by Neal Asher
‘No, you do not,’ said Ganzen. He looked back at the enclosure. ‘Hooders with particle weapons – imagine that.’
‘That might be why they’re interested,’ said Hoskins.
‘Hooders with Gatling cannons,’ said one of the others.
Jonas looked at them as if he did not understand, but that last comment had been the giveaway.
Ganzen explained, ‘I have buyers interested and one of those is Skerr – a prador father-captain resident here. You may recollect me telling you about him. He’s supposedly a prador that fled the kingdom because of the usurpation but is actually an agent of the new king.’
Jonas nodded mutely. The idea of the prador getting their claws on hooders was not appealing. And with what he now knew from the quantum data it became even less so. He felt a momentary surge of panic, thinking that in what he had done he might well have provided this erstwhile enemy of the human race with a formidable weapon.
‘And this is why,’ Ganzen continued, ‘I want you to get onto working out how to drive this creature to segment. We need to go into production.’
Jonas pointed towards the enclosure. Throughout this exchange the hooder had finished with its birth segment and begun pushing towards the surface. ‘It will need to be a lot larger before it can segment,’ he said, just as the front of the hooder’s hood broke the surface.
The hood came up with its back towards them and, at this stage, looking like the ribbed back of a sea louse. Jonas noted colouration here he had not expected and which his scanning of it, mostly structural with colour filled in from record, had not revealed. The thing was bright red with blue mottling – its colour closely resembling that of a terran giant centipede. Legs rippling down its sides, it came higher, then abruptly twisted its hood round towards them. He now saw the rows of sickle limbs and other appendages. Its rows of eyes were orange. Abruptly it shot out of the gel and, writhing like a snake and kicking up chunks of that gel with its feet, it shot towards them.
‘Motherfucker!’ said one of the mercenaries, stepping back.
It came on fast, looking as if it was going to hammer straight into the chainglass window, but at the last it looped up and brought its hood to touch the glass. There it paused for a moment, its sickle limbs grinding against the surface, before it crawled up the glass, writhed along it to one side, and then began to explore the rest of the enclosure. Jonas could not help but feel it had seen prey and gone towards it, assessed the barrier as impenetrable, and was now looking for another way to get to them.
‘Impressive,’ said Ganzen. ‘Feed it one of the grazer constructs.’
Jonas nodded and bent to his console again. Four of his ersatz grazers were lined up to the feeding window, body temperature high enough to maintain their facsimile of life but low enough to keep them immobile. He shifted one of them forwards into the tube throat and microwaved it, bringing it up to temperature. Its image appeared on a screen, shifting weakly, then a plunger drove it up into the ‘breech’ of the feeding tube, closing a thick armour block behind it.
‘Now,’ he said, stabbing a control.
Up in the wall of the enclosure a plug of armour thumped out then swung aside on hydraulics. In the breech another plunger pushed the creature out and it fell to the gel surface. The hooder meanwhile had frozen, hood up high. Above, the armour plug swung back and closed. Below, the grazer lay on its back limbs moving weakly. The thing was the size of a large dog and apparently possessed four limbs, though its forelimbs consisted of two sets of limbs partially melded together. In the real animal these could separate, but not in this case. Its body was bulbous behind a wide triple-keeled chest, while the head, on the end of a long neck, bore some resemblance to that of a cow, but with a longer mouth and too many eyes.
Still the hooder did nothing, and Jonas contemplated what it might mean for him if it failed to feed. But then, the prior warming finally getting things moving, the grazer followed the program loaded to its simple ganglion. It writhed for a moment then rolled over, coming up on its limbs. It began to move forwards, pausing every now and again to dip its head to the gel as if feeding – the jaws moving as if it were chewing, Jonas felt had been good addition.
The hooder shot forwards seeming almost not to touch the gel surface as it did so. At the last it whipped round hitting the grazer from the side, tipping it over and pushing it down. Usually hooders were slow meticulous eaters and that was part of the horror of them. This creature’s hood went into the grazer like a milling wheel. Greenish yellow blood sprayed out along with gobbets of flesh. The grazer kept moving while this was happening, even when the hooder had eaten away half of its flesh, for the thing did not die as easily as its real kin.
