Polity 4 - The Technician (4 page)

The
soldier continued, ‘I’m told they’re gonna install a runcible on Flint but not
down here. We just get supply drops and shitty bandwidth com until they’ve
cleared up the mess out there.’ He gestured towards the ceiling again.

‘Faith, Hope and Charity?’ Sanders asked.

‘Faith is completely burnt out, the other two and the rest
of the satellites and stations got three-quarters of their populations
brain-burnt.’

Faith is dead.

‘You
cannot break me,’ said Jem, turning his new white metal head away from them. He
would ignore them – that’s it. He felt they’d made the wrong move in cutting
off his face, for now he possessed no expression that might give him away.

After
they put this imprisoning metal shell over his skull it required long
introspection for him to figure out precisely what was going on here. This was all about faith, but not about the cylinder world of
that name being destroyed. In the fiction they had created for him the
Theocracy was gone, the Underground victorious and now the Polity poised
overhead in all its supposedly gigantic glory.

‘My
faith cannot be destroyed,’ Jem muttered, more to himself than them.

That was
the crux of all this. The Underground had understood that whilst the faith of
the Brotherhood remained strong, neither they nor their damned Polity could be
victorious. So now they were trying to find ways to destroy faith. He was one
of the subjects of this experiment: they wanted to destroy his belief in God,
they wanted him to spit on the teachings of Zelda Smythe. In a way he pitied
them, for his eventual martyrdom would mark the end of their self-deception.

‘He’s
nuts,’ said the soldier.

‘He
believes none of it,’ said Sanders. ‘First time he woke up he remembered most
of it, but the trauma of those memories sent his mind into retreat. Second time
he woke up he decided he was a prisoner of the Underground undergoing some new
interrogation technique. And now he thinks we’re trying to destroy his belief
in God and His prophet Zelda Smythe. He remembers nothing of what happened
between when he was running an inspection tour of sprawn canals two months ago
and him being here.’

‘He
don’t remember me?’ asked the soldier.

‘No –
the memories will come back of their own accord or he’ll need deep mindtech
work – probably under AI supervision just like with his physical restoration.’

‘There’s
nothing we can do here?’

‘In
other circumstances I would have said yes,’ said Sanders. ‘But the Technician
didn’t just flense his skull – it did other things inside, physical
alterations, and it left things in there too.’

There,
again, they were blaming his condition on a mythical non-existent creature and
as such bringing more pressure down on his faith. If they could somehow prove
to him that this mythical hooder had maimed him, he would necessarily then
believe in its existence, which would undermine one of the tenets of his
beliefs.

Jem
turned back and gazed at the soldier. ‘Why should I remember you?’

But it
was Sanders who replied, ‘You should remember Colonel Grant because he was the
one who saw what the Technician did to you, and he was the one who carried you
to an ATV ambulance. He’s the reason you’re still alive.’

Jem
turned away, ignoring them again.

The main continent of Masada was shaped like a square-rigged sail from
some ancient galleon, rumpled in one upper corner, where the Northern Mountains
lay. Other large land masses dotted the world, the Subcontinent – a
near-circular mass to the east over a thousand kilometres across – and others
whose names and locations Jem was quite vague about. However he had heard of
the Worry Island chain, for it was to one of those islands, Heretic’s Isle,
that the Theocracy shipped, for lengthy interrogation and internment, those
captives of the Underground that weren’t dispatched to the steamers aboard the
cylinder world Faith.

How did
they intend to work this in the fiction they had created for him? Doubtless
some drug would be employed, and when he finally became conscious again he
would find himself in a different room and be told he was now in the ‘hospital’
on Heretic’s Isle, which the rebels now owned having taken it in their
apparently victorious war against the Theocracy. As Sanders headed over to him,
he awaited with interest her explanation for whatever drug it was she would
administer.

‘Obviously,
you are not entirely healed,’ she said, gazing down at him, ‘so you’ll
experience some discomfort and your body will feel quite strange to you. You
should also be aware that muscle regrowth down the front of your torso and
upper legs has some way to go, so you will be very weak. ’

Ah, some
kind of painkiller – an anaesthetic to dull his connection with reality.

