Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Then one of the soldiers turned, and I could recognise her easily through her hardglass visor.

  It was me.

  “Identify yourself,” said Artemis-soldier. And I couldn’t stop myself. I drew my Philos handgun and fired six times at her visor, then grabbed her and threw her and broke her neck.

  The cyborg didn’t die, she just lay on the ground waddling her legs.

  “Run,” said Lena, and we ran.

  I knew this city so well. I knew every alley and hideout. I knew the clubs and their backdoors and the fire escapes, and the hidden entry ways into the fabricator plants.

  We ran and heliplanes hovered overhead and called on us to stop and we ignored them and warning bursts were fired at us. We were masked off, in street clothes, trying to blend in. But the fact we were running like fuck through a city under siege was enough to draw attention to us.

  We turned a corner and a squad of six soldiers (mostly Flanagans) saw us and opened fire. We leaped and fired in mid-air, aiming our exploding bullets so they ploughed holes in the sidewalk. The soldiers tumbled over each other and into the pit we’d created. And we ran.

  Ran down an alley. Ran through a side door that I unlocked via my Rebus link. Ran inside the illegal manual labour workshop. Human workers were handweaving carpets, their faces pale, their fingers torn with cuts. We ran through as a security guard shouted at us to stop. He drew his gun and fired and I took him down with a bullet to the knee. He fell, cursing misogynistically.

  And still we ran. Through the double doors, kicking them open and stepping to the side in case of ambush. A guard shot at us and we leaped up high and clung to the wall with our adhesive shoes and ran past him, catching him a good old kick as we passed by. Then through the red door, up one set of stairs. I blew a hole in the wall and we ran into the next building, the Hunter Refinery. And we ran down the stairs there and out the back to safety and—

  Withering plasma fire greeted our emergence and with clothes ablaze we ran back in. Lena and I doused ourselves in flame retardants. Our faces were stinging with the heat. And we were red-cheeked and hot with the effort of the ceaseless running. I nodded, and we took another door that I knew would lead us down to the basement. It did. Once there, we broke open a ventilator shaft and crawled through. It was a long slow wriggle. I thanked my lucky stars I did not have a fat arse! Lena however was not so lucky. (Heh!)

  I shoved her through the last few feet, then we collapsed in a heap at the other side.

  It was a strange surreal moment – lying on the floor enmeshed and entangled in the limbs and lardy backside (hey! I call it as I see it!) of my own mother.

  The moment passed. We got back on our feet, and started running again.

  The doors ahead of us were locked and hardmetal sealed. So we put a limpet bomb on the floor and blew a hole in it and jumped through. We did the same for another three floors, and that linked us up to the fibre optic subways beneath the city. We crawled through there on our stomachs, still smelling our own charred flesh from the earlier plasma-blasting, until we emerged in the basement of the Abrox fabricator.

  There, we took stock.

  “How the fuck,” asked Lena, gasping like an old wheezy horse, though I have to admit, she had kept up with me, “do we win this war?”

  Good question.

  I asked Magog.

  There were, I learned six hundred thousand cyborgs on this planet, and fifty thousand or so were me.

  Or rather, they were robot bodies built in replica of me. Very funny Cyborg-Daxox. Fuck you.

  The Flanagan I’d killed had been a warrior. But his mind wasn’t the real Flanagan-mind. I was sure of that. Or so I told Lena. In fact I wasn’t so sure but—

  What the fuck. Let’s work on this provisional hypothesis:

  Morgan and Daxox have cyborged themselves. And, as a gag, they have created cyborg bodies that are replicas of their enemies and allies. Peter Smith is not the real Smith; he has none of Smith’s memories or personality, he just looks like him. In the same way, Flanagan is not the real Flanagan. But Daxox and Morgan – they are the real McCoy. Or rather, the replica real McCoys. Or rather—

  It gets tricky doesn’t it?

  Lena was over her blue funk by now. She too was adamant that we weren’t fighting the real Flanagan; and that was a comfort to her, since we’d so recently killed him.

