by Neal Aher
I squatted down by Sepia, and aug-linked to the biostats from her suit. When the stats told me she was alive, and not badly injured, I felt some of the tightness leave my chest. I gazed at her face, at the blood leaking from her nostrils, and stepped back. I needed to ensure we were all safe.
I next focused my attention out through cams on the Lance’s hull. Robots were still fighting each other out there—some were clinging to the hull too and trying to drive in diamond saws and drills. Some of those tentacle umbilici were also approaching. Still running extra programming, I assessed the situation, briefly considered tactics, then set things running. Anti-personnel lasers extruded and began firing, ripping into anything vulnerable to them. Steering thrusters fired up, plasma flames frying anything in reach. I fired the particle cannon, destroying one of the larger umbilici, but was unable to reach the rest. I then triggered the emergency explosive undocking procedure. The Lance jerked and rolled, then rose, the shattered remains of docking clamps falling away. I fired again, particle cannons and railguns spreading a steady wave of destruction from where we’d been secured, scrapped and burning robots tumbling out into the bay. I hit the nearest big grabs threatening us and turned them to glowing scrap, then I brought the ship back down again, engaging remora feet.
“Attempt to take my ship again,” I said, “and I will cut through to this location—” I sent the coordinates of E676 back to the AI “—and will burn everything I find there.”
After a long pause E676 replied, “Understood.”
I glanced over towards the fallen robot. It was utterly still but for something shorting out where its tentacle face touched the floor. I walked over and took hold of the back end of the spine, but it was jammed in solid. It needed to be thinner to slide free. It needed to change its shape just as Penny Royal did with all its parts. Geometric patterns fled through my consciousness and the thing made a sound like blades passing over rock, loosened in its hole, and I pulled it out. The thing was narrower now and indented with deep grooves, small crystalline structures folding down its length.
“Jesus Christ!” said Sepia. She slowly pulled herself upright, wiping at the blood below her nose. Such an archaic curse, I thought, and considered asking her where it had come from. Some sensitivity to my surroundings returned then and I realized she was staring at me with something close to terror. I glanced down at the robot again, then at the screen fabric. The rose sunlight from the hypergiant illuminated it well, giving us an excellent view of the glowing wreckage out there. I then looked across at Trent. The man was watching me carefully, his expression unreadable until memory presented me with many similar examples. People displayed this kind of dumb acceptance when things were just completely out their control. It was often writ on the faces of those who were confronted by Penny Royal.
Now I analysed what I had done. I had been a soldier, but I was no highly trained killer like Trent. I wasn’t physically boosted or augmented, yet I had just, in the matter of a minute, brought down a robot that was part war drone. Next, as if that had been nothing, I conducted two brief conversations before taking on and defeating a station AI. I understood then that the bleed-over from those other dead minds was affecting me on every level. Not only was I acquiring knowledge I hadn’t had before, but skills too. And all were working synergetically within me.
“I’m going out after Sverl,” I said. “I have to stop Riss.” I glanced at Sepia again, whose stats told me she had cracked a couple of ribs. The prostrate Cole was unconscious but in no danger. I then focused my attention on Trent.
He reached over and picked up the laser carbine, frowned as he inspected it, then glanced speculatively into the rear annex.
“Of course you are,” he said.
SVERL
Sverl felt truly frightened for the first time in many decades. Things seemed to be slipping out of his control, because they had slipped out of his understanding.
What happened to Grey?
He’d felt his links to the Penny Royal Golem, John Grey, dissolve and dissipate. This happened just as the King’s Guard delivered its secret message to Spear. These factors, then Riss’s communication, had all increased Sverl’s sense of danger. He suddenly no longer trusted Spear—the man had obviously been undergoing some drastic changes anyway. And he was sure that Spear’s reply to Riss had been just for Sverl’s benefit. He must know Sverl had penetrated their communications. That the man was now controlling Grey was also a distinct possibility. Thereafter, all Sverl knew was that he had to get out of Spear’s ship . . .