She
reached between the pillow and his neck, where something disengaged with a
gristly crunch. Sensation returned; flooded into his body like some fluid
filling a man-shaped vessel. His shins and feet felt cold, everything above
that, to his neck, felt unreasonably hot yet devoid of any other sensation,
whilst his head seemed just a nerveless bulk atop his neck. He tilted this bulk
forwards, but not too far forwards because it felt like it might just fall off
if tilted too far from the vertical. He lay naked on the bed – no sheet to give
him dignity. From his knees up to his chest his body was coated with that same
transparent coating he had seen on other patients here, and underneath this he
could see the movement of wet muscles, all wrapped in hair-thin gridworks,
bloodworm capillaries actually penetrating the skin layer and areas beginning
to cloud with new skin-cell growth.

What
they had told him about the damage to his body was utterly true, but that did
not make it true that some mythical being inflicted it. Perhaps he had been
injured during some terrorist outrage when they kidnapped him, or perhaps they
had inflicted all this upon him themselves. Now he held up his hands to inspect
both them and his arms.

His
right arm possessed the same covering as his torso, though it had clouded and
he could see small bristles protruding, and small moons of fingernail appearing
on his fingers. The detail of his left arm was perfect, down to complete
fingernails, the wrinkled knuckles and the skin texture, but the thing was
utterly white like the shell covering his head. He reached across with his
right hand to touch it, but received very little sensation from his fingertips,
yet he felt the touch of those fingertips from the prosthetic, which possessed
substantially more sensation than his own limb.

‘Feeling
will improve as the nerves grow into the dermal layer,’ said Sanders. ‘By the
time your own skin has displaced the syntheskin, you’ll be back to normal . . .
well, almost.’

He
reached up to touch his face and the sensation was quite odd. He could actually
feel the touch of his fingertips on his cheek, but in a disconnected way as if
he were touching his cheek through a cotton sheet. While he was probing the
shell over his skull, Sanders unwrapped a packet containing plain white pyjamas
and slippers.

‘You
should be able to dress yourself,’ she said. ‘Or do you want my help?’

‘I will
attempt to dress myself,’ he said coldly, feeling it was time to curtail her
intimacy with his body.

Leaning
forward was difficult. His stomach muscles felt like jelly, their strength
seeming only enough to hold in everything behind them, as if the slightest
wrong move would result in a hernia. Also his thigh muscles were pulling, and
felt as if they weren’t securely anchored.

‘Where
are the other patients?’ he asked. ‘Have they been taken to Heretic’s Isle?’ He
might as well run with their fiction to see where it would take him.

‘Most of
them are back with their families or friends, or in recovery wards in city
hospital,’ she replied. ‘Only special patients are being shipped to the Isle –
high-level Theocracy patients.’

‘Prisoners.’

With the
pyjama jacket finally on he looked with puzzlement at the front of the garment,
trying to find buttons. She reached over to pull the edges together and they
bonded. As she stepped back he peered down at his genitals. They were
transparent: tubes, veins and testes clearly visible. He needed those trousers
on, now. He tried to pull his legs up towards him. At first no response, but
after a short time he found himself able to bend his knees and bring his feet within
reach. He threaded the trousers onto them, up over his knees to his thighs, and
then had to stop, because he was gasping.

‘I feel
too hot.’

‘You’ve
no sweat glands in your prosthetic, but the rest of your body should
compensate,’ she said. ‘Just give it a chance – the more you move about the
faster the synthetics will adapt and the faster the healing process.’

Finally
he managed to swing his legs off the bed, down to the slippers there and,
supporting himself on his artificial arm, pull up his trousers, though she
reached out to do up the stick seams for him.

‘Are you
ready to try walking?’ she asked. ‘The transport is ready.’

He
pushed himself from the bed, feeling sick and dizzy, and did not object when
she stepped in to support him. Very slowly they made their way to the airlock.
Would he conveniently faint now so as not to see what lay outside? When they
halted at the airlock she steadied him until he took hold of a rack containing
a varied collection of pond-worker tools – nets, goads and telescopic grabs –
then she stepped to the other side of the airlock to take up a breather mask
from another rack and don it.

