Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  The plan itself was far simpler.

  I needed Teresa Shalco and her fellow Clannites to help me escape. They had the power. They had the prison officers in their pockets. And they had access to illicit contraband of all kind – including weapons and bombs. The only reason they didn’t try to escape themselves is that, well, frankly, life for the Clannites at Giger was cushy. They had all the luxuries they could desire.

  And they also had all the freedom they needed, or were used to. Because, of course, all the Clannites had been raised on slave planets. Captivity, for them, was just the way life was.

  So they weren’t desperate, as I was. Which is why I needed to incentivise them. By telling them about the horror that was soon going to be inflicted upon them.

  And so that was my next task. To tell Shalco and her Clan leaders about the coming of the Exodus Universe.

  I had a great job in the Giger Penitentiary. I worked in the prison library. What a joy that was!

  Hey guys, bear with me here! This does connect up with the story, eventually.26

  I loved the work, because I adore books. More than anything. And I mean, literally, anything. Does that sound strange to you? A killer and a psychopath who likes to read?27

  I had paid heavily to get assigned this plum job. And during my time in Giger, I’m proud to say that I made some major improvements to their prison library system, mainly by recataloguing the entire collection on saner grounds. In other words, by genre and category rather than by a) date of publication or b) how much the librarian liked the book.

  The library itself was a wood-lined room with hundreds of desks each with its own virtual screen and limited access to the remote computer’s archive of books. If you had a personal reader, you could down the book and read it in your cell. But most users of the library sat at the desk and watched the book unfold in front of them in mid-air.

  But when I say, “most users,” that didn’t exactly amount to a whole lot of people. The library was not a popular destination. Reading, after all, was considered in these space-faring times as being, well, archaic, and odd. Whereas on Rebus, books were a way of life.

  And the prison library’s book collection was, in truth, pretty pathetic. No science fiction. No heroic fantasy. No finely crafted contemporary novels about cultural mores and the state of society (thank the gods for small mercies!). No satire. No poetry. It was almost all emotionally gentle and well-intentioned pap. Fictional tales of nice people learning to be nicer.

  In other words, crap.

  But I, of course, could burrow deeper, with the power of my Rebus-chipped thoughts. So I “stole” several thousand volumes from the libraries on Giger and elsewhere, stored in the computer’s deep memory, to supplement my already vast implant library. Classics of literature from the nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first and twenty-second and twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, as well of course as the great works from more recent centuries. Some were books I had read in the course of my boring childhood on Rebus. Most were books I always felt I should read. So I sat in the library and read them in mid-air, or downed them on to my personal mindslate to read at leisure in my cell or in the rec rooms. (This is how I developed a reputation for being a mad staring person.)

  I also – this gets us back into the story – used my Rebus chip to down the Solar Neighbourhood Government ultra-confidential report28 into the prison population problem. It was a bona fide report, I didn’t have to fake anything. All I changed were few words – “possible” became “definite,” “eventual” became “imminent.”

  Then I gave the download to Teresa Shalco and Bargan Oriel.

  And I let them simmer.

  They were appalled at what they read. And they swiftly realised it would mean the end of their whole way of life.

  For crime was about to be banned, totally and for ever.

  This was a wild and crazy time, remember. The cork had been let out of the bottle and the genie was – whatever the fuck, let that metaphor die – it was a time of anarchy and gang violence.

  It was forty years now since the death of the Cheo. That had brought to an end the longest Dark Ages in human history, according to some historians.29

  Other historians,30 however, continued to argue these had been the Good Old Days. They argued that, because of the Corporation’s libertarian polices, great works of art and wonderful acts of planetary engineering had been created. New planets had been colonised and terraformed. Rejuve had been perfected. Fabricator plants had been improved to such a degree that quality furnishings and beautiful designer clothes could be generated by self-replicating machines at next to no cost. And all in all, the quality of life for the few had been unsurpassably good. So did it really matter if billions of people on the colony planets lived in slavery and degradation?

  I mean, what can you say to that kind of logic? How fucking stupid is – don’t get me started!

  Back to the point. In the “good old days” of the Corporation, the Earthian citizens routinely committed appalling crimes against humanity, and massacred alien monsters by the trillion.

  But there was no crime, as such, back then. For why bother to break the law, when obeying the law was a better option for any greedy bastard with a soul of direst malignity?

  There was rebellion, of course, and dissent, and liberal protest.31 But all those who defied the authority of the state in however minor a way were executed without trial. Or tortured, horribly, in dungeons like Giger.32 Lawyers33 became a rarity, since there was literally no fucking justice in the world.

  Now, however, supposedly, it is all different.

  For in the years after the Last Battle, democracy has come to human-habited space. There’s an incorruptible police force. There are fair laws. Peace and harmony reign. In theory.

  In practice, however, there are a hell of a lot of very evil people out there. And so slowly the new rulers of humanity were realising they were fighting a losing battle. I read an academic paper about it: “The Process of Moral Relativism; How Ten Generations of Human Beings Have Become Acclimatised to Evil.”34

  It’s scary, you see. If you live within a system, you absorb its values. Peer pressure can, I kid you not, create entire regiments of psychopaths. Let me give you one word to prove my point:

  Kristallnacht.35

  None of which, of course, explains me – my murders, robberies, all the other stuff I’ve done – ’cause I’m the exception to the rule. I live in a system and I defy its fucking values.

