Crysis: Legion (17 page)
Authors: Peter Watts
I mean—
You know what I mean.
So I’m flat on my back looking up at this spire, this giant twisted tower of backbones and machinery that’s just rammed its way out of the earth and I do not know what to make of this at all. These are supposed to be
space
aliens, right? Not Mole Men. Because seriously, you want me to believe that aliens from out past Mars have been planting these goddamn things under Manhattan and
nobody ever noticed
…?
And that’s when I hear it.
It sounds like the spear’s revving up: that special creepy hiss that only Cephtech seems to make. There’s a kind of grillwork assembly around the base, these flaps or fins or something that fold up and you can see something behind, starting to glow like the coils of a space heater, but that’s not where the sound is coming from. It’s coming from higher up. I try to get back on my feet but the haptics are fratzing out, must be an aftereffect of the suit-sapper; I can stand but when I try to put one foot ahead of the other it’s all staggers and error icons. Mercs are pouring from the skewered building and I’m looking around for a bazooka or semiautomatic or a goddamn rock to throw, if and when my joints reboot; but CELL isn’t paying much attention to me anyway. They’re all looking up at that big ugly earth-raping spear, they’re looking up trying to get a fix on that sound, and suddenly I realize it isn’t coming from the spear at all. It’s coming from
way
higher up, from this little flock of beetles dropping down from the sky. They’re dropping
fast:
It’s only about two seconds before
they’re big enough to not be beetles anymore. Now they’re big fucking dragonflies with glowing crescent scythes for wings. They’re flying wedges of metal shot through with pipes and armatures and big honking cement mixers. And those cement mixers might have been slop-full of digested human remains in the ship that came down this morning but I’m betting that’s not all the Ceph use them for. I’d bet Lockhart’s miserable life that these are dropships.
They are. They’re still ten meters off the ground when they drop those pods like giant eggs, and the things that come out of them are a lot nastier than any newborn hatchling has any right to be. The bogeymen I’ve seen before, but some of these fuckers are
huge:
three times the size of a man, like—like tanks on legs. Their arms don’t
hold
guns and don’t
end
in guns: their arms
are
guns, big fucking cannons bolted to the torso, bores the size of manholes. The ground shivers with every step they take.
I gotta hand it to CELL. They stand their ground, they fight back. I don’t know if I’d call it courage. Maybe. But by the time my joints unlock I’m in the middle of another massacre and the only decision I’ve got to make is whether to die with my fellow backbones or just fade to black and hope the Ceph forget about me while they kick the shit out of black ops over there.
And then the spear starts hooting. Something
snaps
, way overhead. I look up and the tip of the spire has opened like the petals of a big black flower; and the thing those petals have folded back to expose is full of vents.
I take half a second to scoop up a carbine from a mall cop who won’t be needing it anymore. Then I run like hell.
Before I’ve even turned tail I can see the smoke belching out overhead, black stuff, darker than oil and coarser, somehow. It reaches for me. That’s not a metaphor. This shit doesn’t disperse, it
hunts
. I can see cords of it, big ropy tentacles of smoke thick
as telephone poles, reaching around in huge sweeping arcs and circles. It looks a lot like what they always said battlefield nanotech would look like, if we could ever get it to work.
These aliens, they’ve got it working just fine. The suit’s finally back up to full strength and I’m driving it as fast as I can, don’t even dare look back, but I can feel the sky going dark behind me. I can see my shadow fading against the pavement and just like
that
it’s got me, it’s like being caught in a goddamn tornado. It lifts me right off my feet; it slams me onto the pavement. I can see little black particles sleeting across my faceplate. It’s like being sandblasted with pepper. I try to get back up but my joints are seizing again, tactical’s sprouting error icons like hyperherpes and just
dies
. BUD disappears; the world follows a moment later. I’m blind, my motor systems are spazzing out, and the last thing I hear is False Prophet telling me there’s been a systems breach, that the N2 is
infested
—that’s the word he uses,
infested
—and that we’re initiating a total core-systems downboot to protect life support.
He’s still calculating the odds of pulling that off when I black out.
EYES ONLY
This media will autowipe if moved more than 2m from an authorized courier
Case Study on the Integration of SECOND (CryNet Systems Nanosuit 2.0) with the Human Central Nervous System: Insights from Interrogative Interactions
Executive Summary
Lindsey Aiyeola (PhD),
1
Komala Smith (PhD, MD),
and Leona Lutterodt (DPhil)
Directorate of Science and Technology
Central Intelligence Agency
Context:
The manner and degree to which CryNet Systems Semi-autonomous Enhanced Combat Ops: Neurointegration and Delivery (SECOND™) biochip integrates with the wearer of the CN Combat Solutions Nanosuit 2.0(tm) is a matter of intense interest from scientific, military, and national-security perspectives. The Hargreave-Rasch Corporation, staunchly asserting the proprietary nature of this and related technology, has been reluctant to cooperate in our investigations to date.
2
However, it has become increasingly apparent that while HRC could no doubt provide valuable insights into the design and manufacture of the Nanosuit, they might have much less to offer our investigation than was originally thought. Put simply, we believe that both the degree and the nature of the observed human/artifact integration
was as unexpected to HRC as it was to us; and while we did not design this technology, we are currently in possession of it. Hargreave-Rasch knows only what the Nanosuit was designed to be; we are in possession of what it has
become
, and HRC is unlikely to launch any legal proceedings so long as they need our cooperation in managing the PR aftermath of the recent fiasco at their Prism facility. We would therefore advise against making any unnecessary concessions in exchange for technical data we can probably derive ourselves using the materials at hand, and which may prove to be largely irrelevant in any event.
