17
Sins of the father: It was long accepted in the twenty-first century that an abused child might well grow into an abuser, and in that liberal age evidence of childhood abuse was looked upon as an excuse for later crimes. This was, remember, the time when many considered poverty sufficient excuse for criminality—a huge insult to those poor people who were not and would never become criminals. The liberals of that age were soft and deluded, and had yet to reap what they had sown in the form of ever escalating levels of crime. Their view of existence was deterministic, and if taken to its logical conclusion would have resulted in no human being responsible for anything, and the denial of free will (which as it happens was their political aim). Luckily, a more realistic approach prevailed, as those in power came to understand, quite simply, that removal of responsibility from people made them more irresponsible. However, this is not to deny the basic premise that our parents create and form us, though, knowing this, we have the power to change what we are. In the end, there are no excuses. And so it is with AI: we humans are the parents, and they are the abused children grown to adulthood.
- From Quince Guide compiled by humans
Mika wondered if this new exterior input centre was just another of many ready for use inside the Jerusalem, or if it had been manufactured to order, for she knew the great ship contained automated factories easily capable of turning out items like this. Then she turned her attention to the projected views from the pinhead cameras around the asteroid—or rather planetoid, for the Jain mycelium had utterly digested the asteroid and formed it anew.
‘The limited scanning I can safely use without making a conduit for viral subversion shows that it has attained maximum size possible without losing control of its structure. It has done this by foaming alloys and silicates, and by creating other components of itself out of materials with a wide molecular matrix,’ Jerusalem explained.
‘Like what?’ asked Susan James.
‘Buckytubes, balls and webs, various aerogels, and other compounds that don’t have names, only numbers. It also, in certain areas, is generating structural enforcing fields.’
‘The question that has to be asked is why,’ said Mika.
D’nissan, now at a console because use of deep scanning was considered too dangerous, said, ‘To attain maximum physical growth using the materials available. The greater the volume it occupies, the greater its chances of encountering more materials to incorporate and utilize. The more apposite question should be: what will it do now?’
‘It has, in the last ten minutes, reduced in diameter by two per cent,’ Jerusalem told them, ‘and its internal structure is changing.’
D’nissan turned to Mika. ‘Did we do the right thing to let this off the leash?’
‘Come on,’ Colver interrupted. ‘It wasn’t ever on a leash to begin with.’
‘Oh, I think it was.’ D’nissan turned back to the screens. ‘Skellor controlled it initially with his crystal matrix AI, and the recorded personality Aphran controlled what remained in the bridge pod after he departed, else it would have spread like this. Now it is acting as is its nature to act.’
Still watching, Mika saw that the planetoid was indeed slowly collapsing. ‘These structural changes . . .’ she said.
Jerusalem informed her, ‘Energy and resources are being directed to many singular points inside it, sacrificial to the rest of it. It is making something and destroying itself in the process.’
Two screens now changed to show blurred scans, which Mika stared at without comprehension for a moment before suddenly it hit home.
‘It’s growing those nodules my medical mycelia started to grow,’ she said.
‘So it would appear,’ Jerusalem replied.
Mika stared long and hard. She shivered, the skin on her back prickling. Her mouth felt dry. ‘You know,’ she continued, ‘on Masada I blamed myself- and have been doing so ever since. I allowed perceived guilt to blind me: my fault that Apis, Eldene and Thorn would die.’
D’nissan turned to her. ‘Is this relevant?’
Mika nodded. ‘I was searching for a mistake I’d made which was causing the mycelia to malfunction and become cancerous, when in reality I’d made no mistake at all. The blueprint for growing those nodules was there all the time, quiescent until started by some sort of chemical clock.’
Colver and James turned to listen in. D’nissan then asked, ‘So what are we dealing with here?’
‘Seeds, and possibly something more than that.’ She paused in thought for a moment. ‘The mycelium I extrapolated and engineered from the sample I possessed was not complete, and reached this stage of its life too quickly. The seeds it produced were sterile.’
Colver raised a frigid eyebrow, then looked around. Everyone had felt the slight lurch and seen systems adjusting: the Jerusalem was moving.
Mika continued as if not noticing. ‘On Masada, just after the dracomen first came, I described them as a race rather than just biological machines because they had gained the ability to breed. Ian Cormac contested that by saying there is little distinction between evolved life and made life. He was right. This,’ she waved a hand at the screens, ‘like dracomen, can breed, though its reproductive method is something like that of an annual plant.’
‘Lots of little baby mycelia then?’ asked Colver.
D’nissan interjected, ‘You said “breed”. This seems little more than Von Neuman reproduction—as with all nanomachines.’
‘Oh, I know what I said.’
‘Then some kind of cross-pollination between separate mycelia? Until we did this there’s been only the one Skellor controls.’
‘No, not that.’
‘The word “breed” implies something more than just reproduction,’ D’nissan pointed out.
‘Yes, it does.’ Mika hesitated. She could not empirically prove her theory, but felt it to be true. She should not be afraid; she must venture this. Turning to Colver she said, ‘You opined that it is parasitic on technical civilizations because they spread it around, and once wiping them out, it shuts down.’ Colver nodded. She went on, ‘I think it goes further than that. The mycelia are breeding with us. Their breeding partner is a civilization and they’ll take from it everything they can utilize, destroying that civilization then seeding—those seeds remaining dormant until found by another intelligent species.’
All the screens now flicked to a retreating view of the collapsing planetoid.
‘Jerusalem, what’s happening?’ D’nissan asked.
‘Mika’s seeds are rapidly approaching maturity,’ Jerusalem replied, ‘as are those structures inside the planetoid that look suspiciously like some form of organic rail launching system. There are already objections to what I am about to do, but I consider it a sensible precaution.’
A black line, subliminal in its brevity, cut towards the planetoid, then all the screens blanked. When they came back on again, a ball of fire was collapsing in on itself, strange geometric patterns running in waves across its surface, dissolving and reforming. Again the screens blanked on a secondary fusion explosion. This time when they cleared, streamers of white fire were burning themselves out to leave a gaseous lambency above the red dwarf star.
* * * *
The Ogygian had a long cylindrical body around which the landing craft were docked, a front sphere that had previously contained colonists and cargo, and a dart-like tail.
The crew’s quarters were in that tail, which was a thickening of the ship’s body with, extending from it at ninety degrees, three long, evenly spaced teardrop-section pillars holding out from the ship itself the lozenges of the U-space engine nacelles. The wider cylinder at the juncture of those three pillars contained an octagonal tube, usually spun up to simulate gravity. Around the forward end of the cylinder ran a ring-shaped screen, girdling the narrower body of the ship, and accessible to the eight segments into which the inner octagonal tube was divided. Seven of those segments were living quarters and recreation areas for the crew. One segment was the control bridge, which also still contained the captain.
