke trailing from her mouth and with her eyes closed.

  ‘Over the last month we’ve been building some basic programming and frankly struggling, as nothing seemed to stick. Two days ago something dumped those programs and took over,’ she said. ‘It just closed us out. While Angela worked on trying to continue programming them as planned, but failing, I’ve been tracing the source of the interference, and it came through the computers we were using for programming, via the station network, from your lab. I then managed to shut it out, but that’s made no difference. They’re all interlinked and when I try to wipe it out in one of them, it immediately starts recording back across from the others.’

  ‘Viral?’

  ‘Call it a virus, call it a worm, whatever – it’s programming that perpetually recreates itself and it’s very, very complex.’

  ‘Comlife.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Brigitta agreed.

  Hannah turned to study the androids. They had been fascinating before, even when they were immobile, for the leathery-skinned manikins stood over two metres tall and looked as tough as old oak. They were sexless things that possessed practically featureless heads, without ears or eyes, just a visor of the same leathery material as their skin and the harsh slit of a mouth, and big, long-fingered hands.

  Now, however, they were on the move. Even as she entered the room behind Brigitta, ten eyeless visages turned towards her. The one nearest her tilted its head like a curious child that had spotted something of interest. Further do
wn the row, one of them had an arm free of the frame and the nylon webbing straps which had previously supported it and still bound it. It was holding up the same hand for inspection, clenching and unclenching it slowly.

  ‘Let me see,’ Hannah said, walking over to one of the consoles.

  Brigitta followed, tapped in a command and data began scrolling. Hannah studied it for a long moment, then sat down and pulled up her sleeves and set to work. She began opening files, inspecting packets, linking to the computers in her lab and opening analysis and diagnostic programs, trying to ignore her immediate snap assessment but only finding confirmation of it. After a while she sat back, her heart thudding hard in her chest, her mouth slightly dry.

  ‘Well,’ she said finally.

  ‘Well what?’ asked Brigitta.

  ‘They’re alive,’ declared Angela, who had just returned.

  Hannah swung round in her chair and regarded the pair of them. These two were brilliant, their education and knowledge extending across numerous disciplines, but they simply were not familiar with the things Hannah herself knew.

  ‘Comlife is largely a copy of the synaptic neural processes we see in life, but running on, at its basis, binary programming,’ she lectured. ‘That’s what made it possible for living human beings like Saul, Malden and Smith to interface with computers. There’s a gap to bridge, because of translation difficulties, and a heavy reliance on modelling.’

  ‘Then this is comlife,’ said Brigitta.

  Hannah shook her head, not quite sure how to reply. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling her way. ‘Saul loaded an AI called Janus to the hardware and bioware in his own skull. It was a comlife copy of Saul’s mind, with a binary base that allowed him access to computer systems. It was, if you like, his guide and translator, though much more closely interlinked. The core of Saul is mainly human, organic, synaptic, even though much augmented, operating through silicon binary hardware. These,’ she gestured to the row of androids, ‘are the reverse. They’re mainly binary AI with a smaller organic synaptic component. Yes, I guess what’s running inside their heads can be called comlife, but of a kind we’ve not seen before.’

  Hannah stood up, not knowing what more to add.

  ‘Release us,’ said the first android in the row, the resonance in its voice sending a shiver down her spine. ‘Instruct us,’ it added.

  Hannah stared at the thing. The sound of that voice meant nothing to her. A complete psychopath could reside inside that body, even if such a typically human description could be applied. It occurred to her that the same reasoning might now apply to Saul.

  ‘That’s a new one,’ remarked Brigitta. ‘So far it’s mainly just been asking to be released.’

  Hannah gestured to the door and they trooped outside, closing it behind them. Once outside, Angela began rolling herself another cigarette, spilling tobacco from her shaking hands.

  ‘What are they capable of?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘They’re strong and fast,’ Brigitta replied. ‘And they have defences.’

  ‘How strong? How fast?’

  ‘Their bones are made of concentric microlaminations of carbon fibre and steel, all with bearing surfaces, which means they are flexible but practically unbreakable. They’re packed with artificial muscle sustained with oxygen and nutrients through microtubules and tensioned electrically. That makes them about five times stronger than a human being and they can act and react faster than any human nerve impulses. The stepper motors at their joints increase that same strength to something equivalent to that of a construction robot.’

  ‘Dangerous, then,’ said Hannah contemplatively, realizing something that maybe the twins had missed.

  ‘That isn’t all of it,’ said Angela, puffing out a cloud of smoke as she spoke.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Angela reluctantly continued, ‘Their skin is another laminate. You’d be able to penetrate it only with an armour piercer, and then the chances are that you’d encounter another layer of armour underneath. Even if you get through that as well, your chances of hitting something vital are remote. Everything inside them is distributed: mind, power supply, nutrient supplies and stored oxygen.’ She tapped her skull. ‘The brain isn’t only in here, it’s everywhere. Even their senses aren’t completely located in their heads, as they have receptors for light, sound and smell located all over their skins.’

