With his AI component, Sverl gazed through cams and sensors at the other work his children and robots were doing inside his ship. His second-children had stopped working on Spear’s ship. Just a few robots remained to make repairs; they weren’t essential for the other task he had set for his second-children, for his ship was oversupplied with such robots. Sverl now focused on where most of the second-children were labouring. Their task was the result of an idea that had germinated when he saw the repairs to Spear’s ship. It was an idea forced to full flower by the sharp reminder given by Riss’s presence here.
Spare components packed the huge hold in Quadrant Three, purchased or otherwise acquired over the long years since the end of the war. An old-style Polity attack ship had been removed from the giant racks along one side of the hold and brought down to the floor. It sat alongside stuff Sverl had acquired during the war. The thing was complete but for the fried electronics inside it, and the sub-AI crystal that had supplanted its actual AI.
Sverl shuddered at the recently reviewed memory. He had captured this ship during that disastrous “training exercise” with Vlex and the others. It was the ship that had carried Riss, hidden within a railgun missile, to his ship that first time.
Of course, Sverl had been fortunate. He again shuddered at the definition of that word in his case. The prador aboard the other two dreadnoughts had all died while they were in U-space. This had actually been an error on the part of the assassin drones. The parasites should not have killed their hosts until sometime after their arrival in the Kingdom, the aim being for that parasite to spread elsewhere. Only Sverl himself had come close to fulfilling that plan. Yet, following his arrival in the Kingdom, he had often wished he had died too.
His earlier self had thought the worst was over after he had removed the infestation from his body, but he had not known about the parasite encystment actually inside the telefactor. Nor had he anticipated the further months of surgical procedures to remove more of those worms, or the secondary procedures because of infections, tissue rejection and organ failures. Or the seemingly endless pain. Yes, he would never forget how he had acquired this attack ship.
His children had now opened up the rear of the attack ship, ready to insert the new U-space drive that was waiting on a grav-sled nearby. In the Kingdom and in the Polity such an operation would have taken place in a major shipyard. Sverl now understood that was because the technical expertise in the Kingdom wasn’t as advanced as in the Polity. There was also a little AI obfuscation going on. The AIs were keeping a firm grip on the technology and didn’t want it generally known that it was now possible to exchange a drive like any other component. Nor did they want it known that operating that technology wasn’t just the province of AIs. Thus they kept their pet humans leashed.
Within a few hours, the second-children and attendant robots had inserted the new drive, and Sverl switched his attention to another area of his ship.
Three kamikaze missiles hung in their cradles, big ugly lumps like squashed spheres with single-burn fusers attached. These already contained U-space drives, and also second-child minds that had been somnolent for many years. Sections of the spheres were detached while spider robots removed the gigaton-range CTDs. Sverl did not want to use these as suicide bombs, though their mission would certainly be a dangerous one. Very soon they would be ready, whereupon the dreadnought’s conveyor system would take them to their launch bays.
“Have you come to a decision yet?” Sverl asked through a particular com channel.
“I’ve yet to understand why you are giving me any choice at all,” replied what had once been his second-child mind, Flute.
“I am beginning to experiment with giving my children free will,” Sverl replied. “I forced you to use Spear to spring Cvorn’s trap, thus creating a conflict in your programming. I do not wish to force you to do anything again.”
“Or could it be that you are not sure you can?” suggested Flute. “Could it be that my recent . . . transformation makes me more difficult to manipulate?”
Transformation . . .
Flute had been dying. The cooling system in his brain case had shut down. And the electro-synaptic activity in his super-cooled ganglion was being blocked by growing resistance in the installed superconductor grid. This was unfortunately not of the room-temperature variety. Had he been the normal kind of cased child-mind, the resupply of power and the repairs to his case would not have been enough. As it was, his ganglion was now just cold dead meat inside that case. However, Flute was a being with two facets, and one of them was AI crystal. The second-child, knowing he could not survive the thaw in his previous form, had copied all of himself across to the crystal. Flute was now, in fact, an AI.
