Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  On the next day of beginning this, he slipped both nascent skull and knife into his pocket when it was time for him to return to his apartment. Usually he saw no one no his walk back to his apartment. When he found Hoskins waiting for him just outside the door, he showed surprise.

  ‘Hand over the knife,’ the man said, almost gently.

  Of course, though the knife would be ineffective against the armoured mercenaries here, he could use it as a method of escape, though he doubted he would manage to bleed out before the cams and other scanners in his apartment alerted someone. Even if he cut his throat death would not come quickly enough for him to be unrecoverable in the manipulators of Dr Giggles. He took out both skull and knife, and weighing the skull in one hand, passed the knife over with the other.

  ‘I wasn’t going to do anything stupid with it,’ he said.

  ‘So you say,’ Hoskins replied. ‘We meanwhile have a military autodoc on standby in your apartment – it’s been there from the start.’

  ‘Your concern for my wellbeing is touching,’ he replied, and walked off.

  In his apartment he went through his usual routine of washing and eating, then sat on his bed weighing the carved skull in his hand, trying to ignore the cam up there in the ceiling. He went to bed, negligently shoving the skull under his pillow. With the lights out he meditated, bringing his body down to a state of complete relaxation – aware that they would be monitoring him in others ways too. He did nothing that night – just drifted into sleep.

  In darkness on the second night he again calmed himself with meditation. After an hour or so he carefully reached under the pillow and, by feel, searched the surface of the skull. The piece of chainglass, blunt on the outside but atomically sharp in the inside, pulled out easily. He had manufactured the knife in two pieces – one made to break off when he pushed one side of the knife into the sculpture. He lay there for a moment, then climbed out of bed to go to the toilet. While sitting there, as if reaching up to scratch his scalp, he made a quick slit along the edge of the small lump and pressed. The memtab slipped out easily and he pushed it between his fingers while dropping the piece of chainglass down the toilet, then quickly got a finger up to the cut. Pressing, he held it there for a while, then took it away. For a scalp wound there was hardly any blood, but that was down to the speed of his nanosuite. He went to wash his hands, incidentally cleaning the blood off the memtab, and returned to bed.

  In all this he had managed to maintain his meditative calm. In the bed he just lay still for a while wondering if anyone would come. When it became apparent his actions had alerted no one, he reached up and pushed the memtab into the slot at the base of his aug and memories, he had excised but in a moment of rebellion had managed to copy, once again became available to him.

  ‘It was a complete war machine – completely grown as such from its genome and the final stages input through it from the quantum processing,’ said Cheller.

  Jonas had to agree as he studied and modelled the masses of data from the quantum crystals. The hooders they now saw were just empty mobile vessels capable of procreation. Blurred boundaries between life and not-life made him think of the old label Von Neumann machines, but they were just animals now.

  ‘The atheter effectively broke the link to stop the data feeding across rather than excise it,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level as he modelled from some of the data how fusion nodes would grow. ‘Those features I picked up on related to their biomech past are just foundational structure from the genome waiting to take the rest.’

  And so it was with Jonas’ memories. The memtab supplied content to fill holes in his mind and easily transformed from data accessible in his aug to actual memory. But there would not have been enough room in the memtab for all the data in those quantum crystals – just his perception of it. Certainly he now knew things Polity AIs would probably consider dangerous, like how to grow fusion nodes and how a living creature could generate hardfields, but the totality escaped him. The vastly complex integration of it all he could not grasp and he was only just getting a handle on some link between hardfield technology and U-space – neither of which were his area of expertise – when the work came to a natural conclusion. This had become territory for AI to work out, and probably one of those introverted AIs that lost track of outside reality. However, for his purposes now he knew enough.

  Jonas walked back to the laboratory thinking on the things he had learned. The missing link was the one between genome and those quantum crystals. There was the necessity, after all, in converting quantum information into chemical code. While studying this data that had been forbidden to him, he had put it together. The quantum crystals were already imbedded in the genome and that genome produced more crystals to which the data were recopied. In his mind he ran through all those genetic switches that needed to be clicked over to have the genome growing its new overlaid strands which then translated to something akin to protein replication, which would then build the hooder its inner mechanisms and expand its ganglion to control them. A virus could flick over those switches – a Masadan one of course – and he knew how he could make it.

  Once back in the lab he turned his attention to the food they intended to fabricate for the beast. He had designed simple composite and metal skeletons comprised of ribcage, legs neck and skull with superconducting threads running through them to various points on their surfaces. Within the ribcage the cell printers would print proto-organs and on the outside on the limbs neck and head muscle, a venous system and skin. The whole then ran on simple electricity, there not being much in the way of a nervous system.

  ‘These need to be more complicated,’ he told Caster – by text since she had still not actually deigned to speak to him yet.

  >Why?

  ‘The hooder sensorium runs across the EMR spectrum and it will be able to see inside them. I do not want it to decide they’re not edible.’

  >Then you must improve them.

