Infinity Engine

by Neal Asher

  He scanned through the data again. There was more stuff there about universal pattern formation and its underlying principles, something about a branch of science that related to an ancient theory called “string theory,” a great deal of heavy math of the kind runcible AIs dealt with and some frankly bizarre physics that related uncomfortably to Crowther’s earlier thoughts about predestination. Despite his haiman augmentations, much of it was beyond him but, more importantly, didn’t interest him. What did grab his interest were the brief messages in human speech or text that sometimes slipped through, almost as if something in the black hole was talking in the background during the transmission.

  The last one he had picked up had been, “And the trinity becomes one.” He’d queried that with Earth Central and been told, “Classified—do not distribute.” Other messages he had been allowed to distribute for analysis, and swiftly received many thousands of different answers. The one that ran, “The lair of the white worm is large,” could have been to do with a new fantasy virtuality based on the writing of an ancient scribe called Bram Stoker. However, further analysis revealed that it had been chosen via a creative search program that had keyed on events on the planet Masada, and the words “white worm.” The comment had something to do with the Atheter war machine there, the Technician, and its eventual demise, but data from Masada had recently been under some heavy restrictions and the entire meaning of the phrase remained unclear. Sometimes, trying to work out what these phrases meant was like delving into Nostradamus.

  This time the phrase was, “Your greatest fear—the room stands open.” Crowther sent this directly to Earth Central then began his own analysis and soon came up with George Orwell’s 1984 and Room 101, the place which contained the protagonist’s greatest fear. Beyond that the references branched into the millions, since Room 101 had embedded itself in human culture. There had even been that Polity factory station extant during the prador/human war—a thing like a giant harmonica eighty miles long, thirty miles wide and fifteen deep, with square holes running along either side of it that were exits from enormous final-fitting bays. That had been called Room 101 . . .

  “Classified—do not distribute,” Earth Central replied, and then followed that with a huge data package.

  As he studied the new data from EC, Crowther was pretty certain it had been sent to distract him from that latest phrase, but he let that go because firstly he would get nowhere making queries and secondly this fresh data really did interest him, especially the newly declassified stuff. He now focused through his long-range sensors back across the accretion disc towards the planetary system currently being swept in the direction of the black hole. He had already reconstructed the physical history of most of the worlds in that system since their birth in a wholly different kind of accretion disc. One of them contained some odd metals that had only been added to the elementary table in the last hundred years, and there was a ruined prador base on another, but otherwise they weren’t particularly interesting. However, the world of Panarchia fascinated him, and that was what this declassified data was about.

  He’d brought its history up to date at the start of the war—this work a bit of a sideline from his real job. He’d covered the initial terraforming of the world, its early colonies, then the later colonists who had haphazardly imported exotic life forms—one of which, the octupal, a kind of land octopus, had come to dominate. He’d covered the evacuation of the world ahead of the prador advance, then the final slaughter of those who had remained after the prador arrived. And he’d covered much about the third push-back, when Polity forces had advanced, reclaiming territory, and some vicious battles had been fought in the area. But now: the declassified data . . .

  Penny Royal . . .

  Crowther felt as if something was creeping up his spine. He knew about the black AI Penny Royal, but then who didn’t? What he had not known was that this was the place where that creature had first been deployed as the mind of a destroyer which bore an odd name: the Puling Child. Apparently the conflict here had been so intense that a Polity factory station had been pulled in to supply ships. During that conflict—

  Crowther went still as he gazed at the old images of that factory station and absorbed what the thing had been called: Room 101. Whatever had been creeping up his spine had now donned a pair of hobnail boots.

  So, Penny Royal had been created in Room 101, not far from Crowther’s current location. It had taken part in some battles about the Panarchia system. During one of those battles Polity forces had been trapped on the surface of Panarchia, surrounded by much larger prador forces that could have overwhelmed them in a moment, but didn’t. Next, during what appeared to be an attempt to rescue those forces from the planet—eight thousand mostly human troops—Penny Royal had gone rogue. The AI had managed to penetrate behind prador lines but, instead of attempting a rescue, it had anti-matter bombed the troops from orbit and annihilated them all.

  Crowther ran through the summation again, then concentrated on the detail. There was something decidedly odd about this. Yes, rogue AIs tended to get a bit anti-human and Penny Royal, in later incidents, had definitely demonstrated that tendency. But why would such an AI have penetrated behind prador lines to wipe out troops who, judging by the tactical data, were doomed anyway?

  The Brockle

  During its long confinement inside the prison hulk the Tyburn, the Brockle had always dealt with those who were demonstrably guilty of taking the lives of others. However, there were times when it really wanted to interrogate a wider selection of subjects than those who were obviously guilty. Members of separatist organizations, for instance, who, though they might have no blood on their hands, were facilitators who were culpable in murder. Those on the periphery of crimes—but these beings had never been sent. The Brockle had decided that there were degrees of guilt and criminality, and one of them was the criminal negligence that allowed crime to exist at all. In that way of looking at things, the whole human race was guilty.

