Polity Agent

‘I can see it. The aeroplane,’ said someone below him.

Hiroshi tore away tiles to reveal a dusty face. He recognized Yamamoto by the shape of that face and by the muscles that once moved underneath skin. Liquid ran from his eye sockets. Fire bloomed in the wreckage. Someone started to scream jerkily, then fell silent.

‘I see it,’ said Yamamoto again, then fell silent too.

Hiroshi stepped from hot surface to surface, heading for white dusty ground. He found a pair of shoes tied together by their laces. They were too big for him, but enough to protect his already bloody feet. He found Mr Oshagi’s smouldering coat, and from it salvaged enough fabric to fashion himself a loincloth, then he fled the seemingly hungry fire. A man trudged ahead of him, blisters on his back as big as fists, skin slewed away from one thigh to expose wet muscle.

‘Water. Put it out,’ the man muttered.

Hiroshi passed him, then turned, dance-stepping over sizzling wires in the street. He needed to get across the river, to get home. He saw the woman sitting with her back against the lower stump of a telegraph pole. She too was naked, but with the flower pattern of her dress burned into her body. She was crying with pain while her baby suckled at her burnt breast. Hiroshi stared at her, then turned with her to watch the tornado of fire swing around the corner and howl down on them.

— retroact ends -

3

Haiman (a combination of human and Al): the definition of this term has changed just as fast as the technologies involved have developed. First coined as a term of disapprobation when augs became available on the open market, it was soon adopted with pride by those who wore them. As augs developed, the term then became a bone of contention amongst those who were ‘auged’- it soon becoming the case that only those wearing the newest and most powerful augs were considered truly ‘haiman’. If you wore a standard Solicon 2400 you were obviously inferior to those who wore a semi-AI crystal matrix aug buffered from direct interface by band-controlled optic and aural links. Et cetera. Then with the development of gridlinking enabling true download to the human mind, those who only wore augs were no longer considered haiman. The consequent off-shoot of this technology, enabling the downloading of human minds to crystal, led some to claim that only the entities thus engendered were genuinely haiman. However, the general populace ignored this contention, and further developments in such technologies have caused the term to be applied with indiscriminate abandon. It is currently the fashion to describe only as haiman those who are both gridlinked and augmented by the latest cyber pro-prostheses—the carapace and sensory cowl. But they themselves, though adopting the term with equanimity, believe a true haiman is the unbuffered amalgam of human and AI, with its resultant synergy. Such beings have existed—Iversus Skaidon and the Craystein computer became such a one, but its lifespan was measured in seconds. The haiman ideal is to achieve the same result, but stick around for rather longer.

—From ‘Quince Guide’ compiled by humans

I am now a murderess.