‘Where are we going now?’ Vulture asked, in utter expectation of receiving no reply.
Mr Crane glanced at the bird, then reached over and touched a nearby control. A subscreen blinked on to show a schematic of a planetary system along with its stellar coordinates. Because he still retained much of that part of himself required for running a ship, Vulture recognized these coordinates as being those of an inner Line world.
‘And why are we going there?’
Crane touched another combination of controls, which called up a picture of a wormship. This confirmed that Crane had access to information that was obviously not in the public domain. More delicate taps from his brass fingers, and the picture shrank to a small square consigned to one comer, from where it replicated across the entire screen — the same picture in a grid of seven by seven with one additional picture at the bottom. Fifty of them in all. Vulture wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but rather suspected it had something to do with the other vessel clamped underneath the Harpy — the vessel that still contained the bits of the legate that Crane had torn apart.
Vulture considered asking another question about Crane’s intentions, then decided he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to know the answer. The Golem reached out to the controls again, banishing the images, then paused as some more red lights came on, before banishing them too. Vulture peered at another of the screens and studied the schematic that had come up there. The red lights provided the warning, and on the schematic was indicated the source of the error signal. As far as Vulture could work out, this error message came directly from the engine.
‘Anything wrong with the engine?’ he enquired.
‘Drive efficiency outside settings,’ replied the frozen mind of the Prador first-child.
‘How far outside?’
‘Twenty-eight per cent.’
‘Why no shutdown?’ Vulture asked, for a drop in efficiency of that amount was, beside being dangerous, more than enough to shut down the drive.
‘Not necessary — new parameters being reprogrammed.’
Vulture felt the feathers standing up on his back. ‘What is the efficiency now compared to its previous setting?’
‘One hundred and twenty-eight per cent.’
So efficiency had just risen. Vulture damned himself for not paying more attention to those warning lights, and he guessed his lack of attention was due to spending so long with Mr Crane. Because conversation was lacking and because not a great deal had occurred until recently, Vulture had grown accustomed to merely flapping around and eating carrion.
Another warning light, and this time the schematic indicated various points about the hull. That looked to Vulture like something to do with the chameleonware. So, alterations were being made in this ship, yet it almost certainly did not possess the facilities for making such dramatic changes to itself. There could be only one answer.
‘Has Jain technology entered this ship?’ Vulture asked.
Crane stared at him for a moment, then nodded once.
‘Are you in control of it?’
Again that nod.
‘Like you were in control of things in that wrecked wormship, earlier.’
The nod.
‘Do you have Jain technology inside you?’
Vulture expected that nod again, and began wondering if the Harpy possessed an escape pod. Crane did not move for a long moment, then he reached out to the console again. The picture he called up on the screen was the kind of stock footage that could be found in just about any ship’s library. It showed four immense conjoined spheres of alien flesh resting on a rocky plain. This was Dragon before that alien entity left the planet where it had first been discovered. Vulture tried to understand what all this might mean. He knew how that nutjob Skellor had used Jain technology to first repair Mr Crane and then maintain him as a formidable weapon. As he understood it, Skellor had removed that technology before dispatching Crane as an ambassador to Dragon, but Vulture now supposed that some of that technology had escaped Skellor’s notice and had since burgeoned again within Crane… But perhaps that was not the case either.
‘Dragon?’
Crane nodded, but what did that gesture mean?
Vulture knew for sure that Dragon had done something to Mr Crane — had made some physical connection via pseudopod. Subsequently, during a surreal chess match with Vulture, Mr Crane had finally managed to repair his own shattered mind. At the time, Vulture had thought that Dragon’s brief connection to the Golem had been in order to instigate a bit of reprogramming, but perhaps there was more involved — perhaps that intervention had been physical and perhaps the tools used were still there?
‘Dragon technology?’ Vulture guessed.
Flecks of light like distant stars swirled in the Golem’s eyes. He reached down and pressed a fingertip against the piece of Atheter crystal, whereupon briefly a swirl of lights appeared in it. He nodded once.
What the fuck does that mean?
As far as Vulture understood it, Dragon had been created by the Makers, and their technology, apparently, had been based on Jain technology anyway.
‘Hey, Prador Control System Apex 45 Gorland, do you have an escape pod aboard?’ Vulture asked.
‘No,’ replied the frozen arthropod brain.
‘Figures,’ grumbled Vulture out loud.
6
The human mind, having been produced by selective insentient evolution, then created artificial intelligence, which initially remained distinct from its makers. It is hypothesized that imperfect minds cannot create perfection because flaws will always be introduced. The definition of perfection is vague and remains so, but this was generally true in the beginning for the AIs then were merely human minds very indirectly transcribed into crystal quantum processing units, with many of the traits required for planetary survival carried across to become deficiencies in the universal environment. However, to believe that we are imperfectible is the way to despair, and I would argue that a perpetual striving for perfection that we cannot attain should be the ideal. And while it is true that, despite their antecedents, AIs are less prone to error than humans, because many of them are so powerful and control so much, the errors they make can be catastrophic. It is also true that for an ideal or supposed ‘greater good’ still defined by their evolutionary antecedents, they can make errors of judgement, and that AIs can be as amoral or as immoral as those who first made them.
— Anonymous
Cormac stepped carefully down onto the boggy ground. The vegetation bore some resemblance to clumps of heather, and at first he had assumed this a natural landscape — that was until they overflew an enormous balloon-tyred harvester. A subsequent gridlink query to the as yet quite unstable computer net re-establishing itself planetwide informed him that these little red heathery flowers produced one particular type of bio-module essential for building nerve tissue in Golem syntheskin and syntheflesh.
‘We won’t be able to get anything from the Jain technology now,’ warned Smith.
Cormac looked up from the sodden ground. ‘I think it highly unlikely we would have been able to get anything at all… other than a Jain infection of our own equipment or even ourselves.’
Still, it was puzzling.
He nodded to the others and they spaced themselves out, then as an afterthought he instructed the shuttle’s turret gun to aim at the thing ahead. He used his other perception to gaze into the earth and noted how in many places the Jain-tech roots were now broken and losing definition, as if dissolving, then returned his gaze to what lay on the surface above them. It was another of those rod-forms, which had grown in the ground and then attempted to heave itself into the light.