Firefall

by Peter Watts

  Brüks rolled his eyes. “Small world.” His ears popped again. “Are we going to get out of here before our blood starts boiling?”

  “Let’s go, then,” Moore said.

  Up past a leaning cityscape of cargo cubes, man-size alcoves flanked an ovoid airlock, two to each side. Spacesuits hung there like flensed silver skins, held in place by cargo straps. They billowed gently at the knees and elbows. Moore helped Brüks across the slanted deck, passed him a loose cargo strap to cling to while unbuckling the suit in the leftmost alcove; it sagged sideways into the soldier’s arms.

  A breeze hissed softly against Brüks’s cheek. Moore held out the suit: gutted from crotch to neck, a split exoskeleton shed by some previous owner. Brüks stood angled and bouncing slightly on his good foot, let Moore guide his bad one into the suit. The low gravity helped; by now Brüks couldn’t have weighed more than ten kilos. He felt like some overgrown pupa plagued by second thoughts, trying to climb back into its husk.

  An itch crawled across the back of his free hand; he held it up, eyed the blood-brown tracery of elastic filaments webbed across the skin. “Why—”

  “So what’s she in for?” Moore asked, jerking Brüks’s leg hard to seat his injured foot in its boot. Bits of bone ground against each other down there—his tibia carried the vibration past whatever nerve block Moore had installed. It didn’t hurt. Brüks grimaced anyway.

  “Uh, what?”

  “Your wife.” The right leg was trickier, without the left to stand on; Moore offered himself as a crutch again. “What’s she in Heaven for?”

  “That’s a strange way of putting it,” Brüks remarked.

  I’m sick of it, she’d said softly, looking out the window. They’re alive, Dan. They’re sapient.

  Moore shrugged. “Everyone’s running from something.”

  They’re just systems, he’d reminded her. Engineered.

  So are we, she’d said. He hadn’t argued with her; she’d known better. Neither of them had been engineered, not unless you counted natural selection as some kind of designer and neither of them was woolly-minded enough to entertain such sloppy thinking. She hadn’t wanted an argument anyway; she’d been long past the verbal jousts that had kept them sparking all those years. Now she’d only wanted to be left alone.

  “She—retired,” he told Moore as his right foot slid smoothly into its boot.

  “From what?”

  He’d respected her wishes. Left her alone when she’d lobotomized her last victim, left her alone to tender her resignation. He’d wanted to reach out when she’d started eyeing Heaven, would have done anything to keep her on his side of the afterlife, but by then it was long past being about what he wanted. So he’d left her alone even when she leased out her brain to pay her rent in the Collective Conscious, withdrew from the outer world to the inner. She’d left a link behind, at least. He could always talk to her, there on Styx’s farthest shore. She always honored her obligations. But he’d known that’s all it was, so even then—after she’d stopped slaughtering artificial systems and started being one—he left her alone.

  “She was a cloud-killer,” Brüks said at last.

  “Huh,” Moore grunted. Then, helping Brüks’s arms into their sleeves: “Not a very good one, I hope.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say that not every distributed AI’s emergent, and not every emergent AI’s rogue.” Moore handed over his gauntlets. “We don’t publicize it, but every now and then some of the better CKs have been known to pick targets we’d really rather they didn’t.”

  Brüks swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry. “The fucked-up thing is, she agreed with them. The AI Rights idiots, I mean. She quit because she got sick of killing conscious beings whose only crime was”—how had she put it?—“growing up too fast.”

  Suit zipped up. Gauntlets clicked into place. A solid yank on the boa-cord and the suit squirmed around him, cinching from flaccid to skintight in a few disquieting seconds. Moore handed him the helmet: “Seat it facing your three, turn counterclockwise until it clicks. Keep the visor up until I say.”

  “Really?” Brüks was starting to feel light-headed. “The air seems a little—thin...”

  “Plenty of time.” Moore grabbed another suit off the wall. “I don’t want your hearing compromised.” He bounced off the deck, brought knees to chest and spread his suit open with both hands. With one fluid motion he kicked his legs straight back onto the deck, suited to the waist. He bounced lightly.

