Owner 03 - Jupiter War by Neal Asher Read Free Book Online

– surgery even being required. Now, with everything Hannah was coming up with, it should be possible simply to copy across from another mind. Saul could now substantially reduce the danger of physical death to his body in the same way as it had been reduced for his mind. He could make copies of himself. He could, in fact, use copies of himself for risky ventures such as this present one.
    Cowardice?
    Saul allowed himself a smile. What exactly was cowardice? He’d been in turn frightened, angry and exhilarated while hacking a bloody path from the Calais incinerator out here, but had never backed away from danger. Then, again, as he had seen it at the time, he could never have been safe while the Committee had the power to take away his life. Now that he was, to stretch a term, ‘safe’ from the Committee, other considerations were coming into play. And the main one of these was how much did he value his own life; a life that now might just go on and on? No, he defined cowardice as sacrificing his integrity in order to stay safe, and not as the eliminating of unnecessary risks to his life.
    Saul further pondered on the future and, for the first time in a while, felt a surge of unaccustomed excitement. A whole universe lay out there to explore. The Drake equation remained to be solved, while its resultant paradox, described by Fermi, needed to be investigated. Knowledge within and without stood ready to be gathered . . .
    Now, venturing into astrogation data residing inside the hardware in his skull, Saul began mentally exploring the mapped planetary systems that lay beyond Earth, wondering where to go beyond the solar system. Perhaps first some of those least likely to contain life, while he gathered resources and explored the worlds within; perhaps a pause in the light of some binary star system while growing clones of himself and imprinting upon them some honed-down and thoroughly human copy of his mind? Maybe he could bathe in the light of a red hypergiant while extending and cementing his knowledge. So many possibilities.
    But one not to be ignored
.
    He grimaced. Yes, the one possibility he must not ignore was that though he was powerful and now possessed a drive that could take him out into the abyss, Earth did not lie so far behind him. He had managed to extend his mind, but already Serene Galahad had created her comlifers – humans with hardware in their skulls much like his own and similarly linked into computer systems – who were only a step behind him. And, though he had taken Hannah Neumann away from Earth, the slow accretion of knowledge could lead, within just a few years, to bio-interfaces equivalent to the one in his skull. Rhine had managed to design a working warp drive and, with Earth’s resources, Galahad appeared likely to come up with something just like it, and soon. But Galahad was just the latest example of the kind that came to dominate the human race; the near stars, he realized, would never be a safe enough distance away. He would need to lose himself out there, find a place and make himself a fortress.
    Then of course there were other things to speculate on. The Drake equation posited that there should be intelligent life out there, but the Fermi paradox posed the question of why it had not been seen. Perhaps the answer to that was related to the likes of Serene Galahad and himself? Too much power in the hands of too few, genocidal rulers, and dark inwardly turned realms where free beings had become just cogs in a machine, perhaps races intolerant of competition dropping warp-drive weapons on inhabited worlds, perhaps whole races sliding into the mental self-destruction he himself had faced when he uploaded Janus? For all he knew, he could be heading out into something more potentially hostile than a solar system controlled by Galahad and her ilk.
    The hours slid by as Saul created models in his head of nightmare alien cultures, of dystopias, utopias, of intelligent life based on something