Firefall

by Peter Watts

  “Dymic.” Slippers nodded knowingly. “Assub.”

  Back on the pad a newborn vortex chafed at its restraints, smaller than its predecessor but angrier, somehow. Yellow icons blossomed across VEC/PRIME like rampant brush fires. Overhead, something was eating Gemini feetfirst.

  Another window opened on the wall, a hodgepodge of emerald alphanumerics. Slippers blinked and frowned, as though the apparition was somehow unexpected. Greek equations, Cyrillic footnotes, even a smattering of English flowed across the new display.

  Not telemetry. Not incoming. According to the status bar, this was an outgoing transmission; the Bicamerals were signaling someone. It all flickered by too fast for Brüks to have made much sense of it even if he had spoken Russian, but occasional fragments of English stuck in his eye. Theseus was one. Icarus another. Something about angels and asteroids flashed center stage for a moment and evaporated.

  More glyphs, more numbers: three parallel columns this time, rendered in red. Someone talking back.

  Out in the desert, the zombies stopped flickering.

  “Huh,” Slippers said, and raised a finger to his right temple. For the first time Brüks noticed an old-fashioned earbud there, an audio antique from the days before cortical inlays and bone conduction. Slippers inclined his head, listening; up on the wall a flurry of red and green turned the ongoing exchange into a Christmas celebration.

  Over on VEC/PRIME, orange and red icons downshifted to yellow. The chained vortex stopped thrashing on its pad and whirled smoothly at attention. Halfway to the horizon, the last vestiges of its older sibling dissipated in a luminous mist of settling dust.

  The desert rested quietly beneath an invisible thing in the sky.

  Just a few minutes ago, Dan Brüks had watched himself die out there. Or maybe escape in the nick of time. Something like him, anyway. Right up until that last moment when the maelstrom had chewed it up and spat it out. And right at that moment, the zombies had come—unglued...​

  Assub, Slippers had said then. At least, that’s what Brüks had heard. Assub.

  Ass—hub?

  “A.S.?” he said aloud. Brother Slippers turned, raised an eyebrow.

  “A.S.,” Brüks repeated. “What’s it stand for?”

  “Artificial Stupidity. Grabs local surveillance archives to blend in. Chameleon response.”

  “But why me? Why”—in the sky, invisible airships—“why anything? Why not just cloak, like that thing up there?”

  “Can’t cloak thermal emissions without overheating,” Slippers told him. “Not for long at least, not if you’re an endotherm. Best you can do is make yourself look like something else. Dynamic mimicry.”

  Dymic.

  Brüks snorted, shook his head. “You’re not even Bicameral, are you?”

  Slippers smiled faintly. “You thought I was?”

  “It’s a monastery. You spoke like...”

  Slippers shook his head. “Just visiting.”

  Acronyms. “You’re military,” Brüks guessed.

  “Something like that.”

  “Dan Brüks,” he said, extending a hand.

  The other man looked at it for a moment. Reached out his own. “Jim Moore. Welcome to the armistice.”

  “What just happened?”

  “They came to terms. For the moment.”

  “They?”

  “The monks and the vampire.”

  “I thought those were zombies.”

  “Those are.” Moore tapped the wall; a heat source appeared in the distance, a lone bright pinprick well behind the line. “That isn’t. Zombies don’t do anything without someone pulling their strings. She’s coming in now.”

  “Vampires,” Brüks said.

  “Vampire. Solitary op.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “Those things aren’t good in groups.”

  “I didn’t even know we let them out. I actually thought we were pretty scrupulous about keeping them, you know. Contained.”

  “So did I.” Pale flickering light washed the color from Moore’s face. “Not quite sure what her story is.”

  “What’s she have against the Bicamerals?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did she stop?”

  “Enemy of my enemy.”

  Brüks let that sink in. “You’re saying there’s a bigger enemy out there. A, a common threat.”

  “Potentially.”

  Out in the desert, that dimensionless point of heat had grown large enough to move on visible legs. It did not appear to be running, yet somehow crossed the desert far faster than any baseline was likely to walk.