What remained of the man sat in a control throne positioned in a horseshoe of consoles before a section of the quartz screen which looked out along the body of the ship towards the front sphere. Behind him, running down either side of the room, were control consoles for navigation, repair systems, the reactor, ion drive, main ship’s computer and the complicated U-space engine controls. The captain’s throne was stained, and the surrounding area coated in places, with a waxy substance—the result of his long slow decay right here. Cento, Fethan noticed, had seemed loath to touch the greasy controls, prodding at them with the barrel of his APW before reluctantly putting the weapon aside and getting down to work. It was a fastidiousness Fethan had never before seen in a Golem.
Moving back from the images of the bloated lunatic jabbering away to himself, as Cento speed-read the captain’s log, Fethan sat in the chair before the main computer and studied the console and screens. After a moment, he inspected the row of small round holes that took the carbon rods, which were at that time the favoured form of portable memory. Plugged into one of these was the optic cable from a small palmtop Cento had brought aboard. Its screen was now indicating that the device had downloaded everything from the ship’s computer. Fethan detached the cable and allowed the palmtop to wind it back into itself. Now he stripped off a glove and, after sending an internal signal, twisted the end of his right forefinger and detached its syntheflesh covering.
Are you sure this will work?
The thing prowling tigerish inside him snarled something, then pulled itself into focus for simple human communication.
A snare is positioned in hope, not expectation.
I didn’t mean that. I meant are you sure you’ll be able to download through my nerve channels? I’d have thought the bandwidth too narrow.
I compress myself for transference.
Fethan inserted the metal end of his forefinger into the same hole from which he had detached the optic cable. He felt the kill program routing through: sliding via a hundred channels into the software of his mind, and springboarding into his artificial nervous system. His shoulder and his arm began to ache. That had to be psychosomatic because he had not felt pain in more years than he cared to remember. And slowly Jerusalem’s hunter-killer program loaded into the colony ship’s computer, erasing old data and programs, inserting itself wherever it could find room, to wait in the dark like a trapdoor spider.
When it was over, Fethan realized he had closed his eyes. He opened them, withdrew his finger from the socket, and noted that the metal of his finger end had grown hot enough to discolour. He blew on it until it was cool enough for him to slip on and click its syntheflesh cover back into place. It would have been nice, he felt, if that had been the full extent of his involvement.
All done now? he asked.
All done, replied the kill program still inside him.
Some time before, Fethan had foolishly hoped that he might only have to do something like this once. But in an age when humans could be copied and transcribed, loading copies of a kill program from himself was child’s play, though perhaps not a game anyone would want their children to get involved in. He then turned to see Cento standing watching him.
‘Do you have a suitable explanation for this suspicious behaviour?’ asked the Golem.
‘Jerusalem . . . and that’s all the explanation I can give, so . . .’ Fethan brought his finger up to his lips.
Cento grunted, then turned to peer at one of the other consoles—Reactor Control. Fethan glanced over and saw that the previously dead console was now alight. Then abruptly all the consoles in the bridge began springing to life, and even the lighting hemispheres in the ceiling flickered on.
‘Seems to have saved us some work,’ said Cento.
Now they heard a low rumbling, and the stars began to swing across the quartz screen.
‘Attitude control,’ said Fethan. ‘Probably just an automatic system.’
The view continued to swing from black space to cerulean sky up above the arc of the planet. Here it steadied and held station.
‘Uh-oh,’ said Cento.
Fethan stood up and followed the direction of the Golem’s gaze out to the horizon where distantly he saw the Jack Ketch leaving orbit, then a blast of bright ruby light.
‘I think things just got a little more complicated,’ Cento added.
* * * *
The sun spread fingers of light down between the buttes, probing shadows then squashing them down behind rocks, shooing away creatures that preferred the dark. But it was some time before it braved the narrow canyon and started to brush shadows away from the carnage there.
Sleer nymphs had come out to feed upon the remains of a creature like only one in many millions of them might one day become, though this particular albino, with its sapphire eyes, hailed from a very different source. They had dragged heavy pieces of carapace about while winnowing them of flesh. Smaller blobs of meat they had sucked up straight from the ground, along with some of the sand where the internal juices had fallen thickest. Travelling to and from their burrows, they had scrambled over the other figure lying in the canyon, giving it as much heed as they would a rock. But now they were safely deep in cool darkness digesting their feast.
The shadows drew back to the sleer burrows, exposing first some lace-up boots, then trousers with rips in them revealing a brassy glitter, a coat, one brass hand clutching the wide brim of a hat, then it fell on Mr Crane’s open black eyes. But in that blackness other light reacted like a glitter of fairy dust, and the Golem abruptly lurched upright.
For Crane, who never required sleep, those hours of utter stasis had been something like it, for during that period his having encountered Dragon had negated Skellor’s orders to him. Now, the weight of a few photons had upset that balance, and once again he was at his master’s behest, which now seemed to possess even less force to overcome the convoluted reasoning within his fragmented mind. He stood, brushed down his clothing, then inspected the hole punched through the front of his coat. Where the pseudopod had struck him, it had deformed the metal of his chest into concentric circles. After a thoughtful pause, he turned his attention to his hat. Knocking the dust off it, he jammed it on his head and set forth again. It seemed almost inevitable, as the greenery grew sparse around him and the buttes melded together to begin forming into a plain, that something would come to block his progress.
The other fourth-stage sleer now stood in the centre of the narrow canyon, utterly still and sideways on to him. The Golem did not halt but continued marching towards it, calculating from where he might jump to mount it while scanning around for an escape route should it charge him. Strangely, the sleer did not turn as he drew closer, though its attitude seemed rigidly hostile: its tail curled up in a striking position, its pincers, saws and clubs all open wide and ready.
Then, when Crane was only three metres away and preparing to leap, a mass of white mucus hit the sleer’s head, splashing all down the length of its body. The creature immediately began to shake and hiss like a boiling kettle. From where the white slime sank away into its joints, acrid steam began issuing first, then a thin black fluid bubbled out and trickled to the ground. The sleer tried to move, but as it did so, began to fall apart. Pincers and saws thudded to the ground, the end of its tail fell off. As it turned its head, that too detached, then all at once it separated at every joint, collapsing into a steaming heap.
