by Watts, Peter
Oh, it’s smart enough to steer us between the stars. Smart enough to calculate million-digit primes in the blink of an eye.
Even smart enough for a little crude improvisation should the crew go too far off-mission.
Not smart enough to know a distress call when it sees one.
“It’s a deceleration curve,” I tell them both. “It keeps slowing down. Over and over again. That’s the message.”
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
And I think it’s meant for no one but us.
* * *
We shout back. No reason not to. And now we die again, because what’s the point of staying up late? Whether or not this vast entity harbors real intelligence, our echo won’t reach it for ten million corsecs. Another seven million, at the earliest, before we receive any reply it might send.
Might as well hit the crypt in the meantime. Shut down all desires and misgivings, conserve whatever life I have left for moments that matter. Remove myself from this sparse tactical intelligence, from this wet-eyed pup watching me as though I’m some kind of sorcerer about to vanish in a puff of smoke. He opens his mouth to speak, and I turn away and hurry down to oblivion.
But I set my alarm to wake up alone.
I linger in the coffin for a while, grateful for small and ancient victories. The chimp’s dead, blackened eye gazes down from the ceiling; in all these millions of years nobody’s scrubbed off the carbon scoring. It’s a trophy of sorts, a memento from the early incendiery days of our Great Struggle.
There’s still something— comforting, I guess— about that blind, endless stare. I’m reluctant to venture out where the chimp’s nerves have not been so thoroughly cauterised. Childish, I know.
The damn thing already knows I’m up; it may be blind, deaf, and impotent in here, but there’s no way to mask the power the crypt sucks in during a thaw. And it’s not as though a bunch of club-wielding teleops are waiting to pounce on me the moment I step outside. These are the days of détente, after all. The struggle continues but the war has gone cold; we just go through the motions now, rattling our chains like an old married multiplet resigned to hating each other to the end of time.
After all the moves and countermoves, the truth is we need each other.
So I wash the rotten-egg stench from my hair and step into Eri’s silent cathedral hallways. Sure enough the enemy waits in the darkness, turns the lights on as I approach, shuts them off behind me— but it does not break the silence.
Dix.
A strange one, that. Not that you’d expect anyone born and raised on Eriophora to be an archetype of mental health, but Dix doesn’t even know what side he’s on. He doesn’t even seem to know he has to choose a side. It’s almost as though he read the original mission statements and took them seriously, believed in the literal truth of the ancient scrolls: Mammals and Machinery, working together across the ages to explore the Universe! United! Strong! Forward the Frontier!
Rah.
Whoever raised him didn’t do a great job. Not that I blame them; it can’t have been much fun having a child underfoot during a build, and none of us were selected for our parenting skills. Even if bots changed the diapers and VR handled the infodumps, socialising a toddler couldn’t have been anyone’s idea of a good time. I’d have probably just chucked the little bastard out an airlock.
But even I would’ve brought him up to speed.
Something changed while I was away. Maybe the war’s heated up again, entered some new phase. That twitchy kid is out of the loop for a reason. I wonder what it is.
I wonder if I care.
I arrive at my suite, treat myself to a gratuitous meal, jill off.
Three hours after coming back to life I’m relaxing in the starbow commons. “Chimp.”
“You’re up early,” it says at last, and I am; our answering shout hasn’t even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new data for another two months, at least.
“Show me the forward feeds,” I command.
DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop. Stop.
Maybe. Or maybe the chimp’s right, maybe it’s pure physiology.
Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the beating of a heart. But there’s a pattern inside the pattern, some kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.
“Slow the time-series,” I command. “By a hundred.”
It is a blink. 428’s disk isn’t darkening uniformly, it’s eclipsing.
As though a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of the sun, from right to left.
“By a thousand.”
Chromatophores, the chimp called them. But they’re not all opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the membrane in waves.
A word pops into my head: latency.
“Chimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?”
“About fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second.”
The speed of a passing thought.
And if this thing does think, it’ll have logic gates, synapses— it’s going to be a net of some kind. And if the net’s big enough, there’s an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and all that.)
The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin— when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B— the system, well, decoheres. The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves.
I shatters into we.
It’s not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It’s a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we’ve yet to meet as it did to those we left behind.
Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does I spread itself across the heavens?
The flesh is huge, the flesh is inconceivable. But the spirit, the spirit is— Shit.
