The Best British Fantasy 2014

by Steve Haynes

  The Senior Biochemist looked at her watch and said ‘We have two hours at most to begin layering. If we have to abort it will take four months to breed and verify another batch. The ship is ready and waiting for our signal. They will not be pleased.’

  ‘This is not a democracy, normally, but in this instance I would like to see a show of hands. Should we proceed with the operation with the links open and the children conscious?’

  All present raised their hands. Somerton turned back to Julia. ‘Explain the danger to them, ask them one more time, and then we go ahead either way.’

  Mariam and Victor were walking around the inside of the perimeter fence. They had never been to this area before. As they passed the main mushroom building they came to a section of fence with a very big gate that could slide aside on rollers, but now refused to budge when they pulled it. A wide concrete road led back from the gate to a high door in a cube-like building with a cluster of antennae on the roof. The road had parallel metal strips with grooves which ran out under the gate and onto a vast grey road with scorch-marks clearly visible and in the distance a group of white-painted parallel stripes.

  ‘What are they for?’ Mariam asked, pointing at the metal strips.

  ‘I think they’re tracks. Maybe you could run wheels along them.’

  They had never witnessed Julia move fast before, but she came sprinting up to them.

  ‘Please listen to me,’ she said. ‘I’m very sorry. We never told you everything. You were too young. We don’t have much time, but let me explain as quickly as I can.’

  The human brain contains something like a hundred billion neurons. Nobody knows the real count. Each neuron may connect with up to seven hundred others, making an incomprehensibly complex network. The brain weighs about one point five kilos and has a volume of something like twelve hundred cubic centimetres.

  The volume of the two-metre diameter sphere in the centre of the cube-like building was over four million cubic centimetres – the capacity of more than three hundred human brains. It was supported in an alloy framework connected to hoists above. The lights were dimmed and only a diffuse red glow, like a photographic darkroom, lit the lattice of steel pipes that ran from the titanium sphere, through ducts in the wall, and into a second chamber. Technicians clad in full biohazard suits adjusted settings on a large touch-screen panel to one side.

  In the wide-windowed observation room set high in the wall, Julia sat between Mariam and Victor. Somerton stood to one side, nearer the window, blinking more rapidly than usual. ‘Begin,’ he said.

  ‘Am I looking at myself, Mariam? Victor?’

  ‘I don’t know. Think about something nice.’

  In the next-door chamber digital read-outs on the breeding tanks were steady. Nano-scale sieves measured the exact structure of the stem cell clusters and trapped any that were less than perfect, and the perfect were fed forward to a holding tank.

  Through the observation window, as though watching a silent movie, they saw the red-lit sphere begin to rotate about its vertical axis, apparently hanging from the umbilical tubes that entered the centre of the top. On the far wall a projection lit up showing a three dimensional model of the interior of the sphere. It was like a shell with a nut inside. The nut was smaller than the outer shell – held in place by millions of fine struts, surrounded by the image of a light blue membrane. The sphere was not yet full.

  The female voice over the loudspeakers was so sudden and loud that everyone was startled. ‘Lowering temperature now,’ she said. Unseen, viscous chilled cooling fluids moved through capillaries in the central mass of the sphere. Within a few seconds the temperature read-out on the tank dropped five degrees.

  ‘I have no word for this. Thought slow . . . fragments, maybe . . . discontinuity . . . Sky leap – Earth flame.’

  ‘Start cell delivery.’

  In the vat chamber, pumps began to spin up, pushing billions of cells in their nutrient wash slowly through sterile pipes from the final holding tank towards their destiny. The projection showed a steadily rising tide filling the space between the central core and the shell of the containment sphere.

  ‘There’s no more room after this,’ said Victor. ‘Is this the final layer?’

  ‘Yes,’ Julia replied. ‘This is the OCC – the Outer Cortical Complex. When the barrier dissolves, these cells will evolve billions of links into the earlier layers. ‘

  Mariam shivered. ‘Axon is cold,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Julia said. ‘Axon is not cold. Axon has no sensory feelings itself. You are the feelings. You are Axon’s skin, eyes, smell, instinct, arms, and legs. That is your purpose.’

