Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (16 page)

‘Why did they do that?’

‘Apparently, in their elevated state, they saw no purpose in continuing to exist.’

‘But now you have replaced them and have seven ready for me who do see a purpose in continuing to exist?’

‘Apparently – though we do have safeguards,’ Clay told her, as they finally reached the door at the end of the long corridor. ‘We’ve surgically denied them control
over their own nervous systems, immobilized them, and have them working under inducer. If they disobey, or try to take control of more than we allow them, like trying to access readerguns or
robots, we can shut them down in a second.’

The door opened into what had been, until a few weeks previously, an amphitheatre in which modern surgical techniques could be demonstrated to an audience of students. Much of the seating had
now been torn out to make way for computer equipment, and power cables and optics were routed all around the area like lianas growing on the wreck of an ancient civilization. A circle of seven
couches occupied the centre of the amphitheatre – all facing inwards. At the centre of these stood a column, scaled with screens and surmounted by an inducer array. Various technicians were
working in the immediate area, one of whom, Serene noted, was giving a couched figure a sponge bath.

‘But how will they perform, should Alan Saul launch another attack against us?’ Serene asked, as she made her way down towards them. ‘They might choose that moment to
self-destruct.’

‘Conditioning,’ Clay replied. ‘The biological interfaces in their skulls are highly advanced, and when they melded with their comlife elements they were completely distanced
from the real world. However, disconnected as they are from any influence over their nervous systems, they can’t shut anything down, and agony has a way of bringing them back down to earth.
It will take maybe a further three or four weeks, but by the end of that time they’ll be utterly unable to disobey.’

Finally reaching the floor of the amphitheatre, Serene walked over to stand beside the pillar and looked around at the seven lying on the couches. All of them were naked, five of them men and
two women. They had been electro-depilated for reasons of hygiene, and the scars on their skulls had healed into a cross-hatching of white lines, but the scars on other parts of their bodies were
new. Optical plugs in their skulls trailed cables linked to free-standing servers. Other optics ran from their torsos to various machines attached to the sides of their individual couches. As
Serene understood it, only the cables leading from their heads were required for them to access Govnet – any radio option being denied them – while the other optics extending from their
bodies were for control over their nervous systems. They could not now shut down their own hearts, nor could they suppress their pain response.

‘So Alan Saul has hardware in his head just like these.’ She gestured at them dismissively.

‘Unfortunately not,’ said Clay.

‘Explain,’ she instructed.

‘The biological interfaces and internal computers we are using here are the product of Hannah Neumann’s research undertaken two years ago. The database of her recent research was
trashed, we think by Saul himself, and all physical results of it were either destroyed when IHQ London was nuked, or were stolen by Salem Smith when he worked there, before taking on the
directorship of Argus Station.’

‘So how much more advanced than this is the stuff in Saul’s head?’

Clay gazed at her expressionlessly. ‘As far as I can gather, by having access to Messina’s private files you would know that better than me, ma’am.’

He knew what she knew, so she wouldn’t catch him out in any half-truths or outright lies. She nodded soberly to herself, then turned abruptly as a woman lying on one of the couches began
to shriek repetitively. Serene had heard that sound before, knew the rhythm of the agony an inducer supplied. She glanced back to Clay, who had his fingers up against his fone.

‘She recognized you,’ he explained after a moment, ‘and tried to gain access to the readerguns outside, for when we leave here.’

‘An assassination attempt?’ Serene swung back to look at the woman as her screams dropped in register to a steady groaning. ‘Have her killed and replaced.’

‘No, ma’am,’ said Clay. ‘She was completely aware that she had no chance of success, but was hoping for precisely the reaction you have given. It was a suicide
attempt.’

Serene grunted in contempt and turned back towards the stairs. ‘Okay, ensure she stays alive, then. Now show me the rest.’