  Back to the report. It showed that prisons cannot cope. Brainwiping is proving less and less effective, blah, blah. And so a new solution has been found. Transportation of all major felons to terraformable planets in the farthest reaches of our universe, well away from “civilised” folk.

  A thousand planets have already been identified. And the quantum teleportation technology needed to transport millions – no, not millions, billions of criminals is already in place.

  “What’s the catch?” asked Bargan Oriel.

  I could see it appealed to him. The idea of getting out of prison and having his own planet, nay, his own galaxy.

  I sighed. This was going to be tricky to explain.

  If you want a physics lesson, ask a physicist. I’m just giving you the bare outline here, okay?

  The slang term for quantum teleportation36 is “the fifty-fifty” – because, duh, it only works fifty per cent of the time. When it does work, it instantly teleports human beings any distance you like into the far reaches of space. It works for space ships too. Fifty per cent of the time.

  Those aren’t great odds. In fact, the odds are worse than they sound. For it may be that every colonist on a fifty-fifty ship survives the journey through entangled space but the ship’s hull becomes, for whatever random reason, porous. In which event, you will all die.

  So that’s the catch: a toss of a coin will determine whether you live, or die in appalling horror and bodily incertitude.

  Despite these crap odds
, as I patiently explained to Oriel and Shalco, there’s already a volunteer scheme in place. But the Reconciliation Committee now have a plan to make the whole thing compulsory.

  By teleporting entire prisons.

  Well why not? Size isn’t an issue. If you can teleport a colony ship, you can do the same to a self-contained domed community. There are no dubbers inside a dome like ours – all the prison officers and the Governor himself are safely outside in their vast Home Dome, several miles away from the Penitentiary itself. And of course, every prison has an energy supply and fabricators and oxygen synthesisers, and all the other gadgets you need to sustain a civilisation on a new planet. So you can simply teleport the prison on to an alien world, and let the scum inside cope as best they can.

  What a great plan!

  This news was not, however, well received by Shalco and Oriel. They still expected to get their freedom in due course, once their bribes kicked in. And they didn’t care for the idea of their survival being subject to the whims of the quantum-teleport process.

  And so their rebellion sprang up; and thus was born the great Giger Prison Riot.37

  Plans of the prison were downed by me from Dekon’s mind and printed up for Shalco and Oriel to consult. Knives and grenades were smuggled in with their food packages. And the boxes which contained the food were dismantled to reveal hardplastic components which, when carefully re-assembled, became mortars and plasma guns and force field jammers. And, as I pointed out to both Oriel and Shalco, the DRs all carry weapons, and are weapons. Their arm cannons and laser-eyes could be cannibalised to form the armoury for a mob of angry prisoners.

  I suggested a date for the riot too. 1st June. That’s when the prison was due to dematerialise, according to my modified research documents. At 14.00. Two weeks hence.

  And those two weeks had passed. It was now the 1st of June.

  Hence, the boiling hot water in the face, the girly screaming, and the riot.

  I half-wish I had been there, in the main body of the prison, to see the violence erupt. Though I read plenty of accounts of the violence in the months that followed.

  Here’s my favourite:

  Failed Escape from Giger’s Moon

  Government sources indicate that a small number of recidivist prisoners incarcerated in the Giger’s Moon Penitentiary staged a violent protest which was swiftly subdued. Considerable damage to prison property was caused, and the cost of repairs and replacement of equipment and furniture will be charged to the offending prisoners to be redeemed via work in lieu.

  An official of the Solar Neighbourhood Government has exclusively told this news portal: “This was a brief and regrettable lapse, which was quickly rectified. The public can be assured that there was never any chance of these wrong-doers escaping and returning to their life of crime.”

  However, in a wholly unrelated incident, the Governor of Giger Penitentiary Robbie Ferguson was fatally injured during a training exercise.38

  Well I mean! Whatever the fuck happened to the fucking gutter press? That’s what I want to know!

  There was a time when journalists would have had a field day with a story like this. Mobs of violent prisoners smashing DRs! Attempting to flee to the planet of Giger via the space elevator in the Industrial Zones! They almost succeeded too. All the prisoners needed was for someone on the outside to open the prison doors, and to provide them with the transport they needed to reach the space elevator on the Brightside and hence, achieve their freedom.

  That someone was me.

  Oops!

  Go back to where we left off.

  There’s Cassady and me, in the prison hospital, as the riot erupts in the main prison block. She’s looking tense. And I’m looking – well, I’m looking at her, to be honest, transfixed by her beauty and her loyalty, as we wait impatiently for Governor Ferguson to open up the air vents.

  And then he did! Four vents opened up in the wall of the corridor that led to the hospital’s operating theatre. The atmosphere in the corridor starting gushing out; and before long the air in the entire hospital wing was being voided. The same thing was happening all over the prison. This was the prison authorities’ secret weapon – for if you deny oxygen to the prisoners, all and any riots will soon come to an end.

