Weaponized, page 9
‘We’ll do a search,’ she said tightly, ‘and try to find out who that was.’
But of course they never identified the runner, because no humans had survived beyond the perimeter.
Oren, besides being their resident expert on nanosuites, and alien life, and especially cacoraptors, also acted as their coroner and forensic examiner. So he was the one to compile all the details of the deaths. After checking through the files once more, he turned his head right round to look up at Ursula.
‘All I can give you are potentials, and too many of them to really make any sense of,’ he said. ‘I looked at the video feed and ascertained that the subject was male. The appearance of the skin suit he wore could fit that of at least fifty casualties. It was heavily scarred and, as you know, the suits can heal and change as required.’
‘Do you have any that are most likely?’ she asked.
‘Only by circumstance,’ he replied. ‘Seven colonists were in an agricultural station the raptors hit.’
‘Outpost 32 – they called it the Stink Cellar.’
He nodded. ‘You remember.’
Of course she did. She remembered each one of them and wished she could edit them from her mind. But she hadn’t. Apart from the fact that editing might lose her vital knowledge, she felt she should bear the guilt.
He continued, ‘We never saw what happened inside and found only scraps from which we could identify two women and two men. Of three other men there, we found genetic traces but nothing to definitively say they had died.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s often been the case.’
‘Thank you for trying anyway,’ she said, and turned to head away from his work station. On the way, she paused by the window into the morgue. Only two of the body compartments were occupied – by two decapitated corpses. In their case the raptors had been driven back by autoguns before claiming their prizes. Oren had resorted to other storage for most of the remains – containers ranging from the size of a teacup to a bucket.
Standing there, she remembered when she’d cried, and then there being a time in her life when she’d been incapable of that, and was glad of it. Now her eyes were utterly dry, but she felt no fear of this. She grimaced and moved on, her mind straying back to when her emotions had started to die, and when her old life ended.
Past
It had once been mooted that landing sites on the Earth’s moon should be preserved for posterity and, in the decades before the Quiet War, when the AIs took over, many of them had been protected under glassy domes. But even then no one could decide where the cut-off point should be between ‘history’ and the less interesting near past. Meanwhile, arguments raged about who owned which artefacts and what territory on the moon, and had been getting messy, while protecting the numerous scattered sites wasn’t easy. Items went missing, or were relocated if they obstructed the path of lunar developments, and some were destroyed. When the AIs seized power from the corporate entities and governments of the Solar system, they had built the upper levels of the Viking Museum in the centre of Mare Tranquillitatis, diligently recording every detail of the landing sites, then moved all the artefacts into their new home. Historians were apoplectic, of course, but a lot of people were angry at that time about a lot of things. But while the AIs might listen to human concerns, generally they went on to ignore them and did things in their own much better and more efficient manner.
Ursula Ossect Treloon did enjoy the displays of antiquated technology in the upper levels, but the regimented viewing necessary to accommodate millions of visitors every year annoyed her intensely. She passed quickly along the moving pedway which ran through the centre of the museum, while thousands of people swirled around the giant display cases on either side, looking at the artefacts and carefully transplanted areas of regolith, as well as moon dust with centuries-old footprints in it. She had of course been here before, both physically and in virtuality, and seen much of it. But today was special. She had finally been granted permission to see artefacts which few, in terms of the Polity as a whole, got to see. She had applied for permission to view them nearly fifty years ago. That this permission had been granted upon her first return to Earth in decades was passing strange, but she’d lived long enough to know that coincidences were more common than supposed, though in this case it wasn’t an aspect of the human mind’s propensity to look for patterns.
As she approached the edge of the lunar history display, an area of twenty square miles, she moved out to the slower lanes of the pedway before reaching the angled padded barriers. She then crossed a floor of polished moon rock slabs – surprisingly colourful considering the usual impression of the moon from its exterior grey and silver appearance. Finally she came to a wall of chain-glass that stretched up to the glass ceiling, and she moved along it to find one of the doors. It looked like a piece of rectangular cut slate in a silver frame and no handles or locking mechanisms were visible. Via her augmentation, she sent the code they’d provided her with – an n-dimensional construct she could neither transfer, copy nor access, and which changed as time passed. The door swung open silently and admitted her to the outer ring.
No displays occupied this area and the glass ceiling had been displaced by one loaded with scanners and security drones that could drop down at any moment. Rumour had it that there was more here than just them. This might have been true, but seemed a pointless addition, considering the security of her destination. She turned left and began walking. On her right, in the outer wall, heavy circular doors gave access into tubes running across the surface. At the ends of these were large spherical display capsules that contained dangerous, rare or highly valuable items. Personally, Ursula thought that the way these capsules were dotted regularly in a ring around the main museum had more to do with AI OCD than any necessity for these items to be stored separately. In reality only one of the capsules needed to be isolated – the one she was heading to.
