Neal Asher - The Departure

By the time this was all done, the plasfactor had finished its work and extruded a mask which, when glued into position, would fool most recognition systems. Once he arrived in London, all he would need to get into the Inspectorate cell block was another layer of the multi-refractive nanoskin on his palm, his artificial iris – oh, and the expensive suit neatly boxed beside him. He hadn’t bothered with trying to use Coran’s – too messy.

The first time he did it he thought he’d activated a holographic advertising projector, but then he knew that couldn’t be right. Who would bother advertising in an industrial complex overgrown with weeds and now only occupied, for as long as it was safe, by car breakers and those going about other nefarious deeds – like those selling cut implants? He studied the menu hovering to the right of his vision, and realized it must originate from within him.

‘Janus,’ he asked, ‘do I have a computer implant in my skull?’

‘Yes. My signal is relayed to your bonefones through it,’ his unseen companion replied.

‘I can see a computer menu hovering before me,’ Saul explained, ‘presumably relayed to my optic nerve from that computer implant. But how do I operate it?’

‘The control is in the skin of your right temple,’ Janus replied, ‘though the menu is projected up in the artificial retina inserted in your right eye.’ Artificial retina?

He came to a halt and just stood gazing across cracked concrete, noting how a straggle of GM broad beans had punched up through it. Those were another reason people would come here, since they were a ready source of food, though some of the strange proteins they contained could cause stomach cramps. When he reached up and probed his right temple, a sequence of sub-menus flickered across his vision. He needed to get himself somewhere he could spend time working all this out, so decided on a nearby warehouse.

On the floor, just inside the busted door, lay four skeletons, one of them obviously a child’s, and all of them with bullet holes punched through their skulls. He just glanced at them then went and sat down with his back to the wall, only then wondering why the sight did not shock him. He knew, just knew, that though these victims might have run foul of the underworld, a more likely explanation for their deaths lay with the government. It was now the biggest killer on the planet, and they’d probably been too much trouble for Inspectorate enforcers to bother processing. He turned the thought away and concentrated instead on the menus.

It soon became evident, once he got back to the first of them, that something was highlighted: IMPLANT ID. Managing, with practice, to select this, he checked through and discovered the menu provided the code of the new implant in his arm, along with options to reprogram it with new personal details. After a little investigation he found he could only edit the identity in the implant to a limited extent. Profession and personal history could be changed, but physical details were firmly set. The surgeon who had injected the implant into his arm had warned him that it would only get him through public scanning, which merely registered that a certain person was in a certain place at a certain time. Now it seemed more options were available to him, though he would not be able to slip through any recognition security.

Gazing down at his arm, he wondered about the reason for all the scarring. In the past, before he ended up in that box heading for the incinerator, had he taken other people’s implants in order to assume their identities? And if he had done so, he doubted that their owners would have willingly given them up. So what was he previously? What the hell was he? It now seemed quite likely that he had once worked for the organization he’d run foul of. Maybe he had served as an Inspectorate agent of some kind, perhaps working undercover to expose dissidents? Had he then decided he agreed more with the dissidents than with his masters? He needed to find out the truth.

Leaving the industrial estate, he headed south, always keeping under cover whenever the Inspectorate cruisers came by, avoiding large population centres where possible – though, of course, with the urban sprawls covering much of France, that wasn’t always easy – and surviving as best he could. He ate from trash, consumed GM beans, once shared a stew with other indigents, and only wondered after his stomach was full where they’d obtained the pork. He had used his cash frugally but had spent it all by the time he reached Provence. Only on his return journey up the west coast did he really begin to use Janus as he suspected was intended. Creating a community credit account did not cause the AI any difficulties, nor did obtaining a triple C, but Saul’s real problem was finding anything to buy with it. However, that situation started to change once Janus upgraded him to Societal Asset, and he could now gain access to those shops that weren’t rated at or below subsistence level.

But he needed more, so his first new identity was that of a low-ranking bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture. He left the man’s body in an empty grain silo – certain it would never be found, because the silo would never be used.

The London sprawl occupied a vast portion of south-east England, extending right to the Essex coast and including the massive floating airport in the Thames estuary, where once stood Maunsell forts. Saul didn’t come in by scramjet since even Committee Transport Oversight had decided it wasn’t cost-effective to run a scramjet route from Brussels to Maunsell Airport. Aboard an executive rotobus – a giant bubblemetal transport driven by twelve aerofans and hydrogen Wankl engines – he gazed into the well-lit smog over the urban sprawl and contemplated how satellite cameras would simply be unable to penetrate it.

‘Are you here for the Straven Conference?’ asked the woman in the seat beside him.

She was a grey suit with cropped ginger hair and a disapproving mouth as tight as a cat’s arse. He reckoned she must be a delegate’s staffer, since some big Inspectorate bodyguards occupied the seats near the door leading into the forward luxury compartment, where doubtless one of the five hundred and sixty was having his or her every whim catered to. He’d so far managed to avoid talking to her by the usual method of focusing on his much modified and barely functional laptop and pretending to be extremely busy and important, occasionally taking imaginary calls over Coran’s fones whenever she ventured a conversational gambit. He simply did not want her, or anyone, inspecting his face too closely. The silicon mask was indistinguishable from real skin, and its join, running under his chin to up behind his ear then following his hairline, was invisible. Air pockets and electro-muscle also enabled the mask to move along with his face, and capillary pores even transferred some sweat from underlying skin. However, he felt it lent him a certain unnatural deadness of expression that someone might be able to detect – might have been trained to detect.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m here on Inspectorate business.’

She nodded her head wisely and ventured no further enquiries, since probing into Inspectorate business was a good way of becoming Inspectorate business. With his laptop turned away so she couldn’t see the screen, he typed in: ‘What the fuck is this Straven Conference?’, remembering that Coran’s boss had mentioned it too. His question was directed to the large proportion of Janus presently residing inside the machine, and the AI replied via embedded bonefone.

‘They will be discussing the societal consequences of raising the price of staple food items in Britain, i.e. how they’re going to deal with the ensuing increase in riots when ZA citizens here start sliding below the subsistence level like they are in France, and also whether the plan for sprawl sectoring will work.’