Neal Asher - The Departure

He hid the vehicle under a filthy canvas sheet whose colour matched the concrete, then guided her round by a trampled path, to a hatch that he pulled up. He then led her down below, and lights came on as they entered some sort of underground bunker. Next he tore off his mask – the layer of silicone rubber she had somehow known was there – to reveal features that she recognized at once.

She gazed at him for a long moment, not quite sure how to handle this. Then she nodded slowly. ‘I thought Smith had killed you, Alan. I thought he’d finally got what he wanted.’

Thinner-featured, of course. Hair dyed a different colour from its usual acid white. Something almost unhuman wearing a human face and finding it didn’t quite fit. That was him; that had always been Alan Saul. Of course she was glad to see him alive, but it meant that a whole bunch of complicated emotions, once securely cached in her mind, were no longer quite so secure.

‘Smith,’ he echoed, momentary rage transforming his expression, shortly displaced by puzzlement. He shook his head. ‘I know my own name, but that’s about all I know.’

‘You don’t remember Salem Smith?’

‘No.’

She should not feel disappointed with his amnesia. Considering what Smith had done to him, it was miraculous he possessed a mind at all – or that he was even alive.

‘Alan Saul,’ she confirmed tightly. ‘But don’t even bother looking on Govnet or the Subnets for anything regarding yourself. You erased everything, and your work was so highly classified they put nothing back. Even I’m only allowed access to parts of it – after it’s been vetted by a committee of fourteen science-policy advisers.’

‘My work?’

She told him.

5

Prohibition Works!

The greater the power and extent of the state, the more room there is for corruption. The more inept state services and industries become, the more pies it takes its huge cut from and the more regulation it imposes, the greater the call for black markets. This last fact is one governments consistently failed to learn, even after the stark lesson of American Prohibition. Deadspots are where you’ll find them. Inspectorate officers grow rich in cash by selling the locations of such deadspots to the underworld, which in turn makes its cut from those it opens up such spots to. The breakers come there – those who burn out the tracers in stolen vehicles and disassemble them for their components, those who take apart computer hardware to sell on to others maintaining the Subnet, and those who chop up human bodies for usable organs – usually to be sold to low-echelon officials not yet enjoying twenty-second-century medical care. Retailers come to sell other blackmarket goods: food disapproved of by All Health, like high-fat dairy products, sugary drinks and sweets; cigarettes, drugs, illegal ABV booze, coffee and tea without the cumulative emetics to discourage abuse. And then there are the black surgeries dealing in illegal implants, ID implant excision and exchange, gunshot wounds, and all those injuries and illnesses not catered for under All Health – but only for those who can afford them.

In a totalitarian state, some people are just too dangerous to be allowed to live. Saul now considered his second-hand knowledge of the person he had been. He was a brilliant, brilliant man, indeed a genius, but with a huge drawback in that he was also only a marginally functional human being. It could be called autism, or maybe Asperger’s syndrome, but Saul liked to think that so focused on his work had he been, he simply had not found the time, space or energy to deal with the trivialities of normal human relationships. Able to speak and read even before he could coordinate his limbs, his previous self had been sent immediately into special schools, but even they could not quite handle him and he ended up being home-tutored by educational experts. By the age of ten, he also outpaced these experts, and thereafter had taken charge of his own education. Had Saul been a child of zero-asset-status parents, all this might have caused great problems, and sufficient funding and resources might have been hard to find, but his parents were high-level Committee executives and able to lavish attention on him.

For Saul, every test, both mental or physical, was of overriding interest and in nothing he tried did he fail to excel. He practised martial arts, taking his second black belt in shotokan karate whilst studying for eight doctorates in the physical sciences and three in the arts. Very soon he began to produce: making vast improvements to the software of agricultural robots, then designing a new kind of materially inert microbot that could hunt through the human body for cancer cells without causing rejection problems. Next he applied the same inert materials to someone else’s invention of a chip interface to the human mind, so it too would not activate the immune system. That was Hannah’s invention.

Saul thus became a ‘societal asset’ even as the Committee was just inventing the term. When Committee political officers realized how valuable he could be, he was seconded to a gated science community secure in the Dinaric Alps of Albania and there, for the first time, and like all the other scientists thus seconded, he came under intense political scrutiny. This was where he had first met Hannah.

‘That was forty years ago, Alan,’ Hannah told him.

‘How old am I?’ he asked.

‘Somewhere in your sixties,’ she replied. ‘Just like us all, you received anti-ageing treatments.’

‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘So how, then, did I end up in a crate heading for the Calais Incinerator?’

‘You didn’t do what you were told. You kept antagonizing them.’ She gazed at him steadily. ‘Most of the community thought you a brat. They’d been working under the eyes of political officers since their school days, yet you’d experienced none of that.’

‘How . . . how did I antagonize them?’

‘Probably the first example was what you did thirty years ago when you were into splicing nanotech and viruses.’ Hannah shrugged. ‘They still haven’t been able to work out what you actually did, and neither have I. You created something: a splicing of the cancer-hunting nanite you’d developed and a retrovirus used to fix the genetic faults that lead to some cancers – one of the so-called magic bullets. You injected it into yourself and actually edited your own DNA. You wouldn’t tell them what you’d done, and that’s when they really started to get pissed off with you.’

‘Why wouldn’t I tell them?’

‘I think you had developed an extreme dislike of Political Director Smith.’

That name again. The mention of it caused some sort of deep reaction and, as on previously hearing it, he again chose not to analyse the feeling.

‘He wouldn’t allow you unsupervised contact with your sister,’ Hannah added.

‘I have a sister?’ Saul felt a surge of something inside – something difficult to identify.

‘You do. As brilliant as you, apparently, and seconded like you to work on government projects.’

‘Her name?’

‘I don’t know. You never talked about her much.’

That tight emotion wound itself even tighter inside him, and he glanced up, visualizing the Argus Station somewhere above them, seeing void beyond it, and some sort of resolution.

‘Janus,’ he said, ‘find her.’

‘I have already begun searching,’ the AI replied. ‘Unfortunately, with your own files deleted, I don’t have much to work on. Females with the surname Saul number two point six million, and if all reference to you has been deleted then there’ll be no record that they had a brother called Alan. It is also possible that she is now listed under a married name.’