Polity Agent

‘Made that way or evolved that way?’ wondered Cormac.

Mika shrugged, then glanced up as someone else entered the lounge. Cormac looked up as well. This man was an ophidapt, but he wore a hotsuit, so was obviously a version adapted to low temperature. On the side of his bare scaled head he wore a crystal matrix aug with a buffer to visual and aural interlinks. Despite the technology being discrete, the man lay just a spit away from direct interfacing, and was haiman really. Cormac sent a polite query, and in instant reply received a package telling him all he needed to know.

‘D’nissan, please join us,’ he said.

As one of the scientists who shared Mika’s research into things Jain, Cormac wanted to know what this man had to say. D’nissan studied them for a moment before coming over. ‘An update would be nice.’ He sat down on the sofa next to Mika.

Cormac noticed that, sitting alone on the sofa on the opposite side of the low table, this put himself in the position of interrogator once again. He made a recording of his previous exchange with Mika and transmitted it over.

D’nissan blinked, then said, ‘Pursuant on your previous exchange: it is worth noting that something made can then evolve, and that something evolved can be remade.’ He touched a finger to his crystal matrix aug then shrugged. ‘Our studies of Jain morphology, however, are building a body of evidence weighing in on the former option: Jain technology is a weapon created long ago for the single purpose of wiping out civilizations.’

While Cormac sat silently absorbing that, the door into the lounge opened yet again to admit another visitor. Catching its arrival out of the corner of his eye he suppressed an involuntary shiver. The spider-drone from Celedon station had just joined them. So soon after reliving Chaline’s memories, a drone of such a blatantly insectile shape was an unsettling thing to witness. He returned his attention to D’nissan and Mika, as the drone moved off towards the panoramic window.

‘You say it absorbs technical knowledge,’ said Cormac, ‘so what happens when it absorbs U-space tech.’

‘Unless controlled, it won’t, and without a host it would not be capable of retaining that knowledge,’ said Mika.

Cormac gazed at her queryingly, but it was D’nissan who continued: ‘Jain tech uses its acquisitions in, for example, the same way an amoeba uses the physical mechanisms of its body. It is sub-sentient—not conscious. It doesn’t understand what it is doing. It is the very nature of U-space tech that a high level of conscious understanding is required to operate it, hence the fact of runcible and ship AIs controlling it now.’

‘Those creatures… biomechanisms, if you like’—Cormac eyed the spider drone—‘U-jumped down into that base Chaline occupied,’ he observed.

Mika replied, ‘Yes, but they were controlled by a Maker version of our friend Skellor—that being the conscious element.’

‘Some of our original U-spaceships were not controlled by AI,’ Cormac noted.

‘Apocryphal,’ said D’nissan. ‘Those ships left before the AIs won the Quiet War and took over. It suited the companies owning those vessels to define the systems controlling them as CQPs — carbon quanta processors—simple computers. In reality those systems were conscious and a damned sight more intelligent than any of the ships’ passengers, none of whom could understand U-space technology.’

Cormac shrugged, accepting that. ‘Okay, even without U-tech this shit could bring us down. We got lucky with Skellor. A little less arrogance on his part and he could have caused damage on a systems-wide scale, before seeding Jain nodes across the Polity to finish the job. So how do we stop this? How do we kill Jain technology?’

Mika leant forwards. ‘There is no simple answer to that. The inactive nodes are easy to destroy—just drop them straight into a sun—but active Jain technology, especially when it has sequestered an intelligent mind…’ She stared at Cormac, looking grim. ‘You heard Chaline. It seemed as if the only successes the Makers had in destroying it were by planetary sterilization. And if it gets out of control within the Polity… well, there’s an old saying, something about killing the patient to cure the disease.’

There seemed little more to say after that. Cormac listened in half-attentively as the other two discussed recent research. His attention kept drifting to the spider-drone which periodically reared up against the panoramic window and rattled the tips of its legs there in an a

Halting before him the drone said, ‘Hi, I’m Arach—I’ve been assigned to you.’

Cormac eyed it suspiciously, then made a query through his link: ‘Jerusalem, apparently a drone called Arach has been assigned to me!

‘He’s lying,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘He is very bored and feels you are his best bet for some action. I will send him elsewhere if you require.’

‘An ex-war drone that served in the Prador War? Perhaps I would be foolish to refuse?’ Cormac commented.

‘Perhaps you would,’ Jerusalem agreed.

To the drone, Cormac said, ‘I’ll summon you when I need you, Arach. Just make sure you are ready for… any eventualities.’

The drone did a little tappity dance on the carpet.

Cormac departed frowning.

4

Cassius Project: this is a Dyson sphere in the process of construction, an object first described in 1959 by the physicist Freeman Dyson in his paper ‘Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of lnfra-Red Radiation’, though the idea germinated in him after reading a science fiction story by one Olaf Stapleton some thirteen years earlier. It is a hollow sphere being built around the sun, Cassius, to capture nearly all the star’s radiation so as to power (at nearly 1026 W) the civilization that will occupy the i