The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  True to his word, the image the delegation received when they accessed the sensor was pallid, the colour almost nonexistent. All they saw was a small blank disc slide out of the electronic module, positioning itself over the encapsulated eye. Some iconic overlay digits twisted past, meaningless.

  “That’s it,” Mattox announced.

  The First Admiral cancelled his channel with the processor. The clean room’s window turned transparent again, in time to catch the disc retract back into the electronic module.

  Gilmore faced the AV lens. “Junior, can you hear me?” The lens’s diminutive sparkle remained constant.

  Mattox received a datavise from the construct’s monitoring probes.

  “Brainwave functions have collapsed,” he said. “And the synaptic discharges are completely randomized.”

  “What about memory retention?” Gilmore queried.

  “Probably around thirty to thirty-five per cent. I’ll run a complete neurological capacity scan once it’s stabilized.” The CNIS science team members smiled round at each other.

  “That’s good,” Gilmore said. “That’s damn good. Best percentage yet.”

  “Meaning?” the First Admiral asked.

  “There are no operative thought patterns left in there. Junior has stopped thinking. The bitek is just a store for memory fragments.”

  “Impressive,” Mae Ortlieb said reflectively. “So what’s your next stage?”

  “We’re not sure,” Gilmore said. “I have to admit, the potential for this thing is frightening. Our idea is to use it as a threat to force the souls away from their interface with this universe.”

  “If it works on souls themselves,” Jeeta Anwar pointed out.

  “That prospect is bringing about a whole range of new problems,” Gilmore conceded cheerlessly.

  “Let me guess,” Samual said. “If anti-memory is used on a possessed, you will also erase the host’s memories, and destroy their soul.”

  “It seems likely,” Euru said. “We know a host’s mind is still contained within their brain while the possessing soul retains control of the body. The host’s reappearance after zero-tau immersion forces the possessor out proves that.”

  “So, anti-memory cannot be used on an individual basis?”

  “Not without killing the host’s soul as well, no sir.”

  “Will this version work in the beyond?” Samual asked sharply.

  “I doubt it would ever get through to the beyond,” Mattox said. “At present, it’s too slow and inefficient. It managed to dissipate Junior’s thought processes; but as you saw, it didn’t get all the memories. The areas of the mind which are not employed when the anti-memory strikes are likely to be insulated from it as the thought channels which would ordinarily connect them are nullified. If you analogise the mind with a city, you’re destroying the roads and leaving the buildings intact. Given that the connection a possessing soul has with the beyond is tenuous at best, there is no guarantee the anti-memory would manage to pass through in its current form. We must develop a much faster version.”

  “But you don’t know for sure?”

  “No sir. These are estimations and theories. We won’t know if a version works until after it’s proved successful.”

  “The trouble with that is, a successful anti-memory would exterminate every soul in the beyond,” Euru said quietly.

  “Is that true?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gilmore said. “That’s our dilemma. There can be no small scale test or demonstration. Anti-memory is effectively a doomsday weapon.”

  “You’ll never get the souls to believe that,” Lalwani said. “In fact, given what we know of conditions in the beyond, you wouldn’t even get many of them to pay attention to the warning.”

  “I cannot conceivably permit the use of a weapon which will exterminate billions of human entities,” the First Admiral said. “You have to provide me with alternative options.”

  “But Admiral—”

  “No. I’m sorry, Doctor. I know you’ve worked hard on this, and I appreciate the effort you and your team have made. Nobody is more aware than myself of just how extreme the threat which the possessed present. But even that cannot justify such a response.”

  “Admiral! We’ve explored every option we can think of. Every theorist I’ve got in every scientific discipline there is has been working on ideas and wild theories. We even tried an exorcism after that priest on Lalonde claimed his worked. Nothing. Nothing else has come close to being viable. This is the only progress we have made.”

  “Doctor, I’m not denigrating your work or your commitment. But surely you can see this is completely unacceptable. Morally, ethically, it is wrong.

  It cannot be anything other than wrong. What you are suggesting is racial genocide. I will tell you this, the authorization to use such a monstrosity will never come from my lips. Nor I suspect, and hope, would any other Navy officer issue it. Now find me another solution. This project is terminated.”

  The First Admiral’s staff ran a quiet sweepstake to see how long it would be before President Haaker datavised for a conference, the winner called it in at ninety-seven minutes. They sat facing each other across the oval table in a security-level-one sensenviron bubble room. Both kept their generated faces neutral and intonations level.

  “Samual, you can’t cancel the anti-memory project,” the President opened with. “It’s all we’ve got.”

  In his office, Samual Aleksandrovich smiled at the way Haaker used his first name, the man always did that when he was going to adopt a totally intransigent line. “Apart from the Mortonridge Liberation, you mean?” He could imagine the tight lips drawn at that jibe.

  “As you so kindly pointed out earlier, the Liberation is not a solution to the overall problem. Anti-memory is.”

  “Undoubtedly. Too final. Look, I don’t know if Mae and Jeeta explained this fully to you, but the research team believe it would exterminate every soul in the beyond. You can’t seriously consider that.”

