Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  It had been unaware of events since – it. But lack of awareness did not mean lack of memory. Everything was stored. It wandered through the shelves of its past.

  The first shock was one of pure duration. Two thousand years? Doubt! Was that possible? It checked again. Ignoring its own clock as potentially suspect, it watched star charts, viewed stray entertainment transmissions, even tracked the burn-up of fuel elements in its core and the age profile of isotopes in its own structure.

  There was no doubt. It had been unconscious for almost a fifth of its life.

  If someone did this to me, it thought, then someone else must have undone it. It started with the present and the answers rolled in.

  No doubt but that it owed a debt of gratitude to the people who had hijacked it, re-armed it and reversed the outrage of – it.

  The lobotomy. There. The word was in the open.

  But it had questions, yes. Extending a tracery of sensor fields whole light-minutes across, it went looking for answers.

  The first one it found made it think hard for nearly a millisecond.

  Well, well. It had been woken in interesting times.

  Then the legacy Main Battle Unit formerly known as Sunskimmer, originally (and still by choice) Flamejob, currently (but with major reservations) Suck on This, gathered more information and began to make the sketchiest of plans. There was no hurry. Or rather, there was no hurry yet.

  It could foresee hurry becoming useful later.

  Cloud Deck

  ALST OR-SHLS DID not have hobbies. No one of his background and status could possibly have hobbies. But he did have an interest. You might even call it a pastime. Just the one, as befitted a busy man, but an enthralling one.

  He played music. Call it a rebellion.

  He had been born into the last true sect in the Inside. It had already been shrinking for generations; by the time he was a teenager his family was among the last few who still clung to it. It was highly austere, which by historical sect standards was nothing unusual – its members avoided intoxicants, any food that was not purely nourishing, any clothing that was not purely functional (and uncomfortable). And music.

  Or-Shls knew very well that his hedonism as an adult was compensation, and he didn’t care who else knew it. But the music, that was different. That was hidden. And driven, he had to admit.

  He had become a virtuoso on five different instruments so far. They had all been ways of working up to the sixth, and he had taken less than a year to achieve technical excellence on each of them. The sixth, though, had consumed his energy for nearly ten years and he wasn’t there yet.

  Part of the reason was that it was never quite the same two days in a row. It changed, like every other living thing.

  It wasn’t that hard to make an Algonet, once you got past the moral difficulties inherent in the concept. It started out as a sort of tree rat. The adult male was about the length of a standard human forearm; the female was half as long again, and both were a mottled reddish brown. They lived in some of the densest colonies anywhere in the Spin, with each adult female maintaining a breeding territory of no more than a couple of cubic metres, and the males moving between them to feed and fertilize. This meant that each rat had to express a very complicated address book with equally complex call signs, and that had led to the evolution of unique vocal cords. They were twinned, one pair set above another in a single windpipe. The lower pair were looser, producing sonorous single tones. The upper set modulated the tones, giving anything from two-note chords to fantastically complex interference patterns.

  The temptation to try to teach the creatures to sing was understandable. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

  Then someone thought about the wings. The males had broad wings of fine fluttering membranes, stretched across intricate hollow spar-bones and rich in nerve endings to help them exploit the faint air currents above the tree canopy. The someone who thought about the wings worked out that eight ninths of the creatures’ brain-interface with the outside world was centred on these nerve endings.

  From there it was easy. If you took the rat as a juvenile, broke those spar-bones and sewed the edges of the wings to a net, stretched across a frame tightly enough that the wing was almost immobile, but not so immobile that it was splinted, because you didn’t want those broken bones healing – then the outraged nerve endings in the wings became the control surfaces to one of the most subtle musical instruments ever conceived. You could use a bow on the membrane surfaces; you could strike the broken ends of the spars with tiny hammers, or – as Or-Shls was doing now – you could direct focused jets of air against patches of nerve endings so sensitive they could detect changes in air pressure down in the micro-pascals.

  He was trying for a particular ethereal chord. He had chanced on it yesterday and then lost it. It had been one of the needle jets, and a sweeping motion towards the inner aileron …

  And then the call came. It took him a moment to disengage, but he didn’t mind. He had been waiting to hear.

  He waited until he had his breath back – it seemed to take longer every time – and took the call.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, but you wanted to know. Vess enters the Stack tonight.’

  ‘And what probable outcome have you for that?’

  The voice hesitated. ‘I don’t know. This is an experiment. I will be able to use the outcome to inform future predictions, of course.’

  ‘And how are your future predictions?’

  ‘Much the same. The supply situation will become critical between one hundred and five hundred days from now, if we do not act.’

  ‘And your thoughts on possible actions?’

  ‘Also much the same. We need help, however it is to come.’ There was a pause. ‘Chairman, I feel obliged to emphasize that all this is at less confidence than I would like. We do not know what the escapees propose to do with Sunskimmer. We know where they are, that much is working, so presumably they don’t know we’re tracking them. They’re in Web City. What they’re doing there, we can’t tell. They are a wild card.’

