Absolution Gap

TWO

Surgeon-General Grelier strode through the circular green-lit corridors of the body factory.

He hummed and whistled, happy in his element, happy to be surrounded by humming machines and half-formed people. With a shiver of anticipation he thought about the solar system that lay ahead of them and the great many things that depended on it. Not necessarily for him, it was true, but certainly for his rival in the matter of the queen’s affection. Grelier wondered how she would take another of Quaiche’s failures. Knowing Queen Jasmina, he did not think she would take it awfully well.

Grelier smiled at that. The odd thing was that for a system on which so much hung, the place was still nameless; no one had ever bothered with the remote star and its uninteresting clutch of planets. There had never been any reason to. There would be an obscure catalogue entry for the system in the as-trogation database of the Gnostic Ascension, and indeed of almost every other starship, along with brief notes on the major characteristics of its sun and worlds, likely hazards and so forth. But these databases had never been intended for human eyes; they existed only to be interrogated and updated by other machines as they went about their silent, swift business executing those shipboard tasks considered too dull or too difficult for humans. The entry was just a string of binary digits, a few thousand ones and zeroes. It was a measure of the system’s unimportance that the entry had only been queried three times in the entire operational lifetime of the Gnostic Ascension. It had been updated once.

Grelier knew: he had checked, out of curiosity.

Yet now, perhaps for the first time in history, the system was of more than passing interest. It still had no name, but now at least the absence of one had become vaguely troubling, to the point where Queen Jasmina sounded a trifle more irritated every time she was forced to refer to the place as “the system ahead” or “the system we are approaching.” But Grelier knew that she would not deign to give the place a name until it had proved valuable. And the system’s value was entirely in the hands of the queen’s fading favourite, Quaiche.

Grelier paused a while near one of the bodies. It was suspended in translucent support gel behind the green glass of its vivification tank. Around the base of the tank were rows of nutrient controls like so many organ stops, some pushed in and some pulled out. The stops controlled the delicate biochemical environment of the nutrient matrix. Bronze valve wheels set into the side of the tank adjusted the delivery of bulk chemicals like water or saline.

Appended to the tank was a log showing the body’s clonal history. Grelier flicked through the plastic-laminated pages of the log, satisfying himself that all was well. Although most of the bodies in the factory had never been decanted, this specimen—an adult female—had been warmed and used once before. The evidence of the injuries inflicted on it was fading under the regenerative procedures, abdominal scars healing invisibly, the new leg now only slightly smaller than its undamaged counterpart. Jasmina did not approve of these patch-up jobs, but her demand for bodies had outstripped the production capacity of the factory.

Grelier patted the glass affectionately. “Coming along nicely.”

He walked on, making random checks on the other bodies. Sometimes a glance was sufficient, though more often than not Grelier would thumb through the log and pause to make some small adjustment to the settings. He took a great deal of pride in the quiet competence of his work. He never boasted of his abilities or promised anything he was not absolutely certain of being able to deliver—utterly unlike Quaiche, who had been full of exaggerated promises from the moment he stepped aboard the Gnostic Ascension.

For a while it had worked, too. Grelier, long the queen’s closest confidant, had found himself temporarily usurped by the flashy newcomer. All he heard while he was working on her was how Quaiche was going to change all their fortunes: Quaiche this, Quaiche that. The queen had even started complaining about Grelier’s duties, moaning that the factory was too slow in delivering bodies and that the attention-deficit therapies were losing their effectiveness. Grelier had been briefly tempted to try something seriously attention-grabbing, something that would catapult him back into her good graces.

Now he was profoundly glad that he had done no such thing; he had needed only to bide his time. It was simply a question of letting Quaiche dig his own grave by setting up expectations that he could not possibly meet. Sadly—for Quaiche, if not for Grelier—Jasmina had taken him exactly at his word. If Grelier judged the queen’s mood, poor old Quaiche was about this close to getting the figurehead treatment.

Grelier stopped at an adult male that had begun to show developmental anomalies during his last examination. He had adjusted the tank settings, but his tinkering had apparently been to no avail. To the untrained eye the body looked normal enough, but it lacked the unmarred symmetry that Jasmina craved. Grelier shook his head and placed a hand on one of the polished brass valve wheels. Always a difficult call, this. The body wasn’t up to scratch by the usual standards of the factory, but then again neither were the patch-up jobs. Was it time to make Jasmina accept a lowering of quality? It was she who was pushing the factory to its limit, after all.

No, Grelier decided. If he had learned one lesson from this whole sordid Quaiche business, it was to maintain his own standards. Jasmina would scold him for aborting a body, but in the long run she would respect his judgement, his stolid devotion to excellence.

