Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  Even as he studied the old image on the pharmacy window he felt a presence, almost like a shadow falling over him. He saw the servitor drone quickly dart out of sight as if terrified. Perhaps it sensed that other too.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  Sensing, in some manner he could not fathom, objects sharpening themselves in darkness, he moved on. Hellish amusement arose, somehow related to his distraction with the caduceus, and he quickened his pace. Finally reaching the dropshaft, he palmed the control panel. He stepped inside and the irised gravity field took hold of him to waft him upwards. It felt like escape, yet he knew it was not.

  They grabbed him the moment he stepped out on the upper level – station police clad in combat armour. They weren’t gentle and stabbed the tranquiliser implant into his neck without anaesthesia, using a plain steel needle. Next, they slammed him down on a grav-sled and towed him to the upper level hospital where sampling and testing equipment awaited. He tried to tell them he had already done this, but no one listened. Then they tried to take off his Barnard suit.

  ‘What the hell?’ said one of the three medical techs. ‘What the hell is this?’

  He couldn’t reply. He felt guilty, ashamed, just couldn’t talk about it. However, now that someone else had seen, a lock seemed to come off in his mind and he could at least think about what had happened. He had wanted a shower after that night, wanted to feel clean before returning to the fray, only, he hadn’t been able to take off his suit. It had bonded to his flesh, seemed a snakeskin formation of it, as if he had become an ophidapt. He then remembered something else. He had grabbed quick snacks while working, drunk copious amounts of coffee, yet, when was the last time he had felt the need to use a toilet?

  ‘Take your samples from his exposed skin,’ said someone brusquely. ‘We need to talk to him.’

  While a body scanner slowly traversed on its rails above him, the med techs took blood samples from his carotids, snipped off some of his hair, and took biopsies out of his face and hands. When they finished, two troops hauled him to his feet and dragged him off to a cell where they strapped him down in a chair. One air-blast injection dispelled the tranquiliser, and other drugs had him babbling freely while a cap monitored his brain. As it went on and on, he thought those who questioned him must be on rotation, but later realised that the new questioners were replacements for those who had died. He demanded to see Alban, learned he was dead. Eventually they tried an interrogation aug, but it died on his head and fell off like a dry scab.

  Time derailed. More drugs ensued, then the beatings. He could hear pulse-rifle fire beyond his cell, screams and a composite moaning of terror. The half-mad guard with skin peeling from the backs of his hands came. The man used a ceramal combat knife on Whipple’s face and demanded the truth and, after being told it, used the knife to gauge out his right eye and demanded it again. Whipple sat screaming and begging before losing the other eye. In dark agony, he heard a gunshot.

  Time passed.

  ‘It’s you again,’ he sobbed as the darkness all around began sharpening itself.

  His straps fell away and a presence lifted and cradled him. Agony returned to his eye-sockets but he could not scream, could not move at all. He sensed terrible madness and for a moment understood what he was: a product of that madness, art.

  Sight returned – afterimages of that caduceus in the pharmacy window first, like a taunt – and he found himself lying on a composite floor scored with a thousand knives. He stood up and walked out, stepping over corpses, caught a glimpse of his reflection in a window in a shopping arcade, found a mirror and speculated on how he could see with empty eye sockets, then noted the glint of something golden deep inside. Afterwards, he stole some sunglasses from another shop. He could feel it inside him: the division and transformation. He ate and he drank but never needed to open his suit, found it impossible to do so, and in acquiring a sense of touch it now seemed to be his skin. He then set to work, powering up a grav-sled with attached autohandler. It took him weeks to transport every corpse he could find to a zero freezer, but still the place filled with the stench of decay from spilled blood and pieces that weren’t worth salvaging. The gold in his eye sockets expanded, giving him golden snakes’ eyes. He retained the sunglasses. A few days after loading the last corpse he had his first shedding. His skin and his suit blistered, felt tight and finally split, and he peeled away a layer as thick as a finger to reveal exactly the same underneath.

  At length he realised that he was truly alone – that his night visitor was no longer aboard the station. He wondered when rescue would arrive and, when it did not, he checked the docks. Here he found an ECS hospital ship full of corpses, dismembered Golem androids and the glittering remains and dead remote bots of what he supposed must have been a forensic AI. He knew at once, and with little logic, that this had been the point. The deaths aboard the station had just been a way of luring this entity here so the other thing aboard the station could… What? Perhaps gain something, learn something, or test itself in some way? He knew then that he couldn’t stay and wait for whoever or whatever came afterwards. He had become part of the visitor, a product of the visitor – Polity AIs would never trust him and never be done with him. They would never let him go. He stole a ship and fled from the Polity, and found himself in a place just being named: the Graveyard.

