by Neal Asher
The Second King ignored the Golgoloth’s advice against attacking these horrible soft but obviously quite advanced creatures called Humans. Whilst continuing in an advisory capacity, the hermaphrodite rapidly prepared itself for the predicted fall of the Second Kingdom, for its King was now ancient, stubborn and prone to error. It expected this fall to be brought about by the Humans, so it came as a surprise when a Prador mutated by the Spatterjay virus returned to homeworld to usurp the Second King. In the vessel it had diverted funds from nearly one-tenth of the Prador economy to construct, the Golgoloth managed to escape the ensuing–and lengthy–bloody aftermath.
Exiting the long chamber containing its utterly confined and steadily growing children, the Golgoloth heads for the main communication centre of its vessel. The equipment in that place is easily enough accessed from its armoured lair, but the hermaphrodite is wary of so confining itself, for that leads to a hermetic and defensive state of mind, and it needs to stay sharp if it is to survive in this ever-changing universe.
Upon assuming power, the Third King halted the attack on the Polity and withdrew Prador forces, and the Humans, showing more restraint than any of the Golgoloth’s own kind would have shown, only followed them as far as the original border between their two realms. Had they been Prador, the war would have continued further, probably resulting in yet more denuded planets and further billions dead, and ultimately both the Polity and the Prador Kingdom falling apart. The Golgoloth felt some admiration for these soft creatures until it realized that had it been entirely down to them, the war would have continued, but it was their artificial intelligences that made the cold assessment that a war of extermination was not worth the cost.
Oberon, then as now, was incredibly intelligent and dangerous, and had he understood the true nature of the previous King’s rise to power, he would not have let the Golgoloth escape. However, shortly after establishing himself on homeworld he found this out, and dispatched numerous returning warships to search for the escapee. The Golgoloth then fled from hideaway to hideaway in the Third Kingdom, coming close to capture on many occasions. Finally it chose a destination where warships could not follow, and established itself in the borderland, the Graveyard.
Entering its spherical communications centre, the Golgoloth climbs onto a circular dais positioned at the very centre, which is then propelled upwards by a wide pillar. From here it can observe the hundreds of surrounding screens, and sometimes, using those same screens, create VR effects about itself that entirely banish the surrounding room and produce the illusion of placing the hermaphrodite just about anywhere its sensors are positioned. Through an external ganglion it initiates a whole bank of hexagonal screens directly before it. For a moment they show only an enormous wide open area, all aseptically white. Then something even more monstrous than the Golgoloth itself steps into view.
‘So you are not dead,’ says this thing.
‘And you, as always, are very much alive, King Oberon,’ the Golgoloth replies.
Consciousness slides within grasp, and then away again, in the mind that knows itself as the Prador Ebror–yet, in brief moments of lucidity, knows that it cannot be Ebror. Does not the nanite Vrell released destroy all nerve tissue, including the major ganglion? How can Ebror now exist without a brain to hold him?
The armour within which these thoughts occur first contained Ebror’s heavily mutated Prador body, whose shell had softened over the years, and often, in those years immediately before his death, attached itself to the inside of his armour. But now rapid change is occurring. The original Prador nervous system is gone, but the Spatterjay virus immediately seeks to replace it by copying from the relevant strands of some glister genome it contains.
Growth is rapid but the viral organism in which this network of nerves and neurons grows rapidly burns up nutrients, and is soon starving. Aware, on some base level, that it is constantly in motion, the organism grows leech mouths with which to feed, but they suck ineffectually against the armour’s interior. It tries a human skull, jaws and teeth, lines it with flesh, but this also beats itself to no purpose against hard metal confining it. It attaches glister nerves to Prador eyes and other senses, sees that it truly is moving in an environment where other things move, other things that must surely be food, but it just cannot reach them. In its efforts to do so, it reattaches to Prador muscles that also fight against the armour, but to no effect. It grows hard little claws, tubular siphons, belts of teeth and, surprisingly, even manages to obtain some nutrient as it chews up the softer lining inside the armour, but this is a limited resource.
Once all this insulation is gone, along with anything else that can possibly be digested, the viral creature goes through its entire collection of Spatterjay genomes as it tries every possible insentient strategy it can find to feed–and gets nowhere. Genetic strands are tried, energy burnt, and the strands themselves digested as the virus hungrily breaks up the phosphates, sugars and other compounds that bind them together. Working its way down through the layers of collected genomes, it eventually runs out of familiar options to try and reaches those segments of alien code that lie at its heart.
The moment the virus touches the first segment, rapid change ensues. The alien genome keys in to certain ancient chemical sockets within the virus, and takes command of it, impelling it to immediately link to every other fragment of alien code it contains. Now completely in control, the alien genome begins shutting down all futile attempts to escape from the enclosing armour. It shuts down every superfluous use of energy and applies all remaining resources to grow a new neural structure: a brain. It then begins loading into this the mind of the Prador Ebror, which–even though Ebror’s brain has been destroyed–is imprinted on the virus itself. It shortly follows this with an upload of quantum-stored information from itself, though only a little, for there is not yet enough room for it all. The segments also begin to throw off the structures of life, its life: its equivalents to proteins, amino acids, enzymes and RNA, and gradually unravels throughout the process. All of these structures are infinitely more complex, yet more ordered, than everything used beforehand, and they quickly begin to digest and displace their predecessors.
