Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (39 page)

The oval screen before Hannah went to a holding logo, which had once been a United Earth one but was now simply a picture of Argus Station taken from one of the smelting
plants. But then, oddly, that changed to a still image of Var Delex.

‘Now that’s strange,’ said Rhine.

Hannah glanced across at him questioningly. He was sitting before another screen via which he had been monitoring tanglecom, measuring quantum effects within the tangle box itself or, as he put
it, ‘checking the cat’s poison’. Now his screen also showed an image of Var Delex’s face. Hannah turned to look at other screens in the room and saw that they too showed the
same image.

‘One of your quantum effects?’ Hannah suggested, then abruptly grabbed the arms of her chair as a deep thrumming noise rose into being and seemed to penetrate her to the bone. It
continued for a while and was so intense she saw a pen vibrate across the tabletop nearby and fall to the floor. ‘Shit, what is that?’

Hannah could think of very little that could have caused it, but feared something major: Arcoplex Two itself going out of balance, or the massive motors that turned it breaking down. She punched
some commands into her console and disconnected the screen before her from the tangle box, immediately calling up the station log to see if anything had been reported either by the system or by the
staff.

‘PA system,’ said Rhine, the image of Var Delex banished from his screen and other data appearing there. ‘Maybe he’s having another nightmare.’

If Saul was stirring uneasily in slumber, the stuff issuing from his mind into the station system had changed radically. Surely this was something else? The station log appeared on her screen,
slowly scrolling as new events were added, then suddenly it blurred as the number of those events suddenly rose, and, just at that moment, she got notifications of four calls queued up on her fone.
One was from her laboratory, the other three from Brigitta, Langstrom and Le Roque. She answered the technical director’s call first.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Isn’t that the question I should be asking you?’ he shot back.

‘Le Roque, the station log just went crazy after an image of Var Delex appeared on our screens here, and then some . . . noise over the PA system. I’m not keeping anything from you,
so speak to me.’

‘Same screen image in Tech Central,’ he replied grudgingly, ‘and, as far as I can gather, all across the station. That noise was odd because it was largely infrasound, which
can have some strange effects. But that’s not all that’s happened. Grab yourself exterior cam views of your arcoplex, as you might find them interesting.’

She banished the log file and called up image feeds, selected four, and her screen now quartered to provide them. Her first impression was of metallic movement, more than should be registered
through these cams, for all that should be visible was the steady rotation of Arcoplex Two. It took her a moment to realize that she was seeing masses of robots on the move.

‘What the hell?’ she said.

‘So you know nothing about this?’ said Le Roque.

Hannah selected another more distant view of the arcoplex and saw how robots were swarming around it like ants around a chunk of salami. There were thousands of them, maybe their whole
population here.

‘They just finished off whatever job they were doing and headed straight for Arcoplex Two,’ said Le Roque. ‘The only ones not included were the fixed robots, some currently
working out on the vortex generator, and the proctors.’

Hannah stood and headed over to the door. ‘Let me start checking things out – I’ll get back to you.’ She opened the door and looked out, and realized that her spidergun
was no longer with her. Was this something else that had entered the station queue? Some new order from Saul’s unconscious mind?

‘Brigitta,’ she said quickly, responding to the next call, ‘I’ve no idea what’s going on. Have you?’

‘I take it you saw the robots?’ the Saberhagen twin asked.

‘I’ve seen them.’

‘Every station weapon that was capable just powered up too.’

What the hell was going on?

‘I’ll get back to you.’ She responded to the next call: ‘Langstrom?’

‘Why the alert, Dr Neumann?’ the soldier asked.

‘I’m trying to find out what the hell is going on, Langstrom. What alert are you talking about?’ Maybe the PA system was still issuing infrasound, because her skin suddenly
felt cold, as if in response to some invisible wind sweeping through the station.

