by Neal Aher
“No,” Penny Royal replied—voice issuing out of the air all around him.
“I see.” Blite felt relieved at the straight verbal response and wondered if what he was about to say would make him sound like an idiot. But surely everything humans said sounded idiotic to the AI? “When I was a kid I used to play a VR game called Cowl. It was all about time travel and had much in it about infinite energy progressions and energy debts. I understand more now I’m older but by no means have a complete grasp on it all. Because you took us back in time and are not going forward again, aren’t we carrying some portion of universal entropy with us?”
The air before the suit shimmered and a deeper black speck grew in the darkness of the suit, as if from infinite distance, finally halting to form a black diamond hanging just behind the visor. Blite had come to understand that when the AI manifested in this way it was engaging just a little bit more—had become more interested in what he was saying. This also increased the chances of it trying to load data straight to his mind.
“Correct,” said the AI.
“It’s . . . like negative energy . . . part of the heat death of the universe?”
No words now, just a vision of the vastness of space uploaded straight into his head: galaxies and nebulae strewn before him, all their brightness fading into endless dark . . . As Blite returned to the here and now, finding himself down on his knees on the deck, he guessed that he’d been right.
Staying where he was, he hardened his resolve and continued: “And we’re going to be bringing that load back out into the real when we surface in four hours from now.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s . . . dangerous?”
Now he was given a vision of a G-type sun, with peripheral images of the planetary surface of a living world included as a subtext. He watched a wave of something hit the sun and bruise it, watched that mottling spread, and the sun begin to collapse in on itself like the sped-up film of a rotting apple. In the subtext the sky darkened, clouds rolled across it and winter came. He saw jungles collapsing and decaying, then even decay ceasing as they froze. He saw oceans turning to ice, a blizzard covering animal corpses . . .
What the fuck?
Blite tried to shut out the images, and gradually they faded, but he continued his line of enquiry with stubborn persistence, “But that didn’t happen when we went to the Feeding Frenzy . . .”
“I kept the entropic effect balanced by maintaining U-space drive Calabi-Yau frames in juxtaposition with U-space energy draw.”
Whatever. At least the black AI hadn’t tried to load that across to his mind.
Penny Royal continued, and Blite felt the AI was enjoying this.
“Had the king not reacted as I had wished, it would have been necessary for me to take the Calabi-Yau frames out of juxtaposition. The result would have been thirty completely inert King’s Guard ships in darkness—all the energy in the gas cloud snuffed out and the gases no longer radiating,” the AI explained. “I would then have had to find another method of providing Sverl with the information I wanted him to have.”
Okay, I see, you didn’t send the letter I wanted you to send, so here’s a thermo nuke. Blite repressed the urge to giggle insanely. “But still that negative energy needs to be offloaded.”
“Yes, it does, Captain Blite,” said Penny Royal.
A memory now, but one that wasn’t his own: Blite found himself standing in some Polity science museum looking into a holographic star map. His hand operating a half-seen gesture control, he focused the display on a planetary system and a sun lying four light years away, which expanded and were labelled. The system was called Rebus and the sun was called Crispin Six. He then turned away from this, stepping into a childhood memory. He found himself walking towards the arch of a planetary data cache and glancing up at the sign “Read and Learn.”
With the sound of glassy chimes, the diamond receded deep into the suit and winked out, and Blite knew that the audience was over. Penny Royal would talk, in its way, but it was never an extended conversation. Blite suspected that, like many AIs, it grew bored with mere human exchanges and tended to render up just a little less information than the human required, thereby forcing said human to go off to do some research and thinking. With his mouth dry and a feeling of dread clenching his guts, Blite turned and headed back to the bridge. Penny Royal, he decided, trying to think light thoughts, was a bit didactic, a bit of a pedant, and always annoying and frustrating. But he could not dispel the fear that the AI was about to annihilate a solar system.
SVERL
“I must unravel my past back to its beginning, and it’s to the beginning I will go next,” the black AI replied cryptically. “That is, when all is done here and events ordered and set on their course to conclusion.”
Sverl kept replaying Penny Royal’s words in his head—the words Sverl had found in Isobel Satomi’s mind and were a message from the AI to him. Meanwhile, he checked and rechecked other data sources. Displayed on his screens was old recorded footage of a massive Polity construct under attack by the prador. The thing was described by humans as resembling a giant harmonica and it was one of the largest ever made, measuring eighty miles from end to end, thirty miles wide and fifteen deep. The square holes ran along either side, in pairs of lines, being the entrances to enormous final construction bays. This was one of their greatest factory stations; this was the infamous Factory Station Room 101. And it was, Sverl was sure, the beginning that Penny Royal had referred to, because here was where the AI had its genesis.
Checking the reference, Sverl felt wry amusement, for it might well have represented the prador’s greatest fear—all the panoply of the Polity war effort. This war factory had manufactured its weapons of death hourly, spewing them out into space: dreadnoughts, destroyers, attack ships, drones and assassin drones. This station had delayed the prador advance by managing to keep up with the destruction rate of Polity ships, which was then of one medium-sized vessel every eight seconds. And the prador attempt to take out this factory station had been one of their most costly enterprises of the whole war.
