Beyond the Rift

by Peter Watts

  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 lobotomized 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 your waking moments to the barest minimum: just enough to manage the build, to plan your latest countermove 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?

  I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer hasn’t changed: not much. The damn thing’s already full of holes. Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through this system as it does through every other. Infra picks up diffuse pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter, where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the dead center of the thinking part, I can’t imagine this vast creature feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we’re going we’d be through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of a millimeter membrane.

  And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop.

  It’s not us, of course. It’s what we’re building. The birth of a gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It’s why we never slow down to take pictures.

  One of the reasons, anyway.

  We can’t stop, of course. Even changing course isn’t an option except by the barest increments. Eri soars like an eagle between the stars but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our heading by even a tenth of a degree and you’ve got some serious damage at twenty percent l
ightspeed. Half a degree would tear us apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading but the collapsed mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.

  Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take well to change.

  We resurrect again, and the Island has changed its tune.

  It gave up asking us to stop stop stop the moment our laser hit its leading edge. Now it’s saying something else entirely: dark hyphens flow across its skin, arrows of pigment converging towards some offstage focus like spokes pointing towards the hub of a wheel. The bullseye itself is offstage and implicit, far removed from 428’s bright backdrop, but it’s easy enough to extrapolate to the point of convergence six lightsecs to starboard. There’s something else, too: a shadow, roughly circular, moving along one of the spokes like a bead running along a string. It too migrates to starboard, falls off the edge of the Island’s makeshift display, is endlessly reborn at the same initial coordinates to repeat its journey.

  Those coordinates: exactly where our current trajectory will punch through the membrane in another four months. A squinting God would be able to see the gnats and girders of ongoing construction on the other side, the great piecemeal torus of the Hawking Hoop already taking shape.

  The message is so obvious that even Dix sees it. “Wants us to move the gate...” and there is something like confusion in his voice. “But how’s it know we’re building one?”

  “The vons punctured it en route,” the chimp points out. “It could have sensed that. It has photopigments. It can probably see.”

  “Probably sees better than we do,” I say. Even something as simple as a pinhole camera gets hi-res fast if you stipple a bunch of them across thirty million square kilometers.

  But Dix scrunches his face, unconvinced. “So sees a bunch of vons bumping around. Loose parts—not that much even assembled yet. How’s it know we’re building something hot?”

  Because it is very, very smart, you stupid child. Is it so hard to believe that this, this—organism seems far too limiting a word—can just imagine how those half-built pieces fit together, glance at our sticks and stones and see exactly where this is going?

  “Maybe’s not the first gate it’s seen,” Dix suggests. “Think there’s maybe another gate out here?”

  I shake my head. “We’d have seen the lensing artefacts by now.”

  “You ever run into anyone before?”

  “No.” We have always been alone, through all these epochs. We have only ever run away.

  And then always from our own children.

  I crunch some numbers. “Hundred eighty-two days to insemination. If we move now we’ve only got to tweak our bearing by a few mikes to redirect to the new coordinates. Well within the green. Angles get dicey the longer we wait, of course.”

  “We can’t do that,” the chimp says. “We would miss the gate by two million kilometers.”

  “Move the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we send the order now. We don’t even have to suspend construction, we can keep building on the fly.”

  “Every one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable margins, for no payoff.”

  “And what about the fact that there’s an intelligent being in our path?”

  “I’m already allowing for the potential presence of intelligent alien life.”

  “Okay, first off, there’s nothing potential about it. It’s right fucking there. And on our current heading we run the damn thing over.”

  “We’re staying clear of all planetary bodies in Goldilocks orbits. We’ve seen no local evidence of spacefaring technology. The current location of the build meets all conservation criteria.”

  “That’s because the people who drew up your criteria never anticipated a live Dyson sphere!” But I’m wasting my breath, and I know it. The chimp can run its equations a million times but if there’s nowhere to put the variable, what can it do?

  There was a time, back before things turned ugly, when we had clearance to reprogram those parameters. Before we discovered that one of the things the admins had anticipated was mutiny.

  I try another tack. “Consider the threat potential.”

  “There’s no evidence of any.”

  “Look at the synapse estimate! That thing’s got orders of mag more processing power than the whole civilization that sent us out here. You think something can be that smart, live that long, without learning how to defend itself? We’re assuming it’s asking us to move the gate. What if that’s not a request? What if it’s just giving us the chance to back off before it takes matters into its own hands?”

  “Doesn’t have hands,” Dix says from the other side of the tank, and he’s not even being flippant. He’s just being so stupid I want to bash his face in.

