Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

3

Dig up the Foundations

Back in the twenty-first century, a technological singularity did not just seem possible, it seemed inevitable; but those booting up their computer models of human technological development neglected one critical force: the power of human stupidity. For technology to develop so fast that it goes beyond the ability of humans to model it, the underlying bedrock of science must be rigorous and stable. Yet, even in that century, science was becoming unduly influenced by political thought and execrable creations like post-normal science. Science itself began to break down when Karl Popper’s dictum of falsifiability was abandoned in favour of faith, and when funding for it became wholly controlled by political expediency. Scientific thought stagnated when the scientists themselves became frightened to pursue lines of research that led them away from whatever consensus happened to be the love child of the politicians who controlled the funding. They became merely puppets producing the results required of them, distorting their research to fit, taking their thirty pieces of silver and crying in their laboratories; dwarfs scuttling away from the shadows of giants like Feynman and Dyson.

Zero Plus One Month – Argus

‘You’re done?’ Saul said, gazing at Hannah steadily.

She felt a tightness growing in her stomach with the return of her fraudulent friend, her panic attacks. With the pressure off, it seemed it was stirring from slumber. She clamped down on it as best she could and surveyed the gleaming surfaces around her.

It had taken her some hours beyond what she had considered her shift to set the surgical equipment in her operating theatre back to a general-purpose mode, clear away all the additional equipment she had been using over the last month, and return her laboratory to order – return it to a place for research rather than production-line surgery. No more would station police be bringing her yet another heavily sedated Committee delegate, facilitator or executive who had remained blithely indifferent while signing orders for mass murder. No longer would she be destroying memories and adjusting minds down to a base template – a mostly blank slate. Now she could get back to her real work. But he knew that, of course he knew.

‘Yes, I’m done,’ she agreed.

It should have taken her longer but a sickness spreading through Arcoplex One, probably from the decaying corpses there, had shortened the duration of her chore to a month by killing off twenty-two delegates. She wasn’t sure whether to be glad about that or not.

Her gaze now slid to one of her work tables, on which stood three half-metre-square brushed-aluminium boxes. Even after tidying everything up, she had continued working: bringing these boxes out of her clean-room to ensure that the samples from Saul’s brain were still growing in their aerogel matrices, that the nutrients remained balanced and the waste was being properly extracted. She had even connected them up to her computers here and studied the waveforms – the shapeless thoughts already being generated in the growing brain matter. Now exhaustion was catching up with her, and she was too tired for the panic attack to get a firm grip on her.

‘And you’re okay?’ he prompted.

He thought she was burdened with guilt, beating herself up about erasing the minds of erstwhile Committee delegates, and styling herself no better than them because of what she had done. Or did he really think that? Considering how Hannah had reacted to violence of any kind, a normal human being would perhaps surmise that what he had driven her to do was reason for her to be miserable. But Alan Saul had never been a normal human being, even before Director Smith had tortured him to the point of extinction, before his strange resurrection, before the advanced implants in his skull and before he melded his mind with the artificial intelligence, Janus. Perhaps he could see through her, and knew that Hannah’s problem was that she felt no guilt at all.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked. ‘I got the impression you were staying in Tech Central until we can turn off the EM field.’ She glanced towards the spidergun crouching just inside the door. Doubtless the usual horde of robots would also be scattered throughout Arcoplex Two, though she didn’t think that was about cowardice but about control.

‘I’ve come to speak with Professor Jasper Rhine,’ he said.

Before she could stop herself, Hannah emitted a snort of disbelief.

‘You have some opinion?’ he enquired.

Hannah tried to read his expression. Was he amused, angry or indifferent? It was difficult to tell. His eyes were still a dark pink – something initially due to blood-pressure imbalances in his skull, but now due to she knew not what.

‘It’s interesting work,’ she said tentatively, ‘but I would rather rely on fusion, and I would rather not waste time and energy speculating about the transubstantiation of human souls into the fourth dimension, and the connection between the human “energy field” and holistic healing.’

‘But is that all his work is about?’ he asked.

She conceded to herself that it wasn’t. ‘I’m not completely dismissive,’ she said, formulating her opinion on the spot. ‘There are the possibilities inherent in Casimir batteries, rectifier convertors and the tangle communicator . . .’

