Polity 4 - The Technician (35 page)

Amistad
opened a channel to the Tagreb where the AI there, Rodol, replied.

‘Something
you require?’ it asked.

‘What is
Chanter doing now?’ Amistad asked.

‘Right
now he is enjoying a meal of orange-back nematodes, which he seems to prefer to
the more common green variety. Having adapted his body to this world it seems
his taste is for more cyanide in his food, though he has convinced himself that
he prefers orange-backs because they tend to wriggle more in his mouth.’

‘And his
work with Jonas Clyde?’

‘They’re
avoiding each other now,’ Rodol replied. ‘After Clyde’s assertion that the
Technician, through its sculptures, was trying to rebuild an Atheter mind,
Chanter has ventured into more esoteric studies of how artists try, through
their art, to erase the same traumas of their early lives that, so he believes,
resulted in their artistic impulses. He is theorizing that it is impossible for
them to erase those traumas and so they will always remain artists, though,
should such erasure be possible, they would kill the impulse.’

‘In
other words he’s disappearing up his own backside again.’

‘That
about covers it.’

‘Then
it’s time to give him something more constructive to do. I’ll consider how best
he can be used.’

‘Haven’t
things moved beyond his rather distorted and simple view of reality?’

‘Perhaps
. . . what about Clyde?’

‘At
first resentful that I won’t allow him to lapse back into alcoholism, but right
now back in his laboratory studying data now being transmitted from your
location. I believe he wants to talk to you.’

‘Okay.’

Contact
followed immediately.

‘Amistad,’
said Jonas Clyde.

The man
peered from a virtual screen in the drone’s mind, him seeing an image of the
drone from one of the cams on the platform.

‘Evidently,’
Amistad replied.

‘I’ve
been making some comparisons.’ Obviously excited about something, Clyde ignored
the sarcasm. ‘Biochemical activity is about on a par with any other hooder’s,
but that doesn’t account for the amount of bio-electrical activity being picked
up.’

‘Theorize,’
Amistad instructed.

‘Okay,
the Technician is probably over two million years old. Its musculature is about
four times stronger than a normal hooder’s, the complexity of its cowl
manipulators up there with that of an autodoc or even an AI mindtech. Its
armour is not only resistant to energy weapons but to massive shock and
possesses molecular dense layers that would give it resistance to nano-attack.’

‘This is
all known.’

‘Yes,
and from the excess of redundancy you theorized that it might well be a
prototype – the redundancy removed to result in the other hooders.’

‘That
was a hypothesis, not a theory, and a questionable hypothesis too.’

‘Okay,
I’ll give you that.’

‘You
yourself hypothesized, because of the resistance of their armour to energy
weapons, that the hooders of this world were an adapted strain of war machine –
that the Atheter took their war machines and simplified them for the chore of
obliterating gabbleduck remains. Presupposing this was the case, then the
possibility that a high-redundancy prototype hooder
was made seems unlikely.’

‘Yeah,
you got it.’

Clyde
sounded disappointed, defused. In that moment Amistad realized that though he
himself now possessed as much brainpower as other high-functioning AIs across
the Polity, he had yet to acquire another of their traits: diplomacy. The likes
of Jerusalem and Geronamid tended to let those researchers under them enjoy
their discoveries – perpetually being second-guessed by an AI could be
depressing, and would reduce the efficacy of those same researchers.

‘Do go
on,’ said the drone.

‘Right,
I guess the Technician could still be loosely defined as a prototype . . .’
Clyde paused for a moment to get his thoughts in order and, though already way
ahead of the man, Amistad let him work his way through it. ‘Look, the
Technician may or may not be the machine on which the Atheter based the common
hooder, that’s irrelevant, but there’s other things we need to consider. You
know what I thought when I measured that electrical activity?’

‘Please
continue,’ said Amistad, not quite able to express surprise and say, ‘I’ve absolutely no idea!’

‘The
readings looked just like those you’d get if you pointed sensors at a haiman:
biochem, bioelectrics, then a big ramp of electrical activity from their
computer additions.’

Amistad
did suddenly feel some surprise, not at what he knew Clyde was coming to, but
at where that reference to a haiman – a Human being partially blended with an
AI – might lead.

