Neal Asher - The Departure

‘What’s that?’ She nodded towards the screen as the urban sprawl she did not recognize appeared once again.

‘The Luberon Sprawl in southern France,’ he explained. ‘Rather disconcerting to find a disconnected part of my own mind calling up that image. It shows how I am as much inside the machine as the machine is in me.’

He picked up a combined fork-and-spoon implement and shovelled some noodles into his mouth, making, it seemed to Hannah, a deliberate effort to chew slowly, swallow carefully, and then pause between mouthfuls. Both he and Hannah had been gradually starving since they had fled the underground bunker, so if he bolted such rich food he would probably throw it all up over the console. But then he wasn’t unique in his hunger; billions were starving down on Earth, and many millions dying of hunger. He glanced at the screens as he ate and his expression went blank, oddly disconnected. The image cycle disrupted, to be replaced by a randomized feed of views inside and outside the station.

‘You were more human, just for a moment, but now you’re back in the system.’

Even when she had known Saul as a lover, he had always seemed one step away from being truly human, but not in a way that had seemed dysfunctional. He had been strangely unencumbered by the burdens of physical or mental weakness and the millstone of emotion, but now he was partly machine, these traits seemed to be sharply emphasized. This distanced her from him further and, beyond his intention of taking the satellite network out of Committee control, she did not even know his ultimate aims. Perhaps they involved delivering some payback for the billions suffering down below, but was that all he actually intended?

He glanced at her, then deliberately seemed to be fighting something, emotion returning to his face. He turned and gazed at the screens, a sadness, a regret, filling his expression.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, finally.

‘About how it all went wrong,’ he said. ‘And also of how it was inevitable.’

‘Inevitable?’ She sat up straighter.

‘Yup, just human nature.’

That was so dismissive of human nature, she felt the need to challenge it.

‘I think it’s a little more complicated than that.’

‘Really?’

She gazed at him intently, gathering her mental resources, remembering things she had considered over many years but never allowed herself to voice out loud. ‘Crises used by politicians as excuses to stifle freedom, kill democracy and grab yet more power. Terrorism, energy crises, financial meltdown, climate catastrophe . . . all, of course, global so those same politicians could extend their power globally . Everyone made obedient to the state in pursuit of the so-called greater good.’

‘And your point is?’

‘Well,’ she was on a roll now, ‘all those crises strangely seemed to disappear once the state had gained a sufficient stranglehold on the populations it was supposed to serve. Bit of a joke, really, when fossil fuels genuinely started to run out and we hit the human population upslope. Real crises then, and what was the response? To expand the state into a behemoth even more wasteful than the people it governed.’

He just sat there silently waiting for her conclusions.

‘Less of such waste and they might have actually developed the appropriate technologies to handle the problem.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’re an optimist.’

‘Perhaps.’ She shrugged, feeling uncomfortable with that label.

‘We’ve got fusion power, remember, Hannah. What we actually needed was a technology that’s been around for a couple of centuries. It’s called birth control.’ He shook his head and gazed pensively at the screens. ‘The real problem is manswarm.’

‘The fault here is ideology,’ she said, feeling sudden doubt upon hearing him use such a dismissive label. The Committee was very definitely a bad thing, but humans were better than that – could be better than that.

‘What?’

‘You know, the forerunners of the Committee weren’t interested in population control. They weren’t interested in making things better, because people who are well off and comfortable wouldn’t be likely to vote for the crappy ideologies they promulgated. Urban sprawls packed with ZAs were perfectly in tune with their interests.’

She had never spoken to him like this before, even in past times when they had lain in bed together. But of course, even during such intimacy, talk of this kind would have been dangerous, their words recorded and reviewed on the following day by a political officer.

‘But none of them prevented people using birth control – only religions tried to do that.’

‘They deliberately created underclasses and gave them a financial incentive to breed,’ she insisted.

‘True,’ he said, ‘but in China, in the twentieth, they actively discouraged breeding, yet China still went into the twenty-first with a population of over a billion. Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it, Hannah. In the end, you can’t engineer a society to go against four billion years of evolutionary instinct.’

His pessimism scared her. Okay for someone to be a pessimist when he was just among billions of other powerless human beings, but it certainly didn’t seem such a good thing when that person might soon be able to seize control of technology capable of slaughtering millions, or even billions.

‘There’s no light in your world, is there?’ she commented. ‘None at all.’

Hannah didn’t know how to take this conversation any further.

The water from the shower hit like needles, before it spattered and diffused in slow motion, filling the air all around him. Across the transparent shower door it ran as thick as jelly, before being sucked into holes in the three walls of the shower and even in the door, linked by vacuum pipes running through the glass. Without this constant suction, he imagined it would be quite easy to drown taking a shower in near-zero gravity. Even as it was, the moisture hanging heavy in the air made it difficult to breathe.

After washing the rest of him, he applied a soapy sponge carefully to his head, wiping away sodden scabs, a couple of wound staples and flakes of wound glue from his scalp. Flicking these off the sponge he watched them swirl about him until sucked away. Next he turned his attention to the knife wound below his ribs. In itself it was relatively small, but the pain lingered, and kept him mindful of the damage that had been done there. After that he just luxuriated till Le Roque’s shower abruptly shut down. He was then blasted with hot air but, not prepared to wait for it to do its job, he pushed himself out of the booth and grabbed up a towel.

‘I think these should fit.’ Hannah gestured to some items of clothing she’d draped over the double hammock. They consisted of an undersuit, cut off at knee and elbow, and a vacuum combat suit equipped with expansion seams enabling it to cover a range of sizes.

Saul pulled on the undersuit, then thrust his feet into the integral boots of the VC suit before releasing the fabric concertinaed at the knee in order to get the right leg length, then finally tightening the upper section around his torso. It was a useful hard-wearing garment fitted with armour pads and inlaid shock and penetration mesh, suitable for stopping any missile from a plastic bullet downwards.

And it certainly seemed likely that he would be needing such protection.

Once the space plane was only four hours out, he attempted putting some satellites on an intercept course, but those aboard were obviously checking satellite positions constantly, and the craft made a sufficient deviation before he could even apply any serious acceleration. Having expected this, he swivelled one satellite, its laser still functional, and fired on the plane, probing all the way along it to look for weaknesses. No result, however, and infrared imaging indicated the point heat dispersing almost immediately.