Polity 4 - The Technician (6 page)

‘Don’t
be obtuse, Amistad,’ replied the head. ‘You have a special interest and your
present project is relevant too.’

The
polished chrome head apparently floated in the darkness above, but really resided
only in Amistad’s mind, it being just a representation of the AI the drone was
addressing, just as this AI would no doubt be gazing at a big iron scorpion in
some temporary virtuality. The head was the standard factory-setting icon used
by artificial intelligences yet to choose their own form, yet to choose whether
they wanted to live, what body they wanted to live in, and what purpose they
might serve, if any. Yet Amistad knew that this intelligence had been around
for some time, first as the mind of a Polity dreadnought, and now as the mind
running the massive Jerusalem spaceship and research
station. However, Jerusalem had not chosen its own pursuits, rather they had chosen it.

There
were three named ancient and dead alien races: the Csorians, the Jain and the
Atheter. The Csorians were the special interest of an AI called Geronamid – a
part-time hobby it pursued while holding the position of sector AI, mainly
because most Csorian artefacts were to be found in the sector of the Polity it
controlled. No single AI had yet to devote itself to things Atheter – to become
the leading expert on the subject of that extinct race – but Jerusalem was the
leading mind on all things Jain. During the Polity’s long-ago war with the
vicious arthropod Prador, a war in which Amistad had fought too, Jerusalem had
found a small item of Jain technology and used it against the enemy to
devastating effect. Only then did the artificial intelligences across the
Polity realize just how dangerous this technology might be, and Jerusalem got
‘volunteered’ to look into it. Now, that same technology, having come close to
bringing down the Polity, lay outside it, contained in a star’s accretion disc.
That’s where Jerusalem was now, studying Jain technology and, with a strange
collection of helpers, ensuring it remained contained.

‘What
special interest?’ Amistad swung his attention to the technological detritus
surrounding him, focusing for a moment on a mess of spines and tentacles where
it looked as if something huge had stomped on the giant bastard offspring of a
black-spined sea urchin and an octopus.

‘I know
precisely where you are,’ said Jerusalem.

‘Oh
yeah?’

The
request for direct com had routed to Amistad from some nearby runcible, and the
drone had allowed it only after ensuring no tracing routines were attached.
Unless Jerusalem was using some programming technique Amistad was unaware of,
which wasn’t unfeasible, the big AI should not know the drone’s location.

‘I know
the location of the last runcible you used,’ said Jerusalem, ‘and, being aware
of your interests, I surmise that you are presently in the Graveyard. Next,
calculating travel times, it is simplicity itself to nail down that you are
presently in the cave where the black artificial intelligence known as Penny
Royal met its end. You are probably quite close to that creature’s
remains right now.’

‘Lucky
guess,’ said Amistad. ‘So tell me: what do you think my special interest is?’

‘When we
of the Polity were at war with the Prador, speed of manufacture was the way to
win. Independent war drones were made then and, because they were so hastily manufactured, some went into battle with minds
that weren’t quite stable. Some found equilibrium; some went insane and had to
be destroyed, if they could be found. Some found their own ending – like that
black AI just a short distance from you.’

‘Get to
the point,’ Amistad said.

‘During
the war you went insane, Amistad, though it was a useful insanity of greater
danger to the enemy than us. After the war, when we were clearing up the mess,
you recovered what might loosely be described as sanity. Since then your
special interest has been in minds that have been, not to put too fine a point
on it, bent out of shape.’

‘I’ll
grant you that.’

‘We want
you to study such minds on Masada. There is one Human mind – that of a man who
was once a member of the religious police there.’

An
information package arrived and Amistad opened and studied it. Jeremiah Tombs
was certainly an interesting individual, and what had led to his imbalance even
more interesting still.

‘Such minds?’

Another
package now.

‘Are you
sure this Technician has a mind?’

‘That
will be for you to ascertain.’

‘And the
relevance of my present project?’

