Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  Ranging out further, his body seeming to uncoil and certainly growing taller, he touched the minds and bodies of lizard gibbons in the trees, gelid flatworms and burrowing hot-form mole rats. Beyond a certain point, it seemed the whole forest had slid into some abyss. The minds of the creatures there were not functioning right; their behaviour twisted into shapes they could not hope to survive. Seething giggling madness lay in the abyss, but with the eyes of the animals Whip saw through the metaphorical darkness and through the forest in glassy overlay to the ruins.

  And to Penny Royal.

  Trees were stunted and gnarled about the ruins – a grid of low walls laid out in conjoined triangles. Upturned slabs and snapped-off twisted spires were scattered amidst these. A translucent brown substance formed the walls and slabs, all their edges sharp and un-eroded despite having sat here for millions of years. The spires were metallic – like marcasite. At the centre a black flower had sprouted. It rose on a stem of twisted silver threads spreading petals like black sword blades. It was swaying slightly as if in some unfelt breeze and, on a level beyond hearing, Whip sensed a strange singing.

  From his studies of the rogue AI, Whip knew this to be just one of the many forms it could take. Those black crystalline blades could reshape themselves at the nanoscopic level to become shorter, longer, spikes or rods. The silver threads could thin down to invisibility and spread like cobwebs through the air. The whole thing could separate and turn itself into a swarm entity.

  Stepping among the trees now, Whip studied a nearby soldier. Clad in a brown hotsuit, the man lugged a pack with dangling feed-lines to his weapon. Whip recognised a coilgun powered by a U-charger in the pack, ammunition also fed from there. He was big, muscular and almost certainly boosted. A number of men armed likewise were scattered along the line, but most of the rest were conventional soldiers sporting pulse rifles or squat missile launchers. Ahead, the mosquitos carefully picked their way between the trees, alert for any attack. Whip wondered what their programming might be – how they would recognise the enemy.

  A hundred metres into the trees and Whip sensed a change ahead. Penny Royal had stopped singing. Gazing through multiple eyes and his U-space extended sensorium, Whip saw that the AI had stopped swaying too, and now its blade petals shifted as if in agitation. The thrum of pulse-gun fire impinged and Whip dropped down into a squat, all his senses now local. Over to the left a trooper flew backwards in a cloud of blood spray, smoke and pieces of his own body and equipment.

  ‘What the hell?’ said the medic.

  ‘Get down!’ Whip instructed.

  Too late. Pulse gun hits snatched the man from his feet and tumbled him backwards. He hit the ground and bounced with one side of his chest and one arm ripped away. He shuddered for just a second and then lay still, but for the smoke and steam rising from his body. Whip ignored him – he was already dead and possessed a memplant. Over to their right the soldier with the coilgun opened fire and something silvery exploded ahead with the sound of shattering glass.

  ‘It’s taken control of the mosquitos,’ said Susan, from where she squatted down behind one of the trees. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Her eyes had gone glassy – the pupils no longer visible – and her skin had turned metallic. Whip briefly scanned her, recognizing the power surge through her bones. She was going full AI to combat Penny Royal in the territory of the mosquito gun’s computing. He knew, with utter certainty, she would fail.

  He left her and moved on as gunfire and explosions erupted all around him. The air filled with smoke, steam and screams. Splinters of wood rained down, mixed with the twisted shrapnel from broken machines. Gobbets of flesh too. Noting a splash of blood on a tree, he tracked its course down to a body lying half-covered in the churned ground. While scanning deeply, he dragged the man out. The man screamed, and Whip just reached in and switched of his consciousness. Steam gusted from a ripped-open suit, and blood welled from holes stitched down his side. Heart undamaged, lungs and liver holed, a kidney turned to mush. The wounds looked as if blades had made them. A military nanosuite worked to preserve the man’s life by staunching the bleeding, but not fast enough. Whip pulled two sprays from his doctor’s bag, first covering the wounds with surgical glue, then spraying on the hotsuit material spray – the bots swiftly knitting both his skin and his suit closed. Whip meanwhile connected to the man’s nanosuite and adjusted it outside its usual parameters, cybernetic clotting agents flooding the blood, briefly enough to stop the bleeding, then back into parameters. Clots in places other than the wounds would result in tissue necrosis, but that would not kill him as fast as bleeding out would.

