Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘The shutters,’ he managed. ‘The door…’

  ‘I have closed them.’

  He sat there baffled again until realising he had thought it night time – hence his panic.

  ‘The rain, you know,’ he said, not wanting to admit his confusion.

  The monsoon came every day. Obviously she had closed the shutters to prevent water getting into the house. He sometimes did that, sometimes not. The torrent always came straight down and never really splashed through the windows and door. Often he took a chair and sat in the doorway to watch it – especially when the thunder and lightning commenced.

  As his vision cleared to its usual crappy condition, he saw she held his cup. The thought of drinking what it obviously contained did not please him, but he took it anyway and gulped, only managing half a cup at first, then the second half while his body broke out into a hot sweat.

  ‘We must begin now,’ she said. ‘Remove your clothing and come and sit at the table.’

  ‘You should at least buy me lunch first.’ He surprised himself by managing to find that much humour.

  ‘I don’t suppose you feel very hungry.’

  ‘No, not really.’

  As he pulled off his clothes he just felt tired and ill, but when he came to his underclothes he felt suddenly bashful. She was a Golem android but now, with the skin back in place on her face, she had the appearance of an attractive woman. It then occurred to him that despite the nausea and the weariness, perhaps some things in his body had changed, because his mind had ceased to wander into that territory more years ago than he could remember. He left on his pants and, painfully aware of his gaunt stringy frame, pale loose skin and leaf-covered lesions, walked over and plumped down in the chair.

  Now he saw that the table looked paler than it had been. She must have scrubbed it down with something. Laid out on its surface were numerous items: the contents of podules, a selection of his tools – also cleaned until they gleamed – containers of various fluids and pastes.

  ‘Looks like some ancient surgeon’s table,’ he observed.

  ‘There will be no gross surgery, if that is what concerns you.’

  He felt slightly reassured, but that went away when she picked up an object she had obviously fashioned. It was a bloody great big syringe with a needle as long as his hand. He tried not to think about why the needle had to be so long, instead wondering how she had made it. Probably she had paid a visit to the shuttle again and found some micro-fluidic pipe from one of its cooling systems.

  ‘First I need to ascertain what has happened to your nanosuite and, since it shows regional changes throughout your body, I must sample from those regions.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  She put the syringe down on the edge of the table, took up a jar of some sticky green paste and began to gob lumps of it on various parts of his body. By the time she had put on the third lot the area underneath and around the first began to grow numb, so he didn’t need to ask what she was doing. Knowing something of human anatomy it looked like she was aiming for lymph nodes, but then she strayed and he began to get the nasty idea that his liver, kidneys and other internal organs were targets. By the time she had finished he looked spattered from head to foot with the stuff. Next she began taking the paste off in precisely he order in which she had put it on. Just for a second it concerned him that she might forget where she had put some, or might have missed a place, then silently swore at himself for being a fool. An oily substance followed, rubbed into the skin of those areas, astringent smelling and probably some kind of disinfectant, though whether from a podule or from the plants she had gathered, he did not know. She retrieved the syringe.

  The sampling injections didn’t hurt, but they were not exactly pleasant. She worked her way round his body, each time injecting the sample she had taken into one of those brass marbles, then sluicing the syringe through with that oily substance. He didn’t know how she got the needle into those marbles, just as with the eggs he had inspected them closely trying to find a way to open them or at least to ascertain their purpose. By the time she had finished she had twenty or so of them lined up on the table, and he was beginning to feel sore and aching from head to foot, he had also begun to shiver as the temperature dropped. Outside thunder rumbled, but he did not feel inclined to go look at the light show. He sat there just feeling awful, until the light came on making him jump in shock – he hadn’t realised how dark it had become.

  ‘You can put clothes back on now,’ she told him, walking back from the light switch.

  He eased himself out of the chair, staggered over to his bed, picked up his clothing and dumped it to one side when he decided to use the shower. Much freshened after that, he frowned at the lesions. They already looked better and he decided to leave them uncovered, dressed in old clothes and returned.

  She sat at the table with the almanac and his testing tablet linked together with optics she had made. These also linked to that thing like a knuckleduster in the supposed finger holes of which sat some of those marbles. Scientific text ran on the almanac screen while code ran on the tester. He tracked the larger combined optic and s-con skein off the table and into a hole in her forearm. While he watched, she removed some of the marbles from the duster, put them to one side and inserted more. He went and made himself a coffee, thankful there had been more in one of the podules she had brought. He felt he shouldn’t interrupt her, then realised he was anthropomorphising again – she could more than handle whatever she was doing and conduct a conversation.

  ‘So what are you finding?’

  ‘I am finding that your nanosuite is at war with itself and your immune system. I had hoped for some easy fixes, but it looks like I will have to take it down to base,’ she said, adding, ‘You will not feel good.’

  She went through all the marbles – much quicker now and probably just confirming what she already knew. Once finished, she selected three other objects like large chrome almond seeds and plugged them into ceramic rings. He had done that once, but never figured out the purpose of doing so. With a ring about it, one of these objects fitted perfectly into one hole of the knuckle duster. The almanac screen blanked for a moment and began running incredibly complicated schematics at great speed. Only after watching them for a while did he recognise molecular schematics – nano-machines. He turned to her to ask her about these, but she was utterly still and her eyes had faded to a weird metallic grey. Now he knew, but was not sure why, he would receive no answers.

