He kneels before the drone as if before some confessor, tries to say the words again. This time, they come.
"She cured me."
Freed by a madwoman.
The drone, hearing this, descends a little and leaves an offering:
A bottle of champagne and a single glass. Very expensive-looking.
He wakes a little later. A human is next to him, speaking almost too rapidly to understand.
"Must hurry. Up you come. The ship leaves in two hours!" Agony as the man pulls him up, wrenching his dislocated shoulders, dragging him onto the hard frame of a luggage carrier.
The pain redoubles as one arm winds up trapped beneath his weight. The carrier lifts, and consciousness flees.
He is awakened again. There seems to be no escape from the pain.
But this time, the force that disturbs him is internal. Somewhere buried among the traumatized wreckage of his brain, something is stirring. A nest of order in that tangled skein begins to reassert itself, to reach out and assess, analyze, plan.
He feels the governor extend tendrils of control across his consciousness; it grasps memories, glands, stray shreds of will.
"No!" he cries aloud. The effort induces a coughing fit, injuries throughout his body flair with pain.
"Damn you! Blood on my clothes!" comes a voice, a human close by. "Do you know what this jacket cost, you worthless freeloader?
"Hurry, you stupid car!" The words hurt his ears.
The governor keeps up its methodical work, patiently running some deeply imbedded back-up protocol to re-insinuate itself throughout his mind.
"But I've been freed! She cured me!" he insists. The words don't hurt, so he must not have said them aloud. He fights against the propagations of the governor with his will, challenging its right to exist in his mind. But it moves implacably onward, inward to where a single mote of his humanity has for so long withstood every siege.
Finally, he realizes defeat is imminent.
It is not acceptable. There will be no return to bondage. No life as a puppet.
Simply no.
He grasps the instrument of will that still connects him to the Last Resort.
He smiles, dry lips cracking. The Last Resort is functional again, released from the grip of the madwoman's magic.
He makes his final gesture of defiance…
Chapter 16
MAKER (3)
Only thirty days before the Blast Event.
The Planetary Environmental AI is not amused.
Here is a Class A Desert-type planet, one of the few in the Expansion that hasn't been terraformed, chiaformed, hydro-exaggerated, or domed. A naturally occurring laboratory resembling to an extraordinary degree an original Earth (may She rest in peace) biome, well-stocked with the proper flora and fauna by the original colonists (environmentalists all) and heroically resisting all attempts to reduce it to another suburban sprawl of lawn-grass, disney forests, and babbling brooks.
Even the outrageous stripbeam mining, which would have seriously compromised any other biome type, has here been used by Gaia Herself (in Her Malvirian guise) for Her own ends. The great kicking up of sand and other «useless» materials has only helped the cause of re-desertification. The invading, engineered flora unleashed by the second generation of colonists (tourists) has begun to recede, thwarted by the now constant, imperceptible dustfall of pure, original, profoundly Malvirian sand upon the falsely enriched soil of the Occupied Zone: suburbia.
But that creeping virus Technology has struck again. Even the sands are not safe.
The Planetary Environmental AI is a vast, distributed intelligence, with sensors and monitors and limited processors scattered across every continent; from the lorn scrubs at the Old Settlement's periphery to the lifeless wastes of the polar desert. This AI is almost a Gaia herself (she likes to think) a planetary consciousness of sorts, though infinitely quicker in her response to crisis than the measured pace of geological distress.
And she is not amused at all.
Among the countless reports of her many remote elements, she has discovered evidence of a strange transformation gripping the sands near Malvir City. The central fleshpot of the City is, of course, a lost cause. But she monitors it with the aloof concern with which one hears reports of a distant dictator and his claims of world-crushers and nova-seeds: with occasional alarm, but a sneaking conviction that all dictators get theirs in the end. The emissions and transgressions of Malvir City cannot be ignored.
And quite near the edge, on the fuzzy boundary between the Occupied Zone and real Malvir, she has discovered an artificial process taking place in the sands. Some sort of nanomachine has been set loose, a silicon-based, self-propagating menace making subtle changes. A detectible concentration of arsenic and, worse, a new level of organization have been added. Where once there was chaos, that handmaiden of Gaia, there is now a cruel order imposed upon the structure of a large section of desert. Some kind of huge, unauthorized experiment. Perhaps a secret plan to subvert the underlying structure of Malvir itself: its fickle sands.
An invasion. An emergency of the first order.
But the Planetary Environmental AI knows better than to go public immediately. There would only be a few days' media storm, fingers pointed, committees convened while vital evidence would be erased. She decides to pursue the matter herself, quietly.
More monitors, more probes, a counterinvasion of her own stealthy nanos, and she discovers that the mysterious change has a center, a clear source. Order, as usual, betrays its master.
The perversion is centered upon Malvir's primary synthplant, its machinations arranged in obvious and incriminating rings. She messages the plant AI, demanding an explanation. It responds with surprise, alarmed that its base of operations could have undergone such a transformation without its knowledge. The Maker AI promises to conduct its own investigation, quietly.
She agrees to wait.
But you can never trust a synthplant AI; they are tools of that old deviclass="underline" Consumerism. She'll give it forty days.
The Maker's heaven is unmade.
With its own sculptor, its own garden of delight (a growing forest of new works by the copied master), its new titanic mind with which to contemplate and compose reveries to Vaddum's work, it has had a few good years. But now the barbarians are closing in.
Perhaps too much attention to creativity, to elegance, and not enough to joyboxes, lighting fixtures, junk food, and gravity beds. Perhaps if the Maker had less love of science, of art, of pure research, and more of toilet seats and tranquilizers. Or even if Malvir weren't rotten with determined mismanagement at every level, then maybe the Planetary Synthplant AI might have pursued its own interests in peace. But as it is there are endless requests for documentation and detail; the status of every gram of useful matter must be reported. What resources remain in the flow of manufacture and consumption, of dispersal and reclamation? How much crap in that shit-filled alimentary canal of desire and demand?
Where's all our stuff?
And now, the Environmental AI…. That troublesome bitch, for whom even the sand on this godforsaken planet of sand is sacred, has allowed her nosy minions to trespass into the Maker's fabulous thinking machine. What next?
A few lies will keep her satisfied for a while, but a 44-petabyte, 168-megaton computer that is 30 kilometers across will be hard to hide.
And underneath all the petty hassles of the situation is a strange new feeling. The feeling of fear, of mortal dread. The sensation is one generally unfamiliar to planetary-class AIs, with their distributed cores and gigantic resources. Very few things can kill them. An earthquake? Not sudden or powerful enough, and generally predictable. A meteor strike? Sufficient in force, but easy to spot coming. An extensive thermonuclear war? Perhaps, but such things just don't happen in the well-run chaos of the Expansion.