  Whip stood and moved on, felt something slam into his upper arm and dodged round behind a tree. He tracked an object behind him and saw a black blade swing round through the air, hover for a moment as if inspecting him, then flash away. Others passed overhead – a shoal of obsidian fish. Penny Royal had taken on one of its many forms – that of a swarm robot – and had moved out to face its attackers. Almost without thinking, he flexed muscles in impossible ways to draw his wound closed. His Barnard suit material then closed over it too, and, in a moment, the damaged tissue drained away. Did Penny Royal recognise him? Almost certainly. Did it think him a threat? No it did not, but nor did it think the soldiers here a threat either, for it was just playing its bloody games with them. Whip grimaced and glanced over at a nearby trooper, it seemed from some height. The man stared up at him in terror, then just turned and ran. This was good – it was what they should all do.

  Two people down now: one whose leg below the knee was burned ruin, one pulse-shot through the heart. The first victim’s hotsuit had reacted by closing a tourniquet above the knee, but still he writhed in pain as the exposed flesh below steamed. Whip touched his forehead and switched off his mind. As the man slumped, Whip turned to the woman. Her chest smouldered and bled, so Whip sprayed the glue then reached in with force-field fingers drawn fine and thin, hot-pinched arteries closed, plugged veins, then drew tubing from his bag. He then penetrated the nanosuites of each victim in preparation to align their immune responses, as he plugged into her carotids and into the arteries in the man’s legs, sealing split suit behind. He paused, seeing something odd about the suites: they were already functioning outside of their usual parameters. This required examination, but first the two lives here. He adjusted immune systems so that neither would eject the other. Now her brain would remain functional bathed in his blood. She would lose much of her body but she would survive.

  Squatting by the two, he next went deep and felt a further wrench of his body uncoiling and his mind dividing. Examining the suites from two different perspectives, he bounced scenarios between his two halves – synergistic computing. He saw that nanomachines were interfering with their bodies’ thermostats and gathering about certain neural nexuses in their brains. Was this military, to kill their fear? No, the alterations would make them feel hot and claustrophobic, irrationally fearful and impulsive. He knew what was being done and who was doing it, especially when he tried to change the programming and slid off it as if off an icy rock and, even as he stood, he heard shrieking all around.

  ‘MC Severax, withdraw your troops or they will die,’ he said, his penetration of military coms not requiring the coms unit she had provided.

  ‘What the hell?’ she exclaimed.

  He was in her in a moment, feeling her struggling to tear open her hotsuit. Others were doing the same. He had no time for explanations and the time for that retreat had run out. His steady work through the surrounding victims had been like a warm up. His examination of what Penny Royal had done to their nanosuites had raised him to a state way above that he had reached with Snyder Clamp, and he reached out with all his power, and knocked out a thousand human minds. All around him, throughout the forest, the soldiers dropped like unstrung puppets. Whip next moved from victim to victim, closing suits, spraying new material. And it seemed, as he darted fast between the trees, Whip was weaving i
n towards the largest victim of all. Bent over a woman who had lost half her face, moulding a reactive dressing there while adjusting her nanosuite to kill the cerebral swelling in a brain partially parboiled, he looked up as smoke cleared and saw he had drawn close to the centre, and that Penny Royal had returned. Now was his time.

  Stepping over the glassy remains of walls over five million years old, he moved towards the AI. Incidentally, he reached out to remaining victims scattered about the battlefield, reading their injuries through their nanosuites, ignoring them if they were memplanted, adjusting and optimising the rest, healing them even as a great shoal of black spines swirled like a bait ball ahead of him, then abruptly aligned and faced towards him.

  ‘You made me for this,’ he said aloud.

