The Departure to-1

by Neal Asher

  In a totalitarian state, some people are just too dangerous to be allowed to live. Saul now considered his second-hand knowledge of the person he had been. He was a brilliant, brilliant man, indeed a genius, but with a huge drawback in that he was also only a marginally functional human being. It could be called autism, or maybe Asperger’s syndrome, but Saul liked to think that so focused on his work had he been, he simply had not found the time, space or energy to deal with the trivialities of normal human relationships. Able to speak and read even before he could coordinate his limbs, his previous self had been sent immediately into special schools, but even they could not quite handle him and he ended up being home-tutored by educational experts. By the age of ten, he also outpaced these experts, and thereafter had taken charge of his own education. Had Saul been a child of zero-asset-status parents, all this might have caused great problems, and sufficient funding and resources might have been hard to find, but his parents were high-level Committee executives and able to lavish attention on him.

  For Saul, every test, both mental or physical, was of overriding interest and in nothing he tried did he fail to excel. He practised martial arts, taking his second black belt in shotokan karate whilst studying for eight doctorates in the physical sciences and three in the arts. Very soon he began to produce: making vast improvements to the software of agricultural robots, then designing a new kind of materially inert microbot that could hunt through the human body for cancer cells without causing rejection problems. Next he applied the same inert materials to someone else’s invention of a chip interface to the human mind, so it too would not activate the immune system. That was Hannah’s invention.

  Saul thus became a ‘societal asset’ even as the Committee was just inventing the term. When Committee political officers realized how valuable he could be, he was seconded to a gated science community secure in the Dinaric Alps of Albania and there, for the first time, and like all the other scientists thus seconded, he came under intense political scrutiny. This was where he had first met Hannah.

  ‘That was forty years ago, Alan,’ Hannah told him.

  ‘How old am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Somewhere in your sixties,’ she replied. ‘Just like us all, you received anti-ageing treatments.’

  ‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘So how, then, did I end up in a crate heading for the Calais Incinerator?’

  ‘You didn’t do what you were told. You kept antagonizing them.’ She gazed at him steadily. ‘Most of the community thought you a brat. They’d been working under the eyes of political officers since their school days, yet you’d experienced none of that.’

  ‘How . . . how did I antagonize them?’

  ‘Probably the first example was what you did thirty years ago when you were into splicing nanotech and viruses.’ Hannah shrugged. ‘They still haven’t been able to work out what you actually did, and neither have I. You created something: a splicing of the cancer-hunting nanite you’d developed and a retrovirus used to fix the genetic faults that lead to some cancers – one of the so-called magic bullets. You injected it into yourself and actually edited your own DNA. You wouldn’t tell them what you’d done, and that’s when they really started to get pissed off with you.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I tell them?’

  ‘I think you had developed an extreme dislike of Political Director Smith.’

  That name again. The mention of it caused some sort of deep reaction and, as on previously hearing it, he again chose not to analyse the feeling.

  ‘He wouldn’t allow you unsupervised contact with your sister,’ Hannah added.

  ‘I have a sister?’ Saul felt a surge of something inside – something difficult to identify.

  ‘You do. As brilliant as you, apparently, and seconded like you to work on government projects.’

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘I don’t know. You never talked about her much.’

  That tight emotion wound itself even tighter inside him, and he glanced up, visualizing the Argus Station somewhere above them, seeing void beyond it, and some sort of resolution.

  ‘Janus,’ he said, ‘find her.’

  ‘I have already begun searching,’ the AI replied. ‘Unfortunately, with your own files deleted, I don’t have much to work on. Females with the surname Saul number two point six million, and if all reference to you has been deleted then there’ll be no record that they had a brother called Alan. It is also possible that she is now listed under a married name.’

  ‘She’ll be listed in a protected-asset file.’

  ‘Which makes the search even more dangerous and difficult.’

  After a moment, he shrugged the problem away. ‘Keep looking whenever you have the processing space available.’ He was aware he felt strong emotion about his sister, but pursuing his present course now seemed more important. In fact he had the odd feeling that by sticking to this course, the matter of his sister would be resolved, and that it was inclusive – yet that made no sense at all.

  ‘They could easily have forced me to tell them what I did,’ he said to Hannah.

  ‘They searched your files but couldn’t find very much, because you kept most of what you achieved inside your head. They’d already tried the viral nanite on a political prisoner, and it killed him quicker than cyanide.’ She added, ‘You got away with a lot simply because your mother was high up in the Committee Executive.’

  ‘What about my father?’

  ‘Dead by then.’

  ‘What happened next? What finally made them put me in that crate?’

  Hannah explained the history.

