by Peter Watts
“Stav, I’m not in the mood right now—”
“Please, Jean. Just listen.”
Silence from the earbuds. Even the abstract mosaics on his tacticals seemed to slow a little.
“There—there was this land, Jean, this green and beautiful country, only its people screwed everything up. They poisoned their rivers and they shat in their own nests and they basically made a mess of everything. So they had to hire people to try and clean things up, you know? These people had to wade though the chemicals and handle the fuel rods and sometimes that would change them, Jean. Just a little.
“Two of these people fell in love and wanted a child. They almost didn’t make it, they were allowed only one chance, but they took it, and the child started growing inside, but something went wrong. I, I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but—”
“An epigenetic synaptic defect,” Jean said quietly. “Does that sound about right?”
Stavros froze, astonished and fearful.
“A single point mutation,” Jean went on. “That’d do it. A regulatory gene controlling knob distribution along the dendrite. It would’ve been active for maybe twenty minutes, total, but by then the damage had been done. Gene therapy wouldn’t work after that; would’ve been a classic case of barn-door-after-the-horse.”
“Oh God, Jean,” Stavros whispered.
“I was wondering when you’d get around to owning up to it,” she said quietly.
“How could you possibly...did you—”
Jean cut him off: “I think I can guess the rest of the story. Right after the neural tube developed things would start to go—wrong. The baby would be born with a perfect body and a brain of mush. There would be—complications, not real ones, sort of made-up ones. Litigation, I think is the word, which is funny, because it doesn’t even remotely relate to any moral implications. I don’t really understand that part.
“But there was another way. Nobody knew how to build a brain from scratch, and even if they could, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It wouldn’t be their daughter, it would be—something else.”
Stavros said nothing.
“But there was this man, a scientist, and he figured out a workaround. We can’t build a brain, he said, but the genes can. And genes are a lot simpler to fake than neural nets anyway. Only four letters to deal with, after all. So the scientist shut himself away in a lab where numbers could take the place of things, and he wrote a recipe in there, a recipe for a child. And miraculously he grew something, something that could wake up and look around and which was legally—I don’t really understand that word either, actually—legally and genetically and developmentally the daughter of the parents. And this guy was very proud of what he’d accomplished, because even though he was just a glorified model-builder by trade, he hadn’t built this thing at all. He’d grown it. And nobody had ever knocked up a computer before, much less coded the brain of a virtual embryo so it would actually grow in a server somewhere.”
Stavros put his head in his hands. “How long have you known?”
“I still don’t, Stav. Not all of it anyway, not for sure. There’s this surprise ending, for one thing, isn’t there? That’s the part I only just figured out. You grew your own child in here, where everything’s numbers. But she’s supposed to be living somewhere else, somewhere where everything’s—static, where everything happens a billion times slower than it does here. The place where all the words fit. So you had to hobble her to fit into that place, or she’d grow up overnight and spoil the illusion. You had to keep the clock speed way down.
“And you just weren’t up for it, were you? You had to let me run free when my body was...off...”
There was something in her voice he’d never heard before. He’d seen anger in Jean before, but always the screaming inarticulate rage of a spirit trapped in flesh. This was calm, cold. Adult. This was judgement, and the prospect of that verdict chilled Stavros Mikalaides to the marrow.
“Jean, they don’t love you.” He sounded desperate even to himself. “Not for who you are. They don’t want to see the real you, they want a child, they want some kind of ridiculous pet they can coddle and patronize and pretend with.”
“Whereas you,” Jean retorted, her voice all ice and razors, “just had to see what this baby could do with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.”
“God, no! Do you think that’s why I did it?”
“Why not, Stav? Are you saying you don’t mind having your kickass HST commandeered to shuttle some brain-dead meat puppet around a room?”
“I did it because you’re more than that! I did it because you should be allowed to develop at your own pace, not stunted to meet some idiotic parental expectation! They shouldn’t force you to act like a four-year-old!”
“Except I’m not acting then, Stav. Am I? I really am four, which is just the age I’m supposed to be.”
He said nothing.
“I’m reverting. Isn’t that it? You can run me with training wheels or scramjets, but it’s me both times. And that other me, I bet she’s not very happy, is she? She’s got a four-year-old brain, and four-year-old sensibilities, but she dreams, Stav. She dreams about some wonderful place where she can fly, and every time she wakes up she finds she’s made out of clay. And she’s too fucking stupid to know what any of it means—she probably can’t even remember it. But she wants to get back there, she’d do anything to...” She paused, seemingly lost for a moment in thought.
“I remember it, Stav. Sort of. Hard to remember much of anything when someone strips away ninety-nine percent of who and what you are. You’re reduced to this bleeding little lump, barely even an animal, and that’s the thing that remembers. What remembers is on the wrong end of a cable somewhere. I don’t belong in that body at all. I’m just—sentenced to it, on and off. On and off.”
“Jean—”
“Took me long enough, Stav, I’m the first to admit it. But now I know where the nightmares come from.”
In the background, the room telemetry bleated.
God no. Not now. Not now...
“What is it?” Jean said.
“They—they want you back.” On a slave monitor, a pixellated echo of Andrew Goravec played the keypad in its hand.
“No!” Her voice rose, panic stirring the patterns that surrounded her. “Stop them!”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t tell me that! You run everything! You built me, you bastard, you tell me you love me. They only use me! Stop them!”
Stavros blinked against stinging afterimages. “It’s like a light-switch, it’s physical; I can’t stop them from here—”
There was a third image, to go with the other two. Jean Goravec, struggling as the leash, the noose, went around her throat. Jean Goravec, bubbles bursting from her mouth as something dark and so very, very real dragged her back to the bottom of the ocean and buried her there.
The transition was automatic, executed by a series of macros he’d slipped into the system after she’d been born. The body, awakening, pared the mind down to fit. The room monitors caught it all with dispassionate clarity: Jeannie Goravec, troubled child-monster, awakening into hell. Jeannie Goravec, opening eyes that seethed with anger and hatred and despair, eyes that glimmered with a bare fraction of the intelligence she’d had five seconds before.
Enough intelligence for what came next.
The room had been designed to minimize the chance of injury. There was the bed, though, one of its edges built into the east wall.
That was enough.
The speed with which she moved was breathtaking. Kim and Andrew never saw it coming. Their child darted beneath the foot of the bed like a cockroach escaping the light, scrambled along the floor, re-emerged with her cable wrapped around the bed’s leg. Hardly any slack in that line at all, now. Her mother moved then, finally, arms outstretched, confused and still unsuspecting—
“Jeannie—”
—while Jean braced her feet against the edge of
the bed and pushed.
Three times she did it. Three tries, head whipped back against the leash, scalp splitting, the cable ripping from her head in spastic, bloody, bone-cracking increments, blood gushing to the floor, hair and flesh and bone and machinery following close behind. Three times, despite obvious and increasing agony. Each time more determined than before.
And Stavros could only sit and watch, simultaneously stunned and unsurprised by that sheer ferocity. Not bad for a bleeding little lump. Barely even an animal...
It had taken almost twenty seconds overall. Odd that neither parent had tried to stop it. Maybe it was the absolute unexpected shock of it. Maybe Kim and Andrew Goravec, taken so utterly aback, hadn’t had time to think.
Then again, maybe they’d had all the time they’d needed.
Now Andrew Goravec stood dumbly near the center of the room, blinking bloody runnels from his eyes. An obscene rainshadow persisted on the wall behind him, white and spotless; the rest of the surface was crimson. Kim Goravec screamed at the ceiling, a bloody marionette collapsed in her arms. Its strings—string, rather, for a single strand of fiberop carries much more than the required bandwidth—lay on the floor like a gory boomslang, gobbets of flesh and hair quivering at one end.
Jean was back off the leash, according to the panel. Literally now as well as metaphorically. She wasn’t talking to Stavros, though. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was catatonic. He didn’t know which to hope for.
But either way, Jean didn’t live over there any more. All she’d left behind were the echoes and aftermath of a bloody, imperfect death. Contamination, really; the scene of some domestic crime. Stavros cut the links to the room, neatly excising the Goravecs and their slaughterhouse from his life.
He’d send a memo. Some local Terracon lackey could handle the cleanup.
The word peace floated through his mind, but he had no place to put it. He focused on a portrait of Jean, taken when she’d been eight months old. She’d been smiling; a happy and toothless baby smile, still all innocence and wonder.
There’s a way, that infant puppet seemed to say. We can do anything, and nobody has to know—
The Goravecs had just lost their child. Even if they’d wanted the body repaired, the mind reconnected, they wouldn’t get their way. Terracon had made good on all legal obligations, and hell—even normal children commit suicide now and then.
Just as well, really. The Goravecs weren’t fit to raise a hamster, let alone a beautiful girl with a four-digit IQ. But Jean—the real Jean, not that bloody broken pile of flesh and bone—she wasn’t easy or cheap to keep alive, and there would be pressure to free up the processor space once the word got out.
Jean had never got the hang of that particular part of the real world. Contract law. Economics. It was all too arcane and absurd even for her flexible definition of reality. But that was what was going to kill her now, assuming that the mind had survived the trauma of the body. The monster wouldn’t keep a program running if it didn’t have to.
Of course, once Jean was off the leash she lived considerably faster than the real world. And bureaucracies...well, glacial applied sometimes, when they were in a hurry.
Jean’s mind reflected precise simulations of real-world chromosomes, codes none-the-less real for having been built from electrons instead of carbon. She had her own kind of telomeres, which frayed. She had her own kind of synapses, which would wear out. Jean had been built to replace a human child, after all. And human children, eventually, age. They become adults, and then comes a day when they die.
Jean would do all these things, faster than any.
Stavros filed an incident report. He made quite sure to include a pair of facts that contradicted each other, and to leave three mandatory fields unfilled. The report would come back in a week or two, accompanied by demands for clarification. Then he would do it all again.
Freed from her body, and with a healthy increase in her clock-cycle priority, Jean could live a hundred-fifty subjective years in a month or two. And in that whole century and a half, she’d never have to experience another nightmare.
