Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "Why do you think?" I asked, reflexively nondirective.

  "I think that first one was—you know it was a juvenile, right? Maybe it was just inexperienced. Maybe it was stupid, and it made a bad decision. I think we're dealing with a species so far beyond us that even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can't tell you how fucking scared that should make you."

  I could see it in his topology. I could hear it in his voice. His nerveless face remained as calm as a corpse.

  "We should just kill them now," he said.

  "Well, if they're spies, they can't have learned much. They've been in those cages the whole time, except—" for the way up. They'd been right next to us the whole trip back…

  "These things live and breath EM. Even stunted, even isolated, who knows how much of our tech they could have just read through the walls?"

  "You've got to tell Sarasti," I said.

  "Oh, Sarasti knows. Why do you think he wouldn't let them go?"

  "He never said anything about—"

  "He'd be crazy to fill us in. He keeps sending you down there, remember? Do you think for a second he'd tell you what he knows and then set you loose in a labyrinth full of mind-reading minotaurs? He knows, and he's already got it factored a thousand ways to Sunday." Cunningham's eyes were bright manic points blazing in an expressionless mask. He raised them to the center of the drum, and didn't raise his voice a decibel. "Isn't that right, Jukka?"

  I checked ConSensus for active channels. "I don't think he's listening, Robert."

  Cunningham's mouth moved in something that would have been a pitying smile if the rest of his face had been able to join in. "He doesn't have to listen, Keeton. He doesn't have to spy on us. He just knows."

  Ventilators, breathing. The almost-subliminal hum of bearings in motion. Then Sarasti's disembodied voice rang forth through the drum.

  "Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share."

  ***

  Cunningham sat to my right, his plastic face lit from beneath by the conference table. He stared down into that light, rocking slightly. His lips went through the ongoing motions of some inaudible incantation. The Gang sat across from us. To my left Bates kept one eye on the proceedings and another on intelligence from the front lines.

  Sarasti was with us only in spirit. His place at the head of the table remained empty. "Tell them," he said.

  "We have to get out of h—"

  "From the beginning."

  Cunningham swallowed and started again. "Those frayed motor nerves I couldn't figure out, those pointless cross-connections—they're logic gates. Scramblers time-share. Their sensory and motor plexii double as associative neurons during idle time, so every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn't otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual."

  "So peripheral nerves can think?" Bates frowned. "Can they remember?"

  "Certainly. At least, I don't see why not." Cunningham pulled a cigarette from his pocket.

  "So when they tore that scrambler apart—"

  "Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about us, most likely."

  "Pretty radical way to carry on a conversation," Bates remarked.

  "It wouldn't be their first choice. I think each scrambler acts as a node in a distributed network, when they're in Rorschach at least. But those fields would be configured down to the Angstrom, and when we go in with our tech and our shielding and blowing holes in their conductors—we bollocks up the network. Jam the local signal. So they resort to a sneakernet."

  He had not lit his cigarette. He rolled the filtered end between thumb and forefinger. His tongue flickered between his lips like a worm behind a mask.

  Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. "Scramblers also use Rorschach's EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling. Perhaps the ambient radiation acts as a catalyst."

  "Tunneling?" Susan said. "As in quantum?"

  Cunningham nodded. "Which also explains your shielding problems. Partly, at least."

  "But is that even possible? I mean, I thought those kind of effects only showed up under cryonic—"

  "Forget this," Cunningham blurted. "We can debate the biochemistry later, if we're still alive."

  "What do we debate instead, Robert?" Sarasti said smoothly.

  "For starters, the dumbest of these things can look into your head and see what parts of your visual cortex are lighting up. And if there's a difference between that and mind-reading, it's not much of one."

  "As long as we stay out of Rorschach—"

  "That ship has sailed. You people have already been there. Repeatedly. Who knows what you already did down there for no better reason than because Rorschach made you?"

  "Wait a second," Bates objected. "None of us were puppets down there. We hallucinated and we went blind and—and crazy even, but we were never possessed."

  Cunningham looked at her and snorted. "You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet." He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. "Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we've already given them Theseus' technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all."

  "We can cause those effects," Sarasti said coolly. "As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents."

  "Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it."

  "So what?" the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.

  "There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field," Sarasti pointed out. "You can't see it. You can't see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others."

  Cunningham was nodding. "That's my whole point. Rorschach could be—"

  "Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves."

  Nobody spoke. It was several silent seconds before I realized what had happened.

  Jukka Sarasti had just given us a pep talk.

