Polity Agent

Walking out along the jetty towards the boat supposedly containing a Separatist arms cache, there had been no time for him to think his usual To die like this after so long. One moment the boat rocked there on the waves, solid and substantial, the next it turned into a spreading ball of flame. He recollected briefly seeing the jetty flung up like the rearing back of a snake, then the blast hit him. No pain, just a cessation. Then he woke up in the ECS Rescue ship, recovering from cuts, burns and concussion. The reality, he knew, was that nothing larger than what you might scrape up with a teaspoon then remained of the Horace Blegg who hunted Separatists on Cheyne III. Only memories, constantly copied via a link open to the runcible AI.

Here no such link existed, however, and should he die a new Blegg would only remember up to the point he went out of communication with the NEJ, from where Blegg’s memories had been regularly retransmitted to update his back-up. But of course this sort of thing had happened before—these breaks in the narrative of his apparently endless life. When he was thrown to the ground in the Highlands of Scotland, apparently by the blast from a satellite strike, that was a cut-off point. But he now remembered himself lying twisted on his side and gazing in puzzlement at the ribs of his own chest splayed out like bloody fingers, and seeing circuitry patterns etched into his bones. No bump on the head dispelling consciousness, and it hadn’t been a Shockwave that threw him down either, but an explosive seeker bullet. And he just died, very quickly.

But the false bit? Only these extra memories, only these undone deletions told him which they were. Earth Central falsified the day it took him to return to Geneva, probably only to add a certain variety. In reality, EC just took out of storage another body — another facsimile of humanity neither Golem nor human but something else. Another Blegg. When the antimatter bomb struck Tuscor City, the AI had simply placed on hold all his memories concerning events after he left the attack ship Yellow Cloud. So here, now, that whole episode culminating with the searing hammer of that blast finally reaching him, conflicted in his memory with another memory in which he never went down to the planet, since the arrival of the Prador destroyer gave him no time. The bomb on Amaranth Station turned him into slurry, but that small agonizing moment was deleted and replaced with the memory of him having transported himself out at the last moment. Of course, much that ensued was also false, until a new body could be put into place.

Lies, all lies. And what seemed even more cruel was his emulating a human so closely that he wanted to believe his own myth. The Atheter AI had known, for when he gave it his word it replied, ‘I know—it’s the word of a ruler.’ A partial truth perhaps, since he was merely the creation of a ruler. The Legate had known with its, ‘Had we broken them, be assured that you would now be under my control, as would all here, AIs or those using gridlinks or augs… Including you.’