‘Motherfucker,’ repeated one of the mercenaries – Jonas wasn’t sure if it was the same one.
‘It’s good that you selected this kind of grazer,’ said Jonas, trying to keep his voice level. ‘It’s not the kind that has the poisonous black fats inside, therefore the hooder can feed more quickly.’
‘I’m surprised anything poisons them,’ Ganzen replied.
Jonas glanced at him, but said nothing. It was nice to learn that the man’s knowledge of hooders was limited. Hooders killed grazers containing black fats very slowly. Initially the reason for this was theorised to be because when such a grazer died the poisons in its black fats passed into the rest of its body and would poison the hooder. Jonas’ understanding of the hooder physiognomy and genetics had effectively dismissed that. The poisons in the black fats would have little effect on such a creature. It ate them that way out of preference, though whether that preference was for the taste of flesh without poisons or for the pleasure of slowly eating a living prey, was debateable.
After twenty minutes the hooder was finished. Jonas noted that while it had dismembered its prey and stripped out all the soft matter it had left the bones intact. An adult tended to chop up the bones too, eat a great many of them and discard only pieces. He supposed this must be because the young hooder’s eating apparatus had yet to attain its tool-like hardness and sharpness. Now the thing began searching around the area picking up stray pieces of flesh and even hoovering up spilled grazer blood.
‘Feed it another one,’ said Ganzen, his expression predatory.
Jonas nodded and got another grazer on the move in the feeding system. He increased the microwave dose this time and gave it longer in the breech for its facsimile life to establish. And he wondered how long it would be before Ganzen decided to offer the creature other, more entertaining, food.
The hooder easily finished off the four grazers and now the machines around the laboratory were making more. As he lay on his bed Jonas briefly thought about how he would delete the viral mechanism from the bioreactor and scrub the file. Thereafter, as the hooder changed, there would be no evidence that he had done anything.
He then contemplated the beast itself. When they put the second grazer in the thing was halfway up the wall to the feeding hatch as it came through. By the third one it went into the hatch as it opened and Jonas had to stop the thing closing on it. It explored in there for a moment, then dragged the grazer out, dropped with it to the shrinking gel surface and there fed on it. After it had fed it came up to the window again to briefly grind against the glass before then working around the edges. The damned thing was trying to find a way out and in an intelligent manner. He did not know if that was ‘normal’ behaviour because of course nothing like this had ever been done before. After it again went through the hatch to first explore then drag out the fourth grazer, it dropped to the floor and fed more slowly. This time it began taking apart the bones and eating them. It then turned to the bones of its previous prey and set to work on them too. This was certainly not the expected behaviour of an adult, because they never returned to remains. But how could he know what to expect here? There had been rumours of hooders being taken into illegal zoos but he had no detail on that and did not know how they behaved in captivity. And again, he had no ide
a about the behaviour of the juvenile form.
Jonas grimaced. He wished he knew more but he simply did not. This was expected but he wished he could distinguish between ‘normal’ juvenile hooder behaviour and that of one making a transition into something else. Now, almost certainly, the mechanisms had spread their viral load and the creature’s code was being rewritten. Was its apparent intelligence a result of that? He could not know.
He now considered all the implications of what he had done. He had been fatalistic when he came to the decision to disrupt what Ganzen was doing here in the way he had chosen. His feeling had been to smash it all up, hope for some opening so he could escape, but at least cause a great deal of disruption if he was to die. This felt right; this felt better than simply making further doomed to fail escape attempts likely resulting in him being tortured. If he ended up as lunch for a hooder, Dr Giggles would not be putting him back together again for the nightmare to continue. But would the hooder behave as he supposed?