‘All theorized and tested a century ago.’

‘So what’s your interest?’

He swung his gaze around her laboratory, it coming to rest on the three brushed-aluminium boxes. Hannah turned and noticed one of her nearby screens suddenly running streams of code. He was taking a look at it, in his own inimitable way.

‘We should be so much further ahead than we are now,’ he opined. ‘The Committee put human endeavour back a century at least. So much of the technology we have now is last century’s news.’

Despite her weariness, Hannah felt her curiosity stirring. ‘We should have entered the technological singularity by now?’

He shook his head. ‘Difficult to know where we are on the exponential curve, when you don’t know what the exponents are. No, I’m simply stating that, by subjecting the best minds in the world to the strongest political control, the Committee shut down free thought, hampered creativity and suppressed anything outside the box.’ He began heading to the door, then paused and turned back. ‘Do you want to come?’

He’d done it again. When he entered her laboratory, all she had wanted was sleep. Now she knew she had to go with him. She stripped off her lab jacket and tossed it over the back of a nearby chair.

‘So you’re saying that what Rhine is doing is creative . . . outside the box?’ she asked.

‘No, on the surface he is doing precisely the opposite.’

‘If you could elaborate?’

The spidergun rose up onto its legs and exited ahead of him. He stepped out too, and Hannah hurried to catch up.

‘At the start of the twenty-first century, the whole issue of zero-point energy was hijacked by pseudo-scientists,’ he lectured. ‘Like electricity and magnetism of two centuries before, it was associated with the supernatural, the miraculous. General scientific opinion gradually hardened against it and then, with the rise of the Committee, the whole issue petrified. There’s been very little real research into zero-point energy for over a hundred years.’

‘Which hardly explains Jasper Rhine’s function here, does it?’

‘Messina,’ explained Saul, stabbing a finger upwards, in the general direction of Robotics. ‘Just as with those androids the Saberhagens are working on, Jasper Rhine’s so-called research was another pet project of Messina’s. Rhine was instructed to investigate the interaction of the zero-point field with the human energy field. To put that into simpler terms: there have always been those who fear death so much they want to believe that something exists beyond it.’

Hannah suddenly got it. ‘Messina wanted proof that the human soul exists?’

‘On the button.’

‘So you’re visiting Jasper to tell him he’ll henceforth be working in Hydroponics?’

‘Certainly not.’

Jasper Rhine stood just inside the door to his huge laboratory. Thin and exceedingly tall, he had developed a constant stoop to make himself look smaller. His hair was blond and ragged, as if he had impatiently taken the scissors to it himself within recent days. His eyes were like black buttons and his narrow face bore the wrinkles of one who had suffered a great deal of pain. Just noticeable on his face and the backs of his hands was a web-work of narrow white scars.

Computers packed this place, jury-rigged in ways Hannah, during her few brief visits here, had been unable to fathom. Various experiments were also running. A complex tangle of glass tubes, through which clear fluid flowed, emitted bluish glows from within its midst. A framework supported a torus five metres across, this wrapped in electromagnets to which heavy cables snaked across the floor. Other machines here, within enclosed booths, Hannah knew to contain the tools for chip-etching and nano-machining. It seemed such a waste to have all this stuff here for the research of nonsense. What on earth did Saul intend?

Rhine looked terrified, and well he might, for here was someone who would be able to see through all his bullshit. He could babble all he liked about sono-luminescence, vacuum fluctuations and the ground state of hydrogen, and Saul would be baffled by none of it. However, Hannah remembered that he had looked terrified when last she saw him, and others who had met him had commented on this too. It seemed he spent his life in a constant state of fear.

‘You received my instructions precisely two weeks ago,’ Saul stated.

Rhine gave a sharp nod, and shivered. Hannah noticed that he seemed more tired and somewhat less clean than he had appeared last time she saw him. ‘You told me . . .’ he choked to a stop for a moment, took a deep breath, then continued, ‘to abandon a lot of research projects.’

Saul gave a slow nod. ‘Nothing will be lost, since memory storage has never been a problem, and some of the data from those projects might be useful.’

‘Chairman Messina considered it all . . . useful and of prime importance,’ Rhine managed.

