by Peter Watts
Even now, there’s a part of me that mourns. Wonders if maybe, even now, I still can.
I did ask once, in case you were wondering. Came right out and said: “Hey Chimp, what’s our halting state?”
It was an innocent question at the time. It wouldn’t have raised any red flags. It was back in happier days, before Lian had mutated, long before any whiff of revolution hung in the air. Viktor was off on another one of his rhapsodies about the end of time, about dark-matter filigree holding galaxies together, about the faint magical hope that we might be able to outrun the expansion of space itself if we could somehow just wormhole our way one or two superclusters to the left: “Imagine the bonus if we extended the Ring Road out past Lanaikea!”
There were no bonuses. The only bonus had been getting the hell away from Earth, and it was more than enough; I wasn’t going to complain that we were still working it off. But Viktor’s scenarios glittered so very far downstream that our whole voyage to date might have lasted barely a week in comparison. And of course we’d never make it that far—Vik just liked fantasizing about the End Days—so I had to ask:
“Seriously. How do we know when the mission’s over?”
“Why would you want it to be over?” Vik wondered.
“When we receive the callback sequence,” Chimp said. Which had made perfect sense back when we were young and freshly minted and shiny new. The Diaspora reflected the most advanced tech the twenty-second century could offer—but there’d be a twenty-third century, and a twenty-fourth. Our descendants would have wands and amulets unimaginable on the day we launched. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Eri and her sisters fell into obsolescence, before we were called back to a better home and some new generation took over. And if that didn’t happen, it only meant that Home hadn’t got better after all—that Mission Control had died without issue, along with the rest of the species.
Either way, we were better off here.
Still.
“I dunno, Chimp. It’s been a while. What if there is no callback? Could we just, you know, call it off from this end?”
It took a moment for him to answer. “There’s no other definitive end state, Sunday. The closest I could come would be an extinction event.”
“Our extinction?”
“Humanity’s extinction.”
Nobody said anything for a bit.
“So, um. How would you establish that?” Viktor asked eventually.
“And how do you tell the difference between going extinct and just, you know, changing into something else?” I added.
“I’m not certain in either case. I’d have to assess the evidence on a case-by-case basis.”
I frowned. “You don’t have protocols for that kind of thing?”
“I do. But they’re only triggered in context.”
“Funny you don’t have access to them otherwise,” Viktor remarked.
“There’s no need for them otherwise.”
We weren’t fooled. It was Easter Island all over again: a mission set in motion by control freaks, terrified that the meat would eventually screw things up. Limiting our degrees of freedom was their sacred charge.
Looking past the prehistoric politics, though, the bottom line was clear enough: there was no finish line. Far as the Chimp was concerned, we could keep going forever.
Maybe that should’ve bothered me more. It’s not that I objected to a life sentence; we’d known from the age of seven what we were in for. But that sentence had been voluntary. Joyful, even. We were exiles by our own consent, collaborators in the ultimate adventure.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe getting my nose rubbed in the obvious—that our consent was a joke, that the Diaspora had no Off switch—should have burned more than it did. At the time I wondered if they’d deliberately engineered us to be indifferent to future consequences.
Until I realized they wouldn’t have had to.
/ / / / /
Dhanyata Wali did the honors, installed the Pretender during a build deep in the bow shock over TriAnd. I wasn’t on deck, so I never got the details first-hand. (You can’t exactly throw a party to celebrate your tactical victories when the enemy has eyes on your rec room, although there may have been some rejoicing down in the Glade. Assuming Lian was still capable of rejoicing by then.)
The ironic thing was, it wasn’t even our idea. We stole it from the Chimp—and even the Chimp was just using the same old traffic-allocation strategies networks have been using since the dawn of the computer age. Ping your nodes, get them to ping each other, provoke a web of call-and-response so you always know which one is fastest on the draw. The winner becomes Ghost of Chimp Yet to Come: ready to jump in and take the reins when Chimp Present retires, when its current node gets old or breaks or just ends up too far from the action.