‘But I
guess that’s to be expected – a biomech can’t alter its physical structure
quite so fast as can you, Amistad. There’s all the problems engendered by the
organic blueprint in the genome.’

‘Where
are you going with this?’ Amistad asked, his tone one of perfect puzzlement
after he removed the prior tone of get-on-with-it exasperation.

‘I think
the Technician is one of the original war machines.’

How very
surprising.

‘I
agree, this seems likely.’

Clyde’s
enthusiasm returned. ‘This means we’re dealing with an alien version of you,
and all that entails. It means adaptability and maybe the ability to create new
weapons, which probably accounts for the changes it’s been undergoing for the
last twenty years. I need to get closer and run some tests. I bet it’s got
nanite defences in its armour, just like you.’

‘I
wonder about that comparison you made between sensor readings from the
Technician and those you might get from a haiman . . .’ Lead him there, but
ignore that bit about him wanting to come to the observation tower. Clyde had
to remain where he was in readiness to tell his story to future visitors.

‘The
proportions can vary, depending on the amount of hardware a haiman has
installed, though for a Human there is an upper limit.’

Gently,
gently.

‘But no
upper limit for the Technician, it being a manufactured life form?’

‘I
guess.’

‘Well,
it’s a certainty that it is manufactured – its genome is far too precise, lacks
numerous alleles and junk genome.’

Clyde
was dismissive. ‘Humans have been dumping junk DNA and altering their alleles
for centuries.’

Amistad
waited in hope that the penny would drop. It did.

‘Hey,
you know, there’s nothing to say that hooders are completely artificial. They
might be adapted from an original evolved form.’

‘Horses,
dogs, cats,’ said Amistad.

Originally
the product of evolution, then of selective breeding, which then extended into
genetic manipulation. There were dogs now with opposable thumbs and maths
degrees, and pursuing myth, the first Pegasus took flight on a low-gravity
world even before the Prador war.

‘They
might even be native to here,’ said Clyde. ‘Though physiologically they’re very
different from other native forms.’

‘A new
line of inquiry perhaps?’ Amistad suggested.

‘What?’
Clyde was distracted, already manipulating his data maps.

‘I
suggest that you return your attention to all the hooder data you gathered
before and now view it in a different light. Perhaps, rather than concentrating
on all those elements of hooder biology that classify them as biomechanisms, as
artificial creations, you should now look at everything else, perhaps try to
ascertain if an original evolved creature is their basis.’

‘Already
way ahead of you,’ said Clyde, waving a dismissive hand.

Of course you are, Amistad thought, even as the
communication channel closed.

But
would Clyde be able to take an overview of all this: organisms turned into war
machines by a race descending into self-destructive insanity; speculations
about where the main intelligence of a haiman might lie; organisms capable of
manipulating their environment in complex ways; rampant Jain technology and
thousands of years of civil war.

Some
very, very unsettling possibilities were now coming to light.

Amistad
returned his attention to the Technician, now fully uncoiled and writhing
through the flute grasses. For a moment its choice of direction gave him even
more reason to feel unsettled, but then, through an anosmic sensor on the
observation tower, he got his explanation. Somewhere out there a gabbleduck had
died. The Technician, like many other hooders over a large area, was heading
off to obliterate the remains. It was following instinct, or programming. Same
difference.

Fuck, they’ve used a bomb, was Grant’s first
thought as he rolled out of bed and pulled on his undertrousers. He reached his
door, which was still shuddering from the assumed blast, and stepped out
expecting to find the corridor full of smoke and wreckage. He found only Shree
rapidly exiting her room, thoroughly sexy in only a pair of knickers, and it
was evident to him now that she’d had her body cosmetically enhanced.

‘What
the hell was that?’

She’d
felt it too – it wasn’t some mental replay of his past, some nightmare making
the transition into waking.

‘I
thought it was a bomb.’ He glanced at the weapon she held – a thin-gun, and not
the kind of thing you would expect an Earthnet reporter to be carrying – then
swung his attention to the door to Tombs’s apartment, which remained closed.
After a second he returned to his own room to grab up his comunit and turn it
on.

‘Penny
Royal?’ he asked, whilst inserting the receiver into his ear.