In terms of choices, why should he die, so Spear and the others could survive? Should he sacrifice himself to prevent the destruction of Room 101? Was this what Penny Royal wanted of him? No, the AI was playing some other game here. Its interest in him had to be more than that, surely?
Just then, the station shuddered—another missile from the King’s Guard getting through. These strikes acted as a constant reminder of the reality of the situation. Was it a reality he was trying to deny? Sverl wondered.
He now clung to a series of pipes, crusted with odd metallic moulds and running the length of a warship assembly tube. Perhaps it was even the tube in which Spear’s ship had been built. As he did so, Sverl tried to see his way through his steadily waning panic. The certainty that Penny Royal intended more for him than his destruction here arose from the portions of his mind where that earlier panic was deeply rooted. In the human part of his mind, it came from what he might describe as the religious impulse. There was a need to attribute responsibility to a higher being, whilst feeling self-important enough to believe a higher being was interested. Certainty also arose in his prador self—from a similar arrogance and a greater belief in his own immortality. And, annoyingly, it had moved from both of these into his AI self. Sverl considered the idea of shutting down the two organic sources, to look at the situation more realistically, but just couldn’t do it. The mere thought of doing so now caused panic to return—the organic portions of his mind hanging on for grim death.
Penny Royal would not allow anything to destroy Room 101; Penny Royal would not let Sverl die.
“Where now, Father?” asked Bsorol, eyeing some centipede robot crawling along the pipes towards them, seemingly grazing on those metallic moulds.
Where now? Where was Penny Royal?
“We need to establish a base,” Sverl replied, trying to appear utterly firm. “From there I’ll be able to search through this station’s systems and eventually locate Penny Royal. When I have located the AI we go to it, and I at last get some answers.”
Answers? To what?
One of Sverl’s war drones slowly cruised down the length of the pipes to pause over the centipede robot. The thing stretched as if trying to reach it and the drone zapped it with a maser. At once it turned around and scuttled away. The drone swivelled round to return, then something hit it hard on the side, exploding and sending it gyrating away from the pipes.
“Just one response!” Bsorol snapped over the command channel. “We don’t have an endless supply.”
A second war drone fired a missile and the thing sped off, igniting its drive a short distance away. It shot down towards where the end of the assembly tube was filled with one of those massive worm cast growths. There, it hit and exploded—a brief flash was visible and a spreading cloud of debris. Sverl meanwhile keyed into data exchanges. The distant attacker had, again, been a highly mutated maintenance or construction robot. It seemed that was all the fragmented society of AIs here had available inside the station. There were no Polity war drones, thankfully—well, except for one . . .
“They’ll try some sort of sneak attack next,” said Sverl.
“Yes, Father,” Bsorol agreed, obviously still waiting to hear where they should go.
Sverl tried to pull back from his fear—for surely it issued from his amalgamated organic brain—and tried to think with the clarity of AI crystal. To know why Penny Royal would come here, he needed to resolve this place’s mystery. Nobody had a cl
ear idea of what had happened here. The place had been under prador attack and it had escaped. But why had the Factory Station Room 101 AI taken the station out into the wilds like this, and here begun killing all its fellow AIs? What was the madness that infected it? And where was it now? There were intelligences scattered throughout the station—but there was no sign of the Room 101 AI. Had the others destroyed it?
“We go that way,” said Sverl, gesturing with one claw along the length of the assembly tube.
He had already snatched a station schematic from the mind of a maintenance robot, and now knew the physical location of the station AI at least. Sure, with its subminds and data nodes spread throughout the station it had been a partially distributed intelligence. But still, the bulk of its thought processes had run inside a large chunk of AI crystal. And this sat inside an armoured vault lying twenty miles ahead.
