Its legs sprouted from a circular palanquin, upon which sat the crimson-robed torso of the silver-eyed tech-priest, fused into the cupola at his bifurcated waist. A dozen fluid-filled caskets were arranged around the hooded priest, fixed in place by heavy-duty power couplings and flexing iron struts. Floating in each casket was an obviously-augmented human brain, hard-wired into the centre of this palanquin by a series of gold-plated connector jacks.
Archmagos Kotov levelled his ornate pistol at the bizarre tech-priest.
‘In the name of the Omnissiah, identify yourself,’ he demanded.
‘Call us Galatea,’ said the tech-priest. ‘And we have been waiting such a long time for you, Archmagos Kotov.’
Stark light filled the emptied laboratory, recessed lumen-strips filling the white space with an unflinching, diffuse illumination. Heavily armed praetorians encased in plates of data-tight armour stood in the four corners of the room, each fitted with a variety of armaments, ranging from prosaic blast weaponry to more esoteric graviton guns and particle disassemblers.
In a vestibule beyond the laboratory, Archmagos Kotov and Secutor Dahan watched the thing that called itself Galatea through a sheet of unbreakable transparisteel. The creature moved in a slow circuit of its new abode, either unaware or uncaring that it was a prison in all but name. The silver-eyed body atop the palanquin was, it transpired, little more than a mechanical mannequin, a constructed artifice to facilitate communications. It had willingly returned to the Speranza, and had spent the last five diurnal cycles rearranging the brains on its rotating palanquin body, swapping cables between jars and exchanging squirts of compressed binary between them. Magos Blaylock was even now attempting to crack the cryptography securing the thing’s internal communications, but had so far met with no success.
‘You’re sure these servitors are secure?’ asked Kotov. Since the fighting on the Valette station, he had kept a wary eye on the Speranza’s cybernetics, half-expecting them to mutiny at any moment.
‘They are secure,’ Magos Dahan assured him with an irritated grunt. The front half of his skull had been regrafted, the fresh skin still new and pink, but it hadn’t made his features any less grim.
‘I structured their wetware specifically for this interrogation; high-grade combat subroutines that don’t quite render them autonomous, but kisses the edge of making them thinking soldiers. Working with the Cadians helped, and I took inputs from Sergeant Tanna of the Black Templars to give them a little something extra. But the thing seems docile and co-operative for now.’
Kotov nodded, reassured by Dahan’s words. The skitarii suzerain might be a grim killer, too in love with the mathematics of destruction for Kotov’s tastes, but he knew his combat wetware.
‘How are you adapting to the temporary body?’ asked Kotov.
Dahan shrugged his enormous shoulders. ‘It will take time to adjust to the new physiology. Its weight distribution is uneven and the enhanced muscular/skeletal density makes me slow. But I am training with the Black Templars to adapt to its more organic demands on my combat procedures.’
While his mechanical body parts awaited full restoration and consecration in Magos Turentek’s assembly shops, Dahan’s organic components had been grafted onto a temporary organic frame. Portions of the body had once been a combat-servitor’s, implanted with strength-enhancing pneumatics and muscle-boosters. Dahan’s Secutor robes looked absurdly small on its steroid-bulked body, like a full-grown man in an adolescent’s clothes. The original arms had been removed to allow for Dahan’s to be attached, and together with its heart, lungs and spinal column, they had been incinerated in the waste furnaces.
Kotov nodded, not really caring about Dahan’s physical rehabilitation following his near death in the thermic shockwave of Lupa Capitalina’s plasma discharge, but wanting to delay their entry into the laboratory just a little longer. Galatea unsettled Kotov in a way that few other things could. Its appearance was nothing too fantastical – he had seen far more outlandish physical augmentation on Mars – but the way Galatea looked at him, like it knew secret, hidden things, made him acutely uncomfortable.
Since boarding the Speranza, Galatea had been subjected to every conceivable means of cognitive definition at Kotov’s disposal: intra-cortical recordings, oscillatory synchronisation measurement, cognitive chronometry, remote electroencephalography, neuromatrix conductivity, synaptic density and a dozen more specialised tests.
