Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  “What?”

  “Electrons on the outside, positive ions on the inside. Self-organizing membranes. Live ball lightning. Although I don’t know what they’d use as a rep code. Some kind of quantum spin liquid, maybe.” He shrugs. “The guys who discovered these things didn’t have much to say about heredity.”

  He’s talking about primitive experiments with gas and electricity, back in some prehistoric lab from the days before we launched (I know: Chimp fed me the archive file the moment Hakim accessed it). “We’re the guys who discovered them,” I point out; the things that clawed at our doorstep were lightyears beyond anything those cavemen ever put together.

  “No we didn’t.”

  I wait.

  “They discovered us,” he tells me.

  I feel a half-smile pulling at the corner of my mouth.

  “I keep thinking about the odds,” Hakim says. “A system that looks so right from a distance and turns out to be so wrong after we’ve committed to the flyby. All that mass and all those potential trajectories, and somehow the only way out is through the goddamn star. Oh, and there’s one convenient ice giant that just happens to be going our way. Any idea what those odds are?”

  “Astronomical.” I keep a straight face.

  He shakes his head. “Infinitesimal.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I admit.

  Hakim gives me a sharp glance. “Have you now.”

  “The way the whole system seemed primed to draw us into the star. The way that thing reached down to grab us once we were inside. Your lightning bugs: I don’t think they were native to the planet at all, not if they were plasma-based.”

  “You think they were from the star.”

  I shrug.

  “Star aliens,” Hakim says.

  “Or drones of some kind. Either way, you’re right; this system didn’t just happen. It was a sampling transect. A trapline.”

  “Which makes us what, exactly? Specimens? Pets? Hunting trophies?”

  “Almost. Maybe. Who knows?”

  “Maybe buddies, hmm?”

  I glance up at the sudden edge in his voice.

  “Maybe just allies,” he muses. “In adversity. Because it’s all for one against the common enemy, right?”

  “That’s generally good strategy.” It felt good, too, not being the bad guy for a change. Being the guy who actually pulled asses out of the fire.

  I’ll settle for allies.

  “Because I can see a couple of other coincidences, if I squint.” He’s not squinting, though. He’s staring straight through me. “Like the way the Chimp happened to pair me up with the one person on the whole roster I’d just as soon chuck out an airlock.”

  “That’s hardly a coincidence,” I snort. “It’d be next to impossible to find someone who didn’t—”

  Oh.

  The accusation hangs in the air like static electricity. Hakim waits for my defense.

  “You think the Chimp used this situation to—”

  “Used,” he says, “or invented.”

  “That’s insane. You saw it with your own eyes, you can still see—”

  “I saw models in a tank. I saw pixels on bulkheads. I never threw on a suit to go see for myself. You’d have to be suicidal, right?”

  He’s actually smiling.

  “They tried to break in,” I remind him.

  “Oh, I know something was pounding on the door. I’m just not sold on the idea that it was built by aliens.”

  “You think this whole thing was some kind of trick?” I shake my head in disbelief. “We’ll have surface access in a couple of weeks. Hell, just cut a hole into Fab right now, crawl out through one of the service tunnels. See for yourself.”

  “See what? A star off the stern?” He shrugs. “Red giants are common as dirt. Doesn’t mean the specs on this system were anywhere near as restrictive as Chimp says. Doesn’t mean we had to go through, doesn’t even mean we did. For all I know the Chimp had its bots strafing the hull with lasers and blowtorches for the past hundred years, slagging things down to look nice and convincing just in case I did pop out for a look-see.” Hakim shakes his head. “All I know is, it’s only had one meat sack in its corner since the mutiny, and he’s not much good if no one will talk to him. But how can you keep hating someone after he’s saved your life?”

  It astonishes me, the degree to which people torture reason. Just to protect their precious preconceptions.

  “The weird thing,” Hakim adds, almost to himself, “is that it worked.”

  It takes a moment for that to sink in.

