Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

The voice was somehow different this time.

“I take it Spider speaks now.”

“Spider spoke then. Only Spider speaks now.”

Smith nodded and smiled to himself, then returned his attention to what he was being told.

“By shuttle?” he asked.

“By runcible,” said the drone.

“Tell me, what manner of vessel is this Hogue ?”

“A dreadnought.”

Smith felt a slight shiver of excitement. It would have to be one hell of a ship to warrant having a runcible aboard. He was about to ask what classification of dreadnought it was when the drone accelerated away with a sonic crack. After a pause he headed for his AGC, his desert boots kicking up plumes of the red sand. The sifter went on sifting.

“Initially she was your clone. That she is a she, is the least of her alterations,” said Chapra. The girl lay on the examination couch in medlab, her blue eyes wide open, her body motionless. She just stared at the ceiling.

“There’s the interface in her back,” said Abaron. “What else?”

“A lot. She wasn’t burned in there even though she was in water that is nearly at boiling point. She can withstand temperatures that would kill a normal human. Very tough. Also her brain is human, but there are sub-brains branching all down her spine. In that sense she is nearly an amalgam of Jain and human.”

“Normal DNA?”

“Not trihelical, no—”

Chapra paused. The girl was sitting upright.

“Not trihelical, no—” said the girl.

“She can speak,” said Abaron.

“She can speak,” said the girl. Only when she heard the girl repeating Abaron’s words did Chapra realise that she had used exactly his voice, as she had spoken with exactly Chapra’s voice before.

“She is learning, I think,” said Chapra, and listened as the girl repeated it. “We’ll have to give her the meanings of words. She’ll have to be taught.”

The girl repeated everything she said, then smiled. Chapra did not recollect smiling. She stepped up by the couch and took the girl’s hand, brushed stringy blond hair from her face.

“Come with me,” she said, and gave a gentle tug. The girl got off the couch. She did not repeat the words. Chapra felt a cold shiver. The girl had recognised the instruction. That was fast. That was AI fast.

“Let’s go and get you some clothes and something to eat.”

“Clothes and something to eat,” said the girl.

Chapra felt that shiver again. It wasn’t fear. It was awe. And her awe increased when in the eating area the girl learned how to use the eating utensils in moments. All the time Chapra and Abaron kept up a running dialogue, some of which the girl repeated and some of which she ignored.

“I believe the educative process can be speeded,” said Box, out of the blue. The girl tilted her head. “Hello,” she said.

The AI turned on the single screen in the eating area and ran the upper and lower case English alphabet, reciting them as they scrolled past. On the second run through the girl recited. Box did the same with the Chinese alphabet, but at twice the speed. The girl recited. The AI ran the Russian alphabet even faster. The girl recited. After that neither Chapra nor Abaron could tell what was being run as the screen was a liminal blur and Box’s and the girl’s voices a babble. Abruptly the screen flickered and divided and Box began to teach a word at a time: sea, seaweed, water, human, hand, eye. Chapra noted the AI presented huge amounts of information with each word. Beside seaweed, Box opened a frame to display many different kinds of seaweed, nanoscopic pictures of genetic helices, cladograms and other graphical information. She and Abaron sat back and watched in fascination. After an hour Judd came in with a touch console and ran its fibre-optic cable to a wall socket. He laid it in the girl’s lap. Shortly after that the screen became a liminal blur once again and the girl’s fingers were moving across the console faster than even Chapra’s. At that point the two humans left. For some it is a comfort to believe there are entities far superior to themselves. For some it is a comfort to know this. For others both views are merely depressing.

“What do you think it will want?” asked Abaron, as he poured vodka into Chapra’s glass.

“You mean after it has downloaded everything the girl has learnt?”

“Yeah.”

They were sprawled in form-fitting loungers in Abaron’s quarters. This was the first time Chapra had been in there. She noted that the only ornaments were old paper books arrayed on a shelf. A glance at one had shown it to be very old, dating from the twenty-first century before the Reliteration. The language in them was fragmented, almost impossible to understand.

“I don’t know. What would we want? What would you want if you were woken five million years hence by aliens?”

Abaron thought about that for a moment then said, “I would want to find out what happened to my own kind. I’d want to get in contact with them. But then that is me. We don’t know how the Jain associate. They may be rabid individualists.”

“Doubtful. You don’t achieve that level of technology by yourself.”

“Yeah? It might be old knowledge to them.”

More vodka poured into the two glasses. Chapra and Abaron were using an old human remedy for what ailed them.

By the time Chapra was washing down hangover pills with a pint of orange juice the girl was literate in eight Earth languages. She was now rifling Box’s libraries of information. Human limitations slowed her and she had gone through less than one percent of the information stored.

“Any specific interests?” asked Chapra as she stepped into the shower.

“She was taking an overview of all the information; dealing in generalities. She now probably has a general idea of human history, present attainments, and socio-political structures. She was avoiding the specific until a couple of hours ago,” said Box.

“What happened a couple of hours ago then?”

“She came across the first reference to the Jain and has since been concentrating on all the pertinent information. Seeing her interest I gave her access to the files recently transmitted.”

“Alex’s?”

“Eight per cent of them had as their source Alexion Smith.”

Chapra nodded to herself then hit the shower control across to cold. She swore as the blast of icy water hit her so soon after the hot and stood it for as long as she could. She never entirely placed her reliance in hangover cures. When she finally turned off the shower and dried herself with a rough towel from the dispenser, she felt thoroughly awake. She went through into the bedroom and gazed down at Abaron lying in a tangle of sheets, still apparently asleep. Her underwear she took up in one hand and her bodysuit she slung over one shoulder, then she padded naked from his quarters to her own. If that was the way he wanted it…

In her own quarters Chapra slung her old clothing into the cleaner, drew another bodysuit of the next primary colour on the spectrum and dressed. Once clad she touched her caste mark with its colour stick and went through its range of colours until it matched her clothing. She then decided against eating in her quarters and headed for the communal eating area. There she halted at the door to take in the scene. The girl sat before the screen with the touch console across her lap. To one side of her stood a hologram projector. Judd, Rhys and a third sexless and featureless Golem stood around her, slaves to her beck and call. On a table beside her was a plate of what Chapra recognised as high energy food and a beaker of vitamin drink. Here everything was secondary to the ingestion of information. Nothing could have driven that point home more thoroughly than the portable toilet beside the chair. She wondered if the girl had slept, or required sleep, then turned away and went back to eat in her quarters. Later, in the control room, Abaron smiled at her in a surprisingly mature manner. She had expected him to be embarrassed or resentful.