Polity Agent

by Neal Asher

  ‘What about the appearance of the Golem itself?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Male, dark hair, red eyes – very dramatic. Of course then it renamed itself.’ Chaline gave a cynical shake of her head. ‘Called itself, himself, Lucifer.’

  Cormac placed his elbows on the table, interlaced his fingers and rested his chin on them. ‘Do I detect something of Dragon’s humour there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Humour or hubris – you tell me.’

  ‘Tell me about the dreams.’

  ‘Mostly of hiding and being terrified, very often after either running, crawling or swimming – never really clear.’ She gestured over her shoulder. ‘Graham, the haiman sent along to study Maker/human interaction aboard the ship, approached Lucifer about that phenomenon. The dreams stopped immediately afterwards – about a month before we went into coldsleep. I think Graham regretted that, those dreams being yet another source of data, but the rest of us were glad. Graham then, of course, had us describing all those dreams in detail. He was particularly happy with me,’ she tapped her temple, ‘because I’d recorded some of mine.’

  ‘And did Graham come to any conclusions?’

  She nodded. ‘He reckoned we’d picked up stuff from its subconscious and that the activities we dreamed were of some creature dragging itself across mud to escape predators. He theorized that the Makers were some life-form much like mudskippers, either that or we’d picked up stuff from their presentient past – the Maker equivalent of the reptile brain.’

  Cormac grimaced: it somehow figured that such a creature would project the facade of a godlike alien seemingly constructed of light.

  ‘Did Lucifer go into coldsleep too?’ he asked.

  ‘According to Graham, he had enough equipment in his chamber to build something. And Lucifer declared he would be going into hibernation – that’s how he put it. You’d think so, as eight hundred years is a long time.’

  ‘So then the Victoria arrived at the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Maker civilization?’

  ‘There was no Maker civilization,’ Chaline replied.

  Cormac sat back. ‘Ah.’

  ‘The first thing we saw was a giant space station crammed with hard organic growth – like some plant had germinated inside it, sucked out all the nutrient, and then died. We started our approach to that place and all our meteor lasers started firing. Space all around it was filled with clouds of small hard objects – the size of a golf ball and incredibly dense. Lucifer told us to pull away, or we would die.’

  ‘Jain substructure, and Jain nodes.’

  She stared at him questioningly.

  ‘Jerusalem, can you update Chaline on recent events: specifically Skellor and his subversion of the Occam Razor? And related matters Jain?’

  Chaline tilted her head and pressed her fingertips against her temple. Cormac got up and walked over to a nearby dispensing unit, sending his request to it, via his gridlink, before he even got there. A cup of hot green tea awaited him. He took it up and sipped, remaining by the dispenser. It would take Chaline about five minutes to absorb all the information. When he finally finished his tea and returned to his chair, she was shaking her head.

  ‘Exactly the same. We found ships, and then we found a whole world infested like that.’ She looked up. ‘But it stops, you know? Sentient life sets this Jain technology growing, it takes something, technological knowledge . . . something. Those sentient beings can use it for a while to obtain power, knowledge, whatever, then it seeds, destroying them in the process. Lucifer’s people thought they had it under control.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Obviously they did not have it under control.’

  ‘I meant during your journey.’

  ‘Lucifer retreated to his chamber, and for a while the dreams returned. We continued our survey, moving into the heart of the Maker realm. It was small compared to the Polity – mainly in a stellar cluster of about five thousand suns. Apparently this was due to what Lucifer called the “Consolidation”. Their civilization expanded to a certain point, but on becoming aware of other space-borne civilizations – their first encounter was with Jain technology, so you can imagine how wary that made them – they decided on no further expansion until they felt themselves ready.’

  ‘So Lucifer came out of his chamber.’

  ‘Yes, very agitated – it showed, even through the Golem he inhabited – but then his entire species seemed to have been wiped out. I guess that sort of disaster is going to put an overload into the buffers of even the most hardened individualist.’ Chaline shrugged. ‘He provided us with signal codes and frequencies to transmit on – Maker realspace com was on the wide band of the hydrogen spectrum, and U-space com was weirdly encoded. We searched and we called and called, but there was nothing at first. Then we started to get stuff back on Maker channels, but it was loaded with programs we didn’t really want – they propagated like viruses then self-assembled into some really nasty subversion routines. You could call them worms but they were a damned sight more complex than that – nearly AI. It was only with Lucifer’s help that we managed to shut them down. Victoria, the ship AI, needed to completely disconnect herself while we cleared the rest of the systems. One program even took over a nanoassembler and started producing this Jain tech, so we had to eject an entire laboratory into space.’

  ‘So that means there was Jain tech out there still active?’

  ‘Yes, or rather Jain-subverted Makers in the last stages of dissolution.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We found no sentient life at all in a further twelve solar systems we surveyed. But we did find stations and ships crammed with Jain substructures; worlds where destructive battles had been fought, some of them radioactive, some showing no sign that they were once living other than by the massive weapons in orbit that had burned them down to the magma. All the Jain tech there was somnolent. Its seeds were spread through space – awaiting the right kind of sentient touch that would awake them to the fertile earth of a new civilization.’

