“Hello,” she sent, “I’m glad someone’s turned up—we were going to have a long journey otherwise.” She decided it best not to allow her present image to transmit too.
There was no response, but Isobel was aware of how her ship was being constantly scanned. She targeted the other ship through her sensors, but didn’t power up her single railgun. In reality there was no need, since the gun could power up, aim and fire all within milliseconds. Anyway, of all the enemies who might have sought her out here, she couldn’t think of one who wouldn’t take time to gloat before opening fire. Most likely, such an enemy would want to board and make things personal. Which, as she now was, she would much prefer. It was just rather odd that whoever was aboard that other ship, whether an enemy or otherwise, wasn’t talking.
Trent …
She hadn’t been paying attention. The man had just opened the airlock into the small escape shuttle. Doubtless he hoped to get to that other ship, where he rated his chances of survival as being better. She watched him lug his bag of belongings into the airlock and close the door behind him, then she locked both doors.
“Trent,” she said, “I let you shoot at me once to demonstrate the futility of trying to kill me. Now I’ve allowed you to try and escape to demonstrate the futility of that.” This was of course a lie. If he had thought to disable the airlock sensor he would’ve been gone before she noticed. “Any further foolishness like this and I will terminate our agreement. I leave you to consider the nature of that termination.”
She contemplated how delicious that might be.
He started to say something but she cut off the microphone. She would deal with him later. Returning her attention to the bridge screen’s viewing laminate, she blinked her rows of eyes, sure some shadow had flickered during her brief distraction. She replayed the last few seconds in her mind. A shadow had briefly coagulated around an external door in the other ship, before shooting across towards the
Moray Firth
. Then it left her field of view.
She checked sensor data but could find nothing, which was odd. Her sensors should have picked up that moving darkness, just as the cam had. That meant her sensors had been compromised, which meant either her ship’s system had somehow been penetrated, or someone or something out there was using sophisticated chameleonware. She immediately focused on all doors opening to space, while powering up anti-personnel lasers. Next she ran a scouring program through the lasers, so they ran a firing pattern all around her hull which should hit anything man-sized or above.
“Ouch,” said a voice in her mind, and all the lasers shut down.
It was just a silly word, but suddenly Isobel was terrified. She could not even begin to trace where it had come from, or how the lasers had been shut down. She had to be utterly compromised—something had completely penetrated both her ship’s computer system and her haiman enhancements.
“Thorvald Spear,” said the voice contemplatively.
The
Moray Firth
jerked and shuddered, as if a giant had grabbed it and was shaking it to see what might rattle inside. Next a sound penetrated the hull like the scrabbling of a thousand clawed feet. And following that, clear as could be, she saw a warning icon signalling that the engine section’s maintenance door was now standing open.
Isobel swept round, then hesitated. The voice had been bland, but it was one she recognized. Fighting her terror, she headed back out of the bridge. But as she moved down the central corridor, the movement impelled her other part into greater prominence. Terror fled, supplanted by rage and an odd twisted excitement, the emotions of the hunt. She finally reached the airlock into the engine compartment, which was now closed. Again she hesitated. Could she even cram herself into the human-sized airlock? Of course she could—the airlock was made to take two or even three people at a push. What about air? If the maintenance door was open, there would be none in the engine section now. But hooders came from an environment where air was scarce and, though they could die from its lack, they could survive for a long time without it. What could she do? It was Penny Royal …
Cursing to herself, she opened the outer airlock door and squeezed inside. The lock then refused to cycle out its air—because, although it could recognize something was inside, it wasn’t getting any working space suit readings. She overrode it and, as the air drained, she felt sphincters closing all over her body and something glazing her eyes. She opened the inner door and entered, compressed both physically and mentally like a spring.
