Creation Machine (7 page)

Alameche remained silent. So did the Patriarch.

‘I’ll take that as a yes. You heard about some strange object that flew out of the skies, without warning and without showing on the sensors, and landed slap-down-doodie in the core of the biggest nuclear plant on the planet – a plant that was later turned into a sort of memorial to the people killed at the time. Yes?’

Again, both men remained silent. Eskjog made a sighing noise. ‘Another yes, I think,’ it said. ‘So you investigated. Guesses or not, I’m afraid we know this part. You used unprotected human forced labour to excavate the exposed nuclear core of a demolished fission plant. This desecrated the memorial and created yet another heap of corpses, if a bit more slowly than usual. And you found something.’

The screen lit up, making Alameche blink. Then his eyes adapted and he registered the image. It was a white ovoid. There was no sense of scale; it could have been millimetres or kilometres long.

Eskjog went on speaking. ‘Going back to guesswork, I suspect you have this thing deep in a lab somewhere. I don’t know where, so you have actually managed to conceal something. Well done you. I also suspect that you have no idea what it is and that it has defied analysis, otherwise your whole civilization would be in another place altogether. And if that’s true, if it really isn’t letting you in – then it must still be alive, although possibly compromised.’

There was a long silence while both men stared at the screen. Then the Patriarch spoke. ‘How did you obtain that image?’ he asked, his voice shaking.

‘Ah well.’ Eskjog’s voice sounded smug. ‘That’s the bit that leaked, I’m afraid.’

‘But how?’ The Patriarch’s voice was practically a roar. ‘We killed them all! Didn’t we kill them all? Alameche, you useless bastard! Tell me we killed them all!’

‘Whoa! Steady.’ Eskjog floated towards the Patriarch, and through his growing terror Alameche had the insane notion that it would have mopped the man’s brow if it could. ‘You did kill them all. That is, Alameche here had them all killed, just like you told him. But these days, with the right technology death is – how can I put this – a nuanced condition. A personality escaped.’

The Patriarch groaned and slumped back in his seat. ‘Alameche,’ he said, ‘I have stopped understanding. Understand for me, or I’ll have your head cooked on your neck.’

Alameche felt as if his head was already cooking. He shook it carefully. ‘I think it’s a sort of simulation, Excellency. A human personality can exist as a model, within an artificial intelligence.’ He looked at Eskjog. ‘Although how such a thing can “escape”, I don’t know.’

‘Well, the sort of thing you have just described probably couldn’t,’ said Eskjog, ‘and if it did it wouldn’t be much good. But this is the other way round. It’s not a model personality, it’s real, and it exists in a simulated virtual mind. It’s actually easier that way, believe it or not.’

Alameche frowned. ‘Easier to simulate a mind? How can that be?’

‘Oh, the mind isn’t the difficult bit. It’s like music: you can play a complicated piece on a simple instrument.’

The Patriarch sighed. ‘Ambassador, with all respect, I don’t see the relevance of this. We, ah, assimilated Silthx and found an artefact in the process. It’s very important but we don’t know why. Something got out and told you. Some of you are cross. Some of you are interested. Both the interest and the anger represent possible existential threats to us. Yes?’

‘A masterly summary,’ said Eskjog.

‘Good.’ The Patriarch stood up and stretched. ‘At last we know where we are. I always do the same thing about existential threats, and it is this: Alameche, in time for our forthcoming Anniversary Celebrations you will present to me a strategy for the neutralization of this threat, to the glory of our civilization.’

Alameche inclined his head. ‘Excellency.’

‘Very good. My thanks for your information, Ambassador, and any other help you can offer.’ The Patriarch knitted his fingers together, faced his palms outwards and cracked his knuckles in a fusillade that made Alameche blink. ‘Danger has a particular effect on me. I am going to find something female and nubile.’ He looked distant for a moment and added: ‘
Young
and female and nubile.’

Alameche waited until the door had clicked shut behind his master, then turned to Eskjog and spread his arms apologetically. The little machine rose from the table. ‘Young?’ it said.

Alameche smiled. ‘The age of consent is strictly enforced in our society.’

‘Right. And the age of consent is set by . . .?’ Eskjog let the sentence tail off.

Alameche nodded. ‘The Patriarch,’ he said.

