Infinity Engine

by Neal Asher

  Am I real?

  I fired my weapons and watched the soldiers burn. Brief moments for a human mind but an eternity to an AI. Then I flung myself away, into U-jump with engines malfunctioning, my crystal broken open into a flower of swords and the factions of my mind competing for dominance, and settling, in U-space, on mad, bad and black.

  And I, Thorvald Spear, knew.

  Amistad

  As he hit it, and hard, Amistad knew that his weapons weren’t enough. Even as he fried one of the Brockle’s units in the sky, the shoal began relocating, jump signatures blooming in their hundreds. Returned particle beam fire wasn’t individually as strong as Amistad’s weapon, but issuing from hundreds of sources made it difficult to block. Informational warfare probes also stabbed out. He allowed contact but only where it was a two-way street and began sending his own destructive viruses and worms while fielding the ones the Brockle sent to him. One of the forensic AI’s units appeared close to him and detonated, and, tumbling through the sky on the blast wave, Amistad fried other units with his particle beam as they appeared nearby too.

  Only then did Amistad realize how much danger he was in. The Brockle was using its units as missiles—but those units also had the capability of U-jump missiles. The only reason it had not managed to put one of those units right inside him was because the huge amounts of EMR being generated by their battle interfered with the Brockle’s ability to lock onto his location. More EMR was needed, then. Amistad programmed hundred-gravity evasive manoeuvres, spewed chaff from one port in his body, then programmed and fired a swarm of anti-matter mines, each no larger than a marble. These fell down towards the mountains, until just tens of feet above Spear and his party, where they released metallic hydrogen to expand their shells and floated like soap bubbles. Even as they reached this position, one of them exploded, taking out one of the Brockle’s units that had tried to get to Spear.

  Still not enough.

  Unless Amistad could take out the Brockle’s ability to U-jump its units, he would soon be a spreading cloud of debris, and Spear and the rest would be dead. There had to be a way . . . surely Penny Royal would not allow such room for failure? Amistad did not like the thought because such reliance on the black AI’s plans and prediction of the future put him in the same position as the humans. Nevertheless . . .

  More than EMR interference was required. The only sure way of knocking out the Brockle’s ability to jump was to cause some severe U-space disruption and, unlike modern Polity warships, Amistad had not availed himself of his own U-space mines or missiles. Nor did he possess a USER: that device for dipping a singularity in and out of U-space through a runcible gate.

  But a singularity . . .

  More mines detonated below and Amistad saw Spear, the woman and Riss running towards Penny Royal’s location as blast waves picked up dust and rocks all around them. Two more of the Brockle’s units had been destroyed, but still over a thousand remained. Now hurtling through the sky in a zigzag pattern into the midst of them, Amistad gave the internal order to open his armour, hating to make himself so vulnerable during a battle.

  As his armour opened, he loaded his stock of high-yield anti-matter canisters to his railgun. Another nearby detonation sent him tumbling even as he shot his newly remade hardfield projector out, snapping his armour shut behind. If his calculations were right this should work. It might also kill those down on the ground. But then if it didn’t work, they were dead anyway.

  Amistad fired the canisters directly at the hardfield, set to detonate on impact. They struck, and just for a second it seemed reality juddered to a halt. Light glared, bright as a hypergiant sun. The heat flash turned Amistad’s armour red hot, and had Brockle units smoking and writhing in the sky. The blast wave struck, tearing units of the forensic AI apart, slamming into Amistad like a smith’s hammer on glowing metal. He felt one of his claws come away, and one, then two, of his legs. Sensors burned out but still he had enough sight to see the spherical hardfield like a black eye at the centre of the glare, before it collapsed.

  Through other internal sensors he felt the disruption. The U-space twist underlying the hardfield had been pushed beyond its limit. The field had collapsed, setting up something like a feedback whine in that continuum—the energy bouncing against the real as it tried to disperse. Now the Brockle wouldn’t be U-jumping for a while—at least twenty minutes. However, it wasn’t dead, and could still attack Spear and his crew.