This rear section was cylindrical, with all the fuel tanks and other equipment related to the fusion drive to the back. Pipes webbed the inner hull, leading to steering thrusters all around the ship. A fusion reactor squatted nearby, like a huge iron hockey puck caught in a spider’s web of pipes and ducts. Above was the sphere containing her second-child ship mind, and in the middle lay the U-space drive. This resembled a huge wine bottle fashioned of polished aluminium, with matt-black radiator fins extending to the walls and electromagnetic projectors jutting to four quarters. It was partially concealed by the black and silver mass shape, stooping over it.
“Hello Isobel,” it said, in her mind.
Isobel immediately wanted to launch a physical attack, but managed to suppress the urge as she surged forwards, her human self knowing how suicidal that would be. She drew cross hairs over this figure, but she couldn’t fire. Sure, the proton cannon
might
damage the black AI, but it certainly
would
damage the U-space drive, which could well be suicide too. It might be dormant since Spear had knocked out the tuning of its Calabi-Yau frames. However, it still contained torsioned spacial knots which, if they unravelled, might tear apart everything in here, including Isobel.
“What do you want?” she managed.
“A resolution, and a change of course,” it replied, suddenly sweeping away from the drive and in the process turning into a shoal of black, sharp-edged fishes. This mass crossed the engine section in a blink, to poise, wavering, directly before Isobel. All instinctive and logical responses froze inside her. She felt herself being inspected, so deeply that nothing could be hidden. Was this how the religious felt, she wondered?
“How does it feel to tear them apart?” Penny Royal asked.
“Damn you,” she said and, no longer caring, triggered both her weapons.
The guns did not fire but the very action tripped other relays inside her. All her rage at Spear, at Penny Royal and at any who had crossed her waxed strong and hot. All her sense of loss at no longer being human howled at her from some deep dark well and rose. All the human horror at what had been done to her, and what she had become, yanked hard on the threads of her being. A wave travelled through her from hood to tail and she coiled and collapsed, louse-like, to the deck as if to stop herself flying apart. Then another wave, black and full of knives, fell upon her.
Again?
She asked in some part of her being.
I know the original form now
, Penny Royal replied.
Visions of alien destruction pursued her into darkness, watched over by something white, pure and utterly lethal.
When she finally recovered her senses it was to the sound, transmitted through the ship, of Trent pleading to be let out, for he had been trapped in the airlock for six hours. She shouldn’t have been able to hear him, she thought. Then she realized the maintenance door to the engine section was closed and it had recharged with air. In silence she released him, while in her mind she checked and rechecked a diagnostic test of the U-space engine. It was now fully functional once more. Maybe Penny Royal had come into this system to find its own destroyer or perhaps it sought something aboard that vessel. Why it had then stopped on its way out to repair her U-space engine, she just could not fathom. She had no idea what it had done to her either, to leave spreading patches of grey on her carapace and to turn her red eyes orange. She could only understand the deep and violent grief the AI had left with her, for that was precisely in keeping with all its gifts.
SPEAR
The Golem provided nothing—was a bust as far as obtaining data about Penny Royal. I therefore returned to studying the pyrite storage inside the ammonite fossil, which I had brought aboard. Meanwhile, Flute kept slinging us away from the sun to cool down, before returning to manufacture more railgun missiles. I watched this process sometimes, but mostly ignored it. I only stopped my work for a length of time to observe how Flute mined pitchblende from a belt of dust which ran around the supergiant sun in an orbit as wide as that of Uranus around Sol. When I finally couldn’t figure out what was going on and felt an exciting lack of familiarity with the process, I decided to ask.
“I am drawing dust into the ship through a Buzzard hardfield intake,” Flute replied.
“And then?” I prompted.
“I sieve the dust of major impurities and then the rest is mixed with water then enzyme refined. Next, uranium-238 is para-magnetically extracted.”
“Enzymes—how did you make them?”
“This ship has a stock of them for just this purpose.”
Of course: this ship was made to be capable of restocking its armoury, so ensuring a supply of such an enzyme wasn’t improbable. This meant that other equipment used in this process would also be aboard.
“What do you do with it next?” I asked.