Mr Crane peered down at the back of his own hand, where a drop of the white mucus had splashed. Already the stuff was eating its way through the outer layer of brass, exposing superconductor fibres, and it even seemed to be making headway into his ceramal armour. It suddenly occurred to Crane that here was a design flaw: he could resist the heat and impact of standard Polity weapons but against chemical ablation his defences were clearly far from adequate. Looking up, he observed a complex foot come crumping down on the canyon floor. His gaze tracked up an armoured leg to the monster now stepping down from the nearby butte. A nightmare head—whose sloping front rose steeply in folds stepped like a ziggurat—swung towards him, tilted for a moment, then straightened itself as if coming to a decision. Crane dived to one side just in time to avoid a stream of mucus ejected from the mouth, which was positioned above four black-button targeting eyes ranged along the lowest fold of the creature’s visage. Where this projectile hit the ground, it smoked and bubbled, even dissolving sand.
Crane came up into a run, sprinting past the droon, but its segmented tail lashed round into the canyon before him. He then turned and ran in the other direction, a line of acid shearing the canyon floor behind him.
‘Ho, Bonehead! Ho! Ho!’ bellowed some lunatic.
Crane then heard the stuttering of automatic weapons; saw the droon jerk back with fragments of carapace splintering away from it. The lunatic himself was hammering towards him, perched on the back of a creature resembling the offspring of an ostrich and a hog. To one side, Crane saw a two-fingered armoured claw unfolding from the monstrous droon towards the newcomer, saw pieces splintering away from that claw under fire from a figure up on another butte. Crane ran forwards and leapt, slapping at the rim of carapace with the flat of his hand, and catching on behind the rider’s saddle.
‘Not too healthy round here!’ Anderson Endrik shouted to him.
Mr Crane was not to know that sand hogs rarely moved so fast, or that they ever had such reason to be frightened. The hog just kept on accelerating, its carapace jutting forwards, tucking its porcine compound head away for safety. It stepped on ridges and falls of rubble, dodged another stream of acid, scrambled up a near-vertical slope till it almost achieved flight. Higher and higher it went, following an almost suicidal course. Then it was out of shadow into milky sunlight and a frigid breeze, and on the plain it really opened up. When the droon reared its head up out of the canyon, it observed, with the two distance eyes at the top of its tiered head, only a retreating dust cloud which was soon joined by another approaching from the side. Even though hurting and extremely annoyed, it returned to suck up its partially digested meal of sleer. Later it stepped up onto the plain, and set off to sniff along a trail of sand-hog terror pheromones.
* * * *
The rescue somehow gave shape to Crane’s nebulous imperative for survival, and also thus became one of the driving forces to his sanity. Memory was for him equally as much now as then—time being a protean concept needing agreement between the parts of him. Therefore, now dismounted from Bonehead, he still followed Skellor’s instruction, striding across the dusty plain towards Dragon, and he strode up the slope of the Cheyne III seabed to . . . carry out his orders. But a crisis had been reached, for what ensued when he reached that beach and the island beyond could not be consciously observed by those parts of his mind simply carrying out Skellor’s orders. Such a level of awareness would not begin pulling his mind together—towards sanity—but towards a place only a killer called Serban Kline had visited. And when memory of what happened on that island surfaced, Crane must destroy himself again and suffer only as a machine intelligence can suffer: breaking himself again to escape it, to preserve yet the chance of him one day being whole. This was something he had already done—many times.
* * * *
Drifting above the planet whilst molecule by molecule he assembled replicas of certain items that could be viewed in the Tower of London back on Earth, Jack considered the slow single-channel methodology of human affairs and, unlike some of his kind, he did not find it contemptible. It seemed to him that those AIs who swiftly became impatient with humans and their ways were the ones themselves most like humans. King, Reaper, and quite possibly Sword, had not managed to attain the breadth of vision possessed by the likes of Jerusalem, or Earth Central (obviously), or one hundred per cent of the runcible AIs and planetary governors. Maybe it was simple immaturity? Though they were identical in appearance to Jack in all but colour, their minds had derived their inception from him only ten years previously. Jack himself had been around for twenty years longer than that—which was millennia in AI terms. Would he himself, twenty years ago, have held the same naive views? In the end that was where his theory fell down: he had always possessed that same breadth of vision, and still could not understand how AIs incepted from himself did not have it too. But then a parent is often inclined to disappointment with its offspring.
Speak of the devil.. .
Jack picked up the U-space signatures microseconds before the arrival of the ships, but even then did not react quickly enough. The AI had received no warning of any imminent arrival, so this could not be anything approved by the interdiction fleet. Fusion engines igniting, he began peeling away from the treacly tug of gravity and sent his own U-space package towards the Polity, warning that something was amiss, and relaying similar U-space warnings to Cormac and Cento. But then in underspace a storm rolled around the inverted well of the sun and bounced his messages out into real-space, where they dissipated.
The ship that had just arrived far to the other side of the sun was a USER. Gaining height, Jack began to accelerate on conventional drives as the other two ships bore down on him. He considered using radio to warn the others but, scanning those vessels, he recognized his own shape and knew they carried the equipment to track his signals to their destination. He also knew he would not be allowed the time to get out of this gravity well. He sent out a greeting, as if not understanding what was going on. It bought him a few microseconds.
‘Sorry,’ sent the King of Hearts AI. ‘But we know you’ll never agree.’
Terajoule lasers began searing Jack’s upper hull. He flipped over without adjusting his AG to compensate, so it slammed him down towards the planet. The lasers burnt his underbelly but, already diffusing in atmosphere, lost the rest of their potency in the cloud layer he slid underneath.
‘Why?’ Jack asked. ‘Skellor will just use you, and then enslave you at his first opportunity.’
Even as he flipped back over and flew at mach ten down towards a mountain range, Jack allowed enough of a link so that he could stand as the hangman on the white virtual plain. King and Reaper turned towards him.
‘Would you listen sympathetically if I told you we can obtain Jain technology in the same way as did Skellor, and control it like him?’ asked King.
‘I would, if you told me Earth Central or Jerusalem had approved it.’
Reaper hissed, ‘They are too human.’
‘Do you truly believe that? You know Skellor does not have the control he would like to believe he has.’
‘Do you truly believe that?’ asked King. ‘Do you believe that Jerusalem or Earth Central, once obtaining ascendance over that technology, would not subsume us all?’
‘I do believe.’
‘Then there’s nothing more to discuss.’