He twisted the brass wheel shut, blocking saline. He knelt down and pushed in most of the nutrient valves.

“Sorry,” Grelier said, addressing the smooth, expressionless face behind the glass, “but I’m afraid you just didn’t cut it.”

He gave the body one last glance. In a few hours the processes of cellular deconstruction would be grotesquely obvious. The body would be dismantled, its constituent chemicals recycled for use elsewhere in the factory.

A voice buzzed in his earpiece. He touched a finger to the device.

“Grelier… I was expecting you already.”

“I’m on my way, ma’am.”

A red light started flashing on top of the vivification tank, synchronised to an alarm. Grelier cuffed the override, silencing the alarm and blanking the emergency signal Calm returned to the body factory, a silence broken only by the occasional gurgle of nutrient flows or the muffled click of some distant valve regulator.

Grelier nodded, satisfied that all was in hand, and resumed his unhurried progress.

At the same instant that Grelier pushed in the last of the nutrient valves, an anomaly occurred in the sensor apparatus of the Gnostic Ascension. The anomaly was brief, lasting only a fraction over half a second, but it was sufficiently unusual that a flag was raised in the data stream: an exceptional event marker indicating that something merited attention.

As far as the sensor software was concerned that was the end of it: the anomaly had not continued, and all systems were now performing normally. The flag was a mere formality; whether it was to be acted on was the responsibility of an entirely separate and slightly more intelligent layer of monitoring software.

The second layer—dedicated to health-monitoring all ship-wide sensor subsystems—detected the flag, along with several million others raised in the same cycle, and assigned it a schedule in its task profile. Less than two hundred thousandths of a second had lapsed since the end of the anomaly: an eternity in computational terms, but an inevitable consequence of the vast size of a lighthugger’s cybernetic nervous system. Communications between one end of the Gnostic Ascension and the other required three to four kilometres of main trunk cabling, six to seven for a round-trip signal.

Nothing happened quickly on a ship that large, but it made little practical difference. The ship’s huge mass meant that it responded sluggishly to external events: it had precisely the same need for lightning-fast reflexes as a brontosaurus.

The health-monitoring layer worked its way down the pile.

Most of the several million events it looked at were quite innocuous. Based on its grasp of the statistical expectation pattern of error events, it was able to de-assign most of the flags without hesitation. They were transient errors, not indicative of any deeper malaise in the ship’s hardware. Only a hundred thousand looked even remotely suspicious.

The second layer did what it always did at this point: it compiled the hundred thousand anomalous events into a single packet, appended its own comments and preliminary findings and offered the packet to the third layer of monitoring software.

The third layer spent most of its time doing nothing: it existed solely to examine those anomalies forwarded to it by duller layers. Quickened to alertness, it examined the dossier with as much actual interest as its borderline sentience allowed. By machine standards it was still somewhere below gamma-level intelligence, but it had been doing its job for such a long time that it had built up a huge hoard of heuristic expertise. It was insultingly clear to the third layer that more than half of the forwarded events in no way merited its attention, but the remaining cases were more interesting, and it took its time going through them. Two-thirds of those anomalies were repeat offenders: evidence of systems with some real but transient fault. None, however, were in critical areas of ship function, so they could be left alone until they became more serious.

One-third of the interesting cases were new. Of these, perhaps ninety per cent were the kind of failures that could be expected once in a while, based on the layer’s knowledge of the various hardware components and software elements involved. Only a handful were in possibly critical areas, and thankfully these faults could all be dealt with by routine repair methods. Almost without blinking, the layer dispatched instructions to those parts of the ship dedicated to the upkeep of its infrastructure.

At various points around the ship, servitors that were already engaged in other repair and overhaul jobs received new entries in their task buffers. It might take them weeks to get around to those chores, but eventually they would be performed.

That left a tiny core of errors that might potentially be of some concern. They were more difficult to explain, and it was not immediately clear how the servitors should be ordered to deal with them. The layer was not unduly worried, in so far as it was capable of worrying about anything: past experience had taught it that these gremlins generally turned out to be benign. But for now it had no choice but to forward the puzzling exceptions to an even higher stratum of shipboard automation.

The anomaly moved up like this, through another three layers of steadily increasing intelligence.

By the time the final layer was invoked, only one outstanding event remained in the packet: the original transient sensor anomaly, the one that had lasted just over half a second. None of the underlying layers could account for the error via the usual statistical patterns and look-up rules.

An event only filtered this high in the system once or twice a minute.