“I melt the uranium and form it into shaped ingots, these being used to line a separation grid in the neutron fast-saturation chamber, the one adjacent to the fusion reactor. Here it is transmuted into fissile plutonium-239,” Flute replied. “Meanwhile, I’m building the bomb mechanism in the ship’s weapons assembly chamber. It will contain pressure-metalized hydrogen, a hardfield tetragonal box and a single fifteen-kiloton CTD. The expected blast yield is two hundred and thirty megatons.”
I didn’t know the mass of Penny Royal’s planetoid, but if I could slam this device down through one of the tunnel entrances, I felt sure that—if the planetoid itself didn’t fly apart—Penny Royal would be leaving the other entrances as vapour.
“Carry on with the good work,” I said, heading back to my own tasks.
When the pyrite crystals in the ammonite were scanned aboard the
Moray Firth
, a few things had been flagged for my attention. However, I just hadn’t felt inclined to examine them then. Now, with nothing I could do to hasten my arrival time at Penny Royal’s planetoid, I did have time and the inclination. What had been discovered astounded me: the ammonite contained a human mind.
Further examination revealed that it was a stripped-out version of what it
might
have been, when inside someone’s skull. Whether it was from a real person, a copy from a real person or an AI-created facsimile was debatable. I then found it became active when I applied some power. It was thinking and in some manner
doing
—then, after a period of time, it switched to an entirely different quantum circuit. After a further period of time—about six hours at the speed it was running and one hour for me—it switched back to its original circuit. I was baffled. I just couldn’t see the purpose of this because, upon further observation, when it switched circuits it retained no awareness of what had taken place before. It was thinking and doing but trapped in the same perpetual loop of thought and action.
I tried influencing that loop by injecting random data. Certainly there was an effect, but again, after the switch-over it lost all memory of the previous cycle. In doing this I began to notice how other processes, outside its mental patterns, were influenced. There were reactions to my input, which did change whatever the trapped persona was doing. I had to run Hilbert space calculations to divine this, many of which ran on aug processing exclusive to my own mind. Then the penny dropped … to coin a phrase …
What I was seeing was a stripped-down human mind, without much of the baggage we all carry but with sufficient capability to function as a human being. It was living in a virtuality loop. Here was a mind trapped in an artificial reality, forever performing the same tasks. Also, from my outside perspective, it seemed one quantum circuit was activated after the other. However, further analysis revealed that to the mind inside they were acting in concert—this apparently related to some weird time crystallization effect. It was one mind interacting with itself. It was time, I felt, to find out what it was actually doing. I wanted to take a look.
Auging through to these circuits was no easy task. I couldn’t connect in fully and understand what I was seeing, because I needed to at least identify something recognizable there so I could translate the rest of the programming. I started off by trying to interpret everything that lay outside the mind, or minds—the rules, the dimensions and material. Eventually, after hours of work, I felt I had something and routed data through the hologram projector. A shape appeared, flickering and changing rapidly and sometimes filling up the projection cylinder. This flickering slowed as the program discarded the most unlikely data, became contained in an area as wide as a football, then finally something resolved. It took me a further few seconds to realize I was looking at a pair of ancient wrought-iron pincers, and that their tips were glowing. Subsequently, translating the virtuality became just a matter of brute force computing and soon I was ready to peer inside, and so I did.
The victim hanging by his wrists from the chain was probably moaning in agony. I didn’t have audio so I couldn’t hear that. However, his body was clearly covered with burns and blood. At that moment the torturer was over by a brazier, heating his pincers and his poker. I took in details, noting objects scattered on the floor below the victim and identified them as toes and fingers. The whole scene was sickening, and yet prosaic—a standard setup you might find in any fantasy or historical virtual game. The torturer turned away from the brazier, raising the glowing poker. This loop was coming to an end, I realized. And, as the torturer walked round behind his victim, I could guess how it ended. I just took a moment longer to confirm that the blood and burns on the victim’s face were all that distinguished it from that of the torturer. Then I shut down the feed and, as quickly as I could, shut down the power supply to that particular circle of Hell.