Polity Agent

Eventually he came to stand before a wall dispenser for disposable surgical clothing. Using the controlling touch-screen he selected a paper coverall, removed it from the dispensing slot and donned it over the garment he already wore.

‘What about my crew… and the Jack Ketch? Cormac asked reluctantly.

‘Jack, the ship’s AI, is safe, and Thorn and Fethan are presently on Cull. Cento and Gant are dead.’

‘Gant?’ he asked—he already knew about Cento.

‘Gant was terminally infected by a Jain informational virus that supplanted his mind. Thorn therefore destroyed him. There is, however, a back-up copy of him on Earth.’

Cormac grimaced. ‘The situation now?’

‘As you must have already surmised, Skellor is now just a pretty pattern on the surface of a brown dwarf sun. I have one Dragon sphere held in custody, and the planet Cull now has been granted provisional membership of the Polity while search teams locate, remove and isolate any stray items of Jain technology still there.’

Cento probably formed part of that same pretty pattern on that brown dwarf. Only pure luck had saved Cormac from the same fate.

‘You are currently in orbit of Cull?’

‘No, I am currently six hundred light years away.’

‘What?’

‘A rather knotty problem has arisen.’

* * * *

Without cerebral augmentations Thorn could only view the memory in VR and absorb it by repetition. Fethan however, being a cyborg, loaded it directly into his mind so it became part of his memory.

‘What am I seeing here?’ Thorn asked, the VR representation freezing all about him.

‘The planet Osterland,’ Fethan replied, standing at his left shoulder. ‘Cold, about the orbit of Mars around an M-type sun, gravity one point two, plenty of water ice, but completely lifeless until fifty or so years ago. They used designer bacteria, biomass transfer through a cargo runcible, then an orbital mirror to heat the mix. Deciduous trees, with support ecologies, were planted right from the start, and are still being planted by agrobots.’

‘Trees?’

‘That was just the personal preference of the haiman in charge. He could have used fast growing slime moulds or adapted fungi to increase biomass. Instead he chose trees.’

‘Interesting, after what happened here, to discover a haiman rather than an AI in charge,’ Thorn noted. Haiman, he thought, an amalgam of human and AI—which meant this place was ruled, partially, by a human. And humans had never made trustworthy rulers.

‘I wouldn’t read too much into it—there’s not a lot of difference between the two.’

Thorn nodded and took another pace forwards on the platform that extended out from the town lying behind him. He already knew that this platform would become, or had become, a jetty, as the space below it filled with water directed down great canals from the planet’s melting poles. Walking in someone else’s footsteps he finally came to the market located on the platform. Drizzle washed cold against his skin, for a storm approached from the northern outflow.

A dirty hand with chipped fingernails gripped his jacket. ‘I got some good stuff that ain’t on display, my friend,’ said its owner.

‘Like what?’ he asked… only it was not Thorn asking, but the recorded memory.

She was shabby, angry: one of those losers who came to a new world to start a new life and discovered that a change in location did not change what they themselves were. On the whole her goods matched her appearance. But then the memory persona noticed something else.

‘What’s that?’ it asked, pointing.

‘This is real coral, from the Barrier Reef on Earth.’

Thorn himself then spoke, and the representation froze again. ‘Do you reckon she knew what it really was? That this was a setup?’

‘Buggered if I know,’ Fethan replied. ‘Someone will have to ask.’

‘How interesting,’ said the persona, speaking from Thorn’s mouth. ‘All right, how much do you want for them?’

‘You’ll have to buy the whole carton,’ she replied. ‘Twenty shillings.’

‘I don’t want that egg thing, so I’ll give you ten.’

The memory faded, with the buyer returning towards the spaceport with his purchases.

‘A bargain,’ said Thorn. ‘Let’s back up to that stall again.’

He walked backwards to the stall, turned and placed the plastic carton down, and was in the act of taking back the ten-shilling chainglass coin when the representation froze again.

‘Just one piece of the Jain tech coral would sell for millions on the open market—if it even got there before an AI like Jerusalem snatched it,’ said Thorn. ‘The Jain node itself would start in the billions, and go on up from there, if it was actually possible to buy or sell such items. In reality the planet would end up under quarantine, and the buyer and seller would be mentally dissected by forensic AI.’

‘Ah, but who knew about Jain nodes then?’ asked Fethan.

‘End scenario,’ ordered Thorn abruptly.