  One of the scientists working in the Dinaric community, a woman who always came under the most intense scrutiny because the political officers knew she disagreed with the whole concept of world government, had created a very powerful form of Hyex laminate which she supplied to the Albanian Separatists. They then blew the periphery fence and got her and five other scientists out, but that effectively spelled the end of the community. The Applied Sciences branch of the Inspectorate Executive now decided it would be better to separate the scientists into small groups, each focusing on one discrete area of the various projects the Committee wanted quickly advanced. One group worked on fusion-drive technology, one on satellite imaging and recognition programs, another on gerontology and yet another on GM bacteria used to clear up pollution, and so forth. Hannah’s particular group had the goal of connecting up the human mind to a computer, whereupon Alan Saul, his focus now straying from nanotech and retrovirals to artificial intelligence, was seconded to her group under the supervision of Political Director Smith.

  They did some superb work, finally managing to install a terabyte processor inside a human skull, though never able to connect it up completely to the human brain, only managing to wire it in through the sensory nerves. Saul decided he wanted one of these processors inside his own skull and so, with his usual blinkered focus, he hacked into research-team security when Smith was absent, and falsified the orders . . .

  ‘I inserted that processor in your head, Alan,’ Hannah now told him. ‘I thought it a stupid risk to take, but I never disobeyed orders. I assumed you had suggested it to Smith and he’d agreed, perhaps after you claimed that by using the technology you might be able to crack the mind–silicon interface.’

  Saul had then been concentrating on trying to copy the function of the human mind into software, on silicon, to make it easier to crack that same interface. Smith and his advisers were getting both very worried and very excited about this work, and when Alan used some of his comlife, as he called it, to punch through security so easily, it seemed that their worries were justified.

  ‘Smith hated you, though I don’t think he could have done anything about that if your mother had still been alive, but she’d died a month before.’ Hannah shook her head. ‘I tried to excuse your behaviour by telling Smith you’d gone a bit strange after your mother’s death, but the truth was that you showed no reaction to that at all. It just didn’
t seem to interest you.’

  Smith finally cleared permission to take Alan off the project and send him for adjustment. But that came a little too late, because Saul crashed computer security systems and all the research computers before escaping. While in the outside world, he created false community credit, a false identity, and even managed to penetrate secure Committee files to erase all details that might be used to track him down. Alan Saul thus disappeared from most computer systems and most live computer files, except for the discs retained at the Dinaric community. It was the information on a single disc like this that enabled newly developed recognition software to track him down. Enforcers arrested him while he was living in a ministerial apartment in the Caribbean, and handed him directly to Smith for adjustment.

  ‘He used the hardware inside your head and pain inducers to torture you,’ explained Hannah. ‘He even brought me and the rest of the team in to watch, just so we understood where any disobedience would lead. When he’d finished, you didn’t have a mind left; in fact large parts of your brain suffered lethal bleeds, and tissue had died inside your skull, too. They then dragged you off for disposal, so I don’t know how you can be here now.’

  So Smith was his interrogator. Even as Hannah finished speaking, Saul also knew why he hadn’t died. A memory lurked just at the periphery of his mental perception, a ghostly hint of the person he had once been. He realized that to lose his mind was his greatest terror, and Smith, knowing this with the instinct of all sadists, had therefore chosen that way to destroy him. He also realized that he had done something to ensure that both his brain and his mind would prove difficult to totally destroy, perhaps something involving that retroviral and anti-ageing fix. Nevertheless, Smith had come very close to his objective: Saul still possessed a mind, but not the mind of the original Alan Saul.

  ‘Was I violent?’ he asked.

  ‘Never,’ she replied. ‘In fact, if you had been capable of real violence, I don’t think they would ever have caught you.’

  So that was it. The first Alan Saul had not been sufficiently ruthless, but had ensured that his creation would be.

  The British government had established the World War Two bunker in preparation for a Nazi invasion, perhaps to provide just one more safehouse amidst many for dissident forces or a government in hiding, but what remained of its history was unclear. It was Janus who found it for Saul, then carefully erased all reference to it from official computer records, but he needed to ensure that no local knowledge of it existed either. It lay amidst agricultural land, just fifty metres to one side of a road composed of carbocrete blocks along which only robotic harvesters ran. It was a location frequented by very few humans now.

  To gain access to the croplands he had to assume yet another identity but, wanting to use the bolt-hole long-term, he did not lift that identity from a corpse. Janus created a new persona for him, and to acquire it he needed to visit an All Health clinic to have the necesssary ID implant injected into his arm, which struck him as even more risky than killing off another bureaucrat. All agricultural land now being private government property, only approved workers were allowed anywhere near it. Any intruder was at risk of being spattered by readerguns mounted on the harvesters or independently mobile and stalking through the crops like iron spiders – in fact, the precursors to modern spiderguns – or in danger of being attacked by razorbirds, with a similarly messy result. He’d already seen the decaying corpses of those who had tried to supplement their rations: their remains got ploughed into the soil after harvest, old bones shattered by the disking that broke up the clods of earth.

  Driving his recently requisitioned mini-digger up from the roadway, Saul came to a concrete area enclosed on three sides by block walls, now overgrown with weeds and occupied by rusted-together piles of swarf and machine parts and an ancient truck probably belonging to a scrap dealer from some previous age. He recognized this area as a bay intended for mounding beet before they were transported away – from the time before such vegetables were wrenched from the ground by robotic harvesters, washed and then mashed up, before the mulch was injected straight into one of the many processing plants scattered across the local landscape.

