SS1-3 The Island, Hotshot, Giants

by Watts, Peter

  “You think this whole thing was some kind of trick?” I shake my head in disbelief. “We’ll have surface access in a couple of weeks. Hell, just cut a hole into Fab right now, crawl out through one of the service tunnels. See for yourself.”

  “See what? A star off the stern?” He shrugs. “Red giants are common as dirt. Doesn’t mean the specs on this system were anywhere near as restrictive as Chimp says. Doesn’t mean we had to go through, doesn’t even mean we did. For all I know the Chimp had its bots strafing the hull with lasers and blowtorches for the past hundred years, slagging things down to look nice and convincing just in case I did pop out for a look-see.” Hakim shakes his head. “All I know is, it’s only had one meat sack in its corner since the mutiny, and he’s not much good if no one will talk to him. But how can you keep hating someone after he’s saved your life?”

  It astonishes me, the degree to which people torture reason. Just to protect their precious preconceptions.

  “The weird thing,” Hakim adds, almost to himself, “is that it worked.”

  It takes a moment for that to sink in.

  “Because I don’t think you were in on it,” he explains. “I don’t think you had a clue. How could you? You’re not even a whole person, you’re just a—a glorified subroutine. And subroutines don’t question their inputs. A thought pops into your head, you just assume it’s yours. You believe everything that miserable piece of hardware tells you, because you don’t have a choice. Maybe you never did.

  “How can I hate you for that?” he asks.

  I don’t answer, so he does: “I can’t. Not any more. I can only—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I say, and turn my back.

  He leaves me then, leaves me surrounded by all these pixels and pictures he refuses to accept. He heads back to the crypt to join his friends. The sleeping dead. The weak links. Every last one of them would scuttle the mission, given half a chance.

  If it was up to me none of them would ever wake up again. But Chimp reminds me of the obvious: a mission built for aeons, the impossibility of anticipating even a fraction of the obstacles we’re bound to encounter. The need for flexibility, for the wet sloppy intelligence that long-dead engineers excluded from his architecture in the name of mission stability. Billions of years ahead of us, perhaps, and only a few thousand meat sacks to deal with the unexpected. There may not be enough of us as it is.

  And yet, with all that vaunted human intellect, Hakim can’t see the obvious. None of them can. I’m not even human to those humans. A subroutine, he says. A lobe in something else’s brain. But I don’t need his fucking pity. He’d realize that if he thought about it for more than a split-second, if he was willing to examine that mountain of unexamined assumptions he calls a worldview.

  He won’t, though. He refuses to look into the mirror long enough to see what’s looking back. He can’t even tell the difference between brain and brawn. The Chimp drives the ship; the Chimp builds the jump gates; the Chimp runs life support. We try to take the reins of our own destiny and it’s the Chimp who hammers us down.

  So the Chimp is in control. The Chimp is always in control; and when minds merge across this high-bandwidth link in my head, surely it will be the mech that absorbs the meat.

  It astonishes me that he can’t see the fallacy. He knows the Chimp’s synapse count as well as I do, but he’d rather fall back on prejudice than run the numbers.

  I’m not the Chimp’s subroutine at all.

  The Chimp is mine.

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