by Neal Asher
Solenz winked at the camera.
‘The rumour that some of the killers’ bodies now contain the minds of some of those they murdered in the attack cannot be substantiated.’ Solenz grinned—he liked the grin his new face possessed.
‘The prototype Golem Twenty-five was never recovered,’ he added.
— retroact ends -
1
The lethal results for a human of directly interfacing with an AI have been known since the apotheosis of that being who was, briefly, both Iversus Skaidon and the Craystein Computer. This joining killed Skaidon and sent the Craystein far to the other side of weird, where even other AIs find its communications somewhat… gnomic. But what is this ‘direct interfacing’—surely we do this through our augs and gridlinks? Not so. These two methods of connection, along with planetary servers and so forth, act as buffers between the human and the AI minds. This is necessary because though, in most cases, the human mind is something that an AI could run as a brief sub-program, in some cases it has something that is beyond our silicon saints. Call that something imagination, vision, psychosis… it is something that is rooted in our primeval psyche and was never anything to do with the pellucid logic with which we created AI. Direct interfacing gives the AI this human madness, and in turn the human acquires the vast processing power of AI. The resultant composite being transcends all its contemporaries. Briefly, huge synergy is achieved, then the human dies—his mind burnt out like a wristcom connected to a tokomac.
Note: In recent years there has been much speculation about the possibility of interface filters and biotech support systems. This is all fog, and my opinion is that if it really could be done then someone, somewhere, would be doing it.
— From How It Is by Gordon
Standing on the black glass floor of a virtual viewing chamber aboard the Jack Ketch, Cormac took in the scene projected from a holocam a kilometre out from the hull. The ominously named Theta-class attack ship bore the shape of a cuttlefish bone, but with outriggers on either side holding torpedo-shaped weapons nacelles. It was the dark red of old blood, and smooth as polished stone. A more modern product of the Polity, its controlling AI, named Jack, took no orders from any human captain. Cormac wondered if it could withstand Jain technology subversion any better than had the Occam Razor and its interfaced captain, Tomalon. In such a ship as this, there was no facility for AI burn—for killing its AI—it having been built after the time of extreme paranoia about AIs taking over… when they had.
To one side of the Jack Ketch he observed other Polity ships surrounding, like flies around a healing wound, the reconstructed area of Elysium. Dreyden, the ruler of this Out-Polity community, had fought against allowing them to render assistance, and threatened them with the smelting mirrors of Elysium just as he had used those same mirrors against the attacking Occam Razor. But the damage to the community had been more than it could sustain and, without help, his little empire here would have fallen apart anyway, but with a greater resultant loss of life. Now, after one year of quarantine, all assistance had been rendered, and Dreyden was just a businessman in yet another community subsumed by the Polity.
Eight hundred and twenty-three thousand, one hundred and nine…
That was the figure at the last count, though by now it would have risen by a few souls as people continued to the in the hospital ship, or took the easier route of memcording to escape bodies made irreparable by isotope poisoning.
My choice.
It had been the risk of this, balanced against the slaughter of millions on Masada. There had been a chance that no one would have died here. But they did. His call.
Cadmean victory…
Cormac wondered about the name of this ship he had boarded, now that quarantine was over. Perhaps Jack Ketch the hangman was here for him. He now turned his attention to one whom Earth Central Security was allowing to escape the noose.
The trispherical Lyric II was only just visible, by the white light of its fusion drive, as it moved away from Elysium. It was unusual for Polity AIs to make such value judgements on the actions of individuals, and normally they applied the law harshly and without favour. John Stanton had been a mercenary killer, in the past working for the Separatist Arian Pelter, and perhaps deserved to die, as had Pelter. Cormac winced at the memories: Pelter’s brass killing-machine, Mr Crane, coming for him; the Golem Cento and Aiden bringing Crane down; and his own subsequent pursuit of Pelter, and killing of the man. Even so, the Earth Central AI had decided, that for what Stanton had since done and risked, no one would be looking when he and his wife Jarvellis returned to their ship and headed away. Cormac observed white fusion flames blink out inside a distortion that seemed to pull at his eyeballs, and knew that the ship had now entered underspace and was gone. He envied John Stanton such freedom—from prosecution, and from responsibility.
