Neal Asher - The Departure

‘Janus?’ Bronstein enquired.

Did they really need the doctor? Saul felt sure Hannah could complete the operation by herself now that she had the necessary equipment. Perhaps it would be safer if he just raised the automatic and put a bullet through the side of Bronstein’s head.

‘Not your concern,’ Hannah replied.

‘I’m just curious, obviously.’

‘Put it this way,’ she said, ‘you already know enough now to get yourself permanently adjusted through a recycling plant. Do you really want to know more?’

‘Well, things can’t get much worse than you describe. Yes, I do want to know.’

After a pause in which yellowish three-dimensional space sectioned by cubic gridlines began to expand inside Saul’s skull, where surely there could not be room for it, she replied, ‘If you think things can’t get any worse than that, you obviously don’t know enough.’

‘Hey, the Inspectorate catches up with me and I’m in for adjustment anyway – or more likely a bullet through the back of the head. Yeah, I know they can stick you under an inducer until your mind’s turned to jelly, but that’ll never happen to me.’

‘Why not?’ Hannah asked.

‘A lot of us have them now: a Hyex implant at the base of the skull.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘I can kill myself simply with a thought.’

‘A lot of you?’ Hannah echoed.

The space inside Saul’s skull had meanwhile grown vast. In fact it seemed infinite now; something underlying his mind and his perception of . . . everything, but still he managed to interject, before Bronstein answered, ‘He’s a revolutionary . . . Hannah.’ By then he had the automatic raised and pointing straight at Bronstein’s face. The doctor seemed strangely unsurprised by this. ‘Over there.’ Saul gestured with the weapon towards the far side of the theatre and, after a shrug, the doctor moved to where instructed, leant back against a work surface, and folded his arms.

‘How much longer?’ Saul asked Hannah.

‘Just a minute or so and I’ll be able to glue this bit of skull back in,’ she replied.

He had just wanted the time frame, not the physical detail.

‘What are you two?’ Bronstein asked.

‘None of your business,’ Saul replied, calculating the best move to make next. As his capacity for thought expanded, it seemed to be sapping his capacity to act. Other considerations impinged, like, if he shot the doctor now, this place would be filled with a mist of blood that might be infected with something, or he might damage computer hardware linked to the microsurgery.

‘Only Committee executives get given the kind of stuff in your head, and they certainly don’t come here to have it fitted,’ Bronstein said.

The doctor had to have some emergency way of dealing with Hannah and himself, Saul realized. Allowing them to walk in here armed had just been to reassure them, but Bronstein would never otherwise put himself at such a disadvantage, since armed customers might decide to retrieve any payment they had made. Saul needed to work out his options before Hannah finished up, because it would be then that the doctor made his move.

‘It’s still none of your business,’ Saul replied.

‘Maybe we can help each other,’ Bronstein suggested, one finger going up to his own temple.

He clearly had hardware in his own skull, and was doing something with it. After a moment he exclaimed, ‘Jesus!’ and suddenly looked very frightened. ‘We have to go!’ He pushed himself away from the worktop.

Saul heard sizzling and smelt burnt meat as Hannah sealed blood vessels.

‘Stay the fuck where you are!’

Next a smell he recognized as bone glue.

‘The Inspectorate!’

Just then something slammed against the trailer van, throwing it sideways until it crashed to a halt. Bronstein’s feet slid out from under him, but he saved himself from falling by grabbing the work surface behind him. The microsurgery tore loose from the framework steadying Saul’s head, falling to the floor with a sound like a dropped cutlery drawer, and Hannah ended up sprawled across his lap. A great booming roar filled the multi-storey and Saul heard loose objects smashing against the side of the vehicle. Almost simultaneous with this, the paralytic, which Bronstein’s clean lock must have administered to her as they entered the surgery, had now activated and dropped Hannah straight to the floor the moment she pulled herself off Saul’s lap. At the same moment, Saul found himself incapable of pulling the trigger. His arm dropped, heavy as lead. Consciousness faded.

As consciousness slowly returned, Saul felt totally disconnected from his body, his mind cowering alone like a cockroach in some huge tiled bathroom. But then the cockroach began to break apart, each piece of it assigned to a separate tile, as the chaotic structure of thoughts normally organized on an evolutionary organic basis found itself being stored much more logically, and given room . The table of elements sat there perfectly clear in his memory, and he found he could view those elements in any order he chose: whether by valency, atomic weight or even chromatic spectra. Spreading out from this mutable table reached a forest of chemical formulae, all just as mutable, whereupon he found disconnected parts of himself idly modelling and filling in the gaps in his knowledge. From all this he could link to subatomic formulae, but by then was positioned on another tile within his mental space, in another cube of the grid . . . No, such images were too much of a simplification for the benefit of his animal consciousness, for his mental space was multidimensional, the blocks of information reordering and linking up dependent on requirements. He understood this all to be real, as he woke up; his only problem was that he himself did not feel real. If he had believed in the human soul, he would have now felt certain that his own had taken a sabbatical. It seemed that those parts of his brain dealing with self-image and ego had somehow been swamped.

‘More advanced than the shit in my head, then,’ said a voice.

He opened his eyes to find he lay sideways in a ratty armchair, surrounded by a haze of cigarette smoke. His head, which felt as if it’d been kicked by a horse, rested on a stained pillow. Focusing his gaze, he saw two armed guards standing by the door. With great care he turned his head to take in the rest of the room.

‘Slightly more advanced, yes,’ Hannah replied, ‘but still lacking the comlife component.’ She raised a cup from the table she sat beside, took a sip, then put it down again.

‘Why?’ asked the man, scratching at a crusty, sewn-up split in his skull as he paced round behind her, coming to a halt beside the same table.

‘I’ve yet to be able to either obtain or build anything useful, and anyway it’s too early for installation,’ she lied to him. Saul could sense her fear, no matter how hard she tried to conceal it. The man standing over her had, after all, been one of her experimental subjects, with hardware implanted in his skull to test it, and doubtless through which he could be interrogated. It hadn’t mattered to the government if this procedure killed him; he had been due to die anyway.

‘Malden,’ Saul observed, recognizing the man he had released from IHQ London.

He wore the fatigues of an Inspectorate enforcer, over a heavy-boned physique winnowed of spare flesh. Now sprouting bristles on the scalp and chin, his skull-like head had regained some humanity, but dark circles still underscored his eyes, and stitched-up slices were mapped across his crown and behind his ears. When he snapped a glance towards Saul with bloodshot eyes, it felt almost like a blow. Malden assessed him, making calculations based on this new input of him being awake and cognizant, then dismissed him as he returned his attention to Hannah. After a moment he picked up a hand-rolled cigarette from the ashtray on the table and took a drag.