by Alex Lamb
With the final shreds of his attention, Mark had his last suit carry Massimo’s body over to where he lay. While trying to ignore the wet mass of gore that had been Massimo’s skull, he ripped the override control off the dead man’s wrist. His fingers scrambled over it, looking for familiar controls somewhere amid all the ecclesiastical jewellery.
On the back, he found an ordinary-looking reboot button. Mark wedged a finger into the slot and hoped. If it worked anything like a normal domestic wearable, he’d have a fraction of a second during which the cuff was handshaking with the network and vulnerable to intrusion. It had to be worth a shot.
The moment the device surfaced in his mind, Mark seized the link and hammered on its security, bringing the full weight of both his attention and Will’s hackpack to bear. For a slew of dangerous seconds, all his puppets stalled. Then the cuff’s interface spilled open, spewing icons and help files. Mark blinked in understanding. That encrypted traffic he’d found held a second layer with command rights limited to a few special devices. Devices like the one he now had.
He didn’t have long to enjoy success. By the time he’d cracked Massimo’s executive API, he had new problems. The Earthers had taken rapid advantage of his time-out and regrouped. Five of his suits had fallen prey to concentrated flenser fire and couple of thousand angry Revivalists were advancing towards his hiding place clutching guns and improvised weapons. Worse still, the airlock Mark needed to reach lay about a half-kilometre away and getting everyone there alive looked less and less likely. For starters, he was the only one of the three of them who could walk.
Mark rummaged wildly through the interface looking for a miracle. Then he saw something: a package labelled Armageddon Theatrics. He cracked it open, letting yet more icons splatter into the mess of his home node. This new group held programs for infrasonics, ultrasonics, light-control tools and a dozen other things Mark didn’t even recognise. He snatched one and fired it up.
The voice of the Prophet Sanchez boomed out of hidden speakers all over the settlement.
‘BOW DOWN BEFORE YOUR LORD!’
Mark clapped his hands over his ears to block out the deafening sound. When he looked up, half the Flag mob had their faces in the dirt and the rest were clutching their ears in varying states of terror.
Mark kicked off another program. The dome’s polarisation ramped to maximum, plunging the settlement into a ruddy twilight from the end of the world. It looked less impressive than it would have done if one whole side of the settlement wasn’t already wrecked and patched with foam, but the Flags stared upwards in awe.
Mark took his chance. With two of his exosuits he picked up Zoe and Venetia. The last one brought up the rear with its cannon at the ready. Together they ran.
The moment the Earthers caught sight of Mark escaping, the spell broke. He’d already smashed their world enough that each new distraction bothered them less. They surged back to their feet with roars of fury and came after him. His last armed exosuit didn’t stand a chance. It took the full weight of the Flags’ fire as it tried to hold them off. Mark felt his mind retreat from the machine as its cameras and power junctions gave out under torrents of screaming metal.
Before the Flags could refocus their attention, Mark ducked down a side street, dragging his two remaining suits after him. He wheezed in the thin air and wished his recent experiences had left him in better shape. He needed a burst of artificial speed but even his reinforced metabolism had nothing more to offer. He’d used up most of his metabolic arsenal just surviving the punishment box.
That left nothing to do but sprint barefoot down the dusty road and hope. As he ran, his mind skittered over Massimo’s command structure looking for something else he could use. He still had over two hundred and fifty metres to go.
Mark’s mind caught on a subsystem labelled Public Implant Control. He recoiled. Had Massimo actually put externally controlled systems inside his Followers’ bodies? Of course he had. If their minds weren’t sacrosanct, why should their bodies be so? He shuddered at the appalling invasion of human privacy that Britehaven entailed, then grabbed the system and started mashing on it.
As one, the Flags roaring up the lane behind him tumbled like sacks of meat, groaning and screaming like victims from hell’s inner circles. Their flenser fire chased randomly up the walls. Mark glanced back and saw dozens of faces with crazed, empty eyes as the Flags rolled in the road. They clutched wildly at their chests and abdomens as if trying to claw their bodies open.
With a surge of fresh nausea, Mark realised that the controls he’d triggered were part of the sect’s reward and punishment system – much like the penitence box, but surgically installed. Kal’s hunger for penitence points and Five’s eerie submissiveness suddenly took on new implications. Mark felt dirty for using it but didn’t drop the power. Instead, he turned and took off for the airlock as fast as he could. He ran straight into the robot’s waiting elevator pod with his suits beside him and sealed the door, gasping as it slammed shut.
The pod accelerated hard up the robot’s chest – a full forty stories to the main cabin between its top shoulders. Mark burst through into the utilitarian space beyond, ripping med-packs off the wall and pressing burn gel against Venetia’s torched body.
He unhooked the massive robot from the airlock below, backed it away from the dome and started out in a straight line for the spaceport. Without so much as a glance back at the horror of Britehaven, he set his sights on the horizon. This time, nothing was going to stand between him and that shuttle.