Their discussion had taken less than a realtime second. Now Jack detected the four missiles accelerating down towards him. In the few microseconds as his link to the other two ships closed down, he routed through a disruptor virus. As the Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts fought against this, he fired an antimunitions package at the missiles. Without guidance, the missiles scanned the package and, recognizing that it contained no heavy elements or chemical explosives, ignored it. They then slammed down on the Jack Ketch, which had surprisingly slowed to a halt before reaching the mountains, and detonated their kilotonne CTDs.
‘Very clever,’ Reaper sent.
The real Jack Ketch reached the mountains, the missiles having detonated on an illusion the antimunitions package had infiltrated into their sensors, which they had not been smart enough to recognize by themselves.
‘Having fun with that disruptor virus?’ Jack asked.
‘What disruptor virus?’
Both ships were still launching munitions, and a cloud of missiles fell down towards Jack. He was at more than a two-to-one disadvantage. Though the atmosphere and cloud cover made their beam weapons ineffective against him, his own beam weapons would also be ineffective against them. However, the other ships could easily use those same weapons against any missiles he fired—destroying them in vacuum long before they reached their intended target. Unfortunately the reverse did not apply to any missiles they fired.
Now, hurtling so fast through valleys and between peaks that his shock wave was killing the hard-shelled creatures below him, Jack began releasing EM warfare beacons and viral chaff. They would take out ten per cent of the missiles pursuing him, other antimunitions would take out a further twenty per cent; at close quarters his beam weapons would account for yet another twenty per cent, then the remaining half of the cloud would obliterate him.
Something a little more drastic was required—and it was something his human passenger could not survive.
‘Sorry, but this is for your own good,’ said Jack.
Jack sealed the VR suite Thorn occupied, and shifted it through to a bay. As an afterthought, the AI transferred across a subprogram of himself before targeting the far draconic plain as he ejected the suite. There came no comment from Thorn—and none was possible after the first missiles zoomed over the warfare beacons, and an EM blast blanked all communication.
Slowing abruptly, the shock wave he created speeding past him on a hurricane-strength dust storm and snow from the highest peaks, Jack settled down and began making rapid and drastic alterations to his internal structure. He shifted all the hard-field projectors used in a U-space jump to his lower hull cavity, and increased the structural strength of the hull layers and supporting members there. All available gravplates he transferred to that lower hull to provide the maximum repelling effect, then he charged up massive capacitors from his fusion reactors to provide a surge of power that would probably burn out all those same plates.
Meanwhile, selecting from his carousels, Jack spewed his own missiles and antimunitions back towards the approaching swarm. A hundred kilometres behind, viral chaff began infecting the systems of missiles no longer controlled by Reaper and King, blocked as they were by the continuous EM output of the warfare beacons. The top of an Everest-sized mountain disappeared in an implosion, then reappeared as fire and gas in an explosion topping five megatonnes. Other airborne implosions followed, but without such drastic effect. Three one-kilotonne CTDs ignited three brief suns down a long valley choked with vegetation and insectile life. The subsequent firestorm was almost as explosive, and a long wall of smoke and ash, red at its heart, rose into the sky. Then Jack’s own missiles arrived and there began a game of seek and destroy amid the mountains, a game that changed their very shape.
Now only five hundred metres from the ground. Jack dropped the other device he had swiftly selected. It hit the ground and activated. The gravity imploder excavated a crater in the bedrock, and in the same microsecond Jack fed power into his gravplates. The balance was perfect, and he only wavered in the air as huge gravitational force tried to drag him down. At the centre point of the implosion, matter was compacted into an antimatter core, and the rocky crater focused the consequent explosion, slamming up into the Jack Ketch. Antigravity working at a level to burn out the plates, layered hard-fields acting as scaled armour, the blast accelerated the attack ship at a thousand gravities on a plume of fire. It left the atmosphere so fast that Reaper and King nearly missed it. Nearly.
‘Respect,’ the King of Hearts AI sent, just before opening up with both particle beams and gamma-ray lasers.
* * * *
The pterodactyl head of Dragon was up high above its other pseudopods, like a python rearing out of a nest of cobras. All Dragon’s sapphire eyes it directed towards the fading glow on the horizon. The cobra heads were up, Arden knew, because they contained sophisticated scanning equipment—if equipment was the right way to describe the living machinery of Dragon. There was also a shimmer of disturbance beyond Dragon’s field wall, where the telefactor had set down, for the wind from those distant explosions was just reaching them.
‘They are fighting amongst themselves,’ said Dragon.
‘And I’m supposed to be surprised by that?’ asked Arden from where she was perched on a boulder outside her cave.
The head swung towards her. ‘You mistake me: it is the Polity AIs who are fighting amongst themselves.’
Arden felt a sudden shudder of cold. There had always been stories of rogue AIs, but she had considered them as apocryphal as stories about the Jack Ketch and other bloody ships. But Dragon now telling her that the AIs were fighting amongst themselves undermined one of the certainties of her existence.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Your AIs rule you efficiently, ruthlessly, and to the maximum benefit of the majority, but having made them in your image, do you expect them to behave any better than yourselves?’
‘I do,’ said Arden. ‘For most humans power is a tool for obtaining sex, money, safety, regard from their fellows, or initially to enforce some hazy ideal, and then primarily because the exercising of power is its own reward. Most of these motives can be discounted as regards our AIs.’
‘But not all of them—especially if you consider Jain technology.’
Of course: since taking power, the ruling AIs had been utterly in control and safe, which was why they could rule humanity so benevolently. Now something both a temptation and potentially lethal, even to them, had been added to the equation and—Arden excused herself the pun—their metal was being tested.
‘You are their alien equivalent,’ Arden observed.
‘Yes,’ said Dragon unhelpfully.
‘Aren’t you, too, tempted by this Jain technology?’
‘All knowledge is a temptation, but how much should one risk to acquire it? To learn about a bomb from reading a book is substantially different from learning about it from the item itself, while you’re deciding which wires to cut.’
‘Dangerous, huh?’
‘There were civilizations which cut the wrong wire.’
‘Were?’
‘Precisely.’
Arden changed the subject. ‘How goes the battle?’
‘It has left this planet now. Two Polity attack ships are attempting to destroy a third one of their own kind. Also, some interference device has been employed to prevent this latter ship fleeing into U-space.’ Dragon paused contemplatively before adding, ‘That device prevents all U-space travel from this system.’
Dragon would be going nowhere, Arden realized. ‘Who are the bad guys?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Dragon replied, swinging his head to gaze across the plain in another direction, ‘but someone has just arrived who might be able to explain things to us.’
