Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  Its point about my ignorance of physics had touched me, I suppose, because I felt the urge to show off my education. 'What is the gravity at the surface anyway?' I asked this because I assumed stars all to be huge, massive, pulling dozens of g. )

  Are you an idiot? the AI asked, which did surprise me. On the surface the gravity will be more or less the same as it is here.

  'I assumed,' I said, 'that gravity of stars is—'

  This is a small star, the AI interrupted. How else could they build the prison they have?

  'So how does it hold its planets?'

  It doesn't have any planets, only a few asteroids. Do you know nothing?

  'Don't get cross with me,' I advised.

  We will move through the stellar body in the flow of a convection current. When this reaches the heliosurface it creates a solar flare which will shoot us out at the necessary escape velocity. This is how we will travel through space.

  'And then?' I asked. 'Do I drift through space for thousands of years until I happen to be—' But the AI interrupted me again.

  Then you will be collected, of course. What else did you imagine?

  _______

  That there would be somebody waiting for me on the other side of the fiery wall of my prison was startling. It made me realise that this jailbreak, the whole undertaking to which I had agreed, was a real thing and not the fantasy of a mind dissolved in the insanity of years of prison. It put me back into a questioning habit. So I was to be taken from the prison, was I? I was to go to a world I had never before visited and destroy all the people living upon it? Why was I asked to do so terrible a thing?

  I asked the AI. 'Do you know who is employing me?' It did not reply, so I pressed the point. 'You do know, don't you. You do.'

  Of course I know, it replied. Its odd triple-tracked voice sounded almost sulky.

  'Who?' I demanded. And when it didn't reply I started hooting the question in a loud voice. 'Who? Who?'

  Be still! The AI remonstrated. Are you trying to draw their attention to you? They'll realise something is wrong! They'll restrain you – they'll prevent you getting out. Do you want that?

  I stopped hooting, but it was filled with the weird manic energy that possessed me sometimes, so I started a raggedy-strided sprint up the little hill, down the other side and then hopped over the stream in a single leap.

  Calm! cried the AI. Be still! Are you mad?

  'Who?' I asked, in a lower voice, but panting as I ran.

  I cannot tell you.

  That stopped me. I stood for a moment angled forward, back bent, arms straight, resting a hand on each knee. Without dotTech in me it took me much, much longer to recover after exertion.

  'What?'

  I cannot tell you! Enough! Enough! Calm!

  'What do you mean, you can't tell me?' It said nothing to this, so I said again, 'You do know who is employing me?'

  Of course.

  'But you won't tell me?'

  No.

  'I suppose,' I said, sinking to the floor, my breath returning to me, 'that they – my employers – programmed you. They programmed you as code-potential, and somehow transmitted it inside this prison.'

  Yes.

  'And that they want to maintain their secrecy. They programmed that into you as well.'

  Something like that.

  'Do you know why they want it done?'

  Silence.

  'AI,' I said. I was sitting now, my thighs and calves folded up against my torso like a folding chair, hugged to me by my sinewy arms. 'AI, this is a very big thing I am employed to do. To murder a whole world! A very big crime. But I cannot imagine why anybody would want it done – do you know the why? '

  You are asking, said the AI inside my head, the wrong questions.

  But you know why? I was subvocalising now.

  I do.

  Silence.

  And, I asked, as if the question had just started up inside me, And do you know why me? Why did they choose me to do this thing?

  But you already know the answer to that one.

  And so I did. In all the worlds of t'T, the Utopian areas and civilisations of fast-space, there was probably no other individual like me. I was certainly alone in my prison, a unique criminal freak. A statistical oddity. It was the glory of t'T to have reduced the statistical glitch that threw up a small percentage of the population as murderous criminals; to have reduced it almost to nothingness.

  You must do exactly what I tell you, said the AI. I said, silently, Yes, yes. Was there a voice in my head, dear stone? Did I imagine the whole thing?'

  Who can answer my question?