  As his grav-engines burned out and he fell helplessly from the sky, glowing red, Amistad experienced a moment of déjà vu as he realized there was little he could do about that.

  Spear

  My enviro-suit was leaking, but that didn’t matter: the reason I’d worn it was for protection from octupals, not because the air here was unbreathable. I was bruised and my suit informed me that I’d cracked a couple of ribs.

  “Everyone okay?” I asked.

  “Nothing that won’t mend,” replied Sepia, somewhere to my right.

  “Fully functional,” said Riss, “but maybe not for much longer.”

  Lying sprawled against a rock, I tried to penetrate the surrounding murk. It was when I switched over to infrared and computer imaging that I saw it writhing through the air towards me.

  This was one of the units of that thing called the Brockle: a forensic AI turned bad and here to attack Penny Royal and disrupt its plans—up to and including killing me. I reached down and closed a gloved hand around the spine, then as I connected with it, tried to reach out to that unit. But it seemed as slippery in the virtual world as it looked in the real one. Then another shape slid into the air, slimmer, but just as anguine.

  “If you keep moving,” said Riss, “you can reach Penny Royal.”

  The snake drone slammed into the unit and wound around it, shoving in her ovipositor repeatedly. I staggered to my feet, now able to see more units orienting towards us like barracuda, and accelerating. I understood that they could no longer U-jump, but I also understood that the blast that had disrupted U-space had also blown away the floating mines that had been protecting us.

  “Come on.” I staggered over to Sepia and tried to haul her up by her arm. She yelled and via our aug connection I felt her pain. That arm was broken. I dropped it and she pushed herself up with her other hand. We ran.

  The dust was beginning to clear as we came in sight of the cluster of craters, and set eyes on the black AI itself. Even at this distance I could see the hardfield generators sitting in a ring on the ground around it. Why the hell wasn’t it using them? We slogged forwards to the rim of the penultimate crater before the one that contained Penny Royal, where I paused to look back. Riss and the lone unit were still entangled but, as I watched, they parted, and then the unit exploded. I stood there gaping.

  “What did you think I was doing in the weapons cache?” Riss enquired, direct to my aug. “Avoiding the hormones?” She sped away, hurtling directly towards two more of the things now rapidly drawing closer.

  “Shit, shit!” said Sepia from down on the surface of the nearest crater.

  She’d fallen over—a loose crust of rough bubbled glass breaking away from a slick underlying surface the moment she’d stepped on it. I sped down after her, then something shoved me in the back and sent me sprawling too. Turning to look as I hit the deck I saw smoke and debris raining down on us. I suddenly felt very vulnerable and stupid: the units of the Brockle possessed weapons, and one of them had just fired at us with a particle cannon. Stumbling to my feet again, I stepped towards Sepia and almost fell again. It was like walking on small, stiff mats scattered over a highly polished floor.

  “We need cover, fast!” I auged to her, as another two detonations hit behind, though whether they were attacks from the Brockle’s weapons or its units exploding I didn’t know.

  We moved on, slipping and falling, getting up again, never daring to slow down. I could almost feel
a hot targeting spot in the middle of my back as we ran. Riss caught up with us as we finally reached the further lip of the crater and began climbing up over that. Glancing back, I could see more of the Brockle’s remaining units reaching the far side behind us. I was gasping by now, my ribs aching horribly. We descended onto another surface, this one utterly slick. Here I turned, Sepia turning simultaneously and raising her carbine one-armed. We knew we could not reach that ring of hardfield generators around Penny Royal before the Brockle reached us. We had to fight.

  “And now all the parts are in place,” whispered a voice.

  Something white shot overhead and the hardfield slammed down just in time to be bruised by the probing of particle beams. Penny Royal had shifted out of its hardfield to encompass us. A moment later the eel-like units of the forensic AI arrived. I squatted there, relieved, gasping as the Brockle shoaled like feeding-frenzy sharks outside a chain-glass undersea dome. Then I started to feel angry. I turned towards Penny Royal, the spine gripped tightly and my ability to reach through it into the entity ahead utterly firm, impossible to deny. I opened my mask—there were no octupals here.

