Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  “Can we kill them if they do cooperate?”

  “No.”

  The flybiker considered that. Eventually, he nodded assent.

  The deputies started to make their way inside.

  And as the Sheriff and I stood, and briefly savoured our victory, above us the skies darkened. A hundred black-clad assassins on flybikes were approaching.

  “You know who they are?” I said.

  “Gill’s Killers. They’re gonna be hard to beat.”

  “Just watch me,” I said. “Now go. I’ll buy you some time. Save as many as you can.” And then my boot jets ignited, and I took off.

  As I’d hoped, the flock of assassins followed me. But a few swooped down, towards the flybiker deputies.

  I turned in mid-air, and retracted my eyes again, and fired disruptor blast after disruptor blast. Then my eyes locked back into place and I saw that the Killers were black shards falling out of the sky, like rain.

  I turned again, and flew on, pursued by the main body of Gill’s Killers.

  A missile skimmed near my body.

  I fired my body jets more fiercely, and fled faster than a rocket achieving escape velocity.

  And I soared and flew through the spires and towers of the city, weaving and bucking and marvelling at the extraordinary high and narrow spire-tips that literally touched the clouds. And all around me, the sky was lit up by plasma bursts.

  And, once more, I raised my head and once again screamed: “Urgent! Assistance! Now!”

  And once more, there was no response.

  My hypothesis was hardening into a certainty: The QB was down. My spaceship wasn’t responding. The Belladonnans had launched a revolution, and were winning it.

  I was exhilarated. This truly was war.

  I started downloading all my memories into a memory chip. And when the chip was full my ear opened up, and a small cylindrical object crept out into the light.

  It was my databird. It contained all my thoughts, memories, all the facts I had learned, recently or ever, all my downloads, the detailed impress of my human personality, every part of me. I kissed the bird gently, then released it and it flew off high, with astonishing speed, into space.

  Meanwhile, two-score of Gill’s Killers were still on my tail, eating my wake. I tilted myself up vertically at full acceleration and looped a loop at G forces that would have killed any human being.

  And then I was behind them and I pointed an accusing finger and my forearm fell off and hurtled to the ground.

  And the missile launcher in my upper arm was bared. I fired twelve bursts.

  Not a single missile missed its target. These weren’t smart missiles; for I myself am “smart.” My computer circuitry calibrated distance and wind speed to perfection.

  Twelve assassins and their flying bikes turned to flame. I eased up on the throttle.

  I fired again and again; and another eighteen Gill’s Killers exploded into flame and died.

  But then a police cruiser appeared in the sky. It was the size of a space shuttle, with Bompasso PD blazoned holographically on its sides. I MI-radioed my security classification across to it.

  But puffs of smoke erupted from the police cruiser, and a swarm of torpedoes flew towards me. I stayed calm, and fired seven more missiles from my arm.

  The torpedoes exploded in mid-air, and below on the streets of Lawless City molten shrapnel rained down on the rapt gawping crowds who were watching this aerial combat.

  But one torpedo remained, for the missile which had struck it had failed to detonate. Sometimes, despite the miracles of modern technology, that still happened.

  Shit.

  I was, by now, entirely out of missiles, and my disruptor eyes needed to be recharged. But there was no time. I still had my plasma pistols, but they would be useless against an armoured torpedo with a forcefield.

  I was, in short, helpless and unarmed, and doomed.

  I bucked, almost ripping myself in half with G forces, then hurtled upwards to the clouds. On my radar screen I could see the torpedo gaining on me.

  The databird was out of sight by now. It would carry on into space, until it rendezvoused with my lifeship, in orbit around one of Belladonna’s moons. I was reassured by the knowledge that the databird contained everything I had discovered about the phantom hospital, every scrap of evidence against Hari Gilles. It was all there, for the authorities, and for my future self.

  But all that had happened to me after the flight of the databird – including the moment of my death – would go unrecorded.

