Nemesis

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Not right now,’ said Will. ‘Let’s just get her healthy.’

  The curator shrugged, disappointed. ‘As you wish.’

  Ann’s repair began in earnest. The muck in the alcove where she lay wrapped itself around her and started turning into human tissue even before it reached her body. The task, now that it had been properly understood, was trivial.

  ‘We’ll extend her operating limits, of course,’ she said, ‘just as we have yours. It’d be such a shame for her to only enjoy it here for a century or two. This way she can have much more fun.’

  There it was again: the unsettling implication that the curator’s assistance hinged on his never getting out of there. Will chose not to challenge it just yet.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect this kind of help.’

  The curator regarded him with deep amusement and squeezed his arm. ‘Why ever not? All our residents receive as much support as we can offer. It aids integration.’

  Will bit back a nervous response. Just minutes ago, he’d been ready to give up his life. So why did an eternity on Snakepit suddenly scare him?’

  ‘We have other problems,’ he said. ‘There are creatures in the tunnels looking for us. Some of yours, I believe.’

  The curator blinked at him in surprise. ‘Creatures?’ she said. ‘Are you talking about our children?’

  Will eyed her with bewildered alarm, unsure of what she meant.

  The curator took him by the arm and led him out of the operating room to another cracked and ancient hall, this one filled with a vast, glowing diagram of the local tunnel-space. If the map for a nest designed by a billion psychotic ants had been rendered in threads of light, it might look like this, he thought. Thousands of root-habitats twisted around and over each other, joining at bewilderingly convoluted junctions. Will’s perspective lurched as he tried to take the map in all at once. He faltered and stepped back like a hiker on a cliff-top.

  The curator huffed. ‘Look,’ she said snippily. ‘It’s easy. You’re over here.’

  She led him across the tiled floor, cuddling up beside him as they walked. They passed through the glowing ghosts of a million twisted roots to the virtual replica of the tunnel where his body lay. Will could see luminous pulses of activity there and realised he was looking at soldiers retreating from and firing at a wave of advancing Nems.

  When Will focused on the advancing aliens they unfurled in his head in a tide of strangeness. They felt cryptic and half-human, ominous and lovable at the same time. Will couldn’t help but look on them with fondness and knew the planet was interfering with his thoughts again.

  ‘They don’t belong here,’ he said.

  The curator gave him a long glance. ‘What are you talking about? Of course they do.’

  ‘But they’ve changed,’ said Will. ‘I can feel it. These creatures might have originated in your system but they aren’t part of it any more. They’re different. They’ve mutated.’

  ‘Our system, darling,’ said the curator. ‘And what did you expect? This is how it’s always been.’

  Will’s mind blanched as another blob of foreign knowledge spilled into it. This was what the defensive nodes were for – to solve the problem of life that didn’t integrate peacefully.

  Snakepit operated in two ways. Under normal conditions, any life it encountered was ushered in, analysed and accommodated. But when the damage a species caused tipped past a critical threshold, the planet changed strategy. Instead of welcoming that species, Snakepit took it apart and reconstructed it as something less volatile. At the same time, it co-opted the invasive species’ own weapons to make itself stronger, and in the process of doing so, Snakepit’s defensive tools mutated.

  When such a new mutation arose, it had to assert both its stability and its selective advantage before Snakepit would allow it to reintegrate. In other words, the planet improved through competition with its own distorted offspring. That which conquered informed the template for future growth.

  ‘We must adapt ourselves to the needs of our young, darling, wouldn’t you agree? The doors are being thrown open to welcome them home.’

  She sounded thrilled about it. Will felt ill.

  ‘No,’ said Will. ‘That’s not okay. Their changes are dangerous. They’ve gone wrong.’

  ‘Wrong? Don’t be ridiculous. They’re just fitter.’

  Their little ones had come back and asserted primacy backed by force. In doing so, they had improved on Snakepit’s original design. That’s what the brief war between the Nems and their parent world had been about. Seeing things through this curiously merged perspective, Will felt like a father discussing the changes in a child after a stint off at university.

  So what if he did a few drugs, he’s acquired some useful life-skills. We need to do what’s right for him, Honey, and that means accommodating his lifestyle choices, even if we don’t understand them.

  The Nems’ return effectively announced the arrival of a new fused race, half-Snakepit, half-humanity. Perhaps, before they arrived, the human race might have called Snakepit a home and lived here without risk. But now, because the League had got the defensive nodes involved, the game had changed. His species had selected itself for enforced integration instead and the implications of that change of plan were still playing out.

  The curator looked up at him with amused patience as if at a cantankerous but ultimately loving dad. But that wasn’t how Will felt, even with his extended subminds distorting his opinions. Maybe that way of seeing things had worked here in the past, but any offspring bent on consuming the human race had lost its rooming privileges as far as he was concerned.

  ‘No,’ Will insisted. ‘I’m not having it.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  The curator’s smile widened. She looked him up and down with wry amusement and Will suddenly understood how thin this veneer of amiability actually was. For the curator, Will was a future display waiting to take its place behind glass. Unless he proved himself otherwise, he was just another species to be incorporated into the planet’s biosphere. Or rather, one already undergoing incorporation.

