Polity 4 - The Technician (22 page)

Walking
down the aisle towards the altar and the twin lecterns, Sanders looked up at
the paintings decorating the inside of the dome. Depicted was a mishmash of
religious art: the cupids as winged Buddhas, classical Christian demons, along
with the goddess Kali and other more obscure monsters, supposedly tormenting
the unrighteous, whilst the righteous wore glowing crowns, flowing robes and
Dracocorp augmentations. Sanders had only come in here twice before, both
occasions after this place was restored. However, she felt sure that then the
righteous had not worn such expressions of sickening piety, nor had the damned
seemed to be having such fun, or the demons been so amused.

The
lecterns stood just ahead and off to either side of the altar. From the big
lectern on the right the Bishop would have delivered his sermon, whilst from
the left-hand lectern one of his vicars would have controlled the pictures
appearing on the screen wall behind the altar, presently concealed behind heavy
gold-braided curtains, whilst also keeping a close eye on the congregation. The
altar itself was a Bridge console from an ancient First Diaspora U-space colony
ship – the one Zelda Smythe supposedly brought her people here in. Upon it
stood a framed picture of the woman herself – a religious icon – around which
rested a bizarre collection of religious artefacts: a Christian cross with
Christ nailed in place, a wooden carving of Ganesh, a small stone Buddha, amber
worry beads and a scroll reputed to be one of those from beside the Dead Sea.
All these, the religious believed, belonged to Zelda Smythe and helped her
towards revelation and her amalgamation of religions, as did the library behind
the left-hand lectern, numbering such works as the Koran and the Bible,
actually on paper, and numerous other religious texts.

‘I see
you’ve been playing with the artwork, Ergatis,’ she said, finally coming to
stand before the altar.

‘I like
to keep myself amused,’ replied a deep godlike voice. ‘It’s a specially
formatted family of nanites in the paint itself. They also have a random
evolutionary component so I won’t know what they’ll do next.’

Sanders
very much doubted that. The being she was now addressing could probably
calculate every possibility and encompass every one in its mind, all within a
microsecond. It just chose not to. Ergatis had, unusually, not named itself
after the world it governed, but then this AI was in a slightly unusual
position for one of its kind. It did not control the planetary runcible, since
the still extant danger of Jain technology here made it necessary to place the
runcible on one of the Braemar moons – Flint, where the Theocracy shipyards had
once been. Also, a question hung over its governorship, what with Masada maybe
ending up being classified as an alien world inhabited by illegal Human
colonists.

‘So,’
Ergatis continued, ‘you’ve come to register your protest and try to obtain some
sort of explanation. Am I right?’

‘Of
course you’re right,’ Sanders replied impatiently. ‘You were probably running a
copy of me as a subprogram before I walked in the door.’

‘You may
be memchipped and backed up, Sanders, but your mind is your own property.
Anyway, I don’t need to run a copy of you to make that prediction. So, state
your objections and ask your questions.’

‘Two
years ago Amistad, without Tombs’s permission, had him adapted to the environment
of this world. I let that go because my pay-off was to be able to replace his
head prosthetic, to regrow his face, and because I felt sure the drone knew
what it was doing – it had after all been given carte blanche in Tombs’s case.’
Sanders paused in frustration. How to logically put her case which, really, was
just based on a gut instinct?

‘Do go
on.’

‘Amistad
did nothing to stop Tombs believing he still wears a prosthetic and actively
intervened when I tried to convince him that his face is now his own. I would
have been dismissed from my position at the sanatorium if I’d brought up the
subject again.’

‘Yes,
unfortunate, that.’

‘Amistad
is partnered with an ostensibly “cured” black AI called Penny Royal. I did some
research on that creature, and there’s still an outstanding “do not attempt to
apprehend but destroy at a distance” order on it, yet it’s here supposedly
working for the Polity.’

‘The
order you discovered in an outdated databank has since been deleted.’

‘There’s
never any amnesty for Humans who commit murder,’ Sanders stated, feeling the
injustice.

‘The
situation there is more complicated. Penny Royal is not a singular distinct
being. Of its previous eight states of consciousness just one of those states
was the murderer. That conscious state has now been . . . removed.’

Sanders
nodded. She’d just have to accept that. ‘Tombs reached some critical mental
nexus when he finished drawing his shell patterns, assaulted me and attempted
to escape – not that he was really a captive anyway. Amistad intervened, then
went on to allow him to escape, incidentally rendering me unconscious and
setting the scene so it looked to Tombs like he had killed me. The man is now
out on the surface of Masada – a danger to himself and to others.’

