In answer to the missiles, Dragon belched from some orifice a swarm of small black spheres. When, some minutes later, the two clouds of devices met, it seemed that a small thunderstorm ensued.
Passing over this, the Excalibur pursued Dragon through one orbit of the ice giant, then back out into space towards the USER. As it did so it observed the ripples spreading across the surface of its opponent, and knew the entity was preparing for a massive full-spectrum laser strike. They were too far yet from the USER for such a strike to be effective there, so it must be intended for the Excalibur itself. Preparing its hard-fields and the heat-dispersing lasers linked to the superconducting mesh in its hull, Sword almost felt pity for the creature. It obviously had no idea what it was up against.
‘Arrogance is its own reward,’ Dragon sent.
Abruptly, a single large wave spread out over the surface of the Dragon sphere—but did not stop there. It propagated, impossibly, out into vacuum. In a nanosecond, Sword realized it should have been aware of this possibility, for it was inherent in the device the AI ship guarded. This was USER technology.
Sword began firing all its missiles at once, while diverting energy to structural integrity fields. Missiles and wave met, and the missiles died like bugs under some huge roller. When the gravity wave hit Sword, it was like a tsunami slamming into a wooden sailing ship pinned against a shore. The Excalibur distorted, broke, and Sword screamed over the ether. Inside the AI ship, antimatter escaped its containment in missiles the ship had not managed to eject. This was the real reason the AI had tried to fire all its missiles, as no containment was proof against gravitational breach. It had not succeeded in time. The subsequent explosions did not leave much in the way of debris, and what it did leave rapidly dispersed.
‘Hubris,’ Dragon commented, then tittered to itself.
The wave continued spreading out, its strength diminishing, but it was still strong enough when it hit the USER. The towing ship just fragmented and blew away, while the USER itself distorted but held its relative position as if someone had nailed it to vacuum. Then its singularity containment failed. The device glowed briefly and disappeared in an x-ray flash, as hundreds of tonnes of metal and composite collapsed down to an infinitely small point.
Now observing the gravitational terrain, Dragon watched the singularity begin its long slow fall towards the ice giant. The entity then made some calculations, and noted that the damage had only just begun—the real spectacular stuff would occur in about fifty solstan years as the giant planet started to collapse in on itself. Dragon gave a titanic shrug and wished there was somewhere to run, but with so many U-space data streams still shut down, even after it had knocked out the USER, the entity realized it was in a Polity trap—that there were others USERs out there. Then, turning its attention back towards the planet, re-establishing that communications link, it uploaded recent data from thousands of small lizard brains. Data from one of those had Dragon accelerating back towards Cull, as inside itself it initiated repairs to its own U-space drives which had been damaged in its first escape from Sword.
The entity worked with some urgency—one Skellor was quite enough.
22
I can, should this flesh-and-blood body fail me, be loaded to silicon or crystal or mag-carbon, or even to a Q-puter (though in the last case I would probably fit inside something the size of a skin cell). I do have a memplant, and keep my account at Soulbank up to date. I could be loaded into a speed-grown blank clone of myself, the body of a mind-wiped criminal or suicide, a Golem or some other android, or a gen-factored body of my own design (had I the wealth). I am practically immortal and still I cannot quite grasp what that means. I could read these words a century down the line. I could read them in a million years… No, it still is not clear to me. Is it time to upgrade myself and move beyond mere humanity, perhaps become the guiding AI of some ship or even a runcible Al? Maybe, for those of us who can bear immortality, this is the path we must take. Is this what our AI children, who are also our brothers and gods, are waiting for?
— Anonymous
Shattered bodies lay below the edge of the platform. Fethan recognized the unmistakable contortion and surrounding spatter pattern, and knew they had died by falling from above. Without much hope of finding any of them alive, he moved over and checked for a few pulses. It was then that he saw the aug creatures struggling to pull free, their legs straining to draw their tubules from the side of these people’s heads. Moving away, he assumed they were abandoning corpses to find other prey, until a man came stumbling from the ruination, groaning in agony as his aug creature also tried to pull itself free.
The man staggered over to the corpses, dragged the naked body of a woman to him and cradled her head in his lap. He became silent then, rocking back and forth and stroking her misshapen forehead. Fethan noted the liquid smear of brain running from her ear, wanted to help but knew he had nothing to offer. Returning his attention to the man’s aug, he saw that it had almost pulled loose—coils of bloody tubules now between itself and the man’s head. But it seemed that advantaged it nothing, for it began to vibrate and turn grey, then hopped away from its perch and folded up in the dust, dying. Now, Fethan heard the sound of a hailstorm, which he had learned was a common weather condition here.
But this was no hail. Turning, he saw aug creatures, grey and dying in their thousands, falling from the underside of the city platform. He wondered how this particular copy of the kill program felt about destroying its own environment.
I have no urge to self-preservation beyond my task, the master copy replied after he internalized the question.
But surely your task was to kill Skellor?
It is, but when that ceases to be possible, my imperatives change.
You can’t get to Skellor… I mean this copy of you can’t get to him.
Correct. Skellor has disconnected from the network.
You communicate with your copy, then?
Yes.
What are those imperatives now, down here?
For my copy: to save human lives by destroying this enslaving network—Skellor had programmed self-destruction for its human nodes.
That figures.
Fethan noticed that the man was now looking up at him. What must he be seeing? Just someone standing muttering to himself and gazing into the distance? He walked over.
‘Who are you?’ the man croaked.
‘My name’s Fethan.’
‘You… you are not from around here.’
‘No.’
The man was staring with suspicion at Fethan’s chameleon-cloth environment suit while easing the head of his loved one from his lap.
Fethan was old, in the terms of this place, and he knew how to read people. ‘I’m not here to cause harm, but to help,’ he said. ‘It’s because of me, these things’ — he nudged an aug creature with the toe of his boot—‘are now dying.’
The man stood up. ‘Where is the one who caused this?’
‘I don’t know. On the run probably, but I don’t think he’ll get far. Tell me, what are you called?’
The man slumped, suddenly very weary. ‘Tanaquil, Chief Metallier of this city,’ he said, then, ‘Dragon warned us, but how could we believe… this?’