by Neal Asher
‘Very well, I’ll come and pick you up.’ Thorn swung the shuttle joystick across on its hinged arm, so it lay before him. As he engaged the gravmotors and warmed up the turbines, he thought: And these fuckers are breeding…
6
Let me summarize some theories concerning the Atheter: they moved on to a higher plain of existence after reaching the apex of material technology, either that or they reached their own singularity and disappeared in a puff of logic having solved their theory of everything; they are still here with us keeping a benevolent eye on younger civilizations, but shifted slightly into another dimension so we cannot now see their vast glittering cities; their technology destroyed them (either their own AIs — if they built them—reached singularity and wiped them out, or they created some unstoppable nano-plague that did the job); or, my personal favourite, having done it all and understanding the emptiness of existence, they deleted their entire civilization, their entire knowledge base, even from their own minds, and started again, as humans. However, despite much speculation and some quite lunatic theorizing, very little is known about the Atheter. There is in fact still much debate about whether they were in fact a race distinct from those other ancient races named, the Jain and Csorians. And argument still abounds concerning what artefacts are attributable to which race, or civilization. But let us be clear on this: actual physical artefacts dating from each period are few. Most of the theorizing is based on such obscure sciences as xenogeneic archaeology, metallo-crustal dispersion and—this one really is obscure—Fifth Gen. Boolean analysis of U-space transitional echoes. It’s all piss and wind really, we’ll probably never know.
— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon
Thellant turned to gaze at a screen wall. The scene it displayed was taken from cameras high above his present location, and its clarity so good he appeared to be looking through a chainglass window at a pastoral view of patchwork fields, rivers and copses, with only occasional incongruous towers sprouting like vulgar metal plants amid this apparently rural idyll. It was deceptive. Some human, transported to those fields from a past time, would not know that below him lay an arcology housing a billion humans. Fifteen miles straight ahead, a cliff dropped two miles sheer down to the coast, beyond which sea-life breeding pens chequered the shallow ocean extending to the horizon and beyond. That cliff formed one arcology edge. Another edge lay 200 miles behind the present view.
Of course, with so many humans being packed so closely together dissatisfaction with the regime was inevitable, despite passage to less crowded worlds being offered to them free by the runcible AI. Many did leave, but just as many were born to replace them. Thellant thought of the humans here as a particular breed devolved through urbanization: they would not move because they were incapable of imagining anything beyond the life they knew. Sad for them, but not for him—he grew rich on their dissatisfaction. The thousands of Separatist cells abounding here gathered wealth by extortion, theft, murder, blackmail… to finance the fight against the AI autocrat of Earth. Thellant skimmed the cream of that wealth, while allowing his followers to sabotage a few machines and murder a few citizens. But he remained well aware of why ECS could not catch him. The reason sat upon the sofa behind him.
‘You were told to simply kill her,’ it hissed.
Nervous and sweating, Thellant turned. The Legate always had this effect on him: quite simply it looked plain evil. It was humanoid, just like the Golem made by Cybercorp, and metalskin like some of the older versions produced by that same company. But there the similarity ended. This android wore nothing but its metal skin, shiny and shading to blue-green. When standing it towered tall and incredibly thin. Its fingers were half again the length of human fingers and terminated in sharp points. Its head slanted back, tapering sharply down to the lipless slot of its mouth. It had no nose and its eyes were lidless and insectile. There seemed no edges to the metal skin at its joints—the material there did actually stretch and flex like skin. All of it consisted of the same metal, even the eyes, from which it seemed something cold and harsh gazed out.
‘You informed me’, protested Thellant, ‘that there would be a high level of ECS interest in her, and that agents would be sent to apprehend her. I am the de facto leader of the rebellion here on Coloron, so I could not ignore such an opportunity.’
‘You are the leader here only because of the programs I have created to keep the AIs from finding out about you. But that is irrelevant,’ the Legate waved one long-fingered hand, ‘especially now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Despite my programs, ECS has been closing in on you for some time. Now that your people on Osterland have been captured, the gap will soon be closed completely.’
Thellant felt his mouth go dry. ‘I don’t understand.’ For reassurance he reached up and touched his fingertips to the warm scaly skin of the Dracocorp aug he wore.
The Legate pointed one long digit. ‘Those augs have provided you with secure com and processing power outside AI networks. You give your orders with an unprecedented degree of anonymity. ECS have failed to track the money trails back to you through the conventional networks, because of my programs and because of numerous physical transfers of wealth, but mainly because few people know who you are.’
‘I am aware of how it all works. Your assistance has been greatly appreciated, but remember that, even with it, it was I who built up this organization.’
The Legate interlaced its long fingers. ‘Of course, and while your organization confined itself to this world, it has been easy enough for me to arrange the deaths of those who knew too much and were undergoing investigation by ECS. Had you sent out a single contractor to kill Jane von Hellsdorf, there would be no problem. I could have then arranged for the same contractor to die, and thereby closed down any connection with you or with this world. But instead you sent some of your top people there—people who have seen you and know who you are. Now they have been captured, and we both know that once in ECS hands their remaining silent is not an option. Even now ECS teams are closing in on you, and the AIs are closely watching the spaceports and runcibles.’
