Polity Agent

1

Cormac kept his eyes closed and remained very still, expecting something to start hurting at any moment. When no pain became evident, he opened his eyes to observe the tangle of limbs and implements on the underside of a pedestal autodoc, just as it swung aside. The last he remembered, Jain technology had been crawling around inside his head, busy rewiring it, then the rest of his body had caught up with that damage by experiencing ten Gs of acceleration.

Right…

He licked his lips and tried to work up some saliva in his dry mouth, then announced, ‘The King of Hearts AI sends its regards. It wanted you to know it did not acquire any nasty Jain technology, so there’s no reason for you to chase after it and blast it into component atoms.’

‘That was remarkably quick,’ replied a voice just hinting at the massive intellect behind it.

‘That you, Jerusalem?’ enquired Cormac.

‘You already guessed that,’ replied the disembodied voice of the AI that controlled the titanic research vessel Jerusalem.

Underneath Cormac, the surgical table slowly folded upright, moving him into a sitting position. Peering down at himself he saw that he wore a skin-tight garment, his hands similarly clad, and the pressure around his face and head confirming that no part of his body remained uncovered.

‘Very strange pyjamas,’ he observed.

‘Cell welding, while wonderfully efficient, does have its limitations. Also, your spacesuit was breached and you lost nearly half your skin to vacuum freezing. This garment assists regrowth while allowing you to move about unhindered. It is my own invention.’

Cormac glanced around. He lay in a typical ship’s medbay. The pedestal-mounted autodoc had now retreated into an alcove beside a bench extending from one wall, which held a nanoscope, a chain-glass containment cylinder, genetic scanner and nanofactory unit. By the bench stood a chair on which lay a familiar design of note-screen.

‘Where’s Mika?’

‘Sleeping.’

Cormac nodded and swung his legs off the surgical table. Now moving, he could feel the wrongness. He felt tired and weak, parts of him began to ache, and something felt odd about… everything.

‘What did you need to do to me?’

‘All relevant information is available to you via ship server. Why don’t you find out from there?’

A test perhaps? Cormac closed his eyes and sought mental connections via his gridlink. In something almost like a third eye he observed the optical cues for connection, but felt no actual linkage.

‘I’m offline.’

‘Yes, the damage to your brain was severe, and to remove Jain filaments from it and run a counteragent through would inevitably cause even more damage. I downloaded you, then reloaded you after I finished making repairs. Your link, because of the possibility it contained Jain informational viruses or worms, I completely wiped and reformatted. I similarly screened all your memories and thought structures.’

Cormac felt a clamminess.

Am I really Cormac now?

But there seemed no particular advantage in asking that question. Using his third-eye blink reflex, he cued the various channels of his link in turn and felt them reinstate. Now he could download data in just about any form to his link, either to view in his visual cortex, or so that it became part of memory—the mental component of physical skills, languages, the recorded experiences of others. In the link itself he possessed the facility to create programs: perceptile, search, analysis, logic trees… the list was only limited by his imagination, and his imagination need not be limited while he could link to so many sources of knowledge and experience within the human Polity. He opened a skeletal search program, altered its parameters to suit his requirements, and transmitted it to the nearest receiver. It came back with a report he scrolled up in his visual cortex. The report itself was overly technical and detailed, so he ran it through a filter to provide him with the gist:

Spinal reconnection in 2 lumbar regions; extensive bone welding of 116 fractures; the removal of 1 kidney, two thirds of the liver, 2 yards of intestine, 350 ounces of cerebral tissue; extensive cell welding in all areas; currently undergoing nanocyte repair and genetic reversion regrowth…

‘I thought I felt lighter,’ said Cormac. ‘Tell me, how much of my memory is still true?’

‘I reconstructed what I could, but perhaps ten per cent is missing.’

Cormac began walking round the surgical table.

Holes in my body and in my mind. Great.

Eventually he came to stand before a wall dispenser for disposable surgical clothing. Using the controlling touch-screen he selected a paper coverall, removed it from the dispensing slot and donned it over the garment he already wore.

‘What about my crew… and the Jack Ketch? Cormac asked reluctantly.

‘Jack, the ship’s AI, is safe, and Thorn and Fethan are presently on Cull. Cento and Gant are dead.’

‘Gant?’ he asked—he already knew about Cento.

‘Gant was terminally infected by a Jain informational virus that supplanted his mind. Thorn therefore destroyed him. There is, however, a back-up copy of him on Earth.’

Cormac grimaced. ‘The situation now?’