  Only the ignorance of humans and their stubborn insistence in not raising themselves to higher levels of intelligence allowed crime to survive. They stupidly did not realize that the Polity was perfectible and that they were holding it back. Yet wasn’t it also the case that Polity AIs were as guilty? They could force the human race to uplift itself, or they could simply rub out the species and get on with creating a utopia—

  “So what ship is that?”

  Brought out of its ruminations, the Brockle looked out of the panoramic window in the side of outlink station Par Avion at a ship of a somewhat unusual design. Accessing the memories it had stolen from its victims, the Brockle realized its overall shape was that of a kipper. However, it was two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, its hue metallic and its patterning more like that of a mackerel. Thereafter such piscine analogies ran out. Scattered across the visible face were sensor towers and instrument blisters like glass dome houses, while near the “head” crouched two blocky weapons turrets. These were the only visible signs of the huge collection of highly advanced armaments and other instrumentation packed inside. The ship was diamond state—part frontline dreadnought and part research ship—and just what the Brockle required.

  The Brockle turned from the window and studied the woman who had spoken. Long experienced in divining human expressions, the forensic AI recognized at once that she was wary of it, but also curious. There was something about the Brockle that worried her, but she was in the Polity and therefore safe. She was also old, definitely into her second century, and bored. She wore an aug, so if someone attacked her or confronted her with anything weird she could inform the station AI in an instant.

  “It’s the High Castle,” the Brockle replied. “But why did you feel it necessary to ask me when you could have auged the information from the station AI?”

  “It was a conversational gambit,” she said, moving up beside it and resting her hands on the rail before t
he window, “because I tend to get curious when I see a man who appears to have big silvery worms moving about under his skin.”

  The Brockle felt a moment of chagrin as it reined in the activity of its units and returned its skin to its usual opaque hue. While lost in speculation it had allowed its guard to drop. This was down to its many years of confinement; while aboard the Tyburn it had found no need for the concealment it had used in its earlier profession. It must be more careful in future, but right now it had a problem to solve.

  “So what’s all that about, then?” she asked.

  The Brockle searched for a suitable explanation and shortly pasted one together out of the thousands of lives in its memory banks. Assuming a weary and bored expression, it said, “It was once a fashion of the runcible culture. But then things moved on into the positively grotesque and left me behind.”

  The woman was auged so almost certainly had the standard thousand hours of sensory recording of her life, though why humans liked to record the tedium of their existence was a puzzle. No such recordings of the Brockle had been made anywhere else in this station: it had worked its way here via air ducts and gas pipes from the small single-ship dock, subverting all pin cams and constantly altering the images of it that the cameras here perceived. So wary of the Par Avion AI had it been, it had stupidly neglected to pay attention to mere humans. Even more stupidly, it had retained its usual human shape, which would of course be recognizable to all AIs and any humans who had encountered it in the past, although admittedly few of the latter were still alive.

  She would have to be dealt with.

  The Brockle stepped closer to the rail and placed one of its own hands on it. The unit it extruded matched the grain of the ersatz wood perfectly as it slid a thin sliver of itself towards her hands. Emitting just the right EM frequency as it approached them, it numbed her nerves just enough so she didn’t notice as it slid under her palms and bonded them to the rail. Further numbing her nerves, it opened finger-wide holes in her palms and began to work its way up her arms, steadily shutting nerves down ahead of it. It should be able to scramble any data she retained about this encounter and leave her in a semi-conscious state, wandering through this space station.

  “I too used to run with that crowd,” she said convivially. She then tried to move her hands. “Damn . . . some little cocksucker!”

  “What?” The Brockle gazed at her in puzzlement.

  “Hyperglue on the rail. Fuckit!”

  A thousand scenarios played out in the Brockle’s mind until it finally realized it had only one course of action. It reached out, snake-fast, no time now to be subtle since she would call for help the moment she stopped cursing. Subverting the cams behind so they showed two slim women standing at this rail, the Brockle grabbed her aug, probing inside the thing as it did so and jamming it. Analysis revealed the make and model of the device and how it was anchored into her skull, so the Brockle used the requisite force to tear it free. Her head bent right over on her neck before the bones broke. The aug tore free with chunks of skull attached, exposing brain before the hole rapidly filled with blood. However, there would not be as much blood as was usual from such a wound, since the force required to remove the aug had also broken her neck.

  An error of judgement.

  The Brockle quickly forced its unit up through the top part of her arms, through her shoulders and up inside her neck, into her skull. There it paused for a moment because, even now, it was within its abilities to save her life. Then it came to a decision. It had already breached its confinement and killed nominally innocent human beings. It was committed now to a grander aim and could not allow another easily replaceable example of the billions of human beings scattered across the Polity to get in its way. It set the end of the unit to blender mode and turned the inside of her skull to mush, extracted its unit fast so it came out like a bloody whip, then turned and ran, rapidly absorbing the said unit.