‘Yes, but I’ve read all your submissions to him: Vacuum Fluctuations at the Point of Death, Zero-Point Initiation of Human Thought and Kirilian Aural Interaction with the Zero-point Field were the ones that told me all I needed to know, however.’

‘You’ve read them all?’ Rhine looked devastated. Perhaps he wasn’t used to people actually reading his papers.

‘All of them are post-normal science; all are based on statistical artefacts, wishful thinking and what I can only describe as an attempt to create a scientific basis for religious faith,’ said Saul. ‘Your last paper, on the underlying universal mind, is the one most blatant about it.’

‘So you dismiss it all? You’re shutting me down?’ The man looked as if he was about to cry.

‘Not all of it, just the pseudo-science rubbish you fed Messina so as to keep your resource allocation, and to have enough projects running under which to bury your real research – the research I now want you to focus on completely.’ Saul stared at him for a long moment. ‘There will be no more razorbirds or inducement cells in your future, Jasper Rhine. You will give me the truth even if you think I’ll find it unpalatable. All hypotheses will require empirical proof before they can be submitted as theories, and will thereafter undergo every possible test to disprove them.’ He paused again, allowed himself a rare smile. ‘The spirit of Karl Popper is going to be on your back henceforth.’

Rhine not only straightened up, but brushed his hair from his forehead, then inspected his fingernails with something approaching disgust. Saul had done it again: he had judged this man perfectly, used the right words just so, and reached into Rhine’s skull to flip over a few switches. But what was that about razorbirds and inducement? It didn’t take much thought for Hannah to realize that perhaps Rhine had once not been very cooperative with Messina. Here stood a man who had been broken and forced into submission. This whole station was full of people just like him.

Saul scanned the room. ‘You have the prototype power cells here?’

Rhine made a jerky gesture to a nearby bench, then after a pause led the way over to it. He pointed at a small stack of plain grey objects, like dominoes, amidst the other equipment.

‘Pick one up,’ he said.

Hannah glanced at him, and noticed his face had lost some of its stress. There was a hint of excitement there, a ghost of the boyish enthusiasm seared out of him in an inducement cell. His eyes, she now realized, were dark brown, and not black.

Saul reached out and took up one of the objects, held it for a moment, then passed it to Hannah. She almost dropped the thing.

‘Very cold,’ she said, then reached out to touch the bench. It wasn’t cold at all.

Saul turned back to Rhine. ‘What percentages are we talking about here?’

‘Nano-rectification of nearly eighty per cent of all external EM radiation and the same for heat. The ZPE accounts for a debatable five per cent of the power output.’

‘What can they sustain?’

‘Seventy watts constantly, unless in quantum vacuum.’

‘What is this, Saul?’ Hannah interrupted.

He glanced round at her. ‘It’s cold because the heat from your hand is being rectified into electricity and stored. In fact every electromagnetic radiation in this room is being converted into electricity through folded nano-films of rectifiers inside it. They rectify a small amount of electricity direct from the zero-point field too.’ He swung back to Rhine. ‘I want these in production as fast as you can, because we’ll need to cut down on the energy debt as soon as possible.’

‘They’re batteries?’ asked Hannah, not quite wanting to admit what she was holding.

Still gazing at Rhine, Saul replied, ‘Batteries that recharge themselves constantly from their environment, batteries that theoretically can output energy even when surrounded by only quantum vacuum.’ He shook his head and reached out to pick up another one of the objects. ‘The paradigm changed a hundred years ago, but then the research dropped into a cul-de-sac where increasingly complex methods were proposed to extract free energy from the zero-point field – while ignoring the other possibilities.’

‘It seemed as if Messina didn’t ignore them,’ said Hannah.

Saul waved a dismissive hand. ‘I’m talking about the realities, not the fantasy. I’m talking about the real research conducted here . . . aren’t I, Jasper?’

‘You may be,’ said Rhine, non-committal.

‘But you think it’s possible . . . or something like it, don’t you?’

Hannah gazed at Rhine’s expression. Maybe this was something he had spent so long keeping covered that he was finding it difficult to speak about it now – whatever ‘it’ was. Eventually he struggled to get the words out.

‘If you are talking about the Alcubierre Drive then, yes, something like it is very possible indeed.’

‘I am unfamiliar with the name,’ Hannah interjected.

