Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Saul groped for connections, activating dormant synapses and firing up the somnolent nerve tissue lying between them. His vision hazed in and out like a TV channel search. He thought that it might be better if he actually had something other than just the ceiling to focus on, so decided to sit up. Just for a moment he could not, then further previously damaged neurons fired up, fed back into a mental partition that defined every function of his physical body, and in an instant he remembered how to control it all, utterly.

The physical effort required in the arcoplex’s gravity was the only downside. He could define and minutely control every muscle in his body, route blood to them and have them working in perfect concert, but they were partially wasted since muscle-tone stimulation though useful, was hardly adequate. For a while at least it might be a good idea to confine himself to the zero-gravity areas of the station.

Now sitting upright, he concentrated on his vision – still trying to tune in to that station. Shapes began to appear and he tried to resolve them, understand them. One came clear: a circle, rainbow ripples distorting it and bright light burning a hole through one section of the circumference. He tuned out that light and the circle became clear. He saw a rim of concentrically ridged plastic with an object lying across looking like a long curved claw. Scattered about this ring were white crusty items like sheets of crunched-up and compressed bubble wrap. He could comprehend none of these objects as he next focused on the glassy eye this ring enclosed.

Here were lines, reflected lights and a distorted image down towards the bottom. Unable to make anything of that, he instinctively cleaned it up with a program now running in his visual cortex but more commonly found in cam systems. The distortions ironed out, presenting him with a clear image of his own reflection. But what was he being reflected from? Another program – a search through his distributed mind – quickly rendered just one result, and he then had to recalculate scale. He was focusing right across the room at one lens of a binocular microscope, and the objects on the plastic rim about that lens were a human eyelash and a scattering of skin flakes. And next, when the lights came on like a sun going nova, he realized he had been seeing that lens in infra-red.

‘You’re awake!’

Now aware of his visual error, he focused on Hannah entire, mapped her features, noted extra lines on her face, a healing cut on her earlobe and some new grey hairs on her head. He was seeing her complete, and not using the visual shorthand the human brain usually employed to identify someone. She was also thinner, he noticed, looking tired and worried. He read fear in her expression too: fear of him, and of what she was going to find here, which kept her hovering just inside the door as if ready to flee.

‘I am awake,’ he agreed, his voice hoarse, the very words opening to his inspection further connections inside and outside his skull.

The words appeared as text in the visual centre of his brain, and via new connections, were open to be expressed in any language he chose. This was just through a simple connection to the station network, which had located a language library. However, while he had been unconscious, the partition of his mind containing his language centre had already analysed that library in depth and he could not only speak the words in any tongue now, but place on them any nuance he required. His mind, partitioned throughout this particular body’s brain, and throughout the extra neural tissue residing in two metre-square boxes in this laboratory’s clean-room, and then throughout the station system, seemed to have been very busy indeed.

‘How are you feeling?’ Hannah inevitably asked.

‘I will answer the question you wanted to ask, rather than give you the conventional response,’ he said flatly. ‘I am sane, I am functional and have become more than I was before I was shot and, to be specific, I will take charge once again.’

She moved further into the laboratory, some of the tension slipping out of her as she briefly focused on some of the laboratory screen displays. Saul knew what she was seeing there: glimpses of a mind functioning smoothly, while efficiently running the nervous system of a human body, revealing no signs of epilepsy or the other crippling effects of brain damage, instead operating in smooth waveforms. These reassured her, and perhaps she was discounting everything else that she could not recognize because she wanted him to take charge again. She wanted the responsibility taken away from her.

‘More than you were before?’ she asked, moving over beside him and immediately busying herself with removing monitor pads from his chest and skull.

‘I kept myself functional because of this Scour, because we needed to know what it was all about. I should not have done so. My body, brain and mind required time to heal. I ideally needed to shut down to allow that process to commence properly. However, our situation was too dangerous for me to release my hold completely. I first ensured that the robots would obey you, and you alone, then as I slid into unconsciousness I partitioned my mind, delegating my will and intentions to its various parts.’

‘It seems that you achieved a lot in a very short time,’ said Hannah, spraying antivibact on the skin behind his ear as she pulled out a hair-thin optical probe penetrating the inside of his skull. ‘I thought you could hardly manage to look through one cam, at the time.’

‘It was instinctive,’ said Saul dismissively, then added, ‘though instinct is a questionable description of what I did.’

‘Like, for example,’ said Hannah, ‘instinctively calling just about every robot on this station to your present location.’

In an instant he was gazing through cams located outside the arcoplex, then into the minds of the massed robots and isolating what had brought them here. It was something that had spread virally from the two spiderguns now stationed outside the door to this laboratory. He could define it as computer code, but an easier description would be that it was their protective instincts kicking in. He shut it down, he reassured them, and sent them back to work, watched them hesitantly moving away as if unsure that he knew what he was doing.

‘They are returning to work now,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Hannah shrugged, ‘that certainly shows that you are in charge but, anyway, we soon found out that you never really weren’t.’

‘Quite so,’ Saul agreed, ‘though my awareness of that fact wasn’t wholly conscious.’ He reached up to pull the teragate plug from the socket in his skull, and switched the data stream going through it over to his internal radio modem, then continued, ‘I lapsed into unconsciousness without preparing any way to wake myself. Partitioning my mind was almost a survival effort, but it has had some beneficial results.’

‘What did wake you?’ Hannah asked.

‘Let me get to that in its turn,’ Saul said.

‘Okay, you’re the boss.’ Hannah’s expression was wry, almost sad.

‘The parts of my mind were not completely separate, however,’ he said. ‘There were those for my senses, the other functions of my body and the functions of my mind, but access was required to them for one other partition. I needed to analyse our situation perpetually and make the best decisions about what to do to improve our chances of surviving. Hence the orders for Rhine’s vortex generator to be built, and the subsequent course changes – these decisions were made inside that partition.’

‘It’s an interesting theory,’ said Hannah sniffily, ‘and I would guess that from your point of view the different parts of your mind would seem like partitions. In reality the human brain, and thus mind, is already a divided thing.’