  “Because I don’t think you were in on it,” he explains. “I don’t think you had a clue. How could you? You’re not even a whole person, you’re just a—a glorified subroutine. And subroutines don’t question their inputs. A thought pops into your head, you just assume it’s yours. You believe everything that miserable piece of hardware tells you, because you don’t have a choice. Maybe you never did.

  “How can I hate you for that?” he asks.

  I don’t answer, so he does: “I can’t. Not any more. I can only—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I say, and turn my back.

  He leaves me then, leaves me surrounded by all these pixels and pictures he refuses to accept. He heads back to the crypt to join his friends. The sleeping dead. The weak links. Every last one of them would scuttle the mission, given half a chance.

  If it was up to me none of them would ever wake up again. But Chimp reminds me of the obvious: a mission built for aeons, the impossibility of anticipating even a fraction of the obstacles we’re bound to encounter. The need for flexibility, for the wet sloppy intelligence that long-dead engineers excluded from his architecture in the name of mission stability. Billions of years ahead of us, perhaps, and only a few thousand meat sacks to deal with the unexpected. There may not be enough of us as it is.

  And yet, with all that vaunted human intellect, Hakim can’t see the obvious. None of them can. I’m not even human to those humans. A subroutine, he says. A lobe in something else’s brain. But I don’t need his fucking pity. He’d realize that if he thought about it for more than a split-second, if he was willing to examine that mountain of unexamined assumptions he calls a worldview.

  He won’t, though. He refuses to look into the mirror long enough to see what’s looking back. He can’t even tell the difference between brain and brawn. The Chimp drives the ship; the Chimp builds the jump gates; the Chimp runs life support. We try to take the reins of our own destiny and it’s the Chimp who hammers us down.

  So the Chimp is in control. The Chimp is always in control; and when minds merge across this high-bandwidth link in my head, surely it will be the mech that absorbs the meat.

  It astonishes me that he can’t see the fallacy. He knows the Chimp’s synapse count as well as I do, but he’d rather fall back on prejudice than run the numbers.

  I’m not the Chimp’s subroutine at all.

  The Chimp is mine. ■

  The Colonel

  THE INSURGENTS ARE ALREADY VECTORING in from the east when the flag goes up. By the time the Colonel’s back in the game—processed the intel, found a vantage point, grabbed the nearest network specialist out of bed and plunked her down at the board—they’ve got the compound surrounded. Rainforest hides them from baseline vision but the Colonel’s borrowed eyes see well into the infrared. From half a world away, he tracks each fuzzy heatprint filtering up through the impoverished canopy.

  One of the few good things about the decimation of Ecuador’s wildlife: not much chance, these days, of mistaking a guerrilla for a jaguar.

  “I make thirteen,” the Lieutenant says, tallying blobs of false color on the display.

  A welter of tanks and towers in the middle of a clear-cut. A massive umbilical, studded with paired lifting surfaces along its length, sags gently into the sky from the pump station at its heart. Eight kilometers further west—and twenty more, straight up—an aerostat wallows at the end
of the line like a great bloated tick, vomiting sulfates into the stratosphere.

  There’s a fence around the compound of course, old-fashioned chain-link with razorwire frosting, not so much a barrier as a nostalgic reminder of simpler times. There’s a ring of scorched earth ten meters wide between fence and forest, another eighty from fence to factory. There are defenses guarding the perimeter.

  “Can we access the on-site security?” He tried—unsuccessfully—before the Lieutenant arrived, but she’s the specialist.

  She shakes her head. “It’s self-contained. No fiber in, no phone to answer. Doesn’t even transmit unless it’s already under attack. Only way to access the code is to actually go out there. Pretty much hack-proof.”

  So they’re stuck looking down from geostat. “Can you show me the ranges at least? Ground measures only.”

  “Sure. That’s just blueprint stuff.” A schematic blooms across the Lieutenant’s board, scaled and overlaid onto the real time. Translucent lemon pie-slices fan out from various points around the edge of the facility, an overlapping hot zone extending to the fence and a little beyond. The guns are all pointed out, though. Anybody who makes it to the hole in the donut is home free.

