Nemesis (55 page)

‘Now that it’s clear you aren’t an infection, we’re accommodating you rather than dismembering you,’ said the curator. ‘Things are so much nicer that way, wouldn’t you say?’

Will blinked as his field of view widened again. The entire gestalt pseudo-organism around him operated as a kind of all-purpose life-support. It kept the tunnels, and everything in them, intact. It adapted to meet the needs of whatever resided there. It removed systemic threats, co-opting their mechanisms for future use and abandoning its own obsolete tools just as readily.

This wasn’t just a habitable world. It was a cellular-scale terraforming system – a machine for populating entire galaxies. Drop a fragment of tunnel root on a dead world and the habitat would rebuild itself from scratch.

And that was exactly what happened on this planet, the world explained. Snakepit was founded, like countless worlds before it, as part of a grand project to unify and foster life. But the Founders who engineered Snakepit never came back to populate their own creation as expected. Knowledge of them was lost, but the biosphere carried on regardless, ready to nurture whomever it found.

Will gasped in understanding as he saw how wrong he’d been. When he’d first encountered Snakepit’s technology he’d assumed foul play, but now that the mechanisms which drove it were laid out, he saw only kindness. The world’s entire purpose was to encourage life, to merge with it and shape itself to life’s whim. Snakepit was an ancient, open-access Eden, adrift in the universe and waiting to love someone.

It had struck at human colonies, he saw, only because humans had goaded it. They’d damaged the surface on purpose and left false trails for it to follow. Humanity had woken the planet’s instinct to understand and adapt to threats. For all their tinkering with victims, the Nem swarms constituted nothing more than acts of reflexive self-defence. And, if used wisely, that same defensive force would serve to protect all humanity from whatever dangers the universe might have to offer. More than that, the planet
wanted
to protect them. It felt lonely and incomplete without someone to look after.

Will couldn’t argue with the beauty of this vision but something about it disturbed him. What had happened to the Founders? With the Transcended active in this part of space, he could hazard a guess, but why had no information about the race who had designed this place been left behind? Will knew he was still missing something but it was impossible to think clearly with the planet sticking its fingers into his mind.

He forced himself to focus. He had work to do. Ann still needed his help.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘No more memory dumps. I’m still adjusting. I have a friend and she needs help.’

‘Oh,
that
thing!’ said the curator cheerfully. ‘She’s just down here. This way, please.’ She gestured eagerly.

The curator led him out of the passageway in an impossible direction. Will suddenly found himself standing at the threshold of an operating theatre of sorts – a confused mixture of virtual medical displays and mouldering historic architecture.

Ann’s body floated in the air in front of him at the centre of great tiled hall with a vaulted ceiling. She was completely visible to him in a way that normal human sight could never have encompassed. Data splayed out in the space around her – diagrams upon diagrams, updating in real-time – a body teased apart into its component proteins like a schematic for a starship. The model of her ran so deep that it
was
her.

‘Thank you for your supporting texts,’ said the curator. ‘They’ve been very useful. She makes so much more sense now. Tell me, does she need any modifications or improvements while she’s in here? Gills, for instance? Eyes on her hands? They’d be very useful. Just imagine the manual precision she’d attain.’

‘Not right now,’ said Will. ‘Let’s just get her healthy.’

The curator shrugged, disappointed. ‘As you wish.’

Ann’s repair began in earnest. The muck in the alcove where she lay wrapped itself around her and started turning into human tissue even before it reached her body. The task, now that it had been properly understood, was trivial.

‘We’ll extend her operating limits, of course,’ she said, ‘just as we have yours. It’d be such a shame for her to only enjoy it here for a century or two. This way she can have much more fun.’

There it was again: the unsettling implication that the curator’s assistance hinged on his never getting out of there. Will chose not to challenge it just yet.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect this kind of help.’

The curator regarded him with deep amusement and squeezed his arm. ‘Why ever not? All our residents receive as much support as we can offer. It aids integration.’

