by Peter Watts
“You’ll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here.”
“Oh, right. Trust. The very fucking foundation of this mission!”
The chimp says nothing.
“For the sake of argument,” I say, after a while, “suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?”
“A favor,” the chimp replies. “To be repaid in future.”
My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.
• • •
WE SLEEP. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps toward us in the stop-motion increments of a life’s moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling one another into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer.
And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works and what doesn’t. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.
But I believe in the Island, because I don’t have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind-boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can’t help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.
I believe in the Island. I’ve gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.
I may yet.
In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.
• • •
FINAL APPROACH.
Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerizing infinite regress of bull’s-eyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.
Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair—if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—we will be dead. Before we know it.
Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically displaced mass.
I turn to the drone’s-eye view relayed from up ahead. It’s a window into history—even now, there’s a time-lag of several minutes—but past and present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, reenlist them for the next build—but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it’s cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.
A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.
At least we’ve spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?
I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds.
Angels do not speak to ants.
Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past anymore; I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.
Tactical beeps at us.
“Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank-you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?
But—
“It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.
Two minutes.
“Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”
“We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.
“Still in front of us! Look at the sun!”
“Look at the signal,” I tell him.
Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost—random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky. It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.
The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.
I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.
• • •
“MAYBE WE’RE MISSING SOMETHING,” Dix says.
“We miss almost everything,” I tell him.
DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.
So far, though, nothing’s come out.
“Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”
Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.
I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…
I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.
“Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”
“Maybe didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”
Why would you think that? I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.
My son is trying to comfort me.
I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world wher
e life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.
But I’m better now.
It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.
I still have so much to learn.
At least my son is here to teach me. ■
Hotshot
Sunflower #2
YOU DO UNDERSTAND: IT HAS TO BE YOUR CHOICE.
They never stopped telling me I was free to back out. They told me while they were still wrangling asteroids out past Mars; told me again as they chewed through those rocks like steel termites, bored out caverns and tunnels, layered in forests and holds and life-support systems rated for a longer operational lifespan than the sun itself. They really laid it on after that L4 fiasco, when the singularity got loose during testing. Not a whisper of cancelling the project — even though the magic upon which the whole thing rested had just eaten half the factory floor and a quarter of the propulsion team — but in the wake of that tragedy UNDA seemed to think it especially important to remind us of the exits.
It’s your decision. No one can make it for you.
I laughed in their faces, once I was old enough to understand the irony. I’d been trained and tweaked for the mission since before I’d even been born; they’d groomed my parents as carefully as they were grooming me. Thirty years before I was even conceived, I was already bound for the stars. I was built to want them; I didn’t know any other way to be.
Still. We’re a civilized society, yes? You don’t draft people against their will, even if the very concept of ‘will’ has been a laughingstock for the better part of a century now. They give me no end of opportunity to back out now because there will be no opportunity to back out later, and later covers so very much more time for regrets. Once Eriophora sails, there will be no coming back.
It has to be my decision. It’s the only way they won’t have blood on their hands.
And yet, after everything — after eighteen years of indoctrination and rebellion, almost two decades spent fighting and embracing the same fate — when they held that mutual escape hatch open one last time, I don’t think they were expecting the answer they got.
Are you absolutely sure?
“Give me a couple of months,” I said. “I’ll get back to you.”
• • •
BUILT FOR THE stars, maybe. Built to revel in solitude, all those Pleistocene social circuits tamed and trimmed and winnowed down to nubs: born of the tribe, but built to leave it behind without so much as a backward glance. By design there’s only a handful of people I can really miss, and they’ll be shipping out at my side.
Not shipping in, though. I’ll be taking this particular ride on my own. A short hop, not even the blink of an eye next to the voyage on the horizon. And yet for some reason I still feel the urge to say goodbye.
I barely catch the outbound shuttle. I spend the trip running scenarios — what I’ll say, what he will, how best to meet point with counterpoint — as the range ticks down and the Moon shrinks to stern and the rosette spreads across my viewspace like God’s own juggling act. Mountains in space. Jagged worldlets of nickel and iron and raw bleeding basalt, surface features rotating in and out of view with slow ponderous majesty: loading bays and docking ports; city-sized thrusters, built for a few short hours of glorious high-thrust incandescence; a great toothless maw at the front of each ship, a throat to swallow the tame singularities that will draw us forward once the thrusters go cold and dead.
Araneus passes to port, a cliff face almost close enough to touch. Mastophora passes to starboard. Eriophora doesn’t pass: she grows in front of us, her craggy grey face blotting out the stars.
We dock.
I ask the Chimp for Kai’s location: it feeds a translucent map through my local link and lights a spark in the woods. I find him there in the dark, a shadow in twilight, almost floating in the feeble gravity: half-lit by a dim blue-shifted galaxy of bioluminescent plant life.