‘Hmmph.’ Eskjog settled back down on to the table. ‘I find I have more sympathy for biological beings than I thought. Young ones, at least. But you,’ and it inclined back a little so that one of its spikes was pointing at Alameche, ‘you noticed something.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Which was?’

Alameche smiled. ‘The mistake in the Patriarch’s summary,’ he said. ‘He assumed that the escaped personality found you first. But you didn’t say that.’

‘No, I didn’t. Because it didn’t. Well done, again.’

‘So who did it find?’

‘It’s more a question of
who
found
it
,’ said Eskjog. ‘Someone – or something – who went looking for it, is the answer. How up to speed are you on politics in the Outer Spin?’

‘Not very. Not as much as I should be. You haven’t answered my question.’

‘No, I haven’t. That’s partly because I can’t, with any precision. I don’t like being imprecise.’

Alameche waited. After a moment, Eskjog made a sighing noise. ‘All right. The short imprecise answer is that I – we – don’t know. The longer one is that whoever it was had three things: knowledge of the genocide, the ability to snatch a personality from a dying body and a reason to do so.’

Alameche raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s not only imprecise, it’s obvious. Where does it lead?’

‘Well, to any one of several hundred places that we know about, plus the unknown number we don’t. Some of them could even be here, which is something you might like to think about. But it’s not that important. What matters more is that the personality has moved on. It’s now in a place where we can track it covertly – and I am really not going to enlighten you any more about that.’

Alameche nodded and looked at the ovoid on the screen again. ‘The thing we found. You said it was still alive. What is it?’

‘Well, we’re not really sure. As far as we know there’s only been one found before, and that didn’t end well for the finders.’ The screen flowered into a bright blue-white explosion which made Alameche flinch. Then it darkened, and went back to showing the image of the Spin. Eskjog rose from the table and floated over to hover in front of the glittering star field. ‘But we think it’s a remnant, an artefact from the Construction Phase. Maybe a part of the Construction itself.’ It paused. ‘Maybe – probably, even – a causal part.’

Alameche looked at the little machine for a long time. ‘Causal,’ he said. ‘I see. That implies a tool. And most tools are also weapons. So it could be powerfully destructive?’

‘Apocalyptically,’ Eskjog agreed. ‘See why people are interested?’

Alameche stared at the screen for a long time, only tearing his gaze away when his eyes blurred with strain and the images of the Inner and Outer Spin began to weave round each other in a rather suggestive optical illusion. He blinked the image away, and looked at Eskjog. ‘Well, I’m certainly interested,’ he said. ‘Let’s take it from there, shall we?’

Obel Moon

BY THE TIME
they reached the bottom of the Shadow Stair the sun was halfway to the zenith. The early mist had burned off, and the air was warm and sticky. The sweat that had frozen in Fleare’s clothes when she was climbing the Tower had thawed, and the material clung to her unpleasantly. She turned to Muz. ‘Do I smell?’

‘Yup.’

‘Bad?’

‘Could be. Depends on your point of view.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t bother me any more. I’m a cloud of nano-machines now, remember?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’ She moved away from the centre of the narrow street they were on, and flattened herself against a wall as they approached a corner. She felt Muz nudge in behind her. ‘Why are we stopping?’ he asked.

‘Ssshh!’ she whispered frantically, and pointed towards the corner. ‘Near the Rotten Gate. The way out to the Second Circle. There are surveillance cams from here on.’

‘Ah.’ Now Muz was whispering too. ‘Element of surprise, yes?’

She nodded.

‘Only, there’s something you need to know.’

Something about the voice made her turn. ‘What?’

‘It’s about the surprise thing.’

Her stomach fluttered. ‘What about the surprise thing?’ As she said the words, she felt the shape of the answer.

‘It might not be a surprise. You remember the thing I absorbed?’

‘Horribly. So what?’

‘Well, it had an audiovisual feed.’

‘Ah.’ She looked away for a moment.

‘Yes. Ah.’

‘Well, thanks for telling me so quickly.’

‘Wouldn’t have made any difference.’ Muz sank towards the ground, and instinctively she found herself sinking into a crouch to keep level with him. ‘The feed was real-time. I couldn’t stop it. If anyone was watching, they saw me closing in. Then there would have been a half-second blank. Since then I’ve sent in an edited feed that looks normal, but I doubt if anyone’s fooled.’

