Millions of eyes and ears became available to him. Similar to the facility available to him through his aug, he could cast his perception out and away from him: corridors, parks, lidos, VR chambers and autofactories. He encompassed a vast area, but that was not all. Mobile sensory apparatus also came under his control, and it took him a moment to realize these were human beings absorbed into the growing structure like everything else—extensions of himself. They spread out from him, the vanguard of his growth. They armed themselves, those that could. It was preprogrammed: everything not himself, not Jain, was the enemy.
Then he found the gulf, a region previously occupied by his extended structure and now blacked out. Nearby he found a child, one side of her body burnt down to the bone, but muscles still capable of obeying the impulses of the mycelial structure inside her. He stood her up, walked her into this black area. Within minutes she moved through incinerated corridors to the edge of a well cut down through the arcology. The area below looked like the pit of hell; above curtains of smoke blew across open sky. Satellite strike. The AI must have acted drastically to destroy the centre of Jain growth. Thellant understood at once a basic growth pattern implicit in the Jain structure. It grew acentric precisely to avoid this. He, the core, lay not at its centre but right against one edge of the current spread. He must move before the AI realized its mistake. But how?
The how became utter and immediate temptation. He did not need to be Thellant, he could become all and lose himself in this vast and ever-increasing extension of himself. But a life of being a distinct entity, ever the centre, ever in control, made that option antithetical to him. He resisted it with all his will and fought to retake the territory of his own body. Turning perception inward, he studied what had been wrought and what had been wrecked within him. Withdrawing growth inside himself he repaired damage. This was easy, everything destroyed had been recorded and everything recorded could be rebuilt.
Within minutes he restarted his heart and lungs. Alterations to some structures in his brain negated pain signals, oxygenated blood reaching his brain returned to him much of what he had been. But in the end he realized he could not return to being a completely distinct human being. That way he would sacrifice too much perception and too much power, and so many of his former body’s organs were inefficient, weak. Now, totally incorporating the structure into himself, he improved their function, their material, their strength. Minutes passed before he realized, while laminating his bones with metals conveyed into him by the structure, that he was losing sight of his primary purpose. Minutes after that he hauled himself from the floor, Jain structure turned brittle all around him, and breaking away. But he did not entirely separate from it. Perpetually in contact across the electromagnetic spectrum, the air about him hazed with power. Now he was as mobile as those other humans, but he was the prime component, in control. Leaving his apartment he first walked, then ran, finding his way down, deep.
8
At the beginning of the Prador-Human War, drones were, on the whole, merely AI telefactored robots: welders and other designs of maintenance bots, AG probes carrying sensor arrays, security drones that remained wired into the complexes or ships that AIs controlled, or other versions for various security/police applications. Some of these did have limited autonomy, but few could be classified as AI, being merely extensions of an Aclass="underline" hands, eyes and guns. During the war, however, it became necessary to give these drones greater and greater autonomy, since the many EM weapons employed tended to fracture comlinks between an AI and its telefactored drone. Initially the new versions were sub-AI and only able to implement complex programs, but it became evident that artificial intelligence was the one big advantage the Polity possessed over the Prador, so war drones were eventually given complete autonomy, consciousness. They became fully AIs, with all that implied. The first of these drones were quite simple—an armoured shell, weapons, brain, and drive system—and also quite effective, but casualties were high and production needed to be maintained at a frenetic level. Quality control suffered and AI drones, which in peacetime would have needed substantial adjustments, were sent to the front. As a matter of expediency, flawed crystal got used rather than discarded. Personality fragments were copied, sometimes not very well, successful fighters recopied. The traits constructed or duplicated were not necessarily those evincing intelligence or morality. The Polity wanted fighting grunts, even if they were metal soldiers with crystal minds. This whole scenario acted as a fast evolutionary process in the development of AI war drones, the inevitable result being that towards the end of the war they were mostly crafty, belligerent, and very good at killing things and blowing things up. It is of course axiomatic that the soldier returning from war cannot easily settle into civilian life. So it was with the drones, and many unfortunate incidents after the war led to a great distrust of such entities. The manufacture of them ceased and AIs returned to using telefactors or drones loaded with their own subminds, which could be easily resubsumed. Many war drones found themselves niches within Polity society, many left it to find their fortunes elsewhere, and many simply turned themselves off.
- From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein
Below, three antigravity cars could be seen taking to the sky. A silent flash ensued and, one after the other as if in a chain reaction, all three disintegrated and wreckage rained down on the arcology roof cropfields, drawing shafts of smoke through the air, then bouncing fire trails through the crops.
‘It is, as they say, getting ugly down there,’ Jack observed, speaking from the shuttle’s console.
As far as understatement went, Thorn thought that a stinger. Monitors strove to contain over three hundred separate riots instigated by armed Separatists wearing Dracocorp augs. One entire subsector of the arcology had become a no-go zone. There was also firing at the perimeter, over the sea and in the surrounding multi-layered fields, flickering all around like summer lightning. But Coloron strictly applied its quarantine. Though informational infection initially spread planetwide, Coloron had halted and now contained it. Actual physical Jain infestation was only present in Main Arcology itself, and the AI could not afford to let it out. MA would not survive this, Thorn reckoned, though perhaps the rest of the planet might be saved.
‘Who is this Legate?’ he wondered.
‘Perhaps some enemy of Thellant N’komo,’ Jack suggested.
‘We’ve yet to establish he is the principal cause of this,’ Thorn observed.
‘It seems very likely that he is. The speed of informational infection through the Dracocorp network is the prime indicator of that. From what we know of Jain technology, that would not be possible had the host been one possessing a subservient aug within the network. Coloron also informs me that the first to show signs of infection were Separatists who were being watched.’
‘Skellor managed it without being dominant in a Dracocorp aug network.’
‘Yes, but in one case using the transmitters of the Occam Razor, and in other cases by having to physically touch and subvert with Jain tech the prime aug concerned. All the evidence here indicates that someone has joined with a Jain node, without any technological support: witness the speed of Jain growth and a rather stupid choice of location.’
‘Following your reasoning’, said Thorn, ‘it would seem this Thellant joined with a Jain node either unwillingly or by mistake.’
‘Yes,’ Jack replied, ‘which perhaps returns us to your original question.’
‘Huh?’
‘During initial Jain growth the host would not be thinking clearly, perhaps never would again, but his last thoughts, intentions, strong emotions would propagate through the aug network. Those thoughts would probably all be about the Jain node itself, the growth of which would at first cause great pain.’