Polity Agent

6

Thellant turned to gaze at a screen wall. The scene it displayed was taken from cameras high above his present location, and its clarity so good he appeared to be looking through a chainglass window at a pastoral view of patchwork fields, rivers and copses, with only occasional incongruous towers sprouting like vulgar metal plants amid this apparently rural idyll. It was deceptive. Some human, transported to those fields from a past time, would not know that below him lay an arcology housing a billion humans. Fifteen miles straight ahead, a cliff dropped two miles sheer down to the coast, beyond which sea-life breeding pens chequered the shallow ocean extending to the horizon and beyond. That cliff formed one arcology edge. Another edge lay 200 miles behind the present view.

Of course, with so many humans being packed so closely together dissatisfaction with the regime was inevitable, despite passage to less crowded worlds being offered to them free by the runcible AI. Many did leave, but just as many were born to replace them. Thellant thought of the humans here as a particular breed devolved through urbanization: they would not move because they were incapable of imagining anything beyond the life they knew. Sad for them, but not for him—he grew rich on their dissatisfaction. The thousands of Separatist cells abounding here gathered wealth by extortion, theft, murder, blackmail… to finance the fight against the AI autocrat of Earth. Thellant skimmed the cream of that wealth, while allowing his followers to sabotage a few machines and murder a few citizens. But he remained well aware of why ECS could not catch him. The reason sat upon the sofa behind him.

‘You were told to simply kill her,’ it hissed.

Nervous and sweating, Thellant turned. The Legate always had this effect on him: quite simply it looked plain evil. It was humanoid, just like the Golem made by Cybercorp, and metalskin like some of the older versions produced by that same company. But there the similarity ended. This android wore nothing but its metal skin, shiny and shading to blue-green. When standing it towered tall and incredibly thin. Its fingers were half again the length of human fingers and terminated in sharp points. Its head slanted back, tapering sharply down to the lipless slot of its mouth. It had no nose and its eyes were lidless and insectile. There seemed no edges to the metal skin at its joints—the material there did actually stretch and flex like skin. All of it consisted of the same metal, even the eyes, from which it seemed something cold and harsh gazed out.

‘You informed me’, protested Thellant, ‘that there would be a high level of ECS interest in her, and that agents would be sent to apprehend her. I am the de facto leader of the rebellion here on Coloron, so I could not ignore such an opportunity.’

‘You are the leader here only because of the programs I have created to keep the AIs from finding out about you. But that is irrelevant,’ the Legate waved one long-fingered hand, ‘especially now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Despite my programs, ECS has been closing in on you for some time. Now that your people on Osterland have been captured, the gap will soon be closed completely.’

Thellant felt his mouth go dry. ‘I don’t understand.’ For reassurance he reached up and touched his fingertips to the warm scaly skin of the Dracocorp aug he wore.

The Legate pointed one long digit. ‘Those augs have provided you with secure com and processing power outside AI networks. You give your orders with an unprecedented degree of anonymity. ECS have failed to track the money trails back to you through the conventional networks, because of my programs and because of numerous physical transfers of wealth, but mainly because few people know who you are.’

‘I am aware of how it all works. Your assistance has been greatly appreciated, but remember that, even with it, it was I who built up this organization.’

The Legate interlaced its long fingers. ‘Of course, and while your organization confined itself to this world, it has been easy enough for me to arrange the deaths of those who knew too much and were undergoing investigation by ECS. Had you sent out a single contractor to kill Jane von Hellsdorf, there would be no problem. I could have then arranged for the same contractor to die, and thereby closed down any connection with you or with this world. But instead you sent some of your top people there—people who have seen you and know who you are. Now they have been captured, and we both know that once in ECS hands their remaining silent is not an option. Even now ECS teams are closing in on you, and the AIs are closely watching the spaceports and runcibles.’

‘I have my own secure routes,’ Thellant said.

‘Yes, many of which have been compromised for some time. ECS has had agents in place for years, gathering evidence, gradually identifying those in the higher echelons of your organization here on Coloron. Now they have located the head, they will proceed to destroy the body.’

