by Neal Asher
After the events on the world of Masada, and in the cylinder worlds called Faith, Hope and Charity, there was what our more mealy-mouthed ancestors would have called a ‘humanitarian disaster’. Many of those wearing the biotech augs (I can’t say too much about them as there’s still an ongoing investigation) were brain-burnt –becoming human vegetables. In a less enlightened age these bodies would probably have been kept alive for as long as possible, causing a huge drain on the rest of human society. Luckily, we see things differently and, other than simple disposal, have some better options. The advent of memplant technology and newer and more accurate loading techniques has resulted in millions of people outliving physical death. Many of them are being held in memstorage because we cannot produce enough bodies, tank-grown or Golem, to keep up with demand, so . . .
–Excerpt from a speech by Jobsworth
Cormac knew how many said that, in the eternal instant of runcible transmission, the travellers screamed. That being the case, Cormac must have screamed himself raw over the thousands of such journeys he had made. This time, strangely, as he stepped through the shimmer of the Skaidon warp of the first-stage runcible on the small Masadan moon, Flint, it was with a grey and distorted recollection of that eternal instant, of groping to comprehend madness, and nearly understanding it.
‘Are you all right?’ a woman asked him.
His visual cortex still trying to play impossible images, he blinked and stared down at where he was supporting himself on a cylindrical cleaning robot, which was obviously confused about what it should be cleaning up in such chaotic surroundings, so was perhaps glad of an excuse to stop.
‘Yeah, okay, just a bit dizzy.’
The woman said, ‘You want me to get you to an autodoc? Perhaps it’s the low gravity here. It can’t be the transmission –even first-stage runcibles are utterly safe.’
Cormac looked up and was unsurprised to see that she was wearing the overalls of a runcible technician, since such people were always highly defensive of a technology they themselves could not wholly understand. Only AIs possessed a full understanding –the human brain had not evolved that way. He pushed himself away from the cleaning robot. Yes, the gravity was very low here, but he had become accustomed to such changes over the many years he had travelled like this. That wasn’t the problem.
Any problems with this runcible while I transported? he asked.
No problem, agent. Nor with the one in Elysium, replied the Flint runcible AI.
‘Shit, I did it again!’
‘I’m sorry?’ said the woman.
‘I gridlinked. I gridlinked again!’
‘I’m sure you are very proud to possess a gridlink, but you should remember that most people in my trade now possess such technology as well,’ the woman lectured him, before flouncing off.
Cormac peered down at the cleaning robot, which was observing him with its binocular lenses –the irises inside whirring wide as if the machine was suddenly worried about him. He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying again to question the runcible AI. Visions of impossible shapes fled through his mind, and he felt a hint of some huge complex intelligence, then it was all gone and there were no more voices in his head. He opened his eyes and, after locating his position in the temporary dome, headed in long bouncing strides for the exit tunnels that led to where the shuttles would be waiting. He felt he must put aside this strangeness, and concentrate on the job in hand. He felt sure this inadvertent gridlinking somehow related to Blegg and, that being so, its cause would not become clear either soon or easily.
The exit tunnel was cylindrical, the bottom half of this cylinder being tough ceramoplastic, with a flat diamond-pattern floor, the top half being polarized chainglass. Gazing out to the tightly curved horizon, Cormac observed a twisted and monolithic metal beam protruding above a thin smear of sulphurous atmosphere, its jagged end silhouetted against the green and orange swirls of the opaline gas giant, Calypse. Other wreckage was strewn across the barren surface of this little moon: the huge cored-olive shapes of thruster motors, seared skeletons of ships and ground bases, glittering craters where molten metal had splashed, human bones. Destroying the shipyards here had been Dragon’s first blow against the Theocracy, before moving on to obliterate the weapons satellites that had held the surface population of Masada in thrall. Dragon’s subsequent fall to its death had produced the strangest and most controversial result of its arrival here: the birth of the race of dracomen from its own substance.
‘Ian Cormac?’
‘Yes,’ Cormac replied, as he ducked into the low structure from which other short tunnels branched to insystem shuttles crouched around the facility. The questioner he instantly recognized as a Golem.
‘I’m to take you to Masada. We have a shuttle with U-space facility available.’
The Golem, in appearance a squat man of endearing ugliness –obviously from a later series made when Cybercorp discovered that Apollonian perfection made potential purchasers nervous, if not jealous –gestured to a nearby tunnel and led the way. ‘This will be our first landing on the planet itself –a partial quarantine still exists, but it has been decided we can’t learn anything more from up here. There are more ships ready to follow us down.’
‘How will you proceed from now on?’
‘Establish a base on the surface, then limit transport thereafter. Our first job will be to secure all Jain artefacts, then ensure that there has been no further . . . contamination.’
‘That could take some time.’
The Golem shrugged. Cormac guessed ECS would prevent free travel of the Masadan population to and from their own world until telefactors and AI probes had finished deep-scanning the single continent and ocean thereon. Masada could remain partially quarantined for centuries yet. He surmised that these new members of the Polity would not be allowed to object too strongly.
