Neal Asher: Prador Moon

Communication faded away from him, the grey he viewed reflected in his mind. Word and sensation blurred and lost meaning. Time passed. It does. A lurching twist snapped him out of reverie into the black and glitter of realspace.

" What's that ?" he wondered.

" The shipyard—our destination ."

The Occam Razor drew in towards the spaceborne construction site, but being too massive to dock, held off a hundred kilometres. The structure was kilometres long, scaffolds spearing out into space, structural members like iron bones. Steely dots zipping around close seemed like flies around a corpse, but the shipyard was visibly growing under their ministrations. With childlike curiosity John Varence watched vessels smaller than himself heading over, docking themselves to his body, though he only vaguely recollected allowing that. Internally he watched those wetware creatures called humans coming aboard, and wondered what purpose they might serve.

" I will be gentle ," said the other.

John did not comprehend why he felt suddenly numb and that numbness seemed to be increasing. It was very strange, but he could no longer feel the fusion engines. The confusion did not last, within a minute he did not know what fusion engines were. The U-space drive was easier to forget, for he did not understand it anyway. He felt all his other senses somehow receding to a point inside his huge body—discomforts, a nagging ache and slight nausea localized there. Sensors, confined to a narrow part of the emitted spectrum between infrared and ultraviolet, came online within his larger body's bridge pod. He did not like them very much for they seemed dim and gummy, organic, even. Vacuum no longer touched his hull, rather air blew cool over febrile skin. No, he did not like this at all. Vision through his other senses remained and he forced a return to them, spying blackness again and vaguely familiar points of light.

" What are they ?" he asked.

" Stars, John ," his other half replied.

All faded now to that central point as a solid scaffold of AI programming slowly withdrew. John shrank down into a shrivelled body on a throne, tugged and pushed slightly as optical and electrical connections detached and folded away.

" Rest now ," said the other.

John did not hear, already fading to a smaller and much stiller point in his ancient skull.

So they took it away, and were married next day—

Newsnet services she auged into carried the same incredible comic-book stories. That all the newsnets seemed to be carrying the same story was probably one indication of the fault. Seated in her apartment, with her travel bag at her feet, Moria felt a clammy sweat grow on her body. The images she saw were just too cartoonish, too ridiculous, so the only explanation seemed to be that her aug was somehow scrambling up the newsnets with a fantasy virtuality. The programming of such a virtuality would certainly iron out inconsistencies and give the gloss of veracity to what she saw. She needed to do something about this before her brain ended up scrambled too.

MESSAGE MODE >

RECIPIENT > AUBRON SYLAC

MESSAGE > I NEED AN APPOINTMENT AT ONCE. MY AUG IS PRESENTING A FANTASY VIRTUALITY ON NEWSNET CHANNELS.

ATTACH > NIL

After a short delay she received the reply RECIPIENT NOT FOUND which seemed to confirm that her aug was malfunctioning. But what to do? She was due on a shuttle flight back to the Trajeen runcible complex in two hours. Should she just head over to Sylac's surgery first and hope he could do something in the limited time? No, she would have to try to put this right herself.

OFFLINE NETLINK>

WARNING: SERVER STORED INFORMATION WILL BE LOST.

WARNING: COMLINK BOOT CODES—

With a grimace Moria input her instruction: OFFLINE NETLINK> CONFIRM.

It seemed, suddenly, as if a silence fell inside her head.

MEMSTORE> DELETE

CONFIRM?> YES

YOU ARE COMPLETELY SURE YOU WANT TO DELETE YOUR MEMSTORE?> YES!

REPEAT MEMSTORE DELETE X3> DELETE DELETE DELETE

CONFIRM>YES!!!

MEMSTORE DELETED.

That took care of anything nasty she might have picked up via her netlink, which was not unheard of.

DIAGNOSTIC RUN FROM PARTITION SIX, THEN REPEAT IN DESCENDING ORDER FROM EACH OTHER PARTITION.

DIAGNOSTIC RUNNING—ONE HOUR TO COMPLETION.

Moria sighed—this at least would track down any bugs in the aug, unless of course there was also something wrong with the diagnostic program. The time delay also wiped the idea of going to visit Sylac before heading for her shuttle, since he would be unable to do anything while the diagnostic ran. Now she had an hour to kill before driving to the shuttle port, which was only ten minutes away. She stood and walked into her kitchenette, drew off a cup of tea from her hot drinks dispenser—obstinately ignoring the bottle of greenwine open on the counter—then returned to her living room.

Leaning back in her chair she felt it adjust for her comfort. But comfort did not seem enough for she immediately began to miss her aug. Sipping her tea she looked around for something to occupy her mind, and her gaze fell on the remote control for the holoprojector lying on the chair's side table. Eyeing it she noticed the dust on its controls, for since Sylac installed her aug she had felt no need to use her holoprojector. Picking up the remote, and observing the imprint it left on the table, she frowned, and punched in the number for the building submind.

Hovering just a couple of metres from her face, a black hole appeared. Out of this scuttled a large rat to squat upright in midair. "Moria Salem?" it enquired, tilting its head. Why the building's submind chose to represent itself as such had always been a matter of debate among some of the residents. Moria did not think there was much to discuss—like many AIs it simply possessed a distorted sense of humour.

"My cleanbot doesn't seem to be doing its job," she told it.

The rat looked over to one side as if inspecting something, then replied, "That's because you recently transferred the controls of your apartment from this unit to your new aug, and failed to input instructions." The rat shrugged. "I could have done something about this, but we AIs much prefer it when humans try to use their own brains."

"Er… thank you," said Moria, "that's all."

The rat turned and scurried back into its hole and the hole snapped shut. Moria grimaced, since there was nothing she could do now while the diagnostic ran. Instead she punched in the number for the newsnet service she used before obtaining her aug, and recently used via her aug. Time now to find out what was really going on in the world.

The huge multi-legged monster rose out of the floor before her, claws spread and mandibles grating over her head. Black holographic saliva dribbled down upon her body.

"Aaah!" Moria flung herself from her chair and was backing away on her knees before she started to feel really foolish.

"This creature, this Vortex," the announcer was saying, "could be a different species, larger kin, or perhaps just a differently developed version of the same species as is a soldier ant in a nest of ants."

Moria tuned the rest out because she had already heard it via her aug. In the subsequent hour she learnt from simple screen links to friends and associates and by scanning all the newsnet services that no, her aug had not malfunctioned, and yes, big exoskeletal hostile aliens were attacking the Polity, and the fuckers ate people.

The antishock drugs and analgesics were beginning to wear off, but Jebel did not ask for any more since there were others in this medical unit with a greater need, and he wanted his mind to remain clear while auged into the station network, and while he watched through its camera eyes.