‘As you must have already surmised, Skellor is now just a pretty pattern on the surface of a brown dwarf sun. I have one Dragon sphere held in custody, and the planet Cull now has been granted provisional membership of the Polity while search teams locate, remove and isolate any stray items of Jain technology still there.’

Cento probably formed part of that same pretty pattern on that brown dwarf. Only pure luck had saved Cormac from the same fate.

‘You are currently in orbit of Cull?’

‘No, I am currently six hundred light years away.’

‘What?’

‘A rather knotty problem has arisen.’

Without cerebral augmentations Thorn could only view the memory in VR and absorb it by repetition. Fethan however, being a cyborg, loaded it directly into his mind so it became part of his memory.

‘What am I seeing here?’ Thorn asked, the VR representation freezing all about him.

‘The planet Osterland,’ Fethan replied, standing at his left shoulder. ‘Cold, about the orbit of Mars around an M-type sun, gravity one point two, plenty of water ice, but completely lifeless until fifty or so years ago. They used designer bacteria, biomass transfer through a cargo runcible, then an orbital mirror to heat the mix. Deciduous trees, with support ecologies, were planted right from the start, and are still being planted by agrobots.’

‘Trees?’

‘That was just the personal preference of the haiman in charge. He could have used fast growing slime moulds or adapted fungi to increase biomass. Instead he chose trees.’

‘Interesting, after what happened here, to discover a haiman rather than an AI in charge,’ Thorn noted. Haiman, he thought, an amalgam of human and AI—which meant this place was ruled, partially, by a human. And humans had never made trustworthy rulers.

‘I wouldn’t read too much into it—there’s not a lot of difference between the two.’

Thorn nodded and took another pace forwards on the platform that extended out from the town lying behind him. He already knew that this platform would become, or had become, a jetty, as the space below it filled with water directed down great canals from the planet’s melting poles. Walking in someone else’s footsteps he finally came to the market located on the platform. Drizzle washed cold against his skin, for a storm approached from the northern outflow.

A dirty hand with chipped fingernails gripped his jacket. ‘I got some good stuff that ain’t on display, my friend,’ said its owner.

‘Like what?’ he asked… only it was not Thorn asking, but the recorded memory.

She was shabby, angry: one of those losers who came to a new world to start a new life and discovered that a change in location did not change what they themselves were. On the whole her goods matched her appearance. But then the memory persona noticed something else.

‘What’s that?’ it asked, pointing.

‘This is real coral, from the Barrier Reef on Earth.’

Thorn himself then spoke, and the representation froze again. ‘Do you reckon she knew what it really was? That this was a setup?’

‘Buggered if I know,’ Fethan replied. ‘Someone will have to ask.’

‘How interesting,’ said the persona, speaking from Thorn’s mouth. ‘All right, how much do you want for them?’

‘You’ll have to buy the whole carton,’ she replied. ‘Twenty shillings.’

‘I don’t want that egg thing, so I’ll give you ten.’

The memory faded, with the buyer returning towards the spaceport with his purchases.

‘A bargain,’ said Thorn. ‘Let’s back up to that stall again.’

He walked backwards to the stall, turned and placed the plastic carton down, and was in the act of taking back the ten-shilling chainglass coin when the representation froze again.

‘Just one piece of the Jain tech coral would sell for millions on the open market—if it even got there before an AI like Jerusalem snatched it,’ said Thorn. ‘The Jain node itself would start in the billions, and go on up from there, if it was actually possible to buy or sell such items. In reality the planet would end up under quarantine, and the buyer and seller would be mentally dissected by forensic AI.’

‘Ah, but who knew about Jain nodes then?’ asked Fethan.

‘End scenario,’ ordered Thorn abruptly.

At once Thorn was in darkness, and could feel nothing. Then, as the nanofilaments of the VR booth detached from his brainstem and withdrew from his head, he felt cold and stiff. The booth’s door crumped open before him and he stepped out onto the acid-etched floor. Fethan, standing to one side, an apparently old man with snaggle teeth, a mass of ginger beard and thinning hair topping a wiry frame clad in an envirosuit, detached an optic cable from the end of his right forefinger and allowed it to wind back into the wall. He then took a thimble of syntheskin from his pocket and pressed it into place over a metal fingertip that served as a multipurpose plug. Thorn eyed him meanwhile. Fethan was a cyborg, since he retained his own brain and spinal column flash-frozen and bio-gridded in a ceramal case inside him. He was not like Gant: the mind of a soldier loaded to a Golem chassis. But Thorn did not want to think about Gant right then.

