by Peter Watts
I haven’t spoken for millennia. My voice comes out a whisper: “Who are you?” Not what I’m supposed to ask, I know. Not the first question anyone on Eriophora asks, after coming back.
“I’m yours,” he says, and just like that I’m a mother.
I want to let it sink in, but he doesn’t give me the chance: “You weren’t scheduled, but Chimp wants extra hands on deck. Next build’s got a situation.”
So the chimp is still in control. The chimp is always in control. The mission goes on.
“Situation?” I ask.
“Contact scenario, maybe.”
I wonder when he was born. I wonder if he ever wondered about me, before now.
He doesn’t tell me. He only says, “Sun up ahead. Half lightyear. Chimp thinks, maybe it’s talking to us. Anyhow …” My—son shrugs. “No rush. Lotsa time.”
I nod, but he hesitates. He’s waiting for The Question but I already see a kind of answer in his face. Our reinforcements were supposed to be pristine, built from perfect genes buried deep within Eri’s iron-basalt mantle, safe from the sleeting blueshift. And yet this boy has flaws. I see the damage in his face, I see those tiny flipped base-pairs resonating up from the microscopic and bending him just a little off-kilter. He looks like he grew up on a planet. He looks borne of parents who spent their whole lives hammered by raw sunlight.
How far out must we be by now, if even our own perfect building blocks have decayed so? How long has it taken us? How long have I been dead?
How long? It’s the first thing everyone asks.
After all this time, I don’t want to know.
He’s alone at the tac tank when I arrive on the bridge, his eyes full of icons and trajectories. Perhaps I see a little of me in there, too.
“I didn’t get your name,” I say, although I’ve looked it up on the manifest. We’ve barely been introduced and already I’m lying to him.
“Dix.” He keeps his eyes on the tank.
He’s over ten thousand years old. Alive for maybe twenty of them. I wonder how much he knows, who he’s met during those sparse decades: Does he know Ishmael, or Connie? Does he know if Sanchez got over his brush with immortality?
I wonder, but I don’t ask. There are rules.
I look around. “We’re it?”
Dix nods. “For now. Bring back more if we need them. But …” His voice trails off.
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
I join him at the tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We’re on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials: formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the tank. The chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten to care about.
“So fill me in,” I say.
His glance is impatient, even irritated. “You too?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like the others. On the other builds. Chimp can just squirt the specs but they want to talk all the time.”
Shit, his link’s still active. He’s online.
I force a smile. “Just a—a cultural tradition, I guess. We talk about a lot of things, it helps us—reconnect. After being down for so long.”
“But it’s slow,” Dix complains.
He doesn’t know. Why doesn’t he know?
“We’ve got half a lightyear,” I point out. “There’s some rush?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Vons went out on schedule.” On cue a cluster of violet pinpricks sparkle in the tank, five trillion klicks ahead of us. “Still sucking dust mostly, but got lucky with a couple of big asteroids and the refineries came online early. First components already extruded. Then Chimp sees these fluctuations in solar output—mainly infra, but extends into visible.” The tank blinks at us: the dwarf goes into time-lapse.
Sure enough, it’s flickering.
“Nonrandom, I take it.”
Dix inclines his head a little to the side, not quite nodding.
“Plot the time-series.” I’ve never been able to break the habit of raising my voice, just a bit, when addressing the chimp. Obediently (obediently. Now there’s a laugh-and-a-half) the AI wipes the spacescape and replaces it with:
… … … … … … … …
“Repeating sequence,” Dix tells me. “Blips don’t change, but spacing’s a log-linear increase cycling every 92.5 corsecs. Each cycle starts at 13.2 clicks/corsec, degrades over time.”
“No chance this could be natural? A little black hole wobbling around in the center of the star, maybe?”
Dix shakes his head, or something like that: a diagonal dip of the chin that somehow conveys the negative. “But way too simple to contain much info. Not like an actual conversation. More—well, a shout.”
He’s partly right. There may not be much information, but there’s enough. We’re here. We’re smart. We’re powerful enough to hook a whole damn star up to a dimmer switch.
Maybe not such a good spot for a build after all.
I purse my lips. “The sun’s hailing us. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Maybe. Hailing someone. But too simple for a Rosetta signal. It’s not an archive, can’t self-extract. Not a Bonferroni or Fibonacci seq, not pi. Not even a multiplication table. Nothing to base a pidgin on.”
Still. An intelligent signal.
“Need more info,” Dix says, proving himself master of the blindingly obvious.
I nod. “The vons.”
“Uh, what about them?”