  When I estimated that the torpedo would collide with me in ten seconds, I did another loop the loop and turned to face it. The torpedo was implacable and fast, and its navigation circuits were locked to my body’s signature. It was a death that could not be avoided.

  “Bastards!” I screamed and flew, arms outstretched, towards the nosetip of the torpedo that would kill me.

  THE HIVE-RATS

  The Hive-Rats set forth on their epic voyage into space, in an armada of fearsome power and greatness.

  Ten minutes later, they had arrived.

  Admiral Monroe was awed at the sheer speed of the aliens’ ships. They weren’t even travelling in fast time, they were just fast. These creatures must, he realised, have found a way to travel through wormholes in space – which for so long had been the dream of all human space explorers. But how? They hadn’t learned that secret from him.

  The realisation hit him like a hammer blow: these monsters were smarter than humans. Or rather, the Fourth was. The Fourth was, without a doubt, a scientific and mathematical genius.

  Even so, Monroe was unperturbed. If the Hive-Rat thought it could win a war against humanity, it was sadly deluded.

  A few moments later, the armada made another hyperspace jump; then another; and another. Until finally they stopped. And Monroe could see why. The fourth planet from the sun in this system was brightly lit, and active in all frequencies of the radio spectrum. He saw some oddly shaped asteroids, and as one of the Hive-Rat ships flew closer, Monroe was able to see more clearly that these were in fact space battleships. There were solar panels floating around this system’s sun, like gossamer around a candle. And there were space buoys, orbiting at the Lagrangian points, whose flashing lights spelled out in huge letters: WELCOME TO HUMAN SPACE: BORDER CONTROLS IN OPERATION.

  That, he felt, was the clinching piece of evidence to support his theory that this was a human settlement – the bureaucrats were in charge.

  It was certain then. They had encountered a human-settled planet, and it was far from Earth. At a rough guess, he concluded, they were at least a billion light years away from the Sol system. Probably, he guessed, somewhere in the Coma supercluster. He could distinctly see the Great Wall – a filament of galaxies that stretched for hundreds of millions of light years, forming a line in space that culminated in the Hercules Supercluster. And that put them way beyond the regions of space which his civilisation had managed to explore.

  And this meant, of course, that in the half a millennium that had elapsed since his “death,” humanity too had invented a form of instantaneous wormhole travel. And that implied, reassuringly, that technological progress would have been made in every other sphere. Human weapons would be better and more powerful than in his day; human space defences would be better; human military strategy would be better.

  These poor sorry Rats, Monroe concluded, stood no chance.

  But he did not air his reservations to the First. Instead, he carefully kept all such thoughts tightly bottled up. The revenge of humanity would soon occur, and he wanted to savour it.

  Thus, Monroe bided his time, and pretended to be a loyal member of the Hive.

  And, meanwhile, he endeavoured to learn as much as he could about his enemy, and its remarkable evolutionary process.

  At first, of course, there was just the First – the original Sand-Rat Hive Mind. The Sand-Rats were sentient, barely, but had no culture, and their language was rudimenta
ry and consisted chiefly of the words “shit” and “fuck,” which described their favourite pastimes. Their hive intelligence constituted a whole larger than the sum of the parts, but that wasn’t saying much.

  For they were just rats! On Morpheus, they lived in burrows. They used pebbles as tools. They had never discovered fire. They had no electricity, no nuclear power, no cars, no aeroplanes, no guns, no buildings, no telescopes, no anything very much.

  What they did have was the capacity to kill their enemies, and steal their minds. As well, of course, as being able to alter the rate of flow of time.

  Which, Monroe conceded, was pretty damned impressive.

  The Second was, Monroe had gleaned, the last living member of a race of powerful clawed land predators, larger than lions, more deadly than sharks, and possessed of an intuition that bordered on psychic powers. These grand beasts had eaten the saurian monsters that once dominated the world of Morpheus. They had been kings of the jungle, and of the savannah. And, as their intelligence evolved, they had developed a complex civilisation based around ritual and the worship of the hunt.