‘I have my own secure routes,’ Thellant said.
‘Yes, many of which have been compromised for some time. ECS has had agents in place for years, gathering evidence, gradually identifying those in the higher echelons of your organization here on Coloron. Now they have located the head, they will proceed to destroy the body.’
‘You are part of that body,’ Thellant observed.
‘Correct, in so far as I have advised and assisted you in your cause. But I will now take my leave of this world and leave you to reap what you have sown.’
Thellant abruptly felt a surge of the anger that had been his driving force since his childhood. ‘But this mess is down to you anyway! This woman was irrelevant to me. You wanted her killed and I still don’t know why, just as I really don’t know why you have always felt this urge to be so helpful!
Suddenly the Legate was standing. Thellant stepped back, his heart thumping, then he forced himself to take that step forwards again. Looming over him the android spoke, low and soft, ‘It has been in our interest to maintain a level of resistance to the autocrat; nothing sufficiently threatening to elicit a major counter-offensive, but to have skeletal networks ready and waiting for the tools to do the job. You have remained in contact with your offworld associates, so presumably you know something of the biophysicist Skellor?’
Thellant paused before replying. The Legate was some kind of intermediary—that being implicit in its name—and when it referred to ‘our interest’ that obviously included some other party. He had never discovered who or what that other party might be.
He said, ‘Skellor was a useful acquisition. I knew only that he was developing weapons we might be able to use. ECS hit his base and that was the last I heard. All I do know is that ECS went on to take down a planetary organization as a result.’
‘Then what you don’t know is that Skell
or, using technology provided for him by us via von Hellsdorf, subverted an AI dreadnought called the Occam Razor, and came close to wiping out the population of an entire planet just to keep the secret. He then managed to escape the destruction of the Occam Razor, but in the end did not evade the ECS agents pursuing him. And he did all this alone.’
‘Masada…’ murmured Thellant. One of his associates had tried for a long time to find out exactly what had happened out there, but it was a dangerous subject to ask about, what with hunter-killer programs flooding the networks, and with AI warships and ECS teams swarming around that world, a dangerous place to be.
The Legate stepped past him and moved over to gaze at the screen wall. ‘Skellor was in the nature of a dry run, you might say. He was brilliant, but fundamentally unbalanced. We did, however, learn a great deal from him.’
Thellant shivered. ‘What is this technology you’re talking about?’
In an offhand manner the Legate explained, ‘Active Jain technology. It is of an organic nature and enables its wielder to both informationally and physically take control of computer and AI systems, to physically control all mechano-electrical systems, and even to enslave human beings.’
Thellant had already experienced some taste of that. Setting up his network using Dracocorp augs was difficult at first, and he rebelled against the disconnection. He always found it much easier to ensure his orders were obeyed by unexpected visits to his subordinates and the occasional disciplinary knee-capping. But as the number of those using the augs grew he found he could trust that his orders were obeyed. He felt the power—his growing ascendancy over the network—and how, the longer they wore their augs, his subordinates found it nearly impossible to disobey him.
Glancing around at his huge apartment and at the expensive luxuries it contained, he murmured, ‘We need such technology here and now. I… we could take this world, take it out of Polity control, just make it too costly for them in lives and resources to reclaim it.’ He wanted this thing. Perhaps by fleeing Coloron he could escape the coming ECS actions against him, but that would mean him abandoning everything: all this wealth and the power, and his position.
The Legate held out a fist, closed, until Thellant turned to regard it.
‘Then I shall provide,’ said the Legate.
The fist opened, each long finger folding out and snapping straight. A dark layer of something coated the palm and the inner surfaces of the fingers and thumb. At the very centre of the palm rested an ovoid, an inch and a half at its longest axis. Silvery cubic patterns decorated its surface and, as Thellant watched them in fascination, they seemed to slowly shift.
‘This is what Skellor used,’ the android informed him.
Thellant stepped forward and began to reach out. He hesitated. ‘How did he… control it?’
‘It forms nanoconnections to the mind—very similar to those made by augs.’ Cold eyes regarding him, the hand extended a little further. ‘You would then be able to create all the processing space you require. You may of course have this object analysed, but I suspect you do not have sufficient resources for that.’
Thellant kept a straight face. Obviously the Legate did not know about the scientists and technicians he controlled, or about the computers and data stores he had isolated from the AI nets. He reached out and picked up the ovoid, inspected it closely for a moment, then dropped it into his other palm to study at a distance.
‘It seems such a small… it’s cold… Shit!’ He shook his hand to fling the thing away, but it seemed stuck there. It was as if he had grasped something direct from a deep freezer that now froze to his palm. The cold of it then became something else, eating into his skin like acid. Thellant gasped, stumbled back still shaking his hand, and tumbled rearwards over the coffee table, hitting his head against the floor. Hot wires now seemed to be spearing up his arm.
The Legate stepped forwards and peered down at him. ‘What causes it to react is complicated. Simply, it becomes aware that it is within an artificial environment then it bonds to the first… intelligent organic contact. Strangely it will not bond to animals or plants—only self-aware and intelligent organic beings. I am excluded, as are Golem and other AI biomechanisms. You must therefore consider yourself privileged.’
