Neal Asher: Line War

The stars here were sparsely scattered, vague dots without sufficient light output to power up her interface sphere. However, she was being supplied light. Unfortunately it was lased, focused upon her sphere, and all but blinded her to its source.

Energy levels gradually increased and she managed to gain another percentage point of processing power. No, not Polity AIs, for in two hundred years they would have utterly understood and conquered Jain technology or been annihilated by it, so in either case would have no need to study her. Few others possessed the resources to find her, though it was possible that had changed in the intervening centuries. Running projections, calculations and her limited suite of programs, she could not find the answer, so did something utterly human: she took a wild guess.

‘Hello, Dragon,’ she sent.

‘Well, that’s a confirmation,’ came the immediate reply.

The laser now divided into numerous beams, each focusing precisely on individual collections of photovoltaic cells, allowing her to see the massive alien hanging out there in void.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Always a difficult question, that,’ Dragon replied. ‘What do you want, Orlandine? Think carefully before you answer now.’

Orlandine did not bother trying to calculate what might be the correct reply, what would be the best answer to ensure her survival in this situation. Even with her full processing power she probably could not have worked it out, for Dragon was as opaque as steel and even major Polity AIs struggled to divine the reasoning behind its words. She decided to just be truthful.

‘Well obviously I want to survive,’ she said.

‘That is plainly evident,’ Dragon replied. ‘But what do you want?’

Orlandine thought long and hard about that. What had driven her to hang on to a Jain node, to go as far as killing her lover to conceal that she possessed it? What had been her life’s aim before Erebus had killed her twin brothers?

‘I want to build something numinous.’

The intensity of the lasers abruptly increased, upping the power the voltaics were supplying her. Her processing capacity jumped up another five per cent. Obviously she had given a correct answer, though was it correct enough?

‘It is a long slow struggle to overcome the inertia of the Polity, of its humans and even its AIs,’ Dragon informed her, ‘without the kind of impetus Earth Central supplied by giving Erebus the means to control Jain technology and allowing it to attack — an attack you stopped in its tracks.’

‘Yes,’ said Orlandine. ‘Development being proportional to death toll has been a benchmark throughout human history.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Dragon agreed, continuing, ‘you of course understand that Fiddler Randal ensured Erebus would never attack again, but you are certainly unaware that Earth Central would never allow such an attack again.’

‘Why?’

‘The AI that controls the Polity is still called Earth Central, but it is not the same AI — it is a replacement with an understanding that such callous actions will result in it being destroyed just like its predecessor.’

‘Destroyed?’

‘Agent Ian Cormac learned of its perfidy…’

It took Orlandine only a moment to grasp that thread. Of course, with his decidedly unusual abilities, Cormac could be the ultimate assassin — barring USER disruption there was no defence he could not step around, and no human or AI he could not get to.

‘This is very interesting,’ she said, ‘but hardly explains why you came after me.’

‘Over the last two hundred years there have been great dangers, near-extinction events and many like the biophysicist Skellor. Quarantine and selective sterilization of many areas within the Polity has destroyed all the Jain technology there, however, Jain-tech remains a severe threat, one that the Polity, especially since it is as undeveloped as when you departed it, is not truly equipped to deal with. While the accretion disc swarms with Jain technology, even though it is now an interdict area and surrounded by massive defences and watch stations, the evil keeps escaping its box.’

Orlandine contemplated her incorrect prediction of the now. Of course, though AIs might perfectly understand Jain technology, that did not necessarily mean they were safe from it. Many AIs and humans perfectly understood the working of guns and bombs, but that had not stopped people dying as a result of their use.

‘The Polity will go the same way as the other races,’ she said. ‘Some future race might find just a few ruins.’

‘Just so, especially when the accretion disc’s sun fully ignites and blows a sandstorm of Jain nodes across the Polity.’

‘What do you want me to build?’ she asked.

‘You say that you want to build, Orlandine, but two hundred years ago you demonstrated a greater facility for destruction.’

‘I see.’

‘You are,’ said Dragon, ‘going to spend the rest of your existence annihilating a technology, tearing it up by its roots and utterly erasing it. In effect, the numinous thing you will build will be the future of the Polity. Do you agree?’

‘Did you think for one moment that I wouldn’t?’

The light grew brighter.