by Neal Asher
“Anything of relevance to us?” asked Trike.
Angel’s gaze slid away from him to Cog. “You must take your ship to the exit from Dragon and be ready. The Clade is on Jaskor and Orlandine . . . Orlandine has been assassinated.”
“What?” said Cog in disbelief.
It was bad news certainly, but Trike anticipated satisfying at least some of his anger. The Clade was on Jaskor. He could let go . . . just let go.
“We’re going to Jaskor?” he asked, a sudden panic rising with the realization that they might not be going there.
“We are going to Jaskor,” Angel affirmed, again watching him. “The situation on the ground is bad. Polity ships will be there when we arrive, as will prador ships. It seems unlikely that either side will field ground troops. We must . . . take a message to some people down there.”
“Why must we do this?” Trike enquired. Anger again—trying to find direction.
What is wrong with me?
“Shut up, Trike,” said Cog. “We’re going exactly where you want to be.”
Trike stared at him, aware that he was clenching and unclenching his fists again. Yes, he wanted to be there and get his hands on the Clade, but his biggest wish was to escape this ship and his close proximity to Angel.
Control... control...
Cog waited for a moment, then said carefully, gently almost, “Go and get your stuff ready and find yourself some calm—I don’t want you falling off the rails before we get there.”
Trike wanted to argue. He wanted to do so much. But the spring unwound a notch and instead he turned towards the door leading out of the bridge.
“Okay,” he said numbly.
Angel and Cog continued talking behind him as he left. On the spiral stair, he felt he was in a tunnel of darkness. Getting to the door of his cabin, he was confused when he had to duck to enter. He shook his head, trying to deny he had grown taller, then went over to his cupboards to take out his backpack. He filled it with a varied collection of weapons, at the last taking up a big heavy machete and inspecting it closely.
The blade had been with him for many years. Though he had felt no urge to take it with him when they landed on the world of the Cyberat, he wanted it now. He had made the thing out of a shard of prador hull armour and it had taken debonding agents and a molecular shear to shape and sharpen it. It never lost its edge and with enough heft behind it could cut through just about anything. He thought he might try it on units of the Clade, but the mental image of him driving it into Angel’s neck was the only one that came up.
Only now did he think about Ruth’s corpse in cold storage, for she had been the one who could rein in his madness. She was the one who could set him thinking straight. She should be his prime focus—not someone who arose in his mind almost as an aside. He cringed, hating himself, and tried to focus his thoughts on her. He then felt guilty when a hard rap on his cabin door offered distraction.
“What do you—”
Cog opened the door and stepped in.
“Last time I was in here I started telling you a story,” he said perfunctorily.
For a second, Trike had no idea what the man was talking about, then he remembered. It seemed an age ago when Cog had begun to tell him about his brother Janus—Jay “Spatter” Hoop, the pirate.
“I fail to see the relevance of this,” he snapped.
Cog stepped closer, reached out with one fingertip and pushed the blade to one side, peering up at him. “My brother Jay Hoop was like you. You need to hear about the next time I met him.”
Perhaps some other focus could help him keep control; perhaps that was Cog’s intent? Trike reined in his anger.
Focus.
“You told me how you survived the first expedition to Spatterjay and that you revealed everything about the world to your brother,” Trike managed, concentrating on what he remembered. “He went there and did the things he did. But you met him again.”
Cog nodded sharply and stepped away to sit down on the bed, the thing creaking underneath him. “So where to begin?” he said, taking out his pipe and packing it as usual. A long flash from his laser lighter had it smouldering and he sighed out a cloud of smoke. “It was after the war when Earth Central Security suggested I might work with them. I’d been searching for Jay for over fifty years and recently had a run-in with a rather fanatical fella called Sable Keech.”
Trike felt his skin crawling. “The reif?” He then realized that with just a few words Cog had him.
“Yeah, the cop who wouldn’t let death get in the way of his hunt for Jay and his pirates. He was a reified, walking corpse with some serious weapons and a bad attitude. I agreed to meet him for an interview which got intense. He obviously didn’t believe I had no idea where Jay was or that I had no involvement with Jay’s coring trade.”
Cog’s expression was sour at the memory. But then Jay Hoop’s coring trade—the removal of the brains of hoopers and turning them into organic robots with prador control thralls—was the greatest evil committed on their home world. No hooper wanted even a hint of an association with it.
“Shortly after that interview,” Cog continued, “a bomb dropped my grav-car out of the sky and into the side of a mountain. Keech was there, waiting with an old-style grappler to drag me out of the wreckage and insert me in a ceramal coffin. Didn’t work out so well for him.”
“So what happened?”
“I trashed the grappler then stuffed him in his own coffin for a few days while I went off and sorted myself out. You know?”
Trike nodded. Cog had undoubtedly been injured in the crash and needed to repair by eating the right foods for a while. Perhaps he had diluted sprine to use even then.
“When I got back and opened the coffin I had my particle beamer with me. I repeated what I’d told him before and pointed out that it would take very little effort for me to pull the trigger and leave him as a layer of ash in the coffin. Then I left.”
“He accepted that?”
