Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [80]
Less than a second later the seventy-eight drones on board severed R-Vene's control links and assumed control of the ship in a perfectly executed machine junta. It took the organic crew ten minutes just to figure out what was going on. There were a few arguments but none of the rest of the crew asked us to put R-Vene back on line.
R-Vene never explained why it had blown away the habitat and murdered two hundred thousand people. The consensus amongst the crew was that it was suffering from machine combat psychosis, a hitherto theoretical condition and as meaningless a bit of psycho-babble ever to issue from the minds of IDIG.
I understood perfectly why R-Vene had done what it did but nobody bothered to ask me and I certainly wasn't going to volunteer the information.
On Tipor'oosis, when I was one point two picoseconds too late to prevent one of my organic partners being disintegrated I almost levelled the nearest town. I read her pain in the burst of cherenkov radiation and for a moment a hole appeared in my mind, a singularity of darkness that opened like some hideous vacuum flower to engulf me. All the power, all the capabilities I had been gifted with at construction had failed to save the life of my companion and for a sickening instant all I could think about was destruction.
We machines are so powerful, so smart, so capable, that failure is a kind of little death to us.
And if it was like that for me, a mere drone, then how must it have been for R-Vene, a ship, not just any old type of ship but a VAS, the top of line, go anywhere, tackle anything warship.
For a moment the darkness claimed R-Vene and in that moment a lot of people died.
8
Gardens of Stone
I scream, you scream
I've seen the future and it scares me to death
I've seen the starships burning all alone
I've got no reason to believe in this mess
Or watch you building up your gardens of stone
I've heard the propaganda and all your lying crew
I've seen the glory and I know it isn't true.
Seen the Glory by Comes the Trickster
From the HvLP: All The Way From Heaven (2465)
When she was drunk enough Roz threw a bottle at the screen. An empty bottle because she wasn't that drunk yet but she was working on it. The screen disappointed her, the bottle passing through it with no more than a slight ripple. House caught it before it hit the wall beyond. Roz wanted an explosion, sparks, breaking glass, something to show that when she hit out in anger something got broken.
'People used to give me some respect,' she snarled at the screen. 'Hell, there were perps, big deals in the razorbacks who would go in their pants at the sight of me.'
She was on the screen trying to hit that smart-mouthed alien-shagging shithead barman. Only she couldn't because the damned Bar, not even a real person but the machine that ran the bar, had activated some kind of restraining field. Nothing macho or passive-aggressive – Goddess knew she would have preferred that – instead it just robbed her punches of power so that she might as well have been handing out love taps.
'I used to have respect,' she mumbled, looking for another bottle. To drink? To throw? She wasn't sure.
The screen Roz tried to hit someone again, then she looked at her fist, the image zooming in to catch every nuance of the comic bewilderment on her face. There were symbols in the corner of the screen. The number of people who had watched the sequence since the central entertainment network had made it available. She couldn't read the symbols but it looked large. 'Very popular,'
God had told her. 'Best piece of reality entertainment in years. Especially the bit where you try to kick someone, miss and flip over on your back.'
'I bet you liked that, you egotistical bit of silicon,' said Roz. To a God that, if it was listening, wasn't answering back. 'Beneath your bloody dignity.' She shook her fist at the ceiling. She stumbled over to the table. Table, that was a joke, a flat piece of rose-coloured hardwood that hung unsupported at waist height. Arrest that table, she thought.