Firefall

by Peter Watts

  One final burst of counterthrust. The lamprey flinched, recoiled a meter or two, resumed its approach. The Crown was barely moving now. The lamprey closed on the port flank and attached itself to the docking hatch.

  “We are down to fumes felching Bicams better know what they’re doing because even our chemical just ran dry,” Sengupta reported. “You want this ship to go anywhere now you gotta get out and push.”

  “Not a problem,” Moore said. “We’re sitting on the biggest charger in the solar system.”

  Lianna looked at Brüks and tried to smile.

  “Welcome to Icarus.”

  Of course, no one was going to fuck on a first date.

  The sky in the Hub began to fill with handshakes and head shots: Icarus and the Crown introducing each other, coming to terms, agreeing that this little rendezvous was an intimate affair that really didn’t warrant the involvement of Earthbound engineers. Sengupta whispered sweet nothings to the station’s onboard, coaxed it into turning on the lights, booting up life-support, maybe sharing a few pages from its diary.

  Naked bodies floated up from the lower hemisphere. Eulali and one of the other Bicamerals (Haina, Brüks thought), purged of hostile microbes and decompressed at last, slumming it with the baselines. Nobody seemed to think it worthy of comment.

  “No one since the last on-site op check.” Sengupta jabbed one finger at a window full of alphanumeric gibberish. “Nobody came or went anytime in the last eighteen months. Boosters fired a hundred ninety-two days ago to stabilize the orbit but nothing else.”

  Sudden swift movement from the corners of both eyes: the undead in formation, shooting single-file through the hatch like raptors diving for a kill. They bounced off the sky, swung around the forward ladder, disappeared through the ceiling fast and fluid as barracuda.

  So much for the pack, Brüks thought nervously. What about the Alph—and didn’t finish the question, because the flesh crawling up his backbone had just given him the answer.

  She was right behind him. For all he knew, she always had been.

  The Bicamerals didn’t seem to notice. They hadn’t taken their eyes off tactical since they’d arrived. Brüks swallowed and forced his gaze left. He forced himself to turn. He resisted the urge to lower his gaze as Valerie came into view, forced himself to look her right in the eyes. They shone back at him. He gritted his teeth and thought very hard about leucophores and thin-film optics and finally realized: She’s not even looking at me.

  She wasn’t. Those bright monster eyes burned a path right past him to the dome behind, shifted and jiggled in microscopic increments to this datum or that image, jittered fast as the eyes of zombies and with twice the intensity. Brüks could almost see the brain sparking behind those lenses, the sheets of electricity soaking up information faster than fiber. It had all of them now, monks and monsters and minions alike, all of them finally brought together under a tiny metal sky crowded with the machinery of thought: boot sequences, diagnostics, the sprawling multidimensional vistas of a thousand mechanical senses. It threatened to overflow the hemisphere entirely, a ceaseless flickering infostorm that breached the equator and started spilling aft as Brüks watched.

  Crude as papyrus, he realized. All these dimensions, squashed flat and pasted across physical space: it was a medium for cavemen and cockroaches, not these cognitive giants looming on all sides. Why were they even here? Why come together in the land of the blind when ConSensus went on forever, arrayed endless intelligence throughout the infinite space within their own heads? Why settle for eyes of jelly when invisible signals could reach through bone and brain and doodle on the very synapses themsel—

  Shit, he thought.

  All that smart paint, so ubiquitous throughout the ship. He’d just assumed it was for ambient lighting, and a backup for backups should the implants fail in one of these overclocked brains. But now it seemed to be their preferred interface: crude, pointillist, extrinsic. Not completely unhackable, perhaps—but at least any intrusions would take place outside the head, would compromise the mech and not the meat. At least no alien, imagined or otherwise, would be rewriting the thoughts in the heads of the hive.

  A few years to settle in, Moore had said. A few years for parties unknown to study new and unfamiliar technology, to infer the nature of the softer things behind it. Years to build whatever gears and interfaces an unlimited energy source could provide, and sit back, and wait for the owners to arrive. All that time for anything in there to figure out how to get in here.