‘You are part of that body,’ Thellant observed.

‘Correct, in so far as I have advised and assisted you in your cause. But I will now take my leave of this world and leave you to reap what you have sown.’

Thellant abruptly felt a surge of the anger that had been his driving force since his childhood. ‘But this mess is down to you anyway! This woman was irrelevant to me. You wanted her killed and I still don’t know why, just as I really don’t know why you have always felt this urge to be so helpful!

Suddenly the Legate was standing. Thellant stepped back, his heart thumping, then he forced himself to take that step forwards again. Looming over him the android spoke, low and soft, ‘It has been in our interest to maintain a level of resistance to the autocrat; nothing sufficiently threatening to elicit a major counter-offensive, but to have skeletal networks ready and waiting for the tools to do the job. You have remained in contact with your offworld associates, so presumably you know something of the biophysicist Skellor?’

Thellant paused before replying. The Legate was some kind of intermediary—that being implicit in its name—and when it referred to ‘our interest’ that obviously included some other party. He had never discovered who or what that other party might be.

He said, ‘Skellor was a useful acquisition. I knew only that he was developing weapons we might be able to use. ECS hit his base and that was the last I heard. All I do know is that ECS went on to take down a planetary organization as a result.’

‘Then what you don’t know is that Skellor, using technology provided for him by us via von Hellsdorf, subverted an AI dreadnought called the Occam Razor, and came close to wiping out the population of an entire planet just to keep the secret. He then managed to escape the destruction of the Occam Razor, but in the end did not evade the ECS agents pursuing him. And he did all this alone.’

‘Masada…’ murmured Thellant. One of his associates had tried for a long time to find out exactly what had happened out there, but it was a dangerous subject to ask about, what with hunter-killer programs flooding the networks, and with AI warships and ECS teams swarming around that world, a dangerous place to be.

The Legate stepped past him and moved over to gaze at the screen wall. ‘Skellor was in the nature of a dry run, you might say. He was brilliant, but fundamentally unbalanced. We did, however, learn a great deal from him.’

Thellant shivered. ‘What is this technology you’re talking about?’

In an offhand manner the Legate explained, ‘Active Jain technology. It is of an organic nature and enables its wielder to both informationally and physically take control of computer and AI systems, to physically control all mechano-electrical systems, and even to enslave human beings.’

Thellant had already experienced some taste of that. Setting up his network using Dracocorp augs was difficult at first, and he rebelled against the disconnection. He always found it much easier to ensure his orders were obeyed by unexpected visits to his subordinates and the occasional disciplinary knee-capping. But as the number of those using the augs grew he found he could trust that his orders were obeyed. He felt the power—his growing ascendancy over the network—and how, the longer they wore their augs, his subordinates found it nearly impossible to disobey him.

Glancing around at his huge apartment and at the expensive luxuries it contained, he murmured, ‘We need such technology here and now. I… we could take this world, take it out of Polity control, just make it too costly for them in lives and resources to reclaim it.’ He wanted this thing. Perhaps by fleeing Coloron he could escape the coming ECS actions against him, but that would mean him abandoning everything: all this wealth and the power, and his position.

The Legate held out a fist, closed, until Thellant turned to regard it.

‘Then I shall provide,’ said the Legate.

The fist opened, each long finger folding out and snapping straight. A dark layer of something coated the palm and the inner surfaces of the fingers and thumb. At the very centre of the palm rested an ovoid, an inch and a half at its longest axis. Silvery cubic patterns decorated its surface and, as Thellant watched them in fascination, they seemed to slowly shift.

‘This is what Skellor used,’ the android informed him.

Thellant stepped forward and began to reach out. He hesitated. ‘How did he… control it?’

‘It forms nanoconnections to the mind—very similar to those made by augs.’ Cold eyes regarding him, the hand extended a little further. ‘You would then be able to create all the processing space you require. You may of course have this object analysed, but I suspect you do not have sufficient resources for that.’