  Dr Whip gazed at the thing lying on the floor of his cabin, flipped it up with the toe of his boot and caught it in his right hand. He gazed at a rubbery deflated version of his own face and a seemingly exact copy of his Barnard suit, then wadded the whole mess together and tossed it over in the corner where, after a brief hesitation at the mouth of its hole, a cleanbot came out, seized it and dragged it inside. No point keeping this latest shedding of his outer skin. He did not need to run meticulous scans of it, because he knew what he would find. The skin would be precisely twenty-three grams heavier. He would learn nothing new from its intricate layering and mix of his own genes with those of a terran cobra. The nanoskin underlying these, which had produced the exact copy of the Barnard suit incorporated into his new skin, would reveal nothing more. He also knew that he would have grown a little taller, a little paler, and that the awful changes occurring inside him would have progressed a little further.

  He turned to the full-length mirror in his cabin wall. The layered tech of his Barnard suit had been shaped like the musculature of an athlete, but on his tall thin frame gave him the appearance of a particularly ectomorphic high jumper. However, the suit covered a body that wasn’t quite the right shape and didn’t move quite as it should. He considered, yet again, how he seemed to consist of braided together worms, and smiled coldly. It wasn’t a nice smile. His teeth sat translucent and spiky in a long pale face rendered all the more sinister by snake eyes. He turned and picked up his sunglasses from the bed, and put them on.

  ‘Was it the suit, Penny Royal?’ he asked.

  During the war, some AIs had gone black, and the one called Penny Royal was the blackest of them all. Hercules space station had been just one of the places it had attacked, and what it had done there just one of its many atrocities. Now, fifty years after Dr Whip had departed the place, the station was still under investigation. A horde of forensic AIs were still meticulously scanning and taking the place apart. Dr Whip had been right, apparently. The AIs surmised that the black AI had done what it had done to lure in the forensic AI he had seen destroyed there. No one knew why. Those AIs had also managed to divine that one station resident had been the particular focus of Penny Royal, and had survived, though much changed, and escaped. And they wanted to talk to him very badly.

  Dr Whip had his own theory about why he had survived. By now, he had the full story of Penny Royal’s ‘transformations’. He had met the contract killer whose weapons the AI had melded with his body, and the singer whose vocal range became immense, while her head became that of a bird, with a birdbrain inside too. He had seen one seeker of immortality fr
ozen in a diamond and one seeker after God who, when taken out of induced coma, could only stare at the sky and scream. In every case, something unique about them had interested the AI, and influenced its transformation of them. And so it was with Whip, though he did not recollect asking for change. The Barnard suit had been a rarity in the Polity back then, and was rarer now. He felt sure that it had stimulated the black AI’s insane curiosity and that, in some twisted warp of its mind, it had decided the suit must be preserved and so made it a permanent part of him. But the other changes? They baffled him. They bounced most forms of scan and he could not fully understand them, though they were drastic and terrible.

  ‘I will ask you,’ said the doctor, then turned and headed for the door.

  The small vessel he stole from the space station had belonged to Alban. In the ensuing years, the doctor had made changes, converting luxury apartments into a large laboratory and, when it became known that Polity AIs were hunting him, he acquired a prador second-child ship mind and dumped its previous querulous AI. He walked along the corridor to the bridge, feeling an odd shift all around him as his ship dropped out of underspace, perfectly on time. He ensconced himself in the single chair there, reached out and tapped a button, then sat back as armoured shutters drew back from the wide chainglass window to reveal his next destination, his next place of employment.

  For Dr Whip the acquisition of the wealth to buy his research tools and other equipment, and to run this ship, had ceased to be a problem within just the first few years of him entering the Graveyard. This buffer zone, between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom, had quickly become the preferred destination for scum from both realms, and even scum required doctors.

  And Dr Whip was a very good doctor indeed.

  He knew, with utter clarity, that before Penny Royal had changed him he had been brilliant, and with memcrystal installed in his skull had managed to load a vast repository of medical and related scientific knowledge. The only problem with this had been his mental access to it, sorting it in his organic brain and encompassing a wide variety of disciplines. But Penny Royal had done something there too. He now remembered all that data and all the skills, for Penny Royal had completely incorporated them in his mind, and he remembered them with the eidetic precision of an AI. Dr Whip frowned, he also remembered other places like the one lying before him, and wondered if he truly would find here what he had long been seeking.

  Earth forces had hollowed out the asteroid during the war to take some kind of watch station. Snyder Clamp and his lackeys now occupied it. The man had become wealthy in the Polity by dint of his clothing and accessories brand becoming fashionable to the runcible culture and thus across many worlds. He had become incredibly wealthy because, unlike many designers, he had been able to maintain his position as doyen of that culture over many years. Unfortunately, the wealth had disconnected him from reality, specifically the reality that AI law applied evenly and without favour to all and, if you committed murder, no amount of money could buy you out from under a death sentence. However, wealth, and contacts, had enabled Clamp to run, here to the Graveyard. Now, apparently, he had a bit of a problem. He was dying and, like so many, didn’t really want to.

  ‘Doctor on call,’ said a voice.

  Dr Whip transferred his gaze to one of the three screens below the chainglass window to see a woman gazing at him. He felt something lurch inside him at the sight of her.

  ‘Arabella,’ he said, before he could stop himself.

  She tilted her head and grinned in precisely the same manner as Arabella once had, then said, ‘Nice name, but it’s not mine. I’m Susan.’ Then her smile quickly faded as if it had found itself in alien territory.

