by Alex Lamb
Mark kicked at anything and everything, struggling to reorientate himself. At last his feet caught the top rung of the ladder. He dragged them both down and then propelled them at the ceiling. He knocked Ash’s head into the padding as they hit and tried to cram it there. It gave him enough purchase to get Ash’s hands free from his face and neck.
Sam slid fast along the passage below, his body aimed like a torpedo. Mark knew he’d left his back exposed. Sam had a clear shot. He swung Ash’s body awkwardly around, trying to realign his human shield. This brought Ash close enough to kick Mark in the kidneys, which he did with relish, over and over.
Then the network came back on. Mark seized on their surprise and threw Ash’s own memory package back at him – the one he’d sent while Mark was trapped on Carter. He used Will’s hackpack to force Ash to run it. Whatever Ash believed was going on now, maybe he’d recognise his own memories. Ash hesitated, stunned. His eyes glazed over.
Sam moved down the corridor, angling again. Mark twisted as bullets thudded into the padding beside him. He curled and sprang off the ceiling, sending Ash and himself spiralling down the tube into the lounge the wrong way up. While he had the advantage, Mark followed Ash’s package with a memory dump of his time in the penitence box, squeezing it into Ash’s mind. Ash whimpered and went stiff in his arms as Mark forced the memory into him, wedging it down the throat of his interface.
Mark watched Ash’s expression melt from one emotion into another: shock, dismay, despair and finally a kind of terrible resolve. They hung locked and frozen in a wrestling grip, the crash couches over their heads, as Sam came in for a fresh shot.
Ash suddenly brought his legs up against Mark’s chest and sprang away in Sam’s direction. He snatched the gun from Sam’s hand in an eye-blink and brought the handle repeatedly down against Sam’s face.
‘Stop!’ cried Sam.
But Ash’s arm became a blur. Sam struggled weakly as his blood spattered across the lounge.
‘Ash, stop!’ Mark begged.
Citra flew in then with a gun in her hand, pointed at Mark. Mark kicked it from her fingers and caught it as it rebounded off the wall. He fired a warning shot, clipping Ash’s arm as the gun stock threatened to fall into Sam’s face yet again.
Ash spun away, clutching his arm. He curled in on himself and began to keen like a sick animal.
‘Everybody freeze,’ said Mark, breathing hard. ‘This is fucking over.’ He pinged Zoe in the shuttle outside. ‘We’re in,’ he said, watching Sam’s body turn slowly in the air at the centre of a cloud of wobbling scarlet droplets. The man’s face was a mess. Without a med-bay, Mark couldn’t tell if he was still alive. Citra regarded him with eyes full of unadulterated loathing.
‘It’s not pretty down here,’ he said, ‘but we’re in.’
18.5: WILL
What Will had in mind wasn’t betraying Snakepit, exactly. He just didn’t want to be a god. The promise of ultimate power, he’d learned, was also the promise of ultimate loneliness, and he’d lived with that for long enough already. So Snakepit would have to survive with a submind replica of him or nothing at all. Will was ready to die to ensure that outcome. He’d already faced death once today. Doing it a second time felt far less dramatic.
Was that a selfish decision? After all, Snakepit would still exist without him and the risk that the mutants might reclaim it remained, despite the power he now held over them. But Ann had both the smarts and the cold pragmatism to torch the planet if he didn’t get off it. Either way, Will’s ascendancy to ultimate power was permanently off the menu.
For the first time in his life, he actually felt glad that the Transcended had prevented him from making complete copies of himself. Before his trip to Davenport, he’d assumed there was simply a limit to how much data a smart-cell could hold, and therefore how much of his persona his subminds could physically contain. But on that day it became clear that the Transcended had actively blocked him from copying himself by somehow writing a restraint deep inside his operating code. Now, ironically, that same code gave him his one hope of not living out eternity as a galaxy-spanning deity.
Will brought up a set of SAP design tools and started assembling a copy of himself in the planet’s substrate. The world responded with incredible eagerness, opening up oceans of resources for him. Then, slowly, Will started detaching his threads of control from himself and handing them to the replica. Snakepit had bound itself close enough to him that it took just seconds to figure out what he had in mind.
The museum metaphor smacked back into place with a force that made his nerves shake.
The curator looked up at him with eyes full of pain.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. She reached for the octopus-orchid on his lapel.
Will brushed her hand away. ‘Leaving,’ he told her. ‘You gave me control, remember? I can do that now.’
‘But why?’ she cried. ‘I thought we had an understanding!’
She looked shocked at his duplicity. Apparently, the curator had not yet figured out the difference between untruths and lying by omission. She still had a lot to learn about the human race.
Clouds parted in Will’s mind and suddenly he could feel the planet’s hunger more keenly than ever – an aching well of loneliness large enough to drown empires. It only tightened his resolve further. If that was what godhood felt like, he wanted no part of it.
‘But you won’t be alone,’ said the curator. ‘You’ll have me!’
‘You’re not real,’ said Will sadly. ‘You’re a part of my imagination – a picture of someone I once knew.’
