Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

I watched as the drones surrounded her, pinioning her arms and legs with their flashing tentacles and jetting with her towards the Interceptor.

  She disappeared into the ship and the hatch slid shut behind her.

  My attention returned to the ramp of my ship, snagged by movement there. Karrie was stirring. Dazed, she raised a gloved hand to her shattered face-plate as she floated above the deck.

  Then she applied thrust, directed herself towards the ship, and hit the entry sensor. A second later she disappeared inside.

  “Karrie…” I tried to get through to her. Still no reply: I assumed the laser blast to her helmet had affected the receiver.

  I cursed Ella for her capitulation, and at the same time felt a welling of strange pride.

  Seconds later I saw sudden movement to my left. I turned, raising my laser, thinking for a terrible second that I had miscalculated and another spider had found me.

  I blinked. Ella was floating across the gulf of space towards me.

  Ella?

  I caught her, feeling her slim form through my padded gloves. “Ella! What the…?”

  She positioned her head before my face-plate and smiled in at me. Christ, but I wanted to kiss her.

  “Ella?” I said incredulously. “You got away?”

  She silenced me with a raised forefinger, pressing it against my face-plate. Her lips described a moue. “Shh,” she said. “Those corpsicles back there, they weren’t criminals or colonists, as you surmised. They were a series of state-of-the-art AIs, proto-types of the series that would become the MT-xia-73 designation.”

  I stared at her. “You?”

  She nodded. “Me. But back then, five years ago, there was a Federation-wide proscription on the manufacture of semi-sentient, self-aware AIs. That didn’t stop Mitsubishi from developing the series, though. This ship was hauling a dozen individuals from the manufactory to Sirius III, where they were to be field tested, when the blow-out happened.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand,” I said, but I was beginning to guess at what had happened.

  Ella said, “Back in the cryo-hold I found a survivor. The only one. I decided I’d go back for her, once we’d sorted out the spiders… but then the bastards captured Karrie and I had an idea.”

  I shook my head in silent wonder.

  “I resuscitated the AI,” she went on. “She was blank, just meat and an inchoate operating system. So I downloaded a doctored copy of myself into her program core –”

  I stopped her. “So the AI who gave herself up in return for Karrie’s release… she’s a version of you?”

  Ella smiled. “A very limited version. She has a fraction of my memory capacity and mentation. But she is me inasmuch as she knows that she had to give herself up to the spiders in order not only to save Karrie, but to save me… herself, in effect.”

  She touched my shoulder, gestured. I turned and followed her gaze. On the plane of decking below, the spiders’ ship rose slowly, turned on its axis, and burned away from the wreck of the Nakamura.

  “The AI is sufficiently me,” Ella went on, “to fool the spiders for a while. The drones will reach the manufactory in around seven days. We have a leeway of that long before Mitsubishi realise they were duped.”

  Laughing like a fool, I hugged her.

  “Come on, Ed. Let’s get back to the ship. Karrie will be wondering what’s happened to us.”

  Karrie was in her sling on the flight-deck when we pulled ourselves through the hatch.

  She stood, elation making her look twenty years younger, and moved across the deck. “Jesus, Ed… What happened? The spiders’ ship just up and left!”

  “It’s a pretty complicated story,” I said. “Ella, why don’t you tell Karrie while I start tractor beaming some of this junk.”

  I slipped into my sling and ordered the smartcore to activate the beam. There were some mighty chunks of machinery out there that would fetch good money on the open market back on Altair III.

  While I worked, I watched Ella as she recounted what had happened, and I smiled to myself.

  When Ella had finished her story, Karrie nodded and said, “Thank you, Ella.” She glanced across at me, sharply. “And what are you smiling at?”

  I waved. “Oh, I was just thinking of the killing we’ll make when we haul this junk back to Altair,” I said. “Okay, tractor beam established?”

  “Affirmative,” Karrie murmured.

  “Then let’s get out of here.”

  “Phasing out,” Ella said, smiling across at me.

  I returned her smile, considering what she had done back there. Karrie had called Ella a selfish, soulless machine, lacking in humanity, but I had no doubts at all. Okay, in rescuing Karrie she had also saved her own skin…

  But if self-preservation isn’t a human motivation, I thought to myself, then what is?

  We phased into the void and headed to Altair III.

  Extraordinary Rendition

  Steve Longworth

  Huang watched impassively as the prisoner transport ship fired its landing rockets and descended silently to the lunar surface.

  Ignoring a spectacular view of the Earth, he turned and walked unhurriedly from the observation deck to the arrivals hall where he stood and waited for his new charge to complete the necessary administrative processes.

  This one was special.

  An automatic door slid silently open. Two heavily-armoured security droids marched up to Huang and stopped in front of him. Manacled between them, dressed in bright orange prison fatigues, was a small, fit-looking, wiry man who managed to maintain an air of dignity despite struggling to cope with the transition from weightlessness to one-sixth earth gravity.

  “Welcome to the Moon, Mister Li.”

  “An actual human being,” said Li. “I was beginning to wonder if the whole place was automated.”

  “As you well know, there are still some things that people can do better than machines,” Huang replied.