  It would be best, the AI said, if you allowed me to grow in your brain, so that I can connect with sections of your motor cortex. That way I can directly influence your movements, make you more dextrous.

  'Do you really need to ask my permission?' I asked. 'How could I stop you if you decided to, will-me or nil-me?'

  It seemed upset at this. I was only being polite, it said.

  Night came. I loitered by the water, watching my jailer and her red lover dancing together illuminated by the stars. Striated patterns of pale light glittered on the dark waters of the lake. I ducked behind the nearest trees, peering round the treetrunks as if they were columns and I were acting in a play. My jailer and her mate stopped to pick a few fruit, and then sat with their legs soaking in the water up to their knees as they ate. The interrupted hum of their conversation, made bleary by the distance, reached me on the other side of the prison. I could not make out what they were saying.

  They'll sleep soon, said the AI, close and sharp in my ear.

  This was so precisely my own thought that my hairs stood up. How could I be sure there truly was an AI in my head? What if I were imagining the whole thing?

  This thought, though, was too close to my speech centres, for the AI overheard (overthougt?) it.

  Perhaps you should consider, it said tartly, whether your habit of disbelieving that anybody else truly exists except yourself is a strength or a handicap?

  I don't know what you mean, I subvocalised. I had been practising this mode of internal communication, and had become more adept at it.

  Yes you do, said the AI, and was still.

  Eventually, the jailer and her mate stood, embraced, and made their way into the hill. This is where they slept; locked away from me, lest i should go mad and try to injure them in their sleep. Finally I was alone.

  Now, said the AI. There – where the bark bulges out a little. Pull that away. But it didn't need to tell me to do this, because it was already influencing my hands and fingers. The bark would not give, but then with a strength and coordination I didn't know I possessed, I yanked it away.

  Inside, urged the AI. Inside. It sounded eager, even overexcited, and this worried me. Surely a genuine AI would be more dispassionate; this made me fret that the voice was simply an inner extension of me.

  I fumbled and gutted the tree of part of its machinery, the technology that processed carbon, water and trace minerals into the necessary protein flesh of the fruits. I drew out a series of dangling black tube-wires, a small nodule, a manifold. Take those! screeched the AI in my ear. Close up the bark! I closed the bark back over the hole in the tree, gathered up my cache, and hurried away.

  That night I – the AI, working through my fingers – built a new device; one that would manufacture the foam that covers interstellar travellers. The foam, the AI assured me, was a simple matter. What about the technology, the machinery, the processing that actually propels a body faster than light? Don't be ridiculous, said the AI. That's far too complex to be knocked together here. Do you think I am a genius? The tone of rebuke was so sharp that I said nothing more; but I worried that – even if I were able to leave the star – I would be left merely floating in space.

  But then again a part of me believed that the whole thing was merely a sort of fantasy dream inside my own head. At least it provided a certain variety in my life; and my life
had been death-beckoningly dull until then. So I went along with it.

  2nd

  O Stone,

  Is there a need to delay the narrative with the preparations I made? No, I don't think so. All throughout them I doubted that they were real, but I was carried along, more passenger than agent. The AI made me fashion a sac out of four or five very broad leaves from one of the bushes that grew closse to the corner where the sky met the land.

  Why do I need a sac?

  To carry the mud. We must have raw materials to fashion the foam. The foam is actually a complex of carbon. And fluid of course; we'll find that in mud.

  I built crampons to attach to arms and feet. I ate more regularly, and to better purpose, than ever before. You'll need strength to climb the sky, said the AI.

  And so it went on.

  Another night. I waited, stomach burning acidic with fear and anticipation. I could not keep myself in check; I ran from tree to tree, dived in the water and climbed out, trying to burn up my energy. It seemed to take forever before my jailer and her mate prepared to go to bed. I watched them do their nightly dance. Why did they dance? I cannot say. It was their ritual. Then, in a skittish excess of nerves, I leapt up whining and sprinted, legs akimbo from stride to stride.

  Will you be calm? complained the AI in my head. Be calm!