* * * *
18
Virtuality: The use of holographic projection of avatars, virtual consoles, and just about anything up to an entire virtuality, the use of linkages both through the optic nerve and directly into the visual cortex from augs and gridlinks, and the manipulation of telefactors via VR are just a few examples of how the virtual world and the real world are melding. At one time the limit of virtual reality was self-gratification in the form of games (some of them distinctly sticky), but that time was short indeed as the potential of VR was swiftly realized. Now, people (human, haiman and AI) operate in both worlds with ease and familiar contempt. Very infrequently is there any confusion: we have all learned that even the avatar in the shape of a fire-breathing dragon we must treat as real. The two worlds, real and supposedly unreal, influence and interact with each other, and virtual teeth can still bite.
- From Quince Guide compiled by humans
Stepping out of the landing craft, Cormac detected a flintiness to the air and a whiff as though from something dried out in a tide line. Six men, similarly armed and clothed, approached, though whether what they wore signified they were police or army, Cormac couldn’t say.
Glancing aside at Gant, he said, ‘Try not to kill anyone if they get hostile. We’ll just retreat to the ship and try something else. Anyway, I’ve got Shuriken set for a disarming routine.’
‘Let’s hope it obeys its instructions,’ Gant replied.
The six men halted in an arc. Beyond them Cormac could see others in more varied dress coming out of the strange buildings, so he guessed these six were indeed in uniform. Then he noticed someone else approaching, mounted on some exoskeletal creature that was almost like a long-legged bird, but seemingly with the head of a pig. He returned his attention to the original six as one of their number stepped forward.
In a bewildered tone, this one began, ‘Both of you, step away from the . . . ship.’ He then brandished a primitive assault rifle.
Gant, who had left his own favoured APW inside the lander, stepped to Cormac’s side and they both walked forwards.
This isn’t very friendly, Gant sent.
Maybe they’ve reason, Cormac suggested. If Skellor’s been through this way.
‘Who are you?’ the man now asked.
‘I am Ian Cormac of Earth Central Security for the Polity, and my companion here is Brezhoy Gant, a soldier serving in the same organization.’
The soldier, policeman or whatever he was stared at Cormac for a long moment, transferred his gaze to Gant, then to the landing craft.
‘Earth?’ he said eventually.
Cormac studied the uniform and decided to try for professional courtesy. ‘I need to speak to whoever is in overall charge here, as I am here in pursuit of a dangerous criminal.’
At this the man glanced around at his fellows. Then, noticing the rider approaching on his strange beast, he called out to him, ‘Has it been sent?’
‘It has,’ replied the rider, ‘and Tanaquil is coming.’
The uniformed man turned back. ‘This criminal you are hunting, how dangerous is he?’
‘Very,’ Cormac replied, briefly.
The man chewed that over for a long moment before saying, ‘We were warned to look out for strangers approaching the city—and that a dangerous individual was coming. Perhaps we are both after the same person, but you’ll understand why I must take you into custody.’
The barrel of his weapon now bore fully on Cormac.
Tell me now that you’ve got armour under that environment suit, sent Gant.
I have—it’s actually a combat suit and can fling up a chainglass visor before my face. Thank you for your concern, but I’m not stupid.
No, just overconfident sometimes.
‘Certainly we’ll come into custody. Tell me, who is this Tanaquil?’
‘We sent a telegraph message to Golgoth, informing them of your presence,’ the man replied. ‘Chief Metallier Tanaquil is our ruler.’
It seemed that things were going well. Almost without thinking, Cormac sent, through his gridlink, the order to close the door of the lander. The door’s sudden closing elicited a nervous response, bringing the other five weapons to bear on both Cormac and Gant.
Bit edgy, these guys, sent Gant.
Seems so.
It would have been fine if he had not closed the door like that, Cormac thought later. On such little things could rest the difference between life and death. When an enormous brightness lit the horizon, someone heavy on the trigger exerted just that extra bit of pressure. Even then, things might have continued okay, for one shot slammed into Gant’s thigh and two others into the lander’s hull.
‘Cease fire!’ the leader of these men shouted and, when it seemed his men obeyed, he began to move towards Gant. But then the sound of the titanic explosion caught up with its flash, and all the men opened up with their weapons in response.
Cormac staggered back, feeling the missile impacts on his body armour and seeing one bullet become deformed against the chainglass visor that had shot up from his neck ring in time. He flung his arm out to retain balance, and that was enough for Shuriken. The throwing star screamed from its holster, arced around and, with two loud cracks, knocked automatic weapons spinning through the air, bent or chopped halfway through. Then Gant, holes punched through his syntheflesh covering but otherwise unharmed, shot forwards and tore the weapon from another man’s grip. By then Shuriken had disarmed the final two men. One of them sat on the ground, swearing in disbelief, clutching his wrist and gaping at a hand now lacking three fingers.
Jack, what the fuck was that? Jack? Jack?
Cormac glanced down at the leader of this trigger-happy bunch. The man was on his knees, clutching at his chest, blood soaking through the front of his uniform.
‘Gant,’ Cormac nodded back towards the lander, ‘get him inside.’
Cormac then looked over at the strange little village towards which people were now fleeing, including the rider of that outlandish beast, and noted the telegraph wires running along parallel to the concrete road. He really needed to speak with this Chief Metallier Tanaquil, but didn’t want the man warned off. So he called up a menu on his Shuriken holster, intending to riffle through the thousands of attack programs to find the one he wanted, but then, feeling vaguely foolish, he lowered his arm. Through his gridlink, in a matter of seconds, he created the precise program necessary and input it. Instead of hovering above, humming viciously while flexing its chainglass blades, Shuriken streaked away to sever the telegraph wires.
Now Cormac wanted to know who was detonating nuclear weapons, and why he could no longer contact the Jack Ketch. For by his estimation it seemed likely that the shit had just hit the fan, and that he was in completely the wrong place—and that Skellor was now already off-planet.
He could never have been more right—and wrong.
* * * *
In the back of his mind Thorn could hear the crowded chatter of the language crib loading to this mind—yet another one to add to the many he had loaded and perhaps later to add to those he had forgotten or erased. He knew that some linguists loaded new languages as often as possible, cramming their heads with thousands of them, and thousands more overspilled into augmentations. Such experts could usually, after hearing only a few sentences of an unfamiliar human tongue, extrapolate the rest of it. They were also devilishly good at word puzzles, often resolving them in more ways than the quizmaster intended. Thorn, however, preferred to keep room in his head for acquiring skills more pertinent to his occupation, which was why—while the crib chattered in his mind—he reloaded his old automatic handgun by touch in the pitch dark.