Thellant kept a straight face. Obviously the Legate did not know about the scientists and technicians he controlled, or about the computers and data stores he had isolated from the AI nets. He reached out and picked up the ovoid, inspected it closely for a moment, then dropped it into his other palm to study at a distance.

‘It seems such a small… it’s cold… Shit!’ He shook his hand to fling the thing away, but it seemed stuck there. It was as if he had grasped something direct from a deep freezer that now froze to his palm. The cold of it then became something else, eating into his skin like acid. Thellant gasped, stumbled back still shaking his hand, and tumbled rearwards over the coffee table, hitting his head against the floor. Hot wires now seemed to be spearing up his arm.

The Legate stepped forwards and peered down at him. ‘What causes it to react is complicated. Simply, it becomes aware that it is within an artificial environment then it bonds to the first… intelligent organic contact. Strangely it will not bond to animals or plants—only self-aware and intelligent organic beings. I am excluded, as are Golem and other AI biomechanisms. You must therefore consider yourself privileged.’

The thing, working up his arm, was making his fingers move one after the other as if trying them out.

The Legate added, ‘I neglected to mention that Skellor used a crystal-matrix aug to accept the connections and control the technology. In this case it will connect directly to your brain. That means you may experience some… difficulties.’

Hot wires now in his shoulder, searing up through his neck and into his head. The node, still in his hand, deforming and melting into him. As he began shrieking, the Legate made a contemptuous little moue with its hard mouth, and departed.

Cormac brought his craft in over a curving landscape of living flesh tegulated with scales ranging from the size of a thumbnail to a yard across, which seemed almost like jewelled facets cut on red and green opal. He crossed a trench from the rim of which sprouted pseudopods like giant cobras with blank sapphire eyes where their mouths should be, and passed low slopes strewn with writhing red tentacles like a growth of lianas. The manacle, as ECS personnel now called it, rose over the sharply curved horizon ahead of him. A mile long, it followed the curve of Dragon’s body, and at the centre of it lay a trapeziform building fashioned from the same block of highly polished ceramal. The metallic strip was thirty feet wide and a yard thick and, as Cormac flew above it, his craft dipped then compensated as it encountered the tug of gravplates mounted in its surface. The agent brought his craft down on the metal, where it settled in one Earth gravity, and contemplated what he had landed upon.

The manacle held itself in place with hooks driven into draconic flesh—injuries that meant nothing at all to Dragon. Many instruments pierced the entity, measuring, sampling, testing and perpetually monitoring. The AIs did not intend to miss out on this opportunity to study Dragon up close, but all that equipment was not why this object had come to be called a manacle. As well as more conventional armament, Dragon contained a gravtech weapon. The giant entity had once destroyed a Polity warship with it, by breaching antimatter containment within that ship. The manacle itself held numerous CTDs whose antimatter flasks would also be breached should Dragon try to use that same weapon again. The bombs could be detonated remotely by those entrusted with their code.

Cormac knew that code.

Arach, the spider-drone from the Celedon station, had wanted to come across too, but Cormac refused. This situation did not warrant the presence of an irascible war drone and, anyway, there was not room for it in this one-man craft. Arach had suggested clinging externally to the craft’s hull, and only desisted in wheedling when Jerusalem intervened.

Cormac closed up his spacesuit’s visor, hit purge, and unstrapped himself while a pump rapidly drew the cockpit air into a storage cylinder aboard the craft. He touched a panel beside him and a wing door rose, while his seat swung towards the opening. Stepping out, then down onto the polished ceramal, he looked to one side and saw a row of pseudopods silhouetted against the ice giant, waving like cilia. Considering his previous encounters with other incarnations of this entity, it surprised him that the pseudopods did not all gather around him menacingly, for Dragon loved to play such games. He wondered what the game would be this time, and if Dragon really understood how the odds were stacked against it.