  And as we outlined our war strategy, her eyes sparkled and her mood lifted. This was the old Lena. The legendary Lena. I liked her that way.

  Picture the scene. There we were, huddled in the basement of a dimly lit fabricator building. Faces flushed, bodies battered, clothes ripped revealing black warsuit armour beneath. Just the two of us, with no means of calling for help, facing an army of half a million or so armed and dangerous cyborgs.

  Just the kind of odds that Lena and I both like.

  “It’s not fucking fair! I know so much about you!” I told Lena, angrily.

  We’d been in the basement an hour. I was in a reflective mood. And it occurred to me that this would be a good opportunity to bond with my mother.

  But instead, I began bitching at her.

  “Yeah, you have a problem with that?” she acknowledged, defensively, in response to my accusation.

  “It’s so damned annoying,” I protested. “There’s nothing to find out. I’ve read your thought diary, I know every last thing about you. I know about the freckles. I know about the Kingdom of Alchemy.” She rolled her eyes. “I know about all the men. And the drinking. And the drugs. And the game where you stop the heart of the man you’re—”

  “Wash your mouth out girl.”

  “Hey, it’s in the book!”

  “The book should never have been published.”

  “Yeah, like, you didn’t accidentally on purpose—”

  “I did not ‘accidentally on—’ ”

  “You’re just a braggart.”

  “I was baring my soul.”

  “Euch, please don’t, your soul is vile.”

  “I agree.”

  “Now you’re being mock-humble.”

  “Ah, you know that trick?” Lena said, with a mock-sweet smile. She gave as good as she got, this woman, even with her own daughter.

  There was a silence, which lasted a little while.

  I was working hard, by the way, all this time, fighting the war with the cyborgs. I’ll explain how in a moment. But I still had enough headspace to chat. And to enjoy the occasional companionable silence.

  “A daughter should never know her mother,” I concluded. “There should be secrets.”

  “I have secrets.”

  “Name one.”

  Lena thought hard.

  “Well, one time Flanagan – hey!”

  I laughed.

  “Almost gotcha there,” I said.

  “In your dreams,” she retorted, amused.

  “Huh.”

  “I think a daughter should,” Lena said, a few moments later.

  “Should what?”

  “Know. Her mother. Not just as a mother. As a – real person.”

  I thought about that.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  We were silent again, for a long while.

  “We could maybe be friends?” Lena said eventually.

  “In your dreams.”

  “Come on Artemis. Lighten up. Friends?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe, if we were in a different life.”

  “Or if we survive?”

  “No hope of that.”

  “Ah…”

  Okay. I should maybe clarify my actual strategy here:

  I was communing with Magog, you see, all this while, planning our attack.

  Lena and I huddled, and talked, and bitched; but the larger part of my consciousness was as one with the quantum brain of the planet’s computer. Not, I must admit, conducive to great conversation, but I was doing my best.

  I spoke again:

  “I’m pregnant you know.”

  “I know ab
out that,” Lena said. “I was told – about that.”

  “That was my motive for—”

  “I know.”

  “I called the child—”

  “Douglas. I know.”

  “You have spies everywhere, huh?”

  “Pretty much. Plus—”

  “What?”

  “I have Tinbrain in my head.”

  “Who?”

  “Tinbrain is the Earth QRC. The founder quantum computing brain. The rest are really – what would you call it? Subsystems? Clones?”

  “Children. Maybe. They’re certainly not clones. They’re mostly all quite different. The ones I’ve known anyway.”

  I already knew this about Lena and Tinbrain. Of course I did, it’s in the book. But I should have remembered. She is like me. The only one who is like me. In having a QRC as a – friend.

  “If we had a beaconband link, I could talk to Tinbrain now,” Lena mused. “And Tinbrain could talk to Magog. And Magog of course is communing with your thoughts on a second by second basis.”

  My mind whirred, decoding that one.

  “You’re saying, you’d be able to read my mind?”

  “Only those thoughts which – yes.”

