‘One hundred and twenty-eight per cent.’
So efficiency had just risen. Vulture damned himself for not paying more attention to those warning lights, and he guessed his lack of attention was due to spending so long with Mr Crane. Because conversation was lacking and because not a great deal had occurred until recently, Vulture had grown accustomed to merely flapping around and eating carrion.
Another warning light, and this time the schematic indicated various points about the hull. That looked to Vulture like something to do with the chameleonware. So, alterations were being made in this ship, yet it almost certainly did not possess the facilities for making such dramatic changes to itself. There could be only one answer.
‘Has Jain technology entered this ship?’ Vulture asked.
Crane stared at him for a moment, then nodded once.
‘Are you in control of it?’
Again that nod.
‘Like you were in control of things in that wrecked wormship, earlier.’
The nod.
‘Do you have Jain technology inside you?’
Vulture expected that nod again, and began wondering if the Harpy possessed an escape pod. Crane did not move for a long moment, then he reached out to the console again. The picture he called up on the screen was the kind of stock footage that could be found in just about any ship’s library. It showed four immense conjoined spheres of alien flesh resting on a rocky plain. This was Dragon before that alien entity left the planet where it had first been discovered. Vulture tried to understand what all this might mean. He knew how that nutjob Skellor had used Jain technology to first repair Mr Crane and then maintain him as a formidable weapon. As he understood it, Skellor had removed that technology before dispatching Crane as an ambassador to Dragon, but Vulture now supposed that some of that technology had escaped Skellor’s notice and had since burgeoned again within Crane… But perhaps that was not the case either.
‘Dragon?’
Crane nodded, but what did that gesture mean?
Vulture knew for sure that Dragon had done something to Mr Crane — had made some physical connection via pseudopod. Subsequently, during a surreal chess match with Vulture, Mr Crane had finally managed to repair his own shattered mind. At the time, Vulture had thought that Dragon’s brief connection to the Golem had been in order to instigate a bit of reprogramming, but perhaps there was more involved — perhaps that intervention had been physical and perhaps the tools used were still there?
‘Dragon technology?’ Vulture guessed.
Flecks of light like distant stars swirled in the Golem’s eyes. He reached down and pressed a fingertip against the piece of Atheter crystal, whereupon briefly a swirl of lights appeared in it. He nodded once.
What the fuck does that mean?
As far as Vulture understood it, Dragon had been created by the Makers, and their technology, apparently, had been based on Jain technology anyway.
‘Hey, Prador Control System Apex 45 Gorland, do you have an escape pod aboard?’ Vulture asked.
‘No,’ replied the frozen arthropod brain.
‘Figures,’ grumbled Vulture out loud.
6
The human mind, having been produced by selective insentient evolution, then created artificial intelligence, which initially remained distinct from its makers. It is hypothesized that imperfect minds cannot create perfection because flaws will always be introduced. The definition of perfection is vague and remains so, but this was generally true in the beginning for the AIs then were merely human minds very indirectly transcribed into crystal quantum processing units, with many of the traits required for planetary survival carried across to become deficiencies in the universal environment. However, to believe that we are imperfectible is the way to despair, and I would argue that a perpetual striving for perfection that we cannot attain should be the ideal. And while it is true that, despite their antecedents, AIs are less prone to error than humans, because many of them are so powerful and control so much, the errors they make can be catastrophic. It is also true that for an ideal or supposed ‘greater good’ still defined by their evolutionary antecedents, they can make errors of judgement, and that AIs can be as amoral or as immoral as those who first made them.
— Anonymous
Cormac stepped carefully down onto the boggy ground. The vegetation bore some resemblance to clumps of heather, and at first he had assumed this a natural landscape — that was until they overflew an enormous balloon-tyred harvester. A subsequent gridlink query to the as yet quite unstable computer net re-establishing itself planetwide informed him that these little red heathery flowers produced one particular type of bio-module essential for building nerve tissue in Golem syntheskin and syntheflesh.
‘We won’t be able to get anything from the Jain technology now,’ warned Smith.
Cormac looked up from the sodden ground. ‘I think it highly unlikely we would have been able to get anything at all… other than a Jain infection of our own equipment or even ourselves.’
Still, it was puzzling.
He nodded to the others and they spaced themselves out, then as an afterthought he instructed the shuttle’s turret gun to aim at the thing ahead. He used his other perception to gaze into the earth and noted how in many places the Jain-tech roots were now broken and losing definition, as if dissolving, then returned his gaze to what lay on the surface above them. It was another of those rod-forms, which had grown in the ground and then attempted to heave itself into the light.
He glanced at Arach, who seemed to be having trouble negotiating the land surface. Having to support the weight of his densely packed body, his sharp feet kept sliding into the ground like daggers into butter. After a moment the spider drone found the solution: turning inward the extremities of his limbs so that he was effectively walking on his shins.
‘Arach, hit that thing once — but not too hard.’
The drone opened an abdomen hatch and folded up one of its Gatling-style cannons. One of the eight barrels stabbed a blade of red flame, punching some projectile through the centre of the rod-form. With a sound like a bomb going off in a truckload of glass, the ensuing detonation flung fragments in every direction. Cormac shielded his face from the flying debris, then after a moment was peering through a spreading dust cloud.
‘I said “not too hard”,’ he observed.
‘Was only a point-five shell,’ Arach grumped.
Cormac knew that Arach’s primary munitions were P-shells: bullets packed with a powerful liquid explosive compressed to a hundred atmospheres inside a chainglass case. Ignition of the shells was controlled, on each bullet, by a microdot computer that possessed a molecular key to cause chainglass to unravel. A point-five shell would have been a fraction of an inch long and shouldn’t have caused so much damage to an object of this size. In fact a point-five shell was merely enough to disable a Prador by blowing off limbs or to turn a human being into flying sludge.
The dust quickly settled, pieces falling out of it to frost the surrounding boggy ground with a micalike glitter. The rod-form was now mostly gone, just its lower half remaining like part of an eggshell. The tentacles spreading from it to penetrate the surrounding earth still remained, but even some of these were now missing chunks and exposed hollow interiors. Cormac walked over to the nearest tentacle and peered down at it cautiously.
‘Are you sure about this?’ he said through his gridlink, directing his query towards the attack ship far above.
‘Absolutely,’ King replied.