Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  Inside his head, the Golem’s self-perception leaped from submind to submind at a frequency not dissimilar to a giggle. The untruth was just the sort of comforting balm it should feed to humans at every opportunity. The truth was some memory of morality which had no power over him.

  Stalek pushed his chair back and stood up. As the man walked around the table, the Golem self divided into the subminds controlling its eyes. It noted that the man wore thick leather lace-up boots –very anachronistic footwear.

  ‘No,’ Stalek said, ‘you are capable of doing whatever you like, yet your mind is structured in such a way that you choose not to commit murder, but choose to abide by ECS rules. In fact you choose to be a good little citizen. This programming, though tough to break, is breakable. Ever heard of Serban Kline?’

  The Golem searched his uploaded memory, and fragments of self, and came up with nothing. He shook his head.

  ‘Not surprising,’ said Stalek. ‘You probably get the nicely historical ones like Jack the Ripper, but not the more modern ones. The fact is that they could completely fill up your memory space with information, but they prefer you to find out some things for yourself –helps you develop your own personality. Well, in total, Serban Kline killed a hundred and eight women. He was clever and it took ECS years to track him down. They found him with his hundred and ninth victim, who he’d had for two weeks. They managed to give her back her face and body, but they never managed to restore her mind. In one of her more coherent moments she later chose euthanasia.’

  ‘Do not understand the relevance of serial killer,’ said the Golem.

  ‘Kline went for mind-wipe, and that is what happened to him, but not before a very naughty individual at ECS had made a memcording of Kline’s mind.’

  ‘For forensic psychiatric study,’ said the Golem.

  ‘No, for black VR entertainment. Amazing how much some people will pay to be a monster for a little while. Trouble is that they discovered Serban’s recording tended to drive into psychosis those experiencing it, so after a while it didn’t sell so well.’

  ‘Why are you telling this?’

  ‘Because I’m going to load a Serban Kline memcording straight into your silicon cortex. After a while you won’t be concerned about your indenture, or ECS law.’

  The Golem decided it did not like the name ‘Longshanks’ and so tested its bonds to the limit, but found that they were firm. Fear of losing itself was quite irrelevant. The Golem did not know what ‘self’ was.

  –retroact ends –

  Consciousness was immediate, whereupon Thorn said, ‘Seems I’m still alive. The nanobots worked?’

  ‘They worked, Patran Thorn –you are human again,’ answered the disembodied voice of Jack.

  Staring at the ceiling, Thorn tried to understand how this confirmation made him feel. He realized he felt the sadness of an addict freed from addiction –knowing the power of the narcotic, and that he could never go back.

  Sitting upright, he surveyed the medical area and wondered how much time had passed. Sliding back the thin sheet that covered him, he inspected his naked body and saw no sign of drastic surgical intercession, but he did feel battered, slightly ill and weak. Slowly swinging his legs off the surgical table, he paused before standing up.

  ‘You have been unconscious for eight days,’ Jack informed him, ‘and since your . . . incapacity a number of things have occurred.’ Jack went on to detail them, while Thorn padded over to a wall unit, scrolled down a menu and called up a disposable shipsuit and slippers, which he took from the dispenser and donned. Then, from the same unit, he ordered coffee, but instead got a tall carton of some sickly vitamin drink –and quickly drank half of it. The AI’s voice tracked him as he left Medical, stepped out into the decorous corridor and headed for the dropshaft. By the shaft’s entrance, he looked around for somewhere to discard the carton.

  ‘Just throw it on the floor,’ Jack told him.

  This he did, watching as something like a glass beetle scuttled out of a small hatch opening up at the bottom of the wall, caught the carton even before it hit the floor, and scuttled back again. He shuddered, stepped into the shaft.

  There was only one occupant on the bridge, whom it took him a moment to recognize. ‘Cento,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Thorn.’ The Golem nodded to him, then turned back to face the spectacular view.