  Again, there came the calm voice over the loudspeakers in the observation room. ‘The layer is stabilised. Raising the temperature to normal minus one . . . preparing to dissolve the barrier. Permission is required. ‘

  Somerton gripped the handrail in front of the wide window, looked back towards Julia and the children, and said ‘Proceed.’

  New fluids entered the sphere. The temporary membrane surrounding the original core of the Axon brain – the dura mater – thinned and its dead cells were washed way. Very slowly the impenetrable wall between the old cells and the new grew thinner. On the big display the blue was steadily eroded and became patchy. At the same time, internal blocking membranes dissolved, and what was a place of many rooms became one. Tendrils of tailored neuronal fibre spread through the new tissue like a root system growing at an impossibly fast rate. Microscopic tubules carrying oxygen and nutrients followed.

  It hit Mariam like a tsunami. The world vanished, and huge arcs of geodesics, star-fields, vector–diagrams, swiftly-changing complex mathematical functions, planetary systems and galaxies swamped her with colour and deep ringing sounds like a vast tolling of underwater bells. And then, suddenly, she felt a terrible pain, and screamed.

  Medics who had been standing near the children with their hands behind their backs, as though merely observing, brought the gas-powered syringes forward and sprayed anaesthetic directly into their carotid arteries.

  Inside the building, on the outside of it, around the perimeter fence, and throughout the world, biohazard warnings lit up and flashed.

  ‘Switch the HUD on!’ Somerton shouted. A technician on the floor below pressed a finger on a panel and an incomprehensible green text overlay appeared on the window, scrolling fast.

  ‘Interpenetration failure-level rising. Core temperature rising. Re-cooling initiated.’

  ‘Cortical activity symmetry is collapsing.’

  As the soothing coolants flowed into the maddened biological brain that was Axon, the medics lifted Mariam and Victor onto wheeled stretchers and pushed them down long white corridors to the hospital suite, Julia walking alongside.

  ‘Prognosis? Assessment?’ Somerton snapped at the Senior Biochemist, who was standing next to him. She took a step backwards, ran her fingers through her blonde hair, and said ‘I did warn you that this was a dangerously large volume to layer at one time.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for a history lesson!’

  ‘This is not just a brainstorm. This is a hurricane. We were prepared and we’re doing what we can, but it looks at the moment like total network collapse.’

  Axon raged in random fury and fever. The trees of logic grown over years fell apart. The music of the synapses lost all coherence and was swamped in chaotic noise. The older connections fought the new, and the new knew nothing except their urge to be, to be something, to be a link, or a constant, or a function, or the signature of the scent of a rose. Fractal patterns swept through the complex of tissues. Filaments grew and shrank, touched and embraced or touched and withered, as their electrical charges and biochemical payloads summed or negated.

  Evolution can be slow. To build a hawk or a daffodil can take several million years. But it can also be very fast. Axon’s brain was a war zone as st
rategies competed. But eventually, all wars come to an end.

  Thirty-seven hours later the anaesthetists turned off the systems which had been keeping Mariam and Victor safe from the storm in their bunker of unconsciousness.

  Mariam’s first thought was not hers: ‘I could do with a swim.’ She smiled as the nurse held the plastic beaker of water to her lips.

  Victor opened his eyes and saw a thought that was an equation. ‘Sparse search on eleven dimensional vector space in log(n) time. Not bad for a twelve-year old!’

  The ship was two thousand metres long and shaped like an elongated silver ovoid with lattices of filigree golden wire at each end, like a vast insect egg trapped between the centres of two magical spiders’ webs that connected to – nothing. The light from the star reflected from its body and drive webs, but here there were no eyes to see its strange beauty. It orbited the star silently, patiently and entirely automatically. Yes – it did contain life: plants, seeds, soil, saplings, mature olive trees, fish, sheep, ravens and cabbages – but they were all frozen and silent in the hold. The control bridge, with its comfortable chairs and wrap-around 3D screens was empty. All was dark; the screens and tell-tale lights were of no use to a room without observers.