‘Events
concerning Penny Royal’s demise have been a closely guarded secret. That black
AI died because it tried to install the recorded mind of one of the Atheter
into one of its animal descendants, a gabbleduck. Perhaps now you can start
working things out for yourself?’

‘Yes, I
think I’m beginning to see the pattern.’

‘Then I
can leave this to you?’

‘You
can, though it will take me at least three years to get to Masada.’

‘The
situation is not critical – not yet.’

As
Amistad pondered that ‘not yet’ he felt some chagrin. He had just been
‘volunteered’ to a task similar to Jerusalem’s, only in his case the long-dead
race was the Atheter. He had just filled a position that had remained vacant
ever since the Atheter were named, and it was just right, for it seemed that
entire alien race had succumbed to a kind of mass insanity. It gave him some
comfort that the vast intelligence named Jerusalem could get so much so right,
for such an intelligence was needed precisely where it was, watching over that
lethal technology out there. Then, eyeing the twitching of one tentacle tip,
Amistad also felt a degree of satisfaction in knowing that Jerusalem could also
get some things entirely wrong.

Masada (Solstan 2451 – 14 Years after the Rebellion)

Gravmotor rumbling in his guts, the scorpion war drone Amis-tad descended
towards a building surrounded by swampy wilderness. His companion descended on
a parallel course – just a ball of black spines three metres across.

From up
here the building looked like a black sun surrounded by the white rays of
plasticrete walkways spearing out into the surrounding flute grasses. Amistad
settled lower, down towards one of the walkways, the black disc revealing
itself as a domed roof constructed of photo-electric glass – a material often
used in remote Polity buildings. This then, was the place. Having arrived on Masada
only a few months previously, it had taken Amistad a little while to orient,
and to really understand what was required of him. The Polity needed data,
about Jeremiah Tombs, about the Technician, and about the entire Atheter race
and what had driven it to self-extinction. This building housed an Atheter AI,
though a rather reticent one, and here seemed a good a place to start as any.

Penny
Royal landed seconds before him, gently on the rhizome mat and then rolling
towards the building, spines shifting like a starfish’s feet. As Amistad
finally settled on a walkway, he studied his companion pensively. They didn’t
call them black AIs because of their colour; they called them that because they
were the arch bogey men of the Polity around whom no one was safe. After
extracting the bitter darkness from Penny Royal’s mind and putting the AI back
together, Amistad had kept it with him because it might retain knowledge about
the thing that had attacked it, and which seemed likely to have some bearing on
events here. Having restored Penny Royal to apparent sanity, this entity had
become Amistad’s responsibility too, and he could not deny a lingering
fascination. However, he still wondered if he had made this complex and
puzzling entity entirely safe. Keeping Penny Royal around was risky at least.

Amistad
returned his attention to their destination, now seeing the supporting ring of
pillars below the dome. The whole building looked like an old Greek temple long
abandoned here. He stalked towards it, the walkway dipping under his weight,
and considered how this thing had arrived on Masada.

The
planet from which the artefact housed here originated had been named Shayden’s
Find after the woman who discovered this thing, and who died there. It would be
so easy, Amistad thought, to see what had happened on that world as part of a
pattern, for the Jain-infected madman who had obliterated the Masadan Theocracy
had gone there earlier, but to do so would be to lapse into the kind of
conspiracy theory that Humans, who did not really understand statistics, tended
to lapse into. It was coincidence, just that.

A single
rocky slab, a small tectonic plate adrift on a sea of magma, had been that
planet’s only enduring feature. This object could not have survived on such a
world but for one circumstance: the magma had accumulated and solidified around
a large flat object unaffected by the heat. The woman Shayden went there to
study this object, and found that some fragments of its incredibly tough and
durable substance had broken away – enough to retrieve and study thoroughly.
This substance, something like diamond, also bore certain similarities to
memcrystal. Out of curiosity Shayden had attached an optic interface to one
piece, and the reams of code feeding back through it astounded her. She had
discovered something very important. It was an artefact, later confirmed as
being too young to be a product of the Jain, and too old to be something the
Csorians made. A product of the Atheter then. But a piece of memcrystal the
size of the last joint of a man’s thumb could store a Human mind, so what did
such a mass of crystal contain? The mind of a god? The stock-market
transactions of an entire galactic civilization? Alien porn tapes and family
albums? Atheter blogs?