Sverl watched the battle footage unfold. Room 101 was spewing out ships at an incredible rate to counter the attack from a prador fleet. The thing was glowing like hot iron as its temperature climbed beyond anything survivable by organic life forms. At first these ships had been meticulously designed for their task, but as the battle progressed they became little more than heavily armed missiles, sans U-space drives, their armour and the amount of materials otherwise used in their construction varying considerably, and utterly dependent on the rate at which materials were being transmitted into the station by cargo runcible. But these were thinking missiles, sacrificing their brief lives to protect the station. Sverl felt himself wincing as he saw prador dreadnoughts smashed utterly out of shape—their armour unpunctured while everything inside died. He watched so many particle beams playing through space that it seemed that wedges of star fire were flashing into being. Multiple detonations kept changing the shapes of formations while debris and molten-metal laced vacuum. Oxygen fires burned. Armoured prador fried in their suits. First-child kamikazes weaved about like hunting fish but detonated in the stabs of a red laser so intense it had to be fed by some runcible portal grazing off the fusion fire of a sun. Then one of those kamikazes got through the defensive net.
The detonation against the factory’s side was immense, its blast wave frying nearby ships and hurling a whole quarter of the battle formations into disarray. Even so, the gigaton CTD had lost most of its energy against hardfield projectors that were routing the feedback energy from the blast out of the station by runcible. As a result, the explosion only excavated a large chunk out of the side of the structure. Meanwhile, the Polity ships that the thing was still producing took advantage of the disarray, pushing into the prador formations and wreaking havoc. They forced the prador to retreat. Sverl remembered the humiliation he had felt at the time, as he pulled out in his damaged destroyer�
��the ship he’d captained before this dreadnought. He also remembered his last sight of Room 101. Its giant engines flared into life, hauling it away and then, with a massive wrench felt for light years all around, it dropped into U-space.
Factory Station Room 101 survived that encounter—he saw it himself. So how did one square that with the Polity account, perfectly illustrated by a few lines from the human publication “How It Is” by a character called Gordon. Sverl again viewed those lines:
ECS dreadnought Trafalgar was built halfway through the prador/human war at Factory Station Room 101, before that station was destroyed by a prador first-child “Baka”—basically a flying gigaton CTD with a reluctant first-child at the controls, though slaved to its father’s pheromones and unable to do anything but carry out this suicide mission. Records of the Trafalgar AI’s inception were therefore lost . . .
This was just one sample from the massive amounts of data about Room 101. The rest all said the same thing: a first-child kamikaze had destroyed Room 101. Yet no mention was made of that final U-space jump. AIs confirmed the station’s destruction from debris, from numerous AI accounts of the battle and from the fact that it took no part in the war thereafter. Perhaps it had made a faulty U-jump and ended up trapped in that space continuum, or had been destroyed by the transition back into the real. Still, the excising of the fact that it had jumped, from so many accounts, stank. Sverl did not believe the kamikaze had destroyed the station because of that vital clue that Penny Royal had given him via Isobel. He replayed those words to himself again: “ . . . and it is to the beginning I will go next.”
Penny Royal’s beginning had been in the station that manufactured it—that was incontrovertible fact. Penny Royal, therefore, must be going back to Room 101. Sverl just had to find out where it was but—as Arrowsmith would say—it was like banging his head against a brick wall. Polity AIs had worked diligently to conceal that Room 101 still existed, so it was hardly likely he was going to just stumble across its location. Perhaps they didn’t want to admit to the desertion of such a major AI factory station. Perhaps they didn’t know what had happened?
I have to look elsewhere.
Gost was tardy in replying to Sverl’s call, and when that King’s Guard did appear the armoured dome of his suit was closing on something black, lethal-looking and definitely not the shape of a prador. Sverl was momentarily dumbfounded, but understood that Gost must have allowed him this glimpse of his true form.
“Have you come to a decision?” Gost asked.
Sverl hesitated for a moment, then mentally cancelled the image he generally used to front his communications and allowed his true image to be broadcast.
“I have,” he said.
“I see,” said Gost. “We analysed some of your genome obtained from the ocean of the Rock Pool. However, we were baffled as to how it would be changing you physically.”
“Now you know,” said Sverl.
“You must not be seen by any other prador,” Gost stated.
Sverl felt a moment of chagrin. He really shouldn’t have succumbed to the perfectly calculated lure. Seeing him as he really was had only confirmed Gost’s earlier intent to hunt him down and be rid of him.
“I will not be seen by any other prador,” said Sverl, “and with your help I can remove myself as a threat to the Kingdom.”
“And how can I help exactly?”
“I do not have the kind of access you do to prador databases,” Sverl explained. “I need you to search out data on something for me.”
“Continue.”
“I need to find the location of Polity Factory Station Room 101.”
Gost turned an armoured palp eye to view something to one side—possibly another set of screens, or perhaps it was the output from the kind of AI computing generally frowned on by normal prador.