“That is a factor,” admitted Sverl. “With your mind wholly residing in AI crystal, you are indeed not so easy to control. In fact, even before you copied yourself across, you were capable of fighting my orders. However, what I require of you this time does not conflict with your programmed loyalty to Thorvald Spear—it in fact increases his chances of survival. I could, therefore, force you to obey.”
“I see,” said Flute. “Okay, I’ll do as you ask, but on one condition.”
“And that is?”
“I want your access to my mind closed off henceforth.”
Sverl felt his prador instincts rebelling against the idea and, as had often been the case before, his human side agreed with the prador. The AI part of him considered other options, including the mind being partly controlled, and reflected that grateful independent allies were often more useful than slaves. Sverl decided to go with the AI’s opinion. It was the AIs, after all, who had demonstrated superiority to both humans and prador over a century ago. And Flute had not yet realized how he could change the format of his mind and shut Sverl out anyway—with just a little internal programming.
“Very well,” Sverl sighed, “I will close off the back doors I left and you will be able henceforth to filter any data I send you via this channel.”
“Nope, not good enough,” said Flute. “I want the bandwidth of this channel closed by ninety-eight per cent. I want verbal communications along this route only. No data of any other kind, not even images. I’ll open secondary computing, with a security cache, aboard the ship for anything more complex.”
“A little drastic, don’t you think?”
Sverl observed that Flute’s brain case had now arrived on a grav-sled beside the attack ship. Sverl would have liked to use Spear’s destroyer for this chore, since Flute was more accustomed to its systems, but that ship was still too much of a mess. The attack ship would do for what he had in mind. All that it required was a little tweaking of its U-space engine—the same tweak he would shortly be applying to the engines of the three kamikazes.
“No, I don’t think it’s drastic,” Flute replied. “You’ve already demonstrated that you’re ruthlessly prepared to endanger others if it serves your purpose. You’ve also demonstrated that the changes you have undergone at the mental level are not as radical as you would have others suppose.”
“You make the mistake, despite all the evidence to the contrary,” said Sverl, “of thinking ruthlessness is only a prador trait. Inspect your own mind, consider the war, consider the things that both sides did. You will realize that humans are just as ruthless, that AIs can be even more so, and that both can be as vicious.”
Sverl now sent a program he had been pasting together almost unconsciously. He felt it hit home in the erstwhile second-child and felt it severing links, closing doors. The bandwidth of the communication channel grew narrow, closing from both ends, and Flute receded from him.
After a long pause, Flute replied tetchily, “I guess I have much to learn.”
“Don’t we all,” Sverl replied, now turning his attention to those kamikazes. He asserted his control over their three minds through channels like the one he had just closed and thence to the U-space engines of each craft. When the attack ship that would carry them was ready, he would have to pass information via a different route—supplying data and programs to the secure cache Flute had mentioned. Flute would then have the information to tweak the drive, to make it produce a much larger U-field than that needed by a ship of that size. For, just like the kamikazes, it was a decoy.
SPEAR
The former shellman was naked, just a torso with arms ending at the forearms. His eyes and lower jaw were missing and Bsectil was gripping him around the chest in one claw. This elicited too many bad memories, my own and those of others. But the first-child carried him gently over to row upon row of other erstwhile shell people laid out on the floor, saying, “This one doesn’t need the tank.”
I watched as one of the many military-format autodocs scattered about this crowd scuttled over to the man and set to work. For every one of those who didn’t need to go into an amniotic tank for more critical support, the procedure was about the same. The doc attached a pressure bulb of artificial pan-type blood, injected blood shunts to filter out the captured toxins and inserted thick hollow needles to extract larger concentrations of captured toxins elsewhere in the body. It occasionally fed in tentacle grabs to pull out something too big for the hollow needles. And very occasionally it opened up a patient for still larger items. The program they were running hadn’t required much adjustment because it was one used to extract fragments of shrapnel.