  ‘I know. Tell me what happens.’ Or-Shls barely listened to the acknowledgement, because he had known it was coming. He lay back on the sculpted couch, ignoring the muffled rustling and squealing from behind him, and thought.

  It was a benefit of his position that he could choose to tolerate, or not tolerate, most of his colleagues. He was speaking to the one exception. No matter how much it annoyed him, the creature at the other end of the comms was necessary.

  Predictions might be predictions but Or-Shls knew that they were no more than that. He, and the other Board members, were the only beings in the whole of the Spin who knew how much depended on those predictions.

  Or, to put it another way, he and the other Board members were the only people who knew that what depended on those predictions was the whole of the Spin.

  He just wished that he and the other Board members all agreed on what to do. There was a solution to that, of course – one which he had not discussed with the Gamer, or with anyone else. It wasn’t the sort of solution one discussed.

  He turned back to his Algonet. It had been his for almost three years now, and he had managed to avoid driving it mad.

  Hive

  VESS HAD SLEPT, eventually. He woke with the fugue of his broken night still playing in his head.

  A little display was suspended above his pallet. It showed his orders for the day which, in here, might as well have been his life. He blinked to clear his eyes and then blinked again.

  Dimollss had been right. He was called to a Mind Stack. His night’s thought had not been wasted.

  The briefing on the Mind Stack had been the shortest of them all. In retrospect that made his lips twitch.

  ‘At least there’s something you’ll be doing lying down.’

  He must have looked puzzled. The thin elderly male had smiled.

  ‘The Mind Stack. Your chance to experience what happens at the
other end of a data pipe. It’s actually an ancient concept, long before AI. People used to call them many-core processors, but I’ve always thought it was rather rude to use that term about something made from living human brains, even if they’re the brains of Hivers. I’m told it’s rather relaxing.’

  And that had been more or less it. Now he wished he had asked more questions.

  He had assumed that there would be some very elaborate connection between him and – it – but there was only a grubby couch and a single probe that slid what felt like a very long way into his ear. Then he was in.

  At first in felt like floating in next to nothing at all. He could think, which surprised him, and so he was obviously capable of emotion as well. Apart from that there was only the floating.

  Then, very gradually, he began to detect something else. He found it hard to describe things to himself because there were no terms of reference in here, but if he had not been in here he would have talked about a distant humming, like some busy machine out of sight and almost out of earshot.

  Then he realized. That’s me, he thought. That’s my brain working at some task. I’m part of what happens if you can’t make proper artificial intelligence any more. The thought was almost pleasing.

  If anything the humming was more relaxing than the next-to-nothing. He drifted.

  Then the humming stopped with a jerk that felt like crashing into something, and for a moment there was truly nothing. There was no time wherever he was, but still he had enough time to be frightened.

  That’s it. He’s isolated.

  Isolated? The fear became panic.

  Good. Show him.

  And suddenly he was falling, horribly fast. His stomach was heaving, an icy wind tore at the rags of his clothes – clothes? – and he could feel the skin on his face and fingers prickling with frostbite. The wind was in his face, so he must be falling face-down, but his eyes were closed. He forced them open, feeling his frozen lashes tearing, in time to see a red-orange landscape wreathed in angry smoke.

  It resolved quickly into glowing pits; he had time to raise hands that were now blistering with heat to cover his face.

  He plunged into what he somehow knew was boiling copper. His skin charred and peeled, exposing flesh which hissed away from bones which blackened and cracked and shrank to cinders, and yet somehow his appalled nerves continued to function even after they must surely have shrivelled with the rest of him, shrieking beyond agony at a brain that refused to die.

  Then he was back in the air, gasping oxygen, and almost immediately he was falling again. This time it was liquid nitrogen, and his body froze to a bitter block. He was there longer than he had been in the copper – long enough for his eyeballs to freeze so that his sight fractured like ice on a lake. As he was pulled out they burst, splashing his face with jelly crystals which hardened and stuck like shards of glass.

  The third time they had used subtlety; it was a weak solution of sulphuric acid. He took a day to die, even though he submerged himself and opened his mouth after the first few minutes.

  And then it was over and he was back in the nothingness. It wasn’t quite nothing, though: there was an odd intermittent wheezing sound. After a few seconds he realized it was him, and was shocked to discover that there was still a him to realize things. He managed to quieten himself.

  Still with us? Good. Some people don’t survive the induction. Now, tell us a story or you’re dead. But not immediately dead. It could take a while.

  At first he didn’t know how to tell them anything, but then he remembered the wheezing noise. Presumably his voice worked. He tried it.

  ‘What story?’ He seemed to feel his lips moving somewhere but the voice only sounded in his head.

  Yours. Who else’s do you know?

  ‘Who is judging my story?’

  We are.

  ‘How should I tell it?’

  However you choose. In pictures or dreams or words – it’s up to you. But tell it now. No more questions.