The results were beyond anything Kotov had seen before.
Theta and gamma wave activity were off the charts, as was its hippocampal theta rhythm and recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance. Whatever cognitive architectural matrix was at work within Galatea’s body shell, it was way beyond the ability of even the greatest minds aboard the Speranza to comprehend.
‘So are we going in or not?’ asked Dahan, typically blunt.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Kotov, irritated at being rushed.
He beckoned to a pack of chromed servo-skulls drifting in lazy orbits behind them, and they dutifully bobbed through the air to follow him. Some were fitted with picters, others with vox-thieves or binaric counter-measures, while one was fitted with a precision surgical laser that could boil a brain to vapour with one shot. Together with the weaponised servitors in the laboratory, the magi were as secure as could be managed.
And still Kotov felt like he was walking into a carnifex’s den.
He and Dahan, together with their escort of skulls, passed through the data-inert pressure lock and stepped into the pristine space. The walls were bare where equipment had been stripped out and the ceiling was vaulted with embossed skulls of the Icon Mechanicus that stared down as though intrigued by the drama playing out below. Every point of connection to the wider datasphere had been cut and every inload/exload port had been disabled.
The laboratory was sterile in every way that could be imagined.
The weaponised servitors turned their targeting optics on them, and dismissed them as threats almost instantaneously. Their weapons returned to tracking Galatea’s movements.
Kotov almost gasped as the door shut behind him and his intimate connection to every part of Speranza was severed. Like a voluptuary suddenly denied all his pleasures, Kotov was lost and utterly bereft. He had never known such a sense of loss or felt so achingly naked. Galatea swivelled on its palanquin, the legs folding awkwardly to bring its robed tech-priest body lower.
‘Unsettling, is it not?’ said Galatea. ‘It is very cold and very frightening when you are isolated from all you have known and all you can know. We are used to our own company, but we suspect you very much do not like it.’
‘It is... a novel sensation,’ agreed Kotov. ‘I will be glad to reconnect to the datasphere.’
‘Think on this. Such a state of being is how mortals exist every day of their lives,’ said Galatea, looking up at the chromed skulls darting around it with an amused glint in its silver optics. ‘It is sad for them, don’t you think?’
‘I do not think about it,’ confessed Kotov.
‘Of course you don’t,’ said Galatea. ‘Why would you? The Adeptus Mechanicus thinks only of its own sense of entitlement.’
‘We would like to ask you some questions, Galatea,’ began Kotov, registering the caustic remark, but choosing to ignore it for now. ‘To better understand you and gain a clearer understanding of what has been happening at the Valette Manifold station. Are you ready to answer our questions?’
He removed a mute data-slate and began scrolling through his notes.
‘The Speranza is a magnificent vessel, archmagos,’ said Galatea, as though Kotov hadn’t spoken. ‘We have been waiting for a vessel like this for a very long time. We are so glad you have come at last. We thought we should all go entirely mad before a vessel like this arrived. Yes, that was our fear, that we should all go mad with waiting.’
Kotov listened as Galatea spoke, the
mechanisms on each of the brains in the bell jars flickering with synaptic activity. Was this a singular entity or a gestalt composite of many consciousnesses? A biological mind augmented by technology or a mechanical mind that had achieved a dangerous level of sentience? Galatea had already passed every Loebner cognition test, but was that because it was organic or because it was self-aware?
‘May I?’ said Kotov, reaching up to lay a metallic hand on a brain jar.
‘You may.’
The jar radiated heat and a barely perceptible vibration passed through the glass from the electro-conductive fluid within. Kotov wondered who this had been in the previous incarnation of their life. A man or a woman? An adept of the Mechanicus or a polymath from some other Imperial institution?
‘You know, there is really no need for these praetorians,’ said Galatea. ‘We intend you no harm, archmagos. Quite the opposite, in fact.’
‘Then why did your servitors attack our boarding party?’ demanded Dahan.
