by Neal Asher
It had delayed them for a couple of hours, during which time they set up a brief camp and broke out supplies. Shree hadn’t let up then, continually pressing Jem about his beliefs, about his opinion of the Theocracy, the Polity. To escape this Jem had taken a walk up to look at the damage. A great scar had been ripped across the road – the rhizome mat completely torn apart to reveal black tricone-infected mud beneath. Apparently this was a common occurrence, the tricones attacking the road as if it were a real structure rather than just a path hammered through the flute grasses. Over the other side of this had stood a large truck with a loading arm, the back of it filled with sheets of plastimesh to make repairs, but no workmen had been in sight.
Other supplies quickly packed away, Grant had taken the ATV off the road, barging through flute grasses beside the tear, labouring over raised mud banks, the beaked monstrous head of a mud snake, like a giant horse skull, briefly surfacing to one side as if they had run over its body. Going off-road being so easy, Jem had wondered why they bothered with a road at all, but that detour made him realize why. Though capable of going off-road the trucks that generally used this route were not as agile as the ATV, and with the road open ahead of them could travel much faster. After that, two hours’ travel had brought them to the way station, which remained invisible to Jem until its main door opened, for flute-grass rhizomes were spreading over its upper surface to disguise it.
The inner door opened, flooding the tunnel with a brighter artificial light from within, and Grant drove the ATV into the central area. Here vehicles were parked directly on the foam-stone raft, whilst around these, raised beds contained gnarled grape trees shading grey grassy masses starred with flower flashes of red, yellow and white with exotic combinations in between. Jem wondered what bishop had made this place his gardening project, and whether his remains resided in his flower beds or outside. Grant drew the ATV to a halt beside a large dozer and shut it down.
Both Grant and Shree picked up packs to carry out of the vehicle with them and, seeing this, Jem felt a sudden surge of loss. His only possessions now were the clothes he stood up in, and even they might not be considered truly his. He didn’t even have a bag containing a few personal items, toiletries, a palmtop or even a watch. Directly upon this feeling he felt a sudden nostalgia for his room in the sanatorium. Only as he stepped out of the ATV after the other two did he wonder at his lack of yearning for his proctor residence at Triada Compound. It seemed so utterly distant from him and, though he had spent the intervening years since in something like delirium, their impact remained. Even further in the past lay the family home in Zealos, parents struggling with oxygen debt and his father dying from the strain, a debt Jem paid off with his first year of proctor wages, only for his mother to die just as the account cleared.
That past now lay utterly disconnected from him. It belonged to a person Jem no longer recognized; one with simple beliefs and few questions, one who accepted the world as he found it and his position there. The Jeremiah Tombs of right now recognized that the world was a lot more complicated than he had supposed and that the questions storming in his head only began with the ones Humans asked themselves day to day. Shree had helped bring this into focus; her hate had brought it into focus.
Above the gardens enclosing the parking area, the ring of apartments and other concerns rose to four storeys; short balconies ran in a ring around each level. Jem could see some people up there, and more in the restaurant they passed on the way to one of the four reception entrances. Inside, a tall woman with scars on her face and a shirt open to her navel to expose a scole scar took Grant’s details, handed over room cards and gave him directions. With wary doubt she stared at Jem for a moment, at his clothing, at the script running down it. Perhaps she’d seen something about him on Earthnet. He wanted to tell her that a lot more resided inside these clothes than she was seeing.
‘You can buy new clothing direct from your rooms, if you like,’ she said, her gaze on Jem. ‘In fact there’s a lot you can buy here now.’ She flashed a sympathetic smile at him, her gaze again straying down. Confused, he looked down too, saw that his clothing was stained with mud and there were rips in both knees of his trousers. When had that happened? He turned and followed as Grant led off, realizing the woman had seen only a person, not an erstwhile proctor, and that to her his clothing might only have been some odd fashion, like the open top she wore. Glancing back as they mounted the stairs he saw her watching him with just a hint of a smile, her look something he had no recollection of any woman directing at him before. But he had to turn away, angry that his sudden gratitude tightened his throat and squeezed tears into his eyes.
Corridors decorated in bright colours and soft thick carpets led to their rooms.
‘I do need a change of clothing,’ said Jem, as Grant directed him to one door and handed over his room card.
‘There’ll be a console inside,’ said Grant. ‘You can order what you want through that.’
‘Got some proctor back pay?’ Shree enquired.
Grant took a wallet out of his pocket, opened it and extracted a thin memory stick. ‘Use this – your credit rating should cover anything you want.’
‘So now he gets Polity credit?’
Grant glanced at her. ‘He’s on a retainer – he’s working for the Polity now.’ The soldier turned away and headed for his room.
‘You’ll find it difficult to buy yourself a Satagenial here,’ said Shree, turning to Jem. ‘Though there are plenty available for sale in places more often frequented by tourists. It seems Theocracy artefacts sell well to Polity citizens, who always like to snatch up the remnants of a dead past.’
‘I will let go of my religion the moment you let go of your hate,’ Jem replied.
She snorted derisively and moved away.
