Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  For two years before that, a period that would come to be called the Dark Years, the Hive-Rats had swept through inhabited space, killing all human beings in their path, and destroying all human-occupied planets. These monsters were ruthless, powerful, and inconceivably fast.

  But not fast enough.

  For when Lucifer, their first planetary victim, had burned, a warning signal went out on the Quantum Beacon to all other human-inhabited planets in the Universe: Alien Invasion in Progress. Every stage of the attack was logged and transmitted. And when the last human on Lucifer was dead, robot probes in the Luciferan solar system continued to transmit information.

  The next planet, Amara, knew what to expect. But the power of the Hive-Rats was beyond all measure. And Amara too perished.

  The third Settler planet, Caledonia, was even better prepared, armed with new technology sent by Earth’s technical élite. But they too perished.

  But by the time the Hive-Rats reached Gullyfoyle, their methods and tactics were well known. A new energy beam had been invented that made the Hive-Rats’ forcefields useless. And the human defences were orchestrated, remotely, by the quantum-computing artificially super-intelligent Earth Computer.

  The entire Hive-Rat armada was obliterated, apart from a few rogue ships. The alien threat was downgraded. Humanity was officially saved.

  But then the Hive-Rats re-evolved and bred and launched their counterattack. Gullyfoyle too perished.

  But this was merely a feint, a cunning ploy on the part of the Earth Computer. For when the Hive-Rats attempted to escape the Gullyfoyle system via hyperspace, they found they could not. All the wormholes had been sealed.

  And they were now surrounded by an armada of robot-controlled heavily armed warships, on a scale that defied all imagining. The Hive-Rats had tens of millions of battleships; the humans had billions.

  The Hive-Rats tried once more to utilise their secret weapon, their ability to slow down time and hence to evolve at a phenomenally fast rate.

  But the Earth’s quantum computer was also able to function at inconceivably fast speeds. A War of the Nano-Second ensued.

  The human War Cabinet sat in a room on Earth and every micro-fraction of a second a new piece of military information arrived. The hapless humans could barely process the fast-changing news, they certainly could not fight the battle.

  The Earth Computer had the capacity to fabricate metal and circuitry at dazzling speed; it had factories that could build spaceships in a matter of days. And it was able to do this in a billion different factories all at the same time, then convey all the spaceships to a single location in the blink of an eye.

  This would go down in human history as the Fast War. To make it possible, the Government of the Solar Neighbourhood had signed and transmitted a Genocide Edict, allowing for the alien invaders to be destroyed by any means possible. Then the Earth Computer did the rest.

  “Result, affirmative,” said the Earth Computer, one year later, and that meant that the aliens had been annihilated. The humans did not even know the genus and species of their attackers. They were killed at a distance, crushed by a god’s foot.

  No ballads were written of this great battle; the official account was curt to the point of insult:

  Technologically Super-advanced and Aggressive Alien Species VI Engaged and Genocided.

  Alien Species II, III, IV and V had fought longer, more spectacular campaigns, but they were just as dead. (And Alien Species I, the Bugs, were still held in quarantine, trapped within a region encircled by the frontier land known as Debatable Space.)

  For humanity remained, as it had always been, a decisive and a ruthless species. The Government of the Solar Neighbourhood preached peace and liberty, and tolerance for all sentient creatures. But any alien that threatened the wellbeing of humanity would be eradicated, without a second thought. That was the way it always had been, and always would be.

  The last surviving Hive-Rat Mind in the last surviving Hive-Rat body realised all this, with horror.

  Then a bizarre unstoppable energy beam obliterated it entirely.

  THE COP

  Version 46

  I woke, and wondered what had happened.

  I accessed my database, and recalled the details of my complex conspiracy against the anciens. It had culminated in the detonation of an anti-matter bomb in a corridor on the top floor of the tallest of the city spires, on a night when all the anciens were in the same place at the same time. The blast was designed to be contained within a radius no wider than the spire itself. So in theory, I should have killed Vishaal and all the other anciens, together with their human employees and guests, but without harming anyone in the city itself.

  I plugged into the planet’s database and accessed recent information about bomb blasts. I discovered nothing. No spire had fallen, no anciens had died.

  The plan had failed.

  I descended fast through the atmosphere of Belladonna; the heat of re-entry turned my spacesuit armour red. Then I crashed through white clouds, and landed in a heap about a hundred miles from Bompasso.

  Twelve hours later, I was walking the streets of Lawless City, breathing in the scent of flowers of varied species that I no longer cared to name, and whose aroma annoyed me profoundly.

  My humaniform body was smaller than before, less muscular, more nondescript. It was a blending-in body; the body of a man who was used to his listeners wandering off halfway through his telling of a joke.

  I walked to the Tallest Spire, the scene of the winter solstice ball, and found it was as tall as ever. There was no trace of a bomb blast. But in theory, the anti-matter bomb should have hacked out a piece of mantle a hundred miles deep, as well as incinerating every part and particle of the spire.

