by Neal Asher
‘That is another mental mechanism,’ the drone said dismissively. ‘Human pain is necessarily intense because the lesson of avoidance must be learned by the dull recording medium of the Human brain, but Human memory of pain must not be intense enough to cripple the risk-taking function which is a necessity of species survival.’
‘Thank you for that.’ Sanders picked up her drink and sipped. ‘But the relevance of it escapes me.’
‘We know about the fibrous structures the Technician left in his brain, and we now know that via them the Technician embedded something very deep and very integral in his mind – we are certain that it actually downloaded something from itself. However, whilst doing so, it was also performing its feeding function – whether out of instinct or as part of the process is unclear – and that memory of pain was deeply embedded too.’
‘So we’re getting somewhere?’ said Sanders excitedly.
‘Somewhere, yes. But unfortunately, what was downloaded to him is so tightly entangled with his pain, that it remains inaccessible whilst he cannot remember what happened to him.’
‘So we use nanosurgery to restore his memory . . .’
‘No, we considered that, but the embedding process has made his memory of the pain a direct experience, as with us AIs. Recall would be as agonizing to him as what he experienced underneath the Technician’s hood. This is why both download and memory are so deeply submerged – he is a Human being and incapable of holding so direct an experience of pain in his conscious mind.’
Sanders grimaced and sat back. ‘So what now?’
The scorpion drone gestured to Jem again. ‘It leaks through. Very slowly his memory returns to be incorporated in his mind as an indirect experience: a normal Human memory. And with it we get leakage of the download too. It is a process with which we do not want to interfere, at least directly, for fear of destroying the data.’
‘Leaks through?’ said Sanders. ‘Yes, I guess it does, but at least the knockout feed stops him screaming. He just lapses into unconsciousness.’
‘But remember his drawings.’
Yes, the drawing. Jem returned his attention to the clear collection of Euclidean shapes, erased a couple then drew them back in just so.
‘Those penny molluscs?’ queried Sanders.
Jem looked up to see her standing over him, flinched when he saw that the drone had also moved closer, peridot eyes watching him impassively, then returned his attention to the sketch pad. Yes, he was nearly there with this one. He began muttering the Second Satagent.
‘Before the tricones completely churned up the area where the Technician attacked him, Commander Grant had someone make digital two-dimensional photographs there,’ said the drone. ‘It’s a shame he did not have better recording equipment available to him, but we must make do with these. Penny molluscs had been attracted by the blood and were scattered all about the area. Whether these were all present when he lay there is unknown, but we do know, from closely studying the photographs, that thus far he has precisely drawn the shapes seen on the backs of twelve of those creatures.’
‘He’s remembering them.’
‘So it would seem.’
Sanders turned to the drone now. ‘By the way, you keep referring to “we” – who else is here studying Jem? I thought you were working alone. I thought you decided any form of linkage to local AIs would interfere with your thought processes.’
‘My associate is a little shy of company and wishes to remain incognito for the present.’
One last line in place and, satisfied, Jem scribed around the drawing the perfect circle of a penny mollusc shell. The thing itself arose utterly clear in his mind then, there on the bloody flute grass. His skinned hand was closing on that grass, and looking up he saw the scorpion drone – no, it was rising up, two columns of yellow eyes blinking into being down its underside. Then, nothing.
Triada Compound (Solstan 2457 – Present Day)
Leif Grant stepped up to the airtight door leading from what had once been a pond workers’ bunkhouse, then a hospital, and which had now been returned to its original form and classified by the AI governor of Masada as a planetary relic. Remembering a long-ago conversation at this place, he realized that Sanders had been right about why he had saved Tombs’s life, but only partially right. When that massive alien creature Dragon, who he had known as Behemoth back then, came and knocked out the laser arrays before crashing to the ground to enact its peculiar and worrying rebirth, the rebels of Masada took the opportunity to leave their caves and seize the surface. They knew they wouldn’t be able to hold it for long, since the rebellion had been all about getting Polity intervention, and inevitably Deacon Aberil Dorth quickly responded by bringing troops down from the cylinder world Hope to attack. No quarter was given on either side. The rebels, and those of the underclass freed by them, were especially vicious in their reprisals against the likes of the proctor who had once occupied this very bunkhouse during its brief service as a hospital. The religious police had been the source of all the beatings, the torture and the enforced worship they had endured.