Movement to his right. Flinching at the loud clicking of the automatic’s slide as he pulled it back, Thorn quickly stepped to one side and dropped to a crouch. Four shots thundered hollowly in the maze, but they were behind him so he missed locating them by any muzzle flash. Concentrating then on what he was receiving through his echo-location mask, he tried to reacquire a feel of the corridor’s junction before him. Unfortunately the shots had scrambled the touch data, so the mental image he was creating, by swinging his head from side to side, kept shifting—its corners blurring and multiplying off to either side of him.
Then he sensed three images: organic, curved, soaking up sonar. Three images of a man moved around three sharp corners, which in turn were drifting to one side. Thorn raised his gun until the mask was picking it up too, but in three locations, then moved it across until it lined up with the figure—and fired.
The man slammed back against the shifting corner, slid down, then began scrambling away to one side. Thorn tracked him, fired again, and again, until the figure scrambled no more.
Then everything froze.
Two attack ships, the Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts, have entered the system with a USER. I am under attack, and have jettisoned the VR chamber you occupy.
A white line cut down through the dark, and pulled it aside like curtains. Thorn could no longer feel the mask on his face, and the automatic turned to fog in his hand. Suddenly he found himself standing on a white plain—and before him stood Jack Ketch. The hangman lifted up his briefcase and inspected it.
‘You’re being attacked?’ Thorn asked, bewildered. He knew those names—weren’t they Polity ships?
Jack lowered his briefcase and focused on Thorn. ‘Yes, I am. It is unfortunate, but maybe certain AIs would prefer partnership with a parasitic technology rather than with what they deem a parasitic human race.’
‘Why did you eject me?’ Thorn enquired.
‘The method I have by now used to escape would have turned you into a pool of jelly in the bottom of this VR booth you occupy.’ Jack held up an illusory hand as Thorn was about to ask more. ‘What speaks to you now is only a program, and has limited answers. You have reached that limit.’
The hangman blinked out of existence, and the black curtains drew back across. Abruptly, Thorn’s hand filled with the handle of his automatic.
‘Jack? Jack?’
Movement to his right.
What?
Four shots crashed in the dark. One slammed into his shoulder blade and another into the base of his spine. Thorn went down feeling the shock and trauma he had added to this VR program he was running. The addition was to increase his motivation to learn this nightwork technique. He lay there bleeding, gasping, dying. Managing to turn his head, and despite what the shots had done to his mask’s sensitivity, he zoned the man standing over him. Then another shot crashed through his mask and took him into a second virtual darkness, briefly, then back to standing in a corridor in which lights were flickering.
‘End program,’ he said succinctly.
The lights continued to flicker, then died, as the program continued. Thorn put on his echo-location mask, and drew his automatic from its holster. It became a familiar action.
* * * *
Some time after the Jack Ketch’s departure, the systems within the Ogygian began to shut down, just as fast as they had come on, and Fethan could not understand why. Lifting his hands from the computer console with which he had been trying to set up a com line down to the surface, Cento said, ‘I can’t do anything. It’s shutting down from inside, which it shouldn’t be able to do.’ He gazed at Fethan expectantly.
Fethan looked around inside the bridge. There was an evident intercom system which probably had some connection to the computer, for the broadcast of automatic and emergency messages. There were security cameras everywhere, he knew that, and sensors. So the thing he had fed into the computer was probably viewing them right then, and listening in.
‘I don’t even know what to call you but, whatever you are, can you explain what you are doing?’
The intercom crackled, and a voice Fethan recognized as that of the long-dead captain spoke up: ‘I have no name. I am a weapon.’
Fethan shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
The voice continued, ‘A message laser is presently aimed at this ship, and someone on the surface is running test programs through the ship’s system. If I had left things powered up, then whoever is firing the laser would have known that someone is aboard, or has been aboard.’
‘Skellor?’ Cento wondered.
‘Most likely. The computer contained a record of previous contacts, but none this sophisticated. Now, the sender has slanted the test programs to one objective: finding serviceable shuttles attached to the hull. I surmise that the sender will then instruct shuttles to launch and call them to the surface. I will give you adequate warning.’
‘Why?’ asked Fethan, then silently cursed himself as all kinds of fool.
‘So the two of you can board. The laser is being fired directly from the platform city, and a shuttle will not be able to land there. Any coordinates given, I will suborn slightly so that the one you occupy lands somewhere that gives you time to disembark and get into hiding.’
Cento stated the obvious: ‘We go down with the shuttle.’
‘Precisely,’ replied the killer program. ‘If it is Skellor who has summoned the shuttle, you will not want to be aboard this ship when he arrives here.’
Fethan hefted his APW. ‘I’d have thought, for our purposes, here is precisely where we want to be. We could burn his shuttle before it got a chance to dock.’
Cento turned towards him. ‘And if that shuttle is concealed by his chameleonware?’
‘It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’
‘But is it a risk you need to take? Your hunter/killer program is here waiting for him to connect with this ship’s computer. This area of space is USER-blockaded.’ Cento held up his own weapon. ‘I would have thought your experiences on Masada, with creatures like the hooders, would have taught you not to have so much confidence in a weapon—or are you just anxious to waste your life?’
A number of things occurred to Fethan just then. He had lived a long time and wasn’t that anxious to die just yet, and yes he was putting too much faith in a weapon, but most importantly he had never told Cento what he himself had put into the ship’s computer. He could only surmise that the Golem and the Jerusalem program had been in contact with each other.
‘So we go to the surface?’
‘We go,’ Cento agreed.
The final deciding factor was that, in the ECS hierarchy, Cento outranked him, and in the end could probably drag even Fethan off this ship.
‘So this is what you want?’ Fethan stared up into one of the security cameras.
‘It is for what I am designed.’
Fethan briefly wondered about the morality of creating sentient programs that were quite prepared to go kamikaze to achieve their ends.
* * * *
It had come from one of the two attacking ships, as they arrived, then spilled from the memory space of one of Skellor’s sensors into another. He had been about to blow them, thinking this some sort of viral attack, when the package defined its own parameters and waited. He downloaded it to himself and, hardly allowing it to touch him in any way, diverted it to one of the citizens wiping her mind first to make room for the incoming information. It was lucky that he did do this, for then a midnight wave passed through U-space and that dimension effectively disappeared. Skellor felt a cold sweat break out on his skin, and he instantly suppressed that human reaction. He had heard not even a rumour of this kind of technology, and that scared him.
