The Technician

by Neal Asher

  ‘Assumptions can be made,’ said Amistad.

  ‘Dangerous.’

  ‘The Atheter destroyed their civilization and their own intelligence. The thing reacted to you, reacted to you trying to resurrect one of that kind, so quite simply it was built to prevent that – to keep the Atheter extinct, to prevent the gabbleducks from being more than animal.’

  ‘Obvious,’ Penny Royal stated.

  Yes, certainly, but they needed more than that. The device resided in underspace and could reach out to the physical world to flatten an AI, to tamper with a powerful biomech, and it seemed likely that what was happening with Tombs might activate it again. They needed to know how to stop it.

  From his position aboard the platform overlooking the scenery of Masada, Amistad first firmly cut all connection with Penny Royal then mentally reached out. The heavily encrypted signal he sent, via a U-space transceiver inside his own body, activated another such transceiver inside an armoured sphere anchored to a plate of ancient coral deep in the southern ocean. Inside this shell rested a chunk of AI crystal, powered up but connected to no sensorium. Trapped in a virtual environment entirely of its own making, Penny Royal’s eighth state of consciousness perpetually tried to escape, searched for the door that Amistad now entered through.

  That Eight, as Amistad had designated this thing, had created a virtual world based on a model of existence as viewed through the Human senses only confirmed reality: AIs weren’t something separate from Humanity, but its descendants. That Eight had chosen to make its home in such a place indicated something else, though what, Amistad had no idea.

  Amistad manifested on the floor of some huge cathedral cavern whose walls seemed to be in perpetual motion. With Human senses this would be all the drone could see, however, magnifying things revealed the walls were made of millions of Human beings writhing together in black slime, slowly tearing each other apart and also slowly reassembling. Amistad had not yet ascertained how deep was the reality of these . . . things. Quite possibly they represented the recordings of Human minds Penny Royal had tormented and now continued to torment. Certainly, just this one eighth of the AI possessed the capacity to contain them. Herein lay the reason why Amistad had not simply obliterated this thing, or at least so he told himself.

  In places these bodies formed the entrances to further caves and, observing these, Amistad awaited the perceptual representation of the attack the thing here always made as it tried to find a way back through the door into here. Odd, that on this occasion those caves did not immediately spew their complement of flying, hopping and crawling horrors.

  ‘Eight,’ said Amistad.

  Nothing for a moment, then in one cave a red light surging forwards. Eight manifested as a great black squid with glowing red eyes. It shot out, spewing an ink consisting of highly destructive nanomachines in this virtual environment, but as com line chewers in reality. The cloud of machines washed over Amistad, darkening his carapace, tried to find a way in but, as always, blunted molecular teeth on sheer armour and were torn apart by the drone’s own complement of nanomachines. The comline chewers hit the same wall for, quite simply, Amistad was the door and remained stronger than the thing beating against it.

  ‘The Atheter device,’ Amistad stated.

  No verbal response from Eight, but a flash of some broken computer architecture underlying this virtuality. The ink cloud dispersed and now the squid sat right over the drone, trying to find some purchase on Amistad’s shell, its tentacles screeching across adamantine armour. In a flash of irritation Amistad reached up with one claw and snipped a tentacle away. Eight fell writhing through the air, breaking into small spiny black stars. It shrieked, drew back, then attacked again.

  ‘We need to understand the Atheter device,’ the drone insisted.

  Eight offered some construct. Here in the virtuality the tormented began bursting like sporulating puff balls, spewing internal organs that flitted through the air like grotesque birds to coagulate in a glistening squirming sphere above. Hints of knowledge of the Atheter device’s abilities to reform matter and suck energy from somewhere. Hints also that it was damaged, no longer functioning as it should, and that it possessed vulnerabilities. Amistad was left in no doubt that deep knowledge of the Atheter device existed here, and that by seizing the sphere above he could possess it. The only problem was that by doing so Amistad would open himself to Eight, open the door, and the thing would escape, probably damaging Amistad as it opened up a channel back to its original home inside Penny Royal.

