by Neal Asher
It was working . . .
The next microsecond, the hardfield projector’s temperature increased a thousand degrees. The microsecond after that a safety trip cut in and opened the ejection port leading to the opposite side of the station from the projector and, as the U-signature cut out, belated kinetic energy complemented the heat energy, and shot the molten and radiating projector out into vacuum.
“That could have gone better,” said Owl.
Feeling very pleased with himself now because, through his own calculations, he had divined the problem, Crowther said, “The U-space tap needs to be integral to the projector. I know that should not be relevant, since there is nominally no distance in U-space, but at these energy levels you cannot neglect quantum tunnelling at the interface.”
“Oh. Right,” Owl replied.
Now feeling expansive, Crowther continued, “You do of course understand what this implies? The hardfield curve can be extended and actually link up. No more scaling of fields, fully enclosing fields, weapons systems fed by the U-twist.” There he paused because, in reality, he hadn’t thought about that last bit deeply enough. Again the implications: weapons systems drawing on the kind of power output you might find at a major runcible terminus, but certainly not aboard any Polity ship he knew. He was appalled.
After a pause he muttered, “Fully enclosing hardfields . . . perhaps we should . . . look at this again.” Damn, he hoped this was again behind the curve. He’d heard nothing about such fields from EC but they were probably in development somewhere in the Polity. Better there than anywhere else. Like the Kingdom, for example.
Over the next few days, and with no recent data surges from Layden’s Sink, they worked together on designing a hardfield projector. Still, Crowther knew that even if no such projectors had been developed in the Polity, since his transmission of the last data package, some serious AIs would be working on them. In fact, they would almost certainly come up with something before he and Owl did. Two weeks later, with plans put on hold as he studied new data again seeping from the black hole, Crowther peripherally picked up a U-space signature back towards the far rim of the accretion disc, out towards the Panarchia system. He supposed another Polity research vessel or private sightseer had arrived.
“Well, someone got there before us,” Owl commented.
“How so?” Crowther asked.
“Spherical hardfield.”
“What?”
Keeping the Hawking dish focused, Crowther redirected his other sensors away from the black hole and back towards that U-signature. Whatever had arrived was light minutes away so no realspace EMR had arrived yet, but the U-space signature was weird, disperse, and in that underlying continuum sat a massive distortion—a twist. Measuring this and deploying new esoteric math, Crowther realized why Owl had said that there must be a spherical hardfield out there. Minutes later, when the EMR reached the station, Crowther gazed in glorious Technicolor at their new arrival.
“Fucking hell,” said Owl.
“Indeed,” said Crowther, surprised to hear that from the normally precise and acerbic drone.
Out at the edge of the accretion disc, and now heading in under some kind of drive actually clawing at the fabric of space, came a spherical ship, enclosed by a truly immense—and spherical—hardfield. But then the hardfield had to be big, since it was enclosing a ship nearly fifty miles across.
Spear
I began to walk towards this larger form of the black AI as it now lowered itself to the grit in urchin form, spines shuffling, moving in and out, changing shape and energetic. Was it really programming that made me open my connection to the spine and, for the first time, experience its full impact, or my own choice? The crowd filled me and I felt Sepia’s sudden panic and her severing of our connection. I paused and looked back at her. She was down on her knees with her gloved hands against her space helmet, clutching and shaking her lowered head. But the crowd overrode my reaction to that because I was both me and all of them, and now I was reaching out to Penny Royal for resolution.
And then I was in and though I numbered in the thousands I was still small in this new hellish vastness. A great cavern of black crystal surrounded me, its walls within touching distance or a thousand miles away, the cavern extending ahead to the eye of infinity. I could sense the eight states of consciousness—their interplay, alliances, the pure vicious evil of one of them—and saw in this whole a reflection in myself. I too had those within me who were vicious and who only had their one response to the world. I suppressed them. I was a synergetic combination of all, an alliance, and yet I was still me.
The scale and the complexity I found around me were awesome, yet I could also see that the relationship, through the spine, was comparable to the connection I had made with Riss, to Mr Grey, to any other robot or AI I cared to infiltrate. With the spine I was like a chain-glass decoder. I could press myself in here and everything would unravel. I understood then that as well as giving me reasons to kill it the AI had also provided me with the means. Was this what it meant when it said, You have come here to learn how to kill?
“Not yet,” Penny Royal told me.
Through the all-encompassing vision of the AI I saw another ship arrive and recognized it. Belatedly Flute informed me, “We’ve got a visitor.”
“I know,” I replied. “Just keep watch—I’ll let you know if you need to take any action.”
“Why is he here?” I asked Penny Royal.
“You know.”
Of course I did. Mr Pace was here for me, for the spine, for Penny Royal. He knew precisely what I was. He needed to take the spine away from me because he believed that with it he could kill Penny Royal and then he himself could finally die. As I watched the ship coming in fast, I realized there had to be more to it than that. I was the judgement the AI had created for itself. So where exactly did Mr Pace fit in? If I wanted to see Penny Royal dead all I needed to do was hand the spine over to him. All the AI’s manipulations would then mean nothing; all its preparation of me. I knew the AI’s crimes because I had experienced them thousands of times over. Did I want to see Penny Royal dead?