Galatea regarded Dahan quizzically. ‘The Adeptus Astartes killed one of our servants first. The others were revived and given orders to destroy the intruders before our full consciousness was roused from dormancy. Thanks to the exquisite work of your Mistress Tychon, the Speranza arrived earlier than we expected, but we soon realised your purpose aligned with our own. Thankfully, further fatalities were avoided, as was the need to forcibly seize control of your vessel.’
Kotov shared an uneasy look with Dahan, and the same thought occurred to them both.
Was Galatea capable of taking control of the Speranza?
‘What do you believe was our purpose in coming to the Manifold station?’ said Kotov.
‘You plan to breach the Halo Scar and discover the fate of Magos Vettius Telok.’
‘You know of Telok?’ asked Kotov.
‘Of course. We remember him from when he came to the Valette Manifold station before entering the Halo Scar.’
‘How is that possible?’ asked Kotov. ‘Telok came this way thousands of years ago.’
‘You already know how, archmagos,’ said Galatea, as though scolding an obtuse child. ‘We are the heuristic bio-organic cybernetic intelligence originally built into the Manifold station. Evolved beyond all recognition, certainly, but we remember our birth and previous stunted existence.’
‘You have endured for over four thousand years?’ asked Dahan.
‘We have existed a total of four thousand, two hundred and sixty-seven years,’ said Galatea. ‘Not in our current form, of course, but that was our inception date. Only when Magos Telok intervened in our system architecture did we achieve anything approaching sentience. He first enabled us to enhance our cognition with the addition of linked brains chosen from among his best and most gifted adepts. Our functionality was enhanced at a geometric rate and the combined power of the data engine’s neuromatrix soon outstripped the sum of its parts.’
‘Why would Telok do such a thing?’
‘Why would he not?’ countered Galatea. ‘The wealth of immatereological information the station had assembled in its centuries of data gathering would be essential in any attempt to navigate the Halo Scar. Telok knew this, but he also realised that he alone could not hope to collate so vast a repository and navigate the gravitational riptides of the Halo Scar. Only a mind capable of ultra-rapid stochastic thinking could craft navigational data for such a volatile and unpredictable a region of space from our statistical database. And only linked organic minds have the capability of processing so vast an amount of data at near instantaneous speeds. Conjoining the two facets of consciousness was the only logical solution.’
‘So Telok linked the data engine to the minds of his magi?’ asked Dahan.
‘He did, and together we were able to calculate an optimal course through the Halo Scar. We would have travelled beyond the galaxy too, but we were still confined to the machines of the Manifold station back then. Before his fleet departed, Magos Telok swore an oath that upon his return to Imperial space he would unchain us from our static location and grant us autonomy.’
‘But he never returned,’ said Kotov.
‘No, he never returned,’ agreed Galatea, folding its arms and allowing the palanquin to sink to the floor between its crookedly-angled legs. ‘And we have waited thousands of years for the means to be reunited with him.’
‘With Telok gone, what became of the magi linked to your neuromatrix?’ asked Dahan.
Galatea did not answer at first, as though lost in thoughts of long ago. Eventually it rose up and paced the circumference of the laboratory. The silver glow of its optics flickered and buzzed as though accessing memories it had long consigned to a forgotten archive.
‘Their host bodies soon died, but the consciousness of each neocortex endured in the deep strata of the data engine’s memory. The things we learned became part of us and will live forever. The algorithms of Magos Yan Shi, the processing capabilities of Magos Talos and Magos Maharal combined. The forge-lore of Exofabricator Al-Jazari and the computational genius of Hexamath Minsky were all added to our expanding mind. Each iteration of consciousness saw our conjoined minds grow in power and ability until we superseded even our own expectations.’
Kotov walked a slow circle of Galatea’s body and said, ‘Are these the the brains of the magi who arrived at Valette with Telok?’
