Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "Dispassionate?" Cunningham smiled faintly.

  "Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing. Maybe the only difference is that I don't lie to myself about it."

  "Do they look the way you imagined?" he asked.

  "What? What are you talking about?"

  "The scramblers. Multijointed arms from a central mass. Sounds rather similar to me."

  He'd been into Szpindel's archives.

  "I—Not really," I said. "The arms are more—flexible, in real life. More segmented. And I never really got a look at the body. What does that have to do with—"

  "Close, though, wasn't it? Same size, same general body plan."

  "So what?"

  "Why didn't you report it?"

  "I did. Isaac said it was just TMS. From Rorschach."

  "You saw them before Rorschach. Or at least," he continued, "you saw something that scared you into blowing your cover, back when you were spying on Isaac and Michelle."

  My rage dissipated like air through a breach. "They—they knew?"

  "Only Isaac, I think. And it kept it between it and the logs. I suspect it didn't want to interfere with your noninterference protocols—although I'll wager that was the last time you ever caught the two of them in private, yes?"

  I didn't say anything.

  "Did you think the official observer was somehow exempt from observation?" Cunningham asked after a while.

  "No," I said softly. "I suppose not."

  He nodded. "Have you seen any since? I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill TMS hallucinations. I mean scramblers. Have you hallucinated any since you actually saw one in the flesh, since you knew what they looked like?"

  I thought about it. "No."

  He shook his head, some new opinion confirmed. "You really are something, Keeton, you know that? You don't lie to yourself? Even now, you don't know what you know."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You figured it out. From Rorschach's architecture, probably—form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least—" He drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED— "part of you did. Some collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can't show their work, can they? You don't have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table."

  "Blindsight," I murmered. You just get a feeling of where to reach...

  "More like schizophrenia, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw pictures. And you still didn't understand."

  I blinked. "But how would I—I mean—"

  "What did you think, that Theseus was haunted? That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically? What you do—it matters, Keeton. They told you you were nothing but their stenographer and they hammered all those layers of hands-off passivity into you but you just had to take some initiative anyway, didn't you? Had to work the problem on your own. The only thing you couldn't do was admit it to yourself." Cunningham shook his head. "Siri Keeton. See what they've done to you."

  He touched his face.

  "See what they've done to us all," he whispered.

  ***

  I found the Gang floating in the center of the darkened observation blister. She made room as I joined her, pushed to one side and anchored herself to a bit of webbing.

  "Susan?" I asked. I honestly couldn't tell any more.

  "I'll get her," Michelle said.

  "No, that's all right. I'd like to speak to all of—"

  But Michelle had already fled. The half-lit figure changed before me, and said, "She'd rather be alone right now."

  I nodded. "You?"

  James shrugged. "I don't mind talking. Although I'm surprised you're still doing your reports, after...."

  "I'm—not, exactly. This isn't for Earth."

  I looked around. Not much to see. Faraday mesh coated the inside of the dome like a gray film, dimming and graining the view beyond. Ben hung like a black malignancy across half the sky. I could make out a dozen dim contrails against vague bands of cloud, in reds so deep they bordered on black. The sun winked past James's shoulder, our sun, a bright dot that diffracted into faint splintered rainbows when I moved my head. That was pretty much it: starlight didn't penetrate the mesh, nor did the larger, dimmer particles of the accretion belt. The myriad dim pinpoints of shovelnosed machinery were lost utterly.

  Which might be a comfort to some, I supposed.

  "Shitty view," I remarked. Theseus could have projected crisp first-person vistas across the dome in an instant, more real than real.

  "Michelle likes it," James said. "The way it feels. And Cruncher likes the diffraction effects, he likes— interference patterns."

  We watched nothing for a while, by the dim half-light filtering out from the spine. It brushed the edges of James' profile.

  "You set me up," I said at last.

  She looked at me. "What do you mean?"

  "You were talking around me all along, weren't you? All of you. You didn't bring me in until I'd been—" How had she put it? "—preconditioned. The whole thing was planned to throw me off-balance. And then Sarasti— attacks me out of nowhere, and—"

  "We didn't know about that. Not until the alarm went off."

  "Alarm?"

  "When he changed the gas mix. You must have heard it. Isn't that why you were there?"

  "He called me to his tent. He told me to watch."

  She regarded me from a face full of shadow. "You didn't try to stop him?"