  Sixteen navigational and systems computers controlled the ship’s status constantly and voted on any required action, which, since they had arrived into the vicinity of the star Angelus XI three hundred Earth days ago, had been next to nothing apart from an unanimous decision to send a mining drone to a metal-rich asteroid within easy reach.

  It had been a long journey. The silicon-based computers could not manage the complexity of a level three void jump, and they’d coasted here at only near light-speed.

  The ship was waiting.

  In an orbit perpendicular to the ship a strange object moved around Angelus XI. Take a can of beer and add a cone to one end and half of a transparent ball to the other. Add gigantic light-catching wings radiating from its waist, and colour it a blue so deep it bordered on the ultraviolet. Now, expand the length of the can to fourteen thousand metres, and spin it slowly around the long axis. Add some powerful transmitters that broadcast, on a sweeping frequency band covering most of the electromagnetic spectrum, the following message: ‘Bio-containment station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta Seventeen. Warning. Unauthorised approaches within one million kilometres will trigger lethal and indiscriminate attack. This facility is protected with a network of cloaked military drones with a lot of fire-power and a minimal sense of humour. Have a very nice day.’

  Times passes. That’s its job. Sixteen year old Victor was sitting on the beach beside the lake eating something that resembled a hamburger. He refused to go into the water where Mariam floated, flipped and dived.

  ‘Why won’t you show me the world?’ Victor thought.

  ‘It’s not allowed.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Victor. If I could tell you why, you would see it. Go for a swim while you can.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘I won’t share some quite cute solutions for quantum gravity. No swim, no tell.’

  Victor kicked off his shoes, his tee-shirt and shorts, walked down to the edge of the water, and stuck his toes in. ‘It’s freezing!’ he yelled. Mariam emerged from the lake very close to the shore and splashed water over Victor. He ran back up the beach, swearing.

  In the cluster of buildings that housed the Axon development system, Somerton was hosting a five-hour crucial meeting of the full team. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the decision point. If there are any doubts you must articulate them now.’

  One by one the teams voted. Only the Senior Biochemist raised an issue. ‘The complexity of Axon is now, as we would expect, far beyond our diagnostics. However, we can see some zones that are constantly changing – changing faster than we would expect. Specifically, these are in the inferior temporal gyrus region. We predict that this pattern will eventually stabilise, but I must flag up this slight anomaly. We have no objection to advancement.’

  ‘Very well,’ Somerton said. ‘Many of you have given the best years of your lives to this project. There have been differences, and quite properly so, but we move towards our goal united in the will to succeed. I hereby authorise advancement to level Sigma.’

  Far away, the ship decoded a signal and began to move.

  Julia walked down from the Centre towards the lake as the flyer came in low over the beach with a sound like a deep breath. They ran towards her.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Get dressed. Then you really can come and see your world.’

  The gate to the runway was open. The flyer was parked on an apron area, gleaming bright blue, its hatch raised and stairs ascended into its interior. Even Victor’s constant stream of questions ceased as they walked across the apron following Julia. Axon was also unusually quiet.

  Mariam thought ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m too busy to talk,’ came the reply.

  ‘Come,’ Julia said, and led the way up the stairs into the flyer. Three rows of light blue seats were arranged just behind the wide windscreen. Behind them was a large cargo area. Everything was tastefully colour-coordinated – what might have been harsh edges rounded and softened.

  ‘This is a flyer,’ Julia said. ‘Sit in the front seats. This is the most important day of your lives. So far, at least.’

  As soon as they sat down, shoulder restraints moved gently into place. Julia had taken the control seat. Had Mariam and Victor lived in a different place in a different time they might have been concerned at the lack of any visible controls and any sign of a pilot. Julia inspected the flyer’s identification code neatly stencilled onto the bulkhead below the windscreen. Some things, over centuries, slip from languages and cultures, whilst others stick and are still used when their origins are lost in obscurity.