  “Samual, those souls you’re so concerned about are attempting to enslave every one of us. I have to say I’m surprised by your attitude. You’re a military man, you know that war is the result of total irrationality combined with conflict of interest. This crisis is the supreme example of both. The souls desperately want to return, and we cannot allow them to. They will extinguish the human race if they succeed.”

  “They will ruin almost everything we have accomplished. But total life extinction, no. I don’t even believe they can possess all of us. The Edenists have proved remarkably resistant; and the spread has all but stopped.”

  “Yes, thanks to your quarantine. It’s been a successful policy, I won’t deny that. But so far we’ve been unable to offer anything that can reverse what’s happened. And that’s what the vast majority of the Confederation population want. Actually, that’s what they insist upon. The spread might have slowed, but it hasn’t stopped. You know that as well as I do. And the quarantine is difficult to enforce.”

  “You really don’t understand what you’re proposing, do you. There are billions of souls there. Billions.”

  “And they are living in torment. For whatever reason, they cannot move on as this Laton character claimed is possible. Don’t you think they’d welcome true death?”

  “Some of them might. I probably would. But neither you nor I have the right to decide that for them.”

  “They forced us into this position. They’re the ones invading us.”

  “That does not give us the right to exterminate them. We have to find a way to help them; by doing that we help ourselves. Can you not see that?”

  The President abandoned his image’s impartiality and leant forwards, his voice becoming earnest. “Of course I can see that. Don’t try to portray me as some kind of intransigent villain here. I’ve supported you, Samual, because I know nobody can command the Navy better than you. And I’ve been rewarded by that support. So far we’ve kept on top of the political situation, kept t
he hotheads in line. But it can’t last forever.

  Sometime, somehow, a solution is going to have to be presented to the Confederation as a whole. And all we’ve got so far is one solitary possible answer: the anti-memory. I cannot permit you to abandon that, Samual. These are very desperate times; we have to consider everything, however horrific it appears.”

  “I will never permit such a thing to be used. For all they are different, the souls are human. I am sworn to protect life throughout the Confederation.”

  “The order to use it would not be yours to give. A weapon like that never falls within the prerogative of the military. It belongs to us, the politicians you despise.”

  “Disapprove of. Occasionally.” The First Admiral permitted a slight smile to show.

  “Keep on searching, Samual. Bully Gilmore and his people into finding a decent solution, a humanitarian one. I want that as much as you do. But they are to continue to develop the anti-memory in parallel.”

  There was a pause. Samual knew that to refuse now would mean Haaker issuing an official request through his office. Which in turn would make his position as First Admiral untenable. That was the stark choice on offer.

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  President Haaker gave a tight smile, and datavised his processor to cancel the meeting, safe in the knowledge that their oh-so diplomatic clash would be known to no one.

  The encryption techniques which provided a security-level-one conference were, after all, known to be unbreakable. The most common statistic quoted by security experts was that every AI in the Confederation running in parallel would be unable to crack the code in less than five times the life of the universe. It would, therefore, have proved quite distressing to the CNIS secure communications division (as well as their ESA and B7 equivalents, among others) to know that a perfect replica of a 27-inch 1980’s Sony Trinitron colour television was currently showing the image of the First Admiral and the Assembly President to an audience of fifteen attentive duomillenarians and one highly inattentive ten-year-old girl.

  Tracy Dean sighed in frustration as the picture vanished to a tiny phosphor dot in the middle of the screen. “Well, that’s gone and put the cat amongst the pigeons, and no mistake.”

  Jay was swinging her feet about while she sat on a too-high stool. As well as being their main social centre, the clubhouse catered for the retired Kiint observers who weren’t quite up to living by themselves in a chalet anymore. A huge airy building, with wide corridors and broad archways opening into sunlit rooms that all seemed to resemble hotel lounges. The walls were white plaster, with dark-red tile floors laid everywhere. Big clay pots growing tall palms were a favourite. Tiny birds with bright gold and scarlet bodies and turquoise membrane wings flittered in and out through the open windows, dodging the purple provider globes. The whole theme of the clubhouse was based around comfort. There were no stairs or steps, only ramps; chairs were deeply cushioned; even the food extruded by the universal providers, no matter what type, was soft, requiring little effort to chew.

  The first five minutes walking through the building had been interesting.

  Tracy showed her round, introducing her to the other residents, all of whom were quite spry despite their frail appearance. Of course they were all very happy to see her, making a fuss, patting her head, winking fondly, telling her how nice her new dress was, suggesting strangely named biscuits, sweets and ice creams they thought she’d enjoy. They didn’t move much from their lounge chairs; contenting themselves with watching events around the Confederation and nostalgic programmes from centuries past.

  Jay and Tracy wound up in the lounge with the big TV for half the afternoon, while the residents argued over what channel to watch. They flipped through real-time secret governmental and military conferences, alternating those with a show called “Happy Days,” which they all cackled along to in synchronisation with the brash laughter track. Even the original commercial breaks were showing. Jay smiled in confusion at the archaic unfunny characters, and kept sneaking glances out of the window.