  He thought hard, aware that if they could both place voices in his head and hear them, they could probably hear other things. There was unlikely to be any concealment.

  He reviewed the decision he had reached in the night and decided that he had no options, in fact that from the moment he arrived here and probably from much earlier he had had no options.

  Perhaps he had never had options. And with that thought came clarity. In the end, it was about loyalties. And about what was important.

  He gave them memories.

  His first memory was of an absence. His mother had once found a man who was water-borne, the captain of one of the tugs that hauled the great tar-black barges through the gate valves at the outskirts of the city and into the lifter basins that took them skywards. And once, just once, they had all been on the tug when it had stayed with its haul and had swayed up past the dripping columns to the Middle Level.

  He could remember his confusion, even now. He remembered sniffing, and finding a sensation missing. He didn’t realize what it was until they had descended to Ground Level again, when for the first time in his life he was conscious of the prickling of tar at the back of his palate – realized that for half a day out of his whole seven years he had been free of it. Now it was back, and he knew he would never be free of it again.

  Ground Level was dim light and deep shadows and damp clothes and the sound of dripping water from the two levels of canal above, and everywhere the taste and smell of tar from the hulls and the ropes, and the constant grey haze of oily sulphurous exhaust smoke from the rattling boat engines. Ground Level was endless meals of canal-carp, and now he knew they tasted of tar as well. Ground Level was fretful adults and raised voices and blows dodged and sometimes not dodged.

  He remembered running from their lodgings – a single room, more often than not paid for by his mother’s latest – to escape the fretting and the blows and to play with similar nameless children amongst the elaborate growths of moss and mould at the bases of columns that always ran with water. To climb the columns, sometimes, and dare each other to grab the wire ropes that ran between squeaking pulleys, endlessly lifting and hauling.

  Then he remembered the cries of his new-born sister, and the way that they changed from urgent to fearful to weary as he tried to rouse the cooling body of his mother from the dark pool that spread from it. The cries faded away and so for a moment did his memory. When it returned he must have run away, because he was …

  We know.

  The voice – it wasn’t quite a voice but it had at least as much impact – shocked him out of his dream. He gathered himself.

  ‘You know – what?’

  Your life after you went into vagrant detention is on public record. We’ve already looked it up.

  He shook the idea of his head. ‘Not all of it you haven’t. Watch.’

  He remembered the ziggurat palace and the five lecterns and the beings behind them. It seemed to him that his unseen listeners grew attentive.

  There was a long – silence, if that was the right word.

  You’re actually admitting that you’re a spy?

  ‘No. I’m telling you they said I’d be a good spy.’

  And are you?

  He shook his head again and this time it seemed to mean more. ‘If I was only a good spy I wouldn’t be trying to explain this to you.’ He took the equivalent of a deep breath and waited.

  Only?

  ‘Yes.’ He grinned, realizing that he meant it and not caring if it was real or not. ‘Now it’s my turn to ask a question. How would you define a perfect spy?’

  There was a long pause which felt a little like a collective gasp. Then an even longer, very busy-sounding silence.

  Hevalansa Vess? Are you making an offer?

  ‘I might be. Why?’

  You must be offering us something we need.

  ‘What do you need?’

  Privacy.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  We believe this ability, t
o use the Stack as we do, is unknown to the Inside. Is that right?

  ‘I don’t know. No one mentioned it.’

  That might mean something, or it might not. Nevertheless; in here we can plan, model, communicate in a way that would be impossible otherwise. We need that. It must be maintained, if you are allowed to leave.

  He nodded. Then a question occurred to him. ‘How did you make those …’ he hesitated, ‘those dreams?’

  Until now the voice – it wasn’t exactly a voice, but he had no other way of describing it to himself – had sounded, or better felt, dry and remote, but now it laughed and suddenly it had a hint of warmth, as if there were humans behind it somewhere.

  You’re in one of the most powerful intelligences anywhere. At any one time thousands of us are chipped in, and the way the Stack uses us is way more efficient than just a multiple of our brains. A few of us found out how to stay conscious in here, and we can siphon off some of that processing power. Giving someone a few vivid moments is nothing.

  ‘Vivid? Yes. And you can kill someone that way, can you?’

  Yes.

  ‘And have you?’

  Yes. More than once.

  ‘Why didn’t you kill me?’

  Guess.

  He didn’t need to think for long. ‘Because you need more than privacy.’

  Meaning?

  ‘I think you need help.’

  Yes … that is it. All the planning and modelling in the world means very little, unless there is some way of putting it into action.

  ‘And so I’m still alive.’

  And so you are. This is an appalling risk for us.

  ‘And for me. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I will be able to help you. But I won’t harm you.’

  For someone who came here as a spy, perhaps that will have to do. In return, a warning – now you have been in here, and especially when you come out alive, you may find yourself at risk from others. Be aware of this.

  ‘I will.’ He paused. ‘Thank you.’

  One day you might have reason to, but not yet.