  ‘I will. Perhaps you can assist? Perhaps you know something about Masadan wildlife beyond hooders?’

  >I will observe.

  Once again his attempt to engage with her had been kicked into the long grass. He knew nothing about the woman, but it seemed, after one lapse to say she was sorry for what happened to him, she was deliberately keeping her distance.

  Jonas returned to his design. He had the grazer genetics all perfectly mapped out and bioreactors ready to make anything he wanted. He also had detailed schematics of the body of an adult. First he focused on that skeleton, making a copy of the first design and setting to work on that. He erased the superconducting wires, sat thinking for a moment, then erased the whole thing. Instead he made a copy of an actual skeleton and began simplifying it for some things he had in mind. Next he turned to the genome again, which he had input into one of a series of bioreactors in the structure surrounding the lab and set to manufacturing this creature’s equivalent of stem cells to feed into the other reactors. Already these were making muscle, fat, blood and other cell lines. The process took time – in each reactor running conversion routines to give those cells specificity. He now had cells for nerves, gristle, lungs, eyes and more besides, including bone since he might as well make the skeleton out of that, and began using more and more ship’s computing. The cells thereby produced would then go into printer matrix holding tanks ready for production. In reality, he did not think all these were needed – he just wanted complications in which to lose some very small items.

  As the process continued he took up his chainglass knife and skull and began carving again, muscle memory taking over so the actual application of thought remained small. He breathed evenly and enforced a calm meditative state while focusing inwardly on aug processing. Here he began designing a virus. Putting the genetic changes he wanted to make into a base format design program he soon saw that what he needed would require somewhat more than the simplicity of a virus. He expanded parameters, gradually producing something th
at also incorporated much of the support structure of a bacterium but one with a carbon meta-material shell, because this microbe would have to survive hooder digestion.

  During all this he kept pausing to tweak the design of his grazer substitute. The thing now looked a lot more like an animal and functioned with a rudimentary nervous system powered by an equally rudimentary ganglion. He wondered, the thing having now risen from some vague definition of not-life to life, if it would be capable of suffering. He then tweaked the design further so damage reporting, in the form of pain, did not exist. After three hours he finally sat back, that other design of what could only be described as a collection of viruses in a transport mechanism, reached completion. Now fear arose again, because this thing was complicated and he wondered if he could get it past Caster.

  Jonas sighed out a breath. Up until now, in doing this design work in his aug, he had done nothing Caster or Ganzen could detect, but he needed to get his viral mechanism into the grazers before manufacture. To do that, he needed to input this data into one of those bioreactors. He switched over to another menu in his aug and began to check the EMR around him. He soon compiled a long list of connections extending from the visible spectrum through to long wave radio. These were all the device links scattered throughout this ship. Just the likes of Hoskins would have many in his suit functions, connecting him to weapons. Aug and other enhancement connections were also there, links between discrete computing – in the end a whole ecology of EMR. He began sorting, first deleting all quantum entangled links then the otherwise coded ones because he wasn’t an AI and had no chance of breaking into them. Those remaining he began opening and examining. Further fear and excitement now returned when, as he had expected, he found that wireless transmission to the bioreactors had not been shut down. Whoever had set them up for Ganzen had set them up with optic connections to the computing here, but left wireless available and uncoded.

  The muscle. He identified the bioreactor turning stem cells into muscle cells after he linked and pinged it for a report. He went through further reactors, finally tracking down the one producing the basic stem cells. He could insert the virus carrier here. Now he had to decide if he dared to do this, and whether or not Caster would see it.

  ‘You won’t tell me much about yourself,’ he said – voice turning to text for her.

  She didn’t reply so he tried again.

  ‘There’s no danger in conversation surely?’ he asked.

  >There is always danger here.

  ‘You are under as much threat as me?’

  Again she paused for a long time then answered >Yes.

  Jonas nodded then looked around the lab. It seemed to have distorted and appeared oddly bright. He recognised the moment of unreality as one of those symptoms of anxiety – as if it had escaped chemical suppression. Partly in dream he began sending data to the bioreactor, only after he had begun to do so knowing there was no going back now.

  ‘Did he put you in that room?’

  >Yes I have met Dr Giggles.

  ‘Why did you come here in the first place?’ he asked. Yes, curiosity was driving him, but he was also being manipulative. If he could keep her distracted she was less likely to notice what he was doing and, once the process was installed in the reactor, she would be unlikely to notice it unless she asked it for a report. He opined that if she did not see him altering its program she would not check.

  >Ganzen paid me for some work. I was curious.

  ‘Hooder related?’ he asked.

  ‘Hooder related yes, but I did not know that at first,’ she replied, this time using voice. ‘I came to install the laboratory you are in. I did not realise he was also interested in my knowledge of hooders, which I acquired while working in the tagreb on Masada.’

  ‘Oh I see… when were you there?’

  ‘Four years during that period you were not there.’

  ‘So what happened?’ The loading completed and, there being no reports of possible problems, he initiated the new work in the bioreactor.