  He could have shut down Cunningham's tirade—could have probably shut down a full-scale mutiny—by just sailing into our midst and baring his teeth. By looking at us. But he wasn't trying to frighten us into submission, we were already nervous enough. And he wasn't trying to educate us either, fight fear with fact; the more facts any sane person gathered about Rorschach, the more fearful they'd become. Sarasti was only trying to keep us functional, lost in space on the edge of our lives, facing down this monstrous enigma that might destroy us at any instant for any reason. Sarasti was trying to calm us down: good meat, nice meat. He was trying to keep us from falling apart. There there.

  Sarasti was practicing psychology.

  I looked around the table. Bates and Cunningham and the Gang sat still and bloodless.

  Sarasti sucked at it.

  "We have to get out of here," Cunningham said. "These things are way beyond us."

  "We've
shown more aggression than they have," James said, but there was no confidence in her voice.

  "Rorschach plays those rocks like marbles. We're sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery. Any time it feels like—"

  "It's still growing. It's not finished."

  "That's supposed to reassure me?"

  "All I'm saying is, we don't know," James said. "We could have years yet. Centuries."

  "We have fifteen days," Sarasti announced.

  "Oh shit," someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe Sascha.

  For some reason everyone was looking at me.

  Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number? None of us asked aloud. Maybe Sarasti, in another fit of inept psychology, had made it up on the spur of the moment. Or maybe he'd derived it before we'd even reached orbit, held it back against the possibility—only now expired— that he might yet send us back into the labyrinth. I'd been half blind for half the mission; I didn't know.

  But one way or another, we had our Graduation Day.

  ***

  The coffins lay against the rear bulkhead of the crypt—on what would be the floor during those moments when up and down held any meaning. We'd slept for years on the way out. We'd had no awareness of time's passage—undead metabolism is far too sluggish even to support dreams—but somehow the body knew when it needed a change. Not one of us had chosen to sleep in our pods once we'd arrived. The only times we'd done so had been on pain of death.

  But the Gang had taken to coming here ever since Szpindel had died.

  His body rested in the pod next to mine. I coasted into the compartment and turned left without thinking. Five coffins: four open and emptied, one sealed. The mirrored bulkhead opposite doubled their number and the depth of the compartment.

  But the Gang wasn't there.

  I turned right. The body of Susan James floated back-to-back with her own reflection, staring at an inverse tableau: three sealed sarcophagi, one open. The ebony plaque set into the retracted lid was dark; the others shone with identical sparse mosaics of blue and green stars. None of them changed. There were no scrolling ECGs, no luminous peak-and-valley tracings marked cardio or cns. We could wait here for hours, days, and none of those diodes would so much as twinkle. When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.

  The Gang's topology had said Michelle when I'd first arrived, but it was Susan who spoke now, without turning. "I never met her."

  I followed her gaze to the name tag one of the sealed pods: Takamatsu. The other linguist, the other multiple.

  "I met everyone else," Susan continued. "Trained with them. But I never met my own replacement."

  They discouraged it. What would have been the point?

  "If you want to—" I began.

  She shook her head. "Thanks anyway."

  "Or any of the others—I can only imagine what Michelle—"

  Susan smiled, but there was something cold about it. "Michelle doesn't really want to talk to you right now, Siri."

  "Ah." I hesitated for a moment, to give anyone else a chance to speak up. When nobody did, I pushed myself back towards the hatch. "Well, if any of you change—"

  "No. None of us. Ever."

  Cruncher.

  "You lie," he continued. "I see it. We all do."

  I blinked. "Lie? No, I—"

  "You don't talk. You listen. You don't care about Michelle. Don't care about anyone. You just want what we know. For your reports."

  "That's not entirely true, Cruncher. I do care. I know Michelle must—"

  "You don't know shit. Go away."

  "I'm sorry I upset you." I rolled on my axis and braced against the mirror.

  "You can't know Meesh," he growled as I pushed off. "You never lost anyone. You never had anyone.

  "You leave her alone."

  ***

  He was wrong on both counts. And at least Szpindel had died knowing that Michelle cared for him.

  Chelsea died thinking I just didn't give a shit.

  It had been two years or more, and while we still interfaced occasionally we hadn't met in the flesh since the day she'd left. She came at me from right out of the Oort, sent an urgent voice message to my inlays: Cygnus. Please call NOW. It's important.

  It was the first time since I'd known her that she'd ever blanked the optics.

  I knew it was important. I knew it was bad, even without picture. I knew because there was no picture, and I could tell it was worse than bad from the harmonics in her voice. I could tell it was lethal.