When he had started this he had felt that the creature evident aggression, being weaponised, would result in extreme mayhem. Now he wondered. Intelligence was part of the package – part of those genetic changes – and an alien intelligence too. Maybe it would simply grow to its altered form of adulthood as a biomech war machine and simply await instructions. He might well have provided Ganzen with something that would be even more profitable. He closed his eyes on these doubts, intensely worried about all he could not predict. No, he had to go back to the aggression idea and stay there, and hope. Of course one hope had to be that when the hooder finally did something, he could put as much distance between himself and it as quickly as possible.
‘Are you awake?’ Caster’s words rang in his ears, mildly distorted and via his aug so could not be heard by any of the equipment watching him in his room.
He jerked as if slapped. He had not expected this at all and certainly there seemed something odd about it. He doubted Ganzen allowed communication outside of lab time. He pulled up menus to his inner vision and studied them. Something seemed out of kilter in his aug: optic reception seemed to be off, distorted, like he was seeing things through thick greenish glass. Then, despite this, he saw Caster had used another comlink and he simply had not allowed it, that meant Caster had hacked his aug – an exercise supposedly all but impossible but for by an AI.
‘Yes, I’m awake,’ he replied, speaking only in his head.
‘I’ve hacked you, aug to aug.’
‘And it seems caused some disruption in my aug.’
‘What?’
‘Optics aren’t working properly.’
‘That shouldn’t happen,’ she replied. Whatever, he thought, and waited to hear what else she had to say.
Finally, after a long pause she said, ‘Nobody can listen in unless you’re stupid enough to speak out loud.’
‘I’m not that stupid,’ he replied. He paused, reviewing his earlier thought about AI and paranoia arising. ‘I’m also not so stupid as to think you capable of hacking an aug.’
Another long pause ensued, then she spoke again, ‘I guess you think Ganzen has suspicions, has copied my voice and is now trying to get something out of you.’
‘Not that there’s anything to get,’ he replied.
‘No? Really?’ He could almost hear the gears of her mind grinding, which made him think that this really was her. But he could not concede that. If he was wrong then he had no doubt Dr Giggles would be next.
‘Okay,’ she continued. ‘You set one of the bioreactors to making viruses and a carrier shell to get them through the hooder’s digestion and into its body. From things you said previously I’m pretty sure they are to make genetic changes related to the creature’s biomech past. And that’s as far as I’ve got.’
Jonas just lay there feeling scared. This could be Ganzen speaking to him or maybe this was Caster and her link was not as secure as she hoped. But, as he thought this, he realised there was nothing he could do. In either case he would be fucked. He had to just go with it and not overthink.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The virus is making genetic changes that will result in the hooder turning into its ancestral form of a biomech – a war machine.’
‘Damn and fuck,’ she replied, and he noted awe in her voice. ‘But how is that possible? Where does the data come from?’
He decided at this point to take a half-measure. This could still be Ganzen or the man could be listening in and, at least, it would be better for him not to know about the quantum storage crystals.
‘It’s all there in the genome,’ he said briefly. ‘Just blocked.’
She snorted, then said, ‘It really is me speaking to you and there is no way anything less than an AI can penetrate the coding of this link. Ganzen has no AIs – they would not approve of what he does.’
Jonas allowed himself a wry smile. He always found the faith some people had in AIs touching, and naïve. But she was probably right in this case. To be honest, if Ganzen had a rogue AI working for him it would have seen what Jonas had done; in fact, with such an entity, the man would have had no need of Jonas at all. He decided to tell her.
‘Quantum crystals in the genome. The viruses merely reattach the link between the two,’ he told her.
‘So what does that mean for us?’
‘I am hoping an opportunity to escape, though it may well be an opportunity just to die.’ He grimaced, thinking maybe he should not have added that last. She might get scared enough of the hooder to end up confessing to Ganzen. ‘I’m pretty sure the hooder will attempt to escape and will have the means to do so. And when it does I’m also sure it will be aggressive and highly destructive.’
‘I tried to kill myself three times,’ she said. ‘I’m with you.’
‘We’ll need to do what we can to prepare.’
‘I’ll be able to get envirosuits,’ she said, ‘if I’m sure that the hooder is breaking out.’
