by Neal Asher
Why was there so much blood?
18
Cold Robots: When human beings augment or enhance their mental abilities with augs, gridlinks, neural laces, haiman tech or any of the other technologies and hardware available, they become colder and less human. Or at least this is what popular fiction would have you believe. Yet the capacity for emotion has for a long time been included in the structure and programming of our AIs. So why do humans feel they are losing it the closer they come to that state? Because this is another one of those memes that persist like a stubborn virus in human consciousness, spread, as ever, by confirmation bias, apocryphal stories, lies and stubborn stupidity. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who upgrade their minds often mistake the clarity and their venture onto higher intellectual planes for emotional coldness, because that is what they expected. It is a strange dichotomy when the haiman woman, as she steadily upgrades herself, turns into an icy goddess, while war drones—those thoroughly efficient killers in the prador/ human war—grow in wisdom and expand their emotional response to the universe. While the goddess contemplates higher mathematics, the war drone considers making additions to its body that will enable it to get giggly on malt whisky.
—from How It Is by Gordon
THE CLIENT
The creature—the portion of herself the Client detached—was something no member of the Species had ever grown before, to her recollection. But the Jain had probably created such things because she had used the forbidden data to make it. The thing was like an Earth centipede possessing twelve legs. Extra segments sitting between the legs contained armament, shields and scanning gear, while coiled up on either side of each were triangular section tentacles. There was no head as such—one end looked no different from the other. As it dropped from the crystal tree and rattled around its base, the Client inserted her perspective inside it. Looking up at her primary form, she felt a strange mix of potency and vulnerability as she automatically calculated targeting solutions on it. She then turned away and scuttled over to the hatch opening in the base of the environment cylinder.
She moved at great speed through the station until she came to the war dock attached to the moon. A moment later she was down in the dock itself and the iris door at the further end was opening. She shot through it into a store in the library very like the one from which she had stolen the forbidden data. Some of the pillars had toppled, others had shattered, and the smoking remains of defence drones littered the place—destroyed by the armaments at the end of the war dock.
Meanwhile, her primary form was at work, scanning down into the moon, cutting with lasers, particle beams and shaped charges. Everything was shuddering around her and another data pillar fell over with a ringing crash. She darted over towards a circular door, folded out a nacelle and fired one missile. It exploded against the door, blew it into the tunnel beyond and she followed it through. In her primary form, she continued to use platform weapons to rip open areas and destroy defences. A great explosion blew out the roof of a chamber on the surface, and a particle beam stabbed down from one of her attack pods, melting through the floor. She moved on.
More tunnels, more data storage chambers, then narrow shafts leading deeper down into the moon. Linked to her primary form, she kept updating and finally fell into the chamber she was looking for. Here she had missed a cache of the moon’s drones—the coin-shaped things flying up the shaft she was descending. They immediately opened fire, hitting her with dense beads of metallic hydrogen that exploded on impact. A series of detonations blew her squirming against one wall, but even as she was hit she chose the first targeting solution. She extruded hollow tubes from her mid-segments and locked on target, as she shot forwards again, returning fire with her own super-dense beads. Drones exploded one after another, flinging armoured plates in every direction. She fell through the debris and into a wide chamber where thousands of the things were swarming. Around the edges of this chamber tunnels led off into the moon and one of them would take her to where she wanted to go. But instead she accelerated straight into the main mass of drones.
Destroying drones all around her, and disappearing herself in a cloud of explosions, the Client uncoiled her tentacles and snared two of the drones. With her outer skin burned away, two legs missing and underlying silver armour glowing in places, she dropped out of the swarm. Her tentacle tips melded perfectly with triangular indents on the drones and she injected nanofibres, as well as decoding tubules into their workings. Their minds were hardly even sub-AI and their programming was simple too. In a moment, she had the data she needed and, discarding the drones, emitted an EMR data flash. All firing ceased at once and the drones began flying in tight circles that reflected the looped program running in their minds.
“Now we can speak,” said the Librarian.
Hitting the floor hard and skittering towards the tunnel she required, the Client had a moment of trepidation. The Librarian had taken something from her brief link to the drones to enable it to communicate directly. She isolated the laser com it was using, routing it through detectors for informational warfare. Strangely there was none—just the words.
“We have nothing to discuss,” she replied.
Now pausing before the tunnel mouth, she peered up at the cloud of drones. In just a moment she formulated a new program, put warfare beams on three of the drones and transmitted it. The three reacted first by retransmitting the program, then dropped out of the swarm, and burned out their receivers. Within a minute the other drones began dropping too, to spear off into the surrounding tunnels. The drones had rendered themselves incapable of being reprogrammed. They would now attack all defensive mechanisms in the library, while transmitting data to her on all surrounding systems.
“You must delete the forbidden data,” said the Librarian. “And you must give me access to ensure its removal from your mind.”
“I will not,” replied the Client. But there seemed no consciousness behind the Librarian’s demands—almost as if some old and long-out-of-date program was speaking to her. This seemed to confirm her earlier conjectures. The ancient Jain hidden deep in the moon had completely lost its grip on reality. The thing was senile.