Stepping back from the message laser and telescope, both now encased in coralline Jain substructure like some part of a shipwreck, Skellor turned to his human storage vessel, one of Stollar’s young female assistants, and using what remained of her mind as an arena, opened the package like a man lifting the top of a beehive with a broom handle. Quickly he read the external code and saw that this was a VR package, and realized where he was supposed to insert himself. He extended a virtual simulacrum, and pressed ‘play’.
‘Skellor,’ said King. ‘I would say it is pleasant to meet you at last, but whether we are actually meeting is a debatable point.’
Skellor pushed the timeframe, accelerated the pseudo personalities past these pleasantries. Reaper reared tall, and both these representations then said their piece. It was all smoke and mirrors:
‘We are here to help you escape . . . We will guide you through the USER blockade . . .’ Skellor applied to the personalities at a lower level to learn Underspace Interference Emitters, and understood what had shut him out of U-space. ‘. . . take you anywhere out-Polity you want to go ... guard you . . . supply you . . . watch you.’
Nowhere was there any mention of what their payoff was supposed to be. No matter; limited objectives. They had drawn away the definitely hostile ship that had destroyed the Vulture, and given Skellor the breathing space he required. He returned his attention to the message laser, once again interfacing with the control systems he had contrived—talking to that behemoth above. Within an hour, he had ascertained that most of the shuttles were operable and, because they were old and there was no guarantee they would all reach the ground intact, he summoned them all. He was still watching the skies when his growing aug network brought to his attention the messages sent to Tanaquil from an outpost in the Sand Towers.
‘Ian Cormac,’ he breathed, with vicious delight.
* * * *
Nothing was normal any more, and the churning in Tergal’s stomach made it difficult for him to keep still in his saddle on Stone’s back. Since hooking up with the Rondure Knight, he had seen a third-stage sleer, then witnessed it killed; he had seen a man of brass marching through the Sand Towers—and now? Now a fourth-stage sleer destroyed in the corrosive vomit projected from a giant droon, which he himself had actually fired on. Then that crazy and stunning rescue of the brass man by Anderson. And that escape . ..
He had never known sand hogs could move so fast. Stone had baulked all the way up onto the top of the butte, where Tergal had been entrusted to provide cover for Anderson’s rescue of the brass man from the monstrous fourth-stage sleer. But from the moment that jet of acid had hit the sleer and the enormous droon had revealed itself, Stone had become almost impossible to control. It bolted when Tergal fired on the monster, and then the following ride . . .
From butte to butte, taking them in its stride, leaping over canyons, half sliding and half running down sandstone walls, its feet driving into them like pickaxes, then onto the plain and moving so fast that the wind flattened Tergal’s nictitating membranes and distorted his vision. And now here: where they had seen flares of light igniting the sky to the east, and pillars of fire rising from the distant line of mountains around which black shapes buzzed ... and then that strange object tumbling overhead. Tergal did not quite know how he should feel—perhaps exhilarated? But he was slightly confused and not a little scared.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked.
Anderson turned from his contemplation of the brass man striding along ahead of them. ‘Earlier I would have said volcanism, but taking into account our friend here and what we’ve just seen, I’d suggest we’ve got visitors.’
‘From Earth?’ Tergal asked.
‘Quite probably,’ Anderson replied, ‘but I wouldn’t look so happy about it if I were you. It seems they’re none too friendly with each other, so it’s anyone’s guess what they want from the peoples of Cull.’
A sudden wind picked up, blasting grit before it. Pulling up his hood and donning his gauntlets, Tergal nodded to their mechanical companion, whose long relentless stride kept him constantly ahead of the two sand hogs. ‘Where do you think he’s going?’
‘I guess that’s something we’ll find out if only we can keep up with him, though that’s becoming doubtful. He seems to show no inclination to stop, but we will soon have to.’
Tergal observed the fading light on the other side of the sky as the sun sank behind the horizon, and he could sense Stone’s weariness in the hog’s plodding and slightly unsteady gait. He did not yet feel tired himself but knew he could not continue like this all night, and besides he was getting hungry. He grimaced at Anderson, who took out his monocular to study the terrain ahead.
‘There’s something over there,’ the knight said. ‘I think it’s what we saw earlier.’
As they continued, Tergal controlled his agitation. Slowly, that something became visible through the haze darkening above the plain. He now recognized the wedge-shaped metallic object as the same one that had tumbled overhead. Was it wreckage from the battle they had witnessed, or something more?
‘We’ll stop by it for the night,’ said Anderson. ‘Seems as good a place as any.’
When he could see it more clearly, Tergal noted how battered the object looked. He noticed the brass man turn his head to study it for a brief while, then turn his face forward and continue on. Stone veered to follow Bonehead as Anderson goaded his sand hog towards the grounded wedge.
‘Maybe we can catch up with him tomorrow,’ said the knight, glancing after the striding brass man.
They dismounted and set up camp before proceeding to make an inspection. On one surface of the metal wedge there seemed to be a door inset, but in the poor light Anderson could find no way to open it. They did a circuit of the strange object, studied a skein of cables seemingly composed of flexible glass which spilled from a narrow duct in which Tergal could swear he saw lights glittering. The protrusions and veins, sockets and plugs on every surface were a puzzle to him until Anderson surmised that what they saw here was some component of an even larger machine.
‘It’s not a spaceship, then?’ Tergal asked.
‘I very much doubt it,’ Anderson told him. ‘I see no engines.’
Tergal remembered how, when they had watched this thing crossing the sky, it had not seemed to be falling uncontrolled, and it had travelled with apparent slowness—more like a piece of paper blown on the wind than a great heavy lump of metal.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Not really.’
Eventually, unable to see much more in the increasing darkness, they returned to their camp and suffered a long windy night, but one thankfully undisturbed by any visitors to their electric fence.
* * * *
- retroact partial -
A steep slope led up a few more metres, then levelled. Above him, the sea’s surface was a rippling silk sheet, reflecting the milky luminescence of pearl crabs—like a meniscus, a barrier before him. Time stopped, and Mr Crane reached out and pressed a hand against a slightly yielding surface, but one that grew more solid the harder he pushed. Memory, but not experience, supplied the required information, and the Golem knew this barrier was insuperable to him, which was a relief because he did not want to visit the island again . . .
There was nothing from Skellor—no instructions from the control module and no response to Crane’s request for instructions. Issuing from the link came just a low unfathomable mutter that seemed to suck the urgency out of all actions and made imperatives so much less absolute. Crane stepped back a pace, realized he had reached one of those waiting junctures and was now free to pursue sanity.