  Amistad had once managed to extract and imprison this eighth state of consciousness from the erstwhile black AI, but that was when Penny Royal had been poised on the edge of extinction. Now, even though Amistad was much much more powerful, he doubted that he could extract Eight from a fully functional Penny Royal and put it back in the box.

  Amistad demurred, retreated, slammed the door shut on his way out.

  The shadows on the walls here were low-echelon vicars, bishops and others in the priesthood, mere proctors like him, women, and even menial staff of the cylinder world. He gazed at them and felt only sadness, regret, but that seeming to arise out of a growing strength in his inner self, which recognized that these images denied Hierarch Loman’s sainthood.

  ‘Same effect as with the Hierarch,’ said Grant. ‘These images are all across the Polity now in picture-wall memories, though it ain’t the kind of decoration I’d choose.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Shree. ‘They have their appeal.’

  Jem gazed at the ruin of the Friar Hold. The stone wall before him now possessed a glaze into which the ghost of the garden, now blackened soil underfoot, had been etched. He could see roses, shadow stems, a soldier hunched over something, his honour guard rifle a metallic splash distorted into a curve over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m sure you can see some of the bodies,’ said Shree.

  Bodies?

  ‘So I’m told,’ said the soldier. ‘Though I can’t.’

  ‘Bodies?’ Jem asked out loud. He looked over his shoulder seeking an answer, but again Sanders wasn’t there, would never be there.

  ‘When Loman had the Septarchy Friars murdered he had the bodies left here in the garden,’ Grant explained. ‘Some say they can see the shapes of those bodies in that charred mess at the foot of the wall.’

  Jem shook his head, tried to dispel ghosts, then bowed low and peered hard at the drift of fused and scaly ash. Yes, maybe a hint of a limb there, and could that be a face? No, what looked like eyes were rivet holes in some half-molten lump of metal. He abruptly stood upright again, realizing that even those without faith distorted their perception of reality for the purpose of confirming their own beliefs.

  ‘Your . . . Penny Royal gave me back my mind,’ he said. ‘Was that so you could have something whole in which to break my faith?’

  ‘Whether or not you believe you got an invisible friend in the sky is irrelevant to us,’ the soldier growled, turning to him. ‘The Theocracy is dead, and the number of believers dropping daily as they come out of the darkness and choose sanity. Polity AIs don’t much care about people’s beliefs, just so long as they obey the law.’

  ‘The Theocracy may have fallen,’ Jem said, the ghost of a shrug shifting his frame for a moment as he allowed his obvious indoctrination to take over, ‘but you cannot destroy the teachings of Zelda Smythe.’

  Grant glanced across at Shree, some amusement in his expression, before returning his attention to Jem. ‘The biggest lesson she taught was that Human gullibility should never be underestimated, including her own. Seems Smythe’s problem was too much belief – she bought into any mystical crap thrown her way, including all the major religions back then. In trying to sort out all the contradictions she wrote it all down and began work on her teachings – what you call the Satagents. However, her own excess of belief didn’t blind her to the benefits when those searching for belief started knocking on her door.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ A r
ote question; a game played out to its end.

  Shree interjected, ‘What he means is she used her patchwork religion to become extremely wealthy, and she used that wealth to later explore some new interests in memcording, exotic drugs and what she described as ‘transcendence through sexual ecstasy’ with her highly paid staff of young men.’

  Jem nodded, continuing the game. ‘Yet, with her wealth she brought her followers here and established the Theocracy. Whether you believe or disbelieve her teachings, her own faith in such an act cannot be doubted.’