  'Can't helpi it!' I sang. 'Can't help it.' And then in time to my strides, 'Can't help it, can't help it, can't help it.'

  I rounded the little hill and there was the jailer. That brought me up short.

  'Hello,' I said, giggling. Thinking to myself, Soon I'll be away from here, step into space and wipe my tears away. But a part of my brain was trying to stifle even the thoughts. The fact that the AIcouldoverhear me thinking gave me an edgy paranoid sense that the jailer could overhear me too. After all, in some crucial sense, she only existed inside my head too, like the AI. Wasn't that so?

  Do you understand why I say that, dear stone? Do you appreciate the sense in which these people are not really people outside of me? But of course you are silent. You're still silent. The still point.

  'You've been talking to yourself a great deal,' said the jailer in her cumbrous manner.

  'I talk to myself,' I gabbled. 'I've always talked to myself. Lack of company you know. From time to time I split myself in two and one split talks to the other split. You know? You know?'

  'It has been a part of your mental pathology,' she said, keeping me steady with a straight look. 'From time to time. But you've changed in the last two weeks. You've become much more insistently talkative. You seem to be having actual conversations.'

  Kill her, hissed the AI in my ear. She knows.

  My eyes may have widened, because the jailer seemed to register some change in my face. To myself I subvocalised, Keep quiet, keep out of it.

  Kill her! Do it now!

  But this was ill advised. It would have been a very difficult thing to manage. The dotTech in her system would have preserved her against almost any assault I could make. Besides she was larger and stronger than I. I felt a lurch in my muscles, as if the AI were trying to command my nerves, but I fought down the impulse. 'No,' I said, as firmly as I could.

  'No?' repeated the jailer. 'How do you mean?'

  'No, I'll stop talking to myself,' I said. 'Yes, I mean, yes, I'll stop doing it.'

  Kill her kill her said the voice in my head.

  The jailer tilted her heavy yellow head to one side, eyeing me hard. I stood there. How hard would it be to kill her? If I had some sort of knife or weapon . . .

  But now her back was towards me, and she was lumbering away. I was still muttering to myself, sweating. Can we go now? I asked the AI, silently. I was scared, jittery, jumpy. I wanted to be away from that place. Can we go now?

  Yes, said the AI, subdued now. Yes, yes.

  I gathered my crampons from where I had buried them under the plastic grass and made my way to the wainscot of the jail, where the blue sky and green ground met in a perfect ninety degree join. The sky was dim now, with only a little starlight throwing out a shaky illumination. I embraced the darkness. Cover me, I thought. I slung the sac filled with wet mud around my naked waist, propped the AI's adaptor/creator inside it. Then I applied the two hand crampons to the plastic of the sky. Pulling my weight onto these, I dug my toes into the wall.

  With easy gestures at first, but with increasing difficulty and trembly pain, I hauled myself up the sky. I was hanging flat against the blue nothing like a fly. Most of the hauling was done with my arm muscles, and this was not easy. Each time the prick of the crampon dug into the yielding plastic of the sky there was a faint toc noise. And so I made my clockwork way upwards.

  I'll be honest, stone. My flesh lacks will. If it had been up to me I would have given up after a few metres, would have dropped awkwardly back to the ground. But the AI had access to my motor centres now; it co-ordinated my gestures, forced my muscles to their limits, refused to let them stop. With each painful straining, each lift of a few centimetres, I winced; but it would not relent. I believe I even started begging it, half way up, please to stop, please. But it did not even reply, it simply pushed me on.

  After a great deal ot this painful climbing I began to feel a sensation of heat on the top of my head. 'We're coming near the first star,' I gasped.

  That's it, said the AI inside my head. A few more reaches.

  I hauled myself a metre or so closer. The heat from the star-shaped gap was quite fierce now. My muscles ached with an equivalent fire, pain pulsing up and down my arms and legs. My fingers were sharply sore. My breath was heaving in and out.

  Now, said the AI. I've extruded some rope from the fabricator. In the sac, do you see?

