Infinity Engine

by Neal Asher

  What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  “You want my forgiveness or you want me to be your executioner,” I said, my throat tight. “In my death you are blameless, as you are in the deaths of my comrades here on this world. In the form you had on Masada, without your eighth state, you could be forgiven too. But you took it up again.” I paused, and it seemed eternity poised on this moment. I felt how goddamn unjust it was for all this to come down on me. “Yet, even that can be seen in a new light. Who of us does not contain a suppressed murderer?”

  Again I paused, aware that I still had not made my decision. Looking down, I was again standing on a glassy surface with the AI poised before me. I knew then what I stood upon and what I had to do. A symbolic act was required.

  “I can’t forgive you now because you made me the sum of your victims and I feel their hatred, their anger and their eagerness. You killed thousands and many of them died in unimaginable agony and fear. But I will not be your executioner either. I select neither of the choices you have offered me.” I turned to Sepia and Riss. “Get back to the rim.”

  “Why?” they asked, simultaneously.

  I stabbed a finger down at the surface. “Because you don’t want to be standing here when this runcible activates, which it will be doing shortly.”

  Sepia turned and moved away as fast as she could with her broken arm, feeling the urgency through our connection, and Riss shot away after her. At that moment I reached out, into and through Penny Royal, deactivating the machines that maintained the AI in U-space. Then I inverted the spine, point down, and stabbed it into the meniscus of the runcible I stood upon, feeling its remnants of the dead dispersing with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

  Then I turned and ran myself.

  The Brockle

  Swarming around the hardfield, the Brockle shrieked its frustration between its remaining eight hundred units. Out of sheer temper it considered sending some of them to tear apart the drone Amistad, now lying at the centre of a shallow crater just a hundred miles away and still, incredibly, despite its huge damage, alive. But that would not truly alleviate its frustration. Nor would it bring back the fleet and the Brockle subminds that controlled it, whose loss, the Brockle realized, was the main source of its ire.

  Instead the forensic AI fought for calm as it viewed the events inside the hardfield. Minutes remained before it might be possible to U-jump inside and finally get to Penny Royal. All was not lost. In fact, the Brockle could already taste victory.

  It watched the two humans and the snake drone come to stand before the black AI, but could penetrate none of what was occurring on a virtual level. Doubtless this was Penny Royal’s special pleading for forgiveness, Thorvald Spear’s response carefully designed to fill some strange need inside that mad AI.

  Calm now suffused the Brockle. Cold analysis arose. Penny Royal was very much larger now and it seemed likely that all of the AI was at last here. Next, probing with sensors, it found confirmation: the whole crater was a deactivated runcible gate. The unnatural level and polished surface inside the crater was the result of that gate previously being activated, the meniscus slicing through the glass generated by the wartime CTD explosions and the rough surface above dropping through the gate to whatever location it had first been opened to, doubtless during a test run. Penny Royal had come through that gate, it seemed certain—all of Penny Royal. And it was also certain that the black AI would be departing through it to the distant sphere hanging above Layden’s Sink, just at the right moment.

  The Brockle continued circling, ready to U-jump, but also preparing some of its units for a second very short U-jump, and for their own violently destructive demise. If it could get inside the hardfield before the runcible was activated it could launch a concerted and distributed attack on Penny Royal. Without a hardfield to protect it, the thing would surely succumb. The Brockle could hit it with particle cannon blasts from all around, meanwhile jumping those explosive units inside the thing. In fact, no matter how powerful the AI was, its present singular form made it vulnerable. During this attack Spear and the woman would certainly die, but the Brockle also assigned one destructive unit for the assassin drone Riss who, in destroying three of its units, had prevented the Brockle from getting to the two humans before Penny Royal activated its hardfield. Once Penny Royal was out of the way the Brockle would open the runcible to the sphere, and there supplant the AI, finally installing itself inside Layden’s Sink.