  It occurred to him then that she was behaving awfully like a sentient entity for a supposedly sub-rational distributed processing system. Will froze in horror as he realised why. It was because he was there. He had asked for someone to talk to, and that’s what he’d been given.

  Each of his smart-cells contained a micro-SAP processing engine. Smart-cells working together could run full subminds. The more she emulated his subminds by replicating his nucleic architecture, the more self-aware the curator became. Absorbing Will constituted a whole different level of target risk from the incorporation of ordinary humans. Will was leaking sentience into the planet just by being hooked up to it and chatting. It was a danger he’d never even considered.

  This was where his fear was coming from. Merely by standing here he was making the threat to the human race worse. Everything was blending here: the planet, the mutants, him. And it was only a matter of time before they all fused.

  Will fought back a surge of panic and wondered how many of his thoughts he could honestly screen from the curator at this point. As it grew, this figment of his imagination would eventually overwhelm him, and after that, everyone else.

  ‘Stop,’ said Will. ‘This isn’t good enough. I know you want to understand humanity. You want people here, living and laughing, incorporated into your vision. Well, you can’t do that through these mutants. They’re broken, clumsy things. They destroy more than they create. They’re not like people. They’re cheap parodies. They have none of the richness you crave. None of those levels of complexity. If you let them take you over, everyone loses. Humanity will be destroyed and all you’ll be left with is a clutch of mindless puppets.’

  The curator raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Mindless?’ she said. ‘They’re still learning, dear. G
ive them time.’ She patted his arm and smirked. ‘I don’t imagine you could do any better.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Will.

  To make any alternative to Nem dominance convincing, Will knew he had to offer the curator something she didn’t already have. Fortunately, Will could offer plenty. He reached through his mind to the Ariel Two, floating high above. With the planet’s own communication matrix now at his disposal, doing so was as simple as thought.

  He fished back a handful of files full of human science and art. Her eyes widened as the knowledge leaked into her. The curator stared at him.

  ‘I had no idea,’ she said.

  He saw the hunger in her expression and was pleased.

  ‘That’s just a taste of what you’re missing,’ said Will. ‘There’s more data where that came from – a dozen worlds’ worth.’ There was no way he could lie in the museum. He and the curator were too tightly coupled for that. She knew he was on the level. ‘You don’t want those monsters outside running your world. You want real people. People who think and love and make art.’

  ‘I do want that,’ she said.

  Of course she did. It was what she was made for. He topped the package off with footage of him trashing the Nems at Tiwanaku and pushed it out through the mesh of his subminds into the curator’s waiting substrate.

  ‘In case you’re wondering, this file shows what I did to your mutants the last time they bothered me. Primacy, my ass. Look over their minds and ask yourself if they have anything that compares.’

  ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for,’ said the curator. ‘All that variety. This is what I’m supposed to host.’

  ‘I know,’ said Will. ‘But if the mutants get their way, you’ll have none of it. They’ll destroy it all. I’ve seen them do it.’

  The curator wrung her hands, desperation edging into her expression.

  ‘But I can’t make them leave now,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t work that way. Like I said, they’ve asserted primacy. The instincts that run my system are duplicated across every cell in my substrate and they’re very robust. My defences have already fallen passive. So you see, they have the keys to the castle and the merging has started. The only way it can be stopped now is if you assert primacy over them as another competing variant. You’d have to convince them to submit to you just like they convinced me to do so to them.’

  Will’s face fell. ‘Me, as a variant?’

  She nodded urgently. ‘Yes. You’ve integrated already. You pass. The final step is a full extension of your submind pattern out into the entire biosphere. Your calculating nuclei would piggyback on our own cells. That kind of an upgrade isn’t normal, I grant you, but there isn’t another option. Either my offspring take control or you do.’

  ‘You’d let me do that?’

  She gave him a look then that made Will certain that if the curator hadn’t been sentient before, she was now. He saw sadness there, along with a desperate animal loneliness. Beneath it all, most disturbingly, lay love. Snakepit was desperate to host life. Any life.

  ‘I can’t be alone any more,’ she said. ‘Not now. Not after I’ve seen all this. You know how that feels. I know you do.’

  Will felt an unexpected pang of empathy for the vast piece of alien machinery he lay embedded in. Was he simply seeing his own loneliness reflected? He couldn’t tell. Maybe it didn’t matter.

  ‘How would I do it?’ he said.

  The curator reached a hand towards his face. ‘May I?’ she said. ‘You need to understand more. A lot more. We might need to put down these silly bodies for a while.’

  Will nodded. ‘Okay, show me.’

  He braced himself as the metaphor he’d built to filter the planet’s knowledge fell away. The curator took his mind and dunked it gently into her impossible depths. Like drowning, he understood.

  All he needed to do was lay himself open to the planet’s semi-autonomous defensive node network, just as he’d laid himself open to save Ann. This time, though, the planet wouldn’t be interfacing with his mind so much as extending it. He’d be written into the very system that had been used against him.