He trudged the few yards up to the nearest wall of the building. The airlock there consisted of an outer metal door and an inner shimmer-shield. Quickly going through, he entered the single room of which the building consisted. It looked like the housing for a small swimming pool, only the pool itself contained scaled flesh. Controlling his spacesuit via his gridlink, Cormac retracted the visor down into the neck ring, then collapsed the segmented helmet back over his head so it settled into a collar at the back of his neck. He sniffed: familiar terrarium smell, cloves and something slightly putrid. Moving around the edge of this minor expanse of Dragon’s surface, he finally came to a small area off to one side containing VR and laboratory equipment. These were intended to be used by those who wanted to get this close—Mika being foremost of thousands aboard the Jerusalem who had volunteered. He sat in a VR chair, right elbow resting on the chair arm and chin cupped in his hand, and contemplated Dragon.

‘Are we all sitting comfortably?’ he asked over his gridlink.

‘I do not sit,’ Jerusalem replied.

‘Oh, get on with it,’ said Mika impatiently.

Only these two, excepting Dragon itself, could speak to him directly while he was here. Many thousands of others listening in could lodge requests, ideas or questions, which were filtered through Jerusalem and stored ready in Cormac’s gridlink should he require them. Through that same device he checked his access to many files and to the controls of the equipment within the building. The holographic projectors specifically interested him.

‘Dragon, I think it is time for our little chat,’ he said out loud.

How many words of dialogue had that Dragon expert Darson recorded all those years ago when Dragon stood as four conjoined spheres down on the surface of Aster Colora? Millions? And how few solid facts. As far as they went, Cormac had learnt so much more in his own brief exchanges with the alien entity. It was all about exigency: it seemed that the less critical the situation Dragon found itself in the more Delphic its pronouncements tended to be. Cormac supposed that having nowhere to run and having many CTDs attached to its surface would be making it feel pretty exigent right now. However, its lies might be even more convoluted. He needed to judge the answers behind the answers.

‘Dragon?’ he began again.

The smell of cloves grew stronger and there seemed a sudden stormy intensity to the atmosphere.

‘Activity below you,’ Jerusalem told him. ‘An incursion developing through the underlayers and a pseudopod tree coming up.’

Cormac scratched his earlobe, rested his hands on the chair arms. Shortly a split began to unzip in the scaled skin extending before him, revealing a red cavity from which he felt a warmth against his face. The edges folded down, seemingly flowing inside. Then a cobra pseudopod speared into the air, then another, then three more. Amidst them a thick loop of neck appeared, which straightened to bring into view a head. This was not one of the usual pterodactyl heads, but something sleeker, lacking a crest, with a more expressive mouth and slotted pupils in its sapphire eyes. It blinked, then surged forwards and down resting a loop of neck on the rim of the cavity, so the head was now poised only a few yards away from him, its eyes directly level with his own. The other cobra pseudopods spread out like a peacock fan behind it, and Cormac wondered if he should read anything into these choreographed actions. Though the head itself was like that of a flesh-ripping predator, it did not rear threateningly above him as usual. And was it looking more expressive to enable better communication or just more convincing lies?

Cormac powered up the holoprojector. To one side, hanging in midair, appeared a dracoman, then beside it one of the by-blows this dragon sphere had created on Cull: a melding of human and sleer, a chimera, the body of a woman attached waist upwards in place of the head of something that resembled a scorpion.

‘When I talk to just one dragon sphere, do I talk to Dragon entire?’ Cormac asked.

Two cobra heads turned towards the holoprojections, the main head remained focused on Cormac. ‘No and yes,’ it replied.

Cormac sighed. ‘Do you remember part of you dying at Samarkand?’ Cormac had used a CTD to destroy one of Dragon’s four spheres there—retribution for the tens of thousands of human deaths it caused on that cold world.

‘I do not.’

Not perpetually connected, then.

‘How much of that particular sphere’s experience is your own?’

‘We are distinct entities, yet we are not. We do not share what we are not, but we share what we all are.’

‘Some AIs do this,’ Jerusalem interjected for Cormac alone. ‘A shared pool of knowledge, understanding and personality, whilst retaining individuality.’