  No time to dally now. As it ran, the Brockle crushed the aug in the palm of its hand, injected diatomic acid into it, then dropped the rapidly dissolving thing on the floor. Rounding the end of the walkway and entering one of the corridors spearing into the station, it slowed to a walk and began transforming. Its blue overall steadily darkened, the top half separating from the bottom, buttons and fancy stick seams appearing as it changed into high-class businesswear, shrinking to fit the Brockle’s steadily diminishing bulk. As this process continued, the AI was faced with a choice: it could increase its height to redistribute the internal mass of its units, or it could compress them. In the former case this would result in its standing over seven feet tall which, though not particularly unusual, wasn’t as low profile as it would like. In the latter case compression would result in a reduction in the efficiency of its units, and it was going to need them.

  In a flash of inspiration it halted, squatted down and began extruding a great mass of its units from its stomach. The thick silvery worms squirmed out one after the other and coagulated into a great mass on the floor, shaped themselves to give flat edges and corners and darkened, then rose up off the floor as a fairly standard piece of hover luggage.

  The Brockle moved on, immediately coming face to face with a group of humans and Golem. It stepped aside to allow them to pass, feeling a frisson of anxiety knowing that, had they entered this corridor just a moment earlier . . . One of the Golem shot it an odd look, but that was most likely because of some breach of usual social etiquette. Next, entering a concourse, the Brockle made its way through the crowds until it reached a series of dropshafts. It hesitated for a moment, then decided against the idea—instead it found a stair leading between decks and headed down, hover luggage negotiating the steps with slightly more ease than was normal.

  Eight floors down, a door opened into a shuttle bay. As it stepped out, the Brockle instantly penetrated the cam system, maintained a link and constantly erased its presence from cam memory. Here a floor ledge jutted into a large open space, shuttles drawn up beside it and beyond them a giant curve of chain-glass separating all from vacuum. All along the ledge were small cargoes sitting on grav-sleds or motorized pallets. Dock workers were scattered all around, some controlling handler robots that were like the by-blows of forklifts and mantids, others heaving crates by themselves. Some shuttles here were small private vessels, two were simple intership passenger vessels, while the biggest and most obvious was a military resupply shuttle for the High Castle. This had two ramps down, and personnel and robots were using them to load supplies rapidly. The Brockle opened visual cells on the side of its head and gazed without turning at a group of humans standing beside one ramp. It increased its hearing and filtered out other noises until it could hear their conversation.

  “I still think we should have been included,” said a man—obviously one of a Sparkind unit.

  “We’re backup,” said a woman the Brockle recognized as Grafton, the human captain of the High Castle. “Remember, our remit is half scientific and we’re not full military.”

  “Not full military?” said the man.

  Grafton grinned. “We do have a science section . . .”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s like this,” she said. “The initial mission profile is a simple negotiation with this renegade prador, then if that doesn’t work, the injection of a few U-space missiles, and the Garrotte is more than capable of that. We then go in to gather data.”

  “I’m waiting for the ‘but’,” said one of the Golem Sparkind.

  “But,” said Grafton, losing her grin, “if things start to get more complicated, we go in and assume command.”

  “You mean drag their nuts out of the fire,” said the Golem.

  “Yes, quite,” said Grafton.

  The Brockle experienced a surge of disappointment. It had been sure that at last the Polity AIs had understood the danger Penny Royal represented and were going after that black AI, and that the High
Castle was going to be part of the hunt—it certainly possessed the necessary resources. But it seemed this was not the case. What was this about a “renegade prador”? As the Brockle understood, from all the data it had been stealing since arriving on Par Avion, the High Castle was heading out towards the once supposedly missing factory station Room 101—the last known location of Penny Royal. The only prador that could be described as renegade out there were dead. The one known as Sverl had been killed aboard the station by an assassin drone while, according to a long-range Polity observation satellite, the other documented renegade, called Cvorn, had had his ship intercepted by the King’s Guard out from Room 101 and all but destroyed. It had managed to drop into U-space, but in such a state of ruin that there wasn’t much chance it would come out again. However, in the end this did not matter because it changed the Brockle’s plans not one whit.

  The Brockle sauntered towards the stacked cargo ready to be loaded onto the shuttle, aiming for an area near the back where there were fewer workers. As it walked it prepared the way: altering the positioning and format of its various internal units, plus those inside the hover trunk, readying all for a flash change. Meanwhile, it also scanned the intelligent manifest labels on the various packages and penetrated the scanners either held by various dock workers or sitting in the memories of handler robots. Just a little alteration was required; just the addition of one more package. Finally arriving beside a grav-sled that only carried half a load, it extruded sensors all around its head, focusing on human and Golem eyes while subverting further cams in the various robots here. It waited until the moment was just right—until no eyes were looking—then stepped up onto the sled and collapsed; for the blink of an eye a mass of silver worms, then that snapping into a new shape.