Skellor smiled to himself as he pressed together the seventeen fragments of the crystalline Golem mind. Obviously, the Golem—Aiden and Cento—had torn the object from Crane’s body and smashed it irreparably with a blast from a pulse-gun. But what was irreparable to Polity technology was not necessarily beyond Skellor’s ability. What most amused him was that the mind had broken along established virtual fractures, for Mr Crane’s mind had always been in seventeen fragments—this was the nature of the Golem’s madness and, strangely, what had made sanity and autonomy a recoverable objective. His mentality fragmented like this, Mr Crane operated as the killing machine the Separatists required, committing the most horrifying crimes and maintaining them in memory as disjointed unrelated incidents, meanwhile always attempting to reconnect the seventeen fragments and regain self. This he would perhaps have done sometime in the next thousand years. Thus it was that the Golem had obeyed his Separatist masters—in that dangerous and erratic manner entirely his own.
Roughly holding the fragments in the lozenge shape they had once formed, Skellor began to send Jain nanofilaments into it, clouding the crystal as they penetrated between the lattices. Concentrating on a single clean shear, he pulled the two faces together. Pecking along them on an atomic level, he cleared away oxygen atoms from the oxides formed on each surface, also organic dirt and minerals—anything that should not be there. Drawing this detritus away, he found all the major neural pathways, cooling nanotubes and s-con power grid wires, and aligned them. There was some distortion caused by relieved stresses in the crystal, which he recreated. The two faces, drawn together by the Van Der Waals force of atomic attraction, snapped back together as if they had been held apart by elastic, and it was all he could do to pull the filaments out of the way to prevent them from being trapped and crushed. Two of the fragments had become one, and now he detected the nightmarish mutter from this piece of a mind.
For a moment, Skellor refocused his awareness on his surroundings. Not having acquired the same resources he had possessed on the Occam Razor, he was unable to split his awareness during such an operation, which was as intricate as anything he had done before. He briefly noted the man Inther, lying naked on his side nearby, bleeding to death from where Skellor had torn his arm away. Marlen was motionless in his hole, though Skellor’s control of him was not so strong as to prevent the man from showing by his expression the terror he felt. Mr Crane’s body stood perfectly poised, its balance system operating as if he was already alive. The human arm Skellor had grafted on to replace the missing ceramal one only looked out of place at the raw shoulder joint, with its swollen organo-optic interfaces. Inside that body Skellor had built a device acting as a heart, lung and nutrient supply—pumping round the arm an artificial blood supply. The human limb would last perhaps six months like this, but hopefully Skellor would not need it for so long. He returned his attention to Mr Crane’s mind.
Interface after interface bonded, and the mutter of the Golem’s mind grew loud to Skellor’s senses. Delving into this he replayed scenes of murder and atrocity and perpetual imbalance. Quite often, Mr Crane had been as much a danger to the people who tried to control him as he was to those he was sent out to kill. Skellor noted how Crane disobeyed some direct orders when the program, aimed at regaining the Golem autonomy, interfered with the task at hand. Sometimes this program could briefly displace an order to do murder so that, rather than kill, Crane found external iconic representations of each virtual fragment of his mind. Rather than kill a man, Crane had once stolen a pair of antique binoculars. Rather than kill he had once taken a Tenkian dagger. Even with the Separatist orders re-establishing, Crane would not carry out the kill order, for, in the twisted logic of this insane Golem, the theft became the killing.
As the final physical fragments of the mind came together, Skellor decided that his own orders must not be disobeyed in any manner, so he proceeded to wipe the program intended to reassemble the virtual fragments of the Golem’s mind. But he couldn’t. As soon as he attempted to wipe the program, the mind began to break in other places, in a way that would make it unusable. Annoyingly, what could make Crane whole and sane and autonomous was also preventing him from sliding into true oblivion. Remove it, and the mind would fall apart. Skellor realized he could erase everything and start again, but doing that would result in the loss of the Mr Crane he wanted. This he found aesthetically displeasing. To possess godlike powers, Skellor felt, meant he should please the poetic as well as the pragmatic part of his soul.
With the mind now cupped before him like an offering to this brass god, Skellor stood and approached Crane’s body. There was a Jain substructure inside the Golem: it supplied the power lost by two broken micro-piles, and was mopping up spilt radioactives. It would also repair him, just as similar mycelia had repaired the calloraptor creatures Skellor sent after Ian Cormac on Masada. Mr Crane, dangerous though he used to be, would now be formidable.
Skellor reached out and pressed the lozenge into its recess inside the Golem. It snicked into place, light flickering around it as the structure inside him made optic connections. The Jain substructure, taking on a brassy hue from its surroundings, reached out like sharp fingers and drew closed the ceramal torso as if it was made of rubber. The superconducting grid then rolled across and joined, then finally brass melted and flowed across the surface. After a moment Mr Crane—not Skellor—opened those black eyes.
‘Welcome back to your life,’ Skellor told the Golem.
‘Mr Pendle…’ began Agent Bryonik, leaning back, his fingers interlaced beneath his chin.
‘Is this entirely necessary?’ Pendle interrupted, waving a hand at their surroundings.
Bryonik wondered what his problem was: this was genuinely in the style of a premillennial police interrogation cell, with a scarred and coffee-stained plastic table, magnetic tape recorders, strip lights…
Pendle went on, ‘Do you know how many times I’ve sat in rooms like this?’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘Precisely seven hundred and twenty-three.’
‘There are worse alternatives.’
‘And do you know how many times that has been said to me?’
Bryonik grimaced, and through his gridlink accessed Penal Storage to change the VR format. He didn’t like being predictable, so rather than go for the Caribbean island, bright shirts, and drinks with umbrellas in them, he cobbled his own scenario. Now the two men stood in the uppermost viewing gallery of the Eiffel Tower. Pendle eyed the bank of screens to one side, showing a steel-recrystalizing robot as it slowly traversed one of the ancient structural members.
‘This is a new one,’ commented Pendle. ‘In my time the damned thing had fallen down. When did they put it back up?’
‘About seven years after you died.’
Pendle’s case had a certain historical significance — one of a defining variety of crimes committed around the same period. Prior to then it would have been called what—assault?