The drones heading off in front of her alerted her to the robot coming down the tunnel some seconds before she picked up on it with her sensors. Explosions lit the way ahead and smoking debris bounced in the tunnel. The robot was an octahedron with weapons circlets on each of its eight faces. It slid forward over the remains of five coin drones, its armour smoking and dented as it turned one face towards her and stabbed out with a pure green particle beam. It tracked her, boiling grooves out of the tunnel wall as she dodged from side to side and hurtled towards it. A series of hits on her forward segment had it smoking and began to eat through the armour. The thing turned, presenting another face, and began railing dense slugs into her. Then she was on it.
“I am your father,” said the Librarian.
That was new. Some thought operating now?
“And I am your only child,” the Client replied as she grabbed and writhed around the machine, keeping her body away from the weapons circlets. However, one circlet extruded an arm with a sticky grab and tried to drag her in front of the railgun. Unravelling tentacles, she groped for access but could find none. She then allowed the arm to grip her body and, once it was firm, used the dense artificial muscle in her main body to heave to one side. The arm tore out, and she speared a tentacle in through its circlet and searched within.
There...
“You must obey,” said the Librarian. There seemed no point in responding.
In a moment, she engaged in another triangular socket and slid quickly into the robot’s mind. This one was more complex than that of the coin-shaped drones. It slammed against the tunnel wall trying to crush or dislodge her as she burned out parts of its mind, seized control of others and input the same program she had used on the coin drones. When she released, it just swung away from her and headed off down the tunnel
ahead. She paused, shook herself, then, with a crunch, detached her forward segment and dropped it, its two legs kicking as its power died. Then she moved on.
“You created my kind, then you regressed us to primitivism and dumped us on our home world,” said the Client. “When we climbed out of the mud and found you, again you gave us information, yet forbade us knowledge of our history. Why did you even allow us to know that this history existed?”
The tunnel wound on and on. She came upon the remains of the octahedral machine at the lip of a wide shaft, which speared down into the moon. The remains of autoguns hung broken and melted from the walls, while rocky debris fell from above. She moved to the lip, then rapidly back as high-intensity lasers struck the edge. Defensive weapons all the way down, she had no doubt.
“Sometimes I did not forbid it,” said the Librarian. “And you always regressed.”
This gave the Client pause, for it now seemed a thinking being had spoken to her, not a hard-wired, senile creature parroting the responses it had used for millennia. She considered what this meant, in light of what she now knew. In the allowed history of the Species there had been periods when their civilization collapsed back into primitivism—the last being two million years in the past. This time had been debated amongst the Species and the consensus had been that it was due to an asteroid strike. Was that consensus wrong? It seemed that the Librarian meant they had become more like their ancestors, the Jain, before such periods. In her knowledge of the forbidden history those periods were just blank. So then—
“What happened on those occasions?” she asked.
“It was necessary to reset the experiment,” the Librarian replied.
“And how did you do that?”
An explosion above dropped tons of rubble into the shaft, falling in slow motion in the low gravity.
“Extermination and reseeding the initial design,” the Librarian replied.
The Client froze as she absorbed this information. It was a hard reminder that the thing below, crazy and different from its own kind as it was, was still one of the Jain. She wondered then about that asteroid strike. Was that how it “reset the experiment”?
“And now all my doubts have gone,” she said.
Looking up, she watched the attack pod descending, its sides grazing the edges of the shaft. It fell past her, two particle beams emitting from the packed hardware found between its opened outer shells, the beams tracking round as they destroyed every defence below. She followed it down.
TRIKE
The air pressure was rising, but a normal human would still be unconscious now and suffering from all kinds of ruptures throughout their body. However, even though Ruth was no hooper, she did possess a nanosuite which ran inside her. And, really, a normal human was something that had ceased to exist centuries ago. Trike looked towards the bridge door and saw a shimmershield across the gap. Through it he could see smoke swirling and a glow of hot metal. He next regarded the alert messages scrolling along the bottom of the screen, then the damage in the bridge, trying to ignore flitting shadows he knew were not there. Trying to ignore something else that was screaming for his attention.
“I think you killed it, Cog,” he said, his tone strangely flat in the low air pressure.
Cog was on his knees clutching a tangled mass of scrap he seemed ready to smash against the floor again. He looked at it, frowned and discarded it, then stood up. Angel was squatting on the floor, the third attacker in pieces all around him. He was holding its head, and studying it intently, while the tentacles were writhing weakly. After a moment, he stabbed a long pointy finger into its remaining eye, reamed it around a bit then extracted it. The tentacles slumped. He discarded the head and stood, brushing his hands together.
Trike returned his attention to Ruth. Her mask was full of blood. When he pulled it from her face to wipe the blood away from her mouth, her hand just dropped away. She was still looking at him. She was okay. His gaze strayed down to her body. Her clothing was soaked with blood and the stub of the tail of her Clade attacker protruded from above her collar bone. He realized that Angel had done the right thing in breaking it off there. She was no hooper and pulling the thing out would have caused further damage she could not survive.