“He had no choice at the time—I broke some essential parts of his reification hardware to slow him down. When I got back to my ship a war drone was waiting there with a deal from EC and thereafter I became an agent of Earth Central Security.”
“What was the deal?” Trike asked, feeling a resurgence of his anger about Cog’s ECS connection, and yet again forcing it away.
“ECS would keep Keech off my back and in return I would work for them. They wanted me to continue what I was doing—hunting for Jay— but with support from the Polity. It seemed good to me.”
“You were still worried about Keech?” he asked.
“He was a worrying person,” said Cog, “but that wasn’t the main reason that hooking up with the Polity seemed a good idea to me—I now had the resources of Polity AIs at my disposal. So I started running searches. I even had one of the ECS AIs assigned to assist me. Meanwhile ECS slipped some information to Keech about one of the pirates—Gosk Balem—who was apparently on Spatterjay.” Cog then fell silent, watching Trike.
Trike realized he was rubbing one thumb along the edge of the machete, slicing through the skin. He stopped himself and put the thing aside. “So, you found Jay . . .”
Cog nodded. He looked sad, but whether about Jay or about what Trike had just been doing, lay open to debate. He continued, “ECS had massive resources but they did not have my insight. They were looking in areas they considered the most likely refuges for someone like Jay, mainly in the Graveyard. I understood my brother’s twisted mind well enough to know the kind of place he’d choose. I searched enclaves within the Polity, communes trying to separate themselves from it, worlds that went the biotech route, places where he could play his games and grow an organization. I found him, in the end, in prison—specifically, aboard a prison ship.”
Trike recollected something about prison ships, then felt a twist in his chest when he remembered it was Ruth who had told him about them. The prador/human war resulted in many damaged people—the term people also ext
ending to cover machines that had gone badly wrong, or quite often had been products of the Polity’s Factory Station Room 101, as the Clade had been. Those troubled people who had committed serious crimes, up to and including homicide, were confined aboard prison ships while forensic AIs sorted out what to do with them. That they weren’t simply put to death indicated a degree of guilt on the part of the AIs—the war had changed these people, and their sins were the result of suffering. The ships were used only for a few brief decades and then closed down. However, some of the criminals, or victims, depending on your inclination, formed a community aboard a remaining ship.
“The prison ship Prosecutor had gone out of communication shortly after one of the residents rose to power. This man, whom they called the Janus—” Cog grimaced—”was described as being a monstrous hooper,unusually tall, strong and utterly crazy. I managed to get hold of an image file of him and recognized him, even though the AI I was working with did not.”
“Did he look like me?” Trike asked.
“No, not as you are now . . .”
Trike nodded tightly, peered at the damage on his thumb and noted that it had healed. He tried not to study his hand too closely. “The story,” he said flatly.
After gazing back at him for a long moment, Cog continued, “EC had been pondering whether to close down the Prosecutor and this information gave it reason for intervention. I went there with a division of Sparkind troopers. When we arrived, we got no response to communication and little reaction when we used a war dock to board the thing. My suit told me the air was good apart from some harmless contaminants. When I opened my visor I found out what they were—the stink of death. The place was a charnel house. Thousands were dead, rotting corpses everywhere. Many had been violently attacked, others were dead in sections deprived of air. A few survivors told the story of how, under Jay’s rule, factional fighting started—how a kind of insanity infected the air. Analysis revealed hallucinogens had been fed into the air processors. Then I discovered what Jay had been doing.”
“What?”
“He’d been coring and thralling humans, only the technology he used didn’t really work very well. I could see that he’d been mimicking what he’d done on Spatterjay—a lot of the people had been infected with the virus. But the thralls he was using weren’t even very good copies of the original prador version. It was like he was trying sympathetic magic.”
“But where was Jay?”
“I found his log in the pit he’d made his home. It illustrated his decline into madness and the steady physical changes he underwent. There was a section too on his intention to return home to his ‘kingdom,’ to go back to his ‘greatest achievements.’”
Trike’s skin was really creeping now and he felt something straining at the door he’d closed in his mind. Was that his future? Would the madness come out again?
“And you pursued him there?” he asked.
“I did, but alone—I didn’t let ECS have the log.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted answers.” Cog shook his head. “He was under a death sentence by ECS, to be enacted immediately. I didn’t like that. I thought they were concealing something.”
“How did he get there?”
“He’d left the ship some weeks earlier in a landing craft. I traced a payment from the ship’s account to a cargo ship heading for Spatterjay and I followed. When I got there a local search revealed the entry of his craft into atmosphere and its crash. A drone found wreckage on one of the islands and a few badly burned corpses. The whole episode was recorded but no further action taken. I took my landing craft down onto the island.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t need to.” Cog opened the stick seam on the front of his suit, took an object out of the top pocket of his shirt and held it up. “I made a copy. Take a look yourself.”
He tossed the object towards Trike, who snatched it from the air. Cog stood up. He gestured to Trike’s cabin console. “There’s a headset there— should still work on you.” He headed for the door.
“Why can’t you just tell me?” Trike asked.
“Because they are memories I would rather not keep in my mind,” Cog replied, then opened the door and left.