He nods at my approach but he doesn’t turn. “Sixty percent productivity. We could leave right now if we had to. Never run out of O2.”
“Man does not live on air alone,” I remind him. He doesn’t disagree, though he must know what I’m leading up to.
We sit without speaking for a while, lost in a forest of branching skeletal arms and spindly fingers and gourds set faintly aglow with the waste light of symbiotic bacteria. I’ve been able to rattle off the volumes and the lumens and the metabolic rates since I was seven, but on some level my gut still refuses to believe that this dim subterranean ecosystem could possibly keep us going for even a week, much less unto the end of time. Photosynthesis under starlight. That’s all this is. Barely enough for an ant.
Of course, ants don’t get to amortize their oxygen. Starlight will do when you only breathe a week out of a thousand years.
“So,” Kai says. “Fun in the Sun.”
“Yeah.”
“Three months. A hundred fifty million klicks. For a parlor trick.”
“Two, tops. Depending on the cycle. And it’s more than that, you know it’s more.”
He shakes his head. “What are you trying to prove, Sunday?”
“That they’re right. That I can quit if I want to.”
“You’ve been trying to prove that your whole life. You could’ve quit a million times. The fact is you don’t want to.”
“It’s not about what I want,” I insist. “It’s about what happens if I don’t.” And I realize, You’re afraid this mad scheme will work. You’re afraid that this might be the time I really go through with it.
His silhouette shifts beside me. The light of a nearby photophore washes across his cheekbone. “Sometimes the bodies just start — acting out, you know. The people inside can’t even tell you why. They say it’s like being possessed. Alien body syndrome.” He snorts softly. “Free will my ass. It’s the exact opposite.”
“This isn’t TMS. It’s—”
“You go in one side and something else comes out the other and what does it prove? Assuming anything comes out the other side,” he adds, piling on the scenarios. “Assuming the ship doesn’t blow up.”
“Come on. How long do you think they’d be in business if they were peddling suicide missions?”
“They haven’t been in business that long. We sold them the drive what, six years ago? And they must’ve spent at least a year torquing it into shapes it was never designed for—”
I say: “This is exactly why I’m going.”
He looks at me.
“How did you even know?” I ask him. “I never told you what I had in mind. Maybe I mentioned being curious once or twice, back when they bought the prototype. And now I come over here and you’ve already got all your arguments lined up. What’s worse, I knew you would.” I shake my head. “It doesn’t bother you we’re so predictable?”
“So you scramble your brain, and you’re a cipher for a while, and that buys you what exactly? You think shuffling a deck of cards gives it free will?” Kai shakes his head. “Nobody’s believed that shit for a hundred years. Until someone comes up with a neuron that fires without being poked, we’re all just — reacting.”
“That’s your solution? We’re all just deterministic systems so we might as well let them pull our strings?”
He shrugs. “They’ve got strings too.”
“And even if all it does is shuffle the deck, what’s wrong with just being unpredictable for a change?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I just don’t think you should ba
se the single most important decision of your life on a dice roll.”
I’m scared, Kai, is what I want to say. I’m scared by the thought of a life lived in such thin slices, each one lightyears further from home, each one centuries closer to heat death. I do want it, I want it as much as you do but it frightens me, and what frightens me even more is that I can feel this way at all. Didn’t they build me better than this? Aren’t I supposed to be immune to doubt? What else did they get wrong?
“Think of it as—” I shrug. “I dunno, a line item on the preflight checklist. Somewhere between synch displacement field and pack toothbrush. Purely routine. What could go wrong?”
Somehow Kai’s silhouette conveys a grimace. “Other than being vaporized when you fall into the sun? Or is that—”
—the whole point? He doesn’t finish but I can tell from the sudden tilt of his head that he’s looking down at my wrists. Wondering if this isn’t just some elaborate way of getting out from under so I can try it again, without interference…
“You know better than that.” I lean forward and kiss him on the cheek, and he doesn’t pull away; I call it a win. “The Sun’ll die long before we do.
“We’re gonna outlive the whole damn galaxy.”
• • •
UNITED NATIONS DIASPORA AUTHORITY DEPT. CREW PSYCHOLOGY
Post-Incident Interview Transcript
TS Tag: EC01-2113:03:24-1043
Nature of Incident: Agonistic physical encounter.
Subject: S. Ahzmundin; ass. Eriophora , F, Age 7 (chron), 13 (dev)
Interviewer: M. Sawada, DPC
surv/biotel: YZZ-284-C04
Psych commentary: YZZ-284-D11
M. Sawada: Two fractured ribs and a broken nose. Not to mention the black eye.
S. Ahzmundin: Didn’t see that coming, did you? Think you got everything figured out for the next ten million years and you can’t even tell what a little kid is gonna do five minutes from now.
MS: Why did you attack Kai, Sunday?
