‘Your eyes,’ said Hannah.
‘Bloodshot like Malden’s,’ he stated. ‘Blood-pressure differential through the organic interface to his cerebellum, caused by increased demand. It will kill him eventually.’
‘And you?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
He halted and turned to her. ‘Because of the viral nanite fix my previous self made.’ He paused, briefly studying the map in his head of the surrounding sprawl. ‘Telomeres reconfigured, T-cell boost and an increase in stem-cell division, but with strong immune response to stem-cell mutation. I heal about four times faster than a normal human being, and this body physically adapts to internal and external pressures at the same rate. Also, those little biomechs are still in my bloodstream, constantly running repairs. This is why I survived Smith’s torture.’
No terror in her expression now, but a look of shock remained, and something like awe. ‘How can you know that?’
‘I worked it out, and that’s what my present self would have done.’
A motorway flyover now above. A big truck with strobing green lights shot over it, followed by four Inspectorate ground cruisers. He began walking towards a pedway over to his far left. It cut through under the flyover and on the other side of it lay access for maintenance workers to reach the road itself.
‘Where are we going?’ Hannah asked.
‘Closer to the blast.’
‘Please, speak to me, Alan.’
He was already speaking to her, so what was her problem? The answer to that didn’t really require much thinking about, but its implications did. The human component of his self had been all but subsumed by Janus, and he now thought with the ordered logic of a machine intelligence. Emotions: what were they but an evolved evolutionary imperative, a chemical anachronism residing in the new him? Love, hate, friendship, fear and happiness, what did he need them for? In the mouth of the pedway tunnel, he dumped the assault rifle in a litter bin – as a precaution, since carrying it might draw the attention of enforcers in the cruisers passing above – then, two paces beyond the bin, a great black gulf opened up in his extended mind, and he sank to his knees again.
What use were emotions? He could analyse them right down to their smallest components and know the reason for them all, then he could discount them from his thought processes and become a totally logical being. What use then for that other anachronism called the survival instinct? He’d run full-tilt into the dilemma of those who saw themselves merely as machines for the transmission of genes, and nothing more. If that was to be his only purpose, what use was existence at all? Why live, why struggle, why seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, in the sure knowledge they were both just a couple more screwdrivers inside the genetic toolbox? Surely oblivion was a better choice?
He didn’t need a lump of Hyex embedded in the base of his skull to end it all. Through the organic interface, he could just shut himself down, turn off his conscious mind, erase all data. His autonomous nervous system would continue functioning, but he would then be mindless. He lay a breath away from oblivion at that moment, but even patterns of thought are a product of evolution and the old survival imperative itself had survived the integration process, having as its source both himself and Janus who, after all, was a near-copy of a human mind. Saul realized that to survive he must make divisions, he must retain a human mind to interface with the world, just as the organic interface in his skull marked a physical line of division between the organic and the silicon him. In that instant he began rebuilding the cowering cockroach inside his skull, re-establishing its predominance, turning a human face back towards the world. Finally he stood up again, and the human face he turned towards the world boiled with anger and hate.
‘What happened?’ Hannah asked.
‘Call it existential angst,’ he said tightly.
She nodded. ‘Something like that happened with Malden, but he thought it was a fault in the comlife he used.’
‘You knew?’ He looked up.
‘I got no chance to tell you.’ She gazed at him accusingly. ‘I thought you would warn me before you loaded the AI.’
‘How did Malden survive?’
‘He hung on to his hate.’
The much larger and more complex part of himself delivered into Saul’s human mind the dry verdict that, though Hannah indeed had some idea of how things had run within Malden’s head, she had no idea of what was going on in his own. Saul realized that she had taken a gamble with him; she could not have known what combining Janus with the hardware in his head would result in.
‘I, too, hang on to my hatred,’ he declared.
But was it just the Committee he hated, or the entire human race?
As the Inspectorate cruisers, the big trucks of DRS or ‘disaster response service’, the AH ambulances and ATVs sped past, their occupants all ignored Hannah and Saul. Why, Hannah wondered, would they take note of just two more civilians milling around the periphery of the blast zone? If she and Saul had been the only two actually walking towards the great boiling cloud still rising from the firestorm, the only two making their way through the increasing amounts of debris, perhaps they would have been more noticeable.
‘Why are there people heading towards it?’ she asked Saul.
‘Desperation,’ he replied succinctly. ‘It’s an opportunity for looting not to be missed.’
Soon impassable, the highway became a traffic jam of emergency vehicles, though some surprisingly organized individual had kept one lane clear for the bulldozers that approached shortly after she and Saul arrived on the scene. With such a concentration of Inspectorate enforcers, the citizens who flocked along this route, with apparently nefarious intentions, abandoned the main highway long before, heading off into devastated sprawl and dodging between smoking mounds of rubble, while avoiding those buildings that still belched flames. She wondered if they hadn’t noticed the shepherds pacing about over there, or hadn’t heard the clattering hum of razorbirds. However, one small group of citizens, who she and Saul joined, seemed to be here merely as spectators. She felt that Saul’s cynicism might be catching, as she found herself surmising that they had come here to see something appalling enough to lessen the impact of the constant disaster of their own lives.
Survivors came staggering out of the surrounding wreckage, and some others barely crawling. Many of them seemed to be naked, some bearing burn blisters big as fruit, and after their clothing they were now shedding their skins. But there and then, in that moment when screaming might be justified, there was only silence from them.
‘They’re not receiving any help,’ Hannah observed.
Though a crowd of these injured had gathered in a clear space beside that section of the highway where most of the All Health ambulances were parked, no one showed any signs of tending to them, and instead they were being driven away from the ambulances by baton-wielding enforcers.
‘They cannot all be saved,’ he remarked fatly.
She glanced at him, feeling something leaden in her stomach. ‘You’re not just talking about those we see here, are you?’
He gestured to the traffic jam of emergency vehicles. ‘This is probably the result of some automatic disaster-response plan that Committee execs just hadn’t yet got round to shelving,’ he said. ‘I doubt they would have bothered sending any ambulances, since what’s the point of saving a few thousand people when you expect billions of others to die?’