‘What
about me?’ he asked, noting she had collected no breather mask for him.

‘You’ve
no need – your prosthetic contains a super-dense oxygen supply which it
continuously keeps topped up,’ she told him. ‘Outside you can last for ten days
before it runs out. You’re wearing your own mechanical scole.’

Doubtless,
when they stepped outside there would be some malfunction of his prosthetic,
and he would find himself waking up either inside some transport with no
external view, or inside the prison hospital on Heretic’s Isle.

They
entered the airlock together, where he leaned on her heavily, and as it cycled
he felt a sudden terror to be in such a situation. Never in his life had he
been inside an airlock without a breather mask over his face, and underlying
that he felt something of the indignity of this situation. The only people who
went through airlocks without breather masks were pond workers, the underclass,
who had the big aphid-like scoles attached to their bodies to oxygenate their
blood. He tried to deny that terror, because this was all a set-up, all staged
. . .

Sanders
opened the outer door and they stepped out. The compound was a morass and
foamed plastic walkways had been laid across it, one of them spearing over to a
Theocracy troop transport. He gazed about himself in utter confusion, trying to
make sense of this place. To his right lay the burnt-out ruins of overseers’
huts, and just behind them a three-storey proctors’ station lay tilted at an
angle, its foundations torn up out of the soil. The surrounding fence was down,
as were the nearest watchtowers he could see. Beyond this the chequerboard of
ponds stretched into the distance, but pocked with crater holes and strewn with
the wreckage of armoured vehicles. Distantly, plumes of smoke rose into the sky
and on that horizon he saw the tall stilt-legged shape of a heroyne stepping
from pond to pond, its long beak occasionally stabbing down to spear something.

‘There
is a heroyne within the perimeter,’ he said woodenly, feeling that if he could
just stick to that one fact, that one breach of crop-pond security, then in a
moment all the rest would begin make sense.

‘That’s
not all,’ she said. ‘Take a look over there.’

He
reluctantly turned to look where indicated. A couple of aerofans were down on
one of the pond banks over to the left of the troop transport. Men in uniforms
the colour of new growth flute grass were gathered there about a tripod-mounted
rail-gun aimed at a massive creature squatting in one of the ponds.

The
gabbleduck seemed to be staring directly at Jem, its tiara of green eyes
gleaming with unnatural brilliance. It raised its bill from its chest, opened
out one of its dimorphic arms and spread one claw. It seemed to be gesturing to
the surrounding devastation: here you are, here it is, how can you deny this?
Jem snapped his gaze away, those eyes an after-image in his vision and their
colour sliding through the spectrum to one he feared. His gaze came to rest on
a bullet-riddled sign lying half-submerged in the mud. Triada
Compound.

Jem’s
legs gave way and he fell from the walkway into the mud, where he lay clawing
at it, dragging himself, trying to get away. But there was nowhere to flee too.
Something closed down on every horizon, throwing him into darkness, and out of
the sky scythes began to fold down around those two columns of yellow eyes.
Something closed on his temples and he could just hear a high whine over his screaming.

The
Wheelchair

This anachronism can still be seen in
museums, but only in the museums of Earth, since it ceased to be an option even
before Humans set foot on Mars. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
many societies began imposing rules and regulations to make buildings more
accessible to wheelchair users, but it can be seen that the vast sums involved
could better have been spent on something already on the cards. Those working
in robotics already had its replacement ready by the turn of the twentieth
century with computer-controlled powered exoskeletons but, as was the case with
a lot of technologies of the time, viable small power supplies were needed.
Later developments of the supercapacitor, ultracapacitor and nanotube batteries
quickly swept that problem aside, and within a period of ten years all
wheelchair manufacturers went out of business. A Japanese cybernetics company,
later absorbed by Cybercorp, was the first to sell its Motorleg and Fullbot
exoskeletons for paraplegics and quadriplegics respectively.