Penny
Royal reached the pillars first, folded itself flat and clattered through,
expanded into a ball again and rolled on to settle at the centre, shape more
oblate now, tentacles squirming out from between the spines. Reaching the
pillars, Amistad had to turn himself sideways to squeeze through, finally
clanging down on a floor of ceramal gratings. Peering down he saw that a layer
of mud had collected below the gratings, perhaps trailed in by the local
wildlife, maybe even by gabbleducks. In this mud, over the past twenty years, flute
grasses had germinated and spread their rhizome mat. Only the stumps of grass
stalks were visible however, the maintenance robot residing in one of the
pillars here having cleared the area before Amistad’s arrival. The war drone
moved over by his companion, reached down with one claw, closed its tips in one
grating a couple of metres across, and flipped it aside, used the sharp inner
edge of a claw to cut around the space exposed, then scraped up a mat of
rhizome and mud and tossed that aside too. Beneath lay a flat surface of
incredibly tough green crystal.

‘Here,’
said Amistad.

Penny
Royal flipped one eye-stalk from its mass, blinked a hellish red eye and
replied didactically, ‘Anywhere.’

Next the
black AI extruded a single tentacle. This limb, ten centimetres thick, seemed
to be made of liquid glass inside which things shifted and quivered like the
internal workings of a diatom. The tentacle terminated in a tubeworm head,
which Penny Royal opened out and pressed down against the crystal. The star of
fronds the tentacle opened out into melded against the surface, then started to
sink into it. Amistad took a wary pace back and as quietly as possible brought
his internal weapons systems online.

A
science vessel, the Hourne, was specially
constructed to retrieve this artefact from Shayden’s Find, and it was duly
retrieved. Next the AI of that vessel had made connections with it, to supply
it with energy and look inside. What the artefact contained immediately came to
life and seized control of both AI and vessel. Subsequent negotiations had
resulted in it being deposited here. It had just wanted to be dumped, hadn’t
requested anything else, not even power to keep it active. But the Polity AIs
had decided otherwise, building this structure and ensuring a power supply,
connecting up projectors, sensors and some defences.

Amistad
now swung round to study the surrounding pillars with their inset consoles, a
deeper sensor probe revealing other equipment inside the pillars. Though all
this technology remained active in itself, for two decades it hadn’t received
any instructions from the entity residing in the crystal below his metal feet.

‘Anything?’
Amistad enquired.

‘You
know when I know.’

It
seemed evident that the Atheter AI here had made a personal choice to cease
communicating, that if it wished it could communicate once again. The Polity
had respected that choice, even though the likely vast store of data it
contained could be very useful. Generally, Polity AIs were prepared to play a
waiting game. However, for a war drone, impatience was a programmed-in trait,
whilst for something like Penny Royal there were few rules that could be
applied.

‘Response,’
Penny Royal noted.

‘Good.’

If
Amistad was to be the prime expert on all things Atheter, he wanted the
information that could be obtained here. The planetary governor of Masada, an
AI called Ergatis, had warned against doing anything like this and lodged its
protest with Earth Central. To no effect, for Amistad had carte blanche.

‘Definitely
– ’ began Penny Royal, then fell silent as another huge being joined them.

The
massive pyramidal gabbleduck squatted off to one side, seemingly in deep
shadow, though that was certainly some effect of the projection. Its forelimbs
were folded across its belly and its bill rested down on its chest as if it
were dozing. Its eyes were closed and a deep rumbling sound permeated the air.
Was it snoring?

‘Keep
doing whatever you’re doing,’ Amistad instructed, then addressing the
gabbleduck, ‘What should I call you?’