  However, if the runcible was active before the Brockle jumped it would be dragged straight through the thing to the sphere when it did jump. No matter. This would still bring it face to face with the black AI, and the end result would be the same.

  It was the latter case, the Brockle realized, as Spear stabbed the spine down into the surface below and turned to run for the rim of the crater. The Brockle felt somnolent fusion reactors firing up and massive machines in the surrounding landscape going live. There seemed to be a lot of activity spread over a wide area, which was puzzling, but then the Brockle realized Penny Royal must have distributed the runcible’s system so as to make it less vulnerable to attack. Still, those power readings . . .

  No time to ponder this further. Spear and the woman had made their way unsteadily to the edge of the crater and climbed up onto the stone there. The spine, jabbed into flat glass below, seemed to be acting as some kind of key. It was all so over the top and filled with ridiculous symbolism. Ripples spread from the object, then flattened out as the meniscus tightened. The spine collapsed like shattered safety glass, spreading chunks of itself across the glistening surface and began to sink out of sight. The Brockle could sense the runcible activating and its frustration returned in full force, especially as Penny Royal began to sink into that surface too. Minutes still remained before U-space had settled enough for it to U-jump its units safely inside the sphere and be drawn through the runcible. It sent one unit and immediately lost contact with it, detected a mass anomaly inside the hardfield and saw a weird impact point on the meniscus of the runcible gate, almost a splash. The substance of that unit had passed inside and thence been drawn into the runcible—but highly disrupted, useless, and, according to the Brockle’s calculations, not quite real matter at all.

  Penny Royal continued to sink, half of its mass now inside the meniscus. Why was it taking so long to get through? Was it intentionally taunting the Brockle? Once it was on the other side it could deactivate the runcible and that would be the end of it. The Brockle could eventually take its vengeance upon Spear and the rest, but then it would have to steal the Lance to escape and thereafter it would be a fugitive from the Polity, and a failure. This could not be right, surely? Another minute passed and the Brockle watched the last spines of Penny Royal sinking out of sight. It sent another unit. This time there was less disruption and the unit actually materialized over the meniscus—except it had turned inside out, into a collection of components clustered around a twist of meta-material skin. It then disappeared again as it somehow bounced out again, rematerializing a second time inside the rock of a nearby peak, there exploding to bring down a rock-slide.

  Failure was not an option. The Brockle decided it would try to jump all of itself inside and hope that enough of it remained coherent . . .

  Then everything changed. For a fraction of a second the Brockle couldn’t quite believe it. The hardfield had gone down. Knowing that the runcible could now shut down at any second, the Brockle decided to ignore Spear and the rest and instead U-jumped all of itself to the meniscus. An instant later it was dragged through, the first of its units at last glimpsing the inside of the sphere. It swarmed in, orienting on the dark mass of Penny Royal floating in vacuum, and fired every weapon it had available at the AI.

  Particle beams struck all at once, turning spines white hot and exploding away glittering showers of crystal. Silvery tentacles writhed like snakes on a hotplate. Penny Royal began to part, but
the Brockle launched those of its units it had earlier prepared, but using rocket motors since U-jumping them would just put them straight back through the runcible. They struck one after the other in quick succession, and Penny Royal blew apart, shattered: masses of dusty black crystal spreading in clouds. Here a single spine trailing a length of silvery tentacle, there a mass of spines barely holding together like a chunk of sea urchin torn apart by a crab.

  Now attacking those separate parts, the Brockle could not understand the lack of response. Surely Penny Royal had its own integral weapons? But then the forensic AI came to the only logical conclusion: Penny Royal had meant to die here. The AI had known that it wasn’t the one in Layden’s Sink. It was paying the ultimate price for its crimes by dying as it facilitated the Brockle’s transcendence.

  Even as it thoroughly destroyed the remains of the black AI, the Brockle began penetrating the systems of the sphere. When it entered the black hole, which now lay only minutes away, it would shut down its hardfield and eject energy, meanwhile collapsing. Via the AIs remaining here the Brockle could feed itself into the meta-material weave of the sphere as that happened. As the sphere passed through the event horizon, the hardfield would re-engage, feeding energy to the underlying U-twist, which would in turn supply an infinite amount of energy to the Brockle. The meta-material collapse would turn the whole of the sphere into a super-dense processor and, as it fell beyond the event horizon, and here the Brockle was a little unclear, the process would infect the collapsed matter of the black hole, inverting it and somehow becoming it.

  Infinity and eternity awaited.

  Spear

  When the hardfield went down I was sure we were going to die, but the Brockle just jumped and disappeared, going straight after its main prey. Just for a second I thought that was it—that was all we were going to see. We would not know what happened to either the forensic AI or the black AI as they fell into Layden’s Sink.

  But Penny Royal was not done with us yet.

  “Look,” said Sepia, from where she was standing on the edge of the crater.

  I climbed up to stand beside her. She was pointing to some object in the sky hurtling towards us. Perhaps this was one last unit of the Brockle’s, in hot pursuit of the rest of itself. Perhaps it had been intentionally left behind to deal with us.

  “That was quick,” said Riss. “I thought he was completely fucked.”

  I closed my visor and ramped up image enhancement to bring the approaching shape clear: a big metal scorpion. Amistad seemed to be having trouble: hurtling forwards then abruptly dropping, the jet of a dirty-burning thruster throwing him back up in the sky for a moment so he could make further progress, probably on some malfunctioning grav-engine. In a final slanting descent he came over on the other side of the nearest crater, hit the far rim and went skidding across, finally slamming into the near crater rim a hundred yards away from us. The drone looked a mess: both claws and a couple of limbs missing, body bent in the middle and slightly flattened, burns and molten patches all over. However, he shrugged himself and, smoke still rising from glowing spots on his carapace and with as much dignity as he could muster, climbed up and made his way to us.

  I meanwhile returned my attention to the crater he’d landed in because something wasn’t quite right. The skid-marks of Amistad’s landing had revealed a smooth seemingly perfectly polished surface underneath that wrinkled crust—a smooth surface just like the one behind us. As I watched, the remaining crust began glittering and shifting and then it began to collapse as if sinking into a pool—sinking just like we had seen Penny Royal sink away.

  “Two runcibles?” I suggested.

  “No,” Riss replied, “three of them.”

  Sverl

  “The runcible has connected,” said the Flint AI.

  A microsecond later a spherical hardfield blinked on around the Weaver. At the same time behind him, out of the runcible interface, what looked like a wall of contorted and cracked volcanic glass collapsed into the runcible chamber, scattering glittery sharp chunks across the floor.

  “And now you have a decision to make,” said Sverl. “I’m sure you’re up to date on the latest analyses of these hardfields. You’ll know that attacking such a field only feeds its underlying U-space twist. If you hit it hard enough, that twist will turn until past three hundred and sixty degrees, whereupon the field collapses, crushing anything inside down to a brief singularity.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” said the Flint AI.

  “I doubt you have the weapons capable of doing that but, if you do, I doubt there will be any survivors here. In fact, I seriously doubt this moon would survive. And then, of course, if you fail, you may prevent the Weaver leaving but it will still be alive, and pissed off, and waiting for that Atheter starship.”

  “We are not barbarians in the Polity,” said the Flint AI.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Sverl. “Children, you know how to respond if there are . . . problems.”

  “Yes, Father,” chirped Bsorol and Bsectil simultaneously.

  The Weaver, now up off the floor and floating in its hardfield like a giant alien Buddha, drifted to the runcible. It occurred to Sverl that such a hardfield might not be able to pass through a runcible interface and that the moment it shut down was precisely what the Flint AI was waiting for.

  “Protective blocking,” Sverl ordered. When his second-children began to move round ahead of him he snapped, “Not round me, round him,” and stabbed a claw at the Weaver.