‘So, how did you obtain this recording?’Thorn asked.

‘Courtesy of Jerusalem. Apparently there was some bleed-over from Skellor to Cormac while they were linked. Jerusalem copied it while putting Cormac back together.’

Thorn surveyed his surroundings. A large hole had been burnt through one wall by the projectile saliva of a monster called a droon, then ripped open wider when it had crawled inside. The ceiling was missing, peeled back, from when the droon broke out again like a nightmare jack-in-a-box. This VR chamber was one remnant of a ship called the Jack Ketch, on which Thorn had arrived here on the planet Cull. He walked to the opening, stepped through and glared round at the arid landscape. Just within sight lay dusty pieces of carapace that were the remains of a sandhog the droon had killed.

‘And what exactly are we supposed to do with this piece of Skellor’s memory?’ He glanced up as a craft, shaped like an ‘H’ made from copper cylinders, drifted overhead. ‘This place is still under quarantine, and both of us have been in contact with Jain technology.’ Gant, the recorded mind of Thorn’s friend, once resided in a Golem chassis but, when they eventually found him, a Jain tech virus had turned him into something else. Thorn and Fethan had destroyed this object.

‘Jerusalem wants you to track this woman down.’ Fethan rejoined him. ‘And I think your ride just arrived.’

The H-shaped craft drew to a sudden halt above them, then began to descend. A hundred yards from the ground, it extruded four three-toed feet and, when it finally crunched down, one of them kicked away a nearby rock in seeming annoyance. Thorn estimated the craft to be 150 yards long and half that wide; a fully AG lander of the kind used for transporting dangerous cargoes. One strut of the H contained the ion drive, and possibly its controlling AI—though such ships were usually telefactored—and crew quarters if necessary. The other strut was a cargo pod, and the ship possessed the facility to blow this away from itself. Thorn was unsurprised when the circular end of the cargo pod opened and extruded a ramp like an insolent tongue.

‘Taking no chances, but this is an insystem ship, so where or to what is it carrying me?’ he asked as he began walking towards it.

Moving beside him, Fethan shrugged and made no comment.

Thorn glanced at him. ‘So you definitely are staying.’

‘I’m needed here.’ Fethan grimaced then removed something from his pocket, weighed it in his hand for a moment then tossed it across. Thorn snatched it out of the air and inspected it. It fitted in his palm, a five by three by a half inch cuboid of burnished metal, coppery, its corners rounded. Along one end of it was a row of ports, nanofibre and optic, designed to interface with just about any computer known, and probably many others unknown. It was a memstore.

‘It don’t say much, but it might come in handy,’ said Fethan.

‘What’s inside?’

‘It’s what killed that Jain tech construct down here, and what helped to kill Skellor in the end: a hunter-killer program constructed by Jerusalem.’ He patted his stomach. ‘I carried it inside myself for some time. I don’t need it any more and I don’t want it any more.’

They reached the ramp and paused there. Thorn held out his hand and they shook.

‘Stay well, Thorn,’ said Fethan, ‘and try not to let that bastard Cormac get you killed.’

‘You stay well, too. It’s been—’

‘Yeah, interesting.’ Fethan pulled his hand away and gestured towards the ship. ‘Get out of here.’ He turned and began walking away.

Thorn thoughtfully pocketed the memstore, then entered the cargo pod. Behind him the ramp immediately began withdrawing back into the floor. He spied just one acceleration chair bolted to one wall—there were no other facilities.

‘Spartan,’ he commented, then grinned to himself. He had, after all, himself been a member of the Sparkind who based their ethos on those ancient Greek warriors.

After he strapped himself in, the take-off was abrupt and sickening for, though the whole ship lifted on gravmotors, the pod itself contained no compensating gravplates. Sitting above the gravity-negating field he became immediately weightless. Strapped in his chair, and without a view, there was no way of telling how fast the ship was rising, or even if it rose at all.

Many space travellers, Thorn knew, had their temporal bone and its related nerves surgically adapted to enable them to shut down any physical response to signals from their inner ear. Others used drugs to dampen the effect. Sparkind, however, were conditioned to control their reaction, so Thorn merely clenched his teeth and held onto his breakfast. Within seconds he brought the disorientation and nascent space sickness under control, and relaxed. He remembered once watching one of the Cull natives being sick over the side of a balloon basket, prompting a subsequent conversation with Fethan about his own Sparkind conditioning.

‘Those must have been messy training sessions,’ Fethan had observed.