  I couldn't answer the accusation in her voice. "I just—observe," I said weakly.

  "I thought you were trying to stop him from—" She shook her head. "That's why I thought he was attacking you."

  "You're saying that wasn't an act? You weren't in on it?" I didn't believe it.

  But I could tell she did.

  "I thought you were trying to protect them." She snorted a soft, humorless laugh at her own mistake and looked away. "I guess I should have known better."

  She should have. She should have known that taking orders is one thing; taking sides would have done nothing but compromise my integrity.

  And I should have been used to it by now.

  I forged on. "It was some kind of object lesson. A, a tutorial. You can't torture the nonsentient or something, and — and I heard you, Susan. It wasn't news to you, it wasn't news to anyone except me, and..."

  And you hid it from me. You all did. You and your whole gang and Amanda too. You've been hashing this out for days and you went out of your way to cover it up.

  How did I miss it? How did I miss it?

  "Jukka told us not to discuss it with you," Susan admitted.

  "Why? This is exactly the kind of thing I'm out here for!"

  "He said you'd—resist. Unless it was handled properly."

  "Handled—Susan, he assaulted me! You saw what he—"

  "We didn't know he was going to do that. None of us did."

  "And he did it why? To win an argument?"

  "That's what he says."

  "Do you believe him?"

  "Probably." After a moment she shrugged. "Who knows? He's a vampire. He's—opaque."

  "But his record—I mean, he's, he's never resorted to overt violence before—"

  She shook her head. "Why should he? He doesn't have to convince the rest of us of anything. We have to follow his orders regardless."

  "So do I," I reminded her.

  "He's not trying to convince you, Siri."

  Ah.

  I was only a conduit, after all. Sarasti hadn't been making his case to me at all; he'd been making it through me, and—

  —and he was planning for a second round. Why go to such extremes to present a case to Earth, if E
arth was irrelevant? Sarasti didn't expect the game to end out here. He expected Earth to do something in light of his—perspective.

  "But what difference does it make?" I wondered aloud.

  She just looked at me.

  "Even if he's right, how does it change anything? How does this—" I raised my repaired hand—"change anything? Scramblers are intelligent, whether they're sentient or not. They're a potential threat either way. We still don't know. So what difference does it make? Why did he do this to me? How does it matter?"

  Susan raised her face to Big Ben and didn't answer.

  Sascha returned her face to me, and tried to.

  "It matters," she said, "because it means we attacked them before Theseus launched. Before Firefall, even."

  "We attacked the—"

  "You don't get it, do you? You don't." Sascha snorted softly. "If that isn't the fucking funniest thing I've heard in my whole short life."

  She leaned forward, bright-eyed. "Imagine you're a scrambler, and you encounter a human signal for the very first time."

  Her stare was almost predatory. I resisted the urge to back away.

  "It should be so easy for you, Keeton. It should be the easiest gig you've ever had. Aren't you the user interface, aren't you the Chinese Room? Aren't you the one who never has to look inside, never has to walk a mile in anyone's shoes, because you figure everyone out from their surfaces?"

  She stared at Ben's dark smoldering disk. "Well, there's your dream date. There's a whole race of nothing but surfaces. There's no inside to figure out. All the rules are right up front. So go to work, Siri Keeton. Make us proud."

  There was no contempt in Sascha's voice, no disdain. There wasn't even anger, not in her voice, not in her eyes.

  There was pleading. There were tears.

  "Imagine you're a scrambler," she whispered again, as they floated like tiny perfect beads before her face.

  ***

  Imagine you're a scrambler.

  Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing.

  You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

  Try.

  Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.

  You decode the signals, and stumble:

  I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—

  To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—

  They hate us for our freedom—

  Pay attention, now—

  Understand.

  There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.

  The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

  Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

  The signal is an attack.

  And it's coming from right about there.

  ***

  "Now you get it," Sascha said.

  I shook my head, trying to wrap it around that insane, impossible conclusion. "They're not even hostile." Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn't help but treat human language itself as a form of combat.

  How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?

  "That's why they won't talk to us," I realized.

  "Only if Jukka's right. He may not be." It was James again, still quietly resisting, still unwilling to concede a point that even her other selves had accepted. I could see why. Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores. Susan James could not bring herself to concede that point—because Susan James, her multiple lives built on the faith that communication resolves all conflict, would then be forced to admit the lie. If Sarasti was right, there was no hope of reconciliation.