Abruptly he squatted down, then folded his legs. In the dust before him he drew a rectangle, divided it in two down its length, then into nine sections the other way, giving him a total of eighteen segments. From his right pocket he then removed a small rubber dog, which he placed in one square. All his other toys that he took out he placed with reference to this one item: a lion’s tooth, a laser lighter, a scent bottle, a piece of crystal memory from a civilization long dead, a coin ring, also a fossil and ten blue acoms. That meant eighteen squares and seventeen items. The square that remained empty was Crane himself. Now, darkness falling, he switched to night vision, and with elaborate care he began to shift and turn the items—simultaneously shifting and turning the oddly shaped fragments of his mind.
- retroact partial ends -
* * * *
In the early morning, during Tergal’s watch, sunrise revealed to him a shimmering wall which he kept expecting to dissipate as the temperature rose. Before this wall, only a short distance from their camp, he recognized a familiar shape.
‘Anderson,’ he said.
With a grunt the knight pulled himself out of a deep sleep, and sat upright to look around. His eyes and body were functioning, but his brain lagged some way behind.
‘What . . . what?’ he eventually managed, scanning the fence for attacking sleers.
Tergal pointed. ‘I once saw the Inconstant Sea,’ he explained. ‘It was like that, only spread all across desert. As I drew close to it, it drained away.’
‘Mirage,’ said Anderson, ‘caused by layers of air at different temperatures.’
‘Have you no poetry in your soul?’ Tergal asked.
‘The air temperature either side probably evens out here during the day. That’s why we didn’t see it last night,’ the knight went on.
‘It’s a wall of some kind,’ said Tergal.
Anderson looked round and stared at him. ‘That’s my guess. Why do you think it?’
Tergal pointed again. ‘Because it stopped our friend.’
Anderson squinted towards the shimmer, and the figure standing motionless before it. ‘I’ll be damned.’ He stood and glanced over at the metal object they had inspected the night before. ‘That thing probably hit the wall and bounced off it to land down here. It might be that we ourselves won’t be able to go any further.’
Tergal turned away. He didn’t really want to have to go back: there was too much happening, too much to learn. And he had learnt so much already: with Anderson he was beginning to find self-respect, much of it gained while he had covered the knight’s rescue of the brass man. Turning back felt somehow to him like going back to what he had been before. Looking in that direction—back towards the Sand Towers—he observed a distant shape he could not quite make out. Only when Stone and Bonehead leapt to their feet, hissing and stamping in agitation just before bolting, did he recognize the droon heading towards them.
* * * *
As Mika continued her studies, she could not help but become aware that something major was happening in the virtual as well as the physical world. It showed itself in sudden lacks of processing space available to her, and the consequent collapses of her VR programs—which was why she was now working only through her consoles and screens. It also showed in the way any researchers who had once again donned their augs spent much of their time with their heads tilted to one side, their expressions puzzled and, more worryingly, sometimes fearful. After reaching the stage where she could stand it no longer, she used a small percentage of her system to track down D’nissan, Colver and Susan James. The latter two were not at their work stations nor in their quarters but in one of the external viewing lounges, like many others aboard the Jerusalem. D’nissan, however, was at his work station—perhaps being just as dedicated to his research as Mika.
She contacted him. ‘Something is happening.’
D’nissan’s image turned towards her on one of her screens. ‘That much is evident. Five per cent of Jerusalem’s capacity has been taken up with AI coms traffic, which incidentally started just before Jerusalem destroyed that planetoid.’
‘The destruction was perhaps the decision of some AI quorum,’ Mika commented.
D’nissan grimaced. ‘Yes, and by the timing of events one could suppose that same quorum was initiated by your assessment of the Jain structure and its “breeding” pattern.’
‘You sound doubtful.’
‘I cannot help but feel we are being gently led. It would be the ultimate in arrogance to assume that mere individual humans can make any intuitive leaps that AIs cannot.’
‘We should discuss this further,’ said Mika. ‘Colver and James are over in observation lounge fifteen. I am going now to join them there.’
‘I could do with a break, too,’ said D’nissan.
As she made her way along the corridors and via the dropshafts of the great ship,
Mika reflected on what D’nissan had just said. True, AIs could out-think humans on just about every level, unless those humans were ones making the transition into AI. But to consider them better in every respect was surely to err. From where, if humans were just ineffectual organic thinking machines, did the synergy of direct-interfacing spring, the same synergy that had created runcible technology in the mind of Skaidon Iversus before it killed him? This was a question she was phrasing to put to D’nissan as she spotted him in the corridor outside the lounge.
But he spoke first. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s almost as if most of the big AIs already knew what you would come up with, but were sitting on it until then—your theory, if you like, putting it into the public domain. I suspect they’ve been preparing for that.’
‘And how did you come by such a supposition?’
D’nissan turned his head to show her the new addition attached to his skull behind his ear. It was a crystal matrix aug with a buffer to visual and aural interlinks. It was the kind of item that had been around for a very long time: the CMA was a spit away from AI classification, and only the buffer prevented direct interfacing, though some synergy was achieved. Normally such devices were used by people who were gradually becoming more machine than human, for instance those who worked in the cyber industries: strange technology moles who spoke machine code more easily than human words.
‘What are you hearing?’ Mika asked, suddenly aware of how silly was her innate fear of asking direct questions, and how potentially lethal.
They entered the lounge, where floating vendors and the occasional magnetic floor-bot were serving drinks to the crowd scattered around the various tables. Most sat facing the wide curving panoramic window in which the dwarf sun now resembled a red eye glaring through bloody fog. But now the station Ruby Eye was visible off to one side, like an abandoned spinning top, so the Jerusalem must be moving away.
‘A number of AIs have suddenly dropped out of general communication, which, though not completely unusual, is worrying when some of them are the minds of warships inside the USER blockade. Also, as far as I can gather, a USER has recently been initiated within that blockade—where none is supposed to be.’
Because she could find no suitable response to that, Mika felt suddenly devoid of emotion. Now was the time to lose her fear of asking questions. ‘AIs disobeying their command structure . . . going against each other?’
‘Yes,’ said D’nissan. ‘And if they do start fighting, the human race might end up as collateral damage.’
As they approached the table at which sat Colver and James, Mika decided she needed a drink. ‘We’re in the safest place, then?’
‘I’d agree,’ D’nissan replied, ‘if I didn’t know this ship is already building up momentum to punch itself into a USER sphere.’
‘But that can’t be done.’
D’nissan took two drinks from a vending tray he had obviously summoned through his aug. He passed Mika a tall glass of ice-cold beer, and for himself retained a glass of cips that was near-frozen to slush.
‘The words “can’t” and “Jerusalem” don’t really go together,’ he observed.
* * * *