  ‘Very poetic’

  Chaline grimaced. ‘You had to be there.’

  ‘So then you decided to set up the First Stage runcible?’

  ‘Not then, exactly. While we were surveying we picked up a U-space signature. A Maker ship appeared, just discernible at the core of a mass of substructure – it looked like a dandelion clock. It attacked immediately, suicidally. We took it out with a CTD. I don’t know what he heard, but Lucifer was briefly in contact with whatever was on that ship. He said it was time for us to go home, that other similar entities were closing in on us – the Maker versions of your friend Skellor. Lucifer also informed us that these entities would be able to track us through a standard U-space jump, and therefore we should escape via runcible. Graham and myself were a little dubious about this – they didn’t have runcible technology and we weren’t about to make a gift of it to them by leaving a first stage runcible behind.’

  ‘It perhaps means nothing,’ said Cormac, ‘but what was your impression of Lucifer’s attitude at that point?’

  ‘Well . . . he seemed almost guilty. But he could have been using emulation programs in the Golem’s base format program. We supposed the guilt, whether real or emulated, was what Lucifer considered a suitable response to the danger he’d put us in.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  Chaline frowned at him. ‘As sure as I can be. Why are you digging at this?’

  ‘Never mind. You set up the runcible.’

  ‘We did – after Lucifer demonstrated a knowledge of runcible technology he could only have acquired in the Polity. It was he who suggested a time-inconsistent runcible. We thought he didn’t understand how dangerous that could be. But he understood perfectly. His people were dead, wiped out by a technology that spreads like a virus, and he wanted to innoculate that particular area of space.’ She stared at Cormac, waiting for some comment or question. When none was forthcoming she continued, ‘We chose a barren and untouched moon
circling a gas giant – the only planet in orbit of a nearby white dwarf. Other suns lay under a light year away and we were near to the centre of the Maker realm. We landed the Victoria – a difficult enough task in itself. I set up the runcible and we cannibalized the ship’s U-space engine for the parts to make that runcible time inconsistent. Lucifer provided some esoteric tech to enable us to fine tune things and boost the power from the fusion reactors we dismounted. We were running alignment tests when—’

  ‘One moment,’ Cormac interrupted, ‘you need an AI to run a runcible. I’d have thought that requirement even more critical in this situation.’

  ‘Yes . . . obviously we’d brought a runcible AI, in stasis, along with us.’

  ‘It sacrificed itself to get you back here?’

  Chaline stared off to one side for a moment, then turned back to Cormac. ‘Yes, it did. You see, it could have escaped through its own runcible, but that would mean that runcible shutting down before the one on Celedon, which in turn would mean the energy of the time-inconsistent link coming this way rather than going that way. We could not have escaped it, nor would something in the region of a hundred billion other human beings.’

  On hearing that Cormac kept his mouth closed – the figure was worthy of a respectful silence.

  Chaline continued, ‘We initiated the runcible AI before agreeing to Lucifer’s scheme, and it instantly concurred. Just one of those Jain nodes is hideously dangerous, as you know. Here was a chance to turn trillions of them to ash.’

  ‘What came through the runcible after you?’

  ‘As I was saying: we were running the alignment tests when another of those Maker ships appeared. I put together the information package and sent it through to Celedon and, to us, at our end, full connection was instantly accepted. Things would have been mighty shitty for us then if it had been rejected.’

  ‘You chose Celedon because of its remoteness?’

  ‘Exactly. And we meanwhile knew, or rather Graham knew, hostile protocol Starfire would be instituted. We thought we’d have time to get all our stuff together, but things U-jumped down into the base we’d built.’ Chaline winced.

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Creatures . . . check the download and you can see what they were like. Only a proton blast would take any of them down. I saw one take apart Villaeus. The horrible thing about that was that it didn’t just rip him apart to kill him; it was obviously very quickly taking him apart and analysing those parts. As we retreated to the runcible, they just kept killing us. Lucifer then started using some weapon I’d never seen before – it seemed to create a collapsing gravity field in whatever he aimed it at. He broke out of his Golem then, in full glass dragon mode, and held them off while we went through. He told us all he would not be joining us . . .’

  Cormac leant back. ‘Why not?’

  ‘To give us the time to get away, and because he did not want to survive his own kind.’

  ‘That’s how Lucifer felt?’

  ‘Yes,’ Chaline said staring at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like the dreams – there’s that telepathic link. Lucifer would have been under some stress then, and not shielding himself from you so well . . .’

  ‘There was a lot of stuff. We were all “under some stress”. I felt anguish, and incredible anger – I don’t know how much of it was my own.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He felt guilty. We’d brought him home and because of that put ourselves in such danger. Many of us died. I guess the guilt was understandable.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Cormac, standing. ‘I think it’s time for me to look at those downloads now.’

  Chaline remained in her seat, watching him go. Once he was through the shimmer-shield and the irised door closed behind him, he asked, ‘How moral a creature was Lucifer, do you think?’

  ‘Neither more nor less than any human being, I would suggest,’ replied Jerusalem.

