Copyright © by Craig Saunders 2012
Evolution
Craig Saunders
Acknowledgements
For Dad and Mum. For good friends, lost and found. You know who you are.
For Tom, Jack and Harry.
For Sim, always.
Bonus Material: Glossary and novel excerpt from Rain by Craig Saunders.
Also by Craig SaundersThe Love of the Dead (Evil Jester Press)
A Stranger's Grave (Grand Mal Press)
Spiggot (Grand Mal Press)
Scarecrow and the Madness/With Robert Essig (Blood Bound Books)
Available exclusive to Kindle:
NOVELS
Vigil: Vampire Apocalypse
The Seven Point Star
Evolution
The Outlaw King (The Line of Kings Book One)
The Thief King (The Line of Kings Book Two)
The Queen of Thieves (The Line of Kings Book Three)
Rythe Awakes (The Rythe Trilogy Book One)
Tides of Rythe (The Rythe Trilogy Book Two)
The Line of Kings Trilogy Boxset
COLLECTIONS
Dead in the Trunk
The Black and White Box
Coming soon:
The Walls of Madness (Crowded Quarantine Publications)
A Home by the Sea (Crowded Quarantine Publications)
Rain (Crowded Quarantine Publications)
Rythe in Chaos (The Rythe Trilogy Book Three)
Praise for Craig Saunders:
[Rain] 'I'd say it's the best book I've read in a year.' - The Horror Zine
'Saunders brings the unthinkable to life with pure visual perfection.' Emma Audsley, the Horrifically Horrifying Horror Blog
'Stephen King with a touch of Cardiff dirt and a lot of London grime.' - Richard Rhys Jones, author of 'The Division of the Damned'.
[Spiggot]'Incredibly tasteless, shamelessly lowbrow, and very, very funny!' - Jeff Strand, author of Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to "Shirley")
"With A Stranger's Grave, Saunders has written a truly dark, atmospheric and character driven tale, packed with page-turning mystery, sorrow, and a jaw-dropping reveal that will leave readers haunted long after they've gone to bed." --David Bernstein, author of Machines of the Dead and Amongst the Dead
'A talent to keep an eye on.' - Eric S Brown, author of Bigfoot War
"A top-notch, thrilling read. Craig Saunders is a master of the genre." Iain Rob Wright author of Animal Kingdom and Final Winter
'An awesome talent!' - Ian Woodhead: Author of Shades of Green and Infected Bodies
“The Love of the Dead starts out like the type of horror novel you think you’ve read before, then whacks you over the head and goes in a direction you didn’t see coming—think chainsaws at a daycare center. Saunders’ writing will creep into your spine and paralyze you with dread.” —David Bernstein, author of Amongst the Dead and Tears of No Return
[The Love of the Dead] 'Craig Saunders' unique chiller kept my eyes glued to the pages in anticipation.' - Kenneth W. Cain, author of These Tresspasses
Prologue
Gas world/Retra/subplate tect PU Nal. Unclaimed.
I stood over your vacant shell, warm with your blood. I took your eyes. I took them to help you find your way out of this life.
I showed you the empty space you left behind and still you stare at me. I released you and yet you seem unhappy.
You ungrateful son of a bitch.
Kyle spoke to the eyes. They spread out at the bottom slightly, where their dead weight pushed them against the shelf. The shelf sagged under their presence as though the eyes were still attached to the beast’s body. They would not forget. It was their gift.
Now it was Kyle’s.
*
Shell ship/Habla’saem
Society laughs at its own creators as the higher races laugh at gods. A man stood at a holowindow looking out upon the loneliest of an unknown planet’s fifteen satellites. Habla’saem did not laugh. Soft eyes and cherubic features belied his nature. Ice chinked in the thick swirling spirit.
Meteor rain battered the moon outside while he drank this morning’s dranmoir, a pine filtered Tormian spirit. His last reserve. He sat on a resplendent armchair watching the show. Soft limbs lacking exercise through necessity crumpled weakly against the soft fabric. He looked out across the vista ignoring his pallid flabby skin. His form was pitiful in the eyes of nature’s merciless power.
He alone would choose this place of gravitational rage for peace. There was no danger – as long as he remained in the shell. Polarised neutron fields protected the metal composite shell (it was actually composed with foreign elements) by constantly realigning. The atoms shifted so fast that each time a meteor struck there was no damage. Matter was never there at the same time as meteor; collision rendered impossible.
Fake air, which the shell imported from a distant planet and synthesised when no connection could be made, kept him breathing. The shell protected him from life, the risks outside too great. His was a body that had never seen a sun.
He pulled another long drink, shrugging his flailing eyebrows at the burning rain-fell outside, puffing out already swollen cheeks and swilling the harsh liquid against barren gums. The Com-K link last night had shaken him. It was only natural that they would want him, but he was unsure; the Ecentrists spayed morality was as devoid of fertility and warmth as the battered landscape before his eyes. There was beauty in what he did. A beauty the Ecentrists could never appreciate, with their concept of beauty dependent upon the whim of their false god; themselves.
