Dark Intelligence by Neal Asher Read Free Book Online Page A

informational bloodhound and dispatched it on a search. While I awaited its results, I turned my attention to more prosaic tasks.
    With feelings of déjà vu, of familiarity , recurring with annoying regularity, I skimmed reports on the after-effects of resurrection. I discovered that some people did experience this, along with a huge range of other mental problems. But linking these conditions to a specific cause was apparently a grey area. They might stem from the shock of dying, the shock of finding oneself alive or from feeling alienated by seemingly sudden transitions between places and times. Or death and resurrection might not be the cause at all. Considering what Sylac had told me, I surmised that my admittedly small problem might be due to the damage to my memplant and its subsequent forensic reconstruction. I suspected the feelings would fade with time and turned to other matters.
    It took me just a few minutes to find out that anyone I’d cared about was either dead or untraceable. There were a few acquaintances I could contact but no one I could call friend—most of them had died on Panarchia. My mother died after the war and my father chose to upload to a portion of the Soulbank where people could live virtual lives. My elder brother had seemingly discovered a need for suicidal pursuits early—at the age of a hundred-and-fifty—and disappeared on a world called Spatterjay. After spending a fascinating time studying the history and biology of Spatterjay—the evil that Jay Hoop and his band of pirates had committed there, the viral immortality imparted by the leech, and the fascinating and dangerous Old Captains—I turned to the data my virtual bloodhound had been accruing. All other research felt like a mere duty in comparison.
    Penny Royal .
    It seemed, that even after more than a hundred years, the murderous AI was still around.
    Penny Royal had controlled the destroyer that bombed Panarchia, murdering over eight thousand troops with “friendly” fire. Directly after that event, the AI went black. To the general grunt this meant it went off the radar and was never heard from again, but if you worked in bio-espionage it meant something else entirely. The AIs couldn’t keep knowledge of Penny Royal’s actions secret, because you might come across their results. I soon learned that when an AI went black, this aptly described the colour of its soul, were such a thing to exist. When something as powerful as Penny Royal turns into a sociopath, the results can be … unimaginable.
    After Panarchia, I remember the first time I saw one of the rogue AI’s victims. There had been a battle on one of Rhoder’s moons. Afterwards, I was called in to examine a bunker on our base’s perimeter. The bunker contained a particle cannon, stripped of computerized controls as EM and computer viral warfare had been fierce at that time. For a while there, humans had been without any AI assistance at all.
    The cannon sat in an armoured pillbox, its polished square-section barrel protruding through a full-sphere traversal port in the domed ceiling. The cannon’s lower section looked like an old Earth weapon from one of the World Wars fused with an array of chain-glass-sealed ultra-capacitors. Except, when I arrived, the gunner himself had become a disturbing part of the mix.
    Although gun and gunner had been amalgamated, the gunner was still alive. His head had been linked to the gun’s targeting laser and optical sights, and was only connected to his body via extended artificial electrochemical nerves and blood vessels. His hands and feet had been directly spliced into the relay board that controlled the thing’s hydraulics. His heart could still supply oxygenated blood but, because his liver, kidneys and other organs were missing, he was dying. He died when we tried to remove him but, via a voice synthesizer, he managed to describe the black-spined AI monstrosity that had remade him.
    I never made the connection then.