A Quantum Mythology (27 page)

‘No!’ Sal shouted across comms, but it was too late. Lodup stabbed the blade through the top of the creature’s body, close to its mouth. The blade cracked the armour, passed straight through its primitive body and bisected its mutation-reinforced vertebrate, then out of the other side, through Lodup’s thermal sheath and into his leg. Lodup tried to scream in the liquid environment of his own larynx, and failed.

He had a moment to register that the black ink he was seeing in the water was actually his own blood, and then the water was full of hagfish. He felt their teeth against the thermal sheath and tried to cry out as they found the rip in it, and the wound beneath.

The burst of ultrasound was agonising. He felt his eardrums burst, and things tearing inside his body. The hagfish were now just so much chum sinking in the water. He saw the armoured maw of the orca swimming straight at him. It opened wide, displaying metal teeth. Then darkness.

Light, heat, panic overwhelmed him. He reached down for his leg even as he managed to work out where he was. Hideo was standing over him inside the submersible.

‘Dude, you all right?’ The submersible driver was smiling again. At least Lodup’s brush with death had cheered him up.

‘I hate this place,’ Lodup said quietly. He was running his hand down the left leg of his thermal sheath. He couldn’t even find a cut in the material.

‘The suit’s repaired itself, so has your leg, and your ruptured internal organs. Marvin pretty much saved your life. They’re not that dangerous unless they can swarm you. They’re parasites.’

‘They live off the city?’ Lodup asked incredulously. ‘Anything else I need to know.’

Hideo tapped his head. ‘Anything that’s not classified is in there. You just need to find a way to assimilate it.’

‘With all this tech, your only means of dealing with those things is zapping them with ultrasound?’ he demanded.

Hideo looked uncomfortable. ‘No, there’s lots of other ways,’ the submersible pilot said. ‘But sometimes, particularly in and around the buildings, there isn’t.’

‘So this was training rather than a set-up?’

‘Sorry, dude, not my idea.’

‘Can you tell Siska to go and fuck herself?’

‘Not verbally. I could maybe glare at her while she’s not looking if you want, but this was more likely Yaroslav.’

‘Okay, so now that I’ve failed my training and the killer whales think I’m a pussy, can I go home?’

‘Do you want to?’

This stopped Lodup dead. He thought about it for a long time.

‘No,’ he finally admitted.

‘You’ve got a choice, man. The building’s open, the AUVs have been inside and mapped it. The interior’s too small for the ADS.’

Normally after any kind of accident, a dive would be called off. This clearly wasn’t that sort of environment.

‘Any more fucking surprises?’

‘If there are, they’ll be a surprise to me as well,’ Hideo said, grinning.

‘Comforting,’ Lodup muttered.

Lodup dropped out of the bottom of the submersible into water illuminated by the flatbed and the ADS’s running lights. Light projected from his mask and right wrist as the feet of the thermal sheath grew into fins, and he carefully made his way across to the dark, rectangular-shaped hole they’d cut in the low, tomblike building.

‘You all right, love?’ Sal asked.

‘Yes, Sal, thanks.’

He gripped the side of the doorway and was surprised by the tactile feedback through the thermal sheath’s glove. The rock felt smooth, like a pebble in a riverbed, and despite the recent heat of the fusion torch it was cold again. The interior was illuminated by the AUVs. Sal dropped down behind him, using the ADS’s propulsion system to keep the exoskeleton off the seabed to avoid kicking up more silt.

Lodup dived down a little and then gently finned into the building. Normally he’d use a line for any form of entry into a restricted environment, but the structure had been mapped, it was open plan, there was nowhere to get trapped.

The interior was basically an oddly angled, almost rectangular chamber. Low panels of differing heights protruded from the walls, floor and ceilings. Something about them suggested they were incomplete, as if they’d been frozen in place at the moment the city was petrified.

The AUVs were hovering in opposite corners of the long, low chamber, illuminating the interior with their running lights.

Lodup realised this was some kind of rite of passage. He played his wrist light over the walls as he slowly finned around the chamber. He jumped in mid-water and almost cried out when he saw them. Two figures. Largely humanoid, though their hairless heads looked slightly too large, and there was something wrong with their eyes. They had terrified expressions on their faces. They were both female, one of them a child. They were fused with the wall, as if they had been running through it and hadn’t quite made it.

Lodup swallowed hard. He cast the light around but there were no more of them.

‘Now what?’ he subvocalized nervously.

‘Now we’ve done our piece, they’ll send in the bioengineers to see if it can be mined for anything useful,’ Sal said.

Lodup made a thorough sweep of the place and then tried not to move too quickly as he finned back towards the exit. He didn’t look at the two figures fused with the wall. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching him.