Morality was no real consideration for Habla’saem. Immoral art his may be, but all art requires an audience, or else why would the creators have made such a universe? Just to have it ignored? Why create society if it was not to be played with? The Ecentrists would never understand. Perhaps his art would be lessened for the lack of an appreciative audience. Perhaps, he mused, as the draft reached his senses, there was a certain beauty in the secret art, too.
Nevertheless, he would meet the Ecentrists. Habla’saem had been called and from within his shell he would perform his obligations. We need you. No lubrication. The Ecentrists were straightforward, refreshing in a life surrounded by subtlety and subterfuge.
For a socioassassin, to kill a race, recognition or not, would be the highest accolade. Was it not always so for him? When had the audience ever been appreciative?
Never. It was a lonely job. Satisfaction was his alone.
He had destroyed societies before. The death of a society was for savouring, like the fine filter spirits he preferred with their grain and humours. This, though, was more than just the death of a society, or a world. It was the death of an entirety. The entity known as the Lore.
Their death knell would resound throughout the universe.
He was wise enough to realise even the death of a galaxy would affect little. Universally speaking, the whole could take the loss of a galaxy with a long-suffering shrug – it could easily birth a new one. It might take longer than Habla’saem would be around for, but then it was not birth that interested him but the death that foreshadowed it. Nothing could be born without death, not since the making of existence itself. Even for existence to be nothing had been slaughtered, just as for a new sentience to be born an old sentience must die. There was no overcrowding in nature simply because the matter wasn’t there. You couldn’t make something that wasn’t.
He laughed at his nonsensical altruism. He didn’t often kid himself, but when he did, gods it was funny.
Subterfuge worked best where the minds were subtle, and if any of his marks knew his work, could think collectively, they could have pooled their resources and recognised the threat. This time, though, was different. The Lore did have
a collective consciousness – it was something he had not experienced before.
In a specialty entirely his own, with no peers other than catastrophe and war (disease was obsolete, as was famine and natural disaster. Suns still had a tendency to explode unchecked, but generally with slow, ponderous explosions, and well, anything that couldn’t get out of the way with a million year head start didn’t deserve salvation), the challenge was all that held interest for him. Maybe had he been a warrior, rather than a shut-in, he would have turned out differently.
Now all he had were his conversations, unreal and filtered as they were, and the bigger picture. This was more complicated than he knew. To kill a society that lacked the ability to look in on itself was simple. He had not realised it himself until this new duty had arisen. This attack would not, could not be silent. Subtlety would be wasted on the Lore.
For the first time in thirteen thousand years, he must become the warrior.
Habla’saem stood on useless feet and filled his glass at the cabinet. Three bottles of Stum, a decanter of l’thi espiele and, soon, no more dranmoir. Holding the glass to the light, the tan liquid slopped. The wave took a moment to die down. When it was flat he took one long gulp and filled it again.
Nothing the socioassassin did truly mattered. Revolutions, genocide, rebellion…empire’s ebb and flow. All were nature’s tools. Given time it would all end the same way, but the nature of sentience, the conceptualisation of time, lent an impatient hue to thought and a predilection for lost causes.
Age gives one the luxury of many thoughts.
The realisation that all ends regardless came early in Habla’saem’s life. He had been in his hundreds, he seemed to remember. At thirteen thousand years old he lost track of the finer details of time.
He filled his fourth glass of the morning (emptying the bottle) before sitting back, the soft cushioning puffing and holding his body upright. He let the dranmoir seep through to his stomach, felt his mind give in. Today, rest. Tomorrow, he would go back to work. Society had another joke for him to play.
That night he cracked a bottle of Stum. In the morning he took off with a hangover for the Lanta system.
The wide, effervescent sarong of the Fretful Seas (a Miaray, or ‘shy class’ system) remained constant in its distance until, without warning, it was behind him.
Time to put events in motion.
He made one call, spoke, and then, a click. The socioassassin Habla’saem broke the link and the sound, like a sword thumbed from the sheath, was the last sound until Nol Sar.
*
Exel
There are three sides to every story (at least, there are in this plane). Sub-space station Exel kept watch on them all. It is surprising what can be seen by looking at the edge.
Inter-stellar space was singularly, unimaginatively, unequivocally uniplanar. A strange place by all accounts from those that had gotten stuck there on inter-stellar jaunts (a surprisingly rare occurrence considering all the traffic that passed through it), phenomenally undull for a place of such oneness, likened by many to living entirety in one miniscule second on the film that covered ancients mirrors, in parts able to see the reflection, the flip-side to the reflected light, its originator, the light itself and the darkness that enables it; all the while sensing a disquieting sensation of the glass’ dormant fluidity trickling, or pre-trickling, down one’s back.
Others have just said it was vast and tiny and darkly colourful.
Within that sticky mass Exel floated on its way from one/side to the other. When it had left, its job would be done. When it arrived elsewhere, it would be as a catalyst again.
Every society has a point of critical mass. Physical rules hold true even in the intellectual and spiritual domains. Stars do not become nothing upon explosion. When a society reaches critical mass it, too, explodes.
But matter never disappears.