‘How?’ Saul asked Rhine, ignoring her remark.

‘Polarize the quantum foam . . . then collapsing the ZPF ahead induces expansion behind.’

‘I thought there would be a requirement for exotic matter, negative-mass structures and Bose–Einstein condensates?’

Rhine shook his head and allowed himself a superior smile. The man would now explain something that Saul quite obviously already knew, and would feel more confident, boosted, and thus be more enthusiastic about producing what Saul required of him.

‘Exotic energy,’ he explained. ‘The apparent effects of exotic matter can be generated by the interaction of EM radiation fields with tensioned space-time.’ Rhine gestured about himself to indicate all of Argus Station. ‘Our EM radiation shield could supply half the equation. All we would then need is the tensioning device, which, the moment the interactions begin, would become a vortex generator.’

‘Speed?’

‘Of the tensioning mass?’ Rhine shrugged. ‘Overall spin would be . . . three-quarters c, with the spiral eddy currents taking us as close as it gets.’

‘Very high energy requirements to get it up to that speed,’ Saul observed.

Rhine waved a dismissive hand. ‘If you believe Einstein.’

Saul allowed himself a private smile, then continued, ‘Anyway, I meant, what is the overall speed of the space-time bubble. Theories on that haven’t changed much in centuries, and they put it at twenty-five per cent.’

‘No, it’s governed only by how fast you can collapse the field.’

‘Then I want plans and I want evidence. I want you to work out how we build it and, if you convince me it will work, we’ll start construction of your tensioning . . . of your vortex generator directly after we’ve finished enclosing the station.’

‘It will work,’ said Rhine, ‘and I can prove it.’

Saul nodded and turned to Hannah. ‘A theorized warp drive is what he means. We’re talking about inertia-less flight, faster-than-light travel, and everything that entails.’

Zero Plus One Month – Earth

The sun was shining on massive activity within the Aldeburgh Complex. Aeros were taking off and landing, personnel were disembarking or boarding. A couple of big heavy-lifter aeros were delivering a fusion reactor and, even as Serene stood there taking it all in, a scramjet shot overhead. There was no indication at all of the grim horror that lay just a few kilometres inland, except the smell.

Serene took the nasal spray out of her pocket, gave herself a shot up each nostril, and the putrid smell went away. Right at that moment, factories in Britain, Germany and Portugal which previously manufactured nasal inhalers for a particularly virulent herpes sinus infection, were mass-producing these devices. Even so, supply was struggling to keep up with demand, especially from those working the in-field clear-up teams. Serene turned to gaze at a distant pillar of black smoke: the pyre taking in the dead from Aldeburgh and from the hordes of zero assets lying beyond. It had been burning for ten days now.

Serene grimaced then headed towards her own aero, Clay walking beside her and the rest of her security staff and her PAs following behind. When she arrived, two guards boarded ahead of her, one turning to help her up the steps. She entered and went through to sit in the pilot’s chair, Clay coming through next to occupy the chair beside her.

‘We have a pilot on hand,’ Clay noted.

‘I like to keep in practice,’ she replied, strapping herself in then starting up the engines. ‘A lack of self-reliance can kill.’ She took the vessel up into the sky and tilted it nose-down towards that pillar of smoke.

As they flew over Aldeburgh, she noted the huge activity in the streets. The only people visible down there were the infield clear-up teams clad in bright yellow hazmat suits as they collected bodies that the heavy machinery swarming below couldn’t reach. The motorways in both directions were also crammed with convoys of trucks.

‘The cargo-rail networks?’ she asked.

‘They’ll be up and running tomorrow.’

She nodded. This was a microcosm of what was happening all across Earth, though in some regions they were using different methods of transport and disposal. One example immediately sprang to mind: in South Africa they had built ramps down to the sea and were using telefactored bulldozers to shove the corpses into the waves. Apparently the sea along that coast was alive with surviving sharks drawn in from the deep; even two killer whales, thought to be extinct for over twenty years, had been spotted.

‘What’s that?’ Serene asked, noticing something below, in the zero-asset sector beyond the city’s centre, and bringing her aero lower.

‘The river Alde,’ Clay replied, his voice neutral.

