by Neal Asher
His recitation stuttered to a halt. He was having a nightmare, that was it. This whole situation seemed to possess its own internal logic but, when examined from a distance, the inconsistencies were evident. What was that over there? Something moving at the end of the building, where that big shadow lay . . .
‘It went even further than that,’ she said. ‘There are numerous holes through your skull, numerous incisions, bleeds, what looks like cautery inside your head and the remains of fibre connections like you get from an aug. All the facial nerves have been removed right back to your spine. The damage is beyond the reconstruction technology I have available. Until we get some real Polity expertise here, all I can do for you is this.’
She pulled the cloth from the object on the bed, revealing a hairless human head fashioned of some stark white material. It had one eye, yellow like old glass, the other missing. He stared at that yellow eye then glanced away, but it seemed to leave an after-image in his vision. A clicking sound, he looked back in utter terror, only to see that she had hinged the head open like a clam to reveal gleaming electronics inside.
‘It came by special delivery,’ she said, frowning in perplexity, then went on, ‘Like the voice synthesizer it detects relevant neural activity and translates it into action. You’ll be able to speak, to eat, and your sense of smell will return. It will also route blood to underlying bone to prevent it dying.’
She tapped a lump inside the open head, then turned it over and opened the mouth to reveal a tongue, pure white. He realized the lump she had tapped was a mouth lining seen from the skull side. Turning it back over, she now pointed to the back of the yellow eye, then picked up the wormlike connection extending from it.
‘The hooder left your optic nerve in place and, though it did something odd with it, we can still make a connection so you get binocular vision back.’ She now pointed up at his face. ‘It left you your eardrums, which is why you can hear me, but with the extra connections in this prosthetic your hearing will improve too.’
She closed the head up, and there, again, that yellow eye. He tried to blink to clear the previous after-image of it, could not, and now there were two after-images, then three. The darkness had grown now to fill one entire half of this room, and that medical machine, the insectile one, seemed a lot lot bigger now.
‘I don’t . . . believe you,’ he managed.
She sighed, picked up the mirror and held it up to his face. A skull, with one glistening eye in one socket leered back at him. Then he was blind, in darkness, and the medical machine was looming over him. Yellow after-images further multiplied there, became two columns of yellow eyes. The voice synthesizer was screaming; a raw, horrible sound. He began to fall somewhere, Euclidean shapes flashing into being around him and swirling like snowflakes.
‘Okay, that didn’t go so good,’ someone said.
But Jem was gone.
‘They’re here, good,’ said Sanders. ‘That’s the final nail in the Theocracy’s coffin – it’s finished.’
Jem felt a flash of frustrated anger at her certainty. How could she not understand that the Polity, a political entity run by godless machines, had no future at all? It was a building constructed over a tricone mud vent and the only uncertainty about its fall was the timing. And the Theocracy? Under direct instruction from God, Zelda Smythe had taken the best from the old religions of Earth and written the Book of Satagents: the basis of the true and final religion until The End of Days. So the Theocracy was forever.
‘And we’ve received instructions about you,’ she added, turning from her new companion to address him. ‘You’re going to a sunny island for some R and R.’
He had heard the aerofan outside, the whine of an ATV engine then later the roar of a big transport coming down, and from that surmised that he had to be somewhere on the surface of Masada. For a moment he entertained the hope that Theocracy troops were coming to rescue him but, by the lack of reaction from the other staff here, he suspected not. Then there was a soldier with Sanders – a man he felt sure he recognized.
‘So how’s he doing?’ the soldier asked.
‘He’ll live,’ Sanders replied.
The soldier pointed at Jem’s face. ‘So that’s the prosthetic? Seems a bit primitive by Polity standards.’
‘That’s the thing,’ said Sanders, ‘but if you knew what kind of damage lies underneath it you’d think differently. The only way to complete restoration would be controlled regrowth under AI supervision.’
