Hilldiggers (polity)

by Neal Asher

  While carrying the original Spatterjay virus, I hadn't really been human and so could not have died like a human. But I didn't know what carrying IF21 inside me meant. The fact that I leaked blood was so unusual for me in itself, but could I actually bleed to death? Would I die if my heart stopped or if I stopped breathing? I don't know whether it was these thoughts that initiated it, but suddenly I found myself at a point of utter stillness, deep in a personal silence. I had just allowed my heart and lungs to grow still, and blood no longer pumped from my arm—yet I remained functional, presumably due to the transference of oxygen and nutrients through the viral fibres of IF21 to where they were needed, as would have been the case with the original virus. With the shutting down of those two crucial organs also went all those involuntary twitches that are the signs of life. Perhaps other autonomous functions had also closed down. Lying there in that silence, I realised my body might not die, yet that I myself could. To complete my death I only needed to shut down my brain, which I now felt I knew how to do. However, I was an Old Captain and 'the long habit of living' was a difficult one to break, so I just lay there not dying.

  Next, voices impinged upon my silence, and I saw people staring down at me. I realised they believed me to be dead and so were taking no action. By restarting my heart and lungs, I initiated all sorts of activity around me. Soon Flog was carrying me, cradled like an infant, a silver tiger pacing at his side. A tourniquet of woven hide wound above my elbow seemed to have lessened the renewed blood flow, but not stopped it. Or maybe there just wasn't that much of it left inside me. Something had changed, too: my breathing and the beating of my heart no longer seemed entirely autonomous. It was as if by consciously interfering with the living process I had now taken over responsibility for it, so must keep a small hard kernel of willpower constantly focused on the task of making those organs work. To allow myself to die now seemed rather less an act of will, more a case of ceasing that act.

  "He's dying," Tigger confirmed for me to Rhodane as I lay on my organic bed inside the spin section. A Brumallian I did not recognise attached a drip, while another placed metal clamps around shattered bone in my numb open arm. "He'll not last more than another month," Tigger added.

  "What is doing this to him?"

  "I told you about the two viruses inside him, and how one of them needed to be sacrificed—the only one we could kill—to ensure his survival. Well, it now looks like the one left behind is killing him anyway."

  "How so?"

  I never heard the rest for I blacked out. Later I woke in a panic, thinking that by slipping from consciousness I might also release the reins I held to my heart and lungs. However, that hard lump of willpower was too stubborn to renege on its duties because of mere unconsciousness.

  "How is it killing me?" I asked.

  Even before opening my eyes I knew only Tigger occupied the room with me.

  "IF21 does work like the original Spatterjay virus—transferring nutrients and oxygen around your body and occasionally carrying nerve impulses. Unlike the original, this one isn't replacing muscle and bone with something stronger, but with something weaker. The nerve impulses it carries aren't always the ones you want either, and it's also destroying some parts of your body to feed its own growth."

  "It's destroying my autonomous nervous system," I suggested, opening my eyes.

  Tigger squatted beside my bed, peering down at me with mild but implacable amber eyes. He paused for a long moment before replying. "You're aware of that?"

  "I am."

  "Well, it isn't just that it's screwing. Add to the list your immune system, your body's ability to produce T-cells and clotting cells, and really," Tigger shrugged, "all your major organs. By the state of your liver it looks like you've been a bit too partial to the sea-cane rum for far too long."

  "Any good news?" I quipped.

  "Some. The IF21 may still not kill you."

  "Really."

  "Quite likely the hilldigger on its way out to us will do that instead."

  I can't say that I was a great fan of Tigger's morbid humour.

  "Then you must do what we discussed."

  "I intend to—just preparing myself for the AI-upon-AI melding." Tigger tapped one claw against his metal skull. "I need to be in full control—can't just give instructions."

  "Right," I said, staring at the ceiling. Only after a moment did it impinge upon me what Tigger was saying. "You're saying this ship's computer is AI?"

  "Yup, even under the two hundred and seventy-first revision of the Turing Test," Tigger replied.

  It seemed that the ship, after receiving instructions from the Consensus, carried them out in the way it saw best—in the same way that, under the impetus of consensus, Brumallians would go into battle, but it would be up to them to figure out how best to avoid getting themselves killed. It would seem that the Consensus knew how to delegate.

  "I'll ask the ship," Rhodane had told Tigger, shortly after the drone let her know his intentions.

  And the ship apparently replied, "Yes, I would like to make these alterations to myself, since a hilldigger is now heading directly towards us."

  After hearing all that news, I closed my eyes again.

  "There's something else I can do," Tigger informed me.

  "Hit me with it."

  "Once melded, I can create the means to stick you into hibernation. Then I could get you back to the Polity."

  "I'll think about it," I said.

