Neal Asher - The Gabble

“Look, you piece of — “

Henara appeared before me, her legs chopped off at the knees by the coffee table.

“Sorry, I thought you might be Grable.”

She looked at me quizzically and I explained the previous call to her. She smiled. I asked her what she wanted.

“Paul has his basic personality, his Cybercorp programming and a few giga of short term memory. His long term memory has actually been removed.”

“I told you that,” I said, confused.

“No, you misunderstand me. Until Golem fifteen compartmentalisation was used, not wholemind programming. The LTM unit has been physically removed. Probably at about the same time as the missing syntheflesh and skin.

“Oh,” I said brilliantly.

“I would of course like you to acquire this LTM should it become available…”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I told her.

Of course she was far too polite to bring my integrity into doubt. As she flickered out of existence I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I studied the bracelet. Could this be it? Seemed unlikely. I decided to check.

My hand scanner revealed a complexity it could not analyse. I used my system scanner and paid for time on one of the runcible subminds. It took a few minutes, but I soon received the analysis, along with the bill. The bracelet went under the name of a four seasons changer. It was a twenty-seventh century adaptogen laboratory. Not particularly old, but quite valuable if you can find the right buyer, and the right buyer was almost always an adapted human to beyond the fifth generation. I wondered, as always with the kind of morbid fascination that comes with the discovery of such an artefact, if it still worked. I was not to know then that one day the answer to that question was something on which my survival might depend.

Three solstan days later I had expert advice on the changer and the advice was, “Use this at considerable risk, the construction is far too complex and old for any kind of study that would not involve deconstruction, and why the hell do you want to know?” I was of course hoping for documented proof of working order as this would double the value of the bracelet. There are experts and there are experts.

On the same day as I received this piece of negative equity I picked up the mollusc shell and listened for the sound of the sea — I hadn’t identified the shell yet. There was no sound and feeling hard put upon I shook it in irritation as one would shake any other piece of malfunctioning hardware. A cuboid crystal with silver circuitry etched in three faces like strange glyphs, fell out and cracked the top of my coffee table. Okay, it wasn’t that valuable, but I was attached to it, which was probably why I was pissed off enough to download a copy of what turned out to be Paul’s LTM to sell to Grable before passing the original on to Henara. As was to be my luck at that time I discovered I could not find Grable anywhere. I ended up studying the memory myself, determined to make a decent profit somehow that week.

It took me a couple of days to run through the last mission. Much of my time was spent fast forwarding by hand or by computer instruction ie stop when something interesting occurs. It seemed to me that these Golem spent most of their time standing about waiting to be given orders. The tale I eventually managed to piece together was one of incompetence and failure.

The PSC had tried to establish a base on a planet called Scylla before something called the world-tide occurred. This was to be done by a mixed crew of hired labourers and androids.

The whole thing was severely disorganised. The androids weren’t complex enough and the workers not clever enough to sort out the discrepancy. There were disputes about pay and an attempt, considering the time limit on the project, at what can only be described as extortion. I saw the base half-finished and a belated attempt at evacuation. Some of the humans got away, others boxed the androids and attempted to seal the base against the world-tide. Paul was not boxed because he was almost as useful as the humans. He was a very new design. The rest was like some Atlantean disaster; explosions, water, sparks, floating bodies. When Paul’s memory greyed into auto shutdown — after a long period of time recording the marine life feeding — I realised what Grable had been after. The androids. They were Golem twos, the first workable androids to be sold by Cybercorp — there had only been one Golem one — and if still there they were worth disgustingly huge amounts of money. I wondered then where he got his information from and why Paul’s LTM had ended up in that shell. But even as I wondered I packed the equipment I would need and sought the required permissions for its transportation. By the next solstan day I had booked myself for transmission to Scylla’s runcible, for while running through Paul’s memory I had seen a map and a map reference. I knew where the base was.

The crate is hidden. The world-tide is coming. And there are only two things that stand between me and death. My Tenkian autogun keeps the lice away, but there is no sensible way it can keep me from drowning. There is another way though. Even as I record this I pull up my sleeve and look at the bracelet clasped around my wrist. The jewels seemed to have taken on a sinister glitter.

Jane was not happy about my sudden business trip, but I managed to bring her round, as I normally do. After spending one pleasant night with her I got up early and made my way to the transmission station. The runcible transmission, the longest and most unbelievable part of any interstellar journey, took no time at all. I don’t even try to pretend to know anything about the technology that can shove me through an underspace non-distance and drag me out a hundred or more light years away, and in that I am more honest than most. Skaidon technology; brought about by the linking of a human mind and AI. It’s impossible to understand unless you are both a genius, like Skaidon himself, and plugged in. In my life I have been neither and am unlikely to be.

One moment I was there standing in the containment sphere as before the altar to Minotaur; silver bull’s horns on a dais of black glass, horns holding the shimmering disk of the cusp, then one step after I am one hundred and twenty-three light years away on the other side of another cusp in an identical sphere: standardization across the galaxy — as awesome as it is depressing.

Beyond the standard one G gravity in the containment sphere the gravity was rather less, but being a fairly well-seasoned traveller I soon adjusted. A wide concourse led from the row of containment spheres to a huge embarkation lounge, this being because I had arrived on the moonlet Carla; the closest companion to Scylla, which was too unstable for siting a runcible. At the opposite end of the lounge I could see a delta-wing shuttle waiting to heave itself into a violet sky and was surprised to see how few people there were waiting for the flight. I made my way to an information console and called up one of the runcible subminds.

“Name?”

“Jason Chel.”

“What information do you require, Jason Chel?”

“There are certain packages under my code and I wish to pick them — “

“The packages have arrived at cargo runcible four. There are AG drays available at all cargo runcibles.”

I regarded the console with a degree of suspicion. It had been very quick for a submind.

Perhaps it was Carla AI taking an interest itself. The contents of one of my packages were somewhat unusual.

“Er, could you also tell me when the next shuttle is leaving for Scylla?”

“There will not be another shuttle to Scylla for two hundred solstan days.”

“What?”

“There will not be another shuttle — “