‘Which ain’t gonna happen while the AIs stay up there.’ The soldier stabbed a finger up at the ceiling, then gazed intently at Sanders. Jem experienced an odd reaction on seeing that there seemed some connection between them. He, Jem, should be the focus of her attention, not this unimportant grunt.
The soldier continued, ‘I’m told they’re gonna install a runcible on Flint but not down here. We just get supply drops and shitty bandwidth com until they’ve cleared up the mess out there.’ He gestured towards the ceiling again.
‘Faith, Hope and Charity?’ Sanders asked.
‘Faith is completely burnt out, the other two and the rest of the satellites and stations got three-quarters of their populations brain-burnt.’
Faith is dead.
‘You cannot break me,’ said Jem, turning his new white metal head away from them. He would ignore them – that’s it. He felt they’d made the wrong move in cutting off his face, for now he possessed no expression that might give him away.
After they put this imprisoning metal shell over his skull it required long introspection for him to figure out precisely what was going on here. This was all about faith, but not about the cylinder world of that name being destroyed. In the fiction they had created for him the Theocracy was gone, the Underground victorious and now the Polity poised overhead in all its supposedly gigantic glory.
‘My faith cannot be destroyed,’ Jem muttered, more to himself than them.
That was the crux of all this. The Underground had understood that whilst the faith of the Brotherhood remained strong, neither they nor their damned Polity could be victorious. So now they were trying to find ways to destroy faith. He was one of the subjects of this experiment: they wanted to destroy his belief in God, they wanted him to spit on the teachings of Zelda Smythe. In a way he pitied them, for his eventual martyrdom would mark the end of their self-deception.
‘He’s nuts,’ said the soldier.
‘He believes none of it,’ said Sanders. ‘First time he woke up he remembered most of it, but the trauma of those memories sent his mind into retreat. Second time he woke up he decided he was a prisoner of the Underground undergoing some new interrogation technique. And now he thinks we’re trying to destroy his belief in God and His prophet Zelda Smythe. He remembers nothing of what happened between when he was running an inspection tour of sprawn canals two months ago and him being here.’
‘He don’t remember me?’ asked the soldier.
‘No – the memories will come back of their own accord or he’ll need deep mindtech work – probably under AI supervision just like with his physical restoration.’
‘There’s nothing we can do here?’
‘In other circumstances I would have said yes,’ said Sanders. ‘But the Technician didn’t just flense his skull – it did other things inside, physical alterations, and it left things in there too.’
There, again, they were blaming his condition on a mythical non-existent creature and as such bringing more pressure down on his faith. If they could somehow prove to him that this mythical hooder had maimed him, he would necessarily then believe in its existence, which would undermine one of the tenets of his beliefs.
Jem turned back and gazed at the soldier. ‘Why should I remember you?’
But it was Sanders who replied, ‘You should remember Colonel Grant because he was the one who saw what the Technician did to you, and he was the one who carried you to an ATV ambulance. He’s the reason you’re still alive.’
; Jem turned away, ignoring them again.
The main continent of Masada was shaped like a square-rigged sail from some ancient galleon, rumpled in one upper corner, where the Northern Mountains lay. Other large land masses dotted the world, the Subcontinent – a near-circular mass to the east over a thousand kilometres across – and others whose names and locations Jem was quite vague about. However he had heard of the Worry Island chain, for it was to one of those islands, Heretic’s Isle, that the Theocracy shipped, for lengthy interrogation and internment, those captives of the Underground that weren’t dispatched to the steamers aboard the cylinder world Faith.
How did they intend to work this in the fiction they had created for him? Doubtless some drug would be employed, and when he finally became conscious again he would find himself in a different room and be told he was now in the ‘hospital’ on Heretic’s Isle, which the rebels now owned having taken it in their apparently victorious war against the Theocracy. As Sanders headed over to him, he awaited with interest her explanation for whatever drug it was she would administer.
