by Peter Watts
"Keeton!" Bates snapped, sailing through the hatch. "You okay?"
The chemlight shone from her forehead. It turned the interior of the spine into a high-contrast mosaic, all pale surfaces and sharp moving shadows. It spilled across the grunt that had killed Sarasti; the robot bounced down the spine, suddenly, mysteriously inert. The light washed across Sarasti's body. The corpse turned slowly on its axis. Spherical crimson beads emerged from its head like drops of water from a leaky faucet. They spread in a winding, widening trail, spot-lit by Bates' headlamp: a spiral arm of dark ruby suns.
I backed away. "You—"
She pushed me to one side. "Stay clear of the hatch, unless you're going through." Her eyes were fixed on the ranked drones. "Optical line of sight."
Rows of glassy eyes reflected back at us down the passageway, passing in and out of shadow.
"You killed Sarasti!"
"No."
"But—"
"Who do you think shut it down, Keeton? The fucker went rogue. I could barely even get it to self-destruct." Her eyes went briefly deep-focus; all down the spine the surviving drones launched into some intricate martial ballet, half-seen in the shifting cone of her headlamp.
"Better," Bates said. "They should stay in line now. Assuming we don't get hit with anything too much stronger."
"What is hitting us?"
"Lightning. EMP." Drones sailed down to Fab and the shuttles, taking strategic positions along the tube. "Rorschach's putting out one hell of a charge and every time one those skimmers pass between us they arc."
"What, at this range? I thought we were—the burn—"
"Sent us in the wrong direction. We're inbound."
Three grunts floated close enough to touch. They drew beads on the open drum hatch.
"She said she was trying to escape—" I remembered.
"She fucked up."
"Not by that much. She couldn't have." We were all rated for manual piloting. Just in case.
"Not the Gang," Bates said.
"But—"
"I think there's someone new in there now. Bunch of submodules wired together and woke up somehow, I don't know. But whatever's in charge, I think it's just panicking."
Stuttering brightness on all sides. The spinal lightstrips flickered and finally held steady, at half their usual brightness.
Theseus coughed static and spoke: "ConSensus is offline. Reac—"
The voice faded.
ConSensus, I remembered as Bates turned to head back upstream.
"I saw something," I said. "Before ConSensus went out."
"Yeah."
"Was that—"
She paused at the hatch. "Yeah."
I'd seen scramblers. Hundreds of them, sailing naked through the void, their arms spread wide.
Some of their arms, anyway. "They were carrying—"
Bates nodded. "Weapons." Her eyes flickered to some unseen distance for a moment. "First wave headed for the front end. Blister and forward lock, I think. Second wave's aft." She shook her head. "Huh. I would have done it the other way around."
"How far?"
"Far?" Bates smiled faintly. "They're already on the hull, Siri. We're engaging."
"What do I do? What do I do?"
Her eyes stared past me, and widened. She opened her mouth.
A hand clamped on my shoulder from behind and spun me around.
Sarasti. His dead eyes stared from a skull split like a spiked melon. Globules of coagulating blood clung to his hair and skin like engorged ticks.
"Go with him," Bates said.
Sarasti grunted and clicked. There were no words.
"What—" I began.
"Now. That's an order." Bates turned back to the hatch. "We'll cover you."
The shuttle. "You too."
"No."
"Why not? They can fight better without you, you said that yourself! What's the point?"
"Can't leave yourself a back door, Keeton. Defeats the whole purpose." She allowed herself a small, sad smile. "They've breached. Go."
She was gone, fresh alarms rising in her wake. Far towards the bow I heard the crinkle of emergency bulkheads snapping shut.
Sarasti's undead carcass gurgled and pushed me down the spine. Four more grunts slid smoothly past and took up position behind us. I looked over my shoulder in time to see the vampire pull the handpad from the wall. But it wasn't Sarasti at all, of course. It was the Captain—whatever was left of the Captain, this far into the fight—commandeering a peripheral interface for its own use. The optical port sprouted conspicuously from the back of Sarasti's neck, where the cable used to go in; I remembered the drone's maxillipeds, chewing.
The sound of weapons fire and ricochets rose behind us.
The corpse typed one-handed as we moved. I wondered briefly why it just didn't talk before my gaze flickered back to the spike in his brain: Sarasti's speech centers must be mush.
"Why did you kill him?" I said. A whole new alarm started up, way back in the drum. A sudden breeze tugged me backward for a moment, dissipated in the next second with a distant clang.
The corpse held out the handpad, configured for keys and a text display: Seizng. Cldnt cntrl.
We were at the shuttle locks. Robot soldiers let us pass, their attention elsewhere.
U go, the Captain said.
Someone screamed in the distance. Way off up the spine, the drum hatch slammed shut; I turned and saw a pair of distant grunts welding the seal. They seemed to move faster now than they ever had before. Maybe it was only my imagination.
The starboard shuttle lock slid back. Charybdis' interior lights winked on, spilling brightness into the passageway; the spine's emergency lighting seemed even dimmer in contrast. I peered through the opening. There was almost no cabin space left—just a single open coffin jammed between coolant and fuel tanks and massive retrofitted shockpads. Charybdis had been refitted for high-G and long distance.