  They’re afraid, Brüks realized, and then:

  Shit, they’re afraid?

  Sengupta threw a row of camera feeds across the dome. Holds and service crawlways, mainly: tanks for the storage of programmable matter, warrens of tunnels where robots on rails slid along on endless missions of repair and resupply. Habs embedded here and there like lymph nodes, vacuoles to be grudgingly pumped full of warmth and atmosphere on those rare occasions when visitors came calling—but barren, uninviting, barely big enough to stand erect even if gravity had been an option. Icarus was an ungracious host, resentful of any parasites that sought to take up residence in her gut.

  Something had done that anyway.

  Sengupta grabbed that window and stretched it across a fifth of the dome: AUX/RECOMP according to the feed, a cylindrical compartment with another cylinder—segmented, ribbed, studded with conduits and access panels and eruptions of high-voltage cabling—running through its center like a metal trachea. The view brightened as they watched. Fitful sparks ignited along the walls, caught steady, dimmed to a soft lemon glow that spread across painted strips of bulkhead. Wisps of frozen vapor swirled in weightless arabesques before some reawakened ventilator sucked them away.

  Brüks had educated himself on the way down. He knew what he’d find if he were to cut that massive windpipe down the middle. At one end a great black compound eye, a honeycomb cluster of gamma-ray lasers aimed along the lumen of the tube. Pumps and field coils encircled that space at regular intervals: superconductors, ultrarefrigeration pipes to bring some hypothetical vacuum down to a hairbreadth of absolute zero. Matter took on strange forms inside that chamber. Atoms would lie down, forget about Brown and entropy, take a message from the second law of thermodynamics and promise to get back to it later. They would line up head to toe and lock into place as a single uniform substrate. A trillion atoms would condense into one vast entity: a blank slate, waiting for energy and information to turn it into something new.

  Theseus had fed from something a lot like this, part of the same circuit in fact. Maybe it was feeding still. And down at the far end of AUX/RECOMP, past the lasers and the magnets and the microchannel plate traps, Brüks could see something else, something—

  Wrong.

  That was all he could tell, at first: something just a little bit off about the far end of the compiler. It took a few moments to notice the service port just slightly ajar, the stain leaking from its edges. His brain shuffled through a thousand cue cards and tried spilled paint on for size, but that didn’t really fit. It looked too thick, too blobby for the smart stuff; and he’d seen no other surface painted that oily shade of gray on any of the other feeds.

  Then someone zoomed the view and a whole new set of cues clicked into place.

  Those branching, filigreed edges: like rootlets, like dendrites growing along the machinery.

  “Is it still coming through?” Lianna’s voice, a little dazed.

  “Don’t be stupid you don’t think I’d mention it if it was? Wouldn’t work anyway some idiot left the port open.”

  But life support had been shut down until the Crown had docked, Brüks remembered. Vacuum throughout. “Maybe it was running until you pressurized the habs. Maybe we—interrupted it.”

  Those little pimply lumps, like—like some kind of early-stage fruiting bodies...​

  “I told you I’d mention it Jesus the logs say no juice for weeks.”

  “Assuming we can trust the logs,” Moore said so
ftly.

  “It looks almost like dumb paint of some kind,” Lianna remarked.

  Brüks shook his head. “Looks like a slime mold.”

  “Whatever it is,” Moore said, “it’s not something any of our people would have sent down. Which raises an obvious question.”

  It did. But nobody asked it.

  Of course, no slime mold could survive in hard vacuum at absolute zero.

  “Name one thing that can,” Moore said.

  “Deinococcus comes close. Some of the synthetics come closer.”

  “But active?”

  “No,” Brüks admitted. “They pretty much shut down until conditions improve.”

  “So whatever that is”—Moore gestured at the image—“you’re saying it’s dormant.”

  Stranger even than the thing in the window: the experience of being asked for an opinion by anyone on the Crown of Thorns. The mystery lasted long enough for Brüks to glance sideways and see monks and vampire clustered in a multimodal dialogue of clicks and phonemes and dancing fingers. The Bicamerals faced away from each other; they hovered in an impromptu knot, each set of eyes aimed out along a different bearing.

  Jim may be Colonel Supersoldier to me, Brüks realized, but we’re all just capuchins next to those things...

  “I said—”

  “Sorry.” Brüks shook his head. “No, I’m not saying that. I mean, look at it: it’s outside the chamber, part of it, anyway. You tell me if there’s some way for that machine to assemble matter off the condenser plate.”

  “So it must have—grown.”

  “That’s the logical conclusion.”

  “In hard vacuum, near absolute zero.”

  “Maybe not so logical. I don’t have another answer.” Brüks jerked his chin toward the giants. “Maybe they do.”

  “It escaped.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. Not that it got very far.” The stain—or slime mold, or whatever it was—spread less than two meters from the open port before petering out in a bifurcation of rootlets. Of course, it shouldn’t have even been able to do that much.

  The damn thing looked alive. As much as Brüks kept telling himself not to jump to conclusions, not to judge alien apparitions by earthly appearance, the biologist was too deeply rooted in him. He looked at that grainy overblown image and he didn’t see any random collection of molecules, didn’t even see an exotic crystal growing along some predestined lattice of alignment. He saw something organic—something that couldn’t have just coalesced from a diffuse cloud of atoms.

  He turned to Moore. “You’re sure Icarus’s telematter technology isn’t just a wee bit more advanced than you let on? Maybe closer to actual fabbing? Because that looks a lot like complex macrostructure to me.”

  Moore turned away and fixed Sengupta with a stare: “Did it—break out? Force open the port?”

  She shook her head and kept her eyes on the ceiling. “No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around. Just looks like someone ran a standard diagnostic took out the sample forgot to close the door.”

  “Pretty dumb mistake,” Brüks remarked.

  “Cockroaches make dumb mistakes all the time.”

  And one of the biggest, Brüks did not say, was building you lot.

  “ ’Course there’s only so much you can see with a camera you gotta go in there and check to be sure.”

  Up on the sky, the slime mold beckoned with a million filigreed fingers.

  “So that’s the next step, right?” Brüks guessed. “We board?”

  A grunted staccato from Eulali, with fingertip accompaniment. From any other primate it might have sounded like a laugh. The node spared him a look and returned her attention to the dome.

  It wasn’t English. Brüks supposed it wasn’t even language, not the way he’d define it at least. But somehow he knew exactly what Eulali had meant.

  You first.

  Two hours later four of the Bicamerals and a couple of Valerie’s zombies were on the hull crawling forward along the Crown’s spine with a retinue of maintenance spiders, hauling torches and lasers and wrenches behind them. Two hours to start making half a ship whole again.

  Three days to screw up the courage to go anywhere else.

  Oh, they laid the groundwork. Sengupta did cam-by-cams of the whole frozen array, hijacked a couple of maintenance bots and sent them through every accessible corner and cranny. Brüks couldn’t make out any angels on the feeds. No asteroids, either, for that matter. He was starting to wonder if that code-name hadn’t been a red herring—a phrase set loose across the ether so pursuers wouldn’t think twice when the Crown relit her engines halfway through the innersys and accelerated away to some farther destination.

  Squinting as hard as she could, all Sengupta could see was a small dark suspicion that disappeared when you laid an error bar across it: “Station allometry’s off by a few millimeters but it’d be weirder if you didn’t get shrinkage and expansion with all the heat flux.” The hive huddled together and passed occasional instructions through Lianna: Bring the condenser up to twenty atmospheres. Freeze the chamber. Heat the chamber. Turn out the lights. Turn them on again. Vent the condenser back to vacuum. Here, fab this SEM and bot it over.

  The elephant in the room refused to rise to any flavor of bait. After three days, Brüks was itching for action.

  “They want you to stay here,” Lianna said apologetically. “For your own safety.”

  They floated in the attic, the Crown’s viscera hissing and gurgling about them as a procession of Bicamerals climbed into spacesuits at the main airlock. A globe of water, held together by surface tension, wobbled in midair just off the beaten path. The soft light spilling from the lamprey’s mouth washed everything in robin’s egg.

