Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Hello, Fei,’ Terri said. ‘Do you recognise everyone?’

  ‘Hello, Terri. Hello, Jackson. Hello, Fox. I am pleased to see you again, Fox. This is your new body?’

  ‘Hi, Fei. This is it, but it’s not quite finished yet. It’ll look more like me… when it is.’

  ‘This afternoon,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ve got everything ready.’

  ‘Good. So, how does your new body feel, Fei?’

  ‘It is… strange. I cannot move.’

  ‘I’ll release the clamps,’ Terri said, tapping away.

  ‘I was expecting Kit to be here.’

  ‘She is, sort of,’ Fox replied. ‘She’s running inside my frame. She can see and hear you, and I can relay what she says. You just can’t see her.’

  ‘Tell her hello,’ Kit said, grinning as the blonde gynoid stepped out of the support frame.

  ‘Uh, she says to say hello. You seem to be handling that fairly well.’

  Fei was holding up her hands and examining them, much as Fox had done the day before. Fei’s cyberframe was only a remote rather than a fully occupied body, but they had taught her the protocols to handle full VR control, so technically she could feel as though she were actually inside it. Apparently she did. She stroked her fingers over her hand, and then the sleeve of her suit, and a rather childish grin settled over her face.

  ‘Am I doing the smile right?’ Fei asked. ‘I have seen them, quite a lot of them, and I practised with a number of simulations.’

  ‘It looks pretty good,’ Fox said.

  ‘Perfect,’ Terri said. ‘Perhaps you would like to walk around the base a little. It’ll help you get used to the frame.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fei said, nodding. ‘I would like that.’

  ‘You do that,’ Jackson said, ‘but I need Fox for a while.’

  ‘Yes. I would like the opportunity to talk at a later time, Fox.’

  ‘We’ll do that. Maybe after I’ve got my new skin.’

  ‘Yes.’ And then Fei started for the door of the room, taking her steps carefully, with Terri walking behind her like a mother watching a toddler taking her first steps.

  ‘And you, young lady,’ Jackson said, pointing at Fox, ‘get out of that suit. I want to examine this bullet wound.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like seeing me naked?’

  ‘For science, I’ll make an exception.’

  ~~~

  ‘The process is a little overcomplicated at the moment,’ Jackson said. ‘This is the prototype and we separated the various stages out. Possibly more than we needed to.’

  Fox looked at the machine she was about to go through, which looked like it had been constructed by someone presented with a lot of blocks and pipes and told to use them all. It had been constructed in one of the largest chambers in the base and was at least five metres in height and maybe twenty in length. Facing her was what looked a lot like an airlock door in the biggest of the blocks.

  ‘It’s big,’ Fox said.

  ‘It may also be a little over-engineered. We’ve already identified several stages which can be handled simultaneously. When we build the next one, in tower three in New York, it should be significantly more streamlined.’

  ‘And you’re sure it’s okay for me to go through this in the body?’

  ‘It’s safe, but boring. The system will need to control the motion of the body by remote so you’ll be a spectator in your own body, and it takes about forty minutes.’

  Fox gave a shrug. ‘I’ve got plenty to read. Anyway, maybe I’ll spot something in there that’ll help you streamline your process.’

  Jackson flashed her a grin. ‘I’m sure your engineering skills are up to the task.’

  ‘Huh.’ Fox turned and looked around at the people gathered in the room. Terri and Fei were there along with Jackson. Terri looked a little worried, and a little eager. Fei was… Her face held a vague smile and her eyes were bright with interest. Fei was still excited just to be out of her room. ‘Kit,’ Fox said silently, ‘why don’t you transfer into that gynoid you’ve got for talking to Fei?’

  ‘You don’t want me with you?’ Kit replied.

  ‘I think I’d like to do this alone. It’s not that I don’t want you with me, exactly. It’s just…’

  ‘I think I understand. This is likely to be a very personal experience. I will make the transfer and be waiting for you when you come out.’

  Fox waited a few seconds for Kit to leave her and then said, ‘Let’s do this.’

  Jackson nodded and tapped keys on a nearby terminal. The door opened. ‘Just step inside,’ Jackson said. ‘I’ll initiate the sequence when the door closes. You’ll lose control of motor function more or less immediately.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fox walked through the door into a fairly slim chamber with a grating for a floor, pulling up the process pipeline documents as she walked. The first stage was a cleaning process…

  There was a slight sense of shock as the system took over physical control of her cyberframe and she found herself looking out through a fixed window as the room began to fill with slightly cloudy liquid which swirled around her. After a few seconds, the colour of the fluid changed and Fox got the impression that she was rising: the grill floor was pushing her upward toward the next stage which was the main processing tank. She was now surrounded by billions of tiny robots suspended in a carefully controlled medium.

  Manipulator arms positioned her in the centre of what was, basically, an Yliaster fabricator tank, retracting to leave her hanging in the liquid bath. Her arms and legs, even her fingers, were spread out to give the nanomachines access to her surface. But she could see very little, hear and feel nothing. Jackson had been right: it was going to be boring until she emerged from the other side.

  Fox could not close her eyes, but she turned away from her window on the outside world and just drifted…

  ~~~

  The quality of the light coming through her ‘window’ changed and Fox returned her attention to the outside world. There had been changes of position before now, movements from chamber to chamber. Hair and nail growth was handled in a different section to skin, using different nanomachines, Fox assumed, but from inside Fox’s body, it had seemed no different. Now the light grew brighter, clearer.