The moment he stepped outside, his Polity tech breather automatically closed a shimmer-shield across his face and began to feed him breathable air, for he still remained wary of undergoing the adaptation to the atmosphere of his own world. He headed out across a meticulously cropped lawn of blue grass. This lawn had not existed when last he was here, and the fence now standing perfectly restored before him had been crushed into the ground by his own side’s tanks. It was evening now, and the moon Amok tumbled across the aubergine sky against the backdrop of a nebula like a knotted glass octopus. The light of both of these reflected from the chequerboard of ponds lying beyond the fence, in which the Theocracy underclass had once raised the lethal squerms whose proteins were then the only source of offworld wealth here. There were squerms in the ponds even now, though those that tended to them were armoured swimming robots like metre-long, green-chromed water beetles.
Grant walked over to the gate and pushed it open, then headed out onto the paths lying between the ponds. Remembering that last visit, he glanced over to one pond in which glinted brassy writhing movement. The battle tank had been removed. Back then the burnt-out vehicle had still emitted wisps of smoke, which meant there must have been a leaking oxygen supply inside still supplying the embers. Other wreckage had been scattered here and there, both Human and mechanical. There had been a corpse – a Theocracy soldier, his augmentation grey against the half of his head that remained.
Why hadn’t Grant killed that proctor when he found him out there lying on a bed of trampled flute grass? Sanders had been correct about anyone surviving an attack from a hooder likely being held in superstitious awe. In fact, Jeremiah Tombs was still held in superstitious awe by many, especially now some portion of the truth about this world had come out. Grant might perhaps have allowed Tombs to live just because of that. But there had been more to it than just superstition, or awe, even though the hooder Grant had seen lift its massive spoon-shaped head from the proctor had been none other than the mythical Technician. There had been that breather mask, that damned breather mask . . .
Grant had been sure that the man had some questions to answer, and the interrogator would probably be a Polity forensic AI tapped directly into his brain to ask them. Yet for over twenty years those questions had remained unasked, and Tombs was a basket case and last internee of what had once been a prison hospital on one of the southern islands. His sanity lay within the compass of Polity technology, yet the AIs did not want to tamper with what had been done to him, and that was probably because they did not yet understand it.
Grant, erstwhile soldier and colonel in the army of the underground, shuddered and peered down at the ground just ahead of him. The particular corpse that had lain here had been surrounded by a few departing dryben, small creatures that seemed related to the sprawns the workers had raised in some ponds, but which were native to Masada and, like maggots on Earth, were th
e undertakers of this world. Something about the death had called them to the surface, but contact with it was driving them away, for alien meat did not contain the proteins they required. However, Grant remembered how the corpse had been crawling with penny molluscs, their domed shells with their even colourful patterns, just like the same molluscs that had surrounded Tombs . . .
Grant abruptly turned away, heading back towards the bunkhouse and the ATV he had parked behind it, questioning the impulse that had caused him to revisit his past. He understood what drove that impulse. Those discoveries made by Polity researchers here, and the presence of an Atheter AI out there in the wilds, had both weighed heavily on his mind. But now, it seemed, an ancient war drone had arrived, its remit to find some answers. And he felt certain that some of those answers would be to questions he often asked himself, about Jeremiah Tombs.