  ‘So the Makers were “consolidating”, and they’d also sent an organic probe, which later named itself Dragon,

  to the Milky Way. I reckon they were getting ready for a massive expansion.’

  ‘That would seem plausible.’

  ‘And they’d been working with Jain tech for some time . . .’

  ‘So it would seem. Coincidental that during the expansion of the Polity we found nothing but the mere remnants of Jain technology. Then, within a few decades of the Maker’s arrival and Dragon’s dramatic reaction to that arrival, a working Jain node somehow ended up in the hands of a biophysicist quite capable of knowing how to use it.’

  ‘I think we need to have a long talk with Dragon.’

  ‘Yes, I agree,’ replied Jerusalem.

  The soil under his feet was a deep umber, scattered with nodules of dark green moss and speared by the occasional sprout of adapted tundra grass. Some growth clung to rock faces and exposed boulders in defiance of the dusty gales that scoured here twice each Martian year. However, the red hue of Mars was discernible in this place as in few others now. Horace Blegg walked to the edge of a declivity that descended in tiers and steep slopes for five miles. Far down in Valles Marineris there seemed the gleam of some vast still lake. It was no lake, however, but the chainglass ceiling of the Greenhouse, which had been the first step in an early terraforming project and now contained forested parks. How things had changed during Blegg’s enormously long life.

  Cormac believed Blegg to be something created by Earth Central – an avatar of that entity – and not really an immortal survivor of the Hiroshima nuclear detonation. However, Blegg knew himself to once have been a boy called Hiroshi who walked out of that inferno. A boy who grew into a man with the ability to transport himself through U-space. A man who could turn inner vision on his body and had learned how to change its appearance at will, just as he had so many times changed his name. At the time when they built that edifice on the shore of Lake Geneva to house the Earth Central AI, he was calling himself Horace Blegg, and so he remained ever since that entity woke for the first time and perceived him.

  ‘So, Hal, let’s talk scenarios,’ Blegg said abruptly.

  After a pause, when there came no reply, he gazed in a direction few other humans could perceive, and stepped there. Mars faded around him, and momentarily he existed in a realm without colour, distance, or even time. Then he was pacing towards a runcible gateway on that same world, curious faces turned towards him. He ignored them, stepped through. Another transit lounge, gravity even lighter and his steps bouncing. He located himself, then transported himself again into a very secure chamber in the Tranquillity Museum on Earth’s moon.

  At the centre of this chamber rested a hemispherical chainglass case covering innocuous-looking coralline objects. The column this case rested on he knew contained a CTD – Contra Terrene Device – the euphemistic term for an antimatter weapon. The chamber he stood in also sat on top of a fusion drive. In an instant Earth Central could cause this chamber to be ejected intact from the museum and, when it was a safe distance from the moon, detonate the weapon it contained. Blegg turned, eyeing the display screens ringing the walls. They all showed recorded microscopic and nanoscopic views of the objects within the case – only a few of the millions of images available, though subscreens could be called up to gain access to a huge body of data concerning the complex molecular machinery revealed. However, this chamber was closed to the public now – had been closed for some years.

  ‘So, Hal, what are the prospects for the human race?’ Blegg asked.

  One of the screens changed to show a simple graph. The bottom scale was marked off in dates from 1,000 AD to the present, while the side scale gradated in the currently accepted units of technological development. For five hundred years the graph line rose only a little above zero, began to curve, then shot sharply upwards with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. By the twenty-first century the line speared up and had disappeared off the top of the graph by the twenty-third century.

 
‘That’s wrong,’ said Blegg.

  ‘Two things,’ said the Earth Central AI. ‘The first is that calling me Hal is now a positively geriatric joke, and the second is that yes, the graph is wrong. This was in fact how the twenty-first-century humans saw the prospective development of the human race. Those same humans expected their descendants of this time to be something akin to gods and perhaps utterly unrecognizable to them. But this happened instead.’

  The line changed now, beginning to curve back down towards the end of the twenty-second century, and in the next century returning to a rate of growth akin to that of over a thousand years earlier.

  ‘Life just got too cosy,’ suggested Blegg.

  ‘Precisely. What do you strive for when your every comfort can be provided, and when you have more than an ample chance of living forever? In the heart of the Polity now the greatest cause of death is suicide out of boredom. Only on the outer rim, on the Line worlds and beyond, does this attitude begin to change. Most gradations of technological advance take place there, or within the Polity itself, and are the result exclusively of research by haimans.’

  ‘Most human beings do not consider that a problem.’

  ‘Very true. Consider the Roman Empire.’

  ‘We’re decadent?’

  ‘And the Vandals are ready and waiting.’

  ‘You neglected to mention AI technological development,’ Blegg observed.

  ‘Poised always on Singularity, and avoided by choice. We accept that we are essentially human and choose not to leave our kindred behind. But should the Vandals arrive, that may change.’

  ‘Two points: not all of you choose so, and not all agree about that essential humanity. AIs leave the Polity in just as large numbers as the more adventurous human beings.’

  ‘Those AIs little realize that this makes them more human.’

  ‘Interesting concept,’ said Blegg. He slapped his hand down on the chainglass case. ‘But let’s talk about this.’