“The one the Polity claims we destroyed,” Gost stated. “I am running searches now, so perhaps you can explain to me why you need this data.”
“It’s complicated,” said Sverl.
“I am capable of dealing with complicated.”
“Very well. For my own purposes I need to find Penny Royal. I am sure that the black AI has gone or is going to Room 101. I am guessing that this station is a long way from the Graveyard, and in going there I will remove myself from play. I am sure that, as it has provided me with the data in its own unique way, my presence there is exactly what the AI intends, along with my extraction from the Graveyard. I believe this because I am certain I am a problem Penny Royal wishes to correct.”
“I note a great deal of supposition there,” said Gost.
“But I note a lack of disagreement in you, despite this,” Sverl countered.
“You’ll get none. As long as you remove yourself from the Graveyard, I, and the king, will be happy.”
Happy? An amusing concept for a prador.
After a long pause Gost said, “It appears that we do not know the location of Room 101.” Sverl felt a surge of disappointment at this news, but Gost continued, “Doubtless there are high-up Polity AIs that are trusted with the knowledge, but I suspect you won’t be talking to them. However, a small number of drones and AI ships escaped that station after its U-space jump. Higher AIs in the Polity must have instructed or compelled them to keep quiet about the manner of that station’s disappearance and its subsequent location.”
“One has to wonder why,” said Sverl.
“After a war such as ours there are things that combatants, especially human and AI combatants, would rather not admit to—secrets that must be kept until softened by time.”
“With the prador too?”
“Certainly—you just glimpsed one of them.”
What had really happened to the King’s Guard, and perhaps the king himself? Sverl shook himself and returned to his main interest. “These drones and ships, where are they?”
“Their number was severely reduced during the remainder of the war, and since then many of them have disappeared. Those still extant are keeping quiet. I have a list of them I can transmit to you, but before I do so there is something more you need to know and something more you must do.”
Quid pro quo time.
“Go ahead.”
“It has recently come to our attention just how Cvorn intends to capture you,” said Gost. “The five children of Vlern raided a Kingdom world for females and then stole a ship as they departed. They did this in an area where none of my kind was in attendance and they functioned with cooperation and efficiency far beyond that expected of young adult prador. Imagery on file shows that they are augmented with biotech augs made for prador and purchased from a Polity corporation called Dracocorp.”
Gost paused to give Sverl time to gather data. He did so: soon he had a fair understanding of the enslaving nature of Dracocorp’s products, and their similarity to prador thrall technology.
“Surprisingly,” said Gost, “they returned to the Graveyard rather than fleeing beyond our grasp. Surprising, that is, until we understood the function of their augmentations. As you probably well know.”
“Cvorn is controlling them,” said Sverl. “What sort of ship did they steal?”
“An ST dreadnought.”
“Shit,” said Sverl, which he suspected was an expletive he could find in the language of any sentient species.
“Indeed,” said Gost. “And it is the kind of shit we would prefer to be removed from the Graveyard: a rogue dreadnought in such a politically unstable area . . . Therefore, should you obtain the location of Room 101, I want you to transmit that location to me. Then I want you to lure Cvorn out there. Wherever it is, it is certainly not in the Polity because it would be too difficult to conceal from the population there. Nor is it in the Kingdom. So it must be beyond the Graveyard.”
Sverl pondered that idea. Certainly Gost would like Cvorn at a location where he could be stamped on without infringing on Kingdom agreements with the Polity, but he also no doubt wanted Sverl himself at such a location too.
“I certainly need to get Cvorn off my back,” said Sverl, “and a squadron of the King’s Guard should achieve that aim. I will send you the coordinates, should I find them, but I need you to promise that you will not interfere in my dealings with both Room 101 and Penny Royal.”
“Of course,” said Gost, “and here is the list you require. Interesting, the workings of serendipity, when you consider one of the drones on that list, and its location . . .”
Much to Sverl’s surprise, a list of names and Polity drone designations did arrive as promised. Gost had to know that Sverl was lying about sending those coordinates, just as Sverl knew that Gost was lying about noninterference in Sverl’s affairs—the intent of the King’s Guard was almost certainly to annihilate both Cvorn and himself.
“Keep me informed,” said Gost, and closed the com channel.
Sverl stared at the screen for a long moment. That had been just too easy and the whole exchange stank of half-truths and manipulation. Gost had certainly been lying about something other than his intent concerning Sverl, but right then Sverl couldn’t plumb it. After a moment, he decided to let it go and turned his full attention to the list, ripping through it at top AI speed. Next he saw the name and drone designation Gost had been referring to, experienced a moment of bafflement, then a growing awe.
Serendipity, I name you Penny Royal, Sverl thought.
That it was so predictable how he would react made Sverl feel very small and insignificant. He was just a game piece the black AI was shifting around a board. The sheer chutzpah and godlike manipulation of events was awesome. Or was it something more than that? Had Penny Royal managed to breach time itself? Was the black AI operating like one of those artificial intelligences said to have transcended the restrictions of realspace and embedded itself for eternity in U-space?
