by Neal Asher
Next, even though he did not relish the prospect of getting down on the floor, he did the same for the burned lower legs. Finally he had her sitting clean with all the damage exposed – a sad combination of human facsimile and the truth of exposed and broken machine. Now he knew the real work would begin.
He took a break, lying down on his bed and drifting into a doze, woken again by something dying noisily out in the night, heart thumping and breath short. He sat up bleary and unenthusiastic, knowing it would take him an hour or so to be properly functional again. Then stabbing pains in his chest further woke him and spread a hot tingling sweat down his body from the crown of his head. He sat there wondering if this was it, if his recent efforts had finally pushed something to breaking point, for he had no doubt that his heart no longer beat as it should. He then stood, because that’s what you did: you kept going until you no longer could. The pain faded as he picked up his chair and took it over to where the almanac sat on charge, and noted in passing that this time there had been no pain in his left arm so it probably hadn’t been due to his heart – more likely muscle strain from heaving about the android.
The almanac looked like a slab of black glass a foot square, but it had massive data storage and sub-AI processing. He sat down with it propped up on a wooden stand he had made for it, with its shielded s-con charging cable still plugged into one of the wall sockets of the house power supply. A touch turned it on, centre screen bringing up the last thing he had been looking at – which plants of Afthonia might provide heart medicines, as it happened – with sub-menus on the subject to either side. After swiping that away he brought up the main menu, and input a search on Golem androids. He hoped for at least a few pointers from the general database, though this device mostly contained stuff about Afthonia. But his luck was in because it contained a whole chapter on Golem, and even schematics. He settled himself to read and absorb as much as he could, but after just an hour or so, with what he had learned, he became enthusiastic about getting back to work.
Turning the almanac off again, he returned his chair to its original position, then went into his kitchen area and hauled out the table to put it beside the android. The noise he made must have alerted something because he heard a whoosh of breath as if from a large animal. He paused, listening, then eyed the carbine again. Perhaps his choice of night-time activity should be fixing that? He pondered that for a second then dismissed it. The android interested him and he was damned if he wanted to keep being scared. Anyway, during the daytime his other weapons were sufficient – his crossbow and machete – he only needed the carbine when things got hectic as darkness fell, and he had no intention of being out in the dark ever again.
He knew his reasoning was faulty, but dismissed it as he went to fetch his tool boxes.
On the table he laid out a wide selection of tools, but left one space. Next he retrieved the almanac, unplugged its charging lead and brought it on its stand to sit on the table. Inspecting the burned interior of the Golem he could see some things he could do now. So much of a Golem’s system was about emulation, and so much of that could be removed to give him access to the really important stuff. She did not, for example, need the digestive system there, nor the nodular bioreactors that acted as a backup to extract energy from anything she ate – all that stuff was badly burned anyway. He selected tools and set to work.
Over the next few hours he removed a coil of ribbed tube with something dry inside it that might have been her last meal, along with skeins of tubes connecting to bioreactor nodules. He removed a cylinder that produced a form of bile, along with other items that fed into that – a distributed liver, kidneys and facsimiles of other organs that served the purposes of digestion and excretion. All the while he took extreme care not to break any of the optics or s-con wires and, each time he did break one turned frangible by fire, he connected it back up with string, or tape, or blobs of glue. This was not to maintain any function, but just so he knew what connected to what. He also took care with that metallic fungi and other stuff he did not recognise, trying his best not to displace it, and angry with himself every time some section of it came away.
By the time he had finished removing everything surplus to requirements the Golem looked partially gutted. Of what he recognised remaining inside were optics and wires, nodular junction boxes, shunts, transformers, temporary distributed power storage and small processing units. Some optics and wires connected to the spine and ran down into the pelvis and legs. Where they spread from other items in the torso they each had a yellow ring around them. Checking the almanac he identified these as leading to joint motors. Others marked in red ran into syntheflesh and skin and many had pulled out of what he had removed, either connected to small nodes or broken. They were for a sense of touch, emulation of muscle movement and all other changes visible to others, and they were not necessary to him. Most important were two things: an ovoid power-supply about two hands across attached to the inside of the spine and from which most of the s-con wires ran, and which also ran a thicker wire down to a socket above one hip bone, and an object only partially visible in the lower part of the chest.
Numerous black boxes were gathered around this upper object making millions of connections to its surface. As far as he could see nothing there had burned, but he needed a closer look. Fetching his torch, he leaned in close and turned it on, trying to get a glimpse of what lay inside. Light reflected from crystal and he could detect no cracks or discoloration. This was her mind: a crystal gridded through with nanowires and laminated with sapphire, hugely complex meta-materials intersecting. He wanted to inspect it more closely, but dared not. He just had to hope it was still functional and still contained the person this had been if he managed to power it up again.
