The Departure to-1

by Neal Asher

  ‘What happened?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘Call it existential angst,’ he said tightly.

  She nodded. ‘Something like that happened with Malden, but he thought it was a fault in the comlife he used.’

  ‘You knew?’ He looked up.

  ‘I got no chance to tell you.’ She gazed at him accusingly. ‘I thought you would warn me before you loaded the AI.’

  ‘How did Malden survive?’

  ‘He hung on to his hate.’

  The much larger and more complex part of himself delivered into Saul’s human mind the dry verdict that, though Hannah indeed had some idea of how things had run within Malden’s head, she had no idea of what was going on in his own. Saul realized that she had taken a gamble with him; she could not have known what combining Janus with the hardware in his head would result in.

  ‘I, too, hang on to my hatred,’ he declared.

  But was it just the Committee he hated, or the entire human race?

  As the Inspectorate cruisers, the big trucks of DRS or ‘disaster response service’, the AH ambulances and ATVs sped past, their occupants all ignored Hannah and Saul. Why, Hannah wondered, would they take note of just two more civilians milling around the periphery of the blast zone? If she and Saul had been the only two actually walking towards the great boiling cloud still rising from the firestorm, the only two making their way through the increasing amounts of debris, perhaps they would have been more noticeable.

  ‘Why are there people heading towards it?’ she asked Saul.

  ‘Desperation,’ he replied succinctly. ‘It’s an opportunity for looting not to be missed.’

  Soon impassable, the highway became a traffic jam of emergency vehicles, though some surprisingly organized individual had kept one lane clear for the bulldozers that approached shortly after she and Saul arrived on the scene. With such a concentration of Inspectorate enforcers, the citizens who flocked along this route, with apparently nefarious intentions, abandoned the main highway long before, heading off into devastated sprawl and dodging between smoking mounds of rubble, while avoiding those buildings that still belched flames. She wondered if they hadn’t noticed the shepherds pacing about over there, or hadn’t heard the clattering hum of razorbirds. However, one small group of citizens, who she and Saul joined, seemed to be here merely as spectators. She felt that Saul’s cynicism might be catching, as she found herself surmising that they had come here to see something appalling enough to lessen the impact of the constant disaster of their own lives.

  Survivors came staggering out of the surrounding wreckage, and some others barely crawling. Many of them seemed to be naked, some bearing burn blisters big as fruit, and after their clothing they were now shedding their skins. But there and then, in that moment when screaming might be justified, there was only silence from them.

  ‘They’re not receiving any help,’ Hannah observed.

  Though a crowd of these injured had gathered in a clear space beside that section of the highway where most of the All Health ambulances were parked, no one showed any signs of tending to them, and instead they were being driven away from the ambulances by baton-wielding enforcers.

  ‘They cannot all be saved,’ he remarked fatly.

  She glanced at him, feeling something leaden in her stomach. ‘You’re not just talking about those we see here, are you?’

  He gestured to the traffic jam of emergency vehicles. ‘This is probably the result of some automatic disaster-response plan that Committee execs just hadn’t yet got round to shelving,’ he said. ‘I doubt they would have bothered sending any ambulances, since what’s the point of saving a few thousand people when you expect billions of others to die?’

  ‘Can it really be so cynical?’ she asked, but with no real question in her tone. By now she was beginning to know the score.

  Four of the large bulldozers made their way off the highway, beginning to cut a path through the wreckage. A couple of AH ambulances turned round on to the lane the dozers had just vacated, providing a gap through which further bulldozers could pull out on to the other side of the highway. The big machines weren’t making a path towards where Inspectorate HQ had recently stood, but almost certainly scribing a circle with that place as the centre point.

  Hannah nodded to herself as the two ambulances now returned along the highway, and other ambulances began breaking away from the main cluster to follow them.

  ‘They’re sectoring it,’ she said.

  ‘I imagine they’ll bring in readerguns, in a few hours,’ he said, then pointed to where a number of large aeros had settled in one of the few clearings amidst the rubble. ‘We go there.’

  A double crash barrier lay bent down a slope strewn with burnt rubbish and seared grass, a Dascan Hydrobus lying on its side down at the bottom. The windows were all blackened, yet as far as Hannah could see the vehicle had taken very little damage from its impact with the barrier. Then she saw why: the posts securing the barrier had rusted through and it had possessed almost no stopping power at all. In passing, she saw the red palm of a single hand welded against one window of the bus, but only noted it with a kind of numbness. Enough horror surrounded them anyway, like that woman crouching in a doorway, the only part standing of an apartment block, with her face a dripping mess and her plastic sunglasses melted into her eyes.

  ‘You should have brought the rifle,’ Hannah said, her voice hoarse to breaking point.

  Inspectorate enforcers patrolled within the area where the four aeros had landed, while a cylinderbot circled it, crawling round on rubber treads to deposit coils of razorwire behind it like spider silk. If they had waited any longer, they would not have been able to just walk straight in here the way they did. As they crossed in front of the bot, Saul paused for a moment then turned and gazed over to the Inspectorate officer who appeared to be in charge.