“Chimp. Assuming the mean neuron density of a human brain, what’s the synapse count on a circular sheet of neurons one millimeter thick with a diameter of five thousand eight hundred ninety-two kilometers?”
“Two times ten to the twenty-seventh.”
I saccade the database for some perspective on a mind stretched across thirty million square kilometers: the equivalent of two quadrillion human brains.
Of course, whatever this thing uses for neurons have to be packed a lot less tightly than ours; we can see through them, after all. Let’s be superconservative, say it’s only got a thousandth the computational density of a human brain. That’s— Okay, let’s say it’s only got a ten-thousandth the synaptic density, that’s still— A hundred thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I’d hypothesize it right out of existence.
Still twenty billion human brains. Twenty billion.
I don’t know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.
But I’m not quite ready to believe in gods.
* * *
I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
He seems surprised by my reaction. “Wanted to— talk,” he says after a moment.
“You never come into someone’s home uninvited!”
He retreats a step, stammers: “Wanted, wanted—”
“To talk. And you do that in public. On the bridge, or in the commons, or— for that matter, you could just comm me.”
He hesitates. “Said you — wanted face to face. You said, cu
ltural tradition.”
I did, at that. But not here. This is my place, these are my private quarters. The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and lie in wait, and stand there like part of the fucking furniture…
“Why are you even up?” I snarl. “We’re not even supposed to come online for another two months.”
“Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.”
That fucking machine.
“Why are you up?” he asks, not leaving.
I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. “I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.” The implicit alone should be obvious.
“Anything?”
Evidently it isn’t. I decide to play along for a while. “Looks like we’re talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That’s the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane’s pretty much empty. I mean, it’s all alive. It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.”
“Molecular cloud,” Dix says. “Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it’s concentrating stuff inside the envelope.”
I shrug. “Point is, there’s a size limit for the brain but it’s huge, it’s…”
“Unlikely,” he murmurs, almost to himself.
I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me.
“What do you mean?”
“Island’s twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere’s seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that’s— one in fifty-billion odds.”
“Go on.”
He can’t. “Uh, just… just unlikely.”
I close my eyes. “How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat, and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?”
That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. “Don’t— I’m not—”
“It is unlikely. It’s astronomically unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one-and-a-half AUs across. Which means… ”
He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.
But finally, the lights flicker on: “There’s, uh, more than one island? Oh! A lot of islands!”
This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day. That is a very scary thought.
I try to set it aside for the moment. “There’s probably a whole population of the things, sprinkled though the membrane like, like cysts I guess. The chimp doesn’t know how many, but we’re only picking up this one so far so they might be pretty sparse.”
There’s a different kind of frown on his face now. “Why Chimp?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why call him Chimp?”
“We call it the chimp.” Because the first step to humanising something is to give it a name.
“Looked it up. Short for chimpanzee. Stupid animal.”
“Actually, I think chimps were supposed to be pretty smart,” I remember.
“Not like us. Couldn’t even talk. Chimp can talk. Way smarter than those things. That name— it’s an insult.”
“What do you care?”
He just looks at me.
I spread my hands. “Okay, it’s not a chimp. We just call it that because it’s got roughly the same synapse count.”
“So gave him a small brain, then complain that he’s stupid all the time.”
My patience is just about drained. “Do you have a point or are you just blowing CO2 in—”
“Why not make him smarter?”
“Because you can never predict the behavior of a system more complex than you. And if you want a project to stay on track after you’re gone, you don’t hand the reins to anything that’s guaranteed to develop its own agenda.” Sweet smoking Jesus, you’d think someone would have told him about Ashby’s Law.
“So they lobotomised him,” Dix says after a moment.
“No. They didn’t turn it stupid, they built it stupid.”
“Maybe smarter than you think. You’re so much smarter, got your agenda, how come he’s still in control?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say.
“What?”
I let a grim smile peek through. “You’re only following orders from a bunch of other systems way more complex than you are.”
You’ve got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are still pulling the strings.
“I don’t— I’m following?—”
“I’m sorry, dear.” I smile sweetly at my idiot offspring. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the thing that’s making all those sounds come out of your mouth.”
Dix turns whiter than my panties.
I drop all pretense. “What were you thinking, chimp? That you could send this sock-puppet to invade my home and I wouldn’t notice?”
“Not— I’m not— it’s me,” Dix stammers. “Me talking.”