  I glanced down, and saw a spool of rope coiled on top of the mud. But then my eyes became hooked, magnetically, to the view directly below me. All the way down the flat of the sky to the ground, a great distance down. I started whimpering.

  Don't be silly now, said the AI. We have to throw the end of that rope into the opening of the star. Attend!

  'I'm scared,' I blubbed. 'I'm greatly scared of falling.'

  You won't fall. Hold on with your feet and your left hand; let go with your right and reach into the sac.

  'Are you insane inside my head?' I shrieked. 'Let go? I'll fall!' I looked down again, and my whole torso yawed and shrunk with terror at the drop. It seemed an impossible distance. I imagined myself falling and being dented and bashed to pieces. There had been times during my stay in prison when I would have welcomed such a suicide, but now, faced with the reality of it, and tantalised by the nearness of escape, my whole being revolted against the idea. I felt terror solidify inside me, like a hard-edged thing inside my belly and my chest.

  Release your right hand, ordered the AI.

  'No!' I yelped. 'No! No!'

  But the AI had its tendrils in my motor cortex. Despite myself I felt my pressure relax, my wrist tipping up to release the hook ot the crampon, and the hand come away. 'No, no,' I moaned, and started wriggling in a sort of ecstasy of fear. The AI, saying nothing but clearly deciding that I was being irrational, froze up all my limbs, save only the right hand that was reaching gingerly into the sac.

  It brought out the end of the rope and hooked a five metre loop over my wrist. It was as if somebody else were acting, and I merely spectating, as it reached back, and with an awkwardly positioned but perfectly balanced throw hurled the rope upwards. I angled my head back in time to see the end of it disappear through the heart of the star-shaped hole.

  There was a snicking sound. The processing machine, controlling the magnetic channel from within its mouth, responded as it was programmed to in the event of contaminants entering the hole. Now the star, like a human sphincter, clenched and closed, holding the rope tight. Light dimmed.

  Is it supposed to do that?

  Yes it is.

  Won't they notice the diminution in light below?

  It's fine, said the AI. It's only one star out of ma
ny. Give me a moment, and I'll work it. Now, we need to wrap you in foam.

  Release my limbs to my own control, I said.

  I don't think so. You'll panic and fall. Here— and it moved my right hand back up the sky, so that I could reinsert the crampon. Better?

  I could feel the foam starting to bubble up at my waist. I had experienced that sensation of being entirely immersed in this foam many times before, but never in so strange and precarious a position. I was still sobbing, gasping; and only the mastery of the AI was stopping my limbs from trembling. But there was something almost comforting about the experience, like a blanket being drawn over a sleepy child, as the foam slewed up and covered my torso, crept along my arms, and swallowed my head.

  I'm going to make you let go, now, said the AI. I couldn't speak, because the foam was forcing itself into my mouth, making the tube which delivered air to my lungs during transit, but I subvocalised frantically, No, no, no.

  Yet there was nothing to be done. My arms and then my legs clicked away from the sky, and drew themselves through the still soft texture of the foam. My legs came together, slightly bent at the knees; my arms went to my sides. At the same time, I was conscious of a sensation in my gut as I swung free, suspended only by the rope I had thrown into the mouth of the aperture.

  My terror, now, was that the star's orifice might open itself, releasing the rope and dropping me to the ground far below. But I was too far gone to be terrified in any rational sense. Help me AI, I gibbered in my mind. What is going on! Please tell me! What is happening?

  . . . letting the outside of the foam harden a little, in the natural way . . . came the AI's odd, treble-tracked voice, as if in the middle of something and not wanting to be distracted.

  So I hung there. I experienced the distinctive sensory deprivation of being in the foam, robbed of sight and hearing and smell, feeling only the uniform pressure of the foam on my naked body, tasting only the grey taste of the foam as it hardened into an airway in my mouth – in that state, I began to calm a little.

  . . . talking to the machine in the star aperture, came the AI's voice again. It is a simple machine, densely built but not lateral in its programming. I'll just. . . I'll just. . .