  “So I guess I can go now,” Brüks said.

  The old soldier turned to face him. Regret mingled with the tactical reflections in his eyes.

  “Not a chance,” he said.

  TWO GUARDS STOOD at the door halfway down the hall, one to each side, like a couple of dark golems in matching pajamas. Brüks had not been invited to the party inside but he followed Moore at a distance, hanging back along the edge of the corridor for want of any other destination. Bicamerals brushed past in both directions, going about whatever business involved the domestication of weaponized whirlwinds. They seemed unremarkable in the morning light slanting through the windows. No arcane ululations. No vestments or hooded robes, no uniforms of any kind that Brüks could make out. A couple wore denim. One, preoccupied with a tacpad as he passed, was stark naked except for the tattoo squirming along his chest: some kind of winged animal Brüks was pretty sure didn’t exist anywhere in the taxonomic database.

  They still had stars in their eyes, though.

  Ahead, Moore stepped between the guards and into the room. Brüks sidled up in his wake. The sentries stood still as stone, barefoot, faces forward, their beige coveralls identically featureless. Empty holsters hung from their belts.

  Their lightless eyes wouldn’t stop moving. They jiggled and jerked in panicked little arcs, back and forth, up and down, as though terrified souls had been buried alive in wet cement. Someone coughed softly down the hall. All four eyes locked on that sound for the merest instant, froze in synchronized quadrascopic far focus: then broke, and resumed struggling in their sockets.

  There was a market niche for zombies, Brüks had read, among those who still took their sex in the first person. He tried to imagine fucking any creature possessed of such eyes, and shuddered.

  He passed by on the far side of the hall. Parallax served up a moving slice of the room behind the door: Jim Moore, a tabletop holo display in standby mode, a handful of Bicamerals nodding among themselves. A woman: lean as a greyhound beneath a mimetic body stocking, a bone-pale face under a spiky shock of short black hair, jawline just a bit more prognathous than any card-carrying prey might feel comfortable with. She turned her head as Brüks crept by. Her eyes flashed like a cat’s. She bared her teeth. On anyone else it would have been a smile.

  The door swung shut.

  “Hey. Hungry?”

  He jumped at the hand on his arm but it was only a woman, dreadlocked and gracile and with a smile that warmed his skin instead of freezing it. Her skin was uniform chocolate, not the rainbow swirl of false color it had been the night before; but he recognized the voice.

  “Lianna.” He grunted, taking her in. “You’re the first person I’ve seen here who’s actually dressed like a monk.”

  “It’s a bathrobe. We’re not really into gang colors around here.” She jerked her chin down the hall. “C’mon. Breakfast.”

  They selected their meals from a commons that looked reassuringly like a conventional cafeteria bar (cloned bacon, Brüks was relieved to see; he’d been afraid the Bicamerals would be vegan traditionalists), but they ate sitting on the sprawling steps of the main entrance, watching the morning shadows shorten by degrees across the desert. The quiet hiss of an idling tornado drifted over the ramparts behind them.

  “That was quite the night,” Brüks said around a mouthful of egg.

  “Quite the morning, too.”
<
br />   He raised his eyes. Far overhead, the contrail of some passing airbus etched a line across the sky.

  “Oh, it’s still up there,” Lianna remarked. “Kinda flickers in and out of the higher wavelengths if you stare hard enough.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “What kind of augments you got?”

  “For my eyes? Nothing.” Brüks dropped his gaze back to the horizon. “Got wired with cryptochrome back when it was the Next Big Thing, thought it would help me find my way around down in Costa Rica. You know the ads, never be lost again. Except suddenly I wasn’t just seeing Earth’s magnetic field, I was seeing a halo around every bloody tacpad and charge mat. It was distracting as hell.”

  Lianna nodded. “Well, it takes some getting used to. Give sight to the blind, takes time to learn how to see.”

  “More than I had the patience for. Pigment’s still sitting back there in my retina but I got it blocked after about a week.”

  “Wow. You’re old school.”

