Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘What is your status today?’ Clay asked, and waited impatiently.

‘Unchanged,’ Alex eventually replied. ‘The android is still too close for us to risk leaving this unit and, as I stated before, if we don’t leave here within the next month we will be incapable of ever doing so.’

‘Understood,’ said Clay, quickly continuing now the pleasantries were out of the way. ‘You’re doing very well there, and your sacrifice will be recognized. However, I have something more for you to do, in addition to your previous instructions. I need to you to find out whether the Gene Bank samples and data are being moved, and if a space plane is currently being prepared for launch. Do as much as you can now towards that end, with the data access you have, and, should you manage to get out of there soon, that is the first thing I want you to check.’

‘Understood,’ said Alex, once the instruction was received. ‘Is there anything else?’

He hadn’t even asked why – another sign of his lack of human characteristics.

‘That’s all for now,’ said Clay, noting out of the corner of his eye that Trove had just stood up and was heading for the exit. He shut down the communication, got out of his seat and gazed across at Scotonis. ‘I’ll be here for his next scheduled report, but if Alex gets in contact before then, I must be informed at once.’

Clay turned and headed after Pilot Officer Trove. Doubtless now was the time for her break, and she would head for her cabin, where, if she followed her usual routine, she would enjoy a meagre meal of rice and reconstituted vegetables before sleeping for five hours. Upon waking, she would drink some coffee while awaiting the arrival of a ship’s engineer who had taken her fancy, whereupon they would have frenetic sex for most of the remaining hour allowed to her. She would then wash, dress and return here.

Clay had seen how others entertained themselves aboard this ship and knew that his own method was unique, because he was the only one with such free access to the cam system. Now he felt it was time for him to utilize his free access to other equipment, namely the pain-inducer in Trove’s cabin.

11

Fones

A great deal of time has passed since the days of the ancient telephone necessitating wired connections and finger-dialling or press-button keypads. The modern fone – a distinct spelling that rose into prominence with the first Internet – is an adaptable piece of technology that has taken many years, perhaps too many years, to reach its present state. More than a hundred years ago, computer voice-recognition enabled the owner of such a device to call someone just by speaking their name, and over fifty years ago the introduction of rugged implant technology ushered in visual cortex interfaces and sensitized skin controls – usually positioned at the temple – to allow us to call up menus to our inner vision, and thereby make all our calls that way. In fact, terabyte processors and old Bluetooth technologies have since made the fone a simple mobile Internet connection. However, it has still taken two centuries to get to where we are today, and those who all those years ago predicted technological singularity would wonder why such a simple thing had taken so long.

Earth

Nelson allowed Serene’s father twenty-two hours to stabilize between each two-hour session. In the first week, Donald Galahad gained a four-day respite – if it could really be called that – when Serene dispatched Nelson to attend to some other work that was conducted before a private audience as an object lesson. It was the first and last time she used him like that, for the response had not been good. Many of the staff of the factory whose manager had been the object of that lesson failed to turn up for work the next day, until enforcers went and rounded them all up. Better to kill quickly and cleanly and move on. She had also quickly developed a loathing for Nelson and his ‘art’. The man was like some poisonous insect in which one might show some scientific interest, nothing more. She therefore left him alone in the cellar with her father and attended just one further torture session, affecting a clinical detachment from it all but experiencing the same reaction in the elevator afterwards.

Why can’t I stop?

She had thought she would enjoy this, but hated it from the start. She half-expected to come to enjoy it eventually – this personal exercising of ultimate power – but it seemed petty now, a foolish whim, altogether too frivolous. She understood herself enough to know that she would never want to admit to having made a mistake, and surely stopping Nelson from his activities would be such an admission, but there was something more to it than that. The last time she had come down here was after one of the exterminations necessary to rebalance Earth’s ecology; when the Scour had wiped out three million people in the Northeast India region and then the big dozers and macerating machines went in to level that particular area of sprawl.

Am I punishing myself? she wondered. Had she found it necessary to come down here to feel shame, feel the gorge rising in her throat, for some kind of penance?

‘The physical work is complete now,’ said Nelson, stepping back. ‘The level of agony he will experience henceforth will be governed by electrical stimulation of his nerves and by the drugs employed. He will also experience pain from the various infections that will inevitably ensue. How long he remains compos mentis is now dependent on the degree of pain delivered, and how long he will last physically depends on the extent of those infections.’

Serene felt her father had already lost all the compos from his mentis over the course of the last week.

So this then was Nelson’s art.

The frame holding her father’s body now sported numerous silvery extensions supporting polished dishes and glass containers. He seemed a freeze-frame of an exploding human being. Opened up like a gutted fish, his internal organs were arrayed all about him, all the plumbing and nerves of his body stretched, force-grown or otherwise extended in order to support them. In some areas Serene could see his blood running through glass tubes. Wires were interwoven, electrochemical amplifiers connected here and there, nerve interfaces running optics between each other. Serene watched his heart beating in a glass vessel half a metre out from his chest, his kidneys throbbing on dishes up either side of his drooling face, his intestine formed into a neat spiral just below the plastic-enclosed mass of his liver.