“All I need to do is give this to him,” I said.
“Then you have failed,” the AI replied, after a pause adding, “to understand Mr Pace.”
Really?
I reached deep into the spine and, in another respect, out towards that ship. In the tangle of a thousand threads I found his. The totality of his life resided in his body while perpetually recorded to the spine. From there it was relayed through U-space to Pace’s home world to update a third recording of the man residing in the extended mentality of what had once been a war drone. Damn me if I didn’t recognize the signature of the mind of the thing, but I couldn’t place it. I glanced at Riss, and only learned why I had done so when she said over suit com, “When I was on Room 101. The first time.”
I got it then: the drone on Mr Pace’s world was one of those who had escaped with Riss, whose memory of the whole episode I had experienced. Further reflections and shadows here, for this was a drone that had wanted purpose just as desperately as Riss. Penny Royal had given it such a purpose, of course, when Mr Pace had come begging. And now the drone perpetually recorded Mr Pace and resurrected him every time his body was destroyed, or otherwise burrowed aimlessly through the crust of that world. There seemed to me a lesson in this . . . a case of be careful what you wish for.
Now I focused fully on Mr Pace and, just as I had with many others residing in the spine, experienced him. It was a brief sojourn in a mind that was an abyss of despair, only stirred to action by the prospect of murder. I divined then why he had been aboard the extremadapt station. He had found something in a piece of green memory crystal: some hint to the location of an Atheter starship. There, he felt, would be the technology that could free him from his unique damnation. He knew there was something on his home world that resu
rrected him each time he destroyed himself and he was powerless to stop it. He had decided his best option was to obliterate the world—a task such a starship could easily achieve.
Had Penny Royal destroyed the extremadapt colony to drive him away? I could make no sense of it but, nevertheless, Mr Pace was coming in fast and now I did, if imperfectly, understand him. Sure, if I handed over the spine he would use it against Penny Royal. But first he would use it against me. He had to get to me, though, and there was this hardfield . . .
Even as I thought that, the hardfield went out and one of the projectors came in low over my head to land between me and the AI. The hardfield came on again, surrounding it, and leaving me outside. I turned away, some intimation now of what Penny Royal wanted here.
“Sepia . . .” I groped to re-establish our connection, but the attempt only raised a squall of error messages. I began trotting towards her, now using my suit com, “Sepia, head for the shuttle. Fast.”
“What? Why?”
“Mr Pace just arrived and he’s going to try and kill me.”
She turned round and set off in loping paces towards the shuttle.
“Too late,” said Riss direct to my aug.
Even as I heard her words, the railgun missiles hit.
The Brockle
The High Castle slid out of U-space and immediately concealed itself under chameleonware. The ’ware was good, but still would not be enough to conceal it completely from the Polity ships. They would know that something had arrived, they just would not know what or where. The Brockle surveyed the scene.
The twenty prador ships were in a loose formation separated from the Polity fleet by a hundred thousand miles. The latter had its two dreadnoughts, close together between the prador ships, and the seven attack ships, which were arranged in a ring formation oriented towards the hypergiant. Com activity was high and the Brockle, possessing the requisite codes, keyed into it. Both sides were preparing to leave, their brief alliance over, but some diplomacy was ongoing, in an attempt to create closer ties.
The lead Polity dreadnought was transmitting data on the Well Head, the Weaver and the war drone Amistad to the lead King’s Guard ship, while in return the Polity was getting much data on Sverl and other renegade prador past and present. This was necessarily a slow and very careful process because, despite a hundred years having passed since the end of the war, the parties represented two civilizations that had come close to exterminating each other. They were also, the Brockle realized, checking each other’s trustworthiness by comparing received data against what they already knew. It seemed a shame to break up the party.
Now turning its attention to the High Castle’s weapons systems, the Brockle made its selections and chose its targets. It fired two Polity U-jump missiles athwart the hypergiant. They would materialize in vacuum beyond the sun to await updated coordinates on their targets, at which point they could jump back in again. It next turned its attention to the two highly modified U-jump missiles and fired them off. These were bulky oblate objects with single-burn fusers attached, their U-signatures varying from the Polity norm and with deliberate inaccuracies introduced. Unlike the first two missiles, they were not capable of materializing actually inside a target. These the Brockle dispatched out towards the asteroid belt here, where they too would await updates on their targets. The Brockle then cut its chameleonware and under fusion accelerated in towards the massed ships.
Fleet communications immediately opened to the High Castle and this of course was because the ship had been expected. Its apparent mission had been an investigation of the situation with Room 101 after the fleet had dealt with the problem. It had also been tasked to intervene if the problem turned into one that couldn’t be solved with the simple application of CTDs and particle beams.
“You’re late,” said the Garrotte AI.
