Neal Asher - The Departure

‘Alan,’ urged Hannah. ‘Alan.’

He was down on his knees and she was trying to pull him back to his feet with one hand, whilst she clutched Merrick’s assault rifle in the other. He raised his head to study their surroundings through watery eyes. To his right stood a row of double-skin inflatable tents, and directly ahead lay a campfire around which a crowd of ZAs was gathered. Many of them were staring at him and Hannah, and some of them were beginning to walk towards them. They needed to get out of here, now.

There was no reason to suppose these people were hostile, but they would certainly want to know about the AH trailer van, and why he and Hannah had deserted it. The state of his skull would raise questions too. Or maybe they thought he and Hannah might be able to provide answers regarding that distant atomic blast.

‘Alan!’ she repeated.

He was still weak and his head ached abominably, but his awareness of his body, provided by the martial training in his previous existence, had grown to something almost mathematical in its precision. He stood upright, automatically assimilating a mental model of the movements of every muscle and bone in his body, whose names, strength, position and size he now knew, calculating the stresses caused, calculating potential, as he also filled in a rather more sketchy model of his surroundings. This other model he expanded, briefly switching on his modem again to download a city map, seemingly snatching it from beneath the multiple limbs of some shadowy behemoth, mapping the sprawl around him and working out precisely where he wanted to be next in order to further his plans, for they had not changed.

‘Who are you?’ called the woman leading a group of four zero-assets towards them.

‘Rife,’ he said, reaching out to close his hand about the assault rifle Hannah held, delighting in the complexity of the structure of both hand and arm, and already seeing much room for improvement.

‘No.’ She did not release the gun.

He turned to gaze at her, targeting the points on her body he could strike to get her to release the weapon, finally deciding that one jab in her solar plexus would be quickest. She met his gaze and straight away let go, looking terrified. Weapon held one-handed, its butt tucked under his arm, he turned back to face those still approaching. The woman halted then and, as if Saul had struck her, abruptly lurched backwards into the man directly behind her. The other ZAs halted as well, and Saul measured subtle alterations in their pose. They went from a belligerent curiosity to something cowed and frightened. What were they seeing? He turned and began heading back out of the tunnel, already downgrading their importance within his mental model.

‘Your eyes,’ said Hannah.

‘Bloodshot like Malden’s,’ he stated. ‘Blood-pressure differential through the organic interface to his cerebellum, caused by increased demand. It will kill him eventually.’

‘And you?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

He halted and turned to her. ‘Because of the viral nanite fix my previous self made.’ He paused, briefly studying the map in his head of the surrounding sprawl. ‘Telomeres reconfigured, T-cell boost and an increase in stem-cell division, but with strong immune response to stem-cell mutation. I heal about four times faster than a normal human being, and this body physically adapts to internal and external pressures at the same rate. Also, those little biomechs are still in my bloodstream, constantly running repairs. This is why I survived Smith’s torture.’

No terror in her expression now, but a look of shock remained, and something like awe. ‘How can you know that?’

‘I worked it out, and that’s what my present self would have done.’

A motorway flyover now above. A big truck with strobing green lights shot over it, followed by four Inspectorate ground cruisers. He began walking towards a pedway over to his far left. It cut through under the flyover and on the other side of it lay access for maintenance workers to reach the road itself.

‘Where are we going?’ Hannah asked.

‘Closer to the blast.’

‘Please, speak to me, Alan.’

He was already speaking to her, so what was her problem? The answer to that didn’t really require much thinking about, but its implications did. The human component of his self had been all but subsumed by Janus, and he now thought with the ordered logic of a machine intelligence. Emotions: what were they but an evolved evolutionary imperative, a chemical anachronism residing in the new him? Love, hate, friendship, fear and happiness, what did he need them for? In the mouth of the pedway tunnel, he dumped the assault rifle in a litter bin – as a precaution, since carrying it might draw the attention of enforcers in the cruisers passing above – then, two paces beyond the bin, a great black gulf opened up in his extended mind, and he sank to his knees again.

What use were emotions? He could analyse them right down to their smallest components and know the reason for them all, then he could discount them from his thought processes and become a totally logical being. What use then for that other anachronism called the survival instinct? He’d run full-tilt into the dilemma of those who saw themselves merely as machines for the transmission of genes, and nothing more. If that was to be his only purpose, what use was existence at all? Why live, why struggle, why seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, in the sure knowledge they were both just a couple more screwdrivers inside the genetic toolbox? Surely oblivion was a better choice?

He didn’t need a lump of Hyex embedded in the base of his skull to end it all. Through the organic interface, he could just shut himself down, turn off his conscious mind, erase all data. His autonomous nervous system would continue functioning, but he would then be mindless. He lay a breath away from oblivion at that moment, but even patterns of thought are a product of evolution and the old survival imperative itself had survived the integration process, having as its source both himself and Janus who, after all, was a near-copy of a human mind. Saul realized that to survive he must make divisions, he must retain a human mind to interface with the world, just as the organic interface in his skull marked a physical line of division between the organic and the silicon him. In that instant he began rebuilding the cowering cockroach inside his skull, re-establishing its predominance, turning a human face back towards the world. Finally he stood up again, and the human face he turned towards the world boiled with anger and hate.

‘What happened?’ Hannah asked.

‘Call it existential angst,’ he said tightly.

She nodded. ‘Something like that happened with Malden, but he thought it was a fault in the comlife he used.’

‘You knew?’ He looked up.

‘I got no chance to tell you.’ She gazed at him accusingly. ‘I thought you would warn me before you loaded the AI.’

‘How did Malden survive?’

‘He hung on to his hate.’

The much larger and more complex part of himself delivered into Saul’s human mind the dry verdict that, though Hannah indeed had some idea of how things had run within Malden’s head, she had no idea of what was going on in his own. Saul realized that she had taken a gamble with him; she could not have known what combining Janus with the hardware in his head would result in.

‘I, too, hang on to my hatred,’ he declared.

But was it just the Committee he hated, or the entire human race?

As the Inspectorate cruisers, the big trucks of DRS or ‘disaster response service’, the AH ambulances and ATVs sped past, their occupants all ignored Hannah and Saul. Why, Hannah wondered, would they take note of just two more civilians milling around the periphery of the blast zone? If she and Saul had been the only two actually walking towards the great boiling cloud still rising from the firestorm, the only two making their way through the increasing amounts of debris, perhaps they would have been more noticeable.