Firefall

by Peter Watts

  This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

  Susan James—congenital optimist, high priestess of the Church of the Healing Word, was best qualified to design and execute the protocols. Now, at her command, the scramblers writhed. They pulled themselves around their cages in elliptical loops, desperately seeking any small corner free of stimulus. James had piped the feed into ConSensus, although there was no mission-critical reason for Theseus' whole crew to bear witness to the interrogation.

  "Let them block it at their ends," she said quietly, "If they want to."

  For all his reluctance to accept that these were beings, intelligent and aware, Cunningham had named the prisoners. Stretch tended to float spread-eagled; Clench was the balled-up corner-hugger. Susan, playing her own part in this perverse role-reversal, had simply numbered them One and Two. It wasn't that Cunningham's choices were too cheesy for her to stomach, or that she objected to slave names on principle. She'd just fallen back on the oldest trick in the Torturer's Handbook, the one that lets you go home to your family after work, and play with your children, and sleep at night: never humanize your victims.

  It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae. I guess every little bit helped.

  Biotelemetry danced across the headspace beside each alien, luminous annotations shuddering through thin air. I had no idea what constituted normal readings for these creatures, but I couldn't imagine those jagged spikes passing for anything but bad news. The creatures themselves seethed subtly with fine mosaics in blue and gray, fluid patterns rippling across their cuticles. Perhaps it was a reflexive reaction to the microwaves; for all we knew it was a mating display.

  More likely they were screaming.

  James killed the microwaves. In the left-hand enclosure, a yellow square dimmed; in the right, an identical icon nested among others had never lit.

  The pigment flowed faster in the wake of the onslaught; the arms slowed but didn't stop. They swept back and forth like listless, skeletal eels.

  "Baseline exposure. Five seconds, two hundred fifty Watts." She spoke for the record. Another affectation; Theseus recorded every breath on board, every trickle of current to five decimal places.

  "Repeat."

  The icon lit up. More tile patterns, flash-flooding across alien skin. But this time, neither alien moved from where it was. Their arms continued to squirm slightly, a torqued trembling variation on the undulation they effected at rest. The telemetry was as harsh as ever, though.

  They learned helplessness fast enough, I reflected.

  I glanced at Susan. "Are you going to do this all yourself?"

  Her eyes were bright and wet as she killed the current. Clench's icon dimmed. Stretch's remained dormant.

  I cleared my throat. "I mean—"

  "Who else is going to do this, Siri? Jukka? You?"

  "The rest of the Gang. Sascha could—"

  "Sascha?" She stared at me. "Siri, I created them. Do you think I did that so I could hide behind them when—so I could force them to do things like this?" She shook her head. "I'm not bringing them out. Not for this. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy."

  She turned away from me. There were drugs she could have taken, neuroinhibitors to wash away the guilt, short-circuit it right down in the molecules. Sarasti had offered them up as if he were tempting some solitary messiah in the desert. James had refused him, and would not say why.

  "Repeat," she said.

  The current flickered on, then off.

  "Repeat," she said again.

  Not a twitch.

  I pointed. "I see it," she said.

  Clench had pressed the tip of one arm against the touchpad. The icon there glowed like a candle flame.

  ***

  Six and a half minutes later they'd graduated from yellow squares to time-lapsed four-dimensional polyhedrons. It took them as long to distinguish between two twenty-six-faceted shifting solids—differing by one facet in a single frame—as it took them to tell the difference between a yellow square and a red triangle. Intricate patterns played across their surfaces the whole time, dynamic needlepoint mosaics flickering almost too fast to see.

  "Fuck," James whispered.

  "Could be splinter skills." Cunningham had joined us in ConSensus, although his body remained halfway around BioMed.

  "Splinter skills," she repeated dully.

  "Savantism. Hyperperformance at one kind of calculation doesn't necessarily connote high intelligence."

  "I know what splinter skills are, Robert. I just think you're wrong."

  "Prove it."

  So she gave up on geometry and told the scramblers that one plus one equaled two. Evidently they knew that already: ten minutes later they were predicting ten-digit prime numbers on demand.

  She showed them a sequence of two-dimensional shapes; they picked the next one in the series from a menu of subtly-different alternatives. She denied them multiple choice, showed them the beginning of a whole new sequence and taught them to draw on the touch-sensitive interface with the tips of their arms. They finished that series in precise freehand, rendered a chain of logical descendants ending with a figure that led inexorably back to the starting point.

  "These aren't drones." James's voice caught in her throat.

  "This is all just crunching," Cunningham said. "Millions of computer programs do it without ever waking up."

  "They're intelligent, Robert. They're smarter than us. Maybe they're smarter than Jukka. And we're—why can't you just admit it?"

  I could see it all over her: Isaac would have admitted it.

  "Because they don't have the circuitry," Cunningham insisted. "How could—"

  "I don't know how!" she cried. "That's your job! All I know is that I'm torturing beings that can think rings around us..."

