Firefall

by Peter Watts

  The Colonel was always civil, these days. Never more.

  When the sight of people in more productive roles failed to satisfy, Brüks abandoned Icarus’s bustling tourist district and went off by himself, cam by cam: stepped through views of empty crawlspaces and frozen habs, an endless dark maze of tunnels connecting the uninhabited and the unexplored. Sometimes there was atmosphere, and frost sparkling on bulkheads. Sometimes there was only vacuum and girders and rails along which prehensile machinery scuttled like platelets in a mechanical bloodstream.

  Once there were stars where no stars should have been: a great hole bitten out of Icarus’s carapace where it would do the least damage. Brüks could see incendiary Bicameral teeth through the gap, brilliant blue pinpoints taking another bite farther down the hull. Even filtered by the camera, they made him squint.

  Next stop.

  Ah. AUX/RECOMP again, more crowded than before: Moore had joined Valerie and the Bicamerals at play.

  Just another roach, Brüks thought. Just like me.

  But you get a seat at the table just the same.

  He watched in silence for a few moments.

  Fuck this.

  Pale blue light spilled into the attic from the open airlock, limned the edges of pipes and lockers and empty alcoves. Brüks sailed through the hatch, grabbed a strut in passing, swung to port and into the glowing mouth of the lamprey itself.

  Eyes hypersaccading in an ebony face, snapping instantly into focus. A body rooted to the airlock wall by one arm, fingers clenched around a convenient handhold. Spring-loaded prosthetics below the knees; they extended absurdly and braced against a bulkhead, blocking Brüks’s way.

  He braked just in time.

  “Restricted access, sir,” the zombie said, eyes dancing once more.

  “Holy shit. You talk.”

  The zombie said nothing.

  “I didn’t think there’d be—anyone in there,” Brüks tried. Nothing. “Are you awake?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So you’re talking in your sleep.”

  Silence. Eyes, jiggling in their sockets.

  I wonder if it knows what happened to the other one. I wonder if it was there...​

  “I want to—”

  “You can’t, sir.”

  “Will you—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  —stop me?

  “Yes but it won’t be necessary,” the zombie added.

  Brüks had been wondering about lethal force. Maybe best not to push that angle.

  On the other hand, the thing didn’t seem to mind answering questions...​

  “Why do your ey—”

  “To maximize acquisition of high-res input across the visual field, sir.”

  “Huh.” Not a trick the conscious mind could use, with its limited bandwidth. A good chunk of so-called vision actually consisted of preconscious filters deciding what not to see, to spare the homunculus upstream from information overload.

  “You’re black,” Brüks observed. “Most of you zombies are black.”

  No response.

  “Does Valerie have a melanin feti—”

  “I’ve got this,” Moore said, rising into view through the docking tube. The zombie moved smoothly aside to let him pass.

  “They talk,” Brüks said. “I didn’t—”

  Moore spared a glance at Brüks’s face as he moved past. Then he was back on board, and heading aft. “Come with me, please.”

  “Uh, where?”

  “M&R. Freckle on your face I don’t like the look of.” Moore disappeared into the Hub.

  Brüks looked back at the airlock. Valerie’s sentry had moved back into place, blocking the way to more exotic locales.

  “Thanks for the chat,” Brüks said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Brüks obeyed; the insides of his lids glowed brief bloody red as Moore’s diagnostic laser scanned down his face.

  “Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.”

  “I wasn’t teasing him, I was just chat—”

  “Don’t chat with them, either.”

  Brüks opened his eyes. Moore was running his eyes down some invisible midair diagnostic. “Remember who they answer to,” he added.

  “I can’t imagine that Valerie forgot to swear her minions to secrecy.”

  “And I can’t imagine her minions will forget to tell her any secrets you might have asked about. Whether they answered or not.”

  Brüks considered that. “You think she might take offense at the melanin-fetish remark?”

  “I have no idea,” Moore said quietly. “I sure as hell did.”

  Brüks blinked. “I—”

  “You look at them.” There was liquid nitrogen in the man’s voice. “You see—zombies. Fast on the draw, good in the field, less than human. Less than animals, maybe; not even conscious. Maybe you don’t even think it’s possible to disrespect something like that. Like disrespecting a lawn mower, right?”

  “No, I—”

  “Let me tell you what I see. The man you were chatting with was called Azagba. Aza to his buddies. But he gave that up—either for something he believed in, or because it was the best of a bad lot of options, or because it was the only option he had. You look at Valerie’s entourage and you see a cheap joke. I see the seventy-odd percent of military bioauts recruited from places where armed violence runs so rampant that nonexistence as a conscious being is actually something you aspire to. I see people who got mowed down on the battlefield and then rebooted, just long enough to make a choice between going back to the grave or paying off the jump-start with a decade of blackouts and indentured servitude. And that’s pretty close to the best-case scenario.”

  “What would be worst-case?”