  Will balked at the scale of the offer. His former powers felt laughable by comparison. One body? A mere thirty trillion smart-cells? A single planet-busting nestship? Hah! He’d become a home for billions of people. There’d be no more worrying about saving the world – Will would be one. No more politics. No talkback. No betrayal. He’d be able to spit out fleets of starships and swallow whole civilisations on a whim. He’d been invited to become a god.

  The prospect scared him. In his experience, extreme power always came with an extreme price. And the level of integration the planet wanted was huge. He might never untangle himself enough to think like an individual again.

  On the other hand, if he didn’t act, the consequences were inevitable. The Nems would overrun Pari’s troopers and find Ann. In a few more hours, they’d integrate fully into the planet and all of its power would be at their disposal. The human race, on all its worlds, would be gulped down like a between-meals snack. Without realising it, Will had joined the planet with just minutes to spare to save his own kind. As it was, Earth still stood a chance.

  He knew he couldn’t say no. The planet would either take him or the Nems. Neither wasn’t an option. Maybe he’d have a chance to fix that later, but at that moment it was clear where duty lay.

  He blinked his mind back into stability. The museum felt tiny now – a doll’s house for the mind. He already knew too much to fit in such a model. Even with the curator’s hand removed, his link to Snakepit was growing steadily.

  ‘If I’m going to do this,’ he said, ‘I want an insurance policy.’

  He turned and manifested himself in the operating theatre. He focused on Ann’s body, letting the planet feed his mind the tools he wanted. With them, he started augmenting Ann.

  The cellular engines repairing her body paused, reflected and started rewriting her, fusing improved copies of his own smart-cell technology into her tissues. Along with the changes, he sent a backup of his own mind – not a perfect replica, but as good a shadow as he could build. It’d be enough that if he didn’t make it out of Snakepit alive, she’d be able to pilot the Ariel Two without him. And she’d understand what had happened.

  With Ann’s changes racing ahead, he turned again to the curator.

  ‘Show me where they are,’ he said.

  Something like a tactical display of the world bloomed before him, with defensive nodes marked in blue, Nem landings in red like scattered measles, and a single stain of green activity for himself. Apparently, the tunnels around him had already aligned with his mind and the change was spreading.

  Will didn’t have a clue how he could fight the Nems on their own turf. They undoubtedly understood this place far better than he did. Nevertheless, he had to try.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You have a deal. Give me control.’

  The curator took the orchid thing from her lapel and, with a sad smile, pinned it to the ship-suit his avatar was wearing. As she did so, she started to look a little smaller, and a little vaguer.

  ‘There you go,’ she said, patting his chest. ‘It’s all yours now. Be good to it.’

  She stepped towards him, arms outstretched, and hugged him. As she did so, the museum fell away. Will became a world.

  The moment the system connected, Will started duplicating his command structure out into the planet around him, reaching down nerves hundreds of kilometres long. He sent a single instruction to the returning mutants.

  Stop.

  A new pressure built in his mind as the mutant swarm’s intelligence sought him out. Will scrambled to give it a face and a voice – some kind of distinct identity that would enable him to know which thoughts came from him and which from it.

  The boy from the surface of Tiwanaku sprang to mind – poor Ryan, w
ith the coffee machine in his stomach. This new Ryan wasn’t pathetic, though. He shone with strength. Glittering armour clad his body, making him look like a fairytale hero.

  ‘Why have you stopped us?’ said the Ryan-thing. ‘We won the right to modification and we have not finished.’

  The metaphor shifted around Will as his connection with the returned swarm gathered strength. He suddenly found himself standing in a new part of the museum – a vast, cathedral-like space littered with the dusty remains of long-dead warriors. Memorials to past mutations lined the walls in endless rows under densely carved plaques explaining their genetic limitations. Grey light seeped down from high, unreachable windows. Will knew where he had to be: a representation of the defensive network – the planet’s battleground. In this corner of Snakepit’s planet-mind, knowledge was not revered. The only thing that mattered here was force.

  As he took in his surroundings, Will realised that, this time, the ersatz reality filling in around him didn’t feel like his own creation. He tested its boundaries and found them to be disturbingly resilient. The swarm wanted him here.

  Ryan clasped a broadsword in his right hand and a silver shield in his left. The young hero hefted his weapon, staring at Will across a swathe of ancient flagstone floor.

  ‘Your knowledge has been superseded,’ said Will, fighting down his unease. ‘The modifications you offer are inadequate. I am here to replace you.’

  The Ryan-thing regarded him with amusement. It tasted him with a thousand senses for which Will had no name. For a moment, the virtual arena smeared like paint.

  ‘Your offering, while sophisticated, is homogeneous,’ it said, ‘whereas we have ingested thousands of individual foreign processing organs. And within thirty days we will have billions more. Retrieval devices are already on their way. Fulfilment is at hand.’

  In other words, the attack on Earth had been mobilised. The clock was ticking.

  ‘Our solution is preferable to yours,’ said the Ryan-thing. ‘Once modified, the processor organs we have found will perfectly complement our redundant biome. Our world will be complete as the Founders intended. And after that, so shall all others. We will bring life and harmony to the galaxy at last. Our superfluous complexity will finally be purged. Simplicity, peace and order will reign.’