by Neal Asher
This chamber occupied the upper level of the ship’s nose. The ceiling, curving down to meet the floor ahead of Cormac, was not visible, for a VR projector created the illusion that there was no ceiling at all and that he was walking out onto a platform open to vacuum. This platform, it seemed, possessed a low stone wall to prevent the unwary from stepping off the edge into the abyss. There were no instruments for humans to use, nor any need for them, though Jack could easily project a virtual console here. In the centre of this was what Cormac now mentally referred to as the drawing room.
Below a free-floating crystal chandelier, which might have been merely a projection or the real thing, club chairs, a drinks cabinet, coffee table and other items of premillennial comfort were arranged on a large rug, at the corners of which incongruously stood Victorian cast-iron street lamps giving off a soft gaslight. These were all items from Jack’s collection, replicas all, but almost to the molecular level. Now, Cormac saw that off to one side the AI had added something else.
‘Is that for my comfort as well?’ asked Cormac.
The wooden framework towered against the stars, no doubt perfect in every detail, mechanically sound, its trapdoor oiled.
‘It is here because I find it aesthetically pleasing,’ Jack told him.
Cormac turned to the localized sound of the AI’s voice.
Seated in one of the club chairs, the hangman looked like a bank manager or a stockbroker from sometime before the twenty-first century. His antique suit was pinstriped and tight on his thin body, his face white and skull-like. The brim of the bowler hat he never removed was pulled low on his forehead, shading his eyes, so that when the light caught the lenses of his spectacles, they glittered in shadow like something insectile. His overfull briefcase, no doubt containing execution orders and probably a coiled rope, stood beside his chair. Cormac suspected he wore sock suspenders and Y-fronts –for every detail of the hangman was meticulous –just like the mind this ancient automaton represented.
‘Your idea of aesthetics is a little worrying,’ Cormac observed. ‘I take it that this is not just any old gallows.’
‘No,’ said Jack, ‘it’s the Nuremberg one.’
Cormac fell silent as he allowed himself to absorb that. Using as an avatar an automaton from an age two centuries ago, rather than a holographic projection, was another strange facet of this AI. But he preferred that to Jack’s attraction to devices of execution. Stepping onto the drawing room rug Cormac decided this was a subject best dropped, and instead asked, ‘How long will it take us to get to this asteroid?’
‘It will be ten minutes.’ With a clinking ticking of gears and levers, Jack stood, turning to face Cormac. ‘This is a matter of some urgency, so I’m going to drop into U-space.’
Cormac strolled across the rug, then out across the black glass floor leading towards the nose of the Jack Ketch. Here he gazed over the ersatz stone wall into vacuum. From below and to his right, the sun heated his face as if he had just peeked over a wall beyond which a bonfire burned. Its glare filtered, he was able to look directly at it, and there observed, flung up from its vast infernal plains, an arching lariat of fire that could have swallowed worlds. Curving up from his left, then ahead and up high, before being attenuated to nothing by distance, the asteroid belt seemed an artefact, having been shepherded into neat rings by the larger chunks remaining from whatever cataclysm had shattered the planets of this system. Then the VR feed blanked to infinite grey depth, and Cormac felt that shift into the ineffable as the ship dropped into underspace. He realized he was seeing a representation less real than the one before. No human could experience underspace unshielded.
‘Do you look directly into U-space?’ he asked Jack.
‘Yes, I do.’ The reply was close at his shoulder, though the hangman automaton still occupied the drawing room behind.
‘And you retain your sanity?’ Cormac shot a glance at the gallows.
‘Yes. AI has never been limited by the four-dimensional view of the universe. It is only by being able to see and comprehend more that we can operate runcibles and ships like this.’
‘But you are physically confined to that universe and subject to its constraints?’
‘For the present.’
Cormac let that one go. No way was he going to get into a metaphysical discussion with an AI –he’d done that before and, rather than gaining enlightenment, ended up with a headache.
After a few minutes, the grey flickered away as the ship surfaced in realspace. The sun was not noticeably smaller, but the asteroid belt was now a wall of rocks beside them. The Jack Ketch eased itself into this wall, tilting and dipping, the drone of its fusion motors changing constantly as it negotiated its way through. Above, below and to the sides, Cormac observed mountain ranges swinging past as fast as fan blades, and saw flares of incandescent gas where proximity lasers hit smaller rocks.
‘This asteroid is actually within the belt then?’ he asked.
‘Its erratic orbit will take it out in fifteen hours, if it is not obliterated meantime. I have it on visual now.’
A square red frame seemingly flickered into existence far ahead of the ship, singling out just one more undistinguished lump of rock.
‘You have to wonder if it is a coincidentally erratic orbit,’ suggested Cormac.
‘Almost certainly not.’
‘Will you be able to moor?’
‘No, the longest mooring time in any location on the surface here is eight minutes before some passing object would hit me. I am now taking out of storage a tele-factor unit to send down to investigate.’
‘I want to go with it,’ Cormac said.
‘That is inadvisable. If there is active Jain technology down there, it might kill or sequester you. The telefactor can find out all we need to know, and it’s dispensable.’