‘We just got instructed to go to full security alert – all station police called on duty and permission given to employ deadly force. Yet the arms caches are locked down. I checked
with Le Roque and it’s nothing to do with him. It makes no sense.’

‘It’s not me, either. I’ll see what I can find out.’ She shut off that line and noted the one left was routed from her laboratory. She then remembered that it was closed
off, and that neither James nor any other member of her staff was there. Suddenly she had an intimation of what it might be. She opened the channel in question.

‘Recorded Alert One,’ her own voice told her. ‘Alpha rhythms detected and patient conscious.’

It was the message she had wanted to hear for months but, now it had arrived, she felt numb. She didn’t know what to say to the others. She had to check first. She turned to gaze at Rhine,
who took one look at her expression and asked, ‘What’s the problem, Dr Neumann?’

‘No problem, none at all,’ she said, noting the slight edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘It’s Saul – I think he’s awake.’

‘At last,’ said Rhine, looking somewhat smug.

She turned away from him, stepped out into the corridor and began walking.
The sleeping god wakes
, she thought, not sure where those words had come from. It was all right for Rhine to
feel vindicated, to feel that an ally had returned to the conscious world, but he did not know what Hannah knew: that the one now waking up might not even know Rhine, might not even know what it
was to be a human being.

Saul gazed steadily upwards, but could see nothing but weird rainbow effects spreading out in watery ripples. The bullet had all but destroyed his visual cortex at the back of
his skull, but he had lain here for months with brain matter growing to fill the spaces, which he at once checked, sliding into Hannah’s laboratory computer to assess the extent of the
healing. His visual cortex occupied a larger area at the back of his skull than before, and its structure was substantially changed, as were all the other portions of his brain that had been
damaged. His optic nerve was also thicker, and the neural density to the rods and cones of his eyes had all but doubled.

Saul groped for connections, activating dormant synapses and firing up the somnolent nerve tissue lying between them. His vision hazed in and out like a TV channel search. He thought that it
might be better if he actually had something other than just the ceiling to focus on, so decided to sit up. Just for a moment he could not, then further previously damaged neurons fired up, fed
back into a mental partition that defined every function of his physical body, and in an instant he remembered how to control it all, utterly.

The physical effort required in the arcoplex’s gravity was the only downside. He could define and minutely control every muscle in his body, route blood to them and have them working in
perfect concert, but they were partially wasted since muscle-tone stimulation though useful, was hardly adequate. For a while at least it might be a good idea to confine himself to the zero-gravity
areas of the station.

Now sitting upright, he concentrated on his vision – still trying to tune in to that station. Shapes began to appear and he tried to resolve them, understand them. One came clear: a
circle, rainbow ripples distorting it and bright light burning a hole through one section of the circumference. He tuned out that light and the circle became clear. He saw a rim of concentrically
ridged plastic with an object lying across looking like a long curved claw. Scattered about this ring were white crusty items like sheets of crunched-up and compressed bubble wrap. He could
comprehend none of these objects as he next focused on the glassy eye this ring enclosed.

Here were lines, reflected lights and a distorted image down towards the bottom. Unable to make anything of that, he instinctively cleaned it up with a program now running in his visual cortex
but more commonly found in cam systems. The distortions ironed out, presenting him with a clear image of his own reflection. But what was he being reflected from? Another program – a search
through his distributed mind – quickly rendered just one result, and he then had to recalculate scale. He was focusing right across the room at one lens of a binocular microscope, and the
objects on the plastic rim about that lens were a human eyelash and a scattering of skin flakes. And next, when the lights came on like a sun going nova, he realized he had been seeing that lens in
infra-red.

‘You’re awake!’

Now aware of his visual error, he focused on Hannah entire, mapped her features, noted extra lines on her face, a healing cut on her earlobe and some new grey hairs on her head. He was seeing
her complete, and not using the visual shorthand the human brain usually employed to identify someone. She was also thinner, he noticed, looking tired and worried. He read fear in her expression
too: fear of him, and of what she was going to find here, which kept her hovering just inside the door as if ready to flee.