“We set up an array. Use a bunch of bad eyes to fake a good one. It’d be faster than high-geeing an observatory from this end or retooling one of the on-site factories.”
His eyes go wide. For a moment he almost looks frightened for some reason. But the moment passes and he does that weird head-shake thing again. “Bleed too many resources away from the build, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” the chimp agrees.
I suppress a snort. “If you’re so worried about meeting our construction benchmarks, Chimp, factor in the potential risk posed by an intelligence powerful enough to control the energy output of an entire sun.”
“I can’t,” it admits. “I don’t have enough information.”
“You don’t have any information. About something that could probably stop this mission dead in its tracks if it wanted to. So maybe we should get some.”
“Okay. Vons reassigned.”
Confirmation glows from a convenient bulkhead, a complex sequence of dance instructions fired into the void. Six months from now a hundred self-replicating robots will waltz into a makeshift surveillance grid; four months after that, we might have something more than vacuum to debate in.
Dix eyes me as though I’ve just cast some kind of magic spell.
“It may run the ship,” I tell him, “but it’s pretty fucking stupid. Sometimes you’ve just got to spell things out.”
He looks vaguely affronted, but there’s no mistaking the surprise beneath. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know.
Who the hell’s been raising him all this time? Whose problem is this?
Not mine.
“Call me in ten months,” I say. “I’m going back to bed.”
It’s as though he never left. I climb back into the bridge and there he is, staring into tac. DHF428 fills the tank, a swollen red orb that turns my son’s face into a devil mask.
He spares me the briefest glance, eyes wide, fingers twitching as if electrified. “Vons don’t see it.”
I’m still a bit groggy from the thaw. “See wh—”
“The sequence!” His voice borders on panic. He sways back and forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Show me.”
Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri’s-eye view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has these past ten months. On t
he right, a compound-eye composite: an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely spaced vons, their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarf ’s endless winking for merely human eyes.
Except it’s only winking from the left side of the display. On the right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle.
“Chimp: any chance the grid just isn’t sensitive enough to see the fluctuations?”
“No.”
“Huh.” I try to think of some reason it would lie about this.
“Doesn’t make sense,” my son complains.
“It does,” I murmur, “if it’s not the sun that’s flickering.”
“But it is flickering—” He sucks his teeth. “You can see it fl—wait, you mean something behind the vons? Between, between them and us?”
“Mmmm.”
“Some kind of filter.” Dix relaxes a bit. “Wouldn’t we’ve seen it, though? Wouldn’t the vons’ve hit it going down?”
I put my voice back into ChimpComm mode. “What’s the current field-of-view for Eri’s forward scope?”
“Eighteen mikes,” the chimp reports. “At 428’s range, the cone is three point three four lightsecs across.”
“Increase to a hundred lightsecs.”
The Eri’s-eye partition swells, obliterating the dissenting viewpoint. For a moment the sun fills the tank again, paints the whole bridge crimson. Then it dwindles as if devoured from within.
I notice some fuzz in the display. “Can you clear that noise?”
“It’s not noise,” the chimp reports. “It’s dust and molecular gas.”
I blink. “What’s the density?”
“Estimated hundred thousand atoms per cubic meter.”
Two orders of magnitude too high, even for a nebula. “Why so heavy?” Surely we’d have detected any gravity well strong enough to keep that much material in the neighborhood.
“I don’t know,” the chimp says.
I get the queasy feeling that I might. “Set field-of-view to five hundred lightsecs. Peak false-color at near-infrared.”
Space grows ominously murky in the tank. The tiny sun at its center, thumbnail-sized now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water.
“A thousand lightsecs,” I command.
“There,” Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the tank, dark, clear, pristine. 428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded cast-offs from companion stars whose convulsions spew gas and rads across lightyears. But 428 is no nova remnant. It’s a red dwarf, placid, middle-aged. Unremarkable.
Except for the fact that it sits dead center of a tenuous gas bubble 1.4 AUs across. And for the fact that this bubble does not attenuate or diffuse or fade gradually into that good night. No, unless there is something seriously wrong with the display, this small, spherical nebula extends about 350 lightsecs from its primary and then just stops, its boundary far more knife-edged than nature has any right to be.
For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.
Numbers come back. “Chimp. I want false-color peaks at 335, 500 and 800 nanometers.”
The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly’s wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.
“It’s beautiful,” whispers my awestruck son.
“It’s photosynthetic,” I tell him.
Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something called a chromatophore: branching cells with little aliquots of pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles clumped together and the cell’s effectively transparent; spread them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens, dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.
