Polity 4 - The Technician (7 page)

Just a
slight twitch from the hologram, nothing more. Amis-tad waited, then turned to
inspect Penny Royal as the black AI made a strange hissing sound, its spines
rubbing together like dry reeds.

‘Oblivion,’
said a deep sonorous voice.

The
gabbleduck’s head was up now, and all its eyes gleaming emerald. A shriek
abruptly issued from Penny Royal as it rose from the floor, light glaring from
its internal workings. Something snapped then cracked, and a spine shot away,
its base a tetrahedral box from which a tentacle trailed – the one attached to
the green crystal below. The spine tumbled through the air, stretching the
tentacle straight at the limit of its flight, then slammed down against the
gratings. The gabbleduck hologram shimmered, winked out, then abruptly clouds
of steam began issuing from the gratings.

‘Out of
here,’ Amistad instructed.

Penny
Royal shot through between the pillars first, rolling across rhizome, spines
jabbing deep and sizzling as it used the damp soil to cool itself. Behind, the
steam issuing from within the building turned to boiling smoke which, when it
occasionally cleared, revealed the AI below glowing a hot orange. But the thing
had withstood temperatures much higher than this, so would not be damaged,
unless it was deliberately damaging itself.

‘What
did you get?’ Amistad asked when Penny Royal ceased to roll and sizzle.

‘Instruction,’
the black AI replied.

‘Like
what?’

‘Euphemistically,
to go away.’

‘It
doesn’t want to talk.’

‘Very
definitely.’

Heretic’s Isle

‘His legs didn’t stop working back at Triada Compound fourteen years
ago,’ said Sanders. ‘He came out of it aboard the troop transport as we brought
him here, just after I’d cleaned him up and changed his clothing.’

‘Diagnostics?’
enquired the huge scorpion drone.

She
glanced at the big machine. She would have to get used to its blunt and
sometimes patronizing manner, since it was now apparently her boss. She’d
received her orders directly from Earth Central and though she could question
them, that was the limit of it. Anyway, it seemed things were changing. At
first she’d felt herself rebelling, until she understood that feeling stemmed
from a complacency that had grown in her over the last decade and a half. Here
she had used her self-proclaimed duty of looking after her charge as a cover so
she could hide herself away from the world and pursue lengthy academic studies
of Polity medical science, Masadan history and the biology of the Worry Island
chain. Now she understood that, she was impatient for change. Hence her recent
radical pursuit of change in herself.

‘Yes,
his medical implants told the tale, as did the readings from his prosthetic,’
she replied.

As they
strolled along the beach Sanders shut down the shimmer-shield of her Polity
breather mask and tentatively took a breath. The air smelled just like it would
on a beach on Earth but, prior to the nanosurgery she had undergone, after a
few breaths she should have been feeling the lack of oxygen. However, the lungs
in her chest, the blood in her veins and her muscle matter were substantially
different after her three-week sojourn in a somnolence tank, being taken apart
and put back together again by the AI surgeon. Alveoli density in her lungs was
now three times what it had been, and the extra formed of a semi-organic film much
more efficient than the remaining original – a film that actually cracked CO2. Her haemoglobin levels were double what
they were before, complemented by oxygen-gathering nanomachines that operated
from the artificial portions of her lungs and that also collected excess carbon
for excretion through her kidneys. Her muscles burned oxygen more efficiently
than before – much of the dross created by parasitic DNA had been removed.

‘And
that tale is?’ enquired the drone.

Of
course this creature had no need of air, just water, which it processed through
its internal fusion reactor. And, since this creature was a battle spec drone,
it probably also had methods of generating power from every other source
available. It probably could breath oxygen, just didn’t need to.

‘He can
walk – all that part of him is functional – he just won’t
walk.’ Sanders paused to gaze up towards the sanatorium perched at the top of
the slope ahead. The Theocracy had used it as an interrogation camp, and though
the internees had been moved to City Hospital before she arrived, she shuddered
on remembering some of the equipment she had found there when setting the place
up as a hospital for badly injured survivors of the Brotherhood. Of course,
they were all gone now; cured of their ills and coming under the Polity
Intervention Amnesty. Only Jeremiah Tombs remained.

‘Won’t
walk?’