‘But how often do they share, and do they share equally? It must be by U-space com, which, in this situation with USERs all around, means this sphere here has been isolated from the remaining other sphere for some time.’

‘Irrelevant to our present purposes’

Cormac pointed to the two holograms. ‘Why?’

‘You do not accept change swiftly enough,’ Dragon replied. ‘You’ evidently meaning the human race.

‘Adapt or die?’ Cormac wondered.

‘Precisely.’

‘When I first came to you on Aster Colora, as an ambassador, your ostensible purpose was to deliver a warning to the human race, the usual credo, smarten up your act or die, because the big boys are watching.’ Cormac glanced at the holograms. ‘The dracoman was then part of that warning. A rather unsubtle demonstration of the precariousness of human existence—demonstrating how, but for cosmic mischance, the descendants of the dinosaurs could be where we are now.’

Cormac paused and studied the ophidian face before him. He remembered all his own previous speculations about what Dragon might be, or, more importantly, what its purpose might be.

He continued, ‘After Samarkand we marked you down as a bio-engineered device sent by the Makers to observe only, but one that developed a god-complex and started interacting with us. The Maker was sent to retrieve you and, in attempting to kill it, you caused the deaths of thousands of people. Which story is true?’

‘Neither,’ Dragon replied.

‘Tell me about Jain technology,’ Cormac countered.

‘It is an ancient weapon.’

‘And its relation to the Makers?’

At this Dragon showed some agitation, swinging its head from side to side.

‘We’re getting some very odd readings from inside Dragon,’ interjected Mika.

Jerusalem added, ‘Power transferences and much shifting of internal organs.’

Cormac absorbed all that and quite concisely asked, ‘What is the relationship between Jain technology and the Makers?’

‘I must not lie to you,’ said Dragon.

‘Then don’t.’

Mika: ‘Shit! What was that?’

Jerusalem: ‘Massive contraction of some inner diaphragm—something tensing up for a blow, perhaps?’

‘Will three times break the spell?’ Cormac wondered. Out loud he asked again, ‘What is the relationship between the Makers and Jain technology?

‘I will not…’ said Dragon.

Mika: ‘Big energy surge just then—something just got incinerated.’

Cormac suddenly gained some intimation of what was going on, of what had always been going on during communication with this entity. Dragon, after all, was a bioconstruct, specially programmed, and there were truths it could not tell.

With the grab claw and gecko pads detached, Orlandine manoeuvred the Heliotrope to the inner wall of the chamber, and presented the docking tube to the airlock she had constructed there. She set down the ship ten yards away, and extended the gecko feet on their telescopic legs, adjusting them to position the ship precisely. The docking tube mated perfectly. She did not expect otherwise.

‘They will learn about the gift’—a secret admirer.

Orlandine departed her interface sphere with those words of warning still in her mind. It had occurred to her the moment she received the message containing them, that they were a deliberate nudge to start her on her present course, and that in some way she was being used. But she dismissed that thought and stuck with the basic fact: she possessed a piece of technology which contained the potential to take her beyond the haiman to the numinous. Presently, the reasons behind this gift remained irrelevant. All that was relevant was that if Polity AIs learned she possessed it they would do everything in their power to take it away from her. She could not therefore take the chance of assuming the warning to be premature or a lie.

In the cell she designated as her laboratory, the eight beetlebots she had taken out of storage and adjusted to this task moved slowly across the floor spraying on it a layer of crash foam. She dumped a large drum containing more of the polymer-forming liquid on a layer of foam already five inches thick, and transmitted further instructions to the robots. Now they would come automatically to the drum and plug in to its lower sockets to recharge their reservoirs. In the low pressure the polymer foamed and set to a hard insulating layer, which would prevent the laboratory cell from losing any heat that might be detected from outside. Later, for further concealment, she intended to add a layer of the laminated radiation shielding she had ordered loaded on to the Heliotrope before departing the station. A small autofactory inside the ship was meanwhile working flat out to manufacture large quantities of the polymer. A yard of thickness was what she required, thereafter she could open the locks to her ship and use its internal atmospheric systems to bring up the temperature and air pressure to within the specification required for the equipment she intended to use in here. Then she would bring in that equipment, also portable heaters and an atmosphere plant, isolate the cavern from the ship, then finally bring in the Jain node for further study.

