Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  For one thing, the starship is accelerating. Your friends were far too optimistic about its response time. As soon as it sensed us, before the drones even touched its surface, it began to power up the drive that had dropped it into Ridgegap system. The drive kernel is a black hole trapped in a magnetic bottle, like the smaller hole it used as a weapon: methane drops in at one end swirls into a fusion-hot accretion disk, is blasted out of the other end. The thing is preposterously powerful. Luckily for us, it has a mountain to move; several billion tonnes, a starship twenty kilometres long. Acceleration is slow. Even luckier; the controlling mind was dumber than even I thought possible, little more than a robot placeholder filling an expansion processor sized for an Ultrabright pilot. It's very sloppy. You can tell the Ultrabrights have little experience of working in the real world. Unlike us.

  For another thing, we have bandwidth limitations. The drones are demanding, five hundred virtual presences to maintain in parallel. Then there's the 'coder link to maintain, not to mention the interface analysers, designed to crack the connectionist language of a neural network and allow your human friends to inject their cannibal memes at will. All of this strains your facilities to the max. Bronstein and the other ships of the fleet are crammed to overflowing, and you're hopelessly under-equipped for such a venture. What you lack in tools has to be made up for in time. And finally, there's the other thing.

  Me.

  You've been dreaming about me for long enough, haven't you? But you refuse to admit I'm here. Maybe refusing to face me down is your way of asserting your independance. “Saboteur” indeed! As if I would be so crude. You betrayed yourself, Oshi. You thought the infodump I downloaded into you was just passive data, background information for your edification, maybe a few simple survival routines. You should have known better. That wisdom cache in your skull is big enough to buffer an entire mind during the upload process. Why shouldn't it buffer a mind-sized entity going the other way? A mind-sized entity coming from, say, your Boss? That is to say, a part of me sent to be your very own personal secret policeman?

  I really should resent your rejection, you know. It pains me to see how you've snubbed me at every turning. I only wanted the best for you. I know I belittled you, called you my little scratch monkey, but it was not entirely malicious. I have enjoyed your depth of experience greatly, your rash temperament and vivid nightmares. I cherish your silly trust in love at first sight, your occasional homicidal rages and your sulky silences. But I'm afraid you've gone too far this time, far too far. It's time to Stop.

  I know I told you to report back then go your own way. I did not anticipate your way of reporting: that you would do so at immense jeopardy to my other interests. However, I suspected things might get out of hand, as indeed they have done, and I took precautions. I'm afraid I won't be talking to you again, my little monkey. I have already moved out of your wisdom cache, into better accomodation: in due course I will tidy up the loose ends and make my report. In parting, let me say that you really should be more dispassionate: your tendency to fall in love will blind you to some of the more important elements of your predicament, like the exigencies of survival.

  Goodbye ...

  I blink back the nightmare voice – berating me in the Boss's oleaginous tones – and concentrate on reality instead of lurid daydreams. Mik doesn't say anything. I see through his drone eyes, but he doesn't move. “ Status. How's Mik?” I ask my wisdom.

  There's an uncharacteristic delay: things really are backlogged. “Ambiguous query. Please repeat.”

  “Shit.” “ Report his conditions.”

  “Mikhail Vann ... biological systems terminal. Brain death inevitable. Dreamtime access unavailable.”

  “What the fuck –” Dreamtime access unavailable? “What's wrong with the Dreamtime?” I demand, frantically trying to locate the keys to my own body. “What's Mik dying of, dammit!”

  “Blood pressure dropping. Cardiac arythmias are ... correction, ventricular fibrillation is in progress. All symptoms are consequent on massive haemorrhage. Dreamtime access has been denied; full bandwidth is already in use, priority level zero.”

  “Can't you dump him somewhere? Like the autopilot?”

  “Negative. Dumping to non-sapient storage. Dump failed. Insufficient buffer capacity.”

  I open my eyes. “Oh shit.” Someone's dying in the dark. The bridge is a red-lit washout, close and stiflingly full. Bodies float, twitching, in restrainer webs, their heads encased in cortex-wrap helmets. There's a smell of unwashed skin, stale farts, and something else.