‘I’ve
tried everything,’ she said. ‘It’s why I had him put in a wheelchair rather
than an exoskeletal suit – I want his imagined debility to inconvenience him more,
in the hope it will drive him to lose it. But that doesn’t seem to be working.’
Understatement of the hour, since Tombs had remained in that chair for fourteen
years. She glanced at the drone, but there was no point trying to read an
expression there. ‘The problem lies inside his skull – that area I was
specifically ordered to avoid. If I’d been allowed just a little more freedom
to act I could have replaced that damned head prosthetic of his – regrown all
those burnt-out nerves and filled in all those little holes bored through the
bone.’

‘It is
necessary,’ said the drone. ‘However, it’s interesting that he has retained the
use of everything above his waist. Does he do anything with his hands?’

‘Like
what?’

‘Like,
perhaps, make sculptures?’

‘He draws,’
she replied.

Once it
became apparent just three years ago that Jem wanted to draw, when he started
scribing pictures on the floor of his special bathroom with his own excrement,
she provided him with the required materials. Fortunately he took to them well
and stopped his experiments with the previous medium.

‘What
does he draw?’

‘Molluscs,’
she replied.

It had
taken her some time to figure out what his drawings depicted – all those
geometric shapes in intricate and specific patterns that he laboured over for
so long, before enclosing them in a circle and then consigning them to the
floor. Only one day when she was walking out here and had seen penny molluscs
clinging to the shady side of a boulder did she realize what he was drawing.
Perhaps the time it had taken her to realize this, despite her studies of
island biology, was a good indicator of how far she had disappeared into her
own head.

‘Interesting,’
said the drone, but that was all.

‘When are we going to put his mind back together?’ Sanders asked.

It
pleased Jem that the terrace was so wide, but he wished it was wider, so he
could get further away from that thing. Why it came
here to conduct these nonsensical conversations with Sanders he didn’t know. He
just wished it would go away and never come back. Raising his head again he
peered across at it. The machine had been fashioned in the shape of a creature
from Earth. From his computer he had learned it bore the shape of an arachnid
called a scorpion, though that might not necessarily be the truth, since the
information they allowed him was woven with their lies.

‘You
know the answer to that,’ the scorpion drone replied, shifting about on tiles
the colour of a drowned man’s skin.

Jem felt
the terrace vibrate underneath his chair. He shuddered and dropped his gaze
back to his sketch pad, set his pencil to erase and obliterated the shape
there, returned the pencil to draw mode and began again.

‘Yes,
when you have the answers you require.’

Sanders
reclined in a comfortable sun chair, a drink on the stone table beside her, its
ice glinting rainbows. She now wore a skin-tight bodysuit that terminated just
above her breasts and at the top of her thighs. Jem wished she would dress more
appropriately. Women should not expose so much of themselves to a man’s gaze,
much less to the gaze of one of these godless machines.

She
continued, ‘It occurs to me, Amistad, that you’ve more interest in the state of
his mind as it is than in any answers it might provide.’

‘You are
absolutely right,’ the drone replied, and Sanders sat forward with sudden
interest. ‘But it’s only when I obtain those answers will I fully understand
what has been done to him and thus satisfy that interest. And we are much
closer now.’

‘Closer?’

‘It is,’
said the drone, ‘a Human survival trait, this ability to forget pain.’

‘No one
forgets pain.’

‘You
misunderstand me.’ The drone gestured to Jem with one claw, and he concentrated
on his drawing, pretending he wasn’t listening. ‘The AI experience of memory is
utterly direct. When an AI recalls, it re-experiences the entire event
memorized in every detail, including all sensation. When a Human recalls an
event it is a mere tracery in the mind, a dull copy with those sensations that
might adversely effect the survival of the organism either erased or filtered.
You do remember pain, but you never directly
experience the memory of it.’

Sanders
grunted in amusement. ‘If women of the far past had directly remembered the
pain of childbirth the Human race would be extinct.’

‘That is
another mental mechanism,’ the drone said dismissively. ‘Human pain is
necessarily intense because the lesson of avoidance must be learned by the dull
recording medium of the Human brain, but Human memory of pain must not be
intense enough to cripple the risk-taking function which is a necessity of
species survival.’