  He sensed agreement, and then he sensed a tentative probing behind him and began to relinquish his hold on the fallen soldiers.

  ‘I have them,’ said Susan.

  She was at his back, taking the load. In overview he saw her controlling robots and bringing them in to collect up the casualties, and now she too was moving from victim to victim to do what she could to help them. He knew he could do more, but he also understood that to prevent more victims like those around him he needed to heal what lay ahead. He rounded a charred tree – just a blackened spike of wood surprisingly upright in this ruination. As he released the soldiers, he felt his touch winding back in like tentacles and his power concentrating. He stood a metre taller now and thin, so thin. Glancing down at his body, he saw the changes there more pronounced. The musculature of an ectomorphic high jumper twisted into a strange thick braid. Releasing the last soldier, his power peaked and now he reached forward with all of himself, into the AI.

  At once Whip found a mind shattered into pieces at war with each other. He touched one and found himself rolled in a wave of hostility, malevolence and hatred. The force of it in his mind translated into a pulse of hardfield energy in the air, slamming him back against the burned tree. Three spines shot towards him, stabbing into his body and nailing him to the tree, but there was no pain. As the madness of that mind fragment grabbed him, he had little thought to spare for self-examination, but enough to see that the spines had pinned him through the lines of division deepening in his body.

  Finally, he managed to free himself from the hating part of the AI’s mind even as he absorbed its source in the past. Penny Royal had been a destroyer AI gifted with emotions and empathy and ordered to murder. He saw the ship poised over Polity military forces on the surface of a world. He saw them burning in particle beam fire, he saw the CTD explosions turning them into radioactive ash. He felt the AI appalled but unable to disobey its orders, and was appalled himself as he slid to another fragment of its mind. Here he found rationality and understanding, but the immensity of it terrified him. He tried to focus just on the memories. The prador enemy surrounded the eight thousand troops and, in this case, their death was preferable to capture. How could that be? He grabbed another fragment and tried to meld the two together, to heal the wound. Crazy laughter echoed. Dropping straight into his mind were the memories of a man, caught by the prador, a thrall unit installed in his skull without anaesthetic, and the horror of his ensuing life. This is what would have happened to the troops. And this wasn’t just amusing; it was hilarious.

  The complete disparity in fact, the cognitive dissonance tried to cast him out. He realised he needed to encompass all the fragments before him, and, for this, he needed greater synergy. He expanded himself, and widened the break in his dividing mind as he reached out to every fragment, each one greater than a multitude of human minds. Agony coursed through him from head to foot, while he heard an awful tearing sound – his very being pulling apart. His natural vision had blurred into two. He tilted his head to look down at himself and felt just half of his head tilting. The bright green and red scales of his Barnard suit gleamed as the coils of his body parted. One of his boots fell to the ground, which seemed further away now, and his foot extended into a tail. He could not see the other because it lay out of sight behind the tree yet, he knew, that with the other half of his head he could turn there to see it. Instead, he pulled further apart and gazed into his own eyes. They were golden with slot pupils. He possessed two of them on each half of his head – the new ones revealed in the split on either side. His half mouth swung round, the heads reforming and equalizing.

  The heads of snakes.

  Synergy.

  Half to half gazing into his own eyes; mind to mind ramping up the power reaching out to the fragmented mind, now swirling around him, a shoal of black blades. Behind he could feel Susan, a weak cup around his consciousness, trying to catch him. And in Penny Royal the amusement grew in some fragments and gained ascendancy. He understood that his own division reflected in microcosm what had happened to the AI. He peered into his divided self to see how he could reunite it, and saw that he could not, nor could he heal the thing swirling around him.

  I have failed, he thought.

  You did not, came the multiply echoing reply.

  He had always wanted to be the best, and iconic, and he had sensed right from the beginning that Penny Royal had moulded him to that end but, as ever with gifts from that AI, to a poisonous and grotesquely artistic end.

