An Excerpt from World Walkers by Neal Asher (Pyr; September 2024)
The Fenris – Past
The Fenris awoke with a surge of excitement. Curled up in gel, with pipes and data feeds entering his body at numerous points, he opened violet eyes and gained only a blurred impression of his surroundings. But then, engaging other receptors in his long skull, he found himself in a maternal cyst, in one of the long halls that must be a birthing facility – according to the knowledge already loading to his brain. This knowledge, a dry factual cataloguing of reality, swiftly laid down strata of scientific understanding and told him of his race and something of their history. Birth, millennia ago, had been an organic matter of gestation inside a female fenris. But nowadays, with their science so advanced, the optimization of a new addition to their race could be much better controlled outside the womb.
His skull continued to fill. Data was laid down in semi-organic substrates, of which so much of his body consisted, added throughout a million years of biotechnology and controlled evolution. But the data was just a lens through which he looked at the world, with the excitement of a child. Grasping his power and huge breadth of understanding, he became eager to take his place in the world. The loading continued to fill in detail about his kind, finishing with the Great Project. The audacity and high aims of this astounded him. Only on his world could something so ambitious have been attempted. Then, on checking timescales and his inception date, he realized that the experiment must have already concluded. He waited, anxious to be born into his new life to see the results.
Nothing happened.