‘Thank
you for that.’ Sanders picked up her drink and sipped. ‘But the relevance of it
escapes me.’

‘We know
about the fibrous structures the Technician left in his brain, and we now know
that via them the Technician embedded something very deep and very integral in
his mind – we are certain that it actually downloaded something from itself.
However, whilst doing so, it was also performing its feeding function – whether
out of instinct or as part of the process is unclear – and that memory of pain
was deeply embedded too.’

‘So
we’re getting somewhere?’ said Sanders excitedly.

‘Somewhere,
yes. But unfortunately, what was downloaded to him is so tightly entangled with
his pain, that it remains inaccessible whilst he cannot remember what happened
to him.’

‘So we
use nanosurgery to restore his memory . . .’

‘No, we
considered that, but the embedding process has made his memory of the pain a
direct experience, as with us AIs. Recall would be as agonizing to him as what
he experienced underneath the Technician’s hood. This is why both download and
memory are so deeply submerged – he is a Human being and incapable of holding
so direct an experience of pain in his conscious mind.’

Sanders
grimaced and sat back. ‘So what now?’

The
scorpion drone gestured to Jem again. ‘It leaks through. Very slowly his memory
returns to be incorporated in his mind as an indirect experience: a normal
Human memory. And with it we get leakage of the download too. It is a process
with which we do not want to interfere, at least directly,
for fear of destroying the data.’

‘Leaks
through?’ said Sanders. ‘Yes, I guess it does, but at least the knockout feed
stops him screaming. He just lapses into unconsciousness.’

‘But
remember his drawings.’

Yes, the
drawing. Jem returned his attention to the clear collection of Euclidean
shapes, erased a couple then drew them back in just so.

‘Those
penny molluscs?’ queried Sanders.

Jem
looked up to see her standing over him, flinched when he saw that the drone had
also moved closer, peridot eyes watching him impassively, then returned his
attention to the sketch pad. Yes, he was nearly there with this one. He began
muttering the Second Satagent.

‘Before
the tricones completely churned up the area where the Technician attacked him,
Commander Grant had someone make digital two-dimensional photographs there,’
said the drone. ‘It’s a shame he did not have better recording equipment
available to him, but we must make do with these. Penny molluscs had been
attracted by the blood and were scattered all about the area. Whether these
were all present when he lay there is unknown, but we do know, from closely
studying the photographs, that thus far he has precisely drawn the shapes seen
on the backs of twelve of those creatures.’

‘He’s
remembering them.’

‘So it
would seem.’

Sanders
turned to the drone now. ‘By the way, you keep referring to “we” – who else is
here studying Jem? I thought you were working alone. I thought you decided any
form of linkage to local AIs would interfere with your thought processes.’

‘My
associate is a little shy of company and wishes to remain incognito for the
present.’

One last
line in place and, satisfied, Jem scribed around the drawing the perfect circle
of a penny mollusc shell. The thing itself arose utterly clear in his mind
then, there on the bloody flute grass. His skinned hand was closing on that
grass, and looking up he saw the scorpion drone – no, it was rising up, two
columns of yellow eyes blinking into being down its underside. Then, nothing.

Triada Compound (Solstan 2457 – Present Day)

Leif Grant stepped up to the airtight door leading from what had once
been a pond workers’ bunkhouse, then a hospital, and which had now been
returned to its original form and classified by the AI governor of Masada as a
planetary relic. Remembering a long-ago conversation at this place, he realized
that Sanders had been right about why he had saved Tombs’s life, but only
partially right. When that massive alien creature Dragon, who he had known as
Behemoth back then, came and knocked out the laser arrays before crashing to
the ground to enact its peculiar and worrying rebirth, the rebels of Masada
took the opportunity to leave their caves and seize the surface. They knew they
wouldn’t be able to hold it for long, since the rebellion had been all about
getting Polity intervention, and inevitably Deacon Aberil Dorth quickly
responded by bringing troops down from the cylinder world Hope
to attack. No quarter was given on either side. The rebels, and those of the underclass
freed by them, were especially vicious in their reprisals against the likes of
the proctor who had once occupied this very bunkhouse during its brief service
as a hospital. The religious police had been the source of all the beatings,
the torture and the enforced worship they had endured.