  To the right, the giant incandescent orb of an F-class sun filled half their visual field. It was milky emerald, with the contrasting yellow of a titanic flare looping out from its surface, and other fires of orange, red and violet rippling out from a pox of sunspots like mosquito bites turned bad. To their left, a dark dwarf sun revolved with slow dignity, turned jade by reflected light, with the flickering dots of meteor impacts occasionally appearing on its matt, and apparently smooth, surface. Between the two suns, the occasional rocky moonlet –or maybe planet, as there was no real sense of their scale –tumbled through space.

  ‘It can loosely be described as a planetary system.’ Cento gestured: ‘The brown dwarf is small enough and cool enough to be defined approximately as a planet, and its mass is such that it orbits the sun here. Jack’s contracted the view so we can see both of them. In reality, if they were as close as they seem to be, they would be drawn in towards each other in a matter of days, and the cataclysm would be visible a thousand light years away, a thousand years hence.’

  Cento now turned to Thorn, then glanced beyond him. Thorn himself turned as Cormac stepped out of the dropshaft.

  ‘I had hoped,’ the agent said, ‘that Jack would have finished scanning this system by now.’ He grimaced. ‘We had to check it, even though it seemed unlikely that either Dragon or Skellor would be here.’

  Thorn rubbed his face –he still wasn’t up to speed, and he desperately wanted that coffee.

  Cormac went on, ‘Of course Skellor could be present on any of those planetoids, under a chameleonware shield. We are actually looking for Dragon, and by finding him will eventually find Skellor.’ He looked up at the brown dwarf. ‘Anything more, Jack?’

  ‘Excuse the delay.’ The AI’s automaton suddenly came to life, tilting its head back to take in the external view. ‘On one of the planetoids exists a species of rock-boring worm, and a deeper scan was required to confirm that its tunnels were not the result of draconic pseudopodia.’

  ‘Then what are we waiting for?’

  The automaton turned to frown at Cormac. ‘Must I explain to you the interaction of solar and U-space mechanics?’

  Thorn watched as, with something odd in his expression, Cormac gazed out at the F-class sun. The agent replied, ‘No, you don’t. It’s a matter of extra minutes only on our departure time, which could add or subtract days from the duration of our next journey.’ He tilted his head, reaching up to press the tips of his fingers against his temples. ‘The solar gale will hit soon, and the distortion wave can carry us out, accelerate us . . .’

  There were tides and currents in U-space, Thorn knew, and sometimes leaving a system later meant your subsequent journey took less time. Now, by his expression, Thorn realized Cormac must be conducting a silent conversation through that damnable impossibly functioning gridlink of his. Then the view winked out and he felt the strange slew of the Jack Ketch in a direction he could neither see nor indicate. Cormac still stood with his eyes closed and his fingertips to his temples. Thorn thought he himself must still be suffering the after-effects of surgery when the agent wavered and grew thin, so it seemed Thorn could see the drawing room showing right through him. Then, for a fraction of a second, Cormac was gone, then reappearing a pace to the left of where he had been standing –and Thorn knew that what he had seen was real but inexplicable.

  Sunrise usually quelled sleer activity, but this morning not so much as usual. Light cutting down the canyons and ravines now revealed a world of violently contrasting colour. As always, there were the beige, pink and sepia tones of the surrounding sandstone below the turquoise sky, but now dar
k green and purple shoots were spearing up everywhere from the ground, light-green roundish leaves ringing their bases, and nodular yellow growths spattering the butte faces and spreading to smear together in resinous masses. And the armoured brethren and prey of the sleers were also appearing.

  Readying Stone for departure, Tergal observed a line of four small sand gulpers hoovering their way down the canyon towards them, sand spewing from their throat sieves as they worked, and only stopping when they lifted their heads to swallow vegetation compacted in their crops. He also noticed a large rock crawler, its piton feet wedged into stone while it sucked up yellow fungus with twin trumpet-shaped siphons.

  ‘Maybe we should try to get to a drier area,’ he suggested.

