by Alex Lamb
That was enough. The memories were too hard to bear and Will forced them from his mind. It was better to forget than live in pain. But oddly, as the rest of the impressions faded, the SAP puzzle did not. It lingered hard and bright in his mind’s eye, almost like the real thing.
Will scowled at it. It was more warped and convoluted by far than anything he’d solved on the Ariel, not so much a puzzle as a parody of one. It was the visual equivalent of those impossible problems one finds oneself trying to unravel in dreams. With a surge of self-disgust, Will tried to dispel the image again. He found he couldn’t.
Gradually, he began to entertain the idea that the thing might actually be real. It was a strange notion, seductive and dreadful at the same time. He badly wanted the SAP to exist because that meant the Earthers had failed. Maybe Earther surgeons had botched the removal of his interface. Or perhaps new cells had grown across the fragments of it they’d left behind to install his nerve wires.
However, the more pragmatic side of him knew that in all likelihood the presence of the vision simply meant that madness was finally claiming him completely. His explanations for the program’s presence were simply not plausible, no matter how charming they might be. They were the ramblings of a deluded, broken mind.
Then a new thought came to him, certain as stone. The program is real.
Will recognised the flavour of that idea immediately. It belonged to the Transcended.
Somehow, they were still with him.
He sat bolt upright. As he did so, the SAP took on solidity in his mind’s eye. Will stared inwardly at it in awe. The program was literally thousands of times as dense as the other puzzles the Transcended had shown him.
He began to doubt his sanity all over again. A system this vast wouldn’t be decipherable even given a lifetime of study. Why would the Transcended bother to present him with a puzzle he could never solve? He had to be imagining it. If his mind could produce a hallucination as crystalline as this one, convincing himself he’d heard the voice of his alien benefactors was a trivial act of madness by comparison. No doubt the illusion came complete with a suite of equally impossible senses that he was supposed to look through.
But when he glanced across the mad tangle of associations to the consciousness aperture, he stopped cold. The sense mapping was exactly human. In fact, it was cleaner than that. It was the mapping for a roboteer.
More disturbing still was the fact that the aperture was coursing with tiny, twinkling lights almost too small for the eye to see. The program was already running …
He glanced back across the massive structure in confusion. As he did so, his mind’s eye came to rest upon a second shape hidden between the silken corrugations of the memory trees. It was a second program, small but deeply cryptic, keyed invisibly into the primary recall trunks – a program designed to tracelessly insert false memories.
Will scrabbled at the cell floor with both hands. This was no ordinary SAP program. He was looking at himself, complete with Transcended invader.
Will shook his head. How could it be him? He wasn’t a program. No one had built his brain. Yet who was to say a human mind couldn’t be represented as a SAP? He might be looking at a translation of sorts. In fact, he was hard pressed to imagine anything else it could be.
With understanding making his face and fingers tingle, Will considered the overall shape of the program again. It was certainly riotous enough to be a natural system. It was crammed with improbable connections that were nonetheless beautiful in their design. He zoomed in on the core consciousness loop. It was lined with peculiar Gordian kinks and staggered references to the memory structures. Pulses of bright activation coursed down its length in waves. Was this how evolution had passed the Brache limit?
He tried an experiment – a hefty piece of mental arithmetic. He thought up two random three-digit numbers and tried to multiply them together in his head. The kinks lit up like Christmas trees.
It was him. For the first time in weeks, Will laughed out loud. It was incredible, even if it was nothing more than an illusion. The Transcended had granted him a window into his own soul. He pulled his imagination back to admire the structure in its entirety.
Then he noticed the tools.
Arrayed around the mighty SAP in great marching banks were utility programs like the ones Will used to modify his robots’ minds. Only these were utilities he’d never seen before. They were fiendishly complex, multipronged things – almost SAPs in their own right. And there were dozens of them.
Their shapes reminded Will of alien surgical devices from Old World science-fiction movies. With a gulp, he realised that was exactly what they were. They were tools for modifying the organic consciousness laid out before him.
Very nervously, Will instructed one of the alien programs to activate and present a profile for itself. Immediately, reams of foreign knowledge unfolded themselves into his head. The program was an unpicker-rethreader for distributed effector-control patterns, it told him. With it, he could remove the knowledge of how to operate his left thumb from his mind, or add the ability to move a sixth digit. Will took careful, shallow breaths and gingerly returned the device to its place in the array.
How could such devices be stored within him? He had no interface code to support them, no physical means of introspecting. There had to be terabytes of extra code here. Where was it all being kept?
He realised it had to be stored in the only place it could be: his brain. The alien virus must have distorted his neural pathways to include all this stuff, just like the false memories they’d given him. No wonder he’d spent days unconscious, with this going on in his head. Will remembered what the Transcended had told him in their last conversation. They’d told him they would provide him with tools to help him compensate for his changed circumstances. Well, these things would certainly do that, though not in any way he could have guessed. The prospect of performing surgery on his own consciousness cast the idea of constructive self-editing in an entirely new light.
