We stepped out into cold, damp air. A short way off, a group of sheep looked up from their nibbling. The taxi rolled away and parked itself beside the few other cars. Two were old models and one newer, but still far from the first wash and wax of its history. Watched only by the sheep we descended a long concrete staircase and walked along a short corridor towards the door, which yielded to Augustine's palm and a few quiet words.
There were many unlit and disused rooms on the way through the warren, and no secretaries or administrative staff in evidence. In the reception areas the ubiquitous ring of comfortable chairs and workstations was deserted and silent, screens dusty. One was covered in old paper coffee cups, and beside it a neglected wastebin overflowed. We passed five locked and dark laboratories before coming to a glass airlock on the left labelled: DR. BILLINGHAM, DR. LURIA: MECHANO-ORGANICS. The lights were on inside and the figure of Dr. Billingham was visible as she turned towards us, hands stuffed into the pockets of her baggy cord dungarees.
“Morning,” she said.
As soon as I saw her, the question of why it had to be Augustine wearing the suit was answered. Billingham was very, very short, and stout enough to make me feel svelte. As she walked towards us she rolled gently like a coracle riding the swell, her brown eyes almost lost in the crinkles of her smiling. We shook hands, and the extreme shortness of her fingers and something about the shape of her face made me suspect that she had been conceived a dwarf, but treated in one of the early prenatal correction clinics to increase her size. The operation had been only a partial success.
“Good morning.”
“Hello.”
We made our greetings and she gave us the tour of the premises.
Dr. Billingham had the run of the first room and Augustine took up most of the second. Behind that there was a large environmentally controlled safe unit. Lula took up time asking questions and being intelligent, whilst I focused my attention on the safe since the lab was tidy and there was nothing much to see. The suit materials must be inside.
The lock on the safe was a Rank-Cervantes multiple alphanumeric job, rather old but secure enough considering the only way in here was through a host of other barriers infinitely tougher to crack. Briefly I thought it may have been booby-trapped, but it was Augustine's safe, not Roy's. As he, Lula, and Dr. Billingham bent together over a particularly fascinating piece of microcircuitry plan, I sauntered over and looked to see which of the keys were dirtiest and unused. Over the years I had seen a lot of passwords with Augustine and Roy, and knew them to be creatures of habit. For people who routinely dealt with complex mathematical problems they could barely remember any personal names or even the shortest numerical codes. Multiple and arcane passcode combinations would have stopped them as effectively as a blow on the head with a concrete block. This would be easy.
I reviewed the keypad and took a guess: PASSWORD. The lock flashed its red light. Not that one.
Try the oldest first, I thought.
HITHERE, I tapped.
The green light came on. The door opened silently; a ton of metal, concrete, and electronics on its greased tracks. At the bench the others continued talking. I went in, and the infrared sensor kindly put the lights on for me.
Most of the safe was empty. Along the right-hand wall a series of seven-by-seven tanks were racked, and from inside them a bright white light shone which I took for simulated daylight. I walked around to look inside, and there they were: Asian corporation Red Lucky's unlucky hybrid spawn. Record to date—killed five, maddened one, abandoned on the hillside to die like Oedipus for fulfilling their maker's prophecies all too well. Which made Augustine and Billingham the peasant shepherds of good heart who would nurture these things until they got the chance to kill their creators on the road. Much as I had no qualms about pure machines, it was difficult not to feel a primitive, bodily revulsion to the biomechanoids. Their synthesis of inert and living tissue seemed heretical and dangerous to the soul. And I wasn't even religious.
The first tank held a complete one. It looked very much like a medieval suit of armour at first glance, set up as if for display. There was even a helm with a closed faceguard of the same steely grey and impenetrable-looking materials as the rest. In fact, as I got closer, I could see that there were no openings in it at all. Its surface was smooth in places, like green-toned metal, and wrinkled and thick like heavy skin elsewhere. Where it looked most like a living object it was greener, and seemed to be filmed with a slick coat of mucus, although I realized that this was something being dripped onto it from a nozzle inside the tank—what for, I didn't know. The metallic portions were matte but subtly fashioned. They looked impermeable and flexible at once. The entire thing was about six and a half feet tall, not nearly as bulky as I had thought. It stood and looked blindly at me like a badly imagined rubber monster from a B-movie. Then again, that one was not powered up. Its tank controls showed it to be in full hibernation.
I moved along, and then involuntarily took a few very rapid steps backwards.
The second tank held something which looked exactly like the first one, but as I had moved towards the glass it had also moved. A tremor went through its whole structure as if it had just woken up from a light doze and spotted me. It was not the fact that it moved as much as the quality of the movement that made my own skin shudder. The ripple of nervous tension it had displayed was indescribably sensual and animalistic. The following motionlessness—so expected of machines—was even more unsettling. It was waiting.
I looked at it and it looked at me for a few seconds. I knew it was looking because I could feel its attention on me, although it was hard to explain why since objectively there was nothing about it to suggest anything of the kind. It had no eyes. Maybe its limbs were just a millimetre or two more braced than those of the sleeping suit? I waited and it did nothing. There was no way to get out of the tank from the inside. I hoped.