  The changes in their relationship were quite plain. Anderson was not treating him very differently –still discussing things, still imparting his encyclopedic and sometimes boringly extensive knowledge of the fauna and flora –but Tergal knew he was now on trial and there would be no appeal. Out here, if Tergal fucked up, he knew the knight would kill him. But Tergal’s respect for Anderson had increased tenfold. He realized he wanted this man’s good judgement.

  ‘My intention entirely,’ Anderson replied as he strapped himself into his saddle up on Bonehead’s back.

  ‘Which way?’ Tergal asked.

  ‘No idea.’ Anderson shrugged. ‘If we just continue towards the Plains we stand as much chance of coming out of this as anywhere else.’ He rapped his goad on the shell immediately behind his hog’s raised sensor head. It extruded an eye-palp towards him as if to say it knew they were setting out and there was no need for his impatience, then it stood and, with a steady gait, tramped down the canyon towards the sand gulpers.

  The gulpers, without even looking up, parted to allow the sand hogs passage, then closed together behind them. As he and Anderson moved on, Tergal observed something else, with thin fragile legs at least three metres long and similarly elongated pincers, reaching up sandstone faces to pluck down both yellow fungi and rock crawlers, stabbing both with its siphon pincers to suck them dry.

  ‘Stilt spider,’ Anderson observed. ‘Quite slow, but a bastard when you’re camping at night –steps straight over the camp wires and’ll suck you dry easy as it does rock crawlers.’

  Tergal glanced at the knight and noticed how he wasn’t paying much attention to the distant creature, but was studying the ground just ahead of Bonehead.

  ‘You’re following that brass man,’ he said. ‘Is that such a good idea?’

  Anderson looked up. ‘Aren’t you curious?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess . . . Who do you think he was?’

  Anderson directed his attention to a trail that the fresh growth was making indistinct. ‘Not so much a case of who as what. I’d say he is a machine –“android” was the old word –probably left over from colonization time. He could have been wandering around Cull for centuries, recharging himself from sunlight and maybe repairing himself with the skill of a metallier –who can say?’

  Tergal’s instinct was to tell Anderson he was talking rubbish. But he had seen a man, apparently made of brass, twist off a half-tonne sleer’s head as if taking the top off a bottle of quavit. Trying to sit back and fit such an event neatly into the pattern of everyday life was not easy.

  ‘Maybe he was a metallier in some sort of armour?’ he suggested.

  ‘Strong fella, then,’ opined Anderson. And of course the suggestion had been ridiculous.

  At midday they halted to eat oatmeal biscuits and brew amanis tea. Tergal noted that the young sulerbane plants were now standing higher than his ankles, and their ground leaves, trapping the moisture in the canyon floor, were beginning to overlap each other. Finishing their tea quickly when a swarm of snapper beetles, attracted by the heat of their stove, veered towards them, they continued their journey. Later they came upon the remains of an albino second-stage sleer, its legs pulled off and scattered about it. Anderson stopped to study it, before letting Bonehead and Stone share it between them.

  ‘First one of those I’ve ever seen,’ commented Anderson. ‘Must be an inbred colony about here. I’ve heard about such things among Earth stock, but never native animals.’

  But Tergal could see the knight doubted his own explanation.

  Skellor climbed the tumbled edge of a butte to reach its flat top, for a better view of what lay ahead. After studying the city spread before him on its platform, he wished then he had taken apart the mind of the woman he had earlier encountered. It was only a passing regret, for it was not as if he desperately needed knowledge of such a primitive society. There were no killer AIs or Polity agents here, so such an edge was not necessary for his very survival. But, he decided, eyeing the guns casting a shadow below, perhaps it would be prudent to so deal with the next human he encountered.

  Back down from the butte, he was soon heading into deep shadow below the city. Scanning around with infrared vision, he observed a chimera produced by no natural evolution. The man-thing, with its pincer mouth and chitinous hide, came leaping out of one of the bulbous nests. He backhanded it to the ground, then held it down with his foot.

  ‘Now what are you?’ he asked.