  A memory rose into my mind and stuck there: a man in motion, head bent, mouth twisted into an unrelenting grimace. His eyes focused on one foot, then the other. His legs moved stiffly, carefully. His arms moved not at all. He lurched like a zombie in thrall to rigor mortis.

  I knew what it was. Proprioreceptive polyneuropathy, a case study I'd encountered in ConSensus back before Szpindel had died. This was what Pag had once compared me to; a man who had lost his mind. Only self-awareness remained. Deprived of the unconscious sense and subroutines he had always taken for granted, he'd had to focus on each and every step across the room. His body no longer knew where its limbs were or what they were doing. To move at all, to even remain upright, he had to bear constant witness.

  There'd been no sound when I'd played that file. There was none now in its recollection. But I swore I could feel Sarasti at my shoulder, peering into my memories. I swore I heard him speak in my mind like a schizophrenic hallucination:

  This is the best that consciousness can do, when left on its own.

  "Right answer," I murmured. "Wrong question."

  "What?"

  "Stretch, remember? When you asked it which objects were in the window."

  "And it missed the scrambler." James nodded. "So?"

  "It didn't miss the scrambler. You thought you were asking about the things it saw, the things that existed on the board. Stretch thought you were asking about—"

  "The things it was aware of," she finished.

  "He's right," I whispered. "Oh God. I think he's right."

  "Hey," James said. "Did you see tha—"

  But I never saw what she was pointing at. Theseus slammed its eyelids shut and started howling.

  ***

  Graduation came nine days early.

  We didn't see the shot. Whatever gun port Rorschach had opened was precisely eclipsed on three fronts: the lab-hab hid it from Theseus, and two gnarled extrusions of the artefact itself hid it from each of the gun emplacements. A bolus of incendiary plasma shot from that blind spot like a thrown punch; it had split the inflatable wide open before the first alarm went up.

  Alarms chased us aft. We launched ourselves down the spine through the bridge, through the crypt, past hatches and crawlspaces, fleeing the surface for any refuge with more than a hand's-breadth between skin and sky. Burrowing. ConSensus followed us back, its windows warping and sliding across struts and conduits and the concave tunnel of the spine itself. I paid no attention until we were back in the drum, deep in Theseus' belly. Where we could pretend we were safer.

  Down on the turning deck Bates erupted from the head, tactical windows swirling like ballroom dancers
around her. Our own window came to rest on the Commons bulkhead. The hab expanded across that display like a cheap optical illusion: both swelling and shrinking in our sights, that smooth surface billowing towards us while collapsing in on itself. It took me a moment to reconcile the contradiction: something had kicked the hab hard from its far side, sent it careening toward us in a slow, majestic tumble. Something had opened the hab, spilled its atmosphere and left its elastic skin drawing in on itself like a deflating balloon. The impact site swung into view as we watched, a scorched flaccid mouth trailing tenuous wisps of frozen spittle.

  Our guns were firing. They shot nonconducting slugs that would not be turned aside by electromagnetic trickery—invisibly dark and distant to human eyes but I saw them through the tactical crosshairs of the firing robots, watched them sew twin dotted blackbodied arcs across the heavens. The streams converged as the guns tracked their targets, closed on two attenuate throwing stars fleeing spread-eagled through the void, their faces turned to Rorschach like flowers to the sun.

  The guns cut them to pieces before they'd even made it half way.

  But those shredded pieces kept falling, and suddenly the ground beneath was alive with motion. I zoomed the view: scramblers surged across Rorschach's hull like an orgy of snakes, naked to space. Some linked arms, one to another to another, built squirming vertebral daisy-chains anchored at one end. They lifted from the hull, waved through the radioactive vacuum like fronds of articulated kelp, reaching—grasping—

  Neither Bates nor her machines were stupid. They targeted the interlinked scramblers as ruthlessly as they'd gone after the escapees, and with a much higher total score. But there were simply too many targets, too many fragments snatched in passing. Twice I saw dismembered bits of Stretch and Clench caught by their brethren.

  The ruptured hab loomed across ConSensus like a great torn leukocyte. Another alarm buzzed somewhere nearby: proximity alert. Cunningham shot into the drum from somewhere astern, bounced off a cluster of pipes and conduits, grabbed for support. "Holy shit–we are leaving, aren't we? Amanda?"