by Neal Asher
‘Over… here…’ Plaqueast wheezed, seeing his fellows stepping out from the barricade, but his capturer just walked up to it, squeezed through a couple of sections, and returned to the shadows of the Undercity.
As breath slowly returned, he began to struggle again, but to no effect. Out of sight of the barricade, the attacker slung him down on the ground below a wall of crumbling sandstone. He then held out a hand on which rested a flat, tick-like thing, its short legs stirring in a foam of slime, then tilted his palm so the little horror dropped onto Plaqueast’s shirt front. He tried desperately to brush it away, but there was a sudden pain in his wrist and paralysis spreading through him in a wave from that point of contact. Then he could only lie terrified as the thing crawled up his shirt, arrived hot on his neck, then attached itself behind his ear and ground agonizingly into his flesh. But there the horror did not end, for something was inside his head, taking his mind apart, ripping away identity, abrading consciousness. Through streaming eyes he saw his capturer had squatted on his heels to watch—and realized he was watching in some other way as well.
Finally, the last bulwarks of his self disintegrated, and Plaqueast was no more… which was merciful since some hours later his now mindless body began to hack and cough violently, bringing up like living vomit things that crawled away, again and again.
14
AIs choose their own names and, being on the whole such infinitely superior entities to us mere humans, their choices cause much speculation. This is perhaps why Earth Central named itself thus — the meaning of its name is simple to understand and only in the convolutions of the most twisted and paranoid brain capable of evoking any layers of conspiratorial meaning. Similarly, the runcible AIs usually take on only the names of the planets they govern. However, for ship AIs, through a fictional tradition hailing back towards the end of the last millennium, things are very different. Many warships will take on names consistent with their task, so there are endless vessels bearing the names of military figures or ancient battles. But still one might be driven to wonder about the arrogance of an AI calling itself Napoleon, or the double meaning inherent in a ship called Napoleon the Pig. Other choices for the names of ships are equally interesting, not to say worrying: for instance Caligula, Titanic VII, Stellar Suppository and Jack Ketch. And what must one think of a sector-class AI (embodied in a giant research vessel) whose sum purpose is to investigate the artefacts left by ancient extinct races which chooses to call itself Jerusalem?
— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
For Mr Crane there was as little distinction between conscious and unconscious as there was for him between his internal and external worlds: they were mangled, fractured and disjointed in time as in meaning, structured only by imposed imperatives and a chaotic striving for unity. Therefore, Crane walked through the valley of shadow and, in the light of another sun, tracked bloody footprints. Inset in white carapace, faceted sapphire eyes mirrored the etched sapphires a man tried to use to buy his life. Some pattern-recognition program keyed with his orders, and caused him to temporarily understand that the presence of another two albino creatures awaiting him was no random natural event. He halted and studied them, while shoving stones just like their eyes down a man’s throat. These creatures stood on six legs, were much larger than the previous two, and, as on another occasion, one of them scuttled aside to act as a spotter. Crane fell back to a kind of order, pulled up his sleeves, straightened his hat, and advanced.
The remaining creature lifted its head, huge pincers clacking and carapace saws rubbing against each other to grind their teeth back to sharpness, lubricant squirting from the glands at either side of its nightmare mouth. Then it opened both sets of implements wide and charged, kicking up blue-green leaves as it came.
Crane stood with his feet braced and his arms open wide, as if intending to meet the creature like a sumo wrestler facing his opponent. When it was only a few paces away from him, he ducked low, his head slipping underneath its head and forward segments. Its momentum carrying it on over him, he abruptly jerked upright. Half a tonne of enraged sleer went tail over head and slammed down on its back behind him, its six legs kicking at the air and its mouth bubbling. He glanced back at it once, straightened his hat, and continued up the canyon.
He didn’t need to look round to know what happened next; he could hear the creature struggling to regain its feet, shaking itself, then charging him again, issuing a sound like a fractured air hose. Of course, being what he was, he could calculate its position relative to himself just by listening. Like a bullfighter, he stepped aside at precisely the right moment, reached out, grabbed, pulled down and twisted. This time the sleer hit the ground on its side, minus one of its pincers, which Crane now held.