‘Would those artefacts include the mycelia inside Asselis Mika?’
The Golem glanced at him. ‘Your needs have primacy. If you wish to take all of those containing Jain mycelia with you, then you may. There will certainly be enough other stuff down there to keep us occupied for a long time.’
‘And the dracomen?’ Cormac asked, as they entered the airlock into the shuttle and headed for the cockpit.
‘They have been deemed innocent of the crimes committed by their forebear and so have been urged, separately from the human population of Masada, to join the Polity.’
‘They might refuse,’ said Cormac, thinking ‘innocent’ might be stretching the term.
‘They have already accepted.’
Cormac took the co-pilot’s seat, while the Golem took the pilot’s. They both strapped in.
‘Very wise of them,’ he remarked.
‘Yes, quite.’
Gazing ahead as the shuttle launched and rose from the barren moon, Cormac observed the glint of other ships in the darkness of space. Soon after he arrived on Masada, the place would be swarming with ECS troops and monitors, technicians, research scientists and Golem. He had no doubt that the dracomen were more aware of the actual realities than were the planet’s inhabitants. Simply put, Masada must be controlled by ECS because of the potential danger from Jain artefacts on its surface, and the dracomen must join the Polity, for such dangerous creatures could not be allowed to choose a side that might be against it. The alternatives were numerous and lethal. The Jack Ketch AI had earlier enumerated them for Cormac.
Skellor smiled to himself as he pressed together the seventeen fragments of the crystalline Golem mind. Obviously, the Golem –Aiden and Cento –had torn the object from Crane’s body and smashed it irreparably with a blast from a pulse-gun. But what was irreparable to Polity technology was not necessarily beyond Skellor’s ability. What most amused him was that the mind had broken along established virtual fractures, for Mr Crane’s mind had always been in seventeen fragments –this was the nature of the Golem’s madness and, strangely, what had made sanity and autonomy a recoverable object
ive. His mentality fragmented like this, Mr Crane operated as the killing machine the Separatists required, committing the most horrifying crimes and maintaining them in memory as disjointed unrelated incidents, meanwhile always attempting to reconnect the seventeen fragments and regain self. This he would perhaps have done sometime in the next thousand years. Thus it was that the Golem had obeyed his Separatist masters –in that dangerous and erratic manner entirely his own.
Roughly holding the fragments in the lozenge shape they had once formed, Skellor began to send Jain nanofilaments into it, clouding the crystal as they penetrated between the lattices. Concentrating on a single clean shear, he pulled the two faces together. Pecking along them on an atomic level, he cleared away oxygen atoms from the oxides formed on each surface, also organic dirt and minerals –anything that should not be there. Drawing this detritus away, he found all the major neural pathways, cooling nanotubes and s-con power grid wires, and aligned them. There was some distortion caused by relieved stresses in the crystal, which he recreated. The two faces, drawn together by the Van Der Waals force of atomic attraction, snapped back together as if they had been held apart by elastic, and it was all he could do to pull the filaments out of the way to prevent them from being trapped and crushed. Two of the fragments had become one, and now he detected the nightmarish mutter from this piece of a mind.
For a moment, Skellor refocused his awareness on his surroundings. Not having acquired the same resources he had possessed on the Occam Razor, he was unable to split his awareness during such an operation, which was as intricate as anything he had done before. He briefly noted the man Inther, lying naked on his side nearby, bleeding to death from where Skellor had torn his arm away. Marlen was motionless in his hole, though Skellor’s control of him was not so strong as to prevent the man from showing by his expression the terror he felt. Mr Crane’s body stood perfectly poised, its balance system operating as if he was already alive. The human arm Skellor had grafted on to replace the missing ceramal one only looked out of place at the raw shoulder joint, with its swollen organo-optic interfaces. Inside that body Skellor had built a device acting as a heart, lung and nutrient supply –pumping round the arm an artificial blood supply. The human limb would last perhaps six months like this, but hopefully Skellor would not need it for so long. He returned his attention to Mr Crane’s mind.
Interface after interface bonded, and the mutter of the Golem’s mind grew loud to Skellor’s senses. Delving into this he replayed scenes of murder and atrocity and perpetual imbalance. Quite often, Mr Crane had been as much a danger to the people who tried to control him as he was to those he was sent out to kill. Skellor noted how Crane disobeyed some direct orders when the program, aimed at regaining the Golem autonomy, interfered with the task at hand. Sometimes this program could briefly displace an order to do murder so that, rather than kill, Crane found external iconic representations of each virtual fragment of his mind. Rather than kill a man, Crane had once stolen a pair of antique binoculars. Rather than kill he had once taken a Tenkian dagger. Even with the Separatist orders re-establishing, Crane would not carry out the kill order, for, in the twisted logic of this insane Golem, the theft became the killing.