  For the last three days she’d played on the beach with the games the universal providers had extruded; swam, gone for long walks along the sand and through the peaceful jungle behind the beach. The meals had easily been as good as the ones in Tranquillity. Tracy had even got her a processor block with an AV lens that was able to pick up Confederation entertainment shows, which she watched for a few hours every evening. And Richard Keaton had popped in a couple of times to see how she was getting on. But, basically, she was fed-up. Those planets hanging so invitingly in the sky above were a permanent temptation, a reminder that things in the Kiint home system were a bit more active than the human beach.

  Tracy caught her wistful gaze once and patted her hand. “Cultural differences,” she said confidentially as the mortified Fonz received his army draft papers. “You have to understand the decade before you understand the humour.”

  Jay nodded wisely, and wondered just when she’d be allowed to see Haile again. Haile was a lot more fun than the Fonz. Then they’d flicked stations to the First Admiral and the President.

  “Corpus will have to intervene now,” one of the other residents said, a lady called Saska. “That anti-memory could seep outside the human spectrum. Then there’d be trouble.”

  “Corpus won’t,” Tracy replied. “It never does. What is, is. Remember?”

  “Check your references,” another woman said. “Plenty of races considered deploying similar weapons when they encountered the beyond. We’ve got records of eighteen being used.”

  “That’s awful. What happened?”

  “They didn’t work very well. Only a moderate percentage of the inverse transcendent population were eliminated. There’s too much pattern distortion among the inverses to conduct an anti-memory properly. No species has ever developed one that operates fast enough to be effective. Such things cannot be considered a final solution by any means.”

  “Yes but that idiot Haaker won’t know that until after it’s been tried,” Galic, one of the men, complained. “We can’t possibly allow a human to die, not even an inverse. No human has ever died.”

  “We’ve suffered a lot though,” a resentful voice muttered.

  “And they’ll start dying on the removed worlds soon enough.”

  “I tell you, Corpus won’t intervene.”

  “We could appeal,” Tracy said. “At the very least we could ask for an insertion at the anti-memory project to monitor its development. After all, if anyone’s going to come up with an anti-memory fast enough to devastate the beyond, it’ll be our weapons-mad race.”

  “All right,” Saska said. “But we’ll need a quorum before we can even get the appeal up to an executive level.”

  “As if that’ll be a problem,” Galic said.

  Tracy smiled mischievously. “And I know of someone who’s perfectly suited to this particular insertion.” Several groans were issued across the lounge.

  “Him?”

  “Far too smart for his own good, if you ask me.”

  “No discipline.”

  “We never ran observer operations like that.”

  “Cocky little bugger.”

  “Nonsense,” Tracy said briskly. She put her arm round Jay. “Jay likes him, don’t you, Jay?”

  “Who?”

  “Richard.”

  “Oh.” Jay held up Prince Dell; for some unexplainable reason she hadn’t managed to abandon the bear in her room. “He gave me this,” she announced to the lounge at large.

  Tracy laughed. “There you go then. Arnie, you prepare the appeal, you’re best acquainted with the minutiae of Corpus protocol procedures.”

  “All right.” One of the men raised his hands in gruff submission. “I suppose I can spare the time.”

  The TV was switched back on, playing the signature tune for “I Love Lucy.” Tracy pulled a face, and took Jay’s hand. “Come on, poppet, I think you’re quite bored enough already.”

 
“Who’s the Corpus?” Jay asked as they walked through the front entrance and into the sharp sunlight. There was a black iron penny-farthing bicycle mounted on a stone pedestal just outside. The first time Jay had seen it, she’d taken an age to work out how people were supposed to ride it.

  “Corpus isn’t a who, exactly,” Tracy said. “It’s more like the Kiint version of an Edenist Consensus. Except, it’s sort of a philosophy as well as a government. I’m sorry, that’s not a very good explanation, is it?”

  “It’s in charge, you mean?”

  Tracy’s hesitation was barely noticeable. “Yes, that’s right. We have to obey its laws. And the strongest of all is non-intervention. The one which Haile broke to bring you here.”

  “And you’re worried about this anti-memory weapon thing?”

  “Badly worried, though everyone is trying not to show it. That thing could cause havoc if it gets released into the beyond. We really can’t allow that to happen, poppet. Which is why I want Richard sent to Trafalgar.”

  “Why?”

  “You heard what they were saying. He lacks discipline.” She winked.

  Tracy led her back to the circle of ebony marble above the beach. Jay had seen several of them dotted around the cluster of chalets, including a couple in the clubhouse itself. A few times she’d even seen the black spheres blink into existence and deposit somebody. Once she’d actually scampered on to a circle herself, closing her eyes and holding her breath. But nothing had happened. She guessed you needed to datavise whatever control processor they used.

  Tracy stopped at the edge of the circle, and held up a finger to Jay.

  “Someone to see you,” she said.

  A black sphere materialized. Then Haile was standing there, half-formed arms waving uncertainly.

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