“We’re not the only ones with problems,” said Angel, pointing at the screen.
Trike focused unsteadily back on the screen where a frame had opened again. It was better to look there—to look away from what he had just seen. Dragon was in trouble. He could see explosive ejections all around its surface and its skin was rippling, sometimes opening in places to shoot out masses of pseudopods. There was no sign of the Clade and he had no doubt that it was inside the big alien, causing all he could see. But also, there was something else. A net was falling through midnight down towards Dragon. Though its structure was spread out, he recognized the wormship at once.
But then something hit the wormship—an explosion amidst its dispersed mass.
“What was that?” he wondered dully, trying to stay in the moment.
“No idea,” said Cog.
Trike had no ideas either. Nothing seemed to be working in his mind.
“Trike.” It was Cog again, standing at his shoulder.
Trike looked up, and both Cog and Angel were standing close by, watching him. “We need to get her to the infirmary,” he said. He felt cold, really cold.
Cog looked round at Angel who shook his head. “Through her heart.”
Trike heard the words but they made no sense. He focused on Angel. “You can revive her. You can fix her.”
Angel spread his hands. “If I was aboard my wormship.”
Trike returned his attention to Ruth. Her black eyes looked false now—like those of a doll. He carefully fixed the elasticated strap of the mask around her head, then pressed a control behind the chair. A small, high-pressure oxygen cylinder, attached to the line, was ejected into his hand. He inserted this into her top pocket and picked her up. She was utterly limp. In a moment, he was pushing through the shimmershield and breathing smoke. Fire boiling up beside the stairway scorched his trousers, but even as he passed the flames air loss was killing them. The next moment he was gazing into the wrecked infirmary. Nothing seemed real any more.
A hand tugged on his arm. He hadn’t even been aware that Cog was with him. The Old Captain was mouthing something but he couldn’t hear. Finally, woodenly, he followed him. With hot twisted metal around him, he found himself standing in a room in which four coffin-sized cylinders were fixed in a rack. Cog slid one out on rails.
His arms were empty. Where was Ruth?
Angel was carrying her and then lying her down in an open cold coffin. Numb, and suddenly feeling weaker than he had ever felt, he stepped over. Pipes like small snakes were writhing around her, attaching like leeches . . . A giggle rose inside him, but then faded away. The coffin closed and Cog slid it back into the rack.
A hand, tugging on his arm again. He stood as immovable as a rock for a moment, but then turned and went where Cog led. He knew he could not stay here. His injury plus the lack of air would do him no good at all. He would do the sensible thing and return to the bridge, while he still had the ability to think coherently.
He knew that would not last.
BLADE
Cog’s ship was moving away from the action. It had been hit hard and was trailing debris, but the Clade units that had attacked had not reappeared, so Blade guessed they had run afoul of the two hoopers aboard. Whether Cog and the others had survived was questionable, but Blade did not have the option to find out because its priorities did not include a rescue operation. Still accelerating, its own target chosen, Blade now damned the USER disruption that prevented it from using jump missiles. Still, it had plenty of other weapons available—that near-c railgun strike it had delivered had certainly stirred up the wormship. The only problem was the vessel’s dispersion. Only one of ten railgun slugs had found a target.
Particle beam...
This w
ould allow ranging but would also pinpoint the Obsidian Blade for the wormship. Was that a good idea? Blade decided it was and opened up, dropping its chameleonware at the same time to reveal its sleek, black form. Scanning revealed that the wormship’s dispersion presently disabled a lot of its heavier weapons and shields, so this attack had to be quick and effective. The royal-blue beam stabbed out across thousands of miles of vacuum, struck a section of worm and cut along it, winnowing out its glittering interior. It tracked across, tearing apart other sections, wraiths of fire and tinsel-like debris exploding in every direction. In response, the wormship slowed in its descent on its primary target—Dragon—and began to draw itself back together.
Blade next released a series of missiles, slower than railgun slugs or energy weapons, as it continued to hurtle in, then directed scanning towards Dragon. The entity’s defences had collapsed, which was perhaps the purpose of the Clade invasion of its body. Blade could now see more than Dragon usually allowed. The units of the swarm AI were spread throughout its immense spherical interior, like parasitic flukes in a body packed with strut bones and tangled masses of organs. Flares of heat and explosive blisters marked their course as they wreaked havoc and fought a running battle with Dragon’s internal defences. Even as Blade watched, a series of internal explosions wiped out five of the strange robots.
“Can I assist?” Blade enquired.
An instant later it received a targeting solution on Dragon, indicating areas within its body and detailing the weapons to be used. As Blade put a blue high-penetration laser online, it saw areas on the entity’s surface opening up, scales sliding aside like screen doors. Blade fired, probing inside Dragon. The beam licked out time and again, vapour boiling out of the holes, and eight Clade units encysted in Dragon’s flesh broke apart and burned. Two railgun slugs followed into another area, impacting on a structural bone, and the explosion they caused blew five units out through a hole on Dragon’s surface. Here pseudopods rose up about the rim of the hole, cobra heads turning like autoguns, and hit the units with milky-orange particle beams, vaporizing them.