As the final physical fragments of the mind came together, Skellor decided that his own orders must not be disobeyed in any manner, so he proceeded to wipe the program intended to reassemble the virtual fragments of the Golem’s mind. But he couldn’t. As soon as he attempted to wipe the program, the mind began to break in other places, in a way that would make it unusable. Annoyingly, what could make Crane whole and sane and autonomous was also preventing him from sliding into true oblivion. Remove it, and the mind would fall apart. Skellor realized he could erase everything and start again, but doing that would result in the loss of the Mr Crane he wanted. This he found aesthetically displeasing. To possess godlike powers, Skellor felt, meant he should please the poetic as well as the pragmatic part of his soul.
With the mind now cupped before him like an offering to this brass god, Skellor stood and approached Crane’s body. There was a Jain substructure inside the Golem: it supplied the power lost by two broken micro-piles, and was mopping up spilt radioactives. It would also repair him, just as similar mycelia had repaired the calloraptor creatures Skellor sent after Ian Cormac on Masada. Mr Crane, dangerous though he used to be, would now be formidable.
Skellor reached out and pressed the lozenge into its recess inside the Golem. It snicked into place, light flickering around it as the structure inside him made optic connections. The Jain substructure, taking on a brassy hue from its surroundings, reached out like sharp fingers and drew closed the ceramal torso as if it was made of rubber. The superconducting grid then rolled across and joined, then finally brass melted and flowed across the surface. After a moment Mr Crane –not Skellor –opened those black eyes.
‘Welcome back to your life,’ Skellor told the Golem.
–retroact 5 –
‘Mr Pendle . . .’ began Agent Bryonik, leaning back, his fingers interlaced beneath his chin.
‘Is this entirely necessary?’ Pendle interrupted, waving a hand at their surroundings.
Bryonik wondered what his problem was: this was genuinely in the style of a premillennial police interrogation cell, with a scarred and coffee-stained plastic table, magnetic tape recorders, strip lights . . .
Pendle went on, ‘Do you know how many times I’ve sat in rooms like this?’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘Precisely seven hundred and twenty-three.’
‘There are worse alternatives.’
‘And do you know how many times that has been said to me?’
Bryonik grimaced, and through his gridlink accessed Penal Storage to change the VR format. He didn’t like being predictable, so rather than go for the Caribbean island, bright shirts, and drinks with umbrellas in them, he cobbled his own scenario. Now the two men stood in the uppermost viewing gallery of the Eiffel Tower. Pendle eyed the bank of screens to one side, showing a steel-recrystalizing robot as it slowly traversed one of the ancient structural members.
‘This is a new one,’ commented Pendle. ‘In my time the damned thing had fallen down. When did they put it back up?’
‘About seven years after you died.’
Pendle’s case had a certain historical significance –one of a defining variety of crimes committed around the same period. Prior to then it would have been called what –assault?
‘Thirteen years ago, then.’
Bryonik raised an eyebrow.
‘You know I’m real-timed. Believe me, I’ve been counting the years in here.’
‘How long have you got?’
Pendle shrugged. ‘It varies. I’ll never be loaded to a Golem chassis while there’s someone more deserving, and that’s the way it always seems to be. I could be in here until the sun goes out.’
‘Is that so bad?’
‘I can experience all the virtual worlds imaginable, but one thing I can never do is forget that none of it is real. It’s a kind of hell.’
‘Will you tell me about your crime?’ Bryonik asked.
‘No,’ said Pendle, stepping to the window and gazing down. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you want with me. You’re not a student, you’re ECS down to the virtual chainglass shiv in your virtual boot.’
‘Again, it’s probably somewhere you’ve been before. Your memplant was loaded to main storage before we discovered you had sabotaged five Golem minds. Your history being non-technical and all your employment the same, it took a while to establish that you designed a program capable of all that it did. Luckily, we recovered the five before they killed anyone. The idea of five Golem Twenty-four schizoid psychopaths wandering around the Polity gets people in a cold sweat even now.’
‘Good enough summation –though I’d dispute “psychopath”. Sociopath is probably nearer the mark.’
Agent Bryonik held out his hand and an old mem-crystal storage box appeared in it. ‘T
he deal brokered for you was that you told us everything. That’s how you escaped direct mind-to-mind AI interrogation.’
Pendle grinned nastily. ‘It’s how the AIs avoided it too. Knowing I’d designed that program, none of them really wanted to get inside my head –might have been dangerous for them. Even now, I’m in isolated storage. At least other souls-in-waiting get a social life.’
‘You lied, Pendle.’ Bryonik opened the box to reveal the eight empty compartments inside.
Pendle eyed the box. ‘I told you people back then: three crystals were destroyed in the process.’
‘The prototype Golem Twenty-five . . . You were at that launch for more than the free drinks and a chance of throwing elephant shit at Corp execs. We know that now.’
‘I was nothing to do with the attack.’
Bryonik was sure he could see a touch of panic in Pendle’s expression –understandable. If Pendle was found to have been involved in that act of terror, in which eighteen people had died unrecoverably, no deal could prevent him from being utterly erased.
‘The Golem was seen on the out-Polity planet Huma –the location, for the last twenty years, of a lot of illegal arms trading. Was the idea to break the Golem for Separatist reprogramming? This is something that has occurred since then.’ Bryonik could now see that Pendle really was scared. He might call his confinement in VR storage hell, but it seemed he preferred it to death.
