Neal Asher: Polity Agent

‘Observe,’ said Jerusalem, the moment Celedon reinstated coms.

From the point of impact a pattern of hexagons began to spread. It held definition for a while, then began to break apart, and finally disappeared. Celedon surveyed the damage to its station, its body, then ignited one of the remaining rim engines to pull itself away from the sun. The damage was severe, but a mere mote compared to what must have happened at the other runcible involved.

‘In eight hundred and thirty years,’ Jerusalem said, ‘and a hundred and fifty thousand light years away from here, there will be an explosion of such magnitude it will cause a chain reaction between close suns. The Small Magellanic Cloud will probably be sterilized of all life, and probably most other forms of self-organizing matter, as was the intention.’

‘Jain technology.’

‘Yes, precisely. Of course we will not see the light for a very long time.’

Cormac kept his eyes closed and remained very still, expecting something to start hurting at any moment. When no pain became evident, he opened his eyes to observe the tangle of limbs and implements on the underside of a pedestal autodoc, just as it swung aside. The last he remembered, Jain technology had been crawling around inside his head, busy rewiring it, then the rest of his body had caught up with that damage by experiencing ten Gs of acceleration.

Right …

He licked his lips and tried to work up some saliva in his dry mouth, then announced, ‘The King of Hearts AI sends its regards. It wanted you to know it did not acquire any nasty Jain technology, so there’s no reason for you to chase after it and blast it into component atoms.’

‘That was remarkably quick,’ replied a voice just hinting at the massive intellect behind it.

‘That you, Jerusalem?’ enquired Cormac.

‘You already guessed that,’ replied the disembodied voice of the AI that controlled the titanic research vessel Jerusalem.

Underneath Cormac, the surgical table slowly folded upright, moving him into a sitting position. Peering down at himself he saw that he wore a skin-tight garment, his hands similarly clad, and the pressure around his face and head confirming that no part of his body remained uncovered.

‘Very strange pyjamas,’ he observed.

‘Cell welding, while wonderfully efficient, does have its limitations. Also, your spacesuit was breached and you lost nearly half your skin to vacuum freezing. This garment assists regrowth while allowing you to move about unhindered. It is my own invention.’

Cormac glanced around. He lay in a typical ship’s medbay. The pedestal-mounted autodoc had now retreated into an alcove beside a bench extending from one wall, which held a nanoscope, a chain-glass containment cylinder, genetic scanner and nanofactory unit. By the bench stood a chair on which lay a familiar design of note-screen.

‘Where’s Mika?’

‘Sleeping.’

Cormac nodded and swung his legs off the surgical table. Now moving, he could feel the wrongness. He felt tired and weak, parts of him began to ache, and something felt odd about… everything.

‘What did you need to do to me?’

‘All relevant information is available to you via ship server. Why don’t you find out from there?’

A test perhaps? Cormac closed his eyes and sought mental connections via his gridlink. In something almost like a third eye he observed the optical cues for connection, but felt no actual linkage.

‘I’m offline.’

‘Yes, the damage to your brain was severe, and to remove Jain filaments from it and run a counteragent through would inevitably cause even more damage. I downloaded you, then reloaded you after I finished making repairs. Your link, because of the possibility it contained Jain informational viruses or worms, I completely wiped and reformatted. I similarly screened all your memories and thought structures.’

Cormac felt a clamminess.

Am I really Cormac now?

But there seemed no particular advantage in asking that question. Using his third-eye blink reflex, he cued the various channels of his link in turn and felt them reinstate. Now he could download data in just about any form to his link, either to view in his visual cortex, or so that it became part of memory—the mental component of physical skills, languages, the recorded experiences of others. In the link itself he possessed the facility to create programs: perceptile, search, analysis, logic trees… the list was only limited by his imagination, and his imagination need not be limited while he could link to so many sources of knowledge and experience within the human Polity. He opened a skeletal search program, altered its parameters to suit his requirements, and transmitted it to the nearest receiver. It came back with a report he scrolled up in his visual cortex. The report itself was overly technical and detailed, so he ran it through a filter to provide him with the gist:

Spinal reconnection in 2 lumbar regions; extensive bone welding of 116 fractures; the removal of 1 kidney, two thirds of the liver, 2 yards of intestine, 350 ounces of cerebral tissue; extensive cell welding in all areas; currently undergoing nanocyte repair and genetic reversion regrowth…