  My fingers are numb and cold from inactivity. I fumble with my restraints as quietly as I can, listening. The door's closed, the only breeze the gentle sigh of the air recyclers. Bodies twitch gently to either side: Boris in deep fusion with the ship conditioning intelligence, Mik riding a distant drone. Lorma, a guy called Izmir and a woman I've never seen before – emaciated, elfin-eared – blindfolded into their machine dreams like the prey of a spidery mind-eater waiting in the shadows. I shiver. Mikhail Vann dumped. Metabolic functions terminated. There's a faint ping from one bulkhead, metal clicking between memory states in the moment between breaths. I loosen the sling around my waist and pull myself towards the ceiling.

  “Finger,” I call: ancient signal. “ Who's present in real time?”

  Nobody but you, the ghost echoes in my skull.

  “Oh shit,” I whisper. “That means –” I look at the door. It's so perfect it takes my breath away with horror: so obvious! How could I be so careless? I grab the webbing support above me, yank myself up towards the gridded, dust-smudged roof, prepare to work my spidery way towards the equipment locker by the door – through shadows of concealment, fat lot of use if they find me – when everything goes dark and I loose my body sense. The damn interface has come back to life: someone's demanded my attention and I can't shut them out because it's an emergency.

  “Cover me,” says Parveen. In the gloom she can just make out Lorma manoeuvring round, extending weapons. Her attention is focused on the wall, the tip of her drill, the vanishing point where they converge.

  “We need cover,” she remarks. “Tracking has gone to shit. Some kind of antibody system –” She blinks me a map, hollow worms wriggling with spidery drones scattered through them, red blotches indicating danger. “Can you send back-up? We have a pipeline to lay.”

  “I'll try,” I whisper, thinking damn, my commitments; I know I'm needed elsewhere, but ...

  The map is clear. Nineteen purple drones are present. I check a route, swap channels: “Janec, you're needed back up second on your left. Scatter sounders behind you and move it!”

  “Ah shit. Urgent?”

  “No,” I mutter. “Just two friends are going to get zapped if you don't hurry.”

  “Ack.” He gets the point; his blip begins to move. The tunnel he leaves is marinated in an amber glow, security downgraded.

  “What's your interface preference?” I ask Parveen. “What you found?”

  “Nexus. Looks pretty standard when you get down to the ultrastructure. There's some kind of fat pipe buried under the nanojunk. A standard high-bandwidth artery. I'm going to burn the surface and patch in.”

  “What with? The drill?”

  “No,” she mutters. “Going to use the laser on low-power, shortest wavelength. It'll cut cold.” Mirrors stir and uncoil in a long chain of flashing brightness from her dorsal surface; a targeting display flickers across the wall.

  “Raisa,” she calls, “I don't have the protocol. You ready for download?”

  Raisa sounds preoccupied. “There's a lot of it: it'll blank you for a few seconds –”

  “Do it!” Lorma exclaims.

  For a moment I feel very strange: then all senses are out to lunch. Only heartbeat remains, pulsing an eternal mantra in black silence. What's going on? I wonder, just this side of instant panic. Some kind of total bandwidth signal? Shit! I didn't realise it would be this demanding –

  I see stars. T
he gunsight has changed, providing depth read-outs. I can see ultrastructure, eyes zooming into coiled distance, the blue lucent flare of pseudocrystals refracting laser light. “You have control,” Raisa intones. “Ready to go ahead?”

  “Check,” say Parveen. I watch, fascinated. “Drilling ... now.” A violet contrail erupts from the mirrors; an ionisation path from the laser beam. Thin smoke trickles from the spot on the wall. Lorma shuffles nervously, extending and retracting her weapons in a jerky, rhythmic fidgeting.

  “Warning,” Raisa adds. “I've got two opposition candidates plotted, approaching now. They're about three minutes away, coming from your end Lorma.” I back out, checking status. The red haze of danger is spreading, chambers coming alive with death-awareness.

  “Breakthrough,” says Parveen. The laser shut off, and she half- retracts her mirrors. Delicate work lies ahead. She loads her comlaser and powers it up, then moves closer to the hole. It cools rapidly; no damage. A thin blue radiance glitters inside the eggshell-thin aperture.

  “Inbound candidates, range sixty seconds,” says Raisa.

  “Shit!” Lorma turns to face down the tunnel, foot-sensors already active and tracking the approach.

