Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (13 page)

“
Hi,” said Victor. This in
itself was unusual. Normally they communicated through a private
gateway they shared in the Axon interface. But today was different
– very different. It was Layer Day.

A door in the mushroom-dome’s sixty-foot
stem slid open and their foster mother, Julia, beckoned them
in.

All the adults they knew were in the
conference room, and several they had never seen before. Nobody was
smiling as they took their seats. It felt as though they’d failed
an exam or been caught stealing.

“
Don’t worry, Axon,” she
thought. Silence. She looked at Victor and thought “Can you get
Axon?” He shook his head.

Director Somerton stood up and came to sit
beside them. “During this phase we have to cut your link to Axon,”
he said. “This is just a precaution.”

“
Against what?” Victor
asked, in his belligerent way.

Somerton ignored Victor’s tone, and went on:
“This is a critical stage. I will be honest with you – you’re both
growing up fast and you have a right to know. There have sometimes
been complications. It’s better for you if we play safe. So we’re
going to put you in a light sleep for the next few hours and slowly
bring back the link when we think it’s safe, which I’m sure it will
be.”

Victor started to say something, but Mariam
shushed him quiet. “I refuse,” she said.

Somerton was momentarily shocked, but then
recovered and said, “I’m sorry, Mariam. I don’t quite understand
you.”

She was quivering, finding it hard to
breathe, but she forced the words out. “I will not be cut off from
Axon. I will not be put to sleep.”

“
Why?”

She stood up and ran out of the room. The
outside doors slid aside and she kept on running until she reached
the gate through the perimeter fence. It wouldn’t open. She stood
there, staring out at the grass, with her hands on the grill,
suddenly crying, until a hand stroked her back. Finally she turned,
expecting to see Julia. Instead, it was Victor.

“
I suppose they sent you!”
she shouted.

“
No,” said Victor. “I
decided I agree.”

Inside, Somerton paced around the room. “The
culture is ready,” he said. “We must proceed.”

Normally, Julia was silent in meetings. She
was tiny, beak-nosed, like a small bird, but now she stood up and
said, “No.” She marched up to the much taller figure of the
Director and faced him.

“
They’re like triplets.
They’ve been in each others’ minds for twelve years. Are you
surprised they don’t just go along with you chopping them
off?”

“
They’re
children.”

“
Those two are not just
children, are they? They are nearly teenagers, and they have a
right to be included. If they want to maintain the link, that’s
their decision. Explain it to them. If they want to refuse an
anaesthetic, that’s their decision. They are not laboratory
rats.”

Somerton turned and faced the science team.
“Well?” he asked.

The Senior Biochemist looked at her watch
and said, “We have two hours at most to begin layering. If we have
to abort it will take four months to breed and verify another
batch. The ship is ready and waiting for our signal. They will not
be pleased.”

“
This is not a democracy,
normally, but in this instance I would like to see a show of hands.
Should we proceed with the operation with the links open and the
children conscious?”

All present raised their hands. Somerton
turned back to Julia. “Explain the danger to them, ask them one
more time, and then we go ahead either way.”

* *

Mariam and Victor
were walking around
the inside of the perimeter fence. They had never been to this area
before. As they passed the main mushroom building they came to a
section of fence with a very big gate that could slide aside on
rollers, but now refused to budge when they pulled it. A wide
concrete road led back from the gate to a high door in a cube-like
building with a cluster of antennae on the roof. The road had
parallel metal strips with grooves which ran out under the gate and
onto a vast grey road with scorch-marks clearly visible and in the
distance a group of white-painted parallel stripes.

“
What are they for?” Mariam
asked, pointing at the metal strips.

“
I think they’re tracks.
Maybe you could run wheels along them.”

They had never witnessed Julia move fast
before, but she came sprinting up to them.

“
Please listen to me,” she
said. “I’m very sorry. We never told you everything. You were too
young. We don’t have much time, but let me explain as quickly as I
can.”