‘Get out,’ the AI replied, just as some other unknown
impact shuddered the floor. ‘Leave ATV – too large a
target.’

‘What’s
happening?’

‘Hooders.’

‘Surely
it’s safer here?’

‘Gabbleduck death hormone,’ the AI replied. ‘Am searching for source. You remain, you die.’

‘Hooders,’
Grant said to Shree, who was hovering in his doorway. ‘Someone’s released
gabbleduck death hormone in here and if we stay we’re dead.’

‘If we
go outside we’ll probably die too,’ she said, oddly fatalistic.

‘Get
your stuff,’ he instructed, himself pulling on the rest of his clothing.

She
stared at him for a moment longer, then turned away. He dressed fast and
efficiently, ensuring his Polity-tech breather gear was in place at his neck
before then checking the action of his disc gun and holstering it. The weapon
would be no use against hooders, but if one of them got to him at least it
would provide a get-out clause. Next he slung his pack over one shoulder and
left his room. Tombs’s door was still closed and he hammered on it. ‘Tombs! We
go now!’

The door
slid open and Tombs stood there clad in heavy walking boots, black trousers
tucked into the tops of them, a green denim jacket open to reveal the silvery
padding of a temperature-controlled undersuit. He also had a backpack slung
from one shoulder, and had even made use of other facilities in his room, his
jet-black hair now cropped down to his skull.

‘They’ve
come,’ he said.

How did
he know?

‘Who’s
come?’ Grant asked.

‘The
morticians,’ Tombs replied.

The man
wasn’t even looking at Grant, but staring slightly off to one side, almost as
if gazing through the very walls of the way station. His hand strayed up to his
chest and fingered a penny mollusc shell now depending from a string about his
neck.

‘Hooders,’
said Grant.

Tombs
abruptly focused on him.

‘Oblivion,’
he replied, just as Shree stepped out of her room and strode over.

‘Not if
Penny Royal or I have anything to say about it,’ Grant replied. ‘We run. We’ll
use one of the emergency exits— ’

‘West side,’ Penny Royal whispered in his ear.

‘—on the
west side of the station, get as far from here as we can.’

‘Canister located, shut down,’ said Penny Royal, ‘but hormone level at twenty gabbleduck deaths – many hooders.’

Grant
glanced at Shree and continued, ‘Hooders go crazy when they’re looking for a dead
gabbleduck. They’ll attack this way station and probably ignore us.’

Probably.

‘Come
on.’ Grant reached out to grab Tombs’s shoulder and found his hand closing on
iron, then his wrist closed in a similar grip. The erstwhile proctor pulled him
close, then put a hand against his chest and shoved. Grant slammed into the
other side of the corridor, the wind knocked out of him. As he slumped down the
wall he saw Tombs, his expression blank, turn and take a pace towards Shree.
She stepped back, sudden fear there, drew her thin-gun and pointed it at the
man.

‘Oblivion,’
said Tombs, taking another pace and backing Shree up against the wall, the
barrel of her weapon only a metre from his face.

‘No,’
Grant managed.

Tombs
abruptly looked puzzled. He gazed at the gun then took a pace back, before
turning to look at Grant.

‘I am
sorry,’ he said. ‘I am frightened.’

Grant
struggled upright. ‘Put it away Shree – we go now.’

Shree
hesitated, a brief yearning fleeing across her features, then holstered her
weapon. Grant stepped forwards and caught Tombs’s shoulder again, felt only
Human resistance before Tombs turned and set off in the direction Grant
propelled him.

‘Let’s
pick it up.’ Grant broke into a jog, towards the end of the corridor, Tombs and
Shree keeping pace.

You’re frightened, thought Grant. Not
half so much as me.

The
west-side emergency exit lay on the side of the station directly opposite their
rooms. The quickest way to it was down, outside, across the parking area then
through the apartment block over there. A crowd milled in reception, and
through its glass doors he could see vehicles pulling out of the parking area
and queuing up at the main exit from this place. The people here must have been
warned about the danger of staying put, but obviously hadn’t been warned about
the danger of taking large noticeable vehicles outside. Had Penny Royal
delivered a warning, or had someone else? Had it been decided by some horribly
cold mind that those departing vehicles would act as decoys whilst the one they
considered important, Jeremiah Tombs, made his escape?