  But we’d anticipated this of course. Dekon, after all, knew all the prison security systems; and Dekon was under my control. Thus, all the ringleaders of the riot were equipped with oxygen cylinders to allow them to breathe in a vacuum. And the rest of the mob could39 take refuge in the rec rooms, which had been been made air-tight by us; and there they could wait, breathing slowly to conserve the oxygen, until the vents were closed.40

  And, as part of my augments, I had an oxygen capsule in my brain; while Cassady had an oxygen tube, stolen from the infirmary, through which she could breathe freely.

  So when the vents opened and the air gushed out, I was entirely unconcerned. I simply stepped forward and packed all four vents with mouldable explosive and stood well back.

  The wall exploded. I had my eyes closed to protect them from the flare. When I opened them again, I saw that the explosion had left a large gaping hole that opened out on to the planet. Then Cassady and I ran out into the icy airless nightmare that was the surface of Giger’s Moon.

  And for twenty appalling seconds it was incredibly fucking cold. But we ran and we ran, for eleven long and terrible yards.

  Until we reached the force field corridor. The one that linked the prison with the Home Dome. It’s invisible of course. But not to me, because I could see a blueprint of the prison in my visual array, courtesy of Dekon. Reality and map fused in my eyes, and we ran fast, and found ourselves in a zone of warm air and breathable oxygen.

  And we carried on running. The corridor of breathable air was unpredictably winding. If you stumbled on it by chance, you’d have no hope of staying within it. But my mental map continued to show me the way, and we sprinted the three miles from the prison to the Home Dome with relative ease.

  When we got there Cassady took my hand in hers. We looked at each other. We had what I guess you’d call a “moment.”

  The moment ended. We looked at the Home Dome. It was painted a faint gold hue, and was beautifully inlaid with patterns copied by archaeologists from the alien manuscripts left behind on Giger’s Moon millions of years before. No one had ever translated this language. The hieroglyphs might, for all anyone knew, have said LITTERBUGS WILL BE PROSECUTED. But there was something haunting about the alien words etched on the hardmetal dome.

  Then I mentally projected the access codes of the door and we were through.

  We walked into a convention of burly Soldiers. Well, three of them anyway. They were passing the time in the way that brainwashed Soldiers generally do – namely, standing to attention whilst swapping grisly anecdotes about the many ugly alien fuckers they had killed.

  And, naturally, they looked up as we blundered through the airlock, frozen and purple-overalled and clearly in the wrong place.

  Within less than an instant their implants would have told them that we were not prison staff or authorised civilians and must therefore be escapees.

  Although that was pretty fucking obvious – purple overall = convict, guys!

  The three of them reached for their guns.

  Cassady shot at two of them with her home-made anaesthetic gun, with dazzling speed, and almost hit them both. Whilst I took a deep breath, and went to work.

  It was a brutal hand-to-hand encounter and I very nearly lost. But I had speed and surprise on my side, plus an airlock wrench. Afterwards, we stripped two of the bodies, dressed ourselves as Soldiers in body armour and shit-for-brains scowls, and proceeded onwards, at a brisk military walk.

  I could now read the blueprint of the Home Dome itself in front of my eyes as I walked down the corridor. The shuttle bay was far down the corridor to the left, the Governor’s office was to the right. We carried straight on until we reached a large armoured door behind which, I knew
, we would find the doppelgänger berths.

  I tried ordering the remote computer to open the doors; no chance. I had considerable influence over Dekon, but I could not over-rule her high-security protocols. So I used the last of my mouldable explosive on the lock. We stood back. It blew. The door slowly slid open.

  Inside was a dormitory full of dubbers in trance, thirty or forty of them in all.41 They were wired up and slackjawed, a couple of them were dribbling. Oh, and there were two guards as well, but we took them down fast.

  The prison officers were inhabiting the bodies of the doppelgänger robots who were subduing the riot in the prison.

  I watched the warring dubbers for a few moments, fascinated to imagine what was happening at the other end of their virtual link. Each of the forty-five42 prison officers was, I guessed, inhabiting five or more robot bodies at a time. There were twelve female dubbers, eighteen male, and two herms. A couple of them were bodybuilders, but most were just ordinary joes, and janes. But in their virtual selves they were all-powerful robot monsters!

  And to me they looked like – not that I’d even seen such a thing – a gang of teenagers having simultaneous wet dreams. Their bodies twitched uncontrollably, they groaned and grunted with effort as their robots bodies punched and kicked and shot prisoners.

  “Danielle,” Cassady warned me, and I stopped trying to imagine that which I could not see.

  I disconnected the power, by smashing the wireless hub beneath a floor tile. And watched with delight as the dubbers woke up one by one. Only to be sent back into somnolence by Cassady and her dart gun.

  Then I dug deep into Dekon and tried to capture control of the DR network. I did this by attempting to persuade her that I was authorised to replace the now-unconscious prison officers. She knew of course that wasn’t true – Dekon had seen with her own camera-eyes what I had just done. But – how can I explain this? If you’re a computer, you’re not truly in control of your own mind. You are the slave of your sub-programs. It’s a strange—