  ‘Of course you are, my dear,’ said Whip, quickly re-establishing self-control. And of course she wasn’t the woman he had loved, for Arabella was still in that zero freezer in Hercules Station, until the AIs found a way to resurrect her virus-eaten and freeze-damaged brain.

  ‘We’ve shunted instructions to your ship mind and you’re clear to come in now,’ said Susan, all business and seriousness, and something else, fear? ‘Will you need any help carrying equipment from your ship?’

  ‘Not initially,’ replied the doctor.

  ‘Okay, I’ll take you straight in to see Snyder.’

  Dr Whip noted how her face became grimmer when she mentioned her employer. Was she sad that he was dying? Somehow, he didn’t think that the case and, more than anything, he wanted to see her smile again.

  The small space dock looked like the balcony to a cliff dwelling. Two autohandlers for vacuum unloading of any cargo were parked to the rear and an airlock tube extruded across the tiled surface to the edge. His ship mind brought his vessel to that edge where it stuck with gecko pads, and the tube closed in to engage with a thump. Dr Whip, meanwhile, headed for the airlock.

  She waited for him at the far end of the airlock tube, where the second door opened into the asteroid dwelling. She stood exactly the same height, wore her blond hair in the same cut and had a similar fashion sense to Arabella, which had always been to sling on brightly coloured items of clothing at random and somehow get it right. She even had a touch of glitter on her eyelids. Dr Whip suddenly realised he wasn’t breathing, and so started again. He was being foolish.

  Arabella’s beauty was of a kind anyone could possess: a catalogue number and a fast autodoc procedure with nil recovery time. In the Polity, people changed their faces and their bodies as often as women in antiquity changed their nail varnish. Everything else here – the clothing and the glitter – could be related to how those who chose certain body shapes and faces, generally had the same tastes elsewhere.

  She looked him up and down, her expression haunted, then said, ‘This way.’

  Until that moment, so focused on her had he been, Dr Whip hadn’t noticed the security and its bizarre dress. As he stepped after her, two men quickly moved in behind him. He glanced round at them. Physically they were the typical hoodlum’s enforcers out here in the Graveyard. Their boosting had resulted in muscle so thick on their reinforced bones they looked incapable of turning their heads or raising their arms above shoulder level. Their thighs rubbed together as they walked with a leaden tread, while their dress was something else besides. They wore black leather harnesses covered with spiky silver studs, their genitals filled pendulous red leather pouches. On their right hips they each carried large antiquated projectile guns, while on their left hips they carried shock sticks. Black leather masks covered their faces, with pink lenses in the eyeholes.

  ‘Interesting attire,’ said Dr Whip.

  Susan glanced at him and nodded mutely then, as if searching for words she dared not utter, nodded to an item in the corridor ahead. ‘Part of the decor.’

  The woman in the body cage was dead – Dr Whip sensed this immediately. She had been tortured to death, doubtless dying from an internal bleed when someone had shoved into her stomach one of the numerous serrated spikes now protruding from her body.

  The asteroid home was an anteroom of Hell.

  As he progressed, screams and cries of ecstasy punctuated the thumping music that seemed the throb of the asteroid’s heart. Open double doors revealed a red-lit room filled with naked people in a tangled orgy, more body cages, and more torture. Dr Whip saw a woman in some kind of tank, apparently drowning while a man in breather gear fucked her. He paused for a moment and found himself counting perversions, just before one of the heavies straight-armed him in the back and sent him stumbling into Susan, who had been just about to enter this room. For anyone else, for anyone normal, that shove would have resulted in cracked ribs. Dr Whip glanced back, read the puzzlement in the heavy’s pose and moved on in, suddenly feeling tired and peeved, his insides writhing and tugging against each other as if, like a breaking battleship towing cable, they wanted to fly catastrophically apart.

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come?’ Susan whispered into his ear.

  Yes, it w
as looking increasingly like that.

  Snyder Clamp was as grotesque as his surroundings. He did not need to be so hugely fat or display such diseases on his skin, for even the Graveyard had the medical technology to deal with those. He sat ensconced in a huge ornate throne up on a dais at the centre of the room. A rotating table stood beside him, laden with delicacies. He reached out and speared a large beetle with a two-pronged wooden fork, inserted it into his mouth, and crunched. Dr Whip felt his peevishness transform to contempt as he stepped over writhing bodies. Was this then Snyder Clamp’s wonderful fashion sense in action? The diorama here anyone could find in a cheap VR fantasy. Or had Clamp been elegantly retro in the silly world of the Polity runcible culture?

  ‘Dr Whip,’ Clamp shouted over the din, spitting out pieces of black carapace as he did so. ‘You have come to examine me.’ He waved a dismissive hand – a beringed one of course – and the music stopped. Much of the activity all around quickly ceased, though some weren’t capable of stopping, just like the two in the tank. And some sounds didn’t stop, because he heard sobbing, and groans of agony.

  ‘Where are all these people from?’ Dr Whip enquired, coming to stand before Clamp, and placing his bag on the ground at his feet.