  "Not for much longer, at least. Once you figure out the language—"

  She shook her head. "Robert, I haven't a clue about the language. We've been at it for—for hours, haven't we? The Gang's all here, language databases four thousand years thick, all the latest linguistic algorithms. And we know exactly what they're saying, we're watching every possible way they could be saying it. Right down to the Angstrom."

  "Precisely. So—"

  "I've got nothing. I know they're talking through pigment mosaics. There might even be something in the way they move those bristles. But I can't find the pattern, I can't even follow how they count, much less tell them I'm...sorry..."

  Nobody spoke for a while. Bates watched us from the galley on our ceiling, but made no attempt to join the proceedings. On ConSensus the reprieved scramblers floated in their cages like multiarmed martyrs.

  "Well," Cunningham said at last, "since this seems to be the day for bad news, here's mine. They're dying."

  James put her face in her hand.

  "It's not your interrogation, for whatever that's worth," the biologist continued. "As far as I can determine, some of their metabolic pathways are just missing."

  "Obviously you just haven't found them yet." That was Bates, speaking up from across the drum.

  "No," Cunningham said, slowly and distinctly, "obviously those parts aren't available to the organism. Because they're falling apart pretty much the same way you'd expect one of us to, if—if all the mitotic spindles in our cells just vanished out of the cytoplasm, for example. As far as I can tell they started deteriorating the moment we took them off Rorschach."

  Susan looked up. "Are you saying they left part of their biochemistry behind?"

  "Some essential nutrient?" Bates suggested. "They're not eating—"

  "Yes to the linguist. No to the major." Cunningham fell silent; I glanced across the drum to see him sucking on a cigarette. "I think a lot of the cellular processes in these things are mediated externally. I think the reason I can't find any genes in my biopsies is because they don't have any."

  "So
what do they have instead?" Bates asked.

  "Turing morphogens."

  Blank looks, subtitling looks. Cunningham explained anyway: "A lot of biology doesn't use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and Golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there's no gene that codes for them; it's all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo—the genes say start growing or stop growing, but the number of digits and vertebrae result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned? Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You'd be surprised how much of life is like that."

  "But you still need genes," Bates protested, walking around to join us.

  "Genes just establish the starting conditions to enable the process. The structure that proliferates afterwards doesn't need specific instructions. It's classic emergent complexity. We've known about it for over a century." Another drag on the stick. "Or even longer. Darwin cited honeycomb way back in the eighteen hundreds."

  "Honeycomb," Bates repeated.

  "Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hardwired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other—deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway."

  Bates pounced: "But the bees are programmed. Genetically."

  "You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb."

  "Rorschach is the bees," James murmured.

  Cunningham nodded. "Rorschach is the bees. And I don't think Rorschach's magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they're part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism. What we've got back in the hold is a couple of creatures dragged out of their element and holding their breath. And they can't hold it forever."

  "How long?" James asked.

  "How should I know? If I'm right, I'm not even dealing with complete organisms here."

  "Guess," Bates said.

  He shrugged. "A few days. Maybe."

  "YOU STILL DON'T vote," Sarasti said.

  We would not be releasing the prisoners. Too risky. Out here in the endless wastelands of the Oort there was no room for live and let live. Never mind what the Other has done, or what it hasn't: think of what it could do, if it were just a little stronger. Think of what it might have done, if we'd arrived as late as we were supposed to. You look at Rorschach and perhaps you see an embryo or a developing child, alien beyond comprehension perhaps but not guilty, not by default. But what if those are the wrong eyes? What if you should be seeing an omnipotent murdering God, a planet-killer, not yet finished? Vulnerable only now, and for a little longer?

  There was no vampire opacity to that logic, no multidimensional black boxes for humans to shrug at and throw up their hands. There was no excuse for the failure to find fault with Sarasti's reasoning, beyond the fact that his reasoning was without fault. That made it worse. The others, I knew, would rather have had to take something on faith.

  But Sarasti had an alternative to capture-release, one he evidently considered much safer. It took an act of faith to accept that reasoning, at least; by any sane measure it verged on suicide.

  Now Theseus gave birth by Caesarian. These progeny were far too massive to fit through the canal at the end of the spine. The ship shat them as if constipated, directly into the hold: great monstrous things, bristling with muzzles and antennae. Each stood three or four times my height, a pair of massive rust-colored cubes, every surface infested with topography. Armor plating would hide most of it prior to deployment, of course. Ribbons of piping and conduit, ammunition reservoirs and shark-toothed rows of radiator fins— all to disappear beneath smooth reflective shielding. Only a few island landmarks would rise above that surface: comm ports, thrust nozzles, targeting arrays. And gun ports, of course. These things spat fire and brimstone from a half-dozen mouths apiece.

  But for the time being they were just giant mechanical fetuses, half-extruded, their planes and angles a high-contrast jigsaw of light and shadow in the harsh white glow of the hold's floodlamps.

  I turned from the port. "That's got to take our substrate stockpiles down a bit."