‘Obviously, you are not entirely healed,’ she said, gazing down at him, ‘so you’ll experience some discomfort and your body will feel quite strange to you. You should also be aware that muscle regrowth down the front of your torso and upper legs has some way to go, so you will be very weak. ’
Ah, some kind of painkiller – an anaesthetic to dull his connection with reality.
She reached between the pillow and his neck, where something disengaged with a gristly crunch. Sensation returned; flooded into his body like some fluid filling a man-shaped vessel. His shins and feet felt cold, everything above that, to his neck, felt unreasonably hot yet devoid of any other sensation, whilst his head seemed just a nerveless bulk atop his neck. He tilted this bulk forwards, but not too far forwards because it felt like it might just fall off if tilted too far from the vertical. He lay naked on the bed – no sheet to give him dignity. From his knees up to his chest his body was coated with that same transparent coating he had seen on other patients here, and underneath this he could see the movement of wet muscles, all wrapped in hair-thin gridworks, bloodworm capillaries actually penetrating the skin layer and areas beginning to cloud with new skin-cell growth.
What they had told him about the damage to his body was utterly true, but that did not make it true that some mythical being inflicted it. Perhaps he had been injured during some terrorist outrage when they kidnapped him, or perhaps they had inflicted all this upon him themselves. Now he held up his hands to inspect both them and his arms.
His right arm possessed the same covering as his torso, though it had clouded and he could see small bristles protruding, and small moons of fingernail appearing on his fingers. The detail of his left arm was perfect, down to complete fingernails, the wrinkled knuckles and the skin texture, but the thing was utterly white like the shell covering his head. He reached across with his right hand to touch it, but received very little sensation from his fingertips, yet he felt the touch of those fingertips from the prosthetic, which possessed substantially more sensation than his own limb.
‘Feeling will improve as the nerves grow into the dermal layer,’ said Sanders. ‘By the time your own skin has displaced the syntheskin, you’ll be back to normal . . . well, almost.’
He reached up to touch his face and the sensation was quite odd. He could actually feel the touch of his fingertips on his cheek, but in a disconnected way as if he were touching his cheek through a cotton sheet. While he was probing the shell over his skull, Sanders unwrapped a packet containing plain white pyjamas and slippers.
‘You should be able to dress yourself,’ she said. ‘Or do you want my help?’
‘I will attempt to dress myself,’ he said coldly, feeling it was time to curtail her intimacy with his body.
Leaning forward was difficult. His stomach muscles felt like jelly, their strength seeming only enough to hold in everything behind them, as if the slightest wrong move would result in a hernia. Also his thigh muscles were pulling, and felt as if they weren’t securely anchored.
‘Where are the other patients?’ he asked. ‘Have they been taken to Heretic’s Isle?’ He might as well run with their fiction to see where it would take him.
‘Most of them are back with their families or friends, or in recovery wards in city hospital,’ she replied. ‘Only special patients are being shipped to the Isle – high-level Theocracy patients.’
‘Prisoners.’
With the pyjama jacket finally on he looked with puzzlement at the front of the garment, trying to find buttons. She reached over to pull the edges together and they bonded. As she stepped back he peered down at his genitals. They were transparent: tubes, veins and testes clearly visible. He needed those trousers on, now. He tried to pull his legs up towards him. At first no response, but after a short time he found himself able to bend his knees and bring his feet within reach. He threaded the trousers onto them, up over his knees to his thighs, and then had to stop, because he was gasping.
‘I feel too hot.’
‘You’ve no sweat glands in your prosthetic, but the rest of your body should compensate,’ she said. ‘Just give it a chance – the more you move about the faster the synthetics will adapt and the faster the healing process.’
Finally he managed to swing his legs off the bed, down to the slippers there and, supporting himself on his artificial arm, pull up his trousers, though she reached out to do up the stick seams for him.
‘Are you ready to try walking?’ she asked. ‘The transport is ready.’
