Evolution's Darling

His mind's eye returned to the bleeding wreck on the hotel suite floor. So utterly broken. So completely demolished.

So expensive.

"Stop," Zimivic commanded. The limo came to a slow, even halt, drifting uneasily in the accelerated air currents between two skyscrapers.

Zimivic leaned back. Something could be salvaged. Something. The Warden could be repaired, or perhaps sold as is? It was, in its way, beautiful. If it expired on the way home, he could put it into cryo, preserving the delicate and incredibly detailed perfection of its agony. There were techniques of mummification, transparent plastics and nanos that could chase away deteriorating microbes indefinitely.

Titles moved through Zimivic's fevered mind: "The Terror Victim" or "The Measure of Torture" or simply, "A Man."

The reverie snapped suddenly. He realized with horror that the idiot limousine was stalled, wafting like some purposeless kite.

"Back to the hotel, you moron!" he shouted. "Can't you see that I've forgotten something?"

He looked at his watch again, tugged his sleeve across the radiant pyramid on its face and leaned back, sighing. Just enough time.

Chapter 15

FREE MAN

A wasteland:

The man, no longer a Warden, finds that he can move his hand.

He makes a fist, absent the two fingers that are broken, relishing through his agony the feeling of freedom. The motion is his own; the governors seem to have been silenced by the ingenious torrents of pain he has suffered at the madwoman's hands.

For a while, that single movement is all he can manage.

Then he tries to speak again. His throat is sore from the objects she force-fed him: a ring, a hard and serrated leaf from one of the hotel's plants, one of his own teeth. His swallowing muscles were paralyzed along with the rest, and she stuffed them down his gullet with a telescoping stylus. Despite his grim effort, the words come out wrong.

"She cores…"

Someone else is in the room, in a flurry of motion.

He rolls his neck, attempting to find a better position for his wounded throat. He wants to say something.

A few more croaks, and the pain brings a veil of darkness.

He wakes up alone.

Some insistent noise has brought him to consciousness. The distant clang of requested access rings with a strange buzzing echo. He suspects that his eardrums have been burst. Perhaps medical aid is here.

He forces a word from his throat.

"Come." Blood joins the sound in his mouth, spreads its metal taste like a blanket on his tongue.

The swish of a door opening. He finds that he can turn his head. A figure floats silently into the room, some sort of drone. With a new chorus of agonies he pulls himself up into a kneeling position. However painful, the motion is gloriously free of governance. He is the master of his own body.

Somehow, he lasted longer than the controls and programs, watched them die one by one as the madwoman worked. In their single-minded desire to serve sentence, the torture appalled as well as injured them. Even the Last Resort had failed. And when the artificial he was meant to ward left the room, slipping out silently, the governors saw their last chance to serve sentence disappear. And then they began to expire: first the criminal overlays, the kluges and updates added over the years, and finally the deep programs of Justice. Finally only he remained: the original self so long buried.

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 ru

"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 co

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 ca