Now, for the first time, something with real intelligence was invoked. The gamma-level subpersona in charge of overseeing layer-six exceptions was part of the last line of defence between the cybernetics and the ship’s flesh crew. It was the sub-persona that had the difficult role of deciding whether a given error merited the attention of its human stewards. Over the years it had learned not to cry wolf too often: if it did, its owners might decide that it needed upgrading. As a consequence, the subpersona agonised for many seconds before deciding what to do.

The anomaly was, it decided, one of the strangest it had ever encountered. A thorough examination of every logical path in the sensor system failed to explain how something so utterly, profoundly unusual could ever have happened.

In order to do its job effectively, the subpersona had to have an abstract understanding of the real world. Nothing too sophisticated, but enough that it could make sensible judgements about which kinds of external phenomena were likely to be encountered by the sensors, and which were so massively unlikely that they could only be interpreted as hallucinations introduced at a later stage of data processing. It had to grasp that the Gnostic Ascension was a physical object embedded in space. It also had to grasp that the events recorded by the ship’s web of sensors were caused by objects and quanta permeating that space: dust grains, magnetic fields, radar echoes from nearby bodies; and by the radiation from more distant phenomena: worlds, stars, galaxies, quasars, the cosmic background signal. In order to do this it had to be able to make accurate guesses about how the data returns from all these objects were supposed to behave. No one had ever given it these rules; it had formulated them for itself, over time, making corrections as it accumulated more information. It was a never-ending task, but at this late stage in the game it considered itself rather splendid at it.

It knew, for instance, that planets—or rather the abstract objects in its model that corresponded to planets—were definitely not supposed to do that. The error was completely inexplicable as an outside-world event. Something must have gone badly wrong at the data-capture stage.

It pondered this a little more. Even allowing for that conclusion, the anomaly was still difficult to explain. It was so peculiarly selective, affecting only the planet itself. Nothing else, not even the planet’s moons, had done anything in the least bit odd.

The subpersona changed its mind: the anomaly had to be external, in which case the subpersona’s model of the real world was shockingly flawed. It didn’t like that conclusion either. It was a long time since it had been forced to update its model so drastically, and it viewed the prospect with a stinging sense of affront.

Worse, the observation might mean that the Gnostic Ascension itself was… well, not exactly in immediate ganger—the planet in question was still dozens of light-hours away—but conceivably headed for something that might, at some point in the future, pose a non-negligible risk to the ship.

That was it, then. The subpersona made its decision: it had no choice but to alert the crew on this one.

That meant only one thing: a priority interrupt to Queen Jasmina.

The subpersona established that the queen was currently accessing status summaries through her preferred visual read-out medium. As it was authorised to do, it seized control of the data channel and cleared both screens of the device ready for an emergency bulletin.

It prepared a simple text message: SENSOR ANOMALY: REQUEST ADVICE.

For an instant—significantly less than the half-second that the original event had consumed—the message hovered on the queen’s read-out, inviting her attention.

Then the subpersona had a hasty change of heart.

Perhaps it was making a mistake. The anomaly, bizarre as it had been, had cleared itself. No further reports of strangeness had emanated from any of the underlying layers. The planet was behaving in the way the subpersona had always assumed planets were supposed to.

With the benefit of a little more time, the layer decided, the event could surely be explained as a perceptual malfunction. It was just a question of going over things again, looking at all the components from the right perspective, thinking outside the box. As a subpersona, that was exactly what it was meant to do. If all it ever did was blindly forward every anomaly that it couldn’t immediately explain, then the crew might as well replace it with another dumb layer. Or, worse, upgrade it to something cleverer.

It cleared the text message from the queen’s device and immediately replaced it with the data she had been viewing just before.

It continued to gnaw away at the problem until, a minute or so later, another anomaly bumped into its in-box. This time it was a thrust imbalance, a niggling one-per-cent jitter in the starboard Conjoiner drive. Faced with a bright new urgency, it chose to put the matter of the planet on the back-burner. Even by the slow standards of shipboard communications, a minute was a long time. With every further minute that passed without the planet misbehaving, the whole vexing event would inevitably drop to a diminished level of priority.

The subpersona would not forget about it—it was incapable of forgetting about anything—but within an hour it would have a great many other things to deal with instead.

Good. It was decided, then. The way to handle it was to pretend it had never happened in the first place.

Thus it was that Queen Jasmina was informed of the sensor event anomaly for only a fraction of a second. And thus it was that no human members of the crew of the Gnostic Ascension —not Jasmina, not Grelier, not Quaiche, nor any of the other Ultras—were ever aware that, for more than half a second, the largest gas giant in the system they were approaching, the system unimaginatively called 107 Piscium, had simply ceased to exist.