  The heatprints enter the clearing; the Lieutenant collapses the palette down to visible light.

  “Huh,” the Colonel says.

  The insurgents have not stepped into view. They didn’t walk or run. They’re—scuttling, for want of a better word. Crawling. Squirming arrhythmically. They remind the Colonel of crabs afflicted with some kind of neurological disorder, flipped onto their backs and trying to right themselves. Each pushes a small bedroll along the ground.

  “What the fuck,” the Lieutenant murmurs.

  The insurgents are slathered head-to-toe in some kind of brownish paste. Mud idols in cargo shorts. Two pairs have linked up like wrestling sloths, like conjoined twins fused gut-to-back. They lurch and roll to the foot of the fence.

  The station’s defenses are not firing.

  Not bedrolls: mats, roughly woven, natural fiber from the look of it. The insurgents unroll them at the fence, throw them up over the razorwire to ensure safe passage during the climb.

  The Lieutenant glances up. “They networked yet?”

  “Can’t be. It’d trip the alarms.”

  “Why haven’t they tripped the alarms already? They’re right there.” She frowns. “Maybe they disabled security somehow.”

  The insurgents are inside the perimeter.

  “Your hack-proof security?” The Colonel shakes his head. “No, if they’d taken out the guns they’d just—shit.”

  “What?”

  Insulative mud, judiciously applied to reshape the thermal profile. No hardware, no alloys or synthetics to give the game away. Interlocked bodies, contortionist poses: how would those shapes profile at ground level? What would the security cameras see, looking out across—

  “Wildlife. They’re impersonating wildlife.” Jaguars and guerillas, my ass …

  “What?”

  “It’s a legacy loophole, don’t you—” But of course she doesn’t. Too young to remember Ecuador’s once-proud tradition of protecting its charismatic megafauna. Not even born when that herd of peccaries and Greenpeacers got mowed down by an overeager pillbox programmed to defend the local airstrip. Wouldn’t know about the safeguards since legislated into every automated targeting system in the country, long-since forgotten for want of any wildlife left to protect.

  So much for on-site security. The insurgents will be smart enough to hold off on coalescing until they’re beyond any local firing solution. “How long before the drones arrive?”

  The Lieutenant dips into her own head, checks a feed. “Seventeen minutes.”

  “We have to assume they’ll have completed their mission before then.”

  “Yes sir, but—what mission? What are they gonna do, scratch the paint with their fingernails?”

  He doesn’t know. His source didn’t know. The insurgents themselves probably don’t know, won’t know until they network; you could snatch one off the ground this very instant, read the voxels right off her brain, get no joy at all.

  That’s the scary thing about hive minds. Their plans are too big to fit into any one piece.

  He shakes his head. “So we can’t access the guns. What about normal station operations?”

  “Sure. Stations have to talk to each other to keep the injection rates balanced.”

  The insurgents are halfway to the scrubbers. It’s astonishing that such quick headway could emerge from such graceless convulsion.

  “Get us in.”

  A wave of stars ignites across the schematic, right to left: switches, valves, a myriad of interfaces coming online. The Colonel points to a cluster of sparks in the southwest quadrant. “Can we vent those tanks?”

  “Not happily.” She frowns. “A free dump would be catastrophic. Only way the system would go along with that is if it thought it was preventing something even worse.”

  “Such as?”

  “Tank explosion, I guess.”

  “Set it up.”

  She starts whispering sweet nothings to distant gatekeepers, but she doesn’t look pleased. “Sir, isn’t this technically—I mean, use of poison gas—”

  “Sulfate precursor. Geoengineering stockpile. Not a weapon of war.” Technically.

  “Yes sir,” she says unhappily.

  “Countermeasures have to be in place before they link up, Lieutenant. If there’s any exploit—any at all—the hive will see it. There’s no way to outthink the damn thing once it’s engaged.”

  “Yes sir. Ready.”

  “That was fast.”