‘So, we’re rumbled?’

‘Probably. Not certainly. On the plus side, it’s better than being kebab meat. On the down side, we should expect company. You’d better ramp up.’

‘Yeah.’ Fleare rose from her crouch. Then she looked down at Muz. ‘Edited, you said. How edited?’

Muz rose slowly. ‘Mainly I took out the conversation. Right now it shows you standing staring at nothing.’

‘But what else could it show?’

‘Well, anything, I suppose.’ He was level with her face now; she felt looked at. ‘What’s on your mind?’

She tried to suppress her grin, and failed. ‘Show them something to distract them,’ she said.

‘Oooo-kay. I think I know what you mean. Are you still going to ramp up?’

She nodded, and then turned a little so that she could stare out over the jumbled rooftops towards the Rotten Gate, and the Second Circle that lay beyond it. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Even more so.’

‘Want me to get the gate?’

‘Nah.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll do it. I need the exercise.’ She waved a hand vaguely towards the Second Circle. ‘You go and enjoy yourself.’

Most of what was now called the Monastery was not, strictly, Monastery. The original Tower, the First Circle and the fortified wall that ringed it were surrounded by a set of six more, roughly concentric, circles of later parasitic development that straggled down towards the Plains like ripples on a dusty pond. These circles ranged from less than a hundred to more than three hundred metres in thickness, and each had originally only one gate to the next. The Rotten Gate led from the First to the Second Circle, the Supplicant’s Gate from the Second to the Third – set on the opposite side, as was each successive gate. Even though the total radius was only just over a kilometre, to go from the Open Gate in the Seventh Circle to the Rotten Gate in the First one had to walk nearly ten. In a world of land warfare it would have been an excellent defence. For the whole seventeen-thousand-year history of the Monastery it had been made irrelevant by routinely available powered air flight, and the building had relied on far more subtle and devastating means of defending itself. The only function of the Circles seemed to be to make life awkward for its inhabitants.

Fleare stood just inside the Rotten Gate. After a giggling conference about false AV feeds, Muz had dissolved back to vapour and slipped through to try to do something troubling to the Monastery security systems. A few of his particles remained, nestling in a tight cloud just inside her left ear to act as an audio link. It was silent at the moment; presumably he was busy.

Fleare realized that she was grinning, a wide stupid grin that she couldn’t shift. She was ramped up, fizzing with energy, system flooded with bespoke chemicals, reaction speeds tuned up to better than four times standard, altered muscles loose and ready. She hadn’t bothered since she had been at the Monastery. It wouldn’t have done any good; even like this, her chances of staging a solo breakout were less than one in three. Not good enough.

But now she wasn’t solo, and it was good to be back. She stopped fighting the grin.

There was a soft, distant boom, and then a sharper, louder one. The furrowed stone floor shivered, and her enhanced hearing picked up shouts, confused and panicky. The air began to smell of ozone and burning plastics. Muz was obviously having fun. Fleare grinned a bit more. Then she backed slowly up the corridor.

The doors of the Rotten Gate were twice her height, of age-blackened timbers with iron fastenings that could have been as old as the Monastery. They were locked and barred, a final physical defence that spoke straight to the ancient hindbrain.

Fleare dropped into a sprinter’s crouch, paused for long enough to take two deep breaths and launched herself. She took three strides to get up speed, then leapt with feet forward and legs bent, arms raised to cover her face.

Her sandals slammed into the doors at chest height. As they made contact she kicked her legs straight. The impact threw her backwards; she landed ten metres away and rolled upright, shaking her head. Then she took stock.

One of the doors had burst clean off its hinges and lay flat beyond the gate. The other hung, twisting. Fleare looked at it, tutted and gave it another kick. It fell in a crash and a cloud of dust. Fleare nodded to herself and picked her way carefully over it, brushing dust from her robe.

She heard explosions, first singly and then in a stuttering series of twos and threes. Fleare frowned. It sounded more like weapons fire than casual vandalism. If Muz had arranged reinforcements, he hadn’t mentioned it.

She waved a hand at her ear and whispered: ‘What’s going on?’