by Neal Asher
The lights went out.
10
The modern haiman is a hybrid of machine and organism, of computer and human mind, incorporating each in equal measure — well, maybe. She is, however, still a long way away from attaining the ultimate true synergy of this combination. Though it has been rumoured that there are those who have, using alien technology, managed to initiate and maintain Al/human mind synergy, this has not been proven and is plainly not true for the majority of haimens. Haimanity therefore sits in a shadowy borderland between humans and AIs, sampling of both but never truly a member of either. Many believe that they are the future of Polity-kind, the post-post-humans. Many others believe they are a dead end, and that trying to fully meld the human with the AI is as likely to succeed as strapping a jet engine to an ox cart in the hope of breaking the sound barrier.
— From How It Is by Gordon
Vulture brought the Harpy and its attached Jain craft back up into the real, only to see the two pursuing wormships materialize almost simultaneously only a hundred thousand miles away.
‘Let me use the chameleonware,’ Vulture requested. ‘We still have a chance to shake them.’ It might indeed have helped, though it was evident the wormships were now using a new scanning format and recognition codes. The one-time bird and now ship AI then tried the chameleonware again, only to find that it still lay beyond his control. Crane, now back in his usual seat beside the ship’s console, had retained ultimate control of the Harpy, and Vulture felt like one of those AIs, before the Quiet War, who had been strictly controlled by their human masters. It was so humiliating. Crane didn’t need to do this to him; all he needed to do was explain himself. The Golem’s dislike of communicating had to be really extreme for him to adopt such measures.
‘Or is it that you don’t want to shake them?’ Vulture enquired.
Crane acknowledged this with a slow nod of his head, then leaned forward and input some new coordinates. Vulture studied them as the two wormships began to close in. Upon detecting a sudden steep rise in radiation from that direction, the AI immediately dropped his ship back into the U-continuum, energies discharging around it like black lightnings as the U-field dragged some small part of a microwave beam strike back down with it.
‘Nearly fried us,’ Vulture observed.
Crane even acknowledged that too, with another tilt of his head. However, as taciturn as Crane appeared towards Vulture, he had certainly been speaking to someone. Though the Golem’s earlier reply to Vulture’s question, ‘Are you still in contact with ECS?’ had been ambiguous, Crane certainly could not have managed such recent feats without Earth Central’s help. However, Vulture felt that there must be more to it than that. Certainly, the Polity AIs, knowing Crane’s intention of going after Erebus for killing the hybrids, would have been prepared to give him any assistance that did not interfere with their own plans, but there were still discrepancies to explain.
ECS had definitely helped Crane get to the location of this ship, the Harpy. Equally, ECS could have given the location of the crashed wormship — the one that killed the hybrids — and it could have given the location of the wormships in the Caldera system too. However, Vulture had a bit of a problem with how Crane had then managed to destroy all those ships. Crane must have known there was a weakness to be exploited, but one that ECS simply could not have been aware of, therefore the brass Golem must have obtained the information elsewhere. Vulture preferred to believe that explanation rather than the alternative — which was that Crane had somehow returned to a previous state and once again fallen through the booby hatch. And now it was time to find out for sure.
As the Harpy travelled through U-space, Vulture next asked, ‘We going anywhere speciAI?’ The coordinates, according to his library, were of a small scattering of asteroids deep in interstellar space and fifteen light years from the nearest star, and, unless there was something else there that Vulture did not know about, the asteroids would be a poor place to hide from the pursuing wormships.
Crane’s response was typical: he silently took out his toys and placed them neatly on the console before him.
‘Are ECS warships waiting there?’ Vulture tried.
The briefest twitch of Crane’s head maybe indicated a negative.
Keeping half an eye on the brass Golem, Vulture began to submerge more fully into the Jain-infected systems of Harpy and the legate craft. He sampled snatches of the code flowing all about him and studied how things were working here. Soon he realized that though some improvements had been made to Harpy’s systems, especially to its chameleonware, the Jain network did not interfere unnecessarily, except through primacy. On the whole it ran in parallel with Harpy’s hardware. That meant Crane could take over whenever he wanted. Sending a few test diagnostics, Vulture found he himself could use parts of that parallel network and he began to look for recorded data, soon finding tens of thousands of caches distributed throughout the Jain substructure.