  I found out afterwards that she'd gotten caught in the crossfire. The Realists had sown a fibrodysplasia variant outside the Boston catacombs; an easy tweak, a single-point retroviral whose results served both as an act of terrorism and an ironic commentary on the frozen paralysis of Heaven's occupants. It rewrote a regulatory gene controlling ossification on Chromosome 4, and rigged a metabolic bypass at three loci on 17.

  Chelsea started growing a new skeleton. Her joints were calcifying within fifteen hours of exposure, her ligaments and tendons within twenty. By then they were starving her at the cellular level, trying to slow the bug by depriving it of metabolites, but they could only buy time and not much of it. Twenty-three hours in, her striated muscles were turning to stone.

  I didn't find this out immediately, because I didn't call her back. I didn't need to know the details. I could tell from her voice that she was dying. Obviously she wanted to say goodbye.

  I couldn't talk to her until I knew how to do that.

  I spent hours scouring the noosphere, looking for precedents. There's no shortage of ways to die; I found millions of case records dealing with the etiquette. Last words, last vows, instruction manuals for the soon-to-bereaved. Palliative neuropharm. Extended and expository death scenes in popular fiction. I went through it all, assigned a dozen front-line filters to separate heat from light.

  By the time she called again the news was out: acute Golem outbreak lancing like a white-hot needle through the heart of Boston. Containment measures holding. Heaven secure. Modest casualties expected. Names of victims withheld pending notification of kin.

  I still didn't know the principles, the rules: all I had were examples. Last wills and testaments; the negotiation of jumpers with their would-be rescuers; diaries recovered from imploded submarines or lunar crash sites. Recorded memoirs and deathbed confessions rattling into flatline. Black box transcripts of doomed spaceships and falling beanstalks, ending in fire and static. All of it relevant. None of it useful; none of it her.

  She called again, and still the optics were blank, and still I didn't answer.

  But the last time she called, she didn't spare me the view.

  They'd made her as comfortable as possible. The gelpad conformed to every twisted limb, every erupting spur of bone. They would not have left her in any pain.

  Her neck had torqued down and to the side as it petrified, left her staring at the twisted claw that had once been her right hand. Her knuckles were the size of walnuts. Plates and ribbons of ectopic bone distended the skin of her arms and shoulders, buried her ribs in a fibrous mat of calcified flesh.

  Movement was its own worst enemy. Golem punished even the slightest twitch, provoked the growth of fresh bone along any joints and surfaces conspiring to motion. Each hinge and socket had its own nonrenewable ration of flexibility, carved in stone; every movement depleted the account. The body seized incrementally. By the time she let me look at her, Chelsea had almost exhausted her degrees of freedom.

  "Cyg," she slurred. "Know you're there."

  Her jaw was locked half-open; her tongue must have stiffened with every word. She did not look at the camera. She could not look at the camera.

  "Guess I know why you're not answ'ring. I'll try'nt—try not to take it pers'n'lly."

  Ten thousand deathbed goodbyes arrayed around me, a million more within reach. What was I supposed to do, pick one at random? Stitch them into some kind of composite? All these words had been for other people.
Grafting them onto Chelsea would reduce them to clichés, to trite platitudes. To insults.

  "Want t'say, don' feel bad. I know y're just— 's'not your fault, I guess. You'd pick up if you could."

  And say what? What do you say to someone who's dying in fast-forward before your eyes?

  "Just keep trying t'connect, y'know. Can't help m'self…"

  Although the essentials of this farewell are accurate, details from several deaths have been combined for dramatic purposes.

  "Please? Jus'—talk to me, Cyg…"

  More than anything, I wanted to.

  "Siri, I…just…"

  I'd spent all this time trying to figure out how.

  "Forget't," she said, and disconnected.

  I whispered something into the dead air. I don't even remember what.

  I really wanted to talk to her.

  I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.

  THEY'D HOPED, BY now, to have banished sleep forever.

  The waste was nothing short of obscene: a third of every Human life spent with its strings cut, insensate, the body burning fuel but not producing. Think of all we could accomplish if we didn't have to lapse into unconsciousness every fifteen hours or so, if our minds could stay awake and alert from the moment of infancy to that final curtain call a hundred twenty years later. Think of eight billion souls with no off switch and no down time until the very chassis wore out.

  Why, we could go to the stars.

  It hadn't worked out that way. Even if we'd outgrown the need to stay quiet and hidden during the dark hours—the only predators left were those we'd brought back ourselves—the brain still needed time apart from the world outside. Experiences had to be catalogued and filed, mid-term memories promoted to long-term ones, free radicals swept from their hiding places among the dendrites. We had only reduced the need for sleep, not eliminated it—and that incompressible residue of downtime seemed barely able to contain the dreams and phantoms left behind. They squirmed in my head like creatures in a draining tidal pool.