The Jain node.

Orlandine paused and remembered that meeting on one of the Sol stations that had changed the course of her life.

‘Hi, I’m Jonas Trent,’ he had said. ‘You would be Orlandine?’

She had glanced across at him as he took the seat opposite. He was pale, quite then, dressed in black slacks, a canary yellow shirt, a jacket made of black diamond-shaped plates of composite bonded to something like leather, and wide braces that had a shifting pattern of snakes. Seeing he was auged, through her gridlink — the minimum internal hardware required to take the carapace she was not wearing at that time—she sent him a personal contact query. The personal details that his aug settings allowed her were skeletal: he was a hundred and four years old, unattached, a sensocord rep, born on Earth… all the usual details but little more. Nothing there to tell her how he knew of her, or why he approached her now.

She sipped her espresso. ‘What can I do for you?’

He grinned. ‘As we always like to say, it’s not what you can do for me—’

She interrupted, ‘I’m haiman, so do you honestly think I need to buy any sensocordings? I’m now logging this encounter as an infringement—’

He interrupted, ‘Don’t—I’m not here to sell you anything.’

She did not log the personal-space infringement anyway. A person like this would know exactly who to approach and when, so he must be here for some other reason. He took out a rounded brushed-metal box, reached across the table and placed it before her.

‘I’ve been paid very well to act as an intermediary. All I can tell you is that there’s a certain object inside, and a memtab explaining exactly what that object is. I am only instructed to tell you that it is a “gift from an admirer”.’

She peered at the box. ‘My kind are often the target of Separatists, or, rather, would be targets. I’m cautious.’ She slid the box back across the table to him. ‘You open it.’

With a grimace, he picked it up and popped it open, then put it down and slid it back across. ‘See, no problem.’

In the foam packing rested a dull egg. Next to it lay a memtab—a piece of crystal the size of her fingernail. She pulled her palmtop from her belt and inserted the tab into the relevant port. The screen displayed the ovoid itself and, while she watched, it opened like a flower to expose a smaller ovoid inside covered with slightly shifting cubic patterns. A frame appeared over this with the figure x1000 beside it—indicating magnification. The frame expanded, filled the screen, then another appeared and did the same. Then again and again, until displaying the most densely packed nano-technology she had ever seen. Finally the image blinked out. Trying to recall it, she found the original recording had been wiped by a subprogram.

‘What is this?’ she asked, merely for form’s sake, since she already knew.

He stood, saying, ‘Ciao.’ He walked away.

A gift from an admirer.

Upon her return to the Cassius project she ran a search through the nets for this Jonas Trent. It seemed he had stepped out of the airlock of another of the Sol-system stations without the benefit of a spacesuit. It took all her expertise to avoid the semi-AI program that subsequently came after her, for the enquiry into his death remained open, and the program now wanted to know all about her and her interest in him.

‘They will learn about the gift’—a secret admirer.

Orlandine returned to the Heliotrope only to find the auto-factory had run out of some raw materials. But raw materials abounded all around her. She donned an assister frame intended for heavy work, took up a gravsled, and left the ship via the small rear hold. She then cut a small exit out of the giant pillar and stepped out into the vastness beyond. The endless acres of floor stretched away into the distance, layered many feet deep with the substance of the Cassius gas giant. Here most periodic table elements were available to her in compound form, but she possessed the tools to separate and recombine them, and the ship’s fusion reactor supplied the energy to operate those tools. Using a diamond saw extruded by the frame she wore, she began cutting blocks from the icy layer and loading them on the sled. She was satisfied she had everything here; everything she could possibly want.

‘It is protected,’ said Hourne, the ship’s AI.