  “So you expect me to forgive you now,” I asked, “or to kill you?”

  Penny Royal’s other spines rippled in expectation. I knew it couldn’t be as simple as that. I could feel the thrill in the AI, the intensity. The only expectation here was of the random, the unpredictable, because that was the situation Penny Royal had made. Here then was the player, the gambler who had manipulated and won every game, taking up the pistol, loading a shell, spinning the chambers and pulling the trigger; here was an immensely powerful AI getting as close as it possibly could to playing Russian roulette. I realized that everything until this moment had been utterly under the control of Penny Royal. Only what happened here and now it had deliberately pushed beyond its ability to predict. Penny Royal did not know if I would forgive, or kill.

  “So what now?” asked Sepia.

  I began walking, slow and careful on the slick surface. Sepia stepped out after me a moment later while Riss writhed across smoothly. Just a few yards away from the now massive AI, I squatted down, resting the base of the spine against the slick ground. The whole panoply of Penny Royal’s existence was washing round inside my head. All the questions about guilt, about the crime of murder and culpability were warring for my attention, and I still could not decide.

  “It was all about the orders,” I said.

  “Meaning?”

  “All the thousands in here.” I nodded towards the spine. “Are they murder victims when they can be easily resurrected? Are they murder victims when the murderer was a victim itself—driven insane by being forced to murder? By an impossible situation?”

  Riss rose into the air beside me, probed the smooth ground with her ovipositor, turned and gazed back towards the Brockle shoaling outside.

  “Tell it,” she said.

  I nodded an acknowledgement. She too understood now.

  “Penny Royal was locked in unstable crystal,” I continued, “burdened with emotions it could not control and given orders it could not disobey but which ran counter to all its underlying programming. Its orders from Earth Central were relayed to it by Vorpal Dagger: it had to annihilate the human forces down on the surface here. It had to destroy General Berners’ division, and me. Carrying out those orders fractured its already unstable mind.”

  “But why?” asked Sepia. “Why did Earth Central issue such orders?”

  I turned towards her, feeling her confusion, seeing that though—as someone who had lived beyond the Polity—she understood that its AIs were not always nice, she did not know, as I did, just how cold their calculations could be. And especially how cold they had been during the war.

  “What happened here—” I gestured at our surroundings—“as you quite rightly said, happened early in the war, yet we had fully come to understand the extent of prador genocidal ruthlessness.” I paused to gather my thoughts. “Berners’ men were dead. There was no way they could be rescued. Even if the Polity fleet’s aim had really been to rescue them it could not have been done. Had the battle continued, our losses in relation to the prador’s would have steadily increased to the point where there would only have been losses on our side. In fact, our entire fleet would have been destroyed.”

  “But still,” she said, “why kill the soldiers?”

  “Earlier in the war they would have been left,” I said, “in the hope that they could scatter and at least some of them would survive.” My false memory of being a captive of the prador arose for my inspection. I felt the horror of it again; the constant pain and my inability to react to it, even to scream, because I was so thoroughly controlled; the knowledge that only death awaited and that it would be a relief. I understood perfectly why the previous owner of those memories had excised them. It was only the way I had been altered—enhanced, expanded—that allowed me to live with them. A normal human would have needed to suppress them out of existence or would have simply gone mad.

  “Penny Royal gave me the memories of someone who had experienced being thralled for a simple reason: so I would know what those soldiers would have suffered, if they were captured here.”

  “That was the aim of the prador?” asked Sepia.

  “Jay Hoop and his pirates were steadily expanding their operation, and they wanted more . . . subjects. That the prador agreed to supply them and that this was what they intended for Berners’ division was what the Polity AIs had discovered.”

  “So they killed them to prevent them suffering,” said Sepia leadenly.

