by Neal Asher
Through his gridlink he selected another of the row of sub-screens displaying along the bottom of the main one and enlarged it. This showed three of Celedon’s drones moving into an isolated area aboard Jerusalem—old independent drones leaving the station to now work for Jerusalem. But, there was nothing more for Cormac to learn by watching. Now he must do what he did best. He stood and scanned around the room provided for him. He needed no more than what lay inside his head really, so turned to the door.
Outside his cabin Cormac considered the phrase: Levels of contamination risk. Even after Jerusalem scanned his body down to the cellular level, removed Jain filaments and injected nanite counter-agents to clear up the residue, he remained a risk. So the recently installed corridor outside his cabin stayed empty, and linked his cabin only to the isolation area containing the evacuees.
‘Is she ready for me?’ he asked generally as he strode along.
‘She is, and you will find her here.’ Jerusalem transmitted a map directly to his gridlink. Now, in less than a second, he became fully familiar with the layout of the immediate area, as if accustomed to strolling here over a period of weeks. At the corridor end he turned right and came to an iris door. It opened for him onto a shimmer-shield. He pushed through this as easily as if stepping through blancmange. To his left a chair stood positioned before a chainglass screen which was optically polished so as to be only just visible. This intersected a table, on whose far side, on the other side of the screen, stood another chair. The woman, with obsidian skin, green eyes and cropped black hair, had exchanged her technician’s overall for a loose thigh-length toga of green silk, cinched at the waist with a belt of polished steel links. She stood as if waiting to be given permission to sit, but he knew that unlikely.
Chaline.
She had accompanied him while on the planet Samarkand after a runcible disaster there—her job being to set up a new runcible. An alien bioconstruct called Dragon, consisting of four conjoined and living spheres each a nearly a mile across, subsequently arrived there to create mayhem—or rather just one of its spheres arrived. Dragon aimed to murder one of its own makers who had come to Polity space to seek it out. The destruction of the original runcible had been Dragon’s attempt to prevent that ‘Maker’ leaving Samarkand. To avenge the deaths it caused on that small cold world, Cormac killed that lone Dragon sphere with a contra-terrene bomb, whereupon the Polity took on the task of ferrying the Maker back to its home civilization. He had not known Chaline volunteered for that mission to the Small Magellanic Cloud, but was unsurprised. She would have relished the challenges of setting up a runcible so far from the Polity. Of course, a further complication, now he intended to interrogate her, was that for a brief time they had been lovers.
‘So what the hell happened?’ he asked, sitting down.
Also sitting down, Chaline crossed her legs and smiled. ‘As ever direct. Hello, Ian, how are you? I’m fine by the way, if a little tired.’
Cormac sat back and smiled as well. In a mild voice he observed, ‘You know how I have little time for the social niceties. I have lived a hectic life since we last spoke. I’ve lost friends and nearly lost my life. Your sarcasm might be acceptable if we were here meeting as old friends and exchanging pleasantries. The truth is that neither of us ever contacted the other after Samarkand, and there was nothing to stop me thinking that I would not be seeing you again for the best part of a millennium.’
‘A point.’ Chaline nodded. ‘A definite point.’
Cormac sat forward. ‘This is not about points, as you well know.’
‘Then why am I here talking to you?’
‘I want to hear your story.’
‘Then why not just download it.’ Chaline tapped a finger against her temple. ‘You know I’m gridlinked. I already uploaded recordings of my every relevant memory to Jerusalem. We don’t need to have this conversation.’
Cormac replied, ‘I prefer to hear everything directly, while I’m looking into the face of the speaker. Cerebral uploads can be tampered with. This meeting, though crude, can reveal so much more to the right observer.’
‘You don’t trust me? This will be compared to what I uploaded?’
‘It’s not that.’ Cormac shook his head. ‘In situations as serious as this it’s all about information: quantities of information to be processed, assessed. Jerusalem, like any major AI, can create extensions to itself: subminds, telefactors,’ he shrugged, ‘whatever, but they remain only extensions. It likes those humans working for it to do their own thing: that way something unforeseen by itself might be revealed. It has agreed that I should interview you directly.’
‘Kind of it to allow you such a free rein, but I doubt anything will be revealed here that the AI does not already know.’
‘But something might, and that’s the point.’
Chaline snorted. ‘Shall we get on with this then?’
‘Jerusalem did inform me that a time-inconsistent runcible connection was made—something I’d never even heard of until that moment—but why the hostile contact protocol?’ He studied her keenly. ‘Obviously it was to defend us against Jain technology, but how did Celedon know that?’
Chaline grimaced. ‘We sent an information package through to Celedon. You can’t just open an out-network runcible connection without the receiving runcible AI agreeing to it. It’s a security protocol. Surely you were already told this?’
‘I am to hear the story direct from you. If I were to already know all the facts Jerusalem knows, I would only be asking you questions that are utterly predictable to it.’
‘Ah, so you must approach this without the constraints of foreknowledge, like a Stone Age man trying to operate a personal computer.’
