by Neal Asher
Shree walked over to her bed, opened her pack and took out the cylinder, weighing it in her hand. Tombs had to die and, as others had to be aware, killing him was not the problem, the assassin surviving afterwards was. Shree would ensure that Tombs died but, now everything about him had been confirmed, she must use him to get to another target: the Atheter AI. Opening this cylinder she would kill both the AI and Tombs, removing the threat of AOP from Masada that both of them represented. The contents of this cylinder would kill all in the vicinity, so she too would die, but with a real purpose, something she only now admitted to herself she had been searching for since the end of the rebellion.
She put the cylinder away again, shrugged the pack onto her shoulder and went to find Grant.
With a deep sense of urgency the mechanism completed a new U-space jump, then with a deep sense of frustration tried to rebalance its U-space engine. Limiting its jumps to ten light years to prevent the engine getting out of control, upon each surfacing it was forced to repeat the routine. The murky data it had been obtaining from the Homeworld was now clear: the bioelectrical readings seemed a bit odd because the now functional Atheter mind existed inside one of the alien organisms occupying the Atheter realm; one of these Humans.
As it travelled the mechanism prepared itself by bringing all its back-up resources online, even the processing power of all the once somnolent pattern disruptors it contained. It understood now, in a way its creators had not made it to understand, that those same creators had not prepared it for eventualities like this. They had chosen oblivion, but a nuance of oblivion with an ancient cultural basis. They had wanted to live in some long-ago innocent state that in reality had never existed. However, it now seemed to the mechanism that this state, this nuance of oblivion, could not be maintained. The solution was all too obvious: all nuances must be cut away to reveal oblivion in its purest form.
Only total annihilation could work. The mechanism had erased the minds of its masters as instructed but, like Jain nodes, they were persistent. There had been the one the war machine had resurrected, the one the black AI had resurrected, so it only seemed logical that there might be others still. The only way now for the mechanism to properly fulfil its original programming was to remove the vessels to which those minds could be transferred. The Homeworld had to go, but that would only be the beginning.
The alien civilization that had now spread across the Atheter realm, and also occupied the Homeworld, was a great danger. The black AI was a product of that civilization, this was now evident, and that these aliens could also be instrumental in future Atheter resurrection attempts seemed inevitable. Present circumstances also demonstrated that it was possible to awaken an Atheter mind inside a Human being. The only way to ensure complete erasure of every trace of the Atheter would be to work outwards, as it had two million years ago, burning to ash anything with the potential to contain an Atheter, annihilating all informational or physical storage in which they might exist.
Yes, the Homeworld would have to go, but the aliens would have to go next. It seemed only logical to the mechanism, now its graven instructions were becoming much less specific, in fact quite blurred, that the next stage in the existence of Humans, and the machines they made, should be precisely the same as that of the Atheter.
‘You’ll deal with it,’ Earth Central had said, but Masada had not been abandoned by that entity – the world was far too important and the events taking place on its surface more important still. In Amistad’s calculation, Earth Central would rather any number of other worlds in the Polity faced obliteration than this one.
Launching from the observation tower’s platform, he gravplaned out across the wilderness then, finding adequate clearance, ignited the small fusion drive in his tail and headed straight up.
‘So what kind of defences do we have?’ the drone enquired of the planetary governor here, Ergatis. The question was merely a politeness, since Amistad now had the weight to just take that information directly from Ergatis’s mind.
‘Four gamma-class attack ships, two medium-range dreadnoughts and the geostat cannon,’ the AI replied, supplying details of these items.
One of the dreadnoughts and two of the attack ships were out at the Braemar moon Flint, the attack ships undergoing a refit at the space dock there and the dreadnought on guard duty over the runcible installation on the surface. The second dreadnought sat in orbit about Masada, called in from patrol in the unlikely event that it might be needed to back up the geostat cannon – the one positioned directly above the main continent where it could keep both the Atheter AI and the main dracoman towns in it sights. A precautionary measure, with firepower in excess of what the Theocracy laser network had been able to deliver, considered essential when dealing with aliens whose motivations were as yet unclear. But it was the two remaining attack ships that drew Amistad’s attention.
‘This anomaly they’re investigating . . .’ Amistad began.
‘Two detonations under the chromosphere of the sun,’ Ergatis supplied, also opening all that data for Amistad’s inspection. ‘Both were preceded by U-space signatures and whatever the objects were that surfaced there have been all but obliterated. The attack ships, however, have dropped probes to check for instabilities.’
It could have been some kind of attack using U-space technology to cause instabilities in the sun’s surface. This kind of attack had been conducted to devastating effect during the Prador war – deliberately causing a solar flare to sear the surface of a nearby world. However, studying the data available, Amistad didn’t think that the case here. Those instabilities were usually quite plain, and had they been detected, everyone capable of doing so would be running. This time without any politeness, Amistad went through Ergatis to seize the data stream from those solar probes. Chromatic analysis revealed super-dense metals still in the process of dissolving – the kind of metals Amistad had already seen, just recently. The drone apprised Ergatis of this.