‘It was all carried out in VR and thus the sickness was just potential sickness to us trainees. Gant used to…’ Thorn trailed away. Gant was dead—again. He had continued, ‘It is just a matter of you deciding at first what is up and what is down, then finally deciding and accepting that there’s no up or down. Drugs and surgical adaptation disconnect you too much from realities, especially if you’re caught in a fire-fight aboard some tumbling ship with fluxing gravplates.’

‘Tough training, then?’

‘Yeah, you don’t get to become Sparkind without logging five years of combined virtual and actual combat training in similar rough situations.’ He glanced at Fethan. ‘The two are deliberately combined so you don’t get disconnected from reality. Troops fully trained only in VR develop a tendency to feel that what they then experience in actuality is something they can later unplug from. Makes ‘em sloppy, and very often dead. What about you? I know very little about you.’

Fethan grinned and scratched at his beard. ‘I worked for Earth Central way back before you were born, and even before memcording of a human mind became a viable proposition. I crashed a lander on Earth’s moon, after my passenger threw a grenade into the cockpit and, when I survived that, tried to decapitate me with a garrotte.’

‘Nasty person,’ Thorn opined.

‘Memcording wasn’t possible for a whole mind then, but partial recordings could be made. That bugger had overindulged in black-market memory copies made from the minds of imprisoned killers. The lander hit the ground but held together. Next thing I knew, everything was dark and EC was yammering at me non-stop. What was left of my body was too damaged to restore—oxygen fire. My choices were that dubious memcording technology of the time, or flash-freezing of my brain for storage, or installation in an android chassis—or death.’

‘Obviously you chose the android chassis.’

‘Yeah, my nasty passenger survived the crash and escaped. He’d set the fire. I later caught up with him on Titan, where he was making a dog’s dinner of his new career as a serial killer. I hauled him outside the dome with me and dropped him down a surface vent. He’d frozen solid by then, so broke apart on the way down.’

Thorn nodded to himself, then after a long pause had said, ‘Enough of this macho bonding for now?’

‘Yeah, I reckon,’ Fethan had replied.

Now sitting in the cargo pod, Thorn smiled at the memory of that conversation. He would miss the old cyborg, but at least Fethan remained alive, which was more than could be said for certain other people Thorn missed. His smile faded, just thinking of them.

Some time later he felt the acceleration from the craft’s ion drive. This lasted for an hour, next came abrupt deceleration, followed by various clonks and bangs from outside, then an abrupt restoration of gravity and a loud crump as the craft settled.

As Thorn unstrapped himself, the end of the cargo pod opened and the ramp extruded. He walked to the end of it and peered out into what he immediately identified as a spaceship’s small docking bay. As he stepped down the ramp he saw that only the cargo pod lay inside the bay, after being detached from the rest of the craft and transported in by the telefactor which now slid into an alcove of the nearby wall.

A precaution against Jain infection, obviously.

Ahead of Thorn a line drew itself vertically through the air, then from it unfolded the holographic image of a woman. Her hair and her skin were bone white, but her eyes black. She wore something diaphanous, barely concealing her naked body. Speaking, she revealed the red interior of her mouth.

‘Welcome to the NEJ,’ she said.

‘Hello, Aphran,’ Thorn replied to this recording of a dead woman, then added, ‘NEJ?’

‘The Not Entirely Jack,’ she replied, and grimaced.

Of course the AI aboard this ship would not be ‘entirely Jack’, for Jack was now tangled up with the absorbed personality of Aphran herself—one time Separatist and enemy of the Polity.

Cormac rubbed his wrist as he watched the screen. Celedon station seemed clear of Jain infestation, and now manoeuvred away from the sun. But as a precaution it would remain partially quarantined for some years to come. Earlier he had watched the thirteen evacuees towing themselves up the telescopic boarding tube extended from Jerusalem. One of the Golem in the group carried a lozenge-shaped block of crystal caged in a partial skin of black metal—the AI of the long-range spaceship, the Victoria. But Cormac’s attention focused on a woman clad in the distinctive blue overall of a runcible technician. By now the thirteen were through scanning and installed in an isolated area aboard this great ship. Shortly he would go and speak to one of them.

Through his gridlink he selected another of the row of sub-screens displaying along the bottom of the main one and enlarged it. This showed three of Celedon’s drones moving into an isolated area aboard Jerusalem—old independent drones leaving the station to now work for Jerusalem. But, there was nothing more for Cormac to learn by watching. Now he must do what he did best. He stood and scanned around the room provided for him. He needed no more than what lay inside his head really, so turned to the door.

