Neal Asher: Gridlinked

Done, in that instant when time is divided by infinity and brought to a standstill.

Done, in the eternal moment.

Freeman passed by 253 light-years. The second runcible caught him, dragged him back over the horizon and channelled the vast build-up of energy he was carrying… only… only this time something went wrong. Freeman passed dirough the cusp still holding his charge. The Einsteinian universe took hold of him and ruthlessly applied its laws, and in that immeasurable instant he appeared at his destination, travelling the smallest fraction possible below the speed of light.

On the planet Samarkand, in the Andellan system, Freeman supplied the energy for a thirty-megaton nuclear explosion; the atoms of his body yielding up much of their substance as energy. Eight diousand people died in the explosion. Another 2000 died of radiation sickness in the weeks that followed. A few hundred survived even this, but, without the energy tap from the runcible buffers and wim most installations knocked out, the cold returned to Samarkand and they froze to death. Two survived, but mey were not human, and it was open to conjecture that they were even alive. His family and friends mourned Freeman when mey discovered what had happened to him, and sometimes, when she was in a good mood, a half-catadapt woman smiled at a memory; omer times she winced.

Like a discarded child-god's building block, the two-kilometre cube of ceramal which was the headquarters of Earth Central Security rested on the shore of Lake Geneva. There were no windows or doors in this structure and, for the 50,000 people that worked mere, the only ingress was via runcible. They came in naked and left naked, and were scrutinized molecule by molecule each way, yet even they had no idea what information was gathered, what decisions were reached, and what orders given. Each time they left, they left part of their minds inside, downloaded into another mind that knew it all.

Some comedian, at the inception of the project, had christened him Hal, after the computer in an ancient classic, but that was now classified information. Earth Central was an AI, and an exceptionally large AI for a time when a planetary co-ordinator could be lost in an ashtray. Earth Central was the size of a tennis ball, but then terabytes of information were processed in its etched-atom circuits in picoseconds; information received, collated, acted upon. Orders given. The ruler of the human polity was not human.

Unbuffered jump to Samarkand - confirmed.

Major buffer failure - confirmed.

-Analysis Of Cyclic Rebellion by Edward Landel -

ORDER: AGENT 2XG4112039768 ON RUNCIBLE TRACE.

Possible alien involvement - unconfirmed. Trace to second quadrant.

- Terrorism In The Twentieth Century -order: CANCELLED.

All human life on Samarkand extinguished -projection.

- Sea Of Death (Hood) -

ORDER: AGENT PRIME CAUSE TO CHEYNE III.

'What's the problem, Hal?'

QUESTION: HOW DO YOU DO THAT?

Laughter.

It all took less than a second. The laughter faded as the strange old Oriental disappeared from the chamber. Earth Central experienced chagrin, or a near emulation, then turned to other matters. As it continued to collate extant information and give orders, it continued to absorb the vast body of human knowledge in the infm-itesimally small fractions of seconds between. Hundreds of light-years away, its decisions were acted upon.

Angelina Pelter gazed out across a seascape as colour-drained as a charcoal drawing and felt her purpose harden: this was her home, this was the place she must defend against the silicon autocrat Earth Central and all its agents. She looked up at the sky with its scud of oily clouds. It had the appearance of a soot-smeared sheet, pulled taut from the horizon. The sun was a hazy disc imbedded there. She lowered her gaze to where waves the colour of iron lapped against the plascrete slabs on the side of the sea wall. The day reflected her mood.

'Doesn't it get to you?' she asked him.

He looked at her blankly. Probably searching his databank for a suitable response, she thought. He was playing the part of a man romantically involved; in love. She wondered just how difficult it had been for him last night, when he had been inside her - if he had felt anything. She shuddered and pushed her hand deeper into her pocket, clasped the comforting warm metal there. How had she been fooled? He was handsome, yes; his hair short-cropped and a sort of silver colour, his skin that bland olive of the bulk of extraterrestrial humanity, his features sharp, striking - so much so that they belied the dead flatness of his grey eyes. But he was not so handsome, so perfect, as to give away what he was. He had faults, scars, the habit of picking his toenails in bed, a tendency not to suffer fools. All emulation, wasn't it?

'The dark otters are swarming,' he stated.

It was a concise observation. He probably knew their number and deviation from standard size. Angelina felt slightly sick and hardly heard his next words.

'An interesting sight… This is what we have come here to see?'

Not good enough.

Arian had been right from the start: he was a plant. She had to do it. She had to do it now. But it was difficult - so very hard to kill someone she had actually allowed through her defences, allowed to make love to her… have sex with her… emulate the actions of mating.

He stepped away from her, nearer to the edge, and looked down. The sea roiled, as viscid as oil against the sea wall. Below the surface, dark otters were shooting back and forth as they hunted adapted whitebait introduced two centuries before, still to learn that Earth flesh tasted foul and gave no nutrition. Angelina pulled out the weapon it had cost them so much to obtain. Money, and more than one life.

'Sometimes I think,' he said, turning to her with his face twisted in a parody of understanding, 'that the—'

He saw the weapon.

'You made love like a machine,' Angelina said as she levelled the gun at him. The gun was matt black, and had the shape of an old projectile gun, but with LCD displays on its side and a barrel that was an open cube with a polished interior. It was what some called an antiphoton weapon, yet what it projected was not anti-photons, merely field-accelerated protons. It had been a necessary lie, once. Separatists had developed it, and now a Separatist would use it. Angelina had never seen one before, let alone used one. Necessary again. She watched him for a reaction. For a moment he appeared to be listening to something distant, then he slumped in defeat.

'How long have you known?' he asked, turning his shoulder to her and looking inland to the floodplain and neat fields of adapted papyrus.