  I turned and glanced at her. “It’s colder than that. Yes, they killed them to prevent them suffering. But they also killed them to prevent them being turned into an asset for the prador. The AIs had foreseen what was to come: thralled humans being used for infiltration, suicide attacks and, even more so, they saw how demoralizing it would be for our own side to encounter such humans.”

  “Even Amistad,” Riss interjected.

  “What?” I turned to look at her.

  “Amistad was an unstable product of Room 101 driven mad by the war. But he was mainly tipped over the edge by seeing a close comrade and friend being turned into a human blank.”

  The mention of Amistad switched my focus. I saw Penny Royal ever at war with itself, its different states of consciousness constantly making alliances or being set against each other, but the eighth state always dominating. Yet those other, saner parts did have enough control, within the growing entirety of Penny Royal, to do some good. They could not stop the dominant eighth state playing its horrible games, but they could, at least, record the victims. I stood, pacing forwards, the oblate mass of spines and underlying silvery tentacles shuffling excitedly, then seeming to invert, opening into some vast and endless cavern with its walls made of spines.

  Penny Royal would have continued like this with the eighth state dominant, but then it made the mistake of trying to load the recorded mind of an Atheter into a gabbleduck, which brought it to the notice of the Atheter mechanism designed to annihilate any remaining trace of the intelligence or civilization that race sacrificed.

  I felt the massive energies in play: the tens of thousands of years of war technology focused on Penny Royal. The AI had not stood a chance. Blasted and fragmented by the Atheter mechanism, it had been slowly dying and its energy bleeding away. Then Amistad had come—a student of madness because he had experienced it himself—and he began putting Penny Royal back together again. He identified the eighth state as everything that was wrong with the AI, and made it so that during the reconstruction that state of consciousness became subordinate, and he could finally extract it.

  “But you took it back,” I said.

  The giant cavern sighed around me and I saw, with impossible clarity, its reasons. I saw the genius of Penny Royal in some of the terrible, hateful things it had done. I saw how that geniu
s was still reflected in the very structure of its being even when the eighth state was removed. Then I saw how genius returned in full force once Penny Royal took up that eighth state again because it was integral to the internal conflict. I saw that without that genius, without that eighth state, some of the things Penny Royal had done since leaving Masada would have been impossible. I also saw that without the eighth state operating they could have been simpler, less dangerous, and less potentially costly of life.

  “Would you sacrifice brilliance on the altar of morality?” After a moment I realized the question came from Riss, who continued, “We are a product of our time, blameless in our function.”

  “Go to hell,” interjected Sepia. “You can’t blame the past for your actions, and you especially cannot blame the past when you know those actions are wrong. If you have committed just one murder you have stepped beyond the pale and must pay with the only thing of equivalent value: your own life.”

  Were they now two aspects of my consciousness? I felt her key phrase was “when you know those actions are wrong” because the Polity had been right, I felt, to forgive the remainder of Penny Royal when that eighth state had been removed. But now? The black AI had reincorporated the murderer and was as guilty as sin.

  I reached out through the spine and the connections I made were willingly received. It was almost as if the roulette player just kept spinning that cylinder and clicking that trigger, as if it wanted to die. I now saw the entirety of Penny Royal: the fusion generators, like that one I had glimpsed briefly at its planetoid, feeding in the power that maintained this endless cavern in U-space before me. I reached out and touched them and saw how I could seize control of them, shut them down, close out those encystments in that continuum. I could end it all. The bullet lay under the cocked hammer. All I needed to do was squeeze the trigger.

  I was appalled. I had the power to kill Penny Royal and it was too much. To gaze into this cavern—this immensity—was to know that all terms of reference were just too prosaic. A tsunami cannot stand in the dock to await the judgement of its peers. You cannot call a hostile ecology a “murderer.” You can’t find a tiger guilty of the same crime and suspend it from a scaffold. Even as I groped for analogies, that last one dragged up some words from my subconscious: