by Neal Asher
The great dark columns continued to rise while the machines, now back into the grip of gravity, reached the apex of their flight and began to fall. They did not fall for long. The moment they reached the rising black masses they were batted away like some object falling into a fast-spinning spoked wheel. One of them shot overhead, while I saw another slam into the face of a nearby peak and break, releasing jets of plasma. It tumbled down in glowing fragments, leaving a trail of smears of molten metal on the stone face above.
The columns continued to rise out of the two runcibles. High above the earth they entwined and formed into just the one column. It was as though a thunderstorm had drawn across to blot out the stars and within that mass there were flashes like lightning. This last column then began to arc over and down towards us but, knowing its destination, I felt no fear. Only awe. Finally it reached the runcible through which just one small portion of Penny Royal had passed to be destroyed by the Brockle. With a sound like some doom bell tolling, the last of Penny Royal passed from those other runcibles and they shut down. Turning, I watched the entirety of the black AI descending through the runcible to the sphere. The mass of black crystal entwined with silver was solid right to the concealed frame of the runcible. It was like standing next to some giant building as it collapsed into its own basements, or perhaps some vast tree with black scaly bark being drawn down into an underground cavern.
The Brockle now had some serious problems. I again gazed through the sensors into the sphere, but the sight that greeted me was unexpected.
The Brockle
Something was happening to the runcible. The Brockle protectively pulled together its shoal body and studied that device. The readings were just strange, unfathomable, while the scene through the frame, presently of the sky of Panarchia, was growing darker.
Why didn’t I shut it down?
The answer was obvious, of course: the runcible was the only way out of this sphere if the Brockle found for any reason it was out of its depth. Perhaps it should shut the thing down now? On a virtual level, through the systems of the sphere, it reached out for the runcible and for the AI controlling it. But something was growing inside that AI, steadily absorbing it, and that something was unfathomable too. More changes were occurring. The interface was now impossibly bowing outwards like the meniscus of a bubble being blown. Through the system the Brockle could see that this was also happening on the other side of the runcible—the interface expanding in both directions within the frame. It was continuing to darken too, and when it attained the shape of a perfect sphere it crazed all over its surface like broken safety glass.
Panicking now, the Brockle probed with all its sensors but what it found seemed illogical. Local U-signatures were generating all over the surface of that bubble and, thereafter, U-signatures were generating all around in the surrounding sphere. Focusing on these, it saw that they lay within the AIs embedded in the walls. Concentrating on one, it saw a block of crystal sitting inside a skeletal grey ceramal frame, on some sort of carrier mechanism half-sunk in the woven wall. Meta-material connections touched the crystal all around. As the Brockle watched, the AI crystal darkened, fractured, split, and began to expand in its frame while its mass reading steadily increased. Then it began to unfold, issuing growths, flakes and shards of black crystal turning over each other as the thing spread outwards, becoming a glittering, shifting and ever-growing mass of spines.
This was happening all around. Every single AI imbedded in the walls of the sphere was expanding, blossoming into great spiky nodes tearing away frames and whatever mechanisms they had previously used to transport themselves. Soon the Brockle felt it was a shoal at the centre of a sea cave whose walls were scattered with black urchins. And, of course, it was obvious what was appearing here.
The Brockle opened fire with its particle beams, fired slugs of compressed matter, shattered many of these growing objects. The space within the sphere was filling with drifting shards but even each of these began issuing U-signatures and increasing mass readings, and expanded, growing until each became a drifting black star. Within just minutes the interior of the sphere had filled with cubic miles of black crystal, while around its inner faces silver threads and tentacles were spreading like mercury running through transparent veins, all joining up. Still firing its weapons, the Brockle frantically tried to understand what was happening and began to see its mistake. It had understood everything that was to happen here and was happening now, but had foolishly failed to grasp that the sphere was as massive as it was for a very good reason. What it had thought was Penny Royal in here, and what it had thought it had destroyed, was no more the black AI than one of the Brockle’s units was its entire being.
Weapons and power supplies heading for depletion, the Brockle pulled all its units closer together and hurtled towards the bubble interface of the runcible. It bounced off. The runcible was now, in some fashion, a one-way gate. All around it the masses of growing spines, knives of crystal and skeins of silver tentacles were meeting and melding, but continuing to grow. Steadily they filled the interior spaces of the sphere and the Brockle found itself having to retreat as the tips of those spines grew closer and closer. At last, Penny Royal spoke.
“Welcome to my mind,” said the black AI.
The Brockle could think of no reply.
“In just minutes now we will be entering Layden’s Sink,” Penny Royal continued conversationally. “And you are right—you will be there beyond the event horizon. The choice is yours concerning the form you’ll take there.”
The Brockle peered through exterior sensors and saw the truth of it. The hardfield was highly polarized but hellish fires could still be seen burning out there. Tidal forces were ripping apart the matter of moons, planets and suns as they were drawn into the hole. Weird distortions also twisted the scene as light was bent and shifted by those same tidal forces. A giant mass reading lay ahead and in U-space the black hole was a giant impossible eversion. Also, the underlying twist, into which the hardfield shed the vast excesses of energy, had turned nearly to the point of no return.
“Choice?” asked the Brockle.
“Soon you will have only one place left to run, but if you stay you become part of me. This will, of course, be no more murder than how you absorbed Garrotte and those other Polity AIs.”
A subtext to this was a hard and immediate mental connection just too powerful to deny. The Brockle found itself within Penny Royal and felt like a fleck of dust blown into some vast cavern. If it did not escape, it would be just a passing thought in the mind that surrounded it. But there was a chance. It still had enough energy left to make a U-jump. It did not understand the nature of what had happened to the runcible gate, but perhaps that was its way out, perhaps that was the place to run?
Spines encroaching all around, tips occasionally grazing against its units, the Brockle U-jumped, aiming to put itself inside that strange runcible gate bubble. It bounced again. It found itself dispersed, disoriented—its units lying equally spaced as if they had materialized on the surface of a sphere. As it then began to connect up properly again and sense its surroundings, it found a hardfield above and a woven surface below.
“And you know,” said Penny Royal, “you may just survive this.”
And then the hardfield went out.
The Brockle found itself in the burning storm of matter being drawn into the black hole where everything, with mathematical certainty, would attain light speed at the event horizon. It could see that horizon, a cold darkness nothing could escape, yet the Brockle itself still inhabited the region where matter was being torn apart. Immediately it felt itself being ablated outside by the sleet of charged particles and inside by the X-rays. It was almost like sitting in the path of a particle beam. Tidal forces ripped at it, stretching and compressing. It managed, at this point, one more U-jump to sling itself a few hundred thousand miles out. With sensors struggling to cope, it saw the e
nergy ejection of the sphere, as, red-shifting, it touched the event horizon: a pulse travelled from its fore to its rear and emitted as a coherent beam of radiation that included everything in the EM spectrum. The beam cut back through the chaos in line with the accretion disc and likely lost all its energy by the time it reached the far rim. On this pulse the sphere contracted, its weave tightening. It shifted beyond infrared, slowly fading from the electromagnetic spectrum, but caught in the eternal moment on that horizon.
Even as it struggled to survive in this environment the Brockle made its calculations and initiated sweeping changes throughout its shoal body. Meta-materials within its laminar storage made infectious alterations to their structure, photo-electric layers in its skin compressed and shifted their reception wave length. Apple-sized fusion reactors began dirty-burning its internal substance and from ports it emitted radioactive smoke. It switched everything to generating power from this environment: the laminar storage now peizo-electric and producing power from the tidal stretching and compressing forces; its skin now generating power from the X-rays. All this it fed directly into its U-space drives and it jumped again. Yet, even as it did jump, it realized that hundreds of thousands of miles had been eaten up, and it was jumping from a point even closer to the black hole than it had been before. It jumped again and again, and it made cold calculations, though with its intelligence in decline and now just a little below what it had been aboard the Tyburn, this was no longer an easy task. It worked out that it could keep gathering energy and making these jumps for a very long time indeed, but it would eventually pass through the event horizon. Still there might yet be another answer to its dilemma.
Further jumps took it two hundred and thirty thousand miles out from the event horizon. In the time it took to generate further energy for other jumps it ended up fractionally closer again. It had also lost one of its units, ten per cent of combined processing and memory space which in combination made up its intelligence, and had burned a single-figure percentage of what it had classified as disposable matter within itself. It jumped over and over, opening ports in its body to its fusion reactors, burning the ionized matter and plasma surrounding it. These measures gave it a brief gain over an interminable series of jumps, but it was now frightened. It did not want to die. It was like a bird beating against a glass window. The fear turned in on itself as it watched its capabilities steadily ebbing away. It seemed humanly vulnerable. Hundreds and then thousands of jumps. It was being whittled away, the number of its units spiralled down to under four hundred.
This black hole was a revolving and charged one so perhaps entering it could fling it away to another universe? No, it remembered something . . . yes, a wormhole did issue from this black hole to another place in space-time, but that place was, itself, far in the past, so still would come the fall into the singularity. Brockle had to survive and there was less and less matter to feed into its failing fusion reactors. It made the decision then to use matter that before, for some unfathomable reason, it had not wanted to burn: memory crystal and organo-metallic substrates entered those reactors.
Brockle ate itself for a thousand years.
Edmund Brockle, conscious in one ragged unit that looked like a dead decaying eel, heaved up from a tideline once more, then fell screaming into Layden’s Sink. He knew that he was about to die, but did not understand how or why.
On the other side of the event horizon, something caught him.
Epilogue
Spear
We were present in the physical world and present in the virtual world on levels dependent on our mental abilities and augmentations. We saw Penny Royal fall to that point where, to our perspective, time drew to a halt. The sphere red-shifted and disappeared, but according to old and present theories it was there on the event horizon forever. For Penny Royal, though, conventional time continued as normal as it slid into Layden’s Sink. I understood all this on an intellectual level but, even with the multiplicity of lives and perspectives that had become part of me, I couldn’t feel it. I just told myself that as the sphere faded from visibility it passed into the black hole. Those with mentalities that were pure AI could perhaps feel it, and maybe the Weaver did too. Nevertheless, we all felt something momentous had happened.
Yet we kept on seeing.
It didn’t make sense because everything we had been seeing had been transmitted by the sphere. Yet it was now beyond the point where it was possible for it to transmit out of the black hole.
“Some new physics?” suggested Sverl, and I sensed the exchange of blocks of data and calculations between him and Riss.
As we watched the Brockle finally fall into the Sink, the events we were seeing extended into the future. It didn’t make sense, but we had to accept it. And then came the disconnection—like some overstretched elastic being snapped, all transmissions ended.
Done.
Yet still I sensed Penny Royal passing beyond our known universe into something grand and numinous—something that had great value, but lay beyond my compass. I felt my part in all this was at an end and I was at last released. I felt I had achieved some great aim, so why was I on my knees on the stone with tears streaming down my face? Because, having achieved that aim, I felt hollow and purposeless.
Hand on my shoulder.
I looked round at Sepia, reached up to wipe my face and stood.
“Now we have to move on,” she said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, still hollow, but already feeling her there, through our aug link and through her physical presence, sliding in to fill the empty places.
“We do,” interjected Riss. “I for one am considering a new body.”
I glanced at her coiled on the ground. She was gazing down at Sverl’s children gathered beneath us on the slope. I guessed she no longer felt any attraction to the purpose she had served. I then noticed all the prador tilting back and crouching down, the smaller ones thumping their claws against the ground so that I felt the vibration through my feet. I looked up too and watched the massive snowflake of the Atheter starship descending towards us. Down and down it came, blotting out half the sky before smoothly coming to a halt above the highest peaks. The Weaver merely gave me a nod of acknowledgement before floating off the ground and ascending.
“There’s going to be a lot of soul-searching in the Polity after today,” Riss noted, then carefully uncoiled and slid out of the way as Sverl perambulated over.
“I have received an offer,” said Sverl.
“Then you should accept it,” I replied, because I knew at once what it was.
Sverl had been a refugee from the Kingdom for an age and he certainly could not return to it now. His children, of course, would be slaughtered out of hand if they went there. He could head to the Polity, but there he would never be trusted, would always be watched and would have no access to the kind of technology and power he was used to. My thinking was that if he went to the Polity he would drop out of sight, out of mind and out of history.
Sverl paused, obviously surprised by my answer, then continued, “My children and I will crew the ship and make it our business to search out anything that remains of the Atheter, and to carry out any other tasks the Weaver will require of us.”
“Your children will be all right with their . . . pilot?”
Sverl gestured to them. The second-children had stopped hammering on the ground but were still gazing up at the ship. I would like to say they did so with expressions of reverential awe but, being unable to read a prador even without their armour, that’s just my fancy. “They have accepted Sfolk already. My hormones no longer control them, and their own instincts have been long suppressed. Intelligence dominates.”
“Doesn’t it just,” I said. Sverl carried on just standing there while the Weaver faded to a dot against the massive ship and then disappeared. “Still you hesitate,” I added.
“I am still unsure . . .”
&n
bsp; “Then take some comfort,” said Riss, rearing up beside me, “in the fact that if you do go you’ll piss off, in deeply meaningful ways, AIs in the Polity and the majority of the prador race.”
“This is supposed to convince me?” asked Sverl.
“Both sides wanted you dead.”
Sverl dipped in acknowledgement. “There is that.”
“And where else would you and your children be safer?” Riss added.
After a long pause Sverl began, “It has been—’
“No more words. Just go,” I interrupted. “I suspect we’ll be running into each other again.”
On grav-motors, led by Bsorol and Bsectil, Sverl’s children spiralled up into the sky. When the last of them had left the ground Sverl flexed his legs and propelled himself up, his own internal drive taking over to whisk him after them. I stood with my arms folded, watching until they were out of sight, then, like a balsa skeleton caught in a breeze, the Atheter starship tilted and fell away towards the horizon, taking its shadow with it, letting the sun back in.
“Right,” I said, deciding at least to give the appearance of decisiveness until I knew what the hell I was doing. I glanced over at Amistad. “Are we going to need a grav-sled for you?”
Wheezing and clanking, the big scorpion drone got back up onto its remaining feet.
“No,” he said, obviously offended.
“But I’m guessing you want a ride away from here?”
“You guessed right,” Amistad replied.
I turned to face back the way we had come, Sepia falling in close at my side.