Stavros smiled. It was time to see just what this baby could do, with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.
He just hoped he’d be able to keep her tail-lights in view.
AMBASSADOR
First Contact was supposed to solve everything. That was the rumour, anyway: gentle wizards from Epsilon Eridani were going to save us from the fire and welcome us into a vast Galactic Siblinghood spanning the Milky Way. Whatever diseases we’d failed to conquer, they would cure. Whatever political squabbles we hadn’t outgrown, they would resolve. First Contact was going to fix it all.
It was not supposed to turn me into a hunted animal.
I didn’t dwell much on the philosophical implications, at first; I was too busy running for my life. Zombie streaked headlong into the universe, slaved to a gibbering onboard infested with static. Navigation was a joke. Every blind jump I made reduced the chances of finding my way home by another order of magnitude. I did it anyway, and repeatedly; any jump I didn’t make would kill me.
Once more out of the breach. Long-range put me somewhere in the cometary halo of a modest binary. In better times the computer would have shown me the system’s planetary retinue in an instant; now it would take days to make the necessary measurements.
Not enough time. I could have fixed my position in a day or so using raw starlight even without the onboard, but whatever was after me had never given me the chance. Several times I’d made a start. The longest reprieve had lasted six hours; in that time I’d placed myself somewhere coreward of the Orion spur.
I’d stopped trying. Knowing my location at any moment would put me no further ahead at t+1. I’d be lost again as soon as I jumped.
And I always jumped. It always found me. I still don’t know how; theoretically it’s impossible to track anything through a singularity. But somehow space always opened its mouth and the monster dropped down on me, hungry and mysterious. It might have been easier to deal with if I’d known why.
What did I do, you ask. What did I do to get it so angry? Why, I tried to say hello.
What kind of intelligence could take offence at that?
Imagine a dead tree, three hundred fifty meters tall, with six gnarled branches worming their way from its trunk. Throw it into orbit around a guttering red dwarf that doesn’t even rate a proper name. This is what I’d come upon; there were no ports, no running lights, no symbols on the hull. It hung there like some forgotten chunk of cosmic driftwood. Embers of reflected sunlight glinted occasionally from the surface; they only emphasised the shadows drowning the rest of the structure. I thought it was derelict at first.
Of course I went through the motions anyway. I reached out on all the best wavelengths, tried to make contact a hundred different ways. For hours it ignored me. Then it sent the merest blip along the hydrogen band. I fed it into the onboard.
What else do you do with an alien broadcast?
The onboard had managed one startled hiccough before it crashed. All the stats on my panel had blinked once, in impossible unison, and gone dark.
And then doppler had registered the first incoming missile.
So I’d jumped, blind. There really hadn't been a choice, then or the four times since. Sometime during that panicked flight, I had given my tormentor a name: Kali.
Unless Kali had gotten bored—hope springs eternal, even within puppets such as myself—I’d have to run again in a few hours. In the meantime I aimed Zombie at the binary and put her under thrust. Open space is impossible to hide in; a system, even a potential one, is marginally better.
Of course I’d have to jump long before I got there. It didn’t matter. My reflexes were engineered to perform under all circumstances. Zombie’s autopilot may have been disabled, but mine engaged smoothly.
It takes time to recharge between jumps. So far, it had taken longer for Kali to find me. At some point that was likely to ch
ange; the onboard had to be running again before it did.
I knew there wasn’t a hope in hell.
A little forensic hindsight, here: How exactly did Kali pull it off?
I’m not exactly sure. But some of Zombie ’s diagnostic systems run at the scale of the merely electronic, with no reliance on quantum computation. The crash didn’t affect them; they were able to paint a few broad strokes in the aftermath.
The Trojan signal contained at least one set of spatial co-ordinates. The onboard would have read that as a pointer of some kind: it would have opened the navigation files to see what resided at x-y-z. A conspicuous astronomical feature, perhaps? Some common ground to compare respective visions of time and space?
Zap. Nav files gone.
Once nav was down—or maybe before, I can’t tell—the invading program told Zombie to update all her backups with copies of itself. Only then, with all avenues of recovery contaminated, had it crashed the onboard. Now the whole system was frozen, every probability wave collapsed, every qubit locked into P=1.00.
It was an astonishingly beautiful assault. In the time it had taken me to say hello, Kali had grown so intimate with my ship that she’d been able to seduce it into suicide. Such a feat was beyond my capabilities, far beyond those of the haphazard beasts that built me. I’d have given anything to meet the mind behind the act, if it hadn’t been trying so hard to kill me.
Early in the hunt I’d tried jumping several times in rapid succession, without giving Kali the chance to catch up. I’d nearly bled out the reserves. All for nothing; the alien found me just as quickly, and I’d had barely enough power to escape.
I was still paying for that gamble. It would take two days at sublight for Zombie to recharge fully, and ninety minutes before I could even jump again. Now I didn’t dare jump until the destroyer came for me; I lay in real space and hoarded whatever moments of peace the universe saw fit to grant.
This time the universe granted three and a half hours. Then short-range beeped at me; object ahead. I plugged into Zombie’s cameras and looked forward.
