Iain Banks - The Algebraist

Eleven Voehn. Just like that. Eleven heavily armed and armoured special-forces warriors. With no injury to itself.

“No time. Mr Y’sul and Mr Taak wish to return to Ulubis.”

He heard his own name mentioned. Ah, that would be Fassin Taak the complete and utter failure, sent on a mission, engaged on a great quest, only to find it all just trickles away into the dust in the end, leaving him with nothing.

“And besides, maybe the Voehn will work out how to work the Velpin after all and ram us or something. I agree. Let’s go.”

Back to Ulubis? But why? He’d failed. He’d been adding up the days and months since his mission had started. The invasion had probably already happened by now, or was just about to happen. By the time he got back, empty-handed, after another few dozen days spent getting back to the wormhole in the Direaliete system, there was every chance it would all be over. He was an orphan in a damaged gascraft, with nothing to contribute, no treasure to gift.

Why not just stay here with the Ythyn, why not just die and be pinned up on the wall next to the other fool? Or why not get dropped off somewhere, anywhere else? Disappear, float away, get lost between the stars in the middle of nowhere or the middle of somewhere utterly different, perfectly far away, never to be heard of again by anyone who ever knew him… why not?

“That all right with you two?”

“Hmm?” Y’sul said, sticking some sort of bandage over the injuries to his left discus. “Oh, yes.”

Fassin logged the damage: one working arm, his visual senses degraded to about sixty per cent due to the whateverness of weird shit that Quercer Janath had unleashed in the chamber when it had killed the first three Voehn, and a variety of subtle but seemingly self-irreparable damage caused by the combination of pulse weapon and stun-flechette that the Voehn had used on them in the Velpin.

Of course, he told himself, he had to remember he was not the gascraft. He could relinquish it, be an ordinary walking-around human being again. There was always that. It seemed a slightly disturbing thought. He remembered the great waves, crashing.

“Fassin Taak, you wish to return to Ulubis too?” Quercer Janath asked.

“So who knows that you’re an AI?” Fassin said, ignoring the question. “Or two AIs?”

“Or mad?” Y’sul suggested.

The travelcaptain did a shrug-bob. “Not everybody”

“GC stuff. Hurrah!” the other half said, fiddling with some holo controls rayed out from a control stub shaped like a giant mushroom.

“Just munitions, or whole?”

“Whole.”

“How wholly splendid.”

“Absolutely.”

“I don’t understand,” Fassin said. “Was there a real Dweller called Quercer Janath and you replaced them, or—”

“One moment, Seer Taak,” the travelcaptain said. Then, in a slightly different and lower voice, said, “You got the ship?”

“I got the ship,” the other half said. “Talking to its infinitely confused little computer brain now. Thinks it’s dead. Believes the auto-destruct’s been and gone.”

“A common delusion.”

“Indeed.”

“I shall leave you to negotiate a return course with our ship shade.”

“Too kind.”

“Now then, Seer Taak,” one half of the travelcaptain said. “To answer your question: I’m not telling you.”

Y’sul made a snorting noise.

Fassin stared at the back of the AI\Dweller. “That’s not an answer.”

“Oh, it is an answer. It may not be an answer to your taste, but it is an answer.”

Fassin looked at Y’sul, who was using a screen turned to mirror to inspect his bandages. “Y’sul, do you believe Quercer Janath is an AI? Or two?”

“Always smelled a bit funny,” the Dweller said. “Put it down to eccentric personal hygiene, or the effects of truetwinning.” Y’sul made it obvious he was looking hard at the travelcaptain in the seat in front of them. “Frankly, madness is more likely, don’t you think? Usually is.”

“Yes, but—” Fassin began.

“Ahem!” Quercer Janath pulled back from the controls they had been hovering over, turned, rose through the gap in the top of the chair-spines and came slightly towards where Y’sul and Fassin were floating in the splayed-fingers shapes of their own Voehn seats. The thickset double-discus floated right in front of them. Fassin felt his skin crawl again, felt his throat close up and his heart thrash in his chest. Kill us; it’s going to kill us!

“Allow us,” Quercer Janath said, “to suggest that a real Dweller might not be able to do this.”

The thing that looked like a portly Dweller split slowly apart in front of them, carapace discuses twisting slightly and disconnecting from the central hub, arms and mantles and dozens and then hundreds of parts of the creature clicking and disconnecting and floating a fraction away from every other bit until Fassin and Y’sul were staring at what looked like an exploded three-dimensional model of a Dweller-shaped robot, contained within a gently hissing, blue-glowing field. Fassin pinged it with ultrasound, just to check that it wasn’t a holo. It wasn’t. It was all real.

Y’sul made an impressed whistling noise.

As fast as an explosion in reverse, Quercer Janath slam-slotted together again and was whole, turning back and dropping into the commander’s seat where it had been busy before.

“Okay,” Fassin said. “You’re not a Dweller.”

“Indeed we are not,” one of the AIs said. A wild blur of holos and glowing fields filled the volume in front of the creature as it checked through the Voehn ship’s systems, blistering quickly. “Now, if you really want, I’ll answer anything I can that you might want to ask. But you might not be able to take the memory back to your own people, in any form. What do you say? Eh, human?”

Fassin thought about this. “Oh, fuck it,” he said. “I accept.”

“What about me?” Y’sul asked.

“You can ask questions too,” Quercer Janath told him. “Though we’ll need your word that you won’t talk about this to people who don’t already know.”

“Given.”

The Dweller and the human in his gascraft esuit looked at each other. Y’sul shrugged.

“You’ve always been a double AI?” Fassin asked.

“No, we were two completely separate AIs, until the Machine War and the massacres.”

“Who knows you’re not a truetwin Dweller?”

“Outside of this ship, the Guild of Travelcaptains, and quite a lot of individual travelcaptains. One or two other Dwellers that we know of specifically. And any Dwellers of sufficient seniority who might wish to inquire.”

“Are there any other Dweller AIs?”

“Yes. I think something like sixteen per cent of travelcaptains are AIs, mostly double AIs impersonating truetwins. I was not being flippant when I said that it stops one from going mad.

Now that we are reduced from our earlier state of grace, being able to talk to just one other kindred soul makes all the difference between suicidal insanity and at least some semblance of fruitful utility.”

“The Dwellers have no problem with this?”

“None whatsoever.” The blur of control icons and holographs in front of the commander’s seat continued without pause as the AIs took in how the visual displays related to whatever they were pulling direct from the ship’s systems.

“Y’sul?” Fassin asked.

“What?”

“You don’t mind that AIs are impersonating Dwellers?”

“Why should I?”

“You don’t worry about AIs?”

“Worry about what about them?” Y’sul asked, confused as well as confusing.

“The Machine War barely affected the Dwellers, Fassin,” one of the AIs told him. “And AIs as a concept and a practical reality hold no terrors for them. Truly, they should hold none for you either, but I can’t expect you to believe that.”