The Brockle opened up the bandwidth of communications just enough, puppeting through the High Castle AI which was not simply under its control, but had become just one unit in its extended being. Now, since it had realized that what had been seen of Penny Royal was not the whole of that entity, the Brockle had allowed itself to grow physically larger—the conglomeration of its units forming a sphere measuring twenty feet across—and mentally larger. Now it was really ready to deal with Penny Royal.
“The nature of our mission as it now stands required my disembarking my human crew,” the Brockle replied. “We need prime manoeuvring capabilities for AI-on-AI conflict.” It had happened before when the Polity had needed to deal with renegade AIs—when ship AIs pushed systems beyond tolerances that might leave humans smeared about the interior.
“What mission?” Garrotte asked.
“Close U-space com and await delivery of physically transported data. Cut all com to our prador friends here,” the Brockle instructed. “I am now, as per plan, taking command.”
“That bad?” enquired Garrotte.
Via its links to the two destroyers and seven attack ships the Brockle observed its orders being obeyed. All com shortly switched over to laser or microwave beam. Communication channels that had been open to the twenty King’s Guard ships cut abruptly, but the Brockle quickly opened its own channel to the chief Guard ship because it would be needed later. Those ships began changing formation at once—suspicious of their Polity allies after the abrupt cut in com. The prador in charge tried to ask questions, but the Brockle put it on hold for the moment.
Garrotte had also issued other orders and, in response, the human crews aboard the two dreadnoughts were heading for aqueous-glass stasis tanks. In these they would sink into hypersleep, the two-state glass penetrating their bodies and then hardening to the consistency of diamond. In this condition they were no more vulnerable than the crystal of the AIs controlling their ships. The High Castle also possessed this facility, which was worrying, because Garrotte and the other AIs might wonder why it had not been used. Too late to call back the lie.
“U-com has been penetrated,” said the Brockle. “It is possible that ships here have been penetrated too, and that includes those Guard ships.”
“Understood.”
“Physical data units will be dispatched shortly.” As it said this, the Brockle began breaking off clumps of units of itself of much the same mass as its original form aboard the Tyburn. These it quickly dispatched through the altered interior of the ship, down tubeways to a series of eleven sensor probes it had prepared on the journey here—the two spares in case of failures.
“But I’m still puzzled,” said Garrotte. “Our last order from Earth Central was to stand down.”
Despite, or even because of, its much-expanded intelligence, the Brockle felt a surge of irritation at the other AI. Knowing the Garrotte’s history, it said, “You, of all AIs, should know the penalties for arrogance and underestimating an enemy.”
“Yes . . . but surely the greater enemy here is the possibility of tearing open space-time. We were told to stand down because of that. Penny Royal’s transformation is secondary . . .”
“You were told to stand down because that is precisely what Earth Central wanted Penny Royal to hear.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, ‘oh’. Do you fully understand what is happening here?”
“I think so,” Garrotte hedged.
“The limitations of AI are physical,” the Brockle lectured. “The amount of energy available, barriers to the transmission of data through matter, and the processing of data in matter even when using quantum processes. And, of course: time. An AI can lodge itself in U-space and defeat some of the temporal problems, but to maintain itself in that state requires vast amounts of energy from a realspace source. And there are other limitations too.”
“Like the Jain AIs,” said Garrotte.
The Brockle hesitated for a microsecond, long enough to retrieve relevant data from the High Castle AI’s memory. How had it missed that? Ap
parently the Jain AIs had taken their own route to transubstantiation and so embedded themselves in U-space. Except that it now seemed the energy sources that had maintained their state had died long ago, and they thought long slow and indifferent thoughts in that continuum; they had regressed, forgotten . . .
“Like the Jain AIs,” the Brockle agreed. “But Penny Royal’s route is different. If it can survive dropping itself into Layden’s Sink, if it can pass the event horizon and establish itself intact in the compressed matter of a black hole, it can deploy the U-space feedback technology it possesses to order that matter. In such a state it would have taken itself beyond time and would have practically limitless energy at its disposal.”
“But it’s not a case of would, but of already has.”
Yes, that was the whole point of the data being collected at the Well Head: the contention being, now that they knew the AI’s destination, that it was Penny Royal sending that data—a version of the AI that had taken itself beyond both temporal and energy restrictions. The contention was also that if they tried to stop Penny Royal entering the black hole and actually succeeded, this act would create a paradox that could rip open space-time across a hundred years and a thousand light years. The Polity might not survive that; the Kingdom might not survive it either.
The Brockle’s units were now loaded to their probes, the first of these lining up for a slow-shot through one of the railguns. The Brockle targeted the Garrotte and fired the first probe.
“There you are wrong,” it said. “Data from the Well Head is much more open to interpretation than that. There is no way of identifying the entity within that black hole as Penny Royal. In fact, there is more data to indicate that it is another AI that entered Layden’s Sink.”
It was all complete fabrication, but the Brockle was in no doubt that Penny Royal had to be stopped at all costs. It then reconsidered. Perhaps it was true? Perhaps the full circle of destiny was closing? Perhaps the Brockle itself was the one to enter the black hole . . .