He pushed himself from the bed, feeling sick and dizzy, and did not object when she stepped in to support him. Very slowly they made their way to the airlock. Would he conveniently faint now so as not to see what lay outside? When they halted at the airlock she steadied him until he took hold of a rack containing a varied collection of pond-worker tools – nets, goads and telescopic grabs – then she stepped to the other side of the airlock to take up a breather mask from another rack and don it.
‘What about me?’ he asked, noting she had collected no breather mask for him.
‘You’ve no need – your prosthetic contains a super-dense oxygen supply which it continuously keeps topped up,’ she told him. ‘Outside you can last for ten days before it runs out. You’re wearing your own mechanical scole.’
Doubtless, when they stepped outside there would be some malfunction of his prosthetic, and he would find himself waking up either inside some transport with no external view, or inside the prison hospital on Heretic’s Isle.
They entered the airlock together, where he leaned on her heavily, and as it cycled he felt a sudden terror to be in such a situation. Never in his life had he been inside an airlock without a breather mask over his face, and underlying that he felt something of the indignity of this situation. The only people who went through airlocks without breather masks were pond workers, the underclass, who had the big aphid-like scoles attached to their bodies to oxygenate their blood. He tried to deny that terror, because this was all a set-up, all staged . . .
Sanders opened the outer door and they stepped out. The compound was a morass and foamed plastic walkways had been laid across it, one of them spearing over to a Theocracy troop transport. He gazed about himself in utter confusion, trying to make sense of this place. To his right lay the burnt-out ruins of overseers’ huts, and just behind them a three-storey proctors’ station lay tilted at an angle, its foundations torn up out of the soil. The surrounding fence was down, as were the nearest watchtowers he could see. Beyond this the chequerboard of ponds stretched into the distance, but pocked with crater holes and strewn with the wreckage of armoured vehicles. Distantly, plumes of smoke rose into the sky and on that horizon he saw the tall stilt-legged shape of a heroyne stepping from pond to pond, its long beak occasionally stabbing down to spear something.
‘There is a heroyne within the perimeter,’ he said woodenly, feeling that if he could just stick to
that one fact, that one breach of crop-pond security, then in a moment all the rest would begin make sense.
‘That’s not all,’ she said. ‘Take a look over there.’
He reluctantly turned to look where indicated. A couple of aerofans were down on one of the pond banks over to the left of the troop transport. Men in uniforms the colour of new growth flute grass were gathered there about a tripod-mounted rail-gun aimed at a massive creature squatting in one of the ponds.
The gabbleduck seemed to be staring directly at Jem, its tiara of green eyes gleaming with unnatural brilliance. It raised its bill from its chest, opened out one of its dimorphic arms and spread one claw. It seemed to be gesturing to the surrounding devastation: here you are, here it is, how can you deny this? Jem snapped his gaze away, those eyes an after-image in his vision and their colour sliding through the spectrum to one he feared. His gaze came to rest on a bullet-riddled sign lying half-submerged in the mud. Triada Compound.
Jem’s legs gave way and he fell from the walkway into the mud, where he lay clawing at it, dragging himself, trying to get away. But there was nowhere to flee too. Something closed down on every horizon, throwing him into darkness, and out of the sky scythes began to fold down around those two columns of yellow eyes. Something closed on his temples and he could just hear a high whine over his screaming.
2
The Wheelchair
This anachronism can still be seen in museums, but only in the museums of Earth, since it ceased to be an option even before Humans set foot on Mars. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries many societies began imposing rules and regulations to make buildings more accessible to wheelchair users, but it can be seen that the vast sums involved could better have been spent on something already on the cards. Those working in robotics already had its replacement ready by the turn of the twentieth century with computer-controlled powered exoskeletons but, as was the case with a lot of technologies of the time, viable small power supplies were needed. Later developments of the supercapacitor, ultracapacitor and nanotube batteries quickly swept that problem aside, and within a period of ten years all wheelchair manufacturers went out of business. A Japanese cybernetics company, later absorbed by Cybercorp, was the first to sell its Motorleg and Fullbot exoskeletons for paraplegics and quadriplegics respectively.