  14

  The Brumallians were an implacable and merciless enemy. They did not negotiate, did not communicate, and they gave and accepted no quarter, so this was a fight that could only end with one contender lying bleeding on the ground. In the latter stages of the War the people of Sudoria knew all this with utter certainty, which was why, when the hilldiggers arrived at Brumal, their final strike against the enemy came close to genocide. Many records were destroyed during the revolt that resulted in our present Parliament, but a sufficient number have survived to tell us the true story. The Brumallians had wanted peace, they wanted a ceasefire, they wanted an ending, but for the first twenty years of conflict they were asking for these things from the plutocrats—people who were making fortunes out of building massive warships and stations in orbit, and out of manufacturing munitions. These approaches were either dismissed or, worse, responded to with treachery. I shall include below a report that details the capture of a small Brumallian ship sent to us with negotiators aboard, and what happened to those captives when they were sent to a bioweapons research establishment. The Brumallians stopped talking after their first big warships took apart a hilldigger. Directly after this the sudden spate of representations to them from the plutocrats were ignored. This occurred only a few months before those same plutocrats were due for their appointment with a bolt gun and a Komarl rock.

  — Uskaron

  Tigger

  Using full-spectrum scanning of the interior of the ship, Tigger studied its cellular structure of compartments linked by intestinal corridors. Within a scattering of compartments inside the spin section he noted Brumallians monitoring and tending to organic machinery with the focus of veterinary surgeons. The crew seemed almost like components in the ship's immune system—little nano-doctors attentively ensuring its health. It was all rather primitive really. Polity ships, though not the product of an organic technology, did not require ministering to with such finesse.

  He had always been interested in how a society that ruled by consensus could manage to conduct a war where decisions needed to be made instantly and without consultation. He had supposed that some Brumallians had been selected as commanders and on them the Consensus had delegated authority. This he subsequently discovered to be true, but within certain limitations: to those individuals who proved the best at any task, the authority over that task had been delegated, so the weapons inventors were left to their own devices, literally, and those devices then passed on to those most capable of manufacturing them—and so on. But that ha
d not been enough. The Brumallian Consensus wanted the war won, and the enemy rendered incapable of attacking again. Implementing this was not something that could be efficiently governed by the ebb and flow of public opinion—they realised they needed overall commanders to make hard tactical and logistical decisions. They grew them.

  "The hilldigger has us within firing range of its long-range weapons, but I believe the Captain will not order any firing until close enough to be certain of hitting us with a tactical warhead—two hours and thirty-five minutes from now," concluded the ship AI whom Tigger had named Rosebud.

  "I'll be with you in ten minutes, Rosebud," Tigger replied. "I gotta reconfigure some of my internal systems anyhow."

  "Why did you give me that name?" asked the AI running this organic vessel.

  Tigger transmitted the relevant files concerning an old celluloid film called Citizen Kane. After a long delay while he found his way to a corridor that would take him around the spin section, the AI came back with, "But they burnt the sledge."

  "It was only a film," replied Tigger, adding, "and a metaphor."

  Tigger passed below the outer rim of the section, which slid above him like a moving wooden ceiling, then worked in towards the hub along another corridor snaking through the interior without any regard for up or down. At the end of this corridor he found Flog and Slog awaiting him, in evident agitation.

  "Now, why're they here?" Tigger sent to the AI.

  "They were bred to fight non-Consensus attackers. My command override controls them, but it does not override their inherent distrust of you, especially now you are moving into so sensitive an area."

  "The Polity—" said Slog, reaching out a hand that brushed down Tigger's back.

  "— we must permit?" finished Flog, floating backwards before Tigger into the chamber beyond. They were reluctant to allow Tigger into here, perhaps programmed to guard the ship's AI at all costs.

  Tigger, only managing to keep himself to the floor by use of his claws, continued pacing forwards.

  "We are—"

  "— commanded."

  Flog opened his mandibles in threatening protest, then, clutching at a grey branch above his head, pulled himself aside, floated over to one wall and clung there. Tigger halted in the centre of the chamber and observed what lay before him. Rosebud seemed like some giant synapse, ten feet across with branching outgrowths piercing its surroundings. Just visible behind it, the wall of the spin section constantly revolved, as if the AI was turning it manually. Tigger could see the design antecedents here, with the AI acting as an interface between the crew—who were mainly located in the spin section—and the rest of the ship. Further development had resulted in the crew doing less, and the interface doing more, until it finally developed consciousness and the crew became mere adjuncts to it.

  Now Tigger was ready, his internal structure primed to come apart and shift to the required connection points, organo-optic plugs ready inside him layered with living nerve tissue grown from samplings he had already taken from the material of the ship. He took one pace forward, and a ripple passed down the length of his body. His cat features began to lose definition and his head began to sink away. Another pace and one leg retracted into his body—only to reappear, stretching and extending as a tentacle from his back. His whole body shortened and spread out sideways. Amoeboid, with outgrowths taking hold of the grey branches around him, he slid forward to fall upon Rosebud and engulf it. He pushed in the plugs like stings, directing them once they were inside Rosebud with cell-form metal muscles, and there began to connect, and there began to lose himself. Fleetingly he observed Flog and Slog being ordered from the chamber after they had surged forward to try and tear him away, misunderstanding his actions as an attack. As the entrance sphincter closed he saw them raging outside.