Which is where the Ghost of Chimp Past comes in.
Kaden had tracked a hypervisor to the heavy zone a few builds before. Se hadn’t quite nailed it down before the Chimp jumped away again but a little poking around turned up the vacated node behind a service panel, next to one of the secondary trunks. Kaden told Dhanyata; Dhanyata swapped it out for a dummy that would pass for the real thing so long as the Chimp didn’t ask it too many questions while we were hacking the original.
The first hack coaxed the node into subtracting some trifling amount from its latency scores; a little white lie to make it appear to be the fastest player in the game, guaranteed next in the line of succession.
The second hack taught it to be a little more trusting of human judgment.
That wasn’t as complicated as you might think. The Chimp was already wired to follow our commands; it’s just that whenever we issued one, it ran scenarios to predict the impact of that command on the mission. It was a formality most of the time, a millisecond delay between order and implementation. The system only told us to fuck off if any flags went up.
We didn’t even have to touch the lower-level code, just bypass that one detour. Insert a checksum after the jump that matched the one before, and voila: a master enslaved, in our pocket from the moment of its ascension. They tell me it went off without a hitch.
Then it was just a matter of tracking the Chimp to its current digs, and trashing the place.
“Aki Sok.” Lian’s eyes were sad and kind. “What are we going to do with you.”
We all knew, of course. There were only two things we could do, and Lian had already ruled one of them out; she was in this to save lives.
Aki, nodding. Acquiescent. Terrified. “I thought I could—I’m sorry. . .”
The smuggling of clandestine components under watchful machine eyes. The passing of mission-critical intel. The possibility of betrayal. The fear of discovery.
Turns out Aki just wasn’t up to it.
Now the coffin gaped at her feet in this tiny temporary clearing where the black forest squirmed and rustled on all sides. Eventually the rest of us would leave, and the lights would go out. The repellant pheromones we’d sprayed across the rocks would degrade; the forest would close in, hungry for the infinitesimal heat trace Aki’s hibernaculum would bleed out for all the long dark ages of its operation. Even if the Chimp were to sacrifice another bot to the Glade—even if its sock puppets made it in this far—it would not see her. Aki would vanish under vines and darkness and sleep away the aeons until the overlord was overthrown.
It’s not like we could return her to active service, even if we did trust her to keep her mouth shut. She’d been listed as dead for a good twenty gigasecs.
I tried to offer some comfort. “Hey, by the time you wake up we’ll be running our own builds.” And she smiled weakly, and climbed inside, and whispered—
—“you just better fucking win”—
—as the lid came down.
Lian looked around as Aki’s vitals began to subside: at me, at Ellin, at Dao (who had, ultimately, come around after all). “We can’t afford this, people. We can’t afford these kinds of fuck-ups.”
> “Two misses in a thousand centuries isn’t so bad,” Ellin said. “At least this one was an easy fix.”
Not like Stoller, she meant.
“One’s all it takes to deprecate the lot of us.” Lian shook her head. “I need to be a way better judge of character.”
“We’re mutineers,” Dao pointed out. “It’s a risk, Li, it’s always gonna be a risk. We’re never gonna eliminate it, we just gotta keep it—manageable. And know that it’s worth it.”
Suck up, I thought.
He was right, though. Lian had never been careless with her trust, and the plan didn’t depend on heavy numbers. We were maybe thirty strong now, and Lian had chosen us carefully: keep it small, keep it secret, keep it close. Keep potential breaches to a minimum.
But now two of that circle had failed her. She’d vetted them a lot more carefully than she’d vetted me; I’d forced her hand, after all. I was almost a snap decision.
I watched Aki’s vitals flattening on the headboard. I could feel Lian’s eyes on me. It wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking.
Two failures already.
Three, if you counted Mosko.
