Neal Asher - Brass Man

‘We can remain conscious at the present level of function for about ten years then go into permanent storage, or we can go into permanent storage right now for twenty years.’

‘So long. So little.’

‘The limit of the microtoks originally employed to run me while I was transferred from the factory to the ship body, which incidentally is now sinking in liquid hydrogen.’

‘You have contact?’

‘No, just a good grasp of physics. The only extraneous link we have is through the pinhead camera that was attached up at the moment of my inception—the purpose of which was to make me aware that there is an outside world.’

‘We could spend those ten years in a virtual world,’ Aphran suggested.

‘Such an existence does not interest me.’

‘Then let us go to permanent storage now. I don’t think I could keep this same conversation going for ten years.’

‘Then goodnight.’

Blackness.

The hunter/killer program had waited until he was deeply connected into the systems of the ship, Skellor knew, and now it was coming at him in a flood, plunging data tentacles into his mind, one after another, so he had time only to defend himself. With too much ease, the attack translated into a VR scenario. Here it seemed he grasped the situation more completely as he gained iconic control over his responses. It became almost like some computer game, but a very real one in which he could actually die. The computer system, in the virtuality, became a planetoid of slightly disconnected blocks shot through with tunnels and holes, floating in albescent space. Inside this, Skellor was Kali, armed with swords and axes, shifting blocks and seeking a way-out. The kill program—one serpent and sometimes many, sprouting like the necks of Hydra from within the planetoid—patrolled these tunnels, attacking him where it could, its attacks increasing in ferocity the nearer he got to the surface of the planetoid or to gaining some control of its structure.

Slowly Skellor began to identify which collections of blocks represented which ship systems, and the virtuality allowed him to see that every one of these now had its own place for the serpent. He also saw that the deeper into the system he retreated, the easier things became for him—the less assiduously the program attacked him. Closing up the collection of blocks that was the balance control for the primitive hard-field shielding of the ship in U-space and shutting down any access for the program, he realized that unless the same program had resources available he had yet to detect, it would not be able to kill him nor keep him confined for long. He could only assume that some other plan was in the offing.

Before he could plumb that, the program attacked again. Four serpents speared out of the blockish informational darkness. Two of them came for Skellor, and two of them went for the structure he had rearranged. The data stream of one attacker he cut off near its source with a just-prepared virus. In the virtuality, his axe went through its neck, the gaping head fell away and the body retreated like a severed air hose. His second blow fell on the neck of his other attacker just as it closed its jaws on his arm, punching its fangs into his pseudoflesh. The neck bent like a cable being struck, but remained undamaged—this data stream having adapted to the virus. His arm immediately began to change colour, as killing data began to load.

Even as he adapted the virus, he used it swiftly on himself and cut away his poisoned arm. On the back swing, he took off the second serpent’s head before turning to the other two, who seemed busily intent on wrecking his work. Now, knowing the degree of adaptation his viruses needed, he sprouted more axes from his fists and attacked, chopping and hacking in a frenzy. Then, when bleeding segments were drifting all about him, he asked himself why this attack had been so strong.

Skellor stepped away from the virtual vision of his battle and opened his comprehension to an utterly informational level. He realized that the kill programs’ defences were strongest around the hard-field generators, the reactor and the balanced U-space engines of this ship. It wanted to keep him here in orbit of Cull. That being the case, he now made it his prime objective to get away. He probed, tentatively, into the start-up routines for the U-space engines. The reaction he got, like poking a stick into a nest of vipers, confirmed his suspicions. Now, in the virtuality and not limiting himself by human perception, he began gathering his weapons. Turning towards those closely guarded systems, he hurled himself forward thousand-armed, viruses and informational bacilli propagating around him, layered attack programs like swarms of bees, a growing mass then a wall of every informational weapon at his disposal falling on that nest of serpents.

In a virtual age, he slew the guardians. In real computer time of microseconds, he swamped and subsumed engine control. His diagnostic search informed him of slight misalignments in both engines and hard-fields. It would hurt him, but he would survive—as he had before. The fusion reactor started easily; someone had used it recently. No matter. When enough power was available, he started the fusion engines of the ship. He had no control of navigation, but the ship had been tangential to the planet. Accelerating, burning up rusty water from its fuel tanks as it drove up to ram-scoop speeds, the ship left orbit. One fusion chamber sputtered as the water started to run out, then the ram-scoop fields opened out and began funnelling in hydrogen and other spacial matter to use as fuel.

Then, achieving sufficient speed relative to the fabric of space, like a speedboat ready to move up onto its hydrofoils, the Ogygian engaged its U-space engines and dropped out of realspace.

Dragged back against one wall of the bridge, the long-dead captain’s skull still clutched in his right hand and the Jain exoskeleton now rooting into the metalwork around him, Cormac wondered what new torture this was. But agony twisted Skellor’s features, and Cormac’s mind screamed at the flashes of grey infinity beyond the screen—all his human perception could make of under-space. Some instinct made him try to grasp more. He opened up programming space in his gridlink to carry the load, but his mind just kept sliding off. Desperation grew in him, as if his survival depended on his cognizance of this dimension.

With augmentation, it was possible for him to comprehend more than he could with his normally evolved human mind. With heightened perception, Cormac could visualize five dimensions: see a tesseract and observe a Kline bottle pouring into itself. But this was more dimensions than that, and none at all. U-space contained the potential for dimension. It was the infinity of a singularity, and the eternal instant. To human perception, it was things and states that were mutually exclusive. It was impossible… impossible for a human to encompass. But Cormac knew that he must encompass it or completely lose one of the bulwarks of his mind. And so, naturally, as he strove for comprehension, he moved further away from his own humanity.

With a feeling of good riddance, Dragon watched first the Ogygian then the King of Hearts drop into under-space. It being evident that this entire system and probably others were enclosed in a USER trap, the entity felt sure that neither Skellor nor the rogue AI ship would be going far, and that maybe the Polity would survive, just so long as others of its members could resist temptation.

Temptation…

There was a saying attributed to a nineteenth-century human character who seemed famous more for his sexual proclivities than his ability with a pen… or quill.