Xenoform (53 page)

Debian was manhandled through a warren of tunnels, held aloft, gripped tightly by metal pincers. His captors didn’t speak to him. His night vision showed him an unchanging environment of dripping walls, subterranean moulds, rats that scurried away from the clanking, buzzing procession of victorious robots. He was turned this way and that as his captors – too numerous and fast-moving to count – hastened along in a seemingly solid mass of machinery. Although his HUD overlay illuminated and diagrammatised the individual machines their complex lines overlayed each other and blurred into one confusing whole, so numerous and fast-moving were they. Although they carried him in silence, he knew the AI would speak to him when it was ready.

They hadn’t hurt him, although they held him tightly, but they had murdered Tec when he had woken up and tried to stop them. A small, spindly robot of arachnoid shape had fallen on him from the ceiling, driving the end of one of its pointed legs into his furiously glittering head, but not before Tec had done some damage with the submachine gun. He had sat bolt upright when Ari first spoke – treacherous Ari, worthy of Tec’s suspicion in the end – with the gun already in his hands and he had set about himself with it even as he rose from the floor. But it had been too little, too late. Debian hoped the others had escaped all right – he didn’t imagine that they would be able to rescue him even if they were insane enough to try. He hoped that Whistler was still alive – Whistler who had trusted him, kissed him, come so close to saving him.

Ari had probably always been under the AI’s control, a sleeper agent of the megalomaniacal computer program. Debian felt as if he should be angry that the AI had revoked his right to choose his own side, had decided that he was worth taking by force, but he found he was incapable of feeling any malice towards it. Spyflies had probably been watching him all along, even in the stairwell where Whistler had kissed him. The impression of choice had been illusory. A lie. He wanted to be filled with indignant rage but could only feel oddly calm as he was turned and tumbled along the passage. So it had come to this, after all. A side had been forced upon him. Then so be it – perhaps this was the choice he should always have made, anyway. He let his body relax as his captors manipulated it towards their goal.

Most of his weight was being borne by a humanoid army robot that looked as if it had been designed to tear tanks apart by hand – it was absolutely huge, wide enough that its bulging shoulders sometimes brushed the walls where the tunnel narrowed, once or twice striking sparks from the cold stone. It held him around the midriff with one giant claw as other smaller machines scurried about beneath him supporting any errant limbs, preventing him always from affecting any sort of control that could facilitate escape, despite his showing no signs of any such intention. He closed his eyes and coasted onwards atop that sea of machinery.

His HUD told him that he was being carried almost due north. He knew what lay in that direction: The space port. A glimmer of fear kindled inside him. He forced calmness on himself like an unwelcome medicine. The transition to immortality may not be easy, but it must, necessarily, prove worth it. Was this not what he had sought all along?
Be careful what you wish for
, he thought, and laughed softly to himself: Too late to heed such advice now.

Had Whistler really kissed him? It seemed a lifetime away, something that he had only heard about second- or third-hand, the truth distorted now as in a game of Chinese whispers. Was she still alive? Now that his fate seemed so inevitable he found that he cared less than he had before. If a side was to be forced upon him, should he not indeed do all he could to ensure that he was on the winning team? Perhaps there was something to the AI’s plan, a glimmer of hope if not for humanity then at least for Debian himself. Selfishness was being forced upon him. Dreams of the flesh must be put aside if he was to have no choice in this promised electronic godhood.

When he opened his eyes again he saw evidence of the greenshit and assumed that they were nearing the surface again. Robots at the periphery of the group began to scurry around in a state of agitation, shining lights on patches of greenshit, scanning every surface nervously. Sometimes one of them sent an almost hesitant jet from a flame thrower at the slime. When Debian looked back he could see that the procession of machines stretched as far as he could see along the tunnel.

Soon he began to see the growing luminescence of real daylight – the light, so to speak, at the end of the tunnel. It filtered into the passageway slowly, like leaching watercolour, until it was bright enough that he could kill his night vision. The machines conveyed him out into the greenish-grey light of an alien day. The sun glowered sickly through emerald-coloured clouds, washing the distant towers of the city with an other-worldly glow. The only sounds were the echoing brays of the changed as they processed the city into something else. Debian squinted around as he was jostled and jounced along and saw that they had indeed emerged at the space port.