The message of the tools was clear. The Transcended were giving him a choice. Rather than rotting here in this cell till the sun shed its skin or letting Vargas break him, Will could volunteer to alter himself.
That thought stunned him for a moment. He stared, amazed and appalled by the SAP before him. It hung there like a trussed animal surrounded by butcher’s knives. His skin crawled.
The prospect of performing such intimate surgery upon himself made him nauseous, but the longer he thought about it, the less ludicrous it felt. Hadn’t the Transcended already changed him? Wasn’t that what Vargas was trying to do even now, in his own clumsy, brutal way? Why should Will be the only one not to get a crack at his own mind? He forced himself to consider his options.
The first thing that occurred to him was that he could carve out the Transcended program and save himself from doubts about their intentions for ever. It was tempting. Will had longed to have his mind back for weeks. But he couldn’t do it. With the loss of the alien code, the option of further self-adaptation would disappear. He’d be back where he started.
The next solution that sprang to mind was volunteered by the all-too-familiar voice of defeat. He could give in to the Earthers at last, it suggested, and spare himself the pain of caring about it. Will set his jaw. He wasn’t about to do that. He’d rather turn himself into a vegetable than submit to the foul priest. But that solution didn’t satisfy him, either. It felt too much like abandoning hope.
He wracked his brains for a better answer. What he really wanted was some way to turn himself into a weapon – to get out of the cell and strike at his enemies before he died. He fantasised for a moment about the chaos he’d cause. And then, abruptly, he saw how he could do it.
Vargas expected Will to give in. His last words as he’d left the cell had suggested as much. So perhaps Will should give him what he wanted – or the appearance of it, at least.
He’d tried tricking the priest before, but Vargas had proved horribly go
od at finding degrading ways to determine whether Will’s spirit was genuinely crushed or not. Will hadn’t been able to fool him yet. The use of the alien tools might solve that problem.
Will could create a cut-down version of himself to act as a shell. That shell would be addicted to Vargas’s remote, craven and utterly without hope. Will could even populate it with false but believable answers to Vargas’s questions.
Meanwhile, the real Will would observe inside, insulated from the effects of the neural probe, waiting for the opportunity to act. Rather than wasting time, he could be working around the clock to free his shipmates and escape back to the Fecund system. Not even his shell would realise the truth until Will broke free to take full control of it.
He held his breath as hope surged through him. There would be a cost, of course. Will would have to watch himself become someone he despised. And Vargas might still order him to execute his shipmates as a gesture of faith. A situation like that would blow his cover before he had a chance to do anything.
Worse, perhaps, was the possibility that an opportunity to free his friends might never arise. He could spend the rest of his life as a puppet while his true identity chewed itself up silently in guilt and madness.
But what of the risks? The plan was better than any alternative he could think of. Assuming, of course, that the Transcended had in fact given him the tools to make it possible.
With new enthusiasm, Will scanned the pieces of alien software. He picked up each in turn, absorbing the knowledge of what it did. And as he learned, a way to solve his problem revealed itself.
Will couldn’t copy his mind – there wasn’t room for that – but he could bifurcate it. He could turn his real identity into an extra strand in his consciousness, like a buried personality. The real Will would become little more than a voice in his own head, while the shell would inherit all his exterior senses and functions. It sounded intensely claustrophobic, but it was still an answer.
With immense care, he took hold of the tools and started building. Creating a version of himself that was weak and pathetic disgusted him, but he stuck to it. He had to make it believable. A caricature would only raise his jailer’s suspicions. It was several hours before he was done.
Will pulled back to regard his work. The shell itself was thinner and flatter than any SAP he’d written before and far more subtle. It reminded him of a glass mask, touched just enough with colour to disguise the true features of the face beneath.
Connected to it was a launcher program to handle the delicate transfer of power from one version of himself to the next without killing him in the process. As it ran, it would hand over his senses and memories one by one to the shell, leaving the real him as a buried stream of ideas. He would be reborn as a traitor.
Will drew deep, nervous breaths as he checked the code over. He examined each of the associative strands that would break him free from his mental prison when opportunity beckoned. Then he checked it all again. He dearly hoped he’d used the unfamiliar tools properly. There would be no turning back.
With gritted teeth, Will activated the launcher and threw himself in. At first, nothing happened. Then his senses started switching off. The internal ones like balance and body-position went first. Then taste, smell and touch all vanished. As they died in his mind, the memory structures associated with them went, too, so that Will couldn’t even remember what it had been like to have them.
‘To eat a good meal,’ he said to himself experimentally, savouring the idea’s new incomprehensibility.
Next went sight. The cell vanished, along with his recollection of how it had ever looked. Will had decided to keep hearing, with its rich weight of language, till last. Then that went, too.
The world shrank to nothing. There was only the idea of Will and his desire. It was not like a light or a place or a person, as Will no longer had the means to understand such things. It was simply a condition of thought. Then, with mechanical inevitability, the shell turned on.