Finally, she came to the circular door she’d been looking for and walked over to stand before it. She sent the code once more and, as it went, its base format in her aug dissolved. She would never be able to use it again. As she stood there, she felt suddenly hot – a wave passing from the top of her head down through her body. She’d just received a highly active scan and now her enhanced immune system and nanosuite would be repairing or destroying damaged cells that might otherwise turn cancerous.
‘Shut down your aug,’ murmured a voice seemingly out of the air beside her.
She reached up to the slug of grey metal anchored to her skull behind her ear and pressed the, positively retro, off button. A gulf seemed to open in her mind and, as the door ahead thumped open, she felt slightly more stupid than she had a moment before. She stepped through into the long transparent tunnel running over the regolith. Ahead she could see the upper hemisphere of the spherical storage and display capsule. The lower half, below the ground, was apparently filled with security systems, weapons and a collection of CTDs that if detonated would probably break the moon in half, while below that was a massive fuser engine. She strolled towards it, coming to another security door, where she was subjected to yet another scan before being admitted.
‘Do you want the narrative?’ the same voice asked her.
‘No need really, unless you have something new to say,’ she replied.
‘Another artefact is on display . . .’
‘Well, tell me about that while I look around.’
She walked in. Display cases were evenly positioned across the floor while, around the edges, further cases had been inset in the walls. She walked up to the first on the floor and peered inside. Lying on a small plinth was a chunk of something that looked as if it had been dug out of one of the landfill excavations on Earth. A mess of metals and ceramics bound together with rust. Not impressive at all.
‘The new artefact was found on a moon of the Demeter gas giant in the system of Eradni Four. It was discovered during a mining operation – that moon is laden with cantaloupe diamonds with rare metals doping.’
‘Manufactured diamonds?’ Ursula enquired.
‘Natural,’ the Viking Museum AI replied. ‘After the discovery of the artefact the mining operation was of course cancelled while further investigations were made.’
‘Same date as the others?’
‘Within a hundred thousand years, yes – the rock the artefact was found in was formed five million years ago.’
‘Raises some interesting questions, like: was the moon created by a natural event or not?’
‘That question may get an answer when the xenologists have finished taking apart the moon.’
‘I bet the miners were pissed off.’
The AI just grunted an acknowledgement.
Ursula reached out to touch the glass of the display case and it opened a frame for her with touch controls along the bottom. The first magnification showed her something that looked like a crushed mess of ancient electronics. She went down as far as the microscopy could take her, revealing further regular complexity with each magnification. Nanoscopic magnification gave her the same, right down to its limit. The stuff was fractal, with that same regularity and deliberate structure that was supposedly picoscopic and maybe even femtoscopic. But she knew all this and had already studied these objects in virtuality.
‘Where’s the new artefact?’ she asked.
A line appeared on the floor and she followed it to a case set into the wall. Inside this rested a block of what looked like translucent blue glass. However, as she peered closer, she saw it seemed to contain, again, ancient electronics.
‘Laminar densified sapphire,’ said the AI. ‘Speculated to be a foundation piece of some Jain structure, maybe a house.’
‘That seems far too prosaic. What’s that inside it?’
‘The same as you saw in the other item you looked at.’
‘So you’ve no real idea?’
‘We have ideas,’ was all the AI said.
Yes, she had studied all this. The scraps of technology they’d found contained computing, and the ability to grow and become more complex when in the appropriate environment. The conclusions were that this stuff was capable of, well . . . anything. Rumours had it that the AIs had experimented with some artefacts before classifying Jain technology as dangerous and illegal to possess. The questions she had asked were just rote since all the available information could be accessed anywhere with an aug. The reason for visiting in person was the frisson of accessing a part of the museum that could be ejected at any moment by the fuser drive, and then vaporized by the CTDs under her feet on its course towards the sun. But she wasn’t really feeling it.
Ursula spent her allotted hour in the capsule looking at all the objects, moving to the door when it was all over.
‘Was your experience satisfactory?’ the AI asked.
She shrugged. ‘I would have preferred to see the stuff you don’t have on display.’
‘There is nothing more than what you see here.’
Ursula nodded. The AIs had been telling that lie for a long time but, as many had pointed out, why was every Jain artefact just the right size for the display cases here? Where were the larger items, and the stuff the AIs were undoubtedly studying? She headed out, through the tunnel and back into the main museum. She considered going to look at some of the other exhibits but the idea bored her. She carried on towards the exit which would take her to the runcible back to Earth. As the pedway swept her along, she realized she had just ticked off one of the last major items on her bucket list. She needed a new list now – she needed something to do to alleviate a growing numbness inside that she was too frightened to name.
5
Present
After a brief visit to her cubby to confirm something she’d suspected, Ursula went to find Oren. His new laboratory on the car was obviously smaller than at the base. The cacoraptor’s chain-glass tube stood upright, half sunk into one wall. Glancing at it, she noticed changes – spines protruding along its length. Her thoughts about the chain-glass screen of the car replayed; she wondered if the damned thing was trying to escape, and worried it would be here that a raptor learned how to decode chain-glass.