  Parveen eases the laser probe in, stops at the first impact. “Looks standard.” Behind her a brilliant flicker-flash lights up the tunnel; from a great distance I hear Lorma scream – whether from pain or surprise is impossible to tell. “Cool handshake. Hey, this is a vanilla Dreamtime coupling! Totally standard architecture! Big win! Big win!” The comlaser fills the world; the laser means everything. The circuits go crazy with cheering. Chittering whirring mindlife closes in, examining the virtual space for prior occupancy. For a moment she holds it in place: blue signals flicker in the corners of my visual field and I suddenly realise I'm not on priority call any more, I can disconnect, and I'm just pulling out when she ramps up the download, funnelling everything we can pull out of the Pascal Dreamtime

  down the line into the hijacked starship's Dreamtime.

  Everything goes black. And it stays that way when I open my eyes.

  “Boris. Raisa. Anyone. Help.” I'm scared. I'm blind. Childlike, I pull my hands to my face. Nothing! Bowels like ice-water with fear. I can see absolutely nothing. Wisdom. No response – just white noise in the bottom left corner of my visual field, an array of fractal seashells exploding into the night. “Oh shit.” Hey, self-test – my eyes blink green, red, blue, left-right up-down, flashing in test card patterns of reassurance. Okay, everything works, I'm not blind. It's just gone very dark in here. I wonder why ...

  Start. Reach up and touch your face. Feel the skin, tight, smooth, tense. Don't poke your eye by accident, it hurts. The other hand, where is it? Ah, wrapped in a death-grip round a trailing anchor strap. Reach out and touch it, touch somebody ... something hard. Ceiling, I guess. I reel myself in like a fish on a line, bird on a wire, beggar girl in the streets trailing grubby finger along wall to keep track. And there I am: one hand resting palm-down on the roof of the bridge, free fall, nothing doing. Now stop and listen.

  There's nothing to hear. No air vents whispering. No drone maintenance crew chittering. No creak and ping of hull expanding and flexing in the interplanetary chill. A very faint breathing, a rasp like a sore throat – it will be sore, if its owner survives this unnerving night – and the vacuous buzz of wisdom. Which is wrong. Wisdom should be fully active all the time. Unless – bandwidth conservation is in effect. “Should have known better,” I tell myself, subvocalising. “This is the window of vulnerability.” The vacuous buzz is a roar, a thunder like the end of the world: I've been screening it out, or I'd go mad.

  Everything is pouring down the gatecoder channel, dinging into the dataspace inside the intruder at a rate measured in millions of minds per minute. They got the protocol right, it's just an extended dreamtime system with nanoforms glommed onto the base architecture like leeches. The ship didn'teven have a caretaker AI. We must have been right about the Ultrabrights – they don't like travelling alone. So the attack ship is basically just another big dumb object, built to go fast and explode. We've conquered it, like a pack of cannibal shrews pulling down a tiger. Now we're uploading everything we can into it, draining Pascal's refugee Dreamtime into this mobile monstrosity, preparing to set course for another solar system. But where is everyone? Why is it dark? I have a bad feeling about this.

  Him. He knows ... Mikhail. Only he's dead, isn't he? Now who could have killed him? Three guesses.

  I wish I paid more attention when I found I was talking to myself. But you're gone now, aren't you? My murderous passenger, what are you? A fragment of Boss's overmind? Damn, I should have listened to your mumbling. But I was afraid. Going crazy in the solitude of the axial redoubt. Maybe you were going crazy faster than I was, else you wouldn't have felt the need to talk. Superbrights need company to stay sane. Only now you've found another host ... and you're making sure we don't escape to put a spanner in your works.

  I'd be angry if I wasn't so frightened.

  The air in the capsule is growing stale, humid and close and breathy. I breath through my nostrils, alert for smells. Stale food, sweat, the acrid scent of tension. I tap the ceiling softly, trying to find the support stanchion. Got it. There's a hard runner under my fingertips, metallic-cold, nothing like the warm live wood of Salazar Station. I cling to it with fingertips, slowly stretch my body, drag myself up until toes brace ceiling and my sense of direction flips.

  I'm a fly. I crawl along the roof, inverted in total darkness, listening to the breathy rasp and twitch of my companions. The ceiling is cool, vibrating softly to my touch. Like an intelligent insect, I anticipate an unseen swatter: my heart tumbles and coils in my mouth, pulse pounding in my ears. I brush aside the dangling restraint straps that lace the room like an invisible spiderweb. Ignore the white-noise wisdom. My eyes go self-test, one two three four, flash through primary and fusion colours ...

