Read Online Polity 4 - The Technician by Asher Neal - Free Book Online Page A

never come back. Raising his head again he
peered across at it. The machine had been fashioned in the shape of a creature
from Earth. From his computer he had learned it bore the shape of an arachnid
called a scorpion, though that might not necessarily be the truth, since the
information they allowed him was woven with their lies.
    ‘You
know the answer to that,’ the scorpion drone replied, shifting about on tiles
the colour of a drowned man’s skin.
    Jem felt
the terrace vibrate underneath his chair. He shuddered and dropped his gaze
back to his sketch pad, set his pencil to erase and obliterated the shape
there, returned the pencil to draw mode and began again.
    ‘Yes,
when you have the answers you require.’
    Sanders
reclined in a comfortable sun chair, a drink on the stone table beside her, its
ice glinting rainbows. She now wore a skin-tight bodysuit that terminated just
above her breasts and at the top of her thighs. Jem wished she would dress more
appropriately. Women should not expose so much of themselves to a man’s gaze,
much less to the gaze of one of these godless machines.
    She
continued, ‘It occurs to me, Amistad, that you’ve more interest in the state of
his mind as it is than in any answers it might provide.’
    ‘You are
absolutely right,’ the drone replied, and Sanders sat forward with sudden
interest. ‘But it’s only when I obtain those answers will I fully understand
what has been done to him and thus satisfy that interest. And we are much
closer now.’
    ‘Closer?’
    ‘It is,’
said the drone, ‘a Human survival trait, this ability to forget pain.’
    ‘No one
forgets pain.’
    ‘You
misunderstand me.’ The drone gestured to Jem with one claw, and he concentrated
on his drawing, pretending he wasn’t listening. ‘The AI experience of memory is
utterly direct. When an AI recalls, it re-experiences the entire event
memorized in every detail, including all sensation. When a Human recalls an
event it is a mere tracery in the mind, a dull copy with those sensations that
might adversely effect the survival of the organism either erased or filtered.
You do remember pain, but you never directly
experience the memory of it.’
    Sanders
grunted in amusement. ‘If women of the far past had directly remembered the
pain of childbirth the Human race would be extinct.’
    ‘That is
another mental mechanism,’ the drone said dismissively. ‘Human pain is
necessarily intense because the lesson of avoidance must be learned by the dull
recording medium of the Human brain, but Human memory of pain must not be
intense enough to cripple the risk-taking function which is a necessity of
species survival.’
    ‘Thank
you for that.’ Sanders picked up her drink and sipped. ‘But the relevance of it
escapes me.’
    ‘We know
about the fibrous structures the Technician left in his brain, and we now know
that via them the Technician embedded something very deep and very integral in
his mind – we are certain that it actually downloaded something from itself.
However, whilst doing so, it was also performing its feeding function – whether
out of instinct or as part of the process is unclear – and that memory of pain
was deeply embedded too.’
    ‘So
we’re getting somewhere?’ said Sanders excitedly.
    ‘Somewhere,
yes. But unfortunately, what was downloaded to him is so tightly entangled with
his pain, that it remains inaccessible whilst he cannot remember what happened
to him.’
    ‘So we
use nanosurgery to restore his memory . . .’
    ‘No, we
considered that, but the embedding process has made his memory of the pain a
direct experience, as with us AIs. Recall would be as agonizing to him as what
he experienced underneath the Technician’s hood. This is why both download and
memory are so deeply submerged – he is a Human being and incapable of holding
so direct an experience of pain in his conscious mind.’
    Sanders
grimaced and sat back. ‘So what now?’
    The
scorpion drone