  The prisoner looked around him, calmly taking in his surroundings. A faint tang of ozone itched the air.

  “The Moon,” said Li with a nod. “You know, a lot of very powerful people have been at pains to point out that this facility doesn’t exist. The Party goes to enormous lengths to achieve its ends.”

  Huang consulted the sheet of smart plastic in his right hand. Words and images scrolled under his gaze. “You’ve escaped from some of our most secure prisons; you’ve made a real nuisance of yourself.”

  “The Party can’t hold me.”

  “You are here at the will of the people.”

  “I’m here at the will of the Party; The People’s Republic will thrive, but the Party’s doomed,” replied Li in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Huang allowed himself a tight little smile. “Those are propositions we’ll have plenty of time to discuss. Let me show you to your room.”

  As they left the arrivals hall, the transport ship launched for the return journey to Earth. The prisoner party walked in near silence through nondescript windowless corridors, the only sounds being the air circulators and the servomotors of the droids. They stopped in front of a door that opened when Huang placed his palm against the ident-panel. The small group stepped inside. At a gesture from Huang one of the droids released Li from its manacle and stepped out into the corridor, taking a position directly facing the door.

  “Make yourself at home,” said Huang, stepping back into the corridor himself. He touched the panel again. The door closed and became transparent, a sophisticated version of a one-way mirror. Inside, the second droid released its manacle and stepped backwards into a corner of the cell. Li rubbed his wrists and walked around his new accommodation, taking in the bed, the table, the chair, the small cupboard and the toilet. He stopped in front of the opaque door, raised his right hand and waved. On the other side of the door Huang smiled, turned, and walked back down the corridor.

  They did not meet again for two weeks, a deliberate tactic and all part of the standard soft
ening-up process. Huang realised it was pointless in this instance, but if unsuccessful he did not want to be vulnerable to criticism from disappointed superiors.

  Huang stood outside Li’s cell, watching through the one-way-mirror door. Li was performing a Tai Chi exercise routine. During the last fortnight the prisoner had spent much time meditating and exercising.

  The lights never went off inside the cell; the temperature varied randomly, never allowing the body to acclimatise, and meals were served at irregular intervals. There were no books or other distractions. All these measures were designed to disorientate, but they were wasted on Li, and Huang knew it.

  At a signal from the controls embedded in Huang’s smartsheet the droid in Li’s cell walked over to the exercising prisoner and manacled his hands behind his back. Li made a small startled movement as the droid abruptly sprang into action, but almost instantly recovered his poise.

  Satisfied that Li was appropriately restrained, Huang opened the cell door and the droid from the corridor strode in carrying a simple upright chair, which was placed on one side of the small table. Huang sat. The other droid prodded Li to sit in the chair opposite. The men faced each other, less than a metre apart, but divided by a void large enough to swallow the solar system. Their eyes met; the inscrutable versus the impenetrable. Li spoke first.

  “This is illegal. I have been kidnapped, subjected to extraordinary rendition, tortured and abused. I demand to be tried or released.” He spoke calmly and without rancour.

  “Tell me what I need to know and you can go,” said Huang.

  Li gave a thin smile.

  “Of course,” he replied. Then said nothing.

  They sat there in silence for another five minutes, after which Huang rose and without another word left the cell. The droid followed him out, carrying the extra chair.

  Three days later Huang returned. This time Li was asleep, and so the droid in his cell woke him, applied the manacles and brought him to the table. The men sat staring at each other in silence until Li asked, “Is this it?”

  Huang remained silent.

  “No waterboarding? No psychoprobe? No ‘truth serum’?”

  “What would you have done?” asked Huang.

  “I wouldn’t have let me escape, for a start,” replied Li.

  “You were good,” said Huang.

  “I was the best.”

  Huang nodded, slowly. He consulted the smartsheet. “Says here that during your previous sojourns with us on Earth you withstood every known form of interrogation. I guess that’s not too surprising, seeing that you invented many of them.”

  “Oh, believe me, I was good, very good at your job, but even I wouldn’t have cracked me. You’re wasting your time. Every technique you intend to utilise has been anticipated. You’ll kill me before you break me.”

  Huang didn’t doubt this. The scrolling characters described how his predecessors had almost killed Li twice before, once while waterboarding him and once with the psychoprobe.

  “We’ll see,” said Huang.

  Their conversation continued, weeks turning into months.

  When not questioning Li, Huang occupied himself with the interrogation of the other elite prisoners and the management of The People’s Number One Deep Space Lunar Observatory, an establishment that doubled as a prominent projection of Chinese scientific prowess and a cover for the secret prison. The scientific aspect of the facility was mostly automated and required little hands-on input from its single human operative. The giant optical and infrared telescopes and cosmic ray detectors produced astounding images from the edge of the visible universe; the edge of time. Huang, with his firmly imbedded cultural sense of veneration for his ancestors, was impressed and deeply moved by the sight of the ancient cosmos. The astronomers from the School of Aerospace at Tsinghua University told him that through the instruments he was seeing the Universe as it was thirteen billion years ago, 380,000 years after the Big Bang. It was impossible to see back any further in time, as prior to this the Universe was an opaque plasma of superheated fundamental particles. The Chinese cosmologists pooled their observations with the data from the American, European and Indo-Arabian lunar observatories to produce composite images of astonishing beauty and clarity. Under their patient, combined scrutiny, the whole universe would eventually surrender its structure and origin.