The other two tanks beyond that were a kind of abattoir of body parts. I was just edging towards them, past the gaze of the second suit, when I heard Augustine's voice.
“Aha, there you are! I didn't tell you the passwords, did I?”
“Not often,” I said. He seemed amused. Behind him Dr. Billingham was frowning. Lula grinned.
As we grouped together in front of the tanks, I watched the second suit. It hardly moved, but unmistakably it recognized Augustine and Billingham, and did not recognize Lula. Its attention wandered between us.
“Is it always this creepy?” I said.
“Creepy?” Augustine repeated, surprised. “I used to think so, but now it's rather like having a pet.”
“Uh-huh. But you can't interface with your cat,” I said. “Are you going to get it out?”
“Not that one. That's the one which is kept whole and linked up to the computers, the one we use for AI analysis. I can get some pieces out, though.” He moved along to the end tank and opened it up.
“Shouldn't you use gloves or something?” I said.
The helm he was lifting looked wet and dirty.
“Oh no, it absorbs dead skin cells and any other organic matter into a digestive layer just under the surface. We keep it in this solution just because it doesn't get outside enough to pick up food sufficient to keep it going. Very low on sugars, though—don't want it running amok.” He laughed. He held the headcovering out to me. I took it gently. It was heavy and warm with a freshly decapitated feeling. The covering goo was quickly absorbed and the surface hardened, but without drying out. It became skinlike, and tiny filaments which had been gummed flat suddenly sprang up, so soft I couldn't feel them as I ran my finger over them. Inside the cranial cavity I could see wires and metal components. I handed it on to Lula and took a more manageable glove. We moved out to the lab.
As Lula passed the awake suit, it turned its face very slightly towards her and tilted its head a fraction in a kind of double take or dawning recognition. I was going to say something, but Augustine took hold of my elbow.
“Now you regret not majoring in cellular technologies,” he said, “don't you?”
“Hardly.” I looked into the glove. It was tempting to put a hand in, but I could see the wrist jacks' gleaming points and didn't fancy their fang bite. “But I'd like to see how far you've got with the psyche analysis.”
“All in good time.” He was so pleased with himself. I knew he was holding something back, waiting to show me the big stuff. I smiled at him and leant up to kiss him. He squeezed me, arm around my shoulders. Happiness. This little lab, a bizarre project, time, and occasional interest from outsiders. It was all he wanted, the complete formula. I met his gaze, rich with fulfilment, and hoped my feeling of wistfulness did not show.
We sat together in Billingham's room with coffee and biscuits and examined the pieces in better light.
“It doesn't look like much of an armour,” I said, turning the stiff glove over in my hands. It was less than four centimetres thick and remarkably pliable.
“It has three-D PPT matrices inside it which stop most projectiles,” Dr. Billingham said. She cradled her coffee in both hands and seemed content to watch Lula and myself poke around at the stuff as she narrated. “And when it's active it can grow up to fifteen centimetres thick in less than a minute. It's spongiform, like a bone, you see. The filaments inside the core are soft when it's not in use. If you put it on, the microvoids between them fill up with air or a secretion from their internal walls. It's capable of holding internal pressure up to forty million kiloPascals. And—” she smiled in a way which made me think she had discovered the next part herself “—it's capable of distributing impact forces by retaining a degree of flexibility, so it can withstand external pressures, even very small-area ones, up to a thousand tons. There's a circulatory system which works in the same way to distribute heat from laser weapons or fire. It can cool itself enough to survive multiple direct hits for almost a minute.”
“And how does it cool and ventilate the person inside, usually?” Lula asked, placing the helm down carefully and watching its soft skirt mould slowly to the flat surface in a sluglike spreading.
“The direct skin contact makes it able to circulate coolant against its inner surface. Oxygen and carbon dioxide are circulated in the helm cavity under most normal circumstances, vented through the gill systems into the suit circulation, where they are recycled or dispersed through the outside layer into the atmosphere. One of the things we were hoping to adapt for space operation was the breathing. The suit processes waste carbon dioxide effectively and produces oxygen as well as burns it. It's tough trying to figure out the balance, though.” Dr. Billingham put her cup down, leaning forwards with interest. “But in atmospheric conditions it seems able to refine gases and process them to a very high degree of purity. It may be that even this version could last in a very thin atmosphere or in a gas giant. We don't really understand how it manages conversion so well, though. That's what I've just started working on. Augustine is the AI side. I get the biology.”
“Is that your speciality?” Lula asked. She had tucked her short red hair behind her ears and was leaning forwards, examining the glove I had laid down.
“I studied to be a geneticist originally,” Dr. Billingham said, sitting back with a biscuit. “And I did that for a few years, always looking towards the bioengineering field—nonhuman work.” She wriggled her shoulders in a movement of revulsion, almost unconsciously. “And then I moved away from zoologicals to plants instead, and spent a few years engineering pharmaceutical crops out in America. Finally I came back to do a sabbatical on biomechanoid technology, just for the interest, and then this project came up.” She shrugged and smiled. “I prefer to analyse things rather than make them myself. Try and make them work.”
Lula smiled at her in recognition of a kindred spirit.