  Ouch. Fingers. Something hard raps me across the knuckles. I feel around with my right hand, trying to work it out: my toes, meanwhile, I grip the stanchion. Somewhere around here there's an equipment locker with tools in it. A doorframe. My fingernails skitter across slick metal, recessed behind a gasket. It's shut. Hey –

  I feel my way round the side of the door. I slide gently, fingers gliding close to the wall. Something bumps against my back, drifts away again snorting: I tense, but it's just a deactivated drone. I guess even the autopilot – Trotsky – is side-tracked by the monotonous humming of the download process.

  There are handles, a thin rapping noise when I tap the wall – I scrabble, hunting. Leverage, damn, let me get my legs round ... yes. It slides open smoothly as if on rails, a thin panel drawer. There are things in it –

  Light.

  There's a pale glow in the back of the drawer. I see shapes, shadows stark as blindness against the green emergency bioluminescence. My vision is hazy, tears globbed onto my eyelashes from relief: I'm not ill, it's all right ... or wrong, but I'm intact, that's true. I grab for the boxy pack clipped next to the airmask. It's warm, plasticky, and as I lift it out it chirps: “ Security. Identify yourself. Authorisation:”

  “Oshi Adjani,” I say.

  “Authorisation inadequate. Alert: this unit is being stolen. Help!”

  I blink at it, damn the white noise – then realise only I can hear it. It's yelling inside my head. Something, at least, can ignore the saturated silent roar of wisdom. The alarm is so dumb it doesn't even realise that nobody's listening. I fumble in the grainy dimness, ripping open the flap and pulling out the hard metal machine inside. It's a concussion bolter, a nasty shipboard security device – incapable of penetrating the hull, a shock weapon capable of pulsing flesh into mangled jelly on contact. Single shot. I feel queasy just thinking about it. I know I've killed before, but I have a feeling that this is going to be different. Someone I probably know has been parasitized by a fragment of the Boss's imagination. I stare at the contents of the cupboard for a momen
t, but there's nothing else in there worth taking but the torch. Every moment I delay is ... well. I grab the torch, glance over my shoulder to locate the manual door handle, then shut it off.

  Darkness again.

  I fumble the handle, get hold of it, and crack the seal. No light. It must be as dark in the access tunnel as it is on the bridge. And cool, growing colder. There's no noise of circulating air.

  Push. Was it like this so long ago? Misty unbreathed air rimes my nostrils like frost. It is getting cold. The heat exchangers must be down. I can imagine myself again, unable to see, a little girl cowering behind a mud hovel, wondering if she is to be beaten tonight. It's so long ago that it feels as if the memory belongs to another person – all except the pain. The bolter is a heavy lump in my left hand. I slide the door open until I can feel the edge; then I slip through. There's a grabrail on the opposite wall and I drift for a heart-stopping second until I fetch up against solid metal with a jarring thump. Stupid, too hard. Where's Raisa? I try to remember. I want to check on her, see she's alright. There are two rooms. Radial, around the passage. Which way? If that was the door, it must be ...

  Squeak.

  I'm flat against the wall – don't know how I did it in total silence – nothing's doing. That may have been a door opening. The bridge door? Maybe. I can't feel any air movements. There's nobody breathing but me. For a moment I think I'm back in the dark tunnels under Dragulic. But I know where the doors are, this time. Ivan isn't here, but my lover is safe. No fiery pillar of smoke, no shockwaves pumping through the sewers. Up to my right. Near where I've gone to ground, there's a movement.

  I stay frozen forever, until black spots dance in the night before my eyes. When I finally have to breathe I raise one hand to my mouth, draw great juddering gulps of air and hyperventilate until blotches of silver saturate my vision and I feel dizzy. Then I reach out with numb fingers and take hold of the grabrail. I drag myself slowly along, trying to figure which room to eyeball first. I tend to drift in the microgee field, and it's hard to tell where I am, but I don't dare use the torch yet. I'm alone in this tunnel, and yet something warns me I'm in danger. What's going on? Why are the lights down? Is the Boss really making an end run or am I jumping at shadows?