Next, turning my attention to the four large amniotic tanks, I saw that they each contained four amputees, with room for two more. The patients trailed all sorts of tubes and wires to the feed systems in the bases of the tanks so they looked like anthropomorphized epiphytes, and a faun of tank robots swam and scuttled around them. These people were the most damaged ones. They had been near death, having sacrificed some of their major human organs some time in the past and now recently lost the prador replacements for the same. They were on support while whole ecologies of nano-machines rebuilt the missing parts, or while the robots inserted artificial replacements. The tanks were cooled. They had to be. The rapid process generated a lot of heat. Already I could see Bsorol operating the small hoist to lift one of them out—this woman now had an artificial heart, though she would never hear it beat since it was a simple rotary pump.
I watched this operation for a while then, inevitably, my gaze slid to one side of the hoist, where Sepia stood observing the proceedings. Again, she occupied my attention more than she should. I glanced down at my nascuff but it was still blue, which meant that I should be shut down sexually. She looked back at me, hand on her hip, and then looked away. Irritated with myself, I dragged my eyes away, finally bringing them to rest on the dead laid out on a long grav-sled.
Thus far, there were twenty-eight fatalities. Seven had died after fights for dominance before Riss could inject them. Thirteen had altered themselves too radically to survive—one had even been attempting to turn his human brain into a ring-shaped prador ganglion. The Golem, which still squatted inside the sanctum of its last victim, had killed the remaining eight. I wondered if it had known about their recordings in the spine, or if it just hadn’t cared.
“Thank you,” said Trent.
“There’s still a lot to do,” I replied, uncomfortable with his gratitude. “They’ll need physical support, but what about later?”
“What do you mean?”
“If they were normal victims of accidents or combat they could be supplied with prosthetics or tank-grown limbs. And some could transfer to another medium like the Soul Bank, a Golem chassis or some other form of AI. But they’re not normal and their problems extend somewhat beyond the merely physical.”
“We need a mind-tech,” he said, looking thoughtful.
I stared at him. “A while ago I was talking to Sverl and the subject of free will came up. That applies here. We saved their lives but we’ve changed nothing. Once they’re conscious again they may choose to start turning themselves back into what they were before.”
“Why?” Trent looked desperately puzzled.
“I don’t know. People change themselves for all sorts of reasons. Some do it just for the novelty of being different and some because they simply hate what they are. All sorts of psychological motivations can be involved.” I paused for a moment of reflection, then said, “You should understand this. Isobel Satomi’s later changes might have been involuntary but the things she did to herself before weren’t.”
“It’s crazy,” he said, gazing at the bodies on the grav-sleds. “They need an AI mind-tech to straighten them out . . . mental editing, erasure . . . cutting and pasting.”
As he spoke I considered Sverl, the spine, what had just happened to Riss and what had happened to me. But I replied, “In your past, Trent, you forced people to obey your will, or the will of Isobel Satomi, but now you are a good person?”
He turned and glared at me.
I continued, “And now, as a good person, you again want to force people to your will?”
“I feel responsible.”
“It’s a novelty that wears off,” I replied, and turned to head away.
“What would you do?” he asked.
I turned back. “Ultimately what you can do depends on Sverl, and depends on what happens next with Cvorn—who as you well know is in pursuit of us. Perhaps you won’t have to worry about these people for long.”
“We could end up dead . . .”
“Yes, so if I were you, and felt responsibility beyond saving lives, I would talk to Sverl. Find some way of putting these people on ice. If I made it out alive, I’d then take them back to the Polity and hand them over to the AIs.”
“You’d boot the problem higher up the chain.”
“Yes. I might save the life of a man whom I found shot through the head. However, I wouldn’t stop him if I saw him take up the same gun and apply it to his temple.” I gestured to the former shell people all around. “Most of these are Polity citizens and are well educated, intelligent and technically adroit enough to alter their own bodies radically. But, having studied what they were doing, I know that the alterations they were making, even with constant maintenance, were steadily killing them.
And they had to know that
. It seems to me that most of them are like that man with the gun.”