Firefall

by Peter Watts

  I woke.

  I was alone, weightless, in the center of my tent. I could have sworn something had tapped me on the back. Leftover hallucination, I thought. A lingering aftereffect of the haunted mansion, going for one last bit of gooseflesh en route to extinction.

  But it happened again. I bumped against the keelward curve of the bubble, bumped again, head and shoulder-blades against fabric; the rest of me came after, moving gently but irresistibly—

  Down.

  Theseus was accelerating.

  No. Wrong direction. Theseus was rolling, like a harpooned whale at the surface of the sea. Turning her belly to the stars.

  I brought up ConSensus and threw a Nav-tac summary against the wall. A luminous point erupted from the outline of our ship, crawled away from Big Ben leaving a bright filament etched in its wake. I watched until the numbers read 15G.

  "Siri. My quarters, please."

  I jumped. It sounded as though the vampire had been at my very shoulder.

  "Coming."

  An ampsat relay, climbing at long last to an intercept with the Icarus antimatter stream. Somewhere behind the call of duty, my heart sank.

  We weren't running, Robert Cunningham's fondest wishes notwithstanding. Theseus was stockpiling ordnance.

  ***

  The open hatch gaped like a cave in the face of a cliff. The pale blue light from the spine couldn't seem to reach inside. Sarasti was barely more than a silhouette, black on gray, his bright bloody eyes reflecting catlike in the surrounding gloom.

  "Come." He amped up the shorter wavelengths in deference to human vision. The interior of the bubble brightened, although the light remained slightly red-shifted. Like Rorschach with high beams.

  I floated into Sarasti's parlor. His face, normally paper-white, was so flushed it looked sunburned. He gorged himself, I couldn't help thinking. He drank deep. But all that blood was his own. Usually he kept it deep in the flesh, favoring the vital organs. Vampires were efficient that way. They only washed out their peripheral tissues occasionally, when lactate levels got too high.

  Or when they were hunting.

  He had a needle to his throat, injected himself with three cc's of clear liquid as I watched. His antiEuclideans. I wondered how often he had to replenish them, now that he'd lost faith in the implants. He withdrew the needle and slipped it into a sheath geckoed to a convenient strut. His color drained as I watched, sinking back to the core, leaving his skin waxy and corpselike.

  "You're here as official observer," Sarasti said.

  I observed. His quarters were even more spartan than mine. No personal effects to speak of. No custom coffin lined with shrink-wrapped soil. Nothing but two jumpsuits, a pouch for toiletries, and a disconnected fiberop umbilicus half as thick as my little finger, floating like a roundworm in formalin. Sarasti's hardline to the Captain. Not even a cortical jack, I remembered. It plugged into the medulla, the brainstem. That was logical enough; that was where all the neural cabling converged, the point of greatest bandwidth. Still, it was a disquieting thought—that Sarasti linked to the ship through the brain of a reptile.

  An image flared on the wall, subtly distorted against the concave surface: Stretch and Clench in their adjoining cells, rendered in splitscreen. Cryptic vitals defaced little grids below each image.

  The distortion distracted me. I looked for a corrected feed in ConSensus, came up empty. Sarasti read my expression: "Closed circuit."

  By now the scramblers would have seemed sick and ragged even to a virgin audience. They floated near the middle of their respective compartments, segmented arms drifting aimlessly back and forth. Membranous patches of—skin, I suppose—were peeling from the cuticles, giving them a fuzzy, decomposing aspect.

  "The arms move continuously," Sarasti remarked. "Robert says it assists in circulation."

  I nodded, watching the display.

  "Creatures that move between stars can't even perform basic metabolic functions without constant flailing." He shook his head. "Inefficient. Primitive."

  I glanced at the vampire. He remained fixed on our captives.

  "Obscene," he said, and moved his fingers.

  A new window opened on the wall: the Rosetta protocol, initializing. Kilometers away, microwaves flooded the holding tanks.

  I reminded myself: No interference. Only observation.

  However weakened their condition, the scramblers were not yet indifferent to pain. They knew the game, they knew the rules; they dragged themselves to their respective panels and played for mercy. Sarasti had simply invoked a step-by-step replay of some previous sequence. The scramblers went through it all again, buying a few moments' intermittent respite with the same old proofs and theorems.

  Sarasti clicked, then spoke: "They regenerate these solutions faster than they did before. Do you think they're acclimated to the microwaves?"

  Another readout appeared on the display; an audio alarm began chirping somewhere nearby. I looked at Sarasti, and back at the readout: a solid circle of turquoise backlit by a pulsing red halo. The shape meant atmospheric anomaly. The color meant oxygen.

  I felt a moment of confusion—(Oxygen? Why would oxygen set off the alarm?)—until I remembered: Scramblers were anaerobes.

  Sarasti muted the alarm with a wave of his hand.

  I cleared my throat: "You're poisoning—"

  "Watch. Performance is consistent. No change."

  I swallowed. Just observe.

  "Is this an execution?" I asked. "Is this a, a mercy killing?"

  Sarasti looked past me, and smiled. "No."

  I dropped my eyes. "What, then?"

  He pointed at the display. I turned, reflexively obedient.

  Something stabbed my hand like a spike at a crucifixion.

  I screamed. Electric pain jolted to my shoulder. I yanked my hand back without thinking; the embedded blade split its flesh like a fin through water. Blood sprayed into the air and stayed there, a comet's tail of droplets tracing the frenzied arc of my hand.

  Sudden scalding heat from behind. Flesh charred on my back. I screamed again, flailing. A veil of bloody droplets swirled in the air.