As the new brain grows, the larger portions of it take over control of the viral mycelium and use it to explore its environment, building a virtual model of that environment within the mind, applying other loaded data, then coming up with entirely new strategies. The mycelium uses acids to etch away metal from the interior of the armour, forms this into nano-wires at its core, creates an electrical network and wires it into organo-electric interfaces in the brain. Free ends of the mycelium then connect into little joins and junctions in the armour, and begin inserting the nano-wires. It makes connections at random, some direct and some inductive, but, utterly not at random, it interprets the data gathered and tentatively begins to input some of its own.
Sub-AI programs created by Vrell begin to change, corrupt, and reorder themselves, and the armour they control begins to shift and shudder in disturbing ways.
And something that has been dead for four million years starts to open its eyes.
8
It has been well documented that those who survive catastrophic events, in which they see many of their fellows die, will suffer survivor guilt. This guilt is stronger still when they have done things in order to survive for which they have every reason to feel guilty. But the concentration-camp victim forced to stack decaying bodies or feed them into the furnace is not the one I am referring to here. No, it is the one who survives at someone else’s direct and immediate expense. When Jay Hoop and the rest of the Eight established their massive concentration camps on Spatterjay, they delighted in forcing such a situation upon their captives, and the horrible games they played are legend. They regularly conducted ‘hunts’ through the island dingles, using one captive as a ‘hound’ and another as a ‘rabbit’. If a hound did not bring down a rabbit during such a hunt, the hound himself went for coring; and if he did, then
it was the rabbit who was taken away to have his brain and spinal cord cut out. Other groups of captives were forced to vote on who in their group would go for coring next; and similar groups were sometimes stuck in a room with just one open door, and the first five to fight their way out got to survive that day. Sometimes victims were made to perform sex-acts with animals, and men were instructed to rape and often torture women, other men or children for the entertainment of the Eight. If they did not follow instruction they were cored. In this way no depravity was neglected. Jay Hoop especially enjoyed forcing some of the captives to skin others alive, which goes some way to explaining his later incarnation as The Skinner. Many of those who thus survived the rule of the Eight on Spatterjay were later hunted down and killed by more innocent survivors. Many eventually killed themselves, though some still exist, it is said. Certainly they understand the concept of survivor guilt.
–From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans
The stink of Human excrement is almost a taste in the air, and the groaning, the crying and sometimes the screaming whenever someone wakes up to find a ship-louse chewing into him provides a perpetual racket. In the crowded hold, Orbus nudges the blanket-wrapped bundle at his feet, then reaches over to drag it closer. With shaking hands he opens the short penknife the Prador have not bothered to relieve him of, leans down and pulls at the stained blanket and, after a moment, a child’s arm flops out. It is still warm, so he checks for a pulse but finds none, then he reveals the head, and one glance is all he needs to confirm this little girl is dead. Her head is misshapen, crushed by an inadvertent blow from one of the second-child guards that comes in to snatch up the latest complement of corpses.
Checking about furtively Orbus sees that those nearby are too lost in their own misery to even notice what he is doing. Many are asleep, which is one of the best reliefs to the perpetual gnawing hunger, others just stare blank-eyed into shadows. The lack of light will help him here too, since he is some distance from the phosphorescent growths on the wall. He cuts into the muscle just below her elbow, sawing down to bone, then cuts down along the bone itself to just before her wrist, then out again, and extracts a chunk of flesh the size of a banana. Pulling the heat-sheet he has stolen from another corpse over his head, he leans forwards and tries to bite off a piece of the child’s flesh. It is raw, salty, and causes his mouth to well with saliva, but in the end he can’t get his teeth through it, so has to cut through it with his penknife held in front of his mouth. A great deal of chewing later, with bits of sinew lodging between his teeth, he finally swallows the great claggy lump and comes close to vomiting. But he cannot allow that, and soon the nausea passes.
The remaining flesh he cuts carefully into small pieces, feeding them one after another into his mouth, then he leans forward again and quickly cuts further chunks from the corpse, concealing them in his jacket. Upon spotting one of the other prisoners nearby beginning to take notice off him, Orbus covers the girl’s remains, stands up and moves steadily away. He takes a drink from the wall spigot–at least water is no problem here–before returning to seat himself with his back against the wall–a place he has made his own, and manages to retain because he remains physically strong while others weaken. He left just in time. A sudden hysterical screaming issues from the girl’s mother as she discovers what has happened to her daughter’s corpse. Later, the small self-elected group of vigilantes present beats to death a man who happens to be lying nearby, but even they are weakening and it takes them some time. Later still, the second-children come and empty a small bag of decaying human food on the floor, then with unerring precision collect both the girl and the innocent victim of the vigilantes. The mother makes no protest this time, which Orbus thinks unfair. She shrieked blue murder upon discovering some occupant of the hold had cut away parts of her little girl for food, yet keeps silent when these monsters take the dead girl away for precisely the same reason.
