by Peter Watts
Except it’s only winking from the left side of the display. On the right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle.
“Chimp: any chance the grid just isn’t sensitive enough to see the fluctuations?”
“No.”
“Huh.” I try to think of some reason it would lie about this.
“Doesn’t make sense,” my son complains.
“It does,” I murmur, “if it’s not the sun that’s flickering.”
“But it is flickering—” He sucks his teeth. “You can see it fl—wait, you mean something behind the vons? Between, between them and us?"
“Mmmm.”
“Some kind of filter.” Dix relaxes a bit. “Wouldn’t we’ve seen it, though? Wouldn’t the vons’ve hit it going down?”
I put my voice back into ChimpComm mode. “What’s the current field-of-view for Eri’s forward scope?”
“Eighteen mikes,” the chimp reports. “At 428’s range, the cone is three point three four lightsecs across.”
“Increase to a hundred lightsecs.”
The Eri’s-eye partition swells, obliterating the dissenting viewpoint. For a moment the sun fills the tank again, paints the whole bridge crimson. Then it dwindles as if devoured from within.
I notice some fuzz in the display. “Can you clear that noise?”
“It’s not noise,” the chimp reports. “It’s dust and molecular gas.”
I blink. “What’s the density?”
“Estimated hundred thousand atoms per cubic meter.”
Two orders of magnitude too high, even for a nebula. “Why so heavy?” Surely we’d have detected any gravity well strong enough to keep that much material in the neighborhood.
“I don’t know,” the chimp says.
I get the queasy feeling that I might. “Set field-of-view to five hundred lightsecs. Peak false-color at near-infrared.”
Space grows ominously murky in the tank. The tiny sun at its center, thumbnail-sized now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water.
“A thousand lightsecs,” I command.
“There,” Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the tank, dark, clear, pristine. 428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded cast-offs from companion stars whose convulsions spew gas and rads across lightyears. But 428 is no nova remnant. It’s a red dwarf, placid, middle-aged. Unremarkable.
Except for the fact that it sits dead center of a tenuous gas bubble 1.4 AUs across. And for the fact that this bubble does not attenuate or diffuse or fade gradually into that good night. No, unless there is something seriously wrong with the display, this small, spherical nebula extends about 350 lightsecs from its primary and then just stops, its boundary far more knife-edged than nature has any right to be.
For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.
Numbers come back. “Chimp. I want false-color peaks at 335, 500 and 800 nanometers.”
The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly’s wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.
“It’s beautiful,” whispers my awestruck son.
“It’s photosynthetic,” I tell him.
Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something called a chromatophore: branching cells with little aliquots of pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles clumped together and the cell’s effectively transparent; spread them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens, dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.
“So there’s a membrane of—of living tissue around that star,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. “A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.”
“Yes,” the chimp says.
“But that’s—Jesus, how thick would it be?”
“No more than two millimeters. Probably less.”
“How so?”
“If it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von Neumanns when they hit it.”
“That’s assuming that its—cells, I guess—are like ours.”
“The pigments are familiar; the rest might be too.”
It can’t be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever miracle solvent that thing must use as antifreeze...
“Okay, let’s be conservative, then. Say, mean thickness of a millimeter. Assume a density of water at STP. How much mass in the whole thing?”
“1.4 yottagrams,” Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.
“That’s, uh...”
“Half the mass of Mercury,” the chimp adds helpfully.
I whistle through my teeth. “And that’s one organism?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“It’s got organic pigments. Fuck, it’s talking. It’s intelligent.”
“Most cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,” the chimp points out. “Not intelligent signals.”
I ignore it and turn to Dix. “Assume it’s a signal.”
He frowns. “Chimp says—”
“Assume. Use your imagination.”
I’m not getting through to him. He looks nervous.
He looks like that a lot, I realize.
“If someone were signaling you,” I say, “then what would you do?”
“Signal...” Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere “...back?”
My son is an idiot.
“And if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in light intensity, how—”
“Use the BI lasers, alternated to pulse between 700 and 3000 nanometers. Can boost an interlaced signal into the exawatt range without compromising our fenders; gives over a thousand Watts per square meter after diffraction. Way past detection threshold for anything that can sense thermal output from a red dwarf. And content doesn’t matter if it’s just a shout. Shout back. Test for echo.”
Okay, so my son is an idiot savant.
And he still looks unhappy—“But Chimp, he says no real information there, right?”—and that whole other set of misgivings edges to the fore again: He.
Dix takes my silence for amnesia. “Too simple, remember? Simple click train.”
I shake my head. There’s more information in that signal than the chimp can imagine. There are so many things the chimp doesn’t know. And the last thing I need is for this, this child to start deferring to it, to start looking to it as an equal or, God forbid, a mentor.
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 hur
ry 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 incendiary 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, cultural 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 b
ut 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.