  He fought back a twitch of irritation: Half my age, and she’s probably already forgotten the difference between the meat she was born with and the chrome that came after. “I’ve got the usual brain boosts. Can’t very well get tenure otherwise.” Which reminds me—“I don’t suppose there’s any Cognital on the premises? I left mine back at camp.”

  Lianna’s eyes widened. “You take pills?”

  “It’s the same—”

  “It’d take about ten minutes to fit you with a pump and you take pills.” Her face split into a big goofy grin. “That’s not old school, that’s downright Paleolithic.”

  “Glad you find it so fucking amusing, Lianna. You have the pills or not?”

  “Not.” She pursed her lips. “I guess we could synthesize some. I’ll ask. Or you might ask Jim. He’s, well...”

  “Old school,” Brüks finished.

  “Actually, you’d be surprised how much wiring he’s got in his head.”

  “I’m surprised to even find him here. Military man in a monastery?”

  “Yeah, well, you were expecting us all to wear bathrobes.”

  “He’s here to help you in your war against the vamps?” Brüks set his empty plate beside him on the step.

  She shook her head. “He’s here to—he just needed a place to work through some stuff. Also I think he’s kinda spying on us.” She cocked her head at him: “What about you?”

  “I got herded,” he reminded her.

  “No, I mean, what were you even doing out in the field? There any species even left out there that haven’t been RAMrodded and digitized?”

  “The extinct ones,” Brüks said shortly. Then, relenting: “Sure, you can virtualize anything in the lab. Still doesn’t tell you what it’s doing out in the wide wet world with a million unpredictable variables working on it.”

  She looked out across the flats. Brüks followed her gaze. There, just off to the northwest: the ridge upon which his own home had crouched lo these past two months. He could not see it from here.

  “You gonna tell me what’s going on?” he said at last.

  “You got caught in the crossfire.”

  “What crossfire? Why were the zombies—”

  “The vampire,” Lianna said. “Valerie, actually.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She shrugged.

  “So Valerie the Vampire summons her zombie forces against the Bicamerals. And now they’re all sitting together just down the hall, munching chips and cocktail wienies because—Moore said something about a common enemy.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” She tried for a smile—“You’re behind on your Cognital”—but it fell flat.

  “Look, I’m sorry I crashed your party but—”

  “Dan, the truth is I don’t really know a whole lot more than you do at this point.” She spread her hands. “All I can tell you for sure is, well, you gotta trust them. They know what they’re doing.”

  She stopped just short of patting him on the head.

  He stood. “Glad to hear it. Then I guess I’ll leave you to your games, and thanks for the meal.”

  She looked up at him. “You know that can’t happen. Jim already told you that much.”

  “Are you going to tell me where my bike is, or do I have to walk?”

  “You can’t leave, Dan.”

  “You can’t keep me prisoner.”

  “It’s not us you have to worry about.”

  “Who’s us, this time? Bicamerals, vampires? Koalas?”

  She pointed north across the desert, squinting. “Look out there. On that ridge.”

  He did. He saw nothing at first. Then, briefly, something glinted in the morning sun: a spark on the escarpment.

  “Now look up,” she said. A distant shard of brightness stabbed his eye from high to the east, a reflection of sunlight off empty sky.

  “Not us,” Lianna repeated. “You.”

  “Me—?”

  “People like you. Baselines.”

  He let it sink in.

  “Valerie must have hacked a fair number of sats just getting her pieces into position. As far as anything in orbit could tell, this whole chunk of desert just dropped out of existence for a good four hours last night. That got people’s attention. Someone probably slipped a drone or two under the ceiling in time to see our engine going through its paces—and those dance steps are, shall we say, a bit beyond what passes for state-of-the-art out there.” Lianna sighed. “The Bicamerals have been spooking the wrong people for years now. Too many breakthroughs, too fast, the usual. They’ve been watching, all this time they’ve been watching. And now, as far as they can tell, we’re in some kind of gang war with a bunch of zombies.