Queen Jasmina heard the surgeon-general’s footsteps echoing towards her, approaching along the metal-lined companionway that connected her command chamber to the rest of the ship. As always, Grelier managed not to sound in any particular hurry. Had she tested his loyalty by fawning over Quaiche? she wondered. Perhaps. In which case it was probably time to make Grelier feel valued again.

A flicker on the read-out screens of the skull caught her attention. For a moment a line of text replaced the summaries she was paging through—something about a sensor anomaly.

Queen Jasmina shook the skull. She had always been convinced that the horrid thing was possessed, but increasingly it appeared to be going senile, too. Had she been less superstitious, she would have thrown it away, but dreadful things were rumoured to have happened to those who ignored the skull’s counsel.

A polite knock sounded at the door.

“Enter, Grelier.”

The armoured door eased itself open. Grelier emerged into the chamber, his eyes wide and showing a lot of white as they adjusted to the chamber’s gloom. Grelier was a slim, neatly dressed little man with a flat-topped shock of brilliant white hair. He had the flattened, minimalist features of a boxer. He wore a clean white medical smock and apron; his hands were always gloved. His expression never failed to amuse Jasmina: it always appeared that he was on the point of breaking into tears or laughter. It was an illusion: the surgeon-general had little familiarity with either emotional extreme.

“Busy in the body factory, Grelier?”

“A wee bit, ma’am.”

“I’m anticipating a period of high demand ahead. Production mustn’t slacken.”

“Little danger of that, ma’am.”

“Just as long as you’re aware of it.” She sighed. “Well, niceties over with. To business.”

Grelier nodded. “I see you’ve already made a start.”

While awaiting his arrival, she had strapped her body into the throne, leather cuffs around her ankles and thighs, a thick band around her belly, her right arm fixed to the chair rest, with only her left arm free to move. She held the skull in her left hand, its face turned towards her so that she could view the read-out screens bulging from its eye sockets. Prior to picking up the skull she had inserted her right arm into a skeletal machine bracketed to the side of the chair. The machine—the alleviator—was a cage of rough black ironwork equipped with screw-driven pressure pads. They were already pressing uncomfortably against her skin.

“Hurt me,” Queen Jasmina said.

Grelier’s expression veered momentarily towards a smile. He approached the throne and examined the arrangement of the alleviator. Then he commenced tightening the screws on the device, adjusting each in sequence by a precise quarter turn at a time. The pressure pads bore down on the skin of the queen’s forearm, which was supported in turn by an underlying arrangement of fixed pads. The care with which Grelier turned the screws made the queen think of someone tuning some ghastly stringed instrument.

It wasn’t pleasant. That was the point.

After a minute or so, Grelier stopped and moved behind the throne. She watched him tug a spool of tubing from the little medical kit he always kept there. He plugged one end of the tubing into an oversized bottle full of something straw-yellow and connected the other to a hypodermic. He hummed and whistled as he worked. He lifted up the bottle and attached it to a rig on the back of the throne, then pushed the hypodermic line into the queen’s upper right arm, fiddling around a little until he found the vein. Then she watched him return to the front of the throne, back into view of the body.

It was a female one this time, but there was no reason that it had to be. Although all the bodies were cultured from Jasmina’s own genetic material, Grelier was able to intervene at an early stage of development and force the body down various sexual pathways. Usually it was boys and girls. Now and then, for a treat, he made weird neuters and intersex variants. They were all sterile, but that was only because it would have been a waste of time to equip them with functioning reproductive systems. It was enough bother installing the neural coupling implants so that she could drive the bodies in the first place.

Suddenly she felt the agony lose its focus. “I don’t want anaesthetic, Grelier.”

“Pain without intermittent relief is like music without silence,” he said. “You must trust my judgement in this matter, as you have always done in the past.”

“I do trust you, Grelier,” she said, grudgingly.

“Sincerely, ma’am?”

“Yes. Sincerely. You’ve always been my favourite. You do appreciate that, don’t you?”

“I have a job to do, ma’am. I simply do it to the limit of my abilities.”

The queen put the skull down in her lap. With her free hand she ruffled the white brush of his hair.

“I’d be lost without you, you know. Especially now.”

“Nonsense, ma’am. Your expertise threatens any day to eclipse my own.”

It was more than automatic flattery: though Grelier had made the study of pain his life’s work, Jasmina was catching up quickly. She knew volumes about the physiology of pain. She knew about nociception; she knew the difference between epi-critic and protopathic pain; she knew about presynaptic blocking and the neospinal pathway. She knew her prostaglandin promoters from her GABA agonists.

But the queen also knew pain from an angle Grelier never would. His tastes lay entirely in its infliction. He did not know it from the inside, from the privileged point of view of the recipient. No matter how acute his theoretical understanding of the subject, she would always have that edge over him.