Only its movement showed that water ran between the carbocrete banks and under the enclosed walkways penetrating the rust-stained concrete wall to the rear of a megaplex. Its snail-pace crust consisted of corpses, to which the flow seemed to impart the illusion of life: here an arm flopping over, there a boot kicking defiantly at the sky, there a head jutting up with eyes white and tongue protruding cheekily. Serene could think of no explanation for why so many of the dead had ended up in the river. Perhaps something about the Scour drove them to water, or perhaps this was part of that same instinctive drive that had originally impelled so many zero assets towards the sea. She took the aero back into the sky, and continued towards the smoke.

From the residential perimeter of the city, factory complexes extended for ten kilometres to tall security fences. Again there was movement but little of it from living human beings. Here auto-trucks were being loaded and unloaded, while occasional chimneys belched smoke or steam. Not so much of a corpse problem here, since this area was mostly automated, and the problem only became evident in the agricultural land beyond the fence. As soon as the aero cleared the factory complex Serene gazed in numb awe at what she had wrought, then abruptly decided to land the aero. When he realized what she was doing, Clay reached for his nasal spray and took a couple of hits. Serene could hear the others behind doing the same.

Serene landed, the aero’s feet settling with a soggy crunching audible to all inside, and she shut down the engines. After a moment she checked her instruments, for it sounded as if something was still running, then she realized the noise was coming from outside. It penetrated as a droning massive din, as if from some ancient computer room with its switching of relays and hum of transformers.

Certainly there was movement here, what with the filthy seagulls and a scattering of crows, but they only complemented the sound. The view also didn’t seem clear, as if there were smudges on Serene’s sunglasses. She slid a pack of wipes from her top pocket, took off her sunglasses to wipe them, then realized the haze obscuring the view before her was not due to them. Both haze and noise had one source and it was flies: trillions of flies swarming in great foggy clouds over the hectares of corpses.

Good, she thought. At last.

‘They dropped even while they were on the move,’ said Clay. ‘It’s weird.’

The scene reminded her of pictures she had seen of the Tunguska meteorite impact, where trees had been felled evenly in one direction by the blast wave. Or perhaps a better analogy might be the passing of a harvester of GM bamboo, neatly cutting down and laying out the stems ready for the big collectors that conveyed the harvest directly to a nearby biofuel power station. A wheat crop lay before her, trampled flat by the advancing horde, all heading in one direction; and then the largest proportion of the horde felled while stubbornly refusing to change direction. All of them collapsing, all of them lying with their heads pointing towards the sea which, even though almost devoid of life, could be glimpsed sparkling merrily in the sunshine, between the tower blocks of Aldeburgh City.

‘We were thinking it would be better to use one of the big automated ploughs here,’ said Clay, then pointed: ‘we are already doing some clearing at the perimeter.’

In the distance a massive dozer was heaping up corpses, then scooping them onto the back of a long flatbed agricultural trailer.

‘They’re going to the fire?’ Serene indicated the pillar of smoke, which was considerably nearer now.

‘To the fire, yes.’

‘When will that all be finished?’ she enquired.

‘It will need to burn for three months,’ Clay replied.

‘What about burial?’

‘Every piece of earth-moving equipment available is at work, even the old ones that require drivers. All the biofuel power stations on Earth are currently running on zero-asset corpses. And every five kilometres, along all coasts, we’re making ramps to push the mounds of corpses into the sea – just like in Africa. The estimate is that we’ll manage to dispose of just ten per cent of the dead before the remainder are only bones.’

‘Surely we have more efficient methods?’

‘When we’ve finished security-checking Govnet, and can start running the robots, things should improve for the in-field teams as regards moving the dead.’ He shrugged. ‘But where do we move the corpses to?’

‘Our agricultural land is no longer at a premium, therefore much of it can be used.’

‘As we are doing,’ replied Clay.

‘It’s a short-term problem which nature will eventually solve for us,’ Serene stated.

‘Nature already is solving it for us,’ said Clay, indicating with a nod the masses of flies settling on the aero’s windscreen.

Serene smiled briefly, and resisted the temptation to apprise him of a reality recently detailed to her by a taphonomist – a man whose discipline was the study of decomposition. A hundred years ago such masses of corpses would have been much further along in decay after one month. That so many of them were still intact here after so long was due both to a severe lack of all the microbes and insects that had served as Earth’s undertakers, and to the sheer number of corpses they now needed to deal with. That was perhaps one of the best indications of the present state of Earth’s biosphere she had heard.