‘A satisfactory conclusion,’ said a breathy voice beside his ear.
‘Cut visual feed,’ said Cormac and, as the external image blinked out to reveal the glass-walled projection chamber he stood in, he turned to the ancient Japanese man standing beside him. ‘This must be a new definition of “satisfactory” of which I have been unaware. Would you like to elaborate?’
Horace Blegg kept his expression bland as he replied, ‘Masada and this place are under the control of the Polity, and Skellor now so much interstellar ash.’
‘And here, and at Masada, nearly a million dead,’ Cormac added.
‘Such loss of life is unfortunate, but base your calculation on lives saved, not lives destroyed. Had you and John Stanton not led Skellor here to be incinerated, he would have killed every human being in the Masadan system, and for him that would have been just the start.’
Cormac smiled tiredly. ‘I’m not an infant; I made that calculation at the time. But you forget, I’ve been in Elysium for a year and seen what happened.’
‘My assessment still stands. What is there for you to regret?’
‘My original assessment of Skellor, I would say.’
‘You did not know he had gained possession of Jain technology.’
‘But when I did know, I assumed that, like any Separatist upon encountering Earth Central Security, he would go scuttling for cover. I didn’t register how quickly he disappeared after our first encounter, and I didn’t make the connection between that disappearance and his work with chameleonware.’
‘Hindsight can be brilliantly incisive, and never misses the banana skins of existence. Do you want to be punished?’
‘No… what I want is to go back to Masada and find out who is alive and who is dead. I want to retrieve my Shuriken, and see what Mika has to say about the dracomen there—and find out what the EC decision on them is. But, most of all, I want to know how the fuck you got on board this ship. There was no one here last time I looked, and nothing has docked since then.’
‘You well know I don’t answer such questions.’ Earth Central’s leading and most mysterious agent liked to remain inscrutable.
‘You did it on the Occam Razor, and I at first thought you a projection. I touched you and you remained solid, though something happened to you when the Occam went into U-space. But then, is my memory of events true—because you’ve screwed with my mind before.’
‘Your memories are true.’
Cormac nodded contemplatively. ‘I think I know what you are, Blegg. I think I’ve finally figured it out. You’re an avatar of the Earth Central AI—the human face, or interface, which transfers its orders to its agents. Sometimes you’re a projection, sometimes Golem.’ He looked directly at Blegg. ‘All that bullshit about Hiroshima is precisely that: bullshit.’
Blegg grinned. ‘If only things were so simple. You are perhaps eighty years old in personal time, Ian Cormac, but with a mind possessing the plasticity of youth and a brain constantly replacing its dying nerve cells, and your apprehension of the world is at the foot of an exponential curve. Immortality is possible for all of humankind now, and many humans will discove
r what it means to keep on learning and keep on understanding, though many more will simply stagnate. I myself am many centuries ahead of the race as a whole.’
‘Which still doesn’t explain how you manage to keep popping up like the Cheshire cat.’
‘Abilities can be acquired, given the time. This is something you will come to understand, as you are one of those who will definitely not stagnate.’
‘What abilities had you already acquired that enabled you to survive the blast from an ancient fission weapon at Hiroshima? You were supposedly a child then.’
‘Maybe I didn’t survive it.’
Cormac could now feel something, the edge of something he strove to understand, and he knew that Blegg was slipping away from him. With some sense he had never known before, he reached out for the man and found himself groping after shadows.
Quite calmly he said, ‘You’re an avatar, Blegg—I know it.’
I am the future…
The projection room now contained only Cormac. He sighed and shook his head. One day he would know precisely everything there was to know about Blegg, but that day was not yet close. With cold precision, he compartmentalized speculation. Now Earth Central Security—ECS—had work for him. There was always such work.
When are we heading into U-space? he asked the Jack Ketch AI.
‘There is a hold on all transport at present, but when we are ready to go I will inform you,’ the AI replied.