  ‘Charlie Delta Golf,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Julia,’ a soft male voice responded.

  ‘Lock my voice only.’

  ‘Yes, Julia.’

  ‘Depart the facility, and then fly a circum-axial route at three thousand meters and just above stall speed.’

  ‘Yes, Julia.’

  The cabin door swung downwards and closed with a hiss.

  ‘Performing mandatory biohazard check.’

  A stream of almost invisible nano-scale particles issued from a vent in the roof of the flyer and formed tenuous clouds around the three of them.

  ‘What’s this?’ Victor demanded.

  ‘A routine check to see if we have any infections that might cause problems for other people.’

  The nano-clouds swept back into the roof and the flyer said ‘Cleared for take-off.’ Powerful fan jets wound up to a roar and they began to taxi out to the runway, turning to face a long strip of lights that stretched away into the distance. Then they accelerated quickly, the nose lifted, and the flyer headed for what Mariam and Victor knew as the sky.

  Overhead it seemed misty. Below, the buildings of the Facility shrank, and at two thousand feet (aircraft had never gone metric) it was clear that this was a tiny world that was like an undulating disc of green hills and sparkling water. Then, ahead of them, the mist began to move and a circular aperture appeared in what they thought of as the sky, but was really a huge inflated dome of light, biologically impermeable, plastic. When the opening reached a diameter precisely two metres wider than the flyer’s wings the expansion stopped. Seconds later the aircraft passed through, and the hole in the dome began to close.

  Mariam and Victor gasped as they realised they had been living in a small bubble inside a vast space. The inside of the Bio-Containment station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta Seventeen was a cylindrical space thirteen thousand metres long and many kilometres in diameter. A white tubular structure ran along the entire axis, and from it service and support spokes radiated down to a curvin
g landscape of farms, villages, workshops, parks, lakes, harbours and roads.

  ‘Did you know this, Axon?’ Victor thought – a thought coloured, perhaps, with tints of anger.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘It was not permitted. Or, to put it another way, it was not possible.’

  ‘Is there more you can’t tell us?’

  The flyer descended to a thousand feet and then flew low. The huge cylinder seemed to rotate below them.

  Julia received a brief message in her transparent earpiece, and said ‘You’re talking to Axon. Would you like Axon to explain, or shall I?’

  ‘Both.’ Mariam said.

  ‘I’m too busy.’ Axon said. Mariam repeated this to Julia, and added ‘What’s Axon doing?’

  ‘Developing. Growing very fast. Learning interfaces. Testing controls. Now – look over there – you see that white dome? It’s another bubble, like the one you were born and brought up in. There are eight domes. Each dome has, or had, a thing like Axon growing inside it. Charlie Delta Golf, fly the axis – close.’

  ‘Yes, Julia.’

  The flyer rose and turned from its track inside the circumference of the cylinder, and rotated so that ‘down’ was now the thirteen kilometre extent of the axial tube. The engine noise reduced to a low hiss as it changed from full to low-gravity mode and the atmospheric pressure reduced to near-nothing. It was now less of an aircraft than a space shuttle, steered and propelled by impulse and correction jets of superheated steam. From the interior it seemed to be flying a straight line along the axial spine, but was in reality moving with a corkscrew movement to compensate for the rotation of the cylindrical worldlet.

  Julia spoke to the flyer again, and dipped towards the wall that closed the end of the giant cylinder. At ‘ground’ level a door slid upwards and closed behind them as soon as they had flown in. They landed silently on a grey steel floor, next to three other flyers, each brightly coloured. The hangar was high and wide, with tool bays, hoists, service pits and gantries. Julia watched Mariam and Victor carefully, prepared to halt this voyage of discovery if they were being mentally overloaded. But, subliminally, they knew all this because the knowledge had been implanted subtly and appeared only in dreams. They chattered endlessly, pointing things out to each other.