Outside his cabin Cormac considered the phrase: Levels of contamination risk. Even after Jerusalem scanned his body down to the cellular level, removed Jain filaments and injected nanite counter-agents to clear up the residue, he remained a risk. So the recently installed corridor outside his cabin stayed empty, and linked his cabin only to the isolation area containing the evacuees.

‘Is she ready for me?’ he asked generally as he strode along.

‘She is, and you will find her here.’ Jerusalem transmitted a map directly to his gridlink. Now, in less than a second, he became fully familiar with the layout of the immediate area, as if accustomed to strolling here over a period of weeks. At the corridor end he turned right and came to an iris door. It opened for him onto a shimmer-shield. He pushed through this as easily as if stepping through blancmange. To his left a chair stood positioned before a chainglass screen which was optically polished so as to be only just visible. This intersected a table, on whose far side, on the other side of the screen, stood another chair. The woman, with obsidian skin, green eyes and cropped black hair, had exchanged her technician’s overall for a loose thigh-length toga of green silk, cinched at the waist with a belt of polished steel links. She stood as if waiting to be given permission to sit, but he knew that unlikely.

Chaline.

She had accompanied him while on the planet Samarkand after a runcible disaster there—her job being to set up a new runcible. An alien bioconstruct called Dragon, consisting of four conjoined and living spheres each a nearly a mile across, subsequently arrived there to create mayhem—or rather just one of its spheres arrived. Dragon aimed to murder one of its own makers who had come to Polity space to seek it out. The destruction of the original runcible had been Dragon’s attempt to prevent that ‘Maker’ leaving Samarkand. To avenge the deaths it caused on that small cold world, Cormac killed that lone Dragon sphere with a contra-terrene bomb, whereupon the Polity took on the task of ferrying the Maker back to its home civilization. He had not known Chaline volunteered for that mission to the Small Magellanic Cloud, but was unsurprised. She would have relished the challenges of setting up a runcible so far from the Polity. Of course, a further complication, now he intended to interrogate her, was that for a brief time they had been lovers.

‘So what the hell happened?’ he asked, sitting down.

Also sitting down, Chaline crossed her legs and smiled. ‘As ever direct. Hello, Ian, how are you? I’m fine by the way, if a little tired.’

Cormac sat back and smiled as well. In a mild voice he observed, ‘You know how I have little time for the social niceties. I have lived a hectic life since we last spoke. I’ve lost friends and nearly lost my life. Your sarcasm might be acceptable if we were here meeting as old friends and exchanging pleasantries. The truth is that neither of us ever contacted the other after Samarkand, and there was nothing to stop me thinking that I would not be seeing you again for the best part of a millennium.’

‘A point.’ Chaline nodded. ‘A definite point.’

Cormac sat forward. ‘This is not about points, as you well know.’

‘Then why am I here talking to you?’

‘I want to hear your story.’

‘Then why not just download it.’ Chaline tapped a finger against her temple. ‘You know I’m gridlinked. I already uploaded recordings of my every relevant memory to Jerusalem. We don’t need to have this conversation.’

Cormac replied, ‘I prefer to hear everything directly, while I’m looking into the face of the speaker. Cerebral uploads can be tampered with. This meeting, though crude, can reveal so much more to the right observer.’

‘You don’t trust me? This will be compared to what I uploaded?’

‘It’s not that.’ Cormac shook his head. ‘In situations as serious as this it’s all about information: quantities of information to be processed, assessed. Jerusalem, like any major AI, can create extensions to itself: subminds, telefactors,’ he shrugged, ‘whatever, but they remain only extensions. It likes those humans working for it to do their own thing: that way something unforeseen by itself might be revealed. It has agreed that I should interview you directly.’

‘Kind of it to allow you such a free rein, but I doubt anything will be revealed here that the AI does not already know.’

‘But something might, and that’s the point.’

Chaline snorted. ‘Shall we get on with this then?’

‘Jerusalem did inform me that a time-inconsistent runcible connection was made—something I’d never even heard of until that moment—but why the hostile contact protocol?’ He studied her keenly. ‘Obviously it was to defend us against Jain technology, but how did Celedon know that?’

Chaline grimaced. ‘We sent an information package through to Celedon. You can’t just open an out-network runcible connection without the receiving runcible AI agreeing to it. It’s a security protocol. Surely you were already told this?’

‘I am to hear the story direct from you. If I were to already know all the facts Jerusalem knows, I would only be asking you questions that are utterly predictable to it.’