‘Not quite the analogy I’d choose.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Now, I’ve been allowed access to all the logs concerning the preparation for the voyage. The ship was called the Victoria, after an ancient sailing ship in Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet—apparently the one first to circumnavigate Earth. Tell me, other than at Samarkand, did you have any contact with the Maker before boarding that ship?’
‘None at all, as that’s not my province. I build runcibles… Cormac, you know that.’ She grimaced and looked sideways towards the floor. ‘Of course that changed when we got underway. It changed for all of us.’
‘Tell me about that. Tell me about the Maker.’
* * * *
The sun seemed hatched from some cosmic egg, with pieces of its own shell orbiting it, glimpsed briefly in thick clouds lit from within by that solar orb. The Cassius gas giant, in its own orbit close enough around the sun for molten iron to rain from its skies, supplied those clouds as carefully positioned antimatter blasts gradually demolished it. Some of those eggshell fragments were a 100,000 miles across. The matter converters at their edges were the size of small moons; sucking in the miasma of the gas giant’s destruction, slowly laying mile-thick composite laced with a balancing web of gravmotors and superconducting cables. But this, after a century, was just the start: a scattering of bricks on a building site, a pile of sand, a sack of cement. The project downtime was estimated at a million years, give or take a few hundred thousand. You could think in those terms when you were an AI and immortal. The humans and haimans working the project just comforted themselves with the thought that they were part of something… numinous.
From within the cowling of her half-carapace, situated within her own interface sphere, Orlandine observed the scene with her multitude of senses, processed the continuous feed of data through her numerous augmentations, then focused on one of those scattered pieces. This particular fragment of the nascent, fully enclosing Dyson sphere was diamond-shaped, 160,000 miles long and 100,000 wide. She analysed stress data as the first matter converter—something resembling a squat ocean liner with a mile-wide slot cut into its stern—detached. She focused in closer, observing the swarm of surrounding ships, the Pseidon poised like a titanic crab’s claw, collapsing scaffolds of pseudomatter winking out.
A storm of ionization glowed between converter and fragment, trying to draw it back, but the converter’s massive drive engaged, throwing a ten-mile-long fusion flame above the plain of composite, and it pulled away.
‘Are we within parameters?’ asked Shoala.
‘We are,’ Orlandine replied.
Shoala tended to verbalize when nervous, but being haiman for only twenty years he was yet to fully accept what the term implied. Perhaps they were all like that, else they would not so often sever their link with their carapaces for spells of ‘human time’. None of them yet accepted they were truly haiman—a combination of human and AI—and still believed the carapaces just complex tools rather than integral parts of themselves.
‘Then this is it,’ Shoala said, ‘another complete section of the sphere. We should celebrate.’
Ah, human time again, thought Orlandine. ‘And how should we celebrate?’ she asked.
‘Loud music, alcohol, and drugs are traditional,’ Shoala replied.
Orlandine noted that their exchange was now on open com, and picked up on a subchannel that twenty-seven agreed with Shoala’s assessment, whilst only two demurred. She decided, as an overseer, she must attend the celebration.
‘The Feynman Lounge in two hours, then,’ she said, and disconnected. At least this interval would give her time to catch up on her news groups and messages. Initiating subpersona one, she gave it a watching brief over the newly completed fragment of the sphere, then turned her attention to her personal inboxes. Fourteen hundred messages awaited her attention. Subpersona two began whitling those down while she called up the various news items it had earlier starred for her attention. Rather than direct-load them to her central self, she speed-read them into a mid-term memory, and learnt much of interest.
ECS did not bother to conceal that the Polity was gearing up for a possible conflict. Such activity, of course, being impossible to conceal, what with some of the big stations and zero-G shipyards, mothballed after the Prador War, now up and running again. And even the most idiot analytical programs could detect the rise in production and the diversion of resources into military industries. But the nature of the threat itself remained unknown to most. Cover stories abounded about the possibility of some major action on the part of a loose alliance between Separatists and the alien entity Dragon, two of whose spheres remained unaccounted for. Orlandine guessed otherwise, and news stories she uploaded, concerning an out-polity world called Cull, further confirmed her conjecture.
A Dragon sphere had been captured inside a USER blockade (leaving now only one more unaccounted for), and the Separatist and biophysicist Skellor was killed. She had not even known he escaped the destruction of the Occam Razor. But the rest of the signs there—nothing actually being stated outright—allowed her to realize what lay underneath this particular cover story. The previous stories she studied all subtly related to it: the huge damage wrought on the space community Elysium, the news filtering back from an out-polity world called Masada. The subsequent ‘protective quarantine’ of all those same places. None of the stories sufficiently justified the scale of the AI reaction in each situation. Some other worrying element remained missing, and when she inserted that element, it all made sense. Skellor had clearly obtained possession of a Jain node and used it—hence the quarantine, hence the movement of big guns into each area, and hence events unfolding in the Polity right now.