‘Protected?’ Blegg continued gazing at the artefact, now with numerous optic interfaces in position all around its rim.

‘And encrypted,’ the AI added.

‘You were getting something from the fragments of crystal found by Shayden—so what did you find there?’

‘DNA,’ the AI replied. ‘And numerous possible variations thereof.’

Blegg turned away from the viewing window to scan around the control centre. Two haimans, fifteen humans and five Golem worked at consoles, carrying out whatever tasks the AI felt best suited their specialities. The woman, with only her blonde plaits showing because her face was thrust inside a VR mask, specialized in crystal micro-scanning using only UV and indigo light. The two haimans were fast, almost instinctive, programmers; they did not seem to be doing much, but that meant nothing—if they were doing a lot it would not show in any physical way.

‘A message?’ Blegg wondered.

Al Hourne continued, ‘Shayden’s skin cells bonded to the surface of the crystal, were read at the molecular level, her DNA copied in virtual format, and in the same format possible variations processed. It was these that fed back through the optic interface she connected. That piece of crystal then began rapidly to degrade.’

‘This could happen to the entire artefact?’ Blegg watched one of the Golem reach up to pull aside his shirt, then a flap of syntheflesh underneath that to insert an optic plug. Directly controlling something—perhaps one of the telefactors.

‘It is possible. I believe this one protective measure will ensure the contained information does not fall into the hands, tentacles or claws of alien lifeforms.’

Blegg grinned. He liked this AI—it possessed a dry sense of humour.

‘You’re keeping it clean, then.’

‘Yes, now, but even though this object came from an environment in which DNA could not remain intact, just by bringing it aboard this station, it must have come in contact with complete DNA strands. That it has not self-destructed suggests different rules apply to the whole. I suspect those fragments that broke away then cued themselves to disintegrate. This would prevent any hostiles from cutting the artefact apart to obtain its secrets.’

‘So what is happening through the main interfaces with it?’

‘It absorbed the data I transmitted into it, but returned nothing until I sent in a search program. That program came back with three-dimensional measurements for the human eye.’

‘I see. We are not just dealing with data storage here, are we?’

‘The semi-AI program I later sent in returned with a hologram of the human anus—in full colour.’

Blegg laughed out loud. ‘So what does it want?’ he finally asked.

‘From having read human DNA it has constructed virtual representations of human beings. It can read molecules by touch. Scanning indicates nanoscale sensory apparatus imbedded in the surface. I am presently transmitting language files into it with five-level data back-up.’

‘Five level?’

‘Apple, for example, is represented by that word in every current human language, also a hologram, genetic coding and variations, context links to human biology, mythology, semantics—’

‘Okay, I get the picture. Let’s hope whatever is inside there gets it too.’

‘I believe it already has. Observe.’

Blegg turned to see a hologram of a naked woman rise out of the carpet. She wore a fig leaf and, while he watched, took a large bite out of a juicy apple she held.

‘How coincidental that we were just discussing that.’

The hologram shattered—like glass.

‘I am compromised,’ announced the AI.

Just then the station lights all grew very bright. Blegg turned back to the viewing window to see the various telefactors floating around, jerking as if in the throes of silicon epilepsy. To one side a heavy-duty power feed advanced on its rams to the edge of the alien artefact. Glancing around the control room, he saw the plugged-in Golem begin shaking, one of the haimans drop out of his seat and fall flat on his back on the floor. Others not similarly connected pushed themselves back from their consoles or other equipment and began calling out to each other.

‘Subverted power feed controls…’

‘I lost everything…’

‘Telefactors frozen out…’

To the rear of the room, two of the VR booths sprung open and their occupants staggered out of them.

‘What can we do?’

‘Subversion protocol, we have to—’

‘No,’ decided Blegg, loudly and clearly.

Some of the chatter settled down as many eyes turned towards him.

‘You have primacy,’ agreed one of the Golem. ‘What do you require of us?’

‘Do nothing,’ said Blegg.