  After a brief hesitation his children shifted over, interposing themselves between the Weaver and the located weapons in this chamber, in some cases using grav-engines in their armour to rise up off the floor to that end. Sverl moved across too, putting himself between the Weaver and the location in the wall of the particle cannon.

  At the meniscus the Weaver’s hardfield did blink out. In that instant Sverl expected oblivion, but it didn’t come. His second-children then began passing through the runcible, followed by Bsorol and Bsectil. Sverl continued backing up.

  “See you around, Sverl,” said the Flint AI.

  “Likewise,” said Sverl, taking those last hurried steps backwards.

  Spear

  A shape shot up through the runcible, immediately enclosed in a spherical hardfield, and began to drift over. I remembered the last time I had seen this creature, on Masada, and felt some annoyance at its appearance now—it could have saved me so much trouble if it had lost its propensity for talking in riddles.

  “Looks like all the old crew back together again,” said Amistad, now rattling and clanking up beside us.

  I gazed down at the runcible interface, where familiar shapes were coming out edge-on, legs waving in the air as they sought some purchase, then turning and shooting out on thruster bursts or grav-engines. I recognized Sverl’s second-children at once because of their complex armour with its bulk made to conceal their physical distortions. I recognized Bsorol and Bsectil individually, despite their armour. And the skeletal multi-limbed thing that came through next was hard to mistake as anything other than Sverl.

  The Weaver came down beside us, his hardfield winking out. Sverl’s children began settling down in the area lying between the two craters while Sverl came to join us too. Many channel requests came through to my aug, information flows began to open, and the virtual world began to expand around me. I saw the second runcible ahead shut down to leave a polished glass surface, meanwhile getting a replay of what had occurred in the Flint runcible chamber. Updates and explanations fell into my compass while I also found myself gazing omnisciently through multiple sensors sitting inside that distant sphere.

  “You’re getting all this?” I asked Sepia.

  “Enough to understand, though there are whole blocks of data I’m having to deny because they’d overload me,” she replied.

  “Penny Royal,” I said, suddenly
feeling utterly hollow.

  “That’s not possible,” said Riss.

  I guessed, by her tone, the idea of vengeance against the black AI had died long ago, as it had in me.

  We watched the update to current time, saw the black AI attacked, broken apart and even its pieces rendered down to crystal dust. Now we saw the interior of the sphere, the Brockle shoaling round inside it as if searching for further victims.

  “The Brockle’s problem,” said the Weaver directly into our minds, “was a miscalculation of scale.”

  Something leapt from its claw and shot up into the sky. The ground was now shaking under my feet but simultaneously I felt myself rising within the object the Weaver had released. I gazed down at the ground, then at us, and every detail was clear. Higher still and I saw all the craters, three of which glittered like spider eyes. Then I was back in my body, having to go down on one knee or else topple from the edge of the crater.

  Another runcible meniscus lay in front of us—Riss had been right about the number of runcibles here. Something shot from the one before us, a thing like a spinning top but measuring a hundred feet across, a tokomak doughnut girding a thick spindle of organic-looking technology. Here again was one of those devices I had seen at Penny Royal’s planetoid, one of the machines that had maintained the AI in U-space. Three more followed it into the sky. Beyond these, I saw a further four of the machines hurtling upwards, tumbling, trailing smoke, parts of them glowing red and occasionally jetting sprays of molten metal.

  Beneath these machines something else was exiting two of the runcible gates. Above the most distant runcible it looked like swirling black smoke, but nearby I watched the swarms of black knives, the spines and flakes of black crystal, interlinking silver tendrils and tentacles writhing and connecting and disconnecting, the whole mass shifting and changing like some insane image from a kaleidoscope as it exploded into the sky. These two rising masses roared upwards with the sound of a giant waterfall and in my virtual compass I felt something massive arriving and growing.