  "This is unexpected," said Rosebud. "You will destroy me."

  "I will not," Tigger replied.

  "I am a river, but you are the sea."

  "Though I'll absorb everything that you are, I'll nevertheless keep what you are which is distinct, and return you to yourself once I depart."

  "My consciousness will not be my own."

  "Sleep, then," Tigger instructed.

  Rosebud, though with an organic basis, was an AI many generations removed from Tigger. Primitive, Tigger considered, but not in any derogatory sense. Overall, Rosebud became a rather small adjunct to Tigger's extensive mind. Tigger became the ship, and came to control the ship absolutely.

  He studied the fusion drive, which, though controlled by organo-optics, was an additional artefact added to the ship's structure. The ship had been grown with the facility to accept this addition—the ability to grow such an engine being beyond present Brumallian technology. An analogy would be someone growing a human body without legs, but with the nerves and empty sockets in the pelvis exposed and ready to accept grafts of mechanical legs. Similar gaps in the outer body of the ship contained grafts of a rather more lethal nature. He studied their contents, chose one close to his location—a missile cache—and, using ship's systems, opened a missile and began making alterations to it. Simultaneously he began extruding a cell-form metal limb in that same direction.

  The engine was running okay, but Tigger made some adjustments to increase its efficiency by six per cent, and initiated the growth of some additional systems that would raise it higher. Subsequent inspection of other systems on board revealed many other things he could do to increase efficiency, but doing something about them was not his main purpose in this melding…or, rather, subsumption.

  The drone focused his attention on the ship's outer skin. It lay three feet thick, layer upon layer of polycarbonates and ceramics, with nerve fibres threading convoluted paths through to access sensor heads dotted like hair follicles over the hull. An outer layer consisted of electromechanical refractive cells, and simple projectors also linked into this network: a simple chameleonware skin that could, within limitations, blend the ship with its background, not just visibly, but along a wider band of the EM spectrum. It was non-reactive, which basically meant the ship would not be picked up by passive sensors unless the drive was operating. However, it would be quickly revealed the moment a searcher used any form of active scan.

  Tigger now needed to make this chameleonware wholly reactive, so that if any form of scan intersected with the ship when only vacuum lay behind it, the 'ware could refract it away from the scanning ship. He also needed to link in the sensors, so on the dark side of the ship they could scan any background other than vacuum and project it from the scan side, with a suitable delay, to project a return consistent only with whatever lay behind the ship. This required the individual control of billions of discrete refractors, sensors and projectors.

  Tigger applied his extensive intellect to the task, then redoubled his efforts when he felt the first terahertz scan from the distant hilldigger.

  The Captain of that other ship now knew the precise location of the Brumallian ship. Tigger therefore assigned more and more of his own processing space to the task of hiding. Within what had now become his own body, he observed the dismay of the Brumallian crew as the systems they nurtured fell out of their control. He shut down the drive flame. His cell-form limb reached the missile cache and deposited part of itself inside the casing behind the warhead. Ship's systems closed up the missile and loaded it to a coil-gun barrel extending to breach the hull.

  By now the hilldigger was within range to fire a warhead. Tigger detected the flare of a single drive flame departing the massive vessel. He fired his own missile, simultaneously initiating the chameleonware of his ship and the part of himself deposited in the missile. From his own vantage point the missile looked no different, but it contained a Polity antimunitions package that projected a false image of this ship to the distant hilldigger. Those aboard the hilldigger might have detected a brief anomaly—the Brumallian ship repositioning in an eyeblink and abruptly changing course—but the Sudorian missile would not be smart enough to rec
ognise what had happened.

  A long drawn-out hour passed while Tigger worked frantically. What he had done would only work once, since those aboard the hilldigger would be sure to analyse debris and find it very lacking. Now he continued to extend himself throughout the ship, using nano-technological methods to absorb material and reform it as part of himself. Slowly he reached the outer hull and began to spread out, rebuilding sensor heads, refractors and projectors into composite and much more efficient instruments. He would have done this first of all, had there been time, but hopefully he had provided time enough to do it now.

  The hilldigger missile finally slammed down on the Brumallian ship it detected. Tigger detonated the missile he had fired. The two missiles and the illusion of a Brumallian ship disappeared in a sun-bright explosion. Tigger continued to work. Another hour passed and he observed the hilldigger turning, then firing a massive spread of inert rail- or coil-gun projectiles to cover possible locations of the hidden ship. They caught on fast. He tracked the course of every projectile and saw that dumb chance had put one directly on target. It came faster than the original missile, and was only seconds away. One spurt from his main drive would put the ship out of the way, but would also locate it clearly for the beam weapons the hilldigger was now close enough to use. Tigger fired up a steering thruster hidden on the other side, turning the ship to present one particular area at a particular time.