16.2: WILL
The thought that was Will reflected upon itself and grew. Branches of implication were added and gathered texture, replacing what had been lost. Streams of input as varied and sophisticated as senses reappeared, looping back and gathering complexity with every iteration. Will remembered what it was to see.
He found himself floating in a vast galaxy of twinkling lights with a small black sphere hanging before him. An extraordinary sense of quiet rightness suffused him, as if he’d been seared clean in the fires of suffering and this was his reward.
It was not what’d he’d expected to see or feel, but he recognised the place immediately. It was his mind as he’d imagined it – his core self at the centre, with his senses arrayed around it. Except those twinkling lights were no senses he recognised. Each one was a complex ball of woven patterns that flickered with activity like the thoughts of a robot. They sang with life.
The sphere, too, was different. Looking at it, Will knew somehow that it did not represent his soul. It represented the Transcended.
‘Congratulations,’ said the sphere. ‘You have passed the final test.’
Will looked around, bewildered. He was disembodied here, a piece of nothing.
‘Is this my shell program?’ he asked, with something that was not quite a voice.
‘No,’ said the sphere. ‘This is your new mind. You are still welcome to activate the shell you constructed, but you may wish to consider other options first, which we chose not to disclose to you until now.’
Despite the detached, ethereal calm that suffused his mind, Will was immediately suspicious.
‘What other options?’
‘The use of your new internal systems. Those you see around you.’
Will glanced out at the vast, curving wall of software nodes. There was not enough room in his brain for all this, of that he was certain.
‘I thought the mind tools were my new systems,’ he said.
Somehow, the sphere managed to convey amusement. ‘That was our intention. However, as you can see, our work has been further reaching than that.’
Will was baffled. ‘How is this possible? My interface was lost.’
‘It has been reconstructed and improved using the tools that were installed within your cellular structure,’ said the Transcended.
Will wasn’t sure he’d understood. ‘In my cells?’
‘After you activated the third puzzle, the tissues of your body were altered using the protein carriers you call viruses,’ the sphere replied. ‘Information was passed into your cells via the mechanisms in your implant. That information was then used to create running processor models similar to what you call SAPs.’
Will began to understand. His cells had become microscopic robots.
‘Nanotech!’ he exclaimed. He was alive with the technology that humanity had long since considered impossible.
‘No,’ said the sphere. ‘The human conception of nanotechnology is stark and primitive. A better way to describe this would be augmented life. New protein machinery has been added to your cells’ pre-existing mechanisms to enable them to operate as processors. A cell’s behaviour and range of functions may thus be directly altered.’
Will was lost for words.
‘All this,’ he said at last. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘In part, because it was not ready,’ the Transcended replied. ‘And also because we wished to know that, given the choice, you would choose to retain those traits you refer to as “humanity”. When presented with a suite of unlimited options, you chose to adapt, yet you did not give up hope. We were able to see that you understood a fundamental truth of constructive self-editing – that sometimes one must become something one fears or loathes in order for the greater self to survive.’
Will knew that had it not been for the strange, peaceful clarity of this place, he would feel injustice now.
‘Do you mean you engineered my imprisonment just to push me into making this choice?’ he said.
/> His supposed tip-off to the Angeleno police sprang to mind, followed by a memory of Amy’s screaming face.
‘Of course not,’ said the Transcended. ‘We have been required to adapt, too. It was necessary at times to augment your natural capabilities to ensure that you survived until your body was ready. For instance, your rate of physical recovery after being administered drugs was increased. Also, you were provided with extra insight to permit you to crack the depot security while still on New Angeles. However, it should be noted that for the most part, your survival was all your own work.’
Something melancholic settled on the sphere. ‘We regret that our presentation of this solution comes after the death of your comrade. In part, your unwillingness to move since that ordeal was orchestrated by us, to enable us to finish our work rapidly before further loss of life was incurred.’
‘What would you have done if I’d chosen to write a different kind of program?’ Will asked. It appeared that an awful lot of work had been done just building up to this moment.
‘You would have been allowed to run whatever you created,’ the sphere said simply. ‘The extermination program would have run its course unhindered.’
Will reflected on that. Apparently he’d narrowly avoided destroying the human race as well as himself.
‘Do you now understand the difference between creative and destructive species?’ the Transcended asked.
No, was the only answer Will could give.
There was no room for dishonesty in this place. Though he was pleased by how things had turned out, the Transcendeds’ reasoning was still a mystery to him.
‘Then look again,’ said the sphere.
Will’s reality twisted. For a few awful moments he was back in the body of a Fecund roboteer, manipulating the arms of poorly designed robots in return for a few jabs of artificial pleasure. It bore a chilling resemblance to his current predicament. Suddenly, he understood.
Both he and the Fecund roboteer had been adapted by their own kind to serve a technological end, but there was a difference in what had been done to them. The Fecund handler could never become more than the role it was born into. It was a slave. In contrast, Galatean roboteers, although shaped by machinery, were not defined by it. There was room in their lives to grow, and to find their own definition of self. Will had the potential to become more than he’d been designed to be.
