Neal Asher - The Departure

‘You are heading in the right direction,’ Janus informed him. ‘Another twenty metres and you should be right over the entrance.’

It lay behind the beet bay, where brambles and nettles fought for predominance with GM beans, so there was no visible sign of it on the surface. Scraping downwards a metre through this tangle, he unearthed a layer of cracked concrete and managed to pull away a lot of this before revealing a rusted cast-iron lid. This he tore up to expose steps heading down underneath the beet bay. He picked up his torch, climbed out of the digger and descended.

Because it was concealed inside a hill, only the lower floor of the bunker had flooded. The large upper chamber and four side rooms were packed with all sorts of interesting rubbish: sacks of solidified fertilizer, a table and chairs made of plastic now as brittle as eggshell, a kitchen counter with an old gas stove, the gas bottle underneath it; a generator that had obviously broken down, then been taken apart and abandoned; some cups, plates and cutlery in decaying kitchen units which, judging by the date of a newspaper stuck to the table, must have been only a hundred years old. He had much work to do.

It took him a full month to get the required equipment in place. He first ran a buried power line from a harvester recharging station, then a pipe from the surrounding irrigation grid. Pumping out the lower floor revealed rotten crates filled with the rusted shells of food tins, and also an escape tunnel filled with rubble. After running a dehumidifier inside – one stolen from one of the grain-processing plants – he sprayed every surface with a layer of sealant. All the while he resided there, he kept the dehumidifier running and never required any of the irrigation water, instead using water leeched from air that was constantly moistened by the damp surrounding concrete.

Whilst Saul made the place comfortable, Janus worked its magic in the local agricultural security, until such time as Saul would no longer require his new identity – the recognition systems just ignoring him. When finally ready to act, he was fully linked via the agricultural network in Govnet and the intermittent Subnet, and possessed a weapons cache, an excess of computer hardware, and his own cams installed in the surrounding area as an additional layer of security sitting below Janus’s access to the government cams and readerguns. Also a plentiful food supply, and all the other comforts of a home.

‘This place is mine,’ he told her, which was a statement you just did not hear these days. The Committee owned everything and allotted to its citizens those things they might require on the basis of their status – their usefulness. And, with what Hannah had seen, she knew that people did not even own their own bodies, while the property of their minds now lay under constant siege.

‘No cams in here,’ he added. ‘No monitoring of any kind.’

‘Nice place,’ said Hannah, looking round, tears welling in her eyes.

This was incredible, like a dream they’d once shared: no government watchers, none of those constant flushes of embarrassment in case she might have behaved in a manner some political officer might find questionable. Being here seemed like stepping back, over a century or more, to the time when people actually owned their own homes and government intrusion stopped at the front door. Yet, perhaps understandably, she now felt clumsy and somehow foolish. So long had she lived within set parameters defining both her behaviour and what she was allowed to say that suddenly without them she felt almost lost.

‘A temporary accommodation,’ he explained. ‘Nowhere on Earth is safe.’

‘So where next?’ She swallowed drily, tried to get herself back under control.

Grow up. For Christ sake, grow up!

‘I have attained my first goal,’ he said emotionlessly. ‘I now know who I am, so it is time for me to attain my next goal.’ His face showed extreme emotion, raw hate. ‘Now I must show these fuckers they’ve really made an enemy.’

‘How?’

When he told her how she wondered where the hell that idea had come from. He studied her with fevered intensity, perhaps waiting for her to declare him insane, but usual definitions of sanity did not apply to the person he had once been and probably did not apply to the person he was now. She considered what he had told her about this artificial intelligence on Govnet. He’d mentioned a name, Janus, which was revealing in itself. In light of her own research, and what she knew of his previous work, she could see where this inevitably had to go.

‘You are incomplete,’ she said, her voice catching. ‘And once complete you’ll be much more able to do what you want.’

‘I know that, but it’s still not going to stop me.’

He didn’t know. He just had no idea of what was possible . . . Then, again, he had come looking for her first even though, from his point of view, she was merely a footnote to his main goal, just a way to learn about his past. Belatedly she wondered if his older self had prepared his present mind for this, impelled him to go after the one person who could give him the tools to bring his plan – his vengeance – to fruition. Yet she had once known that other self so intimately, and this seemed too cold and cruel a calculation, even for him.

‘I’m not talking about what memories or what portions of your mind you’ve lost.’ She took a firmer grip on her emotions, wiped her face shakily. ‘I’m talking about what it’s possible for you to become.’

‘Become?’

Hannah paused, suddenly horrified with herself, then after a moment continued, ‘I was currently working on a full organic interface of the human mind with an internal computer, and thence with computer networks. Unfortunately that interface, the new cerebral computer and software, are still back at the cell complex.’

She explained further, and it seemed like her words just plugged themselves into his brain like programming patches, yet did nothing to slow down the impetus of something unstoppable. He frightened her at an almost visceral level because of his capabilities, even with his mind fractured, damaged. However, the thought of once again falling into the hands of the Inspectorate frightened her even more, for even here in this damp underground bunker she was experiencing a freedom of thought and expression not previously allowed her, never allowed since the moment the first community political officer had told her to carefully watch her parents and report any incorrect behaviour.

‘I have to go back, then,’ he concluded.

‘Yes, perhaps,’ she agreed, wondering what price she was prepared to pay for her own continuing freedom and survival.

‘The Inspectorate won’t be expecting that,’ he noted, whilst carrying out the prosaic task of pouring hot water from a kettle. ‘But still it’s a risky venture. My plan will require substantial revision.’

She felt a scream of laughter rising in her chest. Risky venture? He’d just broken her out of Inspectorate HQ London, slaughtering most of the staff in the process. Yet, even so, he obviously wanted what she had to offer. Was it because of that ghostly memory of who he had once been, of the powerful intelligence that lay wrecked inside his skull? Was it the promise of turning his mind into something post-human, superhuman, that tightened his expression into something dangerously predatory? Maybe it was more complicated than that. Maybe his old self wanted to live again, and this was the nearest it could get to him, out of the land of the dead.

‘The artificial intelligence is the key,’ Hannah told him. ‘They would only allow me just small portions of the comlife presently being developed, and it works every time – for a little while at least. And if this Janus is capable of penetrating government security like you’ve just demonstrated, then it’s far in advance of anything I knew about.’ She used some of the tea he’d just made her to wash down another painkiller. The ache in her leg was not so bad now – it just felt like she’d bashed it against the edge of a desk.