Serene was glad to see the flies.

Zero Plus Three Months – Argus

As he stepped out of the elevator airlock at the end of Arcoplex Two, and then paced along one of the walkways running past the cylinder world’s massive end bearing, Saul looked up at the ‘roof’ gradually being constructed out from below the watchtower windows of Tech Central, perched atop the asteroid. They would need to get all the reactors out of storage to keep up the work rate, and he calculated that enclosure would be completed a month hence.

He smiled to himself – a perfectly human response both to what he saw here, and what he felt had been another interesting visit to Arcoplex Two. The progress of the twins in Robotics had been slow but sure, and Rhine’s work was opening up whole new horizons of possibility. Moreover, the samples of his own brain grown to maturity in two of those boxes in Hannah’s clean-room – the other of the original samples had died – made it quite possible he would arrive successfully at those horizons and venture beyond them. The effect from them – the echoes in his head – he had considered removing, but the echoes seemed a perfect representation of being in the mansion of large empty rooms that some part of him now wandered. But Saul knew that his present ebullient mood had little to do with any of those three projects.

I was blind, he thought, but now I can see again.

The solar storm was dying at last and, though it still interfered with signals to and from Earth, things weren’t so bad inside the station. Now, but for a few small interruptions, he could remain permanently linked into all of himself.

Over the last three months it had been difficult to take himself out of his room in Tech Central, and each time he left he did so only after thoroughly checking the area he was heading to and swarming it with his robots. Now they no longer seemed necessary, because he could gaze through every available camera, through the eyes of his numerous robots: now he could taste and smell through thousands of sensors, even touch with specially sensitized robotic limbs; now, in fact, the station itself had returned to being his entire body. He was the ruler here too, he was the Owner, and it seemed necessary for him to begin showing his face to the human population again so as to establish firm personal control – to remind them to whom they owed their lives, and who could take away those lives in an instant. He also did not like that his manifest implements of power here were exactly the same as they had been for the Committee: the readerguns, spiderguns and other robots, and the distant impersonal instructions.

Such things he now considered before he died.

A human being, facing fatal danger, charges up with adrenalin and slows his perception of time to a crawl. Alan Saul, who some might not have considered human even before his brain implants turned him into something more, experienced the same surge of adrenalin. Already operating at super-cooled computer speed, his mind accelerated, and time slowed for him to the passing of aeons.

In a nanosecond he recognized the danger. That figure, suspended on one of the new bubblemetal beams extending out to the enclosure framework, was no robot but a human being in a spacesuit. Whoever it was should not be there, according to all work rosters, which Saul checked in that nanosecond. The figure also wore a vacuum combat suit, and a glimpse through a cam much nearer to it revealed it levelling an assault rifle. Saul threw himself sideways, simultaneously spurring his spidergun into action, its weaponized limbs coming up and targeting just as the distant muzzle flash impinged.

Perhaps it was an illusion, an artefact of death, but Saul was sure he saw the ceramic-tipped bullets descending on him like angry hornets, and he was sure he saw the clouds of depleted uranium beads hurtling up from the spidergun. The first bullet hit him in the right-hand side of his chest, the second punched into the right-hand side of his gut. He felt every sensation: the first bullet penetrating between his ribs, ripping his lung, fragmenting, and those fragments smashing several back ribs out from his spine; the second bullet thumping home, spewing a wrecked kidney out of his back. Perhaps he could have survived these. Hannah Neumann possessed the technology and skill to repair even more severe damage, and his spacesuit’s breach-sealant circuit would stop the holes and prevent him boiling his blood away into vacuum. However, the third bullet punched into the back of his space helmet and, broken into three pieces, it shattered his skull as it entered, shards of ceramic and bone tearing into delicate brain tissue as well as the new dense growth of artificially generated neurons and synapses.

The damage stopped his heart, stopped his breathing, blood and brain boiled out into space until a great gobbet of yellow breach sealant plugged the hole, incidentally filling one side of his helmet.

This Alan Saul died.

‘I see you’ve found them,’ Hannah had said.