  Meanwhile, Huang’s interrogation of Li made no headway at all.

  Their sessions sometimes lasted for days at a time, Huang bolstered by anti-fatigue endorphins. Then there would be long gaps when Li was left on his own for days or weeks while Huang studied the recordings of their interviews from the array of surveillance devices hidden in Li’s room, compiling and submitting reports to his superiors, all the while searching for a way past Li’s formidable defences.

  Huang’s superiors asked why he had decided against physical torture. He told them that this was not because torture offended his sensibilities, but because it was unreliable. In his experience, the subject would tell you whatever they thought you wanted to hear in order to make you stop.

  Besides, he wasn’t a sadist, he was a technician; and Li was his biggest technical challenge to date.

  “Why the Moon?” asked Li.

  They had been in intermittent, intimate conversation for over three months. During that time Huang felt they had started to build a grudgingly respectful relationship; two grand masters of their dark art, pitted against each other in a painfully slow combat.

  Huang allowed himself a small, grim, internal moment of satisfaction. He had analysed their interviews and read Li’s file over and over, looking for a potential weakness, and he thought he’d identified one: curiosity. Not surprising, really, from the man who was formerly his organisation’s most effective interrogator. Huang ignored the question. He would take it away with him, explore the implications, see if he could fashion a tool to get underneath Li’s skin.

  “Why did you do it?” asked Huang.

  Li leaned back in his chair and nodded at the tabletop.

  “You’ve read the file.”

  “Yes, but it’s bullshit.”

  Li simply grunted.

  “You had the ear of the Politburo. You had immense power. Your thoughts mattered. You were a Party man to your fingertips, Li. Then you suddenly developed a liberal conscience? You threw away everything for the sake of – what? I don’t get it.”

  Li leaned forward again.

  “I grew sick of it: the hypocrisy, the corruption, the criminal stupidity, the indifference; the monumental incompetence that perpetuated the mess I was supposed to help to clear up. It eventually dawned on me exactly what I was working so hard to protect: greedy, self-serving interests that would stop at nothing to maintain the status quo.”

  This was good. He was talking now, anger straining at the leash of his self-control.

  “Go on…”

  “Look at Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, to name but three. What did we do? We promised them help. We sent in experts to assess their industrial and domestic power needs and then we offered them loans to pay for the construction of the necessary infrastructure. ‘Don’t worry,’ we said, ‘once you have a modern economy up and running you will be able to pay us back in no time’. But we deliberately overestimated their needs then billed them for massively redundant oversupply. They had no chance of paying, even if their economy had worked as well as we forecast. When they defaulted on their loans we demanded payment in kind; sites for military bases, mineral rights, their vote at the UN, exclusive contracts for our companies to build all their future infrastructure and rent it back to them at extortionate cost. We enslaved them. We didn’t need to invade.” Li closed his eyes and tilted up his head. “‘The greatest conqueror is he who overcomes the enemy without a blow’.”

  Huang nodded in approval; Sun Tzu, from The Art Of War.

  Li opened his eyes again. “No need to invade Hong Kong, we simply waited for the British lease to expire. We learned the dangers of impatience
from watching the American debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no need for physical force. We manacle our victims with debt instead. We recruit their own wealthy elites and make them wealthier, give them a massive stake in our hegemony, just like the ancient Romans when they conquered the known world, just like the decadent Westerners who controlled the African slave trade. There’s no difference between the People’s Republic and the Triads, except that we do it on a bigger scale and reward our people with government contracts and celebrity.”

  “‘It is forbidden to steal, therefore all thieves are punished, unless they steal vast quantities to the sound of the Shanghai Stock Exchange bell’,” paraphrased Huang.

  “Very good,” said Li, “I’m sure that’s exactly what Voltaire would have said if he’d lived in our era.”

  “And you really believe that you can change this? Which planet are you on?” As soon as the last words slipped out of his mouth Huang realised the unintended dark irony. “But this is how the world has always worked. No one consciously created this system. It evolved, emerged. You know about chaos theory? Complexity emerges from apparently simple initial starting conditions.”

  Ordered complexity emerging from chaotic simplicity; Huang thought about the images from the edge of space and time being collected by the giant instruments above their head.

  “The methodology is implicit,” he continued, “almost impregnable in its informality, its strength being its tacit nature. Those who wield power know how the world really works, the critical difference between what everyone agrees is supposed to happen and what actually does happen. This has been the way all throughout history. Even the so-called great democracies are simply elected dictatorships in thrall to the powerful vested interests that control the world’s economy. In The West the same people circulate through the top jobs in government, the military industries and the international banks; a corporatocracy.”

  “And where is the difference from our Politburo?” retorted Li, angrily. “Why does nobody notice? Because the same interests also control the media. The Party’s greatest success has been to emulate rampant capitalism while at the same time denouncing it as flawed and decadent.”