“So there’s a membrane of—of living tissue around that star,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. “A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.”
“Yes,” the chimp says.
“But that’s—Jesus, how thick would it be?”
“No more than two millimeters. Probably less.”
“How so?”
“If it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von Neumanns when they hit it.”
“That’s assuming that its—cells, I guess—are like ours.”
“The pigments are familiar; the rest might be too.”
It can’t be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever miracle solvent that thing must use as antifreeze …
“Okay, let’s be conservative, then. Say, mean thickness of a millimeter. Assume a density of water at STP. How much mass in the whole thing?”
“1.4 yottagrams,” Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.
“That’s, uh …”
“Half the mass of Mercury,” the chimp adds helpfully.
I whistle through my teeth. “And that’s one organism?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“It’s got organic pigments. Fuck, it’s talking. It’s intelligent.”
“Most cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,” the chimp points out. “Not intelligent signals.”
I ignore it and turn to Dix. “Assume it’s a signal.”
He frowns. “Chimp says—”
“Assume. Use your imagination.”
I’m not getting through to him. He looks nervous.
He looks like that a lot, I realize.
“If someone were signaling you,” I say, “then what would you do?”
“Signal …” Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere “… back?”
My son is an idiot.
“And if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in light intensity, how—”
“Use the BI lasers, alternated to pulse between 700 and 3000 nanometers. Can boost an interlaced signal into the exawatt range without compromising our fenders; gives over a thousand Watts per square meter after diffraction. Way past detection threshold for anything that can sense thermal output from a red dwarf. And content doesn’t matter if it’s just a shout. Shout back. Test for echo.”
Okay, so my son is an idiot savant.
And he still looks unhappy—“But Chimp, he says no real information there, right?”—and that whole other set of misgivings edges to the fore again: He.
Dix takes my silence for amnesia. “Too simple, remember? Simple click train.”
I shake my head. There’s more information in that signal than the chimp can imagine. There are so many things the chimp doesn’t know. And the last thing I need is for this, this child to start deferring to it, to start looking to it as an equal or, God forbid, a mentor.
Oh, it’s smart enough to steer us between the stars. Smart enough to calculate million-digit primes in the blink of an eye. Even smart enough for a little crude improvisation should the crew go too far off-mission.
Not smart enough to know a distress call when it sees one.
“It’s a deceleration curve,” I tell them both. “It keeps slowing down. Over and over again. That’s the message.”
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
And I think it’s meant for no one but us.
We shout back. No reason not to. And now we die again, because what’s the point of staying up late? Whether or not this vast entity harbors real intelligence, our echo won’t reach it for ten million corsecs. Another seven million, at the earliest, before we receive any reply it might send.
Might as well hit the crypt in the meant
ime. Shut down all desires and misgivings, conserve whatever life I have left for moments that matter. Remove myself from this sparse tactical intelligence, from this wet-eyed pup watching me as though I’m some kind of sorcerer about to vanish in a puff of smoke. He opens his mouth to speak, and I turn away and hurry down to oblivion.
But I set my alarm to wake up alone.
I linger in the coffin for a while, grateful for small and ancient victories. The chimp’s dead, blackened eye gazes down from the ceiling; in all these millions of years nobody’s scrubbed off the carbon scoring. It’s a trophy of sorts, a memento from the early incendiary days of our Great Struggle.
There’s still something—comforting, I guess—about that blind, endless stare. I’m reluctant to venture out where the chimp’s nerves have not been so thoroughly cauterised. Childish, I know. The damn thing already knows I’m up; it may be blind, deaf, and impotent in here, but there’s no way to mask the power the crypt sucks in during a thaw. And it’s not as though a bunch of club-wielding teleops are waiting to pounce on me the moment I step outside. These are the days of détente, after all. The struggle continues but the war has gone cold; we just go through the motions now, rattling our chains like an old married multiplet resigned to hating each other to the end of time.
After all the moves and countermoves, the truth is we need each other.
So I wash the rotten-egg stench from my hair and step into Eri’s silent cathedral hallways. Sure enough the enemy waits in the darkness, turns the lights on as I approach, shuts them off behind me—but it does not break the silence.
Dix.
A strange one, that. Not that you’d expect anyone born and raised on Eriophora to be an archetype of mental health, but Dix doesn’t even know what side he’s on. He doesn’t even seem to know he has to choose a side. It’s almost as though he read the original mission statements and took them seriously, believed in the literal truth of the ancient scrolls: Mammals and Machinery, working together across the ages to explore the Universe! United! Strong! Forward the Frontier!