  “You said it had to be, sir.” She extends a finger toward a fresh crimson icon pulsing on the board. “Should I—”

  “Not yet.” The Colonel stares down from vicarious orbit, tries to make sense of the tableaux. What the hell are they doing? What can even a hive mind accomplish with reed mats and a few kilograms of mu—

  Wait a second …

  He picks an intruder at random, zooms in. The mud sheathing that body has an almost golden glint to it, now that he looks closely. Something not-quite-mineral, something—

  He calls up an archive, searches the microbial index for any weaponized synthetics that might eat heterocyclics. Scores.

  “They’re going after the umbilical.”

  The Lieutenant glances up. “Sir?”

  “The mud. It’s not just a disguise it’s a payload, it’s—”

  “A biopaste.” The Lieutenant whistles, returns her attention to the board with renewed focus.

  The Colonel tries to think. They’re not just aiming to cut the aerostat loose; you don’t need a hive for that, you don’t even need to breach the perimeter. Whatever this is, it’s microsurgical. Something that requires massive on-site computation—maybe something to do with microclimate, something that can be influenced by wind or humidity or any of a dozen other chaotic variables. If they’re not trying to cut the umbilical outright they might be trying to maneuver it somehow: a biocorroded hole exactly X millimeters in diameter here, a stretching patch of candle-wax monomers over there, and way up in the stratosphere the aerostat sways some precise number of meters on some precise bearing—

  To what end? Play bumper-cars with the maintenance drones? Block some orbital line-of-sight, nudge a distant act of ground-based terrorism into surveillance eclipse at a critical moment? Maybe they’re not going for the umbilical after all, maybe they’re—

  “Sir?” The first of the insurgents has made it to the donut hole. “Sir, if we have to light ’em up before they coalesce—”

  “Not yet, Lieutenant.”

  He’s a blind man in a bright room. He’s a rhesus monkey playing chess with a grand master. He has no idea of his opponent’s strategy. He has no concept even of the rules of the game. He only knows he’s bound to lose.

  The last of the insurgents lurches out of weapons range. The Lieutenant’s fi
nger hovers over that icon as though desperate to scratch a maddening itch.

  Coalescence.

  That far-focus moment, that thousand-soul stare. You can see it in their eyes if you know what to look for, if you’re close enough and fast enough. The Colonel is neither. All he has is a top-down view through a telescope thirty-six thousand kilometers away, ricocheted through the atmosphere and spread across this table. But he can see what follows: the fusion of interlocking pieces, the simultaneous change in physical posture, the instant evolutionary leap from spastic quadruped to sapient superweapon.

  Out of many, one.

  “Now.”

  It knows. Of course it knows. It’s inconceivable that this vast emergent mind hasn’t—in the very instant of its awakening—detected some vital clue, made some inference to lay the whole trap bare. The station’s defenses whine belatedly into gear, startled awake in the sudden glare of a million thoughts; multimind networks may be invisible to human eyes but they’re bright blinding tapestries down in RF. The hive, safely behind the firing line, has no need to care about that.

  No, what’s got its attention now is the wave of hydrogen sulfide billowing from the southern storage tanks: silent, invisible, heavy as a blanket and certain death to any standalone soul. No baseline would suspect a thing until the faint smell of rotten eggs told him he was already dead.

  But this soul does not stand alone. Eleven of its bodies simultaneously turn and flee back toward the fence, each following a unique trajectory with a little Brownian randomness layered in to throw off the tracking algos. The other two stand fast in the donut hole, draw sidearms from belts—

  The Colonel frowns. Why didn’t the sensors pick those up?

  “Hey, are those guns—that looks like bone,” the Lieutenant says.

  The nodes open fire.

  It is bone. Something like it anyway; metal or plastic would have triggered the sensors before they’d even reached the fence. The slugs are probably ceramic, though; no osteo derivative would be able to punch through the least of those conduits …

  Except that’s not what the hive is going for. They’re shooting at any old pipe or panel, anything metal, anything that might—