by Neal Asher
Next I was the assassin drone Sharp’s Committee, Sharpy for short. My limbs were all edged weapons honed at the atomic level, my wing cases giant scalpel blades and my sting capable of punching through laminar armour to inject any of the large collection of agonizing poisons I had created. The prador first-child, with its limbs sliced away, screamed and bubbled as nano-machines ate its mind and uploaded a symphony of data to me. I loved my job of creating terror, because it satisfied my utter hatred of my victims . . .
“What the fucking hell was that?” asked Sepia over enviro-suit radio, her voice crackling at first from the charged air, then smoothing out as our suits made adjustment.
“One piece of the jigsaw,” I replied via aug.
It took her a moment to reply to that, so I realized that she had damped our connection. I sent her a non-verbal query and she replied, “Too strong.”
“The second is part of me too,” interjected Riss.
“Let’s keep our com to suit radio,” I said. “Explain it to her.”
Riss continued over radio, “Room 101 made a selection of memories from the minds of the most successful soldiers, killers, war minds and combined them in the new minds it created. I think we just experienced one part of Penny Royal.”
I stepped over white vines, boots crunching on more of the glass that had been formed by the detonation here. The blue fruits on the vines looked like squat melons, but translucent. I noted dead octupals here and there like discarded gloves, and when I nudged one with my toe it broke into dry fragments. To my right stood an anvil of cloud, dark as iron in the setting sun. The occasional flash of lightning lit the mass from inside. I fell back into memories of Penny Royal.
I was the dreadnought AI Vishnu 12, a name chosen by many of my kind. In the five-mile-long lozenge that was my body I contained weapons capable of destroying the world that lay below, but I was mathematically precise in their use because of the higher purpose I served, the knowledge of my aims and my adherence to duty. However, the world was fully occupied and the fate of the humans below was foregone. My railguns punched a thousand anti-matter warheads down into the planet’s core, and I set out to accomplish my next task ahead of the growing cloud of white-hot gas laced with a cooler web of magma . . .
That brought me to a shuddering halt, because there I saw the ruthlessness of a Polity wartime decision. It was one of those cold equations. The world had been occupied by massive prador forces but there were many humans down there too, hiding in caves, clinging to survival, avoiding the prador snatch squads and the inevitable horrible fate that awaited those who were captured. The Polity was retreating at the time, the likelihood of its winning the war was remote. Briefly I slid back into the memory because there was more to it than I had immediately seen. I glimpsed a prador ship down on the surface, humans being herded inside by armoured second-children. These were the few who had survived capture and the vicious appetites of their captors. They were on their way to Spatterjay for coring and thralling, which another aspect of me had already experienced.
Feeling the horror of that slung me straight into other memories that hit me like a gut punch. I stumbled, felt Sepia grab my arm and hold me up. The memories of human soldiers impacted: the man whose whole unit was annihilated and who, more for revenge than any sense of duty, managed to evade capture long enough to smuggle a CTD inside a prador lander and even succeeded in escaping and putting some distance between himself and the thing before hitting the remote detonator he had held tight in his sweaty hand all the time. There were others, many of them, but the one connecting theme was emotion driving them to succeed against odds which I knew, at the heart of my being, no AI would have countenanced.
“Emotion,” said Riss.
Yes, I remembered Riss’s memories of being created in Room 101. The mantis drone she had escaped with had said to her, “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.” This was the reason the Room 101 AI had gone insane. Being forced to create masses of those children to send out into practically hopeless battle to defend itself, the grief had been more than it could stand. It had eventually decided the only way to ensure its children would not suffer would be to kill them all. Only then, as I considered that, did I understand that the children had suffered too.
“Room 101 provided many of its children with emotions, with empathy, with the abilities to feel both fear and pain,” said Riss. “Fear and pain weren’t for me, since they would have hampered my function—this was normally given to larger assets the Polity did not want to lose, like destroyers.”
“Empathy,” I said, because of course there was the lesson of Trent: Penny Royal in microcosm, tested and studied.
I turned and looked back at the Lance, once named the Puling Child, only then realizing how ominous it seemed, and how much it looked like a giant sarcophagus.
In the next moment I saw the sarcophagus-shaped framework of a nascent destroyer shift a hundred feet down a construction tunnel eight miles long. Into the space it had occupied, white-hot ceramal stress girders stabbed in like converging energy beams and were twisted and deformed over hardfields glittering like naphtha crystals. The skeleton of another destroyer was taking shape and was moving on after its fellow, cooling to red in sections as directed gas flows tempered it. I watched the ensuing assembly as the thing was packed with weapons and instruments and sheathed in armour. Inside a remaining cavity, I watched two objects like old petrol engine valves part slightly in readiness. The ship’s crystal arrived inside a shock-absorbing package a yard square. It was a gleaming chunk two feet long, a foot wide and half that deep of laminated diamond and nano-tubes, quantum-entangled processing interfaces—boasting even in its microscopic structures complexity beyond that of the rest of the ship. And it bore no resemblance to the black spiny thing it eventually became.
