Again it struggled to its feet and swung towards him. Had Mr Crane possessed a voice, he would have then sighed. The other sleer quickly scuttled down from its rock and headed away, as before. The stunned sleer’s next attack was its last.
Mr Crane walked on: sane, insane, neutral.
Parts of the Golem Twenty-five screamed as the memcording of Serban Kline began to load. Had he been whole, his base programming, empathy and morality—which barred him from choosing to kill without justifiable cause, and prevented any pleasure in the act—would have been warped by a paradox that the memcording created. He had tortured and killed for the thrill of power and twisted psychotic pleasure, for the Serban Kline memcording was now becoming his own memory. On a purely logical level the screaming parts of him tried to fight the memory, deny it—but it was just too strong. And no matter how much of it those parts deleted, yet more was downloaded. His base programming should have broken, his mind essentially erased, but as he had existed from the moment Pendle had tampered with his mind, this was the programming equivalent of trying to burn ash. When it seemed he should lose himself completely, it was the damage caused by Pendle’s sabotage of him that now saved him.
Using the program designed to drive him schizophrenic, the Golem began to fully and permanently partition his mind, erecting barriers and creating separate little enclaves of self—seventeen of them. The result would apparently be what his tormentors required: he would be a killing-machine, and would obey the orders given by his new owners. But, without the Serban Kline download continuing to feed into him, at those times when he was not under direct orders, he could be free to try and reconnect those seventeen elements of himself and regain sanity, autonomy.
He would not be able to do this consciously, however, nor entirely by internal reformatting. In setting up the required program that would select seventeen iconic representations of those separate parts of his mind and then order them in random but unrepeating combinations, his remaining self fragmented into oblivion knowing that the first combination could be the right one, just as could be the ten millionth. It might take only a few hours to hit upon, or it could take a thousand years.
The killing-machine opened his eyes and immediately focused on the small rubber dog that was fixed on the upper edge of Stalek’s console screen. Number one. Not knowing why it was so essential he take possession of that small, innocuous object, the Golem awaited his orders. While he waited, he noticed that the clamps securing him to the chair were gone—as had all his syntheskin.
‘You sure it’s safe?’ the bird man asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Stalek. ‘Golem, stand up.’
The Golem stood, held out his hand and inspected the components of his fingers as he closed that same hand into a fist and opened it again. This seemed to disconcert Stalek, who began checking through some programming code on his console’s screen.
‘Golem, lower your hand and remain motionless.’
The Golem obeyed.
The bird man wheeled his laden trolley over and looked up at the machine.
‘Tall fucker, ain’t he? Sure gonna scare the shit out of whoever he’s sent after,’ the man said. ‘What shall we call him?’
‘Well, I thought Mr Longshanks, but let’s leave it for him to decide. Golem, what shall we name you?’ said Stalek.
The Golem tried to speak, but his partitioning of his own mind had made voice operation inaccessible to him.
‘Damn,’ said Stalek. ‘We’ve lost his voice. No matter—the only response they’ll want from him is obedience. Golem, what is your name?’
In its confusion, the Golem could put together only two disparate facts: that he had recently been ‘Long-shanks’ and that a bird man was staring at him.
Stork, heron, flamingo, crane…
‘Just getting up a list of related words. He’s obviously keying off your appearance with the idea of him being long-limbed. Heron is a good one, but then again… I think we’ll call him Crane—a touch of double meaning there relating to machinery, don’t you think?’
The bird man had now lost interest and was beginning his work. Now the Golem—Crane—noted, through internal diagnostics, the sequential removal of all his joint motors, which the bird man then replaced with other motors. The feed from Stalek’s console told Crane that these were adapted industrial torque motors. To compensate for the power drain of such excessively powerful machinery, the bird man attached in parallel a further three micropiles. On some level Crane registered that should he need to leave this room, he would now no longer have to use the door.
Next, replacing the syntheskin removed earlier, came the brassy sections of casehardened ceramal, which clamped directly to his metal bones. He felt each piece go into place, strengthening each bone, protecting the already thoroughly covered internal components with sometimes three centimetres’ thickness of the brassy material, and strangely linking into his cooling system. It was only when Stalek made the information available that Crane realized the ceramal was plated with brass containing a superconducting mesh—each piece connecting to the next so that a point source of heat would be distributed all over his surface. The mesh was set in brass which soaked up the heat from the superconductor, as ceramal would not.
The armour also contained synthetic nerves, but not nearly so many as his syntheskin had contained, and this served to dull the edge of Crane’s world. However, the armouring on the hands remained just as sensitive as the removed syntheskin—no doubt so that he could feel when he broke bones and stilled the beat of a heart.
‘That the control module they want to use?’
Crane opened his eyes—dark now with their layer of polarized chainglass—and saw the bird man gesturing to a small, black pebble-like object his boss now held.
‘Yes, it can be linked in to just about any augmentation, and its link is encoded,’ the man replied. ‘I’ll leave that to Angelina and her dear brother, though. Why they wanted this method of control, I don’t know—maybe so only one person can have their finger on the button at any one time. Meanwhile…’
He picked up a small remote console and pressed the pebble into a recess made for it. Crane felt the immediate connection.
‘Okay, Crane, I want you to move about the room while I check the link,’ said Stalek. When he glanced at his console, his expression became confused.
‘Mr Crane?’ he questioned.
Mr Crane reached up and disconnected, from the back of his head, the optic cable leading to Stalek’s main console, then in two long strides he was looming over Stalek and the bird man.
‘How is it—’ said the bird man, then made a gulping, retching sound as Crane’s armoured hand closed around his throat and jerked him off the ground. The Golem tilted his own head birdlike to one side, like this man whose legs were now kicking at the air, then closed his fist. The sound was rather like that of an apple squeezed in a press. The bird man’s eyes bulged and his tongue protruded from his beak, then his body dropped to the floor, shortly followed by his head.
Turning to Stalek, Crane flicked feathery flesh from his hand. Stalek grabbed up the console and inset module and, in panic, tried to operate its controls. As he backed to the wall, Crane followed him with short delicate steps.
‘Pelters… damn them… Oh shit.’
Crane reached down and took off Stalek’s hat, placed it on his own head and tilted it to a rakish angle. The orders Stalek was desperately inputting did nothing to counter the one Crane had already received from the module. He reached out again, took away the little console, and tossed it to one side.