The connections had been there, waiting invitingly. Had he wanted to go there? Had he wanted to take himself even further away from the original human he had been? Of course he had, because, given the opportunity, any ‘original human’ would choose greater intelligence, greater power. That desire was wired in. In an instant he had connected to one of the units and, at once, it was just as it had been when he amalgamated with Janus: a sudden expansion of his mental horizons – but this fitted him comfortably; there had been no resistance. It had been like submerging himself in a still, cool pool of clarity. He held the connection open, felt the mental pressure draining from his skull, then from the first unit opened a connection to the second. Using an analogy with old computing methods, he had decided to call this last unit his D drive. He had begun copying across . . . everything he was.

‘I am making a backup,’ he had said.

She’d turned to him, startled. Hadn’t she realized the possibilities in what she had made? Here she had done something that had been speculated on for centuries: she had made it possible to copy an entire human mind. Here, essentially, was a form of immortality.

‘I also want you to make more of these units,’ he’d added, ‘for yourself first, and for others here later. Rhine must be the next in the queue after you.’

Dislocation.

The extent of Saul’s world collapsed, instantly, down into something dark and limited and primitive. He had never expected to use this so soon, and it wasn’t really ready. To his secondary backup he’d copied across the entirety of what he was down on Earth, before the bio-interface began growing in his skull, but no more. The primary extension to his mind held spillover, just something to relieve the pressure, and the connections of both of them were via the new growth in his skull – growth that was now damaged and malfunctioning. He was merely human, a damaged human no longer even occupying a human body, but with the attention and capacity of the same.

Through the spidergun’s sensors, he saw the distant figure come apart in a cloud of flesh, vaporizing blood and tatters of spacesuit. The spidergun hesitated to obey his new orders, his grip on it slipping, its mind a bright and shiny complexity he couldn’t quite grasp. But its sensitivity to him now lay beyond the simple computer code it had once used and, after running some checks of its own, it sprang into action. It was fortunate that it had become a more complex machine than before, because the detail of its movements lay beyond him. It snagged his body, pulled it back down to the walkway he had been drifting away from, enfolded him in two limbs and headed for the airlock elevator, to take them back down into Arcoplex Two.

Alan Saul, linked to his cerebral hardware, and what remained of his brain and organic augmentations, tried to comprehend the damage from a dark vastness. Consciousness was a hazy concept to him, just as was his conception of himself and his location. Very little would be recoverable from that damaged being without oxygenated blood flooding its wrecked brain; unfortunately that blood would rapidly fill up his lungs and gut and also pour out of the holes there. Luckily, the breach foam in his helmet had sealed both helmet and skull, but still there would be numerous bleeds.

So, thought the Alan Saul struggling for coherence, is what remains of that Alan Saul worth saving? He realized it was possible; some part of him now making cold calculations. The blood might preserve a good portion of the brain throughout the time it would take the spidergun to get the corpse to Hannah, and then throughout the time it would take her to set to work on the damage. He decided it was worth it. There was a lot there that might be recoverable and, in the consciousness he had become, he discovered an old-fashioned attachment to owning a physical organic body. Via the hardware and undamaged portions of the body’s neural network, he struggled to find and identify what he wanted, his perception of the Argus Station diminishing as he applied himself to the complex task of dealing with his body’s autonomic nervous system. Eventually he restarted the heart, but the task drained him, reality stuttered . . . a whole minute gone, the spidergun now nearly at Hannah’s laboratory. He needed to locate her. From a place full of shadows, he struggled to visualize and map Arcoplex Two, laboured to link into the cams. He found her still in her laboratory, just paces away from what had now become his true self, residing in those two boxes, and managed to speak to her through her fone.

‘Hannah . . . I . . . I have been shot,’ he told her.

‘What . . . Alan?’

‘Just . . . listen,’ he said, ‘Right lung . . . lower torso . . . my head. I am dead.’

‘I . . .’

‘Surgery . . . right now – my spidergun brings me.’

She was sensible enough to ask no further questions, just head at full speed to the surgery adjoining her laboratory. Blackness, again, and more time lost. Now he was in the laboratory, his blood leaking out on the floor.

Things to do.

‘I have been shot’ – the words saved in a mini-file.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Langstrom asked, and Saul didn’t even know he had been talking to the man.