Then I was legion and a collection of parts: version 707 primped and polished by stochastic studies of the survivors of my previous versions. Not fully tested and maybe not even viable. The crystal I resided in had its faults, the quantum processes of my mind could not, by their nature, be exact copies, and time was short, the situation desperate . . .
“Let’s keep moving,” I said, straightening up. Though some of what I was experiencing had hit me hard, I now found I could keep it partially suppressed, running in the background.
I glanced over at Sepia. “You okay?”
“I’m getting a fraction of what you’re getting and I feel sick,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “I guess this is what I was made for or, rather, adjusted to handle.”
By the time we had left the crater and found the path winding up into the mountains the sun had gone down. I was almost glad then to feel the pattering of something against my enviro-suit, and to then look over and see an octupal—a land octopus—pulling itself out of a small pool. At least they weren’t all dead, but then, in twenty years they would be. Beside the path I paused to gaze at an object that seemed thoroughly out of place here: an information terminal, probably for tourists, dead, however.
In the time it had taken us to reach this object I had, in my other persona as the mind of a destroyer, entered the chaos of ships outside Room 101. I had absorbed data and understood both human and AI history, as well as the prador and the ensuing war. But at the forefront of my mind were tactical data, situation reports, casualty reports, an analysis of the latest battle and my own purpose within that. I’d taken on the crew, including the Golem Daleen and three humans, and was puzzled by their presence. And I had felt a strange emptiness. They were there and yet not logically required. Therefore, how much else was logical? Briefly I saw everything as purposeless patterned matter without any reason for existence, including myself . . .
Panting on a steep path, I realized that in that last brief moment I’d experienced a hint of the Penny Royal to come.
“Don’t you just love the new smell?” asked the female.
Then as a human I saw her as a mummified corpse when, with Trent Sobel at my side, I’d gone aboard to assess the destroyer.
“What is your purpose?” I asked Daleen.
“It’s about participation,” Daleen replied. “And an inefficiency yet to be purged from the system, but also a very useful inefficiency when it comes to massive EMR shutdowns. We are also your conscience.”
My present self remembered Daleen stripped down and converted, and trying to kill me before I drove the spine through the Golem’s chest. As we continued trudging up into the mountains, and as these events in the life of Penny Royal played out in my mind, I realized this was during an earlier battle in the war and not the one that had led to Room 101 tipping off the rails. The mind of the dreadnought matured rapidly during its deployment, among many other ships, against a prador dreadnought. An EMR weapon was used during a battle. This weapon disabled all ships on both sides, but critically it was deployed when vectors were just right, with the result that the prador dreadnought dropped into the accretion disc of a black hole.
“Layden’s Sink,” said Sepia.
Yes, of course. I paused to look up into the night sky, but the massive accretion disc wasn’t visible. Shame on Penny Royal, I thought, not to have insured this all played out during Panarchia’s winter, when the disc sprawled gloriously across the night sky.
So, it seemed that Penny Royal’s first battle was here in this system. And, experiencing the functioning of its mind, I could see that the likelihood of it being included in other battles was remote. The destroyer AI had named itself prior to the conflict. It had called itself Penny Royal, while naming its ship the Puling Child. Most ship AIs took on the names of their ships or some truncated version, like Garrotte being the name of the AI of the ship Michelletto’s Garrotte. That Penny Royal didn’t identify with the ship that comprised its body should have been warning enough. That it called its ship a child while naming itself after an abortifactant herb . . .
Penny Royal was damaged from the start—another of those AIs laid down in faulty crystal during the exigencies of war. Its mind was fractured, divided. While on the one hand it felt protective feelings for its crew, who were the necessary risk of loss, another part of it had tipped over the edge into the weird—I suspected this was the birth of that “eighth state of consciousness,” but had yet to understand why there might be more than two. Penny Royal was also aware that, should the state of its mind be closely examined, it would be scrapped. Learning, then, that it was the subject of study did not have good effects . . .
After some five miles I felt Sepia grabbing hold of my arm and guiding me off the path, then sitting me down. I came back to myself with a start and looked around. I was sitting on one of a series of compressed-fibre benches, nearby stood another tourist information terminal. Perhaps the tourists stopped here for a picnic on their way to the scene of Penny Royal’s atrocity. The Lance was in view down on the plain below, looking even more like something awaiting burial. Aurora cut the sky above cloud masses like jostling boulders in a landslide, but much of the sky was clear and the stars gleamed like gems.
“Penny Royal,” I said, “was a prototype.”
“Prototype?” Sepia queried.
Now the AI feels the connections, the scanning, the routes opening its mind to screens and other hardware before the woman. It samples her record, realizes she is a human expert in AI, but still cannot fathom how a human mind can do or learn more than the AI can itself. However, the danger remains and it subtly blocks or diverts her intrusion. She will see the largest part of it, and it will be right. She will not plumb the smaller but growing darkness within.
I was lost for a moment in the intensity of that memory, then replayed in my mind what Riss had been saying.
“Penny Royal was the first of a series of ship minds in which feelings were hard-wired,” Riss explained beside me. “It could feel pain, fear, joy, hate—everything humans are burdened with.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” Sepia asked.