The curator grabbed her hair in fists. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Don’t say that! Don’t leave me here like this! I can’t stand it.’
Will backed away slowly down the aisle between the ranks of cryptic exhibits.
‘Think about all the good you could do if you stay!’ she cried. ‘You might make all the difference for the human race. Who would be better than you at ushering in a new age of reason and hope?’
Will struggled with that because he still believed he could help. But he didn’t like what power had done to him last time. He found it hard to believe he’d be a better person with a million times more.
‘I regret that it’s necessary,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back with a better solution for you, I promise. Real people – thousands of them. Not manufactured hybrids. And not just me. But right now, you need to let me go.’
At first she looked as if she might have bought into his vision. She hesitated, suspending her scrabbling attempts to regain control. But as Will retracted his network of influence still further, the curator began to scream. Through his extended senses, Will felt organs the size of small countries start to fail. Oceans roiled. With his every uncoupling, parts of Snakepit’s already damaged matrix shut down. He wondered suddenly if the planet would actually prefer to die rather than carry on with just a shadow for company, even given the promise of his return. He hoped they could both do better than that.
Will forced a change in his mental distribution, narrowing his presence rather than reducing it. He pushed himself like a root deep into the soil of the planet’s memory, looking for the core of its identity.
Without sentient company, Snakepit was still effectively an SAP, if a mind-bogglingly complex one. If he could find the core incentive structure that had driven the biosphere’s growth, maybe he could reshape it. He could insert some incentives of his own and convince the planet that it wanted to let him go – that he wasn’t good enough on his own. In essence, he’d give the place some higher standards.
The curator tugged at his sleeves, becoming vaporous and indistinct as Will sank deeper into Snakepit’s mental structure. Then, as Will reached the threshold where even the curator couldn’t go, she reached out to him one last time.
‘Don’t go down there,’ she begged. ‘Don’t change me. Please.’
She came apart into coloured mist as Will held tight to his control and slid below the horizon of her awareness, into her defining depths.
As museum faded from sight, the vast interlocking machinery Will had seen when he first touched the planet’s mind swam back into focus. This was the world’s true shape, he knew, or as close as his mind could model it. The byzantine detailing of the place didn’t faze him any more, though. Now he understood it. Above him, huge wheels turned, representing higher levels of complexity – whole ecosystems and animal societies. Below him, the cogs and levers grew ever smaller, vanishing into minuscule obscurity. Somewhere down there was a representation of every leaf and vein in Snakepit’s intricately ordered biosphere.
Now that his mind could parse it all, what surprised Will was how similar each level of the structure was. Features of Snakepit’s basic architecture were reproduced at every level, distorted like faces in a mirror-maze. There was some sense in which the entire structure was symmetrical from top to bottom. That repetition also told Will everything he needed to know about where to look for the planet’s root controls.
First, he chased upwards through the hierarchy, towards the planet-spanning intelligence his integration had fostered. As he neared it, he watched arcs of bright emotion welling up from the depths and splashing across the underside of Snakepit’s mind like bolts of pale lightning.
This is what panic looks like, he thought. This is fear. Fresh guilt tugged at him. Once again, Amy was in the torture chair, only this time he was the one doing the torturing. He reminded himself that the curator wasn’t real, and certainly wasn’t Amy. Before he plugged himself in, the planet hadn’t even been conscious in the human sense. He forced himself to focus and sought out the axle upon which that immense wheel turned. Then he dived down towards whatever engine powered it.
Will chased the driving mechanism through level after level. The lower he went, the weirder the planet-mind’s structure became. Small wheels powered larger ones, in turn propelled by others even tinier. He fell through dense thickets of hyperbolic clockwork – nuggets of convoluted machinery clenched like mechanical fists.
If there had ever been artificial order here, it had been overgrown by millennia of organic adaptation. The tangle of representational contraptions became so tortuous that Will could barely see through it, but for a haze of bright light leaking up from below. He sought out that glowing point, pressing himself towards the centre of the Rube Goldberg forest.
When Will found what he was looking for, he knew it immediately. At the deep, incandescent heart of the labyrinth lay a clear space where a tidy crystalline core of ambition hung, shining like a geometric whorl of neon tubing. Its references sprang from the oldest tunnel tissue on the planet – much of it almost five million years old.
Will exhaled in relief and pulled himself close enough to read the structure. Then he stopped, suddenly cold. Something about the shape below him looked horribly familiar. The tidy interlocking knot was way too simple to have spawned all the complexity that surrounded it. It looked more like a kind of circuit diagram he knew well: an entanglement tether for one end of a quantcomm device. Or a suntap.
Suddenly, Will’s situation felt very wrong. He peered closer, unwilling to believe what he was seeing. But there at the hub of the world’s mind lay an impossible join where the rest of the planet’s motivational engine should have been. The guiding spirit of Snakepit, where all its subtle genius had originated, wasn’t actually here. It had been piped in on waves of gravity distortion.
The pit of Will’s stomach fell away as comprehension dawned. He’d looked for hallmarks of the Transcended and found none. But here at the very heart of the world, hidden even from Snakepit itself, lay all the proof of their complicity he needed.