‘The approaching mechanism sent them,’ Ergatis decided.
‘But not, I would suggest, recently,’ said Amistad.
‘The hypothetical sensors,’ suggested the AI.
By now the curve of the world had become visible all around Amistad and the main continent clearly visible in a deep purple sea below. Old habits dying hard, the drone began running close diagnostics on his weapons, even as he did so recognizing the futility of him trying to use such small firepower against what was approaching.
‘Not hypothetical,’ he said. ‘This is certainly the device that screwed Penny Royal in the Graveyard and screwed the Technician a million years ago. That it possesses some method of detecting active Atheter minds is a certainty.’
‘I have some further data on this,’ Ergatis announced, immediately relaying data packets to Amistad.
Studying these, the drone contemplated events that had been occurring very close to the moonlet in which he had found Penny Royal. Since the Atheter device had interfered with the black AI at that location, a small research vessel had been sent. It had been some millions of kilometres out when Amistad had collected up Penny Royal’s remains and transported them away. Its purpose had been to map and analyse U-space tremors for evidence relating to that device – its position consonant with U-space/realspace drift. Four years after Amistad abandoned the small private cargo ship he had hired, then used the runcible network to get to Masada, the research vessel had picked up on something sitting at the interface between the two continua.
Amistad was unsurprised to only learn about this now. The readings could have been from any number of the imperfections sitting in that position: a black hole ghost, the disruption left by a faulty U-space drive, or one of the infinitely multiplying afterimages left when such a drive everted itself. However, just recently, the source of the anomaly became clear when it relocated to the nearby sun to obliterate itself. Another object made of super-dense metals – a necessity of construction when making physical probes to sit at such a location. Here
then was the sensor that had picked up on Penny Royal’s activities, here was another of the device’s eyes.
‘It probably wasn’t at that location originally,’ Amistad noted.
‘Seems likely,’ Ergatis opined.
‘They’ll oscillate in and out of the real at a rate dependent on how much scanning the main device requires.’
‘No sign of that oscillation being picked up with this one, over a period of many years,’ said Ergatis. ‘Yet the speed with which the device attacked Penny Royal would indicate an oscillation rate of just hours or even minutes, not years.’
‘Perhaps Penny Royal caused some fault in it. One detected only recently with the result we have just seen.’
Things were starting to become clear to Amistad. You only started dumping remote sensors like that if you either thought they were about to be detected, or if they had developed some sort of fault that couldn’t be corrected – which, at this technological level where self-repairing machines were the norm, meant only one kind of fault: hostile code in the controlling computers.
‘And in the two we’ve seen destroyed here?’ Ergatis wondered.
‘So it would seem,’ said Amistad, then enquired, ‘Penny Royal?’
Though the erstwhile black AI was still nursing its wounds down on the surface, the response came instantly. ‘Answers in the part of my mind you rubbed out.’
Penny Royal remained unaware that Amistad had not rubbed out that eighth state of consciousness, had just drawn it out like a pulsating sting and dropped it in a sealed container. The answers Amistad wanted certainly did reside in that vessel presently sitting under the southern ocean, but he did not fancy ending up on the end of that sting to retrieve them.
‘I put you back together,’ said Amistad. ‘Evidence indicated that you were first attacked only on a mental level, then subsequently on both a mental and physical level.’
‘Yes,’ was all of Penny Royal’s reply.
‘Speculate,’ Amistad instructed.
‘I would have replied along the route of the attack.’
So it seemed likely that the device’s sensor out at the Graveyard had been infected by something Penny Royal had sent, warranting its destruction. That two such sensors here had been destroyed indicated that the infection might have spread. Amistad paused for a moment, reviewing what little data was available concerning those sensors, reviewing a report from some haiman specialist who had been aboard that science vessel out at the Graveyard, then aboard the old interface dreadnought that first discovered the Atheter device. Something didn’t add up, or rather it didn’t add up until Amistad really thought about it for a couple of microseconds.
‘Something else was used,’ he noted.
Neither Penny Royal nor Ergatis responded to this. They had both heard and closely studied everything Jeremiah Tombs had said in the Tagreb museum and were probably coming to the same conclusion as Amistad.
‘You possessed eight states of consciousness, Penny Royal, each perpetually backing up the others – a scale of redundancy only a few Polity AIs have. During the second attack upon you, you were hit with something that disrupted you so fast, both mentally and physically, you had neither the time nor spare capacity to hold yourself together. If the original sensor had possessed that capability there would not have been two attacks.’
‘Agreed,’ said Penny Royal, adding, ‘Under the bell.’