Equipment was neatly arrayed around the walls, other items kept up in the ceiling to be lowered when required. Despite it being cramped, Oren seemed happy enough studying various nanoscope views while, without looking, he also worked on one of the colonists’ upgrade bracelets that was suspended in a small frame and surrounded by arrays of micromanipulators. His head turned right round to track her. She peered down at his wrist and saw he was wearing an upgrade bracelet himself, but that meant nothing – he might have deactivated it.
‘I’ve had some thoughts,’ Ursula began. ‘These were things that bothered me on a subliminal level before, but now I seem to be thinking about them very clearly.’
‘Really?’ He smiled. ‘Mental pressure is a pressure nevertheless. The cacoraptors enhanced their minds to achieve sentience to face us – they became intelligent – and the same option is available to us: mental enhancement.’
‘To face us,’ Ursula repeated. ‘Which begs the question: why are they facing us?’
‘We are a bounteous source of nutrients and water.’ He paused thoughtfully for a second, then added, ‘Water is the main attraction, I believe, since the human body contains more even than a brontopod.’
An interesting fact, but Ursula saw it for what it was: distraction, diversion.
‘That won’t do, Oren. The cacoraptors have very little problem bringing down their conventional prey, like the brontopods, and are not suffering any lack. Our more accessible nutrients might have explained the initial attacks upon us, but do not account for the later ones. We’ve killed many of them and they passed the point long ago where the energy, nutrients and water they expend in hunting us can be replaced by . . . us. Their hostility goes beyond mere predatory instinct.’
He shrugged. ‘Intelligence.’
‘Yes, they grew brains and reason, yet still the same thesis applies. Why do they keep hunting us beyond any gain for themselves? Why the hostility?’
This time he didn’t shrug, but repeated himself: ‘Intelligence.’
Of course: intelligence. He could keep going back to that and had all of human history to back up his claim. But it didn’t get to the heart of the matter which, despite her clearer thinking, was still nebulous.
‘And another thing: they’re outside of the usual predator–prey cycle. There is no balance. Predators with such an advantage would annihilate their prey and end up dying out from starvation.’
‘No,’ said Oren. ‘On some worlds there are predators with an extreme advantage over their prey. The droons of Cull and the hooders of Masada, for example. They achieve continuance in the first case by hibernation when prey numbers drop, and in the second because of the sheer profligacy of prey. The hooders also have a super-efficient metabolism and a slow breeding rate.’
Ursula didn’t know this and realized she’d been basing her contention on Terran life forms, and she wasn’t sure that was entirely the case there. But she wasn’t about to let this distract her.
‘Then there’s the genetics of these creatures. You opined that they transform themselves – adapt – on the basis of their genetic library, and that they can copy and utilize alien genomes.’ She felt a surge of something, some excitement. She was getting closer to some truth now. ‘But how is it they can respond to things which simply couldn’t be part of their environment? How can they grow defences against energy and projectile weapons and, like one we just saw operating one of our guns, create their own system to supply bio-electricity to technology?’ She paused and added, ‘Do not say “intelligence” again because that first raptor we encountered grew laser reflective skin way before the fuckers grew brains.’
Oren watched her in silence for a long moment, then said, ‘I could offer explanations. The reflective skin might have been a development in the past arising due to high solar output. All the abilities to resist projectile weapons are simply explainable in terms of a hostile environment and hostile prey, some of which do in fact fire projectiles. Bio-electricity is a defence Earth creatures use, but combine that with growing intelligence and, of course, their powering up of the weapon is explainable.’ He smiled a bleak smile. ‘But we are past that now, aren’t we? The upgrade is in you all and cannot be removed and soon enough you’ll work it all out for yourselves.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Think again on what you said a moment ago: “they can copy and utilize alien genomes”. Ponder on this fact.’
Ursula stepped back as if she had been struck. Her mind went into overdrive. Disparate facts and data points seemed to orbit some inner self before collapsing back to a shape that made logical sense.
‘They can copy and utilize alien genomes but, of course, they retain useful survival traits.’ She felt suddenly hot as she got it. ‘They copy alien genomes to their genetic library and use them again. The traits we have seen, the resistance to weapons, comes from an alien source . . . as does the intelligence.’
As she now thought about where next to take this, Oren added, ‘As does the hostility too.’ He winced a smile.
‘Explain,’ she said.
He reached out and tapped a finger against her bracelet. ‘The connection is there and it took me a little while to recognize it. The few examples of Jain tech are locked away in the Viking Museum on Earth’s moon, though the Four Seasons Changer is proof that some of it escaped the AIs hunting down every scrap of it. As I told you before, it’s dangerous because all of it can replicate. But it can also become more complex, and it is hostile – it always tries to sequester any machine with which it comes into contact. From this we can suppose that its creators were hostile too.’