  ‘Walk just ahead of me,’ he told her. ‘You’re my prisoner.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured that.’ A panic attack nibbled at her, then dissipated because everything here was just too real for its falsity.

  ‘Citizen Avram Coran, Inspectorate Executive, command designation HQ707,’ he explained to the exec. ‘I’m commandeering one of your aeros.’

  How the hell could he get away with this? But even as she asked herself the question, Hannah knew the answer. Now the AI had fully loaded to and begun integrating with his mind, he possessed all its abilities within his skull. He was Saul and Janus all in one, and with every passing moment the synergy between those two components would keep expanding his abilities. But that wasn’t all. She hadn’t yet told him about the organic interface she had used, just how different it was from the one inside Malden’s skull. Whilst Malden’s had been made of organic tissue, it remained inert, merely integrating with his brain like a plug-in electrical component. The interface in Saul’s skull, however, was an active organism: even now it would be growing neurons throughout his skull and making yet further connections. Quite possibly it would kill him, quite possibly it would turn him into something never witnessed before, but whether that would result in a demigod or a monster, she didn’t know.

  The two enforcers accompanying the officer already had their machine pistols trained on Saul. All three were staring at him with wary vigilance, and not a little degree of fear. Was it just his red eyes and the stitching in his skull that caused this reaction? Or did something of what was gestating inside him show through to them? Hannah could certainly see it, but then perhaps she was reading more than was actually visible.

  The officer meanwhile dropped his hand to the portable scanner at his belt.

  ‘So it seems you haven’t studied your atomic-incident protocols lately,’ Saul said, inserting what seemed just the right amount of contempt into his voice.

  ‘Sir?’ the officer enquired.

  ‘Electromagnetic pulse from the blast.’ Saul pointed at his forearm, where his varied collection of ID implants resided. ‘Do you really think my ID implant is working right
now? It’ll take at least an hour for its recovery program to reinstate it.’

  ‘You’ll understand that I cannot just hand over an aero without checking first, citizen,’ the man replied.

  ‘You’ve received no orders about me, Commander Taiken?’

  Hannah stared at Saul, whose mind must now be in Govnet, absorbing data, perhaps changing data. Taiken straightened up, now he had been offered some small proof that Saul was of the Inspectorate. For how else would Saul know his name?

  Saul continued, ‘I managed to make contact from my car, after the blast tipped it over.’ He gestured towards Hannah. ‘It’s important I get her away from here fast, but you don’t need to know any more than that.’

  Taiken raised a hand to the fone in his ear, as doubtless his new orders came through. Then, as was only to be expected, he unhooked a palmtop from his belt and did some checking. He directed its integral cam at Saul for a moment, then pointed it at Hannah. After a moment, he snapped the palmtop closed, nodded to himself, then pointed across to the nearest aero.

  ‘You can take this one.’ He turned to the two enforcers. ‘Go check the gas loading, and tell Latham to speed it up with that fence.’

  Hannah was dumbfounded. That was fast – faster than she could have believed possible. Saul’s penetration of the local computer network had to be all but total. He must have been providing data direct to the man’s palmtop even as its recognition programs tried to read their faces. He must have drafted orders, and built a whole fiction to back up their presence here.

  ‘Gas?’ Saul enquired as the officer turned back to him.

  ‘They’re writing it all off,’ he replied.

  Hannah understood. There would be no survivors.

  ‘I’ll get you a pilot and put together a squad for you,’ Taiken added.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Saul replied, and Taiken glanced at him in surprise. ‘I can fly the machine myself and I need to lock down on security.’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘The fewer people who know about her,’ he gestured at Hannah, ‘the better.’

  Officer Taiken didn’t like that, since it suggested that not all of his men were to be trusted. As they reached the craft, its recognition system picked up on him, opened its doors and lowered some steps. Taiken stepped up inside first, and even as Saul waved Hannah up ahead of him, she realized something was wrong. Saul seemed to be in pain, pressing the heel of his hand between his eyes before climbing in behind her. Door motors hummed into life, closing the door behind them, and Taiken turned, with a brief look of confusion on his face, just before the edge of Saul’s hand slammed into the base of his skull. He went down like a sack of potatoes.

  ‘Ack! Jesus!’ Saul stumbled away from the fallen man, and went down into a squat. He retched, bringing up nothing but bile, then just crouched there, gasping.

  ‘Saul . . .’ Hannah took a step over towards him, but just then Taiken groaned and began to make an effort to rise. Saul’s head snapped up, and she saw his eyes were weeping bloody tears. He lurched to his feet and stumbled over towards Taiken, descending to drive a knee into the man’s spine, then, grabbing Taiken’s head, he pulled it back and twisted hard.

  The horrible gristly sound seemed to punch Hannah in the stomach, and she turned away, pressing herself against the wall of the aero. ‘Is it necessary always to kill them?’ she protested, but that seemed about as effectual as appealing to a guillotine, and she hated the whine in her voice.