  “Some jurisdictions still hold that life ends at death,” Moore told him. “Anything else is an animated corpse. In which case Azagba has exactly as many rights as a cadaver in an anatomy class.” He stabbed the air and nodded: “I was right: it’s precancerous.”

  Malawi, Brüks remembered.

  “That’s why you took her on,” he realized. “Not for me, not for Sengupta. Not even for the mission. Because she killed one of your own.”

  Moore looked right through him. “I would have thought that by now you’d have learned to keep your attempts at psychoanalysis to yourself.” He extracted a tumor pencil from the first-aid kit. “Any nausea? Headaches, dizziness? Loose stools?”

  Brüks brought his hand to his face. “Not yet.”

  “Probably nothing to worry about, but we’ll run a complete body scan just to be safe. Could be internal lesions as well.” He leaned in, pressed the pencil against Brüks’s face. Something electrical snapped in Brüks’s ear; a sudden tingling warmth spread out across his cheek.

  “I’d recommend daily scans from here on in,” Moore said. “Our shielding on approach wasn’t all it could have been.” He gestured for Brüks to move to the right, unfolded the medbed from the wall. “I have to admit I’m a bit surprised this started so soon, though. Maybe you had a preexisting condition.” He stood aside. “Lie back.”

  Brüks maneuvered himself over the pallet; Moore strapped him into place against the free fall. A biomedical collage bloomed across the bulkhead.

  “Uh, Jim...”

  The soldier kept his eyes on the scan.

  “Sorry.”

  Moore grunted. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected you to be so fast on the uptake.” He paused. “It’s not as though you’re some kind of zombie.”

  “Roaches, you know—we fuck up,” Brüks admitted.

  “Yes. I forget that sometimes.” The Colonel took a breath, let it out softly through clenched teeth. “Before you showed up, I—well...”

  Brüks waited in silence, fearful of tipping some scale.

  “It’s been a while,” Moore said, “since I’ve had much call to deal with my own kind.”

  “GOT
SOMETHING FOR you.”

  It was a white plastic clamshell, about the size and shape to hold a set of antique eyeglasses. Lianna had fabbed a bright green bow and stuck it to the top.

  Brüks eyed it suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “The Face of God,” she declared, and then—deflated by the look he shot at her, “That’s kind of what the hive’s calling it, anyway. Piece of your slime mold.” She held it out with a flourish. “If Muhammad can’t come to the sample...”

  “Thanks.” He took the offering (try as he might, he couldn’t keep from smiling), and set it on the table next to dessert.

  “They thought you’d like to take a shot at, you know. Seeing what makes it tick.”

  Brüks glanced at a bulkhead window where three Bicamerals floated at the compiler, their gazes divergent as was their wont. (Not any Senguptoid aversion to eye contact, he’d come to realize; just the default preference for a 360-degree visual field, adopted by a collective with eyes to share.) “Are they throwing me a bone, or do they just want someone expendable doing the dissections?”

  “A bone, maybe. But you know, this thing does have certain biological properties. And you are the only biologist on board.”

  “Roach biologist. And that slime mold’s got to be postbiological if it’s anything at all. And you know as well as I do that I’ve got better odds of getting a blow job from Valerie than—”

  He caught himself, too late. Idiot. Stupid, insensitive—

  “Maybe not,” Lianna said after a pause so brief it might have been imaginary. “But you’re the only one in the neighborhood with a biologist’s perspective.”

  “You—you think that makes a difference?”

  “Sure. More to the point, I think they do, too.”

  Brüks thought about that. “I’ll try not to let them down, then.” And then: “Lee—”

  “So what you doing here, anyway?” She leaned in for a closer look at his display. “You’re running mo-cap.”

  He nodded, wary of speech.

  “What for? Slimey hasn’t moved since we got here.”

  “I’m, uh...” He shrugged and confessed. “I’m watching the Bicams.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out their methodology,” he confessed. “Everyone’s got to have one, right? Scientific or superstitious or just some weird gut instinct, there’s at least got to be some kind of pattern...”

  “You’re not finding one?”

  “Sure I am. They’re rituals. Eulali and Ofoegbu raise their hands just so, Chodorowska howls at the moon for precisely three-point-five seconds, the whole lot of them throw their heads back and gargle, for fucksake. The behaviors are so stereotyped you’d call them neurotic if you saw them in one of those old labs with the real animals in cages. But I can’t correlate them to anything else that happens. You’d think there’d be some kind of sequence, right? Try something, if that doesn’t work try something else. Or just follow some prescribed set of steps to chase away the evil spirits.”

  Lianna nodded and said nothing.

  “I don’t even know why they bother to make sounds,” he grumbled. “That quantum callosum or whatever they have has got to be faster than any kind of acoustic—”

  “Don’t spend too much effort on that,” Lianna told him. “Half those phonemes are just a side effect of booting up the hyperparietals.”