Lodup tried to scream, again, but it didn’t happen, again. He thrashed backwards in the water, trying to get away from them as he grabbed at the U-pulse where it had adhered to his thermal sheath. They were simply hanging there, moving just enough to keep them level in the water. They were squid, just under a metre long and about half that across. A web of skin, like a shroud, stretched between their tentacles, and the shroud was lined with sharp-looking metal spikes. The creatures were covered with segmented metal armour and their eyes were lenses.

‘It’s okay, they’re ours,’ Hideo said across the short-range comms.

‘Why are they hanging around out here?’ Lodup asked, trying to control his anger.
And this is just my first day at work
, he thought.

Back in C&C, Siska shook her head as she listened and watched the feed from flatbed 4-2. Behind her she could hear laughter from the other C&C personnel. She glanced back – even Yaroslav had a smirk on his normally emotionless face.

The engineered
Ampyroteuthis infernalis
,
or ‘vampire squid of hell’, weren’t even guard-fauna, really, just a side project the bioengineers had thought was ‘cool’, and which she had okayed.

‘You have to be a bit careful with them in the moon pool. They can launch themselves out of the water up to about five metres.’ Hideo used the short-range ultrasound to tell Lodup, and the long-range infrasound to tell C&C. There was renewed laughter in C&C. Siska turned around to face the room.

‘Okay, that’s enough fun with the new guy. I want everyone back to work,’ she said firmly, though even she was struggling to suppress a smirk.

20

A Long Time After the Loss

Everything felt strangely soft and warm to General Nix. He should have felt hard chitin, sinew and the armour and machinery required to survive in higher-G combat environments. Not only was his mind no longer connected to a powerful neunonic and liquid-software computer, but his thought processes were odd. They were fragmented, chaotic, unfocused. There was no residual connection to Queen or Hive. He opened his eyes to a bizarre mono-image which looked too narrow in scope, as if his eyes only faced forwards.

He felt rage rise in him. He normally killed out of cold necessity, but now he wanted to kill in a cold fury, just for the sake of it. He also wanted to pick up the kids from soccer practice while the pot roast was cooking, and make sure Frank was able to relax in front of the
TV
without the kids bothering him too much.

The General was confused. He held up a hand. Where there had been a power-assisted hard-tech claw, there was now a perfectly manicured human-looking hand. Despite all the housework he liked to keep his hands and nails nice— No! General Nix looked down. He was astonished to find two bizarre mounds of flesh protruding from his chest. He was wearing some kind of pink garment that was open at the back, and his legs were encased in a deeply uncomfortable skintight covering. He was undeniably a hairless monkey. He was pretty sure he was a baseline female but couldn’t be absolutely certain as they all looked the same to him.

He glanced around the bizarre house. It was large and spacious, the furniture old enough not to be made of smart matter. Outside there was even more space, covered in green stuff. The word ‘garden’ rose unbidden in General Nix’s head. From where he was sitting in the ‘lounge’ he could see one of the massive sun windows on the cylindrical habitat. Above the vast window was another strip of land covered with neatly laid out streets. Slowly Nix started to work out where he was. He tried to emit angry pheromone secretions but some kind of biological override prevented him from pissing and shitting himself. His face contorted as he tried, but failed, to scream.

Mr Hat was seated in his bath chair directly in front of General Nix, watching the human woman’s face contort in the real-time immersion rendering of the war criminal’s suburban hell.

‘Surely if he does that in front of anyone, his partner, his children, he’ll give the game away?’ the diminutive lizard said.

‘You’d be surprised what an unaugmented human mind is capable of rationalising away, actually,’ the warden said. He was a nondescript, handsome male-plus, a corporate rather than a combat model. His fixed, ingratiating grin and predatory eyes were already starting to annoy Mr Hat. He was practically bleeding testosterone from his pores. The warden, who had introduced himself as Isaiah, obviously resented the bounty killer’s presence. He wasn’t terribly happy about the presence of the naval contractor’s squadron of ships, either.

‘He’s fighting the programme here. It’s designed to allow that to a degree, particularly when there’s nobody present, like other family members, to see. It causes quite a lot of pain, whereas when they voluntarily go along with the programming they receive a serotonin reward.’

‘So they effectively end up conditioning themselves?’ Mr Hat asked. He was watching one of the most notorious war criminals in Consortium space doing mundane housework of the type that probably hadn’t been necessary since the hairless monkeys had very carelessly lost their home planet.

‘Pretty much. They’re criminals, people unable to embrace the free market and succeed, which makes them weak-minded. Addicting them to their own serotonin is simple enough.’

The human face General Nix was wearing looked as if it desperately wanted to scream.

‘So if you were locked in there, with your thirst for success and competitiveness, you wouldn’t succumb to the serotonin, then?’ Mr Hat asked. He could feel the warden glaring at him. The immersion disappeared as Isaiah closed it down.

