18
It is official: we don’t have to die. There are those amongst us now who are over two hundred years old and who may go on just not dying. However this is not immortality in the old sense of the Greek and Roman gods, for though our lives can be extended to infinity (thus far) we are still subject to death. There’s no medical technology that can save you if you stick your head under a thousand-tonne press (though a prior memcording of you can be saved), and there are some virulent killers, both biologically and nanologically based, that can destroy the human meat machine very quickly and effectively. But, as many have noted, not dying is not quite the same as living. Many would try to make themselves utterly secure against death and as such cease to experience life in its conventional sense. What is the point of immortality if you wrap yourself in layers of cotton wool and armour and bury yourself in peat? Many take that route (well, not literally), but many others seize the opportunity to explore, research, experience, to live a full life. However, there are problems with this, for the human brain, though large in capacity and intricate in function, is a finite thing. Memories are lost during regeneration and repair—that drawback cannot be avoided. Moreover, as a human life grows long, memories are shunted aside by the perpetual absorption of the endless continuing input. The solution, though, is now coming clear: memcording. We can now record our memories and even mental functions and store them separately, reload them should we wish. The technology is now available to actually delete stuff from the organic brain. So, the time has arrived when we can actually edit our own minds. It is speculated that in the future we’ll be able to decide what kind of person we are going to be this year, and cut-and-paste our minds to suit. Maybe we’ll decide to load select portions of our minds to more than one body. Perhaps this is due to become the procreation of the future?
— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon
Warmth enclosed her, but in no way assuaged the pain. Sensing movement, Mika opened her eyes on blackness overlaid with jumbled non-sensical code. Then two words stood out—suit breach—and she realized she was seeing her visor display gone awry. Beyond it, in the minimal light this display provided, the blackness shifted. Further movement, more urgent, and something ungently began stripping her spacesuit from her body. She shrieked as mangled bones twisted inside her leg. Then the visor sank down into the neck ring and wet flesh surged over her face. Stifled, she fought for breath, began to lose consciousness. But next came a warm breeze as the flesh withdrew. She gasped, sucking in stale air smelling of burnt steak.
Ahead of her walls of similar flesh continued to withdraw—she could feel it all moving—then the lights turned on to give her confirmation: small globes affixed in an undulating surface which constantly dripped white fluid. Managing to tilt her head slightly, she peered down at herself. Red tentacles securely bound her against the living wall behind her. It also seemed evident that some of them penetrated her body—she could feel movement inside her. Now, right before her, a cobra pseudopod rose into view.
‘Hello,’ she managed. And even this extremity could not quell her fascination. She was actually, without any technology intervening, inside a Dragon sphere.
The pseudopod swayed from side to side as if seeking the perfect angle from which to strike, its single sapphire eye glowing hypnotically.
‘Can’t we… discuss… this?’
The thing struck at an angle with concussive force, wrenching her neck to one side and burning hot behind her ear. A sudden horrible ache suffused her skull, a scratching buzzing vibration intensifying in her eardrum. This, Mika realized, might be how it would feel to have an aug attached without using the correct anaesthetics. She knew when something entered and connected, because this harsh organic world went away again.
‘Show me,’ something said, and started to fast-forward through her memories, like a viewer impatient with the slower parts of a film. Streams of images and sensations screamed through her mind, but this did not seem fast enough. There came a horrible dislocation as something made an imprint of her total mind, peeled it free like a scab from a raw wound, and placed it to one side, then imprinted another and another until her ego and sense of self seemed something viewed through a cut gem, with alternative Mikas playing out in each facet. It scanned her childhood and adolescence at the Life-Coven on Circe, meticulously winnowing out the very smallest detail. Concurrently it whipped through her subsequent training and early career with ECS, but with slower precision it scanned her memories of Samarkand, then, almost with a horrible sensuousness, pored over the memories of Masada, then Cull.
Somewhere, deep behind that chronological separation, she still felt whole however, and sensed something of this mind’s purpose: her entire life as a basis for comparison. And she understood how the entity prepared for a meticulous reading of her memories of the time when it had fallen out of contact with its fellow; through her it intended to check the veracity of the other Dragon sphere’s story.
Upon reaching the time of the USER blockade around Cull — when it had lost contact with the other sphere, which was actually on that world—it allowed Mika to come back together again. Now, like a spectator to her own life, she proceeded to watch those events unfold: her studies of Jain technology; the Jerusalem’s run into the Cull system and brief contact with the other sphere lodged there, the short journey to a nearby system where the old colony ship Ogygian, with Skellor and Cento aboard, crashed into a dead sun; Cormac’s rescue and the lengthy task of putting him back together again. As it checked her memories, Mika could feel a feedback of growing dismay from this portion of Dragon. When it finally reached the events at Celedon, and Cormac’s subsequent interrogation of the other sphere, during which that one finally broke its Maker programming, she became partially aware of her body again—smelling oven smoke, feeling a discordant vibration within the sphere, and the wash of hot air entering her organic cell. As subsequent events played out, a pain grew in her skull and the connection began to break down. Vision and full sensation returned, and with their revival she screamed.
As the pseudopod ripped away from her head, another pseudo-pod shot into view and wound itself around the first one like a vine. The Dragon sphere then began jolting from side to side, her cell deforming around her. The two pseudopods continued thrashing, as if intent on strangling each other, then through the wall she felt the crump of some massive internal explosion. Acrid stinking smoke filled the area around her. Through watering eyes she observed one of the pseudopods abruptly freeze then grow flaccid, deflating as if all the juice were being sucked out of it. The still-living one rose up, shrugging its opponent away from it like ragged clothing.
‘So… which?’ Mika managed. It seemed this sphere was also in conflict with its Maker programming.
The binding tentacles writhed about her, and she felt those inside her moving as well. She came near to crying out again as pain grew in her in waves, but then something ran cold as ice up her spine and hit the ‘off’ switch in her skull.
Mika’s dreams were dragons.
The comet’s course headed to aphelion—out from the system through the asteroid belt—perihelion lay far in its future, after it swung back through the inner system. Previous fly-bys had boiled off most of its ice to leave a core of rock conveniently wormed through with hundreds of huge caverns. Deep scanning of the interior revealed one cavern system suitable for her purposes. Cutting through ten yards of ice would give the ship access. And Orlandine could hide.