* *

The human brain
contains something
like a hundred billion neurons. Nobody knows the real count. Each
neuron may connect with up to seven hundred others, making an
incomprehensibly complex network. The brain weighs about one point
five kilos and has a volume of something like twelve hundred cubic
centimetres.

The volume of the two-metre diameter sphere
in the centre of the cube-like building was over four million cubic
centimetres – the capacity of more than three hundred human brains.
It was supported in an alloy framework connected to hoists above.
The lights were dimmed and only a diffuse red glow, like a
photographic darkroom, lit the lattice of steel pipes that ran from
the titanium sphere, through ducts in the wall, and into a second
chamber. Technicians clad in full biohazard suits adjusted settings
on a large touch-screen panel to one side.

In the wide-windowed observation room set
high in the wall, Julia sat between Mariam and Victor. Somerton
stood to one side, nearer the window, blinking more rapidly than
usual. “Begin,” he said.

“
Am I looking at myself,
Mariam? Victor?”

“
I don’t know. Think about
something nice.”

In the next-door chamber digital read-outs
on the breeding tanks were steady. Nano-scale sieves measured the
exact structure of the stem cell clusters and trapped any that were
less than perfect, and the perfect were fed forward to a holding
tank.

Through the observation window, as though
watching a silent movie, they saw the red-lit sphere begin to
rotate about its vertical axis, apparently hanging from the
umbilical tubes that entered the centre of the top. On the far wall
a projection lit up showing a three dimensional model of the
interior of the sphere. It was like a shell with a nut inside. The
nut was smaller than the outer shell – held in place by millions of
fine struts, surrounded by the image of a light blue membrane. The
sphere was not yet full.

The female voice over the loudspeakers was
so sudden and loud that everyone was startled. “Lowering
temperature now,” she said. Unseen, viscous chilled cooling fluids
moved through capillaries in the central mass of the sphere. Within
a few seconds the temperature read-out on the tank dropped five
degrees.

“
I have no word for this.
Thought slow…fragments, maybe…discontinuity… Sky leap – Earth
flame.”

“
Start cell
delivery.”

In the vat chamber, pumps began to spin up,
pushing billions of cells in their nutrient wash slowly through
sterile pipes from the final holding tank towards their destiny.
The projection showed a steadily rising tide filling the space
between the central core and the shell of the containment
sphere.

“
There’s no more room after
this,” said Victor. “Is this the final layer?”

“
Yes,” Julia replied.“This
is the OCC – the Outer Cortical Complex. When the barrier
dissolves, these cells will evolve billions of links into the
earlier layers.”

Mariam shivered. “Axon is cold,” she
said.

“
No,” Julia said. “Axon is
not cold. Axon has no sensory feelings itself. You are the
feelings. You are Axon’s skin, eyes, smell, instinct, arms, and
legs. That is your purpose.”

Again, there came the calm voice over the
loudspeakers in the observation room. “The layer is stabilised.
Raising the temperature to normal minus one. Preparing to dissolve
the barrier. Permission is required.”

Somerton gripped the handrail in front of
the wide window, looked back towards Julia and the children, and
said, “Proceed.”

New fluids entered the sphere. The temporary
membrane surrounding the original core of the Axon brain – the dura
mater – thinned and its dead cells were washed way. Very slowly the
impenetrable wall between the old cells and the new grew thinner.
On the big display the blue was steadily eroded and became patchy.
At the same time, internal blocking membranes dissolved, and what
was a place of many rooms became one. Tendrils of tailored neuronal
fibre spread through the new tissue like a root system growing at
an impossibly fast rate. Microscopic tubules carrying oxygen and
nutrients followed.

It hit Mariam like a tsunami. The world
vanished, and huge arcs of geodesics, star-fields, vector-diagrams,
swiftly-changing complex mathematical functions, planetary systems
and galaxies swamped her with colour and deep ringing sounds like a
vast tolling of underwater bells. And then, suddenly, she felt a
terrible pain, and screamed.

Medics who had been standing near the
children with their hands behind their backs, as though merely
observing, brought the gas-powered syringes forward and sprayed
anaesthetic directly into their carotid arteries.