And me.
Sarasti's corpse urged me on from behind. I turned and faced it.
"Was it ever him?" I asked.
Go.
"Tell me. Did he ever speak for himself? Did he decide anything on his own? Were we ever following his orders, or was it just you all along?"
Sarasti's undead eyes stared glassy and uncomprehending. His fingers jerked on the handpad.
U dislke ordrs frm mchnes. Happier ths way.
I let it strap me in and close the lid. I lay there in the dark, feeling my body lurch and sway as the shuttle slid into its launch slot. I withstood the sudden silence as the docking clamps let go, the jerk of acceleration that spat me hard into the vacuum, the ongoing thrust that pushed against my chest like a soft mountain. Around me the shuttle trembled in the throes of a burn that far exceeded its normative specs.
My inlays came back online. Suddenly I could see outside if I wanted. I could see what was happening behind me.
I chose not to, deliberately and fervently, and looked anyway.
Theseus was dwindling by then, even on tactical. She listed down the well, wobbling toward some enemy rendezvous that must have been intentional, some last-second maneuver to get her payload as close to target as possible. Rorschach rose to meet her, its gnarled spiky arms uncoiling, spreading as if in anticipation of an embrace. But it was the backdrop, not the players, that stole the tableau: the face of Big Ben roiling in my rearview, a seething cyclonic backdrop filling the window. Magnetic contours wound spring-tight on the overlay; Rorschach was drawing all of Ben's magnetosphere around itself like a bright swirling cloak, twisting it into a concentrated knot that grew and brightened and bulged outward...
Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, my commander had said once, but we should see anything big enough to generate that effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact.
As, in fact, it had been. An impact splash perhaps, or the bright brief bellow of some great energy source rebooting after a million years of dormancy. Much like this one: a
solar flare, with no sun beneath it. A magnetic cannon ten thousand times stronger than nature gave it any right to be.
Both sides drew their weapons. I don't know which fired first, or even if it mattered: how many tonnes of antimatter would it take to match something that could squeeze the power of a sun from a gas ball barely wider than Jupiter? Was Rorschach also resigned to defeat, had each side opted for a kamikaze strike on the other?
I don't know. Big Ben got in the way just minutes before the explosion. That's probably why I'm still alive. Ben stood between me and that burning light like a coin held against the sun.
Theseus sent everything it could, until the last microsecond. Every recorded moment of hand-to-hand combat, every last countdown, every last soul. All the moves and all the vectors. I have that telemetry. I can break it down into any number of shapes, continuous or discrete. I can transform the topology, rotate it and compress it and serve it up in dialects that any ally might be able to use. Perhaps Sarasti was right, perhaps some of it is vital.
I don't know what any of it means.
* * *
Charybdis
"Species used to go extinct. Now they go on hiatus."
—Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction
"You poor guy," Chelsea said as we went our separate ways. "Sometimes I don't think you'll ever be lonely." At the time I wondered why she sounded so sad.
Now, I only wish she'd been right.
I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades. I live for only an hour of every ten thousand now, you see. I wish I didn't have to. If only I could sleep the whole way back, avoid the agony of these brief time-lapsed resurrections.
If only I wouldn't die in my sleep if I tried. But living bodies glitter with a lifetime's accumulation of embedded radioisotopes, brilliant little shards that degrade cellular machinery at the molecular level. It's not usually a problem. Living cells repair the damage as fast as it occurs. But my undead ones let those errors accumulate over time, and the journey home takes so much longer than the trip out: I lie in stasis and corrode. So the onboard kick-starts me every now and then to give my flesh the chance to stitch itself back together.
Occasionally it talks to me, recites system stats, updates me on any chatter from back home. Mostly, though, it leaves me alone with my thoughts and the machinery ticking away where my left hemisphere used to be. So I talk to myself, dictate history and opinion from real hemisphere to synthetic one: bright brief moments of awareness, long years of oblivious decay between. Maybe the whole exercise is pointless from the start, maybe no one's even listening.
It doesn't matter. This is what I do.
So there you have it: a memoir told from meat to machinery. A tale told to myself, for lack of someone else to take an interest.
Anyone with half a brain could tell it.
*
I got a letter from Dad today. General delivery, he called it. I think that was a joke, in deference to my lack of known address. He just threw it omnidirectionally into the ether and hoped it would wash over me, wherever I was.
It's been almost fourteen years now. You lose track of such things out here.
Helen's dead. Heaven—malfunctioned, apparently. Or was sabotaged. Maybe the Realists finally pulled it off. I doubt it, though. Dad seemed to think someone else was responsible. He didn't offer up any details. Maybe he didn't know any. He spoke uneasily of increasing unrest back home. Maybe someone leaked my communiqués about Rorschach; maybe people drew the obvious conclusion when our postcards stopped arriving. They don't know how the story ended. The lack of closure must be driving them crazy.