Entering his room Jem gazed around at the luxury cluttering the shell of land-bound Theocratic minimalism. It didn’t take much imagination to mentally remove from this small space the soft bed, cupboards, combined high-tech shower and toilet unit and auto vendor, and replace them with institutional paint, sleeping mat, prayer stool, slop bucket and the scourging tools resting in an icon alcove now containing a holographic projector.
He nodded to himself, not sure what this confirmed to him, then deliberately allowed that distant muttering to impinge on his consciousness again. It definitely had a source, he felt, outside his skull, distant but definitely directional. Something was stirring, over there, he could face where it came from. And its unease came from him. What it was he didn’t know, but felt sure he would know. He shrugged it away, walked over to sit before the room’s console.
It was of the kind he had been familiarized with at the sanatorium and it automatically came on, sensing his presence, to show him the wonderful shopping opportunities here at Bradacken way station. He sat staring at it for a long moment, resisting the urge to check over his shoulder, utterly aware that no one was there, that he was alone. If only he hadn’t killed, if only she could be here . . .
Abruptly angry with himself, he jabbed into its slot the memory stick Grant had given him. His credit rating blinked up on the screen, and he proceeded to spend it. Half an hour after that he took a shower, then sat on his bed wrapped in a towel until the door buzzer snapped him out of reverie. He opened the door to find a low, flat oval platform piled with his purchases, and wondered if maybe the woman from reception had brought it. Puzzled that no one was here, he picked up the various packages and took them inside. When he took up the last one, the trolley said, ‘Have a good night, Jeremiah Tombs,’ rose up on six fat insectile legs and scuttled off down the corridor.
Jem slammed and locked the door, stared at his bed and contemplated the certainty of nightmares.
A notification went to every aug, comunit and console inside the observation tower, and many in the monitoring rooms below the main platform returned to their instruments to begin recording and analysing their subject with a depth and precision never used before, yet with so much more con
cealed from them now. Accepting all data feeds from the tower’s sensors, and using many of his own sensors, Amistad watched the Technician wake.
After its last kill the biomechanism had lain coiled on the flute-grass rhizome mat for eighteen days, as if digesting that meal, yet this had been a common occurrence only over the last twenty years, so this certainly wasn’t an after-lunch nap. At the centre of the coil its spike of a tail twitched, then the creature rippled, that ripple spiralling outwards from the tail until it reached the spoon-shaped head, which rose a little. From where that head had been cupping the ground, a mist of vapour dispersed, and Amistad saw that the Technician’s body temperature had risen, in some areas beyond anything seen in it before, and now even higher within its cowl. Other readings, where they could be obtained, revealed high chemical activity, the kind of electrical readings to be expected from a busy computer, running as a background to disperse neuro-chemical firings. This had been seen before, but never at this density.
Amistad opened a channel to the Tagreb where the AI there, Rodol, replied.
‘Something you require?’ it asked.
‘What is Chanter doing now?’ Amistad asked.
‘Right now he is enjoying a meal of orange-back nematodes, which he seems to prefer to the more common green variety. Having adapted his body to this world it seems his taste is for more cyanide in his food, though he has convinced himself that he prefers orange-backs because they tend to wriggle more in his mouth.’
‘And his work with Jonas Clyde?’
‘They’re avoiding each other now,’ Rodol replied. ‘After Clyde’s assertion that the Technician, through its sculptures, was trying to rebuild an Atheter mind, Chanter has ventured into more esoteric studies of how artists try, through their art, to erase the same traumas of their early lives that, so he believes, resulted in their artistic impulses. He is theorizing that it is impossible for them to erase those traumas and so they will always remain artists, though, should such erasure be possible, they would kill the impulse.’
‘In other words he’s disappearing up his own backside again.’
‘That about covers it.’
‘Then it’s time to give him something more constructive to do. I’ll consider how best he can be used.’
‘Haven’t things moved beyond his rather distorted and simple view of reality?’
‘Perhaps . . . what about Clyde?’
‘At first resentful that I won’t allow him to lapse back into alcoholism, but right now back in his laboratory studying data now being transmitted from your location. I believe he wants to talk to you.’
‘Okay.’
Contact followed immediately.
‘Amistad,’ said Jonas Clyde.
The man peered from a virtual screen in the drone’s mind, him seeing an image of the drone from one of the cams on the platform.
‘Evidently,’ Amistad replied.
‘I’ve been making some comparisons.’ Obviously excited about something, Clyde ignored the sarcasm. ‘Biochemical activity is about on a par with any other hooder’s, but that doesn’t account for the amount of bio-electrical activity being picked up.’
‘Theorize,’ Amistad instructed.
‘Okay, the Technician is probably over two million years old. Its musculature is about four times stronger than a normal hooder’s, the complexity of its cowl manipulators up there with that of an autodoc or even an AI mindtech. Its armour is not only resistant to energy weapons but to massive shock and possesses molecular dense layers that would give it resistance to nano-attack.’
‘This is all known.’
‘Yes, and from the excess of redundancy you theorized that it might well be a prototype – the redundancy removed to result in the other hooders.’
‘That was a hypothesis, not a theory, and a questionable hypothesis too.’
‘Okay, I’ll give you that.’