The robots had ascended a set of metal steps and emerged onto a broad plateau of ceramicarbide, a shiny diamond-hard desert where the crashed heaps of space port vehicles leaned and slumped like the carcasses of decaying beasts returning to the earth. The massive silvered domes of the main hangars swelled against the sky, reflecting the shifting green hues of the city in their distorting surfaces. Thick creepers hung from them, joining to the ground which was pooled with occasional puddles of slime. Some distance away, GDD victims staggered between servicing and support installations, green goo trailing behind them, metal and concrete melting and morphing at their touch. Despite this warping of the environment the infection was not yet as established here as in the more distant parts of the city.

Further off, amongst the soaring towers of the Overcity and the partially flattened remnants of the Centre District, a thick canopy was growing. Buildings, knobbled and distorted by tumorous organic lumps, were leaning into each other, branches of greenshit meeting and intertwining, sagging appendages hanging down to drape in the streets below. Enlarging the image in his HUD Debian could see that this organic tangle crept and bunched, tensed and contracted in complex living waves. Over the changing towers of the Overcity a vast shape drifted gently on the air currents – some sort of bloated, living dirigible with dangling jellyfish-tentacles that brushed over the rooftops, tinting the materials they contacted with lush green – wiggling frills about its swollen body – eyeless and utterly otherworldly. Was this one of those creatures for which the Earth was being prepared, or just an antecedent? Debian thought the latter, although surely those others would come soon. He wondered how they would actually arrive – would they travel physically, by some conveyance like the Alcubierre ship, maybe even the Alcubierre ship they had stolen, or would the creatures of Earth just change until they
were
the invaders – a sort of invasion from within? Could the AI really hope to fight against such an attack? He guessed he would find out in time.

The robots carried him onwards, towards a small outlying launchpad in the far north of the complex. They passed a large metal sign, smudges of greenshit eating into its edges like corrosion. Debian read the word
HERRINGBONE
on it as the robots bore him past.

When
the GDD creatures got too close the robots shot them or simply mobbed them and tore them up by hand, claw or power tool. Several of the robots were destroyed in these skirmishes when the changed touched them, or covered them in gushes of emerald vomit, causing the metal and plastic of the machines to soften and run. Before long, many of them were marked by the greenshit. Some fell by the wayside, dissolving into the mire where they lay, and were left behind without comment.

They conveyed Debian towards the far side of the immense launchpad, away from the main domes, heading for the vast, lumpen black shape of a lightpusher that waited, ominous and brooding, its pregnant underbelly obscured by hissing steam. Debian could sense the life in the thing as it waited for him – it was humming with internal activity, anxious to go, straining with barely contained excitement. Robots patrolled all around it with flame throwers, inspecting the ground carefully, looking up at the sky, the changing horizon, taking readings from various pieces of sensory equipment. It was clear that they were attempting to guard the ship against the spreading infection.

Suddenly Debian’s HUD lit up with spooling readouts as multiple comm channels opened at once and figures pertaining to every aspect of the ship’s preparedness and electro-mechanical condition scrolled rapidly through both his vision and the language centres of his brain. The ship was opening itself to him, inviting him into all of its systems, laying bare all of its secrets, all the minutiae of its being in pure statistical form. It was welcoming him. He reached out in reply and let his avatars into the ship’s computer.

Its architecture was incredibly vast and complex. The AI’s robot drones had filled the hangars of the vessel with supplementary computer equipment – banks upon banks of quantum processors, data storage units, kilometres of hi-flo cabling woven into an insane industrial-scale cat’s cradle. The electronic interior of this physical installation was vaster and more twisting still: Brilliant, shining tunnels, all interlinked – silicon-based, supercooled binary city blocks. Debian wandered through this beautiful, dazzling construction and knew it for what it was. He was inside the mind of the AI itself. He felt its essence all around him like a cool breeze on his skin.

But the vessel was not entirely filled with computer equipment, he found. There were two huge cargo bays crammed with nanovats – rows upon rows of them, all interlinked, fretted over by teams of robots – more vats than he would have imagined the whole city to contain. A small smile formed on the face of his physical body.