17.2: WILL
Will felt himself being taken apart. Senses, memories and associations dropped out one by one. The experience brought with it an unexpected stab of nostalgia. He recognised the feeling from what the Transcended had done to him years ago when they’d taken a mortal and turned him into a superbeing.
Easy come, easy go.
Last time, he’d been terrified. This time, he gave no resistance. He opened the gates and let Snakepit in. Great swathes of his extended self that he’d grown so used to over the years were swallowed by creeping darkness. His organs, both natural and invented, fell silent and closed down like shuttered factories. It was like watching the country of his mind fall prey to an invasion. The foreign horde swept over him with molecular sabres waving. The citizens of Will’s mind stood still and let it happen, holding out pamphlets of peace.
Will watched the fall of his own interior Rome until Snakepit’s unstoppable army pressed against the final doors of his citadel of selfhood – his consciousness. He opened the drawbridge. Will retreated to the home node of his sensorium, gazed out at the simulated lawn and watched the darkness gathering. He held his virtual breath.
Oblivion failed to arrive. Instead, the shadows slowed and stopped. Will watched them hang there and frowned to himself in confusion. Then the dark started creeping backwards, oozing into the corners. Will extended himself a little and was confused by what he found. Rather than tearing everything down, the invasion had started restoring things. His subsystems woke to new life.
The entire process that had devoured him had gone into fast reverse. The cavalry charged backwards, uncovering his mental terrain. The factories of his body opened again, springing magically into good repair. Organs began to pump. Will tested the limits of his mind with bewilderment and found them refreshed. He had no idea how or why.
Then, in small ways at first, he began to notice that those parts of him returning to life were not the same as they had been. His lungs breathed more deeply. His blood felt cleaner. And the chorus of smart-cells that filled his body were chattering to him in a slang he’d never heard before.
He framed the question before he was even aware of his intention to communicate.
‘What’s going on?’
A comms channel opened like a pair of enormous doors being thrown wide in his head. It reminded him of the shock he’d experienced when he
first truly connected to the Ariel Two, except that this process felt far larger, and immeasurably more foreign.
A torrent of half-comprehended notions flashed through him like the fleeting memories of impossibly detailed dreams, played in succession at blistering speed. It was like waking up ten thousand times over, all at once. Will felt his mind begin to unhinge. He struggled to bring some guiding metaphor to bear, to turn the mess of incoherent ideas into something he could at least focus on.
His perspective lurched and suddenly he was falling through the largest machine in the universe – a human mote dropped through the clockwork of reality. The structure around him was fractal and incredibly intricate. Wheels turned against wheels from things the size of continents down to sparkling dust too small to make out. Every scale of machinery represented something – a cell, a plant, a continent. Each differed from the others, yet each worked seamlessly with the whole. Will knew what he was looking at. He was falling through the mind of Snakepit.
Except Will knew he was seeing it wrong. In true Snakepit style, he was being shown every level of organisation of the world-sized system simultaneously. This was how the Nems had tried to understand humanity – as a holistic system like their own. This was why they’d paid so little attention to scale or meaning at Tiwanaku. No wonder they’d struggled. Will pushed for a simplifying image, forcing the impenetrable vision into something his mind could encompass. He needed a body, for starters. He needed an environment he could interact with.
The vast machine became a corridor. He wasn’t falling through it, only walking. And it wasn’t a single machine he was looking at but a series of informative exhibits. He pressed shut virtual eyes to stabilise himself. When he opened them, he stood in a passageway in the Museum of Infinite Possibilities.
On either side of him sat glass-fronted display cases filled with racks of surreal organisms and devices. The tiled corridor extended to the vanishing point ahead of him and behind, lit by an endless line of old-fashioned LED lamps under fusty neo-deco shades.
Will glanced at one of the displays. It squirmed beneath his eyes, unpacking itself in lurid multidimensional detail like some baroque sea creature turning itself inside-out. Without Will asking, it began leaking an explanation into his awareness.
Quasi-cooperative heterogeneous cellular membranes can operate as a substrate for the catalysis of novel meta-enzymes. Each enzyme operates as a self-organizing condition-action rule composite that aids in converting the local nutrient landscape into a partially mixed computational arena …
His mind started to fill with tantalising insights till he fought for breath. He blinked them away.
‘This is an improvement,’ he said, focusing on the black and white tiles beneath his feet. ‘Now I need someone, or something, I can talk to.’
A curator appeared – a motherly woman in an old-fashioned mocksuit. She wore a heavy data visor of the sort people used on Galatea before the war and had something halfway between an orchid and an octopus tucked in her lapel. He knew her to be a product of his own imagination but was surprised to find the woman before him so specifically rendered. She had broad apple cheeks and hair wound back in braids. She looked a lot, in fact, like his dead friend Amy.
The curator stood there, peeking at him over the upper rim of her visor. She looked peeved.
‘Why is this necessary?’ she said. She glanced down at her sleeves and tugged on them disapprovingly. ‘You interface directly with your ship, do you not? Why restrict yourself to such a narrow perceptual aperture here?’ She folded her arms.
‘I’m not set up to process this all at once,’ said Will.