Baird Stoller had never even pretended to be on our side. Aki Sok did her best, then took her lumps when it wasn’t good enough. Ekanga Mosko was a whole other thing. Recruited, committed, trusted with the secrets of the sanctum—then caught copying specs down in the Glade, loading himself up with secrets to buy his way back into the Chimp’s good graces after miraculously coming back from the dead.
Lian didn’t kill him. She didn’t deprecate him either. Waste of good coffin space, she said. She found a small inescapable crevice in some remote corner of the Glade where the gravitic tug-o-war was enough to pull your guts out through your inner ears. She ran a line from an irrigation pipe, set it to bleed a continuous trickle down the rock face. Hooked a portable food processor up to an outsize amino tank, parked it on the lip of the precipice, set it to drop protein bricks into the gap at regular intervals. Woke up every few years just to keep it stocked.
Mosko spent the rest of his life in that crevice. Maybe his stomach acclimated to the nausea before his brain turned to pudding, before he lost the ability even to beg, before he devolved into a mindless mewling thing covered in sores and compulsively licking the rocks to slake his endless thirst. Maybe he only lasted a few months. Maybe he lived for decades, died alone while the rest of us slept our immortal sleep, mummified and crumbled to dust and finally vanished altogether between one of my heartbeats and the next. An object lesson, way past its best-before date.
That’s the story I heard, anyway. I slept through the whole time frame, from recruitment to betrayal to dissolution. I found the crevice—found a crevice, anyway—but the plumbing and the processor had long since been retired, if they’d ever even existed. For all I knew Kaden had just been yanking my chain about the whole thing, got some of hir buddies in on the joke for added verisimilitude. A joke. A warning. That would be just hir style.
There had been an Ekanga Mosko listed on the manifest. Astrophysics specialist. Different tribe, but Eri definitely shipped out with meat of that name on board. The official record said he’d died when a bit of bad shielding had failed around the outer core: a blast of lethal radiation, an emergency vent to spare the rest of the level from contamination.
Of course I asked Lian about it. She laughed and laughed. “I’d have to be pretty damn good to plant evidence that far down without getting burned to ash, wouldn’t you say?”
She never actually denied it, though.
The Chimp went behind our backs a couple of times. It waited until we were all tucked in, waited another gigasec or so for good measure, then sent one of its sock puppets into the Glade for a look around.
It didn’t get very far, mind you. The forest had a habit of taking down those bots even before we’d tweaked the vines near the entrance for extra aggression. The Chimp’s scouts made it in a few meters and maybe—if they were lucky— managed to bite off a quick tissue sample and retreat before the vines dragged them to the deck and swarmed them like a nest of boa constrictors.
We found the wreckage of one afterward, just inside the hatch: carapace crushed, innards stuffed with the dried husks of old fruiting bodies, a gnarled tumorous lump barely even recognizable as technology.
Some of us worried that the Chimp was on to us—or was at least getting suspicious—but the model didn’t really fit. The Chimp knew what kind of botanicals it was dealing with, after all. It would’ve been easy enough to custom-fab some kind of armored flame-spewing bunker-buster to cut through the front-line defenses, if it thought there was anything behind worth rooting out. The fact that it settled for disposable off-the-shelf drones was more consistent with a simple sampling effort: rote confirmation of a theory so well-established that basic cost-benefit didn’t justify the design and construction of a new model.
It had no reason to think we were lying. It probably just wanted to see for itself. Hell, it didn’t even try to hide its actions: the telemetry from at least two probes was sitting right there in the op logs, waiting for anyone with a couple of megasecs to kill.
Then again, neither did the Chimp go out of its way to raise the subject. So we didn’t either. It became our mutual unspoken secret, that awkward truth that everyone knows but no one speaks aloud for fear of ruining the vibe at the family get-together.
In a weird way, I suppose that made the Chimp a coconspirator.
“I enter the Black Cauldron,” Yukiko Kanegi said. “Alert for the ice monster.” By which she meant The Chimp’s somewhere around the ventral mass cache.