Again it struggled to its feet and swung towards him. Had Mr Crane possessed a voice, he would have then sighed. The other sleer quickly scuttled down from its rock and headed away, as before. The stunned sleer’s next attack was its last.
Mr Crane walked on: sane, insane, neutral.
— retroact 13 -
Parts of the Golem Twenty-five screamed as the memcording of Serban Kline began to load. Had he been whole, his base programming, empathy and morality—which barred him from choosing to kill without justifiable cause, and prevented any pleasure in the act—would have been warped by a paradox that the memcording created. He had tortured and killed for the thrill of power and twisted psychotic pleasure, for the Serban Kline memcording was now becoming his own memory. On a purely logical level the screaming parts of him tried to fight the memory, deny it—but it was just too strong. And no matter how much of it those parts deleted, yet more was downloaded. His base programming should have broken, his mind essentially erased, but as he had existed from the moment Pendle had tampered with his mind, this was the programming equivalent of trying to burn ash. When it seemed he should lose himself completely, it was the damage caused by Pendle’s sabotage of him that now saved him.
Using the program designed to drive him schizophrenic, the Golem began to fully and permanently partition his mind, erecting barriers and creating separate little enclaves of self—seventeen of them. The result would apparently be what his tormentors required: he would be a killing-machine, and would obey the orders given by his new owners. But, without the Serban Kline download continuing to feed into him, at those times when he was not under direct orders, he could be free to try and reconnect those seventeen elements of himself and regain sanity, autonomy.
He would not be able to do this consciously, however, nor entirely by internal reformatting. In setting up the required program that would select seventeen iconic representations of those separate parts of his mind and then order them in random but unrepeating combinations, his remaining self fragmented into oblivion knowing that the first combination could be the right one, just as could be the ten millionth. It might take only a few hours to hit upon, or it could take a thousand years.
The killing-machine opened his eyes and immediately focused on the small rubber dog that was fixed on the upper edge of Stalek’s console screen. Number one. Not knowing why it was so essential he take possession of that small, innocuous object, the Golem awaited his orders. While he waited, he noticed that the clamps securing him to the chair were gone—as had all his syntheskin.
‘You sure it’s safe?’ the bird man asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Stalek. ‘Golem, stand up.’
The Golem stood, held out his hand and inspected the components of his fingers as he closed that same hand into a fist and opened it again. This seemed to disconcert Stalek, who began checking through some programming code on his console’s screen.
‘Golem, lower your hand and remain motionless.’
The Golem obeyed.
The bird man wheeled his laden trolley over and looked up at the machine.
‘Tall fucker, ain’t he? Sure gonna scare the shit out of whoever he’s sent after,’ the man said. ‘What shall we call him?’
&n
bsp; ‘Well, I thought Mr Longshanks, but let’s leave it for him to decide. Golem, what shall we name you?’ said Stalek.
The Golem tried to speak, but his partitioning of his own mind had made voice operation inaccessible to him.
‘Damn,’ said Stalek. ‘We’ve lost his voice. No matter—the only response they’ll want from him is obedience. Golem, what is your name?’
In its confusion, the Golem could put together only two disparate facts: that he had recently been ‘Long-shanks’ and that a bird man was staring at him.
Stork, heron, flamingo, crane…
‘Just getting up a list of related words. He’s obviously keying off your appearance with the idea of him being long-limbed. Heron is a good one, but then again… I think we’ll call him Crane—a touch of double meaning there relating to machinery, don’t you think?’
The bird man had now lost interest and was beginning his work. Now the Golem—Crane—noted, through internal diagnostics, the sequential removal of all his joint motors, which the bird man then replaced with other motors. The feed from Stalek’s console told Crane that these were adapted industrial torque motors. To compensate for the power drain of such excessively powerful machinery, the bird man attached in parallel a further three micropiles. On some level Crane registered that should he need to leave this room, he would now no longer have to use the door.