Bsorol settled beside him, reaching out and closing a claw around one of his limbs, and used his suit impeller to set them in motion. As they travelled Sverl began to reach out, mentally, trying to reacquire his connection with Grey. At least he might find out if Spear had control of the Golem. This time a connection established at once.
“Hello Sverl,” came the reply.
“What happened, Grey?” he asked. “Does Spear control you?”
“He does not yet know that he can.”
“Are you still free?”
“No, I never was.”
“Who controls you?”
“The same as always.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” Grey replied, and cut the connection.
Sverl felt his panic returning. He had been aiming for an encounter with Penny Royal all along and finally it might happen. However, he entertained the possibility that—after the debacle at the Rock Pool—he should have run just as far and as fast as he could away from all known space. He reached out through Room 101, checking other sensors and clouds of disrupted data for a sign of anything dark and spiny. Instead, he detected something snakish. There seemed a horrible inevitability to Riss’s presence here . . .
“We need to go faster,” Sverl snapped, abruptly knocking Bsorol’s claw away and turning on some of the hardware embedded in his ceramal skeleton. The grav-motor worked against surrounding matter in the same way as Riss’s motive power and shoved Sverl forwards. His accompanying children hurried to catch up and remain in a protective formation about him. As he travelled, he continually scanned and weaned data from his surroundings, and found himself necessarily altering the schematic in his mind.
The station had undergone many changes over the last century. Semi-sentient technology had turned large areas into those strange worm casts, and tangles of tentacles were sprouting everywhere—their pod-like fruit ready to disgorge strange insectile seeds. Wild nano- and microtech growths crusted many surfaces, and extra tunnels snaked haphazardly through the structure, lined with fused detritus as if made by some giant burrowing beetle. It was as if the AIs here had devolved into the very fauna and flora from which some of their programming and physical characteristics derived.
Soon reaching the end of the assembly tube, they came to a wide portal leading into an area tangled with strangely overgrown machinery. Sverl identified handler robots resembling steel bastardizations of the human’s god Kali. Maglev routing tubes were wrapped around with those other worm tubes. Dangling on thick threads of optic and power cables Sverl noted the glittery-eyed heads of hardfield conveyors, giant hydraulic arms and spider constructors. Large masses of coagulated wreckage and unused ship components were mounded up in some spaces or were drifting to the slow tidal pull of the hypergiant. Even deep within the station, the glare of that immense sun managed to penetrate; rather than needing to illuminate his surroundings, Sverl found it necessary to filter out the light.
Through a narrow channel, Sverl could see the edge of an octagonal runcible cargo portal, which he estimated to be a quarter of a mile across. This was where they had brought in pre-manufactured components. The area had been used for some assembly work, but components were mostly routed to mini-factories spread through the station. If anything was active in here, it would probably be perilous. But the place was dead. He propelled himself in.
Drifting down the channel to the runcible portal, Sverl checked the schematic again. Had the portal been working, its meniscus would have obstructed the way, and this would not have been an ideal route. However, this runcible, like all such within this station, was dead too.
“We didn’t do this,” said Bsorol, waving a claw at the surrounding devastation and snaking burrows.
No, the prador attack had not caused the damage here. It had been caused by AIs fighting inside the station, and the subsequent rebuilding by distorted minds and technology gone insane. Sverl began to note further strange anomalies: construction robots wound together in death grips, other robots half melted and stuck to the superstructure. One of the umbilici manipulators had a mummified human corpse in a space suit impaled on one limb. As they drew closer, the sights grew increasingly strange—further evidence of technology run riot. Robots lay tangled in vine-like growths sprouting from the walls. Strange crystalline growths issued from one of the big handler robots like some parasitic fungus. And another human corpse, with just the helmeted skull and one arm visible, lay embedded in solid metal. Spikes of glassy metal protruded from otherwise empty eye sockets.
They passed through the inactive runcible into the next receiving area. Here, Sverl detected a submind surviving in the runcible control mechanism. It was singing the same atonal song to itself over and over again. And it gave no response at all to Sverl’s probe.