  Then, to their amazement, these proud predators had been defeated and exterminated by the Sand-Rats, a species they had always regarded as too wretched to even eat.

  And from the Second, the Sand-Rats had learned ruthlessness and intuition and the joys of heightened sensation at times of danger, and the exaltation of the kill.

  The Third was the last living member of a humanoid four-armed race that had evolved from simians to become magnificent sword-wielding warriors. They had fought and eradicated all their rival predator species in the forests and the plains, they had raised cities full of grandeur, and they had been on the cusp of inventing space travel; and then the Sand-Rats ate them.

  From the Third, the Sand-Rats knew all about culture and architecture and technology and gunpowder and the glory of war. And, with the combined intelligences of the Second and the Third to draw upon, the Hive-Rats were now the intellectual equal of all but the very smartest human beings. Thus, the Hive had become a super-brain.

  The Fourth belonged to the race that had been, for tens of thousands of years, the real masters of Morpheus. They had dwelled in the oceans, and when the saurians fought the mammalians and while the humanoids scrabbled to survive, the Fourth dominated the entire ocean depths. They had been, Monroe had discovered, jellyfish-like creatures that could communicate by touch, and by touching water could communicate with any others of their kind who swam in that water. Thus, without being telepathic, they were able to speak almost instantly to each other over the vastest distances.

  The jellyfish beasts made slaves of all the other creatures of the deeps, and they built huge cities out of live coral-like sealife. They were philosophers, and mathematicians, and their intellects were phenomenal.

  But then the Sand-Rats chose to become aquatic and so re-evolved into ratty-looking fish and colonised the seas and they ate all the jellyfish beasts, and their grand cities decayed. And from the Fourth, the Sand-Rats learned about ideas, and mathematics, and philosophy, and science.

  And now the Hive-Rats had a gestalt mind of truly remarkable power which the First, typically, didn’t really know how to use. For the Hive-Rats loved to burrow, and to fight, and they loved to fuck and eat and shit, and that was all they ever did.

  And so, until that dread day when the humans came and changed everything, what was the point of thinking?

  The Fifth had been a sentient butterfly-like insect. And from the Fifth, the First had learned how lovely it was to be a butterfly-like insect, fluttering in the breeze, singing songs of beauty and joy all day long.

  The Sixth was Monroe.

  The planet of Lucifer was named, ironically, in honour of God’s favourite angel, whose name meant light. But the inhabitants of Lucifer worshipped him for what he was before his Fall.

  This was a planet of profoundly devout human beings who had embraced the terrors of the fifty-fifty in pursuit of a cause that meant more to them than life itself: spiritual perfection.

  The planet was easily terraformed from its original barren state, and no alien life-forms were destroyed in the process. A neighbouring planet, Gabriel, was densely populated with vegetation and swamp monsters, and the Luciferans sedulously preserved its wilderness status, and made no efforts to inhabit it. The Luciferans worshipped the gods as they were before Christianity tainted perfection. And they created a semi-agrarian civilisation in which farmers tilled the soil, and weavers weaved clothes with hand-looms.

  But their civilisation was underpinned by powerful technology: the solar panels, the space elevators, the robot miners, and a powerful quantum-computer brain which they dubbed, ironically and wryly, for these were exceptionally wry and ironical people, “Satan.”

  And, of course, a nominal space defence system had been installed. It was nothing that could deter a very serious invader – the Heebie-Jeebies, say. But it was enough to keep away pests and irritants – those young aggressive species who actually thought it would be possible to conquer the universe.

  And so, when the battleships of the Hive-Rats arrived, the Luciferans transmitted solid holograms to discover whether this fleet was as predatory as it appeared to be.

  It was: and so the Hive-Rat armada was utterly obliterated.

  Then a message was sent to the Solar Neighbourhood Government, alerting it to the presence of yet another species of lunatic alien invaders. But the message priority was low. The Governor of Lucifer didn’t even think it was worth summoning a cyborg defence fleet to their aid.

