Beyond the Rift

by Peter Watts

  Besides, there’s another word that would fit better, if the chimp has its way: Roadkill. And the longer I look, the more I fear that that hateful machine is right.

  If the Island can defend itself, I sure as shit can’t see how.

  “Eriophora’s impossible, you know. Violates the laws of physics.”

  We’re in one of the social alcoves off the ventral notochord, taking a break from the library. I have decided to start again from first principles. Dix eyes me with an understandable mix of confusion and mistrust; my claim is almost too stupid to deny.

  “It’s true,” I assure him. “Takes way too much energy to accelerate a ship with Eri’s mass, especially at relativistic speeds. You’d need the energy output of a whole sun. People figured if we made it to the stars at all, we’d have to do it in ships maybe the size of your thumb. Crew them with virtual personalities downloaded onto chips.”

  That’s too nonsensical even for Dix. “Wrong. Don’t have mass, can’t fall towards anything. Eri wouldn’t even work if it was that small.”

  “But suppose you can’t displace any of that mass. No wormholes, no Higgs conduits, nothing to throw your gravitational field in the direction of travel. Your center of mass just sits there in, well, the center of your mass.”

  A spastic Dixian head-shake. “Do have those things!”

  “Sure we do. But for the longest time, we didn’t know it.”

  His foot taps an agitated tattoo on the deck.

  “It’s the history of the species,” I explain. “We think we’ve worked everything out, we think we’ve solved all the mysteries, and then someone finds some niggling little data point that doesn’t fit the paradigm. Every time we try to paper over the crack it gets bigger, and before you know it our whole worldview unravels. It’s happened time and again. One day mass is a constraint; the next it’s a requirement. The things we think we know—they change, Dix. And we have to change with them.”

  “But—”

  “The chimp can’t change. The rules it’s following are ten billion years old and it’s got no fucking imagination and really that’s not anyone’s fault, that’s just people who didn’t know how else to keep the mission stable across deep time. They wanted to keep us on-track so they built something that couldn’t go off it; but they also knew that things change, and that’s why we’re out here, Dix. To deal with things the chimp can’t.”

  “The alien,” Dix says.

  “The alien.”

  “Chimp deals with it just fine.”

  “How? By killing it?”

  “Not our fault it’s in the way. It’s no threat—”

  “I don’t care whether it’s a threat or not! It’s alive, and it’s intelligent, and killing it just to expand some alien empire—”

  “Human empire. Our empire.” Suddenly Dix’s hands have stopped twitching. Suddenly he stands still as stone.

  I snort. “What do you know about humans?”

  “Am one.”

  “You’re a fucking trilobite. You ever see what comes out of those gates once they’re online?”

  “Mostly nothing.” He pauses, thinking back. “Couple of—ships once, maybe.”

  “Well, I’ve seen a lot more than that, and believe me, if those things were ever human it was a passing phase.”

  “But—”

  “Dix—” I take a deep breath, try to get back on message. “Look, it’s not your fault. You’ve been getting all your info from a moron stuck on a rail. But we’re not doing this for Humanity, we’re not doing it for Earth. Earth is gone, don’t you understand that? The sun scorched it black a billion years after we left. Whatever we’re working for, it—it won’t even talk to us.”

  “Yeah? Then why do this? Why not just, just quit?”

  He really doesn’t know.

  “We tried,” I say.

  “And?”

  “And your chimp shut off our life support.”

  For once, he has nothing to say.

  “It’s a machine, Dix. Why can’t you get that? It’s programmed. It can’t change.”

  “We’re machines, just built from different things. We change.”

  “Yeah? Last time I checked, you were sucking so hard on that thing’s tit you couldn’t even kill your cortical link.”

  “How I learn. No reason to change.”

  “How about acting like a damn human once in a while? How about developing a little rapport with the folks who might have to save your miserable life next time you go EVA? That enough of a reason for you? Because I don’t mind telling you, right now I don’t trust you as far as I could throw the tac tank. I don’t even know for sure who I’m talking to right now.”

  “Not my fault.” For the first time I see something outside the usual gamut of fear, confusion, and simpleminded computation playing across his face. “That’s you, that’s all of you. You talk—sideways. Think sideways. You all do, and it hurts.” Something hardens in his face. “Didn’t even need you online for this,” he growls. “Didn’t want you. Could have managed the whole build myself, told Chimp I could do it—”

  “But the chimp thought you should wake me up anyway, and you always roll over for the chimp, don’t you? Because the chimp always knows best, the chimp’s your boss, the chimp’s your fucking god. Which is why I have to get out of bed to nursemaid some idiot savant who can’t even answer a hail without being led by the nose.” Something clicks in the back of my mind but I’m on a roll. “You want a real role model? You want something to look up to? Forget the chimp. Forget the mission. Look out the forward scope, why don’t you? Look at what your precious chimp wants to run over because it happens to be in the way. That thing is better than any of us. It’s smarter, it’s peaceful, it doesn’t wish us any harm at—”

  “How can you know that? Can’t know that!”

  “No, you can’t know that, because you’re fucking stunted. Any normal caveman would see it in a second, but you—”

  “That’s crazy,” Dix hisses at me. “You’re crazy. You’re bad.”

  “I’m bad!” Some distant part of me hears the giddy squeak in my voice, the borderline hysteria.

  “For the mission.” Dix turns his back and stalks away.

  My hands are hurting. I look down, surprised: my fists are clenched so tightly that my nails cut into the flesh of my palms. It takes a real effort to open them again.

  I almost remember how this feels. I used to feel this way all the time. Way back when everything mattered; before passion faded to ritual, before rage cooled to disdain. Before Sunday Ahzmundin, eternity’s warrior, settled for heaping insults on stunted children.

  We were incandescent back then. Parts of this ship are still scorched and uninhabitable, even now. I remember this feeling.

  This is how it feels to be awake.

  I am awake, and I am alone, and I am sick of being outnumbered by morons. There are rules and there are risks and you don’t wake the dead on a whim, but fuck it. I’m calling reinforcements.

  Dix has got to have other parents, a father at least, he didn’t get that Y chromo from me. I swallow my own disquiet and check the manifest; bring up the gene sequences; cross-reference.

  Huh. Only one other parent: Kai. I wonder if that’s just coincidence, or if the chimp drew too many conclusions from our torrid little fuckfest back in the Cyg Rift. Doesn’t matter. He’s as much yours as mine, Kai, time to step up to the plate, time to—

  Oh shit. Oh no. Please no.

  (There are rules. And there are risks.)

  Three builds back, it says. Kai and Connie. Both of them. One airlock jammed, the next too far away along Eri’s hull, a hail-Mary emergency crawl between. They made it back inside but not before the blue-shifted background cooked them in their suits. They kept breathing for hours afterwards, talked and moved and cried as if they were still alive, while their insides broke down and bled out.

  There were two others awake that shift, two others left to clean up the mess. Ishmael, and—
/>
  “Um, you said—”

  “You fucker!” I leap up and hit my son hard in the face, ten seconds’ heartbreak with ten million years’ denial raging behind it. I feel teeth give way behind his lips. He goes over backwards, eyes wide as telescopes, the blood already blooming on his mouth.

  “Said I could come back—!” he squeals, scrambling backwards along the deck.

  “He was your fucking father! You knew, you were there! He died right in front of you and you didn’t even tell me!”

  “I—I—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, you asshole? The chimp told you to lie, is that it? Did you—”

  “Thought you knew!” he cries, “Why wouldn’t you know?”

  My rage vanishes like air through a breach. I sag back into the ’pod, face in hands.

  “Right there in the log,” he whimpers. “All along. Nobody hid it. How could you not know?”

  “I did,” I admit dully. “Or I—I mean...”

  I mean I didn’t know, but it’s not a surprise, not really, not down deep. You just—stop looking, after a while.

  There are rules.

  “Never even asked,” my son says softly. “How they were doing.”

  I raise my eyes. Dix regards me wide-eyed from across the room, backed up against the wall, too scared to risk bolting past me to the door. “What are you doing here?” I ask tiredly.

  His voice catches. He has to try twice: “You said I could come back. If I burned out my link...”

  “You burned out your link.”

  He gulps and nods. He wipes blood with the back of his hand.

  “What did the chimp say about that?”

  “He said—it said it was okay,” Dix says, in such a transparent attempt to suck up that I actually believe, in that instant, that he might really be on his own.

  “So you asked its permission.” He begins to nod, but I can see the tell in his face: “Don’t bullshit me, Dix.”

  “He—actually suggested it.”

  “I see.”

  “So we could talk,” Dix adds.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  He looks at the floor and shrugs.

  I stand and walk towards him. He tenses but I shake my head, spread my hands. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I lean back against the wall and slide down until I’m beside him on the deck.

  We just sit there for a while.

  “It’s been so long,” I say at last.

  He looks at me, uncomprehending. What does long even mean, out here?

  I try again. “They say there’s no such thing as altruism, you know?”

  His eyes blank for an instant, and grow panicky, and I know that he’s just tried to ping his link for a definition and come up blank. So we are alone. “Altruism,” I explain. “Unselfishness. Doing something that costs you but helps someone else.” He seems to get it. “They say every selfless act ultimately comes down to manipulation or kin-selection or reciprocity or something, but they’re wrong. I could—”

  I close my eyes. This is harder than I expected.

  “I could have been happy just knowing that Kai was okay, that Connie was happy. Even if it didn’t benefit me one whit, even if it cost me, even if there was no chance I’d ever see either of them again. Almost any price would be worth it, just to know they were okay.

  “Just to believe they were...”

  So you haven’t seen her for the past five builds. So he hasn’t drawn your shift since Sagittarius. They’re just sleeping. Maybe next time.

  “So you don’t check,” Dix says slowly. Blood bubbles on his lower lip; he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “We don’t check.” Only I did, and now they’re gone. They’re both gone. Except for those little cannibalized nucleotides the chimp recycled into this defective and maladapted son of mine. We’re the only warm-blooded creatures for a thousand lightyears, and I am so very lonely.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and lean forward, and lick the gore from his bruised and bloody lips.

  Back on Earth—back when there was an Earth—there were these little animals called cats. I had one for a while. Sometimes I’d watch him sleep for hours: paws and whiskers and ears all twitching madly as he chased imaginary prey across whatever landscapes his sleeping brain conjured up.

  My son looks like that when the chimp worms its way into his dreams.

  It’s almost too literal for metaphor: the cable runs into his head like some kind of parasite, feeding through old-fashioned fiberop now that the wireless option’s been burned away. Or force-feeding, I suppose; the poison flows into Dix’s head, not out of it.

  I shouldn’t be here. Didn’t I just throw a tantrum over the violation of my own privacy? (Just. Twelve lightdays ago. Everything’s relative.) And yet I can see no privacy here for Dix to lose: no decorations on the walls, no artwork or hobbies, no wraparound console. The sex toys ubiquitous in every suite sit unused on their shelves; I’d have assumed he was on antilibidinals if recent experience hadn’t proven otherwise.

  What am I doing? Is this some kind of perverted mothering instinct, some vestigial expression of a Pleistocene maternal subroutine? Am I that much of a robot, has my brain stem sent me here to guard my child?

  To guard my mate?

  Lover or larva, it hardly matters: his quarters are an empty shell, there’s nothing of Dix in here. That’s just his abandoned body lying there in the pseudopod, fingers twitching, eyes flickering beneath closed lids in vicarious response to wherever his mind has gone.

  They don’t know I’m here. The chimp doesn’t know because we burned out its prying eyes a billion years ago, and my son doesn’t know I’m here because—well, because for him, right now, there is no here.