It was only as he was leaving the projection chamber that Cormac realized he had just used his gridlink—hardware inside his skull that had enabled him a near-direct interface with AI—to communicate, which was impossible. It had been deactivated long ago.
— retroact 2 -
Glittering leviathans bearing limbs capable of crushing boulders, and others capable of stacking grains of sand, reared in high pillars of gearbox-grinding movement, hung from the ceiling like mechanical multi-limbed bats, or squatted on the vast plain of the factory floor. All seemed chaotic lethal movement—a whole machine rather than distinct engines—where it seemed a human would be minced and scoured away in seconds. The sight would, Pendle thought, have driven Henry Ford screaming from the premises, especially had he seen the silver skeletons that were the product of this labour. But it was all utterly efficient: a three-dimensional assembly line designed by AI so that no movement was wasted, no process interrupted, no energy squandered… Unhuman, and becoming more so.
On the whole, Pendle thought, the execs that were the human face of the corporation were at best glorified salesmen, but mostly shareholders creaming the working credit on their options—the closest a large proportion of Earth’s population got to real work. Pendle, however, considered his erstwhile position as creative design consultant in the prognostic body-form section, to be essential. True, Golem contractual rights were now such that imposition of body form was no longer allowed. Directly after uploading to crystal, and before installation in an anthrop chassis, they were now given the choice of form, which meant a loss of over 30 per cent of loaded crystal to AI applications other than to Golem. However, though less than the profit gained per capita for Golem indenture, Cybercorp was still able to reclaim construction costs and a reasonable profit set by Earth Central Economic Control. But then Pendle felt the distinction between the corporation and Earth Central itself was at best only one of nomenclature. Both were part of the same silicon meritocracy—a ruling elite that humans only managed to join by ceasing to be entirely human. Buphal was a prime example.
‘Apensat has got the chassis prepped for installation, we can go down there now,’ Buphal said.
Pendle studied the man. From the left, all you saw were Asiatic features in profile: a beaked nose, brown eyes, and dark eyebrows below plaited hair artfully dotted with grey. He wore monomer coolveralls with ribbed high collar and wrist-sleeves terminating in interface rings for ‘factor gloves and helmet. The material of this garment was silvery and contained squares of mem-fab displaying what at first looked like the view from some craft flying through a strange city. Buphal had told him this was in fact an ophthalmoscope view of some ancient valved electronics he had studied during his youth. But it was when you saw the other side of the old man’s head that you realized just what he was.
Affixed to the side of his skull, behind his ear, was a grey metal disc. From the edges of this, at one o’clock and seven, bus bars curved round and penetrated his skull. At six o’clock, tubes running down to a plug in the side of his neck piped blood as a coolant. In the centre of the disc, like some trophy on its mounting, was an aug the size and shape of a cockleshell but seemingly fashioned of quartz. In Buphal’s right eye, instead of an eyeball and sclera, a glittering square tube penetrated deep into his skull. Pendle knew when Buphal was doing any heavy thinking—the man would start to sweat even though gusts of frigid air would be escaping his coolveralls, for Buphal’s aug was semi-AI crystal matrix, buffered from direct interface by band-controlled optic and aural links. People like him were called haimans: a compound of AI and human. The man was as close to attaining Al/human synergy as was possible without burning out the human element like a faulty fuse.
Buphal leading, they made their way along the viewing gallery to the antique spiral stair leading down to what Cybercorp engineers still called the shop floor. This stair, Pendle recollected, Cybercorp had purchased at great expense from Sigural, the Sri Lankan AI that ran the runcible on Sigiria. Apparently these ancient iron staircases, originally brought to that island from the London Underground sometime premillennial, had no longer been considered safe to convey the five million visitors the rock received every year, even if most of them did come in by runcible.