‘Ah, so you must approach this without the constraints of foreknowledge, like a Stone Age man trying to operate a personal computer.’

‘Not quite the analogy I’d choose.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Now, I’ve been allowed access to all the logs concerning the preparation for the voyage. The ship was called the Victoria, after an ancient sailing ship in Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet—apparently the one first to circumnavigate Earth. Tell me, other than at Samarkand, did you have any contact with the Maker before boarding that ship?’

‘None at all, as that’s not my province. I build runcibles… Cormac, you know that.’ She grimaced and looked sideways towards the floor. ‘Of course that changed when we got underway. It changed for all of us.’

‘Tell me about that. Tell me about the Maker.’

The sun seemed hatched from some cosmic egg, with pieces of its own shell orbiting it, glimpsed briefly in thick clouds lit from within by that solar orb. The Cassius gas giant, in its own orbit close enough around the sun for molten iron to rain from its skies, supplied those clouds as carefully positioned antimatter blasts gradually demolished it. Some of those eggshell fragments were a 100,000 miles across. The matter converters at their edges were the size of small moons; sucking in the miasma of the gas giant’s destruction, slowly laying mile-thick composite laced with a balancing web of gravmotors and superconducting cables. But this, after a century, was just the start: a scattering of bricks on a building site, a pile of sand, a sack of cement. The project downtime was estimated at a million years, give or take a few hundred thousand. You could think in those terms when you were an AI and immortal. The humans and haimans working the project just comforted themselves with the thought that they were part of something… numinous.

From within the cowling of her half-carapace, situated within her own interface sphere, Orlandine observed the scene with her multitude of senses, processed the continuous feed of data through her numerous augmentations, then focused on one of those scattered pieces. This particular fragment of the nascent, fully enclosing Dyson sphere was diamond-shaped, 160,000 miles long and 100,000 wide. She analysed stress data as the first matter converter—something resembling a squat ocean liner with a mile-wide slot cut into its stern—detached. She focused in closer, observing the swarm of surrounding ships, the Pseidon poised like a titanic crab’s claw, collapsing scaffolds of pseudomatter winking out. A storm of ionization glowed between converter and fragment, trying to draw it back, but the converter’s massive drive engaged, throwing a ten-mile-long fusion flame above the plain of composite, and it pulled away.

‘Are we within parameters?’ asked Shoala.

‘We are,’ Orlandine replied.

Shoala tended to verbalize when nervous, but being haiman for only twenty years he was yet to fully accept what the term implied. Perhaps they were all like that, else they would not so often sever their link with their carapaces for spells of ‘human time’. None of them yet accepted they were truly haiman—a combination of human and AI—and still believed the carapaces just complex tools rather than integral parts of themselves.

‘Then this is it,’ Shoala said, ‘another complete section of the sphere. We should celebrate.’

Ah, human time again, thought Orlandine. ‘And how should we celebrate?’ she asked.

‘Loud music, alcohol, and drugs are traditional,’ Shoala replied.

Orlandine noted that their exchange was now on open com, and picked up on a subchannel that twenty-seven agreed with Shoala’s assessment, whilst only two demurred. She decided, as an overseer, she must attend the celebration.

‘The Feynman Lounge in two hours, then,’ she said, and disconnected. At least this interval would give her time to catch up on her news groups and messages. Initiating subpersona one, she gave it a watching brief over the newly completed fragment of the sphere, then turned her attention to her personal inboxes. Fourteen hundred messages awaited her attention. Subpersona two began whitling those down while she called up the various news items it had earlier starred for her attention. Rather than direct-load them to her central self, she speed-read them into a mid-term memory, and learnt much of interest.

ECS did not bother to conceal that the Polity was gearing up for a possible conflict. Such activity, of course, being impossible to conceal, what with some of the big stations and zero-G shipyards, mothballed after the Prador War, now up and running again. And even the most idiot analytical programs could detect the rise in production and the diversion of resources into military industries. But the nature of the threat itself remained unknown to most. Cover stories abounded about the possibility of some major action on the part of a loose alliance between Separatists and the alien entity Dragon, two of whose spheres remained unaccounted for. Orlandine guessed otherwise, and news stories she uploaded, concerning an out-polity world called Cull, further confirmed her conjecture.

