Dark Intelligence by Neal Asher Read Free Book Online

the popcorn, was chomping down chunks of human flesh—fed to him by one of the second-children. I wondered if I’d died and been consigned to some thoroughly insane adjunct of Hell. Then I turned back to Gideon and saw that they hadn’t finished with him.
    A ribbed glassy tube went down into his neck where his spinal cord had been. Before it was all the way in, they attached a squat metal cylinder to the end, which immediately began to extend sharp metal spines. This they pushed inside his skull. The next stage was to put back the skull they’d removed, using a Polity bone-welder to fix it, then a cell-welder to close up his opened flesh. I just stared, horrified and baffled.
    Bubbling clicks issued from the father. I looked at the monster and saw one of the first-children present him with another hexagonal item, like the ones bonded to his shell, which he accepted while munching on his grisly snacks. When I looked back at Gideon, one of the men was pulling out the metal staples that had held him to the stone—an almost impossible feat of strength. I wondered what they would do with his body next, even as the woman came over to me with the plasma feed and diagnosticer. Maybe that thing they’d inserted imparted some special flavour beloved of the father here? I watched the woman as she squatted beside me, hoping to die as easily as Gideon, then returned my attention to the man himself.
    Gideon jerked, jerked again, then abruptly heaved himself up onto his hands and knees. Or, rather, knees and one hand. I realized then what I’d been stubbornly refusing to see up to this point. They’d implanted control hardware in him. But surely his body couldn’t survive such trauma? Then I looked at the woman as she hooked up my plasma feed, and wondered.
    Gideon stood up, his pose quite unnatural, and took a couple of shuffling steps. Glancing at the prador father I saw he still held that hexagonal device—like the four attached to his carapace—and made the connection with the four humans here. My ex-comrade heaved a breath before taking a lurching step and falling flat on his face. The four blue-skinned humans and all the prador, except for the father, now froze. Gideon jerked and spasmed on the ground for a little while, then shiny metal spikes protruded from his skull for a moment before retracting. Next, with a crunch, his skull popped open, breaking its bone welds, and the device inside shot out. It was still attached to its glassy tube, like some strange sprouting thistle. The prador father discarded the hexagonal object, and in one huge prosthetic claw snatched up the second-child that had been feeding him, and chopped it in half. The two halves hit the ground running but, only having legs along one side, could only manage a perverse circular dance which spread gore over the rock.
    I remembered Gideon trying to remote-start a damaged mosquito gun. He tossed aside the control unit before bawling out the person responsible for the damage. This was similar, but thoroughly, grotesquely, magnified.
    About me, the humans were in motion again. They injected me, which hurt, but the result was an artificial euphoria and comforting indifference. Any moment now the nerve blockers would go on and it would all be over. It didn’t matter—nothing mattered any more. But there were no nerve blockers, and I screamed when they cut into the back of my neck and returned rapidly to hard reality. I saw the thing they brought over. It looked like a chrome spider with a cylindrical body—I felt it digging in and screamed some more.
    Whether it was unconsciousness or the loss of my ability to act in any way that stopped me screaming, I don’t know. All I do know is that the blackness was welcome.

3
    SPEAR
    It didn’t take me long to familiarize myself with modern methods of using the AI net, despite my thinking still lacking clarity. On occasions my mind did function as it should and, in one of those moments, I created a sub-AI