The Departure

Whilst maintaining the communication between himself and the robots, Saul had left open the option to summon other robots into the same network, their com lasers probing all about them in search of new recruits. First another four, too distant to see clearly but from the feedback he ascertained that they were construction robots put to work on the lower bearing structure of the arcoplex cylinder. He summoned them into the fight, and even as they began moving they hijacked yet more robots near to them. Another five construction robots and a big hauler loaded with tonnes of building materials joined his army, then smaller robots, the size of cats and used to clean out one of the newly built habitation units. They swarmed towards the conflict, moving up on the flank of the attacking enforcers.

Braddock rapidly propelled himself along the incomplete tubeway, with Saul and Hannah following. The soldier turned abruptly to one side and fired his missile-launcher. In elegant silence, the blast ripped open a partially constructed wall fifty metres to their right, and a burning corpse fell out from behind it, the fire snuffed the moment the suit air feeding it ran out. They were right in the middle of it now, since the open structure all around them made it impossible to maintain a single front.

‘Stay beside me,’ Saul instructed Hannah.

‘How far to go?’

‘Half a kilometre to Tech Central,’ he said, pointing ahead and upwards.

Directly ahead now, and visible below their destination, lay the rough surface of the asteroid. Saul, at last, restarted his modem and began carefully probing the data spaces all around him. Yes, Smith was there, but at first Saul didn’t venture so deep that he couldn’t pull out in an instant. However, he felt a sudden satisfaction as he mapped signal traffic on to his schematic of the station. Most of it issued from the region of Tech Central, which meant that Smith had to be either there or somewhere nearby.

‘A shoddy application of tactics.’ Smith’s observation came through to him, as if they were sitting together in the same room. ‘And certainly doomed to failure, Citizen Saul.’

13

They Never Suffer

Once the Committee had firmly tightened its grip on Earth, it distributed wealth only on the basis of its own survival. In the beginning, ‘zero-asset’ citizens received just enough to keep them fed, clothed and housed, whilst ‘societal assets’ could receive considerably more, calculated on the basis of their use to the Committee and how much more of a contribution could be derived from them by allowing them more. But the Committee itself sucked up the bulk of world wealth through building the infrastructure of utter control, and it maintained its upper executives at a level of luxury never before witnessed on Earth. However, as the population continues to grow and production does not, inevitably there will be a resource crash and ensuing Dark Age. Those at the bottom of the pile will starve and die in their billions, whilst those at the top will perhaps have to forgo their caviar and biscuits.

As robots located down on the surface of the asteroid began to respond to Saul’s laser communications, he rather thought Smith was mistaken. However, even as he considered that, the number of robots he was hijacking ceased to increase, while other robots again were clearly on the move. Smith had evidently begun taking control of the remainder and was turning them against him. Saul received data on the first robot-on-robot clash less than a second later.

‘I’ll be on top of you very shortly,’ he replied to Smith. ‘That doesn’t look like failure to me.’

He began probing, feeling out the network – gritting his teeth at a familiar stab of pain in his head – and started recording large chunks of code to then run through the processors lodged inside his skull. This was slow progress, however, because though he realized a lot of the activity he was currently picking up would involve tactical information and attack orders, that stuff only gave him a vague lever for code-cracking.

‘You’ve made a miscalculation based on badly collated data,’ Smith explained, arrogantly confident of his own abilities.

‘You think so?’ Saul asked, probing behind the Director’s latest words to where they’d passed through the same coding as served the entire station’s network. Just eight words and one contraction enabled him to crack 18 per cent of the overall coding of voice and text transmission, and also enabled him to recognize the image files of visual feeds, but he was getting nowhere with the hardware instructions to cams, readerguns, and other station security devices.

‘It would appear you are now heading for Tech Central, expecting to seize control there. That could be considered amusing if it were not for the people’s resources I must expend just to deal with you.’

Smith’s love of verbiage had now given Saul a further 47 per cent of all voice and text transmission, then, within a few seconds, he had all of it. He erased all recorded text and voice data from his mind so as to concentrate on the rest, his head immediately feeling less congested. At the same time he realized that, whilst he had partially penetrated Smith’s comlife element, Smith had been probing him likewise in an attempt to crack the ten-digit code keeping the robots secure.

‘You’re not in Tech Central?’ Saul enquired, pretending ignorance.

‘That’s not the kind of information one should volunteer to an opponent.’

Saul supposed Smith must think him really stupid, assuming that Saul believed that, by taking physical control of Tech Central, he would thereby gain control of the station. He’d never thought that for an instant, of course. Having expanded himself just as Malden and Saul had, Smith could control the station from any location he chose, and therefore it was him Saul needed at gunpoint, or dead. He probed deeper still, trying to get a handle on visual feeds being routed from the same source as Smith’s voice. And that’s when Smith pounced.

Smith was into his mind, a search-engine link stabbing deep down into its processing spaces, like a barbed harpoon. Saul tried to cut it off, but the engine instantly began searching the software he used to control his modem, and his instructions queued up like print orders to an overloaded printer, whilst the pain between his eyes rapidly increased. This is how Smith did it, he realized; this is how he got Malden. He simply overloaded everything within his prey until its programs started to hang. Malden had probably failed because his first instinct, like most other people’s, would have been to retreat, defend himself, try to get this intruder out of his head. Saul realized now his advantage over Malden, and maybe over Smith himself: he had more firmly accepted that his self did not reside only in this body of flesh and blood. Like a salmon leaping up through a waterfall, he battled his way up through the informational tsunami to get to Smith himself. Even as the pressure of data began to shove him back down, and lights began flashing across his organic vision, he copied the weapon Smith had used against him – that search engine possessing a huge requirement to find, without any clear definition of what it must find – and flung it straight back towards Smith.

‘You fucker!’ Smith exclaimed, losing his usual laborious manner of speech.