by Neal Asher
‘They followed me,’ said Clamp, ‘they are nothing without me.’
‘And you kill them?’ Dr Whip focused his attention on the corpse of a man nailed to one wall.
‘Sometimes – if that’s what they want.’ The man peered at him with reddened eyes. ‘So, Dr Whip. I like your name.’
Just the words were confirmation, and Whip felt a weird division cleaving his thoughts and trying to separate him physically into two parts. He folded his arms across his chest, apparently confident, but in this small fashion trying to hold himself together. Now, on the mental plain he began processing data exponentially as a product of that mental division; dual processing, the two halves of his mind feeding off each other, synergy. He became suddenly larger than his surroundings and knew that his name had been the reason Clamp had summoned him here, for the man was a collector of perversions. But Dr Whip’s analysis did not stop there.
The compass of his vision widened and Clamp became transparent to him. He gazed down into the man’s cells and noted the changes Clamp had deliberately wrought: the shutdown of life-maintaining nanotechnology so he could suffer numerous STDs, the syphilis eating his brain, the deliberate physiological imbalances resulting in obesity… and then deeper still. The man’s mind was falling apart. Now integrating what he found there with earlier research data on the man, Whip saw that Clamp had been a relatively normal businessman until his success, whereupon he became insecure, unable to believe in that success and perpetually having to challenge it. The perversity of his second line in clothing and accessories – a perversity deliberately made to test his own vaunted brilliance – had led to more success, whereupon he had set his course. Perversity led to obscenity and thence to murder as art, and now to deliberate self-destruction. However, Clamp certainly wasn’t dying, not yet. Dr Whip reached out through U-space into the man’s body with implements that had been no part of him fifty years ago, and which had grown in him. He began reprogramming Clamp’s nanosuite to set certain things in motion.
‘I have examined you,’ Dr Whip intoned.
Clamp had shrunk back into his throne and gaped at him in puzzlement – his damaged brain unable to decide whether it was hallucinating. The girl had moved back and now squatted down by one wall. At Clamp’s emergency summons through a control set in the arm of his throne, more security guards ran into the room, while those already here began drawing back. For it had happened again: something of Whip’s transformation within had shown itself, and that always badly frightened people. He surveyed those entering the room, weapons drawn, checked the two behind him, but all feared to approach him. He looked down on them, of course, because he grew as much as half a metre on these occasions.
‘I can give you the cure you want,’ said Dr Whip, ‘which is death.’
Clamp, through syphilitic befuddlement, managed to regain some composure.
‘What about your Hippocratic Oath, where’s that?’ he asked.
‘The same place the Polity AIs put their three laws of robotics,’ said Dr Whip. ‘Or I can,’ he continued, ‘cure you of wanting to die.’
‘Enough of this,’ said Clamp, now sitting upright. He beckoned in his guards. ‘Take him out of my sight for now – we will continue this later.’
The guards began to close in just as Dr Whip unfolded his arms, held out one hand and snapped his fingers, the sound dry and unnaturally loud in the room. One of the guards went down as if the doctor had cut his strings. All theatre, because with something else entirely Dr Whip reached out to press this nerve nexus or that, to squeeze this or that gland or constrict various arteries. He snapped again and the rest of the guards fell. He snapped a third time, the pulse spreading out, all the people but he and Clamp slumping into unconsciousness. The constant background din faded and stillness settled.
Dr Whip strode across the room, meanwhile surveying the asteroid population on many different levels. Upon reaching the tank, he put his fist through the side, shattering armoured glass. The water inside rushed out, spilling the two bodies on the floor. He turned over the woman and rested a pale hand between her breasts, tweaking certain nerves and muscles. Her chest contracted to eject a stream of water, and she coughed and hacked as he turned her on her side, then she began breathing evenly.
‘Now, to the matter of payment,’ he said, as he stood up.
‘Payment?’ Clamp repeated, staring in disbelief at the prostrate forms all around him. He had begun to think more clearly now, and the befuddlement had gone from his expression. His internal nanomachines were getting back to work, issuing emergency drug packages and now beginning to make repairs inside his brain, rapidly wiping out the ills he had allowed himself to suffer. Clamp now possessed enough comprehension of his surroundings to know fear.
‘I was informed that in return for my services I would be given the location of Penny Royal’s planetoid,’ Whip replied. ‘I want that payment now, before I complete my work.’
‘Complete –’
‘I’ll get it for you,’ said a voice from one side.
Whip turned to gaze at Susan. He must have made some unconscious decision to leave her out, for how else had she not joined the prostrate forms all around her? He gazed at her harder, found her to be entirely human – too easily human, too generic. She would bear closer inspection, but later.
‘It?’ he enquired.
‘The object in which the changing coordinates of Penny Royal’s wanderer planetoid are recorded,’ she replied.
He nodded once, gravely. ‘I will of course need to check it.’ As she swiftly exited the room, he turned back to Clamp.
‘Your mind is clearing now,’ he said, ‘but still you have the problem you had before, which is a mental one and nothing to do with the physical ills you have allowed yourself to suffer. I always find, on these occasions, that self-knowledge is the cure.’