  Brüks nodded. “Plus I think the hive—fragments sometimes, you know? Sometimes I think I’m looking at one network, sometimes two or three. They drop in and out of sync all the time. I’m correcting for that—trying to, anyway—but I still can’t get any correlations that make sense.” He sighed. “At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”

  Lianna shrugged, unconcerned. “You gotta have faith. You’ll figure it out, if it’s God’s will.”

  He couldn’t help himself. “Jesus Christ, Lee, how can you keep saying that? You know there’s not the slightest shred of evidence—”

  “Really.” In an instant her body language had changed; suddenly there was fire in her eyes. “And what kind of evidence would be good enough for you, Dan?”

  “I—”

  “Voices in the clouds? Fiery letters in the sky proclaiming I Am the Lord thy God, you insignificant weasel? Then would you believe?”

  He held up his hands, reeling in the face of her anger. “Lee, I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, don’t back down now. You’ve been shitting on my beliefs since the day we met. The least you can do is answer the goddamn question.”

  “I—well...” Probably not, he had to admit. The first thought that fiery skywriting would bring to his mind would be hoax, or hallucination. God was such an absurd proposition at its heart that Brüks couldn’t think of any physical evidence for which it would be the most parsimonious explanation.

  “Hey, you’re the one who keeps talking about the unreliability of human senses.” It sounded feeble even to himself.

  “So no evidence could ever change your mind. Tell me how that doesn’t make you a fundamentalist.”

  “The difference,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “is that brain hack is an alternate hypothesis entirely consistent with the observed data. And Occam likes it a lot more than omnipotent sky wizard.”

  “Yeah. Well, the people you’re putting under your nanoscope know a thing or two about observed data, too, and I’m pretty sure their publication record kicks yours all over the innersys. Maybe you don’t know everything. I gotta go.”

  She turned to the ladder, gripped the rails so hard her knuckles whitened.

  Stopped. Unclenched, a little.

  Turned back.

  “Sorry. I just...”

  “S’okay,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to, well...” Except he had, of course. They both had. They’d been doing this dance the whole trip downhill.

  It just hadn’t seemed so personal before.

  “I don’t know what got into me,” Lianna said.

  He didn’t call her on it. “It’s okay. I can be kind of a brain stem sometimes.”

  She tried on a smile.

  “Anyhow, I do have to go. We’re good?”

  “We’re good.”

  She climbed away, smile still fastened to her face, bent just slightly to the left. Favoring ribs that medical technology had long since completely healed.

  He wasn’t a scientist, not to these creatures. He was a baby in a playpen, an unwelcome distraction to be kept busy with beads and rattles while the grown-ups convened on more adult matters. This gift Lianna had brought him wasn’t a sample; it was a pacifier.

  But by all the laws of thermodynamics, it did its job. Brüks was hooked at first sight.

  He pulled the gimp hood over his head, linked into the lab’s ConSensus channel, and time just—stopped. It stopped, then shot ahead in an instant. He threw himself down through orders of magnitude, watched molecules in motion, built stick-figure caricatures and tried to coax them into moving the same way. He felt distant surprise at his own proficiency, marveled at how much he’d accomplished in just a few minutes; wondered vaguely why his throat felt so dry and somehow eighteen hours had passed.

  What are you? he thought in amazement.

  Not computronium, anyway. Not organic. More like a Tystovich plasma helix than anything built out of protein. Things that looked like synaptic gates were ticking away in there to the beat of ions; some carried pigment as well as electricity, like chromatophores moonlighting as associative neurons. Trace amounts of magnetite, too; this thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.

  Not much more computational density than your garden-variety mammalian brain, though. That was surprising.

  And yet...​the way it was arranged...​

  He resented his own body for needing water, ignored the increasing need to take a piss until his bladder threatened to burst. He built tabletop vistas of alien tec
hnology and shrank himself down into their centers, wandered thunderstruck through streets and cityscapes and endlessly shifting lattices of intelligent crystal. He stood humbled by the sheer impossibility held in that little fleck of alien matter, and by the sheer mind-boggling simplicity of its execution.

  It was as though someone had taught an abacus to play chess. It was as though someone had taught a spider to argue philosophy.

  “You’re thinking,” he murmured, and couldn’t keep an amazed smile off his face.

  It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.

  It took its time, mind you. Sat on its leaf for hours, figuring out the angles without ever making a move, and then zap: closed on its prey along some roundabout route that broke line of sight for minutes at a time. Somehow it hit every waypoint, never lost track of the target. Somehow it just remembered all those three-dimensional puzzle pieces with a brain barely big enough to register light and motion.

  As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure—a rogue synthophage had taken out the world’s Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look—but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. There’d be some upper limit, of course—some point at which scratchpads and global variables took up so much room there’d be none left over for actual cognition—but this was just a fleck, this was barely the size of a ladybug. The condenser chamber was awash in the stuff.