  ‘She funded it,’ said Grant, ‘but shaved enough corners it’s a wonder the cryoship got here.’ He stared at Jem with puzzlement, perhaps sensing a lack of sincerity. ‘Nearly a quarter of the passengers died during thaw-up. The death rate then was pretty high for those taking the landers down to the surface to establish a foothold there. Not so many died up here where the upper Theocrats started asteroid mining and building their cylinder worlds.’

  ‘There seems to be a hole in your logic,’ said Jem. ‘Why would she risk herself by ‘shaving corners’ as you put it?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Shree, ‘because she didn’t come here.’

  ‘Zelda Smythe walked amidst the flute grasses and heard the music of angels mingled with the raucous cries of demons,’ Jem quoted, tired of the game now.

  ‘Zelda Smythe,’ said Shree, ‘died aged a hundred and eighty-six in her Antiguan palace. The combinations of drugs she was using to control the AIDs VII she suffered did not sit well with the other drugs she used for recreational purposes.’

  ‘Lies,’ said Jem, the robot.

  ‘Why?’ asked Shree.

  ‘You are just trying to break—’

  The back of Grant’s hand slammed into his mouth before he could finish. Jem fell and skidded along the ashen ground, lights flashing behind his eyes. In a moment Grant had him by the throat and dragged him up, slammed him back against the charred wall.

  ‘Listen, you little shit,’ he said. ‘If we wanted to “break your faith” by feeding you lies we could have rigged you up to an aug just like that one I stopped Tinsch from sticking into your skull. We could tear your mind apart and stick it back together in any shape we chose. We could make you believe Zelda Smythe is a transsexual orangutan living on bananas on Mars. We could make you believe anything. But why should we? Do you really think you’re that fucking important, that your belief is that fucking important we want to waste resources on it?’

  ‘Evidently . . . you do,’ Jem choked.

  Grant stared at him, then abruptly released his hold. ‘You’re not important, your damned religion isn’t important. What’s important is what a biomechanism may have shoved inside your skull.’

  Jem rubbed at his throat. These two would never like him, never understand the long journey he had made and was still making, never see him as anything more than Proctor Jeremiah Tombs. Continuing that journey he would make what recompense he could, for Sanders, not for them. But he would damned well have their respect.

  ‘Only extinction is real,’ he said, Euclidean shapes clamouring to escape the wells of his consciousness, a cry of loss turning to sound that could not have issued from a Human mouth. ‘But belief in a negative is incomplete, when the penny has two sides.’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’

  ‘I am ready to hear the truth, soldier,’ Jem replied. ‘And maybe that will uncover the truth of what the Technician branded into my mind.’

  Its last inmate now no longer here, the sanatorium had taken on a ghostly, almost doleful air. Sanders gazed up at it from the small landing field cut into the mountain slope on the landward side, reluctant to return there, because she was also reluctant to bring this part of her life to a conclusion. Then, angrily, she stepped out of her rented gravan, walked to the side loading door and thumped the lock plate.

  Inside rested two large plasmel trunks. Taking a remote from her pocket she selected ‘follow’ on the screen menu then turned and headed for the crushed-stone path that led straight up, rather than taking the curving supply road – best get this over with quickly. After a short while her anger waned, and she glanced back at the two hover trunks dogging her footsteps, gratified to see that the rough path seemed no problem to them despite their usual environment being runcible terminals or space ports.

  Soon she reached the grapewood door into the rear courtyard. In Theocracy times this door had been closely fitted and sealed and she would first have had to pass through the outer door of an airlock to reach it. Now, what with the airlock having been removed along with the roof of the courtyard within, the weather had got to the old wood and it had shrunk, and its seals peeled away. Yanking down the central handle she pushed it open and entered.

  The courtyard had once contained all sorts of exotica grown here by the Bishop of Heretic’s Isle. The image of that man quietly tending his plants before heading off to oversee the bloody games they had played here sat uncomfortably in her mind. She noted that though native growths were sprouting from the pots and raised beds within, some of that man’s plants had survived. It seemed significant – some things could never be wholly erased. She crossed flagstones, the trunks emitting a low whine as they followed, entered through the next grape-wood door, the seals round this new and working, felt the puff of pressure differential as she entered and noted the abrupt slowing of her breathing as her adapted lungs themselves adapted to the extra oxygen here.