  “Even the daydreams?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even the sexual fantasies?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What kind of mother are you?”

  “The worst sort,” said Lena, and she smiled. Her old wrinkled face smiled. It didn’t make her look any younger but—

  She did at least look like a mother. MY mother.

  “Shall we do this thing?” asked Lena.

  “I’m doing it now,” I said.

  Historical fact:

  At the Battle of Agincourt, an army of fifteen hundred British men-at-arms and seven thousand longbowmen faced a formidable French army that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the French army, there were eight thousand men-at-arms, four thousand archers and fifteen hundred crossbowmen in the vanguard alone, with more than twice that number in the rear and on the flanks.4

  In the Battle of Cúchulainn, however, it was just me and my mum, fighting against a planet full of cyborgs.

  Ridiculous isn’t it? I thought so, even at the time.

  “Are you in?” I asked Lena.

  “I’m in,” she said, in a warm whisper that meant her voice was now inside my head. We had linked brain chips, so she too could access the cybernetic pathways of Magog, this planet’s QRC.

  I knew Cúchulainn like the back of my hand. In all its wild splendour, and in all its industrial horror. From the Mountains of Marguid to the icy lakes of Garddown. And all across this once-verdant land were the hunched backs of the fabricator planets that spewed out black clouds, turning ore and mud and gas into a staggering superfluity of consumer items. The doppelgänger robots were stored here too, lined up like suits of armour awaiting ghosts to possess and locomote them.

  Morgan had of course sundered the beaconband link with Earth, and his cyborgs had no need of doppelgängers. So the chassis of the DRs were unused, and forgotten about.

  But now they were mine. And so the robots began to stir, controlled jointly by myself and Lena. We grabbed a thousand at a time in the fringes of our consciousness and swept them up. They flew like flocks of soulless birds across the factory lands towards Laguid. They emerged from basement vaults in the city itself, glaring and angry and dusty. They broke out of abandoned factories; they unpacked themselves from storage. And finally, they gathered together on the streets, an army fit to fight the cyborgs. Five hundred thousand robot shells; controlled by me and Lena.

  And then the battle commenced.

  Two Artemises, blown up by a missile fired by a seven foot high silver-skinned robot.

  A dozen Morgans sundered into pieces by plasma blasts from a flock of flying doppelgängers.

  A hundred Flanagans broken in the streets, after a pitched battle with a platoon of humaniform robots who fought naked, but whose bodies could withstand sustained bursts of direct plasma blast.

  The Peter Smiths were slain in their thousands. The template mind there was clearly old and slow, for not a single of my doppelgängers was killed by a Peter. Lena, however, refused to kill the Smiths, just as she refused to kill the Flanagans. It made my job all the harder.

  But having said that – look, I won’t deny it – I was enjoying myself. I was no longer a soldier in an army. I was the entire fucking army!

  And Daxox, ah Daxox! He died again and again and again.

  Picture the scene: an army in its barracks, enjoying down time. Sipping vintage wine or whisky in the club. Playing pool in the rec room. Swimming, lifting weights, or fucking in palatial bedrooms using to the full the sensory capacities of these cyborg bodies. There are Baron Lowmans galore to be found here. Peter Smiths by the score. Morgans – ah, so many Morgans. Flanagans everywhere you look. And Artemises, too, scattered among them.

  And then doppelgänger robots parachute in to the barracks like blossom falling off cherry trees in spring, and a battle royal erupts. Cyborgs and doppelgängers fight hand to hand. Flanagans are blasted with explosive shells. Peter Smiths flee yowling with fear but are gunned down as they run. Morgans are incinerated by plasma bursts or pulverised by exploding bullets. And Baron Lowmans are scattered into pieces, turning the parade grounds into junkyards of cyborg body parts. A massacre.

  Many massacres, all over Laguid.

  More battles than the mind can conceive, in fact. I fight, I am killed, I fight again. I inhabit a thousand bodies, no ten thousand, no ten times ten thousand. I see citizens screaming with fear as I gun down the cyborgs in the streets. I shoot down heliplanes. And all doppelgänger robots are my allies, for those who I do not possess, are possessed by Lena.