A Dragon sphere had been captured inside a USER blockade (leaving now only one more unaccounted for), and the Separatist and biophysicist Skellor was killed. She had not even known he escaped the destruction of the Occam Razor. But the rest of the signs there—nothing actually being stated outright—allowed her to realize what lay underneath this particular cover story. The previous stories she studied all subtly related to it: the huge damage wrought on the space community Elysium, the news filtering back from an out-polity world called Masada. The subsequent ‘protective quarantine’ of all those same places. None of the stories sufficiently justified the scale of the AI reaction in each situation. Some other worrying element remained missing, and when she inserted that element, it all made sense. Skellor had clearly obtained possession of a Jain node and used it—hence the quarantine, hence the movement of big guns into each area, and hence events unfolding in the Polity right now.

In her position of Overseer of the Cassius project, Orlandine was allowed limited knowledge regarding Jain nodes. The initial source of this knowledge, however, still remained concealed from her. She knew these nodes contained compacted Jain nanotechnology that activated upon the touch of intelligent technical beings. She knew they then grew organic technology, and that the intelligent being affected became both host to and master of it — the level of each state dependent on other unknown factors. It was hideously dangerous because initiated thus by a host, this technology could proceed to access and control any other technology both physically and informationally, seizing control, wreaking destruction, growing and taking over anything or anyone else with which it came into contact. The AIs had told her this much, because Jain technology represented to the project one danger of which she must be aware. She was glad to have been made aware. Very glad.

Orlandine opened her eyes. It was all getting rather messy out there. ECS agents would be rattling around the Polity like disturbed hornets, and at some point they might find a trail leading to her, though she had not yet done anything seriously wrong.

She closed her eyes again and turned her attention to the messages coming through her subpersona’s filters. Many were messages from other haimans scattered around the Polity: some requesting information, some offering it—the usual constant exchanges. One message from her mother, back on Europa, concerned updates of family news and veiled queries about her work, her life. She had not actually seen the woman in thirty years. However, her mother remained persistent and proprietary because of her own choice way back to adapt Orlandine genetically to the newer haiman technologies. Orlandine felt herself to be mature enough not to reject such contact outright, but still assigned the message to a subpersona for reply. Then her attention fell on one message with no personal signature—strange that it managed to get through. After preparing due safeguards, she opened it and found just a single line of text:

‘They will learn about the gift.’—a secret admirer.

Just that, yet Orlandine began shaking, sweating. Did she think there were no consequences attached? Using carapace hardware, she brought her physical reaction under control. Thereafter she tried to analyse why her reaction had been so extreme. Shortly she realized why: she must act now, or not at all. Two courses of action stood open to her: confession and acceptance of consequences, or one other option. She flicked up a list of pros and cons, and left subpersona one to analyse them. The vague result depicted graphically, with much dependent on extraneous circumstances of which she could not be aware. She ran programs then to analyse an optimum ‘must do’ list for each suggested course of action. Studying those lists, she finally accepted that she had already made her decision; not through logical analysis but at a level more primeval than that. And it did not involve confession. It concerned what she was, a haiman, and why she originally chose to remain such.

She paused and cleared all information feeds into her mind, which in itself was not confined to that lump of organic matter in her skull, took a slow clear breath, then called up a memory of Shoala during human time and relived it. He was, on such occasions, a thin-faced individual with blond hair plaited down close to his skull, and a love of dressing in Jacobean fashion. Such attire — the lacy collars, earrings and embroidered jackets—concealed what he truly was. Naked, he revealed a tough wiry physique, interface plugs behind each ear and running like a line of glittering scales from the base of his skull down his spine, nutrient feed ports in his wrists and on either side of his belly, and structural support sockets for his carapace evident over his hip bones, at each rib down either side of his back, at his collar bones, and with a final pair concealed underneath his plaited hair.

By shedding her own clothing, Orlandine revealed her own carapace linkages to be mostly located in the same places, but of an entirely different design. Her body too was as wiry, but her skin purplish black and utterly hairless. The interfaces behind her ears and running down her spine were just closed slits positioned over s-con nanofilament plugs—their final synaptic connections inside her body being electrochemical rather than electroptic. She did not possess structural support sockets, rather nubs of bone protruded from the same points—keratin skinned—and her carapace limbs terminated in clamps that closed over these. Her nutrient feed ports were the same as his, but she did not need to use them so often as Shoala since, prior to a long session in a sphere, her body was capable of putting on fat very quickly, and of storing the required vitamins and minerals in her enlarged liver.

In both cases their sexual organs were standard format, and came together in the usual manner. But this was how haimans began sexual relationships. Cyber-linked orgasms and sensory amplification came later, when they trusted each other more, for that was personal.