“Them bones them bones them dry bones,” it sang.
Sverl shivered and was glad to be moving away from it.
At the end of this area, a growth resembling metallic lichen blocked the route leading towards the Room 101 AI. Sverl could see movement on it and, scanning closer, observed microbots slowly and meticulously building this thing. They were working like ants but with metal rather than organic matter—slicing it from a nearby collection of bubble-metal beams and working it into interlocking puzzle pieces before bringing them over and inserting them into place. There was order here, but no reason. As far as Sverl could tell, the structure they were building served no purpose at all. He estimated it would take them about two billion years to chew up the entire station.
“Burn a way through,” he instructed his children.
Bsorol and Bsectil moved forwards and opened fire, their beams converging on the mass and spiralling outwards. Metal vapour exploded out, white-hot, then rapidly cooling as it reached them. It left threadlike metallic crystalline growths on their armour. It took them some minutes and they even had to use their impellers to hold position—the thrust from the particle beams pushing them back. Finally, they cut through and made a wide enough hole. With a brief mental command, Sverl ordered one of his war drones through first. Bsorol followed with a couple of second-children in tow.
“Clear,” he said.
Sverl went after them, feeling uncomfortable about having wrecked what was perhaps a century of work by those microbots. Was that human guilt at kicking over a termite mound? It certainly wasn’t something a prador would feel.
On his internal map—that schematic—the tunnel was straight. But once inside it, he saw it turned sharply to the right and curved upwards. Scanning ahead, he saw the tunnel distorted into an almost perfect spiral. This was just like the work of those microbots: order and organization to seemingly no purpose. Feeling slightly baffled and rather claustrophobic in the constricted space, he followed his first-children along the winding course. Soon he began to see that more was involved than the pointless distortion of the station structure. Embedded in the walls were Golem, occasional maintenance robots and, in one case, another human corpse. Maybe this was the result of some sort of trap, so he checked his surroundings for anything still active, but all he found were near-somnolent patches
of nanotech. However, those things set in the walls appeared with meticulous regularity, with any limbs arranged just so. Was this art?
Beyond the end of the tunnel, things returned to what you might expect around an assembly plant. It was as if some intelligence had managed to create an enclave of sanity. However, Sverl could detect nothing active in the vicinity. Beyond this zone, things became even more Byzantine than before. The station structure had been severely distorted, so that what lay ahead resembled a jungle of tree limbs up to a yard wide. They were all formed of compressed and twisted metals, plastics and composites. Deep inside this—seemingly the seed from which it all grew—rested a pill-shaped container a quarter of a mile across. Despite the strange protruding connections, Sverl still recognized it—the armoured abode of the Room 101 AI. With a feeling almost of dread, he advanced towards it.
CVORN
The infection that had lost Cvorn one of his newly installed palp eyes was gone. But now his other palp eye was completely blind and beginning to sag. Diagnostics had revealed that the steady transformation of the young adult’s genome in those eyes by antejects had failed because of his own immune response to those same compounds. No matter—the palp eyes weren’t critical. Fortunately, a localized mutation of his own genome caused this, and did not extend to his nether regions. His body was steadily incorporating his new sexual organs. However, as he nibbled at pieces of jellied mudfish and washed them down with chasers of the foul-tasting stomach remedy, he wondered if his insides would ever return to normal.
Cvorn turned his attention back to the steadily expanding ship’s schematic on his screens. Sfolk had still managed to evade the ship’s security drones, so Cvorn had decided that the only remedy was a complete review of the altered schematic. To this end, his children were out with scanners. They were working their way through the ship, transmitting data directly back to him. This laborious manual method was the only reliable way of getting what he needed, as the ship’s system was completely in thrall to this false schematic. But the new schematic would not be ready before he reached the coordinates where his old destroyer had been annihilated.