‘That’s
so, but what precisely is your problem?’

‘I am
not entirely convinced that Amistad’s aims concur with those of the Polity. I
think the drone’s interest in madness outweighs any interest in curing it.’

‘Oh I
agree.’

Sanders
took a step back, stunned, gazed up at the ceiling where a steel angel wore a
smile she was sure it hadn’t had before. ‘You agree?’

‘Oh
yes.’

‘Then
isn’t it time you intervened? Isn’t it time this was taken out of Amistad’s . .
. claws and handed over to someone more capable, more responsible?’

‘One
would think so, yes,’ replied Ergatis, then, after a surprisingly long pause,
‘Six years ago I had the power to negate Amistad’s carte blanche, but not now.
You have to understand that war drones were the grunts of the Prador war, the
slightly dim fighting machines we used and, traditionally, that is how those
that remain are still thought of. However, many of these drones are like the
soldiers who came back from the front with a great deal of anger and drive
which they threw into educating themselves.’

‘It’s
still a war drone, not a planetary governor AI.’

‘Not so.
Amistad, it seems, long ago surpassed the memory, experience and intelligence
of an artificial intelligence like me. And it seems that after reintegration of
his consciousness, Amistad will acquire huge processing power and become the
prime authority on all things Atheter. The drone will climb to the status of
AIs like Geronamid and Jerusalem.’

‘What?’

‘I can
no more give Amistad orders than can you. Only Earth Central itself is higher,
and that AI just told me to butt out.’

Sanders
turned in a daze and left the church, the eyes of fat lecherous cupids tracking
her departure.

Miloh kept his eye utterly fixed on his rifle sight and swore. Whilst
Tombs had been talking to Deela – a dockworker Miloh recognized – he’d got
target acquisition, the crosshairs locking over the proctor’s head and the
rifle’s gyros shifting the weapon about in his hands to make minor adjustments
whilst he kept it in the targeting field. But now the man was running, the rifle
just wouldn’t acquire. This was ridiculous – he’d checked the damned thing over
for hours before coming here to wait, he’d even run a full diagnostic of its
internal workings, including structural scan of its moving parts. The rifle was
as near to perfect as possible, yet now it was malfunctioning.

Without
acquisition Miloh tried one shot, but saw no sign of the bullet hitting
anywhere near the fleeing proctor. He next tried a five-shot burst, but again
saw no sign of impacts. Swearing, he took his eye away from the sight and just
aimed down the barrel, firing another five-shot burst. It was then, his eye
away from the sight, that he saw them: ten slugs hanging in the air just a few
metres away from him, all edge-on and arranged in a slowly turning circle. Then
abruptly all of them turned back towards him.

‘You
have got to be kidding,’ he said.

Suddenly
the bullets were in motion, accelerating towards him one after another as if
the circle they had been arranged in was some sort of invisible ammo can rotating
to present each bullet in turn to an invisible breach. The first slammed into
the crane’s metalwork beside his head before he had time to even duck or
flinch. Then the rest were impacting all around him, splinters of metal and
broken rifle slugs exploding apart and filling the air like a swarm of sprawns.
He managed to cover his eyes, tried to draw back to cover, but with the
certainty one of those bullets would soon slam home. However, the tenth bullet
hit and it was all over. He checked himself for damage and saw none at all,
which seemed an impossibility considering the amount of metal that had been
flying about.

‘Protected,’
he said, his heart thundering in his chest.

He
swallowed drily, then reached with a shaking hand to his water bottle and uncapped
it, took a sip. Suddenly he was just grateful to be alive, the feeling of
relief swamping the constant anger he felt, at least for the moment. He
considered what he had seen. Somewhere about here there was a Polity war
machine concealed by chameleonware. Perhaps that accounted for the reaction
first of Deela, then of Tombs himself. Tombs had been about to put his harpoon
into her, but the weapon malfunctioned. She must have seen the thing, which was
why she ran rather than take the opportunity to beat the crap out of Tombs for
threatening her, as Miloh knew she was quite capable of doing. Tombs must have
seen it too, which was why he ran. It seemed there was something damned scary
about whatever—

Miloh
froze, and felt a shiver running through his body. The crane stood on a loading
jetty not currently in use, so would be powered down. It was also heavily built
and well anchored into the jetty, which itself was reinforced enough to take
the loading stresses imparted by the magnetic docking system dragging in half a
million tonnes of cargo ship. There was no wind today and the sea was calm. So
only one thing could account for the vibration Miloh could feel from the
box-section he was sitting upon and the I-beam he rested his back against:
something heavy was climbing up the crane towards him, and very soon he was
going to die.

