Polity 4 - The Technician (30 page)

‘Emotional reintegration in process,’ Penny
Royal informed Amistad.

The
scorpion drone integrated that and slotted it into the complex formulae in his
expanded mind before returning to his contemplation of the distant coiled shape
of the Technician, and internally to a growing angst. In retrospect there was
something to be said for the lesser intellect he had possessed before. Though
aware the universe could be a dangerous place he had reneged on responsibility
because, of course, there were other higher intellects taking care of things
and because, in that lesser state, he had remained utterly ignorant of the
sheer extent of that danger. Take, for example, Jain technology.

Amistad
had been aware that this dangerous technology had been created as a weapon by
one divergent part of the Jain race to destroy another part, an almost separate
race. Analysis showed that after taking care of its intended target that
technology must have turned on its makers, since they weren’t around any more.
Reappearing recently it had caused some serious problems in the vicinity that
had wholly occupied the attention of some of those higher minds. Now included
in that select group of AIs, they vouchsafed Amistad further information. Jain
technology had come a spit away from annihilating the Polity, and it still
hadn’t been nailed back in its box. Yes, Amistad knew that right at that moment
a vast bloom of it occupied an accretion disc some hundreds of light years away
where a vast engineering project was being made to contain it. But that select
group of AIs estimated the chances of success there at something like
fifty-fifty.

Now
this.

‘Clyde
tells me it was trying to make Atheter minds,’ Chanter had said. ‘Structures
within its sculptures match up with gabbleduck neural structures.’

Clyde?

Amistad
just got to Rodol in time to tell that AI not to permit Jonas Clyde’s request
to be allowed to switch back to alcoholic mode. Clyde had been rather unhappy
about this.

‘Look,’
he had said, ‘you don’t fucking need me. When have you quartz-heads ever needed
organic input?’

‘Tell
me,’ Amistad instructed.

‘Some
massive twist in the Technician’s perception of reality,’ Clyde explained. ‘It
was got at.’

And
there lay the problem. The data indicated that the Technician was over two
million years old and to say it was a rugged biomechanism would be to venture
into farcical understatement. The most powerful force on this world, ever since
the Atheter opted out of civilized existence, had been the Theocracy. All the
data on the Theocracy’s hunt for that creature was now easily available to
Amistad. Even with satellite weapons the Theocrats had failed miserably. The
disaster that occurred the one time they managed to track it down and close in
had remained a secret throughout the remainder of the Theocracy’s existence –
not that there were many survivors of the hunting party to tell tales.

They’d
hit the creature with their satellite lasers, bombed it from the air with
conventional explosives, then nuked the area where it went to ground. Their big
mistake had been to land and search for remains. The search party had consisted
of eight hundred troops, fifty-eight ground transports, forty aerofans and
twenty-six tanks, of which just enough remains were found to fill a small squerm
pond. An interesting footnote to this was that though Ragnorak’s first targets
were to be the rebel caves, its next target was the Technician. The thing
scared the Theocrats in ways that outreached its sheer destructive might.

‘Perhaps damaged during that attack?’ Penny Royal opined
from its present position inside the Monument.

‘I think
you know better,’ Amistad replied. ‘A self-repairing biomechanism might have
lost data but its own genetics dictate that it would have rebuilt itself to
some earlier form. The likelihood of its perception of reality being so
distorted, even by nuclear mutation, that it conflates physical structures with
mental ones, is remote. Clyde was right: it’s been got at – most likely by what
got at you.’

That
ancient Atheter device that had reached out of underspace to prevent Penny
Royal from loading an Atheter mind to a gabbleduck, and had all but destroyed
the black AI in the process, had been active before. It seemed certain now that
what the Technician had been trying and failing to do for about a million years
with its sculptures, it had tried before, but that time with a sufficient
probability of success for the mechanism to reach out and interfere with the
biomech internally. It had not only reprogrammed the Technician but physically
altered the structure of its mind.

‘So what initiates it?’ Penny Royal enquired.

‘You
have no idea?’

‘All a blank to me.’

