The Departure

by Neal Asher

  Grow up. For Christ sake, grow up!

  “I have attained my first goal,” he said emotionlessly. “I now know who I am, so it is time for me to attain my next goal.” His face showed extreme emotion, raw hate. “Now I must show these fuckers they’ve really made an enemy.”

  “How?”

  When he told her how, she wondered where the hell that idea had come from. He studied her with fevered intensity, perhaps waiting for her to declare him insane, but usual definitions of sanity did not apply to the person he had once been and probably did not apply to the person he was now. She considered what he had told her about this artificial intelligence on Govnet. He’d mentioned a name, Janus, which was revealing in itself. In light of her own research, and what she knew of his previous work, she could see where this inevitably had to go.

  “You are incomplete,” she said, her voice catching. “And once complete you’ll be much more able to do what you want.”

  “I know that, but it’s still not going to stop me.”

  He didn’t know. He just had no idea of what was possible…Then, again, he had come looking for her first even though, from his point of view, she was merely a footnote to his main goal, just a way to learn about his past. Belatedly she wondered if his older self had prepared his present mind for this, impelled him to go after the one person who could give him the tools to bring his plan—his vengeance—to fruition. Yet she had once known that other self so intimately, and this seemed too cold and cruel a calculation, even for him.

  “I’m not talking about what memories or what portions of your mind you’ve lost.” She took a firmer grip on her emotions, wiped her face shakily. “I’m talking about what it’s possible for you to become.”

  “Become?”

  Hannah paused, suddenly horrified with herself, then after a moment continued, “I was currently working on a full organic interface of the human mind with an internal computer, and thence with computer networks. Unfortunately that interface, the new cerebral computer and software, are still back at the cell complex.”

  She explained further, and it seemed like her words just plugged themselves into his brain like programming patches, yet did nothing to slow down the impetus of something unstoppable. He frightened her at an almost visceral level because of his capabilities, even with his mind fractured, damaged. However, the thought of once again falling into the hands of the Inspectorate frightened her even more, for even here in this damp underground bunker she was experiencing a freedom of thought and expression not previously allowed her, never allowed since the moment the first community political officer had told her to carefully watch her parents and report any incorrect behaviour.

  “I have to go back, then,” he concluded.

  “Yes, perhaps,” she agreed, wondering what price she was prepared to pay for her own continuing freedom and survival.

  “The Inspectorate won’t be expecting that,” he noted, whilst carrying out the prosaic task of pouring hot water from a kettle. “But still it’s a risky venture. My plan will require substantial revision.”

  She felt a scream of laughter rising in her chest. Risky venture? He’d just broken her out of Inspectorate HQ London, slaughtering most of the staff in the process. Yet, even so, he obviously wanted what she had to offer. Was it because of that ghostly memory of who he had once been, of the powerful intelligence that lay wrecked inside his skull? Was it the promise of turning his mind into something post-human, superhuman, that tightened his expression into something dangerously predatory? Maybe it was more complicated than that. Maybe his old self wanted to live again, and this was the nearest it could get to him, out of the land of the dead.

  “The artificial intelligence is the key,” Hannah told him. “They would only allow me just small portions of the comlife presently being developed, and it works every time—for a little while at least. And if this Janus is capable of penetrating government security like you’ve just demonstrated, then it’s far in advance of anything I knew about.” She used some of the tea he’d just made her to wash down another painkiller. The ache in her leg was not so bad now—it just felt like she’d bashed it against the edge of a desk.

  “You’ve had people connect up?” he asked. “Fully?”

  Her tea was just as she liked it: strong with two sugars. It bothered her that somehow he had remembered this small fact, yet nothing else about her.

  “Yeah but, with the comlife they allowed me, it was like trying to direct-link laptops using different computer languages. Janus is almost certainly like all the other comlife you created: an almost direct synaptic copy of your own mind.”

  “Alan Saul lives again?”

  “No, there should be no memories there…unless you did something no one knows about while you were a free agent. But you claimed Janus activated at about the same time you woke up in that crate?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s…odd.”

  “Perhaps Janus just initiated before but wasn’t conscious, and then started searching for the coded signal from the hardware you installed inside my head?”

  She nodded. It could be that his earlier self had prepared the AI just before his capture, and that it found him only after the guards removed him from the interrogation cell, perhaps when his brain re-engaged with the processor lodged in his skull. However, she felt a horrible intimation: perhaps Saul had connived at his own capture, knowing that he needed to become something else, and that only by destroying what he already was could he…no, no, that way lay madness.

  “You’ll go alone?” she asked.

  “Far too risky to take you back there,” he replied.

  She didn’t quite manage to hide her relief.

  ***

  It now being night-time, diode lamps bathed the cell complex in an unforgiving glare. Between the security fences where the mastiffs had once patrolled, leggy, bunched-up steel shapes squatted—spiderguns at rest. The inner areas now swarmed with Inspectorate investigators, and from the surrounding mess, Saul assumed they’d only just managed to get the readerguns offline. With thin plastic-film overalls covering their clothes, workers were identifying corpses, scooping them into body bags, then loading them on to electric carts to be conveyed to nearby ambulances. The crowd here was good cover, because one more investigator on the scene would be of no particular note. Also, since they’d yet to unscramble the mess Janus had made of their system, they wouldn’t have figured out who had entered or left during this incident, so no one would be particularly wanting to interrogate Avram Coran. Abandoning his car in the internal car park, he acquired a transvan, drove it over to Cell Block A7 and reversed up to the doors, beside an enforcer’s armoured car.