  ‘I’ve shut down all their links to Govnet here,’ Saul rasped, ‘but it won’t take them long to open up some other channel, once they find they’re offline. Then he could identify us.’

  Already he had the aero’s engines starting up, its fans whirling up to speed. It had to be him, since the cockpit stood empty.

  ‘So can others out there,’ she remarked.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Just that? Did he mean he had already set something in motion to deal with the problem?

  He moved past her towards the cockpit, and she followed him inside. As he strapped himself in, he gestured to the seat beside him. She plumped herself down and began to fumble with the straps.

  ‘You have reservations,’ he suggested, his voice tight and angry.

  ‘You might be just like Malden: possibly worse than what you’re fighting.’

  Saul winced, wiped his eyes and studied the watery blood smeared on his hand. ‘You heard what they’re intending here?’

  ‘They’re going to gas the survivors.’

  ‘Whether I’m worse than them or not is irrelevant,’ he snapped. ‘This is about survival now, not morality.’

  He took the override off the controls before him, and grabbed hold of them, then lifted the aero up into the sky.

  Lights still jagged across his vision, but the pain in his skull was beginning to disperse. Apparently, each time he pushed himself too far mentally, as he had back in the aero camp, either the software or the hardware crashed in his mind.

  Things had been fine while he was approaching the camp, reinstating his internal radio modem at last and cautiously exploring his near surroundings in cyberspace. Govnet had lain around him like an infinite city constructed of edifices of information, webbed with highways and lanes, paths, rivers and canals of information all in transit. With a thought he had highlighted the networks relevant to the Inspectorate, picked out the aero section, and absorbed as much data as possible related to the imminent gassing of survivors and the squadron of aeros being used.

  Therefore, once in the camp he had jumped inside the nearest aero’s computer in an instant, made a coded link direct to the modem in his head and simultaneously disconnected the craft from Govnet. He had then disconnected all local hardware from Govnet too, by scrambling connection software, isolating the aero camp, and incidentally cutting himself off from that distant dark thing he had first sensed in Bronstein’s surgery. But by that time his pulse was thudding inside his head and the pain growing constantly.

  He had managed to hold on just long enough to get himself inside the aero, and to eliminate Taiken, but then had come the crash. Yet, each time he recovered from one of these painful episodes, like now, it seemed his abilities were expanded. Saul now considered dumping the aero and going into hiding until whatever was going on inside his head was completed and he had found his new limits. But he soon dismissed that idea, for the longer he waited, the greater the likelihood that the Inspectorate would move to tighten up computer security because, certainly, someone or something out there had got to know about him. He needed to now move fast and with utter ruthlessness to achieve his goal.

  By confining his mental compass to the aero and its systems, he could see everything in them with a clarity that had been missing before. This vehicle was a fast transport with jet assist, internal and external readerguns, external missile-launchers and inducers, state-of-the-art armour and autodefences. And, having seized control through the command override, it had become his absolutely.

  Now airborne, he considered the evidence he’d left behind. Time to remove it. All the aeros possessed similar command overrides, so could be flown and their weapons controlled remotely – this to prevent them being hijacked.

  Useful that, and precisely the route he now followed to hijack them.

  The identities of the two enforcers who had actually seen Hannah and himself, he transmitted to the recognition systems of the aeros still on the ground, and fixed a delay of about two minutes. After that brief time, the other crafts’ readerguns would identify the two of them as dissidents, and that would be the end of them. He doubted the Inspectorate would be able to – or even be bothered to – work out what had happened, or at least not until his and Hannah’s journey was over. He neglected to mention this to her, however. Next he finally severed his connection to the aero camp.

  That was it. Done.

  9

  Blame the Robots

  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, massive proce
ssing power and memory outpaced other technologies. It took many years before the software was invented to utilize it efficiently, and before sufficiently intelligent systems could be designed. When those were finally invented, this advance created its own mini-revolutions in personal entertainment and access to information; unfortunately it also created a mini-revolution in the ability of governments, already increasingly totalitarian as political elites gathered more and more power to themselves, to monitor their citizens and become even more totalitarian. Following the socialist dream into the territory of nightmare, those elites now took increasing control of society. Next to catch up was robotics, displacing the weak human components utilized in so many walks of life, and in the end those not included in the massive bureaucracies that controlled Earth became just client citizens – mostly on the dole, mostly zero-asset. Was the technology itself to blame: should people have Luddite-fashion smashed it? No, technology is merely a tool and any blame always rests squarely on the one wielding that tool.

  Saul chose a less-travelled route: up over the North Sea, to land for refuelling at Trondheim, then crossing the Scandia province of old Norway and Sweden, down across the Baltic to cross erstwhile Lithuania, finally to Minsk. Refuelling was no problem. It merely required a minor penetration of the airport computers, since unscheduled Inspectorate aero fights weren’t uncommon. Just a minor headache there, and a few warning flashes across his vision. This time, as with his previous minor penetrations of Govnet, no sign of that other presence on the net. He calculated the degree of noise he could create before attracting its attention, now knowing that the moment he did anything related to Coran or Hannah, that would be the equivalent of a shout.