Now he returned his attention to all that wiring and the other items in her torso. Something about it had been nagging at him for a while and now he saw what. The junction nodes looked familiar. He went over to the cupboard where he had stored podule finds and took out a large bottle-bamboo pot to peer inside. The thing was full of nodes he could use to replace the damaged ones inside her. From the same cupboard he took out skeins of optics that looked about the right length and had the requisite plugs at each end. A further search rewarded him with a reel of s-con – a little thicker than the stuff inside her, but maybe suitable. Everything labelled as s-con wasn’t actually a superconductor but had levels of conductivity near to that.
Upon his return he stared into the interior again. He was tired and aching but at least wanted to make a start. He worried about pulling things apart and then not remembering where they went, then he had an idea that should have occurred to him right at the start. He turned to the almanac, flicked back to main menu and chose a function he had once used then grown tired of, and took a couple of pictures.
Now he was ready. He chose one damaged junction node and traced the wires and optic from it. With infinite care he unplugged those he could and then taped them in position. For those burned connections he had to cut he took more photographs and even resorted to the finger sketching function of the almanac. It took him a long time before he was satisfied he knew the location of everything and finally removed the node. A sort through his pot gave him one that looked exactly the same. Old and new both had bar codes and the almanac could read them, but the damaged one’s code was half burned away. He reinserted those wires and optics that didn’t look like they were about to break, then traced one fried optic snaking between components right up to the Golem’s mind, measured a replacement against it, then pulled out the old and put in the new. He sat back, feeling at last he was getting somewhere, but now the somewhere he wanted to be was snoozing on his bed.
The long night continued and what at first had seemed an almost impossible task became a mundane chore. Ben replaced most of the damaged superconductor, all the junction nodes and most of the optics – as for the last he decided he would take a trip to the remains of the shuttle and see if he could find s
ome there, in the daylight. As he worked he noticed other ‘black box’ devices that he had in his collection. He replaced just one of these sitting on the power supply – some kind of controller – all the rest he could see were undamaged. Just four of the distributed capacitor batteries were damaged. He replaced these with those he had been saving for house storage, using connector plugs found in his collection. He had no idea if they would be right, but this was the best he could do. Finally he reached a point where he had burned and broken optics and wires extending from junction nodes, or other devices, or the Golem mind, but no idea, should he replace them, where they might plug in. He did replace them, then taped all the loose ends together in bunches and tied them off to one side.
He got down on the floor and set to work on the legs, replacing all he could there, tied off some loose wires, and abruptly realised he had gone as far as he could with this task. It was now time to look at that power supply. He turned on his torch again and inspected the thing. It was blackened on one side but at a point where no wires plugged in. He could unplug everything and take it out? The prospect of getting to the thing and doing such intricate work appalled him and, rather than make a decision then, he decided it was time to see to his own needs.
He heaved up from the floor, gripping the edge of the table, but a dizzy spell washed over him and his legs, like rubber, sent him staggering. He grabbed for the chair to support him but knocked it over, and, arms flailing, fell heavily on his side.
‘Fuck fuck and fuck!’ He pushed himself up with his hands to hear a thumping tread approaching the house. The Stalker crashed into the wall beside one shutter, then whickered and hissed.
‘And fuck you too!’ he shouted.
The shutters began rattling and then it hit them hard enough to have dust and splinters dropping away. With the surge of adrenalin he managed to get up on one knee and peered across the room at his machete, propped against one wall, then got shakily to his feet. The adrenalin began to fade as quickly as it had come and he felt weak. The sensation was familiar. He had long ago grown tired of the fear and it seemed to arise only briefly now – he just did not have the energy for it. The shutters stopped shaking, but he knew the thing was still out there. Going over to pick up the machete, he took it with him into his kitchen area, and put it down on the counter while he fetched himself something to eat and drink. The whooshing breath ensued, sounding almost disappointed, and he heard the creature move away. He finished eating and subsequently felt numb and weary, and simply went for another sleep. Even as he got into bed he acknowledged he had not brought the machete, and could not be bothered to fetch it.
After waking Ben felt a bit more energised. As he returned to the Golem he soon realised he had been too tired before to note that access to the supply would be easier through her back. Fighting her joint motors he hinged her forwards until her head was resting on the table. From the back he photographed the supply and, as he did do, he spotted that three distribution plugs had been pulled out. This made him realise he need not detach individual wires but could take off the distribution plugs they entered. But why were those three plugs out? He shook his head. The shot must have somehow done it – pointless to wonder now.
Using a screwdriver he tried levering out one of those still in place. It came out with a crack and he thought he had broken it until inspecting the bayonet that entered the supply. A quadrate pattern of connectors covered its surface and they were dulled by corrosion. More work, but also some indication of how long this Golem had been in the ground. The connectors looked like copper but he knew them to be a corrosion-proof meta-material version of it. During his work on shuttles he had never seen the stuff less than gleaming. In fact most metals where treated this way and this made him look inside the Golem again at all the dull metal. She’d been in the ground a long time, a very long time.
