Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

At the poles of the world the temperature was the same as at Earth’s equator, but at two atmospheres pressure. At its equator the environment was about as inviting to a human as the inside of a pressure cooker. The place swarmed with life much like that in the isolation chamber, but with one important exception. There were great and complex ecosystems here, but no outpost of any star-spanning civilization, and no discernible remnants, but then little might survive five million years in such hostile conditions. There were no Jain, not a trace.

Very cool and very factual Abaron said, “There are no toxins in me, there is no disgusting alien embryo waiting to burst out of my stomach in a messy spray. There is, in fact, nothing alien to my body inside me barring the two doughnuts I ate half an hour ago and the cup of coffee I washed them down with.” Chapra smiled. The attack, rather than feeding his fear, had destroyed it. Irrational fear could never long survive harsh realities.

“What happened then?”

“This.” Abaron peeled back the dressing on his arm to show the wound. A perfect circle of skin a centimetre wide and few millimetres deep had been excised from his biceps.

“What do you think?”

“I think the Jain took a sample. It is as curious about us as we are about it. Only its curiosity must have a greater urgency because it is entirely dependent on us and has no idea what we might want of it.”

“What do you think it might learn?”

“Everything it is possible to learn from my DNA. Being able to build and alter DNA to the extent it does it must be able to decode it down to the atomic level.”

“I think you’re right,” said Chapra. She thought a lot else but wasn’t going to spoil his moment.

“Box,” said Abaron. “What happened after the… worm… bit me?”

“It swam very fast to the inside of the Jain’s machine. The Jain is now wrapped around its machine. There is much nanomechanical activity.”

“There,” said Abaron to Chapra.

Just then the door to the medlab hissed open and in walked the Jain’s probe beast, closely followed by Rhys.

Box said, “There was an ultrasound communication between this probe and the Jain six minutes after the sample was taken from your arm.”

The beast squatted on the floor, facing towards Abaron, who sat on the edge of the examination couch.

“It is scanning you,” said Box, then, “Your graft is ready.”

“Perhaps it has come to see this,” said Abaron as he lay back on the couch. The doctor, which was a close relation to the PSR but deliberately less threatening in appearance, gripped Abaron’s arm above and below his biceps. What might be described as its head came down against the muscle. It quickly gobbled up the dressing. In a glare of sterilizing ultraviolet it pressed a circle of skin into place with a flattened white egg on the end of one many jointed arm. The egg had the words ‘Cell Weld Inc.’ printed on it. It hummed mildly. The probe beast got up, turned, and left the room.

“It’s satisfied you’re all right,” said Chapra.

When Abaron had nothing to say to that Box said, “You may be interested to know that prior to coming here the probe beast, as you call it, was in an observation blister, looking at the stars, and seeing our arrival at system DF678.98 and the world with the name Haden. It is now returning to the isolation chamber.”

“We have to see this,” said Abaron. He inspected his arm as the doctor took the cell welder from his arm. There was no sign of a wound.

“The world?” asked Chapra.

“No, what the Jain does with its probe beast.”

When the doctor released him Abaron headed quickly for the door. Chapra followed calmly after, faintly smiling. She let Abaron get ahead of her; out of hearing.

“Where’s the xenophobe?” she asked.

“There is nothing more fearful than fear itself,” said Box.

“Yet you would have thought the opposite effect.”

“Human psychology. Go figure,” said Box.

Rhys opened the lock doors for the probe creature. It walked out along the jetty and dropped into the water. Chapra cleared the projection of surface refractivity and they watched the beast walk across the bottom to its creator. The Jain, still clinging around its machine, turned its strange head, then after a moment let go. It coiled out a triangular-section tentacle and plugged into the probe beast’s back.

“It’s down-loading it, reading it,” said Abaron.

Chapra was glad to hear fascination in his voice rather than the suppressed horror she had heard before. They sat watching. Chapra expected nothing more than the tentacle to detach in a few minutes, perhaps in a few hours. She did not expect what happened next. The Jain convulsed, its tentacle cracking like a whip. It broke the probe beast on the chamber floor and let it go. Leaking green blood and fizzing like sherbet the beast floated to the surface. The Jain convulsed again and coiled hedgehog fashion, all its tentacles, its head, its arm, and its tail hidden away. Nothing but a crescent of ribbed body, sinking to the bottom.

“Hell, what happened?” wondered Chapra, her hands blurring over her touch console. Abaron just studied the projection, his hands folded in his lap. “It just discovered how long it was in stasis I reckon.”

Chapra gaped at him. That had not even occurred to her.

The Jain remained coiled for twenty hours and when it finally uncoiled it swam around aimlessly for another eight hours. Chapra and Abaron used the time profitably, putting a probe down into the seas of Haden and discovering many of the same plants and creatures that now flourished in the isolation chamber.

“This certainly could be the Jain home world,” said Chapra.

“Any world could be the Jain home world,” said Abaron.

Chapra waited for an explanation.

“Our Jain has ably demonstrated how it can re-engineer any life form, and how it can build life forms from component atoms. How much has it re-engineered itself? Haven’t we done the same? There are humans with gills and fins, humans with compound eyes and exoskeletons, humans who can live in ten gees.”

“Very true,” said Chapra. “We might even be Jain.”

That shut Abaron up for a long time. When he finally spoke again it was to say, “We have to learn to speak to it now. We have to learn its language.”

Chapra was in thorough agreement, but even she was not sure where to start. The Jain might speak using ultrasound, pheromones, molecular messages, and it might not speak at all. Its language might have billions of words, no words, ten words, or it might ignore them because it felt depressed. Scan of its wide neural structure showed a hugely complex organ in its skull, a spinal column almost as wide as that skull, and from which branched nerve channels as thick as a human arm, leading to sub-brains in the torso that were easily as complex as human brains, then leading to each of its eight tentacles, eight interfaces.

“It’s back at its machine,” observed Abaron. “Will it even listen when it’s there?” They watched it at work, tentacles moving here and there across the surface of its machine.

“The ends of those tentacles are interfaces and they are crammed with microscopic manipulators,” said Chapra. “There must be mating plugs and microscopic controls all over the surface of that thing.”

“The entire surface is perhaps one control system,” said Abaron.

“The machine is expanding,” Box abruptly told them. Chapra reached for her touch controls then realised she did not have to bother; they could see it now. The mouths of the tubes had been approximately forty centimetres wide and the entire structure two metres across. It was visibly growing now, in pulses.