  Now also seemed like a good opportunity to deal with something annoying him since his confusion when he woke up. He found his waterproof jacket, opened the door and went outside, walked round the house opening all the shutters, then returned inside. Checking the time he saw he was an hour past time for his medication so scooped some more out of the small bucket and drank it. Next he made another coffee, brought his chair to the door and watched the storm.

  The monsoon continued to hammer the ground. Thunder rumbled constantly and lightning webbed the sky. He always found this enjoyable. Some atmospheric effect gave lightning streaks in primary colours – a bright red being the rarest. These storms had concerned him in the early years and he had put up a lightning conductor on the house, but in twenty years he had never seen it strike ground. It stayed up high and entertained him.

  ‘First it needs to go back to base,’ she said behind him.

  His cup was empty and on the ground and he guessed he had been sitting for some hours. He lost track of time here and often was glad to do so. He looked round at her and saw eyes still dark and somehow menacing. She held the syringe.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Your torso is best.’

  In her other hand she held that pot of paste. He eyed it for a second then eased to standing, stiff, but not so much as usual. He pulled up his shirt. ‘Just do it.’

  The injection was fast and painful. As she retracted the syringe their surroundings lit up actinic bright
and the crash of the lightning strike was a deafening bang. In that light her eyes returned to normal. He looked around seeing a fire burning on the plain, smoking and steaming as the rain rapidly put it out. He laughed, looked up at the sky.

  ‘Who the fuck ordered the omens?’ he wondered.

  The monsoon passed and, as she had warned him, he began to feel a lot sicker than he had before. His nanosuite had begun to turn off. The nanites she had injected were finding the micro-factories scattered throughout his body, shutting them down and erasing their programming. They would no longer produce the nanites of his suite – that combination of what had once been considered ‘hard tech’ and biotech. Meanwhile, those machines still loose in his body would be breaking down as they reached a set point obsolescence. It would take, she told him, twenty hours.

  After six hours the storm ended, abruptly – cloud breaking up like broken pottery. He walked outside to do some jobs, but started to feel so awful he felt in danger of collapsing. Returning inside he observed her for a while, her eyes metallic again as, plugged into the external computing, she worked on his new nanosuite program. He watched the code running on his tester and the rapidly changing molecular schematics on the almanac screen, drank another cup of medicine, then went to his bed.

  He lay there with his body fizzing, a deep ache in his skull like a sore, and aches of a different kind throughout his body. He felt abruptly thirsty, but also busting to empty his bladder. Struggling to get upright again he nearly pissed himself and only just reached the toilet in time. His urine, he noted, had turned green. In his kitchen area he drank cup after cup of water and returned to the bed feeling bloated, expecting to lie there just a few minutes before needing the toilet again. However, he sank into a world of weird dream where he conducted conversations and did things that frustratingly made no sense, then slid from that into a frightening blackness.

  Wakefulness came with a full bladder, not a surprise, but he felt completely paralysed. Finally toilet training beat his leaden body into motion and he staggered to the toilet, his body feeling like it had been burned from head to foot. His urine had gone from translucent green to cloudy green. When done, he staggered back, noticing fractured capillaries on his arms and strange rashes on the backs of his hands. When he touched his face it felt lumpy with spots. His teeth ached and there seemed rather more crap floating about in his vision than usual. He lay down, desperately hoping to sleep. It came for him like a mugger. On his second waking he saw Anna standing over him. Her expression showed nothing until he looked at her, then it showed compassion. All emulation.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought Golem had superior minds,’ he muttered.

  ‘I was just trying to pay the usual courtesies,’ she replied, her face returning to beautiful indifference. ‘Microbial activity in your body has increased and your immune system, surprisingly, has managed to respond to the burden. In the long run it would do no good and you’d be dead within forty hours. You precisely feel that reality.’

  He reached up to her. ‘Help me up.’

  She gripped his arm and pulled him up, but his legs felt like jelly and collapsed. In an instant she had his arm across her shoulders and her arm about his waist, easily supporting him. With his feet hardly touching the ground she walked him to the toilet – up the two steps onto the platform it sat on. Doubtless her omniscient gaze had seen his inflated bladder. He undid his trousers one handed, but couldn’t piss with her supporting him. Previously urination had not been a problem while she was in the house and he had managed the other business when she was not. He tried to relax, tried to remember she was a machine, visualised her in pieces and with half a face. Eventually something worked. His urine was green still and it hurt to pee. Finally done, she took him back to the bed and sat him down on the edge of it. He remembered the early history of Golem had been precisely this: as carers of the old and infirm.

  ‘I’m watching you internally,’ she confirmed for him. ‘If your heart fails I am ready.’