“It’s coaching you. Do you even know what ‘lobotomised’ means?” I shake my head, disgusted. “You think I’ve forgotten how the interface works just because we all burned ours out?” A caricature of surprise begins to form on his face. “Oh, don’t even fucking try. You’ve been up for other builds, there’s no way you couldn’t have known. And you know we shut down our domestic links too. And there’s nothing your lord and master can do about that because it needs us, and so we have reached what you might call an accommodation.”
I am not shouting. My tone is icy, but my voice is dead level.
And yet Dix almost cringes before me.
There is an opportunity here, I realize.
I thaw my voice a little. I speak gently: “You can do that too, you know. Burn out your link. I’ll even let you come back here afterwards, if you still want to. Just to— talk. But not with that thing in your head.”
There is panic in his face, and against all expectation it almost breaks my heart. “Can’t,” he pleads. “How I learn things, how I train. The mission…”
I honestly don’t know which of them is speaking, so I answer them both: “There is more than one way to carry out the mission. We have more than enough time to try them all. Dix is welcome to come back when he’s alone.”
They take a step towards me. Another. One hand, twitching, rises from their side as if to reach out, and there’s something on that lopsided face that I can’t quite recognize.
“But I’m your son,” they say.
I don’t even dignify it with a denial.
“Get out of my home.”
* * *
A human periscope. The Trojan Dix. That’s a new one.
The chimp’s never tried such overt infiltration while we were up and about before. Usually it waits until we’re all undead before invading our territories. I imagine custom-made drones never seen by human eyes, cobbled together during the long dark eons between builds; I see them sniffing through drawers and peeking behind mirrors, strafing the bulkheads with X-rays and ultrasound, patiently searching Eriophora’s catacombs millimeter by endless millimeter for whatever secret messages we might be sending each other down through time.
There’s no proof to speak of. We’ve left tripwires and telltales to alert us to intrusion after the fact, but there’s never been any evidence they’ve been disturbed. Means nothing, of course. The chimp may be stupid but it’s also cunning, and a million years is more than enough time to iterate through every possibility using simpleminded brute force. Document every dust mote; commit your unspeakable acts; afterwards, put everything back the way it was.
We’re too smart to risk talking across the eons. No encrypted strategies, no long-distance love letters, no chatty postcards showing ancient vistas long lost in the red shift. We keep all that in our heads, where the enemy will never find it. The unspoken rule is that we do not speak, unless it is face to face.
Endless idiotic games. Sometimes I almost forget what we’re squabbling over.
It seems so trivial now, with an immortal in my sights.
Maybe that means nothing to you. Immortality must be ancient news from whatever peaks you’ve ascended by now. But I can’t even imagine it, although I’ve outlived worlds. All I have are moments: two or three hundred years, to ration across the lifespan of a universe. I could bear witness to any point in time, or any hundred-thousand if I slice my life thinly enough— but I will never see everything. I will never see even a fraction.
My life will end. I have to choose.
When you come to fully appreciate the deal you’ve made — ten or fifteen builds out, when the trade-off leaves the realm of mere knowledge and sinks deep as cancer into your bones— you become a miser. You can’t help it. You ration out your waking moments to the barest minimum: just enough to manage the build, to plan your latest counter-move against the chimp, just enough (if you haven’t yet moved beyond the need for Human contact) for sex and snuggles and a bit of warm mammalian comfort against the endless dark. And then you hurry back to the crypt, to hoard the remains of a human lifespan against the unwinding of the cosmos.
There’s been time for education. Time for a hundred postgraduate degrees, thanks to the best caveman learning tech.
I’ve never bothered. Why burn down my tiny candle for a litany of mere fact, fritter away my precious, endless, finite life? Only a fool would trade book-learning for a ringside view of the Cassiopeia Remnant, even if you do need false-color enhancement to see the fucking thing.
Now, though. Now, I want to know. This creature crying out across the gulf, massive as a moon, wide as a solar system, tenuous and fragile as an insect’s wing: I’d gladly cash in some of my life to learn its secrets. How does it work? How can it even live here at the edge of absolute zero, much less think? What vast, unfathomable intellect must it possess to see us coming from over half a lightyear away, to deduce the nature of our eyes and our instruments, to send a signal we can even detect, much less understand?
And what happens when we punch through it at a fifth the speed of light?