  It was like fighting World War III as a computer game, with real fatalities. The scope of it was – well.

  I feared at one point that, like my comrades before me in the war of Invasion: Earth, I would never want to leave this hellish but addictive reality.

  Morgan used hi-tech on us too of course. Satellites fired energy beams from space. Fighter craft shot us by the million. Missiles erupted among our ranks. But much of the military hardware had the potential to be doppelgänger-controlled. And so time and time again, I stole fighter planes and smart missiles from my foes and sent them back with added hate.

  Then some of my doppelgängers broke into the planet’s control hub, and disabled the Nullers that kept this system isolated from the rest of humanity.

  And so Magog was now able to speak across the vast reaches of space with Tinbrain, the Earth QRC. And the two giant computers joined forces, like whales singing to each other from different oceans. Or like dragons ridden by ants; as Lena and I steered and guided these vast intellects with which we were so indissolubly bonded.

  And in the basement of the fabricator building, our bodies twitched and howled and grunted and our limbs flailed, as we slew and slew!

  The Battle of Cúchulainn was a strange and a marvellous and a terrible affair. I remember the terror and the beauty of it all. Guns blazing. Missiles exploding. Plasma beams burning. Cyborg skin and organs melting, and their bodies being rent and smashed.

  Every hour we rested, for ten minutes, in shifts. For our minds could not take the pressure of possessing so many other minds without respite. So once every hour, I would jerk myself out of the doppelgänger trance, and look around, and see Lena twitching and flailing and shouting.

  I tried to sleep in those brief respites but I could not. I was too transfixed with the sight of my aged mother shouting like a mad old crone, as she sent armies of robots into battle and flew missiles and exploded bombs. Each time one of her “selves” died she shouted in rage, a death cry that chilled my blood. There were many such cries.

  Then Lena’s voice would be in my head. “Time in,” she would say and I would re-enter my trance and join her once more. And, I guess, when she took her own respite she seized her ch
ance to look at me. Her only daughter. Spasming in frenzy as I killed, as only gods should be able to kill; in many places all at the same time.

  No military history has been written of this battle and nor will it ever be. Lena and I kept no records of who died and when and how and what our strategy was. And, quite deliberately, I didn’t save the battle record to chip. All I remember is that, at the time, I seemed to know what I was doing. I cross-sectioned the globe and marked off each section in my head as I cleansed it of cyborgs. I sent doppelgängers into the sewers and the sub systems and into the fibre-optic tunnels too. I used robot mosquitoes to search for hold-out Flanagans and skulking Peter Smiths. At one point the enemy even surrendered – I had a message from Daxox offering terms. But I ignored that, of course. Complete victory was the only option I would countenance.

  And so it continued. As savage and bitter a doppelgänger war as Invasion: Earth, but far more upclose and personal.

  In the process the planet was, I have to admit, wrecked. And there was considerable collateral damage. In other words, innocent civilians died. I couldn’t help that. It was not my fault. And they would have died anyway of course. The cyborg way is to turn all human flesh into cyborg, for they honestly think we will prefer it that way.

  What else can I say? There was a long, ghastly, extraordinary conflict, but in the end, the robots of Lena and Artemis prevailed.

  For there were so many of us. That’s how the Corporation had survived for so many years. Its legions of doppelgänger robots were, well, legion.

  At Agincourt, the archers turned the tide of battle. Technology defeated martial prowess. But even so, soldiers fought and blades swept and warriors lost their lives.

  In this battle, only machines died. Victory was achieved; but not glory.

  Let me make that point again; there was no fucking glory.

  “What are you going to do?” Lena asked me, anxiously.

  “Ignore it.”

  “Can you do that?”

  I thought for a while. “No.”

  One of the few surviving Morgan cyborgs had issued a challenge. He was offering a mano a mano. Me and Morgan-cyborg, in single combat, to decide the outcome of the entire battle.