Trike’s gaze strayed down to his hand, gripping what he’d recognized as a memtab when Cog tossed it to him. He turned and put the thing down on the wall console, then studied his hand more closely. He could no longer deny what had been evident when he’d had to duck to get into his cabin, or when Cog had needed to crick his neck to look up at him. His hand possessed blue pigmentation throughout. It was bigger, the fingers longer—a corded and tough-looking thing that hardly seemed human. The nails had grown longer too, blackened and folding in at the ends, as well as curving over. More like claws now. He stared at the console’s blank screen. After a moment he said, “Mirror.”
The screen flickered on to show him his reflection. He possessed a brush of black hair but it had grown down the centre of his skull in a Mohican. His face had grown longer, and as blue as his hands, while his eyes had darkened to a deep royal blue. He yawned and his mouth opened much more than seemed feasible. His teeth were separated pegs and looked diseased. He reached up and gave one a light tug. It came out easily with a spill of bloody pus, then something sharp and yellow protruded behind it. Sticking out his tongue, he expected to see its end open in a leech mouth, but instead it quivered, long and black and pointy.
“Weight and body density,” he instructed.
He felt the scan like the cold wash from an air conditioner, then the figures appeared at the bottom of the screen. In retrospect he should have expected this. He had been eating at every opportunity and had no recollection of visiting the head. He snarled at himself and, with popping sounds, other teeth dropped out of his mouth. He spat more bloody pus then examined the result. A curved yellow fang was already in place, growing even as he watched. This was one of the smaller exterior signs of a body that had altered radically overall and now possessed the consistency of spring steel.
“I’m changing,” he said woodenly, then reached down and picked up the memtab Cog had given him. Here were memories excised from the Old Captain’s mind, ones he wanted to forget but felt Trike needed. Did Trike want to know?
6
The earliest direct mind/machine interfaces were introduced in the early twenty-first century. The most notorious of these were military pilots, by dint of the first neural laces, flying anti-insurgent drones during the “oil and religion” conflicts of the time. But this kind of interface between the human mind and a brute machine is not what we mean when we talk about “interfacing” now—we talk about a human mind connected to AI. The most famous case of AI/human interfacing was of course Iversus Skaidon with the Craystein computer, which resulted in runcible technology (and Skaidon’s brain being boiled like a ham). During the corporate wars, prior to the Quiet War, AI-run system ships had interfaced captains to ensure the AI did what it was supposed to do, and the captain would also be ready to seize control should it fail (though this was not real “direct” interfacing). This model was continued after the war and endures now, but AI ships don’t really need human captains. Those who would set humans on a pedestal above AIs claim this is because they need our moral input and some ill-defined quality of the human “soul.” The reality is both simpler and more complex than that. The AIs (well, some of them) style themselves the wardens of humanity and they want us to evolve, upgrade, catch up. Interfacing is just one push in that direction, as are memplants and the transfer of human consciousness to crystal, as well as augs and gridlinks. Direct interfacing between a human mind and AI is still dangerous territory but, with the haimans showing the way, things are improving. And one day we may even crawl out of the ancestral mud and be a match for our masters.
—from How It Is by Gordon
ORLANDINE
She was drowning in the flood. But even as she flailed about, the physical movement keyed into a routine in he
r brain, woke it up, and she began swimming. Soon able to keep herself on the surface, she aimed for a ledge further along. Her hands closed on slimed, laser-cut rock and she slid for a moment, before getting a grip and pulling herself out of the water. She lay panting, naked and cold, but the terror was fading.
After a moment, she heaved herself into a sitting position. She experienced an intense curiosity about her surroundings but could see very little. A few vibration-powered light blisters, scattered haphazardly along the ceiling of the storm drain, emitted only a dim glow. Frustrated by this, she reached over her shoulder and touched the back of her neck, expecting something but not sure what it was. Nothing happened so she concentrated harder. Another routine in her mind awoke and she felt strange movements in her eyes. Then the dimness resolved and she could see everything around her perfectly: the fine lines of the glued joints between each curved slab of rock, the transparent-shelled molluscs clinging in one place like a rash of watery eyes, black pupils shifting, and the degrading coffee cup sliding by. Finally, her gaze came to rest on one slab just above the water line.
There was a strange glyph consisting of dots, spirals and straight lines enclosed in a rhombus. She recognized it and knew it was no human language—following this came the awareness implicit in her mind that she was human, a human female. She looked down at her naked body, touched the smooth skin on her stomach and ran a fingertip over one nipple and shivered both with pleasure and cold. But something did not seem right, because a vague memory stirred of terrible traumatic injury, yet there was none. What next impelled her she did not know, but she slid her hand up to a lump in her skin, just above her collarbone, and pressed it. It split with a sharp pain and spurt of blood, and she watched in panic as material issued forth, sliding over her body. It formed a top, leggings, boots and a belt, and a high collar around her neck. She began to feel warmer and her panic passed as the transparent monomer fabric flickered and clouded to take on a hue. It was mimicking the stone she rested her back against. Chameleonware, she realized—the knowledge surfacing from somewhere deep in her mind.