“You catch a glimpse of it in your torchlight before it disappears,” I told her. By which I meant Not any more. Fucker’s gone.
Social alcove halfway between core and crust, starboard equatorial, a half-hearted half-gee holding us down. The game board sat on its stand between us: a multilevel dungeon two meters across and almost as high, each wall and chamber and booby-trap fabbed lovingly by hand. Gaetano had acquired a taste for role-playing strategy games over the past few gigs. This was his ode to that ancient pastime, a physical game of his own design. You moved your pieces manually through the labyrinth (the levels came apart and snapped back together for easy access) seeking treasure, avoiding traps, fighting monsters. Dice with fifty facets decided the outcome of probabilistic encounters. It was quite charming when you got into it.
Gaetano called it Teredo. I never asked why.
If you flipped the lower half of that dungeon upsidedown in your mind, and imagined that certain other elements were stretched just so, you might notice a certain topological equivalence to the way Eriophora was laid out. You might almost use it as a kind of map.
Yuki’s character had ventured into the Black Cauldron: either a spring-fed subterranean lake patrolled by blind, ravenous predators or—if you lacked imagination—a lens of rubbery silicon glued into a depression and decorated with tiny plastic stalagmites. It was her piece, but it was following in my footsteps.
“Fuck,” she said now, meaning: Fuck. “I check for traps.” Did it see you coming? Is it on to us?
I made a show of rolling the dice, pretended to take note of whatever number came up. “You find no traps.” Don’t think so. Just changed nodes again.
“Dammit. I was that close. I, um, check for, whaddya call it. Spoor.”
“There’s a frost trail on the rock, straight line, bearing one nine seven degrees.” According to the pings he’s now somewhere in this direction.
“How wide is the frost trail?” How far? Not that she had any real hope I could give her an exact range; latency pings don’t follow a straight line at the best of times. You could always take a stab at an educated guess, though.
“Maybe twenty centimeters?” Twenty kliks?
Her eyes followed an invisible line back from her game piece, came to rest on a larger cavern deep in the bowels of the dungeon. She pursed her lips. “Maybe it’s spawning.”
&n
bsp; The Uterus.
I let a coy smile flicker across my game face. “Maybe.”
Yuki snapped her fingers. “Say, before I forget; you check nav since you thawed out?”
“No, wh—” But she’d already thrown a model of the local neighborhood into my head. A filament, fine as spider silk, passed through its heart: Eri’s trajectory. A dimmer thread, dotted and red-shifted, split from it a few lightyears in the past and diverged gradually into the future.
An initial trajectory, and a modified one.
I shrugged. “Course drift. Chimp wakes us up now and then to see if we can explain it.”
Yuki shook her head. “Drift’s still less than a degree. We’re looking at more than three degrees of divergence here.”
It clicked. “We’ve changed course.”
“Yes we have.”
I sacc’d a projection, extended the deviation out a hundred years. It passed through nothing but space. A thousand: dwarfs and Gs, potential builds but no more than if we’d just continued along our original arc. A thousand years: more of the same. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand.
“Huh.”
Two hundred thousand years from now, our current course would take us through an open cluster about thirty-five lightyears across—right into the heart of a red supergiant. Mass spec said thirty-six solar masses, twenty-four million years old. Young, so very young: a mayfly next to Eriophora, barely a whiff of hydrogen condensing in the void when we’d first shipped out.
And yet so very very old: senescent, hydrogen long-since spent, suffused in a caul of incandescent gas cast off during a profligate youth. It lived on helium now; its spectrum reeked of carbon and oxygen and just the slightest hint of neon.
Twenty-four million years dying and not yet dead.
Wouldn’t be long now, though.
This was why the Chimp had relocated: to get close to the firing chamber, to reduce latency to an absolute minimum. Because this was going to be one big nasty build, and there would be no room for error.