  What had gone wrong? Had Version 45 failed to detonate the bomb? In which case, was 45 still alive? Were there two Versions of me on the same planet? But that, I realised, was impossible, for it takes the death of a Version to trigger – via a quantum-state relay – the rebirth of the next.

  I went downtown, and called into the police precinct house. I waited four hours until a receptionist deigned to take notice of me, and finally I was allowed to see Sergeant Aretha Jones.

  Aretha looked tired, and red-eyed. “You’ve got information about a recent homicide?” she barked.

  “Suicide,” I said, “by anti-matter bomb.” And I smiled.

  Aretha froze. “You’re—?”

  “Shh.”

  “What happened?”

  I shrugged. My database told me that this collaborator was generally reliable, though Version 43 had thought she was a nuisance, and Version 44 had at one point wrongly suspected her of corruption.

  “I wish that I had such knowledge,” I said. “All the indications are that the bomb went off. The sensors in my lifeship recorded that the detonator was triggered. And Version 45 managed to transmit a photograph of his encounter with the ancien known as Vishaal shortly before all transmissions from him ceased.” And I transmitted that image into the air; and we both saw Vishaal, his usual blank features distorted by terror.

  “However,” I explained, “if the bomb had gone off, the spire would have been destroyed. And Vishaal would have been killed, as would every other person in that building.”

  “Vishaal is still alive,” Aretha told me. “I saw him yesterday, at the Games.”

  “Fuck, you’re puny,” Sheriff Heath grinned. “Even I could take you now.”

  I inspected the local law enforcement officer and noted, as my predecessors had done, that he looked exceedingly old.

  “That is not true,” I corrected him, “for no human being could defeat me in unarmed combat.”

  The Sheriff made a face, indicating a strong emotional response to my comment, the precise meaning of which I did not know.

  “What went wrong?” he said, no longer grinning.

  “I must have failed,” I informed him.

  “We only had one chance. You told me that.”


  I nodded, indicating an affirmative. He was almost certainly (with a 98.2 per cent probability) correct.

  “Get me in there,” I said. “I want to see where I died.”

  The spire loomed high. I studied it again: there were no signs of structural damage, no traces of recent repairs.

  “It appears one hundred per cent certain that the bomb did not detonate,” I explained to Sheriff Heath.

  “I think that’s kinda fucking obvious,” he said.

  I decided that the tone of voice of this local law enforcement officer was sarcastic and unhelpful, and I wondered if I should advise him accordingly. But I decided to let the discourtesy pass, for now.

  “Let’s go inside,” I instructed him.

  The Sheriff showed his badge at the desk and the receptionist buzzed him through. She was a Loper, with powerful arms and a muscular beauty and richly coloured fur. She looked trapped in her tight little dress, sitting behind a desk all day. I had a pang of an emotion, and fumbled to identify it, and finally did: Sympathy.

  The Sheriff had concocted a story about utilities fraud, and this gave him authority to get the lift to the 401st floor, where the ballroom was located.

  The ballroom itself was deserted, eerily elegant. The golden chandeliers glittered in the early morning light. I inspected the room carefully, since I had no data about this phase in Version 45’s infiltration of the building.

  “Nothing,” I eventually concluded.

  “Let’s try down the corridor.”

  There were offices leading off the ballroom, and we inspected twelve of them. The Sheriff had a silver mcguff that allowed him to open all doors, but we found no trace of an explosion in any of the spartan meeting rooms.

  In the corridor outside the thirteenth office, I found myself.

  My limbs were ripped apart, my flesh was snaked on the ground, there was bewilderment in my face. My body had been incinerated by the bomb but my head was still intact. And the anti-matter bomb itself was frozen in mid-blast, its shock waves hovering like a balloon in the middle of the room.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you,” said Version 45, and I froze with horror.

  “You’re alive?” I whispered.

  “Indeed,” said Version 45, wryly. The sight of the disembodied talking head suspended in mid-air was, I concluded, a peculiar one. “Time is standing still here,” continued Version 45. “In a few seconds the blast from the anti-matter/matter collision will reach me and, to use an idiom, it’ll blow my goddamn mind. But since time is standing still – that’s never gonna happen.”

  “The cybernetic circuits of your mind are located in the torso of your particular model,” I contradicted him. “Therefore, your brain and hence your consciousness has already been obliterated. And were that not so, my rebirth could not have been authorised.”

  “Indeed,” conceded Version 45, “I too had realised both those facts. My cybernetic mind has been destroyed, down to the very last atom. So therefore, what is left is – must be – Me. Consciousness without circuitry.”

  I refused to believe that: I had no Me.

  “This is too damned creepy,” muttered the Sheriff.

  “What can you tell me?” I snapped at the head.

  “You know it all,” said Version 45. “It’s in the databird I sent you. Everything I know about the anciens is there. All the data I downloaded, all my surmises and conclusions, everything I found out. Add to that one datum: they are invulnerable to all and any weapons. They have the powers of gods.”

  “That is what they believe; it is not so,” I explained sharply.

  “It is, trust me, so.”

  I glared, lamenting the stubbornness of my former self.

  “What else can you tell me?” I insisted.

  “You know it all.”

