“I’ll need an EVA pack. Do you know where they keep those? Are they near the airlocks?”
“You’re insane,” Tilly said. “I can’t be part of this.”
“It’s okay,” Anna said. “I’ll be back.”
Chapter Twenty-Five: Holden
“Naomi,” Holden said again. “Come in. Please. Please respond.”
The silent radio felt like a threat. Miller had paused, his face bleak and apologetic. Holden wondered how many other people had looked at that exact expression on Miller’s face. It seemed designed to go with words like There’s been an accident and The DNA matches your son’s. Holden could feel his hands trembling. It didn’t matter.
“Rocinante. Naomi, come in.”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Miller said. “She could be just fine, but the comm array went down. Or maybe she’s busy fixing something.”
“Or maybe she’s dying by centimeters,” Holden said. “I’ve got to go. I have to get back to her.”
Miller shook his head.
“It’s a longer trip back out than it was getting here. You can’t go as fast anymore. By the time you get back, she’ll have figured out whatever needed figuring.”
Or she’ll be dead, Miller didn’t say. Holden wondered what it meant that the protomolecule could put Miller on its hand like a puppet and the detective could still be thoughtful enough to leave out the possibility that everyone on the Roci was gone.
“I have to try.”
Miller sighed. For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs.
“You want to help her? You want to help all of them? Come with me. Now. You run back home, we won’t get to find out what happened. And you may not get the chance to come back here. Plus, you can bet your friends are regrouping back there, and they can still gently rip your arms off if they catch you.”
Holden felt like there were two versions of himself pulling at his mind. Naomi might be hurt. Might be dead. Alex and Amos too. He had to be there for them. But there was also a small, quiet part of himself that knew Miller was right. It was too late.
“You can tell the station that there are people on those ships,” he said. “You can ask it to help them.”
“I can tell a rock that it ought to be secretary-general. Doesn’t mean it’s gonna listen. All this?” Miller waved his hands at the dark walls. “It’s dumb. Utilitarian. No creativity or complex analysis.”
“Really?” Holden said, his curiosity peeking through the panic and anger and fear. “Why not?”
“Some things, it’s better if they’re predictable. No one wants the station coming up with its own bad ideas. We should hurry.”
“Where are we going?” Holden said, pausing for a few deep breaths. He’d been at low g for too long without taking the time for exercise. His cardio had suffered. The dangers of growing rich and lazy.
“I’m going to need you to do something for me,” Miller replied. “I need access to the… shit, I don’t know. Call ’em records.”
Holden finished his panting, then straightened and nodded for Miller to resume their walk. As they moved down the gently sloping corridor he said, “Aren’t you already plugged in?”
“I’m aware. The station is in lockdown, and they didn’t exactly give me the root password. I need you to open it up for me.”
“Not sure what I can do that you can’t,” Holden said. “Other than be a charming dinner guest.”
Miller stopped at another seeming dead end, touched the wall, and a portal irised open. He gestured Holden through, then followed and closed the door behind them. They were in another large chamber, vaguely octagonal and easily fifty meters long on each face. More of the insectile mechs littered the space, but the glass pillars were not in evidence. Instead, at the center of the chamber stood a massive construct of glowing blue metal. It was octagonal, a smaller version of the dimensions of the room, but only a few meters wide on each face. It didn’t glow any brighter than the rest of the room, but Holden could feel something coming off of it, an almost physical pressure that made walking toward it difficult. His suit said that the atmosphere had changed, that it was rich with complex organic chemicals and nitrogen.
“Sometimes, having a body at all means you’ve got a certain level of status. If you aren’t pretty damn trusted, you don’t get to walk around in the fallen world.”
“The fallen world?”
Miller shuddered and leaned his hand out against the wall. It was a profoundly human gesture of distress. The glowing moss of the wall didn’t respond at all. Miller’s lips were beginning to turn black.
“Fallen world. The substrate. Matter.”
“Are you all right?” Holden asked.
Miller nodded, but he looked like he was about to vomit. “There’s time’s I start knowing things that are too big for my head. It’s better in here, but there’re going to be some questions that don’t fit in me. Just thinking with all this crap connected to the back of my head is a full contact sport, and if I get too much, I’m pretty sure they’ll… ah… call it reboot me. I mean, sure, consciousness is an illusion and blah blah blah, but I’d rather not go there if we can help it. I don’t know how much the next one would remember.”
Holden stopped walking, then turned and gave Miller a hard shove. Both of them staggered backward. “You seem pretty real to me.”
Miller held up his finger. “Seem. Good verb. You ever wondered why I leave as soon as anyone else shows up?”
“I’m special?”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Fine,” Holden said. “I’ll bite. Why doesn’t anyone else see you?”
“I’m not sure we’ve got time for this, but…” Miller took off his hat and scratched his head. “So your brain has a hundred billion brain cells and about five hundred trillion synapses.”
“Will this be on the test?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Miller said conversationally, and put his hat back on. “And that shit is custom grown. No two brains are exactly alike. Guess how much processing power it takes to really model even one human brain? More than every human computer ever built put together, and that’s before we even start getting to the crap that goes on inside the cells.”