3
Prosthetics
With the advent of genetic manipulation to enable someone to grow a new limb, or with the technology available for them to just take rejection-proof body parts off the shelf, you’d have thought the prosthetics industry dead in the water. Not so. It being most people’s preference to have genetically matched limbs or organs grown in a tank, prosthetics are used while they are growing. Fast replacement prosthetics have also been developed where access to advanced medical technology is limited: plug-in limbs for soldiers on the battlefield, self-embedding syntheskins, pop-in eyes that grow nanofibre connections either to the optic nerve or all the way back even as far as the visual cortex, self-planting teeth and self-connecting chest-pack hearts. The technology is such that now the prosthetics can be more durable, sensitive and stronger than whatever body part they replace, and some prefer them to that part. There are those who, over the years, gradually replace their bodies, ending up in a full Golem chassis, then opting for the ultimate prosthetic replacement by having their minds loaded to crystal.
– From HOW IT IS by Gordon
Masada (Solstan 2453 – 16 Years after the Rebellion)
The mud pipe lay between two peninsulas of stone – the foothills of the Northern Mountains – and funnelled in towards his destination. Tricones gathered here in their trillions, intent, in a battle for Lebensraum that would last a billion years, on rendering the whole mountain range down into nice, damp loose mud in which to lay their eggs. Chanter listened to the sound of them thumping against the hull of his mudmarine and noticed, when one hit particularly heavily or loudly, that he was beginning to flinch. It occurred to him that his long years here had perhaps not done his mental condition a great deal of good – he had developed agoraphobia, and the fear of the open spaces he intended to face had begun to grow more and more intense the closer he got to them.
Ten kilometres in and the mud pipe narrowed to just metres across but, having already mapped it, he knew he only had to get through this section, to enter an old volcanic vent, up which he could rise to the surface. Yes, perhaps he did have some fear of open spaces, but it was much compensated for by his utter lack of fear of his claustrophobic environment.
Beyond the narrow section where the pipe debouched into the vent, there were no tricones at all. It was as if the creatures possessed some ancestral memory of narrow escapes from surges of lava, for Chanter could see no other reason for them not to be here. After closing his seat straps across he inclined his mudmarine to the vertical and headed rapidly to the surface, accelerating as soil turned to mud and then finally to water. Here, in the bottom of a caldera lake, he levelled the vehicle again, made his first use in a long while of its buoyancy tanks by releasing a cloud of bubbles, motored in towards the slope to the shore, tractored up this and finally surfaced, chameleon-ware engaged.
Chanter sat for a long moment gazing through the main chainglass cockpit screen as the electrostatics cleared it of filth. The shore here, below a crumbling stone slope leading up to the lip of the crater, was choked with lizard tails of a strange sickly yellow-orange hue. Perhaps some volcanic poison was the cause of this and also the reason for the lack of tricones in the vent. Almost without thinking he tapped instructions into his console, injecting a probe into the mud below to snatch up a sample, then realized he was prevaricating, for this was not why he was here. As the probe retracted, its sample automatically routed to the marine’s internal analyser, he used the conveyor drive to drag his vehicle ashore amidst that yellow growth, then unstrapped and stood up. Next, without giving himself time to think about it for too long, he donned tough monofilament overalls, large boots specially made for his webbed feet, took up the backpack he’d made ready, and exited his craft.
Outside Chanter sniffed the air, picking up the distinct whiff of sulphur dioxide underlying the very specific stink here on Masada of putrefaction – something had died nearby, within the last week. Swinging his shear to chop a path he made his way through the vegetable mass, regretting he could not bring his robot, Mick, with him, but it wasn’t made for this sort of terrain. The smell grew stronger as he advanced until he broke through into an area where the lizard tails had been crushed flat at the base of a crumbling lava slope leading up to the crater rim. And here he found the source of that stink.