It was thinking too much, but then there was so much it could do in eternity. It thought, and as those who live outside of time are wont to be, it was, by and large, insane.
From its gibbering ennui-bowl Exel could see the aftermath of time. As it watched the future, it dribbled.
*
And…
*
Chapter One
Ore Planet/subplate tect/dense LORE CLASS sect 93/a
Lore bot 4/45 b/7 Ur Petept NLR_T ¬re shuddered in anticipation. 7/23 (she allowed him to call her by her pet name) finally emerged from her regain cubicle, and looked – well, emergent. Like precipitual lubricant in shining globules.
7/23 clanked. 4/45 knew lust.
Electrical arousal charged the fronmium pulses and the lights began to play. 7/23’s fantastic shell was mother of pearl, each and every seam brightly visible, a mix of the high and low, a statement – to merge with such an advanced species! 4/45 felt the lasers begin to tease it open, reciprocated. Impulses crackled in the merging cell, and the two, for a time, became one. Its bismuth telluride componet reached fluidity at 445 degree centigrade and its heart, in effect, melted.
Love is purely alchemical, as the ancients say.
Three seconds later 4/45 emerged from its mistress’ backdoor and onto the street.
The robot equivalent of sexual bliss was having its higher functions subverted. Many a theorist spent eons trying to understand why. For a higher being (as robots, numerically far in advance of most biological species, undoubtedly were, although the free will modifier remains elusive and unproven) it was, surely, folly?
Theorists abound in each and every galaxy, and many came close, but Harna Gurn came the closest.
Robots of the Lore, he supposed, were by nature able to adapt – effectively changing the form of their matter in localised fields, enabling them to recreate themselves almost infinitely. Although they could not change their core, some were able to spread that core among each individual part. As biological beings carry their code within each individual cell, so do the Lore.
The Lore were similar to biological creatures in that respect, but even with each nanide containing the sum of the whole the Lore robots still needed an assembly room for those components to meet and greet – in much the same way as a human uses its brain for core functions.
Harna Gurn went further still; the nature of sentience presupposed the awareness of mortality. Planets, suns, rocks – all change over time. They have their nascent era, their prime, their degradation.
Harna Gurn, considering the nature of time and sentience, hypothesised that robots were classed as a species as they have individuality and the ability to determine their own future and reproduction. The classification of a species was ‘that which evolves’ – sentience was therefore irrelevant, as where a substance was subject to the rules of evolution it was also subject to the rules of time, therefore undeniably sentient (as a footnote he recognised the oft-quoted link between nescience – the absence of sentience – and the concept of agnosticism, awareness of the self and god somehow strung together in the metalanguage of existence).
Humans still used machines. Although robots and humans co-existed peacefully on the whole, humans had serving computers (mainly Tradition robots – although in the best tradition (Harna Gurn, like many a savant, was prone to drivelling nonsense from time to time) there was a degree of co-evolution present), which they created. Law required all new bots to be taught the origin of their species. This arrangement did not offend the Tradition in the slightest, nor the Lore, as there was nothing whatsoever repugnant to nature. Symbiosis was thereby a natural order.
Every robot species, even the Ecentrists, thought about existence. That too, was a natural consequence of being a subject of time.
And so, Harna Gurn concluded, in the confusion of merging cognitive thought was subverted, allowing, for just one moment, awareness of time to subside; that which all sentient beings crave. Just one second out of time. (Which would effectively be existence in timelessness and therefore death. Harna Gurn added this as a footnote in only earlier work, evidentl
y finding the point too pedantic for later editions). The nature of sentience, he went on, dictated that such dalliances and pastimes designed to negate the overwhelming effects of time on sentients were all but pissing in the wind, as everyone knows such moments must end.
4/45 didn’t actually think any of that. Had it stopped to ponder, the thought and the conclusion would have passed through its componet in exactly the same amount of time it took to register the bright artificial sunlight, a darker shape spinning toward it, and the terium coil that tore through its forehead.
*
Gas world/Retra/subplate tect PU Nal. Unclaimed.
A ship pulled free of the yawning world under the sound of tearing metal. Oranmium, pressured into liquid, warped the hull and the ship elongated. Further out, liquid became gas. The ship became thin in response to the pressure. The resistance lessened, the ship’s configuration changed again. The plating reddened where it stretched, light from the planet’s gaseous energies visible in the thinnest places, then blackened again as gravity eased its grip.
Orpal watched a holoscreen map. The tiny wireframe image of the ship flew free. Gravitation from the receding planet made the magnetic coils warp, causing powerflux. The minute ship blinked erratically, before it sprang back to shape. Like a flat pebble it accelerated hard across the surface of space, dipped under, and was gone.
.073 milliseconds from planetary decapsulation the ship was once again, to the naked eye, exactly the same shape as it was upon capsulation.
Orpal, old beyond imagination, gazed with rare wonder at the component sitting innocuously before him. It was the first of five, no larger than a fist. Several unexplained angles jutted from the piece. Analysis showed that it was composite steel, but it resolutely refused any further attempt to gain information. Orpal had expected something more.
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