  ‘Hard to kill,’ Hannah observed. ‘You’re scared of them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brigitta. ‘Shouldn’t we be?’

  ‘Anything else?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘An electromagnetic field is generated through the skin – so EM weapons won’t work against them and, to a certain extent, they’ll deflect coherent radiations,’ Brigitta said. ‘That’s about it, I think, but it’s enough.’

  ‘No,’ corrected Angela. ‘Remember the internals.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Brigitta. ‘They’ve got internal nanomachines that they can consciously control, which means they can repair any damage. I don’t know yet if they can also be used as a weapon. That’s it now, I think.’ She glanced at her sister, who merely shrugged and drew on her cigarette.

  ‘One point you neglected,’ said Hannah. ‘If they can consciously control those nanomachines, that means they can grow and change. Already they are growing mentally, as is obvious from the readouts, which are very like some I saw from Saul as he expanded his new neural net.’

  ‘Enough reason to be afraid,’ said Brigitta.

  ‘When you feel you are ready,’ said Hannah, ‘you should then decide whether or not to release them.’

  ‘What?’ Angela exclaimed.

  Hannah studied the two of them. They had analysed and understood so much and, like so many brilliant minds, they’d missed seeing the wood for the trees. In fact they’d missed something blatantly obvious. This was why sometimes scientists needed prosaic minds around them, to slap them across the backs of their heads and point out the elephant in the room.

  ‘They’re as strong as construction robots, you told me,’ she explained. ‘So do you think that, if they wanted to break free, those nylon webbing straps would be enough prevent them?’ She watched them gape at her, then added, ‘Maybe they’re just making a polite request?’ The twins still had nothing to say to that. ‘I have to get back to Saul,’ she said, and headed away.

  As she walked back to her laboratory, Hannah tried to ignore her conscience, which at that moment was telling her she was being a coward. The twins had wanted someone there in charge, someone else to be responsible, to tell them what to do. She had simply pointed out something obvious, and then run away. It was like the situation with her and Saul regarding the mind-wipe she had conducted on the Committee prisoners aboard the station. She had not wanted the responsibility, and had only accepted it when he forced it upon her. She now felt uneasy and slightly disgusted with herself.

  Such thoughts occupied her wholly, to the extent that she did not realize an escort had fallen in behind her as she entered the corridor leading to her laboratory. She halted abruptly when she saw what lay directly ahead. The spidergun was right up against the wall, all its limbs folded inwards, clenched – and it wasn’t moving. She transferred her gaze further along the corridor. Langstrom and Peach stood watching as two repros held her assistant James pinned against the wall while they cuffed him. The medic, Raiman, and two other medics from Tech Central were also present. She glanced back as two more of Langstrom’s men closed in behind her.

  ‘Dr Neumann,’ said Langstrom, stepping forward, shouldering some sort of large heavy weapon with a silvered barrel ten centimetres across, a power cable leading from it to the heavy pack Peach carried on her back. Clearly he’d made one of the EM tank-busters portable, and used it on the spidergun.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ She transferred her gaze from the EM tank-buster to his sidearm, then briefly flicked a glance over some of the weapons the others were carrying. ‘I see you’ve armed yourselves –
against the Owner’s explicit instructions.’

  He tapped a hand against the top of his sidearm. ‘The situation requires them – there’re things that must be discussed. We’ve called together a meeting of heads of staff, and your presence is required.’

  ‘Like hell.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but you have to come along,’ he said.

  ‘What are they here for?’ she gestured at the medics.

  ‘They are here to make an assessment of Alan Saul’s condition,’ Langstrom replied.

  And so it starts . . .

  ‘They will do nothing of the sort . . . he’s my patient and I’m staying here.’

  ‘Unfortunately not, Dr Neumann. Please don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be.’

  Hannah swung her attention back to the spidergun. Still it wasn’t moving. Probably from this they had assumed that Alan Saul wasn’t paying attention, might even be dead. Such an attack on one of his robots should undoubtedly have elicited a response from him.

  Hannah did not make it difficult, because in the end she was an unarmed woman – and not the sleeping demigod in the room beyond.

  Mars

  Var was spending far too much time in her cabin, but she would have had to be a robot not to feel some resentment about the attitude of other base personnel towards her. It was as if they had lived so long under totalitarian rule that they could not accept any other condition. They seemed incapable of questioning their belief that she had killed Delaware and, beyond getting some sort of justice for the man, there seemed therefore no reason to pursue the investigation. No one would believe the results, because all of them believed she was the guilty party. She insisted the investigation continue, however, out of a stubborn belief of her own – the need to discover the truth.

  Now, having finished her shower, and again fully clothed and knowing there was nothing critical she could pursue on her computer, Var hesitated at the door. What was her way out of this bind? She wanted to be pragmatic in her running of Antares Base, which required some degree of authoritarianism, but she did not want to be seen as oppressive. Yet she had noticed how the people here were now working less enthusiastically for their own survival. It was a crazy situation.