Some of these sources contained information that was open to analysis. The easiest stuff was visual files and schematics, which Vulture studied avidly. Here a schematic of a wormship segment, there a visual file that had to be part of a virtual model. But it was hopeless. All this stuff could have come from the legate craft, and it neither proved nor disproved whether Crane had been in direct contact with some other entity. Then, out of vast complexity and seemingly endless data horizons, a simple vocal communication:
‘Well, I would guess you’re looking for me?’
‘Who are you?’ Vulture asked, meanwhile running traces to find the source of this voice.
‘I’m Fiddler Randal,’ came the reply.
Vulture traced it back to one particular data store, but even as he accessed that source, its contents began to copy themselves elsewhere.
‘You’re a virus,’ the AI observed.
‘Quite right — but of a kind quite fatal to Erebus.’
‘You supplied Mr Crane with information about the weaknesses underlying Erebus’s attack on the Caldera system?’
‘Certainly,’ Randal replied.
‘I take it that the coordinates we’re now heading to were supplied by you as well?’
‘Correct.’
‘So Crane trusts you now because the information you supplied before was verified?’
‘He’s a trusting sort of soul.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then maybe he more fully understands the technology I now inhabit than do I. Few manage that, but maybe he can because he is a product of a technically evolved civilization, and in addition because he was supplied with a version of Jain-tech devoid of all its traps.’
‘From Dragon.’
‘Precisely.’
‘But what do you mean by product?’
‘As you are well aware, Jain nodes do not react to artificial intelligences. What is the difference between such intelligences and their naturally evolved creators?’
‘There are many differences.’
‘Let me rephrase the question: how, on an informational level, do you distinguish the two?’
‘Top down and bottom up,’ Vulture replied.
‘Exactly,’ said Randal. ‘Humans and others of their like have evolved moderately logical thought processes through natural selection. Their logic is a skin over chaos. The machine mind is built with pure logic from the bottom up. Therefore machines have to pretend to own that same chaos, so they model it, hence human emulation in Golem.’
Vulture wondered where the hell all this was leading. It seemed insane to be having a debate like this while being pursued by two homicidal wormships.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so you’ve established that there is an identifiable difference, though I would argue that the rules of natural selection still apply in the realms of artificial intelligence, though faster. It is argued by some that AIs like myself are simply posthumans. But let’s move on now.’
‘Jain technology does not react to AIs, because it was biased that way by its makers: the Ja
in AIs. Perhaps they decided that evolved intelligences needed to be cleared out of the way so that the products of those messy organic intelligences — AIs — could get on with ruling the universe.’
‘Products like Erebus?’ Vulture suggested.
‘Erebus is flawed.’
Vulture quickly replayed the conversation and realized that, interesting as it all was, it didn’t really explain much.
‘So you gave Mr Crane information enabling him to wipe out fifty of Erebus’s wormships — a mere fly speck. And now you’ve given him coordinates. Why?’
‘Chameleonware.’
‘Explain.’
‘Another version of myself contacted someone else who, hopefully, by now has fashioned or obtained the means to rub out more than mere fly specks. However, to be successful, she will need the latest chameleonware format and recognition codes that Erebus is using.’
‘Hopefully?’ echoed Vulture, then, reviewing what had just been said, added, ‘We don’t possess that ‘ware and those codes now. It’s all changed.’
‘But the ships pursuing you do.’
Vulture considered how, now he was an integral part of the Harpy, an escape pod would be of no use to him at all.
‘She?’ he queried.
‘Her name is Orlandine, and she controls Jain technology supplied to her directly by Erebus.’
‘But she is no AI.’
‘She was, however, a rare product of evolution sufficiently intelligent to take apart a Jain node while avoiding all its traps.’