Detaching each plug in turn, he cleaned them with a fine grinding paste and solvent, knowing he would somehow have to do the same for the sockets in the supply later. Once all were removed he turned his attention to the thing itself, and found that laughably primitive nuts and bolts fixed it to a bracket. He undid these and soon had the thing out, but cleaning those sockets turned into an hours’ long chore during which he wished one of the podules had provided him with a magnifying glass. Finally he reached the point of being worried to do any more in case be broke something.
Time to test it.
A wire with a standard charging plug on the end from his house supply went into the socket that had previously been positioned above her hip. Here he really did know what he was doing because such supplies, though larger versions, were often used in shuttles. He turned on the power and, finding the requisite socket on its surface, plugged in a testing tablet he had often used to check his domestic needs. He got nothing to start with, then the screen blinked on and displayed a series of loading bars only one of which showed a sliver of energy. Flicking over to numeric he saw it charging, scratched his head, then switched over to the specifications of the supply. He nodded to himself. Even if he could not get the Golem running this power supply alone was a hell of a find. He quickly pulled out the charging lead – it had been sucking on his house supply, would have emptied it in an hour and only moved up one of those bars to halfway. Of course, Golem burned a lot of energy and he suspected this thing was highly advanced laminar storage…
He paused to inspect the surface of the thing again. There were some holes there and now he recollected removing a mass of melted composite from nearby. Pure water supply he had taken to be part of digestive emulation, in fact was part of that because the water would have been filtered from the gut. The damned thing had a fusion node inside! He abruptly went back to the Golem and inspected the interior, but could see no sign of other nodes. Perhaps they had been torn out, perhaps there were others in other parts of the body he had not looked at, maybe the skull? He shook his head. The disheartening reality was that all the components packed in there probably concealed further nodes, but also concealed further damage he had not repaired.
Ben again wondered if he was simply wasting his time. Really he should be searching through the almanac looking for medicines to keep him going or trying to figure out some way to re-programme his nanosuite, or perhaps send more messages from the shuttle radio in the hope that some passing ship might hear him. There were so many things he should do to increase his chances of rescue… so many things he had done here for decades… He fought it, but could feel the depression trying to settle on him. It arrived every time when he spent so long stuck in his house throughout the night. He pushed back to work, because he wasn’t tired yet. He fixed the power supply back into place and began reconnecting the distributor plugs, satisfied with the way they went in after he had cleaned them. Then the Golem android moved.
He jumped out of his chair and stepped back, a moment later thinking he must have imagined it. But no, the head was up when before the forehead had been down on the table and, even as he watched, the shoulders twisted, as if she was trying to get a crick out of her back. Then it stopped, and ever so slowly the head dropped back down to the table again.
‘Yes!’ Ben punched the air, then wished he hadn’t when that sent stabbing pains through his lower back. He stood there anxious to do something more, before realising he had come to a temporary impasse. He needed to get more optics from the downed shuttle and he needed to charge up that power supply. Both of these required daylight.
He walked over and checked the calendar and clock on the almanac and saw twenty hours yet remained until sunrise. Next, he cleaned the table and floor of debris from his work, cleaned and put away his tools, then spent some time sorting through his previously unknown podule finds to see if anything there was recognisable from the Golem, and to refresh them in his mind. Finally he went to bed, and to sleep.
Over the next two waking periods Ben spent much time reading and trying to memorise all the Golem stuff in the almanac. This resulted in him sitting
for too long, so he took breaks to set about various domestic chores. He cleaned the inside of his envirosuit, cleaned himself again and his clothing then, between reading sessions, set about cleaning the interior of his house. The cleaning created a lot of noise and at one point, when he dropped something on the floor, he paused to listen for activity outside. Nothing, no movement. He recollected that this had always happened when the Stalker was about: it left many hours before sunrise. He supposed it must have a hide or a cave distant from his house.
Later he returned to tinkering with the Golem – replacing another damaged component he had recognised in his collection, and managing to put back one of those fungus-like pieces he had managed to knock free while working – when the almanac chimed, telling him he had an hour before sunrise.
He finished what he was doing and set about preparing for another venture outside, first collecting the tools he would need and putting them in his backpack. Checking on the laser carbine he saw that despite it being on charge throughout the night, it had retained nothing. He grimaced, fetched his crossbow, and then the machete he had made from shuttle hull metal. After donning his envirosuit, he turned off the light and waited. In a short while he could see light through the gaps in the shutters. Walking over to listen he could still hear the buzzing of innocular flies so just went and laid down on his bed. A seeming fraction of a second later he opened his eyes to bright light beaming in through those gaps.
Ben hurriedly gathered up his pack and weapons and headed for the door. Something niggled at him and he came to a halt, wondering what it was he hadn’t done, and recalled previous fears about forgetting to close the shutters. Then he looked round at the Golem. Of course. The solar panels up on the roof would be charging up his power supply even now. Putting his stuff down he went to find a power lead, plugged it into the house supply and then into the Golem. After that he paused to consider the risk of fire, then dismissed it. There really wasn’t much inside the android that could burn – her previous damage only possible because inflicted with a high-intensity laser – while the lead and the house power supply were s-con and simply would not heat up. He turned for the door.