Orlandine now skipped the virtual pornography, for she could already feel an anticipatory wetness around her suction catheter. And because she decided not to view this start of her relationship with Shoala, she realized she had already made her decision about that as well.

‘That’s a Prador spider thrall,’ said Shoala, after the sex together, pointing into the glass-fronted case. ‘What are the stones, though?’

Hidden in plain sight, thought Orlandine, as she sat up and swung her legs off the rumpled bed. She stood and walked over beside him, running her finger down the hard edges of the plugs in his spine.

She pointed at a wine-red sphere. ‘Star ruby. It’s natural—from Venus.’

‘The metallic ones?’

‘Ferro-axinite, but with weak monopole characteristics.’

‘And that?’

Orlandine peered into the case at the egg-shaped object he indicated. She decided this time to tell a half-truth—maybe later she would reveal all to him. ‘Something quite possibly Jain. There are what look like nanotech structures on the surface. You notice the cubic patterns? One day I’ll get round to investigating further.’

He turned to her with a raised eyebrow. ‘Is it listed?’

‘It is—and I’ve two years in which to commence study. If I haven’t got around to it by then, it must be passed on to Jerusalem—the AI whose purpose it is to investigate such things.’

One lie turning into a larger lie.

‘And the display case is secure?’

‘Yes, but this is low risk level. It was previously scanned and threat-assessed.’

And yet another lie.

Orlandine allowed this memory to fade, and then abruptly deleted it. Now the only copy of it lay in the organic part of her brain. After a pause she accessed her private files and studied the lists of other things concealed there. Many of them were products of her personal study of the Jain node, yet she had so far only uncovered two per cent of its secrets, and most of those related only to the physical nano technology on its surface. What she now wanted concerned the subversive programming aspects of that technology. The contents of one file would be enough, since the receiver of that file trusted her implicitly. Checking the sphere map she saw he had yet to shed his carapace and depart his interface sphere.

‘Shoala, I’m sending something over for you to take a look at.’ She copied the file into a message titled ‘Sexual Electronics Part VII’—it was their private joke.

She knew he received and opened it the moment the channels to his sphere began opening to her. Through a visual link she saw him lying back, his eyes closed. He began shivering. How far was she prepared to go? The viral attack isolated his sphere, but in a way that would not be picked up by the others. Now viral monads formed chains, deleting stored information, wrecking memories, trashing files and overwriting them time and again, so nothing could be recovered.

He opened his eyes. ‘Orlandine?’

Her throat tight, she squeezed tears from closed eyes. This was so wrong: virtual murder. A haiman encompassed more than the organic brain. It was that, true, but so much more running in crystal-etched atom processors.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘I… I cannot give this up. It’s too much… It’s what we all seek.’

Of course, the memories of that Jain node, and the lies she told about it, were from human time. It was not something wholly stored in crystal. It also rested between his ears.

He was mostly gone now, just the human part left. Orlandine blocked the signals he was desperately sending to detach himself from his carapace, and she herself began to isolate and control its systems. Into the positional map for its structural supports—the insectile legs of the louse-like carapace—she introduced a half-inch error, and cancelled the pressure-sensitive safeties. Now she stood on the brink and, stepping over it, there would be no return. What she had done thus far would be denned only as an assault, though a serious one for which, if caught, she would certainly lose her haiman status and be subject to adjustment. She sent the final instructions and forced herself to watch.

His carapace retracted its ‘legs’ from the sockets attached to his ribs, hip bones, and head, then repositioned them half an inch up, and reinserted them. No sockets lay waiting where they reinserted. The two on his head pressed against his skull above his ears, one slid off tearing up a flap of scalp, the other pushed his head sideways until it too slid off, ripping more skin. The eight ceramal legs, mis-positioned either side of his torso, penetrated between his ribs, puncturing his heart, lungs, liver. The two over his hips stabbed into his guts. He vomited blood, then coughed out more, his arms and legs thrashing. Arterial blood foamed down inside his carapace in steady pulses, until after a moment he hung limp, blood dripping to the floor.

Orlandine stared. Now, if they ever caught her, she would be mind-wiped. Best to make sure that never happened. The subversion program she had sent could destroy itself, but there would be something left: fragments that might easily be identified as a product of Jain technology. She used that same program to locate his back-up power supply—a head-sized U-charger that ran on an allotropic and isotopic liquid pumped through vanadium-silver grids. She inverted his external power supply and fed it all directly into that charger. The trick was to make sure it drew no more than his expected requirement, but that would be enough. Now less than an hour remained before the charger overloaded and his interface sphere became radioactive wreckage.

Time to go.