It required massive concentration to string the words together, to lose the hesitation. He lined them up first, open to his inspection, before sending them. ‘Retrieve what you can of the assassin and find out what you can from him. Start a section-by-section search of the entire station, missing nothing and ensuring no one can get past you.’

‘Will do.’ Langstrom paused. ‘How bad are you hurt?’

‘I’ll survive,’ Saul replied as he faded, not knowing.

Hannah took one look at what was now effectively a corpse, as the robot loaded it on to the clean-lock gurney, then she swung round to gaze at the blurring readouts on two of her screens – the two that were connected to the two metal boxes in her clean-room. She felt cold fingers drawing down her spine as she realized why he had been able to speak to her; that it wasn’t what lay on that gurney actually speaking. She abruptly turned away, overrode the lock into her surgery to take him straight through. Two of her staff arrived and donned surgical gowns, quickly following her inside.

‘Strip off the spacesuit,’ she instructed them, as she prepared her instruments.

Blood poured out as they first disconnected all the seals on the suit. They tried to take off the helmet, but with no success.

‘Quickly!’ Hannah barked.

One of the men stepped over to a nearby equipment cabinet and took out a small electric circular saw and quickly affixed to it a diamond wheel, while the other took from the same cabinet a set of bolt croppers. In very short order, Saul’s suit lay in a soggy heap on the floor, the helmet in two halves. Rather than bother with any of the lifting equipment available, they manually shifted him to the surgical table, strapped him down, tweaked the position of the table to bring his head up high, and shortly after that were attaching feeds for artificial blood. Using an external cardio-stimulator that injected a series of hair-thin titanium wires to provide current where required, they restarted his heart, which had failed again, and the blood filled his veins – then came out of the various holes in his body almost as quickly as it went in, pouring over the floor. Under Hannah’s instruction, one of the men pulled over a surgical unit, and it began simultaneously injecting surgical snakes into his two body wounds, quickly sealing the worst bleeds. Meanwhile, Hannah, after slicing away breach foam to expose the wound to his head, pulled over her specialized combined micro- and macro-surgery and set to work.

As he gazed at all this, Saul understood the detail, but only as a distant spectator. Nothing seemed real; he drifted in a dream, in some half-conscious state. Then, maybe because of some repair she had just made in his skull, everything momentarily slid into proper focus.

‘Must remove all . . . damaged matter,’ he told her via the intercom, causing her to jerk and quickly withdraw her hands from the telefactor gloves. He was only aware of having spoken after the fact, and wasn’t entirely sure of how he had accessed the intercom. The two men looked up in amazement, and some horror, for they were being spoken to by the mess on the surgical table before them.

‘I think I know what I’m doing,’ Hannah replied, returning her hands to her telefactor gloves, and her attention to the screen images the optics were providing.

‘Repair . . . then use tissue stores from the failed unit, rebuild and . . . regrowth.’ Why did he say that? He didn’t know. Time passed; images on a screen, but no emotional content.

She had shaved and then lifted his scalp to remove a hemisphere of skull from the back of his head. His brain had pulsed blood as she pulled out pieces of shattered bone and ceramic bullet, and injected numerous probes and other instruments. She was now cutting out lumps of tissue killed by the impact shock and depositing them in a kidney dish, then micro-cauterizing and repairing veins, so that the bleeding became less. She had also begun putting in struts and discs of collagen foam for support, for without these his brain would deflate like a speeded-up film of a rotting orange.

‘You’ll be on life-support for six months before I can even restore your autonomic nervous system – if I even can.’

‘I can guide regrowth,’ he replied. ‘I can run my body . . . through the implants. My body will . . . restore . . . I will . . .’

She paused, absorbing that.

‘You’ll control regrowth, just as you control your robots?’

‘Yes.’

And the truth? The truth was that it was taking a substantial portion of his erratic mental function to keep his body running. His perception of the station had crashed, and his control of the machines within it was now minimal. Maybe he could fully control one spidergun, but definitely not two. His cam vision had dropped back to something wholly human – for he could only manage to look through one cam at a time without becoming confused. But, worse than all this, his perception of himself seemed to have faded, as had his perception of time and place.

He felt adrift in a dream that was Argus Station.