The gabbleduck was down on its belly, as if crouching like some massively obese cat preparing to pounce. Its bill lay flat on the ground and its eyes were now a pepperpot of holes in its bare skull, which prawn-like dryben were using like holes in a wasps’ nest. Chanter took a hard sharp breath and quickly scanned his surroundings. This was unusual, very unusual, practically unique. The remains of gabbleducks were a great rarity, for hooders – usually avid predators that avoided carrion – always gathered in numbers when a gabbleduck was dying, or dead. They would then go into a feeding frenzy, crowding each other out in their eagerness to feed upon every last scrap of the creature until absolutely nothing remained. Gabbleducks, it seemed, produced an oddly complex hormone whilst they were in the process of expiring, and this hormone drove hooders crazy. There seemed no evolutionary basis for this, but then evolution wasn’t always the answer. It certainly offered no answers for why the Technician produced its grotesque sculptures.
Chanter walked over to the massive corpse, noting further dryben crawling in and out of holes eaten in through its body, and then he glanced up the lava slope. It must have expired up at the top there and rolled down, but still this didn’t explain why no hooders had been attracted here to obliterate the remains. Perhaps some connection with the sickly lizard tails and the lack of tricones down in the vent? Chanter grimaced and headed for the slope, further puzzled as he climbed to see penny molluscs clinging in neat spirals to the stone. As he climbed he felt some degree of worry, for a dead gabbleduck would certainly be of interest to the Polity researchers now on this world and the AIs above would know that it was here. His visit might draw their attention, though he was not so stupid as to believe that the AIs weren’t already aware of his presence here on Masada.
At the top of the slope he pulled his palmtop out of a side pocket of his backpack and called up the map showing his present location and the path he must tread to reach the coordinates Dragon had given him all those years ago. The arrow directed him to his left along the crater rim, though when he checked, he saw his destination lay twenty kilometres directly ahead. The trekking program had obviously found something there he needed to go round, a cliff or crevasse, maybe a river. He set out, big flat feet clumping down on shale bound together by the mycelial fibres of mountain fungus. Luckily it was early in the season for this growth and it had yet to turn the rocks slippery, though the downside of this was that he would be unlikely to see any of the fungus-sucking herbivores that dwelt up here.
Halfway round the crater rim the arrow directed him down a gentle slope into a canyon formed by black basalt walls standing only a few metres high. He trudged on down to this, but at the base of the slope halted and scanned around. Maybe that gabbleduck back there, and the oddities within the crater, had left him with this creepy feeling, but he got the distinc
t impression that something was watching him. He glanced up. Perhaps something was, maybe some AI, keeping a sensor directed towards that corpse, now idly tracking his course. He shook himself and stomped on, legs already beginning to ache from this unaccustomed exercise.
After five kilometres, Chanter chose a suitable rock and sat down heavily, telling himself his amphidapt body was as unsuitable for this terrain as Mick’s delicate machinery, but he wasn’t fooling himself. He would have been just as knackered walking this distance over the rhizome mat of the flute-grass prairie. This wasn’t about adaptation, but about him having spent too much time sitting on his fat froggy backside. He unshouldered his pack and took out his lunchbox, opening it to expose a writhing mass of green nematodes, dipped forwards and snatched up a clump with his sticky tongue, chomped them all writhing and salty in his mouth, and swallowed with an eyeball-sucking gulp. Enough. He stowed the lunchbox away, shouldered his pack then, after a long reluctant pause, stood up again.
Fifteen kilometres from his mudmarine Chanter really just wanted to turn round and head back, and it appalled him that every step now took him further from his vehicle, and was one he must take on the way back. However, both determination and self-disgust drove him on – that, and the knowledge that his lunchbox was still full and that his pack contained a nice monofilament tent with integral bed. By the time he reached the long teardrop entrance giving access into the side of a big tubular cave seemingly enfolded in a wave of stone, the sun was setting and Calypse gleamed bright in the sky. Here he paused, scanning through his finger webbing in infrared to check nothing nasty lurked inside before he entered. For a moment he felt panic upon recognizing the shape of a hooder, but soon saw that its individual segments lay some distance apart, perhaps shaken loose by some tremor, like a row of beads on a plate, the carapace of its legs scattered on the dusty floor all about it, and knew it was long dead.