‘We are all going to die,’ says the youth seated against the wall next to Orbus.
‘I’m going to live,’ Orbus murmurs quietly.
The Old Captain snaps out of uneasy slumber, then carefully removes his fist from the hole he’s just smashed into the wall beside him. The lights in his cabin are on, activated by this sudden movement.
It wasn’t just a nightmare; if only that were the case. The memory has never before been so utterly clear and horribly detailed. He heaves himself up on his bed and rests his back against the wall, gazing into those memories, that clear one and others not so clear. The vigilantes caught four others who were surviving by using the same horribly practical method as himself. They killed two of them outright, but only managed to kill one of the other two while she was asleep. The remaining cannibal spoke out and won others to his side, even some of the vigilantes themselves. The choice was to either eat Human flesh or die. Orbus pretended reluctance, eating what was given to him, but supplementing it from the cache in his own jacket.
Orbus wonders why such an utterly clear memory has surfaced now, and finds a confusing answer just as a sudden surge of anger sends heat flushing down his back.
Vrell?
Before the mutated Prador seized both Orbus and his crew, everything had been so blessedly hazy. By subjecting him to old horror, Vrell shook him back to consciousness, yet…Yet, though he feels a deep instinctive rage against the Prador, he also feels a gratitude. The animal organic part of himself wants to retreat into rage, mindless violence and sadism, but everything superior to that–all that might be described as his higher self–is glad of this return to painful sanity. Yet, again, though he might be grateful that Vrell’s actions coaxed him to his present condition, the Prador had not intended to do him a favour. It had subjected him to hideous pain, drowning and thralldom, and even Orbus’s higher self feels that is a debt to be repaid. Then, again, is his higher self being influenced by…
Orbus angrily throws back the cover, swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands. He walks over to gaze at a wall mirror and inspects the massive bulk of his naked body, blue rings of scar tissue cicatricing its surface so it looks almost scaled. Centuries of leech bites, centuries spent in a place deep inside his skull where memories could not find him, and now standing here with a body that is more viral fibres than Human flesh.
Am I still Human?
He turns away and opens a cupboard, takes out his neatly stacked clothing and dons it, then swiftly exits his cabin and heads for the bridge, even now realizing that it wasn’t any surfacing of old memory that woke him, but the Gurnard surfacing into the realspace of their destination.
Vrell ignores the hissing and clattering racket behind him, instead studying intently the nanoscope images displayed on the hexagonal screens before him. It seems that the mutated third-child, now struggling perpetually against the clamps securing it to a surgical saddle, is a complete viral organism. Previously, its mutated genome had remained distinct from the viral fibres occupying its body, but now there is no distinction between them. The separate cells of its body are blurred together, and the engines of cell division and growth sit in a nub at the end of each viral fibre penetrating every cell. Using nanoscopic tools Vrell excises one of these nubs, opens out great lumpy strands of genetic tissue and begins mapping it. Five hours later he realizes that the processing space he has provided for this task is nowhere near enough, and so provides more.
Checking the ship’s records of genome samples, Vrell at length realizes that this creature’s nervous system regrew by using a combined blueprint of both the Spatterjay glister and hammer-whelk. He then sets programs to automatically check everything being mapped against records whilst the process itself continues. After ten hours, less than 3 per cent of the entire genome has been mapped, but even in that small portion Vrell finds that within its collection the virus holds strands of the genomes of the ocean heirodont, the lung-bird, the frog-whelk and of course the Spatterjay leech itself, though only fragmented strands. Vrell tips back with a sigh and considers what he is d
oing and how this might help him achieve his own ends, and realizes such research will probably be of no help at all. He understands then just how radically he himself has changed, for no real Prador would allow scientific curiosity to divert it from the serious business of vengeance.
Mildly distracted, he is considering the mass of genetic tissue now being revealed when an errant thought occurs to him. Since any planetary ecology has at its root, in the far past, the same life-form, there should thus be a sizeable duplication of code across various species. Even Prador possess much of the same code as simple seaweeds back on their homeworld. Vrell has so far found neither duplication nor junk genetic material, yet without these this sample is far too big and complicated. The entire ecology of Spatterjay could easily fit into about a quarter of it and, even if Human DNA and some of the other species they took to that world with them were to be included, that still leaves a lot of genetic material unaccounted for.
Vrell shakes himself. Stupid…and paranoid. Almost certainly the genetic bulk he is seeing is due to junk genome and pointless replication he has yet to discover. Life only conforms to the logic of environment, not the kind of mathematical logic of those who build artificial life-forms. There is always a huge amount of waste, redundancy, parasitic genetic tissue…Still Vrell feels an unease he cannot shake, for everything he is now seeing, besides lacking such waste, seems far too logically ordered, far too much like the construct of some builder rather than the product of normal evolution.