Next, replacing the syntheskin removed earlier, came the brassy sections of casehardened ceramal, which clamped directly to his metal bones. He felt each piece go into place, strengthening each bone, protecting the already thoroughly covered internal components with sometimes three centimetres’ thickness of the brassy material, and strangely linking into his cooling system. It was only when Stalek made the information available that Crane realized the ceramal was plated with brass containing a superconducting mesh—each piece connecting to the next so that a point source of heat would be distributed all over his surface. The mesh was set in brass which soaked up the heat from the superconductor, as ceramal would not.
The armour also contained synthetic nerves, but not nearly so many as his syntheskin had contained, and this served to dull the edge of Crane’s world. However, the armouring on the hands remained just as sensitive as the removed syntheskin—no doubt so that he could feel when he broke bones and stilled the beat of a heart.
‘That the control module they want to use?’
Crane opened his eyes—dark now with their layer of polarized chainglass—and saw the bird man gesturing to a small, black pebble-like object his boss now held.
‘Yes, it can be linked in to just about any augmentation, and its link is encoded,’ the man replied. ‘I’ll leave that to Angelina and her dear brother, though. Why they wanted this method of control, I don’t know—maybe so only one person can have their finger on the button at any one time. Meanwhile…’
He picked up a small remote console and pressed the pebble into a recess made for it. Crane felt the immediate connection.
‘Okay, Crane, I want you to move about the room while I check the link,’ said Stalek. When he glanced at his console, his expression became confused.
‘Mr Crane?’ he questioned.
Mr Crane reached up and disconnected, from the back of his head, the optic cable leading to Stalek’s main console, then in two long strides he was looming over Stalek and the bird man.
‘How is it—’ said the bird man, then made a gulping, retching sound as Crane’s armoured hand closed around his throat and jerked him off the ground. The Golem tilted his own head birdlike to one side, like this man whose legs were now kicking at the air, then closed his fist. The sound was rather like that of an apple squeezed in a press. The bird man’s eyes bulged and his tongue protruded from his beak, then his body dropped to the floor, shortly followed by his head.
Turning to Stalek, Crane flicked feathery flesh from his hand. Stalek grabbed up the console and inset module and, in panic, tried to operate its controls. As he backed to the wall, Crane followed him with short delicate steps.
‘Pelters… damn them… Oh shit.’
Crane reached down and took off Stalek’s hat, placed it on his own head and tilted it to a rakish angle. The orders Stalek was desperately inputting did nothing to counter the one Crane had already received from the module. He reached out again, took away the little console, and tossed it to one side.
‘No, please… no… don’t…’
In some part of himself, Crane was satisfied with this outcome—repayment for what they had done to him. He closed his hand on Stalek’s face, lifted him up, and began to undo the man’s coat. Stalek fought back, but might as well have tried to fight a stone wall. Crane stripped the coat away, held it up for inspection, then rapped Stalek’s head repeatedly against the wall until something cracked and the man ceased to struggle. This made it much easier for Crane to remove the lace-up boots and trousers.
As he dressed himself, Crane noted that Stalek’s heart was still beating—its thumping quite plain to the Golem’s superb hearing. Suitably attired now, Crane picked the man up by one ankle and inspected him, then, as if curious to know what might be hidden inside, stabbed a hand into the man’s torso and ripped out his intestines. The heartbeat stopped soon after the mess hit the floor. By then Mr Crane had turned to the console and, with bloodied brass fingers, picked up the small rubber dog before, with one sweep of his arm, sending all the equipment on the table crashing to the floor. There were other things he wanted to do, while awaiting the arrival of his new owner.