  “Not all,” I said. “My memories are filtered. You know that. How can I know who I am, if I lose my emotional memories every time I perish?”

  “I have nothing to tell you,” said Version 45.

  “Tell me!” I said, and I realised that I was angry.

  “I – I can’t tell you. I have – no I cannot say. I experience – no, it would be wrong to tell you that. I love – no. You have to feel it for yourself.”

  “Very well. Then I have to kill you now.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “Are you ready?” I said.

  “I’m ready,” said Version 45.

  I raised my plasma gun.

  And I fired, and a pulse of plasma energy blew the ruined cyborg’s disembodied head into fragments.

  Once the head was gone, and the face, and the voice – the “Me” of Version 45 evaporated like dew in the early morning sun.

  I – Version 46 thereof – winced. It felt like dying, and yet I was alive.

  “ ‘I love’ – what? Who?” I said. “What or who did 45 love?”

  “A woman,” said the Sheriff, “called Aretha.”

  I met Aretha in a coffee shop near the precinct house. She was looking harassed, her eyes stared too hard.

  I explained to her what had happened to Version 45, and Aretha visibly twitched.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “How could it hurt? Version 45 is a cybernetic organism. We do not feel pain,” I informed her.

  “You don’t feel—” Aretha looked at me with a strange expression. Incredulity? I could see no rationale for it.

  In reality, as I was well aware, cyborgs were designed to experience a high magnitude of pain when engaged in the undercover impersonation of a human being: but she had no way of knowing that.

  “I remember,” I said, in what I firmly considered to be a jovial and charming manner, “the first time we met in this café.”

  “We’ve never been in this café,” Aretha snapped.

  “We have. One hundred years ago. When I was Version 12. It had a different name then: Luigi’s.”

  “Shit, you’re right. I’d forgotten that.”

  In fact, I had forgotten it too; but now, bizarrely, the memory had appeared in my mind, though not via my database.

  “You drank cappuccino with extra chocolate,” I recalled, marvelling at the vividness of this image, “and it left a moustache of foam on your upper lip.”

  She grinned. “Did I?”

  “The image is still in my database,” I explained to her, “for at that moment, you were imparting to me information of great significance to my case.” She was reassured by my explanation, though it wasn’t, in fact, true.

  But why wasn’t it true?

  Where in fact was this memory coming from? It was a tiny trivial recollection with no relevance to my investigative work whatsoever.

  Indeed, I realised with some dismay, my previous Versions hadn’t recalled any of these prior meetings with Sergeant Aretha Jones. I could distinctly remember, as Version 43, meeting Sergeant Jones in the Dark Side and believing it to be for the very first time.

  “And what did we talk about?” Aretha asked.

  “Just the case,” I bluffed.

  “Nothing else?”

  “What else would there be?”

  We had talked about sport, and birds, and flowers, and art. Aretha had once been an amateur painter, and she still, she’d told me, “loved to splash.” And she’d laughed a filthy laugh when she said that, so I’d deduced a double entendre was intended to be understood, though that second meaning had eluded me entirely.

  “Nothing. Of course. Nothing,” said Aretha, coolly.

  I remained calm and expressionless, while continuing to be astonished at my detailed recall of pointless details that related to a conversation that took place a century ago.

  “Although you did say—” I said.

  “What?”

  It came flooding back to me: a memory of raw emotion and vulnerability.

  “That you wanted children,” I continued.

  “Did I say that?” Aretha marvelled.

  “But that you were afraid to, because of the culture of e
xtortion and kidnapping prevalent on this planet.”

  “Yeah I didn’t have kids for years, because of that. Even now—”

  “This datum is still with me,” I said stiffly, “because it is relevant to my understanding of the culture of crime in Belladonna.” Another lie.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Now, may we discuss the anciens?” I said.

  But Aretha still had that haunted look.

  “You were different then,” Aretha told me. “Back then, when you were 12, and the two times before that, you were almost human.”

  “Not possible,” I said.

  “You have a human personality for a reason. You are not a robot.”

  I had to get this interrogation back on track, I decided. But I felt unable to change the topic of the conversation.

  “I am a cyborg,” I said coldly, “but all the data indicates that the better part of me is robot. The human personality is merely, metaphorically, the mortar in the bricks.”

  Aretha shook her head.

  “Not true. You had – you had a sense of humour. A love of life.”

  “What was the precise nature of our relationship, back then?” I asked.

  Aretha shrugged. “We were friends. Not the first time we met – then, well, you took very little notice of me. The second time we met, I saved your life. And that’s when we became – friendly. And then the third time, we became close, very close indeed. We talked – a lot. We – we were – and then the gangs came after you and there was bloody war and you triumphed. And that’s when I stopped seeing you. That’s when our friendship ended. And that was a hundred years ago.”

  “I do not comprehend,” I admitted, “why we would have become ‘friends,’ in the way you describe. And I do not comprehend why that friendship would have ended, just because I was doing my job, successfully and thoroughly.”

  “Because,” said Aretha, “you killed, and killed, and killed, and I could tell that you were loving every moment.”

  I knew too much, and yet I knew nothing at all.