Yes, that made sense. Now shoving himself into a slow orbit about Masada, Amistad considered how it must have been. The device must have been following narrow and clearly delineated orders. There was an Atheter AI here on Masada and Atheter memcordings existed. It probably didn’t respond to the first because though artificial intelligence aped organic life its underlying mental functions were nowhere near the same. It didn’t react to the second because a memcording was static. It must respond only to active Atheter mental processes, which it must detect by using some sort of very sophisticated pattern-recognition scanner. Until its encounter with Penny Royal it had been ignoring everything else, even the fact that a whole new alien civilization now occupied what had once been the Atheter realm. Having no idea what it was up against, perhaps thinking it was just dealing with an odd stray, some chunk of Atheter technology that had been missed, it had attacked Penny Royal in a limited fashion – through the sensor itself – thus enabling the black AI to respond. Only after that response had the device deployed the big guns.
Under the bell.
That there had been Atheter who had not agreed with the suicide consensus presupposed that the method used to conduct that holocaust incorporated sufficient power to deal with them too; to deal with advanced minds seeking every recourse to avoid oblivion, including the technological defences of a race that had been at war for millennia. It would have been done fast, on a massive scale. And what had done that had been sent against Penny Royal after the AI demonstrated it could defend itself.
‘It probably requires a closer physical location for more effective deployment,’ said Ergatis, obviously thinking along the same lines as Amistad.
So, the device was coming to Masada to deploy the bell, or bells, whatever it had used to rub out the minds of millions of Atheter. What had driven it to relocate was detecting an Atheter mind functioning in a Human being, so it must now almost certainly be aware of and responding to the new alien civilization on Atheter home territory.
‘The cavalry has arrived,’ Ergatis announced.
The big modern dreadnought the Scold, accompanied by the interface dreadnought Cheops, had just materialized in the Masadan system. Amistad felt some relief upon seeing the two ships. In Cheops Earth Central had provided something quite capable of denuding a planet of life, whilst in Scold it had provided something capable of converting the same planet into a collection of smoking asteroids. In light of what he had just learned, Amistad hoped these two would be enough.
Despite having slept for a good eight hours, Grant still felt tired as he gazed out of the windows of the Tagreb refectory and reviewed his most recent exchanges with Amistad. It seemed that now the AIs were getting what they wanted from Tombs, but more than they bargained for from out in space. He wondered what further use he could be. Whilst Penny Royal stood guard his own function as a bodyguard to Tombs had just been an honorary position. He rather thought that he’d served his real purpose just by his presence – a familiar face out of Tombs’s repressed past – so perhaps the time had come for him to quit.
‘Can I join you?’
He looked up to see Shree standing over his table. He actually didn’t want her to join him, had come to realize that though they had been lovers during the Rebellion, he actually didn’t like her very much now. Even so, he waved to the chair opposite.
‘So what happens now?’ she asked, dumping her pack down beside her seat.
Grant shrugged. ‘We go to Dragon Down, where Tombs gets his next shock treatment, or revelation, whatever.’
‘What sort of shock?’ she asked.
Grant knew precisely the shock involved but, almost instinctively, he wanted to reveal as little as possible to Shree. Was this because a whole audience might be looking through her eyes? Or was it because of her still evident hate of the Theocracy and of Tombs? Grant abruptly felt surprise. In considering Shree Enkara’s evident feelings he realized that his own had grown dull. Did he hate Tombs? No. Did he hate the Theocracy? No more than one can hate the corpse of an enemy.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Something Amistad lined up.’
Shree shook her head, showing far too obvious disappointment. ‘Surely he should go to the Atheter AI now. I know it projects holograms, but wouldn’t a gabbleduck speaking to him do more psyche-loosening than anything else? The Atheter AI could probably even speak to him in the Atheter language and he’d probably understand it.’
Obviously Shree, even with her media contacts, still didn’t know that the Atheter AI remained uncommunicative and that the last time it projected the image of a gabbleduck
had been twenty years ago. The Polity AIs must have kept this all thoroughly locked down. Perhaps they were respecting an associate’s privacy.
‘That seems like an idea,’ said Grant. ‘But what the hell do I know? I wouldn’t have pegged letting someone hack off his own face as good therapy.’
‘If Tombs has recovered his sanity.’
‘What’s sanity?’
Shree snorted dismissively and looked aside. Perhaps she had her own firm idea of an answer to that question. Grant realized that he too had once had his own set ideas about such things and, as he had discovered, a lot of ideas failed to survive their first contact with reality.
She looked back. ‘All I do know is that a final encounter like that would be perfect for me.’ She gestured with one hand towards the windows. ‘But then a neat climax to the story I’m broadcasting from here isn’t the first concern of AIs like Amistad.’
No, thought Grant, Amistad’s concern right now is that a two-million-year-old civilization-wrecking machine is on its way here. He allowed himself a small grin – Shree’s story was due to get an awful lot bigger.
‘What’s amusing you?’ she asked, an edge to her voice.
‘Just thinking,’ said Grant, ‘that Amistad won’t object to Tombs’s journey taking him to the Atheter AI – quite probably the opposite in fact.’ If Tombs could elicit a reaction out of that intelligence he would be getting something the Polity AIs had been after for the best part of the last two decades.