‘Everything’s dispensable, and I’m tired of sitting on my hands. Presumably I’ve retained my authority as an ECS agent?’
‘You have, Ian Cormac –I merely advise against you placing yourself in unnecessary danger.’
‘Noted, but I’m still going down.’
‘Very well. You can ride down to the surface with the telefactor. I suggest you go and suit up now.’
The dropshaft shifted while he was in transit, and took Cormac directly to the telefactor launch area. There was no gravity in the wedge-shaped bay and, while he was pulling himself towards the storage area by an airlock designed for humans, he observed the further wall of the bay revolve aside to reveal the unit itself.
Golem androids were often employed by ECS simply because they were more able to utilize equipment originally designed for humans. But even they were now being replaced in some arenas. Cormac had already seen specialized drones, first in Elysium then on Masada. This unit was similar in appearance: a squat cylinder floating vertical to the floor. However, unlike those war drones, this object possessed various arms and probes folded close to its body and a complex array of scanning equipment on its underside. It also possessed no mind of its own, being a telefactor of the Jack Ketch AI.
In storage, Cormac found a standard combat space-suit. It was armoured, possessed greater facility for sealing breaches, and had clinging to its belt an autodoc capable of scuttling to any point on the suit’s exterior, sealing itself to that point, and cutting its way inside to repair the contained body –if it could. Cormac removed that item and left it in the store –the idea of Jain tech subverting such a doc not holding much appeal for him. In the gloves, belt and flat-visor helmet were interfaces for various weapons. Cormac merely attached his thin-gun to the belt, then commenced the always frustrating task of donning a suit in zero gravity.
By the time he was ready, the unit had drifted over by him, bobbing up and down as if impatient to be on its way. A readout in his suit’s visor told him the air was being drained from the bay, then doors, shaped to conform to the edge of the ship, drew back –above and below –onto vacuum.
‘Ready,’ said Cormac.
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A ceramal claw snapped out and closed on his belt, and the telefactor unceremoniously dragged him out. Jetting two scalpels of flame, it flung them both towards the revolving stone behemoth. Finally landing, and walking on stick-boots behind the drifting unit, Cormac swore upon coming in sight of the bridge pod of the Occam Razor. His subsequent language when he spotted the explosive bolts embedded in stone –sure sign that a ship had recently landed –even evinced some surprise from Jack.
A gust of wind rattled the skeletal branches of the chequer trees and shook free some of their few remaining square leaves, which drifted down like stripped-off skin in the bloody moonlight. The not-rabbits fled into the undergrowth as a still and oppressive heaviness weighed the air. Seemingly from nowhere, the revenant stepped into view: the walking desiccated corpse of a man who had been burnt to death. Walking woodenly out from between the chequered trunks and down the rock-scattered slope to the red mirror of the lake, this zombie creaked and crunched with each step, dry or charred skin and the remains of clothing flaking away from him. In his legs, dry fibrous muscle was visible, fraying and splintering as it was worked by other fibrous tendrils wound through it. Reaching the gritty shore, this creature knelt and dipped its hands into the peaty water, and from those hands fibrous tendrils sprouted and grew, expanding as they absorbed water, diving finally into the fertile mud of the lake bottom. Then the revenant began to change.
In gradual stages, he transformed from a desiccated corpse into something newer, fresher. Skin, burnt black, became grey and slimy, and slewed away from red surfaces glistening with plasma and dotted with blood. Around deeper burns, lumps of seared fat and muscle dropped away to expose similar surfaces. Exposed bone stretched and writhed, flaking away ash to expose gleaming white, which was then marred –and given a metallic hue –by a creeping grid, before being covered by a writhe of veins across its surface.
The revenant tilted his head one way, and the woody structure supporting one side of it turned soft and wet, and began to sink into exposed raw flesh. He then tilted his head the other way, and the crystal of his AI aug, still glittering with green light, was flooded with hair-like tendrils, and deformed itself against his head. Sucking back into itself the rods that connected down into his chest, the aug sank away into his skull, to become skinned over with bone and a sudden growth of veins, then muscles opening like summer flowers. The only sign that remained of it was a glint of green deep in the empty eye socket, but even this blinked out as, starting as a shiny black bead extruded into position, an eyeball expanded to fill the cavity.
Skin formed first as a layer of clear slime, which grew opaque, began to knit, thickened and toughened, and conformed itself to the growing structures underneath. Briefly, it covered completely the new-grown eyeball, then split into lids that sprouted lashes. Brown hair then issued from the bare scalp, while the skull underneath still shifted and deformed, as if the head itself were having difficulties returning to its customary shape with all the extras it now contained. But eventually this settled down too. Now the man removed his hands from the water –no sign of those tendrils he had earlier extruded –and watched his fingernails grow. Eventually he stood, naked in the red moonlight, and looked around. On the horizon, he located the yellow-orange glow of city light –and began to walk towards it.
