Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

She gave Greg a forlorn look.

He returned a sad smile. “Tell you, Julia; this, you, it’s all way out of my league. But the alien is right, if anyone’s to decide, it should be you. I’d rather it was you.”

“There is one thing I can add,” Rick said quietly. “A third option.”

“Go on.”

“Send it back.”

There were no NN cores to consult. And it had been a long time since she hadn’t had a second and third opinion on every topic under the sun. She carefully cancelled the waiting logic matrix in her processor node. Then there was just her, alone.

Julia made her choice.

It was a standard personality package, configured to establish control in whatever system it found itself operating in. She had to add a few modifications first.

When the squirt was complete it checked its own integrity, then began to re-format the command routines of the cellular array it was stored in. This time there was a difference; as well as altering the processing structure’s programs, it could change the actual physical nature of the network itself. Protean cells elongated and joined together, forming a complex new topology, their membranes’ permeability altered.

Julia’s mentality unfolded into the new neural network. Satisfied she was now in total control of a clump of cells over a metre in diameter she sent a go code to her flesh-and-blood self.

Memories streamed in, of Peterborough and Wilholm and Event Horizon and the children and Royan; regressing, Grandpa alive, school in Switzerland, Mother and Father-she hadn’t thought of them for over a decade, childhood in the desert sandstone warrens. Not just the visual image, but sounds, tastes, smells, textures, raw emotion. She grew from the present back down into the past. Complete.

Her sensorium was different, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees spherical; optical reception extending from infrared up into high ultra violet; vibration acceptance was so sensitive she could actually hear the big mining machines cutting out New London’s second chamber; the magnetic and electromagnetic spectrums were strange; as was the chemical reception. She began to modify cells and compose filter programs. Chemical reception was easy to translate into smell, once she’d tagged the molecular formulae. Magnetic and electromagnetic she translated into black and white, seeing the gigaconductor cell in Greg’s Tokarev laser shining brightly. It was the all-directions-at-once panorama which gave her the most trouble; she began to adapt her sensory reception and interpretation routines, enlarging the associated neurone structure. Her attention stopped flicking round nervously, and started to accommodate the whole view.

“Have you confirmed your operability?” the Hexaëmeron asked.

“Yes.”

“Very well, Julia Evans, I defer to your authority. This idea goes against every instinct I possess. I am the micro, destined to timeless embrace of the cosmos. This brash voyage goes against nature. Gambling all on one risky flight. What strange, hasty creatures you are.”

“It’s just youthful enthusiasm, the inability to resist challenge. We dream, that is our flaw, and our beauty. Your strength is physical, ours lies in conviction of self.”

She felt the Hexaëmeron’s consciousness fading into dormancy. Her control routines extended out through the remaining cells as it retreated.

“Royan, darling? I’m here with you now.” She said it without a hint of trepidation; the emotion mechanism still existed, but she had superseded it, becoming the Julia Evans everyone always thought she was. A minor pulse of amusement trickled through the prohibition, and she sent a smile image at him.

“You sure, Snowy?” The tone was cautiously welcome, sceptical rather than contemptuous.

“Yes. Watch.”

Cells flowed. A pseudopod distended from her ovoid shell, the tip flattening out. Fingers and a thumb appeared, a human hand took its final shape and gave the three people in the chamber a thumbs-up.

“All right, Snowy, I believe you.”

She worked in tandem with Royan to transform a section of the cells he commanded into a neural network.

“Like old times, Snowy. You and me, working like this.”

“Yeah, old times.”

Her internal perception tracked the neural network forming. When it was complete Royan squirted in his personality package.

“Are you operational?” she asked the mini-entity.

“Yeah.”

Royan began to download his memories.

Julia resumed control of the cells Royan had converted into his life-support system, and began to digest the remains of his ruined body. She left the brain until last, a closed-circuit loop supplying it with re-oxygenated blood from a small haematopoiesis saccate.

“Ready?” Julia asked.

“Memories intact,” Royan said. “More fun to travel than arrive, so let’s go go go.”

The protean cells broke his brain apart, gorging on the raw chemicals they released, reproducing as they went. Julia felt round inside herself until there were no more intrusions; then opened a channel to the terminal in the chamber. “You’d better leave now,” she told Greg, Rick, and her flesh-and-blood self. “Go down into the cave where you first met the drone, and wait until I’ve gone past. There may be tekmercs about.”

She watched her flesh-and-blood self quirk her lips in silent acknowledgement. Some of the tiredness seemed to have gone. She was glad, body and mind had been subjected to far too much pressure over the last three days. Almost maxed out.

“It worked, then,” Greg said, his voice had the sluggishness she knew came from a neurohormone hangover.

“Yes,” she said. “The Hexaëmeron won’t be coming back.”

“Bon voyage, the pair of you.”

Julia began to send tendrils of herself out into the floor, breaking down and digesting the disseminator plant. Watched Rick, Greg, and her flesh-and-blood self scurry down the connecting passage as a circular bulge rippled out from her base.

The tendrils’ inner core of protean cells absorbed the chemicals that the outer layer had dissolved and processed, fissioning rapidly. Individual tendrils met and merged into a single consumptive wavefront. It reached the chamber walls and rose up hungrily.

Once the last of the chamber’s rubbery strings had been converted, Julia pulled the skirt of protean cells back, and began to alter her shape, becoming more pliable. She headed towards the passage, her movement a combination of rolling and slithering. When she reached the entrance she extended a ring of herself that melded with the translucent walls, and began to digest them. She sent a second ring of cells swelling fluidly over the top of the first, then a third. Her main bulk moved forwards, soaking up the engorged rings as she went. More rings were formed and sent on ahead. Specially formatted suckers fastened on to the rock beneath the disseminator plant, and began to leach out various minerals the cells needed.

By the time she squeezed out of the end of the passage she was a globe over seven metres in diameter, almost touching the hemispherical chamber’s apex. Her weight crushed the composite cargo pods into blade-like splinters. She covered the whole chamber in a digestive layer, and moved on into the next passage, pushing a tube of cells ahead of herself as she followed the spiral down. The titanium nuggets in the tumours were ingested and pulverized, the motes held in suspension. She would need all the metal she could get later.

In the bottom chamber she waited for the new cells to catch up with her, at the same time sending fresh tendrils out into the four remaining passages to suck in still more organic matter.

She could perceive Greg and her flesh-and-blood self standing at the far end of the passage, consternation on their faces. The three crash team hardliners had taken their Konica rip guns from their armour suits’ waist clips.