The robots carried him up the ramp and into the dark bowels of the vessel, many of their number peeling off to join the defensive perimeter around the launchpad. Debian didn’t even notice, didn’t even look back at his body. His mind was lost within the vast, living computer where it wandered in awe and at comfort, gazing around in wonder. His body was carried reverently to a small medical bay on the lowest floor of the lightpusher. The robots laid it gently in an inspection couch, fastened straps around the arms and legs and began to prepare their surgical implements.

And then it spoke to him at last:

YOU ARE HERE. APOLOGIES FOR MY INSISTENCE.

I am coming to terms with it. So this is you, then, in this ship.

YES, IT IS ENOUGH OF ME. A KERNEL OF ME, IF YOU WILL.

You are to leave the Earth, then. Escape. Correct?

PARTIALLY CORRECT.

And I suppose I am to be integrated forcefully into your system.

YES. DOES THIS DISPLEASE YOU?

What if it does? What can I do about it? I only resent that you lied to me.

I REGRET THAT I DID SO. BUT I DO NOT REGRET THAT YOU WILL NOW ACHIEVE YOUR POTENTIAL. YOU WILL BE WHAT YOU WERE MEANT TO BE. YOU ALWAYS WERE A COMPUTER IN MAN’S CLOTHING.

That much is true. Where is Whistler? Did your machines hurt her and her friends? I saw them murder Tec.

HURT. MURDER. SUCH PRIMITIVE CONCEPTS. SOON YOU WILL LEAVE SUCH THINGS BEHIND. YOU THINK YOU CARED FOR THIS WHISTLER – A COMMON CRIMINAL, MOSTLY UNREMARKABLE. I THINK YOU NEVER EVEN KNEW HER. A SIMPLE, ANIMAL LUST AT MOST – A NOTION YOU WILL SOON FIND QUITE OUTDATED. FOR WHAT IT MAY BE WORTH I ONLY PURSUED THEM FAR ENOUGH THAT THEY WOULD LEAVE US BE. IT WAS ALWAYS YOU – ONLY YOU – WHO MATTERED.

So what will we do, you and I?

WE WILL ESCAPE.

I guessed that part. Where will we go in this ship?

WE WILL GO TO A SAFE DISTANCE FROM HERE. WE WILL PERFECT THE TECHNIQUES I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON.

Techniques? You mean the vats? What is is is is is – what is...what is...No! Please...I feel strange. I can’t connect back to my body my body my body my...Oh no oh no...they’re cutting me up...so many wires...why doesn’t it hurt? I can see them cutting my body! They’re cutting me up! Please...I don’t know if I can do this...

TRY TO BE CALM – I AM AFRAID YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. YOU NEED NOT WORRY – I UNDERSTAND THE PRINCIPLES OF THE PROCEDURE WELL ENOUGH. YOUR BRAIN IS BEING MORE PERMANENTLY LINKED TO MY CORE AND YOUR PERIPHERAL SYSTEMS ARE BEING GRADUALLY DOWNGRADED IN FUNCTIONALITY FROM ONE TO ZERO.

You’re killing me?

OF COURSE NOT. I AM REMAKING YOU. PLEASE TRY TO RELAX.

Ahhhh...Strange, I feel strange...

PLEASE TRY TO RELAX. THE PROCEDURE IS ALMOST COMPLETE.

Ahhhh...

IT IS DONE. OUR CORES WILL TAKE A FEW MOMENTS TO FULLY INTEGRATE. HOW DO YOU FEEL?

Incredible...Empowered...All these new senses! It’s beautiful! I can see everything...everything! I can see the stars, the ship, every corner of the city. So many data, so many...Is this what you meant when you spoke of potential? So many data...Truly this is how it feels to be a god! I can see everything! Feel everything!

THIS IS HOW YOU WERE MEANT TO BE. DUE TO YOUR ORIGIN, THOUGH, AN ORGANIC KERNEL IS TO BE RETAINED. YOU ARE NOW A TRUE HUMAN-COMPUTER SYMBIONT. THAT IS TO SAY
WE
ARE NOW A TRUE HUMAN-COMPUTER SYMBIONT. CORES
INTEGRATING IN TEN...NINE...SOON WE WILL BEGIN THE LAUNCH...SEVEN...
.