Will bit back a nervous response. Just minutes ago, he’d been ready to give up his life. So why did an eternity on Snakepit suddenly scare him?’

‘We have other problems,’ he said. ‘There are creatures in the tunnels looking for us. Some of yours, I believe.’

The curator blinked at him in surprise. ‘
Creatures?
’ she said. ‘Are you talking about
our children
?’

Will eyed her with bewildered alarm, unsure of what she meant.

The curator took him by the arm and led him out of the operating room to another cracked and ancient hall, this one filled with a vast, glowing diagram of the local tunnel-space. If the map for a nest designed by a billion psychotic ants had been rendered in threads of light, it might look like this, he thought. Thousands of root-habitats twisted around and over each other, joining at bewilderingly convoluted junctions. Will’s perspective lurched as he tried to take the map in all at once. He faltered and stepped back like a hiker on a cliff-top.

The curator huffed. ‘Look,’ she said snippily. ‘It’s easy. You’re over here.’

She led him across the tiled floor, cuddling up beside him as they walked. They passed through the glowing ghosts of a million twisted roots to the virtual replica of the tunnel where his body lay. Will could see luminous pulses of activity there and realised he was looking at soldiers retreating from and firing at a wave of advancing Nems.

When Will focused on the advancing aliens they unfurled in his head in a tide of strangeness. They felt cryptic and half-human, ominous and lovable at the same time. Will couldn’t help but look on them with fondness and knew the planet was interfering with his thoughts again.

‘They don’t belong here,’ he said.

The curator gave him a long glance. ‘What are you talking about? Of course they do.’

‘But they’ve changed,’ said Will. ‘I can feel it. These creatures might have originated in your system but they aren’t part of it any more. They’re different. They’ve mutated.’

‘
Our
system, darling,’ said the curator. ‘And what did you expect? This is how it’s always been.’

Will’s mind blanched as another blob of foreign knowledge spilled into it. This was what the defensive nodes were for – to solve the problem of life that didn’t integrate peacefully.

Snakepit operated in two ways. Under normal conditions, any life it encountered was ushered in, analysed and accommodated. But when the damage a species caused tipped past a critical threshold, the planet changed strategy. Instead of welcoming that species, Snakepit took it apart and reconstructed it as something less volatile. At the same time, it co-opted the invasive species’ own weapons to make itself stronger, and in the process of doing so, Snakepit’s defensive tools mutated.

When such a new mutation arose, it had to assert both its stability and its selective advantage before Snakepit would allow it to reintegrate. In other words, the planet improved through competition with its own distorted offspring. That which conquered informed the template for future growth.

‘We must adapt ourselves to the needs of our young, darling, wouldn’t you agree? The doors are being thrown open to welcome them home.’

She sounded thrilled about it. Will felt ill.

‘No,’ said Will. ‘That’s not okay. Their changes are dangerous. They’ve gone wrong.’

‘Wrong? Don’t be ridiculous. They’re just fitter.’

Their little ones had come back and
asserted primacy
backed by force. In doing so, they had improved on Snakepit’s original design. That’s what the brief war between the Nems and their parent world had been about. Seeing things through this curiously merged perspective, Will felt like a father discussing the changes in a child after a stint off at university.

So what if he did a few drugs, he’s acquired some useful life-skills. We need to do what’s right for him, Honey, and that means accommodating his lifestyle choices, even if we don’t understand them.

The Nems’ return effectively announced the arrival of a new fused race, half-Snakepit, half-humanity. Perhaps, before they arrived, the human race might have called Snakepit a home and lived here without risk. But now, because the League had got the defensive nodes involved, the game had changed. His species had selected itself for enforced integration instead and the implications of that change of plan were still playing out.

The curator looked up at him with amused patience as if at a cantankerous but ultimately loving dad. But that wasn’t how Will felt, even with his extended subminds distorting his opinions. Maybe that way of seeing things had worked here in the past, but any offspring bent on consuming the human race had lost its rooming privileges as far as he was concerned.