‘Holy shit,’ he croaked. ‘The League was right.’
He glanced around at the still, silent blizzard of ideas that crowded him on every side. But why? Why build a world like this and hide its origin even from itself? Why make it believe a lie?
It suddenly became obvious that the ‘Founders’, as the curator had thought of them, had never existed. That was why Snakepit had no memory of their passing. The world had been made this way – delusional and devoid of purpose until now. It had been established between waves of intelligent life in this part of the galaxy. Ready for whoever came next.
But why? A gift? What kind of gift arrived anonymously and attacked the person who opened it? Perhaps not a gift, then, but a trap set on an unbelievably long fuse. But even that didn’t make sense. Why go to such lengths to trap the human race when they could have achieved that aim so much more simply? Whatever the agenda, Will no longer trusted it.
He regarded the core structure before him. If he touched it, would it know? Could he afford to make changes here, or would he awaken whatever Transcended intelligence hid at the other end of that tether?
Will began to pull carefully away, like a man stepping back from a tripwire. As he rose up through the planet’s layers of thought, he began shutting down his connections to the planet as fast as he dared. His network of links to Snakepit’s distributed mind fell away like threads of spider silk. Towers of knowledge crumbled inside him. His mind shrank back to a human scale like an ice cube melting under desert heat. He relished ignorance as it overcame him.
As his mind retreated, Will quickly zeroed in on the core of the submind matrix that hosted him and reached for his body. He could see it before him now, lying prone in the alcove and plugged into the world through a billion interlocking hyphae.
Just as his awareness closed on his physical form, reintegration stopped. Will hovered before himself, disembodied and full of dread. For some reason, he could collapse no further than the alcove itself. Something beyond the limits of his extended perception was blocking him.
Then, while he watched, his body sagged apart like warm butter melting in a pan. The world thinned a little. Will’s perceptions flattened out, taking on the plastic edge of artificial memory.
He stared, speechless. Just minutes before, he’d been ready to die this way, but he’d never bargained on having to watch it happen. A sick sense of impotence gripped him. Will scrabbled for the bacteria in the pool, willing the cellular matrix to reconstruct what it had lost. Nothing happened. The body that had been his diffused gently into the brackish water leaving nothing but a pinkish residue on the surface.
Then, slowly at first, Will’s detachment from the planet began to reverse itself just as it had when Snakepit first invaded him. Except this time, Will had a cold certainty that someone else was pulling the strings.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Stop. Please.’
The planet didn’t listen. The spider was drawing him back down towards the centre of the web. Will fought it every step of the way until he found himself hovering before the suntap again. He twisted like a man in a straightjacket, unable to look away. The shape beneath him pulsed with manic light – light that swelled up and overwhelmed him.
19: OWNERSHIP
19.1: MARK
Citra glared at him, disgust written on her face.
‘What did you do to poor Ash?’
‘I showed him the truth, that’s all,’ said Mark wearily.
Citra huffed at him. ‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘What do you imagine is happening here?’ said Mark.
She shook her head. ‘It’s a little late to play fantasist, Captain Ruiz. I think we all have a pretty clear idea of what’s going on.’
‘Look!’ Mark snapped. ‘Just tell me what you think’s happening, otherwise we’re going to spend all day talking at cross purposes. At least accuse me of something specific, for crying out loud.’
She folded her arms. ‘Fine. You conspired with Will Monet to push him back into the history books by turning a first-contact situation into a war. With the help of your accomplices, of course. You�
�ve been planning this since before the mission even set out.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Sam and I have been trying to work against that evil ever since.’
‘And you buy that even though he drugged you,’ said Mark.
‘Don’t think me a fool, Captain,’ she snapped. ‘We both know he did that to save me from what you had planned.’
Will rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand and groaned. He opened a link to the lounge’s wall-screens and played back some footage Ash had sent him of Sam giving a talk for the League. Then he showed her some of Sam’s conversations with Ash. And finally he threw in a memory of his own: Sam telling him how Earth, his favourite hovel-world, had to die.
Citra went grey. ‘I find it difficult to believe I’ve been so systematically misled as you suggest. Those videos have undoubtedly been faked.’
‘When would I have done that?’ said Mark. ‘While I was imprisoned by FPP fanatics in New Luxor or when the Flags were torturing me in Britehaven?’
Citra shook her head. ‘You weren’t tortured.’
‘Is that right?’
Mark posted another snippet from his own memories: Venetia going up in flames. Citra’s eyes went wide.
‘You want to check on that?’ he said. ‘You want to go and look at her body in the shuttle to see if she really has life-threatening burns? Tell you what – why don’t we agree to get back to Earth as fast as we can and let the evidence speak for itself? Does that sound fair?’
Citra’s eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing would make me happier. However, I doubt that’s where we’re headed.’
Mark sighed. He reached out through his interface to the closest printer and ordered up three sets of plastic restraints, then hesitated before setting the job running. Sam had been the source of the problems on the Gulliver and now Sam wasn’t conscious. Mark still didn’t believe that either Citra or Ash had any malice in them. Maybe there was a better way to handle this – one that allowed for a little trust.