‘And I’m supposed to believe this.’
‘Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant, as Mr Crane believes it.’
And there it was really. Vulture could not change their destination. He must trust a virus, a Golem android of questionable sanity and, should he ever survive the wormships, a Jain-infested human. Vulture wasn’t at all optimistic about the outcome of all this.
* * * *
When Dragon finally closed down her outside view from the cyst, Mika felt unutterably weary and drifted into sleep on the soft fleshy floor, where she dreamed of gabbleducks and woven cities and the bitter wars of a civilization fighting infection. When she woke again, in an instant like the time before, she opened her eyes on painful brightness — her view meanwhile re-established. For a moment it seemed Dragon was hovering over a snow-covered midnight plain. However, as the two spheres descended towards that same whiteness some internal detonation turned it orange and threw objects deep within it momentarily into silhouette. Then she began to get a sense of scale and realized they had reached the accretion disc. She decided she must have been put to sleep for the rest of the journey, and this rather begged the question of why Dragon had woken her to witness the twin spheres’ destruction of the five wormships. Maybe this was just more evidence to be added to the dense mass already residing in her skull?
Gazing at the view she felt a sudden deep fascination because, though having witnessed most stellar phenomena, this was not one of them. Also, if Dragon could be believed, this place swarmed with wild Jain technology. Her hands itched to be controlling the instruments she could use to study both this great object and everything it contained.
‘Did the conferencing unit survive?’ she enquired.
It again took a while for Dragon to reply, so perhaps the entity was more concerned with carefully watching everything going on outside than tending to the curiosity of the primitive little being it carried inside itself. Finally, the ceiling of the cyst split open with a liquid tearing sound, showering her with magenta juice. Above, a gap opened up through a mass of what looked like coarsegrained white muscle fibres, then gravity within the cyst abruptly shut down.
The smell from outside the cyst was intense: cloves, putrefaction, hot reptile and raw meat. Mika wrinkled her nostrils and swallowed, sure she could become inured to it, but when she started to experience difficulty breathing realized the air out there wouldn’t keep her alive. She closed up her suit helmet and with relief enjoyed her own air supply, then pushed up from the floor and floated right out of the cyst through an eye-shaped tunnel leading into wider spaces. Here hellish red glows lit up glimpses of crowded organs or mechanisms, and frequently she saw the shifting flashes of sapphire pseudopod eyes. It occurred to her that, without any sense of up or down, she might soon lose her way, but Dragon anticipated her.
‘Follow the remote to the surface,’ came its voice over her suit radio.
Peering ahead she observed a diamond-shaped fleshy object peel away from the curved heavily veined surface and flap sluggishly out into the gap in front of her. Bringing her boot down on the same surface, she altered her course to follow it. But as she did so, and gazed around at things she had always wanted to study, close up, something occurred to her. Dragon had told her that the conferencing unit might not survive what was to come, and she had assumed it had been referring to their coming adventure within the accretion disc. Now it seemed likely Dragon had been alluding to the imminent encounter with the wormships. Dragon must have known for some time that they were still following and therefore made preparations to destroy them. Mika felt annoyed Dragon had not told her about this, though she wasn’t sure why, since, amid all the other stuff Dragon did not tell her, it was hardly in the minority.
The flapping remote, which reminded her somewhat of a large skate from Earth’s oceans, continued doggedly. Mika caught hold of a solid glassy strut shaped like a chicken’s wishbone, one end of which disappeared into darkness while the other connected firmly to what looked like an iron acorn extending ten feet across. Through a cavity beyond this object the intermittent strobing of blue light revealed a great cylinder, both of its ends lost to sight. She guessed this must be one of the Dragon sphere’s equatorial weapons. Pushing off again she drifted past a cliff of solid flesh from cavities in which peeked objects like the heads of tube worms. Mika guessed their purpose was to collect for digestion or disposal any dead material drifting through Dragon’s innards.