They walked straight into the lethal blur of machinery and, of course, it flinched away from them, creating a space ten metres in diameter around them, until they reached the second stair taking them down to their destination. Here, on a smaller floor, technicians pursued specialist projects whilst, behind a glass wall alongside them, silver skeletons with ribbed chests open like butterflies marched neatly towards a perpetually cycling clean-lock and to the glare beyond where sentience awaited them. In this room it was sometimes difficult to distinguish specialist project from technician. Even pure humans like Pendle were visually identical to Golem who had donned syntheflesh. Sometimes there were humans so in love with the machine it was difficult so see any humanity left in them. Apensat was a silvery thing with the geisha stoop and glittery limbs of a surgical robot. But he also had normal arms and a face in there under the cowling. He looked like a man a huge polished-chrome beetle was gradually subsuming.
With a fluid hand gesture, mirrored by gleaming spidery limbs, Apensat indicated a Golem skeleton standing nearby, its chest open just like the others processing beyond it.
‘This is him?’ Pendle could see that it must be. The thing was two and a half metres tall, its ceramal bones bearing that slight bluish tint of the newer alloy/ceramofibre composite. Everything about it was heavier, more robust, impressive.
‘No,’ said Buphal, ‘that’s an anthrop chassis. That’s him.’
Pendle looked to where Buphal was pointing at a lozenge of memory crystal sitting in an AI support column on a nearby bench. He walked over, pulled up a swivel chair and sat down, reached out and tapped the base of the column to get the mind’s attention. To one side of the column a projection monocle rose off the bench. Below it, the air flickered, and the standard iconic head appeared: metallic—even the eyes, teeth and tongue.
‘Unit G25 alpha, I’m going to load some syntheflesh/skin schematics as, with the larger size you chose for yourself, the order must go via Specialist Ordering.’ Pendle glanced round and saw that both Buphal and Apensat had their attention focused on the Golem chassis. Of course it was all complete rubbish; Pendle’s job had been non-existent for three days now since, being described as redundant for a long time, that description had now been made official. However, he felt that though his job was finished, his crusade had only
just begun. Out of the top pocket of his Corp overalls he removed a piece of memcrystal the size of a fingernail and inserted it into the slot at the base of the column. Immediately it began to load. The projected head multiplied to infinity as if positioned between facing mirrors. Pendle snatched the monocle out of the air, killing the image. He then retrieved the memcrystal, dropped it between his feet, and ground it into white powder.
‘Standard spec,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘They’ll be able to handle it in synthetics.’
Even though finally ejected from the Cybercorp plant a number of days later, Pendle did manage to turn up at the launch of the Golem Twenty-five, where he waited expectantly. But what happened was most unexpected. The nanoscopic dose of neurotoxin that finally killed him, just after the Golem was stolen, was not the main reason he coughed and gasped so much. That was laughter—Pendle had always been a sucker for irony.
— retroact ends -
Mika knew the doctor mycelium was a small fragment of the Jain technology Skellor had controlled and, like some primitive stumbling across a ground car, she had walked away with a wheel but had no idea about the workings of bearings, electric motors and hydrogen fuel cells. The fragment of nano technology resulting in the mycelium inside the Outlinker, Apis Coolant, had been a stored sample she used only because the alternative was to watch the boy die as his fragile body fought a losing battle against the gravity here on Masada. Why she then grew a similar mycelium inside herself was less clear. ‘For research purposes,’ was her answer to any who asked—not because it enabled her to live in an asphyxiating atmosphere surrounding her, or because it enabled her to quickly recover from severe injury, and not because her physical strength was now twice normal. But there was a downside… as always.
The changes the doctor mycelia were undergoing she was unable to fathom. They were growing thicker and more complex—becoming something more than she required. Perhaps this dangerous experiment was keeping the Polity ships and personnel in orbit, and the quarantine in place. Thus far, their only contact had been via straightforward radio transmission—no signal deep enough to take any kind of computer viral attack from Jain tech on the surface—and ECS stratojets dropping medical supplies, food and equipment. They had every reason to be wary of Jain technology. Using it, Skellor had subverted the AI dreadnought Occam Razor and left a system in chaos: cylinder worlds containing brain-burnt populations, the wreckage of spacecraft and satellites, and tens of thousands dead. But that was not all the Polity might fear down here.