‘Whatever they do, they cannot break the fourth wall,’ Isaiah told Mr Hat, ignoring the lizard’s question.

‘But they are aware of their core personalities, who they really are?’

‘Initially, but that fades – there’s too much bleed from the program personality. It needs to be strong enough to stop them taking over, after all. Al is working on a way to extend their self-awareness whilst keeping them trapped, perhaps indefinitely.’

‘Al is the habitat’s artificial intelligence?’

‘Yes, and, if you ask me, something of a sick fuck,’ Isaiah added smugly.

‘You feel they deserve this?’ Mr Hat enquired. He glanced up at Isaiah, who looked genuinely perturbed by the question. The immersion was replaced with the nearly featureless control room. It was little more than a series of couches on which the warden and his staff lay as they neunonically interfaced with the habitat’s systems. The control room was at one end of the cylinder, and transparent smart matter provided a vertiginous view of the six segments. Three windows and three strips of land stretched away from the control room as the entire cylinder slowly rotated.

‘Every single form of control has been tried at one time or another,’ the warden said. ‘Only one has won out over all others and proven to be the way forward for the uplifted races. If you don’t believe me, then perhaps you should move to the anarchy of the Monarchist systems.’

‘
FIFO
, ay?’ Mr Hat asked, smiling slightly. Isaiah frowned.
FIFO
was the unofficial motto of the Consortium: Fit In or Fuck Off. ‘Tell me, have you ever been to the Monarchist systems?’ He could feel the answering glare without turning around to look at Isaiah.

‘This facility is as secure as a Citadel. I am a little confused by your presence here, let alone a naval squadron.’

No it is not as secure as a Citadel, you silly little man
, Mr Hat thought. Though having reviewed the habitat’s security, he could not see an obvious way in.

‘Why the murders?’ Mr Hat asked.

‘So that even when they go along with the programming, they still live in fear.’

‘These are hard people. Violence does not scare them.’

‘Hello, Mr Hat,’ a very jolly voice said. ‘Loss of control scares them, their helplessness in the face of pain and violence. The tension and anticipation of it makes them suffer, as does the memory of it, and not knowing when it will happen again, and who will initiate it. Though some of the sicker minds may enjoy it.’

‘Hello, Al,’ Mr Hat said to the AI. He was forced to agree with Isaiah – the AI didn’t sound entirely healthy. ‘Where is the Widow?’

‘That is the beauty of it,’ Isaiah said.

‘We tell partners, friends or other bonded groups that they will be close,’ the AI added. ‘That they will interact in day-to-day life, but as a result of never being able to break the fourth wall they will never know who the other is.’

The AI sounded absurdly pleased with this. It sounded petty to Mr Hat.

‘Do you use experiential ware? Like in the Game?’ Mr Hat asked. The pause before the answer came told him everything.

‘No, soft tech. The split-level mind-imprisonment systems we use are too sophisticated to be compatible with something like experiential ware.’ It was Al who answered. As jolly as it was, it sounded rehearsed to Mr Hat.

You mean you don’t have the processing power to listen in to more than a million minds and their prisoners at one time
, Mr Hat thought. Experiential ware allowed for thought-policing. It was the ultimate in surveillance.

‘Suburbia’s status as the longest-running situation comedy soap opera in Known Space means that it is a total surveillance environment, a panopticon,’ Isaiah told him. Mr Hat nodded as he looked out over the hexagonal cylinder habitat. ‘Now, Mr Hat, I don’t mean to be rude but we allowed you to interview Prisoner Berger. We have been very cooperative, but you can see for yourself that we are perfectly secure. Woodbine Scab will not come here. Not unless he’s an inmate.’

Even if I caught him, I do not see him coming here
, Mr Hat thought. He couldn’t see the programming taking, somehow.

‘I don’t recall you being given any choice about allowing my interview of the prisoner. Just like you’ve not been given any choice about my presence here. There is something you should bear in mind about your “perfectly secure” habitat, however. Mr Scab infiltrated the Game, and he now has one of the best intrusion specialists in Known Space helping him.’ Isaiah opened his mouth to retort but Mr Hat had tired of the corporate mouthpiece’s narrow-minded ignorance. ‘Just make sure you keep me ’faced in to all surveillance feeds around Mr Berger.’

With that, Mr Hat’s bath chair started trundling towards the door. Two of his eyeless automatons, a male and a female, appeared out of the corners of the room. The male moved behind the bath chair and started pushing it, unnecessarily. As Mr Hat left the control room, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something.

The garden had been torn up a little. Plant pots had been knocked over, saplings uprooted, a garden gnome smashed.

A small hand picked up the vial lying on the disturbed lawn.

