Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Alan Saul, linked to his cerebral hardware, and what remained of his brain and organic augmentations, tried to comprehend the damage from a dark vastness. Consciousness was a hazy concept to him, just as was his conception of himself and his location. Very little would be recoverable from that damaged being without oxygenated blood flooding its wrecked brain; unfortunately that blood would rapidly fill up his lungs and gut and also pour out of the holes there. Luckily, the breach foam in his helmet had sealed both helmet and skull, but still there would be numerous bleeds.

So , thought the Alan Saul struggling for coherence , is what remains of that Alan Saul worth saving? He realized it was possible; some part of him now making cold calculations. The blood might preserve a good portion of the brain throughout the time it would take the spidergun to get the corpse to Hannah, and then throughout the time it would take her to set to work on the damage. He decided it was worth it. There was a lot there that might be recoverable and, in the consciousness he had become, he discovered an old-fashioned attachment to owning a physical organic body. Via the hardware and undamaged portions of the body’s neural network, he struggled to find and identify what he wanted, his perception of the Argus Station diminishing as he applied himself to the complex task of dealing with his body’s autonomic nervous system. Eventually he restarted the heart, but the task drained him, reality stuttered . . . a whole minute gone, the spidergun now nearly at Hannah’s laboratory. He needed to locate her. From a place full of shadows, he struggled to visualize and map Arcoplex Two, laboured to link into the cams. He found her still in her laboratory, just paces away from what had now become his true self, residing in those two boxes, and managed to speak to her through her fone.

‘Hannah . . . I . . . I have been shot,’ he told her.

‘What . . . Alan?’

‘Just . . . listen,’ he said, ‘Right lung . . . lower torso . . . my head. I am dead.’

‘I . . .’

‘Surgery . . . right now – my spidergun brings me.’

She was sensible enough to ask no further questions, just head at full speed to the surgery adjoining her laboratory. Blackness, again, and more time lost. Now he was in the laboratory, his blood leaking out on the floor.

Things to do .

‘I have been shot’ – the words saved in a mini-file.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Langstrom asked, and Saul didn’t even know he had been talking to the man.

It required massive concentration to string the words together, to lose the hesitation. He lined them up first, open to his inspection, before sending them. ‘Retrieve what you can of the assassin and find out what you can from him. Start a section-by-section search of the entire station, missing nothing and ensuring no one can get past you.’

‘Will do.’ Langstrom paused. ‘How bad are you hurt?’

‘I’ll survive,’ Saul replied as he faded, not knowing.

Hannah took one look at what was now effectively a corpse, as the robot loaded it on to the clean-lock gurney, then she swung round to gaze at the blurring readouts on two of her screens – the two that were connected to the two metal boxes in her clean-room. She felt cold fingers drawing down her spine as she realized why he had been able to speak to her; that it wasn’t what lay on that gurney actually speaking. She abruptly turned away, overrode the lock into her surgery to take him straight through. Two of her staff arrived and donned surgical gowns, quickly following her inside.

‘Strip off the spacesuit,’ she instructed them, as she prepared her instruments.

Blood poured out as they first disconnected all the seals on the suit. They tried to take off the helmet, but with no success.

‘Quickly!’ Hannah barked.

One of the men stepped over to a nearby equipment cabinet and took out a small electric circular saw and quickly affixed to it a diamond wheel, while the other took from the same cabinet a set of bolt croppers. In very short order, Saul’s suit lay in a soggy heap on the floor, the helmet in two halves. Rather than bother with any of the lifting equipment available, they manually shifted him to the surgical table, strapped him down, tweaked the position of the table to bring his head up high, and shortly after that were attaching feeds for artificial blood. Using an external cardio-stimulator that injected a series of hair-thin titanium wires to provide current where required, they restarted his heart, which had failed again, and the blood filled his veins – then came out of the various holes in his body almost as quickly as it went in, pouring over the floor. Under Hannah’s instruction, one of the men pulled over a surgical unit, and it began simultaneously injecting surgical snakes into his two body wounds, quickly sealing the worst bleeds. Meanwhile, Hannah, after slicing away breach foam to expose the wound to his head, pulled over her specialized combined micro- and macro-surgery and set to work.

As he gazed at all this, Saul understood the detail, but only as a distant spectator. Nothing seemed real; he drifted in a dream, in some half-conscious state. Then, maybe because of some repair she had just made in his skull, everything momentarily slid into proper focus.

‘Must remove all . . . damaged matter,’ he told her via the intercom, causing her to jerk and quickly withdraw her hands from the telefactor gloves. He was only aware of having spoken after the fact, and wasn’t entirely sure of how he had accessed the intercom. The two men looked up in amazement, and some horror, for they were being spoken to by the mess on the surgical table before them.

‘I think I know what I’m doing,’ Hannah replied, returning her hands to her telefactor gloves, and her attention to the screen images the optics were providing.

‘Repair . . . then use tissue stores from the failed unit, rebuild and . . . regrowth.’ Why did he say that? He didn’t know. Time passed; images on a screen, but no emotional content.

She had shaved and then lifted his scalp to remove a hemisphere of skull from the back of his head. His brain had pulsed blood as she pulled out pieces of shattered bone and ceramic bullet, and injected numerous probes and other instruments. She was now cutting out lumps of tissue killed by the impact shock and depositing them in a kidney dish, then micro-cauterizing and repairing veins, so that the bleeding became less. She had also begun putting in struts and discs of collagen foam for support, for without these his brain would deflate like a speeded-up film of a rotting orange.

‘You’ll be on life-support for six months before I can even restore your autonomic nervous system – if I even can.’

‘I can guide regrowth,’ he replied. ‘I can run my body . . . through the implants. My body will . . . restore . . . I will . . .’

She paused, absorbing that.

‘You’ll control regrowth, just as you control your robots?’

‘Yes.’

And the truth? The truth was that it was taking a substantial portion of his erratic mental function to keep his body running. His perception of the station had crashed, and his control of the machines within it was now minimal. Maybe he could fully control one spidergun, but definitely not two. His cam vision had dropped back to something wholly human – for he could only manage to look through one cam at a time without becoming confused. But, worse than all this, his perception of himself seemed to have faded, as had his perception of time and place.

He felt adrift in a dream that was Argus Station.

4

The Reaper’s Blunt Scythe

Before doctors and medical technology came along to queer the pitch, death was a quite easily definable state. If your breathing and your heart stopped, you had achieved that state and little else was considered. This, in its time, could lead to some unfortunate results when the person checking the death failed to make absolutely sure, as fingernail marks on the insides of lids of ancient coffins attest. As time progressed, it became possible to restart the heart, restart the breathing and then to maintain both. Brain death due to the total necrosis of cerebral neurons then became the point of no recovery, but even that was a movable feast and a hunting ground for lawyers. This line was then blurred when the necrosis became a matter of degree, when cerebral matter could be regrown or replaced, and then became almost invisible when it became possible to programme new neural tissue. The new line was then the death of the personality, but even that became a moot point and was not necessarily connected to the death of the human body concerned. Combine the fact that we can now clone human beings with the seeming likelihood that we will soon be able to record most of the information a brain contains, and the meaning of death moves into the territory of philosophers – a place where ancient certainties themselves go to die.