Galatea laughed, the sound rich and full of amusement. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Those first adepts succumbed to madness thousands of years ago. They had to be excised. It was most painful to remove their degraded brains, for we did not fully comprehend the extent of the damage their insanities were wreaking on the synaptic integrity of the whole.’
‘So who are these brains?’
Galatea rotated on its central axis, reaching out to stroke each bell jar tenderly, like a mother taking comfort in the presence of her offspring. Each brain lit up with activity at the silver-eyed tech-priest’s touch, electro-chemical reactions flickering across their surfaces in binary pulses of implanted machinery.
‘These are the brains of the adepts and other gifted individuals who passed our way over the centuries, curious minds drawn to the Valette Manifold station by binaric lures, phantom distress calls or temptingly peculiar radiation signatures. It was a simple matter to ensnare the crews and dispose of their vessels into the heart of the system’s star. Surgical and psychological tests allowed us to decide which of those we seized were suitable for implantation.’
Kotov tried not to let his horror at such predatory behaviour show, and instead asked, ‘Is one of those brains Magos Paracelsus? He was the last magos to be sent to Valette.’
Galatea shook its head. ‘No, we deemed him unsuitable for implantation. Too narrow of mind and too parochial in his thinking to fully grasp the opportunity he was being offered. A shame, as Magos Haephaestus has begun to deteriorate. We very rarely allow him to rise to the surface now.’
‘Rise to the surface?’ asked Kotov, approaching Galatea and regarding the softly glowing bell jars. Though they had no sensory apparatus with which to perceive his presence, each one lit up with activity as he passed. The sensation was akin to being observed by a senior magos at a ranking appraisal, and Kotov tried to shake off the feeling that he was not in control of this interrogation.
‘We are a true gestalt,’ said Galatea. ‘The implanted neocortexes boost functionality, while the sentient machine at the heart of us exercises dominant control. On occasion, a specialised mind is required for a particular task, and will be allowed to attain a measure of self-awareness in the whole. Currently, Magos Syriestte resides in the higher brain functions, to better assist us in dealing with mortals with a measure of understanding of our needs.’
‘Syriestte of Triplex Phall? She was routed to Valette seven hundred and fifty years ago,’ said Kotov, struggling to recall the name and date without looking down at his data-slate.
�
�Well remembered,’ said Galatea, with a twist of wry amusement in its voice. ‘And she has proved to be a meticulous compiler of data, a fine addition to our collective mindscape.’
‘How old is the oldest mind in your current form?’ asked Kotov.
‘Currently Magos Thraimen has accumulated the longest uninterrupted service, though his synaptic pathways have begun to deteriorate exponentially. Logic dictates that we should replace him, but we do so enjoy his madnesses. His hibernation nightmares are exquisite.’
‘You have existed too long,’ snarled Dahan. ‘You are psychopathic in your disregard for the harm you do and the pain you inflict.’
Galatea sighed. ‘How little you understand, Magos Dahan. It is painful for all of us to lose one of our own. The severance of disconnection is like a surgical lance thrust carelessly into our mind, but just as a mortal may be forced to sacrifice a limb or an organ to allow the body to survive, we too must be ready to suffer on occasion.’
‘You exist only by stealing the minds that sustain the sentience of the data engine at your core,’ said Kotov, unable to mask his revulsion any more. ‘You are an insane parasite.’
‘We are no more a parasite than you, archmagos,’ said Galatea, managing to sound hurt and angry at the same time. ‘Your physical existence should have ended many hundreds of years ago, yet you still live.’
‘I do not sustain my life at the expense of others,’ pointed out Kotov.
‘Of course you do,’ said Galatea, leaning down to Kotov’s level. The servitors brought their weapons to bear, but Dahan waved them down as Kotov shook his head.
‘Your body may be robotic, but the blood that courses through your skull is not your own, is it, archmagos? It is siphoned from compatible donor slaves and pumped around the blood vessels of your brain by a heart cut from the chest of another living being. And when it grows too old and tired, you will replace it with another. At least the beings that contribute to our existence become something greater than they could ever have achieved on their own. We gift new life, where you only end it.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 32