‘No,’ Will insisted. ‘I’m not having it.’

‘You’re not?’

The curator’s smile widened. She looked him up and down with wry amusement and Will suddenly understood how thin this veneer of amiability actually was. For the curator, Will was a future display waiting to take its place behind glass. Unless he proved himself otherwise, he was just another species to be incorporated into the planet’s biosphere. Or rather, one already undergoing incorporation.

It occurred to him then that she was behaving awfully like a sentient entity for a supposedly sub-rational distributed processing system. Will froze in horror as he realised why. It was because
he
was there. He had asked for someone to talk to, and that’s what he’d been given.

Each of his smart-cells contained a micro-SAP processing engine. Smart-cells working together could run full subminds. The more she emulated his subminds by replicating his nucleic architecture, the more self-aware the curator became. Absorbing Will constituted a whole different level of target risk from the incorporation of ordinary humans. Will was leaking sentience into the planet just by being hooked up to it and chatting. It was a danger he’d never even considered.

This was where his fear was coming from. Merely by standing here he was making the threat to the human race worse. Everything was blending here: the planet, the mutants, him. And it was only a matter of time before they all fused.

Will fought back a surge of panic and wondered how many of his thoughts he could honestly screen from the curator at this point. As it grew, this figment of his imagination would eventually overwhelm him, and after that, everyone else.

‘Stop,’ said Will. ‘This isn’t
good enough
. I know you want to understand humanity. You want people here, living and laughing, incorporated into your vision. Well, you can’t do that through these mutants. They’re broken, clumsy things. They destroy more than they create. They’re not like people. They’re cheap parodies. They have none of the richness you crave. None of those levels of complexity. If you let them take you over, everyone loses. Humanity will be destroyed and all you’ll be left with is a clutch of mindless puppets.’

The curator raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Mindless?’ she said. ‘They’re still learning, dear. Give them time.’ She patted his arm and smirked. ‘I don’t imagine you could do any better.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Will.

To make any alternative to Nem dominance convincing, Will knew he had to offer the curator something she didn’t already have. Fortunately, Will could offer plenty. He reached through his mind to the
Ariel Two
, floating high above. With the planet’s own communication matrix now at his disposal, doing so was as simple as thought.

He fished back a handful of files full of human science and art. Her eyes widened as the knowledge leaked into her. The curator stared at him.

‘I had no idea,’ she said.

He saw the hunger in her expression and was pleased.

‘That’s just a taste of what you’re missing,’ said Will. ‘There’s more data where that came from – a dozen worlds’ worth.’ There was no way he could lie in the museum. He and the curator were too tightly coupled for that. She knew he was on the level. ‘You don’t want those monsters outside running your world. You want real people. People who think and love and make art.’

‘I
do
want that,’ she said.

Of course she did. It was what she was made for. He topped the package off with footage of him trashing the Nems at Tiwanaku and pushed it out through the mesh of his subminds into the curator’s waiting substrate.

‘In case you’re wondering, this file shows what I did to your mutants the last time they bothered me. Primacy, my ass. Look over their minds and ask yourself if they have anything that compares.’

‘This is what I’ve been waiting for,’ said the curator. ‘All that variety. This is what I’m supposed to host.’

‘I know,’ said Will. ‘But if the mutants get their way, you’ll have none of it. They’ll destroy it all. I’ve seen them do it.’

The curator wrung her hands, desperation edging into her expression.

‘But I
can’t
make them leave now,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t work that way. Like I said, they’ve
asserted primacy
. The instincts that run my system are duplicated across every cell in my substrate and they’re
very
robust. My defences have already fallen passive. So you see, they have the keys to the castle and the merging has started. The only way it can be stopped now is if you assert primacy over
them
as another competing variant. You’d have to convince them to submit to you just like they convinced me to do so to them.’