There
was the rub. Penny Royal had fought some savage informational battle with that
device and, just like with Jeremiah Tombs and the things Amistad needed to know
from him, knowledge of that battle was locked up in some dark part of its
consciousness. However, unlike with Tombs, that dark region no longer resided
within the mind that gave it birth but in the state of consciousness Amistad
had removed to turn Penny Royal into a more acceptable being – the eighth state
had been where all Penny Royal’s murderous impulses had resided.

‘Assumptions
can be made,’ said Amistad.

‘Dangerous.’

‘The
Atheter destroyed their civilization and their own intelligence. The thing
reacted to you, reacted to you trying to resurrect one of that kind, so quite
simply it was built to prevent that – to keep the Atheter extinct, to prevent
the gabbleducks from being more than animal.’

‘Obvious,’ Penny Royal stated.

Yes,
certainly, but they needed more than that. The device resided in underspace and
could reach out to the physical world to flatten an AI, to tamper with a
powerful biomech, and it seemed likely that what was happening with Tombs might
activate it again. They needed to know how to stop it.

From his
position aboard the platform overlooking the scenery of Masada, Amistad first
firmly cut all connection with Penny Royal then mentally reached out. The
heavily encrypted signal he sent, via a U-space transceiver inside his own
body, activated another such transceiver inside an armoured sphere anchored to
a plate of ancient coral deep in the southern ocean. Inside this shell rested a
chunk of AI crystal, powered up but connected to no sensorium. Trapped in a
virtual environment entirely of its own making, Penny Royal’s eighth state of
consciousness perpetually tried to escape, searched for the door that Amistad
now entered through.

That
Eight, as Amistad had designated this thing, had created a virtual world based
on a model of existence as viewed through the Human senses only confirmed
reality: AIs weren’t something separate from Humanity, but its descendants.
That Eight had chosen to make its home in such a place indicated something
else, though what, Amistad had no idea.

Amistad
manifested on the floor of some huge cathedral cavern whose walls seemed to be
in perpetual motion. With Human senses this would be all the drone could see,
however, magnifying things revealed the walls were made of millions of Human
beings writhing together in black slime, slowly tearing each other apart and
also slowly reassembling. Amistad had not yet ascertained how deep was the
reality of these . . . things. Quite possibly they represented the recordings
of Human minds Penny Royal had tormented and now continued to torment.
Certainly, just this one eighth of the AI possessed the capacity to contain
them. Herein lay the reason why Amistad had not simply obliterated this thing,
or at least so he told himself.

In
places these bodies formed the entrances to further caves and, observing these,
Amistad awaited the perceptual representation of the attack the thing here
always made as it tried to find a way back through the door into here. Odd,
that on this occasion those caves did not immediately spew their complement of
flying, hopping and crawling horrors.

‘Eight,’
said Amistad.

Nothing
for a moment, then in one cave a red light surging forwards. Eight manifested
as a great black squid with glowing red eyes. It shot out, spewing an ink
consisting of highly destructive nanomachines in this virtual environment, but
as com line chewers in reality. The cloud of machines washed over Amistad,
darkening his carapace, tried to find a way in but, as always, blunted
molecular teeth on sheer armour and were torn apart by the drone’s own
complement of nanomachines. The comline chewers hit the same wall for, quite
simply, Amistad was the door and remained stronger than the thing beating
against it.

‘The
Atheter device,’ Amistad stated.

No verbal
response from Eight, but a flash of some broken computer architecture
underlying this virtuality. The ink cloud dispersed and now the squid sat right
over the drone, trying to find some purchase on Amistad’s shell, its tentacles
screeching across adamantine armour. In a flash of irritation Amistad reached
up with one claw and snipped a tentacle away. Eight fell writhing through the
air, breaking into small spiny black stars. It shrieked, drew back, then
attacked again.

‘We need
to understand the Atheter device,’ the drone insisted.