The thing, working up his arm, was making his fingers move one after the other as if trying them out.
The Legate added, ‘I neglected to mention that Skellor used a crystal-matrix aug to accept the connections and control the technology. In this case it will connect directly to your brain. That means you may experience some… difficulties.’
Hot wires now in his shoulder, searing up through his neck and into his head. The node, still in his hand, deforming and melting into him. As he began shrieking, the Legate made a contemptuous little moue with its hard mouth, and departed.
* * * *
Cormac brought his craft in over a curving landscape of living flesh tegulated with scales ranging from the size of a thumbnail to a yard across, which seemed almost like jewelled facets cut on red and green opal. He crossed a trench from the rim of which sprouted pseudopods like giant cobras with blank sapphire eyes where their mouths should be, and passed low slopes strewn with writhing red tentacles like a growth of lianas. The manacle, as ECS personnel now called it, rose over the sharply curved horizon ahead of him. A mile long, it followed the curve of Dragon’s body, and at the centre of it lay a trapeziform building fashioned from the same block of highly polished ceramal. The metallic strip was thirty feet wide and a yard thick and, as Cormac flew above it, his craft dipped then compensated as it encountered the tug of gravplates mounted in its surface. The agent brought his craft down on the metal, where it settled in one Earth gravity, and contemplated what he had landed upon.
The manacle held itself in place with hooks driven into draconic flesh—injuries that meant nothing at all to Dragon. Many instruments pierced the entity, measuring, sampling, testing and perpetually monitoring. The AIs did not intend to miss out on this opportunity to study Dragon up close, but all that equipment was not why this object had come to be called a manacle. As well as more conventional armament, Dragon contained a gravtech weapon. The giant entity had once destroyed a Polity warship with it, by breaching antimatter containment within that ship. The manacle itself held numerous CTDs whose antimatter flasks would also be breached should Dragon try to use that same weapon again. The bombs could be detonated remotely by those entrusted with their code.
Cormac knew that code.
Arach, the spider-drone from the Celedon station, had wanted to come across too, but Cormac refused. This situation did not warrant the presence of an irascible war drone and, anyway, there was not room for it in this one-man craft. Arach had suggested clinging externally to the craft’s hull, and only desisted in wheedling when Jerusalem intervened.
Cormac closed up his spacesuit’s visor, hit purge, and unstrapped himself while a pump rapidly drew the cockpit air into a storage cylinder aboard the craft. He touched a panel beside him and a wing door rose, while his seat swung towards the opening. Stepping out, then down onto the polished ceramal, he looked to one side and saw a row of pseudopods silhouetted against the ice giant, waving like cilia. Considering his previous encounters with other incarnations of this entity, it surprised him that the pseudopods did not all gather around him menacingly, for Dragon loved to play such games. He wondered what the game would be this time, and if Dragon really understood how the odds were stacked against it.
He trudged the few yards up to the nearest wall of the building. The airlock there consisted of an outer metal door and an inner shimmer-shield. Quickly going through, he entered the single room of which the building consisted. It looked like the housing for a small swimming pool, only the pool itself contained scaled flesh. Controlling his spacesuit via his gridlink, Cormac retracted the visor down into the neck ring, then collapsed the segmented helmet back over his head so it settled into a collar at the back of his neck. He sniffed: familiar t
errarium smell, cloves and something slightly putrid. Moving around the edge of this minor expanse of Dragon’s surface, he finally came to a small area off to one side containing VR and laboratory equipment. These were intended to be used by those who wanted to get this close—Mika being foremost of thousands aboard the Jerusalem who had volunteered. He sat in a VR chair, right elbow resting on the chair arm and chin cupped in his hand, and contemplated Dragon.
‘Are we all sitting comfortably?’ he asked over his gridlink.
‘I do not sit,’ Jerusalem replied.
‘Oh, get on with it,’ said Mika impatiently.
Only these two, excepting Dragon itself, could speak to him directly while he was here. Many thousands of others listening in could lodge requests, ideas or questions, which were filtered through Jerusalem and stored ready in Cormac’s gridlink should he require them. Through that same device he checked his access to many files and to the controls of the equipment within the building. The holographic projectors specifically interested him.
‘Dragon, I think it is time for our little chat,’ he said out loud.
How many words of dialogue had that Dragon expert Darson recorded all those years ago when Dragon stood as four conjoined spheres down on the surface of Aster Colora? Millions? And how few solid facts. As far as they went, Cormac had learnt so much more in his own brief exchanges with the alien entity. It was all about exigency: it seemed that the less critical the situation Dragon found itself in the more Delphic its pronouncements tended to be. Cormac supposed that having nowhere to run and having many CTDs attached to its surface would be making it feel pretty exigent right now. However, its lies might be even more convoluted. He needed to judge the answers behind the answers.
‘Dragon?’ he began again.
The smell of cloves grew stronger and there seemed a sudden stormy intensity to the atmosphere.
‘Activity below you,’ Jerusalem told him. ‘An incursion developing through the underlayers and a pseudopod tree coming up.’