What
could he do against something invisible, and capable of stopping his shots in
midair, playing with the bullets like marbles, then firing them back at him? He
peered down the length of the crane to the ground and for a moment could see
nothing. Then came displacement, occasional prismatic distortions, a glimpse of
something black and sharp at one moment, then the writhe of a metallic
tentacle. The thing could do total invisibility, Miloh knew that – it just
wasn’t bothering to conceal itself from him. He considered emptying his rifle
down towards it, but feared it would only send the bullets back.

‘I’m not
a threat,’ he said. ‘I’ll not try again.’

‘Yess,’
a voice hissed up at him.

‘Shouldn’t
you be sticking with Tombs? The central town won’t be safe for him.’

The
thing relentlessly continued its slow ascent. He pointed his rifle down towards
it, then hesitated. What rules did this thing exist by? If he deliberately
fired upon it would that give it the excuse to kill him? Was that why it had
revealed its location to him? Abruptly he raised the rifle, clicked across the
safety, then ejected the magazine and pocketed it.

‘I’m
done,’ he said, peering down at the thing again.

‘Yess,’
it hissed, and came up at him like an express elevator from Hell.

Black
spines and metal writhing like squerms, cutting, nerves winking on and off like
party lights, a single red eye inspecting him dispassionately. For just
seconds, or maybe eternity, Miloh lived in some nightmare place and understood
he was being given some hint, some small taste of a realm Jeremiah Tombs had
once visited. It didn’t end abruptly, just seemed to fade away, and he found
himself with his face pressed against the I-beam, arms embracing it, legs
coiled on the box section below, a tight cramp in his side. He tried to push
away from the beam, but realized the thing that had assaulted him had either
cuffed or tied his wrists on the other side, probably very tightly too, for he
couldn’t feel his hands and his forearms felt . . . odd.

Shuffling
himself more upright, he tried to bring his wrists into view to see if there
was some way he could free himself. When he finally did get a look at his bonds
he at first felt a slightly irked puzzlement, which gradually grew into horror.
His hands were gone, and his wrists terminated at his rifle, one at the stock
and one at the butt. They were melded into the rifle, skin and metal blended
into some whorled woody substance. He could feel the rifle between, actually feel it as a linking extension of his arms.

It took
three hours before dockworkers responded to his shouts for help, and they
wondered why the harbour submind had ignored him. He soon learnt that his feeling of the rifle was no illusion when those workers
tried to cut through it to free him, and he screamed in pain and the weapon
bled. Eventually they sliced a section out of the I-beam and lowered him to the
ground. Later, in Zealos hospital, Polity medical technology swiftly restored
his hands, but that technology could not free him of the sudden stabbing agony
in his palms any time he touched a rifle, nor could it return to him his hate,
which had withered and shrivelled away like a tumour starved of blood.

Being
Human

Terms change as times change and language
is necessarily protean in order to keep up. When we were still confined to
Earth, a Human being was easily defined by body shape, mind and genetics. The
first of these to go was body shape, as cosmetic surgery and deep body surgery
improved then claimed new territory. This started with cat’s eyes and elfin
ears, then went radical as it became fashionable to take on other animal
characteristics. Thereafter it ventured off into both the weird and the
grotesque as some considered the utility of, say, an extra arm, a fish tail
rather than legs, wings or the head of a crocodile. Mechanical augmentation
played its part as people also turned themselves into cyborgs, with maybe an
extra mechanical arm, or some steel tentacles or a motorized shell. And body
shape became an irrelevance when it became possible to record and download a
Human mind to any vessel. The shape of the Human mind disappeared with cerebral
augmentation, much of it necessary to control different body shapes or those
mechanical augmentations, much of it to expand mental watts, memory, or to turn
the mind into a specialized processor. Human DNA, already being adjusted for
medical reasons, came in for major adjustment as Humans began to adapt
themselves to new environments. Initially surgical alterations and
technological augmentations played their part, but their limited scope was not
enough for a people who wanted to colonize a whole world – they wanted
alterations the body could repair, and that they could pass on to their children.
So, in the end, what is it to be Human now?