‘I am awake,’ he agreed, his voice hoarse, the very words opening to his inspection further connections inside and outside his skull.

The words appeared as text in the visual centre of his brain, and via new connections, were open to be expressed in any language he chose. This was just through a simple connection to the
station network, which had located a language library. However, while he had been unconscious, the partition of his mind containing his language centre had already analysed that library in depth
and he could not only speak the words in any tongue now, but place on them any nuance he required. His mind, partitioned throughout this particular body’s brain, and throughout the extra
neural tissue residing in two metre-square boxes in this laboratory’s clean-room, and then throughout the station system, seemed to have been very busy indeed.

‘How are you feeling?’ Hannah inevitably asked.

‘I will answer the question you
wanted
to ask, rather than give you the conventional response,’ he said flatly. ‘I am sane, I am functional and have become more than I
was before I was shot and, to be specific, I will take charge once again.’

She moved further into the laboratory, some of the tension slipping out of her as she briefly focused on some of the laboratory screen displays. Saul knew what she was seeing there: glimpses of
a mind functioning smoothly, while efficiently running the nervous system of a human body, revealing no signs of epilepsy or the other crippling effects of brain damage, instead operating in smooth
waveforms. These reassured her, and perhaps she was discounting everything else that she could not recognize because she wanted him to take charge again. She wanted the
responsibility
taken
away from her.

‘More than you were before?’ she asked, moving over beside him and immediately busying herself with removing monitor pads from his chest and skull.

‘I kept myself functional because of this Scour, because we needed to know what it was all about. I should not have done so. My body, brain and mind required time to heal. I ideally needed
to shut down to allow that process to commence properly. However, our situation was too dangerous for me to release my hold completely. I first ensured that the robots would obey you, and you
alone, then as I slid into unconsciousness I partitioned my mind, delegating my will and intentions to its various parts.’

‘It seems that you achieved a lot in a very short time,’ said Hannah, spraying antivibact on the skin behind his ear as she pulled out a hair-thin optical probe penetrating the
inside of his skull. ‘I thought you could hardly manage to look through one cam, at the time.’

‘It was instinctive,’ said Saul dismissively, then added, ‘though instinct is a questionable description of what I did.’

‘Like, for example,’ said Hannah, ‘instinctively calling just about every robot on this station to your present location.’

In an instant he was gazing through cams located outside the arcoplex, then into the minds of the massed robots and isolating what had brought them here. It was something that had spread virally
from the two spiderguns now stationed outside the door to this laboratory. He could define it as computer code, but an easier description would be that it was their protective instincts kicking in.
He shut it down, he reassured them, and sent them back to work, watched them hesitantly moving away as if unsure that he knew what he was doing.

‘They are returning to work now,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Hannah shrugged, ‘that certainly shows that you are in charge but, anyway, we soon found out that you never really weren’t.’

‘Quite so,’ Saul agreed, ‘though my awareness of that fact wasn’t wholly conscious.’ He reached up to pull the teragate plug from the socket in his skull, and
switched the data stream going through it over to his internal radio modem, then continued, ‘I lapsed into unconsciousness without preparing any way to wake myself. Partitioning my mind was
almost a survival effort, but it has had some beneficial results.’

‘What did wake you?’ Hannah asked.

‘Let me get to that in its turn,’ Saul said.

‘Okay, you’re the boss.’ Hannah’s expression was wry, almost sad.

‘The parts of my mind were not completely separate, however,’ he said. ‘There were those for my senses, the other functions of my body and the functions of my mind, but access
was required to them for one other partition. I needed to analyse our situation perpetually and make the best decisions about what to do to improve our chances of surviving. Hence the orders for
Rhine’s vortex generator to be built, and the subsequent course changes – these decisions were made inside that partition.’