Neal Asher - The Departure

Once they were out of sight, Saul pressed a fingertip to his temple to call up a menu within his iris. It appeared as a small screen apparently floating off to one side ahead of him, and he scrolled down it by sliding his finger lower, selected something with another press of his fingertip and continued searching. Skin nerves at his temple, linked to the processor embedded in the bone lying underneath, acted like a fine-tuned ball control. Finally he found the blueprint of this building, the diagram appearing to him on a large square virtual screen seemingly rising out of the floor just a few paces ahead. After reminding himself of the layout, he shut the thing down and quickly headed for a nearby bank of lifts, which took him down into the basement.

As he stepped out of the lift, an immediate drop in temperature sent a shiver down Saul’s spine. Ahead lay a long corridor lined with doors opening into the mapping rooms, which in turn opened into the main store of deep-frozen cylinders containing the DNA samples waiting to be mapped. To his right a short corridor terminated at the door leading to the combined library and control room. Opening his holdall to take out one particular item, Saul strode over, pushed the door open and entered.

Aiden King sat at a line of consoles, a big display screen above him running graphics charting the progress of the mapping computers, one frame open on something he had obviously been working on – clearly some sort of presentation. Behind him lay the door into a staff toilet, beside which stood a vending machine filled with Food Agency approved drinks, low-sugar chocolates and plastic-wrapped sandwiches.

Saul glanced up at a security camera set high in the wall, but if Janus hadn’t dealt with that by now it was simply too late. King was taking a break, eating a grey-looking sandwich, his feet up on the console. He abruptly dropped his feet to the floor, tossed his sandwich back on to his plate and sat upright.

‘Citizen Avram Coran?’ he said, obviously surprised. The Inspectorate Assessor wasn’t due for half an hour, but it was not unknown for government officials to turn up early to start throwing their weight around.

‘He’s not here yet,’ Saul said mildly, heading over towards the man.

King began to stand, still looking slightly bewildered, then dumbfounded when he saw his own name on the tag Saul wore. Too late. The space between them hazed and crackled with energy. King jerked upright, stiff as a flagpole, miniature lightnings skittering over his lab coat and earthing from his shoes into the floor. Eyes rolling up into his head, he toppled like a falling tree and slammed down on his back with wisps of smoke rising from his clothing, a smell like burnt wiring permeating the air.

Saul slipped the ionic stunner back into his pocket and sat down in King’s chair even as the man shuddered into unconsciousness. Quickly keying in a code gave him access to Janus. The screen blanked for a moment, then opened a display signifying that Janus was ready. He sat back, breathed in through his nostrils, out through his mouth, slow, calming, then coldly studied the graphic of a slowly turning ammonite shell.

‘Any problems?’ he enquired, picking up King’s sandwich and taking a bite. It tasted relatively good, and actually contained thin slivers of bacon far too salty to have been Food Agency approved, so obviously it hadn’t come from the vending machine behind him.

‘Simple systems,’ Janus replied fatly. ‘Easily acquired.’

‘So no Inspectorate interference?’

‘None – they expect no problems here. Only the relocation order has been sent.’

‘Any idea yet where the stuff here is going?’

‘The data is presently going to distributed terabyte storage, to be copied and consolidated at multiple locations. I’ve yet to ascertain where it is being sent from there.’

The data consisted of thousands of terabytes of DNA maps, even though compressed and with interconnecting hyperlinks where code repeated in different samples. Some 20 per cent of all the species of Earth had been mapped – mainly the larger fauna and flora. Experts here and at other banks calculated that samples of another 60 per cent of the total awaited, unmapped, in storage, whilst a further 20 per cent remained to be either collected or discovered.

But knowing the destination of that data was a sideshow. Saul had only discovered that it was being rerouted whilst researching Avram Coran, who was his main reason for being here. Coran ranked high in the mainland European Inspectorate Executive, but had never been to Inspectorate HQ London, so wasn’t personally known there. Upon discovering he was coming here, to such a low-security operation, Saul had felt this an opportunity he could not afford to miss. Coran, though disappointingly not the interrogator Saul was most anxious to meet, was perfect nevertheless for his purposes. If it had been him , the man who haunted Saul’s nightmares, that would have made the operation here even more satisfying, but again, a sideshow.

‘What about the physical samples?’

‘Nothing on Govnet. I’ve tried searching Subnet in the hope that someone involved in the physical transportation has mentioned the relocation, but nothing yet.’

‘The likelihood of transvan drivers getting loose at the mouth is remote, don’t you think?’ said Saul. ‘Showing too much curiosity about government orders usually results in a little inducement in a white-tiled cell.’

Saul was very sure that the human mind could not quite process the effect of the pain inducer, which was useful for the Inspectorate because it made sensory reprogramming easier. After some months of such treatment, dissidents were either returned to society as terrified and obedient robots, or became too damaged to function at all. The latter, if they were lucky, ended up paying a visit to a ‘Safe Departure’ clinic, after which they went through the mulchers feeding community composting tanks. The unlucky were sent to trash incinerators and, as Saul was well aware, were often still alive when thrown in.

‘The white tiles are a human affectation,’ Janus noted. ‘And the inducers will soon no longer be required.’

Saul stared at that revolving ammonite. Thousands of dissidents had been euthanized after the failed experiments, but now the technology was nearly ready. Soon the Inspectorate would be able to edit, copy and cut-and-paste a human mind like a computer file. Hannah Neumann was the name connected to all this – another individual he was anxious to meet. After cracking a supposedly secure database to find the most likely candidate responsible for having installed the hardware inside Saul’s skull, Janus had found her, and found out how the Inspectorate was using her work. But what got him just now was Janus saying ‘a human affectation’.

What is an artificial intelligence? Janus, a mass of synaptically formatted software, mimicked a near-copy of a human mind but with sensory inputs adjusted to allow it to exist on Govnet, distributed and hidden. Janus’s memories were only those it had acquired since it initiated two years previously, but the AI was constantly growing, its vocabulary and reactions changing. Saul believed he himself must have created Janus, because what expertise he possessed seemed to lie in the realm of computer systems. He also surmised that Janus was a risky option, but nevertheless had a head start. The Inspectorate were almost certainly putting together comlife just like it, which would eventually track it down. Saul had limited time to find out who he was, to hunt down his interrogator, and then to exact his vengeance on the Committee.

‘The Inspectorate Assessor has just arrived,’ Janus informed him, opening up a frame on the main screen so as to display this gene bank’s roofport.