  “So she wasn’t afraid of the conscious AIs.” Moore shrugged arms into sleeves. “How about the smart ones?”

  “W-what?”

  “Smart AIs.” He clicked his own helmet into place. “Was she afraid of them?”

  Brüks gulped oily alpine air and tried to concentrate. The smart ones. Past that minimum complexity threshold where networks wake up: past the Sapience Limit where they go to sleep again, where self-awareness dissolves in the vaster reaches of networks grown too large, in the signal lags that reduce synchrony to static. Up where intelligence continues to grow even though the self has been left behind.

  “Those, she—was a little worried about,” he admitted, trying to ignore the faint roaring in his ears.

  “Smart woman.” The Colonel’s voice was strangely tinny. He leaned over and checked Brüks’s seals and sockets with precise mechanical efficiency, nodded. “Okay, drop your visor,” he said, dropping his.

  A louder hiss replaced the fainter one: a blessed wash of fresh air caressed Brüks’s face the moment his visor sealed. Relief flooded in a moment later. An arcane mosaic of icons and acronyms flickered to life across the crystal.

  Moore’s helmet bumped against his own, his voice buzzing distantly across the makeshift connection: “It’s a saccadal interface. Comm tree’s upper left.” Sure enough an amber star blinked there: a knock at the door. Brüks focused his gaze just so and accepted the call.

  “That’s better.” Suddenly it was as though Moore was speaking from right inside Brüks’s helmet.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Brüks said.

  Moore held his arm out, watched it drop. “Not quite yet. Another minute or two.”

  Out beyond Brüks’s helmet, the air—the lack of it, maybe—grew somehow hard. Through that impoverished atmosphere and two layers of convex crystal, Jim Moore’s face was calm and cryptic.

  “What about yours?” Brüks asked after a moment.

  “My what?”

  “Your wife. What was she—in for?”

  “Yes. Helen.” A frown may have flickered across Moore’s face then, but it was gone in an instant and he was answering before Brüks had a chance to regret the question. “She just got—tired, I suppose. Or maybe scared.” His gaze dropped for a moment. “Twenty-first century’s not for everyone.”

  “When did she ascend?”

  “Almost fourteen years ago now.”

  “Firefall.” A lot of people had fled into Heaven after that. A lot of the Ascended had even come back.

  But Moore was shaking his head. “Just before, actually. Literally minutes before. We all said good-bye, and then we went outside and I looked up...”

  “Maybe she knew something.”

  Moore smiled faintly, held out his arm. Brüks watched it drift back to his side, slow as a feather. “Almost—”

  The hab lurched. Cubes and cartons teetered and wobbled against their mutual attraction; rogue containers lifted from the deck and bumped against the walls in a ponderous ballet. Brüks and Moore, tethered to their cargo straps, drifted like seaweed.

  “—time to go.” Moore dialed open the inner hatch. Brüks pulled himself along in the other man’s wake.

  “Jim.”

  “Right here.” Moore pulled a spring-loaded clasp from a little disk at his waist. A bright thread unspooled behind it.

  “Why were you here? When things went south?”

  “I was on patrol.” Fastening the clasp to a cleat on Brüks’s own suit. “
Walking the perimeter.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” The inner hatch squeezed down behind them.

  Brüks tugged on the thread while Moore went through the motions of depressurizing the ’lock: impossibly fine, impossibly strong. A leash of engineered spider silk.

  “You’ve got a ConSensus feed in your head,” Brüks pointed out. “You can see anyplace on the network without getting off the toilet and you walk the perimeter?”

  “Twice a day. Going on thirty years. You should be thankful I’ve never seen any reason to stop.” One gauntleted hand made a small flourish toward the outer hatch. “Shall we go?”

  Moore, you old warhorse.

  I’m alive thanks to you. I pass out inside a tornado, I wake up with a smashed ankle on a space station with a broken back. You get me into this suit. You get me to natter on about my wife so I barely even notice the air bleeding away around us.

  I bet you’ll never tell me how close we came, will you? Not your style. You were too busy distracting me from making a complete panicking ass of myself while you saved my life.

  “Thank you,” he said softly, but if Moore—tapping out some incantation on the bulkhead interface—even heard him, he gave no sign.

  The outer airlock irised open. The great wide universe waited beyond.

  And the magnitude of all Jim Moore’s well-intentioned lies spread naked across the heavens for anyone to see.

  “Welcome to the Crown of Thorns,” Moore said from the other end of the universe.

  The sun was too large, too blinding: Brüks saw that as soon as the outer hatch opened, in the instant before a polarizing disk bloomed on his faceplate—perfectly line of sight—to cut the glare. Of course, he thought at first, no atmosphere. Things were bound to be brighter in orbit.

  And then he stumbled out in Moore’s wake, and toppled weightlessly around some lopsided center of mass while stars and vast structures spun around him.

  The Earth was gone.

  That wasn’t true, he knew in some distant hypothetical place that made absolutely no difference. It couldn’t be true. Earth was still out there somewhere; one of those billion bright shards lacerating the heavens on all sides. Unwinking pixels, all of them. Not a single one close enough to rise above zero dimensions, to actually assume a shape.

  No ground to fall to.

  His breath rasped in his ears, fast as a heartbeat. “You said we were in orbit.”

  “We are. Not around Earth.”

  The ship—the Crown of Thorns—spread before him like the bones of some city-size monster. The broken spoke hung directly ahead, a tangle of struts and tubes suffused in a glittering sharp-edged halo: bits of foil, crystals of frozen liquid, little shurikens of metal with nowhere else to go. Things moved in that mosaic of light and shadow. Metal spiders swarmed across the wreckage, spot-welding with incandescent mandibles, spinning webs to suture shattered pieces back together. Tiny starbursts sparkled across the metalscape in waves.

  Not bent. Not torqued. Broken. Snapped clean off. Horrified, Brüks took in the sight of a slender silver cable, its diameter barely that of a human finger: a lone tendon, miraculously intact, emerging from the amputated stump and stretching across vacuum to anchor the massive barrel-shaped hab at his back. If not for that one frail thread...​

  “You knew about this, didn’t you?” He gulped air. “You’ve been hooked into ConSensus all along...”

  Moore hung off a handhold, utterly unconcerned by the billions of light-years stretching away beneath his feet. “In my experience, it’s generally better to ease people into these situations a little at a time.”

  “It’s not my exp—exper—” His tongue was swelling in his mouth. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Nowhere was up, nowhere was down—

  “My air—”

  Something smacked the sole of his boot; absurdly, down clicked back into place. Moore was in front of him, hands on his shoulders, squeezing through the suit: “It’s okay. It’s okay. Close your eyes.”

  Brüks squeezed them tight.

  “You’re just hyperventilating,” Moore said from the darkness. “The suit’ll thin the mix before you run any serious risk of passing out. You’re perfectly safe.”

  Brüks almost laughed aloud at that. “You—” he managed, “are The Boy Who Cried Safe...”

  “You must be feeling better,” Moore observed.

  He was, a little.

  “Try opening your eyes. Focus on the ship, not the stars. Take your time. Get your bearings.”

  Brüks opened them a crack. Vacuum and vertigo came flooding in.

  Focus on the ship.

  Okay. The ship.

  Start with this spoke. Truncated, cauterized, one of—one of six (the others apparently undamaged), radiating from a spherical hub like the skeleton of an impoverished bicycle wheel: no rim, nothing but a tin can at the end of each spoke. A few minutes ago those spokes had been slinging their habs around like stones on strings; now they just hung there. A smaller baton—a giant’s femur skewered through the midpoint—hung equally motionless just fore of the Hub. (Counterspinning flywheel, probably. To neuter the torque.)

  Fifty meters long at least, those hollow bones. This insane Ferris wheel stretched over a hundred meters from side to side.

  But it was an ephemeral contraption of twigs and straws next to the wall of metal looming behind it. The drive section. Seen from dead-on it would be a disk: a whole landscape turned on edge, a hard-edged topography of ridges and trenches and right angles. But out here on the wounded rim, Brüks could see the mass piled up behind that leading edge: not so much a disk as a core sample extracted from some artificial moon. The striated faces of sedimentary cliffs, carved in metal; monstrous gnarled arteries twisting along the patchwork hull, carrying rivers of fuel or coolant. The arc of a distant engine nozzle, peeking past that metal horizon like a dull sunrise.