‘I’ll need to be able to recognise you.’
She sent a picture: a waif-like woman clad in blue overalls with cropped silver hair and big eyes with thick eye-shadow around them, or genetically darkened skin there. He noted points to her ears, pronounced canines, long fingers and something almost predatory in her stance. He reckoned she must be some sort of ’dapt but had no idea what kind. He took a picture of himself out of a file in his aug and sent it to her.
‘That wasn’t really necessary,’ she said. ‘I know what you look like.’
‘Okay.’
‘Is there any requirement for those viruses now?’ she asked.
‘No, they will either have done their work or failed.’
‘I’ll erase them from the bioreactor, and their record.’
‘We’ll talk again,’ he told her, uncomfortable with how long this had gone on. ‘I need to sleep now.’
‘Night,’ she replied, and cut the link.
Jonas turned off his aug and lay there worrying, still half expecting Hoskins to crash into his room. After a little while he turned the aug back on again and saw that the optical effect remained and briefly, up to the right of his internal visual field, an effect like that of a kaleidoscope appeared, shifted for a while and disappeared. It seemed that despite her claim otherwise, her hack had caused some damage. Or was it Ganzen trying to penetrate his com? Cold sweat then arrived with a return of the shakes. At some point he carried his anxiety down into dreams about running an endless corridor with a hooder after him. Far far too ominous he felt, when he finally woke.
The hooder grew and grew, occasionally shedding just pieces of its carapace, but then eating those. It hardly seemed to excrete and when it starting eating the rubbery layer into which the gel had transformed, Jonas suspected there must be something missing from its diet. Inside the thing he could see changes at variance from the anatomy of hooders on Masada, along with concentrations of metals and other odd materials. He turned his attention to the food supply, determined to try s
omething.
Returning to his files he found the early design of the skeleton for the grazer – this one made out of composite and metals. He matched it to the present skeleton he was using then began making changes. All were subtle but matched in quantity the materials profile in the hooder. Also, because he knew more about what the thing might grow in its body, he added other elements and compounds.
‘Why are you doing this?’ asked Caster – as was her duty to ask. He had now switched her communication over to the intercom. Because his aug still did not seem to be working right he had shut down many functions and had it running a diagnostic.
‘I intend to try something experimental but very unlikely to harm the hooder.’ They had agreed on his use of ‘experimental’ as a secret signal during night-time conversations he had increasingly curtailed – his aug malfunction giving him a headache. ‘Experimental’ meant he was doing something he felt necessary for the new hooder – for the growth of the biomech war machine. They were in dangerous territory now in regard to that too. They had also agreed that she should point out some of the changes in the thing as slightly aberrant, but no more, and hoped that Ganzen did not know what a hooder should look like inside, or simply would not bother to check at this stage.
Jonas quickly finalised his early iteration of food source and set the manufactories and printers to making just one, which he shot through the feeding tube. The hooder had ceased trying to explore that now and didn’t search around its enclosure as much as it had before. It spent long periods in stillness as if concentrating on the changes within. The grazer came through and dropped to the floor, flipped upright much faster than the other version, then ran across the enclosure straight into the far wall. Though it ran on muscle and was covered with skin it did not really look like a living thing, nor move like one.
After hitting the wall it paused for a moment, turned round like the robot it was and ran back. The hooder, having raised itself to observe, shot forwards and knocked it over halfway across, but then pulled back. The grazer robot flipped upright and ran in a new direction, this time hitting the viewing window, falling over again, then running again. The hooder flipped it again, then again. At one point it used its tail to flip the thing over too. Jonas watched all this and could not help but feel that it was playing, and somewhat amused by the robot’s antics. At last it pinned the grazer down using one leg to hold it while raising its hood above the thing. It was inspecting it, he was sure it was inspecting it. It then dipped abruptly and began to feed. Again it ate fast, shredding its prey in moments and ingesting it, then hoovering up the fragments. Jonas felt satisfied. It had been hungry for those things it was lacking, found them and responded.