  The creature tried to snap at his ankle, and from its armoured mouth issued hissing, gulping sounds that might have been words. Skellor pressed his full weight on his leg and the ribcage under his foot collapsed with a dull crunch. As the creature expired, Skellor dipped a finger in leaking orange blood and put it in his mouth. Having already recorded the base chromosome format of the creature back at that encampment, he quickly analysed the substance in his mouth, and was unsurprised to identify that same chromosome containing additional human DNA. Glancing up at the platform and remembering what he had already seen of the technology here, he knew this creature did not result from any recombination experiment carried out by humans.

  ‘Well, Dragon, what have you been doing?’

  Thereafter Skellor used chameleonware to avoid the most persistent attackers, and killed only those bearing some form he found particularly interesting, gathering data each time to store in the vastness of that crystal part of his own crossbred brain. Some hours later, he came to a steel wall, and was annoyed to find no access from here to the city above. Now, walking alongside the wall, he planned his next moves.

  Neither the woman nor any others in that little encampment had worn Dracocorp augs, which came as a surprise to him. This planet being the hideaway of one of the Dragon spheres, he had expected to find all of the human population under that entity’s control. But then he realized Dragon did not need such devices to control a primitive population so easily to hand. Skellor, however, did need some comparable method of enslavement if he was to usurp this society and twist it to his own purpose: that being the manufacture of components to repair his ship.

  Luckily, like the chromosome patterns he had started filing away, he had also stored much else. For conscious inspection, he called up the blueprints of the Dracocorp aug and adjusted them to its state when virally subverted to his control, and made some minor adjustments, since he didn’t want everyone here brain-burnt moronic. There was also the matter of distribution, but that would be easy –the sleer chromosomes offered him an easy means.

  And as Skellor walked back out into daylight, where he found uniformed soldiers setting up barricades and mounting weapons, he hacked and spat something horrible into his palm.

  In bright white flashes, each of the telefactors disappeared –the glare from each explosion so intense it left black polarized dots on the screens. Jerusalem had just destroyed all but the visual link of the pinhead cameras to itself. The skin on her back crawling, Mika dropped her gaze to the screen that had been showing her a nanoscope view from one of the ’factors. Either that screen should now be blank, or show the research programs she had been running in parallel. But what it showed was no code she knew: blockish pictographs, like odd-shaped circuit boards, revolved and fitted into each other, shifting diagonally across
the screen.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s in,’ she said.

  Just then, there sounded loud clangs from all around Exterior Input, and Mika noticed that emergency door irises had closed on all exits.

  ‘Er . . . what was that?’ Colver asked in dismay.

  Susan James grimaced at him. ‘Clamps disengaging. You didn’t feel the acceleration because the gravplates in here would have automatically compensated.’ The woman flicked a control to one of the pinhead cameras and her screen immediately displayed an external view of the Jerusalem with the exterior input centre, like the smallest fleck against the vastness of the ship, now departing it.

  ‘Shit,’ said Colver.

  Though she had speculated that Jerusalem might do this, Mika had never quite believed it. She stared at the screen, wondering if the AI was currently selecting an imploder missile from some carousel inside the ship, prior to ramming it into a launch tube. Then all the screens went blank.

  ‘D’nissan?’ Colver turned towards the sphere.

  ‘I disconnected from the pinheads. Whatever got to us did it through the telefactor, but it could leap from us to the cameras, and I don’t want to lose them as well.’ Abruptly the door on the side of the sphere popped open and D’nissan stepped out in a gust of cold. He was wearing a reflective hotsuit, frigid air also gusting out from it around his unmasked face. He pointed a remote control back at the sphere and operated it. Things hissed and crackled in the frigid interior, and there arose a smell of fried optics.

  ‘Took it completely,’ he said to Mika, then turned and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Jerusalem?’

  ‘Still here. I am maintaining simple voice transmission and reception only. Any image link has too high a bandwidth.’

  ‘Okay,’ said D’nissan, ‘it’s a waste of a lot of data, but I recommend full system burn. It subverted everything in the deep scanning sphere, then tried some sort of optical link into me.’