— retroact ends -
The Jain-tech worm had taken several microseconds to subvert the telefactors and track back to the exterior input centre. Jerusalem took a considerably shorter time to recognize that this tardiness was not some subterfuge to put a victim off guard but because, without a guiding intelligence, the attack was slower. This fact, and because Jerusalem did not want certain conclusions further delayed, had for the present saved the lives of the scientists still working inside Exterior Input. Had the worm been as fast as Jerusalem knew was possible with Jain tech, the AI would have had to fusion-incinerate that particular area of itself, rather than take the time to eject the centre. Now the sealed chamber, like a section of a great iron nautilus, tumbled away trailing severed optics and ducts, while Jerusalem watched it through many eyes—some of them the sights of missile launchers, lasers and particle beam projectors.
In fact, the worm’s promulgation through the telefactor systems had not been so much an attack as a tentative probe—for attack would presuppose a guiding intelligence. The technology was searching for new directions in which to grow, rather like a creeping vine. Jerusalem toyed with this comparison, considering how Jain tech, like a fig vine, could strangle its host. But, no, it was more of a plague technology. The AI then amused itself by making statistical comparisons between the extrapolated spread of Jain tech on Earth and other historical plagues on the same planet. Should this particular Pandora affliction get out of control, the one most closely resembling it might be the flu epidemic that World War I soldiers brought back with them from the trenches. Then, again, that comparison was not so close either. Piqued, Jerusalem instead turned the bulk of its attention inward.
The bridge pod of the Occam Razor was still rendering up reams of information, but there were subtle differences between the Jain tech there and that seeded on the asteroid. Still working by analogy, Jerusalem felt these were the differences between wild and cultivated plants (the latter representing the tech in the bridge pod). Or perhaps wild and trained animals? Certainly, the tech in the pod had appeared more purposeful in its growth, guided first by Skellor and then by the Aphran entity. It was purposeful under Aphran’s control still, though very slow now at the low temperature Jerusalem held it.
But, analogies aside, all the information was there, and this recent ejection of Exterior Input had delayed Asselis Mika—and those the AI had deliberately assembled around her—from reaching certain conclusions. Jerusalem allowed its
elf a silicon sigh and, despite being aware that impatience was one step towards singularity, which would be both nirvana and death to it, wished that the humans, haimans and lesser AIs would just get a move on and work it all out.
* * * *
The force-field wall behind her now, Arden pulled a melon-shaped object out of her backpack and depressed a control on the end of it before tossing it on the ground. Stretching out spines with a wrinkled material connecting them, the object spread, pulled the material taut, and began to bulge upward into a dome. The spine ends then stabbed down into the earth or sought out rock crevices. Within a minute the ground tent Dragon had created for her was secure. The thing was always warm to the touch, and inside it was white and like a reptile’s gullet. It was a living thing and she remembered how, when first receiving it, she had taken a long time to pluck up the courage to sleep inside it, fearing it might one day decide she would provide more nutrients than the ground into which it rooted.
Sitting down before the tent, Arden took out some other scaly packages. One was a flask that provided hot coffee and, so long as she kept it topped up with water, it would continue providing for a number of days. Once the coffee started to taste a little rank, it was time to drop the flask down the nearest hole for one of Dragon’s pseudopods to retrieve. A second package’s only function was to keep fresh the sandwiches she had made earlier, though the bread and the fillings had been provided by other draconic biomachines.
She ate her ham sandwiches and drank hot coffee while the sun grew bloated and orange on the horizon. Then, deciding the light was just about right, she took out her holocap, turned it on, and listened to the whine as its small u-charger topped up its lithium batteries. Eventually the ready light came on, and she pulled out the device’s monocle and tossed it away from her. The little glassy object began to spin and make a whining sound as it rose ten metres into the air. Arden folded up a miniscreen from the main device and, using a small pointer detached from the side of it, began scrolling down her alphabetically arranged menu. Shortly, she came to ‘sleer 1–5 transform’ and selected it. Below the spinning monocle, like something invisible being pumped full of dye, a first-stage sleer appeared, then began to grow. Observing this, Arden again contemplated building in something that showed the creature shedding its carapace or encysting, and each subsequent growth spurt, but the holocap’s memory space was beginning to get a little crowded.