Serene did not like having to use these ‘comlifers’, as they had been dubbed, but they were a precaution she needed to take. Clay was correct: she did know more about ‘the
stuff in Saul’s head’. One year and four months ago, the erstwhile Chairman decided that the bio-interfaces Neumann had developed were sufficiently advanced for installation in himself
and in his core delegates, so had them transported to Argus Station. Those interfaces were much in advance of what was being used here now. However, Neumann had continued working towards producing
something of an order of magnitude yet more advanced; something Messina had decided he wanted just for himself. But he wasn’t quick enough. Inspectorate HQ London was destroyed and Argus
taken over before he could get his hands on the new interface.

It had taken Serene a while to piece things together from various reports. The forensic investigation of the slaughter at IHQ London, before the nuke was detonated, detailed how an exec called
Avram Coran had removed a crate of physical objects from Hannah Neumann’s laboratory. Yet that same Avram Coran had apparently died in an aero accident over the English Channel some
thirty-six hours earlier, just after he had visited a gene bank whose computer systems were trashed shortly after his visit. A stolen All Health trailer bus had been seized, and a forensic
investigation revealed evidence that Hannah Neumann had been inside it and had used the sophisticated surgery therein. Someone else had been there too – someone whose genetic fingerprint just
could not be identified.

Serene very much suspected that the genetic fingerprint was Alan Saul’s, and that right now he had some of the most advanced bioware ever developed sitting inside his head.

Comlifers

Over a century ago the phrase ‘computer life’ described computer programs that mimicked life. In other words, they grew and bred and evolved. However, over
the ensuing years it became a catch-all term not only for programs that modelled living creatures and ecologies, but also for those that mimicked the function of the human brain. Towards the end of
that century, the term became restricted to describing brain modelling, and to a limited extent displaced the old term ‘artificial intelligence’, which itself was applied to expert
systems that often possessed no human characteristics of thinking at all. In the time of Alan Saul, it became completely confined to describing computer reconstructions of a functioning human brain
that could effectively be used as a software interface between a living human brain and a computer. In that time, under Serene Galahad, those people who thus interfaced with computers were called
comlifers, with its intimation too of them serving a life sentence.

Argus

The voice speaking over the station intercom was Saul’s, sounding utterly reassuring and utterly in control, yet Hannah knew he lay apparently comatose in her
surgery. This only made sense if she considered that all of Saul did not reside in his physical body’s organic brain.

‘Prepare for a course correction,’ he said. ‘The Mars Traveller engine will be firing at 7.00 a.m. station time.’

Another prepared statement maybe? And how long ago had it been prepared? What the hell, exactly, was guiding this station?

Le Roque issued his instructions calmly, no more aware of Saul’s condition than anyone else aboard, except Hannah and the Saberhagen twins. Preparations were made and, after the big
Traveller engine fired up, ran for two weeks without anyone being hurt, people soon returned to their usual tasks. Le Roque, however, wanted to talk.

‘He’s not answering me,’ said the technical director.

Hannah shrugged. ‘What am I supposed to do about that?’

‘You’re closer to him.’ Le Roque glanced up at a nearby cam, obviously anxious. ‘What the hell is he doing? This route change is taking us off course for Mars and
swinging us out into the edge of the Asteroid Belt. That could kill us.’

‘The Asteroid Belt is not the same as the one you see in space-war interactives,’ Hannah lectured him snootily. ‘They’re not very close together.’

‘No, what we define as asteroids are in fact not very close together, but that definition fails to take into account small rocks capable of vaporizing large chunks of this station at the
speed we’re now going,’ said Le Roque. ‘Do you have any idea what a chunk of rock the size of a pea could do at twenty thousand kilometres per hour?’

‘Yes, I’m not entirely—’

‘And we’re heading straight for the disruption zone,’ Le Roque interrupted.

Hannah was suddenly annoyed, though she knew herself well enough to understand that was because she didn’t really know what the director was talking about.

‘Disruption zone?’ she enquired.

