Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures [044] - The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch

Author:Ben Aaronovitch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426204565
Publisher: London Bridge
Published: 1996-01-14T23:00:00+00:00

Hyper-lude

Extract from the external memory datacore (subjective) of vi!Ca-pin-go-ri

Omicron 378, mining habitat, built into an asteroid in an unremarkable but strategic system, it had a population of two hundred thousand sentient individuals. An unremarkable people from an adjacent star system built it three hundred years before to burrow out the valuable cores of the surrounding asteroidal material – the remains, according to ship, of a sub-gas giant that had broken up sixty-two billion years previously. The plan was that a couple of the crew would go over and have a little scout round to see if the Insects were using it as a forward base. R-Vene stayed out of sight, hidden in the upper atmosphere of a nearby gas giant during the operation. Nobody asked me to go despite the fact that I was the best qualified drone, word of what had happened on Tipor’oosis having spread as far as the rest of the fleet by then.

I regret not having gone, not that I would have made any difference, but at least I would have ceased to exist.

The infiltration party was made up of two organics and a drone, the standard composition for what had become almost a routine by that time of the war. According to R-Vene the drone was killed first upon entering the airlock, the two organics died a couple of minutes later as they tried to get back to the safety of the shuttle.

Fifteen seconds later R-Vene dumped six kilograms of antimatter into the centre of the Omicron 378: there were no survivors.

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.

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