‘What just happened?’ Isaiah asked. There was a blinking red symbol in his mind.

‘Slight change in pressure, very localised,’ Al answered, a razor-thin edge to his jollity.

‘Should we inform Mr Hat?’

‘I see no real reason to,’ the AI said. ‘After all, security at this facility is our responsibility, not his.’

‘Can we dispatch a stealthed S-sat to the area, to be on the safe side?’

‘Sure, why not?’ Al said.

Nix discovered that his name was Hilda Swanson now. This angered him further. Then the pain started. He was crying out, clutching at his head and careening around the house to the sound of canned laughter. He felt as if the inside of his head was being eaten. He was losing himself, remembering less and less of his former life, slowly ceasing to exist.

‘What’s going on with Prisoner Swanson?’ Isaiah asked. He was receiving the direct feed from inside the house as Nix staggered around the lounge, screaming.

‘The core personality must have downloaded corrupt – we’ll need to pull him and run a diagnostic,’ Al said, sounding less jolly than normal.

‘That hasn’t happened in a while,’ Isaiah said. ‘It’s going to look bad on the weekly report.’ Then they lost the feed. ‘What the fuck?’ That hadn’t happened before. ‘Al?’

‘We’re losing more feeds. Looks localised. Something’s eating the nano-cams.’

Al ’faced the macro-cam feeds to Isaiah. They showed footage of the area shot by powerful cameras mounted on rails running along the window supports. They could provide very detailed shots but did not have the total coverage the nano-cams provided, and all they could pick up through the walls of the houses were heat signatures. They focused on the garden that had been disturbed.

‘More vandalism?’ Isaiah asked. Another feed kicked in showing the wreckage of the garden from a different angle as the stealthed S-sat hovered over it.

‘No, look at the pattern of destruction,’ Al’s disembodied voice said. ‘That’s caused by depressurisation.’

‘The S-sat’s picking up traces of Cherenkov radiation,’ Isaiah said, frowning. Al turned part of the smart matter of the control room into a screen, his circular, yellow cartoon happy face no longer smiling. Its mouth was now a big downward curve. ‘Al, has someone just established a bridge point within the habitat?’

‘We may not have the mass of a planet but that should still be impossible,’ the frowning cartoon face on the wall said.

‘Does it fit the data?’ Isaiah demanded.

There was a moment’s pause. Then: ‘Yes.’

‘Review the footage leading up to it.’

‘There isn’t any.’

‘It went down after the pressure change?’

‘Someone has released a very powerful privacy swarm in the area,’ the AI told him.

Isaiah checked the macro- and S-sat feeds. ‘The area looks okay. Can we counter it?’ he asked.

‘Eventually.’

‘Eventually! We’re supposed to be the highest security prison in Consortium space! I want stealthed S-sats patrolling the area constantly until that privacy swarm is fucking eaten and we know what’s going on. It’s the Church, it fucking has to be.’

‘If it is, then they are after Prisoner Berger. Do you want to bring him in?’ the AI asked.

‘No, I want to catch whoever’s doing this. Besides, why bother? They’d want him dead and we have his personality in our Psycho Bank – they’ve got nothing to gain.’

‘Do you want me to notify Mr Hat?’

The vial transformed into a syringe. The child put it against his skull. There was a crunch and he grimaced at the pain. He wasn’t used to it. The needle grew through the bone and squirted its contents into the soft matter beneath it.

Nix died in the mind of Hilda Swanson and Vic was reborn. He looked down at his strange new body.

‘Oh,’ he said, crestfallen. He was wondering what the fuck Scab had done to him this time. He glanced down at his human female form again and then went looking for a reflective surface. His appreciation of the human form allowed him to recognise the baseline female body. His favourite of the human sexes, he even preferred it to the girly-girl, which was just a bit too much for him. His self-taught understanding of human aesthetics told him he was in good shape and attractive enough, if a little ordinary-looking. He was certainly no Talia, but he liked his auburn hair and brown eyes. He started feeling the body. ‘Oh,’ he said again, this time a little more salaciously. He glanced at the fridge, and then at the open bedroom door.

He was probably here to do something really stupid for Scab. Some secret mission. In terms of his humanophilia, it did occur to him that this could be a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’.
On the other
hand
, he thought,
how many times do you get a chance to investigate such things first hand?

Sated, Vic had finally fallen asleep after deciding that being a human female was the best thing ever, though he was struggling with the distinct lack of limbs. When he eventually awoke, he had no idea how long he’d slept for as his new body didn’t appear to have any neunonics. He got up and dressed himself, looking for the most practical clothing he could find. Not much of it was terribly practical. In the end he settled for a pair of slacks, some tennis shoes and a blouse that tied across the stomach. It was then he heard a noise. Instinct took over and he glanced around for a weapon.