  “They are not going to let this pass, Dan. Now that they’ve caught a glimpse behind the curtain they’ll have thrown a net over the whole reserve.”

  And I, Brüks reflected, don’t blame them one goddamned bit. “I’m not part of this. You said it yourself.”

  “You’re a witness. They’ll debrief you.”

  “So they’ll debrief me.” Brüks shrugged. “You haven’t told me anything. I haven’t seen anything they haven’t, if they deployed drones.”

  “You’ve seen more than you realize. Everyone does. And they will know that, so your debriefing with be aggressive.”

  “So that makes you, what? My personal guard? Here to feed me, and walk me, and make sure I don’t wander off into any of the rooms where the grown-ups are talking. And yank on my leash if I try to leave. That about sum it up?”

  “Dan—”

  “Look, you’re giving me a choice between a vampire with her zombie army and you baselines, as you so delicately put it.”

  She got to her feet. “I’m not giving you a choice.”

  “I have to leave sometime. I can’t spend the rest of my life here.”

  “If you try to leave now,” she said, “that’s exactly what you’ll have done.”

  He looked down at her: thin as a pussy willow, she only came up to his chest.

  “You going to stop me?”

  She looked back without blinking. “I’m gonna try. If I have to. But I really hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  He stood there for the longest time. Then he picked up his plate.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and went back inside.

  Within his prison, she gave him all the space in the world. She backed right off as he stalked down the hall, past the murmuring of the devout and the hyperkinetic gaze of the frozen zombies, past the closed-door deliberations of enemies-of-enemies and the open doors of dorms and studies and bathrooms. He moved without direction at first, following any corridor that presented itself, backtracking from every cul-de-sac, his feet exploring autonomously while his gut churned. After a while, some dull sullen pain behind his eyes brought him back to the here-and-now; he took more conscious note of his surroundings and decided to revisit Moore’s basement wa
tchtower, as much for its relative familiarity as for any tactical insights he might glean.

  He couldn’t find it. He remembered Lianna leading him through a hole in the wall; he remembered emerging from it after the armistice. It had to be off the main corridor, had to lie behind one of these identical oaken doors that lined the hall, but no perspective along that length seemed familiar. It was as though he was in some off-kilter mock-up of the place he’d been just an hour before, as though the layout of the monastery had changed subtly when he wasn’t looking. He started trying doors at random.

  The third was ajar. Low voices murmured behind it. It swung inward easily; flat panels of vat-cloned hardwood lined the space beyond, a kind of library or map room that looked out onto a grassy compound (half sunlit, half in shadow). Past sliding glass doorways, arcane objects rose haphazardly from that immaculate lawn. Brüks couldn’t tell whether they were machines or sculptures or some half-assed hybrid of the two. The only thing that looked at all familiar out there was a shallow washbasin set atop a boxy waist-high pedestal.

  There was one of those inside, too, just past a conference table that dominated the center of the room itself. Two mismatched Bicamerals stood at the table’s edge, gazing at a collection of dice-size objects scattered across some kind of hard-copy map or antique game board. The Japanese monk was gaunt as a scarecrow; the Caucasian could have passed for Santa Claus at the departmental Christmas party, given the right threads and a pillow stuffed down his front.

  “From Queensland, maybe,” Santa remarked. “That place always bred the best neurotoxins.”

  The scarecrow scooped up a handful of objects (not dice, Brüks saw now; a collection of multifaceted lumps that made him think of mahogany macramé) and arranged them in a rough crescent across the board.

  Santa considered. “Still not enough. Even if we could sift the Van Allens dry on short notice.” He absently scratched the side of his neck, seemed to notice Brüks at last. “You’re the refugee.”

  “Biologist.”

  “Welcome anyway.” Santa smacked his lips. “I’m Luckett.”

  “Dan Brüks.” He took the other man’s nod for an invitation and stepped closer to the table. The pattern decorating the game board—a multicolored spiral of interlocking Penrose tiles—was far more complex than any he remembered from his grandfather’s attic. It seemed to move at the corner of his eye, to crawl just so when he wasn’t quite looking.