Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

‘I am always saddened by how ignorant your views are.’

‘Is that: my type , by any chance?’

‘Yes, Paul. Your type indeed, all you reactionary Advancers. Advanced genes have shown you how far you can extend human evolution and abilities; you’ve extended your lifespan, you’re virtually immune to disease, you’re naturally integrated with the unisphere, and a lot more besides; all those abilities have brought you half way towards us, yet still you refuse to make the final step. Why?’

‘Reactionary my arse. Biononics are not part of us, they are not derived from the genome and cannot be added to it, they are machines. They infect the cells of your body, that is why you have to be born with them to be truly Higher, they have to multiply in tandem with an embryo’s natural growth. Only then can they be incorporated by every cell. It’s impossible for every cell to be corrupted in an adult. That’s the difference, the crucial one. They are alien, imposed.’

‘Listen to yourself: Infect. Corrupt. Impose. Alien. How small your mind is, how closed.’

‘I am what I am. I like what I am. You will not take that away from me, nor my children. I have that right to defend myself. If what you are doing is an act of kindness and charity, then why did you arrive here the way you did? Why not be open about it? Every person on this planet can travel to the Central Commonwealth should they wish. Why are you here to spread your culture by deceit?’

‘The lies and prejudice you sustain leave us no choice. You’re condemning generations unborn to suffering they do not deserve. We can save them from you.’

Paul tilted his head to one side, and gave the angel a superior grin. ‘Listen to yourself,’ he said with soft mockery. ‘And the best thing is, I know that you’re in a minority among Highers. You disgust the majority as much as you do me.’

‘And yet they do not stop us.’

‘The price of true democracy. Now, are you going to tell me what I need to know?’

‘You know I cannot do that.’

‘Then this is going to get very unpleasant. For you.’

‘That’s something your conscience will have to carry.’

‘I know. But this isn’t the first time I’ve had to break one of you. And I don’t suppose you’ll be the last.’ Paul manoeuvred the cage into place at the centre of the hastily prepared interrogation room. Equipment modules began to clamp themselves across the outside of the restraining force fields. Eventually there was no sign of the angel beneath the dull metal segments. Paul gave Ziggy a weary glance. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

It took nine days to defeat the angel’s biononics. Nine days of negative energy spikes pounding away at the force field which its biononics produced. Nine days draining out its power reserves. Nine days denying it food, water, and oxygen. Nine days smothered inside a sarcophagus of machinery designed to wreck its body and all the Higher functions it was capable of generating. Nine days to send invasive filaments into its brain, preserving the neurones while its ordinary body cells were burned and destroyed one layer at a time. Nine days to kill it.

Eventually, the inert head was removed from the charred remains and artificially sustained on the cusp of life. The filaments linked Paul’s thoughts to the angel’s undead neurones, allowing him to access memories as if the angel were now a subsidiary brain, nothing more than a recalcitrant storage system grafted on to his own grey matter. Burrowing through the stranger’s thoughts was difficult, and not even modern biochemicals could sustain the neurones indefinitely. Decay gave them a very short timescale to work in. There was no neat index. Human sensory experiences were very different to electronic files, their triggers were unique, hard to guess. But Paul persevered, extracting the missing days since its arrival in confused fragments. Piecing together what had happened.

The angel had reached Kuhmo the day after it landed, renting a modest apartment on the arcology’s fifteenth floor. It merged easily into the lives of the town’s adolescents, signing on at the college, joining several clubs. For two days it studied potential targets.

Ziggy takes less than an hour to confirm the presence of biononics in every cell of the tiny foetus.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Paul grunts.

‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ Ziggy says. ‘It means what we did was right.’

Paul gives Imelda a guilty glance. The girl is crying silently, her face sticky with tears. Occasionally she lets out a small piteous snivel. Traumatized though she is, he still cannot grant her the comfort of oblivion. There is one question he still has to ask. ‘I don’t like being forced to do what’s right,’ Paul says. ‘Not this.’

‘Right,’ Ziggy says. He slides the dead foetus into a flash furnace, eradicating the last trace of the angel’s attempt to subvert their world.

Paul leans over Imelda. ‘One final thing,’ he says, ‘and this will all be over.’

Fear squeezes yet more tears from her eyes.

‘Did you know you were pregnant?’

The distraught girl opens her mouth and cries out in anguish. ‘Yes,’ she sobs.

Studying her face, Paul knows she is telling the truth. There will be no need to use drugs or other stronger methods of enquiry. ‘Thank you,’ he says. At last he activates the sleep inducer, and her weary eyes flutter shut.

‘We’ll need a replacement foetus,’ Paul says. ‘I can wipe tonight’s memories from her, but if we take away that entire week she spent screwing Erik and the angel she’s going to know something happened; that kind of gap can’t be covered up. A doctor will find our tampering.’

‘Not a problem,’ Ziggy says. ‘We’ve got both of them, I can fertilize one of her eggs and re-implant before morning. She’ll still have lover boy’s baby. There’ll be nothing for anybody to be suspicious about.’

‘Apart from their new friend vanishing.’

Ziggy shrugs. ‘Kids their age, it’s hardly unusual. They all have a dozen relationships a year, more if they can. Erik was desperate to bring more girls back to the angel’s apartment. You said he was always going on about it; he wanted to bed Imelda’s sister for a start. Horny little devil.’

‘Yeah,’ Paul says. ‘It’s about time Erik learned he has responsibilities.’

Erik Horovi was a perfect opportunity for the angel. Quite a good-looking lad, but still mildly introverted, which left him susceptible to any girl who befriended him. The angel shifted over into full female mode and spent half a day talking to Erik, who was first nervous, then delighted that such a beauty could show any interest in him. He screwed up his courage and asked her out for a date, trying desperately to disguise his surprise when she readily said yes.

The beer and mild aerosol narcotics legitimately available in Kuhmo’s bars had a big effect on Erik’s inexperienced bloodstream, making him pleasantly inebriated early on in the evening. He talked more easily than he really should have about the Viatak sisters, especially Imelda, the eldest, and how he’d worshipped her from afar. But his alluringly gorgeous new date didn’t seem to mind talking about another girl, she was, she said with an eager smile, very liberal when it came to her own sexuality. The haze of subtle chemicals in Erik’s head did nothing to dampen his arousal as they both smiled at each other knowingly.

Imelda met the angel the very next day; its memory of the event comprised a confused montage of faces flitting across the main quad in the college campus, bursts of conversations, scent of the nearby roseyew bushes that decorated the quad. The scent of flowers in full bloom was a strong one leading Paul onward through the memories until he was somehow walking through a city of soaring towers and delightful parks with vegetation that was sweetly reminiscent of Kuhmo’s public gardens. Silver-white regrav capsules slipped silently overhead as the pink-tinged sun shone at the apex of a cloudless purple sky. It was Teleba, one of the earliest planets to be settled, now nestling right at the heart of the Central Commonwealth. A world of Higher culture, where there were no urban areas decaying like the entirety of Kuhmo, no economic hardship or market fluctuations to perturb the population, no crime, for little was forbidden or withheld — except for the angel’s own purpose, but even that was open to its peers. It strode along a boulevard lined by semiorganic treesculptures whose prismatic ever-shifting leaves were modelled on New York’s unique ma-hon tree. Information and thoughts from the superdense planetary cybersphere whirled into its mind like particles of a multicoloured snowstorm to be modified or answered, its own questions and suggestions administered into the pervasive flow of knowledge, arguing its ideal and ethic to those who showed an interest. Agreement and disagreement swirled around it as it crossed a plaza with a great fountain in the centre. It felt invigorated by the debate, its own resolution hardening.