“Okay.”
“Now picture those synapses as buttons on a keyboard. Five hundred trillion buttons. And say that a brain looking at something and thinking, ‘That’s a flower’ punches a couple billion of those keys in just the right pattern. Except it ain’t near that easy. It isn’t just a flower, it’s a pile of associations. Smells, the way a stem feels in your fingers, the flower you gave your mom once, the flower you gave your girl. A flower you stepped on by accident and it made you sad. And being sad brings on a whole pile of other associations.”
“I get it,” Holden said, holding up his hands in surrender. “It’s complicated.”
“Now picture you need to push exactly the right buttons to make someone think of a person, hear them speaking, remember the clothes they wore and the way they smelled and how they would sometimes take off their hat to scratch their head.”
“Wait,” Holden said. “Are there bits of protomolecule in my brain?”
“Not exactly. You may have noticed I’m non-local.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“Well,” Miller said. “Now you’re asking me to explain microwaves to a monkey.”
“That’s a metaphor I’ve never actually spoken aloud. If you’re aiming for not creeping me the hell out, you need more practice.”
“So, yeah. The most complex simulation in the history of your solar system is running right now so that we can pretend I’m here in the same room with you. The correct response is being flattered. Also, doing what the fuck I need you to do.”
“That would be?”
“Touching that big thing in the middle of the room.”
Holden looked at the construct again, felt the
almost subliminal pressure coming off of it. “Why?”
“Because,” said Miller, lecturing to a stupid child. “The place is in lockdown. It’s not accepting remote connections without a level of authorization I don’t have.”
“And I do?”
“You’re not making a remote connection. You’re actually here. In the substrate. In some quarters, that’s kind of a big deal.”
“But I just walked in here.”
“You had some help. I calmed some of the security down to get you this far.”
“So you let the marines in too?”
“Unlocked is unlocked. C’mon.”
The closer Holden got to the octagon, the harder it was to approach. It wasn’t just fear, though the dread swam at the back of his throat and all down his spine. It was physically difficult, like pushing against a magnetic field.
The shape was chipped at the edges, marked with hair-thin lines in patterns that might have been ideograms or patterns of fungal growth or both. He reached out his hand, and his teeth itched.
“What will happen?” he asked.
“How much do you know about quantum mechanics?”
“How much do you?” Holden replied.
“A lot, turns out,” Miller said with a lopsided grin. “Do now, anyway.”
“I’m not going to burst into flames or something, right?”
Miller gave a small Belter shrug with his hands. “Don’t think so. I’m not up on all the defense systems. But I don’t think so.”
“So,” Holden said. “Maybe?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Holden sighed and started to reach for the surface. He paused. “You didn’t really answer the question, you know.”
“You’re stalling,” Miller said. And then, “Which question was that?”
“I get why no one else sees you. But the real question is ‘why me’ at all? I mean, okay, you’re screwing with my brain and that’s hard work, and if there’s other people for me to interact with it’s too hard and all like that. But why me? Why not Naomi or the UN secretary-general or something?”
Miller nodded, understanding the question. He frowned, sighed.
“Miller kind of liked you. Thought you were a decent guy.”
“That’s it?”
“You need more?”
Holden placed his palm flat against the closest surface. He didn’t burst into flames. Through the gloves of his EVA suit, he felt a short electric tingle and then nothing, because he was floating in space. He tried to scream and failed.
Sorry, a voice said in his head. It sounded like Miller. Didn’t mean to drag you in here. Just try and relax, all right?
Holden tried to nod, but failed at that too. He didn’t have a head.
His sense of his own body had changed, shifted, expanded past anything he’d imagined before. The simple extent of it was numbing. He felt the stars within him, the vast expanses of space contained by him. With a thought, he could pull his attention to a sun surrounded by unfamiliar planets like he was attending to his finger or the back of his neck. The lights all tasted different, smelled different. He wanted to close his eyes against the flood of sensation, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have anything so simple as eyes. He had become immeasurably large, and rich, and strange. Thousands of voices, millions, billions, lifted in chorus and he was their song. And at his center, a place where all the threads of his being came together. He recognized the station not by how it looked, but by the deep throb of its heartbeat. The power of a million suns contained, channeled. Here was the nexus that sat between the worlds, the miracle of knowledge and power that gave him heaven. His Babel.
And a star went out.
It wasn’t especially unique. It wasn’t beautiful. A few voices out of quadrillions went silent, and if the great chorus of his being was lessened by them, it wasn’t perceptible. Still, a ripple passed through him. The colors of his consciousness swirled and darkened. Concern, curiosity, alarm. Even delight. Something new had happened for the first time in millennia.
Another star flickered and failed. Another few voices went silent. Now, slowly and instantly both, everything changed. He felt the great debate raging in him as a fever, an illness. He had been beyond anything like a threat for so long that all the reflexes of survival had weakened, atrophied. Holden felt a fear that he knew belonged to him—the man trapped within the machine—because his larger self couldn’t remember to feel it. The vast parliament swirled, thoughts and opinions, analysis and poetry blending together and breaking apart. It was beautiful as sunlight on oil, and terrifying.
Three suns failed, and now Holden felt himself growing smaller. It was still very little, almost nothing. A white spot on the back of his hand, a sore that wouldn’t heal. The plague was still only a symptom, but it was one his vast self couldn’t ignore.
From the station at his core, he reached out into the places he had been, the darkened systems that were lost to him, and he reached out through the gates with fire. The fallen stars, mere matter now, empty and dead, bloated. Filled their systems in a rage of radiation and heat, sheared the electrons from every atom, and detonated. Their final deaths echoed, and Holden felt a sense of mourning and of peace. The cancer had struck, and been burned away. The loss of the minds that had been would never be redeemed. Mortality had returned from exile, but it had been cleansed with fire.
A hundred stars failed.
What had been a song became a shriek. Holden felt his body shifting against itself, furious as a swarm of bees trapped and dying. In despair, the hundred suns were burned away, the station hurling destruction through the gates as fast as the darkness appeared, but the growing shadow could not be stopped. All through his flesh, stars were going out, voices were falling into silence. Death rode the vacuum, faster than light and implacable.
He felt the decision like a seed crystal giving form to the chaos around it, solid, hard, resolute. Desperation, mourning, and a million farewells, one to the other. The word quarantine came to him, and with the logic of dreams, it carried an unsupportable weight of horror. But within it, like the last voice in Pandora’s box, the promise of reunion. One day, when the solution was found, everything that had been lost would be regained. The gates reopened. The vast mind restored.
The moment of dissolution came, sudden and expected, and Holden blew apart.
He was in darkness. Empty and tiny and lost, waiting for the promise to be fulfilled, waiting for the silent chorus to whisper again that Armageddon had been stopped, that all was not lost. And the silence reigned.
Huh, Miller thought at him. That was weird.
Like being pulled backward through an infinitely long tunnel of light, Holden was returned to his body. For one vertiginous moment he felt too small, like the tiny wrapping of skin and meat would explode trying to contain him.
Then he just felt tired, and sat down on the floor with a thump.
“Okay,” Miller said, rubbing his cheek with an open palm. “I guess that’s a start. Sort of explains everything, sort of nothing. Pain in the ass.”
Holden flopped onto his back. He felt like someone had run him through a shredder and then badly welded him back together. Trying to remember what it felt like to be the size of a galaxy gave him a splitting headache, so he stopped.
“Tell me everything it explains,” he said when he could remember how to speak. Being forced to move moist flaps of meat in order to form the words felt sensual and obscene.
“They quarantined the systems. Shut down the network to stop whatever was capping the locals.”
“So, behind each of those gates is a solar system full of whatever made the protomolecule?”
Miller laughed. Something in the sound of it sent a shiver down Holden’s spine. “That seems pretty fucking unlikely.”
“Why?”
“This station has been waiting for the all-clear signal to open the network back up for about two billion years. If they’d found a solve, they wouldn’t still be waiting. Wha
tever it was, I think it got them all.”
“All of them but you,” Holden said.
“Nah, kid. I’m one of them like the Rocinante is one of you. The Roci’s smart for a machine. It knows a lot about you. It could probably gin up a rough simulation of you if someone told it to. Those things? The ones you felt like? Compared to them, I’m a fancy kind of hand terminal.”
“And the nothing it explains,” Holden said. “You mean what killed them.”
“Well, if we’re gonna be fair, it’s not really nothing,” Miller said, crossing his arms. “We know it ate a galaxy spanning hive consciousness like it was popcorn, so that’s something. And we know it survived a sterilization that was a couple hundred solar systems wide.”
Holden had a powerfully vivid memory of watching the station hurl fire through the ring gates, of the stars on the other side blowing up like balloons, of the gates themselves abandoned to the fire and disappearing. Even just the echo of it nearly blinded him with remembered pain. “Seriously, did they blow up those stars to stop it?”
Holden’s image of Miller patted the column at the center of the room, though he knew now that Miller wasn’t really touching it. Something was pressing the right buttons on his synaptic keyboard to make him think Miller was.
“Yup. Autoclaved the whole joint. Fed a bunch of extra energy in and popped ’em like balloons.”
“They can’t still do that, though, right? I mean, if the things that ran this are all gone, no one to pull that trigger. It won’t do that to us.”
Miller’s grim smile chilled Holden’s blood. “I keep telling you. This station is in war mode, kid. It’s playing for keeps.”
“Is there a way we can make it feel better about things?”
“Sure. Now I’m in here, I can take off the lockdown,” Miller said, “but you’re going to have to—”
Miller vanished.
“To what?” Holden shouted. “I’m going to have to what?”
From behind came an electronically amplified voice. “James Holden, by authority of the Martian Congressional Republic, you are placed under arrest. Get down on your knees and place your hands on your head. Any attempt to resist will be met with lethal response.”
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