  A cylindrical silo squatted dead center atop the drive section. Cargo hold, perhaps. The Crown’s backbone emerged from its apex like a sapling sprouting from the stump of a great redwood. All this forward superstructure—the Hub and its habs, the flywheel, a hemispherical nose assembly bristling with antennae—none of it mattered in the shadow of those engines. Just a few fragile twigs in which meat might huddle and breathe. Fleas clinging to the back of a captive sun.

  “This thing is huge,” Brüks whispered to Moore. But Moore wasn’t there anymore; he was sailing spread-eagled across the gap between this dangling hab and its severed spoke. Moore was deserting him for an army of spiders.

  Something tugged on Brüks’s tether. He turned, ice water trickling along his spine, to see what new master held his leash.

  “You come with me,” Valerie said.

  She yanked him across the void like bait on a hook, faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time it reached out to snatch a passing holdfast—before it could even look around to find one—they were already arcing through clouds of jagged tinsel. Torn scaffolding reached out as he tumbled past; miraculously, none tore his suit.

  He was falling down a well—Not a well. The spoke. The broken spoke. He could see its ragged mouth receding above him. He hit bottom, landed hard on his back; elastic inertia tried to bounce him off but a pile-driver slammed against his chest and held him fast. Blood-orange light pulsed at the edge of his eye. He sucked in great panicky gulps of air, turned his head.

  The pile-driver extended from Valerie’s shoulder. Her other hand worked controls set into the dropgate they’d landed on. Crimson light flashed at two-second intervals around its edge.

  “Moore—” Brüks gasped.

  “Wastes too much time on you already, Cold Cut. He helps with repairs.” A hatch split open in the center of the dropgate. Valerie pitched him through one-handed. Something caught him like a catcher’s mitt on the other side: a resilient membrane, stretched between hoops of tensile ribbing. Vacuum sucked at that translucent skin, stretched it tightly convex between those reinforc
ements.

  Valerie sealed the hatch behind them. The little tent inflated instantly, its skin relaxing as the gradient leveled.

  Tingling in the fingers of Brüks’s left hand; clenched tight, he realized. He forced them open, was vaguely surprised to see a little piece of shrapnel floating on his palm. Its edges weren’t entirely jagged. The metal had flowed and congealed in spots, like candle wax.

  He must have grabbed it in passing.

  The tent split like a clamshell. Valerie dragged him out before it had fully opened, pulled him along a tunnel of pale watery light. A headless brown serpent convulsed along its length, coils slapping the bulkheads with random energy: some kind of elastic cord, thick as his wrist and intermittently studded with little hoops. The rungs of a ladder, too far apart for merely human reach, strobed past on the bulkhead. Occasional flourishes of yellow-and-black hazard striping, flashing by too quickly for any glimpse of whatever they warned against. Brüks craned his neck, eyes forward. Sometime in the past few seconds Valerie had raised her visor. Her face was gray in the shade of her helmet, all planes and angles. Bones and no flesh.

  The spoke ended in a slotted dome, like one of those antique telescopes left to rot on mountaintops after astronomy had moved offworld. Most of that slot was blocked by the socket on the other side. They ricocheted through the gap that remained.

  They emerged into the space between two concentric spheres: a silvery inner core, like a great blob of mercury three meters across; an outer shell, dull and unreflective, containing it. Some kind of grille split the space between into hemispheres, joined crust to core at the equator. Valerie dragged him across the bowl of the aft hemisphere: around a cubist landscape of cargo modules, past the mouth of a gaping tunnel at the south pole (the spine of the ship, Brüks realized; shadows and scaffolds receded down its throat); past the ball-and-socket assemblies of other spokes, arrayed around that opening like a corolla. Brüks caught flickers of motion through the equatorial grille—personnel in the other hemisphere, otherwise occupied as Valerie dragged him to his fate—but in the next instant they were diving down another one of the Crown’s long bones and the faint tinny voice he might have heard through his sealed helmet—