He turned back to the viewing window. The power feed was now nearly in place. He saw the crystal near its point of contact, darkening as something formed there. Then the s-con heads made contact, and the lights dimmed. A webwork of glowing lines spread through the crystal like a million cracks, then they faded to a general glow throughout it. The lights came back on again.

‘Use one of the VR booths,’ said Hourne.

People in the room glanced suspiciously up at the camcom points set in the ceiling, then turned to Blegg to see what he would do.

‘Are you truly Hourne?’ he asked.

‘Yes, and no,’ replied the AI.

Blegg nodded, turned, and walked across the room to step into a VR booth. He fully expected this to be an interesting experience.

Logan passed him a joint. He placed it between the last two fingers of his right hand, cupped both of his hands over his mouth, and drew in the aerated smoke. Tracking the physical reaction through his body always gave his new face an introspective and shocked appearance, so that others always thought him more stoned than he actually was. The ache of rearranging facial muscles had receded to a dim memory—the art almost instinctive now since his time in Korea where displaying a Caucasian face gave him the time to step aside into that other space to avoid American bullets. Skin hue was a whole different problem for his cellular inner vision, but directing his immune system against the melanoma that appeared five years after Hiroshima, while he explored the Australian outback, had granted him the required know-how. Now though, it felt strange to be wearing a Japanese face again.

Studying the young stoned Americans all around him in the firelight, all debating civil rights and cursing their government’s obstinacy in the face of the inevitable triumph of Marxism, Harris—formerly Herman, Hing Cho, Harold and Hiroshi—realized it was time to move on yet again. Though he looked as young as the rest of the group, he was a good twenty years older, but he felt mentally removed from them by a century.

‘Man, you mount your placards on two-by-twos,’ Logan was saying, ‘and maybe nail ‘em to the wood with four inch nails.’

General laughter greeted this. Harris assessed this man with his long hair and his beard with plaits in. ‘Peace’ he often proclaimed. ‘End the wars—disarm.’ But he carried a flick-knife tucked into his sock, and a.45 in the kitbag beside him, along with his delicate boxed scales, a bag of heroin secreted in a sugar box and a cellophane-wrapped block of cannabis resin. The money belt underneath his tatty coat just kept getting fatter and fatter. One of his previous customers lay in the morgue right now; another one, who ended up owing just too much, Logan had carved up with the knife. The boy managed to make it to the hospital before collapsing from blood loss. They sewed his cheek back into place but could do nothing about the ear, which he had left in the car lot where Logan caught up with him.

Logan turned as Harris passed the joint on to Miranda, who looked pale and was staring at Logan intently, avidly. Miranda was short of funds now her parents had cut her off, but she found other ways to pay.

‘Hey, Harris man, you should be handy. I betcha know all about that hiyah shit?’ Logan made a chopping motion with his hand.

‘I know some,’ Harris replied. After being beaten half to death in a Paris back alley—it had all happened too fast for him to even summon the concentration to step away—he had gone home to learn shotokan karate, jujitsu, aikido. Now he only fought when he wanted to. He found that the focus such training gave him also provided more than ample time to step into U-space. In this situation, however, he began to feel like he wanted to fight—that there was something he needed to do before moving on. The conversation drifted on to other matters—something about rednecks fighting for the country and not understanding how they fought to keep the country in a political Stone Age.

‘Hey, Logan,’ Harris squirmed, rubbed at his face, scratched the crook of his arm—generally gave a good impression of what Miranda was doing as she sat beside Logan. ‘I need a private word.’

Doctor Logan took up his kitbag and followed Harris into the gloom under the pines. It did not take long and was surprisingly easy. Harris chopped him across the throat, swept his feet out from underneath him, then came down with a full-force axe kick on his chest. While Logan gurgled and gagged, Harris turned him over on his front, grabbed his elbows and with a knee pressing into Logan’s back, pulled hard, snapping the man’s spine. He pocketed the gun and threw the kitbag into a stream as he walked away. But that night he knew, another Logan would be along some time soon.

The world was full of Logans.