  He glanced across at the table. Items were there, clean and gleaming, including most of his knives it seemed. He really didn’t want to think about that. His arm hurt where it had been across her shoulders. He noted large blisters on the backs of his hands and when he rolled up his sleeve he saw that they had burst on his arm to leak bloody plasma. Turning he flopped down on his back, then wished he hadn’t when his head ached like he’d hit it with a hammer.

  ‘How much longer?’ he asked.

  ‘Another six hours, to be safe.’

  ‘So time for more medicine…’

  She brought him that and supported him like an invalid while he drank it, then did the same with the copious amounts of water he needed afterwards. Lying back again, slower this time, he just sweated, with some twist to his perception and odd open-ended thought trains running through his mind like in the earlier dreams. Feverish and dislocated, sleep evaded him. He was aware of her moving about in the house, then not there for a while. He felt a hand against his back lifting him again and she fed him soup. It tasted like chicken soup, though he had no recollection of anything tasting like that in all his time here. At first he gagged on it, but got it down, which ignited hunger and he kept drinking it until she brought no more. The world faded with the effort of digestion. Went out.

  ‘I’ve injected the reprogramming nanites,’ she told him.

  He lay there unable to figure out if the words had woken him or if he had woken just before them. He now felt dried out, his skin tight – a dry atomy sprawled on the bed.

  ‘How long ago?’ he rasped.

  ‘Four hours.’

  He needed to go to the toilet again but doubted he had the energy. However, the humiliating thought of her helping him there brought him up into a sitting position and he swung his legs off the bed. The blisters on his hands, he saw, had deflated, leaving wrinkled skin. Carefully standing up he expected dizziness, but his motions were hers: dry and exact as a machine. He used the toilet than headed to the kitchen where she was busily at work. Watching her, he drank cup after cup of water. She had cooked and otherwise prepared food and placed it in a turtle tree leaf. On the leaf sat a pile of steaming mantid meat, boiled vegetables, assorted greens, sliced cheese, and now she was making coffee. Even though he ate more on Afthonia than before, this seemed too much for him. Had she reinstalled her digestive emulation?

  ‘Sit and eat,’ she instructed.

  He peered at her, visualising her in a frilly apron, but the image did not really fit. Only retrospectively did he note the turtle tree leaf was on the table, which she had cleared of the tools she might have needed to save his life and moved back into the kitchen area. A brief flash of joy arose at what this meant – he was now getting better – then it dissipated into puzzlement. Sitting, he picked up a carved spoon and set to work. The nausea he felt transformed on the first mouthful to ravenous hunger. He ate fast, too fast at one point because he bit his tongue. Fear of terrible indigestion – something he had suffered many times – arose and dissipated too. It just did not seem relevant at all.

  In a very short time he had cleared the leaf. She put down more hunks of cheese, nuts, bowls of paste and a cup of coffee. He ate the cheese like eating an apple, scooped up the paste, crunched the nuts and washed it all down with the coffee. Finally his stomach seemed to be full. Gulping the last of the coffee he stood as intense weariness bludgeoned him and without a word he went back to bed.

  Darkness had arrived by the next time he ate, and then went straight back to bed. And going through this routine two more times he wondered if she had already planned for this when she fetched the food podules. More mantid meat appeared on these occasions, but only when she provided gnapper snake and sackbat did he realise she must have been hunting while he slept.

  ‘Be careful out there,’ he told her when he saw her heading to the door for one of her outings. ‘Take a weapon.’

  She looked askance a
t him. She was Golem of course, unhumanly strong and fast, but strong enough and fast enough? The Stalker was big and had been fast, and she was an old Golem and perhaps more… brittle. His own decision to avoid even the twilight before dark was predicated on that and the fact his carbine was kaput. He wouldn’t like to face that creature even with the weapon, let alone a machete.

  ‘The mantids and other creatures are no problem,’ she reassured him.

  As a Golem, she was also observant and had perfect recall.

  ‘You’ve seen the claw marks on the outside of the house?’

  She paused for a moment, blinked and then nodded.

  ‘There’s something else out there.’

  ‘Describe it to me.’

  ‘I haven’t really managed to get a close look at it. When I first saw it I thought it a man, but it was up on its hind legs. It came down on all fours and charged at me like a… like a big gorilla. I winged it with one shot but that did not put it off. It’s been lurking around here for over a decade – feeds on the mantids.’

  ‘You have no further detail?’

  ‘Looked like it had carapace, but breathes… and sniffs like a mammal. That’s all I can tell you.’

  She stood there looking thoughtful, then wandered over and picked up the machete. On the one hand he was glad she had armed herself, but on the other, it concerned him that on his brief description she had taken his advice. Perhaps she had done so to reassure him. It hadn’t really worked.

  The skin peeled from his hands and arms in sheets, the stuff underneath newer and fresher looking than it had been for a long time. One of his teeth fell out – one that had been bothering him on and off for years. Probing his mouth he could feel the budding new tooth in the gap. He remembered that old style humans had not had this facility – their teeth only replacing once. For him this had not occurred since he had been on Afthonia, so he took it as a sign of his body again beginning to work as it should. A glance at the almanac screen, set to mirror, showed him a face he recognised from twenty years previously, while the sparse white hair on his skull sat like clouds over black stubble growing underneath.