  Somehow I was in the corridor, staring dumbly at my right hand. It had been split to the heel of the palm, flopped at the end of my wrist in two bloody, bifingered chunks. Blood welled from the torn edges and wouldn't fall. Sarasti advanced through a haze of trauma and confusion. His face swam in and out of focus, rich with his blood or mine. His eyes were bright red mirrors, his eyes were time machines. Darkness roared around them and it was half a million years ago and I was just another piece of meat on the African savannah, a split-second from having its throat torn out.

  "Do you see the problem?" Sarasti asked, advancing. A great spider crab hovered at his shoulder. I forced focus through the pain: one of Bates' grunts, taking aim. I kicked blindly, hit the ladder through sheer happenstance, careened backwards down the corridor.

  The vampire came after me, his face split into something that would have been a smile on anyone else. "Conscious of pain, you're distracted by pain. You're fixated on it. Obsessed by the one threat, you miss the other."

  I flailed. Crimson mist stung my eyes.

  "So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better."

  He's snapped, I thought. He's insane. And then No, he's a transient. He's always been a transient—

  "They could do better," he said softly.

  —and he's been hiding for days. Deep down. Hiding from the seals.

  What else would he do?

  Sarasti raised his hands, fading in and out of focus. I hit something, kicked without aiming, bounced away through swirling mist and startled voices. Metal cracked the back of my head and spun me around.

  A hole, a burrow. A place to hide. I dove through, my torn hand flapping like a dead fish against the edge of the hatch. I cried out and tumbled into the drum, the monster at my heels.

  Startled shouts, very close now. "This wasn't the plan, Ju
kka! This wasn't the goddamned plan!" That was Susan James, full of outrage, while Amanda Bates snarled "Stand down, right fucking now!" and leapt from the deck to do battle. She rose through the air, all overclocked reflexes and carboplatinum augments but Sarasti just batted her aside and kept on coming. His arm shot out like a striking snake. His hand clamped around my throat.

  "Is this what you meant?" James cried from some dark irrelevant hiding place. "Is this your preconditioning?"

  Sarasti shook me. "Are you in there, Keeton?"

  My blood splattered across his face like rain. I babbled and cried.

  "Are you listening? Can you see?"

  And suddenly I could. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. Sarasti wasn't talking at all. Sarasti didn't even exist anymore. Nobody did. I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape.

  I didn't understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn't help but understand.

  "Get out of your room, Keeton," it hissed. "Stop transposing or interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton?"

  And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I heard.

  ***

  You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

  Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

  Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

  But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

  Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

  Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

  Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

  Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

  Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.

  And it's fighting back.

  ***

  Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

  ***

  The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO's office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this— this creaking neurological bureaucracy.

  I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they're saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.

  I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say "I do not exist" would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.

  SARASTI, YOU BLOODSUCKER.

  My knees pressed against my forehead. I hugged my folded legs as though clinging to a branch over a chasm.

  You vicious asshole. You foul sadistic monster.

  My breath rasped loud and mechanical. It nearly drowned out the blood roaring in my ears.

  You tore me apart, you made me piss and shit myself and I cried like some gutted baby and you stripped me naked, you fucking thing, you night crawler, you broke my tools, you took away anything I ever had that let me touch anyone and you didn't have to you babyfucker, it wasn't necessary but you knew that didn't you? You just wanted to play. I've seen your kind at it before, cats toying with mice, catch and release, a taste of freedom and then pouncing again, biting, not hard enough to kill— not just yet—before you let them loose again and they're hobbling now, maybe a leg snapped or a gash in the belly but they're still trying, still running or crawling or dragging themselves as fast as they can until you're on them again, and again because
it's fun, because it gives you pleasure you sadistic piece of shit. You send us into the arms of that hellish thing and it plays with us too, and maybe you're even working together because it let me escape just like you do, it let me run right back into your arms and then you strip me down to some raw half-brained defenseless animal, I can't rotate or transform I can't even talk and you—

  You—

  It wasn't even personal, was it? You don't even hate me. You were just sick of keeping it all in, sick of restraining yourself with all this meat, and nobody else could be spared from their jobs. This was my job, wasn't it? Not synthesist, not conduit. Not even cannon fodder or decoy duty. I'm just something disposable to sharpen your claws on.

  I hurt so much. It hurt just to breathe.

  I was so alone.

  Webbing pressed against the curve of my back, bounced me forward gently as a breeze, caught me again. I was back in my tent. My right hand itched. I tried to flex the fingers, but they were embedded in amber. Left hand reached for right, and found a plastic carapace extending to the elbow.

  I opened my eyes. Darkness. Meaningless numbers and a red LED twinkled from somewhere along my forearm.

  I didn't remember coming here. I didn't remember anyone fixing me.

  Breaking. Being broken. That's what I remembered. I wanted to die. I wanted to just stay curled up until I withered away.

  After an age, I forced myself to uncoil. I steadied myself, let some miniscule inertia bump me against the taut insulated fabric of my tent. I waited for my breathing to steady. It seemed to take hours.

  I called ConSensus to the wall, and a feed from the drum. Soft voices, harsh light flaring against the wall: hurting my eyes, peeling them raw. I killed visual, and listened to words in the darkness.

  "—a phase?" someone asked.

  Susan James, her personhood restored. I knew her again: not a meat sack, no longer a thing.

  "We have been over this." That was Cunningham. I knew him too. I knew them all. Whatever Sarasti had done to me, however far he'd yanked me from my room, I'd somehow fallen back inside.