Free Polity 4 - The Technician by Asher Neal

had not existed when last he was here, and the fence now standing
perfectly restored before him had been crushed into the ground by his own
side’s tanks. It was evening now, and the moon Amok tumbled across the
aubergine sky against the backdrop of a nebula like a knotted glass octopus.
The light of both of these reflected from the chequerboard of ponds lying
beyond the fence, in which the Theocracy underclass had once raised the lethal
squerms whose proteins were then the only source of offworld wealth here. There
were squerms in the ponds even now, though those that tended to them were
armoured swimming robots like metre-long, green-chromed water beetles.
    Grant
walked over to the gate and pushed it open, then headed out onto the paths
lying between the ponds. Remembering that last visit, he glanced over to one
pond in which glinted brassy writhing movement. The battle tank had been
removed. Back then the burnt-out vehicle had still emitted wisps of smoke,
which meant there must have been a leaking oxygen supply inside still supplying
the embers. Other wreckage had been scattered here and there, both Human and
mechanical. There had been a corpse – a Theocracy soldier, his augmentation
grey against the half of his head that remained.
    Why
hadn’t Grant killed that proctor when he found him out there lying on a bed of
trampled flute grass? Sanders had been correct about anyone surviving an attack
from a hooder likely being held in superstitious awe. In fact, Jeremiah Tombs was still held in superstitious awe by many, especially
now some portion of the truth about this world had come out. Grant might
perhaps have allowed Tombs to live just because of that. But there had been
more to it than just superstition, or awe, even though the hooder Grant had
seen lift its massive spoon-shaped head from the proctor had been none other
than the mythical Technician. There had been that breather mask, that damned
breather mask . . .
    Grant
had been sure that the man had some questions to answer, and the interrogator
would probably be a Polity forensic AI tapped directly into his brain to ask
them. Yet for over twenty years those questions had remained unasked, and Tombs
was a basket case and last internee of what had once been a prison hospital on
one of the southern islands. His sanity lay within the compass of Polity
technology, yet the AIs did not want to tamper with what had been done to him,
and that was probably because they did not yet understand it.
    Grant,
erstwhile soldier and colonel in the army of the underground, shuddered and
peered down at the ground just ahead of him. The particular corpse that had
lain here had been surrounded by a few departing dryben, small creatures that
seemed related to the sprawns the workers had raised in some ponds, but which
were native to Masada and, like maggots on Earth, were the undertakers of this
world. Something about the death had called them to the surface, but contact
with it was driving them away, for alien meat did not contain the proteins they
required. However, Grant remembered how the corpse had been crawling with penny
molluscs, their domed shells with their even colourful patterns, just like the
same molluscs that had surrounded Tombs . . .
    Grant
abruptly turned away, heading back towards the bunkhouse and the ATV he had
parked behind it, questioning the impulse that had caused him to revisit his
past. He understood what drove that impulse. Those discoveries made by Polity
researchers here, and the presence of an Atheter AI out there in the wilds, had
both weighed heavily on his mind. But now, it seemed, an ancient war drone had
arrived, its remit to find some answers. And he felt certain that some of those
answers would be to questions he often asked himself, about Jeremiah Tombs.
     

3
    Prosthetics
    With the advent of genetic manipulation
to enable someone to grow a new limb, or with the technology available for them
to just take rejection-proof body parts off the shelf,