But I got the sense there was something else, something my father didn't dare speak aloud. Maybe it's just my imagination; I thought he even sounded troubled by the news that the birth rate was rising again, which should be cause for celebration after a generation in decline. If my Chinese Room was still in proper working order I'd know, I'd be able to parse it down to the punctuation. But Sarasti battered my tools and left them barely functional. I'm as blind now as any baseline. All I have is uncertainty and suspicion, and the creeping dread that even with my best tricks in tatters, I might be reading him right.
I think he's warning me to stay away.
*
He also said he loved me. He said he missed Helen, that she was sorry for something she did before I was born, some indulgence or omission that carried developmental consequences. He rambled. I don't know what he was talking about. So much power my father must have had, to be able to authorize such a broadcast and yet waste so much of it on feelings.
Oh God, how I treasure it. I treasure every word.
*
I fall along an endless futile parabola, all gravity and inertia. Charybdis couldn't reacquire the antimatter stream; Icarus has either been knocked out of alignment or shut off entirely. I suppose I could radio ahead and ask, but there's no hurry. I'm still a long way out. It will be years before I even leave the comets behind.
Besides, I'm not sure I want anyone to know where I am.
Charybdis doesn't bother with evasive maneuvers. There'd be no point even if it had the fuel to spare, even if the enemy's still out there somewhere. It's not as though they don't know where Earth is.
But I'm pretty sure the scramblers went up along with my own kin. They played well. I admit it freely. Or maybe they just got lucky. An accidental hiccough tickles Bates' grunt into firing on an unarmed scrambler; weeks later, Stretch & Clench use that body in the course of their escape. Electricity and magnetism stir random neurons in Susan's head; further down the timeline a whole new persona erupts to take control, to send Theseus diving into Rorschach's waiting arms. Blind stupid random chance. Maybe that's all it was.
But I don't think so. Too many lucky coincidences. I think Rorschach made its own luck, planted and watered that new persona right under our noses, safely hidden—but for the merest trace of elevated oxytocin— behind all the lesions and tumors sewn in Susan's head. I think it looked ahead and saw the uses to which a decoy might be put; I think it sacrificed a little piece of itself in furtherance of that end, and made it look like an accident. Blind maybe, but not luck. Foresight. Brilliant moves, and subtle.
Not that most of us even knew the rules of the game, of course. We were just pawns, really. Sarasti and the Captain—whatever hybridized intelligence those two formed—they were the real players. Looking back, I can see a few of their moves too. I see Theseus hearing the scramblers tap back and forth in their cages; I see her tweak the volume on the Gang's feed so that Susan hears it too, and thinks the discovery her own. If I squint hard enough, I even glimpse Theseus offering us up in sacrifice, deliberately provoking Rorschach to retaliation with that final approach. Sarasti was always enamored of data, especially when it had tactical significance. What better way to assess one's enemy than to observe it in combat?
They never told us, of course. We were happier that way. We disliked orders from machines. Not that we were all that crazy about taking them from a vampire.
And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all. If the scramblers follow the rules that a few generations of game theorists have laid out for them, they won't be back. Even if they are, I suspect it won't make any difference.
Because by then, there won't be any basis for conflict.
I've been listening to the radio during these intermittent awakenings. It's been generations since we buried the Broadcast Age in tightbeams and fiberop, but we never completely stopped sowing EM throughout the heavens. Earth, Mars, and Luna conduct their interplanetary trialog in a million overlapping voices. Every ship cruising the void speaks in all directions at once. The O'Neils and the asteroids never stopped singing. The Fireflies might never have found us if they had.
I've heard those songs changing over time, a fast-forward time-lapse into oblivion. Now it's mostly traff
ic control and telemetry. Every now and then I still hear a burst of pure voice, tight with tension, just short of outright panic more often than not: some sort of pursuit in progress, a ship making the plunge into deep space, other ships in dispassionate pursuit. The fugitives never seem to get very far before their signals are cut off.
I can't remember the last time I heard music but I hear something like it sometimes, eerie and discordant, full of familiar clicks and pops. My brainstem doesn't like it. It scares my brainstem to death.
I remember my whole generation abandoning the real world for a bootstrapped Afterlife. I remember someone saying Vampires don't go to Heaven. They see the pixels. Sometimes I wonder how I'd feel, brought back from the peace of the grave to toil at the pleasure of simpleminded creatures who had once been no more than protein. I wonder how I'd feel if my disability had been used to keep me leashed and denied my rightful place in the world.
And then I wonder what it would be like to feel nothing at all, to be an utterly rational, predatory creature with meat putting itself so eagerly to sleep on all sides...
*
I can't miss Jukka Sarasti. God knows I try, every time I come online. He saved my life. He — humanized me. I'll always owe him for that, for however long I live; and for however long I live I'll never stop hating him for the same reason. In some sick surrealistic way I had more in common with Sarasti than I did with any human.
But I just don't have it in me. He was a predator and I was prey, and it's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion. Though he died for our sins, I cannot miss Jukka Sarasti.
I can empathize with him, though. At long long last I can empathise, with Sarasti, with all his extinct kind. Because we humans were never meant to inherit the Earth. Vampires were. They must have been sentient to some degree, but that semi-aware dream state would have been a rudimentary thing next to our own self-obsession. They were weeding it out. It was just a phase. They were on their way.