“Are these suits alive, in your estimation?” I asked her.
She looked at me as though I had asked her if they danced the chacha. “They are living things,” she said, and then hesitated. “And the living tissues exist in a…a kind of dependent bond with the inorganic elements of the construction. They're also connected to the AI system, part neural, part silicon. It's so hard to say.” She lifted her hands and shrugged. “That's the central question of biomechanics, isn't it? Where does the life end and the machine begin?”
“So you don't think that pure machines have degrees of life?” I asked.
Augustine and Lula were listening carefully, but I got the sense from Dr. Billingham's crossed and uncrossed feet that I was being too intense and I leaned back quickly.
Dr. Billingham chewed her biscuit, swallowed it, and shrugged again.
“It's not my field,” she said. “I just don't know. Sometimes I think the suit is alive as, say, a skin culture; perhaps as much as one of the basic animals—a spider maybe, something like that. Other times it's more like a composite material, functional and responsive, but no more than a kind of fabric. Then again, together with the AI, I wouldn't like to meet it on a dark night.” She smiled. “Is your AI alive? A lot of people seem to think it ought not to be.”
“It's conscious and sentient,” I said, “I don't know about alive. In a technical sense it does fulfill the requirements of the definition, but perhaps it seems like I'm making a strange distinction.”
“Not a scientific distinction,” Lula said, frowning. “If flesh is what matters, then it isn't alive.” Her voice was scornful.
“It always has been,” I said, “in most minds.” I wanted to see where this would go. I was well aware of what Lula, Peaches, and Roy thought of 901, but for myself some doubts still remained. However, my attempt at stirring did not work and the conversation went no further.
“Is there a chance we could look at this one?” Lula pointed at the helm. She meant would Augustine show us the AI unit in operation.
“Sure.”
We left Billingham to get back to her cell cultures, and went into Augustine's area. He fussed at his terminal for a few moments as we gathered around. “I can show you how it works, sort of, but you can't really understand it through this.” He nodded his head at the large screen, now showing initiation sequences. “You have to have a direct interface to it. It uses part of your own neural networks to work properly. I can sim it on here, up to a point.”
“What?” I'd never heard of anything doing that before. I was immediately suspicious. “That sounds like some of those mind-control experiments from the bad old 2020s.”
“Oh no,” he said, “it's not like that. This is a more direct way of talking to you…it makes use of your instinctive reactions to augment its own operations. You still talk to it directly. It can't make you do things you don't want to do.”
I thought he sounded a little too blasé for my liking, and another stab of jealousy coursed under my heart.
A figure appeared on the screen, representative of the suit in operational mode. It looked quite different to the slack suits we had seen earlier. This was bulky and smooth-surfaced, semireflective. Bands of colour played across it as if it was under a shady canopy of leaves. It bent down and picked up something, and a bulky gun appeared in its hands.
“OK,” Augustine said, “when it has nothing, then it's just Armour. As soon as it gets anything it can use, it changes mode and becomes a different identity, different logics—Soldier.”
We watched the soldier on screen targeting imaginary enemies with a display of fire.
“Soldier's more aggressive,” he said. “Dedicated to whatever the objective is. Armour is protective and much more inclined towards strategic retreat and concealment. But, all the way through it, the prime objective is to remain an active unit, so it's very self-protecting.”
“Huh,” Lula said, peering at the readouts scrolling past in the lower portion of the screen. “Doesn't sound like any kind of army I know about. What happened to the cannon-fodder macho squaddie?”
“Wait.” Augustine ignored her. “Here now.”
Another soldier unit just l
ike the first appeared alongside it, and then another and another. As soon as the count passed three there was a subtle shifting of posture among the group.
“Now look, when there's four or more of them the mode changes again and they become Platoon. Well, that's what we called it, anyway. It doesn't have a name as such, but again a distinct change in behaviour.”
“How are you doing this? You've only got one suit,” I said.
“Just realtime replicating them inside the supporting AI subunit,” Lula rattled off under her breath. She was glued to the screen. “Does their whole attitude change?”
“In some respects. I think they search for an Alpha identity from among the available people and promote that person to be in charge, if they can't locate any news from higher up. But it's more like the four decide themselves what to do and how to achieve it. If you pump up the numbers—” he keyed something and suddenly thousands filled the screen like a swarm of dark green beetles “—then you get up to an Army; but without a central instruction from external command, they don't do anything. Although I haven't put them into many different conditions yet. Much more like squaddies.”
“That's nuts,” I said. “Shouldn't the soldier inside intervene? What happens if you suddenly change your mind and become a pacifist, but this hive mind is off on its own, still pursuing the central objective?”
“Well, I haven't got that far.” Augustine sat back and let Lula take control of the board. He shrugged and grinned. “Don't know.”
“And how much control over you does it have when you wear it?” I asked.
Lula shuffled the numbers on the screen, totally lost in reading the results. He and I were alone.
He snorted and looked down. “I've never really tested it at any kind of task other than lifting and walking. I've only put it on once, actually, for a few minutes. It took so long to get this far.” He rubbed the ports at his wrist. “Must have some nickel in the damn things; they itch like hell.”
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