‘You yourself hypothesized, because of the resistance of their armour to energy weapons, that the hooders of this world were an adapted strain of war machine – that the Atheter took their war machines and simplified them for the chore of obliterating gabbleduck remains. Presupposing this was the case, then the possibility that a high-redundancy prototype hooder was made seems unlikely.’
‘Yeah, you got it.’
Clyde sounded disappointed, defused. In that moment Amistad realized that though he himself now possessed as much brainpower as other high-functioning AIs across the Polity, he had yet to acquire another of their traits: diplomacy. The likes of Jerusalem and Geronamid tended to let those researchers under them enjoy their discoveries – perpetually being second-guessed by an AI could be depressing, and would reduce the efficacy of those same researchers.
‘Do go on,’ said the drone.
‘Right, I guess the Technician could still be loosely defined as a prototype . . .’ Clyde paused for a moment to get his thoughts in order and, though already way ahead of the man, Amistad let him work his way through it. ‘Look, the Technician may or may not be the machine on which the Atheter based the common hooder, that’s irrelevant, but there’s other things we need to consider. You know what I thought when I measured that electrical activity?’
‘Please continue,’ said Amistad, not quite able to express surprise and say, ‘I’ve absolutely no idea!’
‘The readings looked just like those you’d get if you pointed sensors at a haiman: biochem, bioelectrics, then a big ramp of electrical activity from their computer additions.’
Amistad did suddenly feel some surprise, not at what he knew Clyde was coming to, but at where that reference to a haiman – a Human being partially blended with an AI – might lead.
‘But I guess that’s to be expected – a biomech can’t alter its physical structure quite so fast as can you, Amistad. There’s all the problems engendered by the organic blueprint in the genome.’
‘Where are you going with this?’ Amistad asked, his tone one of perfect puzzlement after he removed the prior tone of get-on-with-it exasperation.
‘I think the Technician is one of the original war machines.’
How very surprising.
‘I agree, this seems likely.’
Clyde’s enthusiasm returned. ‘This means we’re dealing with an alien version of you, and all that entails. It means adaptability and maybe the ability to create new weapons, which probably accounts for the changes it’s been undergoing for the last twenty years. I need to get closer and run some tests. I bet it’s got nanite defences in its armour, just like you.’
‘I wonder about that comparison you made between sensor readings from the Technician and those you might get from a haiman . . .’ Lead him there, but ignore that bit about him wanting to come to the observation tower. Clyde had to remain where he was in readiness to tell his story to future visitors.
‘The proportions can vary, depending on the amount of hardware a haiman has installed, though for a Human there is an upper limit.’
Gently, gently.
‘But no upper limit for the Technician, it being a manufactured life form?’
‘I guess.’
‘Well, it’s a certainty that it is manufactured – its genome is far too precise, lacks numerous alleles and junk genome.’
Clyde was dismissive. ‘Humans have been dumping junk DNA and altering their alleles for centuries.’
Amistad waited in hope that the penny would drop. It did.
‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing to say that hooders are completely artificial. They might be adapted from an original evolved form.’
‘Horses, dogs, cats,’ said Amistad.
Originally the product of evolution, then of selective breeding, which then extended into genetic manipulation. There were dogs now with opposable thumbs and maths degrees, and pursuing myth, the first Pegasus took flight on a low-gravity world even before the Prador war.
‘They might even be native to here,’ said Clyde. ‘Though physiologically they’re very different from other nat
ive forms.’
‘A new line of inquiry perhaps?’ Amistad suggested.
‘What?’ Clyde was distracted, already manipulating his data maps.
‘I suggest that you return your attention to all the hooder data you gathered before and now view it in a different light. Perhaps, rather than concentrating on all those elements of hooder biology that classify them as biomechanisms, as artificial creations, you should now look at everything else, perhaps try to ascertain if an original evolved creature is their basis.’
‘Already way ahead of you,’ said Clyde, waving a dismissive hand.
Of course you are, Amistad thought, even as the communication channel closed.
But would Clyde be able to take an overview of all this: organisms turned into war machines by a race descending into self-destructive insanity; speculations about where the main intelligence of a haiman might lie; organisms capable of manipulating their environment in complex ways; rampant Jain technology and thousands of years of civil war.
Some very, very unsettling possibilities were now coming to light.
Amistad returned his attention to the Technician, now fully uncoiled and writhing through the flute grasses. For a moment its choice of direction gave him even more reason to feel unsettled, but then, through an anosmic sensor on the observation tower, he got his explanation. Somewhere out there a gabbleduck had died. The Technician, like many other hooders over a large area, was heading off to obliterate the remains. It was following instinct, or programming. Same difference.
Fuck, they’ve used a bomb, was Grant’s first thought as he rolled out of bed and pulled on his undertrousers. He reached his door, which was still shuddering from the assumed blast, and stepped out expecting to find the corridor full of smoke and wreckage. He found only Shree rapidly exiting her room, thoroughly sexy in only a pair of knickers, and it was evident to him now that she’d had her body cosmetically enhanced.
‘What the hell was that?’
She’d felt it too – it wasn’t some mental replay of his past, some nightmare making the transition into waking.