  Fox checked her process chart. The final stage was, basically, a wash. Filtered, deionised water was used to clean up any remaining Yliaster robots and clean the suspension fluid off the new skin and hair. The water started out quite cloudy, mostly thanks to the denser, coloured liquid from the tanks, and gradually grew clearer as it was swirled around her, pumped out, cleaned, and passed through once more.

  A message appeared in Fox’s vision field: Primary operator initiation in 5… Fox readied herself for control. Her head lifted as soon as the processor systems let her go. Above her, a grill ceiling was opening up in preparation for her exit. She was standing on another grill, her hands resting on a pair of small stands set into the floor. A second later, the floor began to rise, slowly, and Fox was lifted up, emerging into the air above.

  She could feel the water running off her body, her hair sticking to the skin of her forehead and neck. As she cleared the tank and the lift locked off, she lifted her arms from the stands to look at them properly. She could feel her weight on the soles of her feet. The skin on the back of her hand was smooth to the touch, perfect. She ran her hand up her arm, unconsciously mirroring Fei’s actions from that morning, and then she went further. They had even managed to reproduce the line of moles over her chest: the little imperfections were all there. Her breasts felt firmer than they had, but soft and definitely realistic. She was just about to go in for further examination when a cough brought her attention to the other occupants on the platform.

  Jackson was staring pointedly at the ceiling. Fei had the same interested smile on her face, but Fox figured she had not developed a full range of expressions yet. Kit looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh her ass off. Terri was holding a short wrap, and
appeared to be trying not to smirk.

  ‘How does it, um, feel?’ Terri said, holding out the wrap in a somewhat pointed manner.

  Fox took it and pulled it on over her wet skin. The silky material soaked through immediately and clung in a manner which rather defeated the purpose of wearing it, but she was wearing something. ‘I should probably dry off before I get dressed,’ Fox said. ‘It feels… like skin. It feels great.’

  ‘But?’

  Fox frowned, felt the muscles in her brow tense, and smiled before shaking her head. ‘I can feel my face moving again. It’s great, but… It’s not… I’m not… me.’

  ‘You look like you,’ Fei said. ‘You sound like you. Why are you not you?’

  Fox flashed the AI a grin. ‘I don’t know, Fei. I just don’t quite feel… I think I feel new. I mean, I am new. I probably just need some time. People adjust to their circumstances. Humans are good at that.’

  ‘It does seem to be what placed us at the top of the evolutionary ladder,’ Jackson said. He was actually looking at Fox again, though he appeared to think something slightly less transparent in the way of clothing might be a good idea; his eyes were firmly fixed on her face. ‘Well, until recently. One can argue about the current generation of AIs, like Kit, but with Fei and now Fox, I’m not so sure we can really claim our lofty position any longer.’

  ‘It does seem like we’re seeing the emergence of some new classes of sentient being,’ Terri said. ‘Fei, obviously, but Fox represents a new level of man-machine integration. I guess the future is bright, and maybe a little scary.’

  ‘I do not believe that I am scary,’ Fei said, her smile brightening into just plain cute.

  Fox laughed. ‘We’ll have a chat about that at some point. But right now… I just emerged from a swimming pool. I’m going to find a shower unit with air blowers, get dressed so that Jackson can stop looking like he’s watching porn with his daughter… And then I’ll start trying to figure out what the new me really is.’

  ###

  About the Author

  I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.

  Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.

  I got into writing through roleplaying, however, so my early work was related to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote science fiction when I was playing Traveller. I wrote “high fantasy” when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing City of Heroes. I still love the idea of a modern world with magic in it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more successful short stories, as steps along the path to the Thaumatology Series.

  Recently I took the big step of quitting my day job and taking up full-time writing. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, J.D. Robb, and Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.

  For More Information

  Take a look at the Witches and Ray-guns blog: http://witchesandrayguns.wordpress.com

  Amazon Author Pages:

  US: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B006J6II9O

  UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B006J6II9O

  Other Books by this Author

  The Thaumatology Series

  Thaumatology 101

  Demon’s Moon

  Legacy

  Dragon’s Blood

  Disturbia

  Hammer of Witches

  Eagle’s Shadow

  Ancient

  Dragonfall

  The Other Side of Hell

  For Whom the Wedding Bells Toll

  Vengeance

  Anthologies in the Thaumatology Universe

  Tales from High Towers’ Study

  Tales from the Dubh Linn

  The Aneka Jansen Books

  Steel Beneath The Skin

  The Cold Steel Mind

  Steel Heart

  The Winter War

  The Greatest Heights of Honour

  The Lowest Depths of Shame

  Hope

  The Ultrahuman Books

  Ugly

  Shadows

  Hunting Mink

  Frostburn

  Guardian – 2017/18

  True Dark – 2017/18

  The Unobtainium Books

  Kate on a Hot Tin Roof

  King Solamet’s Mines – late 2016

  The Reality Hack Books

  Reality Hack

  The Fox Meridian Books

  Fox Hunt

  Inescapable

  DeathWeb

  Criminal Minds

  Emergence

  The Ghost in the Doll – August 2016

  Eden Burning - 2017

  The Princeps Venator Books

  Hunter’s Kiss

  Be My Valentine – late 2016

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Festivities

  Part Two: In the Big Top

  Part Three: Insult, Meet Injury

  Part Four: Rising Sun

  Part Five: Death and Birth