  The shoal swarmed out before him, satisfied with its work here. All the blades and spines slammed together into a great black sea urchin form even as something massive appeared in the sky above, casting them in shadow. Penny Royal disappeared with a deep thump as air rushed in to occupy the space it had occupied. Impossibly, it had jumped through U-space from the surface of a world. Whip now focused his doubled and intense vision upon the woman who moved round to look up at him. He studied Susan’s being with such ease. As a combination of forensic AI and the remains of a human being, she was so much less complicated than the thing he had just faced. He saw that he could separate them, if he so wished, if he had any purpose in doing so.

  ‘We hoped you were the mechanism Penny Royal created to heal itself,’ she said.

  He tried to reply, but only hissed.

  ‘But again, as with so many others, you are just the product of a grotesque sense of humour and an utter disregard for suffering. I’m sorry Aster. I’m so sorry.’

  Why was she sorry? He possessed a superior medical mind divided into two, with the halves synergistically reflecting each other, ramping up their power, their competence, their ability. Hadn’t he always wanted to be the best? He next looked through her mind and through her eyes, at himself, admiring the two snakes into which he had divided, now coiled about the charred tree and facing each other head to head. Was it not appropriate that his form of a Caduceus reflected his excellence?

  Until this morning the provisional title of this was ‘Hooder Segment’ but I knew it wasn’t right. Reading parts of it again a little switch in my brain clicked down to give me the title and in retrospect it seems obvious. Here marks a return of Jonas Clyde – the guy who discovered that hooders are ‘devolved’ biomech war machines created by the alien race the atheter. And, of course, with him present hooders also need to be on the scene too. In this I also take a look at something I’ve been dealing with in a few stories: the ennui barrier. Eternal life is great except, late in the second century, those living it can become immensely bored and embark on some risky pursuits. Mostly, these result in the individuals concerned killing themselves, but sometimes the result can be catastrophic…

  RAISING MOLOCH

  Trying to find some reaction to it, Jonas Clyde studied the inside of the apartment. Hints of emotion arose and he acknowledged how it felt both strange and also like coming home to be allotted the same rooms in the research base as he had used decades ago, but he felt no inclination to take the AI’s unsubtle lure. Hoisting his pack’s strap onto one shoulder he headed out. He would not be staying. The event that had summoned him across the light years to Masada was one he felt he could not miss, just as a matter of form, but once it wa
s over nothing could keep him here. He walked down a corridor – the bubblemetal worn down by the passage of many feet – then out through a chainglass door onto the first level balcony ringing the central dome. Cheller stood waiting for him, staring out through the quarter glass covering the balcony and keeping the breathable air inside. The dark aubergine sky of morning still displayed the glassy sculpture of a vast nebula, while Calypse – the nearby gas giant – sat on the horizon all pastel shades swathed in cloud, bright on one side in the light of the unseen sun.

  ‘You’re ready?’ Cheller turned.

  Over the years, Cheller the Golem had managed to lose all those tells Jonas usually detected. This was probably because twenty-five years ago Jonas had told him about them – up to and including the possibility that humans might even be able to detect the absence of pheromones in the air around him. Cheller had black hair shading to grey, wore a slightly mucky envirosuit, had a scar on his cheek and a slight sheen of sweat on apparently sun-tanned skin. Jonas grimaced, thinking that maybe the Golem had overdone things a bit when he detected a whiff of body odour.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Jonas replied and followed as Cheller led off towards the stair. They both pulled on breather masks that simply added the required level of oxygen – the first through appearance and the second through need. Pressure differential being minimal, just a single door opened to the stair and they headed down to the courtyard of the inner ring. Here, sitting on foamstone slabs bordered by flute grass sprouts, sat a grav platform – a simple circular vehicle ten feet across with a steering lectern at the centre and a variety of equipment bolted to the rails or in storage lockers below them.

  ‘So we get a platform today,’ said Jonas as they walked across to it.

  During his years here such had been the number of researchers it had always been a constant battle over the tagreb’s transport. Jonas had often found himself heading out on an aerofan or on a long journey in an ATV, that was until he spent some of his own money and bought a platform.