  ‘I finished installing most of the lab, also the external paraphernalia like the manufactories and printers, and those bioreactors…’

  Dread came and punched Jonas in the gut. He bowed over clutching his hands to his torso for it was a physical thing. Why had she so specifically mentioned the bioreactors?

  ‘Then what happened?’ he managed to ask.

  ‘He gave me design parameters for the enclosure, asked me for my input and told me what it was for. I told him I would have nothing to do with it and that I was leaving.’

  ‘He did not let you leave.’

  ‘No, he took me to see Dr Giggles.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry,’ said Jonas.

  ‘Perhaps he will let us leave when we are done.’ Her tone was leaden – she did not believe that at all.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued. ‘It’s good to see the work is progressing so well. Your new design for the grazers should work very well, very well indeed.’

  He assumed everything they said to each other was checked over by some other member of Ganzen’s staff, so she had to be careful and he had to be careful. He supposed she had reached a conclusion similar to his: that they had to do something to get out of this place, even at the risk of them ending up dead. For he knew now, with utter certainty, that she had seen that he had done something and, though she could not know what it was, fatalistically agreed with it.

  Inside the segment the young hooder began moving. He watched it coiling out and shifting around leaving a channel behind it, and realised it was eating out the stuff all around it. Finally it moved to the skin of the thing and chewed its way through. He half expected it to now push its way to the surface of the gel, but instead it began working its way around that skin, eating that up too. It was certainly voracious.

  ‘Absolutely fascinating creatures,’ said Caster.

  After getting the bioreactor to make his viruses and their transport mechanism, he had returned to his room with dread sitting on his shoulders and nibbling his ear, but there had come no knock on his door, and Hoskins had not dragged him off for another visit with Dr Giggles. Over the ensuing days he and Caster had continued their conversation while he was in the lab. They discussed the work at the tagreb, Masada, taxonomy, but there were limitations on what they could say. Her hints had been broad enough to confirm that she knew he had done something, so much so in fact, that he had broadly hinted that maybe talk about the bioreactors and grazers was something they should avoid. He really hoped nothing they had said had raised suspicion. She got the hint. But in the end he knew she could not actually know what he had done, because she had no more access to the quantum data stored in crystals in the hooder genome than he was supposed to have had. He decided he must try to find a way to tell her.

  ‘Fascinating, yes, but empty shells in some respects,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You are aware of my theory that they are deliberately devolved war machines – biomechs. Just like the gabbleducks they were taken back retrograde steps to be, or be returned to being, mere animals.’

  ‘Of course I am aware of that. You’re famous for it and that’s why Ganzen wanted you.’

  ‘Well, when I say “empty shells” what I mean is I sometimes think of them like the shell of a war drone before the weapons are installed. Or perhaps a better analogy would be an attack ship after it’s been decommissioned and converted for civilian use.’

  ‘I guess so,’ she said dubiously.

  Jonas continued, ‘Hooders are very rugged efficient dangerous killers. It is perhaps frightening to imagine what they were like when they were war machines.’

  ‘Yes, frightening,’ she said, utterly toneless.

  Jonas felt he had said quite enough on that subject. He suspected she understood now.

  ‘Well that’s very interesting,’ said Ganzen, entering the laboratory just twenty minutes
later.

  Jonas looked round at him. He came in with his tiger at his side, Hoskins and four other mercenary types walking with them.

  ‘What’s interesting?’

  Ganzen tapped his aug. ‘Your earlier conversation with Caster.’ He looked towards the enclosure. ‘I wonder if they can be trained and rigged up with weapons.’

  Jonas felt some of the tightness relax in his chest. That Ganzen had said this meant he had no idea what Jonas had done, and what would occur after the hooder ate its first ersatz grazer. Then again, Jonas too had little idea of what would occur after that first meal.

  ‘I have no idea how one could be trained.’

  Ganzen just gave a brief nod, then said, ‘It’s soon to show itself, I understand?’

  Jonas climbed out of his chair. His apparent x-ray vision showed him that the hooder had nearly eaten away the remains of the segment. Standing up, he worked some controls on the console.

  ‘Isn’t it too soon for that?’ Caster enquired, her voice coming over the lab PA.

  Ganzen looked around at him sharply. The tiger thrashed its tail and Hoskins and the rest had hands straying towards weapons. Jonas grimaced. That was Caster reassuring Ganzen that she was watching him closely as instructed.

  ‘No, it’s not too soon,’ he replied. ‘The molecular chains will take some time to collapse and the system will take further time to extract all the water released.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Ganzen asked.

  Jonas glanced at him. ‘I injected a decoding molecule for the gel. It will begin collapsing down to a rubbery amalgam just a few inches thick while the enclosure draws off all its water. It’s just an environmental change. I’m not sure about a hooder’s atmospheric requirements at this stage of life but assume they must push for the surface quickly, since they do have a vulnerability in that they can drown, though of course that process is different for them – Masada lacking much oxygen in its atmosphere. I certainly don’t want that to happen.’