  ‘You are heading in the right direction,’ Janus informed him. ‘Another twenty metres and you should be right over the entrance.’

  It lay behind the beet bay, where brambles and nettles fought for predominance with GM beans, so there was no visible sign of it on the surface. Scraping downwards a metre through this tangle, he unearthed a layer of cracked concrete and managed to pull away a lot of this before revealing a rusted cast-iron lid. This he tore up to expose steps heading down underneath the beet bay. He picked up his torch, climbed out of the digger and descended.

  Because it was concealed inside a hill, only the lower floor of the bunker had flooded. The large upper chamber and four side rooms were packed with all sorts of interesting rubbish: sacks of solidified fertilizer, a table and chairs made of plastic now as brittle as eggshell, a kitchen counter with an old gas stove, the gas bottle underneath it; a generator that had obviously broken down, then been taken apart and abandoned; some cups, plates and cutlery in decaying kitchen units which, judging by the date of a newspaper stuck to the table, must have been only a hundred years old. He had much work to do.

  It took him a full month to get the required equipment in place. He first ran a buried power line from a harvester recharging station, then a pipe from the surrounding irrigation grid. Pumping out the lower floor revealed rotten crates filled with the rusted shells of food tins, and also an escape tunnel filled with rubble. After running a dehumidifier inside – one stolen from one of the grain-processing plants – he sprayed every surface with a layer of sealant. All the while he resided there, he kept the dehumidifier running and never required any of the irrigation water, instead using water leeched from air that was constantly moistened by the damp surrounding concrete.

  Whilst Saul made the place comfortable, Janus worked its magic in the local agricultural security, until such time as Saul would no longer require his new identity – the recognition systems just ignoring him. When finally ready to act, he was fully linked via the agricultural network in Govnet and the intermittent Subnet, and possessed a weapons cache, an excess of computer hardware, and his own cams installed in the surrounding area as an additional layer of security sitting below Janus’s access to the government cams and readerguns. Also a plentiful food supply, and all the other comforts of a home.

  ‘This place is mine,’ he told her, which was a statement you just did not hear these days. The Committee owned everything and allotted to its citizens those things they might require on the basis of their status – their usefulness. And, with what Hannah had seen, she knew that people did not even own their own bodies, while the property of their minds now lay under constant siege.

  ‘No cams in here,’ he added. ‘No monitoring of any kind.’

  ‘Nice place,’ said Hannah, looking round, tears welling in her eyes.

  This was incredible, like a dream they’d once shared: no government watchers, none of those constant flushes of embarrassment in case she might have behaved in a manner some political officer might find questionable. Being here seemed like stepping back, over a century or more, to the time when people actually owned their own homes and government intrusion stopped at the front door. Yet, perhaps understandably, she now felt clumsy and somehow foolish. So long had she lived within set parameters defining both her behaviour and what she was allowed to say that suddenly without them she felt almost lost.

  ‘A temporary accommodation,’ he explained. ‘Nowhere on Earth is safe.’

  ‘So where next?’ She swallowed drily, tried to get herself back under control.

  Grow up. For Christ sake, grow up!

  ‘I have attained my first goal,’ he said emotionlessly. ‘I now know who I am, so it is time for me to attain my next goal.’ His face showed extreme emotion, raw hate. ‘Now I must show these fuckers t
hey’ve really made an enemy.’

  ‘How?’

  When he told her how she wondered where the hell that idea had come from. He studied her with fevered intensity, perhaps waiting for her to declare him insane, but usual definitions of sanity did not apply to the person he had once been and probably did not apply to the person he was now. She considered what he had told her about this artificial intelligence on Govnet. He’d mentioned a name, Janus, which was revealing in itself. In light of her own research, and what she knew of his previous work, she could see where this inevitably had to go.

  ‘You are incomplete,’ she said, her voice catching. ‘And once complete you’ll be much more able to do what you want.’

  ‘I know that, but it’s still not going to stop me.’

  He didn’t know. He just had no idea of what was possible . . . Then, again, he had come looking for her first even though, from his point of view, she was merely a footnote to his main goal, just a way to learn about his past. Belatedly she wondered if his older self had prepared his present mind for this, impelled him to go after the one person who could give him the tools to bring his plan – his vengeance – to fruition. Yet she had once known that other self so intimately, and this seemed too cold and cruel a calculation, even for him.

  ‘I’m not talking about what memories or what portions of your mind you’ve lost.’ She took a firmer grip on her emotions, wiped her face shakily. ‘I’m talking about what it’s possible for you to become.’

  ‘Become?’

  Hannah paused, suddenly horrified with herself, then after a moment continued, ‘I was currently working on a full organic interface of the human mind with an internal computer, and thence with computer networks. Unfortunately that interface, the new cerebral computer and software, are still back at the cell complex.’