  “Now they’re interested in my safety.”

  She sighed. “We’ve been over this, Dan.”

  Valerie emerged from the Hub and bared her teeth as she sailed past. Her fingers trailed along a bundle of coolant pipes, lightly tapping an arrhythmic tattoo. Brüks glanced at Lianna; Lianna glanced away. Up the attic, Ofoegbu plunged his hands into the water; pulled them out; rubbed them together before donning his gauntlets.

  “You’re going, though,” Brüks observed. To work side by side with the creature who had nearly killed her without so much as a glance in her direction. He’d edged around the subject in casual conversation, what little of that there’d been lately. She hadn’t seemed to want to talk about it.

  “It’s my job,” she said now. “But you know, we’re even keeping Jim pretty much in the background.”

  That surprised him. “Really?”

  “We might bring him over once we’re a little more sure of our footing—he was ground control for the Theseus mission, after all—but even then he’ll mostly be remoting in from the Crown. The Bicams don’t want to expose anyone to unnecessary risk. Besides”—she shrugged—“what would you do over there anyway?”

  Brüks shrugged. “Watch. Explore.” Farther up the hall, the blob shuddered afresh as the node called Jaingchu washed away her sins. Why do all the bodies do that, he wondered, if there’s only one mind behind them all?

  “You’ll get better real-time intel back here.”

  “I guess.” He shook his head. “You’re right, of course. They’re right. I’m just—going a bit stir-crazy in here.”

  “I’d have thought you’d want less excitement in your life. The way things have been going lately, boredom’s something we should be aspiring to.” She managed a smile, laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll be as good as there. Looking right over my shoulder.”

  Sengupta grunted from her couch as Brüks drifted back into the Hub. “So they won’t let you out to play.”

  “They will not,” he admitted, and settled in beside her.

  “Better view from here.” One foot tapped absently against the deck. “Wouldn’t wanna be over there anyway, not with that lot can’t even talk to them they got shitty
manners in case you hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t go over there if you paid me.”

  “Thanks,” Brüks said.

  “For what?”

  For trying. For the comforting scritch between the ears.

  Sengupta waved her hand as if spreading a deck of cards: a row of camera windows bloomed left to right across the dome. Gloved hands, visors, the backs of helmets; tactical overlays describing insides and outsides in luminous time-series.

  The lamprey opened its mouth. The Bicameral entourage swam innocently down its throat.

  Brüks pulled on his hood and booted up the motion sensors.

  He wasn’t entirely useless. They set him to work reseeding the astroturf panels; scraping away the dead brittle stuff that had been sacrificed to cold and vacuum on the way down; spraying fresh nutrigel into the bulkhead planters; spraying, in turn, a mist of microscopic seeds into the gel. The treated surfaces began to green up within the hour, but rather than watch the grass grow he looked on from a distance while Bicams and zombies swarmed across Icarus like army ants, carving great cookie-cutter chunks of polytungsten from its flanks and hauling them back to that jagged gaping stump where the Crown had been torn in two. Eventually they let him outside; the array itself was still off-limits but they let him help out closer to home, tutored him in the use of heavy machinery and set him loose on the Crown’s hull. He torched pins and struts on command, helped shear the parasol free from its mooring at the bow and haul it aft; helped cut precise holes in its center for improvised thrusters that could stare down the heat of ten suns.

  Other times he sat restlessly in the Hub while Sengupta ran numbers across the wall, this many tonnes and that many kilonewtons and so much Isp thrust. He’d tap into AUX/RECOMP and watch Valerie and Ofoegbu and Amina at work, scientific and religious paraphernalia floating about their heads as they attempted communion with an impossible slime mold from the stars. He’d capture their movements and their incantations, feed them to a private database he’d been building since before the Crown had docked. Sometimes Jim Moore would be there; other times Brüks would catch him sequestered in some far-off corner of the Crown, adrift on a sea of old telemetry that had nothing to do with his son, nothing at all, just facts on the ground.