The remote finally led her to where progress was blocked by great lumpy bags some ten feet across interconnected by numerous gutlike tubes. Her diamond-shaped remote landed on one of these bags and all its kin began to jostle against each other like nervous sheep, then opened a way through. Mika found herself falling back gently towards massive black rib bones, and realized she had come close enough to the sphere’s surface to experience Dragon’s minimal gravity. Settling against one such bone she watched the remote crawl to the newly opened passage and flop inside it, but that being too narrow to fly through, it then progressed with the gait of a wounded bat. She launched herself towards the same passage and followed it inside. Eventually they entered a tunnel, through numerous thick and intricately constructed layers, and Mika was now able to see Dragon’s armour at first hand. She rested a glove against a layer of thick brassy metal, observed further strata holding what looked like glass shock absorbers each as thick as a finger, studied another layer with the appearance of soggy fruitcake, and yet another beyond it with the bluish metallic gleam of superconductor. One of the lumpy bags oozed in to block off the passage behind her and, glancing back to watch this she saw myriad threads jet across the gap and bind together. It seemed Dragon was now sealing off this access to its interior.
Now the gas within the space she occupied fogged and began to draw away into numerous protruding tube ends. Checking her suit readout she watched the pressure drop only momentarily then begin to rise again. When something like enormous eyelids opened above to expose a metal surface inlaid with curved lines meeting at the centre, she deduced Dragon was equalizing the pressure here with what lay beyond that metal surface.
Mika hauled herself up towards what she now recognized as the underside of the hatch leading into the conferencing unit. With a steely slither the irised hatch opened, so she pushed up to the lip and pulled herself over it, then rolled over to lie flat on her back, heavy as lead now on the functioning gravplates.
‘Full outside view,’ she pant
ed.
Something black roiled overhead, the glint of stars was only occasionally visible just above the draconic horizon and, even while she watched, this mass appeared to draw visibly closer.
‘So, Dragon, I take it we have finally arrived,’ she said, directing her voice towards the hatch. No reply, so, after checking the external atmosphere readout before opening her helmet, she sat upright and immediately noted the small impact craters in the floor surrounded by aureoles of metal once molten but now again solidified. Glancing up she could just about pick out, against that roiling black, the patches that the automated repair system had extruded into place. Had she still been here inside when the two spheres went up against the wormships, there was a very good chance she would no longer be alive.
As she removed her gloves and powered down her suit, the diamond-shaped remote rose into view with a sound like flapping leather. However, the moment it crossed above the gravplates it dropped and hit the deck like a huge piece of steak. It lay there struggling weakly, then extruded two stalk eyes which it directed towards her as if in accusation. The eyes were piercing blue, and Mika stared at this draconic creation for a long moment before she stood and walked heavily over to her console
First she adjusted the light amplification to give her the same view she’d seen from within the cyst. The black mass above quickly shaded to grey, then to white, as if she was gazing into a fog bank. Then she called up feeds from the scanners positioned all about the conferencing unit. In moments she was getting images from wide EM scans penetrating deeper into the mass, and data about its constituents. Mostly it seemed to consist of sparse hydrogen, rock dust and snow, though not necessarily snow composed of water ice. Mika began to identify some larger objects out there, then, discovering that the view behind was exactly the same, realized they were actually within the accretion disc itself. Outside the conferencing unit a thin fog seemed to have settled. While she studied this a white laser stabbed up, and something erupted into red fire where its beam impacted. There followed more and more explosions, and on the surface outside she saw meteor strikes while simultaneously the defensive green gas laser of the unit began lancing out to intercept and vaporize falling debris. Returning her attention to her console screen she recognized some of the approaching objects Dragon was firing upon. There were rod-forms out there, also pieces like the remains of destroyed worm-ships — even a distorted lens-shape, that being another variety of Erebus’s combat ships. But that wasn’t all: there were things like fragments of coral, tree branches, weirdly distorted spiral shells, insectile horrors looking like something sculpted ineptly out of pieces collected in a scrapyard. The variety was bewildering.