Eight
offered some construct. Here in the virtuality the tormented began bursting
like sporulating puff balls, spewing internal organs that flitted through the
air like grotesque birds to coagulate in a glistening squirming sphere above.
Hints of knowledge of the Atheter device’s abilities to reform matter and suck
energy from somewhere. Hints also that it was damaged, no longer functioning as
it should, and that it possessed vulnerabilities. Amistad was left in no doubt
that deep knowledge of the Atheter device existed here, and that by seizing the
sphere above he could possess it. The only problem was that by doing so Amistad
would open himself to Eight, open the door, and the thing would escape,
probably damaging Amistad as it opened up a channel back to its original home
inside Penny Royal.

Amistad
had once managed to extract and imprison this eighth state of consciousness
from the erstwhile black AI, but that was when Penny Royal had been poised on
the edge of extinction. Now, even though Amistad was much much more powerful,
he doubted that he could extract Eight from a fully functional Penny Royal and
put it back in the box.

Amistad
demurred, retreated, slammed the door shut on his way out.

The shadows on the walls here were low-echelon vicars, bishops and others
in the priesthood, mere proctors like him, women, and even menial staff of the
cylinder world. He gazed at them and felt only sadness, regret, but that
seeming to arise out of a growing strength in his inner self, which recognized
that these images denied Hierarch Loman’s sainthood.

‘Same
effect as with the Hierarch,’ said Grant. ‘These images are all across the
Polity now in picture-wall memories, though it ain’t the kind of decoration I’d
choose.’

‘I don’t
know,’ said Shree. ‘They have their appeal.’

Jem
gazed at the ruin of the Friar Hold. The stone wall before him now possessed a
glaze into which the ghost of the garden, now blackened soil underfoot, had
been etched. He could see roses, shadow stems, a soldier hunched over
something, his honour guard rifle a metallic splash distorted into a curve over
his shoulder.

‘I’m
sure you can see some of the bodies,’ said Shree.

Bodies?

‘So I’m
told,’ said the soldier. ‘Though I can’t.’

‘Bodies?’
Jem asked out loud. He looked over his shoulder seeking an answer, but again
Sanders wasn’t there, would never be there.

‘When
Loman had the Septarchy Friars murdered he had the bodies left here in the
garden,’ Grant explained. ‘Some say they can see the shapes of those bodies in that
charred mess at the foot of the wall.’

Jem
shook his head, tried to dispel ghosts, then bowed low and peered hard at the
drift of fused and scaly ash. Yes, maybe a hint of a limb there, and could that
be a face? No, what looked like eyes were rivet holes in some half-molten lump
of metal. He abruptly stood upright again, realizing that even those without
faith distorted their perception of reality for the purpose of confirming their
own beliefs.

‘Your .
. . Penny Royal gave me back my mind,’ he said. ‘Was that so you could have
something whole in which to break my faith?’

‘Whether
or not you believe you got an invisible friend in the sky is irrelevant to us,’
the soldier growled, turning to him. ‘The Theocracy is dead, and the number of
believers dropping daily as they come out of the darkness and choose sanity.
Polity AIs don’t much care about people’s beliefs, just so long as they obey
the law.’

‘The
Theocracy may have fallen,’ Jem said, the ghost of a shrug shifting his frame
for a moment as he allowed his obvious indoctrination to take over, ‘but you
cannot destroy the teachings of Zelda Smythe.’

Grant
glanced across at Shree, some amusement in his expression, before returning his
attention to Jem. ‘The biggest lesson she taught was that Human gullibility
should never be underestimated, including her own. Seems Smythe’s problem was
too much belief – she bought into any mystical crap thrown her way, including
all the major religions back then. In trying to sort out all the contradictions
she wrote it all down and began work on her teachings – what you call the
Satagents. However, her own excess of belief didn’t blind her to the benefits
when those searching for belief started knocking on her door.’

‘What do
you mean?’ A rote question; a game played out to its end.

Shree
interjected, ‘What he means is she used her patchwork religion to become
extremely wealthy, and she used that wealth to later explore some new interests
in memcording, exotic drugs and what she described as ‘transcendence through
sexual ecstasy’ with her highly paid staff of young men.’