  What am I supposed to make of you, Dix? None of this makes sense. Even your body language looks like you grew it in a vat—but I’m far from the first human being you’ve seen. You grew up in good company, with people I know, people I trust. Trusted. How did you end up on the other side? How did they let you slip away?

  And why didn’t they warn me about you?

  Yes, there are rules. There is the threat of enemy surveillance during long dead nights, the threat of—other losses. But this is unprecedented. Surely someone could have left something, some clue buried in a metaphor too subtle for the simpleminded to decode...

  I’d give a lot to tap into that pipe, to see what you’re seeing now. Can’t risk it, of course; I’d give myself away the moment I tried to sample anything except the basic baud, and—

  —Wait a second—

  That baud rate’s way too low. That’s not even enough for hi-res graphics, let alone tactile and olfac. You’re embedded in a wireframe world at best.

  And yet, look at you go. The fingers, the eyes—like a cat, dreaming of mice and apple pies. Like me, replaying the long-lost oceans and mountaintops of Earth before I learned that living in the past was just another way of dying in the present. The bit rate says this is barely even a test pattern; the body says you’re immersed in a whole other world. How has that machine tricked you into treating such thin gruel as a feast?

  Why would it even want to? Data are better grasped when they can be grasped, and tasted, and heard; our brains are built for far richer nuance than splines and scatterplots. The driest technical briefings are more sensual than this. Why settle for stick-figures when you can paint in oils and holograms?

  Why does anyone simplify anything? To reduce the variable set. To manage the unmanageable.

  Kai and Connie. Now there were a couple of tangled, unmanageable datasets. Before the accident. Before the scenario simplified.

  Someone should have warned me about you, Dix.

  Maybe someone tried.

  And so it comes to pass that my son leaves the nest, encases himself in a beetle carapace and goes walkabout. He is not alone; one of the chimp’s teleops accompanies him out on Eri’s hull, lest he lose his footing and fall back into the starry past.

  Maybe this will
never be more than a drill, maybe this scenario—catastrophic control-systems failure, the chimp and its backups offline, all maintenance tasks suddenly thrown onto shoulders of flesh and blood—is a dress rehearsal for a crisis that never happens. But even the unlikeliest scenario approaches certainty over the life of a universe; so we go through the motions. We practice. We hold our breath and dip outside. We’re on a tight deadline: even armored, moving at this speed the blueshifted background rad would cook us in hours.

  Worlds have lived and died since I last used the pickup in my suite. “Chimp.”

  “Here as always, Sunday.” Smooth, and glib, and friendly. The easy rhythm of the practiced psychopath.

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You think I don’t see what’s going on? You’re building the next release. You’re getting too much grief from the old guard so you’re starting from scratch with people who don’t remember the old days. People you’ve, you’ve simplified.”

  The chimp says nothing. The drone’s feed shows Dix clambering across a jumbled terrain of basalt and metal matrix composites.

  “But you can’t raise a human child, not on your own.” I know it tried: there’s no record of Dix anywhere on the crew manifest until his mid-teens, when he just showed up one day and nobody asked about it because nobody ever...

  “Look what you’ve made of him. He’s great at conditional If/Thens. Can’t be beat on number-crunching and Do loops. But he can’t think. Can’t make the simplest intuitive jumps. You’re like one of those—” I remember an earthly myth, from the days when reading did not seem like such an obscene waste of lifespan—“one of those wolves, trying to raise a human child. You can teach him how to move around on hands and knees, you can teach him about pack dynamics, but you can’t teach him how to walk on his hind legs or talk or be human because you’re too fucking stupid, Chimp, and you finally realized it. And that’s why you threw him at me. You think I can fix him for you.”

  I take a breath, and a gambit.

  “But he’s nothing to me. You understand? He’s worse than nothing, he’s a liability. He’s a spy, he’s a spastic waste of O2. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t just lock him out there until he cooks.”