  I try to keep my voice level. “Maybe it doesn’t need any.”

  “What could it do, blink us to death? No weapons. Doesn’t even control the whole membrane. Signal propagation’s too slow.”

  “We don’t know. That’s my point. We haven’t even tried to find out. We’re a goddamn road crew; our onsite presence is a bunch of construction vons press-ganged into scientific research. We can figure out some basic physical parameters but we don’t know how this thing thinks, what kind of natural defenses it might have—”

  “What do you need to find out?” the chimp asks, the very voice of calm reason.

  We can’t find out! I want to scream. We’re stuck with what we’ve got! By the time the onsite vons could build what we need we’re already past the point of no return! You stupid fucking machine, we’re on track to kill a being smarter than all of human history and you can’t even be bothered to move our highway to the vacant lot next door?

  But of course if I say that, the Island’s chances of survival go from low to zero. So I grasp at the only straw that remains: maybe the data we’ve got in hand is enough. If acquisition is off the table, maybe analysis will do.

  “I need time,” I say.

  “Of course,” the chimp tells me. “Take all the time you need.”

  The chimp is not content to kill this creature. The chimp has to spit on it as well.

  Under the pretense of assisting in my research it tries to deconstruct the Island, break it apart and force it to conform to grubby earthbound precedents. It tells me about earthly bacteria that thrived at 1.5 million rads and laughed at hard vacuum. It shows me pictures of unkillable little tardigrades that could curl up and snooze on the edge of absolute zero, felt equally at home in deep ocean trenches and deeper space. Given time, opportunity, a boot off the planet, who knows how far those cute little invertebrates might have gone? Might they have survived the very death of the homeworld, clung together, grown somehow colonial?

  What utter bullshit.

  I learn what I can. I study the alchemy by which photosynthesis transforms light and gas and electrons into living tissue. I learn the physics of the solar wind that blows the bubble taut, calculate lower metabolic limits for a life-form that filters organics from the ether. I marvel at the speed of this creature’s thoughts: almost as fast as Eri flies, orders of mag faster than any mammalian nerve impulse. Some kind of organic superconductor perhaps, something that passes chilled electrons almost resistance-free out here in the freezing void.

  I acquaint myself with phenotypic plasticity and sloppy fitness, that fortuitous evolutionary soft-focus that lets species exist in alien environments and express novel traits they never needed at home. Perhaps this is how a lifeform with no natural enemies could acquire teeth and claws and the willingness to use them. The Island’s life hinges on its ability to kill us; I have to find something that makes it a threat.

  But all I uncover is a growing suspicion that I am doomed to fail—for violence, I begin to see, is a planetar
y phenomenon.

  Planets are the abusive parents of evolution. Their very surfaces promote warfare, concentrate resources into dense defensible patches that can be fought over. Gravity forces you to squander energy on vascular systems and skeletal support, stand endless watch against an endless sadistic campaign to squash you flat. Take one wrong step, off a perch too high, and all your pricey architecture shatters in an instant. And even if you beat those odds, cobble together some lumbering armored chassis to withstand the slow crawl onto land—how long before the world draws in some asteroid or comet to crash down from the heavens and reset your clock to zero? Is it any wonder we grew up believing life was a struggle, that zero-sum was God’s own law and the future belonged to those who crushed the competition?

  The rules are so different out here. Most of space is tranquil: no diel or seasonal cycles, no ice ages or global tropics, no wild pendulum swings between hot and cold, calm and tempestuous. Life’s precursors abound: on comets, clinging to asteroids, suffusing nebulae a hundred lightyears across. Molecular clouds glow with organic chemistry and life-giving radiation. Their vast dusty wings grow warm with infrared, filter out the hard stuff, give rise to stellar nurseries that only some stunted refugee from the bottom of a gravity well could ever call lethal.

  Darwin’s an abstraction here, an irrelevant curiosity. This Island puts the lie to everything we were ever told about the machinery of life. Sun-powered, perfectly adapted, immortal, it won no struggle for survival: Where are the predators, the competitors, the parasites? All of life around 428 is one vast continuum, one grand act of symbiosis. Nature here is not red in tooth and claw. Nature, out here, is the helping hand.

  Lacking the capacity for violence, the Island has outlasted worlds. Unencumbered by technology, it has out-thought civilizations. It is intelligent beyond our measure, and—

  —and it is benign. It must be. I grow more certain of that with each passing hour. How can it even conceive of an enemy?

  I think of the things I called it, before I knew better. Meat balloon. Cyst. Looking back, those words verge on blasphemy. I will not use them again.