2
The modern surgical robot is an incredibly sophisticated machine. I am informed that this device wields laser scalpels and cauteries, cell welders and bone welders, ultrasound tumour killers and bone saws, micro tome shears, clamps of every shape and size, nerve shunts and blood filters . . . the list goes on and on and, depending on the surgery intended whole different arrays of instruments can be employed. Suffice to say that such a device can divide a body up into its component organs, keeping those organs alive separately, then put that same body back together again. The modern robot can also be telefactored to human or AI, can be raised to consciousness itself, as many now are in the more sophisticated centres of the Human Polity, or can run the programs necessary for just about any surgical procedure. This is all most admirable, and those, such as me, whose professions can be physically dangerous, should be grateful. I am grateful, but I have to wonder who was responsible for making this thing look like the offspring of a chrome samurai and giant woodlouse. Was it the AIs again? Does this menacing appearance impel us to think twice about putting ourselves in the way of injury –to make hospital seem less attractive to us?
–From How It Is by Gordon
The telefactor unit, its scanning equipment extended and working frenetically –dishes spinning, holocorders and gas samplers operating, lasers strobing the area as they measured and were bounced off surfaces to gain spectral information –floated up to a ceiling seemingly interlaced with tree roots. Also surveying the interior of the bridge pod, Cormac remembered how, when he had been aboard the Occam Razor, the ship would shift its internal structure. This pod was moved around inside, and even extruded from, the hull. He had known then that the pod could be ejected. Obviously, while the Elysium mirrors had focused on the ship itself, this was what had happened, for the heat damage here was not so severe. Some quite combustible items had survived it.
He observed a desiccated corpse resting upright against the back wall, and walked over to inspect it. The ripped interfaces poxing this corpse’s skin and the creamy glint of opaque nictitating membranes in the sunken eye sockets confirmed that he had found Tomalon, the captain of the Occam Razor before Skellor had taken over. Returning to the command chair, which the woody growth in the rest of this pod had also swamped, he saw where someone had fitted –as a human-shaped component in some huge organic machine. Then, observing the other chairs here, he realized that they too had once been occupied by people somehow linked to the same woody growth, though it seemed evident to Cormac that those occupants had not left here in the same way as Skellor, for the upholstery was burnt away and much of the metal of the chairs melted.
‘So this is all Jain biotech,’ he murmured, tempted to reach out and touch, but not prepared to increase his present danger with such unnecessary gratification.
‘It is,’ replied Jack over com. ‘Initial analysis indicates that from this point Skellor extended nanofilaments along the fibre optics, in order to take control of the ship. These he then, by necessity, had to expand –and you see the result.’
‘Necessity? Why was it necessary for this stuff to be larger than the fibre optics?’
‘Because it is not simply for conveying information. It is capable of movement, transporting materials, and base construction and reconstruction at an atomic level from any point of contact. It also possesses a high-level computing facility, in all areas. It was probably this that Skellor used to build those flying calloraptors that attacked you on Masada.’
‘I hear everything you say, but most importantly I heard “is capable of movement” –present tense.’
‘At the moment its level of function is at that of a plant, since here its energy sources are limited. It is also hierarchical so perhaps requires a dominant controlling mind.’
Cormac glanced at the main control chair, and wondered if anyone might volunteer for that position beyond Skellor. He looked up as the telefactor drifted down at an angle from the ceiling towards the tangled wall. He noted, as it settled, that one of its arms was folding out to present an optic interface.
‘Is that a good idea?’ he asked.
‘Probably not, but we’ll learn nothing more here by passive observation. Perhaps you would now like to depart the area?’
‘No –just get on with it.’
The telefactor settled just off the floor, its arm telescoping towards the wall, through a gap between the thick roots of the Jain material, to a shadowed optic plug. The moment the interface connected, the unit jerked as if a large invisible hand had slapped it. Light flickered all around the bridge, at the ends of broken optics, and Cormac was not sure if it was an illusion caused by this that made the surrounding stru
cture seem to move. Then the lights died.
‘What the hell happened?’ Cormac asked.
‘There was an attempt to insert an information virus into my telefactor. The attack withdrew the moment the CTD –which this unit contains –activated. It would seem that either this Jain structure itself wants to survive, or that somewhere here there is still a controlling mind . . . I am now receiving communication . . .’
Cormac felt a flush of cold as the suit’s internal air circulation increased to dry the sweat breaking out all over his body. Of course the Jack Ketch AI had taken out insurance, he had known that, but he was uncomfortably aware that his insistence on being here at the scene had abruptly put him on the brink of obliteration. Jack could make that decision in a nanosecond.
‘There is an entity here. I am unable to determine whether it is a physical one in some hidden location, or a stored mentality within the structure itself.’
‘Can you transfer to me what it’s saying?’
‘There are words, but they do not relate to the communication, which is in binary code similar to that used in the thought processes of AI.’
‘Give me the words.’
Like a cold breath in his ear, a woman’s voice said to him, ‘The light, Skellor. The light.’ Then the voice cycled repeatedly, until Jack shut it off.
‘And the essence of the communication?’ Cormac asked, aware that something was niggling at his memory –some familiarity about that voice.