‘Then let us adjust you accordingly,’ said the curator enthusiastically. She held out eager hands.
Will waved her back. ‘No, thank you. There’s no rush, I assume?’
She shot him a disapproving look. ‘We haven’t received a sentient visitor for as long as I can remember, so of course there’s a rush. We need to get you settled in.’
Will wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.
‘Can you first explain what’s going on here? What happened to me?’
The curator’s mouth curved in a satisfied smile. ‘We completed the analysis of your substrate and created an interface to match. This is what is always done with new life forms. It took longer in your case because it wasn’t clear at first that your cells were engaged in processing content at a higher level of representation. It was only possible to discern that when they stopped changing long enough for us to model their contents. Do you see?’
She gestured at a nearby display case where a more complete explanation of the process writhed behind the glass like a nine-dimensional squid, reaching for his mind. Will avoided looking. He understood anyway.
By opening himself up to the planet, he hadn’t just provided tools for saving Ann, he’d inadvertently enabled the planet to finish figuring out his smart-cells at last. It had finally decided he wasn’t a threat.
‘Now that your substrate is understood, we’ve matched it and extended it,’ said the curator with glee. ‘Your substrate is merged with our own.’
In other words, his hierarchy of subminds now reached out into Snakepit. What constituted Will Kuno-Monet wasn’t very clear any more.
‘But that’s okay,’ said the curator. ‘You fit right in.’
The passageway shivered as a nugget of understanding broke free of its metaphoric restraints and unfurled in his head like a shared memory. The entire planet, he saw now, was backed and linked by a hierarchical computing substrate built up from the molecular level. Cellular agents operated as processor nodes much like his own smart-cells, forming a mesh network that reached down through the world’s crust almost to its mantle. This place wasn’t just a habitat for organic life. The amount of virtual room it contained dwarfed the physical space it held by several orders of magnitude. Will struggled for breath as the scale of the system came home to him.
‘Now that it’s clear you aren’t an infection, we’re accommodating you rather than dismembering you,’ said the curator. ‘Things are so much nicer that way, wouldn’t you say?’
Will blinked as his field of view widened again. The entire gestalt pseudo-organism around him operated as a kind of all-purpose life-support. It kept the tunnels, and everything in them, intact. It adapted to meet the needs of whatever resided there. It removed systemic threats, co-opting their mechanisms for future use and abandoning its own obsolete tools just as readily.
This wasn’t just a habitable world. It was a cellular-scale terraforming system – a machine for populating entire galaxies. Drop a fragment of tunnel root on a dead world and the habitat would rebuild itself from scratch.
And that was exactly what happened on this planet, the world explained. Snakepit was founded, like countless worlds before it, as part of a grand project to unify and foster life. But the Founders who engineered Snakepit never came back to populate their own creation as expected. Knowledge of them was lost, but the biosphere carried on regardless, ready to nurture whomever it found.
Will gasped in understanding as he saw how wrong he’d been. When he’d first encountered Snakepit’s technology he’d assumed foul play, but now that the mechanisms which drove it were laid out, he saw only kindness. The world’s entire purpose was to encourage life, to merge with it and shape itself to life’s whim. Snakepit was an ancient, open-access Eden, adrift in the universe and waiting to love someone.
It had struck at human colonies, he saw, only because humans had goaded it. They’d damaged the surface on purpose and left false trails for it to follow. Humanity had woken the planet’s instinct to understand and adapt to threats. For all their tinkering with victims, the Nem swarms constituted nothing more than acts of reflexive self-defence. And, if used wisely, that same defensive force would serve to protect all humanity from whatever dangers the universe might have to offer. More than th
at, the planet wanted to protect them. It felt lonely and incomplete without someone to look after.
Will couldn’t argue with the beauty of this vision but something about it disturbed him. What had happened to the Founders? With the Transcended active in this part of space, he could hazard a guess, but why had no information about the race who had designed this place been left behind? Will knew he was still missing something but it was impossible to think clearly with the planet sticking its fingers into his mind.
He forced himself to focus. He had work to do. Ann still needed his help.
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘No more memory dumps. I’m still adjusting. I have a friend and she needs help.’
‘Oh, that thing!’ said the curator cheerfully. ‘She’s just down here. This way, please.’ She gestured eagerly.
The curator led him out of the passageway in an impossible direction. Will suddenly found himself standing at the threshold of an operating theatre of sorts – a confused mixture of virtual medical displays and mouldering historic architecture.
Ann’s body floated in the air in front of him at the centre of great tiled hall with a vaulted ceiling. She was completely visible to him in a way that normal human sight could never have encompassed. Data splayed out in the space around her – diagrams upon diagrams, updating in real-time – a body teased apart into its component proteins like a schematic for a starship. The model of her ran so deep that it was her.
‘Thank you for your supporting texts,’ said the curator. ‘They’ve been very useful. She makes so much more sense now. Tell me, does she need any modifications or improvements while she’s in here? Gills, for instance? Eyes on her hands? They’d be very useful. Just imagine the manual precision she’d attain.’