Methodology and Results:
The Nanosuit 2 (hence,
N2
), following a long-term but ultimately unsuccessful symbiosis with Commander Laurence Barnes, is now integrated with Patient
A
3
of the USMC. P
A
alleges that he suffered terminal injuries during the Manhattan Incursion, dying on the battlefield, and was subsequently installed in the N2 on the initiative of Cmdr. Barnes (who then took his own life). This story remains unverified, and is inconsistent with independent observations;
4
we are currently seeking corroboration from other sources, but advise that at least some of P
A
’s allegations cannot be considered reliable at this time.
P
A
was successfully extracted from Manhattan in the wake of the Incursion and taken to a secure location for protective debriefing. During this time we were able to establish an interface
with the N2 via its optical interface, using an infrared laser link. P
A
detected the handshaking protocols but misinterpreted them as a failed shutdown command; we were therefore able to monitor the internal states of both he and the N2 during interrogation, without P
A
ever being aware of this fact. The N2’s biotelemetry capabilities proved far beyond what we had expected, providing fine-grained cortical synaptic maps at a resolution of 1–2 voxels (comparable to that of fixed-location scanners that occupy entire rooms; the integration of such technology into battlefield prostheses is at least 20 years ahead of our current state-of-the-art).
A relatively inexperienced and low-ranking individual was selected to interview P
A
, and was provided the minimum necessary information prior to debriefing. This was intended to increase P
A
’s confidence during interrogation, and to encourage him to talk at length about his experiences.
5
By asking wide-ranging questions beyond the pale of a conventional debrief—and by encouraging digressions and lengthy responses—we were able to isolate the functional clusters involved in various cognitive processes, and compare them with baseline norms. We were also able to influence the direction of the exchange by periodically exposing P
A
to subliminal images projected onto the facing wall (duration <20msec to allow for the subject’s increased visual acuity), which were designed to provoke a range of emotional responses.
Some of our more significant findings are as follows:
1. P
A
did not “speak” in the conventional sense throughout the entire interview. On its face this might seem obvious—since his vocal cords had been extensively damaged, P
A
was forced to rely on the N2’s onboard
speech synthesizer throughout—but it goes much farther than this. P
A
generally spoke without invoking the saccadal text interface that should have been necessary for such communication. Furthermore, his speech centers (notably Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) were often relatively inactive during conversation. We did, however, note increased activity in the nanoneural mesh that connected P
A
’s nervous system to SECOND at these times.2. P
A
’s ability to recollect the details of specific events borders on savantism. During our interviews he often recited overheard conversations verbatim, in their entirety. We have managed to acquire independent records of two of these conversations (from streamed security surveillance of Central Station); P
A
’s recollection of these exchanges proved accurate, and we have no reason to doubt his account of the others. There is, however, no record of eidetic memory in his USMC personnel file.3. When discussing events that took place prior to his integration with the N2 (childhood memories, or reminiscence about previous tours of duty), P
A
’s hippocampus and prefrontal cortex lit up in a manner consistent with the activation of long-term memories. However, when discussing events that occurred during the Manhattan Incursion, activity in these areas declined, and throughput between SECOND and its associative coelomic meshes increased significantly.4. When P
A
considered theoretical or tactical problems (such as the most efficient route through complex topography or the assessment of local cover), activity in the prefrontal cortex increased only marginally. However,
when considering problems with a significant moral or ethical component (
e.g.
, lethal containment of infected civilians), P
A
’s anterior cingulate gyrus lit up as it would in any normal human. (SECOND’s input channels also became more active at these times, although outgoing signals did not increase; this is consistent with the “passive monitoring” profile of heuristic biochips when in learning mode.)5. P
A
’s speech patterns tended to vary with the type of experience he was describing at any given time. He spoke of interactions with his fellow marines and “conventional” battlefield events (whether against the Ceph or human paramilitary) using the familiar argot of the typical foot soldier, and while P
A
did evince an interest in science not often found in his demographic, he showed no great expertise beyond what one might acquire from a healthy dose of nature documentaries. However, when describing radically
atypical
experiences—his journeys through landscapes heavily modified by Ceph technology, for example, or the visions he attributed to the N2’s previous host—his vocabulary improved and his sentence construction formalized somewhat. In other words, P
A
proved to be most articulate under circumstances where someone of his educational background would normally be most
lost
for words; this coincided with increased activity levels throughout the SECOND-Neurosomatic Complex (see #6, below). This is reminiscent of the serial manifestation of “alters” reported in cases of multiple personality disorder, albeit far less extreme; it was merely P
A
’s linguistic skills that changed, not his fundamental personality.6. Distribution of processing workload changed over time across the SECOND-Neurosomatic Complex (SNC). On some occasions activity would be centered in P
A
’s brain, on others in SECOND and its associated meshes, on still others distributed relatively evenly across the entire metasystem. There exists a weak but significant correlation between these distributions and the subject’s vocabulary and speech patterns. P
A
was most articulate when processing activity was evenly distributed throughout the SNC, or when concentrated in the architecture of the N2. He was least articulate (and most given to the casual use of slang and profanity) when his own brain was the primary locus of activity. While these properties fluctuated from moment to moment, P
A
’s overall mean eloquence and articulations scores increased by 7% and 9% (respectively) over the course of the interrogation. This suggests an ongoing off-load of cognitive processes from organic to artificial system elements.7. At a more fine-grained scale, on several occasions as many as two (possibly three) loci of high cognitive activity were simultaneously present across the SECOND-mesh elements of the system (in addition to the locus more consistently discernible within P
A
’s brain itself). The signatures of these loci were similar to those of standard functional clusters, but were of far greater magnitude. The significance of these “islands of cognition” remains unclear: They could be artifacts of a background autoarchiving subroutine, or an emergent property of SECOND’s parallel-processing architecture. We are continuing to explore these possibilities.