  After which, the Luciferans declared a day of prayer and repentance. For they regretted bitterly the need to slay all their enemies: yet slay their enemies they had.

  However…

  One Hive-Rat vessel had remained, concealed, at a safe distance from the battle. And thus the Hive-Rat intelligence remained alive.

  This sole surviving Hive-Rat brooded, and planned, and schemed; and then it entered fast time and a thousand more years of brooding, planning and scheming ensued in what, for the Luciferans, was no more than a few hours.

  The Fourth and the Sixth had by now both received their punishment: a near-eternity of blinding agony which, in real time, occupied no more than a trillionth of a second. Both emerged stunned, embittered, and humble from their aeons of anguish.

  A trillionth of a second after that, the Fourth finished absorbing all of the lessons of the failed invasion, and conveyed the key points to his/her master, the First.

  The First then gave the order for his bodies to multiply. And so the few surviving Hive-Rats fornicated and gave birth and grew into adulthood.

  And these, their children, then fornicated and gave birth and grew into adulthood. And so it went on, for generation after generation, until a trillion or more of the little ratty creatures now existed, inhabiting the hundreds and thousands of new battleships which their fabricators had managed to churn out.

  Meanwhile, the Second and the Third had divined that a nullification ray of some kind was being used to “vanish” the nuclear weapons they had rained down on the planet. After the careful study of the recordings of the planetary assault, they had identified bizarre patterns of electromagnetic radiation that seemed to be indicative of the use of unstable exotic matter to annihilate real matter.

  Armed with this clue, the Fourth was able to devise a new system of mathematics that allowed him to invent a forcefield that could nullify the humans’ nullification ray.

  The trillions of Hive-Rats that had been born were then assigned the task of building forcefields that could be fitted to each and every one of the Hive-Rats’ missiles and bombs. At the same time, the battleships’ hyperspace engines were transformed into weapons. By turning their arses on the enemy and emitting vast pillars of energy, the fleet could destroy enemy vessels with ease.

  Monroe watched all this with awe. He had long ago ceased to fathom the physics that was being used, but he admired the beauty of these new weapon
s and defence systems. And he did admire the Hive-Rat’s complete absence of shilly-shallying.

  Furthermore, Monroe’s advice about how to identify and neutralise the solid holograms being used against them was invaluable. The Hive-Rats could now easily distinguish between real enemy and chimaerical enemy.

  And thus, one and a half days after their abject defeat, a second Hive-Rat armada was launched into battle and rained nuclear bombs on all the other planets in this solar system, including Gabriel, but excluding Lucifer itself. The flames of these exploding planets lit up the skies of Lucifer. Phantom defence fleets were dispatched but were ignored; the core of real ships lurking inside the miasmic cloud were utterly obliterated by precision plasma beams and anti-matter bombs.

  Then nuclear bombs protected by anti-nullification forcefields pummelled Lucifer itself. The atmosphere boiled away. The mantle burned. Magma boiled up into the crust. Every human being on the planet died, and the dead planet glowed, like an angry semi-extinct volcano.

  The last of the Luciferans prayed as their planet expired. Their faith remained intact; they died with the name of their perfect saviour on their lips.

  Then their planet burned like Hades itself.

  The First was content. Victory had been achieved.

  Now, all that remained was to kill every other human being in the Universe.

  THE COP

  Version 45

  I woke, and inhabited my consciousness, and accessed my database. And a few moments later, I was gripped by an overwhelming and completely unexpected emotion:

  Fear.

  For according to my database, my previous two Versions had been eliminated within the space of a week on the same planet. And now, on my return to Lawless City, I would be faced with enemies on all fronts: the four gang bosses, the corrupt civic authorities, the corrupt police, Gill’s Killers, and the unknown assassins who had killed Alexander Heath and his friends and then had slain Version 43, Jaynie Hooper, and forty-nine bystanders, with a weapon that seemed to defy the laws of physics.