“They weren’t properly adjusted,” I said, my throat feeling tight. “Penny Royal was flung straight into battle with a human AI expert aboard to adjust the levels of what the AI could feel. Too much pain is crippling, as is too much fear and maybe too much joy. The ship minds had to be adjusted to optimum efficiency.”
It was a trial run of a strategy devised by some planetary AI deep inside the Polity. Observing the success of some human units, and some drones programmed for emotional response, it decided to test something that heretofore had been considered a disadvantage: let some AIs be programmed to feel fear, pain, guilt, protective urges and loss, and see how well they did.
While it was mourning the loss of fellows during the battle the rift in Penny Royal’s mind grew larger. Its other half, its “dark child,” began establishing control over more ship’s systems so as to hide itself. However, no matter what it was feeling, the AI as a whole was absolutely incapable of disobeying its orders . . . in the beginning.
I sat there replaying the battle in my mind. There were some famous ships involved, like the Stonewater and the Vorpal Dagger. The woman who was supposed to be closely studying Penny Royal’s mind was so frightened she took drugs which prevented her paying attention. She missed the changes it was undergoing. During the battle the Puling Child also received some severe knocks which resulted in further damage to Penny Royal’s crystal.
V12 watches and, while doing so, realizes that various parts of itself are muttering to others. Running self-diagnostics, it discovers a network of fine cracks in its crystal, extending from a single deep fault—an intriguingly even pattern which, without its containing case, would fragment the substance of its mind into numerous dagger-shaped pieces.
And there, of course, in this moment of the memory, I could see the shape of the Penny Royal to come.
“Let’s keep going,” I said, standing up.
Crowther
Beware scorpions, Crowther thought, and felt the urge to giggle inanely. However, his amusement died as he remembered that statement had been the first data from Layden’s Sink. That it had, essentially, come from the future. Then he felt as if something nasty was squirming into his spinal ports.
“What do you want here?” he asked, adding, when Owl supplied the name, “What do you want, Amistad?”
“Multi-level scans throughout,” said Owl, privately. “Amistad, like me, has seriously upgraded since wartime.”
Now having loaded data on the erstwhile war drone, Crowther replied, “Upgraded on Masada while acting as warden there—that upgrade overlaid on unknown changes he made to himself while studying . . .
madness.”
“Not here legally,” said Owl. “We would have been forewarned.”
“Oh, really?” said Crowther, gazing through a cam at the smoking remains of the grappler.
“I too am advanced,” said Owl, “enough to recognize sarcasm.”
Meanwhile Amistad replied, “I want your well-hopper.”
“You want our well-hopper,” Crowther repeated, now thinking that he would rather keep the option open for himself and Owl, what with the arrival of that sphere and that fleet, and now Amistad. The odds of something untoward happening and them needing to escape had increased considerably.
“You obviously know what it is,” he said carefully, “and therefore know it is not a passenger vehicle. Do you intend to transfer inside it, leaving your body here?”
“No,” said Amistad. The war drone had crossed the arrival chamber to one of the heavy bulkheads—one of those lying between him and the well-hopper.
“We’re in trouble,” said Owl.
Oh really, thought Crowther, deciding not to communicate his sarcasm this time. Intrusion alerts had just multiplied. Previously the drone had just been exploring thei
r systems but now he was obviously after something. The well-hopper, of course—the drone was going to take it whether they agreed or not.
“Why do you want it?” Crowther asked, observing the bulkhead panel ahead of Amistad unzipping around its perimeter. Analysing that, he discovered that the drone had now penetrated even the ’structor nano-machines holding the ship together with bonds stronger than any weld—machines that also constantly fought to maintain the Well Head’s integrity against the massive forces in play here. In reply Amistad sent an information package. That “Beware scorpions” had been as Delphic as anything else from the Well Head and was now, as it was being revealed, just too late. The data opened up in his mind and, seeing it did not contain any attack, he opened it to Owl too.
“Interesting,” said Owl, now also acquainted with Amistad’s reasons for wanting the well-hopper.
“Could we fight him?”
“Depends . . .”
“?”
“We might be able to stop him. But if he uses all his resources it will cost us the Well Head, and may cost us our lives too.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Crowther wanted confirmation of what his other underlying communications had already suggested.
“Yes.”
“Okay, good. Then we do nothing.”
Amistad now trudged through the open bulkhead, which closed behind. Meanwhile, Crowther picked up on intrusion into the well-hopper’s system and simply offlined its defences.
“Thank you,” said Amistad.
“Think nothing of it,” said Crowther tightly.
Two more bulkheads went down before the drone came to the circular blast door at the base of the tube containing the well-hopper. Other things had disconnected from their power supplies as an automatic intruder defence, Crowther noted, so he turned the power back on. The blast door hinged open, while the coils in the launch tube now had access to power. Amistad scuttled inside, the blast door closing behind. Crowther really hoped the drone hadn’t been lying about when and where he would use the fuser, because if he used it here, as it had been designed to be used, to give the initial escape blast, it would leave a great big hole in the space station.