Somewhere inside this man, there might have been an earlier Clamp, a version undistorted by perversion but, as Dr Whip had discovered on other occasions, those versions were often amoral and when exposed to the sins of their older selves reacted with indifference. The key, he found, was empathy. It was the cure Clamp required but, whether or not he could survive it, was moot.
Dr Whip made the man the utter focus of his divided mind, again probing deep inside him on a cellular level. Even now, he did not fully understand the toolkit Penny Royal had provided. He used radiations across the emitted spectrum, and he reached through U-space with complex force-field technology. He read the pattern of Clamp’s mind, the mechanisms of thought and action, the governors of behaviour and the building blocks of morality, and from the patterns of neural firings read the man’s thoughts and traced out the shape of his internal being. In moments like this, Dr Whip knew he functioned at the level of a forensic AI, and utilised the tools such beings carried about inside their bodies. In moments, he began plotting the solution to Clamp: instructions to his internal nanomachines to issue certain neuro-chemicals, targeted electro-magnetic pulses to seize synaptic firings and make the whole fall into a new pattern, along with the deliberate destruction of certain neural structures. Initiating these changes, Dr Whip strode forwards, reached out with one pale hand as Clamp shrank back, and touched the palm of that hand to the man’s forehead. Clamp shuddered as if electrocuted, then slumped. Dr Whip stood back.
Enough.
Now the time had come for him to pull back from the precipice. He reached up to pass a numb hand over his forehead, feeling the line of division there, leading up into his scalp, then down his nose to his chin, splitting his lips, which even now were bloody. He touched inside his mouth and felt it there, then gazed down at his Barnard suit, seeing the line, the indentation, spiralling round his torso to his groin. The division was not only mental but physical, as if the stress of using his powers to their fullest extent might split him in two but, as yet, he had not gone so far.
He fought to pull his mind back together and, as he did so, felt himself contr
acting, shrinking. The world became duller as he closed other eyes and felt himself locking back together. The indentations began to fade but never went away completely; always the process had advanced.
‘What have you done to him?’
Dr Whip turned, all at once coming back to himself. ‘I’ve cured him.’
She smiled a smile that wasn’t Arabella’s but her own, and not bad for all that.
‘But not perhaps the cure he wanted,’ she suggested.
‘Perhaps not,’ he replied, now focusing on the object she grasped as she approached. She held out the fossilised spiral shell of an ammonite formed of some hard black rock inlaid with the fool’s gold of iron pyrites.
‘The coordinates are recorded in one of the pyrite crystals,’ she said. ‘There is a microport for access at the centre of the spiral.’
He would have to take it back to his ship to check, he decided, and began heading there. She fell in beside him and they walked out to the airlock in companionable silence until she said, ‘Take me with you. Take me away from here.’
‘It will change here,’ he said. ‘Clamp will not be able to continue as he did before even if he is able to continue at all.’ He paused contemplatively to listen to groans and curses issuing from a room over to one side. ‘His grip on these people will fail, at which point they will either leave or turn on him. It’s over.’
‘Nevertheless,’ she said.
Just then, a raw scream issued from behind as Clamp regained consciousness. He now had an empathic understanding of all his previous actions, and resultant guilt. Another scream followed, and thereafter they continued with machinelike regularity. Dr Whip, meanwhile, gazed at Susan with more than just his eyes. The guise of humanity had slid away like old skin revealing something bright.
‘He never knew,’ he said.
‘He never knew what?’ she asked innocently.
‘That you are as unhuman as I.’
‘No, he didn’t.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Nor did he know that the cures you sometimes provide are like the gifts of a certain black AI.’
That froze him. He knew this about himself but rarely acknowledged it. Yes, he healed even those who turned against him, but often his healing became a curse. Penny Royal had made him in its own image.
‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ she said
He nodded once solemnly. ‘Yes, you can come.’
He could not run from the Polity forever so might as well allow one of its representatives to accompany him. It didn’t matter. He liked her form and its associations and even she could not change his course now.
He weighed the fossil in his hand, and turned towards the airlock.
He could gaze at and into Susan with a clarity and precision beyond human and, on these occasions, equated his abilities to that of a haiman – one of those people who had taken augmentation to the cyborg limit beyond which flesh fails. This level still lay some way below what he had attained while looking into Snyder Clamp and altering him, yet he felt that he might need the next level, because there was something about Susan.
He could trace with utter precision the curves and angles of her ceramal skeleton, he could measure the torques of her joint motors and read their design codes, map her artificial nervous system and gaze somewhat into the processes of the AI crystal residing in her chest, but this was not the entirety of her, for something else lay underneath. She was Golem, yes, but her metal bones contained a marrow of further AI crystal, nanotech packed her body, some of which formed nodes scattered throughout whose complexity he could not plumb, and which occasionally emitted energy signatures indicative of U-space processes, just like the U-space transmitter inside her skull, and just like the tech inside him.
‘So where are we going now?’ she asked, as she watched him plug a hair-thin optic into the microport of the ammonite fossil.
‘Do you need to ask?’ he wondered.
