Firefall

by Peter Watts

  Fidelity in an aerosol. "You don't need that any more," I said.

  "Probably not," he agreed.

  "It won't work anyway. You can't imprint on someone who isn't even there, no matter how many hormones you snort. It just—"

  Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists.

  "She's gone," I blurted. "She doesn't care if you find someone else. She'd be happy if you did." It would let her pretend the books had been balanced.

  "She's my wife," he told me.

  "That doesn't mean what it used to. It never did."

  He smiled a bit at that. "It's my life, son. I'm comfortable with it."

  "Dad—"

  "I don't blame her," he said. "And neither should you."

  Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she'd inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory. Do you think it's easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it's easy always wondering who you're with and what you're doing and if you're even alive? Do you think it's easy raising a child like that on your own?

  She'd blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he knew it was all a lie. He knew he was only the pretense. She wasn't leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn't stand to look at the thing who'd replaced her son.

  I would have pursued it—would have tried yet again to make my father see—but by now we'd left the gates of Heaven for the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky. I followed their gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped—

  The stars were falling.

  The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

  I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set my empirical gaze to high-beam. I saw a vampire in that moment, a female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep's clothing. Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level. I'd never seen one in the flesh before.

  She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining yellow and bright as a cat's in the deepening dark. She realized, as I watched, that something was amiss. She looked around, glanced at the sky—and continued on her way, totally indifferent to the cattle on all sides, to the heavenly portent that had transfixed them. Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned inside-out.

  It was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.

  ***

  They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.

  For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn't know what.

  Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We'd been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone's guess.

  My father might have known someone who might have known. But by then he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of hemispheric crisis. Whatever he knew or didn't, he left me to find my own answers with everyone else.

  There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic. The Fireflies had seeded lethal germs through the jet stream. The Fireflies had been on a nature safari. The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a doomsday weapon against the aliens. The Icarus Array had already been destroyed. We had decades to react; anything from another solar system would have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else. We had days to live; organic warships had just crossed the asteroid belt and would be fumigating the planet within a week.

  Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions. That was nothing new, as far as it went; I'd spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate human society. It had always worked before. Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn't satisfy any more. It was as though the presence of this new outgroup had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous.

  Yet I couldn't, for my life, figure out how to let it go.

  Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction. "They say it's indistinguishable," she told me once, "just like having your family right there, snuggled up so you can see them and feel them and smell them next to you. But it's not. It's just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-dee color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They're good enough to fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren't people, even if it can't put its finger on how it knows. They just don't feel real. Know what I mean?"

  I didn't. Back then I'd had no clue what she was talking about. But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides. There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn't get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty.

  I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn't vanish the moment I unplugged. But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake. The few others I could have called— peers and former clients with whom my impersonations of rapport had been especially convincing—didn't seem worth the effort. Flesh and blood had its own relationship to reality: necessary, but not sufficient.

  Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space. I'd known all along.

  I'd just never been able to see how it was any different from real life.

  ***

  Imagine you are a machine.

  Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information.

  I
can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform.

  I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface—but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch.

  My heart is warm, at least. A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won't go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to. So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence.

  Which is why these latest instructions are so puzzling, for they make no sense at all. The frequency is wrong. The signal strength is wrong. I cannot even understand the handshaking protocols. I request clarification.

  The response arrives almost a thousand minutes later, and it is an unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information. I answer as best I can: yes, this is the bearing at which signal strength was greatest. No, it is not the usual bearing for Mission Control. Yes, I can retransmit: here it is, all over again. Yes, I will go into standby mode.

  I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.

  I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control.

  I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom. Eventually a fleeting, familiar signal brushes against my afferent array. I reacquire and track it to source, which I am well-equipped to describe: a trans-Neptunian comet in the Kuiper Belt, approximately two hundred kilometers in diameter. It is sweeping a 21-cm tightbeam radio wave across the heavens with a periodicity of 4.57 seconds. This beam does not intersect Mission Control's coordinates at any point. It appears to be directed at a different target entirely.

  It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to this information. When it does, it tells me to change course. Mission Control informs me that henceforth my new destination is to be referred to as Burns-Caulfield. Given current fuel and inertial constraints I will not reach it in less than thirty-nine years.

  I am to watch nothing else in the meantime.

  ***

  I'd been liaising for a team at the Kurzweil Institute, a fractured group of cutting-edge savants convinced they were on the verge of solving the quantum-glial paradox. That particular log-jam had stalled AI for decades; once broken, the experts promised we'd be eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment. It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a Singularity that had been waiting impatiently in the wings for nigh on fifty years.

  Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract.

  I was actually surprised it had taken them so long. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative. Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching towards bankruptcy. Installations in deep space, long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason. Lagrange habitats had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy. Commercial ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and reassigned; some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell sunward to guard the Icarus Array.

  It didn't matter that the Fireflies hadn't fired a shot at any of these targets. We simply couldn't afford the risk.

  We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off. In the meantime, the prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday. The Kurzweil Institute, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about.

  So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head. Everyone Icons debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their expiry date:

  Disgraceful breakdown of global security.

  No harm done.

  Comsats annihilated. Thousands dead.

  Random collisions. Accidental deaths.

  (who sent them?)

  We should have seen them coming. Why didn't we—

  Deep space. Inverse square. Do the math.

  They were stealthed!

  (what do they want?)

  We were raped!

  Jesus Christ. They just took our picture.

  Why the silence?

  Moon's fine. Mars's fine.

  (Where are they?)

  Why haven't they made contact?

  Nothing's touched the O'Neills.

  Technology Implies Belligerence!

  (Are they coming back?)

  JIM MOORE VOICE ONLY

  ENCRYPTED

  ACCEPT?

  The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the debate. I read it twice. I tried to remember the last time he'd called from the field, and couldn't.

  I muted the other windows. "Dad?"

  "Son," he replied after a moment. "Are you well?"

  "Like everyone else. Still wondering whether we should be celebrating or crapping our pants."

  He didn't answer immediately. "It's a big question, all right," he said at last.

  "I don't suppose you could give me any advice? They're not telling us anything at ground level."

  It was a rhetorical request. His silence was hardly necessary to make the point. "I know," I added after a moment. "Sorry. It's just, they're saying the Icarus Array went down, and—"

  "You know I can't—oh." My father paused. "That's ridiculous. Icarus's fine."

  "It is?"

  He seemed to be weighing his words. "The Fireflies probably didn't even notice it. There's no particle trail as long as it stays offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew where to search."

  It was my turn to fall silent. This conversation felt suddenly wrong.

  Because when my father went on the job, he went dark. He never called his family.

  Because even when my father came off the job, he never talked about it. It wouldn't matter whether the Icarus Array was still online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a thousand kilometers of torn origami; he wouldn't tell either tale unless an official announcement had been made. Which—I refreshed an index window just to be sure— it hadn't.

  Because while my father was a man of few words, he was not a man of frequent, indecisive pauses—and he had hesitated before each and every line he'd spoken in this exchange.

  I tugged ever-so-gently on the line—"But they've
sent ships."—and started counting.

  One one-thousand, two one-thousand—

  "Just a precaution. Icarus was overdue for a visit anyway. You don't swap out your whole grid without at least dropping in and kicking the new tires first."

  Nearly three seconds to respond.

  "You're on the moon," I said.

  Pause. "Close enough."

  "What are you—Dad, why are you telling me this? Isn't this a security breach?"

  "You're going to get a call," he told me.

  "From who? Why?"

  "They're assembling a team. The kind of—people you deal with." My father was too rational to dispute the contributions of the recons and hybrids in our midst, but he'd never been able to hide his mistrust of them.

  "They need a synthesist," he said.

  "Isn't it lucky you've got one in the family."

  Radio bounced back and forth. "This isn't nepotism, Siri. I wanted very much for them to pick someone else."

  "Thanks for the vote of conf—"

  But he'd seen it coming, and preempted me before my words could cross the distance: "It's not a slap at your abilities and you know it. You're simply the most qualified, and the work is vital."

  "So why—" I began, and stopped. He wouldn't want to keep me away from some theoretical gig in a WestHem lab.

  "What's this about, Dad?"

  "The Fireflies. They found something."

  "What?"

  "A radio signal. From the Kuiper. We traced the bearing."

  "They're talking?"

  "Not to us." He cleared his throat. "It was something of a fluke that we even intercepted the transmission."

  "Who are they talking to?"

  "We don't know."

  "Friendly? Hostile?"

  "Son, we don't know. The encryption seems similar, but we can't even be sure of that. All we have is the location."

  "So you're sending a team." You're sending me. We'd never gone to the Kuiper before. It had been decades since we'd even sent robots. Not that we lacked the capacity. We just hadn't bothered; everything we needed was so much closer to home. The Interplanetary Age had stagnated at the asteroids.