‘It’s where the asteroid below us came from,’ he replied. ‘Think of it: millions of asteroids and what were previously thought of as asteroids but have turned out to be
loose accumulations of rubble, dust, fragments – all barely stable after billions of years – then we come in and snatch the Argus asteroid away, meanwhile sending the remains of the
Traveller VI tumbling into the belt. That destabilized the immediate area, and the disruption spread, so that now nearly two million kilometres of the belt is a mess.’

‘The objects in the belt are still very far apart, so we should be fine,’ said Hannah, further annoyed with herself the moment she said it, because she considered herself quite
capable of admitting to her own errors.

‘Maybe, but Argus station presents one hell of a big profile.’

‘Best you take it up with him, then,’ Hannah replied, then quickly left Tech Central.

For over a month Saul just lay there, apparently with rigor mortis set in, but for the fact his heart kept beating and he kept breathing. He was still healing, though, the brain tissue she had
used steadily growing and making connections; the organic net from his bio-interface unwaveringly repairing itself and reinstating connections. As he lay there, she’d tried to guide the
process, to make it adhere to the maps she had of his mind as it was before, but had only been partially successful. The problem was that it grew with reference to the two masses of other brain
tissue sitting in two one-metre-square boxes in her clean-room, and also seemed to be making partial connections to certain parts of his brain that he seemed to have partitioned off in some way.
Yes, he was healing, but would he ever wake up and, if so, would what then woke up even be defined as a
person
?

Connections from his brain also remained open into the entire Argus computer system, and it seemed that, through that system, windows opened into his dreaming mind. She’d heard complaints
from technical staff about strange strings of code propagating in their computers, like worms, then just transferring away, also disturbing images appeared in screensavers and visual coms, and
nonsensical messages and spine-crawling sounds issued from speakers. The whole station seemed to have turned into a haunted house. People spoke in whispers, jerked nervously at unexpected sounds,
and checked the shadows in the corridors. All this created an air of gloom, as well as a fear difficult to nail down.

There were ways she could force things with Saul, but she was in entirely uncharted territory here and might do irreparable damage. She had so far ascertained that he had allowed himself to
sleep but without putting in place the processes that would wake him up. He was in a coma, and it seemed she had stepped a hundred years into the past with him, to a time when people woke up from
comas for no real discernible reason, or woke not at all.

‘Le Roque called me up to Tech Central again,’ said James, her lab assistant.

He had only just returned with some downloads obtained directly from a construction robot, all of which type were still working on the station enclosure – in fact getting near to
completing it. Saul remained connected to them, too, via some of those mental partitions, and she hoped to get some data on what was happening with him. James’s approach to a spidergun for
the same reason had been unsuccessful – they wouldn’t let anyone near.

‘What does he want now?’ she asked.

‘He wants to talk to you personally, and he wants to know why you’re not answering your fone.’

Hannah checked her visual-cortex menu and noted eight unanswered calls from Le Roque, twenty from Langstrom, five from Rhine and a recent one from Brigitta.

‘Tell him that I’ll speak to him when I’ve got something to report,’ she said, then opened up the channel to the last of these. ‘Brigitta?’

‘How is he now?’ asked the more talkative Saberhagen twin.

‘Healing, slowly, but still not conscious,’ she said. Then, with some irritation, ‘I said I’d let you know.’

‘That’s not really why I called. I need your input.’

‘On what?’ Didn’t Brigitta realize just how bad things could get? Hannah couldn’t leave Saul now while he was so vulnerable. How long before either Le Roque or Langstrom
decided to take full charge of the station? How long after that before they decided that maybe they would like to stay in control, and that maybe it was time for Saul’s coma to end,
permanently?

‘I’m in HUD with Angela . . . you need to come and see this.’

‘I do have my own problems here,’ Hannah replied.

‘This may be related . . . we’re getting the same data-exchange processes here that you’re seeing between Saul and the robots. We think he’s loaded something to
them.’

‘Them?’

‘The androids.’

Hannah felt a chill. She turned to gaze at the body lying in her clean surgery, almost lost among the feeding tubes, optics and wires she’d plugged into him.