In her position of Overseer of the Cassius project, Orlandine was allowed limited knowledge regarding Jain nodes. The initial source of this knowledge, however, still remained concealed from her. She knew these nodes contained compacted Jain nanotechnology that activated upon the touch of intelligent technical beings. She knew they then grew organic technology, and that the intelligent being affected became both host to and master of it — the level of each state dependent on other unknown factors. It was hideously dangerous because initiated thus by a host, this technology could proceed to access and control any other technology both physically and informationally, seizing control, wreaking destruction, growing and taking over anything or anyone else with which it came into contact. The AIs had told her this much, because Jain technology represented to the project one danger of which she must be aware. She was glad to have been made aware. Very glad.
Orlandine opened her eyes. It was all getting rather messy out there. ECS agents would be rattling around the Polity like disturbed hornets, and at some point they might find a trail leading to her, though she had not yet done anything seriously wrong.
She closed her eyes again and turned her attention to the messages coming through her subpersona’s filters. Many were messages from other haimans scattered around the Polity: some requesting information, some offering it—the usual constant exchanges. One message from her mother, back on Europa, concerned updates of family news and veiled queries about her work, her life. She had not actually seen the woman in thirty years. However, her mother remained persistent and proprietary because of her own choice way back to adapt Orlandine genetically to the newer haiman technologies. Orlandine felt herself to be mature enough not to reject such contact outright, but still assigned the message to a subpersona for reply. Then her attention fell on one message with no personal signature—strange that it managed to get through. After preparing due safeguards, she opened it and found just a single line of text:
‘They will learn about the gift.’—a secret admirer.
Just that, yet Orlandine began shaking, sweating. Did she think there were no consequences attached? Using carapace hardware, she brought her physical reaction under control. Thereafter she tried to analyse why her reaction had been so extreme. Shortly she realized why: she must act now, or not at all. Two courses of action stood open to her: confession and acceptance of consequences, or one other option. She flicked up a list of pros and cons, and left subpersona one to analyse them. The vague result depicted graphically, with much dependent on extraneous circumstances of which she could not be aware. She ran programs then to analyse an optimum ‘must do’ list for each suggested course of action. Studying those lists, she finally accepted that she had already made her decision; not through logical analysis but at a level more primeval than that. And it did not involve confession. It concerned what she was, a haiman, and why she originally chose to remain such.
She paused and cleared all information feeds into her mind, which in itself was not confined to that lump of organic matter in her skull, took a slow clear breath, then called up a memory of Shoala during human time and relived it. He was, on such occasions, a thin-faced individual with blond hair plaited down close to his skull, and a love of dressing in Jacobean fashion. Such attire — the lacy collars, earrings and embroidered jackets—concealed what he truly was. Naked, he revealed a tough wiry physique, interface plugs behind each ear and running like a line of glittering scales from the base of his skull down his spine, nutrient feed ports in his wrists and on either side of his belly, and structural support sockets for his carapace evident over his hip bones, at each rib down either side of his back, at his collar bones, and with a final pair concealed underneath his plaited hair.
By shedding her own clothing, Orlandine revealed her own carapace linkages to be mostly located in the same places, but of an entirely different design. Her body too was as wiry, but her skin purplish black and utterly hairless. The interfaces behind her ears and running down her spine were just closed slits positioned over s-con nanofilament plugs—their final synaptic connections inside her body being electrochemical rather than electroptic. She did not possess structural support sockets, rather nubs of bone protruded from the same points—keratin skinned—and her carapace limbs terminated in clamps that closed over these. Her nutrient feed ports were the same as his, but she did not need to use them so often as Shoala since, prior to a long session in a sphere, her body was capable of putting on fat very quickly, and of storing the required vitamins and minerals in her enlarged liver.
In both cases their sexual organs were stand
ard format, and came together in the usual manner. But this was how haimans began sexual relationships. Cyber-linked orgasms and sensory amplification came later, when they trusted each other more, for that was personal.
Orlandine now skipped the virtual pornography, for she could already feel an anticipatory wetness around her suction catheter. And because she decided not to view this start of her relationship with Shoala, she realized she had already made her decision about that as well.
‘That’s a Prador spider thrall,’ said Shoala, after the sex together, pointing into the glass-fronted case. ‘What are the stones, though?’
Hidden in plain sight, thought Orlandine, as she sat up and swung her legs off the rumpled bed. She stood and walked over beside him, running her finger down the hard edges of the plugs in his spine.
She pointed at a wine-red sphere. ‘Star ruby. It’s natural—from Venus.’
‘The metallic ones?’
‘Ferro-axinite, but with weak monopole characteristics.’
‘And that?’
Orlandine peered into the case at the egg-shaped object he indicated. She decided this time to tell a half-truth—maybe later she would reveal all to him. ‘Something quite possibly Jain. There are what look like nanotech structures on the surface. You notice the cubic patterns? One day I’ll get round to investigating further.’
He turned to her with a raised eyebrow. ‘Is it listed?’
‘It is—and I’ve two years in which to commence study. If I haven’t got around to it by then, it must be passed on to Jerusalem—the AI whose purpose it is to investigate such things.’
One lie turning into a larger lie.