Inside the building, on the outside of it,
around the perimeter fence, and throughout the world, biohazard
warnings lit up and flashed.

“
Switch the HUD on!”
Somerton shouted. A technician on the floor below pressed a finger
on a panel and an incomprehensible green text overlay appeared on
the window, scrolling fast.

INTERPENETRATION FAILURE-LEVEL RISING. CORE
TEMPERATURE RISING. RE-COOLING INITIATED. CORTICAL ACTIVITY
SYMMETRY IS COLLAPSING.

* *

As the soothing
coolants flowed into
the maddened biological brain that was Axon, the medics lifted
Mariam and Victor onto wheeled stretchers and pushed them down long
white corridors to the hospital suite, Julia walking alongside.

“
Prognosis? Assessment?”
Somerton snapped at the Senior Biochemist, who was standing next to
him. She took a step backwards, ran her fingers through her blonde
hair, and said, “I did warn you that this was a dangerously large
volume to layer at one time.”

“
I didn’t ask for a history
lesson!”

“
This is not just a
brainstorm. This is a hurricane. We were prepared and we’re doing
what we can, but it looks at the moment like total network
collapse.”

Axon raged in random fury and fever. The
trees of logic grown over years fell apart. The music of the
synapses lost all coherence and was swamped in chaotic noise. The
older connections fought the new, and the new knew nothing except
their urge to be, to be something, to be a link, or a constant, or
a function, or the signature of the scent of a rose. Fractal
patterns swept through the complex of tissues. Filaments grew and
shrank, touched and embraced or touched and withered, as their
electrical charges and biochemical payloads summed or negated.

Evolution can be slow. To build a hawk or a
daffodil can take several million years. But it can also be very
fast. Axon’s brain was a war zone as strategies competed. But
eventually, all wars come to an end.

Thirty-seven hours later the anaesthetists
turned off the systems which had been keeping Mariam and Victor
safe from the storm in their bunker of unconsciousness.

Mariam’s first thought was not hers: “I
could do with a swim.” She smiled as the nurse held the plastic
beaker of water to her lips.

Victor opened his eyes and saw a thought
that was an equation. “Sparse search on eleven dimensional vector
space in log(n) time. Not bad for a twelve-year-old!”

* *

The ship was
two thousand metres long
and shaped like an elongated silver ovoid with lattices of filigree
golden wire at each end, like a vast insect egg trapped between the
centres of two magical spiders’ webs that connected to – nothing.
The light from the star reflected from its body and drive webs, but
here there were no eyes to see its strange beauty. It orbited the
star silently, patiently and entirely automatically. Yes, it did
contain life – plants, seeds, soil, saplings, mature olive trees,
fish, sheep, ravens and cabbages – but they were all frozen and
silent in the hold. The control bridge, with its comfortable chairs
and wraparound 3D screens was empty. All was dark; the screens and
tell-tale lights were of no use to a room without observers.

Sixteen navigational and systems computers
controlled the ship’s status constantly and voted on any required
action, which, since they had arrived into the vicinity of the star
Angelus XI three hundred Earth days ago, had been next to nothing
apart from a unanimous decision to send a mining drone to a
metal-rich asteroid within easy reach.

It had been a long journey. The
silicon-based computers could not manage the complexity of a level
three void jump, and they’d coasted here at only near
light-speed.

The ship was waiting.

In an orbit perpendicular to the ship a
strange object moved around Angelus XI. Take a can of beer and add
a cone to one end and half of a transparent ball to the other. Add
gigantic light-catching wings radiating from its waist, and colour
it a blue so deep it bordered on the ultraviolet. Now, expand the
length of the can to fourteen thousand metres, and spin it slowly
around the long axis. Add some powerful transmitters that
broadcast, on a sweeping frequency band covering most of the
electromagnetic spectrum, the following message: “Bio-containment
station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta Seventeen. Warning. Unauthorised
approaches within one million kilometres will trigger lethal and
indiscriminate attack. This facility is protected with a network of
cloaked military drones with a lot of fire-power and a minimal
sense of humour. Have a very nice day.”