  “What’s the situation now?” he asked.

  “All security is offline and all the computers down,” Janus replied. “They had to shut everything down just to stop the readerguns.”

  Good. Confusion was just what he needed. He climbed out of the transvan.

  “You two,” he pointed to two of the Inspectorate enforcers outside the doors, “come with me.”

  The things Hannah really needed could be fitted into his briefcase: namely the secondary processor and implant hardware enclosed in a cylinder lit with LEDs to show they were powered up and running interface software; also the organic interface, which resided in a container the size of a cigarette packet—again under power but this time to keep the scrap of semi-organic tissue frozen. However, she had drawn up a secondary list of surgical items, and they would fill up a crate like the one Smith had dispatched him in to the incinerator. It took about half an hour to get this stuff loaded, and just as he headed for Transvan Gate Two, an Inspectorate forensics van, trailed by an Inspectorate limousine, passed him heading in the other direction. He guessed there would be some delay whilst they sorted out how they were going to conduct their investigation, so hopefully it would be a little while before someone got round to mentioning that an Inspectorate officer had already removed certain items from th
e scene.

  On through the gate and out, then into the nearest tunnel. He parked in the underpass where previously he had made the second vehicle change, fifty kilometres from the burnt-out van he’d used in order to get Hannah out. Even though not precisely following the previous route, he was now using the same vehicles a second time, and this worried him. Before moving the crate over to the car, he ran his scanner over it, and found it loaded with trackers, so he just took off the lid and spilled it and its contents out the back of the van, knowing that the whole lot would be spread out among the indigents of the sprawl by the time the Inspectorate even started looking. However, the only trackers he found on the essential items were fixed on their containers and therefore easy to dispose of. Fortunately the items themselves were aseptically sealed, ready for surgical implantation.

  By early morning he reached the bunker where Hannah, having only just roused from his bed, greeted him wearily.

  “You did it,” she observed.

  He dropped the briefcase on the worktop and pulled out the objects she had requested.

  “Is that all?”

  “Too many trackers on the other stuff,” he said. “We’ll have to acquire it from elsewhere.”

  She looked disappointed, but seemed to shrug it off and move on. “That means we’ll need equipment from a high-tech surgery.” She scanned her surroundings and frowned. “Preferably the use of a high-tech surgical theatre.”

  “Mobile black hospital.”

  She nodded in agreement, which surprised him. How could she have learned about such illegal concerns from her prison?

  “Problem,” Janus abruptly warned him.

  “What sort of problem?”

  Hannah looked at him oddly, but he pointed a finger at his bonefone, and she nodded in understanding. Janus did not reply; all he got was a fizzing noise from the fone.

  Of course, it had all been too damned easy. He grabbed up a scanner from the work top and ran it over himself. Nothing, so what had he missed? They must have worked out what happened to Avram Coran and been tracking him by satellite the moment he departed the cell complex—he could see no other possibility. He abruptly stepped over to the two screens allowing him a view outside. The agricultural security net was offline and most of his own cams were now down, the screen becoming a patchwork of fizzing squares with only a few clear views. He realized the clear views came from cams with direct fibre-optic links, but they were enough. One big aero had landed in a nearby field and another was still descending. Inspectorate enforcers were pouring from the first and heading across directly to the old beet storage bay.

  “We’ve got trouble,” he said, gazing at the screen disbelievingly, the evidence before his eyes not yet really impacting.

  “Oh, Christ.” Hannah’s voice was full of weary pain.

  “They’re using EM blocking, and have knocked out the agricultural network here,” he observed. “I can’t talk to Janus.” He abruptly felt a strange sense of loss, not remembering ever having gone without the voice of Janus in his ear…never in all his two-year lifespan.

  “We’re dead,” said Hannah.

  He turned to study her. “I might be, but they’ll sacrifice anything at all in order to take you alive.” Simple fact of life: while she was close to him they’d use ionic stunners which didn’t have a great range, maybe disablers or gas, but they certainly wouldn’t be firing live rounds. His mind abruptly kicked into gear again and he jerked round to gaze down at the open briefcase, then after a moment he walked over to a cupboard standing against one wall, took out a package and returned to drop it into the case.

  “An optigate?” Hannah enquired, eyeing the box as he slammed the case shut.

  “More specifically: a teragate optic socket with skin port and inert fibre-grid exterior.”

  “For installing in a human body.”

  He nodded. They used such ports for access to cerebral computers employed to replace function and control stem-cell regrowth in the severely brain-damaged. It was twenty-second-century medicine.

  “But where?” she asked.