  "Shielding the carapace was worse." Bates monitored construction through a dedicated flatscreen built right into the Fab bulkhead. Practicing, perhaps; we'd be losing our inlays as soon as the orbit changed. "We're tapping out, though. Might have to grab one of the local rocks before long."

  "Huh." I looked back into the hold. "You think they're necessary?"

  "Doesn't matter what I think. You're a bright guy, Siri. Why can't you figure that out?"

  "It matters to me. That means it matters to Earth."

  Which might mean something, if Earth was calling the shots. Some subtext was legible no matter how deep in the system you were.

  I tacked to port: "How about Sarasti and the Captain, then? Any thoughts?"

  "You're usually a bit more subtle."

  That much was true. "It's just, you know Susan was the one that caught Stretch and Clench tapping back and forth, right?"

  Bates winced at the names. "So?"

  "Well, some might think it odd that Theseus wouldn't have seen it first. Since quantum computers are supposed to be so proficient at pattern-matching."

  "Sarasti took the quantum modules offline. The onboard's been running in classical mode since before we even made orbit."

  "Why?"

  "Noisy environment. Too much risk of decoherence. Quantum computers are finicky things."

  "Surely the onboard's shielded. Theseus is shielded."

  Bates nodded. "As much as feasible. But perfect shielding is perfect blindness, and this is not the kind of neighborhood where you want to keep your eyes closed."

  Actually, it was. But I took her point.

  I took her other point, too, the one she didn't speak aloud: And you missed it. Something sitting right there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Top-of-the-line synthesist like you.

  "Sarasti knows what he's doing, I guess," I admitted, endlessly aware that he might be listening. "He hasn't been wrong yet, as far as we know."

  "As far as we can know," Bates said.

  "If you could second-guess a vampire, you wouldn't need a vampire," I remembered.

  She smiled faintly. "Isaac was a good man. You can't always believe the PR, though."

  "You don't buy it?" I asked, but she was already thinking she'd said too much. I threw out a hook baited with just the right mix of skepticism and deference: "Sarasti did know where those scramblers would be. Nailed it almost the meter, out of that whole maze."

  "I suppose that might have taken some kind of superhuman logic," she admitted, thinking I was so fucking dumb she couldn't believe it.

  "What?" I said.

  Bates shrugged. "Or maybe he just realized that since Rorschach was growing its own crew, we'd run into more every time we went in. No matter where we landed."

  ConSensus bleeped into my silence. "Orbital maneuvers starting in five," Sarasti announced. "Inlays and wireless prosthetics offline in ninety. That's all."

  Bates shut down the display. "I'm going to ride this out in the bridge. Illusion of control and all that. You?"

  "My tent, I think."

  She nodded, and braced to jump, and hesitated.

  "By the way," she told me, "yes."

  "Sorry?"

  "You asked if I thought the emplacements were necessary. Right now I think we need all the protection we can get."

  "So you think that Rorschach might—"

  "Hey, it already killed me once. "

  She wasn't talking about radiation.

  I nodde
d carefully. "That must have been…"

  "Like nothing at all. You couldn't possibly imagine." Bates took a breath and let it out.

  "Maybe you don't have to," she added, and sailed away up the spine.

  ***

  Cunningham and the Gang in BioMed, thirty degrees of arc between them. Each poked their captives in their own way. Susan James stabbed indifferently at a keypad painted across her desktop. Windows to either side looked in on Stretch and Clench.

  Cookie-cutter shapes scrolled across the desk as James typed: circles, triskelions, a quartet of parallel lines. Some of them pulsed like abstract little hearts. In his distant pen, Stretch reached out one fraying tentacle and tapped something in turn.

  "Any progress?"

  She sighed and shook her head. "I've given up trying to understand their language. I'm settling for a pidgin." She tapped an icon. Clench vanished from his window; a hieroglyphic flowchart sprang up in his place. Half the symbols wriggled or pulsed, endlessly repetitive, a riot of dancing doodles. Others just sat there.

  "Iconic base." James waved vaguely at the display. "Subject-Verb phrases render as animated versions of noun icons. They're radially symmetrical, so I array modifiers in a circular pattern around the central subject. Maybe that comes naturally to them."

  A new circle of glyphs appeared beneath James's—Stretch's reply, presumably. But something in the system didn't like what it saw. Icons flared in a separate window: a luminous counter flashed 500 WATTS, and held steady. On the screen, Stretch writhed. It reached out with squirming backbone-arms and stabbed repeatedly at its touchpad.

  James looked away.

  New glyphs appeared. 500 Watts retreated to zero. Stretch returned to its holding pattern; the spikes and jags of its telemetry smoothed.

  James let out her breath. "What happened?" I asked.

  "Wrong answer." She tapped into Stretch's feed, showed me the display that had tripped it up. A pyramid, a star, simplified representations of a scrambler and of Rorschach rotated on the board.

  "It was stupid, it was just a—a warm-up exercise, really. I asked it to name the objects in the window." She laughed softly and without humor. "That's the thing about functional languages, you know. If you can't point at it, you can't talk about it."