As his ship detached from the dock inside Clamp’s hollow asteroid, he cast his vision back into that place. The occupants were beginning to wake from their long nightmare, now the core of the madness no longer fed them. Snyder Clamp had ceased to scream and sat on the floor at the foot of his throne, one of those antique pistols resting in his lap. Three times, thus far, he had placed the barrel of the weapon in his mouth, tasted metal death, and three times removed it. Dr Whip sensed that the man did not have the courage to kill himself and would try to make some form of restitution, and in the end that would drive him back to the Polity.
‘It’s a deeper question than one about your travel plans, Aster,’ said Susan.
He gazed at her, Clamp fading from his compass as his ship accelerated under fusion drive out from the asteroid. She sat in the high chair he usually occupied while working in here.
‘No one has called me that in a long while,’ he observed.
‘Aster Whipple,’ she said, ‘but shortly after you arrived in the Graveyard you dispensed with your forename and insisted on shortening your surname. Why did you do that?’
The pyrite crystal inside the ammonite fossil began spilling its data. Dr Whip studied a screen, noting the course of Penny Royal’s home, the wanderer planetoid, mapped out for the next two thousand years. With his extraordinary vision, he gazed into the ammonite itself. There he found chunks of code like fragments of memcordings, time-crystal loops, strange and nightmarish images. He withdrew, because he had what he wanted now.
‘I will answer that question when you tell me why you bear the appearance of a woman I loved,’ he said.
‘Surely that’s obvious?’
Dr Whip nodded gravely. ‘So that I would say “yes” when you asked to accompany me.’ He paused for a moment then continued, ‘Did you insert yourself in Clamp’s retinue after he transmitted his request for my services?’
‘Of course not.’
Again he nodded. ‘You inserted yourself there beforehand and persuaded him to ask for me. Did he possess this?’ Dr Whip gestured towards the fossil, then continued before Susan could reply, ‘He didn’t – you brought it with you. Why did you choose him?’
‘Because once in his presence I knew you would be unable to resist him.’
‘And?’
‘And then I could obtain a better view of what you are becoming.’
‘And what is that?’
‘The utter apex of your profession, a healer without parallel, and a physical though mistaken representation of that same profession.’
Just then, his ship mind sent them on course towards the coordinates he had given it and, with a wrench that seemed to distort the bedrock of the universe, they dropped into U-space.
‘Who are you?’ Dr Whip asked.
‘You know part of me very well,’ Susan replied. ‘And you found the remains of the rest.’
‘Explain,’ Dr Whip instructed.
Trying to resurrect someone who had died from a flesh-eating virus that delighted in dining on nerve tissue, and who had then been flash frozen and thus received more damage in that process, was an immense and arguably pointless task. Only fragments of the original mind could be extracted from the cerebral mush and to weave them into a coherent whole might result in a viable human being, but it would not be the one who had died. Only three people had thus been recovered from Hercules Station, and two were those who had entered the zero freezer before the virus had reached their brains. The third was a special case.
Susan Epsilon 02 had her personal motive for pushing for the resurrection of this individual. Earth Central had employed her to investigate Penny Royal’s atrocity aboard that station because of it. Her previous iteration had been the AI originally sent, along with the Polity medical team, to investigate the incident. Susan Epsilon 01 had been the forensic AI Penny Royal had torn apart and whose pieces Dr Whipple had found.
Susan had taken the body of Arabella Cotisian from a zero freezer and set to work measuring and coding her wrecked mind even down to the quan
tum states of the atoms forming it. She put together perhaps ten per cent of the original human being, then set about weaving the rest. Research was required. Every scrap of data pertaining to Cotisian went into the weave: her journals, her network profiles, all recorded data from the time she had an aug and until she had it removed, second- and third-hand knowledge of her, family history, genetics, medical history – everything. Of course this could not all be simply lumped together with the expectation of a complete human being resulting. Susan had to translate it and fit it into the skeletal mind she was moulding. She had to make decisions about what to discard and what to retain. Human memory, with its inaccuracy and distorting effects, she had to account for. The task was immense, even for a forensic AI, and when the observer forensic AIs realised this task had engulfed the one performing it, the process was too advanced to stop.
‘Arabella is now an integral part of me,’ said Susan. ‘As I maintain her so she maintains me. We are mental Siamese twins permanently locked together. To separate us would result in one of us dying. We, or rather I, decided to accept the meld, for we have work to do, and a mission to complete.’
Dr Whip knew with absolute certainty the truth of this story, because Susan had used more than just words to convey it, had in fact taken him into the lengthy processes involved. He felt both humbled and disappointed – the first because the complexity of what Susan had done was so utterly impressive, the second because having seen it, up close, and come to know the mind of the woman he had loved so intimately, he could no longer love her. She had become to him the product of nature and nurture; a complex but wholly predestined biological machine. She was data.
‘One hour,’ he said.
It had taken five days for him to obtain the whole story and now they were just one hour away from arriving at the coordinates from within that fossil. It seemed obvious Susan deliberately edited said story to use up the time their journey would take. Had she, obviously knowing things about him that he did not know, deliberately limited the time he had to ask questions?