Like most people of his era, Grelier could only imagine agony, extrapolating it a thousandfold from the minor discomfort of a torn hangnail.

He had no idea.

“I may have learned a great deal,” she said, “but you will always be a master of the clonal arts. I was serious about what I said before, Grelier: I anticipate increased demand on the factory. Can you satisfy me?”

“You said production mustn’t slacken. That isn’t quite the same thing.”

“But surely you aren’t working at full capacity at this moment.”

Grelier adjusted the screws. “I’ll be frank with you: we’re not far off it. At the moment I’m prepared to discard units that don’t meet our usual exacting standards. But if the factory is expected to increase production, the standards will have to be relaxed.”

“You discarded one today, didn’t you?”

“How did you know?”

“I suspected you’d make a point of your commitment to excellence.” She raised a finger. “And that’s all right. It’s why you work for me. I’m disappointed, of course—I know exactly which body you terminated—but standards are standards.”

“That’s always been my watchword.”

“It’s a pity that can’t be said for everyone on this ship.”

He hummed and whistled to himself for a little while, then asked, with studied casualness, “I always got the impression that you have a superlative crew, ma’am.”

“My regular crew is not the problem.”

“Ah. Then you would be referring to one of the irregulars? Not myself, I trust?”

“You are well aware of whom I speak, so don’t pretend otherwise.”

“Quaiche? Surely not.”

“Oh, don’t play games, Grelier. I know exactly how you feel about your rival. Do you want to know the truly ironic thing? The two of you are more similar than you realise. Both baseline humans, both ostracised from your own cultures. I had great hopes for the two of you, but now I may have to let Quaiche go.”

“Surely you’d give him one last chance, ma’am. We are approaching a new system, after all.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to see him fail one final time, just so that my punishment would be all the more severe?”

“I was thinking only of the welfare of the ship.”

“Of course you were, Grelier.” She smiled, amused by his lies. “Well, the fact of the matter is I haven’t made up my mind what to do with Quaiche. But I do think he and I need a little chat. Some interesting new information concerning him has fallen into my possession, courtesy of our trading partners.”

“Fancy that,” Grelier said.

“It seems he wasn’t completely honest about his prior experience when I hired him. It’s my fault: I should have checked his background more thoroughly. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he exaggerated his earlier successes. I thought we were hiring an expert negotiator, as well as a man with an instinctive understanding of planetary environments. A man comfortable among both baseline humans and Ultras, someone‘ who could talk up a deal to our advantage and find treasure where we’d miss it completely.”

“That sounds like Quaiche.”

“No, Grelier, what it sounds like is the character Quaiche wished to present to us. The fiction he wove. In truth, his record is a lot less impressive. The occasional score here and there, but just as many failures. He’s a chancer: a braggart, an opportunist and a liar. And an infected one, as well.”

Grelier raised an eyebrow. “Infected?”

“He has an indoctrinal virus. We scanned for the usuals but missed this one because it wasn’t in our database. Fortunately, it isn’t strongly infectious—not that it would stand much of a chance infecting one of us in the first place.”

“What type of indoctrinal virus are we talking about here?”

“It’s a crude mishmash: a half-baked concoction of three thousand years’ worth of religious imagery jumbled together without any overarching theistic consistency. It doesn’t make him believe anything coherent; it just makes him feel religious. Obviously he can keep it under control for much of the time. But it worries me, Grelier. What if it gets worse? I don’t like a man whose impulses I can’t predict.”

“You’ll be letting him go, then.”

“Not just yet. Not until we’ve passed beyond 107 Piscium. Not until he’s had one last chance to redeem himself.”

“What makes you think he’ll find anything now?”

“I have no expectation that he will, but I do believe he’s more likely to find something if I provide him with the right incentive.”

“He might do a runner.”

“I’ve thought of that as well. In fact, I think I’ve got all bases covered where Quaiche is concerned. All I need now is the man himself, in some state of animation. Can you arrange that for me?”

“Now, ma’am?”

“Why not? Strike while the iron’s hot, as they say.”

“The trouble is,” Grelier said, “he’s frozen. It’ll take six hours to wake him, assuming that we follow the recommended procedures.”

“And if we don’t?” She wondered how much mileage was left in her new body. “Realistically, how many hours could we shave off?”

“Two at the most, if you don’t want to run the risk of killing him. Even then it’ll be a wee bit unpleasant.”

Jasmina smiled at the surgeon-general. “I’m sure he’ll get over it. Oh, and Grelier? One other thing.”

“Ma’am?”

“Bring me the scrimshaw suit.”