  In from the courtyard lay a long room containing all an enthusiastic botanist would want, then beyond this the kitchens. Treading a familiar route, Sanders passed old confinement cells, torture rooms stark and empty but for the occasional fixture that once supported frames, manacles, gallows. Finally she entered the modernized section of the sanatorium – redecoration here, no sign of the past use of this place – then eventually came to the door into her quarters.

  Gazing around at the place she had slept in for two decades, she felt a surge of nostalgia and old regret. She focused on a chair over the back of which her nova wrap still cycled its hot display of a dying star, walked over and picked that up, then took the remote control from her belt and pressed ‘packing’.

  The two hover trunks obliged by settling down on the whitegrass carpet and hinging open their divided lids. Sanders tossed in the wrap first, then her clothing, a small collection of items she’d found washed up on the shore, including the much-eroded upper beak of a gabbleduck, then other items she considered personal possessions. By the time she had finished she’d only filled one trunk. Of course, before the arrival of the Polity she would have also packed a large collection of books, memory crystals and other singular data-storage items, but now all that just sat in her personal store somewhere in cyberspace, and she could recall it wherever she settled. She eyed the laptop on her desk here. Even that wasn’t really hers – just disposable and easily replaceable tech. She walked over to it. Keyed into the offworld excursion site to check on her booking, for with things not quite as functional here as in the rest of the Polity, there could be problems.

  Cancelled.

  Sanders stared at this a long moment, then keyed in a query. The laptop blanked, then two words appeared on the screen: Disposal Confirm?

  What the Hell?

  Sanders reached down to cancel the order, but now ‘Confirmed’ flashed up. The screen blanked again, then rainbow faults spread and it began to crack. The keys started to shrivel and the whole case of the thing distorted.

  Her hand instinctively strayed to the button of her comlink now on the lapel of her jacket, then she hesitated. This could have just been some sort of glitch, or it could be that the computer hardware here had been set to wipe itself anyway, but she doubted it. She pressed her right forefinger to her comlink, which read the whorls and activated.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ she said out loud.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ a familiar voice replied from her link. ‘But I wanted to get your attention.’

  ‘Well you ha
ve it now, Amistad. Why’ve you cancelled my booking?’

  ‘Jeremiah Tombs still believes he murdered you,’ the drone replied. ‘It will be necessary, quite probably in the near future, to apprise him of the reality.’

  ‘I thought you wanted him to carry on believing that,’ she said bitterly. ‘I thought his guilt over supposedly killing me was one of the driving factors to enable you to get to what lies inside his mind?’

  ‘Not so much for that, but rather to impel his cooperation over a limited time span. However, since one of the main drivers in religious indoctrination is guilt for which there can be no recompense, examples being original sin, guilt about wholly natural sexual impulses, and the general guilt at being unable to live up to deliberately unattainable ideals, those with that mindset tend to revel in it, and for our purposes it could now become a hindrance, even destructive.’

  ‘Just show him recordings of what you did – of me getting up afterwards and cleaning off that artificial blood.’

  ‘Too little drama,’ Amistad stated. ‘Humans always require drama when changing underlying belief structures else they fall back into the old patterns. They need an excess of pain, joy, strong emotion or new experience, to impress the change upon the dull recording medium between their ears.’

  ‘Y’know, Amistad, you can be really irritating sometimes.’ Sanders took out her remote control again, hitting ‘follow’. The two trunks closed up, rose a few centimetres off the floor, then trailed her as she headed out of the room. ‘So what do you want of me?’

  ‘I require you to remain available – preferably in the vicinity of Dragon Down, which I calculate is where Tombs will be when he reaches his next mental nexus.’