  He tapped his temple where the control for his internal computer resided. “We haven’t enough time for me to explain now.” He turned and headed towards his weapons cache. She followed him over, and watched while he donned a bulletproof jacket, belted on an automatic still in its holster, shouldered the strap of an assault rifle, then loaded ammo and grenades into a backpack, though reserving some of the latter for his pockets. He slipped the briefcase and its precious components in too.

  “Do you know how to use any of this?” He waved a hand towards the weapons.

  “I know, but I’ve never done so.”

  “You came with me,” he said, “but how long are you prepared to stay with me?”

  “For as long as it takes. I’m not going back.”

  She pulled on a bulletproof jacket, then selected a light, short assault rifle and plenty of ammunition. She also took up a couple of press-button grenades and put them in her pocket.

  “Where now?” she asked.

  “We go down.”

  After he’d managed to get things set up in the bunker just as he wanted, and begun formulating the detail of his plan, he had found physical activity a welcome distraction, so had often spent time clearing rubble out of the escape tunnel. At the end of the tunnel he found only bare earth, checked the position of that point on GPS, then dug towards a particular location, sealing the earth walls all along the way behind him with a spray of fibre bonding. His tunnel exited about a hundred metres away from the bunker, through the side of a drainage dyke, and just another few metres from a wide underground pipe.

  As Hannah went ahead of him, down the stairs to the lower floor, he felt really reluctant to leave. So much work, so much equipment—and a home of his own. He would have had to abandon it at some point, but hadn’t expected it so early in the game. Saul stepped over to one of the computer consoles to input the code detaching the whole system from the surrounding agricultural network, then input another code, whereupon a number of things happened simultaneously. A proximity explosive activated under the entrance hatch, the computer began scrubbing data and overwriting with nonsense, time and time again, and a three-minute countdown began to trigger detonators within the Hyex laminate buried in the bunker walls, and along the walls of the tunnel below. He took one last regretful look around, then followed Hannah downstairs.

  A steel door closed off the entrance to the tunnel. He now unlocked and opened it, pointing his assault rifle inside, just in case the cam images he had seen from down here had in some way been subverted. Nobody home, thankfully, but then they wouldn’t have had time to do seismic scanning here, so hopefully only knew that he’d descended into a hole in the ground. He moved ahead, rifle braced against his shoulder constantly and his nerves on edge. Fragmented memories surfaced of what happened to him the last time the Inspectorate had got him in its tender care, so the weight of the grenades in his pockets was a comforting one. Whether they took Hannah alive, he left up to her, but they certainly would not be capturing him.

  The tunnel curved round, lined with concrete until they entered the freshly dug section, where the walls now looked to be made of fibreglass. He then caught a whiff of something: a perfume-like smell that was characteristic of some insecticides.

  “Gas! Run!”

  As they hurtled ahead, he could feel the knockout gas starting to haze everything. Soon they reached the exit hatch, where he fought a growing lethargy whilst undogging it. He thrust it open and hauled himself out on to a muddy slope, then had to reach back inside and drag out Hannah, who seemed unable to control her limbs. He slammed the hatch shut.

  They lay gasping on the bank, clearing the gas from their lungs, but their limbs still heavy as if they had just woken from a deep sleep.

  “Come on, movement’ll clear it quicker.”

  Sliding down the bank, they ended up to their knees in water choked with sickly yellow silkweed, then waded alo
ng the V-shaped dyke towards the pipe and ducked inside it. The massive crump of an explosion resounded, and a shockwave sent them staggering. Glancing back, Saul saw an enforcer, his clothing afire, slam into one bank of the dyke and roll down it, sizzling in the water and thrashing about, seemingly unable to put out the flames. His screams pursued them into the darkness.

  ***

  Hannah knew something about the illegal hospitals Saul had mentioned—she had learned about them from the kind of people supplied for her experimental work. He had originally planned on heading for such a hospital, but as they stepped out of the end of the pipe, and a mobile readergun stepped down into the dyke ahead of them, it seemed they weren’t going to get much further.

  The incredible unfairness of it suddenly raged up inside her. “Fuck you!” she shouted, and opened fire, but the kick of her gun put her aim well off, the bullets cutting clods out of the dyke’s lip, some distance above the advancing robot. She then threw herself in one direction, while Saul took the other.

  Like a harvestman spider, two metres across and fashioned of wrought iron, it crab-walked and slid down the bank, the sharp tips of its extended legs slicing through the mud. As Hannah lay there expecting to die, she noticed how fast Saul moved. Already he was up in a squat on the bank, swinging his weapon round to target the thing, but then he hesitated.

  “Shoot it!” she yelled, trying to pull her own weapon out from underneath her.

  “Those attacking us would have taken all the readerguns offline, to prevent them shooting their own soldiers or, worse still,” he glanced her way, “killing you.” He pointed to the robot. “If this thing was back to running its usual program, we’d have been dead less than a second after it spotted us.”

  Hannah now managed to get her weapon aimed at the thing, but didn’t open fire. She just stared, taking in its details and wondering how Saul managed to show so little fear. The robot’s main body was a squat upright bullet of metal painted in earthy camouflage patterns, a sensory band under clear glass encircled its circumference. The barrel of its gun protruded like a proboscis, while depending underneath its body, like a prolapsed bowel, hung its magazine and power supply.